his common, so to speak, irreverent habit, and place him here to live for a few moments in this religious atmosphere--how unlike is he to himself, and how conscious of this self-unlikeness! Would that our cathedrals were open at all times! Even when there is no service, though that might be more frequent, there would be much good communing with a man's own heart, when, turning away for a while from worldly troubles and speculations, in midst of that great solemn monument, erected to his Maker's praise, and with the dead under his feet--the dead who as busily walked the streets and ways he has just left--he would weigh the character of his doings, and in a sanctified place breathe a prayer for direction. Nor would it be amiss that he should be led to contemplate the "storied pane" and religious emblems which abound; he will not fail, in the end, to sympathise with the sentiment even where he bows not to the legend. He may know the fact that there have been saints and martyrs--that faith, hope, and charity are realities--that patience and love may be here best learnt to be practised in the world without. It is curious that the saints, those _Dii minores_, to whom so many of our churches are dedicated, still retain their holding. Beyond the evangelists and the apostles, little do the people know of the other many saints while they enter the churches that bear their names. Few of a congregation, we suspect, could give much account of St Pancras, St Margaret, St Werburgh, St Dunstan, St Clement, nor even of St George, but that he is pictured slaying a dragon, and is the patron saint of England. Yet were they once "household gods" in the land. It is a curious speculation this of patron saints, and how every family and person had his own. There is a great fondness in this old personal attachment of his own angel to every man. That notion preceded Christianity, and was easily engrafted upon it: and the angel that attended from the birth was but supplanted by some holy dead whom the Church canonised. And a corrupt church humoured the superstition, and attached miracles to relics; and thus, as of old, these came, in latter times, to be "gods many." And what were these but over again the thirty thousand deities who, Hesiod said, inhabited the earth, and were guardians of men? Yet, it must be confessed, there has been a popular purification of them. They are not the panders to vice that infested the morals of the heathen world.