My way this afternoon lay through a succession of old hamlets, one
closely bordering on another, that lie all along the base of the wold.
I have no doubt that the reason for their position is simply that it is
just along the base of the hills that the springs break out, and a
village near a perennial and pure spring generally represents a very
old human settlement indeed. Sometimes the wold drew near the road,
sometimes lay more remote; its pale fallows, its faintly-tinted
pastures, seemed to lie very quietly to-day under the grey laden sky.
Here a chalk-pit showed its miniature precipices; here a leafless
covert detached its wiry sprays against the light. The villages were
pretty enough, with their quaint, irregular white cottages, comfortably
thatched, among the little orchards and gardens; and in every village
the ancient, beautiful church, each with a character of its own and a
special feature of interest or beauty, lay nestled in trees, or held up
its grey tower over ricks and barns. We are apt to forget what
beautiful things these churches are, because they are so common, so
familiar; if there were but a few of them, we should make careful
pilgrimages to see them, but now we hardly turn off the road to visit
them.
I often wonder what exactly the feeling and the spirit were that
produced them, what the demand precisely was that created the supply. I
suppose they were almost always the gift of some wealthy person; of
course labour and perhaps materials were cheaper, but there must have
been a much larger proportion of people employed in the trade of
building than is the case nowadays; probably these churches were slowly
and leisurely built, in the absence of modern mechanical facilities. It
is difficult to conceive how the thing was carried out at all in places
with so few resources--how the stone was conveyed thither over the
infamous miry roads, how the carving was done, how the builders were
lodged and fed. One would like, too, to know exactly what part the
churches played in the social life of the place. Some people would have
us believe that the country people of that date had a simple enjoyment
of beauty and artistic instincts which caused them to take a pleasure,
which they do not now feel, in these beautiful little sanctuaries. I do
not know what the evidence is for that. I find it very hard to believe
that our agricultural labourers have gone backwards in this respect; I
should imagine it was rather the other way. My impression is that
education has probably increased the power of perception and
appreciation rather than diminished it. It is possible that the absence
of excitement, of diffuse reading, of communication in those days may
have tended to concentrate the affections and interests of agricultural
people more on their immediate surroundings, but I rather doubt it; the
problem is, considering the much greater roughness and coarseness of
village life in the Middle Ages, how there could have existed a
poetical and artistic instinct among villagers, which they have now
forfeited.
These churches certainly indicate that a very different view of
religion prevailed; they testify to a simpler and stronger sense of
religion than now exists, but not, I think, to a truer sense of it.
They stand, I do not doubt, for a much more superstitious and barbarous
view of the relation of God to men; the people who built them had, I
imagine, the idea of conciliating God by the gift of a seemly
sanctuary, a hope of improving not only their spiritual prospects in
the after-life, but of possibly advancing their material prosperity in
this, by thus displaying their piety and zeal in God's service. I
cannot believe that the churches were designed with the intention of
making the rustic inhabitants of the place holier, more virtuous, more
refined--except incidentally; they were built more in obedience to
ecclesiastical tradition, in a time when rationalism had not begun to
cast doubt on what I may call the Old Testament theory of the relation
of God to men--the theory of a wrathful power, vindictive, jealous of
recognition, withholding blessings from the impious and heaping them
upon the submissive. As to those who worshipped there, I imagine that
the awe and reverence they felt was based upon the same sort of view,
and connected religious observance with the hope of prosperity and
wealth, and the neglect of it with the fear of chastisement. If
misfortune fell upon the godly, they regarded it as the chastening of
God inflicted upon the sons of His love; if it fell upon the ungodly,
it was a punishment for sin; religion was a process by which one might
avert the punishment of sin, induce the bestowal of favours, and in any
case improve one's future prospects of heaven. No doubt this form of
religion produced a simpler kind of faith, and a profounder reverence;
but I do not think that they were very beautiful qualities when so
produced, because they seem to me very alien from the simplicity of the
religion of Christ. The difficulty in which popular religion finds
itself, nowadays, is that in a Protestant Church like our own, neither
priest nor people believe in the old mechanical theories of religion,
and yet the people are not yet capable of being moved by purer
conceptions of it. A priest can no longer threaten his congregation
sincerely with the penalties of hell for neglecting the observances of
the Church; on the other hand, the conception of religion as a
refining, solemnising attitude of soul, bringing tranquillity and
harmony into life, is too subtle an idea to have a very general hold
upon unimaginative persons. Thus the beauty of these exquisite and
stately little sanctuaries, enriched by long associations and touched
with a delicate grace by the gentle hand of time, has something
infinitely pathetic about it. The theory that brought them into
existence has lost its hold, while the spirit that could animate them
and give them a living message has not yet entered them; the refined
grace, the sweet solemnity of these simple buildings, has no voice for
the plain, sensible villager; it cannot be interpreted to him. If all
the inhabitants of a village were humble, simple, spiritually minded
people, ascetic in life, with a strong sense of beauty and quality,
then a village church might have a tranquil and inspiring influence.
But who that knows anything of village life can anticipate even in the
remote future such a type of character prevailing? Meanwhile the
beautiful churches, with all the grace of antiquity and subtle beauty,
must stand as survivals of a very different condition of life and
belief; while we who love them can only hope that a more vital
consciousness of religion may come back to the shrines from which
somehow the significance seems to have ebbed away. They are now too
often mere monuments and memorials of the past. Can one hope that they
may become the inspiration and the sanctification of the present?