Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CAP FITS About two months after the conversation just given, and therefore somewhere about the Christmas holidays of the year 1821, Pere Jerome delighted the congregation of his little chapel with the announcement that he had appointed to preach a sermon in French on the following sabbath—not there, but in the Cathedral. He was much beloved. Notwithstanding that among the clergy there were two or three who shook their heads and raised their eyebrows, and said he would be at least as orthodox if he did not make quite so much of the Bible and so little of the dogmas, yet '' the common people heard him gladly.'' When told, one day, of the unfavorable whispers, he smiled a little and answered hisinformant—whom he knew .to be one of the whisperers himself—laying a hand kindly upon his shoulder : "Father Murphy"—or whatever the name was—" your words comfort me." "How is that?" '' Because—' Ve quum benedixerint mihi homines !' " ' The appointed morning, when it came, was one of those exquisite days in which there is such a universal harmony, that worship rises from the heart like a spring. "Truly," said Pere Jerome to the companion who was to assist him in the mass, " this is a sabbath day which we do not have to make holy, but only to keep so." Maybe it was one of the secrets of Pere Jerome's success as a preacher, that he took more thought as to how he should feel, than as to what he should say. The cathedral of those days was called a very plain old pile, boasting neither beauty nor riches ; but to Pere Jerome it was very 1 "Woe unto me when all men speak well of me !"lovely; and before its homely altar, not homely to him, in the performance of those solemn offices, symbols of heaven's mightiest truths, in the hearing of the organ's harmonies, and the...