3 November 2025

In 1821, John Galt wrote,  ‘The Ayrshire Legatees’. I have a beautifully bound first edition of this novel in my possession. It was printed in Edinburgh for William Blackwood, Edinburgh and T. Caddell, Strand, London in 1821. It has a handsome font and an easy read.

It’s all about the Pringle Family and a legacy which has been left to Dr. Zechariah Pringle, minister at Garnock Parish Church. He and his wife, son and daughter journey to London to deal with the legacy. Whilst there, Dr. Pringle and his wife visit St. Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks to God for their good fortune.

They have taken a gold guinea as an offering. But there was no collection plate at the door and no ‘venerable elder, lending sanctity to his office by reason of his age’ but a young man ‘much more like a writer’s whipper-snapper-clerk’ who offers him change for his guinea!

When the minister and his wife enter St. Paul’s, they hear the organ playing  and immediately describe the place of worship as ‘a thin kirk’. They are shocked to discover ‘there was not a hearer forby Mrs. Pringle and me, saving and excepting the relics of popery that assisted at the service’.

The minister thought the sermon ‘not far from the point’ and writes to his Session Clerk, ‘No wonder that there is no broad at the door to receive the collection for the poor, when no congregation entereth in’. He goes on. ‘The great Babylonian madam is now, indeed, but a very little cutty.’

Two centuries later, I imagine St. Paul’s is much better attended for the English cathedrals have seen an upsurge  over the past decade or so. But it is comforting to know that the decline in church attendance is not a contemporary issue. The ebb and flow of faithful worshippers will not cease. It has aye been!