There is a
sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every
tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would
generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and
honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that
the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to
sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness, or their
suffering,--that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all
material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp
of themselves upon--was to be swept away, as soon as there was room
made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no
affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children;
that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm
monument in the hearth and house to them; that all that they ever
treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted
them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear
this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear
doing it to his father's house. I say that if men lived like men
indeed, their houses would be temples--temples which we should hardly
dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to
live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a
strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents
taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our
fathers' honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our
dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to
himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.
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