The following is an excerpt from Allen's writing on the  history of Grace Church's stained glass.

Please click here to access a pdf of the full piece.  

 

"One of the most immediately observable features of the physical plant of Grace Church is the stained-glass which fills the fourteen windows of the Church. This present glass, which is one of the glories of the building, has been slowly, very deliberately added over the course of a century, so that the Church contains currently windows placed from 1869 to 1962. While the results are a bit eclectic, by and large we can be thankful that not all the windows were executed in the same point of time by a single maker. As St. Thomas Aquinas remarked, "Variety belongs to beauty; as the Apostle says, 'In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and earth.' " [2 Timothy 2:20]

 

We can be even more thankful that, despite the truly excruciating periods of taste which have swept the Western World during that century, our Church has been spared (it must have been Providence) the horrors of opalescent and heavily-enameled glass presenting sentimental "portraiture." Perhaps kindly Providence took this form: a succession of rectors of innate good taste who gently steered prospective donors to suitable glass makers.

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It may not be amiss to recall the origin of stained glass in churches, used in medieval European churches as a Biblia Pauperum–a "poor man's Bible", this in an era when the great mass of people were illiterate, and could not depend upon prayer books and hymnals as aids to devotion, and therefore especially in deed of some substitute when services were not actually being conducted. This the stained-glass helped in large measure to provide. Stained-glass, of course, retains this function in part, especially for small children. It will ever be a not insignificant adjunct to the teaching functions of the Church. It surely has always been to the credit of the Church Catholic that it has never feared to make use of every proper means to appeal to every sense of man to teach the Faith, because its theology is not of that warped sort which condemns the senses as evil in themselves. So through the eye, through the ear, through the nostrils, through the touch, the Faith is expounded."