Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1934. ST. PAUL'S

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 90, 13 October 1934, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1934. ST. PAUL'S

A few centuries ago in the days which we are accustomed to regard as the age of faith St. Paul's was the most popular resort in London for the purposes of gossip and business and petty crime, for the man of fashion and the merchant, for the hawker and the sharper and the pickpocket. So firmly established were these profane uses that even the greatest of the Deans of St. Paul's—John Colet, who dared in the fifteenth century to declare that the first chapters of Genesis were not to be interpreted literally, and a few years later publicly denounced a war on which Henry VIII had decided—did not venture to interfere' with them. Here .at any rate i we may safely boast of having improved on the ways of our forefathers. Situated in the central hum and roar of London, St. Paul's has been transformed from a pandemonium to an oasis of solemnity and peace.. As Mr. J. R. Glorney Bolton says in his article on "The Deans of St. Paul's" in the August "Fortnightly": "St. Paul's is a place not only for sermons and prayers, but for silence. > Day after day there is an unostentatious pilgrimage of men and women who seek a shelter from, the perplexities and hardships of life." Yet the illustration which he supplies is of the "lucus a non lucendo" type. It tells how one of the most pious and forlorn of religious pilgrims sought in St. Paul's a few minutes' shelter from the perplexities and sorrows of his life and was summarily ejected. . The story told by Mr. Bolton verges indeed so closely on the incredible that one would be compelled to reject it if it were not fully authenticated, but, as he takes it from W. J. Ward's standard biography of Cardinal Newman, the authentication must be regarded as ample. After his life-long friend, R. W. Church, had become Dean of St. Paul's, Father Newman was passing the Cathedral while a service was proceeding, and he was attracted by the music.

The temptation to enter the Cathedral and listen to the prayers that he once knew by heart was too great for him to resist. He advanced a few steps into the nave and stood wher.e. he was, entranced. Then a verger came up and requested him to leave. Father Newman was inured to ill-treatment, and perhaps the man who was indirectly responsible for the liturgical improvements of St. Paul's was dressed too shabbily to merit the respect of a Victorian verger.

An astounding story, indeed; i|nominiously ejected .as disreputafjle from a Protestant Cathedral somewhere in the 70's and honoured with a Red Hat from Rome a few years later! 'Had a similar tax been imposed upon our credulity by an analogous story dating from some eighteen centuries before, the Higher Critics would surely have dismissed it as plainly symbolical and "tendentious," and most of us would have agreed with them. But though we should all be glad to reject this story it is plainly impossible to do so. ■ Mr. Bolton's comment upon the story is that "today no one would dare to eject a- man because of his shabbiness; for St. Paul's belongs to the people." He points out that the daily pilgrims include men who are unemployed and destitute, and that they are sometimes asleep. Though he refers to the high standard of a Victorian verger,.it is possible that a generation or two previously a Victorian or preVictorian verger might have shown himself less exacting. It is at any rate certain that the "poor man in vile raiment," whom the Apostle warned Christian congregations not to despise, could hardly have presented a viler appearance than that of the Cathedral itself. When Carlyle paid his first visit to London in 1831 and "caught a first glimpse'from Cheapside of the huge dome, its gold finger pointing to the heavens, human creatures creeping about it on their petty errands," he was duly impressed by the grandest building he had ever seen. But he received a severe shock' when he entered and saw the filthy mess that these same human creatures had made of the interior. "Within if it were not a whited sepulchre full of dead men's bones, it was certainly a disgrace to the community." The testimony of Carlyle is confirmed by an abundance of less capricious authorities during the next thirty or forty years. "Punch," which first/ appeared in 1841, was constantly harping on the shameful condition of St. Paul's, on its Churchyard as "a disgrace to the Metropolis," and on the railings as "a perfect eyesore." In 1843 G. A. Sala described the noble ritual of the Cathedral as "celebrated amicfet perhaps the meanest and cheapest accessories it is possible to conceive." The windows were "apparently of the cheapest glass and scarcely ever cleaned."

The velvet covering to the Communion table was worn to a cord, its gold lace fringe tarnished to blackness, and the carpet before the

altar was in rags. ... As for the nave, the aisles, and the side chapels, they Were in a shamefully grimy and dilapidated condition, the pavement of the nave was in many places broken in holes or worn with ruts. The Bishop's throne wanted a leg, the Lord Mayor's Chair of State was in not 'much better case, and the wretched little pulpit, with its winding stair and its sounding board, like a crippled dumb waiter above, would have been a disgrace to a village church in the eastern counties where the value of the living did not exceed a hundred a year, and the incumbent was fain to fatten geese for Leadenhall Market to eke out a livelihood. Two more witnesses may be briefly cited to complete this extraordinary story. In his novel "Yeast," which appeared in 1848, Charles Kingsley said that St. Paul's "breathed imbecility and unreality and sleepy death in life." Our examples so far are'mostly taken from the Rev. D. Wallace Duthie's "The Church in the Pages of 'Punch." The last we owe to Archdeacon W. M. Sinclair, who quotes at length in his "Memorials of St. Paul's Cathedral" from a paper contributed to "All the Year Round" by an old friend of his. We cite a few sentences: Having now been from crypt to ball, and round- galleries, and about nave, dirt and neglect are, I find, the most prominent characteristics of the handsomest edifice of the wealthiest city of the world. The most prominent fact connected with an inspection of the monuments is their filth. ... It would be ludicrous if it were not sad to note the strange metamorphoses effected ;by simple dirt. . It is astonishing to find that the date of the article from which this extract is taken is as recent as April 4, 1868, and that Dr. Sinclair's only comment upon it, at any rate in his abridged edition, is that it is "an amusing paper." But after the trouble was over he could afford to smile; not knowing that relief was almost in sight the writer could not. Two years 4ater it had come. Today, says Mr. Duthie, it [St. Paul's] bears witness to the resurrection which came with the addition of men like Liddon and Lightfoot and Gregory to its stalls and Church to its Deanery. They have helped to restore it to its proper place as the spiritual centre of tho Metropolis of the World. The two great Deans of the Old St. Paul's were Colet and Donne. Almost as obviously, those of the new one are Church and Inge. And the last name reminds us that in an earlier generation and in another cathedral Dean Inge himself might possibly have suffered in the same way as Newman. Pew public men, with perhaps the exception of Samuel Rogers, .writes Mr. Harold Begbie in "Painted Windows," ever cared so little about appearance. It is believed that the Dean would be indistinguishable from a tramp but for the constant astonishment and active benevolence of Mrs. Inge. As it is, ho is something more than shabby, and only escapes a disreputable appearance by the finest of hairs. On that point the Protestant Dean had a crucial advantage over the future Cardinal. Of greater importance is a point on which Mr. Bolton brings Dr. Inge into relation both with two of his predecessors and with his successor.' The great Deans of St. Paul's, he writes, have always transcended the limits of their own Church. As a youth, Donne was taught to love the Church of Rome to which his mother was faithful to the end, and throughout his life he retained- the inward grace of the Catholic mind. Richard Church owed more than he realised to his Quaker grandfather. Dean Inge openly, regarded the Society of Friends as, perhaps, the best product of the religious spirit of England. Dean Matthews has already shaken the placidity of {he West Country by permitting a Nonconformist to preach in Exeter Cathedral. What he has done in Exeter he can scarcely fail to do in St. Paul's, and there will come a time when the voices heard. "beneath the Dome" are no longer exclusively Anglican. It is a great office and a great tradition to which Dean Matthews succeeds, and in view of his statement that "the need for some synthesis between Christianity and the modern outlook was never more pressing than at the present time, and perhaps never more difficult to achieve," the question what he will make of them is one of exceptional interest and importance.