It is not be too difficult to asses the “mood” of this visit. This was not the time for floating ideas and plans but rather a time of meeting and negotiation to resolve conflict.
The whole mood is well summed up in the introduction to Section VI of “A Founder Speaks” where Coste highlights the words of Colin which recur as a leit-motif to his sayings before he left in December of 1846:
“I shall be leaving shortly….”
As Coste says, the words recorded by Mayet during the period (Docs. 109-139) “would suffice by themselves to give quite a complete panorama of the Founder’s great themes.”
Colin is here making sure that the main ideas of Marist life are heard and understood by his followers. He seemed to have a sense of foreboding of the difficulties that lay ahead of him in Rome. It seemed inevitable that misunderstanding would follow on tragic misunderstanding.