Rambles in an Old City / comprising antiquarian, historical, biographical and political associations

by Susan Swain Madders

We say old, but where is the cathedral not old? save and except a few just springing into existence, evidences we would hope of a reaction in the devotional tendencies of our nature, rising up once more through the confused assemblage of churches and chapels, and meeting houses, reared in honour of man’s intellect, sectarian isms; human deity in fact, with its standard freedom of thought, under which the myriad diverse forms of hero worshippers

have rallied themselves, each with their own atom of the broken statue of truth, that they may vainly strive of their own power to re-unite again into a perfect and harmonious whole. Setting aside, however, these later efforts to regain something of the lofty conceptions that can alone enter into the mind of a worshipper of God, not man, we have to deal with the monuments of a past age yet left among us, witnessing to the early life in the church, though not unmingled with symptoms of disease, and marks of the progress of decay,—marks which are indeed fearfully manifest in the relics existing in our country, that bear almost equal traces of corruption and spiritual growth, each struggling, as it were, for victory. Is there any one who can walk through the lofty nave of a cathedral, and not feel lifted up to something? may be he knows not what; but the spirit of worship, of adoration, is breathed on him as it were from the structure around him. And should it not be so? does not the blue vault of heaven, with its unfathomed ocean of suns and worlds, each moving in its own orbit, obeying one common law of order and perfect harmony, call up our reverence for the God of Nature? and has it ever been forbidden that the heart and understanding should be appealed to through the medium of the outward senses, for the worship of the God of Revelation? Is the eye to be closed, the mouth dumb, the ear deaf, to all save

the intellectual teachings of a fellow man? Is music the gift of heaven, colour born in heaven’s light, incense the fragrance of the garden, planted by God’s hand, form the clothing of soul and spirit, to be banished from the temple dedicated to the service of that living God, who created the music of the bird, the waterfall, and the thunder, who painted the rainbow in the window of heaven, who scented the earth with sweet flowers, and herbs and “spicy groves,” who gave to each tree, each leaf, each bird and flower, each fibre, sinew, and muscle of the human frame, each crystal, and each gem of earth, each shell of the ocean’s depths, each moss and weed that creeps around the base of hidden rocks, even to the noisome fungus and worm that owes its birth alike to death and to decay a material body, full of beauty and adaptation in all its parts; revealing thus to man, that all thought, all life, all spirit, must dwell within an outer covering of form. True, the spirit and life may depart, the garment may cover rottenness and decay, the symbol may be a dead letter, in the absence of the truth it should shadow forth, the candle at the altar, be meaningless from the dimness of the light of the spirit, that it should represent as ever living and present in the church; the eagle of the reading-desk be a graven image, without place in God’s temple, when the soaring voice of prophecy, rising above earth, and fed from

the living fire burning on heaven’s altar, that it should symbolize, has ceased to be heard. Incense may be a mystic mockery, when the prayers of the children of God have ceased to ascend in unison as a sweet smelling savour to the throne of their Father; the swelling chant be monotonous jargon, when the beauty and harmony of one common voice of praise, thanksgiving, and prayer, is not felt; the vestment be a mere display of weak and empty vanity, when purity, activity, authority and love, have ceased to be the realities expressed in the alb, the stole, the crimson and purple, the gold and silver; the screen, a senseless mass of carving, the long unbenched and empty nave, so much waste stone and mortar, to those who see not in it the vast Gentile court, where the voice of preaching and invitation was sent forth to sinners to enter the temple and join in the worship of praise and prayer of the church within.

Why are all these too often as cold and empty outlines of a nothing to our senses? is it not that their life is gone? But should we therefore cast away the fragments that remain? should we not rather desire that the spirit may breathe upon the dry bones, that they may live again, and form a new and living temple for the most High to dwell in; the outer edifice of wood and stone, being the model or statue of that spiritual church, of which every pillar, every window, every beam, and curtain,

should be formed of living members, with Christ for the foundation and chief corner stone, to be built up and fashioned by the hand of God; every sand or ash of truth that lies scattered over the surface of the earthy being cemented together by bonds of love and charity, to form the masonry of the one great Catholic Church.

Such thoughts may be misunderstood, and bring down upon us, in these days of Papal Aggression, anathemas from many a zealous reformationist, or member of the heterogeneous Protestant Alliance, nay, perhaps every shade of Protestant dissenter, evangelical churchman, and Puseyite, may shake his head at us in pity, and wonder what we mean; we would say to the last, beware of the shadow without the substance, the symbol without the truth, the emblem without the reality; and of the others we would ask forbearance. Popery does not necessarily lurk beneath the advocacy of forms.

With such formidable prejudices as we may possibly have raised by these suggestive hints, dare we hope to find companions in our visit to the venerable pile of building, whose spire still rears itself from the valley, where some eight hundred years ago, the foundations were laid of one of those huge monastic institutions, combining secular with spiritual power, once so common, and plentifully scattered over our country, and even then grown into strange jumbling

masses of error and truth, beauty and deformity? the sole trace of whose grandeur is now to be found in the church and cloister of a Protestant cathedral, and the palace of a Protestant bishop.

We must not, however, lose sight of the fact, that this edifice, in common with most others, among which we have to seek the past history of the church either at home or abroad, did not spring into existence until almost every truth possessed by the early Christians was so hidden by cumbrous masses of superstition, the growth of centuries of darkness, that it is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to trace any harmony of purpose in their outline or filling up; hence the inconsistencies that have sprung from the efforts to revive the ornaments and usages of a period when, the life having departed from them in a great measure, their meaning had been lost, and their practice perverted; hence, too, the folly often displayed by zealous ecclesiastical symbolists, in regarding every monkey, dog, mermaid, or imp that the carvers of wood and stone fashioned from their own barbarous conceits, or copied from the illuminations that some old monk’s overheated brain had devised for embellishment to some fanciful legend, as embodied ideas, to be interpreted into moral lessons or spiritual sermons.