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.
And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring
up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our
capital--upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered
wood and imitated stone--upon those gloomy rows of formalized
minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as
solitary as similar--not merely with the careless disgust of an
offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but
with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must
be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native
ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs
of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark
the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere
than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn;
when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and
live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the
comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt; and
the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ
only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy
openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of
earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of
stability without the luxury of change.

This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it is ominous, infectious,
and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men do not love their
hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have
dishonoured both, and that they have never acknowledged the true
universality of that Christian worship which was indeed to supersede
the idola