Our Churches and Chapels: Their Parsons, Priests, & Congregations: Being a Critical and Historical Account of Every Place of Worship in Preston — John Shaqi
Our Churches and Chapels: Their Parsons, Priests, & Congregations: Being a Critical and Historical Account of Every Place of Worship in PrestonAtticus
History
Our Churches and Chapels: Their Parsons, Priests, & Congregations: Being a Critical and Historical Account of Every Place of Worship in Preston
Atticus
Preston (Lancashire, England) -- Church history
of colour to perfection, and whilst we may not theologically agree
with some of its uses, one cannot but admire its general effect.
Saints, angels, rings, squares, floriations, spiralizations, and
everything which the brain or the brush of the most devoted painter
could fairly devise are depicted in this church, and there is such
an array of them that one wonders how anybody could ever have had
the time or patience to finish the work.
The high altar which occupies the southern end is, in its way,
something very fine. A magnificent picture of the crucifixion
occupies the back ground; flowers and candles, in numbers sufficient
to appal the stoutest Evangelical and turn to blue ruin such men as
the editor of the "Bulwark" are elevated in front; over all, as well
as collaterally, there are inscriptions in Latin; designs in gold
and azure and vermilion fill up the details; and on each side there
is a confessional wherein all members, whether large or diminutive,
whether dressed in corduroy or smoothest, blackest broad cloth, in
silk or Surat cotton, must unravel the sins they have committed.
This confession must be a hard sort of job, we know, for some
people; but we are not going to enter upon a discussion of its
merits or demerits. Only this may be said, that if there was full
confession at every place of worship in Preston the parsons would
never get through their work. Every day, from an early hour in the
morning until a late period of the evening, St. Wilfrid's is open to
worshippers; and you may see them, some with smiling faces, and some
with very elongated ones, going to or coming from it constantly.
Like Tennyson's stream, they evince symptoms of constant movement
and the only conclusion we can fairly come to is that the mass of
them are singularly in earnest. There are not many Protestants--
neither Church people, nor Dissenters, neither quiescent Quakers nor
Revivalist dervishes--who would be inclined to go to their religious
exercises before breakfast, and if they did, some of them, like the
old woman who partook of Sacrament in Minnesota, would want to know
what they were going to "get" for it. On Sundays, as on week days,
the same business--laborious as it looks to outsiders--goes on.
There are several services, and they are arranged for every class--
for those who must attend early, for those who can't, for those who
won't, and for those who stir when the afflatus is upon them. There
are many, however, who are regular attendants, soon and late, and if
precision and continuity will assist them in getting to heaven, they
possess those auxiliaries in abundance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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