THE POETIC SPIRIT 201 



There is one God ; but the gods which men worship 

 are innumerable as the stars in heaven and as the 

 sands on the seashore, and they vary in character 

 even as their worshippers do. To go back to the 

 dark days of the seventeenth century, we see that 

 beauty and whatever was of good report, which be- 

 came associated in the Puritan mind with the life and 

 forms of worship of their enemies, was a thing accurst. 

 And, the human mind being what it is, it was but 

 natural that the particular god of their worship came 

 to be the very god of ugliness, a despiser of beauty 

 who looked with jealousy on those who were won by 

 it even as he did on those who kissed their hands to 

 the rising moon. He was not the God to whose glory 

 the great fanes of England were raised. And from 

 that far time " of Oliver's usurpation when all monu- 

 mental things became despicable " this same temper 

 of mind and dismal delusion has come down to us in 

 a hundred denominations with their temples of ugli- 

 ness sprinkled over all the land. 



Any house is good enough to worship God in, is 

 a treasured saying, and it has been remarked that no 

 place of worship has ever been raised by Noncon- 

 formity in England which any person would turn 

 aside from the road to look at. This would be too 

 little to say of the chapels in West Cornwall, where 

 the principle of any-house-good-enough has been 

 carried to an extreme. The principle may or may not 

 be insulting to a personal Deity, mindful of man and 

 anxious that man should do Him honour we cannot 

 know His mind on such a question ; but these square 



