e arch sank lower; and the rafters
grew more horizontal; and the likeness to the old tree, content to grow
no more, took the place of the likeness to the young tree struggling
toward the sky.

And now--unless you are tired of listening to me--a few practical words.

We are restoring our old cathedral stone by stone after its ancient
model. We are also trying to build a new church. We are building it--as
most new churches in England are now built--in a pure Gothic style.

Are we doing right? I do not mean morally right. It is always morally
right to build a new church, if needed, whatever be its architecture. It
is always morally right to restore an old church, if it be beautiful and
noble, as an heirloom handed down to us by our ancestors, which we have
no right--I say, no right--for the sake of our children, and of our
children's children, to leave to ruin.

But are we artistically, aesthetically right? Is the best Gothic fit for
our worship? Does it express our belief? Or shall we choose some other
style?

I say that it is; and that it is so because it is a style which, if not
founded on Nature, has taken into itself more of Nature, of Nature
beautiful and healthy, than any other style.

With greater knowledge of Nature, both geographical and scientific, fresh
styles of architecture may and will arise, as much more beautiful, and as
much more natural, than the Gothic, as Gothic is more beautiful and
natural than the Norman. Till then we must take the best models which we
have; use them; and, as it were, use them up and exhaust them. By that
time we may have learnt to improve on them; and to build churches more
Gothic than Gothic itself, more like grot and grove than even a northern
cathedral.

That is the direction in which we must work. And if any shall say to us,
as it has been said ere now--"After all, your new Gothic churches are but
imitations, shams, borrowed symbols, which to you symbolise nothing. They
are Romish churches, meant to express Romish doctrine, built for a
Protestant creed which they do not express, and for a Protestant worship
which they will not fit." Then we shall answer--Not so. The objection
might be true if we built Norman or Romanesque churches; for we should
then be returning to that very foreign and unnatural style which Rome
taught our forefathers, and from which they escaped gradually into the
comparative freedom, the comparative naturalness of that true Gothic of
w