to-night, in hopes that if they
have no other effect on you, they will at least stir some of you up to
read Mr. Ruskin's works.

Now Mr. Ruskin says, "That the original conception of Gothic architecture
has been derived from vegetation, from the symmetry of avenues and the
interlacing of branches, is a strange and vain supposition. It is a
theory which never could have existed for a moment in the mind of any
person acquainted with early Gothic: but, however idle as a theory, it is
most valuable as a testimony to the character of the perfected style."

Doubtless so. But you must remember always that the subject of my
lecture is Grots and Groves; that I am speaking not of Gothic
architecture in general, but of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture; and
more, almost exclusively of the ecclesiastical architecture of the
Teutonic or northern nations; because in them, as I think, the
resemblance between the temple and the forest reached the fullest
exactness.

Now the original idea of a Christian church was that of a grot; a cave.
That is a historic fact. The Christianity which was passed on to us
began to worship, hidden and persecuted, in the catacombs of Rome, it may
be often around the martyrs' tombs, by the dim light of candle or of
torch. The candles on the Roman altars, whatever they have been made to
symbolise since then, are the hereditary memorials of that fact.
Throughout the North, in these isles as much as in any land, the idea of
the grot was, in like wise, the idea of a church. The saint or hermit
built himself a cell; dark, massive, intended to exclude light as well as
weather; or took refuge in a cave. There he prayed and worshipped, and
gathered others to pray and worship round him, during his life. There
he, often enough, became an object of worship, in his turn, after his
death. In after ages his cave was ornamented, like that of the hermit of
Montmajour by Arles; or his cell-chapel enlarged, as those of the Scotch
and Irish saints have been, again and again; till at last a stately
minster rose above it. Still, the idea that the church was to be a grot
haunted the minds of builders.

But side by side with the Christian grot there was throughout the North
another form of temple, dedicated to very different gods; namely, the
trees from whose mighty stems hung the heads of the victims of Odin or of
Thor, the horse, the goat, and in time of calamity or pestilence, of men.
Trees and not grots were the