We close the day with a farewell visit to the cathedral. Surely it is the most wonderful building in the world. Even St. Peter's hardly fills one with greater astonishment. This is altogether unique; and its grace, and elegance, and harmony win one to love it. We lingered by the chapel of the holy of holies, finding beauties which we had not before seen, and bade farewell to it with deep regret; then wandered to the bridge over the Guadalquivir, and gazed upon the truly eastern prospect it reveals.
To-day, a great robber from the mountains, upon whose head a price had been fixed by the late government, comes boldly into town. The people cry, "Viva Pacheco!" In half an hour after, we hear he has been shot—the victim of private revenge.
Cordova is the birthplace of Lucan, the author of the Pharsalia; of the two Senecas; of many eminent Moslem poets and authors, and of the famous Gonzales de Cordova, "El Gran Capitan."
Pope Or People.
[Footnote 50]
[Footnote 50: The Congregationalist and Boston Recorder, Boston, March 4th, 1869.]
We confess to having read with no little surprise an elaborate article in the Congregationalist and Boston Recorder entitled Pope or People. Had we met the article in a professedly Unitarian journal or periodical we should have thought little of it; but meeting it in the recognized organ of the so-called orthodox Congregationalists of Massachusetts, we have read it with no ordinary interest. It shows that the Protestant, especially the old Puritan mind of the country, is profoundly agitated with the church question under one of its most important aspects. He who reads with any attention the leading American sectarian journals can hardly fail to perceive that there is a growing distrust in the Protestant world of the Protestant rule of faith, and a growing conviction that the only alternative, as the journal before us expresses it, is either pope or people. Of course the journal in question has no clear apprehension of either of the alternatives it suggests, but it does see and feel the need of certainty in matters of religious belief, and is in pursuit of it. It says:
"One of our great men once declared that the thing most to be desired in this world, by an intelligent mind, is an unfaltering religious belief. In the sense in which he meant it, his remark is unquestionably true; and it explains the philosophy of much of the success of the Romish Church. Men do crave certainty in their conviction; such certainty demands infallibility on which to found itself, and the papal system offers the promise of just that infallibility. And thousands upon thousands of minds rest in that; and being able to receive it, it meets that innate and inextinguishable craving of the soul for stability under its feet, and gives them a great—though it be a fallacious—peace.