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Editor's Table, February 1852

From: Editor's Table
Creator:  A (author)
Date: February 1852
Publication: The Opal
Source: New York State Library

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The second article brings us into familiar and most instructive acquaintance with the real levers which, under God, are to move the mind of Europe, -- Villemain, Cousin, Guizot, Michelet, and Cuvier. And then follows an article, which makes us even admire and value more than before those masters of poetry, philosophy and everything else that is interesting in humanity -- Spencer and Shakspeare.

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Success to this noble work.

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The Ecclesiologist. -- We have received and read with attention the last number of the New York Ecclesiologist. Its object, as its title imports, is to awaken a higher interest in ecclesiastical proprieties, to aid the devotions of Christians by furnishing what it considers just views with regard to Ecclesiastical Architecture, the interior arrangements of churches, the order of public worship, and sacred music, -- in short, to cultivate the aesthetics of religion.

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The Address of the venerable President, (John M'cVickar, D. D., Professor of Moral Philosophy and Belles Letters, in Columbia College.) is beautifully written, often ingenious and sometimes elegant. He claims a much higher class of ideas than those belonging to mere propriety (decorum) as the field of Ecclesiological Science, for each is the lofty phrase used to describe the subject of inquiry and teaching. It is a science of types -- certain forms and colors in building, certain arrangements of services, certain positions in the performance of public worship being deemed typical of certain portions of divine truth -- authorized exponents of the Word and Will of God. In all this we cannot sympathize. All those arrangements and combinations which, on the well-known principles of human nature, are favorable to a spirit of devotion, favorable especially to that reverence, the absence of which, it may almost be said, is the characteristic of the age, we most cordially welcome in the construction, internal arrangements and services of our churches. More than this is not only unnecessary, but, we are bound to say, dangerous.

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The expensiveness of many of our new churches, the sacrifice of the main object to be attained -- the accommodation of as many worshippers at possible -- to the gratification of mere taste, the prominence given to certain things which have nothing whatever to recommend them except some associations with antiquity, and more than all the absence, necessarily caused by this devotion to artistic peculiarities, of an all-absorbing idea that a church is a place in which to pray and praise and worship God, and in which His Word is to be proclaimed and expounded -- these are things, we would say make ecclesiology dangerous.

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With regard to the prevailing taste for what is styled Gothic Architecture, we may be allowed to make a remark or two.

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In the first place, this disposition to identify Gothic and Christian Architecture is wholly destitute of any rational or historical foundation. We do not wish to enter into a discussion of the truly difficult question, as to the origin of the Gothic style. Still, we have our opinion. It is not pretended, we resume, by the most zealous members of the Ecclesiological Society that its origin is to be traced to any supernatural source. It is a mere matter of reasoning and history. -- We will venture to suggest, then that the churches of the dark ages, in their form and style, partook of the character of the times. Every thing in the shape of a house, as it was constantly liable to attack, needed to be strong. The churches, from the habits of the age, were also strong or rather massive. We say massive rather than strong. The Roman arch, and the cylyndrical column, were weakened into the pointed arch and clustered column. And yet the style required great weights to be supported. The buttresses, therefore, which we are so eager to imitate, are really deformities rendered necessary by the defects of the structure they are to support -- just as a stick of timber is placed against the side of a tottering barn. Yet these deformities are one of the chief characteristics of the Gothic style. Now, are we to be called on to degrade the character of our Holy Religion, by allowing that its types are to be found in a style of architecture which is essentially defective because it is essentially unnatural.

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But, again, on the supposition that we might with propriety and truth associate the Gothic style with our Holy Religion what are we to say of the attempts at it, which are standing or starting up all over our country? Massive buttresses, supporting light brick walls, or quite possibly wooden ones -- unnatural and inconvenient arrangement or confusion rather of doors, seats, windows (round tri-foil and slit) recesses, &c., for the sake of no assignable object except their unnaturalness and inconvenience. But what shall we say of the "painted windows" as they are called? Do the lovers of "Gothic" suppose that the green light that shoots and cuts about in all directions in one of our new churches, any thing like that of an old cathedral in Europe, which does nothing more than soften the whole of the light of the building-like the effect produced by the mixed colors of a forest in autumn?

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