pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek what
could have been the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words of
the archdeacon: "This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice."

To our mind, this thought had two faces. In the first place, it was a
priestly thought. It was the affright of the priest in the presence of
a new agent, the printing press. It was the terror and dazzled amazement
of the men of the sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press of
Gutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at the
printed word: something similar to the stupor of a sparrow which should
behold the angel Legion unfold his six million wings. It was the cry of
the prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring and
swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith,
opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. It was the
prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilized
by the press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient. It was the
terror of the soldier who examines the brazen battering ram, and
says:--"The tower will crumble." It signified that one power was about
to succeed another power. It meant, "The press will kill the church."

But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no doubt,
there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first,
less easy to perceive and more easy to contest, a view as philosophical
and belonging no longer to the priest alone but to the savant and the
artist. It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form,
was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of
each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in
the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was
about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more
durable. In this connection the archdeacon's vague formula had a second
sense. It meant, "Printing will kill architecture."

In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the
Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity,
the principal expression of man in his different stages of development,
either as a force or as an intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass
of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that
speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men