The artistic record of the Church in England over the last hundred years is indeed a dismal one. Dull, drab and even ugly churches, in what passes for a period style, are furnished with clumsy woodwork, characterless plaster statues and fussy, over-decorated altars, exhibiting so often a general air of tawdriness which can scarcely fail to depress and may actually repel a seeker after peace and beauty in God’s house. There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions; but no more than enough of them to prove the rule and to show the tremendous opportunities which lie within our grasp.

The reasons for this unhappy state of affairs are not difficult to discover or to understand. The restoration of the English Hierarchy, and the emergence of the Church from obscurity, took place at a time when artistic taste in this country had sunk to its lowest ebb. The classical tradition had had its last flourish in the first two decades of the century, in the form which we now call the Regency style. But it flourished then not as the accepted tradition in which all men worked and within which the genius of the time found new expression, but as one of several styles, an alternative to more exotic forms borrowed from the East, or to the revived ‘Gothick’ manner. There was no longer any accepted grammar of architecture, or any universal standard of artistic criticism. The Romantic Movement in literature had been followed in the graphic arts, and the paintings of Claude and Poussin had fired the imagination of patrons of architecture.