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on the other; and “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” is written on one of the doorways of a building added at the flank of the Casa Barbarigo,¹ in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. It seems to be only modern Protestantism which is entirely ashamed of all symbols and words that appear in anywise like a confession of faith.²

§ 58. This peculiar feeling is well worthy of attentive analysis. It indeed, in most cases, hardly deserves the name of a feeling; for the meaningless doorway is merely an ignorant copy of heathen models; but yet, if it were at this moment proposed to any of us, by our architects, to remove the grinning head of a satyr, or other classical or Palladian ornament, from the keystone of the door, and to substitute for it a cross, and an inscription testifying our faith, I believe that most persons would shrink from the proposal with an obscure and yet overwhelming sense that things would be sometimes done, and thought, within the house which would make the inscription on its gate a base hypocrisy. And if so, let us look to it, whether that strong reluctance to utter a definite religious profession, which so many of us feel, and which, not very carefully examining into its dim nature, we conclude to be modesty, or fear of hypocrisy, or other such form of amiableness, be not, in very deed, neither less nor more than Infidelity; whether Peter’s “I know not the man”³ be not the sum and substance of all these misgivings and hesitations; and whether the shamefacedness which we attribute to sincerity and reverence, be not such shamefacedness as may at last put us among those of whom the Son of Man shall be ashamed.⁴

¹ [On the Grand Canal, next the Casa Pisani: see in the next volume, Venetian Index.]

² [Compare Seven Lamps, ch. vi. (Vol. VIII. p. 229), where some other illustrations are given of “that good custom which was of old universal, and which still remains among some of the Swiss and Germans, of acknowledging the grace of God’s permission to build and possess a quiet resting-place.” At Chatsworth, over the fireplace of the main hall is the inscription Deus nobis hæc otia fecit, and the same motto has been similarly placed in a Scottish house. These, however, are interior inscriptions, and so do not amount to public professions of faith.]

³ [Matthew xxvi. 72.]

⁴ [Mark viii. 38. Compare in Vol. XII. Lectures on Architecture and Painting, §§ 110-122, where this subject is treated more fully.]

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