stood as it was for five hundred years, and before that for perhaps ten hundred more, falling and rising with the chance and change of time. They had all been there once and the visit was a white day in their lives. It had been like the visit of the disciples to the Mount of Transfiguration, a vision of glory never to be forgotten. And so it was felt to be a common calamity!

Before I was able to go there and see it for myself, some fifteen years after, it had been restored to something like its original beauty, and I have gone there from this country twice to see the brave sight again, to see others, also, each wonderful in its way, in other parts of England, and that especially, I remember with the greatest delight, at Durham - a great, grand pile of Norman work of which Dr. Johnson said, "It looks as if it had grown out of the rock on which it is founded and would stand as long as the rock will hold it;" where Cuthbert rests under the great marble slab worn hollow by the knees of the worshipers who came and went for perhaps 600 years before the Reformation; where Bede rests, that noble spirit, who gave us the first Saxon translation of the Gospels, and, finding he was passing away as the last chapter drew to a close bade the scribe hasten his hand that the work might be done, and then breathed his last.

I want to speak to you now and then this winter about some of these cathedrals and the memories they hold, and shall begin this evening by touching

my dream of their beauty as it stays with me, and some of its lessons, reserving special studies, like that you may remember of Westminster, for other chances; and to begin by saying that the first thing these English cathedrals do is to upset entirely and destroy that idea we all harbor somewhere within us, that we have gone ahead, in everything, of what we call the Dark Ages, though you shall hear old people say that times are all the time growing worse, but they mean by this that the times were better when they were young, or, at most, a hundred years ago, or at the farthest, in the days of Good Queen Bess, as they call her over there without any reason in the world. The good times, I think, to all our minds, find their uttermost edge about then; but before then you begin to touch the Dark Ages. Now, all these cathedrals, except St. Paul's in London, grew to this marvelous beauty and completeness some hundreds of years before Elizabeth. They range through a period of perhaps 200 years, but the most and the best of them were built in the Thirteenth Century,— that is, from five to seven hundred years ago, and yet they are so wonderful in their design, so grand in their proportions, and so perfect in all the details of their finish, that no man in England, or even in America, ever thinks of surpassing them in any way.

The best architects, when they want to build a noble church, merely adopt the ideas of these old forgotten builders and, as a rule, manage to spoil

them before they get through, while as for copying their vast and precious beauty and finish, it is a thing never thought of.

It

After this fire I mentioned in the Minster at York, the workmen went up among the dim vaults of oak and stone that, from their great height, had only appeared for centuries, to the people below, as it were "through a glass darkly," and never could appear anything else. But they were struck with wonder to find up there carving as perfect, to the last detail, as that on the stalls and altars. made no difference to these reverent men in the old days that other men would never see what they had done; they were not building for men, but for God, and felt it would not do to shuffle mean work away among the rafters and put the beauty and excellence where everybody could see it. In the old days before them men caught out of Heaven the idea that the Almighty must not be put off with an imperfect offering, it must be spotless and speckless, and so they wrought to that idea in these temples built to His Name. Indeed in this same Church at York they showed me, the last time I was there, some mason work discovered a few years before by an accident, a part of the old Church built, perhaps, 1200 years ago and hidden away when the great Gothic pile was reared after the Norman Conquest. It was as sharp and clear and beautifully joined as if it had been done yesterday by the best masons on the earth; great massive stones fitted to their places with the finest

cement, of which not an ounce went to hide bad work. All there was had been laid there simply for perfection of the perfect stone, and not a stone had shifted a line out of its place or sunk from its true level in all these ages. And so it is everywhere with these Churches, allowing for the inevitable wear and tear of time and the difficulty the slender and delicate work blossoming out of the stone finds in withstanding the elements. For these Gothic Cathedrals are, of all things that were ever done in stone and wood, the most difficult to preserve, and at the same time give that lightness of design which is their rare perfection, and the builders knew it. But then it was to them as it is to us now, the most beautiful way to build, and so they neither spared their money nor hedged against spending more the moment there was any needed. They believed that the most sacred outward thing they could do was to build a grand temple to the Lord whether they were right or wrong I shall not say in this connection. They believed, also, that the people who loved God and loved their Church would always be ready to keep it up to the high standard of perfection they had touched in its completion, and so they died with its glory in their eyes.

But in these Cathedrals you have to wonder not alone at the perfection of beauty, but at its diversity, no two of them are alike or at all alike. In this new land and life of ours you may travel a thousand miles and never know where you are by

the churches, except in Montreal, where the great Cathedral of Notre Dame has a certain character we find nowhere else on the continent; but in that little England you cannot mistake your locality if you catch sight of a Cathedral. "Ah!" you say, "this is Salisbury," as you see one tall spire rising from the downs and then the marvelous west front with its three great lancet windows and innumerable niches once filled with statues of the saints and heroes of the old time. Then two great square towers rise out of a gray old city and you say "Canterbury," and think that just here the glad tidings were first heard that turned pagan England into Christian England after a long fight. You ride over a great plain, and gradually, out of the haze, rise three great towers, two just alike and one rising above them, massive, square, and almost bare of ornament, and you say again: "This is York," before you see the ancient walls that compass the town or the west front of the Church with the statues of Walter Gray, who made it, and Vavasour of Haslewood, who gave the stone; wonderful old York, where they used to decide, now and then, the fortunes of the Roman Empire, and, when the Christian Faith got the mastery, built this Church on the site of a heathen temple. And this with one low square tower and a round Saxon doorway all abloom with carving,"What is this?"- this is Rochester, dear to the heart of Charles Dickens, the scene of the work broken off at his death, “The Mystery of Edwin