Now, without being concerned to defend, or the contrary, any or all of these ceremonies, we ask:--Is it possible to conceive that the Church which invented so deeply symbolical a system of worship--should have rested content with an unsymbolical building for its practice? This consideration, perhaps, belongs to the analogical branch of our essay: yet it may also find a place here, as one of the strongest parts of the inductive argument. Seeing then that there are strong reasons _à priori_ for believing that the ritual and architecture of the Church would partake of a decidedly symbolical character: that by the analogy of the practice amongst all religionists, of the operations of God in nature, of the conditions of Art, and especially of the whole sacramental system of the Church, it is likely that church architecture itself would be sacramental: that from the nature of things everything material is in some sort sacramental, and a material fabric essentially figurative of the purpose for which it was designed: that an actual Christian church (taken as we find it) has such accidents as can be explained on no other than a symbolical supposition, and might be analysed into just those elements from which, by induction, we first constructed an hypothetical Christian church: and lastly, that from express and {lxxix} continuous historical testimony without any actual acquaintance with existing fabrics we might have deduced that the material church would be itself, to some extent, a figurative expression of the religion for the celebration of which it was constructed: it does not seem too much to assert that Christian architecture owes its distinctive peculiarities to its sacramental character, and that consequently we can neither appreciate ancient examples nor hope to rival them, at least in their perfection, without taking into account this principle of their design. In other words, the cause of that indefinable difference between an ancient and modern church which we were led to discover at the beginning of this treatise, is neither association of ideas nor correctness of detail, nor picturesqueness, nor of a mechanical nature, but (in the most general point of view) is the sacramentality, the religious symbolism, which distinguished and sanctified this as every other branch of mediaeval art. {lxxx} CHAPTER VII EXAMPLES OF SYMBOLISM