The worshipper must descend three steps of stone as he enters into this aisle of St. John; and this gradation is intended to recall the time and the place where the multitude went down into the river of Dan “at Bethabara, beyond Jordan, where John was baptising.” The churchyard of Morwenstow is the scene of other features of a remote antiquity. The roof of the total church--chancel, nave, northern and southern aisles--is of wood. Shingles of rended oak occupy the place of the usual, but far more recent, tiles which cover other churches; and it is not a little illustrative of the antique usages of this remote and lonely sanctuary, that no change has been wrought, in the long lapse of ages, in this unique and costly, but fit and durable, roofing. It supplies a singular illustration of the Syriac version of the 90th Psalm, wherein, with prophetic reference to these commemorations of the death-bed of the Messias, it is written, “Lord, Thou hast been our roof from generation to generation.” The northern side of the churchyard is, according to ancient usage, devoid of graves.[24] This is the common result of an unconscious sense among the people of the doctrine of regions--a thought coeval with the inspiration of the Christian era. This is their division.[25] The east was held to be the realm of the oracles, the especial gate of the throne of God; the west was the domain of the people--the Galilee of all nations was there; the south, the land of the mid-day, was sacred to things heavenly and divine; but the north was the devoted region of Satan and his hosts, the lair of the demon and his haunt. In some of our ancient churches, and in the church of Welcombe,[26] a hamlet bordering on Morwenstow, over against the font, and in the northern wall, there is an entrance named the Devil’s door: it was thrown open at every baptism, at the Renunciation, for the escape of the fiend; while at every other time it was carefully closed. Hence, and because of the doctrinal suggestion of the ill-omened scenery of the northern grave-ground, came the old dislike[27] to sepulture on the north side, so strikingly visible around this church. The events of the last twenty years have added fresh interest to God’s acre, for such is the exact measure of the grave ground of St. Morwenna. Along and beneath the southern trees, side by side, are the graves of between thirty and forty seamen, hurled by the sea, in shipwreck, on the neighbouring rocks, and gathered up and buried there by the present vicar and his people. The crews of three lost vessels, cast away upon the rocks of the glebe and elsewhere, are laid at rest in this safe and silent ground. A legend for one recording-stone thus commemorates a singular scene. The figurehead[28] of the brig _Caledonia_, of Arbroath, in Scotland, stands at the graves of her crew, in the churchyard of Morwenstow:--