CHURCH FABRICS AND SERVICES.
Thirty years or more of the present century had passed before the Church
awoke to put its material house in order, to improve and beautify its
churches, and to improve the character of its services. Church buildings
and Church services, as they are remembered by men yet of middle age,
were very much the same at the close of the Georgian period as they were
at its beginning. Much, therefore, of the present chapter will exhibit a
state of things in many respects perfectly familiar to men who are still
in the prime of life. Our great-great-grandfathers would have felt quite
at home in many of the churches which we remember in our childhood. They
would find now a great deal that was strange to them. Though Prayer-book
and Rubrics remain the same, Church spirit in our day does not own very
much in common with that which most generally prevailed during the
reigns of the four Georges.
In a Church like this of England, where so much liberty of thought and
diversity of opinion has ever been freely conceded to bishops and clergy
as well as to its lay members, there has never failed to be, to some
extent at least, a corresponding variety in the outward surroundings of
public worship. From the beginning of the Reformation to the present
day, the three principal varieties of Church opinion known in modern
phraseology as 'High,' 'Low,' and 'Broad' Church have never ceased to
co-exist within its borders. One or other of the three parties has at
times been very depressed, while another has been popular and
predominant. But there has never been any external cause to prevent the
revival of the one, or to make it impossible that the other should not,
with changing circumstances, lose its temporary supremacy. In the
eighteenth century there were, from beginning to end, men of each of
these three sections. The old Puritanism was almost obsolete; but there
were always Low Churchmen, not only in the earlier, but in the modern
sense of the word. High Churchmen, in the seventeenth-century and
Laudean meaning, were no doubt few and far between by the time the
century had run through half its course. But they were not wholly
confined to the Nonjuring 'remnant,' and High Churchmen of a less
pronounced type never ceased to abound. Broad Churchmen, of various
shades of opinion, were always numerous. Only each and every party in
the Church was weakened and diluted in force and purpose by a widespread
deficiency in warmth of feeling and earnestness of conviction. Hot party
feeling is no doubt a mischief; but exemption from it is dearly bought
by the levelling influences of indifference, or of the lukewarmness
which approaches to it. The Church of the eighteenth century, and of the
Georgian period in general, was by no means deficient in estimable
clergymen who lived and died amid the well-earned respect of
parishioners and neighbours. But the tendencies of the time were in
favour of a decent, unexacting orthodoxy, neither too High, nor too
Broad, nor too Low, nor too strict. It may be well imagined that this
feeling among the clergy should also find outward expression in the
general character of the churches where they ministered, and of the
services in which they officiated. A traveller interested in modes of
worship might have passed through county after county, from one parish
church to another, and would have found, as compared with the present
time, a singular lack of variety. No doubt he would see carelessness and
neglect contrasting in too many places with a more comely order in
others. He would very rarely notice any disposition to develop ritual,
to vary forms, and to make use of whatever elasticity the laws of the
Church would permit, in order to make the externals of worship a more
forcible expression of one or another school of thought.
Our forefathers in the eighteenth century were almost always content to
maintain in tolerable, or scarcely tolerable repair, at the lowest
modicum of expense, the existing fabrics of their churches. It has been
truly remarked, that 'to this apathy we are much indebted; for, after
all, they took care that the buildings should not fall to the ground; if
they had done more, they would probably have done worse.'[838] For
ecclesiastical architecture was then, as is well known, at its lowest
ebb. 'Public taste,' wrote Warburton to Hurd in 1749, 'is the most
wretched imaginable.'[839] He was speaking, at the time, of poetry. But
poetry and art are closely connected; and it is next to impossible that
depth of feeling and grandeur of conception should be found in the one,
at a date when there is a marked deficiency of them in the other. There
were, however, special reasons for the decline of church architecture.
It had become, for very want of exercise, an almost forgotten art. In
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the work of building churches
had been prosecuted with lavish munificence; so much so, that the
Reformed Church succeeded to an inheritance more than doubly sufficient
for its immediate wants.[840] A period, therefore, of great activity in
this respect was followed by one of nearly total cessation. In England
no church was erected of the smallest pretensions to architectural
design between the Reformation and the great fire of London in 1666,
with the solitary exception of the small church in Covent Garden,
erected by Inigo Jones in 1631.[841] 'During the eighty years that
elapsed from the death of Henry VIII. to the accession of Charles I.,
the transition style left its marks in every corner of England in the
mansions of the nobility and gentry, and in the colleges and schools
which were created out of the confiscated funds of the monasteries; but,
unfortunately for the dignity of this style, not one church, nor one
really important public building or regal palace, was erected during the
period which might have tended to redeem it from the utilitarianism into
which it was sinking. The great characteristic of this epoch was, that
during its continuance architecture ceased to be a natural mode of
expression, or the occupation of cultivated intellects, and passed into
the state of being merely the stock in trade of certain professional
experts. Whenever this is so, '_Addio Maraviglia!_'[842] The reign of
Puritanism was of course wholly unfavourable to the art; the period of
laxity that followed was no less so. Even Wren, of whose comprehensive
genius Englishmen have every reason to speak with pride, formed, in the
first instance, a most inadequate conception of what a Christian Church
should be. 'The very theory of the ground plan for a church had died
out, when he constructed his first miserable design for a huge
meeting-house.'[843]
Before the eighteenth century, Gothic architecture had already fallen
into utter disrepute. Sir Henry Wotton, fresh from his embassies in
Venice, had declared that such was the 'natural imbecility' of pointed
arches, and such 'their very uncomeliness,' that they ought to be
'banished from judicious eyes, among the reliques of a barbarous
age.'[844] Evelyn, lamenting the demolition by Goths and Vandals of the
stately monuments of Greek and Roman architecture, spoke of the mediæval
buildings which had risen in their stead, as if they had no merits to
redeem them from contempt--'congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy and
monkish piles, without any proportion, use, or beauty,'[845] deplorable
instances of pains and cost lavishly expended, and resulting only in
distraction and confusion. Sir Christopher Wren said of the great
cathedrals of the Middle Ages, that they were 'vast and gigantic
buildings indeed, but not worthy the name of architecture.'[846] Even at
such times there were some who were proof against the caprice of
fashionable taste, and who were not insensible to the solemn grandeur of
'high embowed roofs,' 'massy pillars,' and 'storied windows.'[847] Lord
Lyttelton censured the old architecture as 'loaded with a multiplicity
of idle and useless parts,' yet granted that 'upon the whole it has a
mighty awful air, and strikes you with reverence.'[848] Henry VII.'s
Chapel at Westminster was still regarded with admiration as 'that wonder
of the world;'[849] and although people did not quite know what to do
with their cathedrals, and regarded them rather as curiosities, alien to
the times, and heirlooms from a dead past, they did not cease to speak
of them with some pride. But popular taste--so far as architectural
taste can be spoken of as prevalent in any definite form throughout the
greater part of the last century--was all in favour of a 'Palladian' or
'Greek' style. It was a style scarcely adapted to our climate, and
unfavourable to the symbolism of Christian thought, yet capable, in the
hands of a master, of being very grand and imposing. Under weaker
treatment the effect was grievous. There was neither manliness nor
solemnity in the usual run of churches built after the similitude of
'Roman theatres and Grecian fanes.'[850] Maypoles instead of columns,
capitals of no order, and pie-crust decorations--such, exclaimed
Seward,[851] were the too frequent adjuncts of the newly built churches
he saw about him. At the time, however, that Seward wrote, a change had
already begun to show itself in many influential quarters. Even the
'correct classicality' of Sir William Chambers,[852] the leading
architect of the day, met, towards the close of the century, with by no
means the same unquestioning admiration which he had received at an
earlier date. There was division of opinion on fundamental questions of
architectural fitness; and persons could applaud the talents of mediæval
builders without being considered eccentric. Gray, Mason, Warton, Bishop
Percy, and many others, had contributed in various ways to create in
England a reaction, still more widely felt in Germany, in favour of
ideas which for some time past had been contemptuously relegated to the
darkness of the Middle Ages. A frequent, though as yet not very
discriminating, approval of Gothic[853] architecture was part of the
movement. 'High veneration,' remarked Dr. Sayers, writing about the last
year of the century, 'has lately been revived for the pointed
style.'[854] It was one among many other outward signs of a change
gradually coming over the public mind on matters concerned with the
observances of religion.
An enthusiastic antiquary and ecclesiologist, whose contributions to the
'Gentleman's Magazine' of 1799 were of great service in calling
attention to the reckless mischief which was often worked, under the
name of improvements, in our noblest churches and cathedrals, has
transmitted to us a sad list of mutilations and disfigurements which had
come under his observation. He has told how 'in every corner of the land
some unseemly disguise, in the Roman or Grecian taste, was thrown over
the most lovely forms of the ancient architecture.'[855] His indignation
was especially moved by the havoc perpetrated in Westminster Abbey,
sometimes by set design of tasteless innovators, often by 'some
low-hovelled cutter of monumental memorials,' or by workmen at
coronations, 'who, we are told, cannot attend to trifles.'[856] Carter's
lamentation is more than justified by Dean Stanley, who has enumerated
in detail many of the vandalisms committed during the last age in the
minster under his care. What else could be expected, when it was held by
those who were thought the best judges in such matters, that nothing
could be more barbarous and devoid of interest than the Confessor's
Chapel, and 'nothing more stupid than laying statues on their backs?' It
might have been supposed that Dean Atterbury, at all events, would have
had some sympathy with the workmanship of the past. But 'there is a
charming tradition that he stood by, complacently watching the workmen
as they hewed smooth the fine old sculptures over Solomon's porch,
which the nineteenth century vainly seeks to recall to their
places.'[857] For a list of some of the disastrous alterations and
demolitions inflicted upon other cathedrals, the reader may be referred
to the pages of Mr. Mackenzie Walcot.[858] Wreck and ruin seems
especially to have followed in the track of Wyatt, who was looked upon,
nevertheless, as a principal reviver of the ancient style of
architecture. If cathedrals, where it might be imagined that some
remains of ecclesiastical taste would chiefly linger, thus suffered,
even when under the supervision of the chief architects of the period,
what would have happened if, at such a time, a sudden zeal for Church
restoration had invaded the country clergy?
We may be thankful, on the whole, that it was an age of whitewash.
Carter, writing of Westminster Abbey, records one thing with hearty
gratitude. It had not been whitewashed. It was the one religious
structure in the kingdom which showed its original finishing, and 'those
modest hues which the native appearance of the stone so pleasantly
bestows.'[859] Everywhere else the dauber's brush had been at work. He
spoke of it with indignation. 'I make little scruple in declaring that
this job work, which is carried on in every part of the kingdom, is a
mean makeshift to give a delusive appearance of repair and cleanliness
to the walls, when in general this wash is resorted to to hide neglected
or perpetrated fractures.'[860] The stone fretwork of the Lady Chapel at
Hereford,[861] the valuable wall-paintings at Salisbury,[862] the carved
work of Grinling Gibbons at St. James', Westminster,[863] shared, for
example, the general fate, and were smothered in lime. Horace Walpole,
laughing at the City of London for employing one whom he thought a very
indifferent craftsman to write their history, said he supposed that
presently, instead of having books published with the imprimatur of an
university, they would be 'printed as churches are whitewashed--John
Smith and Thomas Johnson, Churchwardens.'[864] How few churches are
there that were not earlier or later in the last century emblazoned with
some such like scroll! But if whitewash conceals, it also preserves; it
hides beauties to which one generation is blind, that it may disclose
them the more fresh and uninjured to another which has learnt to
appreciate them.
When it is said that the churches were kept in such tolerable repair
that at all events they did not fall, it would appear that in many cases
little more than this could be truthfully added. Ely Minster remains
standing, but more by good chance, if Defoe is to be trusted, than from
any sufficient care on the part of its guardians. 'Some of it totters,'
he wrote, 'so much with every gale of wind, looks so like decay, and
seems so near it, that whenever it does fall, all that 'tis likely will
be thought strange in it will be that it did not fall a hundred years
sooner.'[865] Such an instance might well be exceptional, and no doubt
was so among cathedrals;[866] but a great number of parish churches had
fallen, by the middle of the century, into a deplorable state. Secker,
in a charge delivered in 1750, gives a grievous picture of what was to
be seen in many country churches. 'Some, I fear, have scarce been kept
in necessary present repair, and others by no means duly cleared from
annoyances, which must gradually bring them to decay: water undermining
and rotting the foundations, earth heaped up against the outside, weeds
and shrubs growing upon them ... too frequently the floors are meanly
paved, or the walls dirty or patched, or the windows ill glazed, and it
may be in part stopped up ... or they are damp, offensive, and
unwholesome. Why (he adds) should not the church of God, as well as
everything else, partake of the improvements of later times?'[867]
Bishop Fleetwood had observed forty years before,[868] that unless the
good public spirit of repairing churches should prevail a great deal
more, a hundred years would bring to the ground a huge number of our
churches. 'And no one, said Bishop Butler, will imagine that the good
spirit he has recommended prevails more at present than it did
then.'[869] As for cleanliness, Bishop Horne remarked that in England,
as in the sister kingdom, it was evidently a frequent maxim that
cleanliness was no essential to devotion. People seemed very commonly to
be of the same opinion with the Scotch minister, whose wife made answer
to a visitor's request--'The pew swept and lined! My husband would think
it downright popery!'[870] One can understand, without needing to
sympathise with it, the strong Protestantism of Hervey's admiration for
a church 'magnificently plain;'[871] but in the eighteenth century, the
excessive plainness, not to say the frequent dirtiness, of so many
churches was certainly owing to other causes than that of
ultra-Protestantism.
After speaking of the disrepair and squalor which, although far indeed
from being universal, were too frequently noticeable in the churches of
the last age, it might seem a natural transition to pass on to the
singularly incongruous uses to which the naves of some of our principal
ecclesiastical buildings were in a few instances perverted. In the minds
of modern Churchmen there would be the closest connection between
culpable neglect of the sacred fabric, and the profanation of it by
admission within its walls of the sights and sounds of common daily
business or pleasure. There was something of this in the period under
review. The extraordinary desecrations once general in St. Paul's belong
indeed chiefly to the latter half of the 16th and the first half of the
17th centuries. Most readers are more or less familiar with the accounts
given of 'Paul's Walk' in the old days,--how it was not only 'the
recognised resort of wits and gallants, and men of fashion and of
lawyers,'[872] but also, as Evelyn called it, 'a stable of horses and a
den of thieves'[873]--a common market, where Shakspeare makes Falstaff
buy a horse as he would at Smithfield[874]--usurers in the south aisle,
horse-dealers in the north, and in the midst 'all kinds of bargains,
meetings, and brawlings.'[875] Before the eighteenth century began,
'Paul's Walk' was, in all its main features, a thing of the past. Yet a
good deal more than the mere tradition of it remained. In a pamphlet
published in 1703, 'Jest' asks 'Earnest' whether he has been at St.
Paul's, and seen the flux of people there. 'And what should I do there,'
says the latter, 'where men go out of curiosity and interest, and not
for the sake of religion? Your shopkeepers assemble there as at full
'Change, and the buyers and sellers are far from being cast out of the
Temple.'[876] At Durham there was a regular thoroughfare across the nave
until 1750, and at Norwich until 1748, when Bishop Gooch stopped it. The
naves of York and Durham Cathedral were fashionable promenades.[877] The
Confessor's Chapel made, on occasion, a convenient playground for
Westminster scholars, who were allowed, as late as 1829, to keep the
scenes for their annual play in the triforium of the north
transept.[878] Nevertheless 'Paul's Walk' and all customs in any way
akin to it, so far as they survived into the last century, had in
reality little or nothing to do with the irreligion and neglect of which
the century has been sorely, and not causelessly accused. Rather, they
were the relics of customs which had not very long fallen into
desuetude. The time had been, and was not so very long past, when the
stalls and bazaars of St. Paul's Cathedral did but illustrate on a large
scale what might be seen on certain days in almost all the churches of
the kingdom. Our forefathers in the Middle Ages drew a broad line of
distinction between the chancel and the nave. The former was looked upon
as sanctified exclusively to religious uses; the latter was regarded
rather as a consecrated house under the care and protection of the
Church. It sounds somewhat like a paradox to assert that the exclusion
from churches of all that is not distinctly connected with the service
of religion was mainly due to the Puritans, of whose wanton irreverence
in sacred buildings we hear so much. Yet this seems certainly to have
been the case. Traces of the older usage lingered on, as we have seen,
into the middle of the last century; but from the time of the
Commonwealth they had already become exceptional anachronisms.
Before the century commenced pews had become everywhere general. In
mediæval times there had been, properly speaking, none. A few
distinguished people were permitted, as a special privilege, to have
their private closets furnished, very much like the grand pews of later
days, with cushions, carpets, and curtains. But, as an almost universal
rule, the nave was unencumbered with any permanent seats, and only
provided with a few portable stools for the aged and infirm. Pews began
to be popular in Henry VIII.'s time, notwithstanding the protests of Sir
Thomas More and others. Under Elizabeth they became more frequent in
town churches. In Charles I.'s time, they had so far gained ground as to
be often a source of hot and even riotous contention between those who
opposed them and others who insisted on erecting them. Even in Charles
II.'s reign they were exceptional rather than otherwise, and the term
had not yet become limited to boxes in church. Pepys writes in his
'Diary' on February 18, 1668, 'At Church; there was my Lady Brouncker
and Mrs. Williams in our pew.' On the 25th of the same month, we find
the entry, 'At the play; my wife sat in my Lady Fox's pew with
her.'[879] Sir Christopher Wren was not at all pleased to see them
introduced into his London churches.[880] During the luxurious,
self-indulgent times that followed the Restoration, private pews of all
sorts and shapes gained a general footing. Before Queen Anne's reign was
over they had become so regular a part of the ordinary furniture of a
church, that in the regulations approved in 1712 by both Houses of
Convocation for the consecrating of churches and chapels, it is
specially enjoined that the churches be previously pewed.[881] Twelve
years, however, later than this they were evidently by no means
universal in country places. In 1725, Swift, enumerating 'the plagues of
a Country Life,' makes 'a church without pews' a special item in his
list.[882] But 'repewed,' had been for many years past a characteristic
part of formula which recorded the church restorations of the
period.[883] There are plenty of allusions in the writings of
contemporary poets and essayists to the cosy, sleep-provoking structures
in which people of fashion and well-to-do citizens could enjoy without
attracting too much notice--
the Sunday due
Of slumbering in an upper pew.[884]
In Swift's humorous metamorphosis--
A bedstead of the antique mode,
Compact of timber many a load,
Such as our ancestors did use,
Was metamorphos'd into pews;
Which still their ancient nature keep,
By lodging folks dispos'd to sleep.[885]
Those of the more exclusive sort were often built up with tall
partitions, like Lady Booby's, 'in her pew, which the congregation could
not see into.'[886] Sometimes they were curtained, 'sometimes filled
with sofas and tables, or even provided with fireplaces;'[887] and cases
might be quoted where the tedium of a long service, or the appetite
engendered by it, were relieved by the entry, between prayers and
sermon, of a livery servant with sherry and light refreshments.[888]
Even into cathedrals cumbrous ladies' pews were often introduced.
Horace Walpole tells an extraordinary story of Gloucester Cathedral in
1753. A certain Mrs. Cotton, who had largely contributed to whitewashing
and otherwise ornamenting the church, had taken it into her head that
the soul of a favourite daughter had passed into a robin. The Dean and
Chapter indulged her in the whim, and she was allowed to keep a kind of
aviary in her private seat. 'Just by the high altar is a small pew hung
with green damask, with curtains of the same, and a small corner
cupboard painted, carved, and gilt, for birds in one corner.'[889] In
Ripon Cathedral, some of the old tabernacle work of the stalls was
converted into pews.[890] Everywhere the pew system remained
uncontrolled, pampering self-indulgence, fostering jealousies, and too
often thrusting back the poor into mean, comfortless sittings, in
whatever part of the church was coldest, darkest, and most distant from
sight and hearing. Towards the end of the century its evils began to be
here and there acknowledged. The population was rapidly increasing in
the larger towns; and the new proprietary chapels erected to meet this
increase were often commercial speculations conducted on mere principles
of trade, most unworthy of a National Church. No reflecting Churchman
could fail to be disgusted with a traffic in pews which in many cases
absolutely excluded the poor.[891] Among the new churches there were in
fact only one or two honourable exceptions to the general rule. A free
church was opened at Bath, another at Birmingham;[892] it appears that
all the rest of these 'Chapels of Ease' unblushingly gave the lie, so
far as in them lay, to the declaration of our Lord that the poor have
the Gospel preached unto them. Some time had yet to elapse before
improved feeling could do much towards abating the unchristian nuisance.
But energetic protests were occasionally heard. 'I would reprobate,'
wrote Mrs. Barbauld (1790) 'those little gloomy solitary cells, planned
by the spirit of aristocracy, which deform the building no less to the
eye of taste than to the eye of benevolence, and insulating each family
within its separate enclosure, favour at once the pride of rank and the
laziness of indulgence.'[893] 'It is earnestly to be wished,' remarked
Dr. Sayers about the same time, 'that our churches were as free as those
of the continent from these vile incumbrances.' Their injury to
architectural effect was the least of their evils. They were fruitful,
he said, in jealousies, and utterly discordant to the worship of a God
who is no respecter of persons.[894]
Of the galleries, so often enumerated in Paterson's account of London
Churches (1714) among recently erected 'ornaments,' little need be said,
except that they were often wholly unnecessary, or only made necessary
by the great loss of space squandered in the promiscuous medley of
square and ill-shaped pews. It was an object of some ambition to have a
front seat in the gallery. 'The people of fashion exalt themselves in
church over the heads of the people of no fashion.'[895] A crowded
London church in the old times, gallery above gallery thronged with
people, was no doubt an impressive spectacle, not soon to be forgotten.
To many the thought of galleried churches will revive a different set of
remembrances. Dusky corners, a close and heavy atmosphere, back seats
for children and the scantily favoured, to which sound reached as a
drowsy hum, and where sight was limited to the heads of people in their
pews, to their hats upon the pillars, and perhaps an occasional
half-view of the clergyman in the pulpit, seen at intervals through the
interstices of the gallery supports--such are the recollections which
will occur to some. Certainly they are calculated to animate even an
excessive zeal for opening out churches, and creating wider space and
freer air.
And who does not remember some of the other special adjuncts of an
old-fashioned church, as it had been handed down little altered from the
time of our great-grandfathers? There were the half-obliterated
escutcheons, scarcely less dismal in aspect than the coffin plates with
which the columns of the Welsh churches were so profusely decorated. No
wonder Blair introduces into his poem on 'The Grave' a picture of--
the gloomy aisles
Black plastered, and hung round with shreds of 'scutcheons.[896]
And then, in the place of the ancient rood loft, was that masterpiece of
rural art--
Moses and Aaron upon a church wall,
Holding up the Commandments, for fear they should fall.[897]
There was the glorified record of the past deeds of parish officials,
well adapted to fire the emulation of a succeeding generation--
With pride of heart, the Churchwarden surveys
High o'er the belfry, girt with birds and flowers,
His story wrought in capitals: 'twas I
That bought the font; and I repaired the pews.[898]
There were the tables of benefactors conspicuous under the western
gallery. The Lower House of Convocation in 1710 had issued special
directions in recommendation of this practice. The bishops
also--Fleetwood,[899] Secker,[900] and others--did not fail to enjoin it
in their charges. And not without reason; for a great number of parish
benefactions appear to have been lost by lapse or otherwise about the
beginning of the eighteenth century. Yet smaller letters, and a less
prominent position, might have served the same purpose, with less
disfigurement, and less offence to the decent humility which best befits
the deeds of Christian benevolence.
The great three-decked pulpit of the Georgian age is still familiar to
our memories. To the next generation it will be at length a curiosity of
the past. Nor must the mighty sounding-board be forgotten, impending
with almost threatening bulk over the preacher's head, and adorned with
the emblematic symbol of grace:--
I cast my eyes upon him, and explored
The dove-like form upon the sounding hoard.[901]
The pulpit had supplanted the old portable box-desk at the time of the
Reformation, and had maintained itself in undiminished honour through
all the subsequent changes. In rich London parishes much rare
workmanship was often expended upon it. If not by its costliness, at all
events by its dimensions, it was apt to throw all other church furniture
into the shade. And 'in a few abnormal instances, particularly in
watering-places, the rostra would even overhang the altar, or occupy a
sort of gallery behind it.'[902] During the earlier part of the century,
an hour-glass, in a wood or iron frame, was still the not unfrequent
appendage to a pulpit.[903] In the Elizabethan period it had been
general. But perhaps the Puritan preachers had not cared to be reminded
that preaching had its limits; or a later generation, on the other hand,
might dread the suggestion that the sermon might last the hour. At all
events, as they wore out, they were not often replaced; and Bishop
Kennet[904], writing in the third decade of the century, spoke of them
as already beginning to be uncommon. They were chiefly to be seen in
old-fashioned country churches, such as that where, in Gay's eclogue,
the village swains followed fair Blouzelind to her burial, and listened
while the good man warned them from his text, and descanted upon the
uncertainty of life--
And spoke the hour-glass in her praise quite out.[905]
The bible 'of larger volume,' as directed in Lord Cromwell's
injunctions, and in the Canons of 1751[906], venerable with age, might
sometimes be seen still chained to its desk[907], as in the old days. In
Pope's time, church bibles were very commonly in black-letter type[908].
Litany desks were a great rarity. One in Exeter Cathedral appears to
have been disused about 1740[909].
Everyone knows what a neglected aspect the font usually bore during the
whole of the Georgian period; how it was often thrust into some corner
of the church, as if it were a kind of encumbrance that could not be
absolutely done away with, and very frequently supplanted by some basin
or pewter vessel placed inside it. In 1799 Carter recorded with
indignation that in Westminster Abbey the font had been altogether
removed, to make space for some new monument, and was lying topsy-turvy
in a side room[910]. In this, however, as in other respects, the neglect
that was too generally prevalent must of course not be spoken of as if
it were by any means universal.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, and in the reign of Queen
Anne, there was some little discussion, in which Bishop Beveridge and
others took part[911], as to the propriety of retaining or renovating
chancel screens. In mediæval times, these 'cancelli,' from which the
chancel took its name, had been universal; and a few had been put up
under the Stuart sovereigns, notwithstanding the offence with which
they were regarded by those who looked upon them as one of 'the hundred
points of popery.'
We find Archbishop Secker expressing his regret, not without cause, that
chancels were not, as a rule, kept in much better order than other parts
of the building. Incumbents were by no means so careful as they should
be, and lay impropriators, whether private or collegiate, were generally
strangely neglectful. 'It is indispensably requisite,' he added, 'to
preserve them not only standing and safe, but clean, neat, decent,
agreeable; and it is highly fit to go further, and superadd, not a light
and trivial finery, but such degrees of proper dignity and grandeur as
we are able, consistently with other real obligations[912].'
The condition and decoration of the Lord's Table differed widely,
especially in the earlier years of the period, in accordance with
varieties of opinion and feeling in clergymen and in their
congregations. For the most part it was insignificantly and meanly
furnished, and hemmed closely in by the Communion rails. At the
beginning of the century, it would appear that in the London churches a
great deal of care and cost had been lately expended on 'altar-pieces.'
In one church after another, Paterson records the attraction of a
'fine'--a 'beautiful'--a 'stately'--a 'costly' altar-piece[913]. Many of
these, however, would by no means approve themselves to a more
cultivated taste than that which then prevailed. Instead of the Greek
marbles and rich baldachino which Wren had intended for the east end of
St. Paul's, the authorities substituted imitation marble, and fluted
pilasters painted with ultramarine and veined with gold[914]. The Vicar
of Leeds, writing to Ralph Thoresby in 1723, tells him that a pleasing
surprise awaits his return, 'Our altar-piece is further adorned, since
you went, with three flower-pots upon three pedestals upon the wainscot,
gilt, and a hovering dove upon the middle one; three cherubs over the
middle panel, the middle one gilt, a piece of open carved work beneath,
going down towards the middle of the velvet.' If, however, the reader
cannot altogether admire the picture thus summoned before his eyes, he
will at all events agree with the words that follow: 'But the greatest
ornament is a choir well filled with devout communicants[915].' The
painted 'crimson curtains' at the east end of Battersea Church, 'trimmed
with amber, and held up by gold cord with heavy gold tassels,'[916] may
serve as another representative example of the kind of 'altar-piece'
which commended itself to eighteenth-century Churchmen.
Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more inoffensive than the use of
the sacred monogram. But there were some at the beginning of the period,
both Dissenters and Puritan Churchmen, who looked very suspiciously at
it. They ranked it, together with bowing at the name of Jesus and
turning eastward at the Creed, among Romish proclivities. 'What mean,'
Barnes had said towards the close of the previous century, 'these rich
altar-cloths, with the Jesuits' cypher embossed upon them?'[917] So also
that worthy man, Ralph Thoresby, had expressed himself 'troubled' to see
at Durham, among other 'superstitions' 'richly embroidered I.H.S. upon
the high altar.'[918]
In Charles the First's time the Ritualistic party in the Church of
England used sometimes to place upon the altars of their churches
crucifixes and an array of candlesticks.[919] After the Restoration the
former were never replaced. The two candles, however, interpreted as
symbolical of the divine and human nature of the Lord, were by no means
unfrequent in the churches of the last century, especially during its
earlier years. Mr. Beresford Hope speaks of an old picture in his
possession, of Westminster Abbey, referred to the beginning of the
eighteenth century, in which candles are represented burning upon the
altar.[920] This, at all events, was most unusual. Bishop Hoadly,
writing against the Ritualistic practices of some congregations, speaks
of 'the over-altars and the never-lighted candles upon them.'[921] In
Durham Cathedral, which by traditional custom retained throughout the
century a higher Ritual in some respects than was to be found elsewhere,
the 'tapers' of which Thoresby speaks[922] were probably more than two
in number.
The credence, or side table, upon which the sacramental elements are
placed previously to being offered, in accordance with the rubric, upon
the Lord's Table, had been objected to by many Puritan Churchmen.
Provision was rarely made for this in eighteenth-century churches. It is
mentioned as somewhat exceptional on the part of Bishop Bull, that 'he
always offered the elements upon the Holy Table himself before
beginning the Communion service.'[923]
Puritan feeling had very unreasonably regarded the cross with almost as
much jealousy as the crucifix. This idea had, in the last century, so
far gained ground, that the Christian emblem was not often to be seen,
at all events in the interior of churches, and that those who did use it
in their churches or churchyards were likely to incur a suspicion of
Popery. An anonymous assailant of Bishop Butler in 1767, fifteen years
after the death of that prelate, made it a special charge against him
that he had 'put up the Popish insignia of the cross in his chapel at
Bristol.'[924]
Steele, speaking, in one of his papers in the 'Guardian,' of Raphael's
picture of our Saviour appearing to His disciples after His
resurrection, makes some remarks upon religion and sacred art. 'Such
endeavours,' he says, 'as this of Raphael, and of all men not called to
the altar, are collateral helps not to be despised by the ministers of
the Gospel.... All the arts and sciences ought to be employed in one
confederacy against the prevailing torrent of vice and impiety; and it
will be no small step in the progress of religion, if it is as evident
as it ought to be, that he wants the best sense a man can have, who is
cold to the "Beauty of Holiness."'[925] Tillotson, and other favourite
writers of Steele's generation, had dwelt forcibly, and with much charm
of language, upon the moral beauty of a virtuous and holy life. But
there had never been a time when the English Church in general, as
distinguished from any party in it, had cared less to invest religious
worship with outward circumstances of attractiveness and beauty. As to
the particular point which gave occasion to Steele's remarks, whatever
might be said for or against the propriety of painting in churches,
there was in his time little disposition to open the question at
all.[926] One of the very few instances where a painting of the kind is
spoken of, was connected with a very discreditable scandal. At a time
when party feeling ran very high, White Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough,
the well-known author of 'Parochial Antiquities,' had made himself
exceedingly obnoxious to some of the more extreme members of the High
Church section, by his answer to Sacheverell's sermon upon 'false
brethren.'[927] Dr. Welton, Rector of Whitechapel, put up at this
juncture in his church a painted altar-piece in representation of the
Last Supper, with Bishop Kennet conspicuous in it as Judas Iscariot. 'To
make it the more sure, he had the doctor's great black patch put under
his wig upon the forehead.'[928] It need hardly be added that the Bishop
of London ordered the picture to be taken down.[929]
Sir Christopher Wren had intended to adorn the dome of St. Paul's with
figures from sacred history, worked in mosaic by Italian artists. He was
overruled. It was thought unusual, and likely also to be tedious and
expensive.[930] But there were some who cherished a hope that some such
embellishment was postponed only, not abandoned. Walter Harte, for
example, the Nonjuror, in his poem upon painting, trusted that 'the cold
north' would not always remain insensible to the claims of religious
art. The time would yet come when we should see in our churches,
Above, around, the pictured saints appear,
and when especially the metropolitan cathedral would be radiant with the
pictorial glory which befitted it.
Thy dome, O Paul, which heavenly views adorn,
Shall guide the hands of painters yet unborn;
Each melting stroke shall foreign eyes engage,
And shine unrivalled through a future age.[931]
The question was brought forward in a practical shape in 1773. Two years
earlier the State apartments at old Somerset Palace had been granted by
the King to the Royal Academy. The chapel was included in the gift; and
it was soon after suggested, at a general meeting of the society, 'that
the place would afford a good opportunity of convincing the public of
the advantages that would arise from ornamenting churches and cathedrals
with works of art.'[932] This proposal was highly approved of by the
society, and many of its members at once volunteered their services.
Their president, however, Sir Joshua Reynolds, proposed a bolder scheme.
He thought they should 'undertake St. Paul's Cathedral.' The amendment
was carried unanimously. Application was accordingly made to the Dean
and Chapter, who were pleased with the offer. Dean Newton, Bishop of
Bristol, a great lover of pictures, was particularly favourable to the
scheme, and warmly advocated it.[933] Sir Joshua promised 'The
Nativity'; West offered his picture of 'Moses with the Laws'; Barry,
Dance, Cipriani, and Angelica Kauffman engaged to present other
paintings; and four other artists were afterwards added to the number.
But the trustees of the building--Cornwallis, Archbishop of Canterbury,
and Terrick of London--disapproved. Terrick was especially hostile to
the idea, and when the Dean waited upon him and told him, with some
exultation, of the progress that had been made, put an absolute veto
upon the whole project. 'My good Lord Bishop of Bristol,' he said, 'I
have been already distantly and imperfectly informed of such an affair
having been in contemplation; but as the sole power at last remains with
myself, I therefore inform your lordship that, whilst I live and have
the power, I will never suffer the doors of the metropolitan church to
be opened for the introduction of Popery into it.'[934]
Bishop Newton says, in his 'Memoirs,' that though there were some
objectors, opinion was generally in favour of the offer made by the
Academy, and that some churches and chapels adopted the idea. But St.
Paul's probably suffered no loss through the further postponement of the
decorations designed for it. In the first place, paintings--for these,
rather than frescoes, appear to have been intended--were not the most
appropriate kind of art for such an interior. Besides this, those
'earthly charms and graces,' which made Reynolds' style such an
abomination to the delicate spiritual perceptions of the artist-poet
Blake,[935] were by no means calculated to create any elevated ideal
among his countrymen of what Christian art should be. And if the
President of the Academy, the most renowned English painter of his age,
was scarcely competent to such a work, what must be said of his proposed
coadjutors? 'I confess,' said Dean Milman, 'I shudder at the idea of our
walls covered with the audacious designs and tawdry colouring of West,
Barry, Cipriani, Dance, and Angelica Kauffman.'[936] Such criticism
would be very exaggerated if it were understood as a general
condemnation of painters, whose merits in their own province of art were
great. But it will universally be allowed that not to them, and scarcely
to any other painters of the eighteenth century, could we look for the
grandeur of thought or the elevated sentiment which an undertaking of
the kind proposed so specially demanded.
Puritanism had been very destructive of the glass paintings which had
added so much glory of colour to mediæval churches. The art had begun to
decline, from a variety of causes, at the beginning of the Reformation.
In Elizabeth's reign, few coloured windows of any note were executed.
Under James I. and Charles I. the taste to some degree revived. A new
style of colouring was introduced by Van Linge,[937] a skilful Flemish
artist, who appears to have settled in England about 1610, and found
many liberal patrons. It was an interval when much activity was
displayed throughout the kingdom in the work of repairing and
beautifying churches. When he died, or left the country, the art became
all but dormant. The Restoration did little to resuscitate it. Religious
taste and feeling were at a low ebb. Not only in England, but throughout
the Continent also, the glass painters had no encouragement, and were
continually obliged to maintain themselves by practising the ordinary
profession of a glazier. And besides, long after the time when painted
windows had become secure from Puritanic violence, a feeling lingered on
that there was something un-Protestant in them--something inconsistent,
it might be, with the pure light of truth. For many years more, few were
put up; nor these, for the most part, without much difference of
opinion, and sometimes a great deal of angry controversy.[938] It may
have stirred the irony of men who had no sympathy with these suspicions,
that corporations and private persons who would by no means[939] admit
into their churches windows in which scenes from our Saviour's life were
pictured in hues that vied with those of the ruby and the sapphire had
often no scruples in emblazoning upon them, to their own glorification,
the arms of their family or their guild.[940] Winslow speaking of the
east window[941] in University College, Oxford, done by Giles of York in
1687, the earliest example of a stained-glass window after the
Restoration, remarks how much the art had deteriorated even in its most
mechanical departments.[942] In the first quarter, however, of the
eighteenth century, there was some improvement in it. Joshua Price, in
the east window of St. Andrew's, Holborn, has 'rivalled the rich
colouring of the Van Linges. The painting is deficient in brilliancy,
and some of the shadows are nearly opaque; yet these defects may almost
be overlooked in the excellence of its composition, and in its immense
superiority over all other works executed between the commencement of
the eighteenth century and the revival of the mosaic system.'[943]
Joshua Price also executed some of the side windows in Magdalene
College, and restored, in 1715, those in Queen's College, Oxford, the
work of Van Linge, which had been broken by the Puritans.[944] William
Price painted, in 1702, the scenes from the life of Christ, depicted on
the lower lights of Merton College Chapel. They are 'weak as regards
colour, enamel being used almost to the substitution of coloured
glass,'[945] and lose in beauty and effect by the glaring yellow in
which they are framed. He also painted the windows which were put up in
Westminster Abbey by order of Parliament in 1722,[946] and repaired with
considerable skill the Flemish windows of Rubens's time, which he
purchased and put up on the south side of New College Chapel.[947] It is
remarkable that the Prices appear to have been the last who possessed
the old secret of manufacturing the pure ruby glass.[948] After their
time, until its rediscovery some forty years ago in France, it was a
familiar instance of a 'lost art.'
When nearly fifty years had passed, some little attention began to be
once more turned, chiefly in colleges and cathedrals, to the adornment
of churches with coloured windows. The most memorable examples are in
New College Chapel. Pickett, of York, painted between 1765 and 1777 the
lower lights of the northern windows in the choir, with much brilliancy
of colour, but in a style very inferior to the work of the Flemings and
William Price on the other side.[949] The great window in the
antechapel, erected a few year later, certainly avoided that uniformity
of gaudiness[950] which Warton so greatly complained of in Pickett's
work. Its design employed for several years[951] the genius of Sir
Joshua Reynolds. The central picture of the Nativity, after Correggio's
'Notte' at Modena, was exceedingly fine as a sketch in colours.
Unfortunately, it was wholly unsuited to glass, and remains a standing
proof that oil and glass paintings cannot be rivals, their principles
being essentially different. A competent critic pronounces that had it
been executed in coloured glass, it would still have been
unsatisfactory.[952] As it is, the dull stains and enamels employed by
Jarvis give it what Horace Walpole called 'a washed-out' effect.
Reynolds has introduced into it likenesses both of himself and Jarvis,
as shepherds worshipping. Of the allegorical figures beneath, Hartley
Coleridge justly remarks that personifications which are nowhere found
in Scripture are not well adapted for a church window.[953]
Another glass painting of something the same character, and showing the
same futile attempt at impossible effects of light and shade,[954] was a
picture of the Resurrection, executed by Edgington, from a design by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, for the Lady Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral. Mention
should also be made of the great eastern window in St. George's Chapel,
Windsor, by Jarvis and Forrest, and designed by West. The three last
examples quoted by Dallaway are Pearson's windows in Brasenose Chapel,
his scenes from St. Paul's life, at St. Paul's, Birmingham, and his
'Christ bearing the Cross,' at Wanstead, Essex.[955] All these were
produced towards the close of the century. They have merit, but they
show also how much had to be learnt before the slowly reviving art of
glass painting could recover anything of its ancient splendour.
Many ancient church bells disappeared in the general wreck of monastic
property at the commencement of the Reformation. Many more were broken
up and sold during the Civil Wars. In the eighteenth century another
danger awaited them. They were not converted into money for spendthrift
courtiers, nor disposed of for State necessities, nor cast into cannons
and other implements of war; but they came to be considered a useful
fund which the guardians of churches could fall back upon. 'Very
numerous were the instances in which four bells out of five have been
sold by the parish to defray churchwardens' accounts.'[956] On the other
hand, a great number of new bells were cast during the period, among
which may be mentioned the great bell of St. Paul's, 1716, and those of
the University Church, Cambridge, a peal particularly admired by
Handel. The single family of Rudall of Gloucester, cast during the
ninety years ending with 1774 no less than 3,594 church bells.
Bell-ringing is often spoken of as an exercise and recreation of
educated men. Hearne, the famous Oxford antiquary, was passionately fond
of it. In his diary there are constant allusions to the feats of
bell-ringing which took place in Oxford, and to the intricacies and
technicalities of the art.[957] The learned Samuel Parr is said to have
been excessively fond of church bells,[958] and so was Robert Southey
the poet.
The old superstitions connected with the inauguration of bells, and the
services expected from them, had become exchanged in either case for a
great deal of coarse rusticity and vulgarity. Some pious aspiration was
still in many cases graved upon the border of the metal; but often,
instead of the old 'funera plango, fulgura frango,' &c., or the
dedication to Virgin or saint, the churchwarden who ordered the bell
would order also an inscription, composed by himself, commemorative of
his work and office. The doggerel was sometimes absurd enough:--
Samuel Knight made this ring
In Binstead Steeple for to ding;
or,
Thomas Eyer and John Winslade did contrive
To cast from four bells this peal of five;
or,
At proper times my voice I'll raise,
And sound to my subscribers' praise.[959]
And when the new bell was placed in the steeple, instead of the priestly
unctions and quaint ceremonies of a past age, there was too often a
heathenish scene of drunkenness and revelry. A common custom, alluded to
by White of Selborne, was to fix it bottom upwards, and fill it with
strong liquor. At Checkendon, in Oxfordshire, this was attended with
fatal results. There is a tradition that one of the ringers helped
himself so freely from the extemporised ale cask that he died on the
spot, and was buried underneath the tower. Bells were still sometimes
rung to dissipate thunderstorms, and perhaps to drive away contagion,
under the notion that their vibrations purified the air. They were often
rung on other occasions when they would have been much better silent.
At Bath no stranger of the smallest pretension to fashion could arrive
without being welcomed by a peal of the Abbey bells.[960]
The curfew has not even yet fallen entirely into disuse. In the last
century it was oftener heard to 'toll the knell of parting day.' At
Ripon its place was supplied by a horn sounded every evening at
nine.[961]
'If,' said Robert Nelson, 'his senses hold out so long, he can hear even
his passing bell without disturbance.' Towards the beginning of the
century, this old custom seems to have been tolerably general. Its
original object had been to invite prayers in behalf of a departing
soul, and to summon the priest, if he had had no other admonition, to
his last duty of extreme unction. It was retained by the sixty-seventh
canon as a solemn reminder of mortality. But towards the end of the
century it was fast becoming obsolete. Pennant, writing in 1796, says
that though the practice was still punctually kept up in some places, it
had fallen into general desuetude in the towns.[962]
Churches neglected and in disrepair were not likely to be surrounded by
well-kept churchyards. During the Georgian period it was common enough
to see churchyards which might have served as pictures of dreariness and
gloom. Webb's collection of epitaphs, published in 1775, is prefaced by
some introductory verses which intimate, without any idea of censure, a
condition of things which was clearly not very exceptional in the
churchyards of towns and populous villages:--
Here nauseous weeds each pile surround,
And things obscene bestrew the ground;
Skulls, bones, in mouldering fragments lie,
All dreadful emblems of mortality.[963]
Secker hopes the clergy of his diocese will keep their churchyards 'neat
and decent, taking the profits of the herbage in such manner as may
rather add beauty to the place.' But he implies that there were many
incumbents who turned their cattle into the sacred precincts, 'to defile
them, and trample down the gravestones; and make consecrated ground such
as you would not suffer courts before your own doors to be.'[964] And
there were some who were not satisfied with turning in their cow and
horse.[965] Practices lingered within the recollections of living men
which would nowadays cause a parochial rebellion. While, for example,
the transition from licence to order was in progress, a certain rector
had sown an unoccupied strip of the burial-ground with turnips. The
archdeacon at his visitation admonished this gentleman not to let him
see turnips when he came there next year. The rebuked incumbent could so
little comprehend these decorous scruples that he supposed Mr.
Archdeacon to be inspired by a zeal for agriculture, and the due
rotation of crops. 'Certainly not, sir,' said he, ''twill be _barley_
next year.'[966]
For the most part, however, there was nothing to give gross offence to
the eye. Gray, in his charming elegy, used words exactly expressive of
the ordinary truth, when he called it 'this neglected spot.' It was
tranquil enough, and suggestive of pensive meditation, shaded perhaps by
rugged elms or melancholy yews; but the grass was probably rank and
untended, and the ground a confused medley of shapeless heaps. Except in
epitaphs, there were no particular signs of tenderness and care; no
flowers, no shrubs, no crosses. The revival of care for our beauty and
comeliness of churches, and the example of well-kept cemeteries, have
combined, since the time of the last of the Georges, to effect an
improvement in the general aspect of our churchyards, which was
certainly very much needed. Culpable neglect, it may be added, was
sometimes shown in the admission of jesting or profane epitaphs. The
inscription on Gay's monument in Westminster Abbey is a well-known
example. One other instance, in illustration, will be abundantly
sufficient. Imagine the carelessness of supervision which could allow
the following buffoonery to be set up (1764) in the cathedral churchyard
of Winchester:--
Here rests in peace a Hampshire grenadier
Who kill'd himself by drinking poor small beer;
Soldier, be warned by his untimely fall,
And when you're hot, drink strong, or none at all.[967]
In Wales, and in a few places in the south and west of England, the
custom still lingered of planting graves with flowers and sweet herbs:--
Two whitened flintstones mark the feet and head;
While there between full many a simple flower,
Pansy and pink, with languid beauty smile;
The primrose opening at the twilight hour,
And velvet tufts of fragrant camomile.[968]
Pepys makes mention of a churchyard near Southampton where the graves
were accustomed to be all sown with sage.[969]
Before leaving the subject of church fabrics and their immediate
surroundings, some little mention should be made of the effort made at
the beginning of the century to supply the deficiency of churches in
London. 'After some pause,' writes Addison, in one of his Roger de
Coverley papers, 'the old knight, turning about his head twice or thrice
to take a survey of the great metropolis, bid me observe how thick the
City was set with churches, and that there was scarce a single steeple
on this side Temple Bar. "A most heathenish sight!" said Sir Roger.
"There is no religion at this end of the town. The fifty new churches
will very much mend the prospect, but church work is slow, very
slow."'[970] That growth of London, which was to bring within its vast
embrace village after village and hamlet after hamlet, was already fast
progressing, and in the early part of the century had greatly
outstripped all church provision. Dean Swift, it is said, has the credit
of having first aroused public attention to this want. In a paragraph of
his 'Project for the Advancement of Religion,' he had said 'that five
parts out of six of the people are absolutely hindered from hearing
divine service, particularly here in London, where a single minister
with one or two curates has the care sometimes of about 20,000 souls
incumbent on him.'[971] A resolution was carried in the House of Commons
(May 1711), that fifty new churches were necessary within the bills of
mortality, and 350,000_l._ were granted for the purpose, 'which was a
very popular thing.'[972] Of the proposed fifty, twelve were built; the
money for which was raised by a duty on coal--2_s._ per chaldron from
1716 to 1720, and 3_s._ from 1720 to 1724.[973] After this exertion the
work of church-building seems to have pretty nearly ended for the
century. Towards the middle of it, the bishops complained in their
Charges that there was no spirit for building churches, and that the
occasional briefs issued for the purpose brought in very little.[974]
Fifty years later the question had again become too serious to be
overlooked, and with the revival of deeper religion in the Church, there
was little likelihood of its being allowed to rest. In large towns, the
disproportion between the population and the number and size of churches
had become so great 'that not a tenth of the inhabitants could be
received into them were they so disposed.'[975] A return made in 1811
showed that in a thousand large parishes in different parts of the
kingdom there was church accommodation for only a seventh part of their
aggregate population.[976] Parliament granted a million for the erection
of new churches, and large subscriptions were raised by the societies.
But Polwhele, writing in 1819, said there were two large London
parishes, with a joint population of above 120,000, which kept their
village churches with room for not more than 200; and that in 1812, Dr.
Middleton tried in vain to build a new church for St. Pancras, where the
population was 100,000, and the church would only accommodate 300.[977]
These facts seem almost incredible; probably the writer from whom they
are quoted overlooked subsidiary chapels attached to the parish church.
It is, however, very clear that in London and many of the large towns no
energetic efforts had for a long time been made to meet necessities of
very crying urgency.
Bishop Beveridge, writing in the first years of the last century,
lamented that 'daily prayers are shamefully neglected all the kingdom
over; there being very few places where they have public prayers upon
the week days, except perhaps on Wednesdays and Fridays.'[978] But in
towns this order of the Church was far more carefully observed in Queen
Anne's reign, and for some little time afterwards, than it has been
since, at all events until a very recent date. Archbishop Sancroft, in
his circular letter of 1688 to the bishops of his province, had
specially urged the public performance of the daily office 'in all
market and other great towns,' and as far as possible in less populous
places also.[979] In London there was little to complain of. Although
Puritan opinion had been unfavourable to daily services--Baxter having
gone so far as to say, that 'it must needs be a sinful impediment
against other duties to say common prayer twice a day'[980]--the old
feeling as to the propriety of daily worship was by no means so
thoroughly impaired as it soon came to be. Conscientious Church people
in towns would generally have acknowledged that it was a duty, wherever
there was no real impediment. Paterson's account of the London churches
shows that, in 1714, a large proportion of them were open morning and
evening for common prayer. He notes, however, with an expression of
great regret, that the number of worshippers was visibly falling off,
and that in some cases evening service was being wholly discontinued in
consequence of the paucity of attendance.[981] In the popular writings
of Queen Anne's time constant allusion may be found to the early
six-o'clock matins. It must be acknowledged, however, that the daily
services were sometimes attended for other purposes than those of
devotion. Steele, in a paper in the 'Guardian,'[982] in which he highly
commends the practice of daily morning prayers, says that 'going to
six-o'clock service, upon admonition of the morning bell, he found when
he got there many poor souls who had really come to pray. But presently,
after the confession, in came pretty young ladies in mobs, popping in
here and there about the church, clattering the pew doors behind them,
and squatting into whispers behind their fans.' Before long 'there was a
great deal of good company come in.' A few did, indeed, seem to take
pleasure in the worship; but many seemed to make it a task rather than a
voluntary act, and some employed themselves only in gossip or
flirtation. He remarks, towards the close of the paper, that later hours
were becoming more in vogue than the early service.
The duty of daily public worship was, as might be expected, chiefly
insisted upon by the High Churchmen of the period. Thus we find Robert
Nelson urging it. There were very few men of business, he said, who
might not 'certainly so contrive their affairs as frequently to dedicate
half an hour in four-and-twenty to the public service of God.'[983]
Dodwell's biographer speaks of the great attention he paid to the daily
prayers of the Church.[984] Bull introduced at Brecknock daily prayers,
instead of their only being on Wednesdays and Fridays; and at Carmarthen
morning and evening daily prayers, whereas there had been only morning
prayers before. In 1712 these were kept up and well frequented.[985]
Archbishop Sharp admonished his town clergy to maintain them
regularly.[986] Whiston, while he was yet incumbent of Lowestoft, used
at daily matins and vespers an abridgment of the prayers approved by
Bishop Lloyd.[987] The custom was, however, by no means confined to High
Churchmen. Thoresby, while he was yet more than half a Dissenter,
feeling, for instance, much scruple as to the use of the cross in
baptism, remarks in his 'Diary,' 'I shall never, I hope, so long as I am
able to walk, forbear a constant attendance upon the public common
prayer twice every day, in which course I have found much comfort and
advantage.'[988] Some time before the century had run through half its
course, daily services were fast becoming exceptional, even in the
towns. The later hours broke the whole tradition, and made it more
inconvenient for busy people to attend them. Year after year they were
more thinly frequented, and one church after another, in quick
succession, discontinued holding them. It was one sign among many others
of an increasing apathy in religious matters. At places like Bath or
Tunbridge Wells the churches were still open, and tolerably full morning
and evening.[989] Elsewhere, if here and there a daily service was kept
up, the congregation was sure to consist only of a few women; and the
Bridget or Cecilia who was regularly there, was sure of being accounted
by not a few of her neighbours, 'prude, devotee, or Methodist.'[990] At
the end of the century, and on till the end of the Georgian period,
daily public prayers became rarer still. In the country they were kept
up only 'in a few old-fashioned town churches.'[991] How much they had
dwindled away in London becomes evident from a comparison between the
list of services enumerated in the 'Pietas Londinensis,' published in
1714, and a book entitled 'London Parishes: an Account of the Churches,
Vicars, Vestries,' &c., published in 1824.
Throughout the earliest part of the period, the Wednesday and Friday
services, particularly enjoined by the canon, were held in the London
parish churches almost without exception, and very generally in country
parishes.[992] But as the idea of daily public worship became in the
popular mind more and more obsolete, these also were gradually neglected
and laid aside. In the middle of the century we find many more allusions
to them than at its close. Secker, in his Charge of 1761, said there
should always be prayers on these days.[993] John Wesley wrote, in 1744,
to advocate the careful observance of the Wednesday and Friday 'Stations
or Half-fasts;'[994] the poet Young held them in his church at
Woolen;[995] they formed part of the duty at a church to which Gilbert
Wakefield, in 1778, was invited to be curate.[996] James Hervey, at a
time when his health was fast failing, said that he still managed to
preach on Wednesday evenings, except in haytime and harvest,[997] &c. In
1824 there were Wednesday and Friday services in only a small minority
of the London churches.[998]
Very similar remarks may be made in regard of the observance of Saints'
days. In Queen Anne's time they were still generally kept as holy days,
and business was even in some measure suspended.[999] There were
services on these festivals in all the London churches.[1000] We find,
it is true, a High Church writer of this date, regretting that of late
years the observance of these days had not been so strict as heretofore.
He attributed this backwardness mainly to superstitious scruples derived
from Puritan times, and to the immoderate pursuit of business.[1001] The
wonder rather was, that having been, for a considerable portion of the
previous century, 'neglected almost everywhere throughout the
kingdom,'[1002] Church festivals should have recovered as much respect
as they did. The extensive circulation of Robert Nelson's 'Festivals,'
and the number of editions through which it passed, is in itself a
sufficient proof that a great number of English Churchmen cordially
approved a devout observance of the appointed holy days. But by the
middle of the century the neglect of them was becoming general.
Burnet wished that Lent were not observed with 'so visible a
slightness.'[1003] It was observed, certainly, and very generally, but
also very superficially. In London there were a considerable number of
special sermons on Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent, the place and
preachers being notified beforehand in a printed list issued by the
Bishop.[1004] Colston's Bristol benefaction, of 1708, provided, amongst
his other charities, for an annual series of fourteen Lent sermons. The
Low Churchmen of William's and Queen Anne's time instilled a devout
observance of the season no less than the clergy of the High Church
party. Burnet has been mentioned. Fleetwood's words, in his sermon
before the King, on the 1st Sunday in Lent, 1717, are worth quoting.
'Our Church,' he said, 'hath erected this temporary house of mourning,
wherein she would oblige us annually to enter.... And that we might
attend more freely to these matters, she advises abstinence, and a
prudent retrenchment of all those superfluities that minister to luxury
more than necessity: by which the busy spirits are composed and quieted;
the loose and scattered thoughts are recollected and brought home, and
such a serious, sober frame of mind put on that we can think with less
distraction, remember more exactly, pray with more fervency, repent more
earnestly, and resolve with more deliberation on amendment. These are
the beneficial fruits and effects of a reasonable, well governed
abstinence, as every one may find by their experience.'[1005] John
Wesley, as might naturally be expected from one who in many of his
sympathies was so decidedly a High Churchman, was always in favour of a
religious observance of Lent, especially of Holy Week. Steele, in a
paper of the 'Guardian,' specially addressed, in Lent 1713, to careless
men of pleasure, begs them not to ridicule a season set apart for
humiliation. And passing mention may be made of indications, more or
less trivial in themselves, of a tolerably general feeling throughout
society that Lent was not quite what other seasons are, and ought not to
be wholly disregarded. There were few marriages in Lent,[1006]
comparatively few entertainments, public or private;[1007] in some
cathedral towns the music of the choir was silent.[1008] And just as
Sunday is sometimes honoured only by the putting on of a better dress,
so the fashionable world would often pay that easiest show of homage to
the sacredness of the Lenten season, not by curtailing in any way their
ordinary pleasures, but by going to the theatre in mourning.[1009]
Masquerades, too, were considered out of place, at all events unless
they were disguised under another name--
In Lent, if masquerades displease the town,
Call them ridottos, and they still go down.[1010]
In the Isle of Man, and there only, under the system of Church
discipline set afoot and maintained in so remarkable a manner by the
influence of the venerable Bishop Wilson, Lent was celebrated with much
of the solemnity and austerity of primitive times. Immediately before
its commencement, courts of discipline were held, in which Church
censures were duly passed and notified. During the forty days penances
were performed, and Easter was the time for re-admission into the full
communion of the Church.[1011]
Throughout the country Lent was very commonly selected as a time
specially appropriate for public catechizing.[1012] 'A Presbyter of the
Church of England,' writing in the first year of this century, said
that, except among the Evangelical clergy, it was almost confined to
that season.[1013] Secker also, in the middle of the century, expressed
a similar regret.[1014]
'It was Passion Week,' writes Boswell, in 1772, 'that solemn season,
which the Christian Church has appropriated to the commemoration of the
mysteries of our Redemption, and during which, whatever embers of
religion are in our breasts, will be kindled into pious warmth.'[1015]
He could hardly have written thus if Holy Week, and especially Good
Friday, had not received at that time a fairly general observance. The
rough treatment with which Bishop Porteus was requited[1016] for his
attempt to bring about a better regard for Good Friday might seem to
show the contrary. But there was no period in the last century when
throughout the country at large shops were not generally closed on that
day, and the churches fairly attended.
In the Olney Hymns, published 1779, Christmas Day only is referred to
among all the Christian seasons.[1017] This was somewhat characteristic
of the English Church in general during the greater part of the Georgian
period. Other Christian seasons were often all but unheeded; Christmas
was always kept much as it is now. It may be inferred, from a passage in
one of Horsley's Charges, that in some country churches, towards the end
of the century, there was no religious observance of the day.[1018] But
such neglect was altogether exceptional. The custom of carol-singing was
continued only in a few places, more generally in Yorkshire than
elsewhere.[1019] There is some mention of it in the 'Vicar of
Wakefield;' and one well-known carol, 'Christians, awake! salute the
happy morn!' was produced about the middle of the century by John Byrom.
In George Herbert's time it had been a frequent custom on all great
festivals to deck the church with boughs. This usage became almost, if
not quite, obsolete except at Christmastide. We most of us remember with
what sort of decorative skill the clerk was wont, at this season, to
'stick' the pews and pulpit with sprays of holly. In the time of the
'Spectator'[1020] and of Gay,[1021] and later still,[1022] rosemary was
also used, doubtless by old tradition, as referring in its name to the
Mother of the Lord. Nor was mistletoe excluded.[1023] In connection with
this plant, Stanley says a curious custom was kept up at York, which in
1754 had not long been discontinued. 'On the eve of Christmas Day they
carried mistletoe to the high altar of the cathedral and proclaimed a
public and universal liberty, pardon, and freedom to all sorts of
inferior and even wicked people, at the gates of the city, toward the
four quarters of heaven.'[1024] A number of other local customs, many of
great antiquity, now at last disused, lingered on at Yule into the time
of our grandfathers. On Christmas Day, Easter Day, and Whitsun Day there
were very commonly two celebrations of the Holy Communion in the London
churches.[1025] In a few cases, especially during the earlier years of
the century, there was a daily celebration during the octaves of these
great festivals.[1026] John Wesley, writing in 1777, makes mention that
in London he was accustomed to observe the octave in this manner 'after
the example of the Primitive Church.'[1027] Throughout the latter part
of the Georgian period little special notice seems to have been taken,
in most churches, of Easter and Whitsuntide, and Ascension Day was very
commonly not observed at all, except in towns.
As one among many other indications that at the beginning of the last
century a shorter period than now had elapsed since the days that
preceded the Reformation, it may be mentioned that 'Candlemas' was not
only a well-known date, especially for changing the hours of service,
but retained some traces of being still a festival under that name. For
instance, it was specially observed at the Temple Church;[1028] and 'at
Ripon, so late as 1790, on the Sunday before Candlemas Day, the
Collegiate Church was one continued blaze of light all the afternoon,
by an immense number of candles.'[1029] Such traditions lingered in the
north of England long after they had expired elsewhere.
It may be added that in Queen Anne's time we may still find the name of
the Lord's Mother mentioned in a tone of affectionate respect not at all
akin either to the timidity, in this respect, of later days, or to the
somewhat defiant and overstrained veneration professed by some modern
High Churchmen. Thus when Paterson begins to enumerate the London
churches called after her name, he speaks of her in a perfectly natural
tone as 'the Virgin Mary, the Mother of our ever-blessed Redeemer,
Heaven's greatest darling among women.'[1030]
In some of the London churches, as at St. Alban's, St. Alphege's, &c.,
special commemoration services were, in 1714, still kept in memory of
the patron saints from whom they had been named.[1031] In the country,
at different intervals since the Reformation, there had been frequent
and often angry discussions as to the propriety of continuing or
suppressing the wakes which had been held from time immemorial on the
dedication day of the parish church or on the eve of it.[1032] The
feeling of High Churchmen was now by no means so unanimous in their
favour as it had been in Charles the First's reign. Bishop Bull, for
instance, when he was yet rector of Avening, was quite alive to the
evils of these often unruly festivals, and succeeded in getting them
discontinued there.[1033] Sometimes, where they had been held on the
Sunday, a sort of compromise was effected, and, as at Claybrook, 'the
church was filled on Sunday, and the Monday kept as a feast.'[1034]
The parish perambulations customary in Rogation Week were generally less
of a solemnity in the eighteenth than they had been in the seventeenth
and preceding centuries.
That every man might keep his own possessions,
Our fathers used, in reverent processions,
With zealous prayer, and with praiseful cheere,
To walk their parish limits once a year.[1035]
George Herbert, and Hooker, and many old worthies, had taken great
pleasure in maintaining this old custom, thinking it serviceable not
only for the preservation of parish rights and liberties, but for pious
thanksgiving, for keeping up cordial feeling between rich and poor, and
for mutual kindnesses and making up of differences.[1036] Sometimes,
however, the religious part of the ceremony was altogether omitted; and
sometimes these 'gang-days' provided an occasion for tumultuous contests
or for intemperance,[1037] or served mainly as a pretext for a
churchwardens' feast.[1038] We find Secker in 1750 recommending his
clergy to keep up the old practice, but to guard it from abuse, and to
use the thanksgivings, prayers, and sentences enjoined by Queen
Elizabeth.[1039] At Wolverhampton, until about 1765, 'the sacrist,
resident prebendaries, and members of the choir, assembled at morning
prayers on Monday and Tuesday in Rogation Week, with the charity
children bearing long poles clothed with all kinds of flowers then in
season, and which were afterwards carried through the streets of the
town with much solemnity, the clergy, singing men and boys, dressed in
their sacred vestments, closing the procession, and chanting in a grave
and appropriate melody the "Benedicite." The boundaries of the parish
were marked in many points by Gospel trees, where the Gospel was
read.'[1040]
Days appointed by authority of the State for services of humiliation or
of thanksgiving were far more frequent in the earlier part of the last
century than they are now. In King William's time there were monthly
fasts throughout the war, every first Wednesday in the month being thus
set apart.[1041] Thus also, during the period when success after success
attended the arms of Marlborough, there were never many months passed by
without a day of thanksgiving. During the civil wars of the preceding
century fast days had been very frequent. To a certain extent no doubt
they had been used on either side as political weapons of party; but
they were also genuinely congenial to the excited religious feeling of
the nation, solemn appeals to the overruling power which guides the
destinies of men. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, although
religious energies were so far more languid than they had been in the
preceding age, the great war that was raging on the Continent was still
regarded somewhat in the light of a crusade. Not that it inspired
enthusiasm, or awoke any spirit of romance. There was no such
high-strung emotion in those who anxiously watched its progress. Still
it was generally felt to be a struggle in which great religious
principles were involved. The Protestant interest and the religious
future of the Church and State of England were felt to be deeply
concerned in its ultimate issues. And thus a good deal of
half-religious, half-political feeling was centred on these appointed
days of solemn fast or thanksgiving. The prayer for unity, calling upon
the people to take to heart the dangers they were in by their unhappy
divisions, seems to have been very generally read upon these
occasions.[1042] A political element in them was always clearly
recognised by the Nonjurors. The more moderate among them, who attended
other services of the National Church, would not, except in rare
instances, attend these. 'They held that to be present on such special
occasions, which were significant of a direct purpose, was to profess
allegiance to the new reigning family, and therefore an act of
dissimulation; but not so their attendance on the ordinary
services.'[1043]
The prayers appointed for these set days of humiliation appear to have
often had the reputation of being neither impressive nor edifying.
Winston spoke, indeed, in the highest terms of a prayer drawn up by
Tenison on occasion of the great hurricane of 1703. He thought it a
model composition, unequalled in modern and unsurpassed in ancient
times.[1044] But its excellences, he added, were especially marked by
the strong contrast with the jejune and courtly formulas which usually
characterized such prayers, and most of all those which had been written
for the days of fasting during the war.[1045] They were, too commonly,
examples of the bad custom, scarcely to be extenuated by long
established precedent, of clothing in the outward form of adulation of
powers that be, what was ordinarily meant for nothing worse than
expressions of patriotic loyalty. Another frequent fault of these
special prayers was uncharitableness. Gilbert Wakefield speaks in
particular of an 'execrable prayer against the Americans,' and of the
storms which threatened him when he 'read it, but with the omission of
all those unchristian words and clauses which constituted the very life
and soul of the composition to the generality of hearers.'[1046]
The two anniversaries of January 30 and November 5 gave rise--especially
the former--to a whole literature of special sermons, the great majority
of which should never have been preached, or at least never published.
Extreme men on either side delighted in the favourable opportunity
presented by the one or the other of these two days of airing their
respective opinions on subjects which could not yet be discussed without
excitement. Protestant ardour, scarcely satisfied with commemorating
Gunpowder Treason in Church services which matched in language the
bonfires of the evening, found scope also for Antipapal demonstrations
in other and more distant reminiscences. November 27, the anniversary of
Elizabeth's accession, had been celebrated in London in 1679 with the
most elaborate processions.[1047] In the earlier part of the eighteenth
century it was still a great day in some parishes for riotous
meetings,[1048] and was solemnised in some churches with special sermons
and religious services.[1049] On the 14th or 20th of August there were
also commemorative sermons in several London churches in remembrance of
the defeat of the Armada.[1050] At St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, this
custom still survives.
Throughout the eighteenth century the old laws which required due
attendance on public worship were still in force. They were, in fact,
formally confirmed in the thirty-first year of George the Third;[1051]
and however much they had fallen into neglect, they were not removed
from the statute-book till the ninth and tenth years of the present
reign.[1052] We are told, however, that when the Toleration Act was
passed in 1689, by one of the chief provisions of which persons who
frequented a legal dissenting congregation were excused from all
penalties for not coming to church, there was a general and observable
falling off in the attendance at divine worship.[1053] Hitherto
congregations had been swelled by numbers who went for no better reason
than because it was the established rule of the realm that they must go.
Henceforward, mistaken or not, it was the popular impression that people
'had full liberty to go to church or stay away; and the services were
much deserted in favour of the ale-houses.'[1054] At the beginning,
however, of the eighteenth century, the churches were once again fuller
than they had been for some time previously. Dissent was at that time
thoroughly unpopular; and the practice of occasional conformity brought
a considerable number of moderate Dissenters into church. It was
observed that churches in London which once had been very thinly
attended now had overflowing congregations.[1055] Unfortunately, this
revival of church attendance was not long-lived. Year after year it
continued to fall off, until it had become in many parts of the country
deplorably small. In 1738 Secker deplored the 'greatly increased
disregard to public worship.'[1056] It was never neglected in England so
much as during the corresponding period in Germany. Even in the worst of
times, as a modern writer has truly observed, the average Englishman
never failed to acknowledge that attendance at church or chapel was his
duty.[1057] Only it was a duty which, as time went on, was continually
less regarded alike in the upper and lower grades of society. Bishop
Newton, speaking in 1768 of Mr. Grenville, evidently regarded his
'regularly attending the service of the church every Sunday morning,
even while he was in the highest offices,' as something altogether
exceptional in a Minister of State.[1058] His namesake, John Newton, the
well-known writer of 'Cardiphonia' and the 'Olney Hymns,' says that when
he was Rector of St. Mary, Woolnoth, in London, few of his wealthy
parishioners came to church.[1059] Religious reformers, towards the end
of the century, awoke with alarm to the perception of serious evil,
betokened by the general thinness of congregations. The migration of
population from the centre of London to its suburbs had already set in;
but the following assertion was sufficiently startling nevertheless.
'The amazing and afflictive desertion of all our churches is a fact
beyond doubt or dispute. In the heart of the city of London, in its
noblest edifices, on the Lord's day, repeated instances have been known
that a single individual hath not attended the divine service.'[1060]
Another writer observes, in similar language, that 'the greater part of
our churches, particularly in the metropolis, present a most unedifying
and afflicting spectacle to the eyes of the sincere, unenthusiastic
Christian.' 'Attendance was almost everywhere,' he adds, 'most
shamefully small.'[1061] Some of the remoter parts of England seemed to
be absolutely in danger of relapsing into literal heathenism. Hannah
More said, in a letter to John Newton (1796), that in one parish in her
neighbourhood, 'of nearly two hundred children, many of them grown up,
hardly any had ever seen the inside of a church since they were
christened. I cannot tell you the avidity with which the Scriptures were
received by many of these poor creatures.'[1062] But things had indeed
come to a pass in the country district where this indefatigable lady
pursued her Christian labour. 'We have in this neighbourhood thirteen
adjoining parishes without so much as even a resident curate.'[1063] Of
such villages she might well add, that they 'are in Pagan darkness, and
upon many of them scarcely a ray of Christianity has shone. I speak from
the most minute and diligent examination.'[1064] No doubt the locality
of which she spoke was suffering under very exceptional neglect; but
somewhat similar instances could have been produced in other parts of
England. A hundred years earlier, Ralph Thoresby, travelling in
Yorkshire, had expressed his amazement that 'on the Lord's Day we rode
from church to church and found four towns without sermon or
prayers.'[1065] This is scarcely the place to enter further into the
degree of spiritual destitution which prevailed in many parts of
England, and into the causes which brought it about. It may be enough
here to remark that the re-quickening of religious activity in the
Church of England, mainly through the labours of clergy and laymen of
the Evangelical school, came none too soon.
It should be added that, owing mainly to the thoroughly bad system of
bundling three or four poor livings together, in order to provide
respectable maintenance for a clergyman, it was very common in country
places to have only one service on the Sunday. Nothing could be more
likely than this to promote laxity of attendance at divine worship.
Dean Sherlock, in a treatise upon religious assemblies published by him
in 1681, remarked severely upon the unseemly behaviour which was
constantly to be seen in church--the looking about, the whispering, the
talking, the laughing, the deliberate reclining for sleep. Whether it
had arisen out of contempt for all the externals of worship, or whether
it were owing rather to a wild fear of any semblance of fanaticism or of
hypocrisy, this rude and slovenly conduct had come, he said, to a great
height, and brought great scandal upon our worship. The essayists of
Queen Anne's reign made a steady and laudable effort to shame people out
of these indecorous ways. The 'Spectator' constantly recurs to the
subject. At one time it is the Starer who comes in for his reprobation.
The Starer posts himself upon a hassock, and from this point of eminence
impertinently scrutinises the congregation, and puts the ladies to the
blush.[1066] In another paper he represents an Indian chief describing
his visit to a London church. There is a tradition, the illustrious
visitor says, that the building had been originally designed for
devotion, but there was very little trace of this remaining. Certainly
there was a man in black, mounted above the rest, and uttering
something with a good deal of vehemence. But people were not listening;
they were most of them bowing and curtseying to one another.[1067] Or a
distinguished Dissenter came to church. 'After the service was over, he
declared he was very well satisfied with the little ceremony which was
used towards God Almighty, but at the same time he feared he was not
well bred enough to be a convert.'[1068]
Addison, however, and his fellow-writers, who might be abundantly quoted
to a similar effect, succeeded in making their readers more sensible
than they had been of the impropriety of all such conduct. During the
latter half of the century, the careless and undevout could no longer
have ventured, without fear of censure, on the irreverent familiarities
in church which they could have freely indulged in for the first twenty
years of it.[1069]
Polwhele, remarks that in Truro Church, about the year 1800, he had seen
several people sitting with their hats on,[1070] as they might have done
at Geneva, or in the time of the older Puritans. This, however, was
something wholly exceptional at that date. One of the things which had
displeased English Churchmen in William the Third was this Dutch habit.
He so far yielded to their feeling as to uncover during the prayers, but
put on his hat again for the sermon.[1071] A minute in the
Representation of the Lower House of Convocation, during their session
of 1701,[1072] shows that this irreverent custom was then not very
unfrequent. After all, this was but a very little matter as compared
with gross desecrations such as happened here and there in remote
country places during the last ten years of the preceding century.
'Amongst the Lambeth archives is a very long letter by Edmund Bowerman,
vicar of Codrington, who gives a curious account of his parish. The
people played cards on the communion table; and when they met to choose
churchwardens, sat with their hats on, smoking and drinking, the clerk
gravely saying, with a pipe in his mouth, that such had been the
practice for the last sixty years.'[1073] This was in 1692. In 1693,
Queen Mary wrote to Dean Hooper that she had been to Canterbury
Cathedral for the Sunday morning service, and in the afternoon went to
a parish church. 'She heard there a very good sermon, but she thought
herself in a Dutch church, for the people stood on the communion table
to look at her.'[1074]
Throughout the eighteenth century, a variety of secular matters used to
be published, sometimes by custom and sometimes by law, during the time
of divine service. In a general ignorance of letters, when a paper on
the church door would have been an almost useless form, such notices
were to a great extent almost necessary. But in themselves they were ill
becoming the place and time; and a statute passed in the first year of
our present sovereign has now made them illegal.[1075] The publication
just before the sermon of poor-rate assessment, and of days of appeal in
matters of house or window tax,[1076] must often have had a very
distracting effect upon ratepayers who otherwise might have listened
calmly to the arguments and admonitions of their pastor. John Johnson,
writing in 1709, remarked with much truth that it was quite scandalous
for hue-and-cries, and enquiries after lost goods, to be published in
church.[1077] Even in our own generation. Mr. Beresford Hope, telling
what he himself remembers, records how in the church he frequented as a
boy, the clerk would make such announcements after the repeating of the
Nicene Creed, or of meetings at the town hall of the executors of a late
duke.[1078]
It was chiefly in the earlier part of the period that an observer
visiting one church after another would have noticed the great
differences in points of order. Such departures from uniformity were
slight as compared to what they had been in the reigns of Elizabeth or
Charles the First, yet were sufficient to arouse considerable uneasiness
in the minds of many friends of the Church, as well as to point many
sarcasms from some of its opponents. There were some special reasons for
disquietude in those who feared to diverge a hand-breadth from the
established rule. Although since the Restoration, the Church of England
was undoubtedly popular, and had acquired, out of the very troubles
through which she had passed, a venerable and well-tried aspect, there
was, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, a wide-spread
feeling of instability both in ecclesiastical and political matters, to
an extent no longer easy to be realised. No one felt sure what Romish
and Jacobite machinations might not yet effect. For if the Stuarts
remounted the throne, Rome might yet recover ascendancy. The
Protestantism of the country was not yet absolutely secure. And
therefore many Churchmen who, if they consulted their feelings only,
would have been thoroughly in accord with the Laudean divines in their
love of a more ornate ritual, were content to stand fast by such simple
ceremonies as were everywhere acknowledged to be the rule. However much
they might have a right to claim as their legitimate due usages which
their rubrics seemed to authorise, and which were scarcely unfrequent
even in the days of Heylyn and Cosin, they were not disposed to insist
upon what would in their day be considered as innovations in the
direction of Rome. Better to widen that breach rather than in any way to
lessen it. So, too, with men of a different tone of mind, who, so far as
their own tastes went, disliked all ceremonial and thought it rather an
impediment than a help to devotion, and who would have been glad if the
Church of England had approximated more closely to the habits of
Presbyterians and Independents. They, too, in the early part of the last
century felt, for the most part, they must be cautious, if they would be
loyal to the communion to which they had yielded allegiance. If they
indulged in Presbyterian fancies, they might perchance bring in the
Presbyterians, an exchange which they were not the least prepared to
make. The Dutch propensities of William, the ratification of Scotch
Presbyterianism in the reign of Anne, the frequent alarm cry of Church
in danger, made it seem quite possible that if civil dissensions should
arise, Presbyterianism might yet lift up its head and find a wealthier
home in the deaneries and rectories of England. And so they were more
inclined to control their sympathies in that direction than they might
have been under other circumstances. It may be added, the extreme
vehemence, not to say virulence of party feeling, in ecclesiastical as
in political matters, which prevailed in England so long as a decisive
and universally recognised settlement was yet in suspense, obliged both
High and Low Churchmen to keep tolerably close to the strict letter of
the Act of Uniformity. When so much jealousy and mutual animosity were
abroad, neither the one nor the other could venture, without raising a
storm of opprobrium, to test to what extreme limits its utmost
elasticity could be strained.
Notwithstanding such considerations, differences in religious opinion
within the Church, especially as to those points which the Puritan
controversy had brought into prominence, did not fail to find expression
in the modes and usages of worship. Something has been already said on
this point, in speaking of the furniture of churches, the decoration of
the sanctuary, and the observance of fasts and festivals. What has now
to be added relates rather to varieties in the manner of conducting
services.
The rubric which occupies so prominent a place in our Prayer-book,
stating 'that such ornaments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof,
at all times of their ministration, shall be retained and be in use, as
were in the Church of England, by the authority of Parliament, in the
second year of the reign of King Edward VI.,' was of course not
forgotten--as indeed it could not be--in the eighteenth century. High
Churchmen not unfrequently called attention to it. John Johnson, writing
in 1709, said he was by no means single in his belief that this order
was still legally enjoined.[1079] Archbishop Sharp appears to have been
of the same opinion, and used to say that he preferred the Communion
office as it was in King Edward's Book.[1080] Nicholls, in his edition
(1710) of Bishop Cosin's annotated Prayer-book, insisted upon the
continuous legality of the vestments prescribed in the old rubric, which
was 'the existing law,' he said, 'still in force at this day.'[1081]
Bishop Gibson, the learned author of the 'Codex Juris Ecclesiastici'
(1711), although he marked the rubric as practically obsolete, steadily
maintained that legally the ornaments of ministers in performing Divine
Service were the same as they had been in the earlier Liturgy.[1082] In
Charles I.'s reign the rubric had been by no means obsolete. But after
the Restoration the use of the more ornate vestments was not revived.
Even the cope, though prescribed for use as an Eucharistic vestment in
cathedrals and collegiate churches, had become almost obsolete. Norwich,
Westminster, and Durham seem to have been the only exceptions. At
Norwich, however, the cope, presented by the High Sheriff of Norfolk in
the place of one that had been burnt during the Civil War,[1083] does
not appear to have been much worn. Those at Westminster were reserved
for great state occasions, such as Coronations and Royal funerals.[1084]
It was only at Durham that the cope was constantly used on all festival
days. Defoe wrote in 1727 that they were still worn by some of the
residents, and he then described them as 'rich with embroidery and
embossed work of silver, that indeed it was a kind of load to stand
under them.'[1085] A story is sometimes told of Warburton, when
Prebendary of Durham in 1759, throwing off his cope in a pet, and never
wearing it again, because it disturbed his wig.[1086] Their use does
not seem to have been totally discontinued until 1784.[1087]
The surplice was of course, throughout the period, the universally
recognised vestment of the Church of England clergy. Not that it had
altogether outlived the unreasoning hatred with which it was regarded by
ultra-Protestants outside the National Church. It was still in the
earlier part of the century inveighed against by some of their writers
as 'a Babylonish garment,'[1088] 'a rag of the whore of Babylon,'[1089]
a 'habit of the priests of Isis.'[1090] In William III.'s time, its use
in the pulpit was evidently quite exceptional. The writer of a letter in
the Strype Correspondence--one of those in whose eyes a surplice was 'a
fool's coat'--making mention that on the previous day (in 1696) he had
seen a minister preach in one, added that to the best of his remembrance
he had never but once seen this before.[1091] During the next reign the
custom was more common, but was looked upon as a decided mark of High
Churchmanship. There is an expressive, and amusingly inconsequential
'though' in the following note from Thoresby's Diary for June 17, 1722:
'Mr. Rhodes preached well (though in his surplice).'[1092] In villages,
however, it was very frequently worn, not so much from any idea of its
propriety as what Pasquin in the 'Tatler' is made to call 'the most
conscientious dress,'[1093] but simply from its being the only vestment
provided by the parish. Too frequently it betrayed in its appearance,
'dirty and contemptible with age,'[1094] a careless indifference quite
in keeping with other externals of worship. At the end of the
seventeenth century many Low Church clergy were wont so far to violate
the Act of Uniformity as often not to wear the surplice at all in
church. They would sometimes wear it, said South, in a sermon preached
in King William's reign, and oftener lay it aside.[1095] Such
irregularities appear, however, to have been nearly discontinued in
Queen Anne's time.[1096] About this date, the growing habit among
clergymen of wearing a wig is said to have caused an alteration from the
older form of the surplice. It was no longer sewn up and drawn over the
head, but made open in front.[1097]
Those who abominated the surplice had looked with aversion on the
academical hood. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, some Low
Church clergymen--they would hardly be graduates of either
University--objected to its use. Christopher Pitt, recommending
preachers to sort their sermons to their hearers, bids them, for
example, not to be so indiscreet as to 'rail at hoods and organs at St.
Paul's.'[1098]
Next, says Addison, after the clergy of the highest rank, such as
bishops, deans, and archdeacons, come 'doctors of divinity, prebendaries
and all that wear scarfs.'[1099] It was an object therefore of some
ambition in his day to wear a scarf. There was many a clerical fop, we
are told in a later paper of the 'Spectator,' who would wear it when he
came up to London, that he might be mistaken for a dignitary of the
Church, and be called 'doctor' by his landlady and by the waiter at
Child's Coffee House.[1100] Noblemen also claimed a right of conferring
a scarf upon their chaplains. In this case, those who knew the galling
yoke that a chaplaincy too often was, might well entitle it 'a badge of
servitude,' and 'a silken livery.'[1101]
At this point, a short digression may be permitted on the subject of
clerical dress during the last century.
In the time of Swift and the 'Spectator,' clergymen generally wore their
gowns when they travelled in the streets of London.[1102] But they wore
them, so Hearne says, with a difference, very characteristic of those
days of hot party strife. The Tory clergy only wore the M.A. gown; 'the
Whigs and enemies of the Universities go in pudding-sleeve gowns,'[1103]
or what was otherwise called the 'crape' or 'mourning gown.' In the
country the correct clerical dress was simply the cassock. Fielding's
genius has made good Parson Adams a familiar picture to most readers of
English literature. We picture him careless of appearances, tramping
along the muddy lanes with his cassock tucked up under his short
great-coat.[1104] A clergyman, writing in 1722, upon 'the hardships and
miseries of the inferior clergy in and about London,' compares with some
bitterness the threadbare garments of the curate with 'the flaming gown
and cassock' of the non-resident rector. He could wish, he said ('if
the wish were canonical')[1105] that he might appear in a common habit
rather than in a clerical garb which only excited derision by its
squalor. He thought it a desirable recommendation to the religious and
charitable societies of the day, that they should make gifts to the
poorer clergy of new gowns and cassocks.[1106] Soon, however, after
Fielding's time, the cassock gradually fell into disuse as an ordinary
part of a clergyman's dress. It was still worn by many throughout the
Sunday; but on week days was regarded as somewhat stiff and formal, even
by those who insisted most on the proprieties.[1107] Ever since the
Restoration, the old strictness about clerical dress had become more and
more relaxed. The square cap had been out of favour during the
Commonwealth, and was not generally resumed.[1108] The canonical
skull-cap was next supplanted--not without much scandal to persons of
grave and staid habit--by the fashionable peruke.[1109] There is a
letter from the Duke of Monmouth, then Chancellor of Cambridge, to the
Vice-Chancellor and University, October 8, 1674, in which this
innovation is severely condemned.[1110] A few years later, Archbishop
Tillotson himself set the example of wearing the obnoxious
article.[1111] Many country incumbents not only dropped all observance
of the old canonical regulations, but lowered the social character of
their profession by making themselves undistinguishable in outward
appearance from farmers or common graziers. South spoke of this in one
of his sermons, preached towards the end of William III.'s reign.[1112]
So also did Swift in 1731.[1113] The Dean, however, himself seems to
have been a glaring offender against that sobriety of garb which befits
a clergyman. In his journal to Stella, he speaks in one place of wearing
'a light camlet, faced with red velvet and silver buckles.'[1114] Of
course eccentricities which Dean Swift allowed himself must not be taken
as examples of what others ventured upon. But carelessness in all such
matters went on increasing till about the seventh decade of the century.
After that time a number of remonstrances and protests may be found
against the brown coats, the plaid or white waistcoats, the white
stockings, the leathern breeches, the scratch wigs, and so forth, in
which clerical fops on the one hand, and clerical slovens on the other,
were often wont to appear. A writer at the very end of the century
pointed his remarks on the subject by calling the attention of his
brother clergy to the distinctly anti-Christian purpose which had
animated the French Convention in their suppression of the clerical
habit.[1115]
If a modern Churchman could be carried back to the days of Queen Anne,
and were at Church while service was going on, his eye would probably be
caught by people standing up where he had been accustomed to see them
sitting, and sitting down when, in our congregations, every one would be
standing up. Some people, following the common custom of the Puritans,
stood during the prayers.[1116] Some, on the other hand, sat during the
creed.[1117] In both these cases there was plain neglect of the rubric.
Where the Prayer-book was silent, uncertainty and variation of usage
were more reasonable. Thus some stood at the Epistle, as well as at the
Gospel,[1118] and some whenever the second lesson was from one of the
Evangelists.[1119] What Cowper calls the 'divorce of knees from
hassocks,' was perhaps not so frequent then as now.[1120] In pictures of
church interiors of that date, the congregation is generally represented
as really kneeling. Still, it was much too frequent, and quite fell in
with the careless, self-indulgent habits of the time. Before the middle
of the century it had become very general. In one of the papers of the
'Tatler,' we find there were some who neither stood nor knelt, but
remained lazily sitting throughout the service like 'an audience at a
playhouse.'[1121] Sitting while the Psalms were being sung was,
notwithstanding many remonstrances, the rule rather than the exception
during the earlier part of the century. The Puritan commission of 1641
had spoken of standing at the hymns as an innovation.[1122] Even
Sherlock, in 1681, speaks of 'that universal practice of sitting while
we sing the Psalms.'[1123] In 1717, Fleetwood speaks of standing at such
times as if it were a singularity rather than otherwise.[1124] Hickes,
on the other hand, writes in 1701, as if those who refused to stand at
the singing of psalms and anthems were for the most part 'stiff, morose,
and saturnine votists.'[1125] In fact, High Churchmen insisted on the
one posture, while Low Churchmen generally preferred the other; and so
the custom remained very variable, until the High Church reaction of
Queen Anne's time succeeded in establishing, in this particular, a rule
which was henceforth generally recognised. In 1741, Secker speaks of
sitting during the singing as if, though common enough, it were still a
mere careless habit.[1126]
At the beginning of the century many who had been brought up in Puritan
traditions thoroughly disliked the custom of congregational responses.
They called it 'a tossing of tennis balls,'[1127] and set it down as one
of the points of formalism.[1128] Partly, perhaps, from a little of this
sort of feeling, but far more often for no other reason than a lack of
devotional spirit, that cold and most unattractive custom, which
prevailed throughout the Georgian age, of making the clerk the
mouthpiece of the congregation, fast gained ground. This, however, was
much less general in the earlier part of the period than at its close.
In Queen Anne's time there were many zealous Churchmen who both by word
and example endeavoured to give a more hearty character to the public
worship, and who thought that such 'unconcerned silence[1129] was a much
greater evil than the risk of an occasional 'Stentor who bellowed
terribly loud in the responses.'[1130] Most people are familiar with the
paper in the 'Spectator,' which describes Sir Roger de Coverley at
church, and his patriarchal care that his tenants and dependents should
all have prayer-books, that they might duly take their part in the
service.[1131]
The period which immediately followed the Revolution of 1689 was not one
when minor questions of ritual, upon which there was difference of
opinion between the two principal parties in the English Church, were
likely to rest in peace. Turning eastward at the creeds was a case in
point. There was quite a literature upon the subject. Many Low
Churchmen, among whom may be mentioned Asplin, Hoadly, and Lord
Chancellor King, contended that it was a papal or pagan superstition
which ought to be wholly discontinued. The High Church writers, such as
Cave, Meade, Bingham, Smallbroke, Whiston, Wesley, and Bisse, answered
that it was not only the universal custom in the primitive Church, but
edifying and impressive in itself as symbolising unity in the faith,
hope of resurrection, and expectation of our Saviour's coming. The usage
was very generally maintained.
The injunction of the 17th Canon, to bow with reverence when the name of
the Lord Jesus is mentioned in time of divine service, was observed much
as now. In the recital of the Creed it was the general custom. At other
times, High Churchmen were for the most part careful to observe the
practice,[1132] and Low Churchmen did not. Later in the century the
canon was probably observed much more generally in country villages than
among town congregations. Bisse observed that it was a primitive usage
which ought least of all to be dropped at a time when Arian opinions
were abroad.[1133]
At the close of the seventeenth century we find South and others
bitterly complaining of the liberties taken with the Prayer-book by some
of the 'Moderate' clergy. Some prayers, it appears, were omitted, and
some were shortened, and in one form or another 'the divine service so
curtailed,' says South in his exaggerated way, 'as if the people were to
have but the tenths from the priest, for the tenths he had received from
them.'[1134] No doubt the expectation of immediate changes in the
liturgy, and the knowledge that some of the bishops were leaders in that
movement, had an unsettling effect, adapted to encourage irregularities.
At all events we hear little more of it, when the agitation in favour of
comprehension had ceased. There was often a lax observance of the
rubrics;[1135] but there appear to be no complaints of any serious
omissions, until three or four of the Arian and semi-Arian clergy
ventured, not only to leave out the Athanasian Creed, but to alter the
doxologies,[1136] and to pass over the second and third petitions of the
Litany.[1137]
The Athanasian Creed, however, might fairly be said to stand on a
somewhat different footing. If it had been a pain and a stumbling block
only to those who had adopted Whiston's opinions about the Trinity, men
to whom the ordinary prayers could not fail to give offence, it would
have been clear that such persons had no standing-ground in the ministry
of the Church of England. But the case was notoriously otherwise.
Persons who have not the least inclination to adopt heterodox opinions,
may most reasonably object to the use in public worship of elaborate
scholastic definitions on questions of acknowledged mystery. Those
clergymen, therefore, whether in the eighteenth or in the nineteenth
century, who have been accustomed to neglect the rubric which prescribes
the use of this Creed on certain days, might feel reasonably justified
in so doing, on the tacit understanding that, at the demand of the
bishop they should either read the formula, notwithstanding their
general dislike to it, or give up their office in the Church. No doubt
it was quite as often omitted in the last century as in our own;[1138]
and in George III.'s time, even if a desire had existed to enforce its
use, there would have been the more difficulty in doing so from its
having been forbidden in the King's Chapel.[1139]
The habit of reading continuously, as parts of one service, Morning
Prayer, the Litany, and part of the office for the Communion, had hardly
become fixed at the commencement of the century. John Johnson,[1140]
writing in 1709, said it was an innovation. The old custom had been to
have, on Sundays and holy days, prayers at six, and the Litany at nine,
followed after a few minutes' interval by the Communion service. Even in
Charles I.'s time they had often become joined, as a concession to the
later hours that were gradually gaining ground, or, as Heylin expressed
it, 'because of the sloth of the people.' But 'long after the
Restoration' the distinction was maintained in some places, as in the
Cathedrals of Canterbury and Worcester. And throughout the last century,
'Second Service' was a name in common general use for the Communion
office.[1141]
Bull, Sherlock, Beveridge, and other Anglican divines, who belong more
to the seventeenth than to the eighteenth century, had expressed much
concern at the unfrequency of celebrations of the Eucharist as compared
with a former age. Our Reformers, they said, had regarded it as an
ordinary part of Christian worship.[1142] In the first Prayer-book of
Edward VI. there had been express directions relating to a daily
administration, not only in cathedrals, but in parish churches. But now,
said Beveridge, people have so departed from primitive usage that they
think once a week is too often.[1143] It had come to be monthly or
perhaps quarterly. The Puritans, with the idea that the solemnity of the
rite was enhanced by its recurring after comparatively lengthened
intervals, discouraged frequent communions, and many Low Churchmen of
the next generation held the same opinion.[1144] In the country,
quarterly communions had become the general rule. The number of
communicants had also very much diminished. No doubt this was owing in
great measure to the general laxity which followed upon the Restoration.
But the cause already mentioned contributed to keep away even religious
people. It must be also remembered that, during the period of the
Reformation, and for some time after, stated attendance at the Holy
Communion was regarded not only as a religious duty, but as an ordinary
sign of membership in the National Church, and of attachment to its
principles. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, although the
odious sacramental test was yet to survive for many a long year, that
feeling had very generally passed away, and was being gradually
superseded in many minds by an opposite idea that this Sacrament was not
so much a help to Christian living, as a badge, from which many
excellent people shrunk, of decided religious profession. With the rise
of the religious societies there was a change for the better. The High
Church movement of Queen Anne's time, regarded in its worthiest form and
among its best representatives, was one in which the sacramental element
was prominently marked. If a comparison is made between the number of
churches in London where the Sacrament was weekly administered in Queen
Anne's reign, and on the other hand, in the period from about the middle
of George I.'s reign to the third or fourth decade of the present
century, the difference would be strikingly in favour of the earlier
date. In 1741, we find Secker admonishing the clergy of the diocese of
Oxford, that they were bound to administer thrice in the year, that
there ought to be an administration during the long interval between
Whitsuntide and Christmas. 'And if,' he adds somewhat dubiously, 'you
can afterwards advance from a quarterly communion to a monthly one, I
make no doubt but you will.'[1145] Of course there were many verbal and
many practical protests against the prevalent disregard of this central
Christian ordinance. Thus both Wesley from a High Church point of view,
and the Broad Church author of the 'Free and Candid Disquisitions,'
urged the propriety of weekly celebrations. And before the end of the
century there was doubtless some improvement. In many parish churches
the general custom of a quarterly administration was broken through in
favour of a monthly one, and in many cathedrals the Sacrament might once
more be received on every Lord's Day.[1146] But Bishop Tomline might
well feel it a matter for just complaint, that being at St. Paul's on
Easter Day, 1800, 'in that vast and noble cathedral no more than six
persons were found at the table of the Lord.'[1147] Before leaving this
part of the subject, it should be added that, previous to the time when
the Methodist organisation became unhappily separated from the National
Church, the sermons of Wesley and his preachers were sometimes followed
by a large accession of communicants at the parish church.[1148]