I remember very well the first time I came to Canterbury.  I was a boy, and full of enthusiasm for St Thomas, I would have knelt where he fell, I would have prayed, yes with all my fathers, there where he was laid at last on high above the altar.  But there was nothing.  I was shown, as is the custom, all that the four centuries of ice have preserved of the work of my forefathers; the glorious tombs of King and Bishop, the storied glass of the thirteenth century, unique in England, the litter and the footsteps of thirteen hundred years.  I was led up past the choir into that lofty and once famous place where for centuries the greatest and holiest shrine in England stood.  All about were still grouped the tombs of Princes; Edward, the Black Prince, the hero of Crecy, Henry IV., the usurper, Cardinal Chatillon; but of the shrine itself, of the body it held up to love and honour and worship there was nothing, no word even, no sign at all to tell that ever such a thing had been, only an emptiness and a space and a silence that could be felt.

Later I was led down into that north-west transept, once known as the Martyrdom, where St Thomas laid down his life; and left alone there, I remember I tried in all that dumbness and silence to recollect myself, to pray, at least to recall, something of that great sacrifice which had so moved Christendom that for centuries men flocked here to worship—­where now no man kneels any more for ever.

I remember very well how it came to me in that tingling and icy silence that St Thomas died for the liberty of the Church, that here in England she might not become the king’s chattel or anyway at all the creature of the civil power.  I was too young to smile when I remembered that in the very place where St Thomas laid down his life in that cause, there sits to-day in his usurped place one who eagerly acknowledges the king as the “Supreme Governor of the Church within these realms.”  Yet in my heart I heard again those tremendous words, “Were all the swords of England hanging over my head you could not terrify me from my obedience to God and my Lord the Pope.”  They who slew him fled away, and their title, shouted in the winter darkness that filled the church, was heard above the thunder and has echoed down the ages since:  Reaux!  Reaux!  King’s men!  King’s men!  Is it not they who now sit in Becket’s place?

But to-day I am content with a judgment less bitter and less logical.  Who may know what is in the heart of God?  Perhaps after all, after this age of ice, Canterbury will rise again and my little son even may hear them singing in the streets, gay once more and alive with endless processions that noble old song: 

Laureata novo Thoma,
Sicut suo Petro Roma,
Gaude Cantuaria!

[Illustration:  Canterbury cathedral from Christchurch gate]

For though St Thomas be forgot in Canterbury, he is on high and valiant, and one day maybe he will return from exile as before, to accomplish wonderful things.