When I read, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” I do not know but that each world is a room, and as many rooms as there are worlds, stellar stairs, stellar galleries, stellar hallways, stellar windows, stellar domes.  How our departed friends must pity us shut up in these cramped apartments, tired if we walk fifteen miles, when they some morning, by one stroke of wing, can make circuit of the whole stellar system and be back in time for matins!  Perhaps yonder twinkling constellation is the residence of the martyrs; that group of twelve luminaries is the celestial home of the Apostles.  Perhaps that steep of light is the dwelling-place of angels cherubic, seraphic, archangelic.  A mansion with as many rooms as worlds, and all their windows illuminated for festivity.

Oh, how this widens and lifts and stimulates our expectation!  How little it makes the present, and how stupendous it makes the future!  How it consoles us about our pious dead, that instead of being boxed up and under the ground have the range of as many rooms as there are worlds, and welcome everywhere, for it is the Father’s house, in which there are many mansions!  Oh, Lord God of the Seven Stars and Orion, how can I endure the transport, the ecstasy, of such a vision!  I must obey my text and seek Him.  I will seek Him.  I seek Him now, for I call to mind that it is not the material universe that is most valuable, but the spiritual, and that each of us has a soul worth more than all the worlds which the inspired herdsman saw from his booth on the hills of Tekoa.

I had studied it before, but the Cathedral of Cologne, Germany, never impressed me as it did this summer.  It is admittedly the grandest Gothic structure in the world, its foundation laid in 1248, only two or three years ago completed.  More than six hundred years in building.  All Europe taxed for its construction.  Its chapel of the Magi with precious stones enough to purchase a kingdom.  Its chapel of St. Agnes with masterpieces of painting.  Its spire springing five hundred and eleven feet into the heavens.  Its stained glass the chorus of all rich colors.  Statues encircling the pillars and encircling all.  Statues above statues, until sculpture can do no more, but faints and falls back against carved stalls and down on pavements over which the kings and queens of the earth have walked to confession.  Nave and aisles and transept and portals combining the splendors of sunrise.  Interlaced, interfoliated, intercolumned grandeur.  As I stood outside, looking at the double range of flying buttresses and the forest of pinnacles, higher and higher and higher, until I almost reeled from dizziness, I exclaimed; “Great doxology in stone!  Frozen prayer of many nations!”