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insignificance of my own feelings and hopes is brought home to me very painfully. Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.' So they preach and I cannot answer them.

Very different is the spirit of another great church which stands far south on the banks of the Tagus estuary. Manoel the Fortunate built Belem Abbey on the spot, so they say, where he stood month after month watching for the returning sails of Vasco da Gama's ships. They did return, as we know, from that most romantic of all human voyages. On a sudden the whole boundless wealth of the gorgeous East lay open to Portuguese adventurers who should pour their wealth into Manoel's kingdom. We buy round-the-world tickets at Cook's office and have vulgarised Jerusalem itself with our cheap trippery. It is hard for us to realise what Vasco da Gama's voyage meant to the waiting king. I realised it, as I never did from books, when I gazed at the wild adventurous tracery of the arches and cloisters at Belem. Here is the work of heroes made almost mad by the prospect of unimaginable achievements. Here the spirit of man leaps up. Nothing is impossible. Even to build a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven is no vain dream. Go to, let us make brick,' and what shall stop us? Prince Henry the Navigator pored over quaint charts and wrestled with the mathematics of voyaging. Mariner after mariner forced his way, each a little further than his predecessor, down the African coast, and returned beaten. The strange dream of joining hands with Prester John and making a circle of Christian steel round the empire of the Mussulman still possessed men's souls. Then Vasco da Gama did something far more wonderful, opened the gates of fairy land, and Portugal went drunk with sheer excitement. Belem is the expression of the frenzy. Bacchanals built it. And we who look at it to-day are lifted up. We are a little lower than the angels.' Hardly at all lower. 'I have said ye are gods. Ye are all children of the

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It is a far cry from Belem Abbey to the Pantheon in Rome. To me this is far the most fascinating of all the Roman churches. St. Peter's revolts me. I stand not appalled but disgusted at the pretentiousness of its vast spaces. Michael Angelo may have planned the dome; but if he did, he planned neither for the glory of God nor the glory of humanity. A millionaire might employ a Michael Angelo to-day, if there were one, to design a motor-car

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for him, and the result, the emotional result, would be the same. This church is the achievement of ostentatious wealth, and Mammon is the least erect of spirits that fell.' Nor have I felt myself stirred to any noble emotion by the gilt roof and heavy splendour of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Its present appearance is the result, no doubt, of the Renaissance spirit of its restoration. But there were two sides to the Renaissance spirit. I can conceive a church, though I have never seen one, built by men like the grammarian, whose funeral Browning hymned. Tussis attacked him.' Calculus racked him.' But he laboured on austerely, settling Hoti's business for him. He might have built a church in which to worship, though I cannot imagine what it would have looked like. But the bishop who ordered his tomb at St. Praxed's was also a child of the Renaissance, and he, I think, was the kind of man who gave the church of Santa Maria Maggiore its present form. He wanted when he died to lie where he could hear the blessed mutter of the Mass.' A church of his designing would not, I suppose, appeal to me much in any case. It makes no appeal at all when I remember that he did not even believe in his own masses; that he conceived of God as 'made and eaten all day long' amid clouds of stupefying incense smoke.' Nor, in spite of Matthew Arnold, does that vast lonely church of St. Paul-withoutthe-Walls move me greatly. I feel its dignity; but it seems to be the dignity of some cold soul whom life's joys and sorrows have left untouched, some one who has not wept, nor laughed, nor loved, nor even hated, but has remained calmly impassive while life flowed by him. I can wonder at the dignity but I do not care for the company of such a man. It is no pleasure to me to linger in the vast aisles of the church which expresses his spirit.

The Pantheon is altogether different. There is an austerity in the simple circle of its walls which fascinates me in an extraordinary way. The eye, wandering round and finding no fixed resting-place, no inevitable central shrine, rises slowly to the flat dome and the mind is filled with a sense of almost perfect calm. The men who built this temple had found, if not the peace which passeth all understanding, at least an inward strength which enabled them to face life and all that lies beyond with untroubled courage. It is possible now, even for us to whom their creeds and most of their philosophies are less than nothing, to stand for an hour or two watching the broad panel of sunlight steal slowly round the grey sides of the dome. So, silently, passes the irrevocable hour.

So, surely, comes the darkness in the end. But the light, while we have it, reaches us, not stained with the purple falsehoods of coloured glass, but straight from the sun itself. God, so they must have felt when they left that open space in their dome, should not be interpreted by any formula. At the beginning of the seventh century they turned this wonderful building into a Christian church, or tried to. It was Pope Boniface IV who placed the cross there and filled the Emperor Hadrian's sacred place with waggon loads of martyrs' bones. But what a foolish attempt that was! The facile philosopher to-day, seeing the Christian altar, the crucifix, the madonnas, finds his thrill of satisfaction in repeating the words of the Emperor Julian, Vicisti Galilaee.' I lack the heart even to scold. It is so obvious that the Galilean has not conquered here. The kingdoms of the world and the glory of them are His. But this building remains aloof from His spirit. I imagine that when the sightseers are all gone and the great doors are locked, when the panel of sunlight has passed and the grey dome darkens utterly, that the old Pagan gods flit to and fro through the shadow, themselves dim shadows now. Apollo, Mercury, Venus, divinities with white graceful limbs, pass one another silently. They have wan, faint smiles on their faces. 'He has not altogether conquered us,' they whisper. His cross is here indeed; but the walls and dome are ours and always will be.'

The Duomo at Pisa also gives me the sense of calm, but it is calm of a different kind. It is peace. The builders of the Pantheon reached an untroubled atmosphere by way of courageous agnosticism. The Pisan cathedral is the work of Christians who attained peace through faith in the living God, and with peace, joy. There is no feeling of joy in the Pantheon. The Pisans built their cathedral after a great victory, and I suppose it was their triumph and the external peace which followed it, which filled them first with the sense of joy. But the emotion went much deeper. No signing of any treaty, no crowning victory over enemies could have induced the sense of peace which that most wonderful of all buildings expresses. The men who planned the vast clear space of the nave; who conceived the perfectly restful poise of the roof, who admitted the stream of sunshine from the rows of high-up, simple windows, had realised a peace and a joy beyond any which earth can give. Our Gothic cathedrals are eloquent of noble strife. Their builders were for ever reaching for an ideal not to be attained.

This cathedral is an achievement. All that its designers wished to do they did. There is no beyond. Sitting in it, letting its rapturous peace lay hold on me, I feel, as nowhere else, the absolute felicity of the redeemed. 'They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them nor any heat.'

The same sense nearly, but not quite, comes from the cathedral of Orvieto. It rises from the clustering houses of a little town huddled together on a small hill-top plateau. It is in close touch, so it seems, with the multitudinous cares and anxieties of common life. The Pisan cathedral stands aloof. The houses of the town. seem to shrink back from it. There are no men with wine carts, no women with baskets of olives on their heads, jostling each other across the sunlit space on which it stands. It has no neighbours save its own proud Baptistery and exquisite bell tower. The cathedral at Orvieto has narrow streets near it. The noises of life assail its walls. I can imagine it thronged with human crowds. on festivals. At Pisa there should never be human crowds. Only the lofty company of the spirits of just men made perfect ought to gather inside its walls. This emotional difference between the two buildings is partly due to their surroundings, but more, I think, to their architecture. Orvieto is in the Italian Gothic style. It is not, indeed, dominated by that sense of strife which makes the northern Gothic so terrible. But the feeling of strife is there, or, perhaps, only the feeling of trial which is hardly strife because the soul is always sustained by a power beyond its own. 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me.' In Pisa we have already learned to use that vale of Raca as a well. In Orvieto we pass through it, conscious of its barren stoniness, but more conscious of the rod and staff which are with us.

These great churches have one common characteristic. They all tower above life. Even those like Orvieto which are to some degree in touch with life, tower over it. Though touched by the spirit of our infirmities they belong to another city, not to any of ours, a city where infirmity is pitied, not shared. But there are churches, the little Sussex churches, for instance, which belong to the life of the people. The same hands which held the ploughhandles built their walls. The homeliness of common life is theirs. The God in them is a Christian household god, very different indeed from the majestic deity of the great cathedrals. Among the famous shrines of Christendom there is only one-at least only one which

I have seen-which shares with the Sussex churches the peculiar quality of being an actual part of the life of the men who dwell around it. The earliest impression which I had of St. Mark's in Venice was that it did not tower above the town. I saw it first, I remember, in the evening. Its gorgeous colours were not ablaze. It stood across the end of the Piazza, no loftier than the buildings on each side, overtopped by the Campanile, the highest domes very little higher than the Clock Tower on the left. It adjoins, without dwarfing, the Doge's Palace. The men who built this church built a house which they and God might inhabit together. They were not overwhelmed nor was their spirit daunted by their conception of divinity. Wonder was in their hearts, the wide-eyed wonder of men who beheld the pageant of life with all its glory. The earth is the Lord's,' they said, 'and the fulness thereof,' but no awe moved them. There was no sense of fear in their religion. They bowed their heads and, clad in long furred robes, they made their stately genuflexions. They were never beaten to their knees. They never grovelled in abject prostrations. They put no sackcloth on their loins nor ashes on their heads.

It seems strange to compare this wildly gorgeous building to the stunted grey churches of the Sussex country-side. Yet there is this single point of resemblance between them. They both grew out of life, the life of every day. But how widely different the lives were! The English farmer had his oxen, his cornfields and his homestead. He built for the God he found in these. The Venetian held the gorgeous East in fee.' He built for the God he found in his Adriatic voyages, in the Eastern silk markets, in the sun-soaked caravans of Midianitish merchantmen. It is said that Venice, alone of Italian cities, looked eastwards. It was that vision which inspired the building of St. Mark's, and I find a curious note of sympathy between it and the Abbey of Belem, the one other great Western church whose builders dreamed of India and Araby the blest. There is the same kind of untamed romance in both buildings, the same lawless riot of the spirit of adventure. I find in St. Mark's much that is not in Belem. There is a splendour of colour which King Manoel never imagined. He looked to exploit the East. The Venetians established a kinship with it, conquered it less than they absorbed it, and their church blazes with gold and colouring as Belem never did.

I feel, too, that the Venetians were never possessed by the great romantic idea of the Crusades. They made sound profit, hard gold

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