Paul's Churchyard

“ Paul's was a chapel of rich ornament, built by "Gilbert Becket, portgrave and principal magistrate in this City in the reign of King Stephen." He was the great Archbishop's father. The monuments in it and the surrounding churchyard are said to have rivalled in beauty those inside the cathedral. How this cloister and chapel fared, we shall see presently. ”

“ I'd like a house on a hill, and would not care to be more than a mile from a good old church, where five or ten generations of simple folk have knelt and worshipped until they were gathered into the quiet churchyard. ”

“ At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a tumult. ”

“ But what is this white conventicle-looking edifice which crowns its heights? Surely it is the refuge of some Mormon congregation—the temple, perchance, of some pagan fanaticism? Nay verily, good sirs,—assuage your indignation, for this is a Church of your own communion, a sort of Chapel of Ease to the parish of St. John. The architect was “abroad” when this building was designed; for one less becoming the outward character of a Church it is impossible to conceive. It is dedicated to St. Paul, and was opened for divine worship in 1830. ”

“ Paul's:-- Founded by Lanfranc, 3; Architecture and building, 3-8, 67; Dimensions, 7; Injured by fire in 1135, 4; Images destroyed, 44; Destroyed by the Great Fire, 72-75; The Spire, 5, 8, 49; The High Altar, 7; The Rose Window, 8; Plate 13 The Cathedral Wall, 9; The Churchyard, 9, 10, 15, 44; The Cloister, 10; The Library, 10, 55; Paul's Cross, 11; The Crypt, 11; College of Minor Canons, 11; The Bishop's House, 11, 12, 74; The Deanery, 12, 27; The Brewhouse and Bakehouse, 12; The Chapter House, 12; Plate 9 The West Front, 12; The Lollards' Tower, 12; The Nave, 11, 13, 56 ”

“ But the Church, as a visible organization of men, can be what it is—the city of God, His household and His sanctuary—only because it is pervaded by Christ's life and spirit. The 'stones of the building' are not merely placed side by side of one another, or held together by any external agency of government; they {120} are as branches of a living tree, limbs of a living body. In this recurrent thought, which will be presented to us in another form when St. Paul comes to speak of the head and the body, is the interpretation of all his theory of the Church. ”

“ The architecture of the church generally is not otherwise very interesting; though the east end is good, and has some fragments of fair glass still remaining. I have already mentioned the curious arrangement of the curtains on each side of the Lutheran altar here.
S. Paul’s is another church of precisely the same type. It has a good western steeple, with a very steep square roof, or rather, I should say, a low spire. The stages of the tower are repetitions of each other. Both this church and S. Peter’s are disfigured by a wonderful accumulation of pews and galleries ”

“ Or, if we followed him back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built there—a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with worshippers—who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the severe joys of Church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them? ”

“ Paul’s connection with the church appears to have ceased before the Conquest, since which time the edifice has been once or twice rebuilt. The spire is recorded to have been re-edified in 1479, in which year the parson of the parish, with his officers, ate a goose upon the top, and cast the well-picked bones into the four streets below. The ecclesiastics of those days were a jovial crew,—none of your lean, skewery-built men, like their degenerate types of the present day,—but priests of size and substance; men who quaffed their wine and sack right merrily ”

“ In this church, the people all knelt with their backs to the altar, and facing the great door, whereat a number of us, being scandalized, determined to face about on all occasions and kneel toward the altar, which we did rigidly and in the most impressive manner, to the great annoyance of the rector, Dr. Wyatt. {24} The tout ensemble of St. Paul's Church, especially in the dusk of evening, when the lamps were lit, was to a hasty glance quite that of a Catholic church. Catholics very frequently came in by mistake, and sometimes poor people knelt in the aisles and began saying their prayers. ”

“ After my very hearty commendations you cannot but take notice of his Majesty's most honest and pious intention for the repair of the decay of Saint Paul's Church here in London, being the mother church of this City and Diocese, and the great Cathedral of this Kingdom. A great dishonour it is, not only to this City, but to the whole state to see that ancient and goodly pile of building so decayed as it is, but it will be a far greater if care should not be taken to prevent the fall of it into ruin. ”

“ Even the staunchest believer in Gothic as the only religious architecture may admit, with disloyalty to his faith, that every year St. Paul's becomes more like a place of Christian worship and less like a glorified Council-hall or an Imperial Senate-house. ”

“ Paul's conceptions—and not any lower or narrower ones, Roman or Anglican or Nonconformist—become vivid to our minds. Then, knowing what we aim at restoring, we shall seek, in each parish and ecclesiastical centre, to concentrate almost more than to extend the Church, to give it spiritual, moral, and social reality, rather than to multiply a membership which means little. For if men can understand the meaning of the Church, as the city of God, the family of God, the sanctuary of God, in the world, there is little fear that whatever is good in humanity will fail of allegiance to her. ”

“ Although the interior of its dome and clerestory of the nave and choir are extremely gloomy when compared with those of S. Peter's, the church is generally acknowledged to be far superior to the latter in its architectural details, and few, if any, Italian churches can be said to surpass it, either in general composition or external effect, although it must be admitted that everything having been sacrificed to attain the latter quality, S. Paul's taken as a whole, is neither worthy of its fine situation nor of its great architect. ”

“ Nothing so quickly awakens doubtful feelings in the breast of a passer-by as to the zeal, energy and devotion of the Incumbent, as a Churchyard untidy and unkempt, paths full of weeds, hedges untrimmed, grass long and straggling. Nothing, on the other hand, is so grateful to all the parishioners of a particular parish as the Churchyard well kept and looked after, the graves neat and trimmed, the whole place by its very appearance asserting its right to the title of God’s Acre. ”

“ That noble pile is the symbol of a nation's faith. All over the world St Paul's is known. It is the loftiest point in all these miles that make up London. Four millions of Christian men and women are clustered round its feet, draw breath and kneel in worship in sight of its cross. This is the greatest church built by the most practical race. When we consider that the most practical race on earth built this monument of faith, the opinion of the individual ought to be hushed before such a proof of devotion. ”

“ Measured against the architecture of the Church, as Paul saw it in his lofty idealism, the aggregations of men in the world do not deserve the name of buildings. His point of view is the exact opposite of that which is common around us, and which, alas! finds but too much support in the present aspects of the so-called churches of this day. ”

“ There was a scarcely a voice silent save Paul's own.
Viewed as a picture it was a pretty one, framed as it was by the high narrow Early English arch which opened from the belfry into the nave. First came the bowed heads of the kneeling people, and, through the beautiful old screen which separated chancel from nave, the altar shone out in strong relief against its background of soft-coloured mosaic, the rays of the western sun giving an added touch of brilliance to its decoration of cross and flowers. ”

“ It may be argued that this new arrangement is unnecessary; but to an observer it will have appeared that when in our metropolitan districts new churches have been built, they have been filled, and work has been found for their clergy without at all lessening the congregation or otherwise disturbing to injury the constitution of the parent parish. We anticipate a similar result: the present chapel is not nearly large enough for its congregation; and one has only to visit St. Paul’s to see that more space is wanted there. “Division of work makes light labour;” ”

“ It is an awful thought that we thus live over the action of these subterranean fires; but they are in the control of the Almighty, and all we have to do is to submit to God’s will and merciful providence.”
St. Paul’s Church, of which Uncle Richard was a vestryman, owed its origin to the separation of certain persons from the Congregational mode of worship, and the formation of a society for the resumption of the Protestant Episcopal pattern, as long ago as the year 1712. ”

“ That night, as he lay in his bed upstairs, a moaning wind began to play about the house, and he could not go to sleep. He got up and crossed the room to a little cupboard in the wall: he took out of it something that clinked, and put it in the breast of his bedgown. Then he went to the window and looked out into the churchyard.
Have you ever seen an old brass in a church with a figure of a person in a shroud? It is bunched together at the top of the head in a curious way. Something like that was sticking up out of the earth in a spot of the churchyard which John Poole knew very well. ”

“ The churches are very plain, but have a quiet, grave, soothing air about them, the clergy mostly 'High Church,' but not after our sort, and the people seemed to me to be almost entirely devoid of a Church tone and spirit, though not irreligious. Dissent is very rife, and, I fancy, influences even members of the Church. They have a noble-hearted bishop, Bishop Field, austere, self-denying, devout, hard-working, and charitable, and by his assistance they are building a very handsome church on the island ”

“ Similar development of the idea of the one ecclesia as including all members of all local ecclesiae does not lead St Paul to regard membership of the universal church as invisible.
But the mere history of the word ecclesia does not exhaust the subject. We must take into account not only the idea of the visible actual church, but also the ideal pictured by St Paul in the metaphors of the Body (Rom. xii. 5) , the Temple (1 Cor. iii. 10–15) and the Bride of Christ (2 Cor. xi. 2) . The actual church is always falling short of its profession ”

“ The traditional village and open country church was a one-room structure erected for the sole purpose of providing a place for worship. This amply met the needs of a pioneer time when social activities were largely carried on in the homes. In a very large number of communities this is still the only type of church building to be found. ”

“ The truth is that many of our churchyards have an antiquity far greater than that of the churches, as many of them constituted the open-air meeting-places of our Saxon forefathers long before the erection of parish churches. In the common meeting-place a cross was set up, either of wood or stone, to mark and hallow the spot, and when a church was subsequently built it was usually in the immediate vicinity of the cross, which accounts for the fact that many churchyard crosses are of older date than the churches themselves. ”

“ When a congregation flocks to the church, blocks up the way to the confessional and crowds around the altar rail, all know that there is spiritual power in that mission; when homes are Christian, when father, mother and children kneel together in prayer, when the sanctuary of the house is sacredly guarded like the sanctuary of the church, a race of Christian people is preserved. From such Christian homes come forth Christian men and women—come forth priests for the altar, brothers and sisters for the schools. ”

“ Paul’s Church was the Church of the Citizens. The Monarchs of the land might be crowned or buried at Westminster, but it was to St. Paul’s that the people crowded when they wanted to meet together and stand up for their rights. So there was a great bell in the Cathedral belfry, like the bell in St. ”

“ First, 'Hold fast the tradition, the deposit of faith.' Second, 'Preserve order in the church.' In short this group of Epistles constitutes Paul's last will and testament in which he gives his final instructions for the maintenance and continuity of the faith."
The church of Jesus Christ must have form and order. The truth must have a proper shelter. Churches must have and observe certain regulations. There must be proper officers. ”

“ In 1240 the king and the Cardinal Legate Otho attended the consecration of so much of the new work as was then completed; and Bishop Roger was supported by the Primate, Edmund Rich, and other prelates.
East of the cathedral was St. Faith's, one of those parish churches in which cathedral cities are notoriously prolific—churches with parishes of the size of an average meadow, or less. ”