chief, as the breaker of more windows, than any man before or since. It was not the Church, but the Committee of Puritans who sent forth this most zealous iconoclast. The Church does not bid her members build houses to God of stuccoed bricks, or fit them up with painted deal; nor drive the Poor into aisles and galleries, while the Rich loll in their cushioned pews. The characteristic of the English Church is a grave and simple reverence. It is the intrusion of a secular, covetous, irreverent spirit, in opposition to the doctrines and discipline of our Church; and the detrusion of the Church from her legitimate influence, which sufficiently accounts for that absence of feeling for the beautiful and holy, which has so obscured and vulgarized the mind of modern ages; but which, we trust, is at last beginning to be replaced by a purer and better spirit.
It is not, however, to the historian, or the philosopher, or to the admirer of beauty only, that the study of Church Architecture is interesting. To the philanthropist and practical man of the present age, it is also a subject of important inquiry. We find ourselves in the present generation placed under very peculiar circumstances. In ancient days our forefathers used to build places of worship, as they were required, for themselves and their dependants. Look at the more populous of our ancient cities, Bristol, York, or Coventry, and you will see always an ample number of churches, and those of the noblest structure. But recent generations, strange to say, have had little care for the most urgent of all wants, and have suffered a vast population to grow up without any adequate provision for the worship of God. The minds of men have at last been awakened to the sin and danger of this state of things; and all, or nearly all, acknowledge the necessity of remedying this portentous evil. The first and most natural feeling has been to build up, amidst our dense population, edifices which would contain the greatest number of persons;—and much has been done in many places. But then came in another consideration. An innate feeling of propriety, not to speak of religious principle, teaches us that a church ought to be constructed, not only for the accommodation of the people, but for the glory of God. We look around upon our new churches, and feel ashamed at their meagreness and poverty; especially when compared with those which were built by our ancestors. How is this, we naturally ask, that a generation, with a purer creed, and fifty times the wealth of former ages, does not build worthier houses of God, than these poor abortive attempts which we see around us? Impressed with these feelings many pious Church-builders began to lay out
