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 congregation, which is generally constituted of working-class
people, numbers about 350. The people attending this place are a
quiet, devoted lot, with patches of pride and self-glorification
here and there about them, but, on the whole, kindly-looking and
sincere. Some of them are close-minded and intensely orthodox; but
the majority are wide-awake, and won't pray for fair weather until
it has given over raining. The members of the choir sit on the
eastern side, and if not so refined and punctillious in their
musical performances, they are at least pretty strong-lunged and
earnest. They are located near the wall. The harmonium-player enjoys
a closer proximity to it. He manipulates with fair skill, has a
clock right above him, and ought, therefore, to keep "good time." If
he doesn't, then let the clock be condemned as a deceiver and
incumberer of the wall. The pulpit is a broad, neatly-arranged
affair--fixed upon a platform at the southern end, and environed
with rails of blue and gold colour. Just within, and on its
immediate left, there is a small paper nailed up with four nails,
and containing, is written English, these words, as a reminder for
each preacher during his "supplications"--"Pray for God's ancient
people of Israel." "Does this mean the Jews?" said we to an elderly
man near us, whilst we were scrutinizing with a plaintive eye, the
pulpit, and he replied, "Bleeve it does." That, we thought, was a
bad speculation for a chapel containing two subscription boxes for
"sick and needy scholars." The man who wrote out that exhortation in
the interests of Petticoat-lane men and their kindred, and the
patriot who drove with a fierce virtue the four nails into it
didn't, we are afraid, know clearly how much it costs to convert a
genuine Jew, else more caution would have been exercised by each of
them. A Jew's eye is a costly thing; but a Jew's conversion is much
more expensive; you can't get at the thing fairly for less than
10,000 pounds; and as five good Wesleyan Chapels could be built, in
ordinary districts, for that sum, we advise Wesleyans to go in for
chapels and not for Jews.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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