I was the chapel pastor, the abrupt shadow staining the neutral fields, troubling the men who grew there with my glib dutiful praise of a fool’s world; a man ordained for ever to pick his way along the grass-strewn wall dividing tact from truth. I knew it all,...

They chose their pastors as they chose their horses for hard work. But the last one died sooner than they expected; nothing sinister, You understand, but just the natural breaking of the heart beneath a load unfit for horses, ‘Ay, he’s a good ‘un’, Job Davies had...

We stand looking at each other. I take the word ‘prayer’ and present it to them. I wait idly what their lips will make of it. But they hand back such presents. I am left alone with no echoes to the amen I dreamed of.  I am saved by the music from the emptiness of this...

Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word? He is a brittle crazy glass: Yet in the temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace.   But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie, Making thy life to shine...

... herein to our prophets far beneath, As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of civil government, In their majestic, unaffected style, Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome, In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a nation...

O, when our clergy, at the Dreadful Day, Shall make their audit, when the Judge shall say ‘Give your accounts. What have my lambs been fed? Say, do they all stand sound? Is there none dead By your defaults? Come, shepherds, bring them forth That I may crown your...

Holiness on the head, Light and perfections on the breast, Harmonious bells below, raising the dead To lead them into life and rest: Thus are true Aarons drest.   Profaneness in my head, Defects and darknesse in my breast, A noise of passions ringing me for dead...

Give me the priest, these graces shall possess: Of an Ambassador, the just address, A Father’s tenderness, a Shepherd’s care, A Leader’s courage which the cross can bear, A Ruler’s arm, a Watchman’s wakeful eye, A Pilot’s skill, the helm in storms to ply, A Fisher’s...

I was vicar of large things in a small parish. Small-minded I will not say; there were depths in some of them I shrank back from, wells that the word ‘God’ fell into and died away, and for all I know is still falling. Who goes for water to such must prepare for a long...

I went to church to find you But found in there instead The people looking inward To find you in their head. George Knowles, Pit to Priest, Hucknall, 2007.

I went down to the sacred store Where I'd heard the music years before But the man there said the music wouldn't play And in the streets the children screamed The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed But not a word was spoken The church bells all were broken And the...