1810: “Upon the Present Proliferation of Churches, and Their Indiscriminate Offence to the Eye”
By The Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, Bishop of Ducks-on-Ponds Published in The Bishopsp(r)ic’s Journal
It is one of the lesser tragedies of our industrious age that every parish now wishes to proclaim its faith by erecting something that looks like a chapel and resembles, on closer examination, either a cheese-paring factory or a mausoleum for dogs. The countryside, once so nobly punctuated by the stately towers of yore, is now disfigured by what the Commissioners have lately christened “the necessary expansion of worship.” Necessary, perhaps; expansion, certainly; worship, debatable.
Everywhere I turn my episcopal eye, another ecclesiastical edifice mushrooms from the clay, as self-conscious as a moralist and twice as dull. If I travel by coach from Chichester to London (a route I traverse too often in the service of disappointment), I pass no fewer than seventeen newly completed churches, each vying to be less consequential than the last. They are born of identical ambition: to be quickly built, inexpensively operated, and immediately forgotten.
One cannot wholly condemn the motive. The age, I am told, is economical. Timber is dear, stone dearer, and the spiritual appetite apparently so ravenous that any four walls with a hole in the roof will suffice for the saving of souls. So we have, accordingly, the reign of the neutral church—an edifice of such deliberate anonymity that it could, at any given moment, be mistaken for a barn, a theatre, or a parliamentary subcommittee.
I stood last week in the nave of St. Agatha’s, newly consecrated by my colleague Bishop Cresswell (a man devout in spirit and hopeless in matter of style). The nave resembled, with charitable description, a shoe warehouse struck by remorse. The pulpit, however, soared prominently, as if lecturing were the only sacrament left to us. The altar was obliged to stand back, bashful and apologetic, as though uncertain of its continued employment. The congregation expressed admiration for the “fine acoustics,” which only proves that public taste has descended from the visual to the sonic. The Lord may once have thundered from Sinai, but in England He must now be understood by echo.
It was not always thus. The earlier generation had taste, if not moderation. The Georgian churches, for all their frosted plaster and inflated domes, at least aspired to grace. They erred on the side of opulence—which, for a bishop, is the respectable direction of error. But we now limbo beneath a different kind of bar: made of cheap brick, cut square, drained of all pretence to curve or flourish. One might as well pray between two ledger lines.
The Commissioners (those well-meaning autocrats of parsimony) inform me that the “new Gothic” is cheaper than the old Classical, because it allows the builder to omit ornament and call it principle. What used to be sacred design is now mere geometry in mourning. Everywhere one encounters pretence without precision—pointed arches that point nowhere, windows so “mediaeval” they shudder at daylight, spires that teeter like werewolves caught mid-transformation. They are Gothic in the way a goose is swanlike: by accident and apology.
I remarked this to Sir Ambrose Fettleton, the civil engineer charged with approving new parochial models. “My lord,” said he, “we build for congregations, not for connoisseurs.” To which I replied that congregations must also behold, not merely inhabit. Faith, like any lady, deserves her mirror. Sir Ambrose assured me that simplicity is a virtue. I told him that so is chastity, but I would not style it in plaster.
The pragmatic explanation is that our builders now borrow styles as a hostess borrows sugar—never enough to sweeten, never enough to please. The Gothic Revival, as the younger clergy breathlessly term it, may one day bring scholarship to the stones of England; but for now it produces only Gothic interjections: half-arches, quarter-pinnacles, baptistries that look like asparagus boilers. As one wag observed at the consecration of Holy Trinity, Islington, “It appears the Almighty has taken to architecture by subscription.”
This is not to blame piety, which remains sincere if somewhat prematurely expressed. The cause is practical ambition without aesthetic comprehension: pragmatism and piety, joined in unsuitable marriage. We are assured that these bare edifices admit vast congregations. Alas, vast congregations produce vast noise, and noise, my dear brethren, is not worship. The Reformation gave us plainness; the modern age gives us pallor. One is moral, the other municipal.
In the course of my episcopal duties, I have approved more roofs than I have read sermons. The builders write to me: “My Lord, the parish recommend a stone of moderate texture and an elevation of restrained character.” By which they mean, “Cheap, and taller than the brewer’s warehouse.” I invariably sign with a sigh, for I know the result. The English countryside will soon look like a philosophical argument: rows of premises proving virtue by ugliness.
I have just received a pamphlet from a Mr. Thacker of Birmingham entitled Foundations of Efficient Piety, in which he claims that “beauty dissipates devotion.” This is a lie both to God and geometry. No man has ever sinned because of a well-proportioned cornice. Even the Almighty, I suspect, drew the rainbow for the pleasure of completion. Yet our modern saints sneer at such splendour. They prefer their temples tidy and their souls unadorned. We shall soon be praying in sheds, and congratulating ourselves on their sincerity.
The latest invention—what the architects call “portable chapels”—is the final outrage. Prefabricated in iron, these are said to be erected in a fortnight, in weather fine or foul. “Erected,” of course, is generous. The first example I inspected collapsed at its east end like a repentant drunk. The idea that faith may be boxed, shipped, and unfolded at will strikes me as a parody of miracles. Yet there are whispers that such affordability may extend our ministry to the colonies. If so, Heaven help the colonies.
We are, in short, a nation exchanging sanctity for expedience. The Church, once the mother of architecture, now rents her womb to bricklayers. I do not despair, but I do sigh—a prolonged sigh, built of stone and imagination. Perhaps future generations will rediscover beauty as a form of belief, and once more remember that a church is not merely a hall for instruction, but an instrument for awe.
Until then, I shall continue my rounds and pretend admiration for these “places of worship.” They are places, indeed, though I am uncertain of the other half of the description. When I stand in one of their cold, cubic naves, I feel like a bishop in a counting house: someone is achieving something, but it is not salvation.
And so I advise my younger brethren—clergy, architects, and hopeful converts alike—when next you build a church, do not think first of cost or comfort. Think instead of how the sun will fall upon stone, and how even silence might be made to glow. For economy is mortal; but beauty, even when misunderstood, is a form of prayer.
You are here: States of Grace > Biography