hem fall, unheeded, into decay.

It is not uncommon, even yet, to find people who ought to know, and
perhaps do know, better, blaming Knox and his co-reformers for the
dilapidation and desecration of our ancient fanes. The blame belongs to
the "rascal multitude," and to the rapacious laymen who were served
heirs to the properties of the despoiled Church. What is the Church the
better for their enrichment? What has religion gained by it? The
Reformed Faith could have flourished none the less graciously if its
purified doctrine had been preached, and its reasonable worship offered,
under the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of
Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in
the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate;
St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is
the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is
effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on
the mainland used to hear when the north wind blew from Kirkwall?
Granted that ignorant superstition may have tainted the veneration in
which our fathers' holy and beautiful houses were held 400 years ago,
the iconoclasm which devastated them was not the remedy for it. The
revived interest in our old churches, which has asserted its influence
in such restorations as those of St. Giles, Dunblane, Linlithgow, St.
Vigeans, and Arbuthnott, is no revival of superstition. It is the
outcome of a more reverent spirit; of a deeper sense of the honour due
to God; of the conviction that we owe Him, in all that pertains to His
worship, the offering of our very best; and of a deeper consciousness
also of the supreme value of the Church's national position and
character, and of the duty of piously conserving whatever helps to
illustrate the historical continuity which binds its present to its
past. As regards this, nothing is so full of helpful stimulus as an
intelligent study of our ecclesiastical architecture. In it we can read
the lessons of the gradual growth of the Scottish nation from the
loosely connected tribal conditions of the ninth and tenth centuries
onwards to its consolidation under a settled monarchy; the development
of its commercial and industrial progress; its expanding relations to
the peoples of the Continent; and the vital changes in its political
life, and its religious system and belief, thence resulting. All these