to care were their pues, and so long as these were cushioned and comfortable, nothing else was called for. I have seen before now a piece of an old sheet used to cover the Communion table at the celebration of the Communion; and a lady told me the other day, that it is not many years since she caused some surprise and annoyance among the farmers in the parish where she resides, by presenting the Altar with a covering of crimson cloth, which made them rather scrupulous in using it any longer for the purpose to which they had hitherto found it convenient to devote it,-namely, as a receptacle for their hats, top-coats, and umbrellas!

It is to be hoped that such instances of horrible profaneness are growing more rare, that reverence, (a feeling which as a nation we seem to have almost wholly lost) is reviving, and that we are beginning to understand that if we are affectionate and dutiful to the Church, we shall act very differently from what

has been our practice hitherto: but who shall say that the picture lately drawn by an eminent person among us, in one of his admirable sermons, is not one which too often meets our eye in the present times?

"Here is a man," observes the Dean of Chichester, "Here is a man richly endowed with the gifts of fortune, the inhabitant of a mansion resplendent with every device that luxury can demand, or skill and taste execute, beautiful with its hangings, its carpets, its pictures, its statues, its gilding, its plate; and from this sumptuous abode he thinks it no shame to issue forth, to pay his homage to his God in a hovel incapable of holding the worshippers that require admittance, with a naked floor, with walls green with damp, with dark and broken windows, with old and dilapidated seats. From his library, where the treasures of profane literature are emblazoned with rich bindings and with all the splendours of the typogra

phical art, he turns to hear the word of God read from a book coarse, soiled and torn; and he kneels to receive the Holy Elements at an Altar with ragged and mouldy hangings, and from a paten and a chalice, which, if used for ordinary purposes, would be regarded with contempt by some of the humblest householders on his estate. Yet, it may be, this same man plumes himself, all the while, on his liberality in encouraging industry."

WE may be allowed to ask," says the Cambridge

Camden Society, in its valuable tract, the 'Few

words to Church-builders,' "would not the time and ingenuity spent on worsted work, satin stitch, bead-work, and the like frivolities, be better employed, if it were occupied in preparing an offering to God for the adornment of His holy dwelling-places? Hour after hour is cheerfully sacrificed in the preparation of useless trifles for those charity bazaars which would fain teach us that we can serve God and

mammon: no time is then thought too much, no labour spared. But when an Altar cloth or carpet is to be provided, then the commonest materials and commonest work are thought good enough."

With the spirit of these remarks I entirely agree; but I confess that I do feel that there are a class of edifices on which beautiful embroidery would be quite thrown away, as being altogether out of character and keeping with the fabric. A jewel of gold in a swine's snout would be hardly more inappropriate than would be an altar-cloth, or pulpit-cushion of ornamental needlework in one of those lath and plaster churches of modern Gothic, which have been built (to use an expression, which Mr. Paget's popular tale of St. Antholin's has made familiar to most people) in the "Compo" style. Spruce galleries with thin cast-iron pillars, deal pues, a towering pulpit obscuring the altar-table (sunk in a little niche as an apology for a chancel), neatly white-washed walls,