If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this way. One
day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley where I was born,
and stopping there a moment to speak with them all--when I had argued politics
with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all
but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note
(after so many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love
more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as
though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a change had
not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of some just artist who
knew how grand an ornament was this shrine (built there before our people
stormed Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw that all within was as new,
accurate, and excellent as the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though
a fortune had been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's
soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.
Hilaire Belloc,
The path to Rome (Google book, pdf)
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