d as it
were the mother of England, one of the tremendous places of Europe into
which every year flocked thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
men. The altar is thrown down, the shrine is gone and forgotten, in all
that vast church the martyred Saint who made it what it was is not so
much as remembered even in an inscription or a stone; and the
enthusiasm and devotion of centuries have given place to a silence so
icy that nothing can break it. The place is dead.

I remember very well the first time I came to Canterbury. I was a boy,
and full of enthusiasm for St Thomas, I would have knelt where he
fell, I would have prayed, yes with all my fathers, there where he was
laid at last on high above the altar. But there was nothing. I was
shown, as is the custom, all that the four centuries of ice have
preserved of the work of my forefathers; the glorious tombs of King
and Bishop, the storied glass of the thirteenth century, unique in
England, the litter and the footsteps of thirteen hundred years. I was
led up past the choir into that lofty and once famous place where for
centuries the greatest and holiest shrine in England stood. All about
were still grouped the tombs of Princes; Edward, the Black Prince, the
hero of Crecy, Henry IV., the usurper, Cardinal Chatillon; but of the
shrine itself, of the body it held up to love and honour and worship
there was nothing, no word even, no sign at all to tell that ever such
a thing had been, only an emptiness and a space and a silence that
could be felt.

Later I was led down into that north-west transept, once known as the
Martyrdom, where St Thomas laid down his life; and left alone there, I
remember I tried in all that dumbness and silence to recollect myself,
to pray, at least to recall, something of that great sacrifice which
had so moved Christendom that for centuries men flocked here to
worship--where now no man kneels any more for ever.

I remember very well how it came to me in that tingling and icy silence
that St Thomas died for the liberty of the Church, that here in England
she might not become the king's chattel or anyway at all the creature
of the civil power. I was too young to smile when I remembered that in
the very place where St Thomas laid down his life in that cause, there
sits to-day in his usurped place one who eagerly acknowledges the king
as the "Supreme Governor of the Church within these realms." Yet in my
heart I heard again those tremendous word