ers built their places of worship we
have seen strange changes in American church buildings--changes in
material, location and adaptation to ritual uses. We have had a revival
of pagan temple-building in wood and stucco; we have seen Gothic
cathedrals copied for the simplest Protestant uses, until humorists have
suggested that congregations might find it cheaper to change their
religion than their unsuitable new churches; we have ranged from four
plain brick walls to vast and costly piles of marble or greenstone; we
have constructed great audience-rooms for Sunday school uses alone, and
have equipped the sanctuary with all culinary attachments; we have built
parish-houses whose comfort the best-kept mediaeval monk might envy, and
we have put up evangelistic tabernacles only to find the most noted
evangelists preferring to work in regular church edifices rather than in
places of easy resort by the thoughtless crowd of wonder-seekers. But
not all these doings have been foolish or mistaken: some of them have
been most hopeful signs, and the next century will find excellent work
in the church-building of our day. The Gothic and Queen Anne revivals,
at their best, have promoted even more than the old-time honesty in the
use of sound and sincere building-material; and not a few of our newer
churches prove that our ecclesiastical architects have something more to
show than experiments in fanciful "revivals" that are such only in name.
We shall continue to do well so long as we worthily perpetuate the best
material lesson taught by our grandfathers' temples--the lesson of
downright honesty of construction and of a union between the spirit of
worship and its local habitation.

CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.

WILL DEMOCRACY TOLERATE A PERMANENT CLASS OF NATIONAL OFFICE-HOLDERS?

It is no doubt a public misfortune that so much of that thoughtful
patriotism which, both on account of its culture and its independence,
must always be valuable to the country, should have been wasted, for
some time past, upon what are apparently narrow and unpractical, if not
radically unsound, propositions of reform in the civil service. There is
unquestionably need of reform in that direction: it would be too much to
presume that in the generally imperfect state of man his methods of
civil government would attain perfection; but it must be questioned
whether the subject has been approached from the right direction and
upon the side of the popular symp