the
apse. There is a splendid stone pillar, a clustered column, right in
front of me, and I am as much protected from the minister as Old Put's
troops were from the British, behind the stone wall at Bunker's Hill. I
can hear his voice occasionally wandering round in the arches overhead,
and I recognize the tone, because he is a friend of mine and an
excellent man, but what he is saying I can very seldom make out. If
there was any incense burning, I could smell it, and that would be
something. I rather like the smell of incense, and it has its holy
associations. But there is no smell in our church, except of bad
air,--for there is no provision for ventilation in the splendid and
costly edifice. The reproduction of the old Gothic is so complete that
the builders even seem to have brought over the ancient air from one
of the churches of the Middle Ages,--you would declare it had n't been
changed in two centuries.

I am expected to fix my attention during the service upon one man, who
stands in the centre of the apse and has a sounding-board behind him in
order to throw his voice out of the sacred semicircular space (where the
altar used to stand, but now the sounding-board takes the place of
the altar) and scatter it over the congregation at large, and send it
echoing up in the groined roof I always like to hear a minister who is
unfamiliar with the house, and who has a loud voice, try to fill the
edifice. The more he roars and gives himself with vehemence to the
effort, the more the building roars in indistinguishable noise and
hubbub. By the time he has said (to suppose a case), "The Lord is in
his holy temple," and has passed on to say, "let all the earth keep
silence," the building is repeating "The Lord is in his holy temple"
from half a dozen different angles and altitudes, rolling it and
growling it, and is not keeping silence at all. A man who understands
it waits until the house has had its say, and has digested one passage,
before he launches another into the vast, echoing spaces. I am expected,
as I said, to fix my eye and mind on the minister, the central point
of the service. But the pillar hides him. Now if there were several
ministers in the church, dressed in such gorgeous colors that I could
see them at the distance from the apse at which my limited income
compels me to sit, and candles were burning, and censers were swinging,
and the platform was full of the sacred bustle of a gorgeous ritual
worship, a