Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/77

74 of art. You see forms of beauty which never entered into your "forge of thought" You are filled with new and delightful emotions, but they spring from new impressions of the genius of man, of his destiny and history. No; these cathedrals are not like the arches of our forests, the temples for inevitable worship, but they are the fitting place for the apotheosis of genius."

I promised to give you honestly my impressions, and I do so. I may have come too old and inflexible to these temples; but, though I feel their beauty thrilling my heart and brimming my eyes, they do not strike me as in accord with the simplicity, universality, and spirituality of the Gospel of Jesus. Some modern unbelievers maintain that Christianity is a worn-out form of religion. Is it not rather true that the spirit escapes from the forms in which man, always running to the material, would imbody it?

We took our lunch, and let me, en passant, bless the country where you can always command what is best suited "to restore the weak and 'caying nature," as pathetically called it in his before-dinner