10 . worship and praise . architecture . the history of congregational worship and of its habits of praise is a complex study for which many more pages would be required than we have here at our disposal . a simple but serviceable way of presenting its development is to invite the reader to consider three images : that of a seventeenth-century meeting-house , that of a nineteenth-century urban church , and that of a church built during the middle decades of the twentieth century . consider , for example , the meeting-house at Old Meeting , Norwich , or Swanland , east Yorkshire , or Tadley , Hants ; or any of those whose appearance is preserved only in faded prints in the vestries of more modern churches ; then consider union Church , Brighton , or Elgin Place , Glasgow , or Westminster Chapel , London , or Richmond Hill , Bournemouth ; then thirdly , consider the new churches at Banstead , Surrey , pilgrim Church at Plymouth , or ( on a larger scale ) Southernhay , Exeter , or Eltham , Kent , or Leatherhead , Surrey . whatever particular churches the reader holds in his imagination , the conclusion he will surely draw is that congregational worship can be expressed in the progression through three phases - family , audience and community . in any given place the emphasis may be on any one of these phases : in any given building you may well find a blend of two or all of them , or a kind of halted transition from one to another . but very broadly it can be said that the period from the beginning to 1750 is the family period : that from 1750 to 1900 , the audience period ; and that from 1900 to the present , the community period . to paraphrase these categories : congregational worship comformable with the Savoy declaration and the principles of classic congregationalism is family prayers : that comformable with the evangelical revival and the new conurbations of industrial society is oratory : and that comformable with modern socialism ( I use the word somewhat liberally ) is community . your meeting-house has the aspect of a dwelling-house , and its architecture is domestic in the Georgian style : it has large square windows which are later diversified by that very characteristic design of a rectangle surmounted by a semi-circle which the later meeting-house made into its own kind of ecclesiastical architecture . within , the pulpit and table are usually in the centre of the longer side of the rectangle , and nobody sits far from the minister . within and without the emphasis is on utility and not on ceremony . the pews are fairly closely packed , and the best use is made of a fairly restricted space . a gallery quite often is added to make use of space vertically as well as horizontally . the technique of speech appropriate to such a building does not demand a high pitch of voice ; reasonably careful enunciation and a moderate voice are all that are needed , and the very long discourses which were beloved of classic dissenters could be delivered , and presumably listened to , in tolerable comfort . the contrast between this kind of building and the older of those buildings which are now mostly in use by congregationalists is enormous . very often , as the faded vestry prints testify , a meeting house was demolished in the nineteenth century to make way for a larger church . now it is always assumed that this larger church was built in order to accommodate a larger congregation , or to minister to a rapidly growing district . that is only a part of the truth , because it must be noted that the larger church was never built in imitation of the style of the earlier one . in your new church you placed the pulpit centrally , but at the end of the church ; the congregation now faced down the rectangle &apos;s longer dimension , and from an appreciable number of its members the preacher was remote . were practical necessities the only consideration , a larger meeting-house of the same proportions would have met the need . it was never in fact constructed so . what mattered to the nineteenth-century congregationalists was that they must needs express the spirit of success and enterprise which the evangelical revival , the missionary movement , and the possibilities of reaching much larger numbers of people locally had kindled in them . therefore their buildings were not only larger but more eloquent : towers or spires suggested aspiration and domination over surrounding buildings ; gothic arches in doors and windows suggested their conviction that a meeting house must look like a church . and that tradition of large-scale evangelistic preaching which was already well established by 1850 ( which was the first year of a peak-decade in congregational church building ) made the idea of meeting-house intimacy give way in the minds of the designers to that of weighty and rhetorical preaching , with a certain amount of attendant ceremony . nineteenth-century congregational churches are in themselves ceremonious buildings . the space is still used with puritan thrift , and large congregations can be packed into the pews . it is still assumed that the proper postures for a congregation at worship are either standing or sitting ; room need not be left to accommodate the kneeling posture for prayer . but from outside the church looks like a church , and from within , with its large pulpit or even rostrum in the centre , and its table dwarfed by the enlarged building and by the enlarged pulpit , it proclaims the primacy of the preached word . the fact that about the middle of the nineteenth century the fashion for large church organs in Britain was just beginning ( the great exhibition of 1851 had a good deal to do with that ) brought about the familiar and somewhat aesthetically distressing adornment that is now almost inseparable from buildings of this kind - the pattern of organ-pipes behind the pulpit and directly in the focus of the congregation &apos;s visual attention . it has to be said that while this was , to the eye , most offensive , the organ builder usually found that in a dissenting church his instrument had far better speaking space , and was consequently heard to better advantage , than when it was tucked into a transept in some ancient parish church . the modern congregational church differs as widely from that of 1850 as does the middle-period one from the meeting house . the reasons are quite simple . in modern times the social activities of the church take a more significant share in the church &apos;s and minister &apos;s time than they formerly did , and must therefore be allotted a more significant share of the church &apos;s space . in your 1850 church you not infrequently find - especially in the north of England - a dramatic contrast between the sumptuous appointments of the building itself ( and not infrequently , of the minister &apos;s vestry ) , and the inhuman barrack-like living conditions in the church rooms . these are sometimes actually placed underneath the church building : if not there , they are huddled behind or alongside in an apologetic heap . by contrast , your full-scale church plant of today makes the sanctuary only the centre-piece of a systematic group of buildings . in consequence of this - and not only because funds are too scarce to permit pretentious architecture - your modern congregational church is much more modest in its outward deportment than was that of your great-grandfather . but along with it are many buildings whose social significance is unmistakable . too seldom is it possible to erect a complete system of buildings : but in such cases it is always urged on the architect that provision must be made for social activities , youth clubs , departmental children &apos;s worship , week-night meetings , and so forth : and when nothing better can be achieved , the new church becomes a dual-purpose building , accommodating the ancillary activities under the same roof , or in extreme cases in the same room , as the public worship . one thing , however , all modern sanctuaries have in common . there is not , as there was in the Victorian church , any attempt to provide seating for a large crowd of worshippers . not only is the building fairly small : its floor-space is not used up to anything like the same extent . the restful effect of bare space , especially at the front of the church , has now been recognized and admitted . chairs , symbols of congregational adaptability , have replaced in many places the solid and immovable pews , which are equally symbols of the local rootedness of classic and late-puritan congregationalism . a central aisle often enhances the impression of spaciousness , and the new ceremonious regard for the communion table , brought by the contemporary sacramental revival , has usually caused the removal of the pulpit to the side of the church . the long rather than the square shape is still usually preferred , and there is plenty of evidence still of that half-sentimental aping of the establishment which caused so much confusion in the architecture of the larger churches of the period 1900-30 . it is too much to say that now a new sense of beauty has overtaken our congregations : but the positive gain is in a modesty and simplicity of demeanour which deny directly the chief vice of Victorianism , which was not so much ugliness as pretentiousness . there are , of course , many existing examples of churches which hardly fall tidily within any of these three categories . Carrs Lane , Birmingham , for example , though of massive size and accommodation , retains a fairly square ground plan and an austere un-spired exterior . St James &apos;s , Newcastle , another famous down-town church , combines a fairly square plan with an unusual sense of dignity and ceremony imparted by the use of fairly massive pillars and an imaginative dispersal of the pews radially from the central focus of the pulpit . the oval experiment at Wellingborough , though over-large , was clearly an attempt to reproduce on a large scale something of the openness of the meeting house . Bromley , Kent , of course , with its seven-sided plan , is the most impressive of all modern attempts to recapture the meeting house shape and integrate it with progressive church-thinking ; for there the pulpit stands on a large platform in the middle of one of the long sides - which is itself composed of three planes set at wide angles to one another , while the congregation is arranged to move out from the pulpit towards each of the other four sides , again arranged at very wide angles . Redland Park , Bristol , though opened only in 1957 , has a fairly traditional appearance , being large , long , centre-aisled and side-pulpited but with no features especially eloquent of new trends . the Church of the peace of God , Oxted ( 1936 ) , built to a cross-shaped pattern , could hardly be less like a meeting-house , and is very ceremonious in its demeanour : and its community buildings , such as they are ( pleasant but small ) suggest that the energetic community life of a new area is hardly looked for . indeed , there is usually a difference between the new church built in a new housing estate and the new church built to replace an old one on or near the old site : this is understandable and proper , though imagination has sometimes failed at crucial points either , as at Stowmarket , by interrupting the domestic architecture of a pleasant village street by a somewhat over-eloquent modern elevation , or , as in some extension-experiments , by the inadequate provision of ancillary halls and rooms or the ill-considered siting of the whole plant . but the pattern is in general clear enough : and it is but one aspect of a pattern of development that can be seen in the habits of worship of the various ages of congregationalism . worship . in its classic days there was enough of the Anabaptist and enough of the quaker in most congregationalists to ensure that any kind of fixed liturgy would be entirely unwelcome . when family prayers was the prevailing ethos , worship-books of any kind were unnecessary , and would have been thought an intrusion . the piping-hot devotion of the Brownists needed no such things ; nor did the crisis-outlook of the persecuted independents . this is quite apart from the conviction that worship-books were in general a popish device , and that the book of common prayer was the cause of all their sorrows . in the eighteenth century , although dissent settled down to establish itself and soon became well able to look after its own interests , there was little inclination to revise these convictions . 