Pugin's earlier works were mostly Roman Catholic churches, and they are acknowledged to be an immense advance on any Gothic work which had been seen for centuries. In the Roman Catholic Cathedral of S. Chad, at Birmingham, there is a dignity, loftiness and simplicity surpassed by few Gothic buildings when that style was at its zenith, and from the time Pugin designed this building, architecture--notwithstanding our exhaustive study of archæology, our immense resources of capital and labour, our science and labour-saving appliances, and the comparative accessibility of the finest materials--has neither developed nor advanced. The most erudite Gothic mason could have possessed but little art knowledge as compared with the modern architect, and yet with our learned societies, wonderful libraries, easily obtained photographs and plans of the best buildings in the world; with writers far superior in intellectual acquirements to those of the Middle Ages, our vast wealth, with our tools such as the mediæval craftsman could never have dreamed of, and with the experience of twenty centuries to guide us we have made no advance during more than half a century. Our best architects acknowledge that until we get a new method of building, originality in architecture is an impossibility, mainly because all the existing styles of architecture have been worked out to their legitimate conclusion, and have been perfected under circumstances and conditions with which we have entirely broken; the originality in detail which pervades and permeates our Gothic buildings and gives them the greater part of their charm, must, of necessity, be out of our reach until we blend the spirit of what we are pleased to call our practical age, with a certain amount of that spirit of poetry and romance, religious fervour and devoutness, which animated the builders and craftsmen of the past. [Illustration: A Typical Cornish Font. Probably of the late Norman period. Now at Maker, near Plymouth.] CHAPTER VIII. CHURCH FURNITURE AND ORNAMENTS. The most important part of the internal furniture of a church is the altar, a name derived from the Latin _altare_, a high place. The altar is a raised structure on which propitiatory offerings are placed. In the Christian church the altar is a table or slab on which the instruments of the Eucharist are displayed. [Side note: The Altar.]