PIERANZABULOE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1732, 10 May 1905, Page 77 (Supplement)

PIERANZABULOE.

(By A Banker.)

On the north, coast of Cornwall lies a considerable tract of country, which, though formerly fertile and prosperous, is now a very wilderness, a parched, arid desert. The pedestrian, who has been revelling in the glories of the bold rock-girt coast, midst mighty towering rocks and pinnacled, buttressed craigs and steeps, peaked escarpments, and upreared, beetling cliffs, and midst jutting headlands of adamatine rock, which for ages have withstood,- unharmed, the wild fury of the onslaughts of the great ocean, now finds himself suddenly on the confines of a weird desolation, a desert waste blasted as with the besom of destruction. Not a vestige of animal life is apparent, save a few resentful sea-birds which utter their. wrathful cries at the intrusion into their lonely domain and, with angry movements, circle round as though they would make a combined attack upon the intruder. And even plant-life appears to dread this sere and derelict wilderness ; l or except here and there some tufts of sandgrass, or a few speciments of the hounds-tongue, with its dark rubyhuetl flowers, or perhaps also of the deadly and nauseous henbane, its lurid, veined flowers and sickly odour betraying its noxious, death-dealing properties, with a few others which, appear to possess the faculty of living without nutriment, scarce a wild flower or a vestige of vegetable life is to be seen. For all around, weary mile after weary mile, there is nothing but sand ; coarse, gritty sand ; endless, interminable sand, sand sand. Here a barren pda in; here a series of steep acclivities, or lofty puled up dunes; or here a deep hollow cut out by the wintry north-west winds; but all never-ending sand. Until about five centuries ago all this melancholy solitude was a smiling, fertile valley, when it was overwhelmed

with repeated mighty whirlwinds of sand which buried fields and gardens, village and church as effectually as the ashes, of Vesuvius sealed the doom of Pompeii. And after more than four centuries of oiblivion the old church of Pieranzabulo© (now called Perranzabuloe) was exhumed from its shroud, and the church, founded before the Saxon pagans had, like vampires, settled down upon the country and exterminated the Christian religion from all but Cornwall and Wales; founded centuries before Augustine’s mission to reconvert the Angles, founded even, it is believed, not very long after iSt. Paul’s missionary visit to Britain, is exposed once more to our reverent view.

And there it stands, a relic of the past, a memento of the time when the cruel, child-slaughtering Druidical religion was supplanted by the pure and holy religion of Christ. Would that another St. Pieran would arise and convince the multitudes of the folly of placing religion in - the utter background ; and, like him, lead them with convincing power to fix their faith upon the Great Atonement for sin as the only valid passport to the gloryland.