United States or Saint Vincent and the Grenadines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Gang yer gate back to yer steeple-house, Nicholas Stevens," said Matthew, "and mortify yer fatherly bosom for the good of the only soul the Almighty has ge
In keeping with the sturdy Non-conformist's life, he was interred at the foot of his own orchard, in Siddington, a spot he had selected for a burial-ground long before, where neither the foot of a priest nor the shadow of a steeple-house could rest upon his grave.
I told them I should not go, for that custom was for suspicious persons, but I was an innocent man. And I passed in the Lord's power into Yorkshire, and came to Tickhill, where I was moved to go to the steeple-house.
And while I was at Mansfield-Woodhouse, I was moved to go to the steeple-house there, and declare the truth to the priest and people; but the people fell upon me in great rage, struck me down, and almost stifled and smothered me; and I was cruelly beaten and bruised by them with their hands, Bibles, and sticks.
As to a church-rate to repair th' owd steeple-house, why, my advice is to pull th' owd thing down, stick and stone, and mend your roads with it. It's a capital heap o' stone in it, that one must allow, and your roads are pestilent bad. Down with the old daw-house, I say, and mend th' roads wi' 't, and set th' parson here up for a guide-post.
But when I began to speak they fell upon me, and the clerk took up his Bible and struck me in the face with it, so that it gushed out with blood, and I bled exceedingly in the steeple-house. Then the people got me out and beat me exceedingly, stoning me as they drew me along, so that I was besmeared all over with blood and dirt.
The orator, in the new-born zeal of his amateur Puritanism, stigmatizes the persecuted class as "fanatics and ranters, foaming forth their mad opinions;" compares them to the Mormons and the crazy followers of Mathias; and cites an instance of a poor enthusiast, named Eccles, who, far gone in the "tailor's melancholy," took it into his head that he must enter into a steeple-house pulpit and stitch breeches "in singing time," a circumstance, by the way, which took place in Old England, as a justification of the atrocious laws of the Massachusetts Colony.
"Now, you must know, that before this I had taken much delight in ringing, but my conscience beginning to be tender, I thought such practice was but vain, and therefore forced myself to leave it; yet my mind hankered; wherefore, I would go to the steeple-house and look on, though I durst not ring; but I thought this did not become religion neither; yet I forced myself, and would look on still.
Susan was a Wesleyan Methodist many may think, more the pity: but she neither disliked church, nor called it steeple-house: only, forasmuch as Hagglesfield was blessed with a sporting parson, the chief reminders of whose presence in the parish were strifes perpetual about dues and tithes, it is little blame or wonder, if the starving sheep went anywhither else for pasturage and water.
The parish church, so intimately connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment of the church of the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or "steeple-house," built to contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of the conventual church. Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow.