they gave the best of their time, intending them for
immortality.]

75. I omitted, in preparing the preceding lecture for the press, a
passage referring to this subject, because it appeared to me, in its
place, hardly explained by preceding statements. But I give it here
unaltered, as being, in sober earnest, but too weak to characterize the
tendencies of the "accursed" architecture of which it speaks.

"Accursed, I call it, with deliberate purpose. It needed but the
gathering up of a Babylonish garment to trouble Israel;--these marble
garments of the ancient idols of the Gentiles, how many have _they_
troubled! Gathered out of their ruins by the second Babylon,--gathered
by the Papal Church in the extremity of her sin;--raised up by her, not
when she was sending forth her champions to preach in the highway, and
pine in the desert, and perish in the fire, but in the very scarlet
fruitage and fullness of her guilt, when her priests vested themselves
not with purple only, but with blood, and bade the cups of their
feasting foam not with wine only, but with hemlock;--raised by the hands
of the Leos and the Borgias, raised first into that mighty temple where
the seven hills slope to the Tiber, that marks by its massy dome the
central spot, where Rome has reversed the words of Christ, and, as He
vivified the stone to the apostleship, she petrifies the apostleship
into the stumbling stone;--exalted there first as if to mark what work
it had to do, it went forth to paralyze or to pollute, and wherever it
came, the luster faded from the streets of our cities, the gray towers
and glorious arches of our abbeys fell by the river sides, the love of
nature was uprooted from the hearts of men, base luxuries and cruel
formalisms were festered and frozen into them from their youth; and at
last, where, from his fair Gothic chapel beside the Seine, the king St.
Louis had gone forth, followed by his thousands in the cause of Christ,
another king was dragged forth from the gates of his Renaissance
palace,[27] to die, by the hands of the thousands of his people gathered
in another crusade; or what shall that be called--whose sign was not the
cross, but the guillotine?"

[Footnote 27: The character of Renaissance architecture, and the spirit
which dictated its adoption, may be remembered as having been centered
and symbolized in the palace of Versailles; whose site was chosen by
Louis the Fourteenth, in order that from thence he might _not