covering them with foliage could not curb their invention nor prevent
their hands from beauty and joy. They forgot everything in their
delight, even the great logic of design, even to leap up to God, since
He was here in the meadows in this garden of ours that He has given us
and blest.

But these great buildings, scarcely to be understood by us save by the
grace of God and now a little lonely too, missing so many of their
sisters, and certainly in an alien service, are how much less
appealing and less holy than those village churches so humble and so
precious that everywhere ennoble and glorify England of my heart. They
stand up still for our souls before God, and are to be loved above all
I think--and even the humblest of them is to be loved--for the tombs
they shelter within and without. More than any Cathedral they touch in
us some profound and fundamental mystery common to us all, that is the
life and the energy of the Christian soul. They, above all, express
England, England of my heart, in them we find utterance, are joined
with the great majority and together approach, in their humility,
beauty, and quietness, God who has loved us all and given us England
therein and thereby to serve Him in delight. They kneel with the hind
and now as ever in the name of Our Lord. It is enough. The Cathedrals
are haunted by the Old Faith, and by Rome, whose they are: but the
village churches are our own. Nor though we be of the Old Faith let us
be too proud to salute their humility. They stand admittedly in the
service of man, and this at least is admirable in the Church of
England of my heart--I mean her humility. To her, unlike Rome,
absolute Truth has not been revealed; she is so little sure of anything
that she will condemn no man, no, not one of her officers, though he
deny the divinity of Christ. She desires only to serve: and if any
man, even an atheist, can approach the God he ignorantly denies most