its practical consequences.  You have all been taught by Lord Macaulay and his school that because you have Carpets instead of rushes for your feet; and Feather-beds instead of fern for your backs; and Kickshaws instead of beef for your eating; and Drains instead of Holy Wells for your drinking;—­that, therefore, you are the Cream of Creation, and every one of you a seven-headed Solomon.  Stay in those pleasant circumstances and convictions if you please; but don’t accuse your roughly bred and fed fathers of telling lies about the aspect the earth and sky bore to them,—­till you have trodden the earth as they, barefoot, and seen the heavens as they, face to face.  If you care to see and to know for yourselves, you may do it with little pains; you need not do any great thing, you needn’t keep one eye open and the other shut for ten years over a microscope, nor fight your way through icebergs and darkness to knowledge of the celestial pole.  Simply, do as much as king after king of the Saxons did,—­put rough shoes on your feet and a rough cloak on your shoulders, and walk to Rome and back.  Sleep by the roadside, when it is fine,—­in the first outhouse you can find, when it is wet; and live on bread and water, with an onion or two, all the way; and if the experiences which you will have to relate on your return do not, as may well be, deserve the name of spiritual; at all events you will not be disposed to let other people regard them either as Poetry or Fiction.

[Footnote 4:  Not Londinian.]

With this warning, presently to be at greater length insisted on, I trace for you, in Dean Stanley’s words, which cannot be bettered except in the collection of their more earnest passages from among his interludes of graceful but dangerous qualification,—­I trace, with only such omission, the story he has told us of the foundation of that Abbey, which, he tells you, was the Mother of London, and has ever been the shrine and the throne of English faith and truth.

“The gradual formation of a monastic body, indicated in the charters of Offa and Edgar, marks the spread of the Benedictine order throughout England, under the influence of Dunstan.  The ‘terror’ of the spot, which had still been its chief characteristic in the charter of the wild Offa, had, in the days of the more peaceful Edgar, given way to a dubious ‘renown.’  Twelve monks is the number traditionally said to have been established by Dunstan.  A few acres further up the river formed their chief property, and their monastic character was sufficiently recognized to have given to the old locality of the ‘terrible place’ the name of the ‘Western Monastery,’ or ’Minster of the West.’”

The Benedictines then—­twelve Benedictine monks—­thus begin the building of existent Christian London.  You know I told you the Benedictines are the Doing people, as the disciples of St. Augustine the Sentimental people.  The Benedictines find no terror in their own thoughts—­face the terror of places—­change it into beauty of places,—­make this terrible place, a Motherly Place—­Mother of London.