Have you ever tried really to understand the Past, not so much the material Past of quaint costumes and accoutrements, as the immaterial Past of ideals, ambitions, and enthusiasms? Have you ever wilfully imprisoned your present spiritual being in the emotional matrix of an age that is dead? In the hall where the glum old faces of your ancestors stare out from dull frames upon your unimagined new life, have you ever paused to gaze back into those dim presentments, and to think how impossible to-day would be the quest of the Pilgrims, or of the Crusaders? And when, not so long ago, a Gothic fantasy in gently treated stone crumbled before the war-saddened eyes of the world, did this fearful thought impress itself upon you: No man in all Christendom can ever re-carve those shattered prophets or re-groin those airy arches in the dread sincerity of the first builders?