"
As she spoke she was toiling up the winding staircase after me, where there
was just room enough for my shoulders to get through by turning themselves
a little across the lie of the steps. They were very high, but she kept
up with me bravely, bearing out her statement that she was no stranger to
them. As I ascended, however, I was not thinking of her, but of what she
had said. Strange to tell, the significance of the towers or spires of our
churches had never been clear to me before. True, I was quite awake to
their significance, at least to that of the spires, as fingers pointing
ever upwards to
"regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,
Which men call Earth;"
but I had not thought of their symbolism as lifting one up above the
church itself into a region where no church is wanted because the Lord God
almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.
Happy church indeed, if it destroys the need of itself by lifting men up
into the eternal kingdom! Would that I and all her servants lived pervaded
with the sense of this her high end, her one high calling! We need the
church towers to remind us that the mephitic airs in the church below
are from the churchyard at its feet, which so many take for the church,
worshipping over the graves and believing in death--or at least in the
material substance over which alone death hath power.
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