All over the world every kind of man has had for the high places of
his country, or for the high places that he has seen in travel (though
these last have made upon him a lesser impression), a sentiment closely
allied to religion and difficult to fit in with common words. It is
upon such sites that sacrifice upon special occasion has been offered.
It is here that you will find rare, unvisited, but very holy shrines
to-day, and even in its last and most degraded form the men of our
modern societies, who are atrophied in such things, spur themselves to
a special emotion by distant voyages in which they can satisfy this
adoration of a summit over a plain. It is not capable of analysis; but
how marvellously it fills the mind. It is not difficult to understand
that monk of the Dark Ages--to be accurate, of the early eleventh
century--who, having doubtless seen Paris a hundred times from the
height of Montmartre, could not believe that the martyrdom of St. Denis
had taken place on the plain. Something primal in him demanded the
high and lonely place as the scene of the foundation of the Church of
Lutetia, and he would have it that St. Denis was martyred there. All
the popular stories were with him, and the legend arose. Up and down
Europe, wherever there are hills, you will find upon conspicuous crags
or little peaks, upon the loneliest ridges, a chapel. There is one such
on a hill near Remiremont; there is another at Roncesvalles; there is
another on the high platform at Portofino; there is another on the
very height called Holy Cross above Urgel. In its way, St. Martha’s
in Surrey is of that kind. There are hundreds everywhere throughout
Christendom, and they witness to this need of man for which, I say,
there is no name.
I have heard of a mountain in Ireland, in the west of that country, to
the summit of which upon a certain day of the year the people and the
priests will go together, and Mass will be said in the open air upon
that height. And so it is in several places of the Vosges and of the
Pyrenees, and in one or two, I believe, of the foothills of the Alps.
Everywhere men associate the exaltation of the high places with worship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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