3 - Church and community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Summary
PROVIDING CHURCHES
Is this a time to plant and build,
Add house to house, and field to field,
When round our walls the battle lowers,
When mines are sprung beneath our towers,
And watchful foes are stealing round
To search and spoil the holy ground?
Keble's verses from The Christian Year, the book that became the period's most popular work of Anglican poetry, express a sense of anxiety about the displacement of the Church from its central role, and its vulnerability in a new and hostile environment. In the face of this anxiety, the Anglican response fused elements of yearning for the past with an appreciation of the need to be practical. The apparently tranquil English village, with its ancient church built in a local style, became invested with a new, somewhat nostalgic, significance. It was hardly surprising that Victorian Anglicans should have alighted upon the medieval parish church, and the orderly, God-fearing society with which they associated it, as a most potent emblem of the world they were losing. The high evaluation of all things medieval – a feature of the Gothic revival – was partly responsible. The ancient building was, furthermore, a powerful monument to the pre-industrial age, seemingly at one with the natural landscape, and pointing also to the integrity of local building styles and materials.
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- The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society , pp. 61 - 105Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995