Although of course he did not approve, he said, of a religion of external forms, yet he confessed that he had come to take a certain interest in noticing how, almost every time he went out, he discovered some new symbol of the old Catholic religion--old stone crosses, statues gazing out from the towers, images of the Virgin, hands raised in prayer, the adoration of kings and queens in the painted windows; and even in the gardens stone fragments, covered with ivy, of old saints--everywhere tokens of ancient faith, and intimations of another world, shining and immanent, about this world of sense. It was curious, but he had never noticed these things when he had first come to Oxford! Indeed, he grew to love all the antiquity of the place; was no longer oppressed or frightened by it; and for the old portraits in the hall and library, the tombstones in the cloisters, with their quaint epitaphs and names, he felt a certain fondness, he said, looking on the dead now, not as enemies, frowning on his creed and life, but as friends rather, and kindly predecessors.
The lives of many of those old scholars and worthies had become familiar to him, since he had read Anthony à Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, and he had gone sometimes with his friend on antiquarian walks about Oxford, and the colleges Wood described. Or Gerard would lend him a horse, and they would ride out to visit the historic places and villages that lie in the old country about--Woodstock, Cumnor, Abingdon--the names were familiar to him of long date; had he not first read of some of them, and the scenes they were famous for, in Jones' _Excelsior Reader_, out in Indiana as a boy?
He spoke of the village churches, that seemed so beautiful on those June afternoons, as they stood among their old trees and flowers, with the white clouds in the sky above, a shiver of wind in the long grass over the graves. And then, through the scent of roses about the open door, the dim interior, with its white Norman arches, and light falling from painted windows on the crusaders' tombs--on all the many monuments of the dead. The dead! Sutton wrote that he had always known of the times gone by, and the faith of the Middle Ages, but only in an unreal way, through books. And it made such a difference--to him at least--if he saw the proof of a thing, actually existing with the daylight on it!