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
satisfaction of knowing that nobody else is, and never will be until
they reach the real New Jerusalem.
TRINITY CHURCH.
In a part of the town pre-eminently dim, intricate, and populous
stands "The Church of the Holy Trinity." Father Time and the smoke
of twice five hundred chimneys have darkened its fabric, and
transmuted its chiselled stone walls into a dull pile of masonry.
But it is a beautiful church for all that. If the exterior has been
carbonised and begrimed, the interior has enjoyed a charmed life,
and is apparently as young today as it was on "Friday, the eighth of
December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and
fifteen," when "George H. Chester" consecrated the building and all
thereunto belonging. The first stone of this church was laid on the
4th of June, 1814--the natal anniversary of George III--by Sir Henry
Philip Hoghton, of Hoghton, the lay rector and patron of the parish
of Preston. Under that first stone there were deposited a number of
coins, two scrolls, and one newspaper--the Preston Chronicle. The
first minister of Trinity Church was the Rev. Edward Law, a
gentleman, who, according to a local historian, "ably defended the
belief of the adorable Trinity in a series of letters, assisted by
the Rev. R. Baxter, of Stonyhurst, against a Unitarian minister, the
Rev. T. C. Holland, which appeared in the Preston Chronicle," and
were subsequently reprinted and sold for the enlightenment and
mystification of all polemically-minded men. Trinity Church is built
on a plot of ground once called Patten Field. Moderns know little,
if anything, of that field; but Patten-street--a delicious
thoroughfare proximately fronting the church--still remains as a
lingering topographical reminder of olden days. There were few
houses in the region of Patten Field when Trinity Church was built:
pastures were its colleagues, and patches of greensward its regular
companions. But things have changed since then, and a mile of
houses, stretching northward, and westward, and eastward now fills
up the ancient hiatus. Trinity Church cost 9,080 pounds 9s. 3d., and
that sum was raised partly by subscriptions and donations and partly
by the sale of pews. Who gave the ultimate threepence we cannot
tell, neither are we told in what way it was expended.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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