so, when the German monk affixed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Church, the spire had ceased to be an utterance of prayerful aspiration.  It had lost its peculiar significance as an involuntary expression of worship, and had become liable to all the accidents and contingencies that attend the efforts of a merely human ambition.  The whole story is an architectural version of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who went down to the temple to pray.

Of the finished spires, the loftiest in the world are, first, that of Strasburg Minster, 474 feet; second, that of St. Stephens at Vienna, 469 feet; third, that of Notre Dame at Antwerp, 466 feet; then that of Salisbury, 404 feet; Freiburg in the Breisgau, 380-1/2 feet; and then follow the distinguished heights of Landshut, Utrecht, Rouen, Chartres, Brugrels, Soissons, and others.  The highest spire in our own country is that of Trinity Church, New York, 284 feet.  We do not “sweep the cobwebs from the sky” so effectually as when men built according to the scale of spiritual exaltation rather than that of practical feet and inches,—­after the stature of the soul, rather than that of the man.

The architects of the revival of classic architecture, with the learned language of the five orders, with pediments and attics, consoles and urns, labored to express the childlike sentiment of the spire.  But even the great Sir Christopher Wren, with his sixty steeple-towers, and all his followers to this day, have not succeeded in a translation so unnatural.  Spirituality and the artless grace of inspiration are wanting to the spires of the Renaissance, and so they struggle up painfully into the sky.  And it is very rare to find those who have gone back even to Gothic models building a spire which touches our affections, or claims affinity with any of our nobler emotions; so sensitive is this unique structure to the approach of any element foreign to the early conditions of its existence.

As for the great Strasburg example, that Jungfrau of all spires, German traditions have very properly babbled many strange stories about the erection of it.  These constitute an episode so characteristic in the history of spire-building, that this essay would be incomplete, were they not briefly told here.

In the legendary days of yore, nothing was more common than to meet that personage known as the Devil walking up and down the earth, in innocent guise, but ripe for all sorts of mischief, especially where the people were building up mighty monuments to the glory of the good God.  Very naturally, the sacred spire was a special object of his aversion; and, for some reason or other, that of Strasburg was honored with peculiar marks of his hatred.  Two ancient churches, which stood on the site of the present minster, had been successively destroyed by fire; and although, in the one case, this had been kindled by the torch of an invading army, and in the other by a thunderbolt, yet