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| ST. ALPHONSUS' CHURCH, LIMERICK. -The artistic Catholic Church, whose interior is depicted above, was built for the Redemptorist Fathers in 1862, and is one of the largest religious edifices in a city remarkable for the number, beauty and capaciousness of its temples of divine worship. Architectural critics find fault with the rows of pillars which, while they add to the impressiveness, take away much in the way of light and sound from the superb body of the church. There are found architects, however, who maintain the entire correctness of the pillars, because they give more of what a writer has called "the true cathedral gloom" to the fine interior. All students of church building know that the original idea was borrowed from nature. The early Christian worshippers, hunted and persecuted by Pagans all over Europe, sought the depths of the forests for immunity from impious, and murderous, interruption in their devotions. Nothing as Emerson says, so truly recalls the primeval forest as the dark and solemn arches of a great cathedral, with its lofty apse and windows illuminated, yet shaded, by stained glass, of artistic design. No church in Ireland carries out this fine idea more faithfully than the exquisite edifice whose graceful interior is so strikingly presented in the sketch. |
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