The size of its Groote Kerk indicates something of this past importance, for it is immense: a Gothic building of the fourteenth century, cold and drear enough, but a little humanised by some coloured glass from Gouda, often in very bad condition.

In the days when this church was built Edam had twenty-five thousand inhabitants: now there are only five thousand.
It is difficult to lose the feeling of disproportion between the size of the Dutch churches and that of the villages and congregations.

The villages are so small, the churches so vast.

It is as though the churches were built to compensate for the absence of hills.

From any one spire in Holland one must be able to see almost all the others.
The stained glass in Edam's great church has reference rather to Holland's temporal prosperity than to religion.