Over the course of the nineteenth century, there was a widespread change in the way in which religious commitment was expressed and apparently understood by a majority of observant Roman Catholics. For most of the eighteenth century, all that had seemed necessary to lead what was generally considered to be a devout life was to be baptised; to hear Mass on a Sunday; and to take seriously one’s duties of going to confession and receiving the Blessed Sacrament at least once a year (‘at Easter or thereabouts’ according to the catechism, but by convention some eight times a year, on the greater church feasts). Mainstream Catholic sermons, just like mainstream Protestant ones, stressed above all the reasonableness and morality of the central tenets of Christianity; while religious communities which could not prove themselves to be socially ‘useful’, or which had developed a reputation for excessive attachment to the pope, dwindled in membership and were sometimes forcibly closed down. Biblical miracles, unless considered fundamental to doctrine, tended to be either side-stepped or explained away by Catholic theologians; traditional legends surrounding the lives of the saints were treated with equal fastidiousness, so that St Francis of Assisi, for example, had come to be regarded by the self-consciously enlightened as ‘a harmless enthusiast, pious and sincere, but hardly of sane mind, who was much rather accessory to the intellectual than to the moral degradation of mankind’.