The Comper antidote
Sir: A. N. Wilson's review of Twenty Years at St Hilary (8 January) gives us a deeply perceptive account of why we now find ourselves with many ugly churches, pale ec- clesiastical echoes of The Festival of Bri- tain, and with forms of liturgy to match. For an antidote to it all, one could hardly do better than turn to the work and writings of the church architect Sir Ninian Comper, who shared the belief of Dostoievsky, men- tioned by your reviewer, in beauty for the redemption of the world. This to him would 'reduce to folly those terms of "self- expression" and "the expression of the age", used to cover what is merely such in- capacity and ugliness as every age has in turn rejected'.
A visit to a church with Comper items in it or, better still, to one of the churches he designed and furnished exquisitely such as St. Cyprian's, Clarence Gate, near Regent's Park, would help to show that, in Comper's own words, `to enter therefore a Christian church is to enter none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven'.
lrfon Roberts Priory Wall House, 3 Cockshut Road, Southover, Lewes, East Sussex
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