day when, at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, the first De Grey came to Merton; and I have not a doubt that
if a self-styled professional gentleman, young enough and presumptuous
enough and ignorant enough, were to appear upon the scene, he would
solemnly and emphatically advise that Merton Church should at the
earliest possible moment be restored. The horrible thought is that
under quite conceivable circumstances the thing might be done with very
little difficulty and before you knew where you were.

Think of the feelings of that old oak then!

I know I shall be told that a tree is one thing and a church is
another, that the one you cannot restore but you can restore the other.
You can restore neither; you can murder both if you are a heartless
assassin. Was it in the 1851 Exhibition that they built up the bark of
a giant of the Californian forests and told us it was a restoration of
a wonder of the world that had reared up its lofty top to heaven even
from the days of the Pharaohs? A restoration! Nay! a colossal fraud.
But such a fraud as is perpetrated in our midst every month, and which,
when men have committed, they are actually proud of.

I am often asked, When was this or that church built? And my answer
is ready at hand. It was not built at all! It grew! For every church
in the land that has a real history is a living organism. Do you tell
me that yonder doorway is of the twelfth century; that yonder tower
may have stood where it does when the Conqueror came to sweep away
“pot-bellied Saxondom;” that the chancel was rebuilt in the time of
the Edwards--the rood screen crowded into a place never meant for
it during the Wars of the Roses, the pulpit supplied by a village
carpenter in the sixteenth century, the carvings of the roof destroyed
in the seventeenth, the royal arms supplied in the eighteenth, and
therefore that nothing but a clean sweep is to be made of it all, as
a preliminary to building it all up from the ground in the nineteenth
century? Do you call that restoration? You assure me t