TWO RIVALS—CANTERBURY AND ROME.
ETROPOLITAN Life has its religious phases, also. London contains about 410,000 dwelling-houses, places of business, and public buildings, and in this vast agglomeration of brick, stone, and mortar—there are about seven hundred edifices devoted to public worship. In this number are comprised places of worship for all sects: Roman Catholics, Protestants of the Established Church of England, Baptists, Presbyterians, Independents, Jews, Greeks, Moravians, Quakers, Socinians, Wesleyan-Methodists, and even Hindoos, who have a temple of their own.
There are two hundred and eighteen parishes in the Metropolis, under the jurisdiction of vestries and parochial bodies who, in turn, are subject to the Bishop of London, sitting as a temporal and spiritual peer in the House of Lords. He is Provincial Dean of Canterbury, and Dean of the Chapels Royal at Whitehall and the Savoy.
The Bishop of London ranks next to the Archbishop of York and Canterbury, and has an income of £10,000, annually, and the free gift of one hundred and nine livings, ranging in value from £2,000 to £30 a year. As Dean of Canterbury his income amounts to £2,000 a year. The clergymen of the Established Church receiving the largest salaries in the City of London, whose livings are in the gift of the Bishop of London, are those of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, £2,290, St. Olave's, Hart street, Bloomsbury, £1,891, and St. Giles, Cripplegate, £1,580.
The smallest salary is that received by the pastor of St. Bartholomew the Less, who only gets £30 a year, although his work is far harder than that of the Dean of Westminster, who receives £4,000 a year. The salary of the Archbishop of Canterbury is £20,000, and he has half a dozen palaces throughout the country. The Archbishop of York receives about £15,000 a year, and has two Episcopal and palatial residences.
SPURGEON AND "APOCALYPSE" CUMMING.
Spurgeon, the great Baptist divine, who ranks somewhat like Henry Ward Beecher, receives a salary of $18,000 a year for his preaching, and his congregation, in 1860, erected for him a grand tabernacle at Newington, on the Surrey side of the Thames near the Elephant and Castle, and in one of the roughest districts of London, at a cost of £25,000. The design is simple; the dimensions 85 by 174 feet, and here, every Sunday evening, nearly six thousand persons assemble to listen to the vehement eloquence of Spurgeon, who has his congregation drilled like a company of infantry, and can move them to tears or laughter, as he chooses.