The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.
Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.
Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.
My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.
The cathedral, at its noblest, is the best outward symbol of the spiritual nature of man, as it is also the most suggestive measure and prophecy of the corporate life of man.
