St Paul's 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. ”

“ Paul's churchyard and dedicated to that saint, neither site nor name can ever be authenticated. When the Roman troops retired, so thoroughly did the invading savages destroy all records, that our [5] knowledge of the British Church in London may be compared, not inaptly, to our knowledge of Thornhill's paintings in the concave sphere of the dome. We know that they exist ”

“ Nor is Paul's Church more safe than Paul's Churchyard: [623]
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead,
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread
Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks,
It still looks home, and short excursions makes; ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ And this, too, I know, that upon the night in question, Mr. Paul Dangerfield, who was not troubled either with vapours or superstitions, as he lay in his green-curtained bed in the Brass Castle, had as many dreams flitting over his brain and voices humming and buzzing in his ears, as if he had been a poet or a pythoness.
He had not become, like poor Sturk before his catastrophe, a dreamer of dreams habitually. I suppose he did dream. The beasts do. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There is first the monumental church itself, in the midst of a graveyard entered by a triumphal arch, a Holy Well, a Calvary, an ossuary, and an open oratory, where mass is celebrated before an enormous crowd on the occasion of the Pardon, and, finally, the church possesses a rare collection of precious ornaments, such as belong to no other parish in the diocese. The triumphal arch is of the 15th cent. The Holy Well is in the churchyard, and is a noble renaissance structure composed of a large basin, with two superposed vessels, from which heads of angels spout water. ”

“ 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;” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The columns and arches, the groined ceiling, and all the interior finish is of a dark gray limestone, of dirty soapstone color. The moulding is very rich. On the whole it has a narrow look, is very high in effect in the nave, and has elaborate altar and screen work. There are no pews, of course, but enough flagbottom chairs to cover the floor of the nave. From morning to night visitors are in this venerable place,—hundreds in a day, coming from all parts of the civilized world. This is true of St. Paul's, and of every cathedral. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The church of St Peter and St Paul stands on an isolated mound, and for the ascent sixty steps have been built in the side, and these are well worn by the tread of numerous pilgrims who come in each succeeding year. The interior of the church is curious more than imposing, and is specially noteworthy only for its gloom. ”

“ The church of S. Paul in the town is modern and uninteresting. It occupies the site of an old chapel of All Hallows. The parish church is S. Michael's on the hill, and this contains points of interest. The fifteenth-century screen is of carved oak, and stretches across nave and both aisles. The church was formerly cruciform, but north and south aisles were added to nave and chancel. Probably it formerly had a central tower. Four carved beams now support the roof where the tower should be, and bear sculptured bosses, representing an angel, a bishop, a priest, and a man in armour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first stone of the present edifice was laid June 21, 1675; the choir was opened for divine service in December, 1697; and the whole was completed in thirty-five years, the last stone on the summit of the lantern being laid by the architect’s son Christopher, in 1710. Taken altogether, St. Paul’s Cathedral is a truly glorious work, and its cupola is matchless in beauty. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ If, again, a nave and two aisles be not adequate to the wants of a congregation, transepts may be added, which, if they be well proportioned in themselves, and bear a due proportion to the nave, and aisles, and chancel, produce the most beautiful and most significant plan of a Church—the cruciform.
In large Churches of this kind, of course, one altar will not be sufficient; and, as it is not strictly correct to have more than one (and that the great altar of the Church) within the chancel, suitable provision must be made for the supplementary altars in other parts of the Church. ”

“ St. Faith was situated under the choir of old St. Paul’s. In 1549, Jesus Chapel in the cathedral being suppressed by Edward VI., the parishioners of St. Faith’s were allowed to remove from their crypt to this chapel. It continued so till St. Paul’s was burnt down, when the parish was annexed to St. Augustine’s by Act of Parliament (1670) . The earliest date of an incumbent is 1277.
The patronage of this church has always been in the hands of: The Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s—as far back as 1148; and in 1277 Robert le Seneschal was rector. ”