Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity and
nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these times,
are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell upon the
present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith honors the
superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition in all its
proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the Renaissance
churches,--fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming spirit which has
deprived all young and generous men in Italy of religion; which has made
the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has rendered the population
ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its friendship to tyranny and
its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life of the Church that it may
sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of this superstition are the
foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to in most of the Venetian
temples, and of which the most abominable is in the church of the
Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child, elevated breast-high
to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and garlanded with paper
flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly corseted waist; and she
wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted, silly face of wood, with
its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured a pert smile; and people
come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs by a chain from her girdle,
and utter their prayers to her; while the column near which she sits is
hung over with pictures celebrating the miracles she has performed.

These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the
Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions of
hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is dressed
in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited, is the
Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and hopeless
sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her interference.
You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the ground by frantic