It’s a heavenly sight
There is no sight more beautiful in Paisley than the soaring splendour of the Thomas Coats Memorial Church on a sultry summer night.
The sacred sanctuary is a scintillating sermon in stone when its brick-red balustrades, crimson cornices and vermilion vestibules radiantly reflect the divine light of the sun setting in its scarlet cradle beyond the western horizon.
Another favourite view of the cavernous cathedral is from the lowlying, flower-festooned fields around Linwood.
Sublimely sanctified by an ornate crown-of-thorns tower, poignantly portraying the Passion and Suffering of the Crucified Christ, the magnificent church is visible from miles around.
In Gothic grandeur, its splendid spire – soaring symbolically skywards – enshrines the monumental message of man’s arduous ascent through life’s vicissitudes to his heavenly home.
The church’s prominent presence reminded people working in the town’s thread-mills, iron-foundries, engineering-factories, shipyards and fields, that God is always with them. Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets – the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you.
This article was first printed on July 7, 2003
He shares their joy, comforts them in death’s dark valley and, by His grace and goodness, transforms them from mere mortals into sons of light, guiding them to the immortal mansions of everlasting life.
The palatial place of prayer, completed in 1894 to commemorate thread-manufacturing magnate and public benefactor Thomas Coats, of Ferguslie, is universally-styled the Baptist Cathedral of Europe.
Our town’s towering tabernacle is a rocky reminder that – just as it was sculpturally-shaped in glory and grandeur from rough, undressed stone into a triumphant temple of the Divine Architect – ordinary men and women can be miraculously metamorphosed into bricks and pillars in the Temple of the New Jerusalem.
Many of the master builders who constructed Coats Memorial Church belonged to the mystic Mark Masons brotherhood.
Admission was conferred when the candidate successfully carved a small keystone.
It symbolically completed the final arch uniting the Boaz and Jachin pillars of King Solomon’s Jerusalem Temple of 1000 BC, which inspired the great churches and cathedrals of Western Christianity.
The new Mark Mason was provided with his own personal stone symbol and welcomed to the fraternity with the words: “You have marked well, brother.”
The Coats family bequeathed Paisley its museum, library, observatory, Fountain Gardens, Peesweep Sanatorium, public parks, school prizes, orphan homes and working girls’ lodgings, as well as the glorious church bearing their name. They, indeed, marked well. At the end of our own earthly pilgrimages, may we inherit the same architectural accolade.
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