[20] They said much that was nasty, but they could not oust the professor (though they tried their best) from his professorship. _Au contraire_, he received promotion soon afterwards, being elected to the Chair of Humanity; and a protest organized by certain bigots was allowed to "lie on the table"--i.e., went into the waste-paper basket. {56} CHAPTER IV 1905-1906 An event of Benedictine interest in the autumn of 1905, and one which attracted many visitors to Downside, our beautiful abbey among the Mendip Hills, was the long-anticipated opening of the choir of the great church. Special trains, an overflowing guest-house, elaborate services, many congratulatory speeches, and much monastic hospitality, were, as customary on such occasions, the order of the day. Architecturally, I confess that I found the new choir disappointing: it but confirmed the impression (which after many years had become a conviction with me) that the art of building a real Gothic church on a grand scale is lost, gone beyond hope of recovery. _Ecce signum!_ Design, material, workmanship all admirable, and the result, alas! lifeless, as lifeless as (say) the modern cathedrals of Truro and Liverpool and Edinburgh, the nave of Bristol, and the great church of Our Lady at Cambridge. I have seen Downside compared with Lichfield: nay, some one (greatly daring) placed pictures of them side by side in some magazine. Vain comparison! Lichfield, built long centuries ago, is _alive_ still--instinct with the life breathed into it by its unknown creators in the ages of faith; but these great modern Gothic churches seem to me {57} to have never lived at all, to have come into existence still-born. No: Gothic architecture, in this century of ours, is dead. Such life as it has is a simulated, imitative, galvanized life, which is no more real life than the tunes ground out of a pianola or a gramophone are real living music.[1] "'Tis true, 'tis pity: pity 'tis, 'tis true."