She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

Macaulay wrote this image in the early nineteenth century while arguing against the then-fashionable prediction that Roman Catholicism was nearing collapse. In a review-essay on Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes, he contrasts the Church’s long institutional endurance with the fragility of political regimes and even great cities. The deliberately extravagant scenario—a future “traveler from New Zealand” sketching the ruins of London—draws on Romantic-era ruin imagery and the period’s fascination with historical cycles. Macaulay’s point is polemical as well as historical: whatever one thinks of Catholic doctrine, its organizational continuity has repeatedly outlasted its critics’ confident forecasts.

The sentence is a rhetorical tour de force about durability and historical perspective. By imagining London reduced to picturesque ruins while the Roman Catholic Church remains vigorous, Macaulay reverses his readers’ assumptions about what is “modern” and what is “obsolete.” The New Zealander functions as a stand-in for a distant, impartial future observer, emphasizing how parochial contemporary judgments can look in retrospect. The quote also suggests that institutions rooted in deep tradition, centralized structure, and adaptive capacity may survive upheavals that destroy states, empires, and cultural capitals. It is less a prophecy than an argument from historical precedent, dramatized through a memorable apocalyptic tableau.

1) “...when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s.”
2) “...when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
3) “...when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s.”