The Idaho Springs siftings-news., 1920-09-17

ing race" He got this phrase from an American
friend. The American being shown around the
Abbey by the dean, exclaimed:
"Can any sacred building in the British en-
pire compare with Westminster Abbey? Is it not
the unique and priceless treasure of the English
speaking racer" And using this explanation as
text the dean says:
"It was not made in the tone of rhetorical com
pment, 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 common Anglo Saxon ancestry. 1t is the
same story If you take round friends or visitors
who have just come from Canada, or Australia
or New Zealand, or South Africa, and who have
before been in the mother country. One
feels overwhelmed and humiliated in the pres
ence of their delighted enthusiasm, their rever
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 often heard Familiar it is to of
us, to them the abbey is the heart shrine Of the
worldwide empire. The thought of it 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
1t is the symbol of English monarchyi for Harold,
the last Saxon king crowned here;
William the Conqueror, in 1906; was ever since
every English king Yet as the Times says of the
abbey:
ut is no history of dynasty or of kingdom
that speaks here 1t is the history of 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 these great repositories of the great
dead must move all educated men, the story they
have to tell is short and confined to that embodied
here. That is all-embracing, unbroken, widening
down from Hastings to the great war, from the
itor and fI,a Jyiuo' m thp mar
ments of the empire and, not less truly If less d.
recty, 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 104965 built
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, dean ard II canons, dates
from Elizabeth. The practice of interrng the
great began under Richard II.
Lord Macaulay who himself lies in Westmin-
ster Abbey wrote of it: mo other spot in the
pire contains within such space so many
illustrious citizens His statement is undoubtedly
true, and the list of the great is all the in
teresting for the reason that Westminster is no
Valhalla established by ordinance and decree. And
it is certainly an interesting collecton-Cec. VII
liers Blake, Monk Clarendon, Argyll, Ormond, the
two Pitts Fox, Canning Palmerston, Gladstone,
Chaucer, Spenser. Dryden. Beaumont Ben jon
son, Prior, Cay DR. johnson, Browning. Tennyson,
DIckens-and on, theologians, actors, musl-
clans. artists and scientists