New Englander and Yale Review Volume 21 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Article III.?HOW TO ACCOMMODATE A WORSHIPER. flOION iv otKotopiuTc fat; Acts vii, 49. When that Christian soldier, General Ilavelock, was in India, he held a prayer meeting with his soldiers in theShivey Dagoon pagoda, and let the idols hold the candles for the service. It was the best use ever made of pagan shrine. But if his purpose had been to establish a permanent place of Christian worship, lie would have treated the Shivey Dagoon to a thorough transformation. An idol temple does not offer the most convenient forms for Christian use; a truism which might well be based on the experience of the Romans of the fifth century?for after Alaric had desolated the pagan temples of the metropolis, and the Christians began to occupy them, they found those unhallowed structures required not pious lustrations alone, but architectural readjustments as well, to fit them for the abode of the true God. The history of architecture from that day to this does not show however, a complete renovation of the art to adapt it to the wants of a purer faith. The transition of pagan types into Christian was never a finished process. Heathen art built the primitive basilica, and is perpetuated to our own day in the abbeys and cathedrals of the middle ages. Even the principal churches of England, and many of our finest structures at home, adhere to the rubrics of olden time, and arrange themselves in forms well enough adapted to the ostentation of Catholicism, but too cumbrous for the simpler service of the protestant faith. And as we say of the idol temple, so of the massive and ornate cathedral, architecture can furnish us, and ought, with edifices more suitable for the worship of God and for the preaching of his word. The magnificent memorials of religious art, left by the passing ages to be the wond...