When on the undulating air they swim! Sings, like a soul beatified, of love,— With, now and then, the coo of the wild pigeon ;— Later on he varies the metre, not the mood: I have been there, and still would go,'— A man can pray unbidden from the cassock, Thrice blessed this poet accounts the man for whom the gracious prodigality of nature makes all earth a fane, all heaven its dome; to whose tuned spirit "the wild heatherbells ring Sabbath knells; the jubilate of the soaring lark is chant of clerk; "For choir, the thrush and the gregarious linnet; The sod's a cushion for his pious want; And, consecrated by the heaven within it, The sky-blue pool, a font. Each cloud-capp'd mountain is a holy altar; An organ breathes in every grove; And the full heart's a Psalter, Rich in deep hymns of gratitude and love." With consistent fervour he therefore protests against the beadle species who are for "calling all sermons contrabands, in that great Temple that's not made with hands ;" and his plea is "Oh! simply open wide the Temple door, The willing advent of the rich and poor ! 66 ALL HEAVEN ITS DOME. Voices may come to swell the choral song With notes of praise they learn'd in musings lone."* 461 The simple doctrine of the Deerslayer is, that churches are good, he supposes, else good men wouldn't uphold them; but they are not altogether necessary. They call 'em the temples of the Lord; but the whole 'arth is a temple of the Lord to such as have the right minds." The words are those of a meditative but unlettered man, who loved the woods for their freshness, their sublime solitudes, their vastness, and the impress they everywhere bore of the divine hand of their Creator. The Pathfinder, alter et idem, makes this candid confession of his experiences: "I have attended church sarvice in the garrisons, and tried hard, as becomes a true soldier, to join in the prayers, but never could raise within me the solemn feelings and true affection that I feel when alone with God in the forest. There I seem to stand face to face with my Master; all around me is fresh and beautiful, as it came from His hand; and there is no nicety of doctrine to chill the feelings. No, no; the woods are the * Wordsworth says of his Wanderer "that sometimes his religion seemed to me Self-taught, as of a dreamer in a wood; Who to the model of his own pure heart Shaped his belief, as grace divine inspired, And human reason dictated with awe."-Excursion, book i. + Mr. Horace Moule affirms, in his Inquiry into the History of Christian Oratory (Cambridge, 1859), that “there is no special virtue in the nature of a consecrated place as such, and that Chrysostom's discreet words on this topic have a living significance at the present day." But that Father, it has been objected, makes a reservation "if no house of prayer be near -otherwise he would doubtless have enforced attendance at the House of God. It is, argues one of his expositors, just one of those services which are "generally necessary"-though of course, if you are in the backwoods, the shade of a tree or the broad canopy of heaven may fitly form a place of prayer and thanksgiving. Clement of Alexandria is blamed by Conybeare in a note of his Bampton Lectures for observing that his perfect exemplar of a Christian needs "no stated place or time of prayer, for to him every spot is consecrated, his whole life one continued festival."-Talking of devotion, Dr. Johnson said, in one of his most serious moods, and not long before his death, that true though it be that "God dwelleth not in temples made with hands;" yet in this state of being, our minds are more piously affected in places appropriated to Divine worship, than in others. Some people have a particular room in their houses, where they say their prayers; of which I do not disapprove, as it may animate their devotion." true temples after all, for there the thoughts are free to mount higher even than the clouds." We will not stay to urge a No, no, in another sense; what the veteran trapper says may be no better at the best than natural religion; but at any rate in him it is natural. While Nathaniel Hawthorne was a denizen of that old manse whose mosses cling to his name and memory, he kept a journal, one entry in which, on a June Sunday, runs thus: “Leo [his dog] and I attended divine service this morning in a temple not made with hands. We went to the farthest extremity of Peter's path, and there lay together under an oak, on the verge of the broad meadow." He was born to sympathize with his medical friend's Elsie Venner, who "very uncertain in her feeling about going to church," loved rather to stroll, on summer Sundays, over The Mountain,-one cave in which she was even said to have fitted up as an oratory, where in her own wild way she worshipped the God whom she sought in the dark chasms of the dreaded cliffs. Haply he could even have found it in his heart to be "almost" angry with Tersitza, as Odysseus in Landor's colloquy is taxed with being, because she was sorry she could not go to church, where there was none to go to,— and for saying it was a pity to waste to sweet a morning in the open air, instead of thanking God for it, and singing to Him, and adoring Him. Odysseus and Hawthorne could and would, either of them, probably, have sung a second to Macaulay's strain in a country churchyard: "Let pious Damon take his seat, with mincing step and languid smile, And scatter from his 'kerchief sweet, Sabæan odours o'er the aisle ; And spread his little jewell'd hand, and smile round all the parish beauties, And pat his curls, and smooth his band,-meet preludes to his priestly duties. "Let the throng'd audience press and stare; let stifled maidens ply the fan, Admire his doctrines and his hair, and whisper, 'What a good young man!' While he explains what seems most clear, so clearly that it seems perplexed, I'll stay and read my sermon here; and skulls and bones shall be the text." AT A STAND-STILL IN THE PORCH. 463 Mr. Fields, in his Yesterdays with Authors, imagines Hawthorne, in his quiet musing way, strolling through the daisied fields of the old country on a Sunday morning and hearing the distant church-bells chiming to service. "His religion was deep and broad, but it was irksome to him to be fastened in by a pew-door, and I doubt if he often heard an English sermon. He very rarely described himself as inside a church, but he liked to wander among the graves in the churchyards, and read the epitaphs on the moss-grown slabs." He liked better, it is added, to meet and have a talk with the sexton than with the rector. After hearing in a church, said Dr. Channing, "a discourse which makes God a partial being, and identifies Him with a sect, I delight to escape into the open air; and one view of the heavens, or of any of the great features of nature, is enough to scatter the gloom which had gathered over me, and to teach me that what has been said, however well intended, is false." A minor poem of Longfellow's pictures an outsider, yet a theologian, in this attitude : "I stand without here in the porch,* I hear the bell's melodious din, I hear the organ peal within, I hear the prayer, with words that scorch Like sparks from an inverted torch, I hear the sermon upon sin, With threatenings of the last account. And all, translated in the air, Reach me but as our dear Lord's Prayer, And as the Sermon on the Mount." 66 * Mr. Walter White provoked a protest from the reviewers of his All Round the Wrekin for reckoning among the sweetest of our Sabbath-day privileges"-not going to church, but-stepping silently into the porch of a village church on a quiet Sunday morning, and there sitting down in cool shadow, listening to the hum without and the hum within.' THE CLOAK LEFT AT TROAS BY PAUL THE AGED. BEING 2 TIMOTHY iv. 13. EING such a one as Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of, or for the sake of, Jesus Christ,—such was the Apostle's condition, stricken in years, and confined within prison walls, when he wrote to Timothy to bring with him, when he came, the cloak that Paul left at Troas with Carpus, of which he now felt the need. True, the Apostle sent a message at the same time for other leavings of his at Troas, which he was quite as anxious to have, or still more so; the books to wit, and especially the parchments. He lays stress on the latter, as if he could better do without his cloak in the pinching cold of his cell, than without the writings that should occupy and sustain his mind and spirit.* But to ask for the cloak at all is a significant touch, of more than physical interest. Paul the aged had the right to exhort Timothy in this same letter to endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. He had himself endured it in his time, and was enduring it now. He had fought a good fight, and kept the faith, and in *The combined mention of cloak and books reminds us of what we read of Boniface when setting out on his last travels to Friesland, girding round him his black Benedictine habit, and depositing in the folds of it his Ambrose De Bono Mortis.-Nor be forgotten what Boniface wrote to his trusty correspondent, Daniel, Bishop of Winchester: "I pray you to send me the book of the prophets, which the abbot Winbert, formerly my master, left me when dying, in which six prophets are comprised in the same volume, written in very distinct letters. You cannot send me a greater consolation in my old age; for I cannot find a book like it in this country; and my sight being feeble, I cannot easily distinguish small and contracted letters."—If those are right who for St. Paul's words as Englished in our version, "Ye see how large a letter I have written to you with mine own hand" (Gal. vi. 11), would read, "Ye see [or, See] in what large letters I have written,”Ἴδετε πηλίκοις ὑμῖν γράμμασιν ἔγραψα τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί, on the score of failing eyesight; here again we have a point of analogy between our English apostle to the Germans (for Winfrid's birth is to be borne in mind by English as well as Germans) and the great Apostle of the Gentiles-between Boniface the ageing, and Paul the aged. In reference to which latter title be it remarked, in passing, that the rendering in our version of the Greek Παῦλος πρεσβύτης, is assumed to be correct, and preferable to the suggested emendation, Paul the presbyter. |