[Footnote 7: It may be proper to distinguish between five terms, too generally vaguely employed in common, and which we shall often have occasion to use: we mean, _allegorical, symbolical, typical, figurative_, and _sacramental_. 'Allegory employs fictitious things and personages to shadow out the truth: Symbolism uses real personages and real actions (and real things) as symbols of the truth:' _British Critic_, No. lxv. p. 121. Sacramentality is symbolism applied to the truth [Greek text], the teaching of the Church, by the hands of the teacher: a Type is a symbol intended from the first: a Figure is a symbol not discovered till after the thing figurative has had a being.] {xxvii} We assert, then, that _Sacramentality_ is that characteristic which so strikingly distinguishes ancient ecclesiastical architecture from our own. By this word we mean to convey the idea that, by the outward and visible form, is signified something inward and spiritual: that the material fabric symbolises, embodies, figures, represents, expresses, answers to, some abstract meaning. Consequently, unless this ideal be itself true, or be rightly understood, he who seeks to build a Christian church may embody a false or incomplete or mistaken ideal, but will not develope the true one. Hence, while the Parthenon, or a conventicle, or a modern church, may be conceived to have, on the one hand, so much _truthfulness_, as to symbolise respectively the graceful, but pagan, worship of Athene--the private judgment of the dissenter--and the warped or ill-understood or puritanised religious ethos of the modern churchman; and, on the other hand, to have so much _reality_ as to carry out most satisfactorily Mr. Pugin's canons; yet, inasmuch as in neither case was the builder's ideal the true one, so in neither case is his architecture in any way adapted to, or an embodiment of, the ideal of the Church. Reality, then, is not of itself sufficient. What can be more _real_ than a pyramid, yet what less Christian? It must be Christian reality, the true expression of a true ideal, which makes Catholic architecture what it is. This Christian reality, we would call _Sacramentality_; investing that symbolical truthfulness, which it has in common with _every_ true expression, with a greater force and holiness, both from the greater purity of the perfect truth which it embodies, and from the association which this name will give it with those adorable and consummate examples of the same {xxviii} principle, infinitely more developed, and infinitely more holy in the spiritual grace which they signify and convey,--the Blessed Sacraments of the Church.