Darkness and mystery; confused recesses of
building; artificial light employed in small quantity, but maintained
with a constancy which seems to give it a kind of sacredness;
preciousness of material easily comprehended by the vulgar eye; close
air loaded with a sweet and peculiar odor associated only with religious
services, solemn music, and tangible idols or images having popular
legends attached to them,--these, the stage properties of superstition,
which have been from the beginning of the world, and must be to the end
of it, employed by all nations, whether openly savage or nominally
civilized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of apprehending the
true nature of the Deity, are assembled in St. Mark's to a degree, as
far as I know, unexampled in any other European church. The arts of the
Magus and the Brahmin are exhausted in the animation of a paralyzed
Christianity; and the popular sentiment which these arts excite is to be
regarded by us with no more respect than we should have considered
ourselves justified in rendering to the devotion of the worshippers at
Eleusis, Ellora, or Edfou. [Footnote: I said above that the larger
number of the devotees entered by the "Arabian" porch; the porch, that
is to say, on the north side of the church, remarkable for its rich
Arabian archivolt, and through which access is gained immediately to the
northern transept.
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