[Footnote 766: Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 490.]

[Footnote 767: Id. i. 309.]

[Footnote 768: Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 126, note.]

[Footnote 769: Id. ii. 325.]

[Footnote 770: Id. ii. 236.]

[Footnote 771: Id. i. 324.]

[Footnote 772: Life of the Rev. Rowland Hill, by the Rev. E. Sidney, p. 65.]

[Footnote 773: Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 315.]

[Footnote 774: Id. ii. 467.]

[Footnote 775: Gladstone's Life of Whitefield, p. 465.]

[Footnote 776: Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 423.]

[Footnote 777: Id. ii. 521.]

[Footnote 778: Lord Lyttelton's Letter to Mr. West, quoted in A Refutation of Calvinism, by G. Tomline, Bishop of Winchester, p. 253.]

[Footnote 779: Not, of course, that he waited until the death of Whitefield before reopening the question; for Conference met in August, and Whitefield did not die until September 1770.]

[Footnote 780: Extracts from the Minutes of some late Conversations between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and others at a Public Conference held in London, August 7, 1770, and printed by W. Pim, Bristol. 'Take heed to your doctrine.']

[Footnote 781: Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 236.]

[Footnote 782: Id. 240.]

[Footnote 783: Id. 240, 241.]

[Footnote 784: Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 243, &c.]

[Footnote 785: Id. 245. Berridge said the contest at Bristol turned upon this hinge, whether it should be Pope John or Pope Joan.]

[Footnote 786: And of his own writings he said: 'A softer style and spirit would have better become me.'—See Life of Rev. R. Hill, by Rev. G. Sidney, pp. 121, 122.]

[Footnote 787: Id. p. 122.]

[Footnote 788: Southey's Life of Wesley, ii. 180.]

[Footnote 789: See the abuse quoted in the Fourth Check, pp. 11, 42, 121.]

[Footnote 790: See Fourth Check, p. 155.]

[Footnote 791: Works of A.M. Toplady, with Memoir of the Author, in six volumes, vol. i. p. 100.]

[Footnote 792: But at the same time a very modest and moderate one. 'Predestination,' he wrote, 'and reprobation I think of with fear and trembling; and, if I should attempt to study them, I would study them on my knees.' (Letter, dated Miles's Lane, March 24, 1752, quoted by Mr. Tyerman in his Oxford Methodists, p. 270.) And again: 'As for points of doubtful disputation, those especially which relate to particular or universal redemption, I profess myself attached neither to the one nor the other. I neither think of them myself nor preach of them to others. If they happen to be started in conversation, I always endeavour to divert the discourse to some more edifying topic. I have often observed them to breed animosity and division, but never knew them to be productive of love and unanimity.... Therefore I rest satisfied in this general and indisputable truth, that the Judge of all the earth will assuredly do right,' &c. This, however, was written in 1747 (see Tyerman, 254). Perhaps when he wrote Theron and Aspasio some years later his views were somewhat changed.]

[Footnote 793: Mr. Tyerman, however, thinks otherwise. 'After the lapse of a hundred years,' he writes (Oxford Methodists, p. 201), 'since the author's death, few are greater favourites at the present day.']

[Footnote 794: Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. v. p. 93.]

[Footnote 795: See especially Meditations among the Tombs, p. 29, the passage beginning, 'Since we are so liable to be dispossessed of this earthly tabernacle,' &c.]

[Footnote 796: 'I dare no more write in a fine style,' he said, 'than wear a fine coat.... I should purposely decline what many admire—a highly ornamental style.']

[Footnote 797: Hervey's Letters in answer to Wesley were published after his death, against his own wish expressed when he was dying.]

[Footnote 798: Hervey's Meditations, &c., ut supra, Life.]

[Footnote 799: Toplady's Works, i. 102.]

[Footnote 800: 'My writings,' he wrote to Lady F. Shirley, 'are not fit for ordinary people: I never give them to such persons, and dissuade this class of men from procuring them. O that they may be of some service to the more refined part of the world!']

[Footnote 801: Life of Hervey, prefixed to his Meditations, ut supra.]

[Footnote 802: See Kyle's Christian Leaders of the Last Century.]

[Footnote 803: See Life of Lady Huntingdon, i. 374.]

[Footnote 804: Life of Wilberforce, by his Sons, vol. ii. p. 137.]

[Footnote 805: See Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith, by W. Romaine, especially pp. 28, 40, 98, 99, 102, 149, 158, 182, 192, 227, 229, 232, 233, 274, 275, 286, 287, 321.]

[Footnote 806: 'Memoir of the Author,' prefixed to Venn's Complete Duty of Man (new ed. London, Religious Tract Society), p. xiii. preface 3.]

[Footnote 807: Or perhaps we should have said 'of the Evangelical school;' only, Law can hardly be said to have belonged to that school. Bishop Wilson's Sacra Privata, and other devotional works, and some of Bishop Ken's devotional works, rank, intellectually at any rate, far above Venn's Complete Duty of Man.]

[Footnote 808: Here again we must except Bishop Wilson, who hardly seems to belong to the eighteenth century. He was as one born out of due time. We must except, too, some of the works of those High Churchmen of the old type, who lived on into the eighteenth century, but who, in their lives and writings, reflected the spirit of a past age—a spirit which breathes in every prayer of our Liturgy, but which is very rarely seen in the eighteenth century, or, for the matter of that, in the nineteenth.]

[Footnote 809: Southey's Life of Cowper, i. 117.]

[Footnote 810: See 'Biographical Sketches' in the Christian Observer for 1877.]

[Footnote 811: Christian Observer for February, 1877.]

[Footnote 812: See, inter alia, William Wilberforce, his Friends, and his Times, by J.C. Colquhoun, pp. 90, 98.]

[Footnote 813: See Newton's Works, in six volumes, edited by Cecil, passim.]

[Footnote 814: See especially his fourth sermon on 'The Messiah' in the series suggested by Handel's Oratorio. There is not a taint of irreverence, but no one but a man who had an exquisite sense of humour could have written the first two pages of that sermon.]

[Footnote 815: See Taylor's Life of Cowper, p. 426.]

[Footnote 816: Id. p. 139.]

[Footnote 817: Not, of course, a 'Methodist' as distinguished from an 'Evangelical,' but according to the indiscriminate use of the term common in his day.]

[Footnote 818: Life of Scott, 216.]

[Footnote 819: Id. 127.]

[Footnote 820: Id. 261.]

[Footnote 821: Id. 238.]

[Footnote 822: See Milner's History of the Church of Christ (new ed. four vols. Cadell, 1834), passim, and especially Introduction, and vol. i. 110, 131, 136, 137, 156; ii. 415; iii. 73.]

[Footnote 823: i. 156.—See also i. 131, &c.]

[Footnote 824: See i. 136, 137, 325, 457.]

[Footnote 825: ii. 597, &c.]

[Footnote 826: iii. 73.]

[Footnote 827: ii. 441.]

[Footnote 828: See the Life of the Rev. T. Robinson, Vicar of St. Mary's, Leicester, and sometime Fellow of Trin. Coll., Camb., by Rev. E.T. Vaughan, p. 50, &c.]

[Footnote 829: See Wilberforce, His Friends, and His Times, by J.C. Colquhoun, p. 102.]

[Footnote 830: Sir James Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.]

[Footnote 831: 'Mr. Wilberforce's "Practical View,"' writes Thomas Scott, 'is a most noble and manly stand for the Gospel; full of good sense and most useful observations on subjects quite out of our line, and in all respects fitted for usefulness; and coming from such a man, it will probably be read by many thousands who can by no means be brought to attend either to our preaching or writings, especially the rich.'—Life of T. Scott, 311.]

[Footnote 832: Newton's 'Letters to a Nobleman,' published in his works, were addressed to Lord Dartmouth.]

[Footnote 833: See Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, by W. Roberts, Esq., i. 395. The Quarterly Review vehemently combated the notion of Dr. Johnson's conversion. In reference to the passage in Roberts' Life of H. More, it said, 'This attempt to persuade us that Dr. Johnson's mind was not made up as to the great fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, until it was enforced on him in extremis by sectarian or Methodistical zeal, cannot redound to the credit of Mr. Roberts' understanding,' &c. Those who care to enter into this bygone controversy may be referred to the Christian Observer for May 1843, pp. 281-287.]

[Footnote 834: One of Newton's bon-mots was, 'The place of honour in an army is not with the baggage or among the women.']

[Footnote 835: See one of Newton's characteristically tender and sympathetic letters in answer to Hannah More's description of her spiritual state: 'What you are pleased to say, my dear madam, of the state of your mind, I understand perfectly well; I praise God on your behalf, and I hope I shall earnestly pray for you. I have stood upon that ground myself. I see what you want, to set you quite at ease; and though I cannot give it you, I trust that He who has already taught you what to desire will in His own best time do everything for you and in you which is necessary to make you as happy as is compatible with our present state of infirmity and warfare; but He must be waited on and waited for, to do this.' Hannah More had before this expressed her liking for Newton's 'Cardiphonia, though not for every sentiment or expression which it contains.' See Roberts' Life, i. 236.]

[Footnote 836: Roberts, ii. 260.]

[Footnote 837: See Life of H. More, by H. Thompson, p. 81.]

* * * * *



CHAPTER X.

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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 350,000l. 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—2s. per chaldron from 1716 to 1720, and 3s. 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.