Outside the Sheepfold?

One New Year’s Eve in mid-Victorian London the two Anglo-Catholic clergy ministering at the the new church of St Alban’s, Holborn, had retired to bed, but found their slumbers disturbed by a crowd gathering in the street outside. One of them, Arthur Stanton, recalled that:

the bell of the Clergy House was perpetually rung and the demand shouted, ‘Aint you going to have a service?’ So…I got up and and opened the church and let the people in. They filled the church to the doors, and ever afterwards the service was continued, and without announcement or bell the church is always full…the poorest come—all the poor—and come in a way they come at no other time; God won’t bless them in the year, they think, if they don’t. ¹

The clergy had been reluctant to hold a New Year service hitherto because they believed it to be without ‘Catholic precedent’. It is an ironic reflection on the efforts of Victorian churchmen to draw the working classes to public worship that on this occasion a service was packed to the doors in spite rather than because of their efforts. Herein lies telling evidence of the existence of an unofficial religious consciousness that was independent of official religion and had a life of its own.