St. Mary Aldermary (not Aldermanbury) is an attractive Wren church tucked away on the north side of Queen Victoria Street. When I entered I found about forty middle-aged men and twelve women. They were sitting dotted about the church listening to a clergyman who was leaning earnestly over the pulpit talking about sin, the devil, and St. Paul. It was luncheon-hour in the City. It was also raining with ghastly persistence, and I thought at first that this congregation of fifty numbered many who might have sought refuge from the weather. A second glance assured me that this was an unworthy thought; here was an audience of devout, middle-aged City men with every mark on them of regular attendance. The rows of bald or grizzled heads were inclined towards the speaker, every word was followed with deep interest, save in one corner, where a little old man in a frock coat appeared to slumber.
"And what does St. Paul say...."
The voice echoed round the church, and I smiled to think that I was listening to one of the longest sermons on record—a sermon that has been in progress for three hundred and twenty years! It happened like this.
* * *
There was once an ancient church in Watling Street called St. Anthonie's or vulgarly, St. Antholin's. It must have been an interesting church. It was full in its later period of Presbyterian fire and fury. It was also full of epitaphs, one of which I cannot resist quoting. It covered the bones of Sir Thomas Knowles, Mayor of London about 1399:
Here lyeth graven under this stone
Thomas Knowles, both flesh and bone,
Grocer and alderman, years forty,
Sheriff and twice mayor, truly;
And for he should not lye alone,
Here lyeth with him his good wife Joan.
They were together sixty year,
And nineteen children they had in feere.
Two hundred years after this remarkable epitaph, St. Antholin's became notorious as the head-quarters of the Puritan clergy. The bell used to ring at unearthly hours of the morning, and all the High Churchmen in Cheapside turned uneasily in their beds and perhaps politely gnashed their teeth. In 1599 a group of citizens founded a lectureship. They gave certain property in London which was to pay for a daily lecture in the pulpit of St. Antholin's. The church became famous as a lecture theatre. Lilly, the astrologer, used to go there. Scott makes Mike Lambourne refer to it in "Kenilworth."
The great fire burned down the church but still the daily lecture went on; it was rebuilt and the lecture was continued in the new St. Antholin's; it was demolished in 1870, and the lecture was transferred to St. Mary Aldermary, where I heard it yesterday!
The sermon ended. The congregation rose. The little old man in the frock coat, who I imagined was deep in sleep, sprang to his feet and boomed "Amen!"
"I've been here twenty-five years," said a verger, "and most of the people you see here are regular attendants. That old man in a frock coat was here when I came."