THE USE OF RELIGIOUS EDIFICES.
DOES any one nowadays sincerely believe that a fine church is an impediment to the worship of God? We ask because forty years ago a great many earnest and
sincere people so believed, and would have condemned the Bishop of London for his fine sermon of Saturday at the dedication service of St. Simon's Church, West Kensington Park. They had got into their heads an idea, resting upon no evidence, that a fine building disturbed the mind, that it was difficult to worship if the ;wales under which the service was performed were lofty and well proportioned, and that, failing the "open vault of God's cathedral," which could not always be used for climatic reasons, the nearer a church approached a barn the less would the religious spirit be distracted from inward contemplation. There were men of true piety and quite innocent of affectation to whom ecclesiastical architecture was abhorrent, just as there were also men who had a profound distrust of music, and who held a fine church and a fine organ to be equally instruments of what they contemned as "religious sensuality." It was a phase of feeling which speedily passed away, and to which some of those who passed through it now look back with a surprised effort to recall the thoughts or the emotions which
originally gave it birth. We fancy it was really a half- unconscious bit of asceticism, an effort to treat "the body"—
that is, the senses—as unworthy to join in worshipping God, a trace of the spirit of mortification which has so often led men to believe that self-punishment must be acceptable to the infinite mercy. In all ages, under all circumstances, under all creeds, man, once convinced that worship was need- ful to bring him nearer to the divine, has longed for seclusion from the imperious presence of external Nature, has sought something more restricted than the "temple not built with hands," and has, as it were, shut himself up from Nature, from too m uch light, too free an air, too great a liability to the intrusion of sounds foreign to the religious mood, to offer up his prayers. The lowest fetish-worshipper has always done it ; so has the Hindoo, with his cult of Nature and recognition of her multitudinous variety ; so has the Ma.hommedan, with his impatient disgust of everything that separates him from his Sultan in the sky ; and so has the most spiritually minded and devout of Christians, with all his conviction that worship, to be acceptable, must be of the heart alone. Each one has felt instinctively that the temple, the mosque, the church, though a work of human hands, has tended, almost in propor- tion to its vastness or its beauty, to produce the true mood for adoration, the instinctive humility and awe which the barn does not even help to generate, and which, except in some rare scene where impressiveness is produced by limita- tion, or awe is replaced by unconscious terror, such as Israelites may have felt at the foot of Sinai, is not supplied by Nature. Something must be allowed for temperament; and we have known men to whom every wall was disturbing because it suggested confinement, and therefore revolt or effort to be free, both of them feelings radically opposed to worship ; but on the immense majority a grand church, if only its details are not too distracting, operates with a tranquillising, and also, so to speak, a humbling, effect, highly conducive to religious emotion. So, no doubt, does the open air, if the place be a natural amphitheatre, if the crowd be immense and governed by a common thought, and if the weather suspends itself in the attitude of listening ; but a small assembly on the hillside, and in a northern climate or under the blinding brightness of an Asiatic sky, is always conscious of contest, of being partly beaten, of struggling at best towards God rather than of feeling his presence and his peace. It is not so much the feeling of reverence, for that may be excited by the mountain or the sea, as that of peace, which can be enjoyed nowhere more perfectly than within cathedral walls, when the chant, half lost in the dome, and therefore undisturbing, lifts up the feelings as well as the mind—and in worship they both have their importance— towards heaven. As for the barn, its only use is to shut out
the distracting sky and light, and, as we have said, to give to the mind that impression of asceticism or self-punishment which with some natures has no doubt the effect of setting the soul free, but with others only increases the sense of burden and constraint. It is the grand building, not the barn, that produces the impulse towards kneeling or prostration, which typifies the mental adoration, and which, somewhat
strangely, does not naturally accompany worship in the open air, unless, indeed, open air implies some forest-glade, which of all natural things is nearest to the cathedral which archi- tects have copied from it. There are all over the world natural cathedrals in which worship seems almost compulsory; but then all the attributes of the great building—seclusion, limitation, peace, and the stooping down of the illimitable towards earth—are as present as in the religious building. The world is as much shut out by a forest-glade as by a .church, and it is, as Dr. Creighton probably thinks, though it is not in the bad reports of his sermon, because it shuts out, not because it is a work of Nature, that the glade inspires thoughts that are so devotional. No one, except, perhaps, some Parisian possessed of a mocking devil, ever felt himself made irreligious by a truly great church, or ever failed to feel, if only for a moment, that there was something outside him greater than himself, to which the loftier he himself was the more instinctively must he crook the knee.
If it is not so, what has induced mankind, in all ages and (under impulse from all creeds, to build temples with so vast an expenditure of time and treasure and effort P No revela- tion, false or true, has ever ordered them ; they have not • strengthened any priesthood—the strongest priestboods in the world, the Brahmanical and the Roman Catholic, are curiously independent of structures, though with their vast experience of human nature they utilise their effect—nor has any such body ever confined to them its spiritual ministra- tions; while the earthly powers have had small motive to exalt • by earthly magnificence the claims of a rival authority. We shall, possibly, be told that the true origin of churches is the • -felt necessity, as all services must be conducted by the human -voice, of obeying its limitations; that, in fact, the ultimate object of churches is reverberation. If that is the case, and it is, though an untrue explanation, by far the most plausible -one, let him who objects to churches explain why the clarifi- cation of the voice has never been the first object of any temple-builder, not even of the architects of the mosque, who tinder the conditions of Mahommedan worship have nothing to build for except the preacher or the reader of the Koran. The laws of acoustics have been known to every theatre- -builder since history began, but they have never dominated the architecture of the temple or the church. On the • -contrary, in temple, mosque, and church alike the place for the orator has always been, so to speak, an addendum ; the floor for the worshippers has always been flat, not slowly rising up, as in the modern lecture-room, and the shape has rarely or never been the semi-circle which sends back sounds so well. No temple nave has in it the idea of .a.n auditorium. The wish oE the architect—and if he was -.dominated by the priest the induction is but the stronger— has always been to be impressive, to produce awe, to humble and subdue the worshippers rather than to treat them as an audience, and the degree in which he has succeeded in this is the measure of his merit. The arch, the dome, the hollow tower, the building which confines the worshipper yet calls upward his eyes and his thought, this has always, in all lands and under all creeds, been the ideal, except perchance as in Egypt and Hindostan, where occasionally the architect, mindful perhaps that the earliest place of seclusion was a cave, has rioted in the hope not of elevating but of crushing .the imagination with weight of masonry or of rock. Still even in these latter the object has been, as it is in the cathedral or the great church, to produce at once humility and seclusion from the world, as the impressions instinctively • known to be most conducive to worship. We believe that object to be undying, and regard the present reluctance in all countries to build grand religions structures as due to passing causes, the first of them being the attitude of waiting for greater certitude in which the governing men in all the creeds now stand. It is not poverty which stops the building of cathedral, temple, or mosque, for individuals were never so rich, and men never knew so well what combined sixpences can effect, but a doubt as to their utility, which is, we contend, as Dr. Creighton does, both non-reli- gions and unphilosophical. The art of architecture may have sunk too low—though we do not believe it—for grand ecclesiastical buildings to arise ; but that in some soon-to-be-expected generation the demand for them will revive we have no doubt whatever. It is all talk, not bad talk, but still only talk, about "the spacious firmament on high and all the blue ethereal sky" as the natural building in which to worship the Creator. The firmament was as spacious, and the sky was as blue, when Solomon sent to Hiram for masons and cedar-beams, and nevertheless the Temple rose, to be the rallying point and centre of diffasion for what was then the only monotheistic faith.
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