THE MOST INTERESTING BUILDING IN THE WORLD.
LONDON, _October 2, 1902_.
[Sidenote: The Birthplace of the Shorter Catechism.]
Some months ago, when the kind urgency of my friends made it plain to
me that I should go abroad for a while, and when it was decided that
certain young students of the Shorter Catechism in my family should go
with me, I promised them a visit to the birthplace of that marvellous
compendium of biblical doctrine, which for two hundred and fifty
years has been such a weariness to the flesh of Presbyterian children
throughout the English-speaking world, especially on Sunday afternoons,
and which is such a priceless possession of their adult years when once
thoroughly acquired in youth; but I told them that the condition on
which alone I could take them with a clear conscience to the spot where
that matchless little book was written, was that they should memorize
it perfectly beforehand, and I had the satisfaction before leaving
home of hearing them all recite it without a mistake; and, in order to
retain with ease what was thus acquired with toil, they have continued
to recite it regularly from beginning to end every Sunday afternoon.
This is, of course, nothing more than hundreds of other children have
done, and I do not mention it as anything remarkable, but only as
suggesting one reason for the eager interest with which we were looking
forward to our visit to a certain part of Westminster Abbey. And so, on
the very first morning after our first arrival in London, as soon as
we had finished breakfast, we hurried down to the gray old minster,
where, in the midst of the roaring city, so many of the restless makers
of the world's history, literature and art are now quietly sleeping;
for we intended, after seeing where the Westminster Assembly sat, to
give a full morning to the other historical memorials of the Abbey.
[Sidenote: The Coronation Postponed.]
Imagine, then, our disappointment, on reaching the place, to find the
Abbey closed, and to learn from the policeman at the door that no one
knew when it would be opened again, certainly not for several weeks.
You see, the building had been elaborately decorated for the coronation
of King Edward VII., for this is where all the Kings of England have
been crowned, from the time of William the Conqueror down; and while we
were crossing the ocean King Edward became very ill and had to undergo
a surgical operation, as we learned on landing at Southampton, and so
the great ceremonies planned for June 26th had to be postponed. But
the costly draperies used in the decorations were still in position,
and had to remain till it should be seen whether the King would be
well enough in a few weeks to receive the crown; and of course the
public could not be admitted to the Abbey till these sumptuous fabrics
had either served their original purpose or been removed. Happily the
King did recover in a few weeks, to the great joy of his subjects,
who, chastened and subdued by their sovereign's sickness at a time so
critical, came to the coronation on the second date appointed, August
9th, in a more thankful, if less jubilant, temper.
[Sidenote: The Abbey still Closed.]
Meantime, however, we had gone on to Scotland, after three weeks in
London, feeling sure that on our return there would be nothing to
prevent our seeing the great Abbey to our hearts' content. But no;
after two full months in Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands and
the west of England, we found the Abbey still closed. The work of
removing the temporary structures and hangings used at the coronation
was still going on, a fact which suggests forcibly the extent of
these preparations, and, perhaps, also the leisureliness of English
workmen, who are probably not accustomed to doing things as rapidly as
Americans. But we had no idea of being deprived altogether of a sight
of the interior of the Abbey by their slowness. London is a place of
endless interest to visitors; and so, though we had already given three
weeks to the principal sights of the city, we contentedly settled
down for two weeks more there, till the work in the Abbey should be
finished. At last it was all done, and on October 1st the building was
again opened. We were among the first on the ground, and gave two full
days to as thorough an examination of the building and its unparalleled
contents as was practicable within that time.
[Sidenote: The Assembly of Divines.]
Of this inspection of the Abbey and its monuments in general we shall
have something to say after a while, but for the present let us turn
our attention to those parts of the building which are associated with
the work of the famous Assembly of ministers and other scholars who met
here in 1643 by ordinance of Parliament "to establish a new platform
of worship and discipline to this nation for all time to come," and to
whose pious and learned labors, extending through more than five years
and a half, and occupying one thousand one hundred and sixty-three
sessions, the world is indebted for the Larger and Shorter Catechisms
and that great Confession of Faith "which, alone within these islands,
was imposed by law on the whole kingdom," and which, by its fidelity
to Scripture, its logical coherence, and the majesty and fervor of its
style, still commands the adherence of a multitude of the clearest and
strongest minds in Christendom.
[Sidenote: The Two Places of Meeting.]
The two parts of the Abbey especially connected with the work of the
Assembly are at the two opposite ends of the building: the Chapel
of Henry VII. at the eastern end, and the Jerusalem Chamber at the
western; the one the most beautiful chapel in the world, the other a
plain but comfortable rectangular room. Immediately after the service
with which the Assembly was opened, and in which both houses of
Parliament took part, and which was probably held in the choir of the
Abbey, where the regular daily services now take place, the members
appointed to the Assembly ascended the steps to the Chapel of Henry
VII., and there the enrollment was made and the earlier sessions held.
That was in summer, but when the weather became colder the Assembly
gladly forsook the architectural magnificence of this chapel, called
by Leland "the miracle of the world," for the comfortable warmth of
the homely room at the other end of the Abbey; for, as Robert Baillie,
"the Boswell of the Assembly," says in his delightful account of the
proceedings, the Jerusalem Chamber "has a good fyre, which is some
dainties at London."
[Sidenote: The Two Types of Worship.]
In this removal of the historic Assembly from the cold splendor of
the finest perpendicular building in England to the plain comfort
and common-sense arrangements of the little rectangular room where
they were to reason together through so many months concerning the
teachings of Scripture, one may see a parable of the Assembly's action
in rejecting the ritualistic type of worship, with its predominating
appeal to the æsthetic sensibilities through elaborate ceremonies, and
its adoption of the New Testament type, with its predominating appeal
to the mind through the oral teaching of truth. They were convinced
that the spiritual life can be really nourished and developed only
by the intelligent apprehension of the truth. Their own statement
of the matter, drawn up in this very room, is that "the Spirit of
God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an
effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building
them up in holiness and comfort, through faith unto salvation." And
so those churches which have adopted the standards then framed by the
Westminster divines have steadily magnified the didactic element of
public worship, accentuating the teaching function of the minister to
the extinction of the priestly.
[Sidenote: Interior of the Jerusalem Chamber.]
We pass from the nave of the Abbey through a door on the south side
into the ancient cloisters, and, turning to the right, ring at the door
of the janitor. A cherry-cheeked woman appears, and, when we state
that we wish to see the Jerusalem Chamber, she brings a key, turns
with us again to the right, which brings us to the southwest corner
of the Abbey, and ushers us through an ante-room into the celebrated
meeting-place of the great Assembly, a rectangular room, running north
and south, about forty feet in length by twenty in breadth, with a
large double window in the western side opposite the spacious fireplace
referred to by Baillie, and another fine window in the northern end,
which, by the way, contains the finest stained glass in the whole Abbey.
A long table, covered with a plain green cloth, occupies the centre of
the room, with chairs around it ready for convocation; for the room is
still regularly used for the meetings of ecclesiastical functionaries,
occasionally also for special gatherings of wider interest, the most
notable of which, since the Westminster Assembly, was the series of
sessions held here by the company of scholars who had been appointed to
revise the common English version of the Scriptures, and who, in 1885,
brought that immensely difficult and important work to a successful
conclusion by their publication of the Revised Version of the Old
Testament.
This room has been the scene of many other memorable events, as we
shall presently see, but none of them, nor all of them, can equal in
interest and importance the work of that great Assembly which two
hundred and fifty years ago formulated that lofty ideal of human life
so familiar to us in the answer to the first question of the Shorter
Catechism: What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify
God and to enjoy him forever--a statement which has probably had a
deeper and wider influence for good in the Anglo-Saxon world than any
other twelve words ever written by uninspired men.
[Sidenote: Exterior of the Jerusalem Chamber.]
The Jerusalem Chamber, in which the Westminster Assembly of divines
held its long sessions and did its immortal work, is a low building
which runs along the southern half of the front of the Abbey, and is
easily seen to the right of the main door in any picture of the great
western facade. It strikes one at first as an architectural blunder,
except as a foil to the lofty front of the main structure, but it has
served many great practical uses. It was built about five hundred years
ago, in the old days of monastery, as a guest chamber for the Abbot's
house. I may pause here a moment to remind my younger readers of the
fact that the word "minster," as in "Westminster," is equivalent to
monastery, from the Latin _monasterium_, and the still more curious
fact that the word has been preserved more nearly in its Latin form
in the Monster Tavern and the Monster Omnibuses, well known in the
immediate neighborhood of the Abbey, which derive their name from the
same ancient monastery now known as Westminster.
[Sidenote: Origin of its Name.]
The name, Jerusalem Chamber, seems to have been derived from the
tapestries with which the walls were originally hung, and which
portrayed different scenes in the history of Jerusalem. Before the
meeting of the Westminster Assembly, however, these had been replaced
by another series of pictures representing the planets, and it is to
these that Baillie refers when he tells us that the room was "well
hung." To the same keen observer, whom nothing escaped, we are indebted
for the information that the light from the great window was softened
by "curtains of pale thread with red roses." But the curtains and
tapestries that Baillie saw have in turn given place to those which
the visitor now sees on the walls, and which do not call for special
notice here.
[Sidenote: Death of Henry IV.]
The first tapestries, however, those which gave the room
its name, are connected with one of the most memorable events that
ever occurred in this historic apartment, the death of Henry IV.,
in fulfillment, as the King thought, of the prophecy that he should
die in Jerusalem. In his old age Henry projected a visit to the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem, by way of penance for his usurpation, and when
the galleys were already in port to bear him on his journey, he came
to pay his parting devotions at the shrine of Edward the Confessor in
Westminster Abbey. There he was seized with a chill, and, as the old
chronicler says, "became so sick that such as were about him feared
that he would have died right there; wherefore they, for his comfort,
bare him into the Abbot's place, and lodged him in a chamber, and there
upon a pallet laid him before the fire, where he lay in great agony a
certain time." When borne to the bed, which had meantime been prepared
for him in another room, the scene occurred which is so graphically
described by Shakespeare:
"_King Henry._--Doth any name particular belong
Unto the lodging where I first did swoon?
_Warwick._--'Tis call'd Jerusalem, my noble lord.
_King Henry._--Laud be to God!--even there my life must end,
It hath been prophesied to me many years
I should not die but in Jerusalem;
Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land:
But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie;
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die."
[Sidenote: Imprisonment of Sir Thomas More.]
But Henry IV. was not the only man who looked death in the face in
this room. Many years later, when Henry VIII. was just beginning
that infamous career of divorcing and beheading wives, and burning
Protestants as heretics, and hanging Romanists as traitors for saying
that the Pope was superior to the King in matters of religion--a career
which has made his name one of the most detestable in history--Sir
Thomas More, the noblest Englishman of his time, was arrested for his
refusal to swear that Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn was lawful,
and on his way to the Tower of London was confined for four days in
the Jerusalem Chamber. Shortly afterwards, under the act of Parliament
which directed that every one who refused to give the King a title
belonging to him was to be put to death as a traitor, Sir Thomas More
was executed on Tower Hill because he could not honestly give Henry the
title of Supreme Head of the Church of England.
Other dead bodies, too, besides that of Henry IV. have lain in this
room. The body of Dr. South, the witty and eloquent court preacher,
lay in state here. It was South who, when reading from the seventeenth
chapter of the Acts the accusation of the Thessalonian mob against
Paul and Silas--"These that have turned the world upside down are come
hither also"--remarked that it was well for the apostles to turn the
world upside down, because the devil had turned it downside up.
[Sidenote: Funeral of Joseph Addison.]
From the Jerusalem Chamber the body of the illustrious essayist,
Joseph Addison, after lying in state for four days, was carried forth
in that memorable funeral procession at dead of night which was led
by torchlight round the shrine of St. Edward and the graves of the
Plantagenets to the chapel of Henry VII., the body being finally laid
to rest opposite the Poet's Corner in the South Transept. "Such a
mark of national respect was due to the unsullied statesman, to the
accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English eloquence, to
the consummate painter of life and manners. It was due, above all,
to the great satirist, who alone knew how to use ridicule without
abusing it; who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social
reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous
separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and
virtue by fanaticism." So wrote Lord Macaulay of Addison, reminding us,
at the same time, how Addison "was accustomed to walk by himself in
Westminster Abbey, and meditate on the condition of those who lay in
it"; and now Macaulay himself lies there close to the grave of Addison.
[Sidenote: Sir Isaac Newton.]
But the most illustrious man whose body has ever lain in state in the
Jerusalem Chamber is Sir Isaac Newton, the great philosopher, whom his
friends called "the whitest soul they had ever known," and of whom Pope
wrote the celebrated couplet:
"Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said, _Let Newton be_, and all was light."
Such are some of the great names associated with the Jerusalem
Chamber--Henry IV., Thomas More, Robert South, Joseph Addison,
Isaac Newton--and to some of them the whole world is indebted, as
to Sir Thomas More for his calm refusal to purchase his life at
the cost of his convictions, and to Joseph Addison for all that he
was as an author, a man, and a Christian, and to Sir Isaac Newton
for his lofty character and his unparalleled services to the cause
of human knowledge; but, after all, it may be doubted whether the
world is more deeply indebted to any of them than to that body of
thoroughgoing scholars and profound thinkers who in this room two
centuries and a half ago formulated the statement that "effectual
calling is the work of God's Spirit, whereby, convincing us of our sin
and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and
renewing our wills, he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus
Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel"--and one hundred and six
other propositions concerning the most momentous interests of human
existence, which for luminous condensation of truth have never been
surpassed in all the history of the human expression of the doctrines
of Scripture.
[Sidenote: An Architectural Triumph.]
Westminster Abbey is not wanting in architectural interest. Indeed, it
is pronounced by Mr. Freeman the most glorious of English churches,
and is said to be the one great church of England which retains its
beautiful ancient coloring undestroyed by so-called "restoration."
The exterior is singularly impressive, whether viewed from the east,
where the exquisite lacework of Henry VII.'s Chapel, with its richly
decorated buttresses, rivets the attention at the first glance; or
from the north, where we face the north transept, the front of which,
with its niches, its rose-window, and its great triple entrance, is
pronounced by Mr. Hare the richest part of the building externally;
or even from the west, where, in spite of the two comparatively late
and feeble towers, we have a noble front, the loftiness of which is
well brought out by "the low line of grey wall which indicates the
Jerusalem Chamber." The interior is still more beautiful, and, as we
have already seen, this beauty culminates in Henry VII.'s Chapel, the
loveliness of which is absolutely unrivalled in the whole world. In
his very sympathetic essay on Westminster Abbey in _The Sketch Book_,
Washington Irving says of this wonderful chapel: "On entering, the eye
is astonished by the pomp of architecture and the elaborate beauty of
sculptured detail. The very walls are wrought into universal ornament,
incrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches, crowded with the
statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labor of
the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended
aloft, as if by magic, and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful
minuteness and airy security of a cobweb."
[Sidenote: Coronations and Burials.]
But the intrinsic beauty of the building is only a small part of the
explanation of the unique place which it holds in the interest of
mankind. The two real reasons are suggested by Waller's lines:
"That antique pile behold,
Where royal heads receive the sacred gold:
It gives them crowns, and does their ashes keep;
There made like gods, like mortals there they sleep,
Making the circle of their reign complete,
Those suns of empire, where they rise they set."
Coronation and burial! Here the nominal kings are crowned. Here they
and the real kings--those who by their genius and character really rule
the race--are buried.
[Sidenote: The Stone of Scone.]
In the chapel of Edward the Confessor stands a scratched and battered
wooden chair, six hundred years old, beneath the seat of which is
inserted a thick, flat block of reddish sandstone. This is the
celebrated Stone of Destiny, about the adventures and travels of which
so many incredible stories have been told, from the time of its alleged
use by the patriarch Jacob as a pillar at Bethel, till the time of its
arrival at Scone, near Perth, in Scotland. It is certain that from the
middle of the twelfth century all the Scottish kings were crowned on
this stone, till it was captured and carried to London by Edward I.,
and that in the oak chair beneath which the stone was then enclosed all
the kings of England since the time of Edward I. have been crowned,
the last being Edward VII., on the 9th of last August. It has never
been carried out of the church but once. That was when it was taken to
Westminster Hall, across the street, that in it Oliver Cromwell might
be installed Lord Protector. Thus it was that "the greatest prince
that ever ruled England," as Lord Macaulay rightly calls him, the man
who refused to wear the crown, but who wielded so much more of real
power than any of those who did wear it that he placed England in
the forefront of European nations and made her mistress of the seas,
was not inducted into his office in the Abbey, where all the other
sovereigns have been crowned since William I., but in Westminster Hall,
which is also a place of extraordinary historical interest. The chair
which holds the Stone of Scone, and the mate to it, made later and used
for the queen consort, are, of course, covered with rich upholstering
at the coronations, and much of the defacement of them is the result of
driving nails into the wood for this purpose.
[Sidenote: Whither the Paths of Glory Lead.]
But the main attraction of Westminster Abbey is neither its
architectural glory nor its connection with the crowning of the
nation's sovereigns, but the fact that it is the chief sepulchre of
Britain's great men. Not only is the building "paved with princes and
a royal race," their memory a mingling of grandeur and of shame, but
the uncrowned glories of the nation, the true and pure and gifted, lie
there as well under our feet, or are commemorated in stone before our
eyes. Some English sovereigns are buried elsewhere, as Charles I. at
Windsor, and Victoria at Frogmore; some preëminent men of action also,
as Nelson and Wellington at St. Paul's Cathedral; some authors, too,
of the first order of genius, as Shakespeare at Stratford, Milton at
St. Giles, and Goldsmith in the Temple yard at London; and so on, but
nowhere else on earth have the ashes of so many great men been brought
together as in Westminster Abbey. Moreover, to many who are buried
elsewhere monuments have been erected in the Abbey; for instance, to
the three poets who have just been mentioned. That of Shakespeare is a
marble figure holding a scroll on which are inscribed these lines from
the _Tempest_, peculiarly appropriate in the building where so much
greatness is buried:
"The Cloud capt Towers,
The Gorgeous Palaces,
The Solemn Temples,
The Great Globe itself,
Yea all which it Inherit,
Shall Dissolve,
And like the baseless Fabrick of a Vision
Leave not a rack behind."
In St. Margaret's Church, hard by the Abbey on the north side, lies the
decapitated body of another great Englishman of the Elizabethan era,
Sir Walter Raleigh, whose _History of the World_ contains a passage
which expresses, as no other within my knowledge has done, the feeling
that comes to a thoughtful man as he walks through this solemn burial
place of genius and power: "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom
none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast
done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of
the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched
greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it
all over with these two words, _Hic jacet_."
A sober autumn day, with the leaves changing and the atmosphere touched
with melancholy suggestive of the passing of worldly glory, prepared
us to feel the full force of Raleigh's sentiment, and, as we stepped
through the doorway into the subdued light of the minster, and saw the
multitude of white marble statues and tombs stretching through dim
aisles and clustering in gloomy chapels, we were "hushed into noiseless
reverence," and understood what Edmund Burke meant when he said, "The
moment I entered Westminster Abbey, I felt a kind of awe pervade my
mind which I cannot describe; the very silence seemed sacred."
[Illustration: POET'S CORNER, WESTMINSTER.]
[Sidenote: The Monuments of the Nave and Transepts.]
Remembering that "too many tombs will produce the same satiety as too
many pictures," and determined not to fill our minds with "a hopeless
jumble in which kings and statesmen, warriors, ecclesiastics and poets
are tossing about together," we began at the Poet's Corner, as every
one should do on his first visit, and, merely glancing at the monuments
of subordinate interest, gave our time to those of the men with whose
lives and works we had some acquaintance from our former reading, thus
spending a whole morning in the two transepts and the nave. What
a list of glorious names is afforded by even this meagre selection!
Chaucer, Spencer, Browning, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Burns,
Scott, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Southey (the last eight named being
represented by monuments, but buried elsewhere); Thackeray, Addison,
Macaulay, Garrick, Samuel Johnson (with his degree of LL. D. chiselled
after his name in the unscholarly form of "L. L. D."--a thing which
would have mortified him, and which one would not expect to find in
Westminster Abbey), Charles Dickens; Dr. Busby (for fifty-five years
head-master of Westminster School, celebrated for his extremely free
use of the rod and for having persistently kept his hat on when Charles
II. visited his school, saying that it would never do for the boys
to think any one superior to himself);--all these and many more in
or near the south transept; then in the nave, Major André (hanged by
Washington as a spy), Lord Lawrence ("who feared man so little because
he feared God so much"), David Livingstone, Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac
Newton, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, Wordsworth, William Pitt,
Charles James Fox, "Rare Ben Jonson"; then, in the north transept,
Lord Mansfield, Warren Hastings, and others, among them the monument
of the "Loyall Duke of Newcastle" (1676) and his literary wife, a most
voluminous writer, who was in the habit of calling up her servants at
all hours of the night to take down her thoughts, much to the disgust
of her husband. When complimented on her learning, he said, "Sir, a
very wise woman is a very foolish thing."
[Sidenote: Pagan Sculptures in a Christian Church.]
A great deal of bad taste has been displayed in the monuments of this
transept. There is a colossal tomb by Nollekens, the worst but one in
the Abbey, commemorating three sea captains. It represents Neptune
reclining on the back of a sea-horse, and directing the attention of
Britannia to the medallions of the dead, which hang from a rostral
column surmounted by a figure of Victory. "Is that Christianity?" asked
a visitor, pointing to Neptune and the trident. "Yes," wittily answered
Dean Milman, "it is _Tridentine_ Christianity"--a remark which has an
exceedingly keen edge, though it may not be appreciated except by those
who have some knowledge of the relation sustained by the Council of
Trent to the beliefs and practices of the Romish Church. The sculptors
were for a time "weighed down by the pagan mania for Neptunes,
Britannias, and Victorys." Goldwin Smith says, "Some of the monuments
might with advantage be removed from a Christian Church to a heathen
Pantheon, while some might be better for being macadamized."
[Sidenote: The Nightingale Monuments.]
The most striking monument in the Abbey, though Walpole calls it "more
theatrical than sepulchral," is that of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale. In
the lower part of the sculpture a skeleton figure, Death, has broken
through the iron doors of the grave, and, grasping the ledge above
him with one bony hand, is in the act of hurling his dart with the
other at the lady, who with her husband occupies the upper part of the
sculpture, and who is represented as falling back into the arms of her
horror-stricken husband, while he makes frantic but futile efforts to
shield her from the stroke. Wesley said Mrs. Nightingale's tomb was the
finest in the Abbey, as showing "common sense among heaps of unmeaning
stone and marble"; but Washington Irving, while granting that the whole
group is executed with terrible truth and spirit, says it appears to
him horrible rather than sublime, and asks, "Why should we thus seek
to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors round
the tomb of those we love? The grave should be surrounded by everything
that might inspire tenderness and veneration for the dead; or that
might win the living to virtue. It is the place, not of disgust and
dismay, but of sorrow and meditation."