Form

...the financial handicaps were great...

...and we may rely upon their oncoming fortresses of spiritual conservation as hastening the day when "Ichabod" no longer shall be written over the denominational portico...

...when, as anyone knows, the Presbyterian form of worship acknowledges none of these...

...Bulwer has said that ". . . the artist never seeks to represent truth, but the idealized image of truth...

...We were still a missionary organization...

...I have in mind a handsome Presbyterian church in a certain city, whose Gothic splendor is accentuated by the fidelity with which its plan follows mediaeval use...

...Therefore, every worthwhile structure Catholics continue to erect for their worship is of value, is a chain vital, if we wish to continue to verify by the genius of the architect the correctness of his unconsciously inviolable concept of form...

...One wonders, then, whether into these Gothic cloisters their true complement will come, and religious orders undertake teaching therein...

...sacramental, since knowledge exists by right only in so far as we come thereby to a perception of God through His evidences and works...

...Here indeed the architect is without doubt fully conscious...

...Something of infinite grandeur was on the verge of unfolding, of being discovered...

...I say "unconsciously...

...What is form...

...No one dares deny that with few exceptions our own Catholic churches could not, until the present generation, lay any pretensions either to good architecture or good taste...

...Another great university has recently gemmed its campus with a splendid Gothic chapel, and the service is a modified form of Baptist worship...

...For the fact remains that, while denominational churches are appropriating the Catholic ecclesiastical form, the Church itself which still embodies the true concept of form finds that form ready to its hand in whatever school or form of architecture it cares to adventure...

...It is not too much to state that in his new liturgical groupings the architect has become his guide...

...scoff at, for instance, the writer's imputation to them of a sort of priesthood of art...

...For that there is something providential in the present planning of church architecture no thinking Christian can deny...

...One feels, therefore, that our architect friends are doing their share, and perhaps unconsciously, toward realization of the Church's continual prayer that all may become one...

...for, granting that, there must come with it a perception of other things inalienable to such ministry...

...It is this form, then, which will aid education to resume its sacramental function...

...we must have an altar sometime, somehow—by hook or crook...

...colossal...

...but also an artist, whose unerringly correct visualization of form cannot imagine the church structure except as growing logically in its function from the altar...

...in New York, Cram, an Episcopalian, may live to see the completion of the magnificent new cathedral of Saint John the Divine...

...It is his link with the great tradition, the channel wherewith his conceptions can find nourishment even though he sails the stream which waters as yet alien fields...

...If we seek farther back among the Greek sages, we may recall Plato's suggestion that all we image here is but the imperfect semblance of perfection existent elsewhere...

...Here the architect was faced with the necessity of providing both sanctuary, altar and reredos...

...the temple is but the shrine for the altar...

...Some day these surpliced anachronisms will displace themselves, the communion table move to the reredos, and the way will be paved for liturgical worship and reunion with that Church they faithfully acknowledge when they recite the Creed—and perhaps without knowing why...

...In fact, when one stops to look over the many other Gothic structures which dot our campuses everywhere, one may well envisage a time, not so far in the future, when economic pressure may make lay faculties too priceless and unobtainable...

...Again the answer must be form: magnificent...

...One wondered, contemplating the architectural monstrosities among our own and the denominational churches, where and when the innate good taste of the early colonial builders had departed the land...

...In Liverpool, Scott, a Roman Catholic, has designed the glorious new Anglican cathedral...

...but this adverb can certainly not apply to the architect's exercise of his particular talent, which embraces the artist's conception of form and the engineer's faculty for giving it being...

...When a young Episcopalian minister of my acquaintance discussed with its incumbent the poverty of a "sanctuary" whose deacons' seats faced the congregation under the canopy of what the architect hoped to indicate as a reredos, his comment brought this surprising rejoinder: "I agree with you...

...universal...

...It is undeniable that over the long course of the Church's early history, she no less than her builders began closely to approximate this secret, and the middle-ages brought her gloriously and perilously near the threshold...

...That is as closely as one may dare a definition...

...That architects sense this fact inalienably is perhaps because perception of form is the inherent talent of an artist, and the architect functions only in his fullest power when his talent as an artist enjoys free scope...

...There must come times even to the most evangelical of pastors when he ponders upon and hungers for the sacrificial aspect of worship, but the road thence has been long...

...Form then will come into its own—unique, eternal, indivisible...

...In ecclesiastical architecture form exists only in so far as the church makes provision for the altar...

...For here is a man, not merely cooperating by suggesting a church plan symbolistic of the one Church remaining sacrificial in its worship...

...It was the altar which existed first...

...whether he is not a trifle weary of a prophetic ministry, which preaching after all implies...

...a communion table, I grant you, but nothing more...

...Whether it is the renaissance of Gothic architecture itself which holds the key to the secret, or whether there has been an unconscious rebellion against the Puritan concept of the church as a meeting-house, the fact remains that denominational church architecture today in all countries is following the cruciform plan, is making provision for the sanctuary, is paving the way to the return of the altar...

...But this is an aside...

...a theory for more astute prophets than myself to follow...

...It matters not that in the magnificent reredos fat choristers now find their living niches in place of angular Gothic saints...

...the liturgy has long since been lost in the mist of postReformation centuries...

...Architects, provided they remain sincere and faithful to their talent, will continue to draw strength from those hidden resources which constitute the inspiration of true artists...

...One faces the so-called Reformation then with mingled feelings of bafflement and dismay...

...June i8, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 187 In an age wherein structural advances are making ancient construction methods obsolete, it is curious how this idea of ecclesiastical form persists, and here the architect no less than the clergyman is its custodian...

...Let us grant that ministers of denominational faiths have heard the unmistakable call which justifies their ministry...

...The growth of population, travel and the opportunity for acquired culture has in part remedied all this...

...I think we may let the evidences speak for themselves, both in the meagre present and the fuller future...

...Witness the exquisite chapel at Mundelein Seminary, near Chicago, where the form of a Congregational meeting-house has been boldly adapted to Catholic use, with the altars supplying the fit answer to the austere poverty of a structure once sacred to pulpit alone...

...the school perforce became combined with the church as befitted her conception that education and worship complemented and supplemented the other...

...The denominational minister must wonder at times whether his ideal of service demands the importance accorded to preaching in all evangelical faiths...

...What was it...

...So long as they strive to give us their conception of form they remain transcendentalists whose revelations are valuable...

...Yet architects, sensible as they must be of their utilitarian function in the structural field, may likewise (God bless them...

...so that, in spite of the oft-heard remark that the Catholic Church is of an alien culture, the evidence to the contrary is sufficiently widespread to silence...