Page:Surrey Archaeological Collections Volume 1.djvu/83

 love and gratitude to the Divinity, it seeks, simultaneously, to reflect and to inspire the sentiment to which it owes its origin. That spontaneous testimony, rendered by man to the Author of all things, was originally manifested by psalms and hymns; but soon the song alone began to be insufficient—words demanded a substantial representative—the hymn assumed a shape of stone—the altar was erected on the summit of the mountain, on the margin of the river, or in the solitude of the forests; the incense smoked beneath richly-sculptured roofs; God at length had His temple, and religious architecture was erected!

It is not, however, to ecclesiology alone that the objects of this Society are directed, and if I appear to have given an undue prominence to this department of archæological science, it is because it is the mother and the nurse of all the rest, and I conceive that it comes eminently within the scope of the operations of a body like ourselves to remark, amid the characteristic of grandeur which is peculiar to it, how completely religious architecture has yielded to the influence of the times, places, and worships of which it was the outward manifestation. Morose and mysterious in India, it concealed, amid the caves of its subterranean temples, the arena of its incomprehensible pantheism. Gigantic, and no less enamoured of mystery, in Egypt, it seems anxious, by its pyramids, its obelisks, and its sphinxes, to defy alike the researches of science and the ravages of time.

We see it beneath the blue sky of Greece, blossoming in all the graceful elegance of the smiling Hellenic mythology, and displaying its beauties to the day, crowning every promontory with its flowered capitals, from the colonnades of Neptune's temple, on Mount Parnassus, to