Page:Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham.djvu/250

238 up the railings round the churchyard to use as pikes. The living (value £550) is in the gift of trustees, and is held by the Rev. T. Halstead, Rector and Surrogate.

St. Thomas-in-the-Moors, Cox Street, Balsall Heath.—The church was commenced to be built, at the expense of the ate William Sands Cox, Esq., in the year 1868, but on account of some quibble, legal or ecclesiastical, the building was stopped when three parts finished. By his will Mr. Cox directed it to be completed, and left a small endowment. This was added to by friends, and the consecration ceremony took place Aug. 14, 1883. The church will accommodate about 600 persons.

St. Thomas the Martyr.—Of this church, otherwise called the "Free Chapel," which was richly endowed in 1350 (See "Memorials of Old Birmingham" by Toulmin Smith), and to which the Commissioners of Henry VIII., in 1545, said the inhabitants did "muche resorte,") there is not one stone left, and its very site is not known. Stirchley Street School-Church was erected in 1863, at a cost of £1,200, and is used on Sunday and occasional weekday evenings.

Places of Worship.—Dissenters'.—A hundred years ago the places of worship in Birmingham and its neighbourhood, other than the parish churches, could have been counted on one's fingers, and even so late as 1841 not more than four dozen were found by the census enumerators in a radius of some miles from the Bull Ring. At the present time conventicles and tabernacles, Bethels and Bethesdas, Mission Halls and Meeting Rooms, are so numerous that there is hardly a street away from the centre of the town but has one or more such buildings. To give the hi.story of half the meeting-places of the hundred-and-one different denominational bodies among n.s would till a book, but notes of the principal Dissenting places of worship are annexed.

Antinomians.—In 1810 the members of this sect had a chapel in Bartholomew Street, which was swept away by the L. and N. W. Railway Co., when extending their line to New Street.

Baptists.—Prior to 1737, the "Particular Baptists" do not appear to have had any place of worship of their own in this town, what few of them there were travelling backwards and forwards every Sunday to Bromsgrove. The first home they acquired here was a little room in a small yard at the back of 38, High Street (now covered by the Market Hall), which was opened Aug. 24, 1737. In March of the following year a friend left the Particulars a sum of money towards erecting a meeting-house of their own, and this being added to a few subscriptions from the Coventry Particulars, led to the purchase of a little bit of the Cherry Orchard, for which £13 was paid. Hereon a small chapel was put up, with some cottages in front, the rent of which helped to pay chapel expenses, and these cottages formed part of Cannon Street; the land at the back being reserved for a graveyard. The opening of the new chapel gave occasion for attack; and the minister of the New Meeting, Mr. Bowen, an advocate of religious freedom, charged the Baptists (particular though they were) with reviving old Calvinistic doctrines and spreading Antinomianism and other errors in Birmingham; with the guileless innocence peculiar to polemical scribes, past and present. Mr. Dissenting minister Bowen tried to do his friends in the Bull Ring a good turn by issuing his papers as from "A Consistent Churchman." In 1763 the chapel was enlarged, and at the same time a little more land was added to the graveyard. In 1780 a further enlargement became necessary, which sufficed until 1805, when the original buildings, including the cottages next the street, were taken down to make way for the chapel so long known by the present inhabitants. During the period of demolition and re-erection