FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Suddenly to all appearing the great Day of God shall come."
The Cottage by the Cathedral.
Close under the walls of the Cathedral, nestling against one of its buttresses, leant the Cottage in which the little crippled Marie lived.
Time and weather had stained and shaped the rude timbers of which it was built, and tender mosses had woven their fine tapestries over its roof, so that it seemed as little out of harmony with the stately building which looked down on it and sheltered it, as the mosses and lichens on its own stones.
For all the grandeur of the Cathedral being the grandeur of a house of God, only made it, like the everlasting hills themselves, "the hills of God," so much the more the shelter and refuge of the smallest of His creatures.
Moreover, the Cathedral, for the very reason that it was a house of God, being also a home and refuge for men, having also been designed, arch by arch, by loving human thought, and raised, stone by stone, by lowly human hands, had necessarily a twofold kindred: allying it, on the one side, with the great temple of the Creator's own building, vaulted with its infinite depths of starry worlds; and on the other side, with the lowliest dwelling in which human creatures toil and suffer. Indeed, its kindred with the cottage was closer than with the stars, because He who was adored in it became, for our sakes, Himself the greatest Sufferer; who, while He had made the stars, was made Man, and Himself lived in a very lowly cottage once for thirty years.