The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-11-19 00:00:00

COIIRESPONDENCE

A 'PROPOSAL TO THE PUBLIC, AND THE
PRESENT TOWN COUNCIL.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.
Sts,--it has been already my privilege to offer a few ob-
servations to the public, through your columns, on different
subjects. It will be my present privilege to offer a sugge,,-
.

tion, which, while the recollection of the recent change in the
municipal body makes every Protestant bosom to pulsate
with delight, I would respectfully bring before the inhabitants
of Liverpool, and also the'

channel of communication.
The immense population in the diocese of Chester urged
the propriety, a short time since, of making Manchester a
bishop's see, whose diocese should be the entire county of
Lancaster; that much good would result from the effecting
of such an arrangement no one acquainted with church go-
vernment can doubt, but that much more good would result
from making Liverpool a bistip's see, whose diocese should
embrace one half of the county of Lancaster, while the dio-
cese of Manchester embraced the other half, is, as I think,
indisputable.
We owe to religion, in fact, everything. Nineteen hun-
dred years ago our ancestors were a race of men bearing a
strong resemblance to savages—wars and animosities were
their chief pastimes—waste lands and wild cattle were their
chief property—and a pagan superstition, full of bloody Bola-
tries, was associated with their government : as a consequence
to these things, poverty and barbarity are the chief features
in their history.
A learned prelate (Bishop Burgess) has proved, by com-
petent authorities, that St. Paul preached the gospel of Christ:
in Britain about the 14th year of the Emperor Nero, and
A. D. 68: that he there appointed Aristobulus, mentioned
in the Epistle to the Romans as the first bishop, and estab-
lished a complete form of church government. Eusebius
says, that the apostles preached the gospel in all the world,
and some of them passed beyond the ocean into the British
Isles. Theodoret states that the apostles had induced every
nation and kind of men to embrace the gospel, and among
the converted nations he reckoned particularly the Britons.
Towards the close of the sixth century, when Gregory the
Great sent his first missionary into Britain, there were in
the island schools and churches, and a flourishing clergy in
a flourishing state : and Constantine the Great, the first
Christian emperor, himself an Englishnian, and the son of
an English woman, had severat English bishops preient at
the First Council of Nice, nearly three centuries previous.
With Christianity civilization dawned on our forefathers.
Britain, having welcomed the Almighty's message to salva-
tion, ceased to be the land of barbarism. Under a form of
ecclesiastical government. consisting of bishops and a subor-
dinate clergy, arranged by the Apostles of Jesus Christ, as
God's instrument for the conversion of nations, waste lands
were converted into fruitful field's ; weapons of warfare were
exchanged for instruments of husbandry; the daisies first
spangled the pastures ; the dog rose and the honeysuckle first
bloomed in the hedgerows ; the clack of the windmill and
the music of the watermill first delighted English ears ; the
arts and sciences, that were in future generations to result in
the useful canal, the giant steam-ship, and the wonderful
railroad, and the aggrandisement that is now seen, in the
dominion of the mighty waters, a kingdom on which the sun
never sets, and the greatest, the wealthiest, the most power-
ful, and the most civilized nation that has a present existence,
were first germed.
It appears to have been the will and the intention of the
first founders of church government, namely, the apostles,
that every considerable town or city should have had a bishop.
Tertullian, a learned father of the third century, says, that
St. John appointed bishops, in the seven principal cities of
Lesser Asia—Ephesus, Smyrna, Thyatira Sardis, Philadel-
phia, Laodicea,
Pergamos, and each of which cities contained
a bishop, we are assured from Scripture, in St. John's time;
in fact, St. John was to them an archbishop. He resided
much at Ephesus, and frequently made a circuit of all these
cities. Timothy, who was ordained the first bishop of the
church at Ephesus, received directions from St. Paul as to
the appointment of bishops, iu case the apostle tarried long
in other places ; which circumstance suggests a presumption
that bishops were intended to be many in number. The
Epistle to Titus contains St. Paul's reasons for the apostles
leaving him in Crete in these memorable words : " For this
cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the
things that are wanting, and ordain elders, in every city, as I
had appointed thee ; if any be blameless, the husband of one
wife, having faithful children, not accused of riot, or unruly ;
for a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God ; not
self willed, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker,
not given to filthy lucre; but a lover of hospitality, a lover
of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate, holding fast the
faithful word as he bath been taught, that he may be able,
by sound doctrine, both to exhort and to convince the gain-
sayers."

From these sources we have a clear view of the apostolical
plan ; this plan was mirrored in the arrangements of their
immediate followers ; the early history of the Christian
church presents many such arrangements, shewing a reflec-
tion of it, more or less clear in their detada, to every atten-
tive reader's eye.

To advance 'beyond the boundaries of the more early his-
tory of the British church, that by a nearer road I may ar-
rive at the chief object I have in view, I will briefly glance
at a' fewfaets, offering considerable assistance in my ways
Our little island did not, at the time of the conquest, con-
tain much above a .million inhabitants,altogether ; (this is a
pretty general statement) yet, in the year 604, more than
four hundred years before then, London was made a Bishop's
see : in reality, during the heptarchy, the different dioceses
did not contain anything like a numerous population ; to
abolish some increasing evils apparent-in the times of our
venerable national ecclesiastical historian Bede, he made use
of the recommendations contained in the following portion
of a letter, which lie wrote to Egbert, Archbishop of York :
" Your diocese is too large to allow you to go through the
whole in one' year, therefore appoint presbyters in each vil-
lage to instruct-and administer the.sacraments ; and let them
be studious, that every one of them may learn by heart, the
creed arid the Lord's prayer, and that if they do not under-
stand Latin,•they •may repeat them in their own tongue ; I
have translated them into English for the benefit of English
pastors ; I am told there are many villages in our nation, in
the mountain parts, the inhabitants of which have never seen
a bishop or a pastor, and yet they are obliged to pay their
dues to the bishop.
" The best means to reform our church is to increase the
number of bishops; who sees not how much more reasona-
ble it is for numbers to share this burden ; Gregory therefore
desired Augustine to appoint twelve bishops, to be•under the
Archbishop of York as their metropolitan. I wish you would
fill up this number, with the assistance of the King of Nor-
thumberland."

In the former part of this letter, Bede commends the es-
pecial perusal of the Epistle to Timothy and Titus; this
letter was written in the early part of the eighth century, and
who will deny, that though educated in a monastery, the
writer was a reformer?

Liverpool now contains a population more than equal to
the population of London long after London was made a
Bishop's see, and considerably greater than the present
populations in the dioceses of Bangor, St. Asiph, Bristol,
Carlisle, Chichester, Ely, Hereford, Llandaff, Oxford, Pe-
terborough and Rochester. Why should not Liverpool be
made a cathedral town ? While English bishops, and arch-
bishops even at least as numerous, at a time when the entire
population of England did not reach the number, why should
the present diocese of Chester contain two million inhabi-
tants : If the apostle Paul appointed bishops in every city
in Crete, why should not every city in Lancashire, at least
every considerable city, have its bishop? If Ephesus,
Smyrna, Thyatira, Philadelphia, and the rest of the cities of
Asia minor, had each its bishop, why should not Liverpool
have its bishop?
Our liberal friends will certainly object to our having a
bishop, not but that many of them would like to see a Ro-
man Catholic bishop, but that bishops are useless, that their
office imposes expense and other like evils ; but constituted
as society is constituted now, evil as men's passions are now,
and mischievous as people's inclinations are now, we can
only keep the barriers of civilization perfect, by either
churches, or prisons, being distributed within the water-
walled bulwarks of England; much more expense must be
entailed on such objectors for the support of prisons than
would be entailed on them for the support of churches, and
much larger salaries paid to policemen for tormenting peo-
ple than to clergymen for making people happy ; if they
won't have churches and chapels, they must have prisons
and hulks ; if they won't have pulpits and pews, they must
have treadmills and jibbets ; if they won't send people to
Heaven, they must send people to Hell; and if they won't
love their fellow-creatures from motives of Christian philan-
throphy, they must hate their fellow-creatures from its oppo-
site feeling. Let us have a cathedral and we shall soon dis-
pense with a prison ; let kindly sympathies one towards
another be exercised, and we shall soon have no occasion for
a workhouse ; let us have bishops, and we shall soon not
want overseers ; let us have clergymen, and we shall soon do
away with constables; let apostolical Christianity prevail
amongst us, and love to all men will be our master passion ;
let libral principles be carried out, and hatred towards all
men, under another name, will be our chief characteristic.
I shall advocate the subject still further in a future letter.
Yours, &c.,

A CONSERVATIVE

--- --.11110.-

GREAT GEORGE-STREET CHAPEL

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.
SlR,—Knowing the desire which you have always evinced
for impartiality, I beg, through the medium of your valuable
paper, to offer a few remarks on the one-sided opinions that
have been so profusely dealt out in praise of the design,
architectural arrangement, and detail of Great George-street
Chapel.
With regard to the general plan of the building, it seems
to embrace all that has been required : but it may be ob-
served, that it is much more suited to the purposes of a
theatre than that of a place of worship,—not with respect to
its facilities of plan alone, but from the general appearance
of the building. Its gaudy playfulness is at variance with
the solemn dutieti which have to be performed within it, and
therefore produces an effect contrary to its meaning. The
architect—a gentleman of known abilities, but, I believe,
better known in the professional world as the " old lady" of
the Town-hall—can have no claim to originality in the de-
sign of this theatrical structure; nor has he, with his valua-
ble assistant (the gentleman who had to ask for a share of
the praise of planning this building), done themselves much
credit by the intercolumniation of the order that has been
adopted, it being, as near as I can judge, en style, more the
practice of the Greeks than the Romans ; and it is obvious
that this is an insurmountable error. The whole arrange-
ment becomes affected by it, not only with respect to its
apertures being contracted in width, and thereby rendered
disproportionate ; but it also precludes the possibility of
producing any other than that of a meagre, diminutive detail
to those apertures, and thereby becoming more offensive to
the eye in every respect; and which is the more increased
by the want of finish to the archivolts over the windows,
they having neither console, impost, nor keystone ; indeed
the windows are nothing more than a long slip of a circular-
headed loophole, divided in the middle by a panel, set in a
little from the face of the architrave, which serves to conceal
the gallery joists. The order, too, taking it as a whole, has
not a very agreeable appearance : there is a want of combi-
nation in its parts. The cornice, in particular, the lower
Part of which seems to have no connexion with the coroner
and upper members, the bed, and dentil band, being too di-
minutive for the modellions which surmount them ; there is
also a gross derangement in the modellions at each angle of
the building : so much so, that the three or four modellions
approaching the extreme of each facade have not much more
than half the space betwixt than of their cognate neighbours.
The circular vestibule which forms the principal entrance,
being continued above the roof of the pronoas, forms itself
into a stylobate, the die of which is perforated to give light
to the interior; and from the undulated blocking which sur-
mounts the cornice of the stylobate, springs a dome, perhaps
as handsome in its contour as any one that Liverpool can
boast of, but which has been very much deteriorated in its
appearance by the monstrously large (I should suppose
chryselephantme) finial, which has been introduced as its
crowning ornament; but, through some wise arrangement,
it bas since been taken down, I am informed, to be reduced
to one-half its former size, which will no doubt greatly im-
prove it; when it has undergone this operation, I suppose it
will be again exhibited to the public, in all its glittering
splendour. The impropriety of springing a dome from a
mere stylobate, is forcibly represented in this structure : its
want of interspace and entabletnent gives it somewhat the
appearance of the cone of the " wind-mill," architecturally
embellished, yet requiring the finish produced by its sails.
The huge attic which surmounts the body of the building, is
at variance with the style chosen,
it merely serving to con-
ceal the roof ;
while the roof, in this particular style, is ge-
nerally intended to be the leading feature of .the building.
This seems at first.to have been considered, inasmuch as the