The Romish Church has been especially faulty on this point.  It has assumed, as necessary preliminaries for saintship—­at least after the Christian era—­the practice of, or at least the longing after, celibacy; and after the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches, unconditional submission to the Church of Rome.  But how has this injured, if not spoiled, their exclusive calendar of saints.  Amid apostles, martyrs, divines, who must be always looked on as among the very heroes and heroines of humanity, we find more than one fanatic persecutor; more than two or three clearly insane personages; and too many who all but justify the terrible sneer—­that the Romish Calendar is the “Pantheon of Hysteria.”

And Protestants, too—­How have they narrowed the number of the spirits of just men made perfect; and confined the Paean which should go up from the human race on All Saints’ Day, till a “saint” has too often meant with them only a person who has gone through certain emotional experiences, and assented to certain subjective formulas, neither of which, according to the opinion of some of the soundest divines, both of the Romish, Greek, and Anglican communions, are to be found in the letter of Scripture as necessary to salvation; and who have, moreover, finished their course—­doubtless often a holy, beneficent, and beautiful course—­by a rapturous death-bed scene, which is more rare in the actual experience of clergymen, and, indeed, in the conscience and experience of human beings in general, than in the imaginations of the writers of religious romances.

But we of the Church of England, as by law established—­and I recognize and obey, and shall hereafter recognize and obey, no other—­have no need so to narrow our All Saints’ Day; our joy in all that is noble and good which man has said or done in any age or clime.  We have no need to define where formularies have not defined; to shut where they have opened; to curse where they either bless, or are humbly, charitably, and therefore divinely, silent.  With a magnificent faith in the justice of the Father, and in the grace of Christ, and in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, our Church bids us—­Judge not the dead, lest ye be judged.  Condemn not the dead, lest ye be condemned.  For she bids us commit to the earth the corpses of all who die not “unbaptized,” “excommunicate,” or wilful suicides, and who are willing to lie in our consecrated ground; giving thanks to God that our dear brother has been delivered from the miseries of this sinful world, and in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

At least:  we of the Abbey of Westminster have a right to hold this; for we, thank God, act on it, and have acted on it for many a year.  We have a right to our wide, free, charitable, and truly catholic conception of All Saints’ Day.  Ay, if we did not use our right, these walls would use it for us; and in us would our Lord’s words be fulfilled—­If we were silent, the very stones beneath our feet would cry out.