robe of brightness for the Sabbath.

By dwelling near a church a person soon contracts an attachment for
the edifice. We naturally personify it, and conceive its massy walls
and its dim emptiness to be instinct with a calm and meditative and
somewhat melancholy spirit. But the steeple stands foremost in our
thoughts, as well as locally. It impresses us as a giant with a mind
comprehensive and discriminating enough to care for the great and
small concerns of all the town. Hourly, while it speaks a moral to the
few that think, it reminds thousands of busy individuals of their
separate and most secret affairs. It is the steeple, too, that flings
abroad the hurried and irregular accents of general alarm; neither
have gladness and festivity found a better utterance than by its
tongue; and when the dead are slowly passing to their home, the
steeple has a melancholy voice to bid them welcome. Yet, in spite of
this connection with human interests, what a moral loneliness on
week-days broods round about its stately height! It has no kindred
with the houses above which it towers; it looks down into the narrow
thoroughfare--the lonelier because the crowd are elbowing their
passage at its base. A glance at the body of the church deepens this
impression. Within, by the light of distant windows, amid refracted
shadows we discern the vacant pews and empty galleries, the silent
organ, the voiceless pulpit and the clock which tells to solitude how
time is passing. Time--where man lives not--what is it but eternity?
And in the church, we might suppose, are garnered up throughout the
week all thoughts and feelings that have reference to eternity, until
the holy day comes round again to let them forth. Might not, then, its
more appropriate site be in the outskirts of the town, with space for
old trees to wave around it and throw their solemn shadows over a
quiet green? We will say more of this hereafter.