

Transcribed by Peter Moulding
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OUR CHURCHES AND CHAPELS



THEIR PARSONS, PRIESTS, & CONGREGATIONS;
BEING A CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ACCOUNT
OF EVERY PLACE OF WORSHIP IN PRESTON.

BY "ATTICUS" (A. HEWITSON).

'T is pleasant through the loopholes of retreat to peep at such a
world.--Cowper.

Reprinted from the Preston Chronicle.

PRINTED AT THE "CHRONICLE" OFFICE, FISHERGATE, PRESTON. 1869.



TO THE READER.



The general satisfaction given by the following sketches when
originally printed in the Preston Chronicle, combined with a desire,
largely expressed, to see them republished, in book form, is the
principal excuse offered for the appearance of this volume. Into the
various descriptions of churches, chapels, priests, parsons,
congregations, &c., which it contains, a lively spirit, which may be
objectionable to the phlegmatic, the sad-faced, and the puritanical,
has been thrown. But the author, who can see no reason why a "man
whose blood is warm within" should "sit like his grandsire cut in
alabaster," on any occasion, has a large respect for cheerfulness,
and has endeavoured to make palatable, by a little genial humour,
what would otherwise have been a heavy enumeration of dry facts.
Those who don't care for the gay will find in these sketches the
grave; those who prefer vivacity to seriousness will meet with what
they want; those who appreciate all will discover each. The solemn
are supplied with facts; the facetious with humour; the analytical
with criticism. The work embodies a general history of each place of
worship in Preston--fuller and more reliable than any yet published;
and for reference it will be found valuable, whilst for general
reading it will be instructive. The author has done his best to be
candid and impartial. If he has failed in the attempt, he can't help
it; if he has succeeded, he is thankful. No writer can suit
everybody; and if an angel had compiled these sketches some men
would have croaked. To the generality of the Church of England,
Catholic, and Dissenting clergymen, &c., in the town, the author
tenders his warmest thanks for the generous manner they have
assisted him, and the kindly way in which they have supplied him
with information essential to the completion of the work.

Preston, Dec. 24th, 1869.



INDEX.



Page
7     Parish Church
13    St. Wilfrid's Catholic Church
18    Cannon-street Independent Chapel
23    Lune-street Wesleyan Methodist Chapel
28    Fishergate Baptist Chapel
34    St. George's Church
39    St. Augustine's Catholic Church
45    Quakers' Meeting House
51    St. Peter's Church
55    New Jerusalem Church
60    Trinity Church
66    Lancaster-road Congregational Chapel
70    Saul-street Primitive Methodist Chapel
75    St. Ignatius's Catholic Church
82    Vauxhall-road Particular Baptist Chapel
88    Christ Church
94    Wesley and Moor Park Methodist Chapels
99    Presbyterian and Free Gospel Chapels
104   St. James's Church
110   The Mormons
116   St. Walburge's Catholic Church
122   Unitarian Chapel
127   All Saints Church
132   United-Methodist Free Church and Pole-street Baptist Chapel
137   Church of the English Martyrs
142   St. Saviour's Church
148   Christian Brethren and Brook-street Primitive Methodists
153   St. Thomas's Church
158   Croft-street Wesleyans & Parker-street United Methodists
164   Grimshaw-street Independent Chapel
169   St. Paul's Church
175   St. Mary's-street and Marsh End Wesleyan Chapels, and
      the Tabernacle of the Revivalists
181   St. Mary's and St. Joseph's Catholic Chapels
187   St. Mark's Church
192   Zoar Particular Baptist Chapel
196   St. Luke's Church
201   Emmanuel Church and Bairstow Memorial Chapel
207   St. Mary's Church



OUR CHURCHES AND CHAPELS:  THEIR PARSONS, PRIESTS, AND
CONGREGATIONS.



It is important that something should be known about our churches
and chapels; it is more important that we should be acquainted with
their parsons and priests; it is most important that we should have
a correct idea of their congregations, for they show the
consequences of each, and reflect the character and influence of
all. We have a wide field before us. The domain we enter upon is
unexplored. Our streets, with their mid-day bustle and midnight sin;
our public buildings, with their outside elaboration and inside
mysteries; our places of amusement, with their gilded fascinations
and shallow delusions; our clubs, bar parlours, prisons, cellars,
and workhouses, with their amenities, frivolities, and severities,
have all been commented upon; but the most important of our
institutions, the best, the queerest, the solemnest, the oddest--the
churches and chapels of the town--have been left out in the cold
entirely. All our public functionaries have been viewed round,
examined closely, caressed mildly, and sometimes genteely
maltreated; our parochial divinities, who preside over the fate of
the poor; our municipal Gogs and Magogs who exhibit the extreme
points of reticence and garrulity in the council chamber; our brandy
drinkers, chronic carousers, lackered swells, pushing shopkeepers,
otiose policemen, and dim-looking cab-drivers have all been
photographed, framed, and hung up to dry long ago; our workshops and
manufactories, our operatives and artisans, have likewise been duly
pictured and exhibited; the Ribble has had its praises sung in
polite literary strains; the parks have had their beauties depicted
in rhyme and blank verse; nay--but this is hardly necessary--the old
railway station, that walhallah of the gods and paragon of the five
orders of architecture, has had its delightful peculiarities set
forth; all our public places and public bodies have been thrown upon
the canvas, except those of the more serious type--except places of
worship and those belonging them. These have been neglected; nobody
has thought it worth while to give them either a special blessing or
a particular anathema.

There are about 45 churches and chapels and probably 60 parsons and
priests in Preston; but unto this hour they have been treated, so
far as they are individually concerned, with complete silence. We
purpose remedying the defect, supplying the necessary criticism, and
filling up the hiatus. The whole lot must have either something or
nothing in them, must be either useful or useless; parsons must be
either sharp or stupid, sensible or foolish; priests must be either
learned or illiterate, either good, bad, or indifferent; in all,
from the rector in his silken gown to the back street psalm-singer
in his fustian, there must be something worth praising or
condemning. And the churches and chapels, with their congregations,
must likewise present some points of beauty or ugliness, some traits
of grace or godlessness, some features of excellence, dignity,
piety, or sham. There must be either a good deal of gilded
gingerbread or a great let of the genuine article, at our places of
worship. But whether there is or there is not, we have decided to
say something about the church and the chapel, the parson and the
priest, of each district in the town. This is a mere prologue, and
we shall but hint at the general theme "on this occasion."

Churches and chapels are great institutions in the land. Nobody
knows the exact time when the first was thought of; and it has not
yet transpired when the last will be run up. But this is certain, we
are not improving much in the make of them. The Sunday sanctums and
Sabbath conventicles of today may be mere ornate, may be more
flashy, and show more symptoms of polished bedizenment in their
construction; but three-fourths of them sink into dwarflings and
mediocrities when compared with the rare old buildings of the past.
In strength and beauty, in vastness of design and skill of
workmanship, in nobility of outline and richness of detail, the
religious fabrics of these times fall into insignificance beside
their grand old predecessors; and the manner in which they are cut
up into patrician and plebeian quarters, into fashionable coteries
for the perfumed portion of humanity, and into half-starved benches
with the brand of poverty upon them for the poor, is nothing to the
credit of anybody.

All the churches and chapels of the land may profess Christianity;
but the game of the bulk has a powerful reference to money. Those
who have got the most of the current coin of the realm receive the
blandest smile from the parson, the politest nod from the beadle,
the promptest attention from that strange mixture of piety and pay
called "the chapel-keeper;" those who have not got it must take what
they can get, and accept it with Christian resignation, as St. Paul
tells them. This may be all right; we have not said yet that it is
wrong; but it looks suspicious, doesn't it?--shows that in the arena
of conventional Christianity, as in the seething maelstrom of
ordinary life, money is the winner. Our parsons and priests, like
our ecclesiastical architecture and general church management, do
not seem to have improved upon their ancestors. Priests are not as
jolly as they once were. In olden days "holy fathers" could wear
horse-hair shirts and scarify their epidermis with a finer cruelty
than their modern successors, and they could, after all that, make
the blithest songs, sing the merriest melodies, and quaff the oldest
port with an air of jocund conscientiousness, making one slyly like
them, however much inclined to dispute the correctness of their
theology. And the parsons of the past were also a blithesome set of
individuals. They were perhaps rougher than those mild and refined
gentlemen who preach now-a-days; but they were straightforward,
thorough, absolutely English, well educated, and stronger in the
brain than many of them. In each Episcopalian, Catholic, and
Dissenting community there are new some most erudite, most useful
men; but if we take the great multitude of them, and compare their
circumstances--their facilities for education, the varied channels
of usefulness they have--with those of their predecessors, it will
be found that the latter were the cleverer, often the wiser, and
always the merrier men. Plainness, erudition, blithesomeness, were
their characteristics. Aye, look at our modern men given up largely
to threnody-chiming and to polishing off tea and muffin with elderly
females, and compare them, say, for instance, with--

The poet Praed's immortal Vicar,
Who wisely wore the cleric gown,
Sound in theology and liquor;
Quite human, though a true divine,
His fellow-men he would not libel;
He gave his friends good honest wine,
And drew his doctrine from the Bible.

Institute a comparison, and then you will say that whilst modern men
may be very aesthetic and neatly dressed, the ancient apostolic
successors, though less refined, had much more metal in them, were
more kindly, genial; and told their followers to live well, to eat
well, and to mind none of the hair-splitting neological folly which
is now cracking up Christendom. In old times the Lord did not "call"
so many parsons from one church to another as it is said He does
now; in the days which have passed the bulk of subordinate parsons
did not feel a sort of conscientious hankering every three years for
an "enlarged sphere of usefulness," where the salary was
proportionately increased. We have known multitudes of parsons, in
our time, who have been "called" to places where their salaries were
increased; we know of but few who have gravitated to a church where
the salary was less than the one left. "Business" enters largely
into the conceptions of clergymen. As a rule, no teachers of
religion, except Catholic priests and Methodist ministers, leave one
place for another where less of this world's goods and chattels
predominate; and THEY are COMPELLED to do so, else the result might
be different. When a priest gets his mittimus he has to budge; it is
not a question of "he said or she said," but of--go; and when a
Wesleyan is triennially told to either look after the interests of a
fresh circuit or retire into space, he has to do so. It would be
wrong to say that lucre is at the bottom of every parsonic change;
but it is at the foundation of the great majority--eh? If it isn't,
just make an inquiry, as we have done. This may sound like a
deviation from our text--perhaps it is; but the question it refers
to is so closely associated with the subject of parsons and priests,
that we should have scarcely been doing justice to the matter if we
had not had a quiet "fling" at the money part of it. In the letters
which will follow this, we shall deal disinterestedly with all--
shall give Churchmen, Catholics, Quakers, Independents, Baptists,
Wesleyans, Ranters, and Calathumpians, fair play. Our object will be
to present a picture of things as they are, and to avoid all
meddling with creeds. People may believe what they like, so far as
we are concerned, if they behave themselves, and pay their debts. It
is utterly impossible to get all to be of the same opinion; creeds,
like faces, must differ, have differed, always will differ; and the
best plan is to let people have their own way so long as it is
consistent with the general welfare of social and civil life. It
being understood that "the milk of human kindness is within the PALE
of the Church," we shall begin there. The Parish Church of Preston
will constitute our first theme.



No. I.



PRESTON PARISH CHURCH.



It doesn't particularly matter when the building we call our Parish
Church was first erected; and, if it did, the world would have to
die of literary inanition before it got the