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.
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