130 I GO A- FISHING. 



Laugh at it as we will, deride it as we may, the ages 

 that we call dark were ages of faith in something that 

 may well contrast with this cold, utilitarian age of ours. 

 And when we read or hear the life -histories of the men 

 of those centuries, we learn that men could live and 

 die for a faith, as no man in this age knows how. I say, 

 they were men in those ages. We may well shrink in the 

 comparison of ourselves with them. We may well hide 

 our stories of sacrifice when we read theirs. What if they 

 were ignorant, what if they were superstitious ? What if 

 they did waste treasures untold and lives uncounted in 

 vain battle for a block of wood they called a cross, and 

 an empty cave they called Christ's Sepulchre ? What if 

 all this was folly ? Yet, oh my friend, I beseech you to 

 take a thousand of those men standing before the walls 

 of Jerusalem, with closed helmets, and hands griped firm 

 on sword or battle-axe, while through their lips comes 

 the stern cry of destiny, " God wills it" — Deus vult. I 

 say, compare them with a thousand men of our own city, 

 clamorous around our City Hall for a street to be opened 

 through a grave-yard, an old resting-place of the beloved 

 dead of the last century, or any other barbarianism of 

 the age in which you and I live. Do this, and then tell 

 me, if you dare, that the men of the Middle Ages were less 

 noble than we. A thousand years hence, when the world 

 shall have advanced to another standing-place whence 

 to look back on these centuries, the men of the world will 

 think this nineteenth century blacker than night, com- 

 pared with their notions of what constitutes light ; and 

 yet, measured by standards in the hands of the immor- 

 tals, it may be that we shall be found as light as they, and 

 the ages gone by will not be so profoundly gloomy. 

 I was going to tell that story of the old time, but on re- 



