Harris, the chief builder of the Doncaster Organ, was a contemporary and rival of Father Smith, famous among Organists. Each built one for the Temple Church, and Father Smith's had most votes in its favor. The peculiarity of the Doncaster Organ, which was Harris's masterpiece, is, its having, in the great organ, two trumpets and a clarion, throughout the whole compass; and these stops are so excellent, that a celebrated musician said every pipe in them was worth its weight in silver.
Our Doctor dated from that year, in his own recollections, as the great era of his life. It served also for many of the Doncastrians, as a date to which they carried back their computations, till the generation which remembered the erecting of the organ was extinct.
This was the age of Church improvement in Doncaster,—meaning here by Church, the material structure. Just thirty years before, the Church had been beautified and the ceiling painted, too probably to the disfigurement of works of a better architectural age. In 1721 the old peal of five bells was replaced with eight new ones, of new metal, heretofore spoken of. In 1723 the church floor and church yard, which had both been unlevelled by Death's levelling course, were levelled anew, and new rails were placed to the altar. Two years later the Corporation gave the new Clock, and it was fixed to strike on the watch bell,—that clock which numbered the hours of Daniel Dove's life from the age of seventeen till that of seventy. In 1736 the west gallery was put up, and in 1741, ten years after the organ, a new pulpit, but not in the old style; for pulpits which are among the finest works of art in Brabant and Flanders, had degenerated in England, and in other protestant countries.
This probably was owing, in our own country, as much to the prevalence of puritanism, as to the general depravation of taste. It was for their beauty or their splendour that the early Quakers inveighed with such vehemence against pulpits, “many of which places,” saith George Keith in his quaking days, “as we see in England and many other countries, have a great deal of superfluity, and vain and superfluous labour and pains of carving, painting and varnishing upon them, together with your cloth and velvet cushion in many places; because of which, and not for the height of them above the ground, we call them Chief Places. But as for a commodious place above the ground whereon to stand when one doth speak in an assembly, it was never condemned by our friends, who also have places whereupon to stand, when to minister, as they had under the Law.”
In 1743 a marble Communion Table was placed in the Church, and— (passing forward more rapidly than the regular march of this narration, in order to present these ecclesiastical matters without interruption,)—a set of chimes were fixed in 1754—merry be the memory of those by whom this good work was effected! The north and south galleries were re-built in 1765; and in 1767 the church was white-washed, a new reading desk put up, the pulpit removed to what was deemed a more convenient station, and Mrs. Neale gave a velvet embroidered cover and cushion for it,—for which her name is enrolled among the benefactors of St. George's Church.
That velvet which, when I remember it, had lost the bloom of its complexion, will hardly have been preserved till now even by the dyer's renovating aid: and its embroidery has long since passed through the goldsmith's crucible. Sic transit excites a more melancholy feeling in me when a recollection like this arises in my mind, than even the “forlorn hic jacet” of a neglected tombstone. Indeed such is the softening effect of time upon those who have not been rendered obdurate and insensible by the world and the world's law, that I do not now call to mind without some emotion even that pulpit, to which I certainly bore no good will in early life, when it was my fortune to hear from it so many somniferous discourses; and to bear away from it, upon pain of displeasure in those whose displeasure to me was painful, so many texts, chapter and verse, few or none of which had been improved to my advantage. “Public sermons”—(hear! hear! for Martin Luther speaketh!) “public sermons do very little edify children, who observe and learn but little thereby. It is more needful that they be taught and well instructed with diligence in schools; and at home that they be orderly heard and examined in what they have learned. This way profiteth much; it is indeed very wearisome, but it is very necessary.” May I not then confess that no turn of expression however felicitous,—no collocation of words however emphatic and beautiful—no other sentences whatsoever, although rounded, or pointed for effect with the most consummate skill, have ever given me so much delight, as those dear phrases which are employed in winding up a sermon, when it is brought to its long-wished-for close.
It is not always, nor necessarily thus; nor ever would be so if these things were ordered as they might and ought to be. Hugh Latimer, Bishop Taylor, Robert South, John Wesley, Robert Hall, Bishop Jebb, Bishop Heber, Christopher Benson, your hearers felt no such tedium! when you reached that period it was to them like the cessation of a strain of music, which while it lasted had rendered them insensible to the lapse of time.
“I would not,” said Luther, “have preachers torment their hearers and detain them with long and tedious preaching.”