It was the college of the City clergy, they were its guardians, it was their library, it contained their reading hall; formerly it held their garden, and it had their almshouses.  There was hardly any place in the City more peaceful or more beautiful than the long narrow room which held their library.  It was a very ancient site—­formerly the site of Elsing’s Hospital, the oldest hospital in the whole City.  Everything about it was venerable, and yet the City clergy themselves—­its official guardians—­sold it for what it would fetch, and stuck up the horrid thing on the embankment which they call Sion College.  There they still use the old seal and arms of the college.  But there is no more a Sion College—­that is gone.  You cannot replace it.  You might as well tear down King’s College Chapel at Cambridge and call Dr. Parker’s City Temple by that honoured and ancient name.  Well, for such people as the majority of the City clergy who can do such things, there can be no voice or utterance at all from ancient stones, the past can have no lessons, no teachings for them, there can be no message to them from the dead who should still live for them in memory and association.  For them the ancient City and its citizens are dumb.

Now that we know what to expect and what to look for, let us take together a Sunday morning ramble in a certain part of the City.  We will go on a morning in early summer, when the leaves of those trees which still stand in the old City churchyards are bright with their first tender green, and when the river, as we catch glimpses of it, shows a broad surface of dancing waves across to the stairs and barges of old Southwark.  We will take this walk at the quietest hour in the whole week, between eleven and twelve.  All the churches are open for service.  We will look in noiselessly, but, indeed, we shall find no congregations to disturb, only, literally, two or three gathered together.

I will take you to the very heart of the City.  Perhaps you have thought that the heart of the City is that open triangular space faced by the Royal Exchange, and flanked by the Bank of England and the Mansion House.  We have taught ourselves to think this, in ignorance of the City history.  But a hundred and fifty years ago there was no Mansion House, three hundred years ago there was no Royal Exchange, and the Bank of England itself is but a mushroom building of the day before yesterday.

In the long life of London—­it covers two thousand years—­the chief seat of its trade, the chief artery of its circulation, has been Thames Street.  Along here for seventeen hundred years were carried on the chief events in the drama which we call the History of London.  Its past origin, its growth and expansion, are indicated along this line.  Here the City merchants of old—­Whittingtons, Fitzwarrens, Sevenokes, Greshams—­thronged to do their business.  To these wharves came the vessels laden from Antwerp, Hamburg, Riga, Bordeaux,