The Red Cloud chief., 1920-09-23

- - '"S
ing rnce." He cot this phrase from an American
friend. The American being shown around the
Abbey by the de6n. exclaimed:
Can any sacred building In the British en-
pire compare with Westminster Abbey? Is 1t not
the unique and priceless treasure OF the English
speaking racer And using this explanation as
a text the dean says:
ut was not made in the tone Of rhetorical COM
pliment, but with the intense conviction OF one
who had quite suddenly been awakened to a full
sense of the significance of this great Inheritance
from our common Anglo-SaXon ancestry. 1t Is the
same story II you take round friends or visitors
who have just come from Canada. or Australia,
or New Zealand, or South Africa. and who have
never before been In the mother country. One
feels overwhelmed and Inundated In the pres
ence of their delighted enthusiasm, their rever-
ence for the historic associations OF the building,
their appreciation Of its antiquity. their emotion
at the sight Of places and things Of which they
have so often heard. Familiar as II Is to some OF
us, to them the abbey is the heart shrine Of the
worldwide empire. The thought of 1t Is inter
twined with the most sacred feelings and deep
est affections of brothers and sisters scattered
over the whole world"
Westminster Abbey has been called "the his
tory of the English race set In stone" In a sense,
It Is the symbol of English monarchy; for Harold,
the last Saxon king, was crowned here so was
william the Conqueror, In 1906: so was ever since
every English king. Yet, as the Times says Of the
abbey:
ut is no history of a dynasty or of a kingdom
that speaks here. 1t Is the history of a race In
every branch of human activity. told generation
after generation by the hands that, through good
days and through evil, carried and handed down
the torch.
deeply as these great repositories Of the great
dead must move all educated men, the story they
have to tell IL short and confined to that embodied
here. That is all-embracing, unbrOken. widening
down from Hastings to the great war, from the
Saxon Witan and the Kings council TO the parIia-
ments of the empire and, not less truly If less d.
rectly, to the congress of the United States"
There is a lot of legend about the beginnings
OF Westminster Abbey. The first church Is said
. TO have been built about GIG by King Sebert Of
Essex. Edward the Confessor In lOi9-65 built n
church on the present site and gave 1t Its present
name. Henry III In the thirteenth century began
the reconstruction which was carried on by his
successors. The towers were not built until 1722'
40. The Abbey was disendOwed during the Ref
Ormation, but was restored by Queen Mary. Its
present organization, a dean and II canOn7, dates
from Elizabeth. The practice OF interring the
great began under Richard II.
Lord NIacauiay, who himself lies In Westmln-
ster Abbey, wrote of II: "No other spot in the en-.
pire contains within such narrow space so many
illustrious citizens His statement is undoubtedly
true. and the list of the great Is all the more In
teresting for the reason that Westminster Is no
Vallalla established by ordinance and decree. And
It is certainly an interesting, coilectlon-Cecil. VII.
Tiers, Blake, Monk, Clarendon, Argyll, Ormond, the
two Pitts, Fox, Canning, Palmerst0n, Gladstone,
Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, Beaumont, Ben jon
son, Prior, Gay. DR.. Johnson. Browning. Tennyson,
Dickens-and so on, theOlogians, actors, Wusi,
clans, artists and scientists.