We built a temple of reason with feeling as its foundation. We dissected on blackboards mysteries strangled exorcised eviscerated.

Our congregation swelled with the meek, and with knowledge the meek swelled strong. Our secular arts were freely shared. Our secular loves as well.

But in time apostasy shadowed the stained glass in which we transfixed Ibn Khaldun, Socrates and Newton. Without ranting, without nailing of theses, our temple was overrun.

Overrun by traitors who thought not of treachery. They kept the law of our covenants, but they knew not their spirit.

They mistook our standing on feeling for grinding it beneath our feet. With our compasses and abacuses they measured payloads and trickle-downs. They took our games and made theory. When we protested their cruelty, they said that emotion had swept us, the flighty and the fey, to ivory towers where we could not see the ground.

They have forgotten, because we have forgotten, that moral cowardice is intellectual cowardice.