over the church. The stones were dark, the statues
dismal, the altar mysterious. No lamps competed with the sun. The
latter threw upon the sepulchral stones in the pavement the long white
silhouettes of the windows, which through the melancholy obscurity of
the rest of the church looked like phantoms lying upon these tombs. No
one was in the church. Not a whisper, not a footfall could be heard.

This solitude saddened the heart and enraptured the soul. There were in
it abandonment, neglect, oblivion, exile, and sublimity. Gone the whirl
of 1825. The church had resumed its dignity and its calmness. Not
a piece of finery, not a vestment, not anything. It was bare and
beautiful. The lofty vault no longer supported a canopy. Ceremonies of
the palace arc not suited to these severe places; a coronation ceremony
is merely tolerated; these noble ruins are not made to be courtiers.
To rid it of the throne and withdraw the king from the presence of God
increases the majesty of a temple. Louis XIV. hides Jehovah from sight.

Withdraw the priest as well. All that eclipsed it having been taken
away, you will see the light of day direct. Orisons, rites, bibles,
formulas, refract and decompose the sacred light. A dogma is a dark
chamber. Through a religion you see the solar spectre of God, but not
God. Desuetude and crumbling enhance the grandeur of a temple. As
human religion retires from this mysterious and jealous edifice, divine
religion enters it. Let solitude reign in it and you will feel heaven
there. A sanctuary deserted and in ruins, like Jumieges, like St.
Bertin, like Villers, like Holyrood, like Montrose Abbey, like the
temple of Paestum, like the hypogeum of Thebes, becomes almost an
element, and possesses the virginal and religious grandeur of a savannah
or of a forest. There something of the real Presence is to be found.

Such places are truly holy; man has meditated and communed with himself
therein. What they contained of truth has remained and become greater.
The _a-peu-pres_ has no longer any voice. Extinct dogmas have not left
their ashes; the prayer of the past has left its perfume. There is
something of the absolute in prayer, and because of this, that which
was a synagogue, that which was a mosque, that which was a pagoda, is
venerable. A stone on which that great anxiety that is called prayer
has left its impress is never treated with ridicule by the thinker. The
trace left by those who have bowed down before