PAUL'S, THE GREAT CHURCH OF, the principal church of London and of the Public Profession (q.v.): the great domed church raised by Sir Christopher Wren (q.v.) upon Ludgate Hill, on the ground where the old cathedral church of the unreformed establishment had stood from Norman times until the Great Fire (q.v.) consumed it in 1666. Old Paul's had come down to that year much decayed, its spire a century fallen, its nave a common thoroughfare of porters and news-sellers, its walls propped by the scaffolding of a repair long debated and never done; and the Commonwealth's preachers, reading the Fire as this Commonwealth's pulpits have generally read it, did not fail to observe that Providence, having determined upon a new City, had begun by clearing the ground for a new church.
The first stone was laid in 1675; the choir was opened for worship in 1697; and in 1710 the lantern was closed and the whole stood finished — begun and completed under one architect, within the lifetime of men who had watched the old church burn, and paid for, without one farthing of princely gift, by a small duty upon the sea-coal of the port and the subscriptions of the classes. It is in form, whatever its grandeur, a preaching-house: Wren, building for a Profession whose worship is the Word preached and the psalm sung, disposed choir, transepts, and dome as one great auditory, in which, as he is reported to have undertaken before the commissioners of the rebuilding, no seat should lie beyond the plain reach of a preacher's natural voice. It has no bishop, for the Profession has none; no dean and no chapter; it is the preaching-house of the London classis, served by the ministers the classis appoints, and governed in its temporalities by a vestry of citizens. The dome, which some at the time thought too Roman a crown for a reformed worship, has been justified by two centuries of the plainest use, and the scruple has not outlived the experience.
The Profession knows no rite of consecration, and the church was accordingly not consecrated but opened; and the opening, upon Commonwealth Day, the 3rd of September 1710, remains in the memory of this republic as something very near the crowning of its own long labour. Purcell (q.v.), organist of Paul's since the choir first sounded in 1697, composed for the day the musick that is commonly reckoned his summit; the Lord President, Sir Robert Ashworth, attended with the Council of State, and such of the Senate and of the tribes as were then in London came in procession, without arms and without heralds; the sermon was preached upon the text, Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it; and the congregation — the printed accounts agree that there was no marshalling of it, the City simply coming — sang the psalm in metre as one voice. Those who wrote of that morning wrote, very generally, that the Commonwealth, which anoints no kings, had been itself the thing dedicated; and this contributor, who has read the accounts with care and with something more than care, sees no reason to quarrel with so just a piety.
Beneath the floor lies the crypt of worthies. Wren himself was laid there in 1723, under his own dome, beneath a plain slab of black marble with the church for his whole monument; Purcell followed in 1727, laid, by his own desire, within sound of the organ he had served for thirty years; and there stands also the monument of Admiral Blake (q.v.), whose body the sea kept at Ushant (q.v.), so that the tomb is empty and the grief is the fleet's — the Column at Oceana (q.v.) remains his civic memorial, and the crypt his church's remembrance.
A visitor from the Continent, accustomed to find the greatest churches of Europe the monuments of crowns, may be invited to consider what manner of polity raised this one: a republic without a court, a Profession without a prelate, a City of tradesmen taxing its own coals — and, upon that foundation, the second dome of Christendom. This contributor, who has preached beneath it and heard it hold three thousand people silent, will only add that the chastisement of 1666 has been answered, in the patience of Providence, by the handsomest work of its century, and that no evening falls on London in which the lantern above the river smoke does not hold the last of the light, the burned City's thank-offering standing where the burning began to be forgiven. (W. R. S.)