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 COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE 
 LIBRARY 
 
NA5235.C58M13"""'"'"""'"'^ 
 
 St. Agnes Church, Cleveland, Ohio. 
 
 3 1924 015 339 231 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924015339231 
 
E. Pl. Mo rn S L U. B, hxc\\ .\\\A 
 
ST. AGNES CHURCH 
 
 CLEVELAND - OHIO 
 
 AN INTERPRETATION 
 By ANNE O'HARE McCORMICK 
 
 The Reverend Gilbert P. Jennings, L. L. D. 
 
 Pastor 
 
 JOHN THEODORE COMES 
 Architect 
 
 IS . 
 
THE MARTIN PRINTING COMPANY 
 CLEVELAND. OHIO 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 jHE most interesting study in the world is the history 
 of man. All drama, all experience and all phil- 
 osophy are contained in that long and unfinished 
 Odyssey. But it is an epic so vaguely and feebly told 
 in the written record that the wise man does not go to 
 books to read history; he goes to buildings. To know man, what 
 he thought, what he dreamed, what he worshipped, it is only neces- 
 sary to see how he spent himself and for what uses he mined the 
 earth and blasted its quarries. History is "a catalogue of the for- 
 gotten," more likely to be wrong than right. The chronicler in the 
 midst of the event perpetuates merely his own prejudices or opinions, 
 and after the event must rely upon the prejudices or opinions of 
 others. Architecture is the true witness. No one can impugn that 
 living testimony, or deny that walls are the most vivid and uni- 
 versally legible handwriting that one age indites to another. The 
 past is best restored and reanimated not by its records, but by its 
 ruins. 
 
 Architecture is self-revelation, a memoir of unfailing fascination 
 for him who travels the world to read the illuminated chapters of 
 the human manuscript. Man has always built to express himself 
 and what he loves most. When he pours out wealth and energy 
 and art to erect banks like Greek temples, office buildings like Gothic 
 cathedrals, moving picture theatres like Roman palaces, private 
 dwellings like royal courts, you know that his treasure is money, or 
 business, or pleasure, or self. But when he sows a continent with 
 churches, plants a cathedral in every hamlet, as he did in the Middle 
 Ages, then you must conclude that in that time his chief interest 
 was in religion, and that he was in love with God. 
 
 And if man builds what he loves, it is quite as obvious that he 
 builds best when his love is highest. The centuries that built for 
 God were the greatest building age in the history of mankind. The 
 
work of the medieval builders has been the delight and despair of 
 their successors ever since. They built in a passion of energy and 
 devotion, spendthrift, robust, joyous, young. They counted no cost 
 and expected no fame. They built for another world, and so out- 
 reached all the standards of this. It may be too much to say that 
 they were so eager to please Heaven, or the Queen of Heaven, that 
 they were actually inspired by a taste impeccable above human tastes 
 and a sense of beauty perfect above human sense. That is how the 
 miracle of such an achievement as the Cathedral of Chartres is 
 explained by the most skeptical of American scholars, Mr. Henry 
 Adams, a son of the Puritans who makes claims for the power of 
 the Mother of God that no Catholic would dare to make. 
 
 It is not too much to say, however, that the "first fine careless 
 rapture" in art and architecture is to be recaptured only when 
 modern builders are fired by the same faith and love that created the 
 glories of the past. With all the new tools of science and of skill, 
 heavenly structures are still not to be built for earthy ends. Taste 
 still rises as high as the sources that feed it, and no higher. It is 
 fortunate, perhaps, that few of the churches erected by this genera- 
 tion will live to tell tales upon us to the future. If they did, they 
 would reveal us too candidly and too completely. When congrega- 
 tions realize that they build what they are into their churches, that 
 the walls are as strong as their devotion and as beautiful as their 
 aspiration, they will take more thought for the kind of confession 
 of faith they are willing to make to their children. 
 
 The Church of Saint Agnes is a twentieth-century church on 
 the main artery of a typical twentieth-century city. It is one of 
 many churches rising out of the heart of Cleveland, but distinguished 
 from the rest by a type and form that subtly set it apart. This 
 distinction is not accidental or unintentional. It is partly the effect 
 of an architecture that recalls the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 
 but mainly the effect of the spirit of those ages of faith which their 
 architecture invokes. In the first place it is emphatically Catholic. 
 No passerby could mistake it for anything else. And no passerby, 
 however casual, could escape the impression that it was conceived 
 
 4 
 
in faith and builded in love. The soul of the builders already speaks 
 from its walls as the soul of the old builders speaks across the 
 centuries and cannot be silenced. On its busy corner in a swiftly 
 changing city, it utters the same serene assurance that its truth will 
 not change. Its voice is not mystical, like the Gothic, or secular, 
 like the Renaissance. It is clear and simple, like the faith of the 
 earlier age that inspired it. 
 
 The Church of Saint Agnes is interesting because, like its 
 prototypes, it has something to say. What that is it is the purpose 
 of these pages to suggest. They are worth writing and worth reading 
 only because Saint Agnes' contributes something fresh and vital to 
 the ecclesiastical art of America. 
 
 Whether you like it or whether you do not depends first upon 
 your knowledge. A man may prefer Gothic architecture to 
 Romanesque, or classic to Byzantine, but he cannot reasonably prefer 
 any style unless he knows something of all styles. Whatever the 
 architectural or decorative shortcomings of Saint Agnes Church — 
 and no building is perfect — its most enthusiastic admirers are those 
 whose knowledge gives them the best right to judge. Mr. Ralph 
 Adams Cram, the best exponent of the Gothic in the United States, 
 writes of it as "the most distinguished piece of work I have seen 
 for a long time." It is constantly used as a model in the lectures 
 of the Cleveland School of Art and the Art Museum. It has been 
 celebrated in art journals and by visitors and sightseers from all 
 parts of the country. It is generally recognized as a fine example 
 of a great style, as a strikingly successful attempt to build a parish 
 church of a moderate size and at a moderate cost not unworthy to 
 compare with the best churches of all time. 
 
 This accomplishment was made possible because the pastor 
 of Saint Agnes', the Rev. Gilbert P. Jennings, LL. D., himself a 
 lover and student of good architecture, had the wisdom and vision 
 to entrust the realization of his life-long dream to a competent and 
 specially trained ecclesiastical architect. This architect, Mr. John 
 T. Comes, of Pittsburgh, was permitted to design every detail, from 
 the building itself to the candlesticks on the altar, and to finish the 
 
 5 
 
church down to the last inch of decoration. Construction was begun 
 in the year of great destruction, 1914. When the church was 
 dedicated by the Rt. Rev. John P. Farrelly, Bishop of Cleveland, 
 on June 18, 1916, after two and a half years spent on the plans and 
 only a year and a half on the actual building, it was complete. There 
 is no chance for any one else to mar the harmony which is its chief 
 beauty. 
 
 The vision of the pastor and the spirit of the people were thus 
 translated by the skill of the architect into the most lasting speech 
 in the world. This speech is of itself so eloquent that it seems futile 
 to try to render the clear poetry of arch and tower, color and carving, 
 glass and fresco, in the dull measure of prose. It is attempted partly 
 to help the friendly or curious passerby to read the illuminated 
 script; but mostly to recall the meaning of the ancient and immortal 
 phrases written into its walls to those dwellers within the gates who 
 have forgotten the mother-tongue of the world. 
 
THE FAMILY TREE 
 
 S you look at the Church of Saint Agnes from the other 
 side of Euclid Avenue — unfortunately there is no stone- 
 paved French place or gross-grown Italian piazza to give 
 you better perspective — your first impulse is to look 
 again. A church so different from any church in Cleveland cannot 
 be passed with a casual glance. Your next is to wonder a little at the 
 effect of what you see. Walls of smooth gray Bedford stone rise out 
 of a broad sweep of steps, three deeply recessed doors open under 
 round arches, a pillared arcade runs beneath a great rose window, 
 a carven crucifix tops a turreted gable, and back of all, overshadow- 
 ing gray walls and red-tiled roofs, a tall tower, strong and steadfast, 
 stands like a sentinel. 
 
 It is a simple composition, as such things go, well-proportioned, 
 admirably balanced, combining lightness with solidity, grace with 
 strength. The walls are rooted firmly in the earth, but with an air 
 of confidence in their reach toward heaven. Some ancient power 
 seems built into the calm stone, some old, insistent voice seems to 
 echo in the restrained design. The facade lifts itself above the 
 street with a commanding gesture that bids you follow. The portals 
 withdraw and beckon ; the rose window promises something precious 
 and beautiful within. 
 
 If you are curious, you may try to analyze this effect. You 
 may wonder just why a church so "foreign," so different from the 
 familiar local patterns, should fit so naturally into its corner on a 
 busy Cleveland street. You may wonder how, being so new, it 
 implies so much age, and by just what means it is made to look so 
 distinguished and harmonious, so simply and yet so beautifully 
 expressive of the high uses to which it is dedicated. 
 
 The architect will tell you that the reason lies in the choice 
 of the noble and churchly style of architecture to which the building 
 
 7 
 
conforms. He will explain that Saint Agnes' is Romanesque, and 
 therefore a distillation of the art and aspiration of the most Catholic 
 age in the history of the world. He will point out the distinguishing 
 marks of the Romanesque style — the round arch, the basilican plan, 
 the rose window, the covered porch or narthex, the square tower 
 with its octagonal top, the sturdiness and seriousness of the whole. 
 
 "It was not the intention," he says, "to copy any particular 
 church built during the ages of faith, when Europe covered itself 
 with 'a white robe of churches.' The aim was to secure a plan that 
 would meet squarely all modern and practical requirements, that 
 would retain the flavor and spirit of the best Romanesque traditions 
 and yet give to Cleveland a church of some distinction and original- 
 ity, expressing the ancient and modern continuity of the Church, 
 and also the power of her adaptability to the language of the day." 
 
 Though unlike any Romanesque church that was ever built, 
 therefore. Saint Agnes' so embodies the authentic spirit of the heyday 
 of art and of faith that in order to study its details with any 
 intelligence it seems necessary to take a backward glance at 
 Romanesque architecture in, general. 
 
 The ancestry of art is a subject of the most alluring possibilities. 
 To trace the family tree of any building is to retrace the long march 
 of human history. And all art must have a family tree, if only to 
 prove its legitimacy. "There is no such thing as a 'new' style," 
 says Ralph Adam Cram, "and there never can be a 'new' art cut off 
 from the succession of the past." 
 
 The Romanesque goes back to far beginnings. It is the very 
 earliest form of Christian church building. It may be said to have 
 begun with the adaptation of the formal Roman basilica, or court 
 of law, to the uses of Christian worship when the new religion 
 emerged from the catacombs and was befriended by Constantine. 
 The oldest Roman churches, the original Saint Peter's, Santa Maria 
 Maggiore, Saint John Lateran, San Clemente, Santa Agnese, were 
 the types which for a thousand years inspired the builders of the 
 West, especially in Northern Italy, Southern France, Southern 
 
 8 
 
Church of Saint Agnes from the West. 
 
Germany and Northern Spain. At first they were simple basilicas — 
 an atrium, a three- or five-aisled nave, a semi-circular apse for the 
 altar, a low pitched roof. But almost immediately the straight 
 basilica threw out transepts and became a cross, merging the Roman 
 forever in the Christian. In time it sprouted towers, reached up 
 to point or arch or vault its roof, expanded its apse with chapels 
 and ambulatories, bloomed with a thousand varied beauties in that 
 epoch of fabulous energy that lasted from the eleventh to the 
 fourteenth century and culminated in the Gothic. 
 
 The Romanesque was the child of the Roman and the mother 
 of the Gothic. It reached its zenith in the Romance country, in 
 those sun-swept Latin valleys that cradled modern culture. It was 
 always a little more naive, or native, a little more child-like, a little 
 happier and more serene, than the great heights to which it led. 
 When you catch its spirit, you recognize it as the spirit of Christian 
 youth, vigorous, fearless and simple, believing all things, hoping 
 all things, trying all things. The Byzantine, the Romanesque of 
 the East, is art more mysterious, more opulently imagined. The 
 Gothic, the Romanesque grown up, is art more self-conscious, more 
 intellectual. The Romanesque is more elemental, more easily under- 
 stood, the art of an uplifted people, mighty and young, in the first 
 joy of creation. Its sign is the round arch, serene and solid, as the 
 sign of the Gothic is the pointed arch, restless and aspiring. Henry 
 Adams, in one of his luminous phrases, sums up the difference 
 between the round arch and the pointed as the difference "between 
 the love of God — which is faith — and the logic of God — ^which is 
 reason." Another author very happily calls Romanesque the Credo 
 and Gothic the Gloria of architecture. 
 
 The Romanesque style can be so much more successfully adapted 
 to restricted means and space than the Gothic or the domed 
 Byzantine, which demand cathedral proportions and vast expendi- 
 ture to be at their best, that it is strange that it is so rarely employed 
 in this country. It is a style with few American interpreters, and 
 those mostly feeble copyists and uninspired journeymen. Richardson, 
 of Boston, the designer of Trinity Church, was a life-long student 
 
 9 
 
of the Romanesque, but it may be doubted if even he ever did 
 anything so happily expressive of its spirit as the architect of Saint 
 Agnes'. This is not only because Mr. Comes is a true and faithful 
 artist. It is also because the Romanesque cannot be well adapted 
 to Protestant or secular uses. It is instinct with the medieval ardor. 
 It is the voice of an age and a people robustly and unquestioningly 
 Catholic, and only those who believe with them can really interpret 
 it. If Catholics of today do not understand it, they have lost some 
 capacity to read their own vernacular. They have somehow blunted 
 that fine intelligence of the soul that we call faith. 
 
 The early Christians covered the tomb of Saint Agnes outside 
 the walls of Rome with a Romanesque basilica. The middle centuries 
 blossomed with the work of the Romanesque builders. And now, 
 having glimpsed the long road it has traveled to come to us, let 
 us look more closely at the church which was built in the same old 
 fashion to honor Saint Agnes on the main thoroughfare of Cleve- 
 land in the year of Our Lord 1916. 
 
 10 
 
II 
 
 FROM TOWER TO DOOR 
 
 |IRST, the tower. Perhaps no element of a church so 
 kindles the imagination as its tower. The ancient symbol- 
 ^ ists liken church towers to preachers, "the bulwark and 
 defense of the Church." Certainly the tower is itself a 
 preacher. From whatever distance it is seen, it proclaims a 
 House of God and tells its silent story of the aspirations and hopes 
 of men. There is something very heartening to the spirit in the 
 sight of church towers rising out of the huddled roofs and smoky 
 fogs of cities. In their perpetual gesture of exaltation, they are the 
 «ign that the soul has still its high citadels, its stairways to the stars. 
 
 From the east, long before the church is visible, the tower of 
 Saint Agnes' seems to spring out of the centre of Euclid Avenue. No 
 view of it is clearer or more picturesque than this, whether it is 
 painted white upon a blue sky by the morning sun, or etched darkly 
 against an empurpled west by the softening sunset. 
 
 As you approach, the tower recedes to the back of the church. 
 It is a detached belfry, unusual in this country, like the hardy and 
 firmly rooted campanili that brood over the storied towns and haunt- 
 ed landscapes of Northern Italy, and gain immeasurably in strength 
 and effectiveness by their detachment. It is broad-based, massive 
 and sturdy, as befits its setting. Anything slender or spiral would be 
 -obviously out of place amid the horizontal lines of the Romanesque. 
 Unlighted and unornamented for nearly half its height, it lightens 
 toward the top, as medieval towers do, into arched and stone- 
 mullioned openings. It ends so naturally with the turrets that accent 
 the four corners of the square belfry that the red-tiled cap with the 
 shining cross at its peak seems at first sight superfluous. Such 
 octagonal tops were commonly fitted on square towers by the French 
 and Lombard builders, however, and may have been the acorns 
 from which grew the heaven-piercing height of the eight-sided 
 
 11 
 
Gothic steeples. The old builders loved the octagon, anyway. It 
 was the symbol of perfection, and they used it wherever they could. 
 
 To see a building fairly, you must look at it from all sides. If 
 it is worth anything architecturally, it must satisfy the eye from 
 whatever direction you approach it. Look at Saint Agnes' from the 
 back, therefore, from the foot of Eighty-first Street, before you 
 leave the tower for the facade. Notice the solid curve of the apse, 
 with its tall arched windows, its circling ambulatory, the pleasing 
 harmony of curved surfaces massed beside the uncompromising 
 square bulk and height of the belfry. 
 
 Some great churches are all front, like the miraculous jewelled 
 face of the Cathedral of Orvieto. Some show their greatest beauty 
 in profile, like Notre Dame of Paris seen across the Seine. Others 
 are at their best viewed from the rear. No one has ever known the 
 full loveliness of the Cathedral of Florence who has not circled 
 the chapels that cluster around the Dome, preferably in the moon- 
 light, when the black and white marbles gleam like alabaster and 
 ebony in a harmony of mass and line, light and shade, as moving 
 and melodious as music. 
 
 To do them justice, however, modern architects are generally 
 far more concerned about their exterior effects than the medieval 
 builder, who often enclosed a richly decorated sanctuary with walls 
 as rough and unfinished as a barn. Few of the original Romanesque 
 churches could show the careful masonry of the walls of Saint 
 Agnes'. The smoothly joined stones, the well-managed detail in 
 cornice, coping and corbel, exhibit a refinement which sharply dis- 
 tinguishes the building from its early models. It has none of the 
 crudities of its prototypes. Look at it from the side and it has the 
 suggestion of one of those Italian jewel caskets preserved in old 
 museums, an oblong box with a gabled lid, strongly made and lov- 
 ingly adorned, but not so much embellished as to obscure the fact 
 that its treasure is within, that it was fashioned as a safe and worthy 
 receptacle for a hidden glory. 
 
 The facade brings that glory a little nearer. With its carved 
 portals, its sculptured saints between graceful columns, its charming 
 little arcade under the deeply imbedded and beautifully designed 
 
 12 
 
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rose window, it gathers unto itself most of the exterior decoration of 
 the church and opens the way into the jewel box with a rich intima- 
 tion of the splendor it conceals. 
 
 The rose window itself, like the halo of a saint, seems always 
 a far projection of that splendor. The old builders vied with one 
 another in the size and beauty of their rose windows, those flowers 
 of medieval architecture which are as various in their traceries and 
 sculptured petals as the roses of nature. They filled them with 
 glass more colorful than the most brilliant roses that ever grew. 
 Originally called wheel windows, reminders of the wheel on which 
 Saint Catharine was martyred, as churches multiplied and roses 
 flourished they came to be regarded as symbolic rather of the Rose 
 of heaven, the Mystical Rose pre-figured by all the prophets. 
 
 The rose is Mary's emblem, and the rose window is one of the 
 most beautiful inventions of the age of Christian chivalry, when the 
 poetry inspired by devotion to the Mother of God flowered in 
 knighthood and in "courteous love," in the songs of the troubadours, 
 in Dante and Petrarch and Chaucer, in the astonishing reverences 
 and refinements grafted upon a rude and warlike time by the 
 influence of the Madonna. The rose window is a poem, too, as any 
 one knows who feels its rhythm and its grace. The Gothic architects 
 planted gorgeous roses in the walls of all their cathedrals, so that 
 while the rose rightly belongs to the Romance or Romanesque age, 
 no Gothic church seems finished without one. 
 
 Saint Agnes' rose window is pure Romanesque in design. It 
 greatly resembles, though on about half the scale, one of the most 
 famous rose windows in the world, that in the west front of the 
 Cathedral of Chartres, a twelfth-century masterpiece which the 
 fantastic genius of Henry Adams ofifers as triumphant proof of "the 
 Virgin's will — the taste and knowledge of 'celle qui la rose est des 
 roses,' or, if you prefer the Latin of Adam de Saint-Victor, the 
 hand of her who is 'super rosam rosida.' " 
 
 The rose of Saint Agnes' is twenty feet in diameter and is tied 
 to the rest of the church by an ornamental band of stone work 
 extending to the first buttress in the clerestory. Above it, midway 
 
 13 
 
between the octagonal turrets which hold the vent shafts while 
 adding originality and balance to the facade, is a figure of Saint 
 Agnes, more decorative or structural than naturalistic in feeling, 
 and over all, crowning the central gable, is an architectural group 
 representing Christ on the Cross, Saint John and the Virgin Mary. 
 To form a pedestal for this group, the gable ends in a square base 
 carved with the symbolic snake, skull and crossbones to typify the 
 triumph of Christ over sin and death. 
 
 If the rose is typical of Mary, the church door, as Durandus 
 points out, is symbolic of Him Who said : I am the Door. It opens 
 the Way to Eternal Life. The medieval builders, masters of a 
 sacred symbolism which the world has half forgotten, crowded 
 the arches of their doors with saints and angels, kings and princes, 
 birds and beasts, implements of labor and signs of the liberal arts, 
 as if to indicate to all who passed beneath how many and various 
 are the ways and means of entering heaven. There are two very 
 ancient churches standing amid the Roman ruins in the South of 
 France, that of St. Trophime at Aries and another at St. Gilles, 
 eleven miles away, which seem to have furnished models for the 
 beautiful doors of Saint Agnes'. In the old churches the portals are 
 much more elaborately carved, as might be expected in an age when 
 every stone-mason was an artist and counted no time too long to 
 spend on the embellishment of the House of God. But these mod- 
 ern doors have the same deep and shadowy recesses under Roman 
 arches, the same classic columns with variegated capitals, the same 
 sculptured frieze and carven saints in niches between the pillars. 
 
 A little forecourt of patterned brick and terraced steps of light 
 stone form the approach to the arched doorways. The doors them- 
 selves are of bronze, wrought in a simple design of raised squares 
 framed by decorated bands. A lantern hangs from the lintel of each 
 and in the space above are small panels in bas-relief illustrating 
 scenes in the life of Saint Agnes. Over the east door Agnes stands 
 before a Roman tribunal refusing to marry the husband chosen for 
 her. Over the central door is the scene of her martyrdom, and over 
 the west door her triumph, when she bursts upon her parents, and 
 
 14 
 
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friends after her death, bearing her familiar emblems, the lamb and 
 the palm of victory. Study these little panels, so crowded, so stiffly 
 designed, so roughly and crudely drawn, and you get a miniature 
 of all the architectural sculpture of the Middle Ages. These are 
 exactly in the old spirit, naive, childlike, full of energy, and so made 
 to fit the architecture that to substitute for them any of the smooth 
 and polished and pictorial work of a modern sculptor would be 
 completely to spoil the effect. They were modelled by Mr. Francis 
 Aretz, of Pittsburgh, an artist whose sculptural work throughout 
 the church shows a rare sympathy and skill in rendering the feeling 
 of the Romanesque period. 
 
 Not much more of the old decorative sculpture is to be found 
 on the portals. There are only the little squares of foliated and 
 symbolical ornament set in the frieze over the capitals of the columns, 
 the symbolic designs of the capitals themselves, and the long carved 
 panels framing the doorways. These last are cut in the familiar 
 grape and vine motive, type of the Eucharist or the Precious Blood, 
 intertwined with the birds and beasts which the ancient carvers used 
 to suggest the saints — the stag for Saint Hubert; or the virtues — the 
 pelican for charity; the attributes of God — the raven for divine 
 providence, or of the soul — the peacock for immortality. The 
 repetition of the two-horned ram and the soaring eagle in the 
 capitals of the columns is no doubt meant to typify the human and 
 divine nature of Christ — the Christ of the Passion and the Christ of 
 the Apocalypse. 
 
 Just one suggestion is here of the playful humor characteristic 
 of the Ages of Faith, a time so merry that church building was a 
 joyous adventure punctuated by laughter and the frolicsome fun 
 of youth. In the frieze beside the main door is a pensive little angel 
 recording names in an open book, probably the names of the faithful 
 and the punctual who pass beneath ; and at the extreme right a little 
 imp of Satan takes note of the late arrivals and those who seldom 
 come to church. It may be that the sculptor introduced this bit 
 of medieval humor into the dignified facade as a symbol of the 
 pastor's frequent custom of enacting the role of Recording Angel 
 at the Sunday Masses, when few of the tardy or the irregular are 
 
 IS 
 
able to escape his searching and zealous eye. Except for the corbels 
 in the shape of griffin heads under the cornice, there are on Saint 
 Agnes' walls none of the grotesques by which the medieval fancy 
 delighted to depict the evil spirits flying from the House of God. 
 
 The six niches between the columns contain figures of Fathers 
 and Doctors of the Church, silent exponents of its mission of teaching 
 all nations. They are impressive figures. Saint Jerome and Saint 
 Gregory, Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas 
 and Saint Alphonsus Liguori. They are formal and architectural 
 in effect, true pillars of the Church indeed, but a little freer and 
 more modern than the carving in the panels. It has been objected 
 that the statues are somewhat too tall for their niches, but in that 
 they share a characteristic of all Romanesque door sculpture. The 
 saints and angels are always crowded. The exuberant imagination 
 of that robustious age never had quite room enough to play in. 
 
 Saint Agnes', on the whole, is graver and more restrained than 
 the buildings that inspired it. Though eight centuries younger, it 
 seems older and more subdued. It would be impossible, perhaps, 
 for a modern architect to make a literal translation of the Roman- 
 esque that would be intelligible in our sadder, more self-conscious 
 and more controversial times. We like it better for that tincture of 
 modernity, for mixing our present with its past. 
 
 And if, before entering its old-new doors upon the scene of 
 the old-new Sacrifice, one could preserve in a single picture the most 
 memorable moment of its haunted and reminiscent beauty, it would 
 be the picture painted by the frost one snowy twilight last winter. 
 For an hour, while the light faded, there was something crystalline 
 and transparent about its softly glazed outlines, something unearthly 
 in the frosted carvings and the shining shaft of the tower. Too clear 
 for a dream, too radiant for reality, for a space it looked not like 
 an old church or a new church, like Romanesque or Gothic or 
 Byzantine, but like a temple transplanted from that celestial city 
 whose walls are of chrysoprase and of jasper and whose gates are all 
 of pearl. 
 
 16 
 

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 Statues in Niches Between Doors. 
 
Ill 
 
 ON THE THRESHOLD 
 
 HE moment you pass under the arched doors of Saint 
 Agnes Church, you perceive that it is a basilica. It has 
 every distinguishing mark of the earliest Christian church. 
 You saw from the outside that the vestibule is low-roofed, 
 differing only from the old Roman narthex, or covered porch, in 
 that it is enclosed. In the narthex, the first converts to Christianity 
 were baptized, and in the narthex the catechumens waited, assisting 
 at the sacred mysteries from afar, until they were received into the 
 body of the faithful. In the narthex, therefore, was the baptismal 
 font, just as it is here, in a niche at the left, behind a screen of carved 
 wood and clear glass, to signify by its position that only those born 
 again of water can enter the Church of Christ and the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. 
 
 The baptistery glows with color, especially in the morning, 
 when the sun paints an aureole around the figure of the Baptist in the 
 east window and burnishes the Venetian mosaics set in the polished 
 marbles of the wainscoting. The wall above is deeply blue, like the 
 heart of the ocean, and marked with waving lines to suggest the 
 flowing tides of regeneration, "the laver of water in the word of life." 
 The symbolic figures on walls and vaulted ceiling are the same as 
 those on the walls of the Roman catacombs — the dolphin, emblem 
 of Christ, the fish, sign of the Christian, as being born again of 
 water, and the hart, panting. for the water brooks as the soul pants 
 for the living God. 
 
 The font of Botticino marble is octagonal because the octagon, 
 representing the figure eight, is one of the oldest symbols of regenera- 
 tion. As the first Creation was complete in seven days, the number 
 coming next has been regarded since the time of Saint Ambrose as 
 significant of initiation into the supernatural order of grace. Nearly 
 all ancient baptismal fonts are octagonal in shape, and many, like 
 
 17 
 
this, have a bronze cover embellished w^ith carved emblems of the 
 Seven Sacraments and the Head of Christ, surmounted by a statue 
 of John the Baptist. 
 
 Across the narthex, which is stone-v^ralled and wooden-ceiled, 
 with beams and corbels of a very ancient pattern, you look through 
 another arch to a little office and a winding stair, which, as you 
 may guess from the stained-glass figure of Saint Cecilia on the land- 
 ing, leads to the choir gallery. The simple and well designed bronze 
 lanterns that hang in the vestibule are the best lighting fixtures in 
 the church. 
 
 And now, having been reminded that it is through Christ the 
 Door, through the teaching of the Fathers and the Saints, through 
 the saving grace of Baptism, that one enters the Christian church, 
 having learned that there are literal sermons in stones and mystic 
 meanings in every familiar form and phrase, we are ready to leave 
 the place of the passerby and the waiting room of the catechumen, 
 and to find out what all these preparations were made for and why 
 so much care and thought and love and labor were lavished upon 
 the outer walls. 
 
 The best time to see the interior of the Church of Saint Agnes 
 is when it is the scene of some great ceremonial, the setting for the 
 joy of some high festival. Stand at the end of the nave during the 
 solemn mass on Christmas, or Easter, or the Feast of Saint Agnes, 
 when the place is crowded with kneeling worshippers. Watch the 
 choir boys singing their way down the aisle, the figures of priests 
 and acolytes moving across the chancel and up the altar steps, the 
 glowing color of lamps and vestments and windows under the bend- 
 ing Christ, the cloudy incense sifting through the gold meshes of 
 the baldacchino, and you will get the thrill of the most stupendous 
 drama ever enacted before human eyes. See the church as the 
 background for this great drama, as painted and gilded and carved 
 and jewelled for the incredible coming of the Son of God, and you 
 will understand what churches are made for, and why, in the days 
 when there were no unbelievers and the House of God had no rival 
 in men's hearts, all the riches and color and splendor of the world 
 were gathered up to prepare the scene for this daily miracle. 
 
 18 
 
Narthex with Baptistery and Baptismal Font 
 
The Middle Ages had a passion for color. They used it with 
 that rapture for bright things which men feel when they are young 
 and happy, poets and full of praise. Christianity has always been 
 a religion of color. The color sense that died with the Greeks was 
 born again in the mosaics of the earliest Christian builders. There 
 has been no decoration since to equal such "jewel boxes of color and 
 beaten gold" as were wrought before the tenth century in Rome, 
 Ravenna, Venice and Monreale. The ritual of the Church is ablaze 
 with color. The garments of the priests of the old law were made 
 of "gold, and jacinth, and purple, and scarlet twice dyed," and the 
 same symbolic and poetic employment of color has been preserved 
 to clothe the celebrants of the new Sacrifice. 
 
 And the first impression you will get here is an impression of 
 color. There is a base of strong gray, formed by the limestone of 
 column and triforium and the harmonizing stain of oaken pews 
 and woodwork. But the rest is color, in the windows of nave and 
 clerestory, in marbles and mosaics, in walls and arches, in lamps 
 and carved capitals. From the dull red of the tiled floor to the 
 deep blue and gold of the coffered ceiling, the eye is beckoned and 
 led by color until it rests upon the monumental figure of Christ 
 Enthroned, painted with startling boldness upon the half dome above 
 the altar against a background of stars and seraphim, saints and 
 symbols, painted in pure, rich color, elemental and unafraid. 
 
 That overpowering apsidal decoration is fresco, not mosaic; 
 it is Byzantine in effect, not in detail ; but as you look at it from the 
 door of the church, you feel that you are seeing the color of the 
 Middle Ages as it must have been when it was new, before it was 
 softened by the dust of centuries and saddened by age and decay. 
 You have a sense of opening an illuminated missal, an "open volume 
 of color," fresh from the scribe who dipped his brush in lost pig- 
 ments with a lost skill. You perceive that all his crowding texts 
 flow from and to that focal Figure. This House with all its glory 
 is His, sings the chromatic chorus. And you remember that the 
 Apocalyptic vision of heaven was a vision of color, of a Throne 
 set in a rainbow, "in sight like unto an emerald." 
 
 19 
 
You hear the Gregorian chant, you see that the priests wear 
 the graceful, flowing vestments of the Gothic age instead of the stiff 
 chasubles of more modern usage. You behold the seven ruby lamps 
 around the sanctuary and watch the flicker of candles through the 
 screen of the ambulatory as the acolytes file in to encircle the altar, 
 like a living candelabrum, during the solemn moments of the Con- 
 secration. All elements combine to reproduce the atmosphere that 
 fills old churches with the aroma of centuries of prayer and praise. 
 Such atmospheres conquer doubt and denial. They comfort man 
 with proof of the continuity of a hope expressed in changeless sym- 
 bols. You cannot enter such a church, whether it is old or new, 
 without a feeling of oneness with all the past, without a sense of 
 participation in the only ceremonial and the only faith that are the 
 same yesterday, today and forever. 
 
 20 
 
IV 
 
 THE SANCTUARY 
 
 5OUR first impression of Saint Agnes', that you are in a 
 House of God, a House decorated with an opulence and 
 beauty sanctified by the oldest and best traditions of 
 Christian worship, is an impression created by very 
 
 definite and carefully studied means. Let us see now, then, how 
 
 the builders have contrived to achieve this effect. 
 
 In the first place, you perceive that the church is chiefly a nave 
 and a transept. The word nave itself, from the Latin navis, comes 
 from that symbolism of the Catacombs which conceived the Church 
 as a ship "riding before the winds," the new Ark, the Bark of Peter. 
 It represents the body of the faithful as the transepts represent the 
 arms and the chancel the head, the whole built into the cross which 
 distinguishes the Christian from the pagan basilica. Here is the 
 Christian basilican plan at its simplest. The nave is practically 
 enclosed by the massive monolithic columns of Indiana limestone. It 
 extends without a break to the semi-circular apse. The two side 
 aisles are merely passages, widening towards the front into shallow 
 transepts which are hardly more than side chapels for the shrines of 
 the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph, and leading into a deambula- 
 tory around the chancel. 
 
 The practical advantage of this plan is to secure the churchly 
 effect of long rows of columns while keeping the altar in full view 
 of every worshipper. It gives an unobstructed auditorium one hun- 
 dred and seventy-five feet long, fifty feet wide and sixty-five feet 
 high, with a seating capacity of about eleven hundred. 
 
 The artistic advantage is to gain an illusion of great spaciousness 
 and dignity unusual in a Romanesque church, especially in a church 
 comparatively small. The long sweep of the nave, exceptionally 
 well lighted because of passage-like aisles and narrow transepts, 
 is the most successful single feature of the building. The arches 
 
 21 
 
are higher than in most churches of this type. There is more spring 
 in the span of the barrelled vaulting. A triforium, or open arcade 
 above the arches, is very happily suggested by groups of squat 
 columns set in recessed panels under the clerestory windows. With- 
 out losing the serious solidity of the Romanesque, the general effect 
 is of greater lightness, height and grace. The Gothic intention is 
 always to carry the eye up. Here, you see, the intention is rather 
 to lead your gaze straight to the altar, but with enough upward slant 
 to take in the titan tapestry spread above it. 
 
 Thus the symbolic success of the plan is in announcing at once 
 that the church is built for the apse, which is to say that it is built 
 for the altar. No one looking up that pillared aisle could fail to 
 grasp the purpose of the building or to take in at a glance the central 
 facts of Catholic worship. The doctrine of the Trinity is shadowed 
 forth in the three aisles, in the triforium, in the three divisions of 
 nave, transept and apse. The redeeming Christ is the dominating 
 figure in the great Byzantine half dome. Apostles, martyrs and 
 saints look out from walls, windows and ceiling to testify to that 
 communion of the friends of God which is the pledge of life ever- 
 lasting. The altar railing, the barrier between the Church Militant 
 and the Church Triumphant, opens its gates to steps climbing up 
 to the canopied throne of that perpetual Presence for which lamps 
 burn and jewels glow and gold and marbles and precious stones are 
 built into beauty. 
 
 The nave is the church and the nave is Christ's. There is 
 nothing to distract the mind from that great Figure or that great 
 fact. Even the side aisles lead only to the altar. The short arms of 
 the transept are but chapels, in which Our Blessed Lady and Saint 
 Joseph hold subordinate and almost invisible court. One can get 
 glimpses of both, of course, from the nave, charming glimpses against 
 brilliant backgrounds of the red-robed Saint Joseph and the Boy 
 Christ and of the blue-cloaked Virgin with her white Bambino. 
 They are not shut out from the sanctuary, but from no place can they 
 be seen first, and from the doors they cannot be seen at all. And 
 aside from a Pieta and a Head of Christ in the side aisles, and figures 
 
 22 
 
Nave Looking Towards the Altar. 
 
of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the transepts, the church contains 
 no other statues, unless you count as statues such architectural decor- 
 ations as the columnar angels over the pillars, the Evangelists who 
 expound the gospel from the four corners of the baldacchino, and 
 the little gold image of Saint Agnes that stands above it as straight 
 and slender as a pinnacle. 
 
 Very distinctive is this simple and single-minded insistence upon 
 the fundamental truths of religion. The symbolism of the church 
 is the symbolism of the Catacombs, its reiterant teaching that of the 
 Age of Faith from which it derives — a simpler age than our own, 
 untouched by many later devotions and concentrating upon the 
 Mother of God and a few patron saints the intercessory fervor which 
 the growing company of the Blessed has since somewhat diverted 
 and divided. 
 
 From your pqst at the door you can see that the vault of the 
 ceiling is coffered, or laid in squares, a treatment much more classic 
 than Romanesque. This style was adopted as the best solution of 
 the problem of securing perfect acoustics. The coffers are filled 
 with acoustic felt and membrane, dyed blue and set between bands 
 of gold. You will notice that the capitals of the columns vary in 
 design. The carving is of so many schools — Byzantine, early Celtic, 
 Norman, Italian — that if you could read even this small segment of 
 the architecture you would skim a good many pages of human 
 history. 
 
 If you observe the pews at all — they are admirably incon- 
 spicuous, as such necessary evils as pews should be — it will be only 
 to note that they are low and gray, harmonious with the horizontal 
 feeling of the Romanesque and blending with the delicate color of 
 the stone. The lighting is by means of lamps hung from the ceiling. 
 They are very simple in design, candles set in rounds of sheet iron 
 with polychrome decoration, and would be as happily inconspic- 
 uous as the pews if they did not have to be lighted. The effect of 
 the interior is much more beautiful when they are extinguished, and 
 when, in the soft light of some late afternoon, you can go into the 
 empty church and study its details at your leisure. 
 
 23 
 
It is a very different place now, in the silence and the tempered 
 luminance. Enter this time the door leading into the right aisle 
 and you will get an Oriental view— a long, narrow arcade ending in 
 one of the chancel windows hung like a Persian rug under a gilded 
 arch. The Oriental effect is heightened by the pierced fret work in 
 the doors of the confessionals, six in number, which are built into 
 the walls of the aisles under the windows. They are of the same 
 gray-tinted oak as the pews, but elaborately carved and designed 
 with an originality and effectiveness which prove the art and skill 
 that have gone into every detail of the church. Small ventilators 
 filled with jewelled glass sparkle through the fret work, and over 
 each door is carved a text glowing like the glass itself with the 
 assurance of the Divine Mercy that softens the judgment seat. 
 
 "I come not to call the just but sinners," says the first confessional 
 on the west side. "Come to Me all ye that are heavily burdened," 
 pleads the second. "God's mercy is above all His works," proclaims 
 the third. 
 
 In a recess between the confessionals is a Pieta carved in wood, 
 a striking and original piece of work by Mr. Henry Schmitt. Some- 
 what more realistic and modern than most of the decorative detail in 
 the church, this group of Mary and the dead Christ with its expres- 
 sive angels has just enough of the medieval seriousness and sincerity 
 of feeling to justify its place here. It rests on a plain marble pedestal 
 bearing the inscription: Magna est velut mare contritio tuo (Thy 
 sorrow is deep as the sea). 
 
 The walls of the church are wainscoted up to the windows with 
 slabs of olive Vermont marble finished with a border of colored 
 marble laid in formal geometric design. In this wainscoting, framed 
 in marble, are set the Stations of the Cross. These are flat painted 
 panels, so clear and vivid in color that they are easily seen from all 
 parts of the building, but not so large or so obtrusive that they are 
 unduly prominent in the general decorative scheme. They are a 
 copy made by an American artist of the Stations in the Church of 
 Saint Anna in Munich, and were probably chosen because of a 
 simplicity and vignette-like quality that tells the story of each 
 
 24 
 
West Aisle, Looking into Ambulatory. 
 
The Altar of St. Joseph. 
 
Station at a glance. There are no more than four or five figures in 
 any panel. They are painted in bright primary color on a back- 
 ground of brilliant blue, without perspective, somewhat in the man- 
 ner of the Flemish and Italian primitives. The figures are plainly 
 modern in feeling, however. There is nothing of the primitive con- 
 ception in the white-robed Man of Sorrows Who stands out so strong- 
 ly in each simple and uncrowded canvas that you can follow the 
 Way of the Cross wherever you happen to be. Compare this idea 
 of Christ with the Christ of the apse. Both are the work of modern 
 painters and neither is quite in the modern or quite in the medieval 
 spirit. Yet you will feel at once the difference between them as the 
 difference between an early and a late decorative ideal. 
 
 In the west transept, facing the altar of Saint Joseph, you per- 
 ceive how accurately it may be described as a small chapel, quite 
 open, it is true, to the nave and chancel by means of the wide arches, 
 but self-contained and intimate, focussing upon its own little half 
 dome. There is here a happy proportion between the size of chapel 
 and shrine impossible in churches with larger transepts. The side 
 altars are rich in material but very simple in design. The marble 
 tables are inlaid with gold mosaics and bands of vari-colored marbles, 
 but their chief glory is the splendid apse-like decoration behind the 
 niche. 
 
 Saint Joseph has a golden background rhythmic with bending 
 angels holding in their hands the tools of the carpenter, a timely 
 symbol of the honor heaven pays to honorable and consecrated toil. 
 The Foster Father is represented as a benignant figure, middle-aged 
 and grave, seated behind the Boy Christ, Who is depicted in those 
 years when He helped the Carpenter and grew in grace and wisdom 
 before God and man. Saint Joseph is clothed in a robe of dull 
 Pompeiian red. At his feet is a frieze of conventional lilies rising 
 out of cool green waters. The lily is the emblem of chastity, and 
 is regarded as so typical of the chaste love of the gentle Guardian 
 of Mary and the Divine Child that one of its varieties has come to 
 be known as Saint Joseph's lily. The whole composition is very 
 brilliant and beautiful. Before it swings an unusual lamp, made 
 
 25 
 
of jewelled glass in the form of a cross, which seems to gather up 
 the color of the decoration like a prism and hold it in its heart. 
 When the church is dark these crosses glow in each transept like 
 pendants of precious stones. 
 
 One architectural reason for the successful subordination of 
 the side altars is that they are on a lower level than the main altar. 
 This is apparent as you approach the chancel. Another reason is 
 that the side aisle leads into an ambulatory, or aisle around the 
 altar, which encloses the sanctuary and definitely separates it from 
 the side chapels. 
 
 Stop and look at this ambulatory because it is one of the most 
 beautiful and effective features of the whole church. You saw 
 from the rear how it gave depth and dignity to the sanctuary. You 
 see here how it floods it with color, filtered through mellow tapestries 
 of glass, without interfering with the decoration of the apse itself. 
 Most of the medieval churches had ambulatories. In the great 
 Gothic cathedrals they led into a ring of chapels, sometimes five, 
 sometimes seven, circling the sanctuary in a superb architectural 
 harmony called a chevet. Often, as in Saint Patrick's Cathedral 
 in New York, they open into a Lady Chapel behind the high altar. 
 
 But the original ambulatory was like this; it had no chapels. 
 And it is difficult to remember one anywhere, on this scale, so sat- 
 isfying, so well-proportioned and so lovely. The windows, which 
 deserve to be classed with the best glass in America, help in this 
 effect. So do the arches, which are much narrower here, you see, 
 than in the body of the church, as if the Doctors and Bishops that 
 columns are said to typify were crowding up around the tabernacle. 
 In these narrow, or stilted, arches, Byzantine or even Moorish in 
 character, are hung seven great lamps of finely wrought bronze 
 which burn with a ruby flame, "shining forth with brightness in the 
 darkness of this world" like the seven lights which Moses made, like 
 the Seven Lamps of the Apocalypse, like the seven tongues of Pente- 
 costal fire that signify the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. The design 
 of these lamps is similar to but not so elaborate as that of the sanc- 
 tuary lamp itself, a vessel of pierced silver and bronze fitly fashioned 
 
 26 
 
Altar from. West, with Entrance to Ambulatory. 
 
View from Left of the Altar. 
 
to hold the ever-burning flame which is the type of Christ Himself, 
 the Light of the World. 
 
 Between the ambulatory and the sanctuary is a six-foot screen. 
 This is of marble, panelled below and perforated above in beautiful 
 symbolic designs ; it repays study because it shows how carefully all 
 the marbles in the church have been chosen and combined. Here in 
 the sanctuary they are all imported, mostly from Italy, where a prod- 
 igal nature has filled even the mountains and the quarries with hidden 
 veins of color — golden and black, blood-red and ivory, sea-green and 
 opal. Examine these marbles, richly blent and lustrous, dug from 
 old hillsides that gave altars to Apollo before the seamy earth knew 
 Christ. They are almost as eloquent in their way as the religious 
 symbols that crowd the chancel with such a wealth of imagery and 
 allusion that it would require a volume to interpret them all. 
 
 Take, for instance, the altar railing, which is carved out of 
 Botticino marble in a very charming design. You will note that 
 the capitals of the little columns are all different, as they were in 
 those early churches and cloisters for which the builders gathered 
 material wherever they could find it. Each has its own history if 
 we could stop to read it. And the rail itself is meant to teach the 
 separation of things celestial from things terrestrial. There are three 
 wide gates to break this barrier, however, and on those gates, if you 
 will look closely, you will see a pair of conventionalized peacocks 
 and an entwining grape vine and ear of wheat. The vine and wheat, 
 as you know, are symbols of the Eucharist, the Bread of Life, and 
 the peacock is the emblem of immortality. So perhaps these gates 
 are meant to console us who stand on the earthly side of the rail with 
 the assurance that heaven is open to those who feed their souls at this 
 heavenly table. "He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood 
 hath life everlasting." Quite aside from their mystic message, these 
 gates are a particularly fine example of cast bronze. The marble 
 posts on which they swing are inlaid with mosaic forming another 
 ancient symbol, a cross resting upon a circle, figure of the world 
 redeemed and conquered by the cross. 
 
 Here at the middle gate is your best view of the sanctuary and 
 altar. The floor is paved with tile in rich and variegated patterns, 
 
 27 
 
tessellated and banded with marble. The efifect is much warmer and 
 more interesting than if the parquetry were all of marble, and the 
 uneven reds and browns and purples of the tiles make a pleasant foil 
 for the gleaming surfaces of screen and altar, rail and polished 
 column. Here the efifort of builder and adorner centres and cul- 
 minates. You have reached the place where the Glory dwelleth, 
 the Glory heralded by the tower and the rose, by the deep portals 
 and the flowing arches. There is no need of symbols or interpreter 
 to tell you the message written here. It is announced by art, by 
 color, by gold and precious stones, by all the evidences of the desire 
 of man to offer gifts and create beauty for his Lord. There is no 
 need for the painted text: "Behold the Lamb of God." 
 
 Believer or unbeliever, you know that that high canopy covers 
 a throne. You see that this canopy, or baldacchino, repeats the archi- 
 tectural as well as the spiritual message of the entire building, but 
 in enriched and embroidered and more accented syllables. Its serene 
 Romanesque arches are gemmed with Venetian mosaics. For the 
 massy-capitaled columns of the nave are substituted Byzantine shafts 
 of delicately-veined and sparkling marble. Carved flowers and vines 
 between the arches proclaim that the fruits of the earth are His and 
 its fairness. The marble dome again breaks into the symbolic octa- 
 gon, but an octagon that forms a little open pavilion supported by 
 graceful columns and fretted and lined with gold. The Evangelists 
 are seated at the four corners, each with his symbol and the book of 
 his Gospel, the cornerstones of the teaching of the Church. Observe 
 how these figures are made a part of the design and how like a shining 
 spire is the gilded straightness of Saint Agnes at the apex of the 
 whole. The more closely you study it, the more you will appreciate 
 the skill and taste that have gone into the fashioning of this royal 
 baldaquin erected for the honor of no earthly king. 
 
 Even greater restraint marks the design of the throne itself, 
 which is as simple as an altar can be, a broad table upholding a rather 
 low reredos of severely straight lines, but sumptuous in the texture 
 and color of its marbles and the bright jewelry of its mosaics. It is-a 
 resting place for the tabernacle, and the tabernacle, like the tent of 
 
 28 
 
Main Altar. 
 
Tabernacle, Altar Candlesticks and Sanctuary Gates. 
 
Details of Sanctuary Furniture. 
 
the Old Law which it replaces, is of the ancient circular shape, 
 wrought out of bronze dipped in gold. Its rounded doors are divided 
 into four panels, sculptured in low relief with a delicacy and child- 
 like charm recalling the work of the early goldsmiths. One of the 
 upper panels portrays the Israelites gathering manna in the desert, 
 and the other Christ supping with the two disciples on the road to 
 Emmaus, at the moment when they knew Him in the breaking of 
 bread. Thus the old manna and the new, the Eucharist prefigured 
 and accomplished. "Your fathers did eat manna and are dead, but 
 he that eateth this Bread shall live forever." The lower panel offers 
 the same contrast. In one Melchisedech ofifers the sacrifice as the 
 High Priest of the Old Law; in the other Christ offers Himself 
 on the cross, High Priest and Victim of the New Testament. Around 
 the tabernacle the pastor has carved a bold and beautiful line in 
 English expressing his interpretation of the Mystery locked behind 
 this symbolically carved and golden door : "Whom the world cannot 
 contain love imprisons here." 
 
 That is the meaning of the church and its ornaments, the sum of 
 all it has to say. For the altar is Christ in truth as well as in figure. 
 All the rest prepared the way for this revelation of His presence. 
 The mason built His symbol into the door. The goldsmith imagined 
 Him in the lamp. The sculptor carved His monogram in stone and 
 marble. The painter saw Him presiding over the planets and order- 
 ing the courses of the stars. The glazier discerned in Him the True 
 Sun that enlighteneth the world and wrote His scripture in a "sea of 
 glass." The builder signed his work with the sign of the cross. 
 Everything points to Him and proclaims that He is here. The only 
 place to learn to understand church architecture is at the foot of the 
 altar, in contemplation of that miracle of imprisoned love. Kneel 
 on the altar steps, reminder of that ladder of Jacob's vision that led 
 up to heaven, and you will see all arts as the handmaids of the Lord ' 
 and all symbols as the endless repetitions of man's struggle to express 
 God, the spiritual esperanto of the aspiring ages. 
 
 The strange conventionalized angels soaring above and around 
 this altar are probably very unlike the angels that Jacob saw. And 
 
 29 
 
soaring may be too free a word for figures so straight and pillar-like ; 
 architectural sculpture could not go much farther than these angels. 
 But they suggest the seraphim more vividly than if they were real- 
 istic and human; more than that, their vertical lines elongate the 
 columns and carry the eye up without a break to the fresco above. 
 This is not, however, the place to study that symbolic panorama. 
 Look no higher now than the angels and note that each of the ten 
 carries a shield carved with one of the instruments of the Passion, the 
 nails, scourge, column, crown of thorns, ladder, sponge, sword, et 
 cetera, reminding us over and over again that this is the place of 
 Sacrifice. 
 
 Other symbols are chiselled upon the tall crucifix and the six 
 great candlesticks that stand in a row upon the altar. These are of 
 bronze inlaid with silver and semi-precious stones and, like every- 
 thing else in the church, are of special design to harmonize with the 
 architecture. No other decoration detracts from the dignity and 
 richness of the sanctuary. Flowers are sparingly used at Saint Agnes', 
 and then only on high festivals, when vases of crimson bloom are 
 placed on each side of the altar and under the seven lamps on the 
 ambulatory screen. Nothing less deep or gorgeous in color seems to 
 make an impression amid the glow of gold and glass. At Benediction 
 the ostensorium is exposed on a pedestal erected on the reredos in 
 order to fulfil the rubrical requirement which does not permit it to 
 be placed on top of the tabernacle. A double flight of steps behind 
 the altar leads to this platform, whence the monstrance flashes like a 
 sunburst above the yellow spears of candle light and the red flame 
 of lamps. 
 
 The choir gallery and organ are best seen from in front of the 
 altar. Built over the large vestibule and with no supports on this side 
 except heavy brackets, the organ loft is not the least successful part 
 of the church design. Architects will best appreciate how skillfully 
 a gallery spacious enough to contain a large organ and places for a 
 hundred singers in the desired circular formation has been achieved 
 without shadowing the back pews or interfering with the unbroken 
 line of the nave. Our impression is chiefly that the organ has some- 
 
 30 
 
Nave and Choir Gallery from the Altar. 
 
Another View of Nave and Gallery from Altar. 
 
how been made into a frame of silver pipes, like delicate fluted pil- 
 lars, for the vivid circle of the rose window. The rose looks from 
 here like a great brooch set in a silver casket, or like one of those old- 
 fashioned round nosegays edged with lace, a nosegay of fadeless 
 flowers and adamantine embroidery. If you have the true instinct 
 for color, which Ruskin says is as much a gift as an ear for music, 
 the cadence struck from silver pipes and youthful voices during the 
 Mass will make no more melody than the singing chorus of dusky 
 crimsons and violet blues that the sun strikes from the rose. 
 
 Ruskin has also said something about pulpits, something to the 
 effect that they never should be large or highly decorated, lest the 
 magnificence of the rostrum distract from the message of the 
 preacher. He would probably approve of the pulpit of Saint Agnes', 
 which conforms admirably to his law that when the form is kept 
 simple, much loveliness of color and costliness of work may be intro- 
 duced. This is a law fulfilled by Romanesque decorative detail in 
 general. It decorates with color and cameo carving as the Gothic 
 decorates with form and sculptural ornament. Durandus makes the 
 pulpit a symbol of the life of the perfect, which is here lifted up over 
 the altar rail on the gospel side of the chancel, a squat Doric column 
 supporting an octagonal ambo with sides of perforated marble bor- 
 dered by simple carved mouldings. A panel of scarlet silk takes the 
 place of the cushion formerly laid on the reading desk under the book 
 of the gospels to denote the softness and sweetness of the commands 
 of Christ. "My yoke is sweet and my burden light." 
 
 You come now to the shrine of Our Lady, corresponding exactly 
 to the chapel of Saint Joseph in the opposite transept. The only 
 difference is in the statue in the niche and in the mural decoration. 
 It is very evident that this wall was painted with special love and 
 fervor, and was made as dazzling and splendid as the artist could 
 imagine it. A suggestion of mosaic or enamel work is obtained by 
 the use of much raised gold, in winding scrolls and circles, against a 
 Marian blue of sapphire-like lustre and loveliness. The Virgin is a 
 softened Byzantine Madonna, holding out to the worship of the 
 world a stiff little Christ Child in white swaddling clothes. Gold 
 
 31 
 
angels hover upon a blue-and-gold background bearing in their 
 hands the crown denoting that Mary is the Queen of Heaven. Saint 
 Elizabeth of Hungary kneels at one side of the throne, Saint Dom- 
 inic at the other. The whole circling wall is like an aureole drawn 
 with a bo-ush dipped in gold around the. noble and virginal head of 
 the Madonna. 
 
 Down this aisle you will find three more confessionals. The 
 first is inscribed : "Return to the Lord. He is bountiful to forgive" ; 
 the second, "The bruised reed He shall not break"; the third, "Be 
 converted to Me and ye shall be saved." 
 
 In a recess is a shrine of the Sacred Heart, as simply and chastely 
 conceived as an altar hewn in the rocky walls of the Catacombs. It 
 consists of a plain mensa, or table, under a marble head of Christ 
 carved in high relief upon a marble slab. Behind the head is a cross 
 incrusted with mosaic and around it a golden nimbus with the in- 
 scription: Cor Jesu Amor Flagrans (Heart of Jesus burning with 
 love). This head, the work of the artist of the Pieta, Mr. Henry 
 Schmitt, is a composition of much dignity and reticence. It is hap- 
 pily free from the unauthorized and tasteless realism of many repre- 
 sentations of the Sacred Heart, and at the same time makes its strong 
 and gentle appeal to the devotion which has always been one of the 
 mainsprings of the dynamic spiritual life of Saint Agnes Parish. 
 
 On your way back to this shrine, pause for a moment at the 
 corner of the transept, at the outer wall, and take a diagonal view of 
 transept, nave and chancel. It is the view an artist might take if he 
 were going to paint a picture of the interior. It has a certain crowded 
 and palpable splendor of arch piled upon arch and color splashed 
 upon color. Pulpit and pillar, altar and angel, arcade and canopy, 
 light dappled with shadow, all mingle and mount in a serried pic- 
 turesqueness almost orchestral, like one of those smashing crescendos 
 achieved when all the instruments and elements of music rush to- 
 gether in a final harmony. 
 
 This is one memorable vista. The church is full of others which 
 you will discover for yourself if you go in search of them. There are 
 churches which may be taken in whole at a glance. In them the first 
 view is the best. There are others which are new with each visit, 
 
 32 
 
Altar of the Blessed Virgin. 
 
Pieta and Shrine of the Sacred Heart. 
 
which have a hundred shy and hidden charms besides their obvious 
 attraction for the casual eye, which are always revealing unexpected 
 beauties, like the undiscovered depths and facets in the mind of a 
 friend, to make familiarity breed content. This is the secret of the 
 inexhaustible enchantment of the great masterpieces of the past. 
 They never tire us, because they grow in beauty as the observer grows 
 in knowledge and perception. In its humbler way, the Church of 
 Saint Agnes has the same appeal. It reveals itself slowly, and has 
 in it enough elements of the beauty of all time to help you, as few 
 new churches can, to feel the inspiration that has created Christian 
 art since the world was young. 
 
 33 
 
B^^ 
 
 i 
 
 THE PAINTED WALLS 
 
 O study the painter's part in the beautification of the church, 
 choose a day when the light is good and the place is empty, 
 take a seat about half way down the middle aisle and give 
 yourself up to a general impression. It is always a good 
 plan to get the whole view first and examine the details later. You 
 will see nothing for a while but the great, challenging, audacious 
 decoration of the half dome. You may find it rather bewildering 
 and overpowering. The Director of the Cleveland School of Art, 
 Mr, Henry Turner Bailey, said in a recent lecture that at first sight 
 the figures on the apse of Saint Agnes' struck him as strange and a 
 little startling, but as he sat in the quiet of the nave and surrendered 
 himself to the atmosphere of the church, he had a sense of being 
 lifted up to the blue of some celestial ether, a heaven in which the 
 unfamiliar angels and the astonishing Christ were at home. Then 
 it occurred to him that it might be more surprising if the radiant 
 spirits of that world looked anything like the inhabitants of this. 
 
 That is the explanation of the lasting influence of Byzantine 
 decoration. It appeals to the imagination because it is never pic- 
 torial. Its great decorative figures are not portraits but symbols. 
 They are not real and have therefore some chance of suggesting the 
 ideal. 
 
 To the extent that it is decorative and not naturalistic, this wall 
 painting is Byzantine, which is to say that it is of the Eastern tradi- 
 tion that the Romanesque builders followed in the interiors of their 
 churches because the large plain spaces had to be rendered interesting 
 by surface ornament. The Gothic gets color from its windows and 
 embellishment from architectural detail. The Romanesque attains 
 both with fresco and mosaic. Saint Agnes' has much more glass than 
 the old churches of its type. It achieves an effect of unusual color 
 because it adds to the Gothic richness of decorated windows the 
 Romanesque or Byzantine warmth of decorated walls. 
 
 35 
 
The great Byzantine half domes were in mosaic; they were more 
 classical and conventional than this ; but they had the same dominant 
 central figure of the same majestic size, the same exuberance of color, 
 the same purpose of inscribing roofs and walls with vast symbols of 
 sublime truth. Look here and you will see all the elemental facts of 
 Christian doctrine, set forth with daring imagination and a fearless 
 employment of color and decorative form. The artist, Mr. Felix 
 Lieftuchter, is a young Cincinnati man who seized his first great 
 chance at a "ten-leagued canvas" to produce the largest and most 
 ambitious apse decoration so far attempted in this country. 
 
 He has taken the firmament for a background and set it with 
 stars and planets, he has drawn the signs of the zodiac in the great 
 circle of Eternity, and against this panoramic splendor he has painted 
 the Trinity. He has told the story of Creation in the angels of the 
 Seven Days; of the Redemption in the great cross behind the throne 
 of Christ; of sanctifying grace in the rivers of living water; of the 
 commission of the Church in the frieze of the Apostles, sent to teach; 
 of the chain of prayer between heaven and earth in the kneeling 
 figures of the Virgin and Saint Agnes. There is vigor and exaltation 
 in conception and composition — the high adventurousness of the 
 human imagination scaling the heights of heaven to seek symbols 
 transcendent enough to express the inexpressible. 
 
 The decoration of the body of the church is by a different hand 
 and in a different manner from the painting of the apse. One is tied 
 to the other only by a common sweep of fancy and flow of line. The 
 effect of both together is of a stream circling the walls, a surge of 
 color washing against the gray and solid bank of stone column and 
 round arch. The four rivers that rise in the central Godhead pass 
 through the Apostles and down the nave like a tide. There is a 
 suggestion of waves in the rippling lines and curving vaults and in 
 the undulant wings of the painted angels over the pillars, a constant 
 ebb and flow that has source and sea in the supreme figure of the 
 Redeemer holding in His Hand the Book of Life which proclaims 
 Him the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. In the eyes 
 of that Master of the tides are all the passion and pity, the majesty 
 
 36 
 
Vista of Altar from East Transept. 
 
and meekness, the divinity and humanity, implied in the incarnation 
 of God for the salvation of man. The artist studied most of the 
 existing literature about Christ before painting this extraordinary 
 head and he believes that it expresses the general idea of the face of 
 the Savior held by all the ancient writers. 
 
 In describing his work, Mr. Lieftuchter says that while it is 
 impossible in such an undertaking to shake off the influence and 
 inspiration of the incomparable mosaics of Rome and Byzantium, he 
 endeavored to find a medium of expression in sympathy with modern 
 feeling while preserving the formal dignity and simplicity of the old 
 patterns. His figures are not imitations. They bear only the most 
 general resemblance to the mosaic decorations of the past. His 
 angels, both in form and color, suggest the work of the modern Rus- 
 sians, but since that represents a return to their own primitive tradi- 
 tions, certainly Greek in origin, it should not be out of harmony in a 
 Byzantine composition. The artist thus explains the symbolic mean- 
 ing of his painting: 
 
 "The monumental figure of Christ in majesty seated on the 
 throne, ancient symbol of power, surrounded by a cluster of cheru- 
 bim holding the seven lights of the apocalypse, forms the central 
 and dominating feature of the composition and takes the central 
 place between the twelve apostles in the frieze below representing 
 mankind, and the figure of the Eternal Father on the vault of the 
 apse, thereby symbolizing His position as mediator between God 
 and man. 
 
 "Between the figures of God the Father and God the Son is the 
 Dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, surrounded by seven golden flames, 
 symbolic of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, forming together the 
 traditional representation of the Holy Trinity. 
 
 "The figure of the Eternal Father is represented with arms out- 
 stretched in a bestowing attitude as Father of the universe. He is 
 surrounded by a large circle symbolic of Eternity, which is formed 
 by the signs of the Zodiac on a background of deep blue studded with 
 stars and planets. 
 
 "Kneeling on the base of the throne at the feet of our Lord are 
 the figures of the Virgin Mary and Saint Agnes in attitudes of suppli- 
 
cation, representing the saints of the Church as intercessors for man- 
 kind at the throne of God. On either side of the central figure is a 
 row of richly clad angels holding in outstretched arms symbols of the 
 seven days of creation. The upward and outward movement of these 
 figures following the large circle surrounding the figure of Jehovah 
 and the oval aureola formed by the wings of the cherubim back of the 
 figure of our Lord, formed the main rhythmic features upon which 
 I chiefly depended to give something of the feeling of solemn dignity 
 and grandeur, which the architectural space as well as the theme 
 requires. 
 
 "The four rivers of living waters flowing from the base of the 
 throne representing the graces of the Church and the large cross back 
 of the central figure are further symbolic details. 
 
 "The inscription on the base of the throne: Ecce Agnus Dei 
 Qui Tollit Peccata Mundi — Behold the Lamb of God Who taketh 
 away the sins of the world — points to the fundamental idea of the 
 composition, the redemption of mankind through Christ." 
 
 You will have to make a jump of several centuries to go from the 
 figures of the apse to the decorations of the body of the church. They 
 have in common, as has been suggested, a certain rhythm of design, 
 a conventionalism that keys them to each other and to the architec- 
 ture, and a strong insistence upon color. But in the nave decoration 
 the colors are differently blended, after a more modern formula, and 
 the design is neither classical nor medieval, but of a new school that 
 has been making original and successful decorative experiments in 
 Northern Europe, particularly in Norway and Sweden. Whether 
 this blend of the traditional and the modern, of Byzantine and Scan- 
 dinavian, with a hint of early Celtic for flavor, is congruous in a 
 church interior of a true basilica type like that of Saint Agnes, let 
 the purists and art critics decide. The scheme is at least original, and 
 it is enough for us to see that it is well executed, that it is ecclesiastical 
 in character and that the mingling of North and South, East and 
 West, is in itself a proof of the Catholicity of a church in which all 
 periods and forms of art seem to be at home. 
 
 38 
 
You will notice that painted angels in the nave follow the sculp- 
 tured angels in the chancel, and are quite as conventional in form and 
 color. They are twelve in all, the mystic number indicative of the 
 universal Church. Six bear shields inscribed with the names of 
 virtues; to the four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice 
 and Fortitude, are added the distinctively Christ-like qualities of 
 Patience and Charity. 
 
 The plain blue and gold of the ceiling of nave and aisles helps 
 the procession of angels to bind the body of the church to the apse. 
 The hoops of the barrel vault are very interesting; you may read 
 there, if you will, a whole litany of saints, those preachers and doers 
 of the word that are symbolized by the vaulting as bearing the dead 
 weight of man's infirmity heavenward. Surely there can be no lack 
 of inspiration for the decorator who reads the symbolists and learns 
 that the very walls have meanings ; that the roof signifies the charity 
 that covers a multitude of sins, that the pavement is the foundation of 
 faith, or humility,' the four walls the four cardinal virtues, the win- 
 dows the Sacred Scriptures, the stones the souls of the faithful. 
 
 The decorator here has made use of many symbols, and has 
 revived to express them an old and long-lost medium. This is the 
 medieval method known as Al Secco, which differs from al fresco in 
 that the colors are applied to dry mortar but are themselves mixed 
 with lime and water, making the painting an integral part of the 
 plaster wall. The advantage of this method is to preserve the beauti- 
 ful texture of the mortar and the sweeping trowel marks of the mason, 
 giving life, warmth and durability to walls and vaults. Mr. Harold 
 Rambusch, of New York, who directed the decoration, in an article 
 in the Brooklyn Museum Quarterly (Vol. Ill), says that this method 
 of painting with lime is so enduring that walls recently uncovered in 
 old churches which had been whitewashed at the time of the Refor- 
 mation were found to be as brilliant and clear in color as when they 
 were painted. He adduces the example of the Cathedral of Roskilde, 
 the ancient capital of Denmark. 
 
 "There is a radiance and texture in these lime decorations that 
 cannot be rivaled by anything executed in oil," declares Mr, Ram- 
 
 39 
 
busch. "One of the most important decorative factors is that this 
 technique produces no sheen, and the surfaces thus treated can be 
 seen from any angle and from no position do they become indistinct 
 because of the reflection of light," 
 
 When gold is used it is applied to the raised surfaces of the 
 plaster, giving a very rich effect of incrustation to the spans of the 
 arches. The side walls are quite plain, harmonizing with the stone 
 and the marble wainscoting. Their decorative value is that of back- 
 ground and contrast; they are the wide margins of the missal in which 
 are written the sermons that "reach the heart through the eyes instead 
 of entering at the ears." 
 
 40 
 
VI 
 
 THE WINDOWS 
 
 |0 far we have considered the windows only as the source 
 of light, a light like the glow of a clear and mellow twi- 
 light, made up of many colors but not at once calling 
 attention to the glass that transmits it. That is as it 
 should be. For if there is one fact about stained glass more funda- 
 mental than any other it is that it is a part of the wall and not a 
 picture hung upon it. However, competent authorities differ about 
 other architectural details and principles of decorations, they are 
 all agreed that the so-called "picture window" is an abomination, 
 violating the first rule of the glass maker's art, which is to make a 
 window and not a painting. 
 
 This transparent portion of the wall must be treated, therefore, 
 as a flat surface, in a manner purely decorative and subordinated to 
 the architecture. It should be pictorial only in the sense that a rug 
 may be pictorial. It should have no perspective, because perspective 
 in a window naturally draws the eye out of the church and is thus 
 neither sound art nor sound doctrine. The twelfth- and thirteenth- 
 century glassworker, peerless master of the inimitable art of Chartres 
 and LeMans, "would sooner have worn a landscape on his back," 
 says Henry Adams, "than have costumed his church with it; he would 
 as soon have decorated his floor with painted holes as his walls." 
 
 One would need to read a good many volumes on decorated glass 
 to make an intelligent study of any windows in which an attempt is 
 made to revive the lost art of the glazier of the Middle Ages. He 
 had an instinctive feeling for design and a whole forgotten science of 
 color. He knew, for instance, according to Viollet-le-Duc, the emi- 
 nent French architect, that blue is the light in windows, and he 
 commanded all colors superbly because he knew how to manage blue. 
 It is endlessly fascinating to watch how those unknown craftsmen 
 handled their color ; how skilfully they used lead as well as glass to 
 make the setting as beautiful as the jewels; how exquisitely they 
 
 41 
 
designed their medallions in a miraculous embroidery of. parable and 
 symbol and suggestion until the glass in medieval churches became 
 in truth, as Mr. Cram says, "their flame of life,"" the final and inspired 
 word of a great art and a great devotion. 
 
 The windows before you are not the windows of Chartres, or 
 LeMans, or St. Denis, or Gloucester; but if you will look long 
 enough at the glass in the chancel and the rose, keeping in mind 
 always that the function of the window is to embellish the- architec- 
 ture, you will learn better than by many books what good glass is. 
 You will travel a long way to find anything more beautiful than the 
 color in those chancel windows as it sparkles and burns around the 
 sanctuary. There is no color in the world, an5rway, to compare with 
 the magical color of jewelled glass. Every other medium is lifeless 
 " beside it. Pick out the blues here. Note how limpid and strong they 
 are and how well combined with the other colors. See the vigor and 
 depth of the reds, the clear fire of the greens, the brilliance of the 
 amethysts and ambers. Observe that the strips of lead that hold the 
 mosaic composition together form part of the design, and give accent 
 and strength to the flooding color. 
 
 Here are medallion windows of the approved medieval type. 
 The little panels, set in a wide ornamental border, depidt scenes 
 from the life of Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin or a saint; the medal- 
 lions in each window being tied together by the subject and by- the 
 color key. In the chancel the window behind the altar is the 'Ctvici- ' 
 fixion, and the two outer ones in the circle of seyen honor Saint Petej. 
 and Saint Paul, a grouping which rests on a very early tradition. The 
 rose window at the end of the nave has no -figures at all, It is just a 
 beautiful "symbolic decoration set like a sunburst or breast-pin »of. 
 jewels over the door of the church. In all of these windows thef'^lass 
 is of singular loveliness. Any student will recognize, them a^ among 
 the few modern examples of, the best tradition, of a great decprative 
 art. That it is also a great religious art is borne in upon even the 
 most ignorant as he kneels in the light of these windows and f^ls 
 their vivid inspiration to worship and to praise. -" 
 
 42 
 
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 Sanctuary Windows, Pulpit and Organ. 
 
To study them in detail is an interesting and profitable exercise. 
 They are in truth scriptures and lives of the saints, each an illumi- 
 nated page in an endless volume of spiritual suggestion. You will 
 notice that all of the chancel windows really tell the same story as 
 the painting above the altar, the story of the Redemption and the life 
 and mission of Christ on earth. They are a kind of compendium of 
 the New Testament. The first, starting from the left, is devoted to 
 Saint Peter, but Saint Peter only as the disciple chosen to head the 
 Church Our Lord came to found. The bottom medallion shows him 
 swearing fidelity to his Master; the second his repentance when he 
 had broken that vow; the third the charge -to Saint Peter, and the 
 fourth Saint Peter guarding the gates of heaven. 
 
 The second is Our Lady's window. The centre panel depicts 
 her enthroned in heaven, but the bottom and top medallions illustrate 
 the Annunciation and the Nativity, so you see that Mary's window 
 is mainly concerned with the life of Christ, as the next epitomizes 
 His public ministry. It begins with the Baptism of Our Lord in the 
 bottom medallion, shows Him calling the Disciples in the second, 
 raising the daughter of Jairus in the third, and ends with the Sermon 
 on the Mount. 
 
 In general the windows have four medallions in the centre sur- 
 rounded by formal borders of a rich decorative design. Two of 
 the chancel windows add interest and variety, however, by having 
 only three medallions, slightly larger than the rest, and in the middle 
 the most conspicuous window in the church is so arranged that a large 
 panel of the Crucifixion fills the central space between the top of the 
 reredos and the arch of the baldacchino. Below the Crucifixion, 
 which thus forms the appropriate background for the altar, is a 
 medallion portraying the Agony in the Garden and a small panel 
 showing Christ before Pilate. A Pieta group fills the top medallion. 
 
 The two windows following illustrate the Glory of the Savior 
 and His continuing mission as the Divine Mediator for men. In the 
 first, the medallions, from bottom to top, represent the Resurrection, 
 the Appearance first to Mary Magdalen in the garden and then to 
 the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the Ascension. The second 
 
 43 
 
shows Our Lord the Consoler, below, Our Lord Enthroned in the 
 centre, and above, Our Lord the Intercessor. 
 
 The last window in the chancel presents the story of Saint Paul, 
 beginning with his conversion on the road to Damascus in the bottom 
 panel. In the second he is appearing before Felix, in the third he is 
 seen among the Athenians, and in the fourth he is writing his Epistles. 
 
 The windows in the body of the church, while following the 
 same general design of four medallions in an ornamental border and 
 conforming to the same correct principles of glassmaking, are not so 
 rich in texture or so satisfying in quality as the apse windows. They 
 have been made lighter, for one thing. It is evident, from the use 
 of simple cathedral or stippled glass in the clerestory windows 
 above, which softens the glare without coloring the light, that the 
 desire to secure an adequately illuminated church has resulted in the 
 sacrifice of some depth of tone in the glass of the nave. 
 
 Each of these sixteen windows tells the life story of a saint. 
 Begin at the window next to the Lady Chapel on the east side of the 
 church and you will find the heavenly roll of honor unfolding in the 
 following order. Here the medallions are to be read from the top 
 downward : 
 
 No. 1. St. Rose of Lima. 
 
 1. Confirmation of St. Rose. 
 
 2. St. Rose renounces the vanities of the world. 
 
 3. St. Rose accepts the white and black Butterfly as an in- 
 spiration to join the Order of St. Dominic. 
 
 4. St. Rose doing needlework for her livelihood and the 
 support of the household. 
 
 No, 2. St. Agnes. 
 
 1. Rejects the life of the Roman noble. 
 
 2. St. Agnes protected by the angel. 
 
 3. Beheading of St. Agnes. 
 
 4. St. Agnes appears in glory to her parents. 
 
 No. 3. St. Catherine of Alexandria. 
 
 1. Teaching the Doctors. 
 
 2. Refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods. 
 
 3. Martyrdom of St. Catherine. 
 
 4. Received into Heaven. 
 
 44 
 
No. 4. St. Francis of Assisi. 
 
 1. The Glorification of St. Francis. 
 
 2. St. Francis chanting the Gospel at the first Christmas 
 Mass. 
 
 3. St. Francis before Pope Innocent III, who takes the 
 Brotherhood under his protection. 
 
 4. St. Francis renouncing a life of riches to enter the 
 service of Christ. 
 
 No. 5. St. Augustine. 
 
 1. St. Augustine and his mother, St. Monica. 
 
 2. Converted by St. Ambrose. 
 
 3. St. Augustine and the child at the seashore. 
 
 4. St. Augustine in his study. 
 
 No. 6. St. Patrick. 
 
 1. St. Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland. 
 
 2. Baptizing the King's daughter at the well of Cruachan. 
 
 3. Founding the See of Armagh. 
 
 4. Preaching before the king Leoghaire, 
 
 No. 7. St. Teresa. 
 
 1. Entering the Carmelite noviate. 
 
 2. Writing the "Relations". 
 
 3. Founding the Convent of St. Joseph of Avila. 
 
 4. Death of St. Teresa. 
 
 No. 8. St. Thomas of Aquin. 
 
 1. The parents of St. Thomas take him to Monte Cassino 
 
 and place him under the care of the monks. 
 
 2. St. Thomas converts his sisters. 
 
 3. St. Thomas consulted by King Louis. 
 
 4. St. Thomas writes the "Summa." 
 
 No. 9. St. Vincent de Paul. 
 
 1. Opens the retreat of Saint Lazare. 
 
 2. Bids the ladies of charity to care for the foundlings. 
 
 3. Takes the place of a galley slave at Marseilles. 
 
 4. Organizes relief for the poor. 
 No. 10. St. Bernard of Clairvaux. 
 
 1. Sees a vision of his mother, who persuades him to become 
 a monk. 
 
 2. Exhorting his people to join the crusade. 
 
 3. Denouncing the heresies of Abelard. 
 
 4. The Blessed Virgin Mary appearing to St. Bernard. 
 
 45 
 
No. 11. St. Boniface. 
 
 1. Fells the sacred oak at Geismar. 
 
 2. Preaches to the pagans. 
 
 3. Archbishop of Mainz. 
 
 4. Baptizes the King. 
 
 No. 12, St. Benedict. 
 
 1. Instructing his two disciples. 
 
 2. Blessing a departing missionary. 
 
 3. Last interview with his sister, St. Scholastica. 
 
 4. His departure for Rome. 
 
 No. 13. St. Dominic. 
 
 1. St. Dominic worshipping at the foot of the Cross. 
 
 2. The miracle of the meals served by Angels. 
 
 3. The Blessed Virgin instructing St. Dominic in the use 
 of the Rosary. 
 
 4. St. Dominic appearing before the Pope for the approval 
 of his Order. 
 
 No. 14. St. Lawrence. 
 
 1. Receiving the treasures of the Church. 
 
 2. Giving alms. 
 
 3. Before the Emperor Decius. 
 
 4. Martyrdom. 
 
 No. 15. St. Aloysius. 
 
 1. Receiving his first Communion from St. Charles Bor- 
 romeo. 
 
 2. Resolves to resign his title and family honors to his 
 brother. "* 
 
 3. Instructed in the catechism by his mother. 
 
 4. St. Aloysius asking alms. 
 
 No. 16. St. Stephen. 
 
 1. St. Stephen's speech before the Council. 
 
 2. Ordination of St. Stephen. 
 
 3. Stoned to death. 
 
 4. Burial. 
 
 46 
 
VII 
 
 THE FINAL SYMBOL 
 
 IHESE pages have been an attempt to translate into words 
 the things that the Church of Saint Agnes has to say in its 
 architecture, its decoration and its symbolism. They are 
 a very free and incomplete translation, but they would be 
 still more incomplete if they were concluded without re-emphasizing 
 its symbolic expression of something parochial and of the present as 
 well as of things universal and of the past. 
 
 Styles of architecture and of decoration are only symbols. The 
 church is only a symbol, and this church would have no special 
 interest if it spoTse a dead language or memorialized a dead past. 
 What makes interesting the old forms of faith and fervor employed 
 by the architect is that they are the forms most fit to clothe and 
 embody the soul of the congregation today. 
 
 Saint Agnes Parish was organized in 1893 by the present pastor, 
 the Rev. Gilbert P. Jennings, LL.D. For more than a quarter of a 
 century it has been shaped and fired by a high and uncompromising 
 spiritual ideal. The generosity which has built and paid for the 
 church, the school and a complete parochial plant has been inspired 
 by the most exalted motives. In twenty-seven years there has never 
 been a personal solicitation of contributors or a public record of 
 contributions. The parishioners have been taught to give as the 
 artists of the Middle Ages built — for the love of God. The devo- 
 tional life of the parish is well organized and constantly stimulated. 
 There are seven crowded Sunday Masses and nearly a hundred thou- 
 sand yearly communions in the church. There is a punctilious care 
 for ceremonial observance, a sustained regard for the solemn page- 
 antry and poetry of Catholic worship. Sincerity, order, dignity and 
 ardor are felt in the parish life as well as in the parish church. The 
 heart of both is the Blessed Sacrament, made by perpetual preaching 
 
 47 
 
the centre of the spiritual structure as it is the centre of the material 
 edifice. 
 
 It is not by accident, indeed, that churches take form and grow. 
 All good ecclesiastical architecture has its root in spiritual vitality, 
 but spiritual vitality does not always, alas, express itself in good 
 architecture. Saint Agnes Parish had the first requisite, the love of 
 a devout people for the House of God, and it acquired the second, 
 an architect with knowledge and training enough to interpret and 
 symbolize that love. The combination is rare — so rare that the 
 medievalist is almost justified in his lament that all religious art. 
 Catholic as well as Protestant, died ^f the Reformation. Church 
 architects capable of distingjiished work are few, and pastors and 
 people who know enough to employ them and demand their best are 
 still fewer. No wonder the discovery of an excellent piece of work 
 tempts us to become panegyric, and compels us to go back to a richer 
 past for measures of comparison. 
 
 The Middle Ages are alive today mainly because they built 
 churches. "If they had reflected only what was practical," says one 
 historian, "nothing would have survived for us." And they built 
 churches because they were alive. 
 
 If a church like the Church of Saint Agnes tells us no more 
 than that, if it only points the way to the springs of Christian art, 
 if it only shows the need of architects schooled both in art and in 
 faith, if it only helps others to build better by its shadowy suggestion 
 of how lovely are the tabernacles of the Lord of Hosts, and how 
 blessed are they who dwell in His House, it has said all it has to say. 
 
 48 
 
The Reverend Gilbert P. Jennings, LL. D., Pastor of Saint Agnes Church. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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