Page:The Parochial System (Wilberforce, 1838).djvu/114

 Nor let any man fear that he may do amiss in spending large sums on the beauty of one church, while so many are wanted. Experience refutes the niggard argument, that we should build cheap churches because we have need of many. Our numberless parish churches were built in the same age with our cathedrals; and if any man of great wealth would provide others for our new towns and villages, he will do more by spending ten, twenty, even fifty thousand pounds or more, in building and endowing one church in a worthy manner, than he could by giving the same sum to be spent by a society in raising many such buildings as are now called churches, and providing thirty pounds for the yearly endowment of each of them. For his deed will not be lost or forgotten; it will be imitated, rivalled, surpassed; and then, too, men who have only hundreds to spend instead of thousands, will find a pleasure in doing the like in their measure, and will furnish our villages with fabrics like those of old. These things may we hope to see once again, whenever men shall be made to feel, with holy David, that it is decorous to be more sumptuous in erecting a church than a mansion, that splendour and magnificence befit the house of God, rather than the dwellings of men. For at this moment the evil is not, that they do not build stately piles, and adorn them with much cost, but that they have learned to esteem a great expenditure useful when lavished on their