n of art and the taste for architecture were dead or dying,
and there was no one who could replace the beautiful objects which
these wretches destroyed or repair the desolation they had caused.

Another era of spoliation set in in more recent times, when the
restorers came with vitiated taste and the worst ideals to reconstruct
and renovate our churches which time, spoliation, and carelessness had
left somewhat the worse for wear. The Oxford Movement taught men to
bestow more care upon the houses of God in the land, to promote His
honour by more reverent worship, and to restore the beauty of His
sanctuary. A rector found his church in a dilapidated state and talked
over the matter with the squire. Although the building was in a sorry
condition, with a cracked ceiling, hideous galleries, and high pews
like cattle-pens, it had a Norman doorway, some Early English carved
work in the chancel, a good Perpendicular tower, and fine Decorated
windows. These two well-meaning but ignorant men decided that a
brand-new church would be a great improvement on this old tumble-down
building. An architect was called in, or a local builder; the plan of
a new church was speedily drawn, and ere long the hammers and axes
were let loose on the old church and every vestige of antiquity
destroyed. The old Norman font was turned out of the church, and
either used as a cattle-trough or to hold a flower-pot in the rectory
garden. Some of the beautifully carved stones made an excellent
rockery in the squire's garden, and old woodwork, perchance a
fourteenth-century rood-screen, encaustic tiles bearing the arms of
the abbey with which in former days the church was connected,
monuments and stained glass, are all carted away and destroyed, and
the triumph of vandalism is complete.

That is an oft-told tale which finds its counterpart in many towns and
villages, the entire and absolute destruction of the old church by
ignorant vandals who work endless mischief and know not what they do.
There is the village of Little Wittenham, in our county of Berks, not
far from Sinodun Hill, an ancient earthwork covered with trees, that
forms so conspicuous an object to the travellers by the Great Western
Railway from Didcot to Oxford. About forty years ago terrible things
were done in the church of that village. The vicar was a Goth. There
was a very beautiful chantry chapel on the south side of the choir,
full of magnificent marble monuments to the memory of var