stone and set it up for a pillar, if
you are to mark the place, so as to know it again, where a vision
appeared. A persecuted people, needing to conceal their places of
worship, may perform every religious ceremony first under one crag of
the hill-side, and then under another, without invalidating the
sacredness of the rites or sacraments thus administered. It is,
therefore, we all acknowledge, inessential, that a particular spot
should be surrounded with a ring of stones, or enclosed within walls of
a certain style of architecture, and so set apart as the only place
where such ceremonies may be properly performed; and it is thus less by
any direct appeal to experience or to reason, but in consequence of the
effect upon our senses produced by the architecture, that we receive the
first strong impressions of what we afterwards contend for as absolute
truth. I particularly wish you to notice how it is always by help of
human art that such a result is attained, because, remember always, I am
neither disputing nor asserting the truth of any theological
doctrine;--that is not my province;--I am only questioning the
expediency of enforcing that doctrine by the help of architecture. Put a
rough stone for an altar under the hawthorn on a village
green;--separate a portion of the green itself with an ordinary paling
from the rest;--then consecrate, with whatever form you choose, the
space of grass you have enclosed, and meet within the wooden fence as
often as you desire to pray or preach; yet you will not easily fasten an
impression in the minds of the villagers, that God inhabits the space of
grass inside the fence, and does not extend His presence to the common
beyond it: and that the daisies and violets on one side of the railing
are holy,--on the other, profane. But, instead of a wooden fence, build
a wall, pave the interior space; roof it over, so as to make it
comparatively dark;--and you may persuade the villagers with ease that
you have built a house which Deity inhabits, or that you have become, in
the old French phrase, a "logeur du Bon Dieu."

61. And farther, though I have no desire to introduce any question as to
the truth of what we thus architecturally teach, I would desire you most
strictly to determine what is intended to be taught.

Do not think I underrate--I am among the last men living who would
underrate,--the importance of the sentiments connected with their church
to the population of a pastoral vill