Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 11.djvu/166



ground-plan of religious edifices must in every age be sensibly affected by the nature of the worship to be conducted in them, and, through the ground-plan, the effect becomes hardly less sensible upon the architecture of the building. The primitive basilica, all whose arrangements had reference to a single altar, the great mediæval minster, with its multiplicity of centres of devotion, the thoroughly modern temple with the pulpit as the life and soul of every thing, each expresses the sentiments of its own age, and in each the ritual arrangement directly modifies the architectural character. The first idea produces a long, narrow, and comparatively unbroken structure; the second tends to the erection of a building full of breaks and projections; every possible position is seized upon for the erection of an altar, and where ritual and architecture go thoroughly hand in hand, each altar is marked by a separate chapel, forming a distinct portion of the building. The third ideal, when allowed its full and fair development, is nowhere so consistently carried out as in a semicircular preaching-room. I will not advance further in a direction leading towards the forbidden arena of ritual controversy, but I may make one remark. In adapting ancient ecclesiastical models to modern uses, we should be careful to imitate no feature which is directly and solely connected with some portion of ritual which we do not mean to reproduce. And this I hold to be most distinctly the case with long transepts. I say long transepts, because it is on the length of the transept that the gist of the matter turns.

The cross form of churches Mas doubtless adopted in mediæval times on two very palpable grounds; first, its direct symbolical meaning, this being one of the extremely few cases in which I can bring myself to believe in any symbolism of the kind; secondly, its extreme majesty and