Besides, there were too many
of them. The tax-payer would naturally grumble. As Town Halls, Assembly
Rooms? The idea was unthinkable. It would be like a performance of
Barnum's Circus in the Coliseum at Rome. Yes, they would disappear.
Though not, she was glad to think, in her time. In towns, the space
would be required for other buildings. Here and there some gradually
decaying specimen would be allowed to survive, taking its place with the
feudal castles and walled cities of the Continent: the joy of the
American tourist, the text-book of the antiquary. A pity! Yes, but then
from the aesthetic point of view it was a pity that the groves of ancient
Greece had ever been cut down and replanted with currant bushes, their
altars scattered; that the stones of the temples of Isis should have come
to be the shelter of the fisher of the Nile; and the corn wave in the
wind above the buried shrines of Mexico. All these dead truths that from
time to time had encumbered the living world. Each in its turn had had
to be cleared away.
And yet was it altogether a dead truth: this passionate belief in a
personal God who had ordered all things for the best: who could be
appealed to for comfort, for help? Might it not be as good an
explanation as any other of the mystery surrounding us? It had been so
universal.
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