There are very few Societies started in our time which have done so much with such slender resources and with so very little adventitious aid as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

It was only the other day, so to speak, that a handful of men, whose hearts were in the right place, banded themselves together to raise the voice of warning against a fashion which had become a rage, and which was threatening to make a clean sweep of all that was most venerable, most precious, most unapproachably inimitable in the architectural remains of our country.

Undeterred by the clamour of incompetent impostors, undismayed by the ridicule of people of importance, undiscouraged by the difficulties which must be expected by all gallant crusaders, the little band went forth—a real Salvation Army without drums and without any flourish of trumpets—to save what remained from the devastation that had been going on, not despising the day of small things. They were an audacious band; they proclaimed that the taste and the sentiment of the world had got into an utterly vicious groove—that the taste and the sentiment of the world needed to be corrected, set aright—educated in fact—and that they were going to educate it whether the world liked being educated or not.

Astonishing presumption! “Who are ye?” said the perplexed world,—“who are ye; the apostles of a new toryism, ye that preach the keeping up of the old, which time and tide, the storms and the elements, have pronounced to be moribund? Who are ye that would watch over the homes of the bats and the owls in this our age of advance, with the works of the men of mind rising up to heaven to rebuke you? Ruin-mongers that ye be, prating about the loveliness of mild decay, while we live in the days of carving by machinery, and ashlar smoothed to the likeness of the loveliest stucco by the help of the modern stone plough, and windows that no age ever saw the like of till now, and the smuggest of pulpits and the slipperiest of tiles, and the tallest of walls built of, if not daubed with, the most untempered of mortar? Who are ye? Are ye to be your brothers’ keepers?”

Well! all this was very terrible, especially that last thrust! But even that last thrust seemed to read very like a leaf from the book of the first murderer; seemed, too, as if some modern confederates of Cain were afflicted with that same irritable temperament, that same jealousy of being called to account for their misdeeds, which would even go the length of justifying the slaughter of Abel if it should be made to appear that the dead could not be restored to life again.

But the new Reformers, whatever they may have thought, were content to hold their peace. They went peeping and prying about and protesting; they exposed the gross ignorance of an adventurer here; they issued a serious warning to a well-meaning gentleman there; they did as other apostles have done before now—they were instant in season and out of season; they reproved, rebuked, exhorted; and almost before they knew where they were, they discovered that they had many more supporters than at first they had suspected, that the world had been waiting for them this long time back, and that they had started upon their mission not a day too soon.

As soon as people begin to succeed in any mission, they are pretty sure to get into bad odour by the excesses of their more impassioned supporters. Then follow disclaimers, explanations, recriminations, and they are comforted by the reminder that “when fools fall out wise men get their due.” When this point has been reached, the other side begins to take heart, and mis-statement is apt to be accepted as the explanation of over-statement, just as now it is beginning to be believed that Antirestoration is a full and sufficient summing up of what is meant by the word Protection, and that doing nothing is all that this Society aims at.

If there are some crazy fanatics who have injured the cause which they have at heart by advocating in a furious way that all we have to do with an ancient building is to let it alone, and leave it to fall down, rather than do anything to preserve it, I for one hereby declare that I hold such fanatics to be heathen men and heretics of the worst kind. I look upon such people much as I look upon those peculiar people who denounce the whole medical profession as interferers with the laws of Providence, and who forbid the members of their sect from ever setting a broken bone or taking a prescription when sickness or infirmity has attacked them. To talk of letting an ancient building take its chance, and doing nothing to prolong its life, is to my mind to talk pestiferous nonsense with which I have no manner of sympathy. But unhappily there has been another view which has been put forward in a very specious and ingenious and captivating manner by another set of people, and which unhappily has met with immense favour at the hands of the moneyed public, and which seems to me to find its exact parallel in the proposal of a certain unfortunate lady who suffered martyrdom for her faith, or at any rate her profession, some years ago. That poor lady proclaimed to the world that she was so profoundly versed in all the virtues of certain mysterious herbs and salves and potions and mixtures, that she was prepared to guarantee the perfect restoration of youth and loveliness to the most aged and most battered of her sex; in fact, she asserted that she had discovered the grand secret of making them “beautiful for ever.” She was, I take it, the high priestess and prophetess of restoration.

Now between the criminal and indolent neglect of those who would sit down with folded hands and never stretch out a finger to avert the death of the stricken, and the pretentious puffery of quacks who assure us that they have discovered the secret of rejuvenescence, there is a whole world of difference, and between the stupid do-nothingism of the one and the rash do-everythingism of the other there is—there must be—a middle course. This is what we have to complain of, that when well-meaning people have set themselves to “restore” a church (for I shall keep myself to that branch of the subject for the present), some of us have found the greatest difficulty in learning what they were going to restore.

When these good and well-meaning people take it into their heads that an ancient ecclesiastical building is to be replaced by a modern structure in which “all the characteristic features of the original are to be reproduced and for the most part retained,” we ask ourselves with wide-open eyes of amazement and perplexity what is going to be reproduced? There is a sumptuous Norman doorway, there are abundant indications of the existences of a Norman church having existed on this spot—there are clear proofs that the Norman pillars have been recklessly cut away here to make room for a splendid thirteenth-century tomb, that the north aisle is an addition raised up at the sacrifice of the original north wall—that a chapel of no great artistic merit was added at another time, that the pitch of the roof was altered when the clerestory was added, that the chancel was rebuilt, flimsily, faultily, fantastically, just before the final rupture with Rome,—and yet that the remains of the superb sedilia which the seventeenth-century mob smashed to pieces were evidently removed from the earlier chancel by the fifteenth-century architects. There are signs, in fact, of the church never having been left undisturbed—that from generation to generation the rude forefathers of the hamlet were always doing something to their church, taking a pride in adding to or altering it, according to their notions. They never thought of reproducing anything, but rightly or wrongly they were always aiming at improving everything. You are going to restore, are you? What are you going to restore? The Norman, the Early English, the Decorated, or the Perpendicular church? What are the characteristic features of the original? What is your notion of the original which you pretend to be about to restore? The problem that presents itself becomes more difficult, more complex, the longer you look at it—the problem, namely, what you are going to restore.

If my dear old grandmother should wish to be made “beautiful for ever”—i.e. to be restored—what condition of former loveliness shall we call back? There are some who paid homage to her beauty at eighteen, some who loved her at thirty, and some who almost adored her at threescore years and ten. Look at her portraits! Which shall we take? Nay! I love her as she is, say I, with the smile that plays about her venerable lips and the soft light in the gentle eyes. I love every furrow on her broad brow and would not have the thin grey hairs turned to masses of auburn. I would keep her for ever if I might, but I would no more dream of restoring her to what she was before I was born than I would replace her by something that she is not and never was.

Now up and down this land of England there are, say, 5,000 churches that at this moment stand upon the same foundations that they stood upon 500 years ago, some few of them standing in the main as they were left eight centuries ago. If for 5,000 any one should suggest not 5,000, but 10,000, I should find no fault with the correction.

If we could go back in imagination to the condition of these churches as they were left when the Reformation began, it may safely be affirmed that there was not at that time, there never had been, and there is never likely to be again, anything in the world that could at all compare with our English churches. There never has been an area of anything like equal extent so immeasurably rich in works of art such as were then to be found within the four seas. The prodigious and incalculable wealth stored up in the churches of this country in the shape of sculpture, glass, needlework, sepulchral monuments in marble, alabaster, and metal—the jewelled shrines, the precious MSS. and their bindings, the frescoes and carved work, the vestments and exquisite vessels in silver and gold, and all the quaint and dainty and splendid productions of an exuberant artistic appetite and an artistic passion for display which were to be found not only in the great religious houses, but dispersed about more or less in every parish church in England, constituted such an enormous aggregate of precious forms of beauty as fairly baffles the imagination when we attempt to conceive it. There are the lists of the church goods—i.e. of the contents of churches—by the thousand, not only in the sixteenth century but in the fourteenth: there they are for any one to read; and, considering the smallness of the area and the poverty of the people, I say again that the history of the world has nothing to show which can for one moment be compared with our English churches as they were to be found when the spoilers were let loose upon them.5 Well! We all know that a clean sweep was made of the contents of those churches. The locusts devoured all. But the fabrics remained—the fabrics have remained down to our own time—they are as it were the glorious framework of the religious life of the past. There is no need for me to dwell upon the claim which these survivals of a frightful conflagration have upon us for safe custody. I presume we all acknowledge that claim, and the only question is how best to exhibit our loyalty. But when we have got so far we are suddenly met by a wholly unexpected and anomalous difficulty before we can make a single step in advance.

Now I am free to confess that hardly a day of my life passes in which I am not oppressed by the conviction that there are few men of my age within the four seas who are as deplorably ignorant of things in general as I feel myself to be;—but there is one branch of ignorance, if I may use the expression, which I am convinced that the enormous majority of my most gifted acquaintances are sharing with myself—I really do not know to whom these thousands of churches belong.

There was a time when the church belonged to the parish as a sort of corporation, and when by virtue of their proprietary right in their church the parishioners were bound to keep the fabric in tenantable repair. But when that obligation was removed by the abolition of Church rates (so far as I can understand the matter), the church practically ceased to belong to any one. Tell the most devoted church people in my parish that because they are church people therefore they are bound to keep the fabric in repair, and they would to a man become conscientious nonconformists in twenty-four hours. Tell my most conscientious nonconformists that next Monday there is to be a meeting in the vestry and an opportunity of badgering the parson, and not a man of them but would claim his right to be there:—because, under circumstances which are favourable to his own interests and inclinations, every inhabitant of a certain geographical area protests that he is a shareholder in his parish church. It is true that on a memorable occasion I was presented with the key of my church, and was directed to lock myself in and ring the bell, and then was solemnly informed that I had taken possession of my freehold. I daresay it was quite true, only I am quite certain nobody did believe it at the time and nobody does believe it now. From that day to this I never have been able to understand to whom my church does belong.

Now as long as it is only a question of letting things drift the question of ownership never troubles anybody. I am in the habit of telling my people that if the Church of our parish were to be swallowed up by an earthquake some fine morning, there would be only one man who would be a gainer by the catastrophe, and that man would be the rector. For his benefice would at once become a sinecure, and there would be nothing to prevent his removing to the metropolis and living there during some months of the year, and living in the Riviera during the other months, and leaving his people to shift for themselves—nothing to prevent this except those trifling considerations of duty and conscience which of course need not be taken into account. But when it comes to a question of preventing the church from tumbling down, or when it comes to a question of pulling it about—when it comes to restoring it—then practically the ownership is surrendered to the parson in the frankest and the freest and the most generous way by the whole body of the parishioners. Then the parson is allowed to be the only responsible owner of the fabric. It is remembered that he rang the bell when he came into his freehold: therefore it must be his; and if he does not take the whole burden of collecting the money and seeing the work through and making himself personally responsible for the cost, in nine cases out of ten it will not be done at all.

Now I am not the man to speak with disrespect of my brethren of the clergy. I do not believe that in any country or in any age there was ever a body of men so heartily and loyally trying to do their duty, and so generously sacrificing themselves to what they believe to be their duty, as the clergy of the Church of England are at this moment. But, whether it is their misfortune or their fault—and we are none of us faultless, not even the parsons—I am bound to express my belief that ninety-nine out of every hundred of the clergy of the Church of England know no more about the technical history of their churches than they know about law—in fact, as a body, the clergy know as little about the history of Church Architecture as lawyers know about Theology, and I could not put the case more strongly than that.

Unhappily, however, the parallel between the amiable weakness of the two professions and their relative attitude towards the two sciences in which each of them delights to dabble may be carried out only too closely. For it is painfully observable in both cases that the members of the two professions are profoundly convinced—the lawyers that a knowledge of theology, the divines that a knowledge of architecture, comes to them severally by a kind of legal or clerical instinct. If a lawyer chooses to plunge into scientific theology, and to write a book on the two Decalogues, or give us his obiter dicta on the errors of the Greek Church, though nobody is much the wiser nobody is much the worse, except the man who reads the pamphlet or the volume. But when it has been decided that a church requires a thorough overhauling, then the resigning the absolute control over and disposal of the sacred building to the parson to be dealt with as he in his wisdom or his ignorance may judge to be best becomes a very much more serious matter.

It would be easy to look at that matter from the ludicrous point of view, but it is a great deal too serious for handling as though it were anything to laugh at. Unhappily, we most of us know a great deal too much about it. The parson in some cases jauntily determines to be his own architect, and the village bricklayer highly approves of his decision, and assures him in strict confidence that architects are a pack of thieves, just as, in fact, jockeys are. The builder begins to “clear away,” then the parson gets frightened. Then he thinks he’d better have an architect—“only a consulting architect you know!” Then the bricklayer recommends his nephew brought up at the board school who has “done a deal of measurement and that like,” and then.... No! no! we really cannot follow it out to the bitter end. But in many cases where the good man, distrusting his own power, does call in the help of one supposed to be an expert, the process and the result are hardly less deplorable. There is nothing to prevent the most ignorant pretender from starting as an architect to-morrow morning; nothing to prevent his touting up and down the country for orders, though he is no more qualified to advise and report upon an ancient building than he is to construct the Channel tunnel. And we all know this very significant fact, that there never was a church that ever was reported upon by one of these solemn and aspiring young gentlemen without antecedents and without any misgivings, which was not at once pronounced to be in a most dangerous condition from weathercock to pavement. The roof is always in a most hopeless condition, the walls are frightfully out of the perpendicular and have been so for many generations, the bells jiggle alarmingly in their frames, the jackdaws have been pecking away at the mortar of the tower, fifty rectors lie buried in the chancel, and a hole was dug for every one of them, and all these holes imperatively demand to be filled up with concrete. But mercifully, most mercifully and providentially, a professional gentleman has been called in at the critical moment, exactly in the very nick of time, and now the dear old church may be saved, saved for our children’s children by being promptly restored. Thereupon the worthy parson—he, too, glad of a job—sets to work and the thing is done.

But what is done? The men that started this Society, this union for the protection of the noble structures that are a proud inheritance come down to us from our ancestors, they answered with an indignant protest: “An immense and irreparable wrong is done, and the state of things which makes it perfectly easy for a wrong like this to be repeated every week is a shameful national scandal, which we will not cease from lifting up our voices against till some means shall have been devised for preventing the periodical recurrence of these abominable mutilations, these cruel obliterations, these fraudulent substitutions up and down the land of new lamps for old ones.”

At starting this was all that our pioneers ventured to proclaim. I have often heard people object, “These gentlemen are so vague, they don’t know what they would be at!” Now, I know that with some folk it is quite sufficient to condemn any men or any opinions to pronounce them vague. Why! Since the beginning of the world no great forward movement, no great social religious or political reform, has ever achieved its object and gone on its victorious course conquering and to conquer which did not pass through its early stage of vagueness—that stage when the leaders were profoundly conscious of the existence of an evil or an injustice or a falsehood which needed to be swept away, though they did not yet see what the proper manner of setting to work was, or where the broom was to be found to do the sweeping with.

Oh ye merciful heavens! save us from cut-and-dried schemes, at least at starting! All honour to the men, say I, who did not pledge us all to a scheme, to a paper constitution, but who had the courage to say no more than this: “Here in the body politic there is a horrible mischief at work; the symptoms are very bad, very alarming. Do let us see if some remedy cannot be found. Do help us to see our way out of our perplexity.”

Eleven years have now gone by since the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded, and I venture to think that the time has come when we must pass out of this stage whose characteristic is said to be vagueness of statement and uncertainty in the plan of operations, and when it behoves some one to speak out and propose that we should take a step in advance. I have no right to compromise my betters by pledging them to any crude proposition, or any course which may seem to myself to be the right one. But, as a mere private person, I hereby declare it to be my strong opinion that no time ought to be lost in settling the very important question to whom the churches of England do belong, and who have the right of defacing, degrading, debasing the temples of God in the land, turning them into blotchy caricatures, or into lying mummies smalmed over with tawdry pigments, like the ghastly thing in Mr. Long’s picture in the Academy this year, with an effeminate young pretender in the foreground making a languid oration over the disguised remains of the dead.

There are some things (and they are the most precious of all things) which no man has any moral right to treat as his own. They are the things which came to us from an immemorial past, and which belong to our children’s children as much as to ourselves. In the county of Norfolk we have one aged oak that has stood where it stands now for at least a thousand years. Under its shadow twenty generations of a noble race have passed their childhood and early youth, left it with a fond regret when the call came to them to engage in the battle of life, and returned at last to find it still there, hale and vigorous as it was centuries before the earliest of their ancestors settled in the land where its mighty roots are anchored. The story of that race is full of romance not untinged by pathos. If that oak were a talking oak, what moving tales it could tell! If ’Arry ’Opkins of ’Ounslow should cast his fishy eyes upon that monster vegetable, his first impulse would be to carve upon its gnarled bark his own hideous name or at least those two unhappy initials which he cannot pronounce. His next would be to suggest that the tree should be trimmed up—restored in fact. I should not like to be the man to make that proposition. And why? Because I think the noble gentleman who calls that oak his heirloom looks upon it as a sacred trust which he holds from his forefathers, and holds for his posterity too—a trust which it would be dishonour to neglect, to mutilate, or to destroy.

But within a pistol-shot of that venerable and magnificent tree stands the little village church. There lie the bones of twenty generations of De Greys; there they were baptized, wedded, buried. There they knelt in worship, lifted up their voices in prayer and praise; from father to son they bowed their heads at the altar, gazed at the effigies of their ancestors—sometimes bitterly lamenting that the times were evil and poverty had come upon them, sometimes silently resolving that they would carve out for themselves a career—sometimes returning to thank God who had enabled them so fully to perform their vow—sometimes glad at the sound of their own marriage bells, sometimes sad when the tolling of those bells announced that another generation had passed away. There stands that little church. The old Norman tower was standing as it stands to-day when, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the first De Grey came to Merton; and I have not a doubt that if a self-styled professional gentleman, young enough and presumptuous enough and ignorant enough, were to appear upon the scene, he would solemnly and emphatically advise that Merton Church should at the earliest possible moment be restored. The horrible thought is that under quite conceivable circumstances the thing might be done with very little difficulty and before you knew where you were.

Think of the feelings of that old oak then!

I know I shall be told that a tree is one thing and a church is another, that the one you cannot restore but you can restore the other. You can restore neither; you can murder both if you are a heartless assassin. Was it in the 1851 Exhibition that they built up the bark of a giant of the Californian forests and told us it was a restoration of a wonder of the world that had reared up its lofty top to heaven even from the days of the Pharaohs? A restoration! Nay! a colossal fraud. But such a fraud as is perpetrated in our midst every month, and which, when men have committed, they are actually proud of.

I am often asked, When was this or that church built? And my answer is ready at hand. It was not built at all! It grew! For every church in the land that has a real history is a living organism. Do you tell me that yonder doorway is of the twelfth century; that yonder tower may have stood where it does when the Conqueror came to sweep away “pot-bellied Saxondom;” that the chancel was rebuilt in the time of the Edwards—the rood screen crowded into a place never meant for it during the Wars of the Roses, the pulpit supplied by a village carpenter in the sixteenth century, the carvings of the roof destroyed in the seventeenth, the royal arms supplied in the eighteenth, and therefore that nothing but a clean sweep is to be made of it all, as a preliminary to building it all up from the ground in the nineteenth century? Do you call that restoration? You assure me that you will faithfully and religiously copy the old. Why that is exactly what you can’t do! You can’t copy the marks of the axe on early Norman masonry. You can’t copy Roman brickwork; you daren’t copy Saxon windows that let the light in through oiled canvas in the days when sacredness, and mystery, and a holy fear were somehow associated with the presence of dimness and darkness and gloom. You can’t restore ancient glass: the very secret of its transcendent glories lies in the imperfection of the material employed. Nay, you can’t even copy a thirteenth-century moulding or capital: you can’t reproduce the carvings you are going to remove—you have no eye for the delicate and simple curves: your chisels are so highly tempered that they are your masters, not your servants: they run away with you when you set to work and insist on turning out sharply cut cusps, all of the same size, all of them smitten with the blight of sameness, all of them straddling, shallow, sprawling, vulgar, meaningless; melancholy witnesses against you that you have lost touch with the living past. You can make the loveliest drawings of all that is left, but the craftsmen are gone. There’s where you fail; you say this and that ought to be done, and this or that is what I mean; but when you expect your ideas carried out then you utterly fail.

I know it is often said that the men of bygone times—say of the fifteenth century—were at least as great restorers as we are. If it were true, that would not excuse us. But is it true? Why, so far from it, it is exactly because the architects of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not aim at restoring that our modern visionaries so often ask to be allowed to destroy their work and to reproduce what they destroyed. I am no great admirer of those perpendicular gentlemen, with their ugly flattened arches and their huge gaping west windows and their trickery and their pretence and their insincere display, but they did know their own minds. They did retain some architectural traditions, and they had some architectural instincts. But what have we to represent even their instincts? Have our craftsmen anything in the shape of historic enthusiasm? or any sympathy with the religious feeling or ritual of the past? Emphatically, No! Have they the old spirit of humility and reverence, of generous regard for their masters, teachers, and pastors in religion or in art? Have we among us the self-distrust which kept in check the hankering of our forefathers to alter or improve? Or have we only the fidgetty and utterly reckless impatience of belonging to the majority of dismal beings, who never make a great hit and leave no monument behind them except of the things they destroyed? A few weeks ago I was engaged in examining the muniments of the Diocese of Ely, and I came upon an agreement drawn up in strictly legal form between the Prior of the convent of Ely on the one part and Thomas Peynton, master mason of Ely, on the other part—the convent agreeing to allow Peynton an annuity for life of twelve marks of lawful money of England—i.e. £8 sterling—without board and lodging, and a suit of clothes such as gentlemen wore, he to do such masonry and stone-cutting as the Sacrist of the convent should lay upon him, and further to teach three apprentices, to be nominated, fed, and boarded at the cost of the convent, which in return was to benefit by all the profits of their labour. If the convent should at any time send their master mason to work at any of their outlying possessions, then and only then was the good man to receive an allowance for his maintenance. If his health broke down or he became incapacitated by old age, he was to receive a pension of six marks a year, and his clothes, but nothing more. Who has not stood before some of our cathedrals and found himself asking, “How was this temple piled up to heaven? How could men build it in those rude old times.” How? Because in those rude old times, as we are pleased to call them, there were men like simple old Thomas Peynton of Ely, who, having food and raiment, were therewith content; men who lived for the joy and glory of their work and did not regard their art as a means of livelihood, so much as an end to live for; men who were so stupid, so far astray, that to sacrifice the joy of living for a mountain of coin seemed to them propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

You will be able to restore the churches which these men built when you can revive among the humblest workmen the spirit which animated the benighted, deluded, Quixotic enthusiasts of the days gone by, and not till then.

Meanwhile, we do know how to build better houses to live in—immeasurably grander hotels, magnificent clubhouses, and sumptuous restaurants. Our bridges and our railway stations, our barracks and our shops, are structures of which we have a right to be proud; but as for our churches, let us be humble, let us forbear from meddling with what we do not understand. Let us pause before we set ourselves to restore, let us be thankful if we are permitted to preserve.

But preserve? How are we going to begin? As a preliminary, as a sine qu non, what is wanted is to stop all unlicensed meddling with all ancient buildings throughout the land. This can only be done by making it quite plain to whom those buildings belong. The ownership of the Houses of God must no longer be left, as it is, an open question. It is absolutely necessary that the present anomalous condition of affairs should be got rid of, and without delay, and I see only one way out of the difficulty. The old churches are a heritage belonging to the nation at large, and now, more than ever before, it is true that the public at large have a claim to be heard before these venerable monuments of past magnificence should be dealt with as if they were the private property of individuals, or of a handful of worthy people inhabiting a minute geographical area. There are cases not a few where the whole population of a parish could be completely accommodated in a single aisle of the village church. In one case that I forbear from naming lest some incompetent and restless aspirant for notoriety should fly upon the spoil and tear it limb from limb—one case of a certain parish where the population is under 200 all told—where there still exists one of the most magnificent churches in England, capable of accommodating at least 1,200 worshippers on the floor, and that church untouched by profane hands for centuries, its very vastness has frightened the most audacious adventurers, and it still stands in its majesty as the wonder and pride of the county in which it is situated.

To restore it according to the notions only too much in vogue would absorb a considerable fortune; to preserve it for future generations, unmutilated, undefaced, and in a condition to defy the elements for centuries, would require a few hundreds; and yet it would probably be easier to find a Croesus who to gratify his own vanity or whim would be ready to lavish thousands upon that glorious structure and turn it into a gaudy exhibition for nineteenth-century sightseers to come and stare at; easier to find that than to find the hundreds for putting the church into substantial repair. Yet I for one am inclined to think that to do the last is a duty, to do the first would probably end in committing an outrage. When we contemplate such churches as this (and it is by no means a solitary instance), what forces itself upon some of us is that they need first and foremost to be protected before we begin to speak even of repairing them. We talk with pride of our National Church. Is it not time that we should begin to talk of our National Churches, and time to ask ourselves whether the ecclesiastical buildings of this country should not be vested in some body of trustees or guardians or commissioners who should be responsible at least for their preservation? Is it not time that we should all be protected from the random experiments of ’prentice hands and the rioting of architectural buffoonery?

All honour to the generous enthusiasm which has urged so many large-hearted men and women in our time to make sacrifices of their substance, not only ungrudgingly but joyfully and thankfully, to make the Houses of God in the land incomparably more splendid and attractive than they were. But even enthusiasm, the purest and noblest and loftiest enthusiasm, if misdirected and uninstructed, has often proved, and will prove again, a very dangerous passion. Before now there have been violent outbreaks of enthusiastic iconoclasm when the frenzy of destroyers has been in the ascendant and when those who would fain preserve the monuments of the past have been persecuted to the death. Is there enthusiasm abroad—enthusiasm to strengthen the things which remain that are ready to die? By all means let it have scope; give it opportunity of action; let it have vent, but beware how you allow it to burst forth into wild excesses; let it be at least kept under control. Build your new churches as sumptuously as you please. Ours is the age of brick and iron, of mechanical contrivances, of comfort and warmth and light. Put all these into your new temples as lavishly as you will, and then peradventure the Church architecture of our own time may take a new departure; but for the old Houses of God in the land, aim at preserving them and do not aim at more!

Let it be enacted that, whosoever he may be, parson or clerk, warden or sidesman, architect or bricklayer, man or woman, who shall be convicted of driving a nail into a rood-screen or removing a sepulchral slab, of digging up the bones of the dead to make a hole for a heating apparatus, bricking up an ancient doorway or hacking out an aperture for a new organ or scraping off the ancient plaster from walls that were plastered five hundred years ago—any one, I say, who shall do any of these acts, even with the very best motives, if he have committed such an offence without the license of a duly constituted authority, shall be adjudged guilty of a misdemeanour and sent to prison without the option of paying a fine. Would you do less in the case of a student at the National Gallery who should presume to restore Gainsborough’s “Parish Clerk” or Francia’s “Entombment”?

Having made unlicensed meddling with our churches penal, the next thing to be done is to carry out a survey of our churches, and to obtain an exhaustive report upon the condition of all the ancient ecclesiastical buildings in the country which up to this moment have escaped the ravages of the prevailing epidemic. I am afraid the list of such favoured edifices would stagger and horrify us all by its smallness.

The report to be drawn up and published of such a survey as I have ventured to propose would set out to the world an authoritative presentment of the actual condition of each church visited, drawn up by duly qualified and certificated professional men according to instructions laid down for them. The reports should include accurate ground-plans made according to one uniform scale, elaborate copies of mouldings, window-tracery, doorways, capitals, roofs—not merely pretty little sketches suitable for the readers of the Graphic, but working drawings, the results of careful measurement; and to this should be added lists of monumental brasses, fonts, remains of mural paintings or ancient glass, a complete register, in fact, of whatever remains the churches contained of ancient work in wood or stone or metal at the time the building was examined and reported on. Of course I shall be met by the objection that the expense of such a survey would be enormous, and that any such scheme is therefore for that one reason impracticable. I am not prepared to go into the estimates. But of this I feel very certain, that, so far from the cost of such a survey and such a publication of reports as those contemplated deserving to be called enormous, it would be much more truly described as insignificant.

The great bulk of the ancient churches which have not been violently tampered with during the last thirty years or so belong to two classes: the very small ones, which have seemed not worth meddling with, and the very large ones which have frightened even the restorers. The cost of drawing up reports upon the small churches would be very trifling and would bring down the average expense considerably, and as to the time required for carrying out such a survey, it need not, I believe, occupy more than three years, though I dare say it might profitably be spread over five. As to any other difficulty standing in the way, it is ridiculous to suggest it. A preliminary survey of all the churches in England was actually begun under the sanction of the ArchÆological Institute thirty years ago, and a brief report upon the condition of every church in seven counties was published, and may be purchased now for a song. Each church was personally visited by some competent antiquary or architect, and a slight but instructive notice of every edifice was supplied. The survey of the county of Suffolk alone dealt with no less than 541 ecclesiastical buildings of one sort or another. Will it be said that what was so effectively carried out on a small scale by private enterprise thirty years ago could not be done on a large scale now, or that there is less need to do it now than there was in the past generation?

And consider the collateral advantages that would ensue. Consider the immense gain of keeping a band of young architects out of mischief for five years; of inducing them during that time to confine themselves to the severe study of an important branch of their art; of compelling them to become acquainted with the history of its growth and development, and familiarizing them with the minutest detail of Gothic architecture, not in books but in situ; and above all of giving them a direct interest in keeping up and preserving some hundreds of ancient buildings which, as things are now, they have actually a pecuniary interest in tempting people to pull down.

But, desirable as it would be—nay, necessary though it be—that some such undertaking as this should be carried through, the other question must come first. Again and again we find ourselves driven back upon that when we attempt to stem the current of vandalism that may happen to be setting in this direction or in that. The ownership of our ecclesiastical edifices must be placed upon a different footing from that which we have acquiesced in too long. Sooner or later this must come; the sooner it comes the better for the interests we have at heart.

At this point prudence suggests that I should pause. The time has not come for putting forward more than an outline of a proposal which is sure to be denounced as revolutionary. It will be a great point gained if we can find acceptance for the principle advocated. We all do dearly love our own old ways of looking at things; we all do cling tenaciously to the prejudices which we inherited or which were stamped upon our minds in the nursery; we all do honestly detest being worried into changes which interfere with our habits of thought and action and compel us to enter upon some new course. Yet if it be once brought home to us that a great national heritage is being rapidly sacrificed, allowed to perish, or, worse, being wantonly destroyed for lack of that small measure of protection which life and property have a right to expect in every civilized community, I believe that the sense of a common danger will unite men in a generous forgetfulness of their favourite maxims and a shame at their own supineness, and awaken them to see the necessity for concerted action; and then the thing that needs doing will be done. There was a time in our history when the cry of “the Church in danger” provoked a strange frenzy among the people. The panic did not last very long, and not much came of it. But if another cry should be raised by gentle and simple and men of all creeds and parties, the cry of “the churches in danger!” I do not think little or nothing would come of that. That would be not the mere expression of a passing sentiment, but it would be a call to action; and when that cry does come to be raised, the public at large will not be satisfied with anything less than drastic measures, because the nation will have been roused to a consciousness of the value of their heritage; and when a great people begins to assert itself, it is not often that it is content with demanding only what it is morally justified in claiming.

NOTE.

The following appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette of August 15, 1889. If a more dreadful comment upon the above essay can be produced, I have not yet met with it:—

DISESTABLISHMENT BY DEMOLITION.

Mr. Thackeray Turner, the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, requests us to publish the following appeal for an ancient church which is in imminent danger of destruction:— The parish of Sotterley, in the county of Suffolk, lies about five miles from the town of Beccles, and is one of those close parishes which they who live in the opens are wont to look upon with a suspicion of envy. It is the property of a single owner; not a field or meadow, not a yard of ground by the roadside, not a stake in the hedgerow, not a brick or a gate is to be seen in Sotterley that is not part and parcel of the possessions of the squire and lord of the manor. The estate was for some 400 years held by a family named Playters, which was counted among the great Suffolk houses, and which came to grief at last, partly by taking the wrong side in the troublesome times, and partly by the profuse hospitality which the overgrown size of Sotterley Hall tempted its owners to indulge in. But for four centuries they lived here, and here generation after generation they died and were laid in their graves. In the little church which in life they loved, their bones rest now, and there are their monuments in brass and marble. The walls are studded with their effigies.

Moreover, these Playters—and indeed their predecessors the Sotterleys—spent money and pains upon the sacred building. There to this day stands the fourteenth-century screen in wonderfully good preservation, four at least of the figures in its panels still retaining a great deal of the old brilliancy of colour, though at least 500 years have passed since they were first set up in the position they now occupy. There, too, in situ may be seen many of the old oak benches with their handsome “poppy-heads,” doubtless carved by Sotterley craftsmen, and carved out of the oaks that were growing in Sotterley wood before the Wars of the Roses had begun. The same roof, which might be easily repaired at an insignificant cost, covers the chancel which covered it before people had dreamed of a Tudor king, the panels but little injured, and of the bosses not one missing.

A man may visit fifty churches in East Anglia, and not meet with one so entirely adapted to the needs of the small population who delude themselves with the preposterous belief that they have a right to worship there.

Moreover, Sotterley Church stands in a churchyard of unusually large dimensions. It must cover at least an acre of ground, and not half of this space shows the smallest sign of interments having been made in it during the present century. But, unhappily, Sotterley Church and churchyard lie in the middle of Sotterley Park—not that it was always so, for the park has come to the church, not the church to the park—and people will insist in going to church, even farmers and farm labourers will, and worshipping the Most High where their forefathers worshipped before them. The Hall of the Playters was pulled down during the last century, and the new hall—an ugly white-brick mansion of no pretension—was set up much nearer to the ancient church; and when Sotterley people died nothing could prevent their relatives from carrying their dead to the old graveyard and laying them where they themselves hoped to lie some day. But was not this a little too bad, to have a funeral procession of tearful clodhoppers passing through your park gates and under your very windows, asking no leave, but taking it in quite a brutal fashion?

Therefore, about ten years ago, a vestry meeting, or something of the sort, was held in Sotterley. The landlord’s pleasure was signified, certain formalities were gone through, the tenantry, small and great, were told that it was desirable that Sotterley churchyard should be closed, and, the legal document being duly drawn up, an order was obtained from the Privy Council, and the churchyard was closed accordingly. Outside the park gates, in a place where four ways meet, a square patch of ground, scrubby and soppy, has been fenced off by a mean and ill-kept hedge, and in the middle of it stares rather than stands, a forbidding protuberance, an octagonal construction of cheap Sotterley bricks, covered with cheap Sotterley tiles, looking like a ginger beer stall in a cricket ground where there is no play going on. This thing is called a chapel, I believe, and here the Sotterley people must needs bring their dead. Will they all be brought here? High and low—rich and poor one with another? Well, to get rid of the funerals passing through the park was one point scored; but it was but a beginning. On Easter Monday last a meeting of the parish in vestry assembled was held as usual in Sotterley church. I am told that the parishioners, knowing what was coming, very discreetly kept away, all except the unhappy parson, who was bound to be there, the landlord and one, two, or three others, who, it is suspected, were told to be there. Forthwith a resolution drawn up beforehand was proposed, seconded, and carried unanimously—for the parson had nothing to do but to “put it to the meeting”—to the effect that it was desirable to pull down or shut up the church of Sotterley, and build another somewhere else. I am told that this resolution has been actually forwarded to the Bishop of Norwich and that a faculty has been actually applied for to close or destroy a church which has been standing in its present site for the best part of a thousand years, and that it only remains for the Bishop to give his assent to this iniquitous proposition, and one more of those monstrous outrages will have become an accomplished fact which we English submit to with just a little snarling after they have been committed, and which we allow to be perpetrated under our eyes without ever lifting a finger to prevent. Whether the Bishop of Norwich is the man to connive at so shameful a job as this, and to give his episcopal sanction to the proposed desecration, is a question that is a humiliating one to ask, for is it less than infamous that such things are so possible that we begin to inquire about their probability?