THERE comes a time when the discovery is made, a golden moment of silent expansion and enlargement. Then the reason of all the discipline to which he has submitted becomes clear to him, the principle reveals itself and makes the confused and ill-apprehended multitude of details in a moment harmonious and luminous. But the principle at the same moment that it explains the rules supersedes them. They may be not less true than before. But they are obsolete; their use is gone.

THE minster stones grew old and grey,

The minster worship died away

In soulless forms, and senseless rhymes,

And ringing of unmeaning chimes,
And florid gauds of art,

And preaching with no heart.

The tool had turned its edge; the brand

Had broken in its maker's hand;

The shadow on St. Peter's chair,

No power divine was anywhere:
And God for His intents
Needed new instruments.

"Ecce Homo."

Rev. W. C. Smith, D.D.

HE silence is eloquent enough. The ruined sedilia,

the broken bases, the half-erased inscriptions, tell all that words can tell. A century ago the cloister-court of

Paisley was filled with the beautiful debris of shrines and altars and images destroyed by command of the Reforming lords.

The scenes of that August day we cannot bring back again, how the monks fled from their convent through the eager streets, out through the ripening corn fields and over the meadows and the moss; grey old men who had almost forgotten how the outside world fared, whose grandfathers remembered Paul Crawar, the Bohemian, and his burning at St. Andrews cross; and men in their early prime, who were youths when Wishart, the gentle laird, preached on the Mauchline moor, among the broom and the May-flowers, and whose beautiful face had haunted them when they took the Benedictine vows, and almost averted the tonsure and kept them for strong life; young men, also, perhaps, who did not belong to their times—one or two, more there could not be whose separate individualities were not touched, to whom the cloister offered all they needed, and, as yet, the cloister only.

And as vainly we ask how the young abbot demeaned himself amongst his flying monks; this bold young abbot Claude, with his history all before him; how he brooked to see the crowd of townsmen assail his convent gates, and to hear his voice derided and ignored within his own Abbey walls; how he saw with helpless hands all the wealth of the shrines scattered, and scorned by the meanest there as an unholy thing-scorned by the poor weak men and women who had often crept to the gate of the monastery, and taken the dole from the hands of the monks, and asked their blessing and their prayer.

Axe and hammer and crowbar, and arch and buttress fall. Slow work and hard, but the men have willing hands. Patient men reared the loveliness with glad long labour and life, praying and building for the future, not weary for love's sake. Zealous men dispense with long labour. One day outdoes the years. O the crumbling and crushing of inwreathed flowers which the patient chisel wrought! And the stately pillars broken, and the unfinished chapel spoiled; and the clamour and the ring through the cloisters, of destructive, not creative work!

Yet other churches over all Scotland were faring worse. that day. It may be that the authority which the family of the abbot, distinct from his office, gave him, shielded the monastery of Paisley from a more complete demolition.

For the nave was left untouched. The work of that August day laid choir and north transept in ruins, shattered the house of the abbot, the guestan-house, library, scriptorium, filled the cloister-court with the debris of the beautiful still retreat; but it left the long nave entire, desolate, profaned, indeed, but with no mark of violence. It left a church for the people; a church for worship in the new form amidst the ruins of the old.

Blame is so easily given when three centuries lie between, and the fever is past and the fervour too, and the ruins are wrapt in peace; when the lichens are folding round and clasping the scars of that long ago, and we have leisure to wonder and separate and contemn.

An impulse sufficient to warm and propel future generaations of men, must have in it some destructive element; so history seems to mean.

As for its iconoclasm, the Protestant church stands not alone in this. It is no peculiar out-come of that form of faith taught by the sixteenth century Reformers. Vasari stands mournfully among the ruins of Pagan art, and protests that even the destruction of the Goths and Vandals was out-done by the early Christians. The marble columns of the Tomb of Adrian were removed to build a church. Paintings, sculptures, mosaics, all the beautiful products of the antique Greek art, which could never be revived, which was long dug up in fragments and hopelessly imitated by the moderns; it was not the rude Northern warriors, but the Christians, had despoiled the world of these.

Yet the Christian church, for centuries, was the mother of beauty and art.

Perhaps in the disturbed shadows, when the people were tired of destruction, and slept in the little town at the feet of the dishonoured Abbey; when the autumn moon was rising behind the shattered spire, and silvering the broad corn-fields, and touching dark Ben Lomond, which leaned a low dense cloud against the furthest sky; when stillness once more brooded over the deserted place,-some monk, uncowled, came back, and wandered among the broken shrines; some old reverend man in whom the love of God was deepest, who had waited and hoped and believed in the silence of his Benedictine cell, looking in that sinking despair, which all good men have sometimes felt, as on the triumph of evil at the desolation around.

But the good could not die. The Present learns from the Past, and wins hope from its perplexities and faith in God. and in the future. This was no "golden moment" to the