but of many generations. Is it any the less sacred? Does it not indeed add dignity and a worth, when we feel that the devotions which we have used to-day are hallowed by the use of many generations? Nay, in our worship we realize that there is a true communion of the saints, a link that binds those on earth with those who have gone before. As we erect our House of Prayer and Praise, we are but building the house which has been building these many days, and which is not finished. Our children and our children's children shall continue the work: the generation that now is shall be linked by the bonds of Common Prayer and Common Praise to the generations that are to come.
But again, this principle of continuity finds its expression in this venerable sanctuary in which you are privileged to worship. It stands not by itself. It has an ancestry which should make it all the more sacred and precious to those who love its walls.
When the forefathers of some of us, who are gathered here this evening, builded these walls, they were undertaking no new work. As they prepared a place where God might be worshipped according to the customs of their fathers, they realized that the House they were building, had been building for many years, and was not finished. This Church of 1710, with its later additions, traces back its lineage to the Church of 1683, and that to the one built earlier than 1674, and through the later Church at Jamestown, back to that first shrine on the banks of the river, in which good Parson Hunt first used the prayers and praises we have used to-day, back to the quiet village churches or the cathedrals of old England, back to the shrine of Augustine, or to the old sanctuary of St. Martin, outside the walls of Canterbury, where the British worshipped Christ before the coming of the Roman monk—back to the rock-bound Iona, cradle of our Anglo Saxon Christianity, back to the churches of Gaul—to the catecombs of Rome, back to that first sanctuary of Europe by the river bank of Philippi, back to Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians, back to the upper room at Jerusalem,
