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
The chapel, barring the incomplete masonry mentioned, is a well
made, neat-looking building. In front there is a large four-light
window, which had to be taken right out when the tower was being re-
made; on each side there is a long and very narrow window, more for
ornament than use; and below there are two small triangular
apertures of a similar character. Strong rails, intended to prevent
people from approaching the building too closely on week-days,
surround the chapel. There are three arched doorways immediately
adjoining one another at the front, and on a Sunday you are at
perfect liberty to use any of them--to try all of them if so
disposed--and pass through that which appears most agreeable. The
chapel has a large and remarkably clean interior. It is well lighted
with numerous windows bordered with coloured glass, and has a fine
arched roof, supported by four principals, and filled-in centrally
with elaborate designs. Around the building there is a large
octagonal gallery; and whilst all the seats in it run up to a pretty
fair height, those at the western end approach quite an aerial
altitude. It is almost a question of being "up in a balloon, boys,"
when you are perched in the loftiest of them.
All the pews are plain, strong, and without doors. The central ones
on the ground-floor are very uniform in design; those at the sides
are, of various shapes, and are whimsically disposed--seem to be up
and down, straight, diagonal, and semi-circular. The first pew on
the right side was occupied, when we last saw it, with three
brushes, an elderly shovel, and two gas-meters, one of them being a
very full-grown fatherly affair--a sort of deacon amongst ordinary
meters, and looking very authoritatively upon its smaller colleague
and the brushes. The pulpit, at the eastern end of the chapel, is
neatly made, but when the parson sits in it you can't see him from
the front. When we went the other Sunday evening, we could see no
one in it; but after a hymn had been sung, a spring seemed to be
touched, and up jumped the parson, who had been reclining on his
dorsal vertebra for eight minutes at the rear. The pulpit formerly
stood about a foot-and-a-half higher than it does now; Mr. Slate,
who was a little man, would have it a good height; but a hole was
afterwards made in the platform supporting the pulpit, and it was
dropped through it to the level of the ordinary floor, where it now
stands. Six chairs, in Gothic design, with cushions of rich velvet,
are placed upon the platform near the pulpit; in the centre there is
a more patriarchal-looking seat--a sort of pastoral throne; and in
the front of the whole there is a strong table. The deacons and the
minister sit here periodically, feeling grand and furzy all over,
weighing up the universe on special occasions, but endeavouring
always to discharge their executive duties with due propriety and
gravity. We have seen them once or twice on this platform--on those
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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