Let it be enacted that, whosoever he may be, parson or clerk, warden or sidesman, architect or bricklayer, man or woman, who shall be convicted of driving a nail into a rood-screen or removing a sepulchral slab, of digging up the bones of the dead to make a hole for a heating apparatus, bricking up an ancient doorway or hacking out an aperture for a new organ or scraping off the ancient plaster from walls that were plastered five hundred years ago--any one, I say, who shall do any of these acts, even with the very best motives, if he have committed such an offence without the license of a duly constituted authority, shall be adjudged guilty of a misdemeanour and sent to prison without the option of paying a fine. Would you do less in the case of a student at the National Gallery who should presume to restore Gainsborough’s “Parish Clerk” or Francia’s “Entombment”? Having made unlicensed meddling with our churches penal, the next thing to be done is to carry out a survey of our churches, and to obtain an exhaustive report upon the condition of all the ancient ecclesiastical buildings in the country which up to this moment have escaped the ravages of the prevailing epidemic. I am afraid the list of such favoured edifices would stagger and horrify us all by its smallness. The report to be drawn up and published of such a survey as I have ventured to propose would set out to the world an authoritative presentment of the actual condition of each church visited, drawn up by duly qualified and certificated professional men according to instructions laid down for them. The reports should include accurate ground-plans made according to one uniform scale, elaborate copies of mouldings, window-tracery, doorways, capitals, roofs--not merely pretty little sketches suitable for the readers of the _Graphic_, but working drawings, the results of careful measurement; and to this should be added lists of monumental brasses, fonts, remains of mural paintings or ancient glass, a complete register, in fact, of whatever remains the churches contained of ancient work in wood or stone or metal at the time the building was examined and reported on. Of course I shall be met by the objection that the expense of such a survey would be enormous, and that any such scheme is therefore for that one reason impracticable. I am not prepared to go into the estimates. But of this I feel very certain, that, so far from the cost of such a survey and such a publication of reports as those contemplated deserving to be called enormous, it would be much more truly described as insignificant.