she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New
Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.


Here we have Macaulay in all his strength and all his limitations. The
passage contains in the main a solid truth--a truth which was very
little accepted in England in the year 1840--a truth of vast import and
very needful to assert. And this truth is clothed in such pomp of
illustration, and is hammered into the mind with such accumulated
blows; it is so clear, so hard, so coruscating with images, that it is
impossible to escape its effect. The paragraph is one never to be
forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent
tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking,
without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of
thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of
Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in
America. Now, all this is a very great merit. To have posed a great
historical problem, at a time when it was very faintly grasped, and to
have sent it ringing across the English-speaking world in such a form
that he who runs may read--nay, he who rides, he who sails, he who
watches sheep or stock _must_ read--this is a real and signal service
conferred on literature and on thought. Compare this solid sense with
Carlyle's ribaldry about "the three-hatted Papa," "pig's wash,"
"servants of the Devil," "this accursed nightmare," and the rest of his
execrations--and we see the difference between the sane judgment of the
man of the world and the prejudices of intolerant fanaticism.

But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic antitheses his
problem of "the unchangeable Church," makes no attempt to provide us