The Religious Life of London. James Ewing Ritchie

a brim, and very big. I fancy there are no poor Greeks in London. On our right is a recess, in which are ladies elegantly dressed. On our left is a pulpit very rarely used, and a table at which two clerks are seated. They seem to have the performance of the service very much to themselves. There is a choir in one of the side galleries. In his recess, before the altar, the priest is engaged in praying and taking the sacrament; but every now and then he comes out. A side door opens, and a lad in a white surplice, holding an enormous lighted taper, appears. Then the priest comes from the altar, and stands on the steps. It may be to swing the censer, or to bring out the Gospels bound in silver, which almost all present come forward to kiss; or it may be, in the course of the service, some one wishes to communicate. Then, while the clerks are reading, the doors of the altar are opened, and the priest appears with a cup in his hand, which the communicant comes forward to receive. (The cup, it must be observed, contains bread and wine.) Again the priest comes forward with the crucifix, to which all bow; and last of all he comes forward and says a few simple words of edification to his faithful flock, in number, I should fancy, from two to three hundred. And this reminds us we have not yet stated where they are. Well, they are exactly opposite the altar, before which there is a vacant space well carpeted, and into which, on one or two occasions in the course of the service, the priest descends. The seats are beautifully carved, and are something like those in our cathedral stalls. Each worshipper is well fenced in by himself; and, as he stands all the time, he will find the sides very convenient for resting his arms on. Each seat is beautifully finished, as the reader can well imagine when he is told that the carving of each seat cost about eight pounds about fifteen years ago, when the chapel was first opened. There are no sittings appropriated to particular individuals, any person coming takes the first he finds vacant. All expenses are paid by the men, chiefly merchants in Finsbury Square, who subscribe on an average for the cost of the service about twenty-five pounds a year. Two gentlemen contributed eighty, and one as much as two hundred pounds, a year. The annual income of the church is stated to be 1660l., and of this 50l. or 60l. has to be paid to an English church over the way – a grievance which the Greeks, as well they may, feel deeply. There is another Greek church in London, that of the Russian Embassy, – that of course being much smaller. It cannot, I should fancy, surpass in neatness and finish this in London Wall. The Greek Church, Dean Stanley tells us, has always been unfriendly to the arts. You would not think so; the building seems just what it should be – handsome, ecclesiastical in appearance, and yet plain. On the screen, behind which is the altar, are paintings of the “Last Supper,” “The Virgin and her Child,” and a few others, intended to denote to the eye of the worshipper the great fact the worship has to commemorate. Pictures are used but as symbols, as even words themselves are, of ideas needed for human salvation.

      The Greek Church protests against anything in the way of doctrine not found in the Bible. Surely it cannot claim the same sanction for its rites and ceremonies. As each worshipper entered he made the sign of the cross on his forehead and his shoulders and breast. This ceremony was repeated several times in the course of the service, the priest on more than one occasion doing the same; indeed, this seems to be the only way in which the laity join in the service. They utter no responses, they declare with one voice no creed, they raise no sacred chant or song; otherwise, they stand as it were motionless and apart; everything is done for them by the officiating priest. He comes between them and God. They speak through him and by him; without him they cannot worship the Father in heaven. Such is the theory of worship current in the Greek Church. Thus was it when the Imperial purple was worn by Constantine fifteen hundred years ago; thus it is in the reign of Queen Victoria, thus it will be, we may predict, for the Greek Church is jealous of every iota of its creed, in secula seculorum.

      Well does a living writer remark, “Such as the Greek Church became on the extinction of Paganism, such, or nearly such, she seems to be now. Her missionary work has been narrow, her moral influence and control at home small, and though she has preserved a rigid continuity of doctrinal form, the principle of an ever-expanding and all-absorbing vitality has been wanting; in great cities her prelates have too frequently been the slaves of wealth and power, of courtly intrigue and political faction; in the desert her monks have become dreamy and unpractical anchorites. No lands reclaimed, no centres of agriculture and civilization created, no literature preserved, no schools founded, no human beings raised to a higher sphere of social action and duty, are to be set down to the account of the Greek Church. She is a fragment of old Byzantine civilization, as rigid and angular as the mosaics that still adorn and seem to frown down from the walls of her churches.”

      CHAPTER V.

      the roman catholics

      If we may quote the Eastern Church, the Roman Catholic Church is the greatest heresy of modern times. In the Encyclic Epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs, the Papal system is referred to as “the chief heresy of the latter days, which flourishes now, as its predecessor, Arianism, flourished before it in the earlier ages, and which, like Arianism, shall in like manner be cast down and vanish away.” “I die in the faith of the Catholic Church before the disunion of East and West,” were the last words of Bishop Ken. Under the Stuarts, in solemn conclave the Anglicans accused the Romanists of idolatry. In the opinion, then, of the oldest Church, the only Church with an indisputable apostolical succession, and in the opinion of some of England’s greatest Churchmen, the Church of Rome is an heretical one. Such is the conclusion to which also we are driven by the very slightest historical inquiry. Lady Herbert wonders that an Anglican Churchman can go to Jerusalem and not become a Romanist. Why, as the priest takes you from one sacred station to another, shows you where the Saviour fainted beneath the load of the cross, where Saint Veronica wiped His face with her handkerchief, where the print of the Saviour’s foot yet remains, – when we all know that the Jerusalem of the Saviour’s time is some eighty feet below the surface, and that all these assertions are absolutely false, you feel indignant, and, if you have the smallest iota of intellect left, after listening to the priestly legends, return a considerably sounder Protestant than you went. In like manner, history leads you to a similar conclusion as to the Roman Church. History, with an impartial pen, tells us how the Roman heresy sprang up, and grew, and reigned in every land. History robs Romanism of all its terror and of all its power. We see it, with plain, unblinded eyes, to be a heresy gradually enlarging its claims in accordance with the increasing ambition of its prelates, and the increasing credulity of its devotees. Gradually, as the memory of apostolic teaching and preaching passed away, the Church of Rome, after the fall of Jerusalem, continued to advance among the western Churches certain vague assertions of authority. In proportion as its clergy asserted their claims, other changes of an unscriptural character were made. First of all, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration was asserted; then a mysterious veneration began to attach itself to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper; the sign of the cross was held to be vital to the expulsion of the devil; and prayers for the dead became common. A great step was gained when the doctrine of the celibacy of the clergy was enforced; when Gregory the Great, as the Romanists may well call him, inculcated purgatory, and pilgrimage to holy places; instituted the Canon of the Mass, and added splendour to the ceremonies of the Church, and claimed the power of the keys for the successors of St. Peter. On the foundation thus raised it was easy to base the most astounding claims; whether you are asked to believe that the Church of Loretto flew through the air from Syria to Italy, or, as in our time, the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, and the immaculate conception of the Virgin. After a certain point gained, the rest is sure to follow. Give up the Bible, believe in the priest, and the Roman heresy is the natural result.

      In the Catholic Directory I find the statistics of Romanism as it exists in London. The province of Westminster, established by his Holiness Pope Pius IX. (Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, – such are a few of the titles he assumes), Sept. 29,1850, comprises the diocese of Westminster, with twelve suffragan dioceses. Westminster comprises Essex, Hertfordshire, and Middlesex, with, for Archbishop and Metropolitan, the Rev. Edward Henry Manning, elected and consecrated in 1865. In London also there is another Church dignitary, the Rev. Thomas Grant, Bishop of Southwark, elected and consecrated in 1851. The patron saints of the diocese of Westminster are “our blessed Lady, conceived without sin; St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles; St. Edward, King and Confessor.” In addition to the Virgin in Southwark, the