m, which produced at last the Reformation.

And if any should say--"Nevertheless, your Protestant Gothic church,
though you made it ten times more beautiful, and more symbolic, than
Cologne Minster itself, would still be a sham. For where would be your
images? And still more, where would be your Host? Do you not know that
in the medieval church the vistas of its arcades, the alternations of its
lights and shadows, the gradations of its colouring, and all its
carefully subordinated wealth of art, pointed to, were concentrated
round, one sacred spot, as a curve, however vast its sweep though space,
tends at every moment toward a single focus? And that spot, that focus,
was, and is still, in every Romish church, the body of God, present upon
the altar in the form of bread? Without Him, what is all your building?
Your church is empty: your altar bare; a throne without a king; an eye-
socket without an eye."

My friends, if we be true children of those old worthies, whom Tacitus
saw worshipping beneath the German oaks; we shall have but one answer to
that scoff:--

We know it; and we glory in the fact. We glory in it, as the old Jews
gloried in it, when the Roman soldiers, bursting through the Temple, and
into the Holy of Holies itself, paused in wonder and in awe when they
beheld neither God, nor image of God, but blank yet all-suggestive--the
empty mercy-seat.

Like theirs, our altar is an empty throne. For it symbolises our worship
of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; whom the heaven and
the heaven of heavens cannot contain. Our eye-socket holds no eye. For
it symbolises our worship of that Eye which is over all the earth; which
is about our path, and about our bed, and spies out all our ways. We
need no artificial and material presence of Deity. For we believe in
That One Eternal and Universal Real Presence--of which it is written "He
is not far from any one of us; for in God we live, and move, and have our
being;" and again, "Lo, I am with you, even to the End of the World;" and
again--"Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in My Name, there
am I in the midst of them."

He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace. For ever He looks
down on all things which He has made: and behold, they are very good.
And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect
works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty
He has shown us, in man or w