Those august hymns, he thought, must thereafter ever remain by him as among the well-tested powers in things to soothe and fortify the soul.

One could never grow tired of them! In the old pagan worship there had been little to call the understanding into play.

Here, on the other hand, the utterance, the eloquence, the music of worship conveyed, as Marius readily understood, a fact or series of facts, for intellectual reception.

That became evident, more especially, in those lessons, or sacred readings, which, like the singing, in broken [134] vernacular Latin, occurred at certain intervals, amid the silence of the assembly.

There were readings, again with bursts of chanted invocation between for fuller light on a difficult path, in which many a vagrant voice of human philosophy, haunting men's minds from of old, recurred with clearer accent than had ever belonged to it before, as if lifted, above its first intention, into the harmonies of some supreme system of knowledge or doctrine, at length complete.