the Virgin Mother, of apostles, saints, confessors;
pictures of the joys of heaven and the torments of hell; and outside,
grimacing from every angle, demons and goblins, amusing enough to us but
terrible to the age that set them there, visible embodiments of the evil
spirits driven from within the sacred building by the efficacy of the
holy rites. In considering the origins of medieval churches, moreover,
it must be borne in mind that as a general rule their builders were not
actuated by the motives usual in modern times, at least among
Protestants. The size of churches was not determined by the needs of
population but by the piety and wealth of the founders; and the same
applies to their number. Often they were founded as acts of propitiation
of the Almighty or of the saints, and the greater their size and
splendour the more effective they were held to be for their purpose.
Local rivalry, too, played a large part, one wealthy abbey building
"against" another, much in the same way as modern business houses
endeavour to outshine each other in the magnificence of their buildings.
Of all the mixed motives that went to the evolution of church
architecture in the middle ages, this rivalry in ostentation was
probably the most fertile in the creation of new forms. A volume might
be written on the economic effects of this locking up of vast capital in
unproductive buildings. In Catholic countries (notably in Ireland) great
churches are still built out of the savings of a poverty-stricken
peasantry; and from this point of view the destruction of churches in
the 16th century was probably a benefit to the world. This, however, is
a consideration altogether alien to the Christian spirit, the aspiration
of which is to lay up treasures not on earth but in heaven.

The Reformation was a fateful epoch in the history of church
architecture. The substitution of the Bible for the Mass destroyed the
_raison d'etre_ of churches as the middle ages had made them. Pictures
and stories, carved or painted, seemed no longer necessary now that the
open Bible was in the hands of the common people; they had been too
often prostituted, moreover, to idolatrous uses,--and "idolatry" was the
worst of blasphemies to the re-discoverers of the Old Testament. Save in
some parts of Germany, where the influence of Luther saved the churches
from wreck, an iconoclastic wave spread over the greater part of Western
Europe, wherever the "new religion" prevailed; e