With such formidable prejudices as we may possibly have raised by these suggestive hints, dare we hope to find companions in our visit to the venerable pile of building, whose spire still rears itself from the valley, where some eight hundred years ago, the foundations were laid of one of those huge monastic institutions, combining secular with spiritual power, once so common, and plentifully scattered over our country, and even then grown into strange jumbling masses of error and truth, beauty and deformity? the sole trace of whose grandeur is now to be found in the church and cloister of a Protestant cathedral, and the palace of a Protestant bishop. We must not, however, lose sight of the fact, that this edifice, in common with most others, among which we have to seek the past history of the church either at home or abroad, did not spring into existence until almost every truth possessed by the early Christians was so hidden by cumbrous masses of superstition, the growth of centuries of darkness, that it is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to trace any harmony of purpose in their outline or filling up; hence the inconsistencies that have sprung from the efforts to revive the ornaments and usages of a period when, the life having departed from them in a great measure, their meaning had been lost, and their practice perverted; hence, too, the folly often displayed by zealous ecclesiastical symbolists, in regarding every monkey, dog, mermaid, or imp that the carvers of wood and stone fashioned from their own barbarous conceits, or copied from the illuminations that some old monk’s overheated brain had devised for embellishment to some fanciful legend, as embodied ideas, to be interpreted into moral lessons or spiritual sermons. Before, however, we enter into the detail of the remnants left us for examination, we may take a glance over the page of the early history of the church, and trace a little of the origin of those errors which had grown around simple truths, converting them from beautiful realities into monstrous absurdities. A moment’s reflection may suffice to enable us to believe that the church, as planted by its first head and master, was a _seed_ to be watered and nurtured by the apostles, prophets, and ministers appointed to the work, and intended to have an outward growth of form, as well as inward growth of spirituality. During the early period of its existence, while suffering from the persecution of the Roman emperors, it was impossible that the church could develop itself freely; consequently, we are not surprised to find that “upper chambers,” and afterwards the tombs and sepulchres of their “brethren in the faith,” perhaps, too, of their risen Lord, were the places of meeting of its members. Nor is it difficult to trace from this origin the later superstitious worship at the shrines of the saints.