But it has other scenes to show, other memories to waken. It tells of a Southern church, gaudy and bedizened, full of frivolous worshippers, whose Christmas vigil has been kept
in the ball-room they have hurriedly left to listen to the operatic orchestra preparing its musical pyrotechnics for the dread moment of the Elevation. But pass we on to more congenial remembrances. It tells of a simple, white-washed chamber, a prison-ward in the Holy City, where reclaimed and forgiven women are worshipping the divine Babe, who has wrought their salvation and sent them in their hour of need to the arms of his earthly angels, the Sisters of Mercy; it tells of a high dignitary of the Vatican, leaving his purple magnificence to come among the city prisons, and spend with them a more edifying Christmas than the display of the public churches promised his humble devotion. Venite adoremus! It swells up in sweet woman-tones from some recess of faithful memory, but the halls through which the hymn was borne that Christmas night echo only to the heavy tramp of the sentinel now, if not to worse, the blasphemies of the ungodly trooper.
It brings the mediæval glories of St. Mark’s to the mind of a lover of that unique basilica—that petrified dream of the heavenly Jerusalem, with its curious barbaric wealth, its golden mosaics, its Byzantine spoils of victories that were not merely the victories of civilization over decay, but the triumphs of faith over superstition. The glorious church is full, dark masses of human beings sway about its broad-reaching nave, and here and there, like fire-flies, like heart-stars, shine the little cerini—the rope-like coils of wax, the picturesque forerunners of garish gas-jets and dream-dispelling coronas. The Mass in Venice is not a real Midnight Mass, however, since, by special permission, it is celebrated at five o’clock in the afternoon of the vigil. It is sad to hear profane music even in this consecrated spot, whose dim,
suggestive beauty seems to inherit the vague and solemn halo of the veiled lamps of the Holy of Holies in the temple of Jerusalem; but corrupted taste certainly does reign in the Venetian basilica, and a Mass full of modern Italian fioritura is annually performed in it at the festival of Christmas. Still, the mind sees beyond the unhappy aberrations of the modern Euterpe out into the long vista of past centuries, when graver and nobler strains rang through the low-vaulted temple, and the stern and silent heads of the state came in procession to grace the triumph of the new-born Saviour. From Venice to Geneva there is a wide gulf, but the Venite adoremus bridges over that.
Once again Christmas comes round, and the same world-wide chant rises in the now half-converted stronghold of Calvinism. It leads us towards the older town, far from the noisy port hotels, into a winding labyrinth of steep, ill-paved streets, through rows of old houses, every one of which seems to have a history of its own, and whose old-fashioned windows, and wide portals opening into silent court-yards, remind one of time-worn parchment bindings round poems for ever new. But is this analogy not a little true? for is not the poem of the human heart as old and as changeless as the ancient romances of long-dead bards, and yet do we ever tire of its repetition, any more than we are weary of Chaucer and Shakespeare, of Homer and Virgil?
Venite adoremus! It lures us on to a dark church, dedicated to St. Germain, where there is nothing beautiful to strike the eye, nothing artistic to make the heart beat. Plain and even unsightly, tawdry and faded, as all churches are whose history lies between the dreaded persecution
of the sixteenth century and the Gothic revival of the nineteenth, St. Germain yet possesses that untold charm which the Italians so broadly but accurately describe by the word simpatico. Sympathy! yes, that is it. It breathes on us from every corner; it is the atmosphere of the little church; it softens every incongruity, and sweetly blinds us to every defect. After all, such churches, inartistic as they may be, are no unfit representatives of the church militant, while our glorious blossoms of stone, born of the Moses-like rod of Pugin, are types of the unfathomable beauty and jubilant repose of the church triumphant.
In this Midnight Mass at Geneva it was touching to see the crowds that flocked to the church through drifting snow and biting wind—real Christmas weather—and, without any attraction in the shape of noted preacher or imposing ceremonial, filled the church as full as the generous heart-blood does the bosom of the Christian martyr. Hundreds of silent worshippers were assembled there, and, when the last Gospel of the Mass had been said, the priests returned, in alb and stole, to give communion to the eager congregation. Hardly one present seemed to have left the church, and gradually the vast body of the faithful broke, like successive waves, at the foot of the altar. For one whole hour was this scene enacting, and no music was heard meanwhile, and, though few rules were enforced and little order reigned, yet the sight was as widely suggestive as any more carefully arranged demonstrations. Somehow these artless, unpremeditated outpourings of the heart of Christendom have a far higher power to interest, a far subtler charm to entrance, and leave a higher impression and a more healthful influence behind, than
those wonderful pageants which from year to year draw thousands of curious spectators to Rome. Here is everyday Christianity; here is the inner working of that silent, God-wielded mechanism whose outward robes and draperies only come to us in the shape of those glittering festas; here is the real work, the real core of things, the heart whose pulsation alone gives meaning to all that external magnificence, the sun of which those ceremonies are the radiance, the consuming fire of which that glorious ritual is but the outgoing heat and the coruscant light. And when we think of the darker and varied aspects, the inner complications of the lives of those who were crowding round the altar-rails of St. Germain, what a wonderful, manifold history, what a spiritual landscape of infinite shades of the most delicate pencillings, do we not see! Side by side kneel souls whose life-paths run in opposite channels: here is Martha, the busy household angel, whose faith is inwoven in her every daily movement, her every thought, though it be of toil and anxiety; there is the pensive Magdalen, whose sadness is her soul’s beauty, whose memory brings before her even more tokens of merciful forgiveness and unwearied love than of her own little past, her sins and her hard-heartedness; there kneels the widow whose child has just been given back to her from the very portals of death, and whose only altar for many dreary months has been the darkened chamber and the curtained sick-bed. Close to her is a maiden whose life is one long act of pure preparation for the bridal feast, the marriage supper of the Lamb, and who, when next Christmas-chimes sound, will hear in them the glad knell that proclaims her death to the outside world, and her life-long vow of obedience to her
Spouse. Here is a Monica, wrestling in prayer for a wayward son whose hopeless lapse from the narrow path of virtue is the heaviest cross her Saviour could have chosen for her burden; there again is the bride, kneeling by the side of the simple, joyous, boyish bridegroom, with whom she is just beginning a new stage on the road to eternal bliss. So rough, so uniform, so commonplace is the aspect of the crowd, that these things are only visible to spiritual sight, to the eye of the soul; and, if visible even to our darkened organs of spiritual understanding, how much more clearly and far more touchingly to the eye of eternal Wisdom and fathomless Love! What a rose-garden is a church full of humble communicants before the sight of God! How fragrant and varied the blossoms to his illumined perception! Men in every stage of conversion—those who have just timidly set their foot on the first round of Jacob’s mystic ladder; those who have struggled so far that they can dare to look down one moment, and measure the death from which God’s love has raised them, in order to gain additional grace to correspond with his future and more rapid calls heavenward; those who have left all sin and danger so far behind that they look upon them calmly, as one sees the rolling clouds far below from the crisp-breathing atmosphere of the highest mountains; those whose conversation is in heaven, and whose thoughts are silent angels walking ever with them as the living messengers of God. Such are the miracles of grace that crowd the lowly church; the mysteries that we can only guess at beneath the crust of materiality which we see; the wonders that jostle us in the swaying throng, and of which we have so little knowledge that we hardly even suspect what