command of his medical attendant, as the anxious desire of his
people,--and thereupon departed from his own Cathedral-town on a
tour of several months, during which time he inwardly resolved to
try and probe for himself the truth of how the world was going,--
whether on the downward road to destruction and death, or up the
high ascents of progress and life. He went alone and unattended,--he
had arranged to meet his niece in Paris and accompany her to her
father's house in Rome,--and he was on his way to Paris now. But he
had purposely made a long and round-about journey through France
with the intention of studying the religious condition of the
people; and by the time he reached Rouen, the old sickness at his
heart had rather increased than diminished. The confusion and the
trouble of the world were not mere hearsay,--they in very truth
existed. And what seemed to the Cardinal to be the chief cause of
the general bewilderment of things, was the growing lack of faith in
God and a Hereafter. How came this lack of faith into the Christian
world? Sorrowfully he considered the question,--and persistently the
same answer always asserted itself--that the blame rested
principally with the Church itself, and its teachers and preachers,
and not only in one, but in all forms of Creed.

"We have erred in some vital manner," mused the Cardinal, with a
feeling of strange personal contrition, as though he were more to
blame than any of his compeers--"We have failed to follow the
Master's teaching in its true perfection. We have planted in
ourselves a seed of corruption, and we have permitted--nay, some of
us have encouraged--its poisonous growth, till it now threatens to
contaminate the whole field of labour."

And he thought of the words of St. John the Divine to the Church of