United States or Saint Martin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Glowing on the church-walls, they might be looked upon as symbols of the living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and that glorified it as long as it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with a radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the high altar a faint reflection as much as mortals could see, or bear of a Diviner Presence.
They are still saying masses over his body, the church is packed, and it is a sight such as you may possibly not have an opportunity of again witnessing." In half an hour we were within the church-walls. The place was already thronged, and the air close almost to suffocation.
Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the church-walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intentness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense.
Still, whether we regard this fresco as closing the long series of "Last Judgments" to be studied on Italian church-walls from Giotto downwards; or whether we confine our attention, as contemporaries seem to have done, to the skill of its foreshortenings and groupings; or whether we analyse the dramatic energy wherewith tremendous passions are expressed, its triumph is in either case decided.
But the longing for justice between man and man, which is the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, is the deepest instinct of the human heart, and the voice of the carpenter cannot be confined within the thickest church-walls, nor drowned by all the pealing organs in Christendom.
The South Well is a short distance outside the limits in a little park. The Holy Well, which was inside the minster, is now covered up. Lady Well was just outside the church-walls, but a clergyman fell into it one dark night and was drowned, and it too has been closed. St. Catherine's Well was surmounted by a chapel, and is in repute as a cure for rheumatism.
Smiling as easily as I could, I accosted her with "Madonna, I am the bearer of compliments to you, if you choose to hear them." Then she looked me full for a second of time. For it is ill to think of broken-in hearts, or souls set in bars, and I could fancy Master Peter's hand not so light upon her as upon church-walls.
This little sunny garden, surrounded by a wall which separated it from the vineyards, and overrun with nettles, mallows, and weeds of all kinds, resembled one of those village churchyards where the peasants assemble to bask in the rays of the sun, leaning against the church-walls, with their feet on the graves of the dead.
Word Of The Day