Ecclesiastical Curiosities

From a Photo by A. H. Pitcher, Gloucester. PORCH, GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL.
Edited by William Andrews . . .
LONDON: WILLIAM ANDREWS & CO., 5, FARRINGDON AVENUE, E.C. 1899.
This volume is on similar lines to some of my previously published works, and I trust it will be equally well received by the public and the press.
William Andrews.
The Hull Press, December 1st, 1898.
By the Rev. Geo. S. Tyack, B.A.
DOOR AT CROWLE CHURCH.
In primitive times the approach to a church must have been full of dignity, the worshippers being warned, by successive gates and doors, of the sacredness of the building which they were about to enter. Eusebius gives us a full account of a splendid church built at Tyre by Paulinus, from which we may gather the plan on which such buildings were erected in the primitive ages, when the means were forthcoming, and no opposition from the heathen world prevented.
WEST DOOR, HOLY TRINITY, COLCHESTER.
The Continent presents some splendid examples of these decorated porticoes. The cathedral of Strasburg, preserved as by a series of miracles in spite of every danger that can assail a building, fire, lightning, earthquake, and cannonade, has a very grand west entrance; its tall doors set within a number of receding arches, and the sharply-pointed gable which crowns them flanked and crested with tapering pinnacles. The French artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were unrivalled in the beauty and wealth of statuary with which they adorned their churches, and not least their doors. “The glory and the beauty” of the great porch at Amiens has been set forth fully by Ruskin, who has woven into one wonderful whole the meaning of the statues, which, like “a cloud of witnesses,” throng the western front. But Amiens is not alone; S. Denis, Paris, Sens, Angouléme, Poictiers,
WEST DOOR, HIGHAM FERRERS CHURCH.