THE PILGRIMS' WAY A Little Scrip of Good Counsel CHOSEN BY A. T. QUILLER-COUCH SECOND EDITION LONDON SEELEY & CO LIMITED 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET PREFACE IT is a disease of us English, and I think a reproach to that reformed religion which most of us profess, that we no longer go on pilgrimages. We travel more furiously than ever, and our propensity for it has passed into a by-word among the nations: but we travel among phenomena, and either in that rage for sight-seeing which Matthew Arnold summarised once for all, or in pursuit of bodily, not of spiritual, health. Yet we were once a great people for pilgrimages for our spiritual health; and the roads along which we tear in motors or on bicycles intersect and sometimes follow for miles the tracks whereby the Englishman used to ride or trudge once in his lifetime, perhaps, but for his soul's great benefit-to Canterbury, Walsingham, St. Michael's Mount. For most of us the frequented stretches of these old roads have had their significance rubbed out of them it is where the track diverges-where the rider on his way home from the hunt crosses a ribbon of short turf winding over the downs-that the lesson is more likely to be read: and this is a pity, for it effaces by a foolish antiquarian interest what should be a present practical one. If the new road lead us better to Walsingham than the old, by all means let the old be superseded. But does the new lead to Walsingham? I want to urge here a reason or two why this good custom of our fathers, of going on pilgrimages, should not be discontinued. In the first place, a man ought, at least once in his |