On the twenty-sixth of March, a special meeting of the vestry is held, to pass unanimously, three resolutions, to enable the vestrymen to charge the rates with £19,000, for building Trinity and this church; they appeal again to the Church Commissioners for a nominal grant “to establish the validity of their proceedings;” and, considering the good and pious object, for which the application is made, the commissioners relent, and grant one hundred pounds. After much difficulty £19,000, is at length borrowed. But one Assurance Office, of high respectability, refused to have anything to do with this loan, even after the lawyers had put the parish to the expense of £32 17s. 10d. on account of it; £103 3s. being the amount of two other bills “for negotiating” this loan. [157]
But this sum was not enough to carry on the church account; another £1000 had to be borrowed of the banker, on the fourteenth of December, 1847; and above £100 interest was paid on that sum before the loan was returned. Some time after this, the committee report that the subscriptions for All Saint’s Church amount to £1,635 2s. 10d.; and that the cost of the building has been £7,434 18s. 2d.
This church is built in the early pointed style, and its internal fittings and decorations are exceedingly plain. It is capable of holding 1,500 persons; 600 free seats, and 900 appropriated, or pew sittings.
The amount of church-rate, collected for nine years, ending April, 1852, was £20,574 3s. 8d. Of this there was “balance in hand of £1,607 15s. 2d.;” but a debt of £14,500 was owing for churches which had been built. This debt is bearing interest at the rate of four-and-a-half per cent; and £900 is paid off annually. So that these four churches will have cost the rate-payers of Paddington upwards of £40,000, over and above all the sums given by the Church Commissioners, Metropolitan Committee, bishop and lessees, all Parliamentary provision of the sites, and all private subscriptions; and this sum of money, with upwards of £10,000 paid for St Mary’s, and the church-yard, will have been raised by “compulsory levy,” from rate-payers of all denominations; while the receipts of “the rectorial and other lands” are quietly pocketed by the rector and his lessees!
But I have heard rate-payers told, as a great consolation, “that the churches of Paddington cost nothing in comparison to the churches of Marylebone.” This however, may not be very consoling to those who know the cost of the following:—
Wesleyan Metropolitan Chapels, which have been recently built.
“Poplar chapel is of the decorative style, 105 feet long, by 60 feet wide; is built of Kentish Rag Stone, with Caen Stone dressings; will seat 1,500 persons; and cost about £4,000.
The New North-road Chapel, Hoxton, is Anglo-Norman, in style; is 35 feet long, including the vestries, by 52 feet wide; built of Brick and Bath Stone; will accommodate 1,200 persons; and cost £3,700.
The Chapel of St. John’s-square, Clerkenwell, is built of Brick and Bath Stone; 70 feet long by 60 feet wide; will accommodate 1,300 persons; has a school-room, &c., and cost £4,000.
Jewin-street Chapel, is built in the Early English style; is 68 feet by 52 feet; seats 1,100 persons; is built of White Brick and Bath Stone; and cost £2,700.
The Islington Chapel, in the Liverpool road, measures 90 feet long by 54 feet wide; and will accommodate 1,500 persons. It is built of Kentish Rag and Bath Stone; is in the decorated style and cost about £6,000.” [159]
But the actual cost of the churches of Paddington, is not the whole of the evil, though, considering all the circumstances, this is sufficiently oppressive. These churches, after all, are not free: pew-rents are obliged to be taken for the support of the ministers; the poor parishioners have less than one-third of the room allotted to them, and a considerable portion of this space is reserved for the best singers, and most showy scholars of the church schools.
And after all this; after all the money raised “by compulsory levy” to build, furnish, ornament and decorate; and after all the pew-rents are paid; these churches do not pay their own ordinary expenses. No; not after there is added to this income the portion of the burial-fees received by the churchwardens; but this source of income, which has averaged for many years more than £350 per annum, must soon cease. So that dissenters and others, who reside even on a bishop’s estate, have a fair prospect of being called on to pay a church-rate, after all the churches which the rate-payers have built, shall have been paid for.
Towards defraying these ordinary expenses of the churches, the ministers of Trinity, and All Saints, contribute fifteen per cent. of the pew-rents received by them; the minister of St. James’s £200 per annum, the stipend set aside for the whole cure; the minister of St. John’s, nil. While for the last three or four years the pew-rents of St. Mary’s have more than met the ordinary expenses of that church; although there have been two Services performed in it daily during that period. And “increased church accommodation is loudly called for in Paddington!” How will the bishop of London, and his lessees, now answer to that call? Will the rate-payers of Paddington be left to answer it? Or, will the vestry of this parish, elected under the provisions of Sturges Bourne’s Act, be allowed, of their own mere motion, (without any reference to the rate-payer, or without any efficient representation of the case “in all its bearings,” to the bishop and his lessees), to take upon themselves to spend more of the rate-payers’ property? We shall see.
What can be done by those who care one pin about preserving a state-church; by those who have ground-rents to preserve, and lands and houses to be benefitted by offering to in-coming tenants church accommodation, we have already seen. But another example of voluntary church-building and self-support exists in this parish.