Parish (religious)

“ It has been thought of, and sometimes it has thought of itself, as under obligations to minister to the religious people of the community, or to those who can be induced to become religious. There is a large class of people who are not religiously inclined and who have no affiliation with the Church, and who, perhaps, are not likely to have, for whom it has not been thought to be responsible. In almost every parish, or within reach of it, there are numbers of people who are not touched by the Church, and who are not considered to be material for the Church to work upon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Along with the priest who preaches and confesses in his parish is to be seen the wandering friar, who preaches and confesses everywhere; his universal presence and power are sources of conflict; the parish priest finds himself abandoned; the religious wayfarer brings the unknown, the extraordinary, and everybody runs to him. ”

“ We have some general reflections to make on these three chapters on Domestic Chaplains, Chantries, and Gilds.
The appropriation of so many parochial benefices to the religious houses in the twelfth century had greatly reduced the provision for the parochial clergy on whom the burden of the parochial care of the people rested. The institution during the thirteenth century of vicars in the appropriated parishes, with perpetuity of tenure, fixed endowment, and responsibility to the bishop, had done something to alleviate the evil. ”

“ Larger Parish is to help the people and to serve them in a religious and social way, not to promote a denomination, to build up a church, to perfect an organization, or to construct or to operate machinery of any kind. But in order to help the people and serve their best interests efficiently, some machinery, some organization, is necessary. ”

“ There lived an old hermit or priest, or a religious woman, supported partly by an endowment, partly by the offerings and bequests of the people. Their picturesque asceticism attracted the interest and veneration of impressible people, who would consult them in the affairs of their souls, and no doubt in their social difficulties also, and receive more or less good council according to the character of the recluse. [607]
Bridge-Chapels. ”

“ Some attempt is made in the present volume to supply an account of the historical conditions amid which our parish churches were built, to say something of the builders, and to remove the popular idea, still current even among educated people, that our architecture is mainly due to the profuse benefactions of the religious orders. ”

“ At the ordinary daily services in parish churches it is very likely that there was some congregation; for attendance on the Divine service was highly regarded as a pious exercise, and pious people who had the leisure—women especially—would be likely to attend it; the custom of gathering poor people into almshouses in which they formed a kind of religious community with their chaplain, chapel, and daily prayers, would be likely to have its counterpart in the attendance of the pensioners of the parish church at the daily service in it ”

“ Guilds and Fraternities of a more or less religious character, and usually directly connected with a special altar at the parish church, will naturally come under the history of the Church, provided any can be detected in connection with the particular parish. It used to be supposed that these guilds were only found in cities or boroughs, but later researches show that they also occasionally existed in quite small villages. ”

“ Lay benefactors acquired the habit of alienating land, not to some religious house, but to one or more priests who, as a condition of the gift, should say mass daily at one of the altars of a parish church for the good estate of the giver and other persons named by him, and for their souls after death. These endowments of services were known as chantries, and were intended to continue for ever. Many chantries were founded in cathedral and monastery churches; but, as time went on, the church of the parish in which the benefactor lived was more and more frequently chosen as their site. ”

“ Thus, monk, and friar, and hermit, and recluse, and rector, and chantry priest, played their several parts in mediæval society, until the Reformation came and swept away the religious orders and their houses, the chantry priests and their superstitions, and the colleges of seculars, with all their good and evil, and left only the parish churches and the parish priests remaining, stripped of half their tithe, and insufficient in number, in learning, and in social status to fulfil the office of the ministry of God among the people. ”

“ It is a most miserable thing to have to speak of oneself, especially in regard to religious things; but it is forced upon me by the peculiarity of my position in being thus sent among you.
Some have said,—"How is it possible that you, with your peculiar views about the Church, should again become a parish Priest in the Church of England? We thought you were going to be a Catholic, (by which they mean a Roman Catholic.) ”

“ The desire for the prayers of the Church by those who could not found monasteries or build churches, found its satisfaction in benefactions to religious foundations, which secured for the donors the privileges of confraternity, and among these, the prayers of the community. ”

“ When in 1724 the Bishop of London sent a questionary to every Anglican clergyman incumbent of a parish in America, one of the questions was, "At what times do you Catechize the Youth of your Parish?"
They have builded many pretty villages, faire houses and chapels which are growne good benefices of 120 pounds a yeare besides their own mundall [mundane] industry. ”

“ Later, when it was found desirable to erect chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went his usual round of service in each church or chapel upon regular schedule. Except in remote chapels the custom was to have service each Sunday in every church or chapel. ”

“ A Parish Church indeed, with its venerable spire and ancient records of the past, pointing to times when men were one;—but scattered along the streets, chapels of various orders and degrees of dissent and separation, pointing to the schisms of later ages when unity of the faith ceased to be an item in the Christian's Creed. ”

“ 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 churches are very fine, with more ornaments even than those in Europe, and all the ceremonies of their religion are carried on with more show; their processions in particular are very extraordinary. Every day one or other of the parishes has a solemn procession with all the insignia of its church, altar, and host, etc., through the parish, begging for whatever can be got, and praying in all forms at every corner of a street. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was about this time that parishes, as we now understand the word, were first formed in England. At first, each kingdom formed but one parish, which again was divided into what we should now call dioceses, the cathedral being for a time the only church, the bishop sending his priests travelling about the country, to instruct the people and administer the rites of Christianity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After following a country Church of England clergyman for a period of half a century, a newly-appointed, youthful vicar, totally unacquainted with rural life, comes into the parish, and at once commences to alter the services of the Church, believed in by the parishioners for generations.—Daily Telegraph. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the more modern towns, which had grown into great towns, with the general increase of the population and its tendency then, as now, to gravitate into the towns, the one vicar of the one parish church was often quite unable to cope with the spiritual needs of a large and difficult flock; and the townspeople themselves sometimes made better provision for their own spiritual needs. ”

“ Why, Madam, you both puzzle and surprise me. Too much religion in a parish where the generality of the people forsake the church, and a minister preaching eloquently against religion, which he lives to inculcate and recommend! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”