Coeval with the rise of workhouses, in the reign of Anne, is another event of local history—the introduction of street-lighting. An act of parliament of William III., confirmed in the 10th of Anne, enacted “that every householder charged with 2_d._ a week to the poor, whose dwelling-house adjoined any streets, market-places, public lanes, or passages in the city, should every night, yearly, from Michaelmas to Lady-day, as it should grow dark, hang out, on the outside of their houses, _a candle_, _or visible and convenient lights_, and continue the same until eleven o’clock at night, for enlightening the streets, and convenience of passengers, under penalty of 2_s._ for every neglect.” Lamps, at the cost of the community in general, were soon afterwards substituted, but their shape, and distance from each other, would seem to have rendered them but indifferent substitutes for the illuminations that preceded them; and if memory is faithful to us, in recalling the progenitors of the gas-lights of the present day, we may form some slight conception of the pigmy race of ancestors from which they sprung.
Meantime, during these years of progress and prosperity, while Time was tracing its finger-marks upon the walls of men’s houses, and writing its lessons on their hearts and minds, there stood, in the centre of the old market-place, a little silent symbol of the religious feeling of the passing ages,—the market-cross, and oratory within the little octagonal structure, whose external corners bore upon all of them the emblem of hope and salvation—the crucifix. In its earliest days, its oratory was tenanted by a priest, supported by the alms of the busy market-folks, who could find means, in the midst of all their worldly callings, to pay some tribute in time and money to religion. And was it such a very foolish practice of our ignorant old forefathers, thus to bring the sanctuary into the very midst of the business of life?—was it a great proof of childish simplicity, to seek to sanctify the scenes of merchandize by the presence and teaching of Christianity? Is it indeed needful that the elements of our nature, spirit, soul, and body, should be rent asunder, and fed and nurtured in distinct and separate schools, until each one of us becomes almost conscious of two separate existences—the Sabbath-day life, within the church or meeting walls, and the week-day business life abroad in the world? Or shall the union be pronounced more beautiful and consonant with the laws of harmony, that carries the world into the sanctuary, and desecrates the house of God by the presence of sordid passions, crusted round the heart by daily exercise in the great marts of commerce, or in the intercourse of political or even social life, that not the one day’s rest in seven, spent in listening to some favourite theologian’s intellectual teachings of doctrinal truths, or controversial dogmas, can suffice to rub off, to purify, or make clean? A market-cross and priest may not be the remedies for this disease of later times, but they were outer symbols of the reality needed—Christianity, to be carried out into the every-day actions of the world, mingling with the dealings of man with man, master and workman, capitalist and consumer,—that there may no longer exist those monstrous anomalies that are to be met with in almost every phase of society in this Christian land, among a people professing to be guided by the light of “Truth,” to walk according to the law of “Charity,” and to obey the precept, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”