You can strip a sanctuary of symbols, remove all vestiges of beauty and deny any value the aesthetic may have in worship. But experts say those elements almost always creep back into the church — one way or another.
That principle was illumined by the 1936 book Worship by Evelyn Underhill, in which she showed that Protestants who reject visual symbols simply heard them expressed in “hymns rich in concrete images and emotional suggestion” — in other words, the symbols were experienced “by means of the ear instead of the eye.”
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