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CHAPTER VIII
THE REQUIEM
88. As I re-read the description I gave, thirty years since, of St. Mark’s Church;1-much more as I remember, forty years since, and before, the first happy hour spent in trying to paint a piece of it, with my six-o’clock breakfast on the little café table beside me on the pavement in the morning shadow,2 I am struck, almost into silence, by wonder at my own pert little Protestant mind, which never thought for a moment of asking what the Church had been built for!
Tacitly and complacently assuming that I had had the entire truth of God preached to me in Beresford Chapel in the Walworth Road,3-recognizing no possible Christian use or propriety in any other sort of chapel elsewhere; and perceiving, in this bright phenomenon before me, nothing of more noble function than might be in some new and radiant sea-shell, thrown up for me on the sand;-nay, never once so much as thinking, of the fair shell itself, “Who built its domed whorls, then?” or “What manner of creature lives in the inside?” Much less ever asking, “Who is lying dead therein?”
89. A marvellous thing-the Protestant mind! Don’t think I speak as a Roman Catholic, good reader: I am a mere wandering Arab, if that will less alarm you, seeking
1 [In the second volume of Stones of Venice (Vol. X. pp. 69 seq.).]
2 [Compare the reminiscences in the letter to Count Zorzi, below, pp. 405-406.]
3 [Where Ruskin sat in his youth, under the Rev. D. Andrews: see Præterita, i. § 79.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
