Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899: Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899: Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
If the temple rises out of the tomb, is modeled on that, and remains
to the last pre-eminently a place of sacrifice, the church is an
enlarged dwelling house. It is the house of the god, as the fetichist
called it--the house of God, as we still reverently call it; and in
Romanist countries to this day it is in a manner the abode of two
divine personages, who figure as dizened and painted dolls that are
named respectively God and the Mother of God! Both lines of
development are rapidly recapitulated in colonies. The temple appears
as the cathedral, which has modest beginnings, but gradually assumes
the architecture and proportions of Gothic cathedrals, losing
relation to the primary wants of the worshipers--comfort and
audibility--ministering mainly to their higher needs, and if used for
preaching at all, reserved for such occasional and sensational pulpit
oratory as that of Dominican monks like Lacordaire at Notre Dame in
Paris, or of a Protestant Dominican like the late Canon Liddon at St.
Paul's in London. The church, chapel, or meeting house may be found in
colonial villages in its most rudimentary form, scarcely
distinguishable in style from a dwelling house. According to the sect
it belongs to, it develops in one of two opposite directions. The age
of cathedrals is past, even in Roman Catholic countries, but the
tendency of Anglican and allied churches is to simulate the old
cathedral; high ritualistic sections mimic the gorgeous Madeleine. The
more liberal denominations, on the other hand, develop downward; the
colonial Baptist tabernacle is on the lines of Spurgeon's great
building at Newington, but the ancient pulpit is widened into a
platform and the seats slope upward as in a concert hall; it is a mere
auditorium, in which the preacher is all. The development in this
direction finds its extreme in the secularist hall, which is a mere
concert room, with a piano in place of an organ. The ceremonial
development is on the same lines--toward the gradual adoption of
ancient rites by the older churches, toward more freedom in the
younger sects. Many a colonial clergyman has wrecked himself or his
congregation through too much ritualism; a few have injured themselves
through an excess of liberalism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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