252 Contemporary Evolution. 



the minds of English Catholics since Catholic emancipa- 

 tion, it has been nationally and fittingly expressed by the 

 architecture we have in the main hitherto adopted. What 

 could be more satisfying to the mind of an English 

 Catholic at the end of three centuries of persecution than 

 to see rising on every side church and chapel, convent 

 and cloister, the very same with those of which their 

 forefathers had been formerly deprived ! What a poem 

 can be read in the stones of S. Augustine's, Ramsgate ! 

 How complete is the resuscitation presented to us by the 

 Black Friars of Woodchester ! For some time to come 

 gothic architecture will still be fitly used, and surely 

 it might be well that the metropolitan church of West- 

 minster should visibly and tangibly declare the spiritual 

 authority ruling in it to be the legitimate successor and 

 representative of the extinct primacy of the abolished 

 province of Canterbury. 



That providential action which favoured the classical 

 Renaissance, and which did away with the narrowness 

 of pointed architecture has no less presided over the 

 great mediaeval revival which has spread so widely over 

 the earth with such happy results. But in the nature of 

 things such an architectural protest cannot be continual. 

 The continuity and unity of the Church of the nineteenth 

 century with that of the thirteenth having been by the 

 recent happy revival once for all architecturally demon- 

 strated, the devotional idea will surely cease to be occu- 



