I notice that among all the new buildings that cover your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions; and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic.  Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of this?  For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon.  When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well as houses.  If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St. Paul’s.[207] But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship under another.  What do you mean by doing this?  Am I to understand that you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic; and that you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes you make in a church?  Or am I to understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for your religious services?  For if this be the feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, you will find that, at the root of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from your life.

For consider what a wide significance this fact has:  and remember that it is not you only, but all the people of England, who are behaving thus, just now.

You have all got into the habit of calling the church “the house of God.”  I have seen, over the doors of many churches, the legend actually carved, “This is the house of God and this is the gate of heaven."[208] Now, note where that legend comes from, and of what place it was first spoken.  A boy leaves his father’s house to go on a long journey on foot, to visit his uncle:  he has to cross a wild hill-desert; just as if one of your own boys had to cross the wolds to visit an uncle at Carlisle.  The second or third day your boy finds himself somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, at sunset.  It is stony ground, and boggy; he cannot go one foot further that night.  Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may, gathering a few of the stones together to put under his head;—­so wild the place is, he cannot get anything but stones.  And there, lying under the broad night, he has a dream; and he sees a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are ascending and descending upon it.  And when he wakes out of his sleep, he says, “How dreadful is this place; surely this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”  This PLACE, observe; not this church; not this city; not