The foregoing has been written as a handbook to use at the bench, and therefore I have tried to keep myself strictly to describing the actual processes and the ordinary practice and routine of stained-glass work.
But can we leave the subject here?
If we were speaking of even the smallest of the minor arts and crafts, we should wish to say something of why they are practised and how they should be practised, of the principles that guide them, of the spirit in which they should be undertaken, of the place they occupy in human affairs
and in our life on earth. How much more then in an Art like this, which soars to the highest themes, which dares to treat, which is required to treat, of things Heavenly and Earthly, of the laws of God, and of the nature, duty, and destinies of man; and not only so, but must treat of these things in connection with, and in subservience to, the great and dominant Art of Architecture?
We must not shrink, then, from saying all that is in our mind: we must ask ourselves the great questions of all art. We must investigate the How of them, and even face the Why.
Therefore here (however hard it be to do it) something must be said of such great general principles as those of colour, of light, of architectural fitness, of limitations, of thought and imagination and allegory; for all these things belong to stained-glass work, and it is the right or wrong use of these high things that makes windows to be good or to be bad.
Let us, dear student, take the simplest things first, not because they are the easiest (though they perhaps are so), but because they will gradually, I hope, warm up our wits to the point of considering
these matters, and so prepare the way for what is hardest of all.
And I think a good subject to begin with is that of Economy generally, taking into consideration both time and materials.