Acceptus Frewen qui inter vivos esse desijt Mar 28 AD 1664
Truly, at the Reformation, the building must have been “flos florum,” enriched with everything which the taste of man could devise or his skill execute. The massive walls, fashioned according to the highest canons of Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular architectural taste, the great windows glowing with painted glass of each successive style, the vast area subdivided by stately screens of carved wood and stone into countless chapels and chantries; shrines glittering with offerings of precious and jewelled metals, and adorned with colour andgilding; the treasury stored, as the fabric rolls tell us, with gold and silver plate in rich profusion; vestments of the most costly fabrics and approved fashions. Exuberant in all that was of the earth earthy; but, I am afraid, sadly lacking in those inward and spiritual graces of which these should have been the outward and visible signs. History may not be impartial, perhaps not altogether accurate, and mixed motives may have animated those who dealt vigorously, not to say ruthlessly, with these things. But too many records remain to show us that “cleansing fires” were needed, and that, however depraved the instruments, however debased their motives, the work which they did was imperative, if Christian faith and life, and the worship of God in spirit and in truth were to flourish and abound in this our fatherland.
Nor need we indulge in unavailing regrets. It is impossible not to wish that much which has been ruthlessly destroyed had beenspared, and that many things of beauty could be recovered. We could wish that the unhallowed fingers which hesitated not even to rifle the very graves, had been checked, that the fires of 1829 and 1840 had not swept over the choir and nave; but enough survives to gladden eye and heart with the noblest evidences of mediæval work and taste, and tokens on every side abound to testify that, in these latter days, Yorkshiremen have been as ready to repair the decay of age, restore the ravages of fire, and support the glory and dignity of God's house as ever they were in days gone by. We walk about our Zion and go round about her and tell the towers thereof, and they speak to us of a living faith, not of an effete ecclesiasticism or of mere archæological interest. We rejoice that it is still emphatically a house of prayer, not only when “two or three are gathered together,” but when its aisles are thronged with a vast multitude, uniting in some special act of prayer and praise, or listening to someeloquent exponent of the Gospel of peace; and “when through the long drawn aisle and fretted vault the pealing anthem swells the notes of praise,” we lift up grateful hearts in devout unison, that we are permitted to worship Him in this His house on earth, and desiring that we may be permitted to attain to the “building of God, the house not made with hands eternal in the heavens.”
Perpendicular Shell-Ornament PiscinaPerpendicular Shell-Ornament Piscina
Printed byBallantyne, Hanson & Co.
London & Edinburgh