Opening of the book
“… and as to what may be in this book, do not feel timid nor hesitate to enter. There are more mountains than molehills …”
“… amore Antiqui ritus, alto sub numine Romae.”
То
MISS R. H. BUSK
Praise of This Book
To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book, and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit), greeting —and whatever else can be had for nothing.
If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them all —when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric —what should I note
(after so many years) but the old tumbledown and gaping church, that I love more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as though it had been finished yesterday.
Knowing very well that such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had been left to us all; for one’s native place is the shell of one’s soul, and one’s church is the kernel of that nut.
Keep listening free
Readnara
