ic towers, massive and rich, or taper spires rising majestically
above the cloistered arches, buttresses, and pinnacles, of these
monuments of the piety, consummate skill, and humility of our ancestors;
for no modern black board, with gilt letters, proclaims the name of
their founders, who have sought a simple, perchance a nameless, tomb
within the sacred walls they have reared. Pass within that lofty
doorway; and the silence, the stillness, the vastness within, awe the
heart! From the care and turmoil without, one step has placed us lonely
as in a desert;--from the surges of life to the presence of the dead,
who sleep around as if under the more immediate keeping of the Mighty
One in His holy temple! And if, entering, a solitary memorial of the
more clouded faith which they inherited from their fathers--the jewel,
dimmed by its frail setting--should meet the eye, start not, with the
pride of knowledge, from the meek petition, "Ora pro me," enscrolled
beneath that mitred effigy, worn by the thoughtless feet of the
generations passed away; but believe, and fear not to do so, that "it is
accepted according to that a man hath," and that the sincere devotion of
the heart, even when erroneously expressed, through _involuntary_
ignorance, shall not be rejected by that just Being who seeks not to
reap where He hath not sowed; but that it may come up as holy incense
before Him, when our cold, unloving, orthodox prayers, backed by our
heathenish lives, and meaner offerings on the altar of our God, shall
return, blighted and blighting, into our own bosoms. Or should you be
too petrified with pious horror at this--Popery, as with your longest,
dismalest face, you will style it--to think with any charity of those
who dwelt but in the twilight of your open day--the very verger, sleek,
round, and smiling, as he stands by you in his sake-robes, shall, in his
honest zeal, supply an antidote for the evil, moralizing on the vanity
of such supplications, and winding up his simple homily with the
significant--"Where the tree falleth, there it shall lie!" Think on
that, rigid critic, and take heed how _you_ fall!--nor, if you have the
capacity for finding "good in every thing," will you disdain to learn
the lesson of instruction, which your own heart had failed to supply,
from so lowly a source.

But you still curl your sanctimonious lip, and shrug your pious
shoulders, in intimation of your knowing vastly better than your poor,
ignorant fo