Barnakill led him gently within the area of the railings, where he might conceal his emotion, and it was but a few seconds before Lancelot had recovered his self-possession and followed him up the steps through the wicket door.
They entered. The afternoon service was proceeding. The organ droned sadly in its iron cage to a few musical amateurs. Some nursery maids and foreign sailors stared about within the spiked felon’s dock which shut off the body of the cathedral, and tried in vain to hear what was going on inside the choir. As a wise author—a Protestant, too—has lately said, ‘the scanty service rattled in the vast building, like a dried kernel too small for its shell.’ The place breathed imbecility, and unreality, and sleepy life-in-death, while the whole nineteenth century went roaring on its way outside. And as Lancelot thought, though only as a dilettante, of old St. Paul’s, the morning star and focal beacon of England through centuries and dynasties, from old Augustine and Mellitus, up to those Paul’s Cross sermons whose thunders shook thrones, and to noble Wren’s masterpiece of art, he asked, ‘Whither all this? Coleridge’s dictum, that a cathedral is a petrified religion, may be taken to bear more meanings than one. When will life return to this cathedral system?’
‘When was it ever a living system?’ answered the other. ‘When was it ever anything but a transitionary makeshift since the dissolution of the monasteries?’
‘Why, then, not away with it at once?’
‘You English have not done with it yet. At all events, it is keeping your cathedrals rain-proof for you, till you can put them to some better use than now.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime there is life enough in them; life that will wake the dead some day. Do you hear what those choristers are chanting now?’
‘Not I,’ said Lancelot; ‘nor any one round us, I should think.’
‘That is our own fault, after all; for we were not good churchmen enough to come in time for vespers.’
‘Are you a churchman then?’