Have we not noticed this in Nature, of which Art is the mirror? A dead man lying in an open coffin is like a piece of a fresco framed. The face of a dead man is a picture of a man going through a great gate. It has a grand processional look.
The roll of history itself is a long strip of fresco. It is only too narrow a strip. It is in the breadth of history that the beauty lies. If we could only see in poised moments all people and all nature praising God in all their various ways at one and the same time! That is the full roll of history—to see the broad eternity in each moment. To see that is to see the great phantasmagoria, the infinite blending of all shapes and colours, of all the runic and mystic manifestations which, seen in small, thrill us and puzzle us and perplex us in our mortal lives. It is also a vision of the Last Judgment. I often think in these days of accusing God and quarrelling with Providence it will not be God that judges us, but we who give our judgment about Him. When the true and full vision bursts upon us, we shall all cry Hosanna unto the Highest. The whole universe, seeing itself and understanding itself, will burst into one great cry of glory.
How that could come about, or what such a cry would mean, is beyond thoughts and words. We cannot be literal about it, and yet we have sense of it, and are able to strike chords of the great harmony or catch glimpses of the symphonies of colour and form. The strange picture is miraged for us backward through Eternity and we catch glimpses of it. So it is in the Orthodox Church, in a crowd of pilgrims in a dim temple lit by the lights which the pilgrims themselves have lighted at the altars, enfolded in the great cloud of witnesses we sing praises to the One, the Central One, the God of All.
There is nothing more wonderful than a real crowd, a crowd attracted by a personality or an idea. At interludes throughout history we catch glimpses of gazing crowds, the
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly—alien of end and of aim—
that rush into sight at once as you name the ineffable Name.
The New Testament pictures of Jesus standing in the midst of the crowd is the symbol for all time of the Church, “Jesus teaching among the people, living in His heart the life of every one He saw, living from His heart in living veins over the whole earth, the thousand people about Him listening, calling, reviling, praying, the angelic spirits gazing at Him rapt, even the devils acknowledging Him from the bodies of the possessed, the disciples bringing sick people to and fro at the Master’s feet.”[[7]] This is just the same picture as the Russian Church presents to-day. It is the idea of that wonderful modern Russian painting, “Holy Russia,” where Jesus walks out of the ikon frame and stands enhaloed above the crowd of all sorts and conditions of Russian men and women. It is the picture presented in the work of the great novelist Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky’s novels are pictures of great crowds of Russian men and women in the presence of the mystery of Love. Dostoieffsky’s novel is a church, and in the church there is room for Raskolnikof, the murderer, and the little white-slave Sonia, room for the sick and the suffering and the lustful and the pure. And even the devils cry out from the bodies of The Possessed acknowledging the Christ. Jerusalem of to-day, with its thousands of poor Russian pilgrims and its crowds, is such a church. Thither come not only the good and the respectable, but the outcast, the criminal, and the drunkard; there is room for them in the presence of the Sacred Face.
The little village church of any forest-side of Russia is also such a church. All Russia is such a church, and the world itself also, for every face is turned to one idea of God as the flowers are turned to the sun. Hence we sing most felicitously the Hymn of the Three Children, so popular in the early church, the Benedicite Omnia Opera:
O all ye Works of the Lord ...