England was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an enthusiast, nay, a fanatic, in the cause; whose “Contrasts” (1836) is not only a landmark in the history of the revival of mediaeval art, but a most instructive illustration of the manner in which an aesthetic admiration of the Middle Ages has sometimes involved an acceptance of their religious beliefs and social principles.  Three generations of this family are associated with the rise of modern Gothic.  The elder Pugin (Augustus Charles) was a French emigre who came to England during the Revolution, and gained much reputation as an architectural draughtsman, publishing, among other things, “Specimens of Gothic Architecture,” in 1821.  The son of A. W. N. Pugin, Edward Welby (1834-73), also carried on his father’s work as a practical architect and a writer.

Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church just about the time when the “Tracts for the Times” began to be issued.  His “Contrasts:  or a Parallel between the Architecture of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” is fiercely polemical, and displays all the zeal of a fresh convert.  In the preface to the second edition he says that “when this work was first brought out [1836], the very name of Christian art was almost unknown”; and he affirms, in a footnote, that in the whole of the national museum, “there is not even one room, one shelf, devoted to the exquisite productions of the Middle Ages.”  The book is a jeremiad over the condition to which the cathedrals and other remains of English ecclesiastical architecture had been reduced by the successive spoliations and mutilations in the times of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Cromwell, and by the “vile” restorations of later days.  It maintains the thesis that pointed architecture is not only vastly superior artistically, but that it is the only style appropriate to Christian churches; “in it alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its practices illustrated.”  Pugin denounces alike the Renaissance and the Reformation, “those two monsters, revived Paganism and Protestantism.”  There is no chance, he thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic except in a return to Catholic faith.  “The mechanical part of Gothic architecture is pretty well understood, but it is the principles which influenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all the former works, which is so lamentably deficient. . . .  ’Tis they alone that can restore pointed architecture to its former glorious state; without it all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy.”  He points out the want of sympathy between “these vast edifices” and the Protestant worship, which might as well be carried on in a barn or conventicle or square meeting-house.  Hence, the nave has been blocked up with pews, the choir or transept partitioned off to serve as a parish church, roodloft and chancel screen removed, the altar displaced by a table, and the sedilia scattered about in odd corners.  The