Parish (Christianity)

“ As the church was from the earliest times the centre of the parish, and the priest the head of his flock and the chief person—the parson—of the district, it is natural to look for the first indications of all parochial life in the church itself. From the cradle to the grave, as it has often been said, through the clergy, religion extended its care to every soul, and exerted its influence over man, woman, and child in every parochial district, mainly by means of the Church services and the administration of the Christian Sacraments. ”

“ The churchyard of our parish lies in a deep hollow, and a little river half encircles it. In the midst of it stands the church beneath whose shadow the parish has garnered its dead for centuries. There the generations have lain down to sleep, their hearts reconciled one to another, and the beadle has drawn the coverlet of green over them. ”

“ The Parish partakes of the character of the people who compose it; if they are earnest and devoted, loyal and true to the Church's appointments, the Parish is sure to be prosperous. In other words, the Church lives as they who are of it live. It is vital with their vitality. It is a live body as they are live Christians. Thus the success of a Parish is not wholly dependent on the Rector, but on the people as well. ”

“ First, it must be understood that all England is divided into parishes—a division recognized by the civil as well as the ecclesiastical law of the land. A parish is that circuit of ground, whether in the city or country, which is committed to the spiritual care of one clergyman. Now the boundaries of these parishes are very rarely defined by any law, except that of custom; and hence in most places it was and is customary once a year to make a solemn procession around the bounds of the parish. ”

“ The right to the cure of souls in a parish naturally carries with it the right of the incumbent to a voice in the erection of a new church in the parish and the severance of any portion of the parish from his benefice and its formation into a new ecclesiastical district or parish. ”

“ I must premise that Churches are divisable into several classes, each possessing its own peculiar characteristics—as Cathedral, Conventual, Collegiate, and Parochial Churches. True art does not admit of the confusion of any one of those classes with another. ”

“ The same story of local government, popular interest, and ready self-help, as well as an unmistakeable spirit of affection for the parish church as theirs—their very own—is manifested by the people in every account we possess. ”

“ The parochial history of the towns is very obscure. The facts point to the conclusion that the origin of parishes here was the same as in the country. There the lord of an estate built a church and provided a maintenance for a priest to minister to his family and dependents; and the priest’s spiritual authority was conterminous with the area of his patron’s civil jurisdiction; i.e. the estates were the parishes. The ancient towns, it is found, were frequently divided between several principal proprietors, who had rights of jurisdiction over their own land and the people living on it. ”

“ We find, then, that in a town which was all one parish with one great church, though the person in charge of the souls of the people was only a solitary vicar with a small income, there were often really a considerable number of clergy grouped around him, and that the services of the Church were better maintained than we should perhaps have expected. ”

“ This, this is the blessed truth of which the parish church is token, as nought else can be—that you are one body, members one of another, and that God’s blessing is on your union and fellow-feeling; that God smiles on your bearing each other’s burdens, and so fulfilling the law of Christ. ”

“ But I firmly believe that the parish was the gainer, not the loser, by my interest in those general objects, and nothing tends more to wither up a man’s ministry than such an isolation as brings him into contact with his own limited surroundings, and leads him to stand aloof from the general work of the Church of God. ”

“ Parish work is a part, an integral part, of Paulist work, but not its principal or chief work—and parish work should be done so as to form a part of the main aim, the conversion of the non-Catholic people of the country. ”

“ Any account of parish life in mediæval England must include much more than might at first sight be supposed. To imagine that the story of the parson and his church could adequately represent the story of the parish, even with all that the one had to do for his people and all that in the other was contained and done, is somewhat like thinking that the biographies of kings and nobles and the chronicle of their battles and achievements would tell properly the story of a people or a country. ”

“ There are statistics in the material gathered which abundantly prove that—either through its care for the religious culture of childhood, or through its special claims to league with supernatural forces, or through its magnificently devised and executed parish system—the Roman Catholic church is affecting the city more successfully than any other denomination. ”

“ The parish in which I live makes me pay my share for the paving and lighting of a great many streets that I never pass through; and I might plead that I am robbed to smooth the way and lighten the darkness of other people. ”

“ What is most remarkable about the documents that have come down to us, and which are mere chance survivals amid the general wreck, is the consistent story they tell of the universal and intelligent interest taken by the people of every parish as a whole in beautifying and supporting their churches. In a real and true sense, which may be perhaps strange to us in these later times, the parish church was their church. ”

“ Hence a parish-church, in the stillness of the country, is a visible centre of a community of the living and the dead; a point to which are habitually referred the nearest concerns of both.
As, then, both in cities and villages, the dead are deposited in close connection with our places of worship, with us the composition of an epitaph naturally turns, still more than among the nations of antiquity, upon the most serious and solemn affections of the human mind; upon departed worth—upon personal or social sorrow and admiration—upon religion, individual and social—upon time, and upon eternity. ”

“ If a person inhabiteth in one parish, and hath land in another parish, which he occupieth himself there, he shall be charged for this land, for the reparation of the church of the parish in which the land lieth ”

“ CHAPTER IV THE PARISH CLERGY
The head of every parish in pre-Reformation days was the priest. He might be a rector or vicar, according to his position in regard to the benefice; but in either case he was the resident ecclesiastical head of the parochial district. The word “parson,” in the sense of a dignified personage—“the person of the place”—was, in certain foreign countries, applied in the eleventh century, in its Latin form of persona, to any one holding the parochial cure of souls. ”

“ The Churches here are very fine dressd out with more ornaments even than those in Europe, and all parts of their religion is carried on with more shew; their processions in particular are very extrordinary, every day one or other of the parishes go in solemn order with all the insignia of their church, altar, host etc. through their parish, begging for what they can get and praying in all form at every Corner of a street. ”

“ The parish church is full of interest connected with the parish, it has been built and decorated by the ancestors of the humble inhabitants of the place, the yard about it contains their dust; in it they have left something of their very best—to be swept away by the modern restorer to put in his own stuff, manufactured at a distance, the whole executed by a strange contractor employing strange workmen. ”

“ One of the convictions out of which the vision came that led to the work of the Larger Parish was that the Church should minister to the whole man; that nothing that goes to make a man a full-rounded man, or that has a legitimate place in his life should be ignored by the Church; that it should have something to say and something to do with his social nature as well as his religious nature; that it should [Pg 81] concern itself with the affairs of the community and be an element of uplifting power in the community life. ”

“ It is the whole people of a diocese stretching from the Humber to the Thames, which by representation has assembled in the mother church to listen to their bishop’s fatherly exhortations, and to join with him in a united service of worship of Almighty God. ”

“ Whatever the origin, it is certain that long before the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries the parish church had practically come to be the property of the parishioners generally in a very definite manner, and, with certain exceptions, to which reference will presently be made, upon the inhabitants of a parochial district as a corporation lay the duty of repairing and rebuilding the fabric, of beautifying the edifice, of maintaining the services, and of seeing generally to its well-being. ”

“ The spiritual duties of the parish were sometimes served by one of the community in holy orders, or by a cleric attached to the house; sometimes by a stipendiary priest who was paid according to private agreement, and dismissed at pleasure.
A short experience showed that the monks told off to take charge of these appropriate parishes did not generally make very efficient parish priests—how, indeed, should they? The pastoral work of a parish requires other qualities, ideas, sympathies, than those which are proper to the cloister. ”

“ In such matters authority naturally and necessarily goes along with the cure of souls; the priest of the parish must perforce provide for the spiritual needs of his parish. If he finds those needs satisfied with the rendering of Morning and Evening Prayer--well and good; but those who do not find the needs of their parish so satisfied must seek to satisfy them by the providing of other spiritual means. ”

“ The parish church is the church of [Pg 105] the farmers and the gentry. There is no hostility to the clergyman of the parish, no bitter warfare of sect against sect, or of Methodist against Churchman. But you see very few of the farmers go to chapel. The labourer goes there, and finds his own friends—his cousins and uncles—his wife's relations. He is among his own class. There is no feeling of inferiority. The religion taught, the service, the hymns, the preacher, all are his. ”

“ Every new house in which a man lives, every new shop which he opens for trade, must be blessed. A man who moves from one lodging to another must have his second lodging purified by religious rites. Ten or twelve times a year, the parish priest, attended by his reader and his deacon, enters into every house in his district, sprinkles the rooms with holy water, cleanses them with prayer, and signs them with the cross. ”

“ The fine old church of our country parish has a pretty peal of bells, whose silvery tongues melodiously proclaim to the neighbourhood the various joyful events that break into pleasant ripples the still surface of our usual humdrum existence. ”

“ It can never be impressed too strongly upon the average Englishman that, quite apart from their religious associations, the parish churches of this country form, as a body, one of the most remarkable historical monuments which any European nation possesses. ”

“ There is no man more out of place, and who takes longer to fit into his place, than the worthy young clergyman who has been ordained to a town curacy, kept for four or five years at all the routine work of a large town parish, worked and admirably organized as—thank God!—most large town parishes are, and who, at eight or nine and twenty, is dropped down suddenly into a small village, and told that there he is to live and die. ”

“ Some, I am aware, would urge you to prefer your parish church to a Dissenting chapel, even if the minister be an irreligious man, and to stay there till it shall please God to introduce the gospel into it; but as it is not in my power to reconcile such advice with the injunction of our Lord, Take heed what ye hear, you cannot expect that I can approve of such a course. The eminently devout Christian loves the habitation of the Lord's house, and the place where his honour dwelleth ”

“ You must understand that my parish abounds with Methodists, or at least that the greater part of the serious people are such, and of course the church, though generally attended by them once a day, is looked upon as a mere secondary concern. ”

“ Some, no doubt, after entering sacred Orders, became attached to cathedrals, colleges of priests, and even parochial churches, where, in the midst of a more or less active life, they prepared themselves for further ecclesiastical advancement. ”

“ On high day and feast day, when all that was best and richest in the parochial treasury was brought forth to deck the walls and statues and altars, the display of parish ornaments recalled to the minds of the people assembled within its walls to worship God the memory of good deeds done by generations of neighbours for the decoration of their sanctuary. ”

“ An examination of such parochial accounts as are still preserved affords an insight into the working of the parish, and evidences the care taken by the people to maintain and increase the treasures of their churches. ”

“ What strikes one so much in these parish accounts of bygone days is the richness of even small, out-of-the-way village churches. Where we would naturally be inclined to look for poverty and meanness, there is evidence to the contrary. ”