John Inglesant: A Romance (Volume 1 of 2)Shorthouse, J. H. (Joseph Henry)
History
John Inglesant: A Romance (Volume 1 of 2)
Shorthouse, J. H. (Joseph Henry)
Great Britain -- History -- Charles I, 1625-1649 -- Fiction; Religious fiction
Early on the Sunday morning the family were astir and said prayers in
the oratory. After breakfast many people from the country around and
more than a hundred children came in. These children were called the
Psalm children, and were regularly trained to repeat the Psalter, and
the best voices among them to assist in the service on Sundays. They
came in every Sunday, and according to the proficiency of each were
presented with a small piece of money, and the whole number entertained
with a dinner after Church. The Church was crowded at the morning
service before the Sacrament. The service was beautifully sung, the
whole family taking the greatest delight in Church music, and many of
the gentlemen from Cambridge being amateurs. The Sacrament was
administered with the greatest devotion and solemnity. Impressed as he
had been with the occupation of the preceding day and night, and his
mind excited with watching and want of sleep and with the exquisite
strains of the music, the effect upon Inglesant’s imaginative nature was
excessive. Above the altar, which was profusely bedecked with flowers,
the antique glass of the East window, which had been carefully repaired,
contained a figure of the Saviour of an early and severe type. The form
was gracious and yet commanding, having a brilliant halo round the head,
and being clothed in a long and apparently seamless coat; the two
fore-fingers of the right hand were held up to bless. Kneeling upon the
half-pace, as he received the sacred bread and tasted the holy wine,
this gracious figure entered into Inglesant’s soul, and stillness and
peace unspeakable, and life, and light, and sweetness, filled his mind.
He was lost in a sense of rapture, and earth and all that surrounded him
faded away. When he returned a little to himself, kneeling in his seat
in the Church, he thought that at no period of his life, however
extended, should he ever forget that morning or lose the sense and
feeling of that touching scene, of that gracious figure over the altar,
of the bowed and kneeling figures, of the misty autumn sunlight and the
sweeping autumn wind. Heaven itself seemed to have opened to him and
one fairer than the fairest of the angelic hosts to have come down to
earth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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