"No it was burned down."
"I understand," said a young woman to another, "that at your church you are having such small congregations. Is that so?"
"Yes," answered the other girl, "so small that every time our rector says 'Dearly Beloved' you feel as if you had received a proposal!"
"Are you a pillar of the church?"
"No, I'm a flying buttress—I support it from the outside."
CHURCH DISCIPLINE
Pius the Ninth was not without a certain sense of humor. One day, while sitting for his portrait to Healy, the painter, speaking of a monk who had left the church and married, he observed, not without malice: "He has taken his punishment into his own hands."