uperseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well
as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp,
there is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo
Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an
Italian St. Paul's.[207] But now you live under one school of
architecture, and worship under another. What do you mean by doing
this? Am I to understand that you are thinking of changing your
architecture back to Gothic; and that you treat your churches
experimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes you make in a
church? Or am I to understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently
sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like the fine
frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved
for your religious services? For if this be the feeling, though it may
seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, you will find that,
at the root of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than
that you have separated your religion from your life.

For consider what a wide significance this fact has: and remember that
it is not you only, but all the people of England, who are behaving
thus, just now.

You have all got into the habit of calling the church "the house of
God." I have seen, over the doors of many churches, the legend
actually carved, "_This_ is the house of God and this is the gate of
heaven."[208] Now, note where that legend comes from, and of what
place it was first spoken. A boy leaves his father's house to go on a
long journey on foot, to visit his uncle: he has to cross a wild
hill-desert; just as if one of your own boys had to cross the wolds to
visit an uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day your boy finds
himself somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors,
at sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy; he cannot go one foot
further that night. Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best
he may, gathering a few of the stones together to put under his
head;--so wild the place is, he cannot get anything but stones. And
there, lying under the broad night, he has a dream; and he sees a
ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and
the angels of God are ascending and descending upon it. And when he
wakes out of his sleep, he says, "How dreadful is this place; surely
this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of
heaven." This PLACE, observe; not this