that is death. Canterbury has lost its soul.

Go into the Cathedral, it is like a tomb, but a tomb that has been
rifled, a whited sepulchre so void and cold that even the last trump
will make there no stir. It was once the altar, the shrine, and as it
were the mother of England, one of the tremendous places of Europe into
which every year flocked thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
men. The altar is thrown down, the shrine is gone and forgotten, in all
that vast church the martyred Saint who made it what it was is not so
much as remembered even in an inscription or a stone; and the
enthusiasm and devotion of centuries have given place to a silence so
icy that nothing can break it. The place is dead.

I remember very well the first time I came to Canterbury. I was a boy,
and full of enthusiasm for St Thomas, I would have knelt where he
fell, I would have prayed, yes with all my fathers, there where he was
laid at last on high above the altar. But there was nothing. I was
shown, as is the custom, all that the four centuries of ice have
preserved of the work of my forefathers; the glorious tombs of King
and Bishop, the storied glass of the thirteenth century, unique in
England, the litter and the footsteps of thirteen hundred years. I was
led up past the choir into that lofty and once famous place where for
centuries the greatest and holiest shrine in England stood. All about
were still grouped the tombs of Princes; Edward, the Black Prince, the
hero of Crecy, Henry IV., the usurper, Cardinal Chatillon; but of the
shrine itself, of the body it held up to love and honour and worship
there was nothing, no word even, no sign at all to tell that ever such
a thing had been, only an emptiness and a space and a silence that
could be felt.