218 Tie Yerij Bev. G. Granville Bradley [Feb. 24, 



gave a hundred-fold force in the present day to the striking words 

 of Edward IV., who in a letter to the Pope, written over four cen- 

 turies ago, spoke of it as dear to the orhis Anglicanus — the " whole 

 English world." 



What were then, what are now, the claims to so unique a position 

 of a church whose legal title is " the Collegiate Church of St. Peter, 

 Westminster " f (1) It was no doubt a great monastic church, as its 

 very name of Ahhey imj)lied. Its very legends, such as that of the 

 consecration of the first rude church by St. Peter himself, were 

 closely intertwined with its real history, and had aided its abbots 

 in their pertinacious and successful efforts to assert their entire 

 independence of the English Episcopate. But had this been all, 

 its interest might have grown pale when its days as an abbey church 

 came to an end under Henry VIII., when for a short time it became 

 what Shakespeare calls it — a " Cathedral Church " — and reappeared 

 with its present constitution. It owed its singular position to excep- 

 tional causes. For (2) it was the great monument raised by the last 

 of the English Kings who were heirs of Alfred ; it was reared by 

 Edward the Confessor as his own burial-place. And as such the 

 new and foreign dynasty of the Conqueror claimed a share in it as 

 his heirs, assumed their crowns one after another by his graveside, 

 till at last the fusion between Norman and Englishman was marked 

 by the erection of the most important part of the new church by 

 Henry III., who chose his own place of sepulture by the side of the 

 Shrine in which he placed the body of the sainted King. Round 

 that shrine, with some interesting exceptions, slept his sons and 

 successors, and it became more and more what Edward III. expressly 

 calls it, the colossal " Eoyal Chapel " of the Kings of England, and 

 its history became in every generation more and more intertwined 

 with the history of England as shadowed forth in those Kings — in 

 their accessions, their marriages, their wars, and their deaths. (3) 

 To the people of England also it had become dear — first, as contain- 

 ing the relics of the native King to whose reign they looked back as 

 the golden age of the liberties of England ; and later on as the scene 

 not only of great religious ceremonies, but of great pageants held in 

 memory of national triumphs. There, too, in its splendid Chapter- 

 house was the meeting place of the Commons of England, of the 

 Parliament that was to become the mother of Parliaments. And (4) 

 from the awakening time of the Reformation its influence grew and 

 widened. There was not merely the splendid addition made to it 

 on the very eve of that epoch by the chapel of Henry VII., but there 

 was the recognition of other forms of greatness than that of kings 

 and warriors and statesmen and abbots and ecclesiastics, that dated 

 from the erection of the monument to Chaucer and the burial of 

 Spenser. The tide of interest spread and deepened with every 

 generation, till its crowd of monuments touched the memories and 

 affections of Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welsh, and Irish — alike of 

 citizens of the American Republic, of members of our own colonial 



