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THE BIBLE OF AMIENS.

external sculpture of its walls and gates at once an alphabet and epitome of the religion, by the knowledge and inspiration of which an acceptable worship might be rendered, within those gates, to the Lord whose Fear was in His Holy Temple, and whose seat was in Heaven.

3. It is not easy for the citizen of the modern aggregate of bad building, and ill-living held in check by constables, which we call a town,—of which the widest streets are devoted by consent to the encouragement of vice, and the narrow ones to the concealment of misery,—not easy, I say, for the citizen of any such mean city to understand the feeling of a burgher of the Christian ages to his cathedral. For him, the quite simply and frankly-believed text, "Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them," was expanded into the wider promise to many honest and industrious persons gathered in His name—"They shall be my people and I will be their God";—deepened in his reading of it, by some lovely local and simply affectionate faith that Christ, as he was a Jew among Jews, and a Galilean among Galileans, was also, in His nearness to any—even the poorest—group of disciples, as one of their nation; and that their own "Beau Christ d'Amiens" was as true a com-