colours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not. And this is a
survival of one of the obscure pleasures of man, attested by history.

It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, and not
to recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager, eternal
legislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of this former
human wish. If Galileo's Inquisitors put a check upon the earth, which
yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the Reformers' who arrested the
moving man, and inhibited the moving God. The sixteenth century and a
certain part of the age immediately following seem to be times when the
desire had conspicuously become a passion. Say the middle of the
sixteenth century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth in
England--for in those days we were somewhat in the rear. _There_ is the
obstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and resolved seizure upon
power. _Then_ was Rome rebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single sign and
style. Then was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp the fate of
the unborn. The fortunes and the thoughts of the day to come were to be
as the day then present would have them, if the dead hand--the living
hand that was then to die, and was to keep its hold in death--could by
any means make them fast.

Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that may be
more than willing to build for itself. The day may soon come when no man
will do even so much without some impulse of apology. Posterity is not
compelled to keep our pictures or our books in existence, nor to read nor
to look at them; but it is more or less obliged to have a stone building
in view for an age or two. We can hardly avoid some of the forms of
tyranny over the future, but few, few are the living men who would
consent to share in this horrible ingenuity at St Paul's--this petroleum
and this wax.