r-stricken, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent,
and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to
feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust.

Sec. 7. How to be averted.

And though I believe that we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind
amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the
signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all matter however trivial,
in all directions however distant. And at this time, when the iron roads
are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea, when
their great sagene is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and
strength of England together, contracting all its various life, its
rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating
metropolis of manufactures, when there is not a monument throughout the
cities of Europe, that speaks of old years and mighty people, but it is
being swept away to build cafes and gaming-houses;[4] when the honor of
God is thought to consist in the poverty of his temple, and the column
is shortened, and the pinnacle shattered, the color denied to the
casement, and the marble to the altar, while exchequers are exhausted in
luxury of boudoirs, and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without
a pause all the loveliness of creation which God in giving pronounced
good, and destroy without a thought all those labors which men have
given their lives, and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have
left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their hearts'
blood, for it is of their souls' travail, there is need, bitter need, to
bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that to live is nothing,
unless to live be to know Him by whom we live, and that he is not to be
known by marring his fair works, and blotting out the evidence of his
influences upon his creatures, not amid the hurry of crowds and crash of
innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences
which he gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for
glory and for beauty, he did not give them the fearless, faithful,
inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death,
generation after generation, that we, foul and sensual as we are, might
give the carved work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the
hammer; he has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild
waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under as it
were fire,