this stone, even, which he puts up for a memorial—­the piece of flint on which his head has lain.  But this place; this windy slope of Wharnside; this moorland hollow, torrent-bitten, snow-blighted! this any place where God lets down the ladder.  And how are you to know where that will be? or how are you to determine where it may be, but by being ready for it always?  Do you know where the lightning is to fall next?  You do know that, partly; you can guide the lightning; but you cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit, which is that lightning when it shines from the east to the west.[209]

But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong verse to serve a merely ecclesiastical purpose is only one of the thousand instances in which we sink back into gross Judaism.  We call our churches “temples.”  Now, you know perfectly well they are not temples.  They have never had, never can have, anything whatever to do with temples.  They are “synagogues”—­“gathering places”—­where you gather yourselves together as an assembly; and by not calling them so, you again miss the force of another mighty text—­“Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the churches” [we should translate it], “that they may be seen of men.  But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father”—­which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but “in secret."[210]

Now, you feel, as I say this to you—­I know you feel—­as if I were trying to take away the honour of your churches.  Not so; I am trying to prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills; not that the Church is not sacred—­but that the whole Earth is.  I would have you feel, what careless, what constant, what infectious sin there is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling your churches only “holy,” you call your hearths and homes “profane”; and have separated yourselves from the heathen by casting all your household gods to the ground, instead of recognizing, in the place of their many and feeble Lares, the presence of your One and Mighty Lord and Lar.

“But what has all this to do with our Exchange?” you ask me, impatiently.  My dear friends, it has just everything to do with it; on these inner and great questions depend all the outer and little ones; and if you have asked me down here to speak to you, because you had before been interested in anything I have written, you must know that all I have yet said about architecture was to show this.  The book I called The Seven Lamps was to show that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture, without exception, had been produced. The Stones of Venice had, from beginning to end, no other aim than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue;