We assert, then, that Sacramentality is that characteristick which so strikingly distinguishes ancient ecclesiastical architecture from our own. By this word we mean to convey the idea that, by the outward and visible form, is signified something inward and spiritual: that the material fabrick symbolizes, embodies, figures, represents, expresses, answers to, some abstract meaning. Consequently, unless this ideal be itself true, or be rightly understood, he who seeks to build a Christian church may embody a false or incomplete or mistaken ideal, but will not develope the true one. Hence, while the Parthenon, or a conventicle, or a modern church, may be conceived to have, on the one hand, so much truthfulness, as to symbolize respectively the graceful, but pagan, worship of Athene,—the private judgement of the dissenter, and the warped or illunderstood or puritanized religious ethos of the modern Churchman; and, on the other hand, to have so much reality as to carry out most satisfactorily Mr. Pugin's canons; yet, inasmuch as in neither case was the builder's ideal the true one, so in neither case is his architecture in any way adapted to, or an embodiment of, the ideal of the Church. Reality, then, is not of itself sufficient. What can be more real than a pyramid, yet what less Christian? It must be Christian reality, the true expression of a true ideal, which makes Catholick architecture what it is. This Christian reality, we would call SACRAMENTALITY; investing that symbolical truthfulness, which it has in common with every true expressson, with a greater force and holiness, both from the greater purity of the perfect truth which it embodies, and from the association which this name will give it with those adorable and consummate examples of the same principle, infinitely more developed, and infinitely more holy

in the spiritual grace which they signify and convey,-the Blessed Sacraments of the Church.

The modern writers who have treated on Symbolism seem to have taken respectively very partial views of the subject. Mr. Pugin does not seem in his books to recognize the particular principle which we have enunciated. We have shewn that his law about Reality is true so far as it goes, but that it does not go far enough. He himself, for example, is now contemplating a work on the reality of domestick, as before of ecclesiastical, architecture. Now, nothing can be more true, nothing more useful, than this. Yet even he does not seem to have discerned that as contact with the Church endues with a new sanctity, and elevates every form and every principle of art: so in a peculiar sense the sacred end to which Church architecture is subservient, elevates and sanctifies that reality which must be a condition of its goodness in common with all good architecture; in short, raises this principle of Reality into one of Sacramentality. We should be sorry to assert that Mr. Pugin does not feel this, though we are not aware that he has expressed it in his writings: but in his most lasting writings, his churches namely, it is clear that the principle, if not intentionally even, and if only incompletely, has not been without a great influence on that master mind. Yet even in these we could point to details, and in some of his earlier works to something more than details, which shew that there is something wanting; that in the bold expedients and fearless licence which his genius has led him to employ, he has occasionally gone wrong; not from the fact of his departure from strict precedent, and his vindication of a certain architectural freedom, but because in these escapements from authority, he has not invariably kept in view the principle now advocated. However the author of the "True Principles" might point to his

churches, to prove that a reverent and religious mind, employed in administering to the material wants of the Church, (even though that reverence be misapplied, and that Church in a schismatical position,) cannot fail to succeed, at least in some degree, in stamping upon his work the impress of his own faith and zeal, and in making it, at least to some extent, a living developement and expression of the true ideal.

Mr. Poole, the author of the "Appropriate character of Church Architecture," would appear to believe the symbolism of details rather than any general principle. He was the first, we think, to reassert that the octagonal form of Fonts was figurative of Regeneration. In the latter edition of his Book he has adopted several of the symbolical interpretations advanced by the writers of the Cambridge Camden Society.

Mr. Lewis, in his illustrations of Kilpeck Church, (in an appendix to which he has printed a translation of some part of the Rationale of our Author) has given a treatise on symbolism generally, and has applied his principles to the explanation of the plan and details of that particular church. His book excited some attention at the time of publication, and was met by considerable ridicule in many quarters. To this we think it was fairly open, since the author did not seem to have grasped the true view of the subject. He appears to believe that, from the very first, all Church architecture was intentionally symbolical. Now this is an unlikely supposition, inasmuch as till Church architecture was fully developed, we do not think that its real significancy was understood to its full extent by those who used it. That it was, in its imperfect state, symbolical, we should be the last to deny ; but it seems more in accordance with probability, and more in analogy with the progress of other arts, to believe that at first certain given wants

induced and compelled certain adaptations to those wants: which then did symbolize the wants themselves; and which afterwards became intentionally symbolical. Now such a view as this will explain satisfactorily how a Christian church might be progressively developed from a Basilican model. Mr. Hope, in his essay on Architecture, carries us back to the very earliest expedient likely to be adopted by a savage to protect him from weather, and from this derives every subsequent expansion of the art. Which may be true, and probably is true, so far at least as this: that, however first acquired, the elementary knowledge of any method of building would be, like all other knowledge, continually receiving additions and improvements, till from the first bower of branches sprang the Parthenon, and from that again Cologne or Westminster. But then it is clearly necessary to show some moral reason for so strange a developement, so complete a change of form and style. Now the theory that the ethos of Catholick architects working upon the materials made to hand, namely, the ancient orders of pagan architecture and (say) the Basilican plan, gradually impressed itself upon these unpromising elements, and progressively developed from them a transcript of that ethos in Christian architecture, is intelligible at least, and presents no such difficulty as Mr. Lewis's supposition that ancient architects, (he does not say when, or how long-but take Kilpeck church and say Norman architects,) designed intentionally on symbolical principles. We want in this case to be informed when the change took place, from what period architects began to symbolize intentionally, at what time they forgot the traditions of church-building, which they must have had, and commenced to carry new principles into practice. Nor, on this supposition, do we see why there should have been any progressive developement, why the Basilican and

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Debased-Pagan trammels were not cast away at once; nor why, if the ideal of the Norman architect was true and perfect, (that is if he were a true Catholick,) its expression should not have been so too: nor why any Norman symbolism, thus originated, should ever have been discarded (as it has been in later styles) instead of remaining an integral and essential part of the material expression of the Church's mind. Now our view appears to be open to no such objection. On the one hand there are given materials to work upon, and on the other a given spirit which is to mould and inform the mass. The contest goes on: mind gradually subdues matter, until in the complete developement of Christian architecture we see the projection of the mind of the Church. It is quite in analogy with the history and nature of the Church, and with the workings of God's providence with respect to it, that there should be this gradual expansion and developement of truth. We foresee the objection that will be raised against fixing on any period as that of the full ripeness of Christian art, and are prepared for many sneers at our advocacy of the perfection of the Edwardian architecture. But we are assured that, if there is any truth (not to say in what is advanced in this essay, but) in what has ever been proposed by any who have appreciated the genius of Pointed Architecture-to confine ourselves to our own subject—no other period can be chosen at which all conditions of beauty, of detail, of general effect, of truthfulness, of reality are so fully answered as in this. And from this spring two important considerations. Firstly, the decline of Christian art— which may be traced from this very period, if architecture be tried by any of the conditions which have been laid down -was confessedly coincident with, and (if what we have said is true) was really symbolical of, those corruptions, which ended in the great rending of the Latin Church;