Therefore I would far rather, when I may, worship in an
old church, whose very stones are a history of how men strove to realise
the infinite, compelling even the powers of nature into the task--as I
soon found on the very doorway of this church, where the ripples of the
outspread ocean, and grotesque imaginations of the monsters of its deeps,
fixed, as it might seem, for ever in stone, gave a distorted reflex, from
the little mirror of the artist's mind, of that mighty water, so awful, so
significant to the human eye, which yet lies in the hollow of the Father's
palm, like the handful that the weary traveller lifts from the brook by the
way. It is in virtue of the truth that went forth in such and such like
attempts that we are able to hold our portion of the infinite reality which
God only knows. They have founded our Church for us, and such a church as
this will stand for the symbol of it; for here we too can worship the
God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob--the God of Sidney, of Hooker, of
Herbert. This church of Kilkhaven, old and worn, rose before me a history
in stone--so beaten and swept about by the "wild west wind,"
"For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms,"
and so streamed upon, and washed, and dissolved, by the waters lifted from
the sea and borne against it on the upper tide of the wind, that you could
almost fancy it one of those churches that have been buried for ages
beneath the encroaching waters, lifted again, by some mighty revulsion of
nature's heart, into the air of the sweet heavens, there to stand marked
for ever with the tide-flows of the nether world--scooped, and hollowed,
and worn like aeonian rocks that have slowly, but for ever, responded to
the swirl and eddy of the wearing waters.
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