authority given by Heaven and Christ.

[Footnote 14: Of Oxford, during the afternoon service.]

[Footnote 15: See the concluding section of the lecture.]

With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and their powers, the
Normans set themselves to build impregnable military walls, and
sublime religious ones, in the best possible practical ways; but
they no more made books of their church fronts than of their bastion
flanks; and cared, in the religion they accepted, neither for its
sentiments nor its promises, but only for its immediate results on
national order.

As I read them, they were men wholly of this world, bent on doing the
most in it, and making the best of it that they could;--men, to their
death, of _Deed_, never pausing, changing, repenting, or anticipating,
more than the completed square, ὰνευ ψογου, of their battle, their
keep, and their cloister. Soldiers before and after everything, they
learned the lockings and bracings of their stones primarily in defence
against the battering-ram and the projectile, and esteemed the pure
circular arch for its distributed and equal strength more than for its
beauty. "I believe again," says M. le Duc,[16] "that the feudal castle
never arrived at its perfectness till after the Norman invasion,
and that this race of the North was the first to apply a defensive
system under unquestionable laws, soon followed by the nobles of the
Continent, after they had, at their own expense, learned their
superiority."

[Footnote 16: Article "Château," vol. iii, p. 65.]