And if any should say: "Nevertheless your Protestant Gothic Church, though you made it ten times more beautiful, and more symbolic than Cologne Minster itself, would still be a sham. For where would be your images? And still more, where would be your Host? Do you not know that in the medieval church the vistas of its arcades, the alternation of its lights and shadows, the gradations of its colouring, and all its carefully subordinated wealth of art, pointed to, were concentrated round, one sacred spot, as a curve, however vast its sweep through space, tends at every moment toward a single focus? And that spot, that focus was, and is still in every Romish church, the body of God, present upon the altar in the form of bread? Without Him, what is all your building? Your church is empty; your altar bare; a throne without a king; an eye-socket without an eye." My friends, if we be true children of those old worthies, whom Tacitus saw worshipping beneath the German oaks, we shall have but one answer to that scoff: "We know it; and we glory in the fact. We glory in it, as the old Jews gloried in it, when the Roman soldiers, bursting through the Temple and into the Holy of Holies itself, paused in wonder and in awe when they beheld neither God, nor image of God, but--blank yet all-suggestive--the empty mercy-seat. "Like theirs, our altar is an empty throne; for it symbolises our worship of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; whom the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain. Our eye-socket holds no eye. For it symbolises our worship of that Eye which is over all the earth; which is about our path, and about our bed, and spies out all our ways. We need no artificial and material presence of Deity. For we believe in That One Eternal and Universal Real Presence--of which it is written 'He is not far from anyone of us; for in God we live and move and have our being;' and again: 'Lo, I am with you even to the end of the world;' and again: 'Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in My Name there am I in the midst of them.' "He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace. Forever He looks down on all things which He has made, and behold, they are very good. And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty He has shown us, in man or woman, in cove or mountain-peak, in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly. "But Himself?--Who can see Him? Except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor quintessential diamond."