Because it endures through a perpetual process of discarding and renewal, those members will share the richness and experience of a spiritual life far exceeding their own time-span; a truth which is enshrined in the beautiful conception of the Communion of Saints.

They enter a group consciousness which reinforces their own in the extent to which they surrender to it; which surrounds them with favourable suggestions and gives the precision of habit to their instinct for Eternity.

The special atmosphere, the hoarded beauty, the evocative yet often archaic symbolism, of a Gothic Cathedral, with its constant reminiscences of past civilizations and old levels of culture, its broken fragments and abandoned altars, its conservation of eternal truths--the intimate union in it of the sublime and homely, the successive and abiding aspects of reality--make it the most fitting of all images of the Church, regarded as the spiritual institution of humanity.

And the perhaps undue conservatism commonly associated with Cathedral circles represents too the chief reproach which can be brought against churches--their tendency to preserve stability at the expense of novelty, to crystallize, to cling to habits and customs which no longer serve a useful end.

In this a church is like a home; where old bits of furniture have a way of hanging on, and old habits, sometimes absurd, endure.