Anglican Church-Building
The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship. By G. W. O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells. (Faber and Faber. 25s.) CHURCHES have remained among the few monumental buildings Iwhich have not needed to be demolished or remodelled by reason pf being out of date. It is, of course, because their function has remained unchanged. For a thousand years at least the needs of
Christian worship have been satisfied by the churches which through- out the millennium had been erected. They are, in fact, functional ; and that in the fullest sense, for like all buildings up to the Tudor period their outward form declares their purpose as surely as their internal plan assists it. So far as the parish church was concerned the plan remained virtually unchanged until the genius of Sir Christopher Wren imported a new fashion into English ecclesiastical architecture. It was no mere following of a classical vogue which induced Sir Christopher to depart so radically from tradition. The " Wrermaissance," as Lutyens used to call it, was based on liturgical requirements. Wren perceived that the reformed worship of the Book of Common Prayer called for churches in which all present could both hear and see ; it was not enough, as in the past, simply to be able to see the action at a distant altar.
In the present volume Canon Addleshaw and his collaborator have explored little-trodden ground in tracing the development in the arrangements for public worship in the Church of England from 1559 to the beginning of the Tractarian Movement. Up to that point developments were for convenience, with the important exception of those affecting the position of the altar. But though Laud succeeded in getting the table-wise altar in the midst of the chancel put back to the east end and placed altar-wise again, there was still a post-Reformation difficulty which was met, as at Bolam, North- umberland, by bringing the altar to the west end of the chancel. With the Victorian age, and under the influence of the Tractarians, began a period of self-consciousness. Belief was propagated in the existence of a specifically Christian style of church architecture ; indeed Pugin carried it to the length of designing shop-fronts for Christian haberdashers and grocers. Christian art, in the conviction of the ecclesiologists, stopped short at ;he fourteenth century. Every- thing later was an unfortunate declension, and the " Georgian box " was just execrable. None of the mediaevalists realised that a church in which the priest can be seen and heard only with difficulty is not a church planned for the services of the Prayer Book. Canon Addleshaw and Mr. Etchells have made a most timely contribution to the study of the principles of Anglican church-building and furnishing, and their book is likely to remain for many years an authoritative work of reference. It is specially welcome in the midst of the vogue which has produced such a spate of expensive .rid un- important books on Georgian and other architecture. C. B. MORTLOCIC.
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