Guy's Hospital Chapel

Guy’s Hospital Chapel is a rather magnificent place of worship attached to Guy’s Hospital, standing close to London Bridge. The chapel was built in the 1780s, but the hospital is a generation or two older. Thomas Guy, an MP and wealthy London merchant and importer of Bibles, desired the construction of a hospital to cater for "incurables" who had been discharged from nearby St Thomas' Hospital. Although he was very much a Restoration Gent, his father had been a radical puritan Baptist and carpenter; his extraordinary generosity and compassion for hopeless persons may originate in his unusual evangelical upbringing.

The chapel is very elegant and has a large, marble memorial to Guy, unashamedly portraying him as the Good Samaritan, his eighteenth century upper class clothing assuring us of his real identity. His body was interred here some decades after he died in 1724, entombed most nobly. Notwithstanding the chapel’s ostentation and its founder’s questionable financial dealings (he did rather well out of the South Sea Company just before its ‘bubble’ burst), it reminds us of the good we ought to do. Few of us have the funds to build institutions and churches, but we might still bless individuals with small acts of kindness. Some spiritual ‘incurables’ will always be ungrateful and indifferent, but our grace towards them surely reflects God’s to the wider world. Knowing that such offerings are soon forgotten and sometimes cheerfully ignored, the great God of heaven might even consider them more warmly than the grandiose benevolence of the extremely wealthy.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. Ephesians 4:32

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