cal form of the room should be one
that does not suggest either the concert hall or the playhouse, but
suggests rather a long and unbroken ecclesiastical tradition. Until
the cinema was introduced into worship, we were vastly improving in
these respects, but now we are turning the morning temple into an
evening showhouse. I think we evince a most impertinent familiarity
with the house of God! And too often the church is planned so that
it has no privacies or recesses, but a hideous publicity pervades its
every part. We adorn it with stenciled frescoes of the same patterns
which we see in hotel lobbies and clubs; we hang up maps behind the
reading desk; we clutter up its platform with grand pianos.

It is a mere matter of good taste and good psychology to begin our
preparation for a ministry of worship by changing all this. There
should be nothing in color or ornament which arouses the restless mood
or distracts the eye. Severe and simple walls, restrained and devout
figures in glass windows, are only to be tolerated. Descriptive
windows, attempting in a most untractable medium a sort of naive
realism, are equally an aesthetic and an ecclesiastical offense.
Figures of saints or great religious personages should be typical,
impersonal, symbolic, not too much like this world and the things of
it. There is a whole school of modern window glass distinguished by
its opulence and its realism. It ought to be banished from houses of
worship. Since it is the object of worship to fix the attention upon
one thing and that thing the highest, the room where worship is held
should have its own central object. It may be the Bible, idealized as
the word of God; it may be the altar on which stands the Cross of the
eternal sacrifice. But no church ought to be without one fixed point
to which the eye of the body is insensibly drawn, thereby making it
easier to follow it with the attention of the mind and the wishes of
the heart. At the best, our Protestant ecclesiastical buildings are
all empty! There are meeting-houses, not temples assembly rooms,
not shrines. There is apparently no sense in which we are willing
to acknowledge that the Presence is on their altar. But at least the
attention of the worshiper within them may focus around some symbol of
that Presence, may be fixed on some outward sign which will help the
inward grace.

But second: our chief concern naturally must be with the content of
the service of worship itself, not wit