And presently there rose a sound from the dim-robed altar, and the voice of the angel of the chalice made answer: “My cup is as a bell uplifted, with its song of joy hushed in the very words of God, and drowned in the flood of ruby light that quivers, living and sensitive, within my golden walls.”
“And my cup,” returned the voice of the bell, “is as a chalice inverted, with its saving wealth outpoured in strains that reach the human ken; endowed with a speaking, living tongue that can touch the human heart.”
“I speak of men to God, while my fragile stem bears the wondrous purple flower of the precious blood, and while I am reared aloft with the divine burden weighing on me, even as the cross was reared up high over Jerusalem’s walls.”
“And I speak of God to men while my brazen clangor is heard afar like the trumpets of Israel before the crumbling walls of Jericho.”
And here the soft breeze from the open lancet-windows rustled among the sweet-smelling shrubs around the altar’s base, and, as the night-wind passed over them, their voices seemed to be blended into its sighs, and to have found an interpreter in its fitful sound.
“We are children of many climes, and some of us are exiles in this land, but under this roof we are at home again, and at this festival none of us are strangers. We too, in all our variety, have scarce one blossom among us that is not a chalice or a bell; that holds not high its crimson cup towards heaven to receive the crystal dew, or hangs not its white or purple bell with golden tongue towards the unheeding earth. On the altar of green turf, on the swaying columns of interwoven boughs, on the storm-tossed belfries of vine-surrounded trees, in southern swamp or northern forest, in tropical wilderness or rosy-tinted orchard, everywhere is stamped the semblance of the church, with chalices upreared, with bells anxiously bent human-ward. O brothers of the altar and the tower, let us sing together the same hymn.”
And the child Benignus said softly to himself:
“O God! make my heart a chalice, and my lips a Christian bell.”
The voices of the flower-chorus spoke again, and the lilies of the valley sang a silver peal behind their grass-green curtains:
“Every day we die by thousands, but our seed is borne afar, and drops in some fair nook at last, beside a running brook or beneath a spreading beech, even as the last echo of the unwearied bell that knocks at some heart’s door, far away in the mountains of worldly care, and strikes a well-known, long-silent chord, and draws the exile back to the fruitful plains of God’s own church.”