This is all twenty years ago now, but I do not feel that I need give any description of the Oratory and its ways, for whoever goes there now will find it almost exactly the same as it was then—and has been, I suppose, from a very much earlier time. I could not, of course, penetrate beyond the enclosure: no one of my sex, I was told, had ever done so except once when “Buffalo Bill’s” Indians came to tea—there were still Red Indians in existence down to my own day, and some of these used to be shown off as a circus turn in England, most of them Catholics. At the last moment it was discovered that the good Fathers could not distinguish braves from squaws, and some of the latter had already been admitted into the garden by mistake! “But that was before my time,” said the old priest who had instructed me. The long brown house, with its old-fashioned carriage-sweep, watching unwinking the ceaseless grinding flow of the Brompton Road platform; the stone façade of the church, thrust out like a rock for the daily tide to eddy round, half trapped, half free; the Fathers themselves, still, for all their man-of-the-modern-worldliness, dressed in the very manner of St. Philip, and taking their supper at a quarter to seven after the manner of Father Faber; the interior of the church, housing indeed Saints whom Father Faber had never heard of, yet still the same in its outlines—the same red hangings, the same cope on the Lady statue, spoils of some old South American emperor, the same Corpo Santo, grimed now with London dust till it might have passed for St. Philip himself—all spoke to me of a changelessness which was not dullness, a peacefulness which was not stagnation. Oh yes, I know there are plenty of Congregations which have their roots deeper in the history of the Church, their place in the story of England yet longer and yet more honourable: but it is the Oratory, with the life of the sixteenth century thrown on to the screen of the nineteenth century, and there fixed as if for all time, that stood and stands to me for type of the eternal tradition.
Am I confusing the merely interminable with the eternal? No, it was at High Mass at the Oratory that I realized what eternity meant. The frivolous might find them simply interminable, those long Mozart masses that the Protestants go to hear. But if you are in the right spirit to catch the message of the place, then you find eternity. The three ministers, dwarfed by the height of the building, seem like ants crawling about in the presence of Something immeasurably greater than themselves: the Kyrie and the _Miserere nobis_ of the Gloria sound like what they are, tributes of abject servility to a King whose audience no unclean thing may approach; the spaciousness of the whole setting, music, and building, and ceremonies, stands for a poor sacrament of that Infinitude towards which all this self-annihilating homage is directed: you see the work of man’s hands as the little doll’s house it is. In one breathless moment of the Credo the heart seems to stop still, and all becomes an eternal moment, that silence which is kept before the throne of God.