took refuge in a cave. There he
prayed and worshipped, and gathered others to pray and worship round
him, during his life. There he, often enough, became an object of
worship in his turn, after his death. In after ages his cave was
ornamented, like that of the hermit of Montmajour by Arles; or his
cell-chapel enlarged, as those of the Scotch and Irish saints have
been, again and again; till at last a stately minster rose above it.
Still, the idea that the church was to be a grot haunted the minds of
builders.

But side by side with the Christian grot there was throughout the
North another form of temple, dedicated to very different gods,
namely, the trees from whose mighty stems hung the heads of the
victims of Odin or of Thor--the horse, the goat, and, in time of
calamity or pestilence, of men. Trees and not grots were the temples
of our forefathers.

Scholars know well--but they must excuse my quoting it for the sake
of those who are not scholars--the famous passage of Tacitus which
tells how our forefathers "held it beneath the dignity of the gods to
coop them within walls, or liken them to any human countenance; but
consecrated groves and woods, and called by the name of gods that
mystery which they held by faith alone;" and the equally famous
passage of Claudian, about "the vast silence of the Black Forest, and
groves awful with ancient superstition; and oaks, barbarian deities;"
and Lucan's "groves inviolate from all antiquity, and altars stained
with human blood."

To worship in such spots was an abomination to the early Christian.
It was as much a test of heathendom as the eating of horse-flesh,
sacred to Odin, and therefore unclean to Christian men. The Lombard
laws and others forbid expressly the lingering remnants of grove
worship. St. Boniface and other early missionaries hewed down in
defiance the sacred oaks, and paid sometimes for their valour with
their lives.

It is no wonder, then, if long centuries elapsed ere the likeness of
vegetable forms began to reappear in the Christian churches of the
North. And yet both grot and grove were equally the natural temples
which the religious instinct of all deep-hearted peoples, conscious
of sin, and conscious, too, of yearnings after a perfection not to be
found on earth, chooses from the earliest stage of awakening
civilisation. In them, alone, before he had strength and skill to
build nobly for himself, could man find darkness, the mother of
myst