the new door, grimly closed, with
a printed notice nailed upon it: "Divine Service on Sundays. Evening
lecture." A separate plate exhibits a single compartment of the old door
curiously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the new door in
painted deal and plain as a pike-staff.

But the author is forced to confess that the case is not much better in
Catholic countries, where stained windows have been displaced by white
panes, frescoed ceilings covered with a yellow wash, and the "bastard
pagan style" introduced among the venerable sanctities of old religion.
English travellers return from the Continent disgusted with the tinsel
ornament and theatrical trumperies that they have seen in foreign
churches. "I do not think," he concludes, "the architecture of our
English churches would have fared much better under a Catholic
hierarchy. . . . It is a most melancholy truth that there does not exist
much sympathy of idea between a great portion of the present Catholic
body in England and their glorious ancestors. . . . Indeed, such is the
total absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern Catholic
buildings in England, that I do not hesitate to say that a few crumbling
walls and prostrate arches of a religious edifice raised during the days
of faith will convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind than
the actual service of half the chapels in England."

In short, Pugin's Catholicism, though doubtless sincere, was prompted by
his professional feelings. His reverence was given to the mediaeval
Church, not to her--aesthetically--degenerate daughter; and it extended
to the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Middle Ages.
"Men must learn," he wrote, "that the period hitherto called dark and
ignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is said
to have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith."
In many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin. He did not like St.
Peter's at Rome, and said: "If those students who journey to Italy to
study art would follow the steps of the great Overbeck,[22] . . . they
would indeed derive inestimable benefit. Italian art of the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries is the beau ideal of Christian
purity, and its imitation cannot be too strongly inculcated; but when it
forsook its pure, mystical, and ancient types, to follow those of sensual
Paganism, it sunk to a fearful state of degradation."

As a practisi