There
should be nothing in color or ornament which arouses the restless mood
or distracts the eye. Severe and simple walls, restrained and devout
figures in glass windows, are only to be tolerated. Descriptive
windows, attempting in a most untractable medium a sort of naive
realism, are equally an aesthetic and an ecclesiastical offense.
Figures of saints or great religious personages should be typical,
impersonal, symbolic, not too much like this world and the things of
it. There is a whole school of modern window glass distinguished by
its opulence and its realism. It ought to be banished from houses of
worship. Since it is the object of worship to fix the attention upon
one thing and that thing the highest, the room where worship is held
should have its own central object. It may be the Bible, idealized as
the word of God; it may be the altar on which stands the Cross of the
eternal sacrifice. But no church ought to be without one fixed point
to which the eye of the body is insensibly drawn, thereby making it
easier to follow it with the attention of the mind and the wishes of
the heart. At the best, our Protestant ecclesiastical buildings are
all empty! There are meeting-houses, not temples assembly rooms,
not shrines. There is apparently no sense in which we are willing
to acknowledge that the Presence is on their altar.
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