grasped with hardly equaled precision and clearness, - he deserves perpetual gratitude for the emphasis and effect with which he corrected the error, given currency under several eminent names, and among others that of McCulloch, who had confined political wealth to material productions, thus excluding all consideration of the influence exercised upon national prosperity by science and professional labors. We might say with truth that the Professor's own career was the most solid refutation of this fallacy. It is difficult indeed to estimate by any gauge of this world's valuation, the worth and preciousness of such a career. The principles for which he nobly and effectively battled throughout a protracted life-time, are the very salt which preserves human society and its institutions from corruption and dissolution. They became in many a young and enthusiastic heart, where his skillful hand well knew how to plant them, the guide and stimulus of noble and useful lives, whose regulative principles were a scorn of baseness, contempt for mere expediency, the habit of duty, the enthusiasm which counts it honor to pay life for truth, reverence for the spiritual and unseen, and, as the support and lode-star of all these, Christian faith, received with humility, cherished with devotion, modestly yet firmly and fearlessly confessed before men."

CHAPTER XXI.

CATHEDRAL MISSIONS AND CHURCH BUILDING: 1850-1854.

IN

N 1850 the New York Ecclesiological Society found itself without a president under circumstances which gave good opportunity to its enemies to raise the cry of "Romanizing." The vacant

office was one neither of honor in the Church nor emolument, at the same time sufficiently prominent to make its occupant a good butt for party arrows. In spite of this, and of the fact that neither years nor pursuits fitted him for special interest in this society's labors, my father, at the request of its members, assumed the vacant office of president. He did not desire it in any way, but he sympathized most fully with that foundation principle of the Ecclesiological Society, reverence and love for the house of God, according to its motto, "Tabernacula tua quam dilecta." He also and it was the crown and blessing of his declining years-sympathized with young men, even in spite of their natural rashness, in all aspirations aiming at high and noble ends.

The possible value or use of such a society, might seem at the present day questionable. But it must be remembered that at that day we could boast of

many strange things which this society helped to banish. Even a chapel of Trinity, New York, could proudly point at that time to a chancel arrangement somewhat as follows: About six feet behind the chancel rail was a pyramid filling the greater part of the chancel and built up as follows. First, two square kneeling benches, then the holy table, not unlike in size and appearance to a closed card-table, with velvet cushion on either end; then behind, rising five or six feet, and spreading its wings both ways, a huge reading-desk with folio Bible in the centre and folio Prayer-Book on each side, with its plethoric velvet cushion swelling over in voluptuous folds and garnished with wooden fringes of fantastic shapes, and tassels whose shape and huge proportions reminded one of church bells; above this and still behind, in true pyramidal effect, the towering pulpit on whose desk the traditional fat cushion again reclined, and flung to the air of that upper region its solid fringes and tassels of turned wood; and higher still, in unapproachable dignity, the sounding-board with its gilded and symbolic decoration. Now people this structure, as it was often seen when at the close of a sermon all the clergy would stand, two on the ground floor, three in the second story, and one in the pulpit above, and you have before you a specimen of the not unusual chancel arrangements at the time when the Ecclesiological Society was formed to awaken thought and call attention to better things. Its success is written in such churches as St. George's and St. Thomas's, New York, and in the present

improved taste in church architecture throughout the country.

The following from one of the first papers written by my father on these subjects will show the tone he then took and ever afterwards maintained:

"The ecclesiologist should ever have in view a higher end than his own science gives him, as indeed every true workman must have, whatever his craft. An humble, churchlike spirit, alike quiet and earnest, affectionate and faithful, is a true and sufficient security. In these we have at once our compass, our chart, and our anchor, and, under God, need fear no quicksands, either of Rome or Geneva.

“In addition to this general guidance`as Churchmen, the society stands pledged already to certain great conservative principles in the science which it teaches, which stand forth as landmarks against wandering in church architecture. The following

may be enumerated as the chief:

1. The adoption of the old parish church of England as our present type, with its lengthened nave and ample chancel. Aisles if needed; open roof; sacristy and south porch; no gallery; and with orientation whenever it may be secured.

2. Open seats instead of pews, and, so far as may be, FREE; no proprietorship in the house of God.

3. In church building, rather to erect solidly and well, a portion, than the whole slightly.

4. To seek beauty in proportion rather than in material; for it is not roughness or rudeness that

excludes beauty, but false proportion or feeble outline.

5. To study reality and truth everywhere in the building; no sham, no pretense, no falsehood.

6. To decorate construction, only, and never to construct decoration.

7. To repudiate utterly all heathen symbols and words of vanity in churches and on monuments, and to replace them with Christian forms and words, above all with the cross, that universal emblem of our faith.

8. To have no meanness in the house of God; not wealth at home and poverty there; but to give to God and his house of our best; remembering who hath said, 'Them that honor me will I honor.'

999

But the subject which, above all others in this connection interested my father, was cathedrals and the cathedral system as essential to the efficiency of a missionary church, whether in the metropolis or in outlying missions. He fought hard for it in the first mission established in California long before this society was formed, and now he used his position and pen to further it at home.

"Such then," he says, in concluding a paper on the subject," such then are cathedrals in their essential nature, origin, and uses, the original of dioceses, their spiritual centres; the primeval citadels of the Church's strength; the nursing mothers of a thousand parishes; the primitive council of the bishops, aiding and tempering the severity perhaps of solitary rule; the maintaining in the ever open