n-work spires,
which, if erected, would have surpassed in height and richness all
hitherto existing. But it is worthy of note that at this period the
purity of the Church had become so sullied with priestcraft and the
plenitude of Papal power, that it no longer possessed within its
violated bosom those sacred impulses of piety which whilom sent up the
simple spire, like a pure messenger, to whisper the aspirations of men
to the stars. "Gay religions, full of pomp and gold," could neither feel
nor utter the grave tenderness of the early inspirations. And so, when
the German monk affixed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg
Church, the spire had ceased to be an utterance of prayerful aspiration.
It had lost its peculiar significance as an involuntary expression of
worship, and had become liable to all the accidents and contingencies
that attend the efforts of a merely human ambition. The whole story is
an architectural version of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican
who went down to the temple to pray.

Of the finished spires, the loftiest in the world are, first, that of
Strasburg Minster, 474 feet; second, that of St. Stephens at Vienna,
469 feet; third, that of Notre Dame at Antwerp, 466 feet; then that of
Salisbury, 404 feet; Freiburg in the Breisgau, 380-1/2 feet; and then
follow the distinguished heights of Landshut, Utrecht, Rouen, Chartres,
Brugrels, Soissons, and others. The highest spire in our own country is
that of Trinity Church, New York, 284 feet. We do not "sweep the cobwebs
from the sky" so effectually as when men built according to the scale
of spiritual exaltation rather than that of practical feet and
inches,--after the stature of the soul, rather than that of the man.

The architects of the revival of classic architecture, with the learned
language of the five orders, with pediments and attics, consoles and
urns, labored to express the childlike sentiment of the spire. But even
the great Sir Christopher Wren, with his sixty steeple-towers, and
all his followers to this day, have not succeeded in a translation so
unnatural. Spirituality and the artless grace of inspiration are wanting
to the spires of the Renaissance, and so they struggle up painfully into
the sky. And it is very rare to find those who have gone back even to
Gothic models building a spire which touches our affections, or claims
affinity with any of our nobler emotions; so sensitive is this unique
structure to the a