entirely failed to call to her service the great artists and craftsmen of which the last generation produced so large a number. Her place as patroness of art has been taken by the merchants of Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool.
I acknowledge that the failure to retain these classes of brain-workers has been also due to other causes which are outside the province of this book—to our sermons, for instance. Yet it must be remembered that our Church is still the most learned Church in Christendom ; and also that a want of grip of modern thought is as much shown in art as in anything else. In the case of music, which is in a more fortunate position than the other arts, it is recognised that those churches where the music is 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. A modern preacher often stands in a sweated pulpit, wearing a sweated surplice over a cassock that was 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
