welling-house in the middle ages was rich with the same ornaments
and quaint with the same grotesques which fretted the porches or
animated the gargoyles of the cathedral; that what we now regard with
doubt and wonder, as well as with delight, was then the natural
continuation, into the principal edifice of the city, of a style which
was familiar to every eye throughout all its lanes and streets; and that
the architect had often no more idea of producing a peculiarly
devotional impression by the richest color and the most elaborate
carving, than the builder of a modern meeting-house has by his
whitewashed walls and square-cut casements.[34]

Sec. LIII. Let the reader fix this great fact well in his mind, and then
follow out its important corollaries. We attach, in modern days, a kind
of sacredness to the pointed arch and the groined roof, because, while
we look habitually out of square windows and live under flat ceilings,
we meet with the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our abbeys. But
when those abbeys were built, the pointed arch was used for every shop
door, as well as for that of the cloister, and the feudal baron and
freebooter feasted, as the monk sang, under vaulted roofs; not because
the vaulting was thought especially appropriate to either the revel or
psalm, but because it was then the form in which a strong roof was
easiest built. We have destroyed the goodly architecture of our cities;
we have substituted one wholly devoid of beauty or meaning; and then we
reason respecting the strange effect upon our minds of the fragments
which, fortunately, we have left in our churches, as if those churches
had always been designed to stand out in strong relief from all the
buildings around them, and Gothic architecture had always been, what it
is now, a religious language, like Monkish Latin. Most readers know, if
they would arouse their knowledge, that this was not so; but they take
no pains to reason the matter out: they abandon themselves drowsily to
the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style; and
sometimes, even, that richness in church ornament is a condition or
furtherance of the Romish religion. Undoubtedly it has become so in
modern times: for there being no beauty in our recent architecture, and
much in the remains of the past, and these remains being almost
exclusively ecclesiastical, the High Church and Romanist parties have
not been slow in availing themselves of the natural instinct