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Show ANCIENT GLORIES OF THE CHURCH. Ihe following, from the introduction to 'The Catholic Century 1808-190S As a Newspaper Man Saw It." by Augusta McXally. was written by William Winter, a New York ojurnalist and poet, who was born in Gloucester. Mass., July 15. 183, graduated from Harvard law school, and who became be-came dramatic critic of the Xew York Tribune in 1S65: To think of the Roman Catholic Church is to think of the oldest, the most venerable, and the most powerful religious institution existing among men. I am not a churchman of any kind; that, possibly, is my misfortune; but I am conscious of a profound obligation of gratitude to that wise, august, austere, yet tenderly human ecclesiastical power which, self-centered amid the vicissitudes oi human affairs, and provident of men of learning, imagination and sensibility throughout the world, has preserved the literature and act of all the centuries, cen-turies, has made architecture the living symbol of celestial aspiration, and, in poetry and in music, has heard and has transmitted the authentic voice of God. T say that 1 am not a churchman; but I would also that the best hours of my life have been hours of meditation passed in the glorious cathedrals and among the sublime ecclesiastical ruins of England. I have worshipped in Canterbury and York; in Winchester and Salisbury; in Lincoln and Durham; Dur-ham; in Ely and in Wells. T have stood in Tin-tern, Tin-tern, when the green grass and the white daisies were waving iu the summer wind, and have looked upon those gray and russet walls and upon those lovely arched casements among the most graceful ever devised by human art around which the sheeted ivy drops and through which the winds of heaven sing a perpetual requiem. I have seen the shadows of evening gather and softly fall over the gaunt tower, the rootless nave, the giant pillars, and the shattered arcades of Fountains Abbey, in its sequestered and melancholy solitude, where ancient Eipon dreams in the spacious spa-cious and verdant valley of the Skell. I have mused upoti Xedley, and Kirkstall, and Xewstead and Bolton and Melrose and Dryburgh; and at a midnight mid-night hour I have stood in the grim and gloomy chancel of St. Columbia's cathedral, remote in the storm-swept Hebrides, nad looked upward to the cold stars and heard the voices of the birds of night mingled with the desolate moaning of the sea. With awe, with reverence, with many strange and wild thoughts I have lingered and pondered in those haunted, holy places, but one remembrance was always present the remembrance that it was the Roman Catholic Church that created those forms of beauty, and breathed into them the breath of a divine life, and hallowed them forever; and thus thinking, I have felt the unspeakable pathos of her long exile from the temples that her passionate pas-sionate devotion prompted and her loving labor reared. |