s, "Were all the swords of
England hanging over my head you could not terrify me from my obedience
to God and my Lord the Pope." They who slew him fled away, and their
title, shouted in the winter darkness that filled the church, was heard
above the thunder and has echoed down the ages since: Reaux! Reaux!
King's men! King's men! Is it not they who now sit in Becket's place?

But to-day I am content with a judgment less bitter and less logical.
Who may know what is in the heart of God? Perhaps after all, after this
age of ice, Canterbury will rise again and my little son even may hear
them singing in the streets, gay once more and alive with endless
processions that noble old song:

Laureata novo Thoma,
Sicut suo Petro Roma,
Gaude Cantuaria!

[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM CHRISTCHURCH GATE]

For though St Thomas be forgot in Canterbury, he is on high and
valiant, and one day maybe he will return from exile as before, to
accomplish wonderful things.

And indeed dead as she is and silent, Canterbury is worthy of
resurrection if only because she is as it were a part of him and a
part, too, of our origins, the well, though not the source from which
the Faith was given us. For some thirteen hundred years when men have
spoken of Canterbury, they have had in mind the metropolitan church
of England, the great cathedral which still stands so finely there in
the rather gloomy close behind Christ Church gate, rightly upon the
foundations of its predecessors, Roman, Saxon, and Norman buildings.
Ever since there was a civilisation in England, there has been a
church in this place; it is our duty, then, as well as our pleasure to
approach it to-day with reverence.

Canterbury began as we began in the swamps and the forests, a little
lake village in the marshes of the Stour, holding the lowest ford, not
beyond the influence of the sea nor out of reach of fresh water. When
great Rome broke into England lost in mist, here certainly she
established a city that was as it were the focus of all the ports of
the Straits whence most easily a man might come into England from the
continent. Canterbury grew because she was almost equally near to the
ports we know as Lympne, Dover, Richborough and Reculvers, so that a
man setting out from the continent and doubtful in which port he would
land, wholly at the mercy of wind and tide as he was, would name
Canterbury to his correspondent in England as