t about looking for the fading traces of that lost
cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new world.

But I do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin; I doubt if I
should feel it even if I wished to lay it in ruins. I doubt if Mr.
M'Cabe really thinks that Catholicism is dying, though he might deceive
himself into saying so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the
crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a ruin, or even that
the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathedral at Washington was a ruin, though
it is not yet a church; or that there is anything lost or lingering
about the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up under the
inspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a matter of feeling, as a matter
of fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not in
the religious centres that we now have the feeling of something
beautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is exactly in
the spaces cleared and levelled by America for the large and sober
religion of the eighteenth century; it is where an old house in
Philadelphia contains an old picture of Franklin, or where the men of
Maryland raised above their city the first monument of Washington. It is
there that I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,
whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. It
is then that I feel as if I were the last Republican.

But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason is now a ruin, I
should rather say that at its best it is a ruin. At its worst it has
collapsed into a death-trap or is rotting like a dunghill. What is the
real Republic of our day as distinct from the ideal Republic of our
fathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms; with
those parasites, the professional politicians? I was re-reading
Swinburne's bitter but not ignoble poem, 'Before a Crucifix,' in which
he bids Christ, or the ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of the
way of the onward march of a political idealism represented by United
Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by the strange and ironic
exactitude with which every taunt he flings at the degradation of the
old divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal.
The time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of Liberty, as
represented by the actual Liberals, 'Have _you_ filled full men's
starved-out souls; have _you_ brought freedom on the earth?' For every
en