Christian antiquities -- Great Britain; Folklore -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Social life and customs; Manners and customs
The next event we notice at the cross, is in the reign of the first king
of the ill-fated house of Stuart. For some years Henry Farley had, with
pen and picture, done much to rouse an interest in St. Paul's Cathedral,
which, for over half a century, had been in a dilapidated condition, the
chief cause being the result of a fire in 1561. In addition to trying to
get bills introduced into Parliament, publishing pamphlets, he had, in
1616, pictures painted. One painting represented a procession of great
personages; another, the said personages seated at a sermon at St. Paul's
Cross. We reproduce a picture of his painting of the cross. In the
gallery, placed against the choir of the church, are seated the King,
Queen, Prince of Wales, the Lord Mayor, and other notable men and women,
and a large gathering of citizens is seated in front of the cross. The
dog-whipper is busy driving away a dog. The outcome of Farley's zeal, was
the visit of James I., with his family and court, to hear a sermon here,
on Midlent Sunday, in 1620. The gathering would be similar to the one
represented in the picture drawn four years previously. The preacher was
Dr. John King, called by James "The King of Preachers." He selected for
his text, Psalm cii. 13, 14. "Thou wilt arise, and have mercy upon Zion;
for the appointed time is come; for Thy servants delight in the stones
thereof, and have pity on the dust thereof." It will, perhaps, not be
without interest to give a few quotations from Dr. King's sermon, as a
specimen of the extravagant figures of speech which prevailed at this
period, and came down to the days of William III. "I am now," said Dr.
King, "to speak unto you of litterall and artificial Zion--a temple
without life, yet of a sicklie and crazie constitution, sicke of age
itselfe, and with many aches in her joynts, together with a lingering
consumption that hath long been in her bowels, the timber in the beames
whereof cryeth, 'I perish,' and the stone on the walles answereth no less,
and part is already moultered away to stone, part to dust, and (that which
is more), symbolizing with the other Zion, not only when fates and
casualties, but in the very retinues and revolutions of these fates. After
her building (600 years after Christ), salted with fire, sacrificed to the
anger of God, and being raised, Phoenix, out of the ashes, betwixt 400 and
500 more (two in a thousand years), touched by an invisible hand, with a
coal from the altar of heaven, that was never blowne, which wholly
consumed the crest and vertical point, the top and top-gallant, and so
scorched the rest, that ever since it hath remained valetudinary and
infirm, rather peced out with an ordinary kind of physic, than restored to
a sound plight." In conclusion, he said, "Set it as seale upon your
hearts, that your king has come unto you. Such comings are not often;
Queen Elizabeth once, and now your sovereign once. Would it be believed,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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