I would suggest that the cathedrals are especially designed to help in the solution of the problem. Their attractiveness is a striking fact, and people who are too busy to read or to pray seem to find time to visit buildings where they will gain no advantage for their trade or profession, not even fresh air for their bodies. They are recognized as civic or national possessions, and working people who stand aloof from places of worship, or patronize meeting-houses, are distinctly interested in their care and preservation. They have an unfailing hold on the popular imagination, so that it is always easy to gather a congregation to take part in a service, or to listen to a lecture. “It was not so much what the lecturer said,” was the reflection of Mr. Crooks after a lecture in Westminster Abbey on English History, “as the place in which it was given.” The cathedrals have thus a peculiar position in the modern world, and if it be asked to what the position is due I am inclined to answer: to their unostentatious grandeur and to their testimony to the past. They are high and mighty, they lift their heads to heaven, and they open their doors to the humblest. They give the best away, and ask for nothing, neither praise nor notice. They are buildings through which the stream of ages has flowed, familiar to the people of old time as of the present, bearing traces of Norman strength and English aspirations, of the enthusiasm of Catholics and Puritans, of the hopes of the makers of the nation. The cathedrals are thus in touch with the spiritual sides of life, and make their appeal to the same powers which desire before all things to see the fair beauty of the Lord, and to commune with man’s eternal mind. But the cathedrals which make this appeal can hardly be said to be well used. There are the somewhat perfunctory services morning and afternoon, often suspended or degraded during holiday months when visitors are most numerous; there are sermons rarely to be distinguished from those heard in a thousand parish churches; there is a staff of eight or ten clergy who may be busy at good works, but certainly do not make their cathedral position their platform; and there are guides who for a small fee will conduct parties round the church. Among these guides are indeed to be found men who have made a study of the building, and are able to talk of it as lovers, but the guides for the most part give no other information than lists of names and dates, sometimes relieved by a common-place anecdote. The cathedrals are treated as museums, and not so well as the Forum of Rome. The question is: Can they be made of greater use in spiritualizing life? I would offer some suggestions:--