have learnt to improve on
them; and to build churches more Gothic than Gothic itself, more like
grot and grove than even a northern cathedral.

That is the direction in which we must work. And if any shall say to
us, as it has been said ere now--"After all, your new Gothic churches
are but imitations, shams, borrowed symbols, which to you symbolise
nothing. They are Romish churches, meant to express Romish doctrine,
built for a Protestant creed which they do not express, and for a
Protestant worship which they will not fit." Then we shall answer--
Not so. The objection might be true if we built Norman or Romanesque
churches; for we should then be returning to that very foreign and
unnatural style which Rome taught our forefathers, and from which
they escaped gradually into the comparative freedom, the comparative
naturalness, of that true Gothic of which Mr. Ruskin says so well:

It is gladdening to remember that, in its utmost nobleness, the very
temper which has been thought most adverse to it, the Protestant
temper of self-dependence and inquiry, were expressed in every case.
Faith and aspiration there were in every Christian ecclesiastical
building from the first century to the fifteenth: but the moral
habits to which England in this age owes the kind of greatness which
she has--the habits of philosophical investigation, of accurate
thought, of domestic seclusion and independence, of stern self-
reliance, and sincere upright searching into religious truth--were
only traceable in the features which were the distinctive creations
of the Gothic schools, in the varied foliage and thorny fretwork, and
shadowy niche, and buttressed pier, and fearless height of subtle
pinnacle and crested tower, sent "like an unperplexed question up to
heaven."

So says Mr. Ruskin. I, for one, endorse his gallant words. And I
think that a strong proof of their truth is to be found in two facts,
which seem at first paradoxical. First, that the new Roman Catholic
churches on the Continent--I speak especially of France, which is the
most highly-cultivated Romanist country--are like those which the
Jesuits built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and
less Gothic. The former were sham-classic; the latter are rather of
a new fantastic Romanesque, or rather Byzantinesque style, which is a
real retrogression from Gothic towards earlier and less natural
schools. Next, that the Puritan communions, the Kirk of Scotland