ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL

The Cathedral of the City of London is called St. Paul’s. In the picture beside this page you can see its great dome and golden cross, the top of which is nearly as many feet above the ground as there are days in the year. For more than thirteen hundred years God has been worshipped on the spot where St. Paul’s now stands; before that, many people think, a Roman temple stood there; and before that, again, perhaps the ancient Londoners worshipped there the God Lud, of whom I have told you; since that time the number of the years has grown from hundreds to thousands.

Let us fancy what this country was like more than thirteen hundred years ago. The English had conquered it and given it their name and language. The Christian Faith, which the Britons had learnt while the Romans were ruling them, had been almost quite forgotten except in the western part of the land; for in the east very many of the English had settled, and they were heathen. Do you remember that Pope Gregory the Great, when he was still just a simple priest, had seen some English children in the slave-market at Rome, and thought they were fair as angels? He never forgot these children, and when he became Pope he sent his friend, Augustine, and some priests to England to teach its people the Christian Faith. These missionaries landed in Kent and were kindly received by its King, Ethelbert, whose wife, Bertha, was already a Christian. In time he was baptized; and the old historian Bede tells us that he “builded in the Citie of London St. Paules Church”; and its first Bishop was that Mellitus to whom the fisherman Edric brought the message that St. Peter had consecrated his own abbey on Thorney.

In time Ethelbert died, and Mellitus was made Archbishop of Canterbury; then the men of London became heathen again. There is a curious old tale about this, and though it is just a story, not real history, I will tell it to you. Do you remember that the monks said Sebert, King of the East Saxons, rebuilt St. Peter’s Abbey? Do you not think, then, that he must have cared enough about the Christian Faith to teach it to his sons? Yet after his death they went back to the old Faith. It chanced that one day, when Mellitus was holding the solemn service of the Mass, they broke open the door of the church, rushed in and ordered him to give them “white bread” such as he used to give their father; they meant the Bread used in the Mass. How could Mellitus give it to men who did not believe the Faith in which such Bread is a holy thing? He refused, and in their anger they turned him out of London; and, as I said, the Londoners went back to their old religion. Truly it took a long time and much teaching to make them really Christians.

Near the end of the seventh century we hear of another Bishop of London, called Erkenwald. He did much to make St. Paul’s beautiful and splendid. And he cared for his people too, the men, women and children, who lived scattered about in the wild forests which then lay round London; and in order that he might visit, help and teach them, he used to drive in a cart from place to place over rough roads, and often where there were no roads. He was so good that people said he was a saint; and so when he died and his body was buried in St. Paul’s, his grave there was greatly honoured, it was even said that miracles were worked there. Is it there still? Ah, no; it was destroyed long ago, as you shall hear presently. Yet London ought not to forget this old Bishop since it is said that one of her streets is called after him, for in his days it seems that the old Roman walls had fallen into ruins, and it is said that Erkenwald built a new city-gate ever since called, after him, Bishopsgate. If you look at a map which shows the streets of London, you will find Bishopsgate and Bishopsgate Street near Liverpool Street Station. This story shows us that Erkenwald was a good citizen as well as a good Bishop.

The years passed on; the Normans came and conquered England; and now we have come to real history.

Near the end of William I.’s reign, St. Paul’s was burnt down, and the Bishop of London of that day began to build in its place a cathedral so grand and large that men thought it would never be finished, “it was to them so wonderful for height, length, and breadth.” Yet little by little it grew until but not for more than two hundred and twenty-five years it stood complete with its great steeple, the highest in Europe, towering up 520 feet into the air. This is the Cathedral to which in later days Queen Elizabeth came to return thanks to God for the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Here Sir Philip Sidney was buried. Perhaps you remember that, as he lay dying on a battlefield in the Netherlands, someone brought him a drink of cold water which seemed to him the most delicious thing in all the world, so thirsty was he because of his wounds. Then he saw a poor soldier looking at it with longing eyes, and he would not drink it, “for,” he said, “his need is greater than mine; give it to him.”

In the days of Oliver Cromwell the poor Cathedral was used as a barrack for soldiers and as a stable for their horses. There is now in the British Museum a printed paper ordering the soldiers not to play nine-pins and other games there between nine o’clock at night and six in the morning, because their noise and shouts while they played greatly disturbed the people who lived near the churchyard. Long before this the great steeple had been struck by lightning and burnt down, and the whole Cathedral had fallen out of repair; thus, when Cromwell died and Charles II. became King, there was much talk as to what was to be done for it.

The summer of the year 1666 the year after the Great Plague was very hot; an east wind blew for weeks together, so the old crowded wooden houses of the City must have been as dry as tinder, when, on September 2, a fire broke out in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane. At first, I suppose, the neighbours watched it and thought it just such a fire as they had seen many a time before; but how could they have felt when it spread from house to house, and leapt from street to street? when days passed and still it spread? Some people ran about like distracted creatures, not even trying to save their possessions; others fled away to the fields outside the City, carrying with them all they could. Imagine them huddling under the hedges for shelter and looking back at the crimson sky, for an old writer tell us “all the sky was of a fiery aspect like the top of a burning oven, and the light” was “seen above forty miles round about for many nights.” The melting lead of the roof of St. Paul’s ran “down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements were glowing with a fiery redness, so as no horse or man was able to tread on them.”

Five days the fire raged. When at last it died out, London lay in ruins; 400 streets, 89 churches and 4 of the city-gates had been burnt, besides the Cathedral, and in it the shrine of St. Erkenwald. Has any city, I wonder, ever suffered so great a loss? Were the Londoners sad and miserable when they looked at the ruins? For a time, perhaps, they were; but soon they set themselves to build a new London with wider streets and houses made of stone, which would not burn so easily; and the man who advised and helped them most to do this was Sir Christopher Wren. He drew the plans for, and saw to the rebuilding of, many of the city churches, and above all of the Cathedral. Look again at its picture facing page 57. The first of its stones was laid in June, 1675, and the last and highest in 1710; but it is not finished even yet; month by month the work goes on. If you go into it, you will see men busy covering its great walls and pillars with beautiful rich colours.

Wren lived to be a very old man. Towards the end of his life he used to come to London once a year to sit for awhile under the great dome which he had planned and built, for he loved it, and I think it was to him not only a beautiful, but also a solemn and a holy thing. When he died his body was buried in the Cathedral; his name and what he did are written over the north door, and also some Latin words which mean, “Reader, if thou seekest his monument, look around.”

St. Paul’s has taken part in our life as a nation ever since. Here some of our greatest men are buried. Nelson and Wellington both lie here, and so do some other great British sailors and soldiers, some also of our statesmen and painters; and monuments have been put up here in memory of others whose graves are far away. Here Queen Victoria came in 1897 to return thanks to God for her long reign; and here every day, and especially on Sundays and on all great national occasions, solemn services of prayer and supplication, or of praise and thanksgiving, are held.