It is not their poverty that moves us, because even when they are empty, they appear to be inhabited.
Is it not, then, their modesty that appeals to us?
For, with their unpretentious steeples, and their low roofs hiding under the trees, they seem to shrink and humiliate themselves in the sight of God.

They have not been upreared through a spirit of pride, nor through the pious fancy of some mighty man on his death-bed.

On the contrary, we feel that it is the simple impression of a need, the ingenuous cry of an appetite, and, like the shepherd's bed of dried leaves, it is the retreat the soul has built for itself where it comes to rest when it is tired.

These village churches represent better than their city sisters the distinctive features of the places where they are built, and they seem to participate more directly in the life of the people who, from father to son, come to kneel at the same place and on the same stone slab.

Every day, every Sunday, when they enter and when they leave, do they not see the graves of their parents, are these not near them while they pray, and does it not seem to them as if the church was only a larger family circle from which the loved ones have not altogether departed?
These places of worship thus have a harmonious sense, and the life of these people is influenced by it from the baptismal font to the grave.