19. This meaning, from the proudest heroic, and purest legislative, days of Greece, the symbol had borne for all men skilled in her traditions: to the schools of craftsmen the sign meant further their craft's noblesse, and pure descent from the divinely-terrestrial skill of Dædalus, the labyrinth-builder, and the first sculptor of imagery [Pg 102] pathetic [4-9] with human life and death.
20. Quite the most beautiful sign of the power of true Christian-Catholic faith is this continual acknowledgment by it of the brotherhood—nay, more, the fatherhood, of the elder nations who had not seen Christ; but had been filled with the Spirit of God; and obeyed, according to their knowledge, His unwritten law. The pure charity and humility of this temper are seen in all Christian art, according to its strength and purity of race; but best, to the full, seen and interpreted by the three great Christian-Heathen poets, Dante, Douglas of Dunkeld,[4-10] and George Chapman. The prayer with which the last ends his life's work is, so far as I know, the perfectest and deepest expression of Natural Religion given us in literature; and if you can, pray it here—standing on the spot where the builder once wrote the history of the Parthenon of Christianity.
21. "I pray thee, Lord, the Father, and the Guide of our reason, that we may remember the nobleness with which Thou hast adorned us; and that Thou wouldst be always on our right hand and on our left, [4-11] in the motion of our own Wills: that so we may be purged from the contagion of the Body and the Affections of the Brute, and overcome them and rule; and use, as it becomes men to use them, for instruments. And then, that Thou wouldst be in Fellowship with us for the careful correction of our reason, and for its conjunction by the light of truth with the things that truly are. [Pg 103] "And in the third place, I pray to Thee the Saviour, that Thou wouldst utterly cleanse away the closing gloom from the eyes of our souls, that we may know well who is to be held for God, and who for mortal. Amen." [4-12]
22. And having prayed this prayer, or at least, read it with honest wishing, (which if you cannot, there is no hope of your at present taking pleasure in any human work of large faculty, whether poetry, painting, or sculpture,) we may walk a little farther westwards down the nave, where, in the middle of it, but only a few yards from its end, two flat stones (the custode will show you them), one a little farther back than the other, are laid over the graves of the two great bishops, all whose strength of life was given, with the builder's, to raise this temple. Their actual graves have not been disturbed; but the tombs raised over them, once and again removed, are now set on your right and left hand as you look back to the apse, under the third arch between the nave and aisles.
23. Both are of bronze, cast at one flow—and with insuperable, in some respects inimitable, skill in the caster's art.
"Chefs-d'œuvre de fonte,—le tout fondu d'un seul jet, et admirablement." [4-13] There are only two other such tombs left in France, those of the children of St. Louis. All others of their kind—and they were many in every great cathedral of France—were [Pg 104] first torn from the graves they covered, to destroy the memory of France's dead; and then melted down into sous and centimes, to buy gunpowder and absinthe with for her living,—by the Progressive Mind of Civilization in her first blaze of enthusiasm and new light, from 1789 to 1800.
The children's tombs, one on each side of the altar of St. Denis, are much smaller than these, though wrought more beautifully. These beside you are the only two Bronze tombs of her Men of the great ages, left in France!
24. And they are the tombs of the pastors of her people, who built for her the first perfect temple to her God. The Bishop Everard's is on your right, and has engraved round the border of it this inscription: [4-14]—
"Who fed the people, who laid the foundations of this
Structure, to whose care the City was given,