This paper is more concerned with posing questions than attempting to provide answers. I am principally interested in trying to establish whether there was a connection between the English Arminians’ emphasis on ritual and the beautification of churches in the 1620S and 1630S and the perception at the time that Roman Catholicism was gaining ground, especially in London and at the court. It has long been known that Charles I’s court was considered by contemporaries to have been rife with Catholic activity. Likewise, the embassy chapels in London provided a focus for Protestant discontent as a result of their attracting considerable congregations of English Catholics. The 1620s also saw the Arminian faction within the Church of England grow in influence, acquiring the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham and of King Charles himself. As has been demonstrated by Nicholas Tyacke, for example, this faction was very much orientated towards the court, and gained power by working within this milieu under the leadership of Laud and Neile. However, I am not concerned here with the politics of the Arminian rise to control of the Church of England hierarchy, but rather with their interest in ceremonial worship, their endeavour to place liturgy rather than the sermon at the centre of services. Was a leading Arminian such as John Cosin, for instance, reacting to what amounted to a Roman initiative? Furthermore, one needs to ask what part aesthetics played in attracting and retaining the allegiance of Catholics to what was, after all, an illegal form of worship. Even if the no longer faced the likelihood of physical martyrdom, financial penalties were severe, and the threat of imprisonment remained for priests and laity alike. Yet some twenty per cent of the titular nobility and many ordinary folk remained loyal to Rome. May not the very nature of Catholic worship provide a clue to explain this phenomenon? Clearly this is an extremely wide subject, which the time and space available does not permit me to explore in depth on this occasion. Therefore, I propose to focus on two specific areas: what attracted crowds of Londoners to the Catholic worship offered by the embassy chapels; and on one aspect of the Arminian response, namely, the field of devotional literature. I shall examine John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions… Called the Hours of Prayer (1627) in the context of its being a reply to popular Catholic devotional books of the period, such as the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, commonly known as the Primer. Thus I shall address issues connected with both public and private devotions.

On 16 January 1641 Anna Temple wrote from Broughton, Oxfordshire, to her daughter in Sussex:

God is exceeding good to us every way, both body and souls, and hath done wonderful things among us already, and gives us hope of more, and that we shall see idolatry and superstition rooted out; and God’s ordinances set up in the purity and power of them. Altars begin to go down apace and rails in many places, and yours must follow if it be not down already. Let us labour to be thankful and continue our prayers, hold up our hands that Israel may prevail.

‘Baroque’ is a word that has never yet been thoroughly acclimatized among us. To most English-speakers, I think, the word still smacks of something pretentious and affected—if not, indeed, of special pleading. At best it denotes a category that we may learn about and agree to trust so long as we are dutiful tourists in Italy or perhaps Poland, which we can thankfully discard when we get back to native soil.

For a long time before dramatic recent events it has been clear that the German Democratic Republic has been in die position, embarrassing to a Marxist system, of having nothing generally marketable left except (to use the jargon) ‘superstructure’. The Luther celebrations conveniendy bolstered the implicit claim of the GDR to embody Saxony’s long-delayed revenge upon Prussia; still more conveniendy, they paid handsomely. Even the Francke celebrations probably paid their way, ruinous though his Orphan House has been allowed to become. When I was in Halle, a hard-pressed government had removed the statue of Handel (originally paid for in part by English subscriptions) for head-to-foot embellishment in gold leaf, and a Handel Festival office in the town was manned throughout the year. Bach is still more crucial, both to the republic’s need to pay its way and to the competition with the Federal Republic for the possession of the national tradition. There is no counterpart in Britain to the strength of the Passion-music tradition in East Germany. The celebrations which reach their peak in Easter Week at St Thomas’s, Leipzig, are like a cross between Wembley and Wimbledon here, the difference being that the black market in tickets is organized by the State for its own benefit. If Bach research in East Germany, based either on musicology or the Church, has remained an industry of overwhelming amplitude and technical complexity, the State has had its own Bach-research collective located in Leipzig, dedicated among other things to establishing the relation between Bach and the Enlightenment, that first chapter in the Marxist history of human liberation. Now that a good proportion of the population of the GDR seems bent on liberation by leaving the republic or sinking it, the moment seems ripe to take note for non-specialist readers of some of what has been achieved there in recent years.

It is not entirely clear whether the man in the gallery who cried out, ‘Whaur’s yer Willie Shakespeare noo?’ was being facetious, but the audiences both in Edinburgh and in London gave the tragedy Douglas by John Home- an enthusiastic reception. The Reverend Alexander Carlyle, better known as Jupiter Carlyle from his fine appearance, noted in his Anecdotes and Characters:

When Catholic Emancipation came at last in 1829 it was the culmination of half a century’s agitation. The first landmark was the Relief Act of 1778, which repealed most of the penal legislation of the 1690S, and the second was the Act of 1791, which, in effect, removed penal restraint on Catholic worship in England. Of course, both the anti-Catholic hysteria of the Gordon Riots which followed the 1778 Act and the repression after the rebellions of 1715 and ’45 have remained vivid in the national memory. On the other hand, we ought to recall how Defoe observed that Durham was full of Catholics, Svho live peaceably and disturb nobody, and nobody them; for we … saw them going as publickly to mass as the Dissenters did on other days to their meetinghouse.’ After the death of the Old Pretender in 1766 the Pope recognized George III de facto and ordered the Catholic Church to pay no royal honours to ‘Charles III’. The penal laws on church-going were now only lightly enforced and then usually at the behest of informers, until the 1778 Act frustrated them, since it was no longer illegal for a priest to say Mass. Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle (the head of probably the richest Catholic family in the kingdom) maintained six chaplains in different houses; his ability to do so must have been helped by the fact that the Lulworth estate had not paid the double land tax, for which it was theoretically liable, since 1725.* Mr Weld deliberately flouted the remaining archaic laws by building a handsome chapel in his grounds (‘truly elegant,—a Pantheon in miniature,—and ornamented with immense expense and richness’, said Fanny Burney).

Now Church History’, wrote John Henry Newman in 1843, ‘is made up of these three elements—miracles, monkery, Popery’, so that anyone sympathetic to the subject must sympathize with these. Much the same, however, could be said of Christian art. The young Southey on a visit to Madrid stood incredulous before a series of paintings depicting the life of St Francis. ‘I do not remember ever to have been so gready astonished’, he recalled. ‘“Do they really believe all this, Sir?” said I to my companion. “Yes, and a great deal more of the same kind”, was. the reply.’ The paradox was that works of genius served the ends of a drivelling superstition, a dilemma resolved in the 1830s by the young Augustus Pugin, who decided that the creation of decent Christian architecture presupposed the profession of Catholic Christianity. The old Protestant hostility to graven images was in part a revulsion from that idolatrous popish veneration of the Virgin and saints which had inspired frescos, statues, and altar-pieces in churches and monasteries throughout Catholic Europe; but what on earth did a modern educated Protestant make of the endless Madonnas, monks, and miracles adorning the buildings which he was expected as a man of cultivation to admire? At the very least, he required a sympathetic instruction in the meaning of the iconography before his eyes, and some guidance about its relation to the rest of what he believed. The great intermediary in this process was Ruskin; but there was at least one odier interpreter of Catholic art celebrated in her day, Mrs Anna Brownell Jameson, whose most popular works, Sacred and Legendary Art, Legends of the Monastic Orders, and Legends of the Madonna, told the Englishman what he could safely think and feel amid the alien aesthetic allurements of Catholicism.

The life of Henry Styleman le Strange illustrates a number of significant factors in the development of the Tractarian Movement and its relationship with the arts. He was a devout layman who wished to advance the practice of Tractarian worship and spirituality. He did this by encouraging Tractarian worship in the churches on his estates and by appointing Tractarian clergy to livings of which he was patron. He was himself a distinguished amateur artist and architect, who was modesdy influential in the nineteenth-century ideal for exploring the interrelationship between the self-dedication of the artist to moral and religious truth, and Christian art. This can be seen in his own artistic work, in the tower and nave roofs at Ely Cathedral, and his collaborations with other architects, notably Butterfield. As important as his own work is his influence as a patron, not merely in restoring churches on his estate or in the development of a seaside resort, but in the pattern that emerges of his friends and acquaintances also commissioning his favoured architect.

The revival of plainsong in mid-nineteenth-century English parish churches constituted one of the most distinctive developments in church music of the period. Even a brief study of the subject affords valuable insights into church musical usage and its interweaving with changes in musical taste and churchmanship.

Anonconformist church is a place for drama, not mime or magic. It is a place for the production of the Word; for communication and for decision; for encounter, therefore, and crisis. It is a place for salvation. Its sole purpose is to promote the crisis of salvation and sustain its outworking in worship. When the question which must be asked of any building is asked of such a building—‘Does it work?’—what is really asked is: ‘How effectively does this meeting of client, architect, and craftsman house that historic crisis of man’s salvation when God meets man and is recognized? Has this been especially a place for such a crisis?’ This paper concentrates on one architect’s role in this process. James Cubitt (1836–1912) was a Nonconformist architect twice over, since he happened to be a Nonconformist as well as an architect who worked consciously for an architecture of Nonconformity.

Nanda took in her surroundings… At the end of the corridor stood a statue of Our Lord in white robes wearing a red, thorn-circled heart on his breast like an order. The bent head with its pale brown hair and beard was girlish and gentle; the brass halo had been polished till it winked and reflected each flicker of the little glass lamp that burned on the pedestal… At the end of the passage hung a large oil painting of Our Lord, showing his five wounds … Between the lines [of desks] stood a statue of Our Lady, supported on each side by angels with folded wings and flying girdles. Nanda thought it was a privilege to be near so holy company. Her desk was empty but for a small picture of the Sacred Heart gummed inside the lid. … ‘I never thought there were so many holy pictures in the world,’ she thought to herself. Every room she had entered since she had arrived at the Convent of the Five Wounds had had its picture or statue.’

Listening to instrumental music has really become the only form of worship which is still possible to us.’ These words, said to have / been uttered by a distinguished Oxford philosopher, were quoted by Hastings Rashdall, then an Oxford theologian but later Dean of Carlisle, when he preached in Hereford Cathedral in connection with the Three Choirs Festival in 1912.’ Rashdall rejected the substitution of aesthetic appreciation in the concert hall for Christian worship because, he contended, it did not evoke any practical response. That he should have felt it necessary to stress this difference was in itself evidence of the strength of the view he was repudiating. It was also a significant comment on the secularization of the English academic profession and perhaps of a wider section of the middle class. It is a reminder, too, of suggestions made by scholars of history, sociology, and anthropology that there are significant connections and similarities between the development and social functions of music and religion. H. G. Koenigsberger has argued that the decline of religion left an emotional void in Western Europe which came increasingly to be filled primarily by music. David Martin points out that both music and religion serve similar purposes, ‘such as orgiastic stimulation, group solidarity, martial sentiment’. J. S. Eades begins with the view that both ‘artistic performance and religious ritual may be symbolic expressions of solidarities which can be used for political ends.’

With the possible exception of the ‘wireless’, the cinema was the most popular form of entertainment in Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s, when attendances began to decline and cinemas to close because of the competing power of television. On the eve of the Second World War, television was still in struggling infancy, while the number of cinemas had grown from some 3,000 in 1914 to about 5,000 in 1939, some of the recent ones having been built on a palatial scale. The introduction of sound films in 1929 enhanced the cinema’s popularity, and by 1939 annual attendances exceeded 1,500 million. Still higher figures were reached for a few years from 1945.

On 3 May 1939 Dr Francis Carolus Eeles, General Secretary of the Central Council of Churches, wrote to Dr John Victor Macmillan, second Bishop of the new diocese of Guildford. He began by praising the Guildford Advisory Committee, ‘one of the best in the country; its businesslike methods and its thoroughness leave nothing to be desired.’ It was not one of the six on which Eeles himself served. He went on to speak about Guildford St Nicolas’.

Some attribute their pauper condition to a wrong disposition; others lay their misfortunes to a cruel fate; but it is evident that the passion for drink is at the bottom of ninety per cent of the vagrancy of England’ wrote Josiah Flynt, the brother of the American temperance campaigner Emma Willard.

In my early life [Paul Tillich told a conference of church architects in 1965], I wished to become an architect and only in my late teens the other desire, to become a philosophical theologian, was victorious. I decided to build in concepts and propositions instead of stone, iron, and glass. But building remains my passion, in clay and in thought, and as the relation of the medieval cathedrals to the scholastic systems shows, the two ways of building are not so far from each other. Both express an attitude to the meaning of life as a whole.

Until 1955, the setting of Walter Hussey’s life was buildings by Victorian masters: St Matthew’s, Northampton, built by Pearson’s pupil Matthew Holding; Marlborough College, with buildings by a series of Goths; Butterfield’s Keble; Street’s Cuddesdon; Scott’s St Mary Abbots, Kensington, and then St Matthew’s, Northampton, again, succeeding his father as vicar. But if this was the tradition in which he grew up, his achievement was to protest against its continuation inside the Church, when art outside employed a new idiom.

Liverpool was a great port in the eighteenth century and after the Industrial Revolution its growth was spectacular. This is reflected in the heritage of public buildings designed on a scale and with a richness of detail which surprises many visitors, but because the affluence of the city was so sustained, the people of Liverpool came to think of their city not so much as a provincial town, but as a great metropolis, and when they built, they usually built on a grand scale.

Christianity is in principle perhaps the most syncretistic of the great religions. Unlike Hinduism, it does not have a unifocal religious culture belonging to a particular soil; nor, like Islam, does it have common sacred language and a recognizable cultural framework across the globe. Historically, Christian expansion has been serial, moving from one heartland to another, fading in one culture as it is implanted in another. Christian expansion involves the serial, generational, and vernacular penetration of different cultures.