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love and obedience, and surrender of themselves and theirs to His will; and that their gratitude to Him, and continual remembrance of Him, might have at once their expression and their enduring testimony in the presentation to Him, not only of the firstlings of the herd and fold, not only of the fruits of the earth and the tithe of time, but of all treasures of wisdom and beauty; of the thought that invents, and the hand that labors; of wealth of wood, and weight of stone; of the strength of iron, and of the light of gold.

It has been said—it ought always to be said, for it is true— that a better and more honorable offering is made to our Master in ministry to the poor, in extending the knowledge of His name, in the practice of the virtues by which that name is hallowed, than in material presents to His temple. Assuredly it is so; woe to all who think that any other kind or manner of offering may in any wise take the place of these! Do the people need place to pray, and calls to hear His word? Then it is no time for smoothing pillars or carving pulpits; let us have enough first of walls and roofs. Do the people need teaching from house to house, and bread from day to day? Then they are deacons and ministers we want, not architects. I insist on this, I plead for this; but let us examine ourselves, and see if this be indeed the reason for our backwardness in the lesser work. The question is not between God's house and His poor: it is not between God's house and His gospel. It is between God's house and ours. Have we no tesselated colors on our floors? no frescoed fancies on our roofs ? no niched statuary in our corridors? no gilded furniture in our chambers? no costly stones in our cabinets? Has even the tithe of these been offered? They are, or they ought to be, the signs that enough has been devoted to the great purposes of human stewardship, and that there remains to us what we can spend in luxury; but there is

a greater and prouder luxury than this selfish one--that of bringing a portion of such things as these into sacred service. and presenting them for a memorial that our pleasure as well as our toil has been hallowed by the remembrance of Him who gave both the strength and the reward. And until this has been done, I do not see how such possessions can be retained in happiness. I do not understand the feeling which would arch our own gates and pave our own thresholds, and leave the church with its narrow door and foot-worn sill; the feeling which enriches our own chambers with all manner of costliness, and endures the bare wall and mean compass of the temple.

The tenth part of the expense which is sacrificed in domes tic vanities, would, if collectively offered and wisely employed, build a marble church for every town in England; such a church as it should be a joy and a blessing even to pass near in our daily ways and walks, and as it would bring the light into the eyes to see from far, lifting its fair height above the purple crowd of humble roofs.

I have said for every town: I do not want a marble church for every village; nay, I do not want marble churches at alı for their own sakes, but for the sake of the spirit that would build them. The church has no need of any visible splendors; her power is independent of them, her purity is in some degree opposed to them. The simplicity of a pastoral sanctuary is lovelier than the majesty of an urban temple; and it may be more than questioned whether, to the people, such majesty has ever been the source of any increase of effective piety; but to the builders it has been, and must ever be. It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving (St. John xii. 5). God never forgets any work or labor of love; and whatever it may be of which the first and best portions or powers

have been presented to Him, He will multiply and increase sevenfold. Therefore, though it may not be necessarily the interest of religion to admit the service of the arts, the arts will never flourish till they have been primarily devoted to that service-devoted both by architect and employer; by the one in scrupulous, earnest, affectionate design; by the other in expenditure at least more frank, at least less calculating. than that which he would admit in the indulgence of his own private feelings.

II. THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the estimate of wisdom; but Truth forgives no insult, and endures no stain.

I would have the Spirit or Lamp of Truth clear in the hearts of our artists and handicraftsmen, not as if the truthful practice of handicrafts could far advance the cause of Truth, but because I would fain see the handicrafts themselves urged by the spurs of chivalry.

We may not be able to command good, or beautiful, cr inventive architecture, but we can command an honest archi tecture: the meagreness of poverty may be pardoned, the sternness of utility respected; but what is there but scorn for the meanness of deception?

The worth of a diamond is simply the understanding of the time it must take to look for it before it is found, and the worth of an ornament is the time it must take before it can be cut. suppose that hand-wrought ornament can no more be gene rally known from machine-work than a diamond can be known from paste. Yet exactly as a woman of feeling would not wear

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false jewels, so would a builder of honor disdain false orna ments. The using of them is just as downright and inexcu sable as a lie. You use that which pretends to a worth which it has not; which pretends to have cost, and to be, what it did not, and is not; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin. Nobody wants ornaments in this world, but everybody wants integrity. All the fair devices that ever were fancied, are not worth a lie.

This being a general law, there are, nevertheless, certain exceptions respecting particular substances and their uses. Thus in the use of brick; since that is known to be originally moulded, there is no reason why it should not be moulded into divers forms. It will never be supposed to have been cut, and therefore will cause no deception; it will have only the credit it deserves.

III. THE LAMP OF POWER.

All building shows man either as gathering or governing; and the secrets of his success are his knowing what to gather, and how to rule.

There is a sympathy in the forms of noble building, with what is most sublime in natural things; and it is the governing Power, directed by this sympathy, whose operation I shall endeavor to trace.

In the edifices of Man there should be found reverent worship and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenuewhich gives veining to the leaf, and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates animal organization,-but of that also which upheaves the pillars of the earth, and builds

up her barren precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky; for these, and other glories more than these, refuse not to connect themselves in his thoughts, with the work of his own hand; the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some Cyclopean waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress towers; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality.

Though mere size will not ennoble a mean design, yet Ac every increase of magnitude will bestow upon it a certain degree of nobleness; so that it is well to determine, at first, whether the building is to be markedly beautiful, or markedly sublime.

It has often been observed that a building, in order to show 1 its magnitude, must be seen all at once. It would be better to say, that it must have one visible bounding line from top to bottom, and from end to end. This bounding line from top to bottom may be inclined inwards, and the mass, therefore, pyramidal; or vertical, and the mass form one grand cliff; or inclined outwards, as in the advancing fronts of old houses, and, in a sort, in the Greek temple, and all buildings with heavy cornices or heads. I am much inclined, myself, to love the true vertical, or the vertical with a solemn frown of projection.

What is needful in the setting forth of magnitude in Leight, is right also in the marking it in area,-let it be gathered well together. Whatever infinity of fair form there may be in the maze of the forest, there is a fairer in the surface of the quiet

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