Thus they have stolen away the silver altar of the Baptistery, that miracle of the fourteenth-century silversmiths, Betto di Geri, Leonardo di Ser Giovanni, and the rest, that it may be a cause of wonder in a museum.  So a flower looks between the cold pages of a botanist’s album, so a bird sings in his case:  for life is to do that for which we were created, and if that be the praise of God in His sanctuary, to stand impotently by under the gaze of innumerable unbelievers in a museum is to die.  And truly this is a shame in Italy that so many fair and lovely things have been torn out of their places to be catalogued in a gallery.  It were a thousand times better that they were allowed to fade quietly on the walls of the church where they were born.  It is a vandalism only possible to the modern world in which the machines have ground out every human feeling and left us nothing but a bestial superstition which we call science, and which threatens to become the worst tyranny of all, that we should thus herd together, catalogue, describe, arrange, and gape at every work of art and nature we can lay our hands on.  No doubt it brings in, directly and indirectly, an immense revenue to the country which can show the most of such death chambers.  Often by chance or mistake one has wandered into a museum—­though I confess I never understood in what relation it stood to the Muses—­where your scientist has collected his scraps and refuse of Nature, things that were wonderful or beautiful once—­birds, butterflies, the marvellous life of the foetus, and such—­but that in his hands have died in order that he may set them out and number them one by one.  Here you will find a leg that once stood firm enough, there an arm that once for sure held someone in its embrace:  now it is exposed to the horror and curiosity of mankind.  Well, it is the same with the Pictures and the statues.  Why, men have prayed before them, they have heard voices, tears have fallen where they stood, and they have whispered to us of the beauty and the love of God.  To-day, herded in thousands, chained to the walls of their huge dungeons, they are just specimens like the dead butterflies which we pay to see, which some scientific critic without any care for beauty will measure and describe in the inarticulate and bestial syllables of some degenerate dialect he thinks is language.  Our unfortunate gods!  How much more fortunate were they of the older world:  Zeus, whose statue of ivory and gold mysteriously was stolen away; Aphrodite of Cnidus, which someone hid for love; and you, O Victory of Samothrace, that being headless you cannot see the curious, peeping, indifferent multitude.  Was it for this the Greeks blinded their statues, lest the gods being in exile, they might be shamed by the indifference of men?  And now that our gods too are exiled, who will destroy their images and their pictures crowded in the museums, that the foolish may not speak of them we have loved, nor the scientist say, such and such they were, in stature of such a splendour, carved by such a man, the friend of the friend of a fool?  But our gods are dead.