SERMONS IN STONE.

LAON is a city set on a hill. It cannot be hid, for it stands on the one bill of a wide, wind-swept plain, very flat and very monotonous. The situation alone is wonder- fully impressive ; from down below, the bill with its church looks like a headland out at sea ; but it is not only the situa- tion that makes Laon Cathedral such a dominating feature in the landscape. It has a wonderful cluster of towers, unlike anything else. The character of the church seems concentrated in these beautiful, high, upstanding things, just as the character of the church at Beauvais lies in the sheer precipitous rise of arch, with its empty niches and ineffectual ornament that make the height of the huge, bare space so impressive and terrifying. The old town stands squeezed together on the top of the hill, parted by its old walls with their thirteenth-century gates from the new town that lies in nightmare hideousness on the lower slope beside the railway station and the sugar factory. Laon has been a stronghold under at least three of the races that have occupied the land. One of the roads you see from the hilltop, cleaving the plain as straight as a bolt flies, keeps the memory of the undying race who taught the Christian world that the making of Empires begins with the making of roads. After Laon had ceased to be a Roman military station, she became a still more important station of the Church militant of Rome, and took a masterful part in the affairs, as well ecclesiastical as temporal, of the Middle Ages. Froissart has many tales to tell about Laon and her martial clergy. The Cathedral was turned into a Temple of Reason during the Revolution, and now the Government is turning it into a national monument by scraping, scrubbing, chiselling, and repairing in a hygienic and vastly expensive manner. But in spite of archaeological patronage, Leon still preaches with every stone, as the makers of these stone Bibles of the thirteenth century intended they should preach, to the populace for whose education and edification they were built.

Most of the French Cathedrals have their special character. Laon is said to be peculiarly the erudite Cathedral. All round her walls are carved figures that taught the layman, high and low, of the early Middle Ages most of what he knew about things intellectual. There are the seven Liberal Arts, plain to see with their symbols pointing out the sanctity of gifts of the intellect; there is the Erythrean sibyl who foretold Christ's coming, showing the holiness hidden in profane learning; there is Philosophy, blindfold, with her ladder, a figure most eloquent to an age in which Boethius was so popular among all classes. And besides her special mission of teaching how all wisdom is the handmaid of faith, Laon is rich in such sculptures as covered all these early monuments of popular education. Looking up and down at the beautiful traceries of walls and towers, you have bard work to count the images of the Madonna, high and low, in vault and niche and coping, crowned and worshipped, holding up her baby, and treading the dragon under her feet.

It was because they preached the Gospel to the poor that these Cathedrals so dominated secular life in the Middle Ages, and not alone the hungry and naked poor, but the poor in wisdom and intellect. The Church remembered, as in every revival she remembers, that her strongest call to the world is in the call of the fisherman; and she considered, too, that an enormous proportion of those she had to teach were poor in all sorts of ways, and had to receive a message they could understand. The sculptures and paintings that are a dead letter to our generation were veritable lesson-books then. The poor were politically of no account ; they were despised, incredibly ignorant, and irrational ; the "stormy people, unsad and ever untrue," of Chaucer's day, the " many-headed multitude" of Shakespeare's. But the same class is a class of electors and suffragists now, when Revolutions and Reform Bills have marked such astonishing stages in the position of the masses, and still they require to have a Gospel preached to them that they can understand. They understood well enough the significance of the saints and symbols that preached to them from the walls and windows of Laon Cathedral. And it was no remote and unreal idealism that was preached to the ignorant and the sinners by the gracious figure who looked down on them from every height of the church. Notre Dame de Laon was not only the embodiment of charity and tender- ness in a rude age, the beautiful symbol of grace stronger than law, the advocate of the desperate whose mercy saved those whom the justice of God would condemn, but she was a practical person who tolerated no evasions within her own domain. There is an amusing story in the annals of Our Lady of Leon which tells how certain wool merchants in danger of shipwreck on their passage to England in pursuit of wealth vowed great gifts to their patroness if she would deliver them. Safe on shore, however, they evaded their promise, and were speedily overtaken by swift and severe judgment, for on their way back with distended moneybags they were robbed of both the new and the old goods, to the edification of some English merchants travelling in their company. That sort of story was a practical warning to the weaker brethren showing them the impropriety of breaking troth. And although the symbolism of that day may be a dead letter to ours, still Philosophy, blind- fold, with her ladder, might be translated into a fruitful sermon for Polytechnics ; and it is just as necessary as ever to teach the poor the plain truths of morality and religion which the church walls taught the earlier ages. It is an excellent thing that national education should now be an affair of legislation, but a national educa- tion is useless which excludes religious teaching. And people who are wise enough to evolve theories of education are not always experienced enough to know bow very deep is the ignorance of the ignorant on some points which are quite beautifully legislated for. The poor of the Middle Ages, with all their ignorance and their too often miserable social conditions, had certain educational advantages which our age lacks. They were taught by eye and ear all sorts of lessons of morality, humanity, and faith. The great placid oxen that have looked down for centuries on the toiling beasts of Laon, the pictures of ox and ass worshipping at the manger, the careful exposition of certain verses of the Bible which read differently to modern ears,—all these things were practical lessons to the unlearned. So were their mystery plays, their endless stories and legends of saints, and the Bible stories they knew so well from pictures and carvings and plays. The .Bible now, one is almost compelled to say, is not a national book. Very few cultivated people could read Absolom and

Achitophel without notes. And in spite of all its obvious blessings, the invention of printing has let loose on the world at least as many evils as would have filled Pandora's box.

And cheap sneers at the Board-school are as useless as they are ungracious, because the children of the English poor learn extremely well what they are taught, and they cannot be blamed for not learning more when they leave school at the

precise age at which boys in public schools are beginning to take trouble with their work. Religious education, to have any hold at all in our own day, must be compulsory and must be simple. The plain man must be taught in a language he can understand. Mediaeval legends were useful enough in their day, because they made ignorant people understand by appealing to their sense of reality, as did the quaint com-

mentaries of St. John Chrysostom on Bible history, highly esteemed and much quoted,—" as tells also John Golden.

mouth." It is very bard to realise the almost incredible ignorance of some of the poor of our own day, especially in remote parts where life is not strenuous. They are perplexed at exactly the same things that perplexed the ignorant hundreds of years ago, and nobody thinks of teaching them because nobody would think that such things

disturbed them. There is too strong a tendency towards a sort of intellectual hygiene which bewilders poor and ignorant people accustomed to darkness and a certain amount of dirt. It has been cast up at us that our

Protestant cleanliness has been the ruin of the English Church, and, in truth we do need something of the sensible tolerance that will take in the poor man as he is, rage and dirt and all, and teach him to pray before it teaches him to wash. It is surely a mistake to set out intellectual ideals before people who need to be taught elementary facts, and the lofty. minded persons who want to clear away all the stepping- stones of the simple under the plea that they are stumbling. blocks might do well to remember the curses due to the man who removes his neighbour's landmark. For latter- day tolerance is rather apt to tolerate the wrong point, and it is to be doubted whether the plain way of teaching hard facts had not some advantages which the new fashion lacks. For the kindergarten system of disguising work as play spreads too far into all sorts of educational institutions, and makes us forget, in things spiritual, that there are woes

as well as beatitudes, a thing calculated to undermine the sense of personal responsibility which is the sheet-anchor of national morality, and to justify the bitter epigram which describes the democratic ideal as les vices de quelques-uns raises a, /a port6e de tons. The stone book of Leon taught

better than that. It taught lessons of tenderness, wisdom, morality, in plain language for ignorant people. It taught them also the mysteries of Time, Death, and Judgment, and kept before thCr eyes in crude but convincing fashion the memory of the great awful jaws that gape for sinners. Solomon's rod, which is out of fashion nowadays, doubtless because its usefulness was exaggerated by our forefathers, is an instrument as necessary for the middle-aged as for the child. We are too fond of pretending that virtue has only an attractive side, and forgetting that the Kingdom of Heaven

must be taken by force. It is this disposition that gives us in some of our churches sermons five minutes long, and then sends us to listen in theatres to the interminable harangues of certain modern playwrights, as if, when the world refused

to hear Moses and the prophets, it was going to be persuaded by Brown and Jones.

"The world is full of questions, but the best question in the world is that of the young man in the Gospell : Good Master, what shall I doe that I may have etern all life In the Church's daily office morning and evening we remember that question in the prayer of John Goldentnouth. Two clauses there comprehend all things needful in a simple expression that the ignorant can understand just as they understood the Play of the Shepherds in the old days. It was a lively form of popular education that made the poor feel bow the Gospel was preached to them personally :— "Hail, King of Heaven so high Born in a crib !

Mankind to Thee Thou bast made all sib."

And the shepherd-boys bringing their homely gifts—a pipe, a crook, a bob of cherries for the " sweeting " in the manger— taught the unlearned in plain terms that he needs to-day, as

he needed then, the elements of truth and life everlasting which John Goldenmouth prayed for and the wisest heads in the world are still seeking.