William Drummond of Hawthornden Quote

God never had a church but there, men say,
The Devil a chapel hath raised by some wyles.
I doubted of this saw, till on a day
I westward spied great Edinburgh's Saint Gyles.


Posthumous Poems, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Section 4, Member 1, Subsection 1.


God never had a church but there, men say, The Devil a chapel hath raised by some wyles. I doubted of this saw, till on a day I westward spied great...

God never had a church but there, men say, The Devil a chapel hath raised by some wyles. I doubted of this saw, till on a day I westward spied great...

God never had a church but there, men say, The Devil a chapel hath raised by some wyles. I doubted of this saw, till on a day I westward spied great...

God never had a church but there, men say, The Devil a chapel hath raised by some wyles. I doubted of this saw, till on a day I westward spied great...