Page:Bruton parish church restored and its historic environments (1907 V2).djvu/181

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selected was the traditional mount where Abraham had built the altar upon which to sacrifice his son. Thus did God, through associations, seek to stimulate and sanctify the memory of His people.

Israel's prophets, with spirit-illumined vision, unfolded the scroll of the future and told of things that were to be, but the key that unlocked the years unborn was ofttime the memory or the history of the years that had been.

Israel's poets sang of the glories which the future had in store, but they sang, too, as an inspiration, of the heroes of the past and told in sacred song of what their fathers had told them of what God had done for the nation in the times of old, and called upon the people to give thanks unto the Lord who through Moses, Aaron, Phinehas, Barak and Gideon had "delivered them out of their distress."

This method of appeal is not confined in the book of inspiration to the writers of the Old Testament. In the midst of the Gospel record the evangelists pause to place upon the immortal scroll the names of the men and women whose deeds of self-forgetful devotion gave them the right to live in the long annals of the Church; and nowhere in literature is there to be found a more deathless roll of fame than that recorded in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the writer calls the names of the great heroes of faith, and summons them about us to be our inspiration and example, that we may "run with patience the race that is set before us."

It is in this spirit that historic Bruton has been restored and enriched. All through the long months, when almost overwhelmed by the dust, disorder and confusion of construction, when harrassed by questions of delicate responsibility in reaching decisions as to questions of harmony and taste, while watching the commonplace details of building, and attending to the still more commonplace and arduous work of raising the necessary funds, there has ever been a splendor of association, a richness of glory coming out of the past which has hallowed every task. From out of the