What is to be said of Westminster Cathedral? Is it a great building? Is it more than a big building? The almost universal verdict is in the affirmative. It is not petty. It is a work of genius.

Now, genius has been defined as the will and ability to “put the first thing first,” and certainly Bentley did so at Westminster. Whatever others may have said, Bentley did not say : the first thing is to make a big Byzantine Church. The first thing he did was to envisage a great building suitable for Christian worship, and, again putting the first thing first, he did not say it shall rival Beauvais in height or Rheims in sculpture ; he said : this great Christian Church shall be built of massive piers of brick spanned by vaults of concrete—these are the available materials, and I am not crying for the moon of medieval delight. He did not use such words, nor could he have used them. He was an old-fashioned English architect and was not aware of the social problem. He even dreamed of a building covered with a veneer of marble and mosaic ! But though that was his dream, and even partly his achievement, he saw his church as a great building first and only second as a much adorned one.

This is obvious from the accomplished thing and is admitted even by those people who still, in this pagan age, hanker after pointed arches and pinnacles.