I occupy a seat in church which is an admirable one for reflection, but I cannot see or hear much that is going on in what we like to call the apse.  There is a splendid stone pillar, a clustered column, right in front of me, and I am as much protected from the minister as Old Put’s troops were from the British, behind the stone wall at Bunker’s Hill.  I can hear his voice occasionally wandering round in the arches overhead, and I recognize the tone, because he is a friend of mine and an excellent man, but what he is saying I can very seldom make out.  If there was any incense burning, I could smell it, and that would be something.  I rather like the smell of incense, and it has its holy associations.  But there is no smell in our church, except of bad air,—­for there is no provision for ventilation in the splendid and costly edifice.  The reproduction of the old Gothic is so complete that the builders even seem to have brought over the ancient air from one of the churches of the Middle Ages,—­you would declare it had n’t been changed in two centuries.

I am expected to fix my attention during the service upon one man, who stands in the centre of the apse and has a sounding-board behind him in order to throw his voice out of the sacred semicircular space (where the altar used to stand, but now the sounding-board takes the place of the altar) and scatter it over the congregation at large, and send it echoing up in the groined roof I always like to hear a minister who is unfamiliar with the house, and who has a loud voice, try to fill the edifice.  The more he roars and gives himself with vehemence to the effort, the more the building roars in indistinguishable noise and hubbub.  By the time he has said (to suppose a case), “The Lord is in his holy temple,” and has passed on to say, “let all the earth keep silence,” the building is repeating “The Lord is in his holy temple” from half a dozen different angles and altitudes, rolling it and growling it, and is not keeping silence at all.  A man who understands it waits until the house has had its say, and has digested one passage, before he launches another into the vast, echoing spaces.  I am expected, as I said, to fix my eye and mind on the minister, the central point of the service.  But the pillar hides him.  Now if there were several ministers in the church, dressed in such gorgeous colors that I could see them at the distance from the apse at which my limited income compels me to sit, and candles were burning, and censers were swinging, and the platform was full of the sacred bustle of a gorgeous ritual worship, and a bell rang to tell me the holy moments, I should not mind the pillar at all.  I should sit there, like any other Goth, and enjoy it.  But, as I have said, the pastor is a friend of mine, and I like to look at him on Sunday, and hear what he says, for he always says something worth hearing.  I am on such terms with him, indeed we all are, that it would be pleasant to have the service of a little more social nature, and more human.  When we put him away off in the apse, and set him up for a Goth, and then seat ourselves at a distance, scattered about among the pillars, the whole thing seems to me a trifle unnatural.  Though I do not mean to say that the congregations do not “enjoy their religion” in their splendid edifices which cost so much money and are really so beautiful.