in the tints of the sunset, when down
below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even
now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have
stretched upwards from two stories to five; when the great chimneys are
vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples of modern
industry--the workshops and the factories--spread their long fronts
before the eye, the cathedral is still the governing form in the
picture--the one object which possesses the imagination and refuses to
be eclipsed.

As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church of the middle
ages to the secular institutions of the world. Its very neighbourhood
was sacred; and its shadow, like the shadow of the Apostles, was a
sanctuary. When I look at the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see
in them a type of the change which has passed over us. The House of
Commons of the Plantagenets sate in the Chapter House of Westminster
Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform Bill, five-and-thirty years ago,
debated in St. Stephen's Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by
the side of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's
ashes, the proud Minster itself is dwarfed into insignificance.

Let us turn to another vast feature of the middle ages--I mean the
monasteries.

Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has lived or died at a
particular spot. He has been distinguished by his wisdom, by his piety,
by his active benevolence; and in an age when conjurors and witches were
supposed to be helped by the devil to do evil, he, on his part, has been
thought to have possessed in larger measure than common men the favour
and the grace of heaven. Blessed influences hang about the spot which he
has hallowed by his presence. His relics--his household possessions, his
books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they
received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly
unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At
worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence.

Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, so in the middle ages
they built shrines or chapels on the spots which saints had made holy,
and communities of pious people gathered together there--beginning with
the personal friends the saint had left behind him--to try to live as he
had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to die as he had died.
Thus arose religio