MAKING CLEAN THE OUTSIDE.
THEY are cleansing St. Paul's of the soot and dust of many years. Washing won't serve the purpose : walls and pillars are scraped and holistoned ; the church gets a "dry scrub "—like Nicholas Nickleby when the well was "froze." At this moment the facade resembles nothing so much as one of those portraits, clear carnation on ene side of the face and smirched with, asphalt on the other, which dealers in paintings expose to show how well they can "restore" pictures. Of course, the Dean and Chapter know too well the maxims of their own religion to rest satisfied with mere external purification: the cleansing outside is only typical of a more thorough scrubbing to be begun within. And withinthere is an accumulated dirtiness of whichthe outside smoke and weather stains give no idea—the dirt of Mammon-rusted souls. The buyers who were scourged out of the Temple did not venture to make the privilege of seeing it a matter of purchase and sale. The only person on record who sought to earn something by showing the view from the pinnacles of the Temple was one whom the Dean and Chapter would scarcely venture to take into their service. And yet what was never done in the Temple of the Jews except by the Devil himself is daily practised by the ser- vants of a Christian cathedral. The Dean and Chapter pay their menials, as tavern-keepers do, by permitting them to levy con- tributions on visiters. At the threshold of St. Paul's, at every landing-place on its stairs, in every dim gallery, the luckless visitant is attacked by some extortioner in the shape of an old man or older woman. Even during the reading of prayers these semi-ecclesiastical showmen continue to gather pence in the aisles. It will be a most unchristian act in the Dean and Chapter to spend so much money in making clean the outside of the cathedral, if a few wheelbarrows are not hired at the same time to carry away this moral muck from the interior.
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