THIS

THIS is an English country lane. On one side of it there are many green trees. I am sitting on a wooden stile. An English country lane is strange to me, for I do not live in England: and I have few opportunities of sitting on wooden stiles. In front are two green fields: their grass of a very deep green colour, golden-sprinkled with many buttercups. The fields slope down gently towards a little town. Beyond the town are green fields and woods, sloping upwards and making a green background to the little town.

No consideration of the inexpressible contempt and reprobation with which a certain dear and illustrious friend will regard these lines, shall hinder my saying that midway in the scene on which I am looking rises an Object which I have come 519 miles to see; and which I would rather see than snowy Alp, heathery mountain, or broad ocean. In this still May afternoon, whose light is somewhat overcast, sombre gray against a gray sky, the Object stands. I have been all about it, within it and around it, for the best part of two days: and now I have come to this spot, a mile distant from it, to look at it in one view. I never saw it till yesterday: I know it as well as if I had known it all my life. The Object is Canterbury Cathedral.

Vast and lofty central tower, dominating church, city, landscape: one of the humbler western towers (humble only by comparison with that incomparable one) apparent to the right of it: eastern transept: the other transept hidden: apsidal east end: noble trees of the Close, called The Oaks because there are no oaks among them: I gaze on you this day. Starved in the matter of lovely architecture, as every man must be who lives in the country where I live, that church is to the

Scottish lover of Gothic as cool water to the thirsty throat in the hot desert. Shall I recreantly fail to say this, because certain acquaintances will deride it, and say 'Oh, he is at his cathedrals again?' Shall I regard the weightier objection of the illustrious friend who associates cathedral pomp with conjuring? Nay verily. I should as soon, in deference to the feelings of the man deaf from his birth, admit that there is no such thing as music. And if any have not the inward sense to which that Object before me makes appeal, I pity them and forgive them. They cannot help themselves: they shall not hinder me.

Long ago, I knew an old man. He is dead, like very many of all I have known. He was blind, stone blind: yet he walked independently about the crowded streets of a great city, and along the country roads beyond. He knew his way. Stop him at any point, miles from his home: and he would tell you exactly where he was. I asked him one day to explain to me how he did all this. He answered, ‘Oh Mr. Smith, you have got a sense I have not got, and I have got a sense you have not got: that's all.'

I willingly admit that my acquaintance Mr. Snarling, who laughs at my love of Gothic churches, has many valuable senses which I wholly lack. He has a clear intuition of things I cannot see, such as his own merits and abilities. He has likewise a faculty of hating and vilifying all who differ from him, to which I cannot by any effort attain. But I have a sense which Snarling has not. You will no more persuade the lover of music that he has no real enjoyment in it, than you will persuade me that I am not awestricken and elevated in the presence of what I am now looking on. Yes, I have a sense Snarling has not. Many there are, indeed, who lack

it; as well as Snarling. Several girls of gipsy hue have just passed, walking by a path through the green grass and the buttercups: and one of them, in the presence of the Cathedral, called another by many foul names. You remember the complaint of the Highlander: 'He knocked me down in the presence of the Duke of Argyle's horse.' Probably that poor girl never saw the inside of that church; and I am sure she does not care for the outside of it. There is a place in this world where, if I had heard any young person speak as she spoke, I should kindly but strongly admonish the young person. But I have no right here.

When people get weary, they seek rest in various ways. This is my way: To sit on a stile, in a lane in Kent, and look at a cathedral. Yesterday morning did the writer enter a railway carriage at Victoria Station in London; and make his way through the hop-fields to Rochester. Then he crossed the bridge which spans the Medway, flowing between green slopes and hills: saw the ruined castle, a grand ruin, that meets you on the right as you leave the bridge: and entered Rochester Cathedral. Well, among English cathedrals, it is very poor. The rude external walls have the dignity of age the solitary central tower, rebuilt not many years since, cannot be called other than vile.

Fine samples of whitewash may be discerned inside. The choir is shabby: the shabbiest cathedral choir I ever saw; I mean in England. I have seen worse in Ireland, by many degrees: worse in Scotland, by degrees beyond number. Four hours did the writer study that church, within and without: the pleasantest recollection he brought away is of the ivied church wall in the court where is the deanery. That was very quiet, reverend, and enjoyable. Then on again, through many hopfields: till the towers of Canterbury

arose in the distance: on, till the city was gained. Then he walked about the Cathedral till the daylight failed: and went back and walked about it again by a beautiful moonlight.

The discerning reader of this page may possibly have concluded that the writer has a mania for Gothic churches. Very many has he studied, both in England and on the Continent. Much has he wearied his friends, boring them with the uncongenial subject of pointed architecture. Most of his friends know just as much about it as so many cows. The writer's feelings may be imagined, rather than described, when this day he was asked, by an Archbishop, if he had ever seen a cathedral before. Such was the enquiry addressed to the writer, who knows (as nearly as possible) seven times as much about cathedrals as does the illustrious prelate himself. But I have long been aware that the most astounding ignorance will not hinder a man's rising to great place in some parts of Christendom. It is quite certain that His Holiness the Pope once enquired whether Vealberfoss was not an Oxford professor. That infallible man knew not what Vealberfoss truly was.

But it is growing cold. I must come down from my wooden stile. I am not likely to sit upon it any more. Parting, let me give a friendly pat to the rough post at one side of it, much decayed. I dare say that post is as old as I am. Yet I never saw it before. But there are things in this world which I never saw at all. Let me come away. I take a bit of hawthorn blossom from the hedge: English hawthorn blossom. I pass the little church, where Christianity was (possibly) first preached in England. Here is the lych-gate. An ivied tower: an old yew close to it: many quiet graves.

Here the writer of these lines put

his bit of paper in his pocket: and going away to the Fountain, had a solitary dinner. Very comfortable and good are all the arrangements at that old-fashioned inn. Next, having had a large cup of tea, he sat down at a table in the coffeeroom of that house, and wrote out in ink what he had previously sketched in pencil.

:

I am not going to give an architectural description of Canterbury Cathedral. Most readers would not care for it and the few who want it can readily find it elsewhere. Yet it may be permitted to say that taking it all in all, I think it the grandest Christian church in Britain. There are details, doubtless, in which it is surpassed by this and that other church: but remembering all these, it seems to me to stand first. The exterior is majestic beyond all description; and there is no quieter or more charming close. There are two western towers: an incomparable central tower: two transepts, though neither reaches out far from the body of the building. A marked feature, internally, is the use of grand flights of steps. Passing along the magnificent nave, you ascend a great flight of steps to the choir. Then, within the choir, two successive flights of steps lead to the altar, which is thus set on high. The choir is thus specially fitted for imposing ceremonial: but on the other hand, this raising of the floor lowers the roof, which immediately above the altar is certainly wanting in elevation. Α somewhat cold character, too, is given to the choir through the want of oaken tabernacle-work above the stalls along the sides of it. Only the stalls which face the east have the richly carved wood which gives glory to the choir of Winchester, and throws into relief against itself the white robes of choristers and clergy. But who shall dare to carp, or even faintly praise, in the presence of this majestic house of God?

After you have left it, you can begin at your ease to think how in this respect or that the Cathedral might be better: but in its presence you are cowed. The writer chanced on a confirmation. He beheld the Archbishop enter at the close of a stately procession: he beheld the Dean, for personal eminence second to no one there. And sitting hard by the throne, as the Litany was sung, he regarded with much interest the Primate of All England, the Scotchman whom it has pleased God to set in that anxious and difficult place. And looking at him afterwards, kindly and simply laying hands on four hundred heads, the writer looked back, over many years, to a day when a Glasgow student was dying. He was the most eminent student of his time: Sir Daniel Sandford, the great professor of that period, was wont to point him out as 'the man that beat Tait.' But this victorious man had strong faith in the ability and fortune of his rival for the honours of the University: and, when dying, he said once to those around him, 'Well, I should have liked to have lived to see Archy Tait a bishop.' The writer saw what James Halley wished to have seen, and more. He saw Archy Tait Archbishop of Canterbury. He does not pretend to think that every man who may fill that place is a great man, of necessity. But beyond question it is an exceptional and a great position.

Next morning by railway to London, Victoria: reading by the way the dismal yet inevitable ending of He Knew he was Right; which profoundly true and interesting story if any young wife or young husband have not read, let such go forthwith and read it and learn from it. Let the little rift be stopped ere it widens! The day that follows is Sunday. Let us turn our steps towards a college chapel, well known five and twenty years since, and

days. In those days the college chapel was a plain place: oblong, flat-roofed, not church-like, very light and very cold. Now it is a showy Byzantine interior, with clerestory, open roof, richly-stained windows, open benches arranged in the fashion of a cathedral choir. There is a grand choral service; and at the end of the train of surpliced choristers there walked in two old fellow-students to perform the service; one in the dignity of Principal of the college. So times change. The service was as carefully and well done as you are likely to have it anywhere; and there was a very admirable sermon; calm, weighty, wise, real: the sermon of a man who had faith in all he said.

Let Monday be spent on the banks of the beautiful Thames, the most beautiful of English rivers, many miles from the great city: a day of restful enjoyment in and about the perfect church and charming parsonage of a valued friend. That beautiful church: made what it is by so much loving labour of hands that have been dust for ages! They did not sharply calculate, then, how little money they could decently spend on such a place; nor vex their souls with the sorry problem, How to get the greatest amount of shamappearance for the smallest possible cost. O my beloved land, land of the ecclesiastical barn and even pigsty, land where the house of God is often the ugliest, dirtiest, seediest house in all the parish, what shall be said in the presence of what I see here? And I, lover of Gothic churches, to me it has been given to minister in various sacred edifices which I could call my own, all ugly; very ugly differing in degrees of ugliness, but all ugly save the last; and that, though even in its transmogrification a noble church, oftentimes called ugly by incapable human creatures. Many such have I known, who declared that they

Let me not do more than recall Waterloo Station, busy with many morning travellers: and then the rapid course to Winchester: the quiet close with its noble trees: the grand church, vast in length, cool in the hot summer day: the beautiful service, the last such service I shall join in for many days: the college, schoolroom, chapel, hall, sleeping rooms: then through the water-meadows to fair St. Cross, lovely church and peaceful dwellings, reminding one how the learned and devout Earl impoverished himself to carry fully out the purposes of a benevolent founder, pocketing nothing for his own assiduous labours in season and out of season for the simple brethren's good, and bearing meekly the injustice of a partial Court of Chancery, suspiciously doubtful of his pure and self-denying virtues. Let another day bear the pilgrim onwards to Chichester: peaceful little city, that day filled with sheep and harmless calves: with its four chief streets, running from its decorated cross towards the four cardinal points of the compass: with its beautiful cathedral, less than most, yet a most interesting church: with rebuilt spire, with detached bell-tower, with pleasant close, quaint palace with ivy-grown gate, plain deanery of red brick, with fair garden and great trees, and its Dean known to fame, kind, good, able, skilful, wise, who might well have risen to something higher than a deanery. Then in due time let the train, exceptionally rapid, violently oscillating, snatch the traveller through the lovely fields and trees of Sussex, under princely Arundel, in the bright summer day: a vision of greenness and

beauty, which will be pleasant to remember hereafter in the bleak east wind, far away.

And now let the writer, having visited and diligently studied twentyfour English cathedral churches, humbly express the impression and conviction borne away by him. They are the conviction and impression of as enthusiastic a pilgrim as ever stood under a pointed arch. Well, magnificent as are these churches, and grand as is their service, they are a dead failure so far as concerns their influence over the great majority of the people who live round their walls. The stranger delights in them, and in their worship: they practically fail to exercise any moral weight upon any but a very little handful of the population of the cathedral city itself. Their worship, when the truth is said, fails to attract either rich or poor. The week-day service of most cathedrals is a melancholy sight: specially the morning service. There is not anything that can be called a congregation and while human nature is human nature, those who conduct these services must needs come to conduct them in a perfunctory and listless way, Would it were otherwise! Would that morning and evening saw those grand choirs crowded with a worthy multitude of worshippers. But facts are facts. In a town of seven thousand inhabitants I have seen three individuals besides the officiating clergy and choristers: in a town of twenty thousand, ten: in a town of sixty thousand, eighteen. The poor, as a general rule, never attend the worship of the cathedral at all, unless when attracted by some special service in the nave. And these services, after all that has been said of them, are rare. In one of the largest and noblest of English cathedrals, there have been exactly two in the last twenty-two years. The stalls are manifestly not made for the occupa

:

tion of working folk: the vergers are plainly not there to the end of showing such to their seats. And a musical service, as the rule, has no attraction for uneducated people. Such prefer to go to some shabby little red brick meeting-house, where they find preaching which interests them and comes home to them. The preaching of the average canon will never come home to anybody. Well I remember a summer Sunday, on whose afternoon I worshipped in one of the most magnificent of cathedrals, in a certain city of no great size. The congregation was depressingly small. No one, unless very familiar with the liturgy, and gifted with sharp ears, could have followed the service: and there was no sermon. Considering what the sermon in the forenoon had been, this was doubtless a relief. Worship being over, the little flock (so poor and shrunken in the vast sanctuary) departed. And walking through a back street hard by, I be held a crowd of people pouring out of one of the seediest-looking little conventicles these eyes have seen. So there were people in that city at that hour ready to go to church if sufficient inducement were held out to them. But the cathedral and its service were not sufficient inducement: the homely worship of the seedy little chapel was such. No doubt the prayers there would have vexed the cultured soul; but to the poor worshippers they had the reality which comes of being expressed in the language of daily life. No doubt the singing was bad, but it was such as they could join in. And as for the preaching, doubtless they understood it and were interested by it. As for the sermon at the cathedral that morning, few of them could have understood it, and no human being could have felt the faintest interest in any portion of it.

Even the educated class are not attracted by the week-day services.