SECTION XXV.

OF WARMING AND VENTILATION.

A PERFECT method of warming churches has yet to be invented, and I am myself prepared neither to bring forward any important suggestions of my own on the subject, nor to recommend any one of the systems now in use to the exclusion of the rest. They may be roughly classed under three heads-namely, stoves, placed either in the church itself, or where they have free atmospheric communication with it; pipes, containing either hot water or steam; and flues, arranged so that their upper sides form part of the pavement of the church, which thus becomes a source of heat. These I shall speak of respectively as the stove system, the pipe system, and the flue system.

It is important to remember what is possible in warming, and what is not. Apparatus are frequently condemned, when they are not really at fault. Nothing is commoner than to hear of a church, that it is never warm till the afternoon. On inquiry it will generally be found that such a church is left too cool for six consecutive days, and then a fire is lighted sometime on Sunday morning, and the place is expected to be warm and comfortable by eleven o'clock, when respectable people are

supposed to go to church. Surely a most unreasonable expectation. The large body of air which a church contains cannot be raised say twenty degrees in a moment, or in two or three hours, except by such means as would make the place unbearable when heated. If a church is in constant use, and has its warming apparatus in daily, not necessarily full, operation, and nevertheless, is found always to be cold in the earlier part of the day, then I grant that something is wrong; but it does not necessarily follow that the system of warming is alone to blame, it may be that, owing to some defect in the church itself, the air within it cools more rapidly than it should do, and thus neutralises the effect of the warming. Under the most favourable circumstances it takes a considerable time for a warming apparatus to get fully to work. We should require of it that, when at work, it shall maintain a steady regulatable and sufficient temperature uniformly throughout the building. This I believe may be done either with stoves, pipes, or flues. Each system has its good points and its bad ones, and in individual cases the balance of these will sometimes be in favour of one, and sometimes of another. And with any of them there of course may be, and often are, failures, due either to a mistaken parsimony in the first outlay, or to the incompetence of the tradesman to whom the work is entrusted. If any one method ultimately supersedes the other two, it will probably be the flue. system, but before it does so it will have to receive considerable improvement.

The working out in detail of the warming apparatus

is not the duty of the architect of a church; it belongs to the tradesman whose special business it is; but the architect should arrange the general scheme, and never lose control of the work. It very often happens that this is not done, and, either from the carelessness of the architect himself, or from the ignorant interference of some churchwarden or committee-man, the church is unconditionally handed over to be warmed by some selfstyled "engineer," who may be a man who understands the work, or may be, and often is, simply the local ironmonger. Whichever he be, and whether he warms the church satisfactorily or not, he is pretty certain to disfigure it, for after the manner of tradesmen he looks at the matter solely with respect to his particular craft. He starts with the supposition that the church has been built for no other reason but that he may warm it, and consequently everything must give way to his pipes, grates, stoves, and flues.' It is for the architect so to regulate matters that neither the efficiency of the warming apparatus is impaired, nor the appearance of the church unnecessarily injured by it. I say unnecessarily advisedly, for it is not always possible to keep the church absolutely uninjured.

that

1 To give some idea of what these men are capable of, I may say twice I have had to deal with men who proposed to place coils of pipes inside altars. Both expressed great surprise at this being objected to, and one, after having been with some difficulty made to understand that it would not be allowed, returned with a second scheme-to place the pipes behind the altar, where he insisted they could not be seen from the body of the church-and, when that also was forbidden, he complained bitterly that I would not "give him a fair chance."

The stove system is the simplest. From the number of fires required, it is inconvenient and expensive in large buildings; but that it may be successfully applied to them is proved by the use of it at St Paul's Cathedral, the largest in cubic contents, and, at the same time, one of the best warmed churches in England. Stoves may be placed either visibly in the church itself or in a separate chamber, the air in which, after having been warmed, is passed on to the church. The latter method has not much to recommend it, except when, as at St Paul's, the heating chamber is a crypt under the entire area of the church, and having frequent communication with it—a luxurious arrangement, which cannot often be obtained. When it is not so, the warmed air is rarely equally diffused through the interior, even where attempts are made to carry it to different parts by means of flues, which cause nearly as much disfigurement to the church as the pipe system, without warming it so well. Sometimes stoves are sunk separately in pits, grated over at the top level with the pavement of the church-an arrangement intermediate between the separate chambers and the visible stoves. This may sometimes be successful, but requires doing cautiously; the large grates, besides being ugly patches on the floor, are so much waste space, for it cannot be used when the stoves are in action. If adopted at all, sunk stoves must be so arranged that, even in the most crowded conditions of the church, no one will ever be likely either to sit or stand over them. Otherwise faintings, with all the accompanying confusion, will certainly be the result.

Besides their comparative cheapness, stoves placed upon the floor of the church have the advantage over other means of warming, that they require much less preparation and special adaptation of the building in which they are to be used. They are therefore especially suitable for introduction into existing buildings, particularly into ancient churches, which have been much used for interments, and almost every stone in whose pavements is a historical monument, which it would be sacrilege' to remove or destroy. That they are unsightly I grant. A gill stove is one of the unloveliest objects ever invented by man, but it is confined to one spot, and does not taint the whole interior with its ugliness as do the pipes and grates of an "apparatus." In old churches, stoves are always the best means of warming, and they generally are so in small, poor, modern buildings. The stove need not be placed more majorum in the middle of the chancel, with an iron chimney passing through the east window. It must be in some corner where it is well placed for its work, but as little visible as possible. Such corners nearly always exist in old churches, and in new ones they may easily be contrived on the plan, in which cases proper flues should be built in the walls from them. In old buildings the metal chimney may be used, and taken to the outside, either through the wall or through a window; there is really no harm in that, so long as it is

1 This sacrilege is "correct," and consequently frightfully common. It is committed in nearly every church which is "restored." May those, who remove their ancestors' modest gravestones to make way for cast-iron gratings and "tesselated " pavements, have their own "correct" memorials broken up to mend the roads with.