footsteps of our fathers, to follow the Legions down the long roads, to trudge by the same paths to the same goal as the pilgrims, to consider the silence of the old, old battlefields, to pray in forgotten holy places to almost forgotten deities, is to be made partakers of a life larger and more wonderful than that of the individual, is to be made one with England. For in the quietness of those ancient countrysides was England made by the men who begat us. And even as a man of the Old Faith when he enters one of his sanctuaries suddenly steps out of England into a larger world, a universal country; so we in the earthwork by Thannington or the Close of Canterbury, or upon the hill where Battle Abbey stood, surely have something added to us by the genius of the place, indeed pass out of ourselves into that which is England, a splendour and a holiness beyond ourselves, which cannot die.

It is in such places we may best face reality, for they lend to history all its poetry and, as Aristotle knew, there is more truth in poetry than in history. And this, at least to-day, is perhaps the real value and delight of our churches; I mean those great sanctuaries we call Cathedrals which stand about England like half-dismantled castles and remind us more poignantly than any other thing of all we are fain to forget. There are the indelible words of our history most clearly written. Consider the bricks of S. Martin's, the rude stones of the little church of Bradford, the mighty Norman work of Romsey, the Early English happiness of Salisbury, the riches and security of the long nave of Winchester. Do we not there see the truth; can stones lie or an answer be demanded of them according to folly? And if a man would know the truth, let us say, of the thirteenth century here in England, where else will he find any answer? Consider it then, the joy as of flowers, the happiness as of Spring, in that architecture we call Early English, which for joy and happiness surpasses any other in the world. The men who carved those shafts and mouldings and capitals covering them with foliage could not curb their invention nor prevent their hands from beauty and joy. They forgot everything in their delight, even the great logic of design, even to leap up to God, since He was here in the meadows in this garden of ours that He has given us and blest.

But these great buildings, scarcely to be understood by us save by the grace of God and now a little lonely too, missing so many of their sisters, and certainly in an alien service, are how much less appealing and less holy than those village churches so humble and so precious that everywhere ennoble and glorify England of my heart. They stand up still for our souls before God, and are to be loved above all I think—and even the humblest of them is to be loved—for the tombs they shelter within and without. More than any Cathedral they touch in us some profound and fundamental mystery common to us all, that is the life and the energy of the Christian soul. They, above all, express England, England of my heart, in them we find utterance, are joined with the great majority and together approach, in their humility, beauty, and quietness, God who has loved us all and given us England therein and thereby to serve Him in delight. They kneel with the hind and now as ever in the name of Our Lord. It is enough. The Cathedrals are haunted by the Old Faith, and by Rome, whose they are: but the village churches are our own. Nor though we be of the Old Faith let us be too proud to salute their humility. They stand admittedly in the service of man, and this at least is admirable in the Church of England of my heart—I mean her humility. To her, unlike Rome, absolute Truth has not been revealed; she is so little sure of anything that she will condemn no man, no, not one of her officers, though he deny the divinity of Christ. She desires only to serve: and if any man, even an atheist, can approach the God he ignorantly denies most easily through her open gates, she will not say him nay, nor deny him, nor send him away. It is her genius. Let us salute its humility.

And so I look upon England of my heart and am certain I am of the civilisation of Christ. He hath said, ye shall not die but live— England blossoms in fulfilment. He hath founded his Church, whose children we are, whether we will or no, and after a far wandering presently shall return homeward. For those words endure and will endure; more living than the words even of our poets, more lasting than the cliffs of the sea, or the rocks of the mountains, or the sands of the deserts, because they are as the flowers by the wayside.

Therefore England is not merely what we see and are; it is all the past and all the future, it is inheritance; the fields we have always ploughed, the landscape and the sea, the tongue we speak, the verse we know by heart, all we hope for, all we love and venerate, under God. And there abides a sense of old times gone, of ancient law, of friendship, of religious benediction.

E. H.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

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