of the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with
Saint Theresa and Fenelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints,
who, in our day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. He was
rigidly calm during the services. His own prayers went up in gusts, in
aspirations, without any regular formality; in all things he gave
himself up to nature, and would not pray, any more than he would
think, at any fixed hour. In chapel he was equally apt to think of God
or to meditate on some problem of philosophy.

To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect type of his system. _Et
Verbum caro factum est_ seemed a sublime statement intended to express
the traditional formula of the Will, the Word, and the Act made
visible. Christ's unconsciousness of His Death--having so perfected
His inner Being by divine works, that one day the invisible form of it
appeared to His disciples--and the other Mysteries of the Gospels, the
magnetic cures wrought by Christ, and the gift of tongues, all to him
confirmed his doctrine. I remember once hearing him say on this
subject, that the greatest work that could be written nowadays was a
History of the Primitive Church. And he never rose to such poetic
heights as when, in the evening, as we conversed, he would enter on an
inquiry into miracles, worked by the power of Will during that great
age of faith. He discerned the strongest evidence of his theory in
most of the martyrdoms endured during the first century of our era,
which he spoke of as _the great era of the Mind_.

"Do not the phenomena observed in almost every instance of the
torments so heroically endured by the early Christians for the
establishment of the faith, amply prove that Material force will never
prevail against the force of Ideas or the Will of man?" he would say.
"From this effect, produced by the Will of all, each man may draw