THE CHURCH AND ART 301 



Nor did this Christian art stop with carved stone and 

 moulded brass. Every bit of wood that entered into the sanc- 

 tuary was carved and shaped with an art and a loving skill 

 almost akin to worship. Witness the wonderful choir stalls, 

 rood screens, organ frontals, and episcopal thrones and bal- 

 dacchini, found in the cathedrals and parish churches. In 

 its palmiest days, the art patronage of the Church was so great 

 that even the village chapel always had its artificer to adorn it. 



The blacksmith also came in for his share of artistic pro- 

 duction. In Spain and Portugal and in Northern Italy the 

 blacksmith was an artist. The magnificent hammered iron 

 altar and choir screens and hammered brass and bronze, in a 

 thousand entrancing shapes, testify to his artistic power. It 

 is only of very recent years that we have awakened to the 

 artistic force and power of the artificer in iron and brass, as 

 an adjunct to the architecture and sculpture of the Church. 



Even in the far-off lands of Norway and Sweden, wherever 

 cathedrals were built, whether of brick, in default of stone, as 

 at Upsala, or in the beautiful slender columns of gray stone, as 

 at Trondhjem, the church devised for its humbler structures 

 another form of art, the log church. Any one who has seen in 

 Norway and Sweden the carved logs, forming parts of the 

 church, the sanctuary and sometimes the altar, and the quaint 

 beauty of the belfries and spires of logs for the old Swedish 

 churches, can realize how in a land where wood was plentiful 

 and stone was costly such artistic results were achieved from 

 materials which here in America in our day are made simply 

 repulsive. A stroll through Oscarshall, at Christiania, or the 

 Skandsen, at Stockholm, will make one realize it. 



But the Church laid the pen and the needle under artistic 

 contribution also. It ran the gamut of art, and nothing was 

 too lowly or too insignificant to contribute to the beauty of the 

 House of God. Illumination of the beautiful manuscripts of 

 the Middle Ages is essentially a church art. Monks who wrote 

 and copied primarily to extend knowledge and the teachings 

 of the Church began to develop after their manner into con- 

 summate artists, who made the written page carry, embla- 

 zoned on it, as great works as ever the master-painters limned 

 on the walls of the church, or the glassworker wrought in the 

 windows of the cathedral. The priest at the altar read the 

 words of the Mass from a treasury of art almost as great as 



