are texts in English and inscriptions in Latin. It is, indeed, a gem of a church, and one is the more charmed with the rare beauty of the interior by the contrast with its rough, almost rude, exterior. It takes the stranger wholly unawares, and the suddenness of the surprise enhances the effect. It is not often, alas! that the wanderer of to-day is delightfully surprised by the internal beauty of a remote country church, the more especially when situated like this in a poor agricultural district, where one generally expects whitewash and neglect-which expectation is seldom disappointed.

The rector of Little Braxted is manifestly, and very justly, proud of his small and beautiful church. The great interest he takes in it is shown in a somewhat curious little book that he has written for the benefit of his parishioners, which he calls 'The Story of the Church.' In his book the rector relates much of the church's past history, which he states was first erected about the year 1120, so that this tiny fane is over seven long centuries old. 'Most of the country then,' he writes, was covered with thick woods or wild heath, and as for the roads, oh! what hard work it was to drag the stones over them to build this church! Some of the stones came by ship to Maldon and some by land, and the dark brown stones you see here and there in the walls were gathered from Tiptree Heath. When they had cleared the ground the builders came down on St. Nicholas' morning (December 6) and put two poles in a line so that they stood just straight with the sun as it rose over the hill, and on that line they

HISTORY OF A CHURCH.

61

made the middle aisle. That is the reason the chancel points so much to the south instead of lying due east; and if you come to church next St. Nicholas' Day, just as the service begins at eight o'clock, you will see the sun shining straight in at the east window over the altar.'

After following the history of the church down to the present century the rector goes on to relate, in his easy colloquial manner, the part he took in making the once plain structure beautiful. In 1856, when I was a boy,' he says, 'learning my Latin grammar, and knowing nothing about Little Braxted (and not much about anything), the rector here set to work to restore this church; he collected and spent nearly 500l. and made the whole church sound, strong, and clean. But when I came here I thought, Why should it only be clean? Why not beautiful?—and good friends helped me: friends who never saw this place, but who love the House of God wherever it is. And so many more hundreds of pounds have been spent, and the little window' (the quaintly tiny Norman one that I have already mentioned) that looks down on the chancel would not complain now, as it used to do, that "This House lieth desolate." First, then, teach your children, and everyone you come across in the world, that God's House ought to be the finest house and the most beautiful house in the parish.'

Besides the stories told in frescoes, and besides the many texts in curious lettering, making the walls truly sermons in stones,' there are numerous Latin inscriptions, some painted strangely in long and

short characters, and others with puzzling dots under certain letters. The reason of this curious proceeding much perplexed us. It was evidently not for ornamentation. Manifestly, we thought, there is more here than at first meets the eye, but the rector's little book solved the mystery, of which anon. Let me transcribe here two of these inscriptions, which suggested to us the idea of an enigma such as one comes upon in puzzle books. Here, then, are two-one with the long and short characters seemingly given in a most purposeless manner, the other with the dots under various letters without any apparent motive or order :

LeX eCCe Vera fVLsIt JesV LVCe:

reX nUnC peCCata soLVIt nostra CrUCe :
greX repasCatUr Christo sUo DUCe:

The other that I have selected runs as follows:
Occupet Salus ovilis muros et portas ejus laudatio.

The first of these inscriptions the rector renders in English thus:

Here finds the law in Jesus' light true reading,
Now by His Cross our King the pardon needing
Gives, that the flock may on their Chief be feeding.

which last line does not seem to me to be good Protestant doctrine.

Now to return once more to the rector's little work (shall I call it a guide-book to the church ?), he goes on to say, But perhaps people will come and look about and ask "What does this mean?" and "What is that for?" (Very naturally; indeed these very pertinent questions suggested themselves to us).

THE RECTOR EXPLAINS.

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But let the rector explain in his own peculiar way; ‘I will tell you what they mean,' he says, 'and you can tell people when they really want to learn; not silly people who come to find fault,-you had best let them go about their own business, if they have any.

'Let us come in at the porch door. It is always open; the church is your house as well as God's, and you may go in whenever you like to look at it ; or better still to kneel down and say your prayers; I wish you would.'

After explaining many things (even two of the pillars it would appear have their own names, the one Boaz and the other Jachin, after the names of the two pillars in the first temple of God'), we come to the puzzling inscriptions. Again let the rector speak for himself: But you will say, "Why put these queer-looking texts about with their long and short letters and dots? I will tell you. Suppose a traveller from a foreign country were to come now, or a thousand years hence, if he were to look at those texts he would understand them, because Latin is a language that all learned people know, and it never changes; and the long letters and the letters with dots would tell anyone the date that the things were put into the church, just as the date of the year is made up of letters. I have reckoned up one of these texts for you, just to show what I mean. The others you can puzzle out for yourselves some time when you are waiting in church, but not in the middle of the sermon, please;' which is a wise reservation.

Now we come to the explanation of these curi

ously written texts and inscriptions. It would seem in the one case that the long letters, and in the other that those marked by the dots beneath, are to be considered as Roman numerals, and by adding up the total sum of these you obtain the date of the year when the text was painted on the wall, though of course it takes some little time and trouble to obtain this important information. A simpler method of conveying the desired knowledge (one moreover that all could understand), it appeared to us in our simplicity, would be to have just added the date in plain figures after the texts; but perchance there is some hidden virtue in complication that we do not comprehend.

It will be seen that these texts are written for learned people' who may come to see the church in the present day or in 'a thousand years hence,' not for the primitive agricultural folk, who, unless I greatly mistake, constitute the main portion, if not the whole of the small, congregation; which careful consideration for strangers seems rather hard upon the worshippers for whom the church is chiefly intended. And for all this consideration I do not feel so very sure that the coming traveller (who, by the way, must know Latin) will ever guess the hidden meaning of the curious long letters and the strange dots beneath others. Even with the aid of the worthy rector's lucid explanation, some care and time is required to arrive at a result. Let us take as an example one of the under-dotted texts done in Latin that I have already given. In this we find the following letters marked in the order in which they