BREAK WITH TRADITION

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 98, 27 April 1935, Page 9

BREAK WITH TRADITION

STAINED-GLASS ART

Stained-glass windows do not appeal to the Bishop of Bristol, and he told his Diocesan Conference why. He does not find'them beautiful, and they exclude the daylight. Dr. Woodward picked on country churches to illustrate his meaning. There, he said, you are sometimes "faced by a monstros-1 ity, placed there by the devotion oifj people in the eighteenth century, when you could be looking out into God's sunshine and at God's green trees." All this is a rather surprising break with tradition, according to which "religious .light" has always necessarily been "dim" (states the "Daily Telegraph" in an editorial). The suggestion to flood churches with the white light of day and to provide congregations with vistas of sunshine and . green trees raises the interesting question whether Nature or art is the better handmaid to the act of worship. In the past cathedrals! and churches have been built on the latter assumption; and since art finds room for ugliness as well as beauty, we have such masterpieces of hideousness as the gargoyles of Notre Dame. Dr. Woodward definitely takes the other view. He regrets that in entering a church we leave natural beauties outside. The logical sequence to that, it would seem, is not for the Bishop to try to let the countryside into the church, where it must clash with the heritage of history, but for him to lead his congregations out into the fields, and hold his services there.