ago I roughly sketched out a scheme for regulating the modus operandi in cases where it might be judged advisable that a clergyman should be called on to resign his cure. I am as fully convinced as ever that the main principles laid down in that essay are sound and irrefragable; but I have seen reason for being dissatisfied with the methods there tentatively proposed. Meanwhile the principle that the removal of a clergyman from his benefice on grounds of mere unsuitability for the post he holds should be made more easy than it is, and in cases where such unsuitability has been proved should be enforced. This principle has been making its way to general acceptance; the appeal to the conscience and the common sense of churchmen has not been made in vain. I doubt not that we could without much difficulty come to an agreement as to the constitution of such tribunals as should be empowered to take action and to adjudicate on the delicate questions that would arise, if only we set ourselves earnestly to look the problem in the face, and gave one another credit for singlemindedness and sincerity, even though we might differ very widely from one another in the discussions that should be carried on.

Let me however, at this point, enter my strong protest against those fiery young Rehoboamites who are for carrying out that bad precedent lately set in the Civil Service, of calling upon every man to resign his benefice simply on the ground of his having reached a certain age-whether it be 65, 70, or even 80. Such hard and fast lines I for one abhor. We want—we always shall want-old men as well as young men in the ministry of Christ's Church. God found splendid work for the great apostle when he had passed his prime— 'being such an one as Paul the aged'; and I suspect that 'Diotrephes who loved to have the pre-eminence' was a restless and ambitious young curate, who considered that it was time the Apostle of Love should be called on to retire from active work for no other reason than because he was so very old. The men of my generation in their nonage were kept in their places,' as the phrase is; they were told that it was for them to speak when they were spoken to, or not at all. We were snubbed into a galling consciousness of our insignificance. We did not like it, but we are not much the worse for it. If in those bygone days we suffered under the reproach of the odious crime of youth, we did not, when we had proved ourselves guiltless of the charge-No! we did not-retaliate by reproaching our seniors with the odious crime of eld. Let us all beware how we advocate the shelving of all clergymen who have passed the threescore years and ten, only on the ground that they have lived long enough, and not on the ground that they have overlived their usefulness. When it has come to that, let a man be called upon to retire whether he be 70 or 40.

IX

'But if my nominee is to be subject to dismissal from his cure by some newfangled board of control, or whatever else you call it, what becomes of my patronage?'

The reply is very simple: 'Friend! your patronage is subjected to limitation and control; which is exactly what is needed.'

It matters very little to the public at large, or indeed to anybody but yourself, whether your coachman is deaf or blind or can drive his horses no better than a baby, always provided that you are the only passenger on the buggy. But it is a matter of life and death to other people if they have to sit behind such a charioteer through the long journey. Let it be understood that the patron of a benefice no longer presents to a freehold for life in that benefice, but that he simply nominates a clergyman to take the spiritual oversight of a parish only for so long a time as he shall prove himself fit to discharge the duties of his high calling, and we shall hear no more of buying and selling advowsons and next presentations. The mere suspicion that an incumbent had wriggled himself into a benefice by paying cash down would make the bed on which he lies somewhat lumpy; and the fact of his being no longer able to regard himself as irremovable would go some way to make him walk very warily. If he proved himself morally, physically, or even it might be socially or intellectually, quite the wrong man in the wrong place, the money invested-for that is the way people talk now-would be lost, and it would require only a very few instances of this kind of thing to convince dealers in church property and clerical agents that an advowson or a next presentation had become an unsaleable article.

I have called this paper a Reiteration. If it were only that and nothing more, I should feel myself, as matters now stand, quite justified in repeating the conclusions at which I have arrived, and ' reiterating' them before those who may do me the honour of reading them, and giving them due consideration. If we hope to drive home views that are not generally received views, we must force them upon the attention of the indifferent, we must repeat our challenge to those who are too timid or too indolent to take up the glove thrown down.

The subject of Church Reform is in the air. We cannot put it out of our thoughts by any or all of those methods of persiflage which the languid and half-hearted ones resort to when they want to be left alone. The advocates of laissez faire in this matter are at their last gasp. No man can any longer venture to say of the Church of England-meaning by that the ecclesiastical polity of this country as it presents itself to us to-day-'It will last my time!' The real

↑ What an oppressively suggestive title!

question is 'Ought it to last your time?' If it ought, are you prepared to defend it? If it ought not, are you afraid to reform it? Will you continue to denounce as disloyal innovators those who at all costs, and at all risks, and with never a dream of advancing their own interests, have been and are devoting their best energies to bring about the beginnings of reform? Will you hold out to them the right hand of fellowship? At least will you not point out to them where and how they are wrong, and show them a more excellent way?

For me I feel no more fears for the future of this Church of England than I do for the future of our Fatherland. I foresee-and not so very far off-the dawn of a brighter day, of broadening sympathies, of ever-widening activity, of more practical enthusiasm, of greater triumphs than the past can show us. But it will be a day when this Church of ours shall have shaken herself free from the swathing bands of a childhood protracted too long, from the trammels that have overweighted her till she has been checked in her expansion, from the fetters that have imposed all sorts of checks upon her liberty of action. Disestablishment and Disendowment.' Do you flout those red rags in my eyes? Nay! Mere hack phrases and catchwords have no terrors for those who do not fight with shadows or windmills. It is progress that we cry for, not vulgar spoliation; and the beginning of progress in the present, and the assurance of its continuance in the future, are to be found in the processes of fearless and wise and farsighted Reform.

AUGUSTUS JESSOPP.

DELIBERATE DECEPTION IN

ANCIENT BUILDINGS

EVER since Mr. Penrose made public his measurements establishing the existence of deliberately constructed curves in the lines of the Parthenon attention has been consistently directed to the subject, and his theory has been generally accepted that they were refinements introduced in order to discount certain optical illusions. Deflections from the vertical, vertical curves, and curves in horizontal lines were discovered; these last lying in vertical planes, so that no plan deflections were found. Extremely delicate, these refinements have been considered to have existed only in Greece, and to have had no analogy, even of a crude description, in other than Grecian buildings.

Though Mr. Penrose established the existence of these curves, they had already been discovered some few years earlier by Mr. Pennethorne in 1837, also by Messrs. Hoffer and Schaubert, who published the discovery in 1838 in the Weiner Bauzeitung; nor, in the case of Mr. Pennethorne at least, had this discovery been accidental. In 1833 he had visited Egypt, and there he had found, at the Temple of Medinet Habou, that the cornices of the inner court formed curves on plan, concave to a spectator standing within the enclosure. Subsequently he had been struck by the passage in Vitruvius referring to the construction of curves, and had consequently revisited Athens and discovered the curves of the Parthenon. He appears to have taken little trouble to make his discoveries known, and so far as the curves at Medinet Habou were concerned made no announcement till 1878, and even at the present time their existence is scarcely recognised.

It was in this position that the matter rested until quite recently, with the solitary exception of the announcement by Jacob Burckhardt of the discovery of convex plan curves in the flanks of the great Temple of Neptune at Pæstum, and this has been regarded as something quite exceptional.

In June 1895, however, a notable article appeared in the Architectural Record of New York, by Professor W. H. Goodyear, containing

announcements of discoveries of a character and completeness of sequence which even he seems scarcely to comprehend, and which look much like revolutionising the whole theory as to the intention of curved lines in ancient buildings; and that article has been followed by others yet more recently, drawing attention to the existence of plan variations of an analogous character in mediæval Italian buildings, and sufficiently startling in the conclusions to which they inevitably tend to cause them to be received almost with incredulity.

His first discovery was that the courts at Karnac, Luxor, and Edfou all exhibited plan curves similar to those at Medinet Habou, but he appears to have seen no more in this than confirmation of Pennethorne's observations. On the other hand, the date sequence is all-important, for while Karnac and Luxor are, like Medinet Habou, of the Theban period, though somewhat earlier, dating, possibly, in the earliest example to 1500 B.C., the temple at Edfou is Ptolemaic, belonging to the renaissance of Egyptian architecture, and cannot be earlier than 250 B.C. (this being extreme). Consequently it was built long subsequently to the Temple at Pæstum.

Carrying on the sequence, too, Professor Goodyear found plan curves, similar to those at Pæstum, in the cornice line of the wellknown Roman building, the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and thus established the existence of a series of cognate phenomena in all periods of ancient architecture of which we have complete examples left.

His theory, a revival of that of Hoffer with regard to the Parthenon, but one which has not hitherto been much considered in England, is that these curves were intended to deceive-to convey to a spectator within the courtyards of Egypt, or without the temples at Pæstum and Nîmes, an impression of greater length than that which actually existed, by means of an intentionally exaggerated perspective; and he points out that the Parthenon curves in vertical planes have the same tendency, whatever other explanation of them may also be possible, and in a more refined and delicate manner than have the horizontal curves.

Had Professor Goodyear's discoveries stopped here, therefore, they would have been highly significant; but they have recently been carried much further during his survey of Italian buildings, undertaken by him for the Brooklyn Institute. For example, he finds similar convex curves internally at Fiesole, Genoa, Trani, and in San Apolinare Nuovo, Ravenna; and he gives, in his article in the Architectural Record, a photograph of the curve at Trani, along the cornice above the nave arcade, which would be convincing enough had not the half-tone block been evidently doctored.' Doubtless the effect is that shown, but a carefully figured plan would have better established the existence of the curve and its extent. Other instances

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