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Updated: June 22, 2025
The entertainment in the family this evening was, spite of all that had gone before, very lively; and the result, which was expressed in jesting earnestness, was, that every one, in the spirit which the Assessor had praised, should secretly labour at the temple-building, every one with his own work-tool, and according to his own strength.
We have had a revival of pagan temple-building in wood and stucco; we have seen Gothic cathedrals copied for the simplest Protestant uses, until humorists have suggested that congregations might find it cheaper to change their religion than their unsuitable new churches; we have ranged from four plain brick walls to vast and costly piles of marble or greenstone; we have constructed great audience-rooms for Sunday school uses alone, and have equipped the sanctuary with all culinary attachments; we have built parish-houses whose comfort the best-kept mediæval monk might envy, and we have put up evangelistic tabernacles only to find the most noted evangelists preferring to work in regular church edifices rather than in places of easy resort by the thoughtless crowd of wonder-seekers.
The proposal to unite in building the Temple was a political move; for, in old-world ideas, co-operation in Temple-building was incorporation in national unity. The calculation, no doubt, was that if the returning exiles could be united with the much more numerous Samaritans, they would soon be absorbed in them.
Such a sense of a personal bond of love protecting on the one hand, and love trusting and obeying on the other, is the spring of all true service of God, whether it is busied in temple-building or in anything else. We note also the grateful recognition of benefits received, and the tracing of peace and outward prosperity to God's care. There was not a cloud in the sky.
A heavy imposition of land-tax in the form of tansen, and extensive requisitions for timber and stones brought funds and materials sufficient not only to restore the edifice and to erect a pagoda 360 feet high, but also to replenish the empty treasury of the shogun. Thus, temple-building enterprises on the part of Japanese rulers were not prompted wholly by religious motives.
Nothing looked down upon the temple-building which with its halls, galleries and rooms rose behind this huge canopy.
Other temples followed, to Jupiter under other names than that which he had in the Capitol, and to other deities. That of Faith was a very early one. It was a rule in temple-building that the image in the cella faced the west, so that the worshipper, praying towards it, faced the east.
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