A good many people have the idea, so it seems, that Gothic architecture and Christianity are essentially one and the same thing.  Just as many regard it as an act of piety to work an altar cloth or to cushion a pulpit.  It may be, and it may not be.

Our Gothic church is likely to prove to us a valuable religious experience, bringing out many of the Christian virtues.  It may have had its origin in pride, but it is all being overruled for our good.  Of course I need n’t explain that it is the thirteenth century ecclesiastic Gothic that is epidemic in this country; and I think it has attacked the Congregational and the other non-ritual churches more violently than any others.  We have had it here in its most beautiful and dangerous forms.  I believe we are pretty much all of us supplied with a Gothic church now.  Such has been the enthusiasm in this devout direction, that I should not be surprised to see our rich private citizens putting up Gothic churches for their individual amusement and sanctification.  As the day will probably come when every man in Hartford will live in his own mammoth, five-story granite insurance building, it may not be unreasonable to expect that every man will sport his own Gothic church.  It is beginning to be discovered that the Gothic sort of church edifice is fatal to the Congregational style of worship that has been prevalent here in New England; but it will do nicely (as they say in Boston) for private devotion.

There isn’t a finer or purer church than ours any where, inside and outside Gothic to the last.  The elevation of the nave gives it even that “high-shouldered” appearance which seemed more than anything else to impress Mr. Hawthorne in the cathedral at Amiens.  I fancy that for genuine high-shoulderness we are not exceeded by any church in the city.  Our chapel in the rear is as Gothic as the rest of it, —­a beautiful little edifice.  The committee forgot to make any more provision for ventilating that than the church, and it takes a pretty well-seasoned Christian to stay in it long at a time.  The Sunday-school is held there, and it is thought to be best to accustom the children to bad air before they go into the church.  The poor little dears shouldn’t have the wickedness and impurity of this world break on them too suddenly.  If the stranger noticed any lack about our church, it would be that of a spire.  There is a place for one; indeed, it was begun, and then the builders seem to have stopped, with the notion that it would grow itself from such a good root.  It is a mistake however, to suppose that we do not know that the church has what the profane here call a “stump-tail” appearance.  But the profane are as ignorant of history as they are of true Gothic.  All the Old World cathedrals were the work of centuries.  That at Milan is scarcely finished yet; the unfinished spires of the Cologne cathedral are one of the best-known features of it.  I doubt if it would be in the Gothic spirit to finish a church at once.  We can