Leading Articles in the Reviews. 



217 



OLD CriY CHURCHES. 



How many Londoners know anything of their 

 London ? and how many of the Enghsh travellers 

 whom one sees wandering about in Continental churches 

 have ever set foot in some of our interesting City 

 churches ? 



A serious dilTiculty in London, explains Mr. Norman 

 Croom-Johnson, who has imparted variety to the 

 pages of the Englishwoman for July and August by 

 a charming paper on some City churches, is that our 

 churches are open to the public only for a few hours 

 each day, and on Saturdays these hours are often 

 cut down to vanishing point. At any rate, he attributes 

 the responsibility for the general lack of interest in 

 the old City churches partly to the indifference of the 

 authorities who lock the doors when people have a 

 little spare time. But in part, also, our native apathy 

 to our history and our living so intensely in the present 

 are to blame. 



S.WED FROM THE GREAT FIRE. 



London's churches are London in little. They are 

 the jewels in the crown of the Cit)'. Excluding 

 .St. Paul's, they are not wonders of architecture. 

 Their fascination lies in their rich store of memories. 

 Eight of the pre-Fire churches still remain, and now 

 they stand deserted, brooding in dignity over the 

 pageant of the years. Their mutely proffered message 

 is spurned by a generation whose hurrying feet forbid 

 them to take heed. Before the Great Fire, London 

 was a city of churches. The crowded square mile 

 was studded with their spires and towers. The fire 

 destroyed or severely damaged eighty-six parish 

 churches, and of these Wren rebuilt forty-nine. The 

 flames spared twenty-one, but several became so 

 dilapidated that they were eventually pulled down. 

 Those still standing to-day are .All Hallows Barking ; 

 St. .Andrew Undershuft ; St. Barthoiomew-thc-Greal ; 

 St. Ethelburga, Bishopsgate ; St. Giles, Cripplegate ; 

 St. Helen, Bishopsgate ; St. Katharine Cree ; and 

 St. 01a\c, Hart Street. Mr. Croom-Johnson recalls 

 many interesting memories connected with six of these 

 churches, leaving St. Bartholomew-the-Great and 

 St. Giles, Cripplegate, for a future article. 



HISTORICAL ME.MORIALS. 



In .All Hallows Barking, some of those who met 

 their death at the Tower found a first or a permanent 

 resting-plai e- -Hisliop Fisjier, of Rochester, ,\rchl)ishop 

 luiud and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to name 

 the be<t known. l'robal)ly the chunh owed its 

 preserv.ition to Pepys, who urged the authorities to 

 blow up the adjacent houses to stop the ravages of 

 the flames, St. Olave's was the parish church of 

 IVpys for nearly thirty years, but it was not till 

 1884 that a memorial to him was placed in the church. 

 St. Ethelburga, one of the oldest builrlings in the 

 City, is completely hidden by shops. It is very tiny, 

 being only fitly-four feet long and less than thirty 

 wide. St. Helen's has been called " the Westminster 

 Abbey of the City," bei;ause of its magnificent collec- 



tion of monuments. John Stow, the tailor witfi a 

 passion for topography, and the author of " A Survey 

 of London," written in 1598. is buried in St. Andrew 

 Undershaft. St. Katharine Cree, it may be noted, is 

 nearly always open, but it does not contain many 

 historical monuments. 



THE 



COST OF BECOMING AN 

 ARCHBISHOP. 



Sir Henry Lucy, continuing his ■" Sixty Years in 

 the Wilderness " in the Cornhill Magazine for August, 

 recounts what is said of the cost of entering on the 

 .Archbishopric of York. He says : — 



Dr. Mngec died shortly after transKation from the See of 

 Pelerborous;h to the .Archbishopric of York. He lived long 

 enough to pay the fees exacted in connection with the event, 

 and, as he was not a rich man, public atteniion was pointedly 

 called to the business. It was reported that he paid a sum of 

 ;/f7,ooo in connection with his installation. Questions put in 

 Tarliament have shown that this report was exaggerated. The 

 money passed, but it was to a considerable extent for value 

 received. Still, he had certain fees to pay which, if exactetl in 

 any other connection and by less respectable people, would be 

 regarded as a monstrous imposition. Between receiving his 

 iOui;i d' elite and taking his seat in the House of I^ords, the new 

 -Archbishop had to pay in fees an aggregate sum of close upon 

 ,^850. Several Departments of State had pickings out of the 

 pie. There was the Crown Office, whence issued the (ongi 

 il' elite ; the Home Ullice, whicli received it and charged accord- 

 ingly ; the Board of Green Cloth, which mulct the Archbishop 

 in " homage fees " amounting to J^yi os. 4d. ; the Lord Great 

 Chamberlain, whose emissary extracted a £\o note from the 

 .Archbishop on his way to take his seat ; the Dean and Chapter, 

 who got fees for everything, and then charged twenty guineas 

 for the bell-ringer and ^13 14s. 8d. for the choir. Next came, 

 with outstretched hand, the vicar of the parish in which is 

 situated the cathedral where the ceremony of installation takes 

 place. Finally, a lump sum of ;^2S was exacted on the h.ipless 

 Archbishop taking his scat in the House of Lords. 



RE\IV.\L OF ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 



I.v the PositivisI Revinv Dr. Munro, of the Japan 

 Branch of the Rationalist Press .Association, is reported 

 as .saying, at a meeting at Yokohama : — 



.Auguste Comtc struck the h.irp of a world religion when he 

 announced to mankind that the longer human culture endured, 

 the more would humanity be governed by the dead. Gentle- 

 men, this is a great thought, a fundamental thought. In doing 

 so, I .ask you to regard the cult of ancestor worship, not merely 

 as a survival from a hoary antiquity, but as an organisation ol 

 homage, which, deleted of supernatural vestiges, is destined to 

 become a great world religion, serving not alone the ethical, but 

 the intellectual and cmolion.al needs of our common Humanity. 



The pursuit of wealth is apparently expected by 

 .Mr. Basil Thomson, writing in liedrod; for July, to wipe 

 out the antipathy of race. Discussing the awakening 

 of the coloured races, he says : — 



In tropical countries the line of cxste «ill soon cease to tie 

 the line of colour ; there, as in temperate jones, wealth will 

 create a new arislocr.icy recruited from men of every shade of 

 colour. .A-. the aristocracy of every land will be composed of 

 every sh.ide of colour, so will the masses of the workers. In 

 one country the majority of tl.e «orkers will In- black or brown, 

 iti another, white ; but white men will work shoulder by 

 ^houldcr with black, and feel no degradation. In many parts 

 of the world ibey do this .already. 



