If there are some crazy fanatics who have injured the cause which they have at heart by advocating in a furious way that all we have to do with an ancient building is to let it alone, and leave it to fall down, rather than do anything to preserve it, I for one hereby declare that I hold such fanatics to be heathen men and heretics of the worst kind. I look upon such people much as I look upon those peculiar people who denounce the whole medical profession as interferers with the laws of Providence, and who forbid the members of their sect from ever setting a broken bone or taking a prescription when sickness or infirmity has attacked them. To talk of letting an ancient building take its chance, and doing nothing to prolong its life, is to my mind to talk pestiferous nonsense with which I have no manner of sympathy. But unhappily there has been another view which has been put forward in a very specious and ingenious and captivating manner by another set of people, and which unhappily has met with immense favour at the hands of the moneyed public, and which seems to me to find its exact parallel in the proposal of a certain unfortunate lady who suffered martyrdom for her faith, or at any rate her profession, some years ago. That poor lady proclaimed to the world that she was so profoundly versed in all the virtues of certain mysterious herbs and salves and potions and mixtures, that she was prepared to guarantee the perfect restoration of youth and loveliness to the most aged and most battered of her sex; in fact, she asserted that she had discovered the grand secret of making them “beautiful for ever.” She was, I take it, the high priestess and prophetess of _restoration_. Now between the criminal and indolent neglect of those who would sit down with folded hands and never stretch out a finger to avert the death of the stricken, and the pretentious puffery of quacks who assure us that they have discovered the secret of rejuvenescence, there is a whole world of difference, and between the stupid do-nothingism of the one and the rash do-everythingism of the other there is--there must be--a middle course. This is what we have to complain of, that when well-meaning people have set themselves to “restore” a church (for I shall keep myself to that branch of the subject for the present), some of us have found the greatest difficulty in learning _what_ they were going to restore.