Stones of the Temple; Or, Lessons from the Fabric and Furniture of the Church

CHAPTER XII

THE WALLS

"Thou shalt call thy walls salvation, and thy gates praise."Isa. lx. 18"Behold in heaven yon glorious bow,Which spans the gleaming world below!The hues distinct in order glow,Yet each in each doth melt unseen,That none can mark the bound between:Lo, such is Faith's mysterious scroll,A multiform harmonious whole,Together gather'd for our aid,And in the darken'd heights display'd:The Church shall ne'er that emblem wantOf her eternal covenant."The Cathedral.

Mr. Dole, the proprietor of the village emporium, where all sorts of inferior wares were to be had at the highest obtainable prices, was one of those persons who seem sent into the world for the special purpose of preventing others from being too happy in it. There are persons, no doubt, who go through life always frowning upon their fellow-creatures, ever throwing a dark shadow along the path before them; people who persistently turn their backs upon the sunny side of human life; who seem to think it wicked to take a bright and cheerful view of any thing or any body on all God's earth; whose whole countenances would be utterly revolutionized by the faintest approach to an honest, friendly smile. Such persons, we must believe, are often very sincere, and are endeavouring to do good in their own way; nor must we say that they always fail in their endeavour; nevertheless they are not the sort of persons we care to have as our frequent companions. It is true, there is enough about the lives of most of us to make us often sorrowful; but no less true is it, that the man who, leading a Christian life and doing God's work in the world, preserves "a conscience void of offence to wards God and to wards men" will take care that his outward demeanour does not make his religion unlovely and repulsive in the sight of others. Mr. Dole being of the class we have described, it was no wonder that the village lads had honoured his name with an affix, and that he was generally known among them as old Doleful; nor shall we be surprised that his appearance in the churchyard just as Mr. Acres and the Vicar entered it was not welcomed by them with any excessive pleasure.

"Good evening, Mr. Dole," said both gentlemen, as they approached him. But there was no responsive "Good evening" from Mr. Dole. Now it is always a bad sign when a man will not return such a simple salutation as that: I never knew but one who made me no answer when I wished him "Good evening;" I was at once impressed with the idea that there was little good in him, and my impression was correct, for in a few moments after the fellow had put a light to the thatched house of a poor neighbour who had offended him, and very soon the poor man's house and goods were crackling in a mass of flame. But, it must be confessed, Mr. Dole withheld his salutation from no such motive as influenced this man. There was something far too pleasant and cheerful about a kindly "Good evening" to harmonize in any way with the tone of Mr. Dole's voice or manner; but beyond this, he never said "Good morning" or "Good evening" to any one on principle. The fact is, Mr. Dole belonged to a portion of the sect of Anabaptists called "Calvinist Baptists," and the extreme Calvinistic feature of his Creed had become with him quite a monomania. The idea of predestination haunted him every where and in every thing; it ran through his whole life of thought, word, and action; with it he justified all his own shortcomings, and it made him insensible to the right motives and doings of others. He had become so accustomed to look on the dark side of men and things, that he had gained for himself a settled character of gloominess and suspicion, and had quite lost sight of the Apostolic precept – "Be courteous." Thus he did not believe that these two gentlemen meant what they said, and really wished him to have a "Good evening;" and, as regarded himself, he would have considered the words as a flying in the face of Providence, a direful offence against the phantom idol of inevitable Predestination which he had set up in his own heart. To him it seemed only a mockery to use those words of common courtesy, when – as he said to himself – it was already ordained whether these persons should have a good or a bad evening, and no words of his could affect or alter their destiny. And so he simply said, "How do you do, gentlemen?" But it was spoken in a deep, sepulchral voice, as though he reserved to himself a mental protest against even this small conformity to the world's civility.

"People are talking about the painting you have been doing in the church, Mr. Ambrose, and I have just come up to look at it; not that I like that sort of thing, and I don't think the parish money should be spent in that way."

"You need not be at all anxious on that score, Mr. Dole, as my friend here has defrayed the whole cost of the work; but let us go into the church together."

Now the line of thought which this man had so long adopted, and the one idea he had cherished, had so dulled his heart and mind to all sense of the beautiful that he could never appreciate, like other people, what was pure and lovely, either in nature or in art. No wonder then that he failed to admire the beautiful decoration with which the Squire had adorned St. Catherine's Church.

First of all, Mr. Ambrose pointed out to him some old wall-paintings of great interest, which had been recently discovered. From these Mr. Acres had had the successive coats of whitewash carefully removed, and, though they were several centuries old, the colours were but little faded. Among the most curious were a series of paintings which quite covered the north wall of the chancel.

"You will see, Mr. Dole, that these all represent events in the life of our Blessed Lord. Here is the beginning of the series; it is the Tree of Jesse, showing the descent of our Lord in the line of David, – next is the Nativity, – next the Adoration of the Magi, – then, the Massacre of the Holy Innocents, – then, the Presentation in the temple; and there, on the upper part of the wall, are – the Betrayal, our Lord before Pilate, being Mocked, being Scourged, bearing His Cross, His Crucifixion, and there, below the Crucifixion, His descent from the Cross, and His Entombment58. These, you see, Mr. Dole, are not only valuable as showing one way in which our Church five hundred years ago set before the eyes and minds of the people the human life of our Lord; but they are still well suited for the sacred place they adorn, inasmuch as they still serve to remind the worshipper in this House of Prayer of the great truths they represent. I must, however, confess that we brought to light some paintings on the walls of a different character; some of these were very grotesque, others were from some cause or other objectionable. These were copied, as possessing antiquarian interest, and were then obliterated. It was long before we could bring our minds to destroy these curious relics of old days59, and had they occupied less conspicuous places in the church, I think we should have been tempted to preserve them, but the House of God has a higher use than to be a mere preserver of curiosities, and to this higher use its decorations and all within it should contribute."

Mr. Ambrose then explained the new wall-decorations which had been painted by Mr. Acres. These consisted of groups illustrating sacred subjects, texts of Holy Scripture mixed with foliage and tracery; and, by clever introduction of foliage and holy texts among the old work, he had made the old and the new to harmonize very well. The colours were well arranged, and all was done with a due reference to the architectural features of the church. Before this time the only attempt at ornament for the walls of the church consisted of some square boards, put up about fifty years ago, on which were painted some ill-selected sentences, whilst beneath each sentence was painted a human head of inhuman ugliness.

Not one word had as yet been spoken to the Vicar by his seemingly attentive listener. At length he said, in his usual dismal tone, "I don't see any use in it, sir. To my mind, our little Rehoboth down in the village is more like the simplicity of the Gospel. Besides, I call all this a breaking of the second commandment."

"I leave you to judge whether the mean little meeting-house you call Rehoboth, or this beautiful church, is most in accordance with the only patterns we have in God's Word of houses dedicated to His worship, or most fitting as types of the Heavenly Temple whose magnificence is described in such glowing language by St. John; but as regards these paintings, the pictures and toys you sell in your shop are just as much a breaking of the second commandment; for these are no more made to worship than are those."

"But nobody will kneel down before my toys and pictures; if they kneel at all, however, in your church, they must kneel before these pictures. I call them idolatrous images, and I say they are worshipped."

"And, by the same mode of reasoning, I say, Mr. Dole, that the people at your meeting-house break the second commandment; for they fall down to whitewash, and worship it."

"What do you mean, sir?"

"Why, only this: that turn whichever way they will to worship, they must turn to one of your four whitewashed walls. But let us be quite fair to each other. The truth is, you don't worship whitewash, nor do we worship images; but whilst we think it most in accordance with reason and religion to decorate our walls with sacred subjects, such as are likely to suggest solemn and holy thoughts, and to make our churches as beautiful as possible, you, on the contrary, seem to regard it as a religious duty to make your meeting-houses as ugly as possible. And now I must say good-bye, Mr. Dole."

"Sir, I should like to meet you here again some day."

"I only wish we could at least meet here every Sunday. Good-bye."

"I almost think," said Mr. Acres, as they left the church, "the outside of our church walls are as interesting as their interior. The north wall is evidently the earliest part of the church. It contains some Roman bricks, placed herring-bone fashion, among the old Norman rubble. This, doubtless, was erected immediately after the destruction of the little Saxon church with its wooden walls60 which once stood on this very site; then come the Early English walls of the chancel, then the very interesting specimens of brick-work of the sixteenth century in the tower and western walls. But you have given Mr. Dole and us all such a long and useful lecture on the inside of the walls, that we must not stop to say any more about their outside."

"I must just say this, my friend, respecting the outside walls, that I can forgive a builder for any fault more easily than for want of reality in the exterior of a church. For the sake of decoration and neatness it may be desirable that the internal walls should be covered with cement or plaster, but there is no excuse for so covering the church externally. If mean materials are used, let the mean materials appear; but it is unpardonable to use the mean and spread over it a false pretence of the costly. Brick walls are often very beautiful, and not inferior to flint or stone; but if they are of brick, let the brick be seen, and let it not pretend to be stone."

CHAPTER XIII

THE WINDOWS

"I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones."Isa. liv. 12" … Sometimes thoughts proud and wildHave risen, till I saw the sunbeams stealThrough painted glass at evensong, and weaveTheir threefold tints upon the marble near,Faith, Prayer, and Love, the spirit of a child!"Faber.

Mr. Acres and his family had now learnt, from their many conversations with the Vicar on the subject, to take a deep interest in church architecture, and were ever seeking and finding some new beauties either in the solid building or the ornaments of their own ancient church, which now they looked upon with quite a new feeling of pride and admiration. When, therefore, Mr. Ambrose was a visitor at the Hall, he was not unfrequently called upon to deliver a short drawing-room lecture on some portion of the church or its furniture. "Now, Mr. Ambrose," said the Squire, on one of these occasions, "as we are only a family party this evening, will you kindly give us some more information on our favourite topic of conversation lately? I see the same request is on the lips of all these little people, but they are not so impudent, I suppose, as I am. You will, I hope, find us more profitable pupils than Mr. Dole, to whom you specially addressed your lecture in the church the other day."

"I am not so sure of that; for what I said to him, if it did no more, at least set him thinking; and that is a great point, you know. You see, those kind of people, as a rule, never read and never hear any thing really worth reading or hearing about matters of this sort. They are simply taught to believe that all outward form and ceremony in the Services, and all outward meaning and beauty in the fabric of the church, are idolatrous and superstitious, and they care to inquire no further than that. Their prejudice is fostered by ignorance, and to lead them to inquire is the first step to wards inducing conviction. Then, how very little our own people generally know about these things, and how seldom comparatively they are prepared with a ready answer with which to meet the objections of persons who are even more ignorant than themselves! This surely ought not to be. If we place beautiful and costly ornaments and furniture in our churches, the poorest person in the parish should be taught the meaning of them; and if the Stones of the Temple have each a lesson to teach, the poorest person in the parish ought to know what they say. But I am wandering from my point: our last subject was the walls of the church; what shall we talk about to-day, Constance?"

"Oh, I think the windows should come next, Mr. Ambrose; but there are so many different kinds of windows, that, of course, you cannot tell us all that might be said about them."

"No, indeed, my dear; I can only tell you a very small part of their history, but still enough, perhaps, to increase the interest you already feel on the subject. First, then, I shall say something about the stone-work of the windows; and what I say about windows applies very much also to the doors of a church, only the doors are generally much more richly ornamented. Now there are some very simple rules by which we may commonly know from the windows pretty nearly at what period that particular part of the church was built. You cannot, of course, always tell from any thing still existing at what time the church was first built, because often no part whatever of the first church is remaining. The font, from its sheltered position, is the most frequently preserved relic of the original church; sometimes one doorway alone remains, and sometimes but a single window to mark the earliest date of the church.

"As I must not puzzle your brains with the hard words employed by persons learned in church building, I do not profess to give you the nice distinctions by which they arrive almost at exact dates. Ours must be a very rapid glance at the whole subject. The two great distinct characters, then, in church windows, as also in other parts of the building, are the semi-circular arch and the pointed arch. The former is to be found in churches erected before the year 1150, and the latter since that year; but of course there are exceptions. The earliest round-headed windows (that the few buildings in which they are found were originally intended as Christian temples, I do not of course affirm) are the Roman, and these are easily known, for they are nearly always partly composed of red bricks61. Then come the Saxon; these are built of stone, but are quite plain, and generally as rude and rough as the Roman. You know the Romans held possession of our country from the year 50 before Christ till A.D. 450; and then the Saxons held the country till A.D. 1066; but it is impossible accurately to fix the dates of most of the churches they built. Next follow the Norman; these are more ornamental, and not so roughly executed; and after the Norman Conquest, when many clever builders and masons came over from Normandy, they were often most beautifully decorated. The figures of persons and animals, indeed, that are sometimes to be found (but more especially above the doorways) at this time seem very quaint and curious to us now, and often quite unintelligible, but no doubt they once all had an useful meaning and were specimens of the highest art of the time; very many of them are Scripture subjects. Sometimes triangular windows are to be met with of the Saxon and Norman periods, but very rarely. As I said before, some of their stone carvings appear to us to be very quaint and grotesque, and so too the arrangement of their windows was sometimes fanciful; they seem to have attempted occasionally62, to represent the features of the face, the doorway representing the mouth, and the windows the eyes and nose.

"The reason why the windows were in some instances so small, we may imagine was because they were sometimes not glazed, and it was desirable that, to keep out the wind and rain and the winter's cold, they should be only just large enough to admit the necessary light. I have lately seen an old Norman window which had been long bricked up, in which there had evidently never been any glass63. We need not be surprised at this, for even so lately as in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it was no uncommon thing for the windows in private houses to have no glass in them.

"Now we come to the pointed-headed arches. From about A.D. 1150 to A.D. 1200, which is called the Transition period the two styles were a good deal mixed. People have different, opinions as to the origin of these pointed arches. A learned friend of mine has an idea of his own about it, which he calls the finger theory. He supposes that all church arches and tracery may be derived from different positions in which the fingers may be placed when the hands are clasped as in prayer, and that from these, first the round, and then the pointed arch was suggested as a fit design to be adopted for a House of Prayer. It is at least an ingenious and a pleasing conception. Some have imagined that the meeting of branches in a grove of trees first gave the idea of the pointed arch. Often, as I have looked down the avenue by old Wood's cottage, has the opening at the opposite end reminded me of the eastern window of some splendid cathedral, whilst the long intervening rows of trees, with their branches uniting overhead, has suggested to my mind the pillars and groined roof of the building. Our old heathen forefathers knew well the grand effect of these magnificent temples of nature's building, when they selected them as the places best adapted for their awful sacrifices, and the worship of their 'Unknown God64.' But it seems most probable that one style of architecture naturally introduced another, and that the pointed followed naturally from the semi-circular arch. When the builders saw what a beautiful arch was produced by a number of their old semi-circular arches intersecting each other, they gradually introduced the newly-discovered pointed arch, and at length, finding that it admitted of such a far greater variety of beautiful tracery in the window, they abandoned the old style altogether.

"The first pure style of pointed windows is called the Early English65, which prevailed from about A.D. 1200 to A.D. 1300. It is often very simple, the plain lancet-shaped window being the most common; it frequently has the same ornaments as the Norman, but its peculiar ornament is a flower, almost round, called the ball-flower. This was followed, up to about A.D. 1400, by a more graceful flowing style, called the Decorated or Florid, and it is chiefly to be distinguished by the waving flame-like character of the stone-work in the upper part of the window. Then next we have quite a different style, which is called the Perpendicular, so named from its upright or perpendicular lines, some of which run up uninterruptedly from the bottom to the top of the window. This style is peculiar to England, and windows of this character are very rarely to be found elsewhere. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the arch of the window gradually becomes depressed, first sinking to the Tudor arch, and then losing its pointed character altogether and becoming quite flat; and this introduced what, from its comparative want of beauty, is called the Debased style. The windows of this period were usually square-headed, and possessed, like the other parts of the building, little ornament. It prevailed till the middle of the seventeenth century, and may be considered the second childhood of Church Architecture; and it was certainly far inferior to the first. Succeeding to this period came all those hideous semi-classical erections, most of which, I believe, were built in the reign of Queen Anne, though some were before and some after; and those still more unsightly parodies on Gothic architecture which were erected at the close of the last and commencement of the present century. In our own day we have far advanced by a complete retrogression, and churches are mostly copies of one or other of the styles I have mentioned. If, however, our present age may boast of a church architecture of its own, it will undoubtedly be that of those most beautiful brick churches which have been but lately erected, such as All Saints' and St. Alban's, London, and St. James', Oxford."

"You have not told us any thing about the round windows, Mr. Ambrose," said Constance; "you know we have a very pretty one in our church."

"Yes, I ought to have told you that these circular windows are to be found in all styles of architecture, usually at the west end of the church. They are called rose windows and marigold windows, from their supposed likeness to those flowers; and St. Catherine's windows, from their resemblance to the wheel on which she suffered martyrdom. It is likely that this window was placed in our church because it is dedicated to St. Catherine."

"That leads me to ask," said Mr. Acres, "what symbolism there may be in the windows of a church; for in your sermon last Sunday you said that there was a lesson to be learnt from all the speechless stones of the sanctuary."

"Yes; and every window in the church should remind us of certain Christian truths. The light which they admit should make us think of Him who is the 'Light of the world,' 'a Light to lighten the Gentiles,' 'the Day-spring from on high,' 'the Sun of Righteousness,' 'that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' The window with its double compartments reminds us of the two natures of Christ; the triple window, and the many triple forms in it, of the Trinity66. But it is of course most chiefly in its storied panes that the church window becomes our teacher."

"Certainly; I see that: and, by-the-by, as I am as ignorant as my children about the history of stained glass, please tell us something about that before we part."

"I will, gladly. As far as we know, stained glass was never used before about the year 850; but when it once came into general use, it would appear that no church was considered complete unless every window was furnished with it. At first, it probably consisted of rude imitations of old mosaic patterns67. Then figures were introduced, which depended for their general effect upon broad black lines either produced by lead or colour. The old stained glass may always be known by the deep richness of its colours, especially of the blue and ruby. Probably Canterbury Cathedral possesses the earliest and best specimens remaining, the date of some of which is about A.D. 112068. In the glass of this time you find small medallions containing several figures, the surrounding parts being filled with tracery. Next come small single figures, or groups of figures, with or without canopies, with border tracery and foliage; sometimes there are the shields of founders and benefactors. About A.D. 1350 larger figures of saints were painted, each occupying a whole compartment of the window, with larger and more elaborate canopies. Now, too, windows began to be mortuary, and contained figures of deceased persons, with their shields and banners. In the following century single subjects often extended over several compartments, or even the whole of the window. Sentences in old English letters were frequently painted, issuing from the mouths of figures (just as we find them on monumental brasses of the same date), and also in various other parts of the window. One colour only, commonly yellow, with black lines to mark the features and dresses, was now, and also before this time, frequently used.