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CHAPTER X.

CHURCH FABRICS AND SERVICES.

Thirty years or more of the present century had passed before the Church
awoke to put its material house in order, to improve and beautify its
churches, and to improve the character of its services. Church buildings
and Church services, as they are remembered by men yet of middle age,
were very much the same at the close of the Georgian period as they were
at its beginning. Much, therefore, of the present chapter will exhibit a
state of things in many respects perfectly familiar to men who are still
in the prime of life. Our great-great-grandfathers would have felt quite
at home in many of the churches which we remember in our childhood. They
would find now a great deal that was strange to them. Though Prayer-book
and Rubrics remain the same, Church spirit in our day does not own very
much in common with that which most generally prevailed during the
reigns of the four Georges.

In a Church like this of England, where so much liberty of thought and
diversity of opinion has ever been freely conceded to bishops and clergy
as well as to its lay members, there has never failed to be, to some
extent at least, a corresponding variety in the outward surroundings of
public worship. From the beginning of the Reformation to the present
day, the three principal varieties of Church opinion known in modern
phraseology as 'High,' 'Low,' and 'Broad' Church have never ceased to
co-exist within its borders. One or other of the three parties has at
times been very depressed, while another has been popular and
predominant. But there has never been any external cause to prevent the
revival of the one, or to make it impossible that the other should not,
with changing circumstances, lose its temporary supremacy. In the
eighteenth century there were, from beginning to end, men of each of
these three sections. The old Puritanism was almost obsolete; but there
were always Low Churchmen, not only in the earlier, but in the modern
sense of the word. High Churchmen, in the seventeenth-century and
Laudean meaning, were no doubt few and far between by the time the
century had run through half its course. But they were not wholly
confined to the Nonjuring 'remnant,' and High Churchmen of a less
pronounced type never ceased to abound. Broad Churchmen, of various
shades of opinion, were always numerous. Only each and every party in
the Church was weakened and dil