ore exclusively spiritual in its action.

In Scotland the kirks look exactly suitable to the population which
throngs towards them, with sober dress and gait, and countenances of
solemnity. These edifices stand in severe simplicity, whether on the
green shore of a lake, or in the narrow street of a town; and asceticism
is marked on every stone of the walls, and every article of their
decorations.

No one who has travelled in Ireland can forget the aspect of its places
of worship,--the lowly Catholic chapels, with their beggarly ornaments
of lace and crucifixes, placed in the midst of villages, the whole of
whose inhabitants crowd within those four walls; and a little way off,
in a field, or on an eminence by the road side, the Protestant church,
one end in ruins, and with ample harbourage for the owl, while the rest
is encompassed with nettles and thorns, and the mossy grave-stones are
half hidden by rank grass. In a country where the sun rises upon
contrasts like these, it is clear in what direction the religious
sentiment of the people is indulged.

What the stranger may thus learn in our own country, we may learn in
his, whatever it be. The large plain churches of Massachusetts, their
democratic benches (in the absence of aristocratic pews) silently filled
for long hours of a Sabbath, as still as a summer noon, by hundreds and
thousands who restore the tones of their pilgrim ancestors in their
hymn-singing, and seem to carry about their likeness in their faces,
cannot fail to instruct the observer.--Then there is the mosque at
Cairo, with its great tank or fountain of ablution in the midst; and its
broad pavement spread out for men of every degree to kneel on together;
its doors standing wide from sunrise to sunset, for the admission of all
but women and strangers; its outside galleries, from which the summons
to prayer is sounded;--these things testify to the ritual character of
the worship, and to the low type of the morals of a faith which despises
women and strangers, giving privileges to the strong from which the weak
are excluded.--Then there is the Buddhist temple, rearing its tapering
form in a recess of the hills, with its colossal stone figures guarding
the entrance, and others sanctifying the interior,--all eloquently
explaining that physical force is worshipped here: its images of saints
show that the intercessory superstition exists; and the drum and gong,
employed to awaken the attention of the gods,