A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts: Their Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic SignificationPugin, Augustus Welby Northmore
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A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts: Their Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic Signification
Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore
Screens (Church decoration)
should be most strictly considered for the education of both clergy and
laity, for while the clergy have to officiate in these edifices, and
carry out their various uses, it is to the laity that they must look
both for the funds for the erection and the necessary means of support
after they are erected. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that
both receive the initiations in this matter, for early impressions are
everything. How truly deplorable are the ordinary class of chapels
attached to bishops' seminaries in France, for the most part whitewashed
saloons, without anything ecclesiastical about them, except bad
pictures, worse even than the walls they cover. Fortunately, they are
usually in the vicinity of some fine old church, where the
ecclesiastical students assist occasionally; but still, all should be in
harmony, the seminary with the cathedral, and the clergy with both.
In respect of collegiate chapels we are certainly far in advance in
England, but one great chapel, very nearly completed, yet lingers on in
an unfinished state, when a little effort might render it available for
divine service, and, in the meantime, many students must quit the
college without that true love of ecclesiastical art that is only
imparted to the soul by a devout assistance at the functions of religion
in these solemn edifices. The mere inspection of them is nothing, it is
when they become associated with the life of divine worship that they
produce the full power and lift the soul in ecstasy. Let us hope and
pray that not only in colleges, but in all places set apart for the
education of youth, suitable chapels may be provided, so as to make the
students love the beauty of God's house. I must confess, with every wish
to preserve my charity, I am moved to indignation when I hear proposals
for erecting great sheds to serve as Catholic churches, places
resembling a depot for railway goods or the housings of a wharf. What
treatment is this for the divine mysteries! what treatment for the poor,
who are brought to worship God in a place little, if any, better than
the union, or market shambles themselves! One of the many great benefits
conferred by church architecture, is its affording the poor man a
glorious edifice where he may enter at will; his position of course
shuts him off from participating in all worldly grandeur or
magnificence, but the portal of the Catholic church is open to him early
and late; there he is no intruder, he may rest on the marble pavement or
kiss the costliest shrine—he is spurned from every other ground and
noble edifice but this—and yet this new system would bring the churches
down to a level with the offices of a parish workhouse, and deprive him
for ever of so great a consolation as the sight and enjoyment of a
solemn pile. No blessing can be expected for those who erect the temples
of God in a sparing and commercial calculating spirit. It is a positive
insult to divine providence to build a church on such low and niggard
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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