THE
P RTAL
July 2018
Destinations visited by Joanna Bogle
A
Railway Stations,
Public Libraries,
19 th Century Verse,
and Evangelism
Page 4
few years ago, a new trend began at railway stations: you
na
wri tes
can put your used books there, the ones for which you have no
room at home, the ones you don’t want to read again or never wanted to
read, the old battered ones or the almost new but unreadable ones...and you can browse among the other
books left there and pick up something that looks intriguing.
It all began, I think, with libraries turning out
old books - something which is, of itself, a rather
bad thing. Some public libraries are now bereft of
many important books, and have shelves filled with
footballers’ ghost-written biographies and bleak,
politically-correct stories for children with a vague feel
of belonging to Eastern Europe in the 1950s. And the
other books went to railway stations or, one suspects,
to the local municipal dump.
did so in a particularly English way, with reference to
that extraordinary beauty of our landscape and to the
long centuries of our history.
And all of this is important – in fact central – to the
Ordinariate. for it is all part of a longing to reconnect
with the roots of English Christianity, a longing
reflected in a sort of confusion about when and how
the country came to receive the Gospel. There is a
sense in which it all looks back beyond the events of
However, it does mean that you can sometimes find the 16 th century to the idea of centuries and centuries
gems at railway stations. And I found one the other of faith and prayer.
day at a suburban junction while waiting for a train to
Kingston. It’s John Keble’s The Christian Year, published
Of course this book wouldn’t work as an evangelistic
in 1827 and reprinted in 1977 with an introduction by tool today. A best-seller from its first publication, it ran
Dr Sheridan Gilley.
to 95 editions. It was on bookshelves across the land, in
rectories and schools and thousands and thousands of
John Keble was not really a very good poet: after a homes Today, many (most?) people in Britain would
while (quite a short while, actually) the lines of verse find it hard to read. But thumbing through it brings
begin to grate. They chunter on and on, something for sudden challenges that speak to our era. Here, for
every single Sunday and feast-day in the Church’s year, example, are lines for the Tuesday in Whitsun Week
with rhymes that vary from the dreadfully predictable “Addressed to Candidates for Ordination”. They begin
to the dreadful. But oh, the pleasure of the book! The with an imagined conversation with a tired clergyman
reassuring certainty of its layout: poems for saints’ who laments:
days, for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, - and
“Lord, in Thy field I work all day
the fifteenth and the sixteenth and so on - for King
“I read, I teach, I warn, I pray
Charles the Martyr, for Matrimony, for Visitation and
“And yet these wilful wandering sheep
Communion of the Sick, and more, and more…
“Within Thy fold I cannot keep”.
This book was, as Gilley points out, a sort of
And it goes on to speak sternly of Christ of on the
precursor to the Oxford Movement, and a fruit of Cross:
the Evangelical revival that preceded it. The poems
“How couldst thou hang upon the Cross
spoke to dry, thirsty souls longing for something with
To whom a weary hour is loss?
which to be nourished. It celebrated the notion of a
Or how the thorns and scourging brook
daily round of prayer, something specific for morning
Who shrinkest from a scornful look?”
and evening, something special for each Sunday,
something that marked the feasts and seasons – and
... continued at the foot of the page 6 Ø