e, and the crying of choirs
upborne upon the wings of organ music fills the whole vast space
with a mystery of melody. Yet such ceremonial pomps as this are as
dreams and the shapes of visions, when compared with the clearly
defined splendours of a Greek procession through marble peristyles
in open air beneath the sun and sky. That spectacle combined the
harmonies of perfect human forms in movement with the divine shapes
of statues, the radiance of carefully selected vestments with hues
inwrought upon pure marble. The rhythms and the melodies of the
Doric mood were sympathetic to the proportions of the Doric
colonnades. The grove of pillars through which the pageant passed
grew from the living rock into shapes of beauty, fulfilling by the
inbreathed spirit of man Nature's blind yearning after absolute
completion. The sun himself--not thwarted by artificial gloom, or
tricked with alien colours of stained glass--was made to minister in
all his strength to a pomp, the pride of which was the display of
form in manifold magnificence. The ritual of the Greeks was the
ritual of a race at one with Nature, glorying in its affiliation to
the mighty mother of all life, and striving to add by human art the
coping-stone and final touch to her achievement. The ritual of the
Catholic Church is the ritual of a race shut out from Nature,
holding no communion with the powers of earth and air, but turning
the spirit inwards and aiming at the concentration of the whole soul
upon an unseen God. The temple of the Greeks was the house of a
present deity; its cell his chamber; its statue his reality. The
Christian cathedral is the fane where God who is a spirit is
worshipped; no statue fills the choir from wall to wall and lifts
its forehead to the roof; but the vacant aisles, with their
convergent arches soaring upwards to the dome, are made to suggest
the brooding of infinite and omnipresent Godhead. It was the object
of the Greek artist to preserve a just proportion between the god's
statue and his house, in order that the worshipper might approach
him as a subject draws near to his monarch's throne. The Christian
architect seeks to affect the emotions of the votary with a sense of
vastness filled with unseen power. Our cathedrals are symbols of the
universe where God is everywhere pavilioned and invisible. The Greek
temple was a practical, utilitarian dwelling-house, made beautiful
enough to suit divinity. The modern church is an idea expr