hesying Church, which is the best; second, a Church that struggles
to preach and prophesy, but cannot as yet, till its Pentecost come;
and third and worst, a Church gone dumb with old age, or which only
mumbles delirium prior to dissolution. Whoso fancies that by Church is
here meant Chapterhouses and Cathedrals, or by preaching and
prophesying, mere speech and chanting, let him,' says the oracular
Professor, 'read on, light of heart (_getrosten Muthes_).

'But with regard to your Church proper, and the Church-Clothes
specially recognised as Church-Clothes, I remark, fearlessly enough,
that without such Vestures and sacred Tissues Society has not existed,
and will not exist. For if Government is, so to speak, the outward SKIN
of the Body Politic, holding the whole together and protecting it; and
all your Craft-Guilds, and Associations for Industry, of hand or of
head, are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues (lying
_under_ such SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;--then is Religion
the inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which ministers Life and
warm Circulation to the whole. Without which Pericardial Tissue the
Bones and Muscles (of Industry) were inert, or animated only by a
Galvanic vitality; the SKIN would become a shrivelled pelt, or
fast-rotting raw-hide; and Society itself a dead carcass,--deserving to
be buried. Men were no longer Social, but Gregarious; which latter
state also could not continue, but must gradually issue in universal
selfish discord, hatred, savage isolation, and dispersion;--whereby, as
we might continue to say, the very dust and dead body of Society would
have evaporated and become abolished. Such, and so all-important,
all-sustaining, are the Church-Clothes to civilised or even to rational
men.

'Meanwhile, in our era of the World, those same Church-Clothes have
gone sorrowfully out-at-elbows; nay, far worse, many of them have
become mere hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which no living Figure or
Spirit any longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, in
horrid accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares on
you with its glass-eyes, in ghastly affectation of Life,--some
generation-and-half after Religion has quite withdrawn from it, and in
unnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new Vestures, wherewith to
reappear, and bless us, or our sons or grandsons. As a Priest, or
Interpreter of the Holy, is the noblest and highest of all men, so is
a Sham-p