bad drive away people with sensitive ears. It is not recognised that people with sensitive eyes are driven away by the excruciating faults from which very few indeed of our churches are free. And there is another class of persons concerned, the largest of all, the working class. For vulgarity in the long-run always means cheapness, and cheapness means the tyranny of the sweater. It has been pointed out that a modern preacher often stands in a sweated pulpit, wearing a sweated surplice over a suit of clothes that were not produced under fair conditions, and, holding a sweated book in one hand, with the other he points to the machine-made cross at the jerry-built altar, and appeals to the sacred principles of mutual sacrifice and love.
This vulgarity is due to much the same causes as the confusion and lawlessness of which I have already spoken. It is due to a failure to recognise the principle of authority; and authority is as necessary in art as it is in religion. Every one does what is right in his own eyes, because we have failed to recognise the first principles of the matter, the necessity of wholesome tradition on the one hand and of due deference to the artist’s judgment on the other. We do not listen to the artist when he tells us about art, and we are surprised that he does not listen to us when we tell him about religion. It is partly in the hope that this Handbook may help in restoring the ancient spirit of beauty in our churches that I venture to put it forward.
Fortunately our Church, in its wise persistent conservatism, refers us for our standard to a definite period of twelve months, in the loyal adoption of which standard both confusion and vulgarity would be as impossible as lawlessness. Much of the tawdry stupidity of our churches is due to the decline of art subsequent to that date, and to the senseless imitation of those meretricious ornaments, both of the
