But one must
have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this
poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble,
unlettered, unimaginative peasantry. He will find that the true office
of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue
of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years
in the mind of that poor old woman who is kneeling before it, it is no
longer a wax doll for her, but has undergone a transubstantiation quite
as real as that of the Eucharist. The moral is that we must not roughly
smash other people's idols because we know, or think we know, that they
are of cheap human manufacture.
--Do you think cheap manufactures encourage idleness?--said I.
The Master stared. Well he might, for I had been getting a little
drowsy, and wishing to show that I had been awake and attentive, asked a
question suggested by some words I had caught, but which showed that I
had not been taking the slightest idea from what he was reading me. He
stared, shook his head slowly, smiled good-humoredly, took off his great
round spectacles, and shut up his book.
--Sat prates biberunt,--he said. A sick man that gets talking about
himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that
begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.
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