nd a bell rang to tell me the holy moments, I should not mind
the pillar at all. I should sit there, like any other Goth, and enjoy
it. But, as I have said, the pastor is a friend of mine, and I like
to look at him on Sunday, and hear what he says, for he always says
something worth hearing. I am on such terms with him, indeed we all are,
that it would be pleasant to have the service of a little more social
nature, and more human. When we put him away off in the apse, and set
him up for a Goth, and then seat ourselves at a distance, scattered
about among the pillars, the whole thing seems to me a trifle unnatural.
Though I do not mean to say that the congregations do not "enjoy their
religion" in their splendid edifices which cost so much money and are
really so beautiful.

A good many people have the idea, so it seems, that Gothic architecture
and Christianity are essentially one and the same thing. Just as many
regard it as an act of piety to work an altar cloth or to cushion a
pulpit. It may be, and it may not be.

Our Gothic church is likely to prove to us a valuable religious
experience, bringing out many of the Christian virtues. It may have
had its origin in pride, but it is all being overruled for our good. Of
course I need n't explain that it is the thirteenth century ecclesiastic
Gothic that is epidemic in this country; and I think it has attacked the
Congregational and the other non-ritual churches more violently than any
others. We have had it here in its most beautiful and dangerous forms. I
believe we are pretty much all of us supplied with a Gothic church now.
Such has been the enthusiasm in this devout direction, that I should not
be surprised to see our rich private citizens putting up Gothic churches
for their individual amusement and sanctification. As the day will
probably come when every man in Hartford will live in his own mammoth,
five-story granite insurance building, it may not be unreasonable to
expect that every man will sport his own Gothic church. It is beginning
to be discovered that the Gothic sort of church edifice is fatal to
the Congregational style of worship that has been prevalent here in
New England; but it will do nicely (as they say in Boston) for private
devotion.

There isn't a finer or purer church than ours any where, inside and
outside Gothic to the last. The elevation of the nave gives it even that
"high-shouldered" appearance which seemed more than anything else to
impre