Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/246

256 Protestants conceive the character; and, below this portrait, I write, read, and make extracts from the great number of books which the kind Sœur Geneviève daily brings me, and from which I, in great measure, derive my knowledge of the doctrines of the Catholic church, especially from Le Catechism du Concile de Trente. There, also, she reads to me Loyola's Exercises, which contain some very good and wholesome discipline for the mind, and some, also, of a very childish and mechanical character, as, for instance, to hold the breath some minutes between every several section of the Lord's Prayer. Even Sœur Geneviève rejects these puerilities; but it is evident to me, however, that she has hitherto had only to do with children in mind, nay, that she herself is such a one. Hence her stories of absurd miracles; hence the importance which she gives to receiving the absolution of the Romish church on the death-bed, as an infallible passport to heaven, and the importance which, for the same purpose, she attaches to the daily repetition of every prayer through the rosary.

This morning, the young English lady, Edith H——, renounced the Protestant faith in the little chapel Mater Admirabilis, and adopted that of the Catholic church, to which she was baptized anew. The English Cardinal Monsignor Talbot—who has the appearance of a man of the flesh, rather than of the spirit—performed the ceremony in a simple and brief manner, very unlike that in which Monsignor L—— conducted it on the occasion of the elder sister's entrance into the Catholic church. The form of the renunciation was, however, the same now as then. The