"In all seriousness—without meaning to be frivolous, without meaning to be irreverent, and, more than all, without meaning to be blasphemous—I state, as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:
"First. 'The Mother of God'—otherwise the Virgin Mary.
"Second. The Deity.
"Third. Peter.
"Fourth. Some twelve or fifteen canonized popes and martyrs.
"Fifth. Jesus Christ the Saviour (but always an infant in arms).
"I may be wrong in this—my judgment errs often, just as is the case with other men's—but it is my judgment, be it good or bad.
"Just here I will mention something that seems curious to me. There are no 'Christ's Churches' in Rome, and no 'Churches of the Holy Ghost,' that I can discover. There are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth of them seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter. There are so many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by all sorts of affixes, if I understand the matter rightly. Then we have churches of St. Louis, St. Augustine, St. Agnes, St. Calixtus, St. Lorenzo in Lucina, St. Lorenzo in Damaso, St. Cecilia, St. Athanasius, St. Philip Neri, St. Catherine, St. Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are not familiar in the world—and away down, clear out of the list of the churches, comes a couple of hospitals; one of them is named for the Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost!"
The Fee of the Visitor more Important than the Soul of the Worshipper.