temples of our forefathers.

Scholars know well--but they must excuse my quoting it for the sake of
those who are not scholars--the famous passage of Tacitus which tells how
our forefathers "held it beneath the dignity of the gods to coop them
within walls, or liken them to any human countenance: but consecrated
groves and woods, and called by the name of gods that mystery which they
held by faith alone;" and the equally famous passage of Claudian, about
"the vast silence of the Black Forest, and groves awful with ancient
superstition; and oaks, barbarian deities;" and Lucan's "groves inviolate
from all antiquity, and altars stained with human blood."

To worship in such spots was an abomination to the early Christian. It
was as much a test of heathendom as the eating of horse-flesh, sacred to
Odin, and therefore unclean to Christian men. The Lombard laws and
others forbid expressly the lingering remnants of grove worship. St.
Boniface and other early missionaries hewed down in defiance the sacred
oaks, and paid sometimes for their valour with their lives.

It is no wonder, then, if long centuries elapsed ere the likeness of
vegetable forms began to reappear in the Christian churches of the North.
And yet both grot and grove were equally the natural temples which the
religious instinct of all deep-hearted peoples, conscious of sin, and
conscious, too, of yearnings after a perfection not to be found on earth,
chooses from the earliest stage of awakening civilisation. In them,
alone, before he had strength and skill to build nobly for himself, could
man find darkness, the mother of mystery and awe, in which he is reminded
perforce of his own ignorance and weakness; in which he learns first to
remember unseen powers, sometimes to his comfort and elevation, sometimes
only to his terror and debasement; darkness; and with it silence and
solitude, in which he can collect himself, and shut out the noise and
glare, the meanness and the coarseness, of the world; and be alone a
while with his own thoughts, his own fancy, his own conscience, his own
soul.

But for a while, as I have said, that darkness, solitude, and silence
were to be sought in the grot, not in the grove.

Then Christianity conquered the Empire. It adapted, not merely its
architecture, but its very buildings, to its worship. The Roman Basilica
became the Christian church; a noble form of building enough, though one
in which was neither darkness, solitud