is this,
at bottom, but a new phasis of _Egoism,_ stretched out into the
Infinite; not always the heavenlier for its infinitude!
Brother, so soon as possible, endeavour to rise above all that.
"Thou art wrong; thou art like to be damned:" consider that as
the fact, reconcile thyself even to that, if thou be a man;--then
first is the devouring Universe subdued under thee, and from the
black murk of midnight and noise of greedy Acheron; dawn as of
an everlasting morning, how far above all Hope and all Fear,
springs for thee, enlightening thy steep path, awakening in thy
heart celestial Memnon's music!

But of our Dilettantisms, and galvanised Dilettantisms; of
Puseyism--O Heavens, what shall we say of Puseyism, in comparison
to Twelfth-Century Catholicism? Little or nothing; for indeed
it is a matter to strike one dumb.

The Builder of this Universe was wise,
He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles:
The Plan He shap'd His Worlds and Aeons by
Was--Heavens!--Was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles?

That certain human souls, living on this practical Earth, should
think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy theoretic
demonstrations and laudations of _the_ Church, instead of some
unnoisy, unconscious, but _practical,_ total, heart-and-soul
demonstration of _a_ Church: this, in the circle of revolving
ages, this also was a thing we were to see. A kind of
penultimate thing, precursor of very strange consummations; last
thing but one? If there is no atmosphere, what will it serve a
man to demonstrate the excellence of lungs? How much profitabler
when you can, like Abbot Samson, breathe; and go along your way!

Chapter XVI

St. Edmund

Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices; human
dwellings, churches, church-steeples, barns;--all fallen now and
vanished, but useful while they stood. He built and endowed 'the
Hospital of Babwell;' built 'fit houses for the St. Edmundsbury
Schools: Many are the roofs once 'thatched with reeds' which he
'caused to be covered with tiles;' or if they were churches,
probably 'with lead.' For all ruinous incomplete things,
buildings or other, were an eye-sorrow to the man. We saw his
'great tower of St. Edmund's;' or at least the roof-timbers of
it, lying cut and stamped in Elmset Wood. To change combustible
decaying reed-thatch into tile or lead, and material, still more,
moral wreck into rain-tight order,