Our dwelling houses may be often built in a haphazard way, with a view simply to utility, regardless of style, laying no claim to architectural art. But to build a church so is an offense, an offense to art, and, we believe, an offense to religion also. A church building is presumed and expected to have a certain character, technically called “style,” dignifying and elevating God’s House above our common houses, even though it be small and plain and not costly; small and plain it may be, and not costly, but it must not be tawdry or incongruous or mean. Now a window is, as we have said, a component part of the building. In a church well conceived, the window is inevitable just as it is: to make it larger or smaller, to close one up where now there is one or to make one where there is none, is just so far to do violence to the building. If such a change does not violate the integrity of the building as a whole, the fact simply goes to show that the building had no plan worthy of honor. The window-space is therefore always to be preserved for window use――just such and just so much as the architect gave us. The use of a window (barring for the moment the unscientific one of ventilation) is to give light while still affording shelter. And this light-space is also to serve artistically as a kind of balance to the dark space of the solid wall; hence this light-space is to art sacred, and must be permitted to the end to assert itself as just what it is and such as it is, so much rightly apportioned and correctly proportioned translucent wall-space. When this window-space has been first filled with a plain glass, which is then to give way to stained glass, the new treatment must say, just as obviously, only more beautifully, what the old said: it must still be a window――letting in light, though now the light is colored――and in its architectural value it must be just what it was before, asserting the shape and the design of the structural window, plainly and faithfully. In other words, the true stained glass window――in a church building worthy of that name――is not now to give the beholder the impression that he is looking out through an opening and seeing, of something beyond, so much as the size of the opening will permit: in a word, the spectacular impression of looking into some beautiful out-door world through a hole in the wall. The beholder must be conscious still of looking at the wall itself, the translucent part of it, which confines him within the edifice as much as the stone or the brick. Nor yet is the true stained glass window merely a colored glass picture covering so much wall area: the outline form is to be so obvious, and the treatment so non-realistic, that the architectural idea may never for a moment be in danger of submersion under some other idea.