My smug notebook states that all this was an admission that "the
saints but embodied fine action," and it proceeds at some length
to set forth my hope for a "cathedral of humanity," which should
be "capacious enough to house a fellowship of common purpose,"
and which should be "beautiful enough to persuade men to hold
fast to the vision of human solidarity." It is quite impossible
for me to reproduce this experience at Ulm unless I quote pages
more from the notebook in which I seem to have written half the
night, in a fever of composition cast in ill-digested phrases
from Comte. It doubtless reflected also something of the faith
of the Old Catholics, a charming group of whom I had recently met
in Stuttgart, and the same mood is easily traced in my early
hopes for the Settlement that it should unite in the fellowship
of the deed those of widely differing religious beliefs.

The beginning of 1887 found our little party of three in very
picturesque lodgings in Rome, and settled into a certain
student's routine. But my study of the Catacombs was brought to
an abrupt end in a fortnight by a severe attack of sciatic
rheumatism, which kept me in Rome with a trained nurse during
many weeks, and later sent me to the Riviera to lead an invalid's
life once more. Although my Catacomb lore thus remained
hopelessly superficial, it seemed to me a sufficient basis for a
course of six lectures which I timidly offered to a Deaconess's
Training School during my first winter in Chicago, upon the
simple ground that this early interpretation of Christianity is
the one which should be presented to the poor, urging that the
primitive church was composed of the poor and that it was they
who took the wonderful news to the more prosperous Romans. The
open-minded head of the school gladly accepted the lectures,