ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.

SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN is the only architect in England whose good fortune it has been to be called on to erect a Protestant Cathedral. Our abbeys and minsters, venerable as they are, were founded for the purposes of Romish worship, and, however purified, retain enough to remind us of their dedication. The Popish service of the mass was essentially musical, and the church might be regarded as a vast orchestra. Hangings of tapestry, the blaze of torches, clouds of incense, the chant, the genuflection, the sound of the tintinabulum, the chorus of voices, and the peal of the organ, are suggested to the mind by the long receding aisles, the lofty and converging roof, the stained glass, and painted monuments of the antique churches. We do not suffer our abhorrence of the idolatrous forms observed, and the pernicious doctrines taught, within those walls, to turn our minds from their originally sacred purposes, or shut our eyes to the matchless beauty of their general design, or to the elaborate splendour of their detail.

We are ready to acknowledge that the form of the Greek cross as the ground plan, the aisles divided by avenues of graceful columns supporting arcades of a construction almost miraculous, the fretted roof, the many mullioned oriel, the tracery and tabernacle work within, and the crockets, and finials, and buttresses, and towers, and

surprise and awe, to The sacred drama of word and action, and assisted by deacons

spires without, were wonderfully adapted to elevate the soul and excite the imagination. the mass, performed by priests perfect in clothed with costly and variegated robes; quaintly costumed, and bearing torches or censors; supported by musicians skilled in voice and string, find a fitting theatre in those gorgeous piles, adorned with pictures, rich in colour and lavishly illuminated; and while this attractive spectacle was performing at at the high altar, the side chapels having each its priest, its service, and its saint, every tomb its decorator, every shrine its adorer, every corner its acolyte, every confessional its penitent, and the chair of peace its refugee, clinging for protection from the hand of justice to the horns of the altar, and claiming immunity, even for blood, within the sanctuary :—when such scenes were exhibited, when the passions were stimulated, the mind heated, the imagination excited, the heart warmed, and the understanding deluded by sights and sounds such as these, was it surprising that the auditories were thousands in number and one in feeling, that devotion was a passion, and worship an ecstatic dream? How much the style of architecture had to do with this effect would be a curious question; but such was the daily scene in Old St. Paul's for many centuries.

In the British period there was a town where London stands, and in the Roman time a temple occupied the height now called Ludgatehill; on its site the Anglo-Saxons raised a Christian Church, dedicated by King Ethelbert to St. Paul the Apostle, and Erkenwald, the first recorded bishop of the see of London, greatly enlarged the pile in 695; and for this and other pious deeds was sainted, and a splendid shrine was raised to him in this very Church, which was restored with encreased grandeur some 700 years after his death. About the period of the Norman Conquest, the Church of Ethelbert and Erkenwald was destroyed by fire. The heathen Temple, with its severe outline and chaste enrichments, the long low Saxon Church of wood, with its thatched roof, and the heavy round arches and massive columns of the stone Church of Erkenwald, had alike ceased to be; and for three years the ruins of the Church of St. Paul were scarcely to be distinguished from those of the surrounding buildings which had shared its fate.

It may be well to pause and consider how the simple Gospel, as recorded by the evangelists, taught by the apostles, and applied by the early missionaries, had harmonized with the plain house of wood or wicker which royal hands erected as the House of God in the days of pure Christianity. The British Church was innocent of the superstitions of Rome: prayer, praise, thanksgiving, the breaking of bread, the water sprinkling of children and adults (children in Christ), the laying on of hands, the wedding rite, and the burial of the dead, were her ceremonies. She was holy, pure, unexacting, and beloved. The converted heathen sang the praises of God in a language which his fathers had spoken and which his children were learning a language deeply interesting to us, as it is the mother of our own. They listened to the Gospel read in words which we could nearly make out, if delivered to us in the same tone nov