Stained Glass Windows: An Essay: With a Report to the Vestry on Stained Glass Windows for Grace Church Lockport New YorkFaber, William Frederic
Religion
Stained Glass Windows: An Essay: With a Report to the Vestry on Stained Glass Windows for Grace Church Lockport New York
Faber, William Frederic
Glass painting and staining; Grace Episcopal Church (Lockport, N.Y.)
Then there is the question of a single scheme of subjects for all the
windows, so that all when completed shall tell, chapter by chapter,
one great story, or part by part, one great truth: say, the Christian
Faith, or the Redemption of Man, or the Sacramental Economy of Grace,
or the History of Religion, or the Mission of the Church in the
World. Thus again, as in old time, will the church windows instruct
the people, and the sum total of that instruction will be a unity,
with harmony and interrelation of parts, of the utmost value to sound
Christian thinking and feeling, and to symmetry of Christian character.
For it is just this which our modern religion so much lacks: the sad
result of sectarian thinking and teaching, where each hath a doctrine,
a truth, and few the whole doctrine and the wholeness of truth.
Individualism, let us realize, is not what the Church should foster:
though individuality, in its rightful place, be precious and sacred.
The application here is not fanciful. Sadly absurd examples there are,
where ecclesiastical art has been pressed into service by sectarian
minds (not among the sects alone) to teach some one portion or fragment
of truth through the eye every time the eye gazed upon the interior of
the house of worship and fell upon the favorite symbol or picture.
But not this alone. Individualism is rampant in our day in the
form of utterly arbitrary choice of subjects, as well as of their
mode of treatment in point of material, color, scale of drawing,
and――expensiveness. A Babel of confusion is the result, and that in
some of our foremost churches, which have become thereby rather picture
galleries or museums adapted to the study of all schools and all
tastes, than restful, devotional, solemnizing and uplifting temples for
the worship of Almighty God. A low motive ruled, and how can one help
feeling it as one looks upon the performance?――here the wealthy donor,
or the ambitious so-called artist, forgetting Whose this House was,
demanded worship for himself. “Verily, they have their reward.”
Therefore let those who have such things in charge study first of all
what a church should be, and then what their particular church, such
as they have received it in trust, is. It will often be found that a
building very little esteemed has something to say for itself, and
is worthy of respect as originally conceived, in its own structural
character as designed by its architect. And if not, and if it must
be borne with, then all the more reason, in planning to do anything
further in it or upon it, to “abhor that which is evil, and cleave to
that which is good.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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