h hands.
Say what you will, those Middle Ages that you call Dark had a glory of
faith that never will be seen in our days of cotton-mills and
Manchester prints. Where will you marshal such an army of saints as
stands in yonder white-marble forest, visibly transfigured and
glorified in that celestial Italian air? Saintship belonged to the
medieval Church; the heroism of religion has died with it."

"That's just like one of your assertions, Rudolph," said I. "You might
as well say that Nature has never made any flowers since Linnaeus shut
up his herbarium. We have no statues and pictures of modern saints;
but saints themselves, thank God, have never been wanting. 'As it was
in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be'"--

"But what about your cathedral?" said my wife.

"Oh yes!--my cathedral,--yes. When my stocks in cloud-land rise, I'll
build a cathedral larger than Milan's; and the men, but more
particularly the women, thereon, shall be those who have done even
more than Saint Paul tells of in the saints of old, who 'subdued
kingdoms, wrought righteousness, quenched the violence of fire,
escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed
valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.' I am not
now thinking of Florence Nightingale, nor of the host of women who
have been walking worthily in her footsteps, but of nameless saints of
more retired and private state,--domestic saints, who have tended
children not their own through whooping-cough and measles, and borne
the unruly whims of fretful invalids,--stocking-darning, shirt-making
saints,--saints who wore no visible garment of haircloth, bound
themselves with no belts of spikes and nails, yet in their inmost
souls were marked and seared with the red cross of a lifelong
self-sacrifice,--saints for whom the mystical terms self-annihilation
and self-crucifixion had a real and tangible meaning, all the stronger
because their daily death was marked by no outward sign. No mystical
rites consecrated them; no organ-music burst forth in solemn rapture
to welcome them; no habit of their order proclaimed to themselves and
the world that they were the elect of Christ, the brides of another
life: but small, eating cares, daily prosaic duties, the petty
friction of all the littleness and all the inglorious annoyances of
every day, were as dust that hid the beauty and grandeur of their
calling even from themselves; they walked unknown even to their