TEMPLES NOT MADE WITH HANDS. The man of God will pass his Sabbath-noon, 455 The Finland poet, Runeberg, has found in a living Irish prelate a congenial translator or adapter (is there such a word?) of his Island Church-some stanzas of which are germane to the matter in hand. As where to the utterance, "Ah, in the church are psalms divinely tender," he adds the companion truth, "Yet here is music too, not earthly-born, dropped downward by the skylarks as they render some air heard up beside the gates of morn." As in Mr. Tennyson's poem, there are Two Voices heard alternately in this one. Now we hear a plaint as of one debarred from resort to the sanctuary, who dwells in wistful imagination on the wealth and glory of flowers that deck the church, making the old pillars look so bright, while the organ sends forth its noble strains, "trembling yet victorious," that keep quivering on like light upon the wave : "And better still, the good priest of Christ's merits And launches sinful yet forgiven spirits On that great deep, the promises of God; "Whilst I, far off from church, like one in blindness The Lord commandeth not His loving-kindness, Yet here are flowers, and light, and voices mystic, the second voice urges, and such as never were since the High Priest in the Holy of Holies wore gems oracular and golden bells: "And here are pillared pines, like columns soaring, With branches tall that like triforiums are, And a soft liturgy of winds adoring, With echoes from some temple-gate ajar." One of the paragraphs in a celebrated "prayer or psalm, made by my Lord Bacon, Chancellor of England," comes to this conclusion: "Thy creatures have been my books, but Thy Scriptures much more. I have sought Thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but I have found Thee in Thy temples." Some would reverse the finding; some have done so, and professed to find the Object of their worship very present in the greenwood and garden, and One that hideth Himself in temples made with hands. Southey, in The Doctor, gives a description of the tranquil Sunday evenings of a meditative emeritus, who "took his solitary pipe in his arbour, with the church in sight, and the churchyard wherein at no distant time he was to be laid in his last abode;" and such musings, it is alleged, induced a sense of sober piety,—of thankfulness for former blessings, contentment with the present, and humble yet sure and certain hope for futurity, which "might vainly have been sought at prayer-meetings, or evening lectures, where indeed little good can ever be obtained without some deleterious admixture, or alloy of baser feelings." This was written in Southey's days of mature orthodoxy and conservative churchmanship, long years after he had penned the lines Written on Sunday Morning (1795)— "Go thou and seek the House of Prayer! I to the woodlands wend, and there, Wakes not my soul to zeal, Like the sweet music of the vernal grove. Or when, reclining on the cliff's huge height, "Go thou and seek the House of Prayer! And meet Religion there. She need not haunt the high-arch'd dome to pray, At liberty she loves to rove, 66 SOUTHEY AND NATURAL RELIGION. Wide o'er the heathy hill or cowslipt dale; 457 Southey's line about seeing in lovely Nature the God of love, is suggestive of thoughts to some of which lyrical expression was given by a contemporary minstrel, whose "sacred melodies" Professor Wilson pronounced to be worthy of a place beside those of James Montgomery, or Heber, or Keble.* Thou, dear enthusiast, sayest, None can like Nature preach; that in her fane thou prayest; that woods and rills can teach ;" then let the dear enthusiast leave the vales below, and gaze on the fire-stream, pouring down Etna's viny steep, and listen to the billows at their loudest, and watch the ravage of earthquakes, and give eye and ear at once to the lightnings and thunders of that God who is a consuming fire. Southey could appreciate to the full in the fall of life this aspect of the question. But his letters as a young man betoken that impatience of the constraints of ritual which the lines on woodland worship assert; and in one of them, written two years after those lines were composed, he utters an "almost wish" that he could believe in the local divinities of the pagans, and he goes on to say that the recollection of scenery he loved recalls to him "those theistic feelings which the beauties of nature are best fitted to awaken." The hill and the grove would be to him holier places than the Temple of Solomon ; man cannot pile up the quarried rock to equal its original grandeur; and the cedar of Lebanon loses all its beauties when hewn into a beam." Perhaps to the end of his days Southey would have gone along with Sotheby in his preference of wild Staffa to consecrated Iona, for purpose of innermost heart-worship : "When 'mid Iona's wrecks meanwhile O'er sculptured graves I trod, 66 Where Time had strewn each mouldering aisle I hailed the eternal God: * Keeble, the Professor perversely spelt it; just as he sometimes misspelt the late Bishop of Llandaff's name, Coppleston; and he could even cite a distinguished countryman as Thomas Carlisle. Ta. Sufa, more I felt His presence in thy move Than where Iona's cross rose a er the westan vize." John Foster would have asserted a crime to the preference. Emphansally and candidy be somewhere records his deep fee ing of dillike to all social exercises, less with one I two bosom friends, whose heart he knew beat time w can. This he maintained to be a feeling not of implety but of individually; and he recounts his frequent experiences Í it even in the presence of worthy people. He had a sense of entire instation, and so formd the forms of a sectious sociality" simply irksome. How often the wish, he confesses. came over him to vanish out of the room, and find himsel walking in some lonely wood! A protester against sermonhearing being regarded as an end and not merely as a means (it is to the modern Protestant what the Sacraments were to the old Church"), goes on to say, autobiographically: - Was the minister eager for his own honour, and not for my welfare. when he was not satisfied by my assurance that I found private meditation, with an occasional book or a walk in the fields. so profitable, that I had no longings after his discourse?" And the implied answer is No; but that at the bottom of the "minister's" mind was the assumption, that there is some abstract "duty" in hearing sermons, as if they were an end in themselves. "That you do not find in the pulpit what you seek," writes Caroline Perthes to her daughter Agnes, “distresses me greatly, but does not surprise me. refuge in your own inner church: God can supply a better table than any preacher, and will assuredly feed you, if only you are hungry. The old hymns and chorales have ever been my best stimulants, and are so still, whenever the inner life Take * Washington Irving, in his seventy-sixth year, mildly rebuked his nephew and biographer when proposing for himself a walk in the fields as a sanitary substitute for attendance at church. Here is an extract from Mr. Pierre Irving's diary, which forms the concluding part of the last volume of his Life of his uncle: "Oct. 23, Sunday.-Feverish; no appetite for breakfast. I put on my coat, announcing my intention to take a good walk. 'Better go to church,' said he; that would be a good walk.' He was not able to go himself." IMMENSITY A TEMPLE. 459 grows languid." "Salute the rocks at Schwartzburg," she bids her son Matthias, "and go before noon to the Trippstein, when the sun shines aslant through the firs, and reflect that your father and I have also been there, have thanked God and rejoiced." Consecrated orators in gorgeous churches, quoth General Dale, the Mississippi Partisan, "teach the solemn truths of Revelation, but it is only in the boundless seas, perhaps, or in the deep solitude of mountain and valley, that the untutored eye can look through Nature up to Nature's God.” The "Shirley" of Fraser's Magazine is convinced that to some men—to the sick child or to the tired mechanic—the purple clouds and the wayside flowers convey a message of mercy which they cannot learn from any other teacher—which they cannot learn in their garrets, in their ginshops, "in their churches," the last, deliberately said, and without shrinking, because this essayist on "Sabbath Rest" maintains that you must put physical stamina, human hope, and manly vigour into a man, before you can do much for him either morally or spiritually. This is not indited at all in the spirit of Byron's fling at the "kind casuists" who were pleased to say that he had no devotion 66 But set those persons down with me to pray, And you shall see who has the properest notion My altars are the mountains and the ocean, Earth, air, stars,—all that springs from the great Whole, A pretty piece of pantheism, such as it is. Less earnest than "And I have been 'where bells have knoll'd to church.' Dear bells! how sweet the sound of village bells |