The Conference at Bonn, however little it may have done in other respects, has already produced one result which was far from the intention of its promoters. It has furnished an additional proof that there is one church only which is capable of resisting the invasion of scepticism and unbelief, and that this church is the Catholic and Roman.
“Either Jesus Christ never organized a church, or the Catholic is the church which he organized.”[211]
MIDNIGHT MASS IN A CONVENT.
I have lately been reading some remarks on the curious association existing between certain tastes and odors and an involuntary exertion of the memory by which the recurrence of those tastes or odors recalls, with a vividness not otherwise to be obtained, a whole series of incidents of past life—incidents which, with their surrounding scenes, would otherwise be quite forgotten and buried out of sight by the successive overlaying of other events of greater interest or importance. Montaigne has some singular illustrations of this peculiar fact of consciousness, and there is a brief reference to the subject made in some recently republished recollections of William Hazlitt. Connected with this is the powerful influence known to be exercised in many well-authenticated cases upon the nervous sensibilities by the exhalation of particular perfumes or the scent of certain kinds of flowers harmless or agreeable to all other persons. There is a reciprocal motion of the mind which has also been noted, by which a particular train of thought recalls a certain taste or smell almost as if one received the impression from the existing action of the senses. An illustration is given in the discussion just noted, where a special association of ideas is stated to have brought back to the writer, with great vividness, the “smell of a baker’s shop in Bassorah.” Individual experiences could doubtless be accumulated to show that this mysterious short-hand mind-writing, so to term it, by means of which the memory records on its tablets, by the aid of a single sign imprinted upon a particular sense, the history of a long series of associated recollections, is not confined to the senses of taste and smell alone, but makes use of all.
The recollection of one of the happiest days of my life—a day of strong excitement and vivid pleasure, but not carried to the pitch of satiety—is inseparably associated with the warm, aromatic smell of a cigar which I lighted and puffed, walking alone down a country road. In this case the train of thought is followed by the impression on the sense. But in another instance within my experience the reciprocal action of thought and sense is reversed; the sight of a particular object in this latter case invariably bringing back to my mind, with amazing distinctness, a scene of altogether dissimilar import, lying far back in the memory. The circumstances are these:
’Tis now some years since I visited the seaport town of Shippington. It is, or was, one of those sleepy provincial cities which still retain an ante-Revolutionary odor about its dock-yard and ordnance wharves. A group of ragged urchins or a ruby-nosed man in greasy and much-frayed velveteen jacket might be seen any sunny morning diligently fishing for hours off the end of one of its deserted piers for a stray bite from a perch or a flounder. The arrival of the spring clipper-ship from Glasgow, bringing a renewal of stock for the iron merchants, or of a brig with fruit from the Mediterranean, used to set the whole wharf population astir. Great changes have taken place of late years. Railroads have been built. Instead of a single line of ocean steamships, whose fortnightly arrival was the event of the day, half a dozen foreign and domestic lines keep the port busy. Fashion, which was once very exclusive and confined to a few old families, has now asserted its sway over wider ranks, and the officers of her majesty’s gallant Onety-Oneth, and the heavy swells of Shippington society whose figures adorn the broad steps of the Shippington Club-House, have now the pleasure of criticising any fine morning a (thin) galaxy of female beauty and fashion sweeping by them, whose modes rival those of Beacon Street or Murray Hill.
But at the time of which I write—when I was a school-boy, a quarter of a century ago—it had not been much stirred by the march of these modern improvements. Her Britannic majesty was then young to the throne, and a great fervor of loyalty prevailed; and when the Royal Welsh Fusileers used to march down to the parade-ground for morning drill, with the martial drum-major and its great bearded Billy-Goat, presented by the queen, dividing the honors of the head of the regiment, it would be hard to exaggerate the enthusiasm that swelled the bosoms of the small boys and African damsels who stepped proudly along with the band. Those were grand days, quorum pars magna fui, when I too marched down the hill from the citadel, with a mind divided between awe and admiration of the drum-major—curling his mustache fiercely and twirling his staff with an air of majesty—and a latent terror of the bearded pet of the regiment, whom report declared to have destroyed three or four boys in Malta. But rare indeed were those holidays, for I was impounded most of the time in a college, where the study of the Latin Delectus gave little opportunity for the pursuit of those more attractive branches of a liberal education. About half a dozen of the boys, of whom I was one, were proficients at serving Mass. It was therefore with great joy at the distinction that we found ourselves named, one frosty Christmas Eve, to accompany Father W—— to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, about a mile distant, where he was to celebrate midnight Mass. Oh! how the snow crisped and rattled under our feet as we marched along, full of importance, after Father W——, each boy with his green bag, containing his surplice and soutane, swung over his arm! What a jolly night it was; and how the stars twinkled! We slapped our hands together, protected by our thick blue mitts, and stamped our feet like soldiers on the march to Moscow. It was after ten o’clock, and the streets were dark and nearly deserted. To us, long used to be sound asleep at that hour in our warm dormitory, each boy in his own little four-poster, with the moonlight streaming in through the windows on its white counterpane—and not daring, if we were awake, so much as to whisper to the boy next to us, under pain of condign punishment in the morning—there was something mysterious and almost ghostly in this midnight adventure. As we passed the guard-house near the general’s residence, the officer of the night, muffled in his cloak, came along on the “grand rounds.” The sentry, in his tall bear-skin hat, stops suddenly short in his walk.
“Who goes there?” he calls out in a loud, fierce voice, bringing down his bayonet to the charge.