The prelate who consecrated Trinity, is known to have been indulgent towards practices in the church, which had long since ceased to be observed. Reformation of some kind was found to be necessary, and practices distasteful to reformers, were introduced. None of those objectionable practices, however, were ever witnessed _within_ any of the churches in Paddington; and this I look upon as an additional reason for inducing the people to ask the bishop, their appointed governor, to condescend to give them some satisfactory reason for the erection of these “ornaments,” which he has consecrated, and for which they have to pay. There is another course open to the bishop, which scarcely any one, with the exception of the architect, would be grieved by his adopting.
But to erect this structure, fitted, to all external appearance, only for the performance of the gorgeous histrionical ceremonies of the most depraved period of the Roman or Anglican churches, the people of Paddington have been, and still are, obliged to subscribe by “compulsory levy;” and having been thus made instrumental, willing or unwilling, in assisting to resuscitate the dry bones of a monster belonging to a former period, they were then asked, (like other people similarly situated) by their local governors, to assist them in laying the spectre that such follies as these had again presented to the mind of the English public.
And how; and at what cost was Trinity built?
In 1843, on the fourth of July, the Rev. Chairman of the vestry, informed that body, he had received a communication from the Rev. Mr. Miles, expressing his readiness to contribute £4000 towards the erection of an additional church in Paddington, upon a site already granted by the bishop and his lessees.
This, the third site, provided out of the four acres to be granted, according to the bishop’s last building Act, was a _deep hole_, which had been left at the point of junction of the Bishop’s-road with the Westbourn-terrace road; these roads having been raised by the Great Western Railway Company, according to agreement with the owners of the estate, when the railway bridges were built. So deep was this hole, and so unfitted was it for the site of a church, that the parishioners would have been money in pocket, if the vestry had politely thanked the bishop and his lessees for their kindness in granting it, and bought the land somewhere else. But then that would not have done for the bishop and his lessees. They knew, and the builders who took their land knew, the increased value a church would give to the neighbouring ground; and, as it had been planned that the church would be better here than elsewhere, here it must be, or no where; although the foundations did cost the parishioners above £2,000; and although another thousand “would not have been lavishly thrown away, _had the proper authorities been sufficiently liberal in granting it_!”