angels in old pictures. It was too warm a day for the men to wear their coats and so they left them outside, and I am not sure that any woman wore what you would call a bonnet. They sat down with the children about them in a very pleasant, homely way, and I often had to wait in my sermon for the children to hush, and look as if I enjoyed it very much. But it was all so homelike and they were so hearty and sincere and that log church was so sweet and sound a leaven for a whole county, slaying the grossness of the old evil times, rooting out the drinking dens at the corners, drawing the folk together in this friendly way to bend their faces before the Most High, catch new thoughts of our human brotherhood and find their way from that to the Divine, teach the children a few simple and sweet truths in the little Sunday school and send them home with a good sound book in their hands to where books were hardly known, that this stays with me still as the dream of a better cathedral than the most splendid fanes I have ever seen, when you get at the real heart of the question.

III. In the very bloom and glory of that century when these cathedrals touched the summit of their splendor, the Black Death swept over England so fearfully and fatally that the living were hardly enough to bury the dead. It is surmised that two-thirds of the entire population died of that Black Death. "How did this befall us?" I will tell you. We lived in base, mean, and filthy homes,

dark, close, and ugly as sin, and the poor lived on mean and base food and not enough of that. These grand foundations were like the wens that Idraw all the life to themselves and leave the man to die; the hard-working man had ultimately to pay for them and for the hordes and herds of men that lived on and in them. It was very much like that old print you may have seen,- the King with his crown says, "I govern all," the Soldier with his sword says, "I fight for all," the Lawyer in his gown says, "I plead for all," and the poor man with his spade says "I pay for all."

So my dream of cathedrals for our new and better day turns away from these, beautiful as they are, to foundations where we can learn how to live, to help each other in noble ways to a nobler life, to take no striving out of any man but to teach him how to strive to the best purpose, so that his life shall be well worth living.

We are beginning to think of these things,— they are great things and good. My dream of a cathedral for the future and for this new good world is grand clusters of homes, full of sweetness and light, noble and beautiful in their way as these old fanes are, where we can live together and worship together, maintaining the sanctity of the family and yet maintaining the brotherhood. “A dream," you say; "well," I answer, "it will come true because it is the next great thing to build in our building."

66

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Be

THERE is one church in England we are sure to visit who go there if we visit no other, and that is Westminster Abbey. The real mother church of the mother land, the great and beautiful shrine where her noblest dust is treasured and the monuments of her mighty dead, the place where the American heart is touched as I think it can be touched nowhere else within those four seas! cause this is our dust also down in the vaults and the finest of those monuments are ours by kinship of blood, and so it is as if we stood among the traditions of some grand ancestral home where the dead are more to us for the moment than the living. They belong to the race from which we sprang and make close and true connection with its life, while no doubt it was this feeling which prompted Irving to write one of the finest chapters about Westminster Abbey to be found in books.

I have thought also that to the most of those who go there from this side of the water the curious and touching story which lies far back and within what they see with their eyes is still in the same sense a blank,- something like those old parchments in which when you remove what meets

the eye you find far older and more enduring records that by reason of their very age come home to you like a new revelation. So I want to help those who may go there to catch some crumb of the curious interest in what they will see as they stand within those walls, to remind some others of what they have seen and to what may still be the heavy majority, to those will never go there, recite something of the story of the foundation and fortunes of the venerable pile, so that Westminster Abbey may stand in its true light as a type of the far reaching and enduring life of England, a life mingled forever of good and evil, I know, but still with a stanch and serious purpose, as I believe, in the heart of it all, to get the evil under in the end and to glorify the good.

Dean Stanley questions the truth of the evanescence of names written in water and thinks nothing is apt to be so abiding as such a name, and I think he is right. In Bede, the first English historian, who died 1163 years ago, mention is made of a well, and I was looking down into the cool deeps of that well a few years since. The whole place has been burnt over no man knows how often but the well still bubbled up fresh and clear all the same and said you must build your citadel about me or you can have no abiding city and so a well 300 miles away from this I saw at Carlisle was the nursing mother of Westminster Abbey. There was once once a little island where the Abbey stands now, made by the great

river on one side and on the other by some streams that are now lost in underground London. It was a haunt of wild things and was more than suspected of harboring demons,- loco terribilis — the old Saxon chronicle calls it, and here about the year 600 a few brave men went to see what could be done to bring the island within the clasp of such civility as was possible in those rude and rough days. They struck a well in the very heart of the wilderness and this was the pivot on which all things turned. They also got a church going about 616 and then forever after psalms were sung and prayers lifted from the margin of that sweet old well. And then in time there came another sacred touch to the place. One man's life was so pure and good that when he died they made him a saint and buried him within the church, grouped their homes about it, and so it was very much like our old nests in New England to which our hearts are still bound by the old well, the meeting house and the graves of those who are to you as the saints. It is all dim enough through more than four centuries; still these sweet home touches never quite fade out, the water bubbles, the dust of the good saint sleeps close by and the terrible place grows into a garden of God within sight of London, while the generations live and die and are forgotten of men forever.

But the times we are looking at could not rest content with such sacredness as this, because men were watching then as they are watching forever