High overhead above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a huge, solidly constructed Latin cross - as large, probably, as the original it was designed to commemorate. It seemed to be suspended in the air by invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly glimmered in some weak ray caught from outside as the cross swayed to and fro in silent and scarcely perceptible motion. Underneath, upon the floor, lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes, and from this was repeated the sobbing that he had heard before. It was his Sue’s form, prostrate on the paving. “Sue” he whispered. Something white disclosed itself, she had turned up her face. “What - do you want with me here, Jude” she said almost sharply. “You shouldn’t come! I wanted to be alone! Why do you intrude here?”

‘Jude the Obscure’ - Thomas Hardy

None but church-goers seemed abroad that morning; undergraduates and graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English churchgoing pace which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering; holding, bound in black lamb-skin and white celluloid, the liturgies of half a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St Barnabas, St Columba, St Aloysius, St Mary's, Pusey House, Blackfriars, and heaven knows where besides; to restored Norman and revived Gothic, to travesties of Venice and Athens; all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race.

‘Brideshead Revisited’ - Evelyn Waugh

Red with the Mexican sun, he surveyed the damp English scene with delight . It was wonderful, the way this town kept its secrets. Beyond the canal, and a few warehouses, he could make out the Venetian water-tower of that church where Pamela was so fond of going. It was, from where he stood, the most impressive architectural monument in sight. A row of scruffy Edwardian shops; a lumpy hotel insultingly aping a classical manner; a railway bridge; the most hideous of office blocks, a cube of black glass: these were the campanile’s only rivals for the eye’s attention. The delicacy of pinnacles and spires, the grandeur of domes, the ingenuity of buttresses, the proportions of quadrangles, now intimate, now superb, for which the town was more noted in the imagination of travellers, were kept sensibly hidden from view.

‘The Healing Art’ - A N Wilson

‘I’ve just knocked someone over,’ James said. ‘Very slowly. I didn’t hurt her but I frightened her. I felt awful.’
‘Whisky,’ Leonard said, flapping a long hand at a cluster of bottles on his chest of drawers. ‘Help yourself.’
‘I left her at a surgery,’ James said, picking up Leonard’s toothglass and inspecting it for signs of toothpaste before pouring whisky into it. ‘I’ll go and see her tomorrow. She lives near St Barnabas.

‘The Men and the Girls’ - Joanna Trollope

Turning left into Richmond Road, he noticed with a curiously disengaged mind how the street lights, set on alternate sides at intervals of thirty yards, bent their heads over the street like guardsmen at a catafalque, and how the houses not directly illuminated by the hard white glow assumed a huddled, almost cowering appearance, as if somehow they feared the night. His throat was dry and suddenly he felt like running. Yet with a sense of the inevitable, he knew that he was already far too late; guessed with a heavy heart , that probably he’d always been too late. As he turned into Canal Street - where the keen wind at the intersection tugged at his thinning hair - there, about one hundred yards ahead of him, there, beneath the looming, ominous bulk of St Barnabas’ great tower, was an ambulance, its blue light flashing in the dark, and two white police cars pulled over on to the pavement. Some three or four deep, a ring of local residents circled the entrance to the street, where a tall, uniformed policeman stood guard against the central bollard.

‘The Dead of Jericho’ - Colin Dexter

In Oxford St Barnabas’s had been established in Jericho, the mean quarter lying between Walton Street and the canal. It was intended for the spiritual welfare of the residents who worked in the University Press and the small factories nearby, but it had become unexpectedly fashionable, drawing precisely those members of the University that St Aloysius’s wanted to attract. Even Walter Pater was seen there occasionally. As a Fellow of one college said, “When I want a spiritual fling I go to St Barnabas”. On Sundays the narrow streets of Jericho were choked with carriages, and under-graduates poured in to fill all twelve hundred seats for the 11 a.m. High Celebration (‘High Mass’ was still not in common usage among Ritualists). The music was superbly performed, with Merbecke eventually giving way to Gounod and Mozart. The vicar and his two curates were all Christ Church men and celebrated in full vestments before tall candles scarcely visible through the haze of incense in the sanctuary. It was all considerably more ritualistic than St Aloysius’s, and one bewildered convert, who had been a parishioner at St Barnabas’s, complained sadly that worship at St Aloysius’s seemed extremely bare, even Spartan, in comparison.

‘Gerard Manley Hopkins’ - Robert Martin

St Barnabas, Oxford
How long was the peril, how breathless the day,
In topaz and beryl, the sun dies away,
His rays lying static at quarter to six
On polychromatical lacing of bricks.
Good Lord, as the angelus floats down the road
Byzantine St Barnabas, be Thine Abode.

Where once the fritillaries hung in the grass
A baldachin pillar is guarding the Mass.
Farewell to blue meadows we loved not enough,
And elms in whose shadows were Glanville and Clough
Not poets but clergymen hastened to meet
Thy redden’d remorselessness, Cardigan Street.

‘St Barnabas, Oxford` - John Betjeman

We went to hear Father Stanton preach at St Barnabas. The service was at 8 o’clock and the evening light was setting behind the lofty Campanile as we entered. The large Church was almost full, the congregation singing like one man. The clergy and choir entered with a procession, incense bearers and a great gilt cross, the thurifers and acolytes being in short white surplices over scarlet cassocks and the last priest in the procession wearing a biretta and a chasuble stiff with gold. The Magnificat seemed to be the central point in the service and at the words “For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” the black biretta and golden chasuble (named Shuttleworth) advanced, was ‘censed’ by the thurifer, then took the censer from him and censed the cross, the banners, the lights and the altar, till the Church was in a fume. At least so Mayhew said. I myself could not see exactly what was done though I knew some ceremony was going on. It appeared to me to be pure Mariolatry. Father Stanton took for his text ‘He is altogether lovely’ Canticles ii.1

‘Kilvert’s Diary’ - Ed. William Plomer

 
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