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Title: The London Pulpit
Author: Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing), 1820-1898
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The London Pulpit" ***
Transcribed from the 1858 William Tweedie edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
THE
LONDON PULPIT.
* * * * *
BY
J. EWING RITCHIE,
AUTHOR OF THE “NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON.”
“Oh heavens! from the Christianity of Oliver Cromwell, wrestling in
grim fight with Satan and his incarnate blackguardisms, hypocrisies,
injustices, and legion of human and infernal angels, to that of
eloquent Mr. Hesperus Fiddlestring, denouncing capital punishments,
and inculcating the benevolences, on platforms, what a road have we
travelled!”—CARLYLE’S LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.
* * * * *
Second Edition.
REVISED, CORRECTED, AND ENLARGED.
* * * * *
LONDON:
WILLIAM TWEEDIE, 337, STRAND.
MDCCCLVIII.
JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
Dedication
TO JOHN R. ROBINSON, ESQ.
DEAR ROBINSON,
In dedicating to you this edition of a Work, the contents of which
originally appeared under your editorial sanction, I avail myself of one
of the few pleasures of authorship. Of the defects of this little Volume
none can be more sensible than myself: you will, however, receive it as a
trifling acknowledgment on my part of the generous friendship you have
ever exhibited for an occasional colleague and
Yours faithfully,
J. EWING RITCHIE.
FINCHLEY COMMON,
_Nov._ 7, 1857.
THE
RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS
OF LONDON.
‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,’ said Terence, and the
sentence has been a motto for man these many years. To the human what
deep interest attaches! A splendid landscape soon palls unless it has
its hero. We tire of the monotonous prairie till we learn that man, with
his hopes and fears, has been there; and the barrenest country becomes
dear to us if it come to us with the record of manly struggle and womanly
love. This is as it should be, for
‘The proper study of mankind is man.’
In pursuance with this axiom, we have devoted some little time to the
study of one section of modern men deservedly worthy of serious regard.
There is no subject on which men feel more intensely than they do on the
subject of religion. There are no influences more permanent or powerful
in their effects on the national character than religious influences. We
propose, then, to consider the pulpit power of London. There are in our
midst, men devoted to a sacred calling—men who, though in the world, are
not of it—who profess more than others to realise the splendours and the
terrors of the world to come—to whom Deity has mysteriously made known
his will. Society accepts their pretensions, for, after all, man is a
religious animal, and, with Bacon, would rather believe all the fables in
the Koran than that this universe were without a God. For good or bad
these men have a tremendous power. The orator from the pulpit has always
an advantage over the orator who merely speaks from the public platform.
Glorious Queen Bess understood this, and accordingly ‘tuned her pulpit,’
as she termed it, when she sought to win over the popular mind. We deem
ourselves on a level with the platform orator. He is but one of us—flesh
of our flesh, and bone of our bone. The preacher is in a different
category: he in his study, we in the rude bustle of the world; he
communing with the Invisible and Eternal, we flushed and fevered by the
passing tumult of the day; he on the mount, we in the valley, where we
stifle for want of purer air, crying in our agony,
‘The world is too much with us; late or soon,
Getting or spending, we lay waste our powers.’
We feel the disparity—that there ought to be an advantage on the
preacher’s side—that there must be fearful blame somewhere, if his life
be no better than that of other men.
Before we begin our subject, we will get hold of a few facts and figures.
According to the very valuable Report of Horace Mann on Religious
Worship, it appears that there are, in England and Wales, 10,398,013
persons able to be present at one time in buildings for religious
worship, and that, for the accommodation of such, 34,467 places of
worship have been erected, leaving an additional supply of 1,644,734
sittings necessary, if all who could attend places of worship were
disposed to do so, the actual accommodation being 8,753,279 sittings. In
reality, however, the supply more than keeps pace with the demand.
‘Returning,’ says Mr. Mann, ‘to the total of England and Wales, and
comparing the number of actual attendants with the number of persons
_able_ to attend, we find that, of 10,398,013 (58 per cent. of the whole
population) who would be at liberty to worship at one period of the day,
there were actually worshipping but 4,647,482 in the morning, 3,184,135
in the afternoon, and 3,064,449 in the evening. So that, taking any one
service of the day, there were actually attending public worship less
than half the number who, as far as physical impediments prevented,
_might_ have been attending. In the _morning_ there were absent, without
physical hindrance, 5,750,531; in the _afternoon_, 7,213,878; in the
_evening_, 7,333,564. There exist no data for determining how many
persons attended twice, and how many three times, on the Sunday, nor,
consequently, for deciding how many attended altogether on _some_ service
of the day; but if we suppose that half of those attending service in the
afternoon had not been present in the morning, and that a third of those
attending service in the evening had not been present at either of the
previous services, we should obtain a total of 7,261,032 separate
persons, who attended service either once or oftener upon the Census
Sunday. But as the number who would be able to attend at _some_ time of
the day is more than 58 per cent. (which is the estimated number able to
be present _at one and the same time_), probably reaching 70 per cent.—it
is with this latter number (12,549,326) that this 7,261,032 must be
compared; and the result of such comparisons would lead to the conclusion
that, upon the Census Sunday, 5,288,294 able to attend religious worship
once at least, neglected to do so.’
The non-attendance appears to be greater in towns than in our rural
populations; and in this respect London is not unlike other places. It
is difficult to classify its religious developments; but the principal
denominations may be stated as follows:
PROTESTANT CHURCHES.
BRITISH:
Church of England and Ireland.
Scottish Presbyterians:
_Church of Scotland_.
_United Presbyterian Synod_.
_Presbyterian Church in England_.
Independents or Congregationalists.
Baptists:
_General_.
_Particular_.
_Seventh Day_.
_Scotch_.
_New Connexion_, _General_.
Society of Friends.
Unitarians.
Moravians, or United Brethren.
Wesleyan Methodists:
_Original Connexion_.
_New Connexion_.
_Primitive Methodists_.
_Wesleyan Association_.
_Independent Methodists_.
_Wesleyan Reformers_.
_Bible Christians_.
Calvinistic Methodists:
_Welsh Calvinistic Methodists_.
_Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion_.
Sandemanians, or Glassites.
New Church.
Brethren (Plymouth).
FOREIGN:
Lutherans.
German Protestant Reformers.
Reformed Church of the Netherlands.
French Protestants.
OTHER CHRISTIAN CHURCHES.
Roman Catholics.
Greek Church.
German Catholics.
Italian Reformers.
Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons.
JEWS.
In all, 35; of these 27 are native, and 8 foreign. These are all, or
nearly all, the bodies which have assumed any formal organization. There
are, in addition, many isolated congregations of religious worshippers,
adopting various appellations, but none of them sufficiently numerous to
deserve the name of a sect.
Of course, the chief of these various denominations is the Church of
England. In the Handbook to Places of Worship, published in 1851, by
Low, there is a list of 371 churches and chapels in connexion with the
Establishment. Some of them have very small congregations, and every one
confesses it is a perfect farce to keep them open. In some of the city
churches, thirty persons form an unusually large audience. But most of
them are well attended. To these churches and chapels belong, in round
numbers, 700 clergymen. The appointments of ministers to the parish
churches are, in most cases, under the control of the vicars or rectors
of their respective parishes. In the case of private chapels, the party
to whom the property belongs has, of course, nominally the right of
appointing the minister; but, eventually, that appointment rests with the
congregation, for to thrust in an unpopular preacher against their wishes
would be to destroy his own property. For the parish churches, again,
the right of appointing the clergymen is vested in various hands
according to circumstances, which it would require too much time and
space to explain at sufficient length to make them understood. The
patronage is, in a great many cases, invested in the Crown; but the
Bishop of London is also a large holder of metropolitan patronage. The
Archbishop of Canterbury is patron in several cases, and, in some
instances, holds his patronage conjointly with the Crown. In such cases,
the right of appointment is exercised alternately. The Lord Chancellor
is sole patron of four or five livings in London, and in six or seven
other cases exercises the right of patronage alternately with the
Archbishop of Canterbury, with the Bishop of London, with private
individuals, and with the parishioners. The parishioners possess the
sole right of patronage in only three or four instances; and, in one or
two cases in the City, particular corporations possess the right of
appointing the clergy. The doctrines of the Church of England are
embodied in her Articles and Liturgy. Her orders consist of bishops,
priests, and deacons. Besides, there are dignitaries—archbishops, deans
and chapters, attached to cathedrals, and supposed to form the council of
the bishops, archdeacons, and rural deans. The average income of a
beneficed clergyman is £300 a year; of a curate, £81. The number of
church-sittings in London and the surrounding districts, according to Mr.
Mann, is 409,834.
Next in order are the Independents or Congregationalists, who differ from
the Church of England more in discipline than doctrine. They maintain
the independence of each congregation—that a church is simply an assembly
of believers. Only two descriptions of church officers are regarded by
them as warranted by Scriptural authority—bishops or pastors, and
deacons; and the latter office with them is merely secular. Amongst them
the deacon merely attends to the temporal affairs of the church. In the
Episcopalian Church, the deaconship is the first step to the priesthood.
In London and its neighbourhood the Independents have about 140 places of
worship. Mr. Mann’s return does not give them so many, but he states the
number of sittings to be 100,436.
The Baptists have much in common with the Independents. Like them, they
believe in the unscriptural character of state churches; and, like them,
believe each church or assembly of faithful men to be able to manage its
own affairs; but they differ from nearly every other Christian
denomination on two points—the proper _subjects_ and the proper _mode_ of
_baptism_. According to them, _adults_ are the proper subjects of
baptism, and _immersion_, not sprinkling, is the proper mode of
administering that rite. As an organized community, we find them in
England in 1608, about thirty years after Robert Brown had begun to
preach the principles of Independency. The Baptists have many
subdivisions. The Particular Baptists preponderate: they are
Calvinistic. A remarkable unanimity of sentiment has always existed
among them, except on one particular point—the propriety of sitting down
at the communion table with those who reject adult baptism. Mr. Horace
Mann gives the general body 130 chapels; Mr. Low, 109. The Census
returns give them accommodation for 54,234.
The Methodists have, in all, 154 chapels in London, the larger number of
which belong to the Wesleyans, who are Arminians, who are governed by a
Conference, and whose ministers are itinerant. Mr. Mann tells us they
seldom preach in the same place more than one Sunday without a change,
which is effected according to a plan generally re-made every quarter.
London is divided into ten circuits. Then there are the Calvinistic
Methodists, who were originated by the labours of George Whitfield, aided
by that devoted Countess of Huntingdon whose name yet lives in connexion
with one of the most remarkable revivals of religion in our land. There
are several sub-divisions besides. The original Wesleyan body has
suffered much of late in consequence of the operations of the Wesleyan
Reformers. It is stated that, by this division, the connexion sustained
a loss of 100,000 members. In London, the Methodists, including, as in
the case of the Baptists, six or seven sub-divisions, have sittings for
69,696. Of the number of attendants it is calculated about 12,000 are
church members, or communicants. It may be as well to mention here,
that, with the exception of the Irvingites, and, of course, the Roman
Catholic Church, which only admits priests to the celebration of the
Lord’s Supper, and of the Quakers, who do not profess to observe that
ceremony at all, there are two classes of persons attending all churches
and chapels—the common hearers, and the smaller class who profess to be
converted and regenerated men. In the Church of England the theory is,
every baptized man is this; and therefore every one has a right to
approach what is called the Table of the Lord. In the Church of
Scotland, we presume, it is the same. An anecdote, which was told by Mr.
J. Haldane, implies this:—that gentleman stated that once he was present
at a Highland parish church on a sacramental occasion, when there was a
pause, for none of the people seemed disposed to approach the tables; on
a sudden he heard the crack of sticks, and, looking round, saw one
descend on the bald head of a man behind him. It was the ruling elders
driving the poor Highlanders forward much in the same manner as they were
accustomed to pen their cattle. Among Dissenters only a certain class
are supposed to have this right—that class consisting of those who
profess to have become in their natures changed and sanctified to God,
who are considered to be ‘a chosen generation—a peculiar priesthood!’
They are received into the church after, generally, a careful scrutiny as
to their motives and convictions and character, and, at any rate, amongst
Dissenters are generally considered as _the Church_, for whom a Saviour
died, and on whom he devolves the conversion of the world.
The remaining divisions of the church and chapel goers of London may now
be disposed of.
The Presbyterians have 23 chapels, some in connexion with the Church of
Scotland, and some not. The number of chapels thus connected is 5, and
the number of Scotchmen settled in London being about 130,000, it is more
than probable that Sawney is not the church-going animal abroad, he most
undoubtedly is when he is at home. It seems that the Scotch attending
Presbyterian churches in London, even if they occupy every sitting, are
not more than 18,211; and, if Sawney were not proverbially an economical
fellow, one would be inclined to hint that you will catch him taking a
cheap railway excursion on the very day in which, in his ‘land of the
mountain and the flood,’ it is deemed sinful to do more than walk from
one’s home to the nearest kirk.
Next, as regards numbers, come the Unitarians, who have 9 chapels in
London, and about 3300 sittings.
By-the-bye, we ought to have mentioned before this the Roman Catholics,
who have 35 chapels, and of whom there were, on the Census Sunday, 35,994
worshipping at one time. In no case do the Census returns give us the
real attendance. We have merely the number of sittings, or attendants,
morning, afternoon, or evening. In the case of Roman Catholics, we have
given the number of persons attending in the morning, there being this
difference between them and other sects, that with the latter, the number
of sittings will be generally much greater than that of the attendants,
whereas with the Roman Catholics the reverse is the truth, as they get
more out of their chapels than any other denomination can.
It seems the mild, drab-coloured men, who call themselves Quakers, and
wear broad-brimmed hats and square collars, and say ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ of
whom Belgravia knows but little, but who, nevertheless, are foremost when
some great good is to be done, and some outcast class is to be reclaimed
and saved, are but a feeble folk, as far as numbers are concerned. The
‘youngest of the four surviving sects which trace their origin to that
prolific period which closed the era of the Reformation,’ they promise to
be soonest extinguished. In 1800 they possessed 413 meeting-houses; in
1851 they had but 351. Mr. Low gives them 9 chapels; Mr. Mann but 4,
with sittings for 3151. This latter number, small as it is, appears to
be considerably more than is required for their services. The real
truth, probably, is, that Quaker worship is too calm and phlegmatic for
this bustling go-a-head age. In George Fox’s time, men held communion
with the Invisible and Eternal—with Him who dwells in the light to which
no man can approach. There are but few who care to do so now, and
therefore is it that that race of practical philanthropists was far
larger in George Fox’s time than ours. As to the other sects, it is
scarcely necessary that we do more than take a very hasty glance at them.
The Moravian Brethren, who date from 1772, with Count Zinzendorf at their
head (and who have no reason for their separate existence save the fact
that, when they appealed to the lot as to whether they should join the
Lutherans or not, the lot was against the junction), have 2 chapels and
1100 sittings.
The Jews have 11 synagogues and 3692 sittings.
The remaining congregations, with the exception of the Mormonites, who
have now 33 places of worship, are almost exclusively isolated.
There are 94 chapels that thus defy classification; nor can we be
surprised that such is the case. Our boast is, that every man is free to
worship God according to the dictates of his own heart—that religious
inquiry is unfettered amongst us—that every man who chooses may form a
sect for himself. The advantages of this state of things preponderate
over its disadvantages. The philosopher may despise, and the Christian
of a generous heart and catholic aspirations may regret, that such should
be the case—may think it better that men had wider views—better that we
should stand on a broader platform than a sectarian one: but we may not
quarrel with the conditions of religious existence. We must feel that
these sects and schisms denote religious life and thought—that their
absence would be death—and that, as the world grows and the truth becomes
clearer, they will, one by one, disappear.
‘Thus star by star departs,
Till all have pass’d away;
And daylight high and higher shines,
Till pure and perfect day.
Nor sink those stars in empty night,
But hide themselves in heaven’s own light.’
The 94 chapels we have referred to, belonging to the New Church, the
Brethren, the Irvingites, the Latter-Day Saints, Sandemanians, Lutherans,
French Protestants, Greeks, Germans, Italians, have accommodation for
18,833. Of course some of these people have but little reason to give
for the faith that is in them. Actually, in this age of intelligence—in
these days of cheap literature and cheap schools—there are men and women
so sunk in ignorance as to credit the absurd pretensions of Joanna
Southcote or Joe Smith; but these people we must include. We sit in
judgment on none; and thus we give the church and chapel goers, as
follows:
Church of England 409,834
Congregationalists 100,436
Baptists 54,234
Methodists 60,696
Presbyterians 18,211
Unitarians 3,300
Roman Catholics 18,230
Quakers 3,157
Moravians 1,100
Jews 3,692
Isolated Congregations 18,833
691,723
According to the last returns, we have the following population:
Finsbury, 323,772; Lambeth, 251,345; London (City), 127,869; Marylebone,
370,957; Southwark, 172,863; Tower Hamlets, 539,111; Westminster, 241,
611; and with other places not classified, in all, 2,362,236. If we
compare this with the figures I have given, we shall see that, if all the
accommodation that exists were used, rather more than a quarter of the
London population frequented public worship. In reality, the number is
less. Yet, perhaps, the returns show as much religious observance as we
could expect.
By way of contrast, let us see how the London world that is not religious
spends its Sabbaths. A very large and complicated organization would be
required to collect the statistics of the habits of the population of
London on a Sunday, but an attempt was made on August 16, of the present
year, to throw some light upon the subject by a few gentlemen accustomed
to observe and estimate large numbers of people. The outward
passenger-traffic by the railways during the morning appeared to be about
as follows:—
Great Western, by the 8 and 9 o’clock trains 1900
Ditto, by the afternoon trains 2400
South Western, by the two early excursion trains 2500
Ditto, parliamentary 2800
Ditto, afternoon train 5000
London and Brighton, with South-Eastern, North Kent, and
other lines at London-bridge:
By morning trains 10,500
Afternoon 6000
Great Northern:
Morning 1500
Afternoon 2000
Eastern Counties:
Morning 1800
Afternoon 4500
North Western:
Morning 1800
Afternoon 1000
The steam-boats above and below bridge were crowded, and the various
public gardens, &c, on the sides of the river, were also crowded. About
14,000 persons passed down the river, and about 6000 upwards, beyond the
ordinary river traffic. In Greenwich Park there were about 80,000
persons, and Gravesend and Woolwich were also crowded by visitors,
estimated at 10,000, including the patrons of Rosherville gardens, &c.
At 5 o’clock there were nearly 2000 persons in Cremorne Gardens, and at 8
o’clock fully four times that number. Hampton Court was scarcely as
crowded by visitors as on some previous days, but the numbers there and
the excursionists to Kew have been already estimated by the boat and
train. In the Regent’s Park the numbers have not been counted at any
time during the summer, though some of the “penny-a-liners” have given
the exact number. There was an immense crowd listening to the people’s
subscription band in the Regent’s Park, and at a low estimate the numbers
considerably exceeded a hundred thousand. In the Victoria Park, where
another people’s band played from five till seven o’clock, there were
about 60,000 persons present at one time. The aristocracy had a very
large number of carriages in the Hyde Park, and about 8000 entered
Kensington Gardens during the afternoon. From these estimates, intended
to be free from all exaggeration, it would appear that out of the
population of London, about one quarter of a million were engaged in what
has been characterized as the “public desecration of the Sabbath.” If we
include servants, omnibus-drivers, cabmen, &c.—persons who follow on the
Sunday the usual avocations of the week, of course this number is
considerably increased.
It is cheering to think that the pulpit has advanced; and to feel, if it
have not its lights, such as Chalmers, or Irving, or Hall, it has become
almost freed from the buffooneries by which at one time it was disgraced.
‘’T is pitiful
To court a grin when you should win a soul;
To break a jest when pity should inspire
Pathetic exhortation; and to address
The skittish fancy with facetious tales
When sent with God’s commission to the heart!’
Huntington, the S. S., or Sinner Saved, used to stop in the middle of his
sermons with exclamations such as—‘There, take care of your pockets!’
‘Wake that snoring sinner!’ ‘Silence that noisy numskull!’ ‘Turn out
that drunken dog!’ Rowland Hill once preached as follows:
‘The mere professor reminds me of a sow that I saw an hour since
luxuriating in her stye, when almost over head and ears in the mire.
Now suppose any of you were to take Bess (the sow), and wash her; and
suppose, after having dressed her in a silk gown and put a smart cap
upon her head, you were to take her into any of your parlours, and
were to set her down to tea in company: she might look very demure
for a time, and might not give even a single grunt; but you would
observe that she occasionally gave a sly look towards the door, which
showed that she felt herself in an uncomfortable position; and the
moment she perceived that the door was open, she would give you
another proof of the fact by running out of the room as fast as she
could. Follow the sow with her silk gown and her fancy cap, and in a
few seconds you will find that she has returned to the stye, and is
again wallowing in the mire. Just so it is with the unrenewed man.
Sin is his element.’
Could anything be weaker or in worse taste than that?
The pulpit has ceased to offend by any such exhibitions. The men in the
pews have advanced, and the men in the pulpit have had to do the same.
Men of science and of intellect and literature must have men of science
and of intellect and literature to preach to them. It is power the
ministry lacks. It fails because it is of the past—uses the language of
the past—prays the prayers of the past. Instead of seeking a revival in
the churches, it had better seek its own revival. We have some twelve
hundred clergy (Church and Dissent) in this great Babylon, and yet the
devoutest worshipper can scarce name a dozen as superior men. Yet
preaching is not the difficult thing ministers affirm. Literary men,
enterprising merchants, sharp attorneys, aspiring barristers, honourable
M.P.s, work infinitely harder, though professing infinitely inferior
aims. A popular actor certainly seeks no richer reward than a popular
parson; but the former will throw into his performance a life of which
the latter appears to have no idea. For the men who care not for the
manner but the matter, the pulpit has still less to offer. Where, then,
is the wonder that in London, where men are not driven to church or
chapel—where they do not lose caste because they do not observe the
required customs of respectable society—the mass are beyond the reach of
the preacher’s voice, listening, it may be, to the sermons on our stones
and in our streets—the sermons the world’s great ones and illustrious
leaders preach, when they worship railway kings, or erect statues to
royal debauchees? What wonder is it then that in life’s busy scene the
still small voice of the pulpit grows weaker every hour?
POPULAR PREACHERS.
Church of England.
THE REV. J. C. M. BELLEW, S.C.L.
One of the wonders to us, looking back upon the middle ages, rich in all
the experience they lacked, is their faith in heathenism as a fact, long
after heathenism as a theology had given way to the victorious Cross. It
seems not only as if many Christian churches were erected on what were
once pagan temples, but as if, under new names, the old pagan
superstitions still lingered, as if their hold on the heart of man were
too firm to be driven out by any doctrine, however new or true. In the
middle ages, before a Bacon had led forth the sciences from their house
of bondage—before men had ceased to theorize, and to believe alone in
facts, and the truths facts utter, what confidence, for instance, was
given to that pagan science, or jargon, for it ought not to be called a
science, named astrology. The old heathen gods still remained. Jupiter
and Mars, Saturn, and Venus, and Mercury, were still the arbiters of
human destinies. Take up the great philosopher of that age—Cardan for
instance—and you shall read in him more of the mysterious influences of
the heathen’s Jupiter than of the Christian’s God. Every educated man
exclaimed in language as plain, though not, perhaps, so poetical, as that
of Max Piccolomini, that—
‘Still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names,
And to yon starry world they now are gone,
Spirits or gods that used to share this earth
With man as with their friend; and to the lover
Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky
Shoot influence down, and even at this day
’T is Jupiter who brings whate’er is great,
And Venus who brings everything that’s fair.’
Something like this in the Christian world prevails. Thus is it the Old
Testament binds with iron grasp men who profess to take their religion
from the New. They tell you the law was the schoolmaster—that it was the
shadow of good things to come, and yet for all that they do and plan, the
Old Testament is their perpetual precedent. Instead of the recognised
version, ‘All Scripture is given for instruction,’ some of the good
people we have referred to seemed as if they read confusion. The old
Commonwealth men blundered terribly in this way; but every age has had
men guilty of similar blunders. Poor Granville Sharpe had an interview
with Mr. Pitt, to plead the cause of humanity, and wasted the golden
opportunity by attempting to explain to that great Minister—to whom the
explanation was all unintelligible—the meaning of the little horn in
Daniel. In spite of Christianity, men still cling to Jewish rites and
Jewish creeds, as if the Temple of Solomon still wore its ancient
splendour, as if the seed of Abraham still enjoyed their sacred
birthright, as if the sceptre had not departed from Judah, and Shiloh had
never come. Go into the churches of the metropolis any time you like,
and the probability is that in more than half the texts will be taken
from the Old Testament, and the certainty is, that in almost all, all the
arguments and illustrations will have a similar source. Thus we have a
composite order of preaching. It seems as if the preacher knew not on
which side to take his stand, under which king to speak or die. The hand
is Esau’s, but the voice is Jacob’s. You hear as much of David as of
Christ, as much of the ceremonial of a worship of form and ceremony, as
of the simplicity introduced by Him who was born in a manger, and had not
where to lay his head. To break free from all this—to act in the living
present—to let the dead past bury its dead—to speak to the men of to-day
in the language of to-day, is a great advantage to a preacher, even if it
require, on his part, a little extra care in the composition of his
sermons; and no one knows this better than the popular Assistant Minister
of St. John’s, Waterloo Place, Regent Square, London—the Rev. Mr. Bellew,
formerly of St. John’s Cathedral, Calcutta.
To give a man the position Mr. Bellew has acquired, however, something
further is needed. Peculiar qualities of thought or utterance,
especially the latter, are essential to a man if he would be talked of on
all sides—run after by fine lords and ladies—in request all over London
for charity sermons—and admitted to plead in the august presence of Lord
Mayors and Princes of the blood. In the first place, then, it must be
remembered that Mr. Bellew preaches with all the studied earnestness of
the actor, and every syllable tells as distinctly as if it were Macready
declaiming on the stage. Then he is an Irishman, and what Irishman is
not fluent and born to drive in the pulpit; and what is wonderful, though
an Irish Protestant, Mr. Bellew avoids the _rôle_, somewhat overdone, of
a McNeile, or a McGee, or a Maguire, and does not commit the absurdity of
making his every sermon a wearisome protest against Popery and the Pope.
Why should Irish clergymen get wild on this head? It is not, says
Goëthe, by attacking the false, but by proclaiming the true, that good is
to be done. And it is the same in religion; the Irish Protestants have
little to complain of—their history is written in the tears and blood of
millions whom they have wronged for ages. By the violation of all
right—by means that will ever stain the Irish Protestant Church with
shame—by laws the most infamous the malice of man could devise, have they
got to be where they are; let them take the goods the gods provide and be
thankful. If anything could make a man sympathize with Roman Catholics,
it would be the history of the Protestant Church since its first
establishment there by the strong arm of law. On all other matters Mr.
Bellew seems equally to avoid the errors of partisanship; he ignores the
foolish ceremonial disputes of his own Church—the petty doctrinal
discussions, which are the more fiercely agitated the more trivial and
worthless they in reality are. His Christianity is something proud, and
majestic, and divine,—a universal remedy for a universal disease,—not a
skeleton of dead doctrine, or a bone of contention, or an obsolete word,
but a living, healthy, beneficent power.
But Mr. Bellew has other attractions. Not only are his sermons broad and
catholic in tone,—not only are they enunciated with oratorical
effect,—not only are they heightened by the charm of a commanding
presence,—but they are in themselves highly polished, full of passages of
rare eloquence, and retain the attention of the hearers. They all open
well, the exordium is always spirited, and its tone is maintained to the
end of the discourse. Thus one commences as follows, “Eternity is the
answer to life’s question—immortality is the hallowed reward of life’s
holy works.” Another has, “Life is the expression of religion.” In
another we get a quotation from Tacitus pregnant with meaning, “Truth is
established by investigation and delay.” Then the circumstances of the
text are well brought out. If Paul speaks at Corinth, we see that
licentious city with its groves and temples; if on Mars’ hill he
proclaims an Unknown God, the orator, with a lustre on his face brighter
than any genius could bestow, is in our midst; around him are the
restless Athenians, and in the background, the marble statues of their
deities—of silver-eyed Minerva, and Apollo, lord of the silver bow. If
some divine word of the Great Teacher himself is the subject of
discourse, then the Hebrew landscape is painted as only those can paint
who have trod the steps—as Mr. Bellew has done—where, more than eighteen
centuries ago, the Christ and his sorrowing disciples trod. Occasionally
a little pompous verbosity may be detected; instead of simply telling us
how the earth’s great ones are despised too often by the world, Mr.
Bellew says, ‘My experience of life, and the more I read from all
history, sacred and profane, modern and ancient, is this—the veritable
heroes of humanity have generally been decorated with the epithets of
popular insult.’ This is a little too much in the mouthing vein, and
reminds us of the singular encomium on Mr. Bellew in the _Morning
Herald_, to the effect that our preacher ‘unveils the plan of salvation
in the most _graceful_ and _attractive_ manner’—as if Mr. Bellew was a
Madame Mantilini, and the plan of salvation was the last new fashion.
Perhaps for this singular criticism Mr. Bellew is in some part
accountable. Our readers may have seen a caricature of two popular
preachers, under the title of Brimstone and Treacle. Brimstone is
supposed to represent the youthful hero of the Surrey Music Hall: the
pulpit Adonis, curled and scented and lack-a-daisical, called Treacle, is
supposed, though very wrongly, for Mr. Bellew is no man-milliner, to
typify the subject of this sketch. In spite of grey hair and sallow
cheeks, Mr. Bellew has somewhat too much the appearance of a lady’s man,
and his Christianity is evidently that which will do credit to the best
society; nor is this to be wondered at. Has he not an uncle a Bishop,
and has he not the _élite_ of the _beau-monde_ to hear him?
THE REV. THOMAS DALE, M.A.
In the good old times, before the Reform Bill was carried and the
Constitution destroyed, at a period long prior to the introduction of
cheap ’busses and penny steamers and the new police, stood an old church
in the north of London, in which the parishioners of St. Pancras were
accustomed to meet for public worship. In spite of its unadorned
appearance, it was a venerable pile. According to some, it was the last
church in England where the bell tolled for mass, and in which any rites
of the Roman Catholic religion were celebrated. In its burying-ground
twenty generations now sleep the sleep of death. Grimaldi the clown,
Woollet the engraver, William Godwin, Mary Wolstonecraft, Walker,
immortalized by his Pronouncing Dictionary, Woodhead, the reputed author
of the ‘Whole Duty of Man,’ Jeremy Collier, the writer against stage
plays and the successful combatant of Dryden, Ned Ward, author of the
‘London Spy,’ Theobald, the hero of the early editions of the ‘Dunciad’
and the editor of ‘Shakspeare,’ Boswell’s friend, the Corsican Paoli,
here await the resurrection morn. What passions, what hopes, what virtue
and vice, what loved and loving forms, what withered anatomies, have here
been laid down! Tread gently!—every bit of dust you tread on was once a
man and a brother. Tread reverently! for here human hearts bursting with
agony—the mother weeping for her children, the lover for his bride—have
seen the last of all they hoped for under the sun. You may hear a good
sermon here from the old text: ‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the preacher,
‘all is vanity.’ Such is the lesson we learn here—that all the shows of
the world are poor and little worth—that false is
‘—the light on glory’s plume,
As fading hues of even.
And love, and hope, and beauty’s bloom,
Are blossoms gather’d for the tomb—
There’s nothing true but heaven!’
But we may not linger here. Time came and went, and, as usual, wrought
wonders. St. Pancras ceased to be St. Pancras in the fields. It was
laid out in broad streets and handsome squares. It was lit up with gas.
It echoed to the roll of carriages. It witnessed the introduction of
flunkies, with glaring livery and tremendous calf. Upon its broad
pavements flaunted, in all their bravery, city lords and city ladies. Of
course, the old church would not do for such as they. Early Christians
might worship God in a barn, but modern ones, rich and respectable—of
course, if they are rich they must be respectable—would not for the life
of them do anything so ungenteel. So a new place—the first stone of
which was laid by a Royal Duke, notorious for his debts and his connexion
with Mrs. Clarke,—was built, with a pulpit made out of the old well-known
Fairlop oak, on the model of a certain great heathen edifice, and the St.
Pancras new church reared its would-be aristocratic head. Alas! alas! it
was on the unfashionable side of Russell-square. That difficulty was
insurmountable, and so the church has to stand where it does. However,
the frequenters try to forget the unpleasant fact, and to make themselves
as genteel as they can.
Take your stand there at eleven on the Sabbath morning. What a glare of
silks and satins—of feathers—of jewels—of what cynics would call the
pomps and vanities of the world! With what an air does that delicate
young female—I beg her pardon, I mean young lady—foot it, with Jeames
behind carrying her Book of Common Prayer! United Belgravia could hardly
do the thing in better style. Enter the church, and you will see the
same delightful air of fashionable repose. If the grace that is divine
be as common there as the grace that is earthly, Mr. Dale’s charge must
be a happy flock indeed. With what an air does it bow at the name of
Jesus! with what a grace does it confess itself to consist of ‘miserable
sinners!’ One would hardly mind, in the midst of such rich city
merchants and their charming daughters, being a miserable sinner himself.
Such opulent misery and fashionable sin seem rather enviable than
otherwise. At any rate, the burden of such misery and such sin seems one
easily to be borne.
But prayers are over, and yon immense congregation has quietly settled
into an attitude of attention. All eyes are turned in the direction of
the pulpit. We look there as well, and see a man rather below the
average height, with fresh complexion, mild grey eyes beneath
light-coloured eyebrows, with a common-place forehead, and a figure
presenting altogether rather a pedantic appearance. This is the Rev.
Thomas Dale, M.A. He looks as if the world had gone easy with him; and
truly it has, for he is a popular Evangelical preacher—perhaps, next to
Mr. Melville, the most popular preacher in the English Church. He is a
popular poet—he is Vicar of St. Pancras, and Canon of St. Paul’s.
Mr. Dale reads, and reads rapidly; his enunciation is perfectly distinct;
his voice is somewhat monotonous, but musical; his action is very slight.
You are not carried away by his physical appearance, nor, as you listen,
does the preacher bear you irresistibly aloft. His sermons are highly
polished, but they are too invariably the same. There are no depths nor
heights in them. They are all calm, subdued, toned down. They do not
take you by storm: you miss the thunder and the lightning of such men as
Melville and Binney. Mr. Dale’s sermons are, like himself and like his
poetry, polished and pleasing. All that man can do by careful study Mr.
Dale has done; but he lacks inspiration, the _vis vivida_, the vision and
the faculty divine, which, if a man have not, ‘This brave overhanging
firmament—this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’—‘is but a foul
and pestilent congregation of vapours.’ Yet Mr. Dale has an immense
congregation. I take it that he suits the level of the city magnates
that crowd his pews. Philosophy, poetry, passion are quite out of the
reach of such men, whose real god is the Stock Exchange, and whose real
heaven is the three per cents.
Another and a better reason of Mr. Dale’s immense congregation is, that
his charity is unremitting—given in the best way, in the shape of work
instead of alms—and irrespective of the religious sect of the recipient.
I have heard of several such cases that do him much honour. And, after
all, in the pulpit as well as elsewhere, conduct tells more than
character in the long run. Hence his personal influence is great; and,
of course, that helps to fill the church. Nor can we much wonder. What
eloquence is stronger than that of a holy, a useful, a devoted life?
Acts speak stronger than words. I see more power in an act of charity,
done in the name of religion and of God, than in the passionate and
fascinating gorgeous rhetoric of an hour.
Mr. Dale is a good Greek scholar, and has translated Sophocles. It is
easy to see why Sophocles should better suit him than Æschylus or
Euripides—the polish of the one would please him better than the wild
grandeur of the others. Of him, as a poet, I cannot speak very highly.
His versification is correct—his sentiment is good. To the very large
class of readers who will accept such substitutes for poetry as the real
thing, our divine is a poet of no mean order. ‘What we want, sir,’ said
a publisher to me the other day, ‘is a lively religious novel.’ Mr.
Dale’s poetry answers to these conditions: hence its success.
His poetry was a great help to his popularity. When he was rector of the
parish of St. Bride’s, and evening lecturer at St. Sepulchre, he was more
intimately connected than at present with literary pursuits, and was much
run after. About that time Annuals were the rage, and Mr. Dale edited a
religious Annual called ‘The Iris,’ and young ladies learnt his verses by
heart, or copied them into their albums. At one time Mr. Dale was
Professor of English Language and Literature at the University College,
in Gower Street. However, as a Tory and a Churchman, he seems to have
found himself out of his element there, and left it for King’s College,
Strand, at which place he held a similar appointment. It was thought
that church preferment had something to do with this; that his chances
were, in consequence, in danger; that in high quarters the University
College was regarded with an unfavourable eye: so Mr. Dale threw it
overboard. Such was the rumour at the time. Of course, to some men,
such conduct may seem only wise—prudent; but if ministers of religion
thus shape their conduct, with a view to worldly success, what chance
have they of regenerating the world? If such things be done in the green
tree, what may we not expect in the dry? A teacher of living
Christianity surely should be the last to desert a cause, merely because
it is weak, and unfashionable, and poor!
As a writer, Mr. Dale has been most untiring. His first poem came out in
1820. It was the ‘Widow of Nain,’ and was read with delight in religious
circles. In 1822 he published another poem, called ‘Irad and Adah, a
Tale of the Flood; with Specimens of a New Translation of the Psalms.’
About this time the poetic inspiration appears to have died, for since
only a few occasional verses have appeared from Mr. Dale’s pen, and
henceforth he seems to have betaken himself to prose. In 1830 he
published a volume of ‘Sermons, Doctrinal and Practical;’ in 1835, ‘The
Young Pastor’s Guide;’ in 1836, ‘A Companion to the Altar;’ in 1844, ‘The
Sabbath Companion;’ in 1845, ‘The Good Shepherd: an Exposition of the
23rd Psalm;’ in 1847, ‘The Golden Psalm, being an Exposition, Practical,
Experimental, and Prophetical, of Psalm xvi.’ Besides these
publications, he has printed several occasional sermons. He has now
attained a high position in the Establishment, which certainly can boast
few more faithful or laborious men. Originally not intended for the
Church, his subsequent success has justified his devotion of himself to
her service. Altogether his lot has been cast in ‘pleasant ‘places,’ and
he has had ‘a goodly heritage.’
THE HON. AND REV. R. LIDDELL.
St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, has done what it is a very hard thing to do,
created a sensation in this our phlegmatic and eating and drinking and
money-making and merry-making age. It professes to be a Puseyite, and
not a Protestant, place of worship. Puseyism, says a red-haired Saxon,
foaming with indignation, is next door to Roman Catholicism, and a
Puseyite Church is half-way to Rome. True, my perturbed brother—true.
But what of that? Some are inclined to think that Church of Englandism
is akin to Roman Catholicism, and that all its churches are halfway to
Rome. That brutal old tyrant, Henry the Eighth, was a Roman Catholic at
heart, and had faith in himself as an infallible Pope. His genuine
daughter did the same. Laud, who lacked the discretion of that
strong-minded woman whose
‘Christ was the Word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it,
And what the Word did make it,
That I believe and take it,’
is a splendid specimen of ingenious mystification on the _vexata questio_
of transubstantiation,—I question whether Charles James Bloomfield,
Bishop of London, could have returned a more confused and unmeaning
response,—died for his Roman Catholic tendencies. To this day England
remembers who it was, with red, swollen face, and brown apparel, and
collar with a spot of blood on it, made his maiden speech in Parliament
by indignantly informing the House that Dr. Alabaster had preached flat
Popery at St. Paul’s, and in our own day Mr. Gorham has failed in
obtaining a legal decision against the Roman Catholic doctrine of
baptismal regeneration. The mistake is, in supposing that the Church as
by law established is Low Church. If it were so, then, of course, out
ought to go the whole crop of Puseyite priests, in spite of the tears and
hysterics of female piety. On the contrary, the Church of England is
like the happy family in Trafalgar-square. Beasts of the most opposite
description there dwell together in peace and unity. Dogs and cats there
sleep side by side. In the prospect of a common maintenance natural
enmities are forgotten. Conformity is impossible. I cannot use my
brother’s words with his exact meaning. I must put my own interpretation
on the creeds and articles to which I subscribe, and so long as the State
Church is a chaotic mass of heterogeneous materials—so long as it has no
definite voice, nor law—so long as bishop clashes with bishop, and at
times with himself,—for we may have here a Puseyite, there an
Evangelical, here a fox-hunting divine,—there must be everywhere
heart-burning and scandal, and the degradation of Christianity itself.
But, exclaims my vehement red-faced Saxon friend, you are making Papists
by letting the Puseyites remain. I don’t know that. Papacy is alien to
human nature, or it is not. If it is not, you cannot get rid of it. If
cut down to-day, it will sprout up again to-morrow. It springs from a
tendency, I take it, in the human heart. In a mild form, that tendency
gently blooms as Puseyism. A cold in one man may, by means of gruel, be
removed in a week. In another man, it may deepen into deadly decline.
Puseyism may retain as many in the English Church as it may send to Rome.
Your Low Churchman may say the Puseyite has no business in the Church at
all. Well, the other may say the same of him, and there is no one to
decide as to who is right. King James II. said, Hooker’s Apology made
him a Papist, but Hooker was not responsible for this, and is still
rightly looked on as one of the brightest ornaments of the Church of
England as by law established. Men make strange leaps. Many a convert
to Rome has been won from the ranks of Methodism. Many an infidel has
been born and bred in the very bosom of the Roman Church. A Puseyite may
become a Papist, but he also may not, and so may other men. Some people
say there is Popery everywhere. I listen to a Wesleyan Reformer, for
instance, and he tells me that the Conference is Popish, and that the
President is the Pope. If so, it is hard to blame the Puseyites for
exhibiting the priestly tendency, more or less apparent, as some affirm,
in all priests.
I imagine the crime of Puseyism, in the eyes of most churchmen, is the
crime of a pretty woman in an assembly of haggard crones. The Puseyite
place of worship is always neat and clean, and worth looking at, and it
attracts when others fail to do so. The causes of it must be various.
Why does one graceful woman robe herself in simple muslin, and another
dazzle you with her gorgeous attire? You may be a philosopher. If that
woman can be your companion, can feel as you feel, and love as you love,
you care not for her attire. But she knows that the world has a
different opinion. The Puseyite becomes an object of interest. On a
small, very small scale, he is a hero. True, to fight about little
ceremonials argues the possession of a brain of but limited power, but
his opponents are in a similar position. If you deny worship to be the
simple genuine feeling of the heart—if you make no provision for that—if
you turn it into a form, why then, possibly, the more of a form it is the
better. I confess the way in which they intone the service at St. Paul’s
is pleasant to listen to. It is not worship, I grant. Neither is
mumbling the thousandth time over a printed form of words worship. What
a dull thing an opera would be, read, and not sung. It is true people do
not make love, or do business, or address each other in music, in real
life, but in an opera they do, and the effect is great. So it is with
the Church of England service. Intoned it may be unintelligible or
theatrical, but it is attractive nevertheless. It is not natural, but
what of that? The soul bowed down with a sense of sin, yearning for
peace and pardon, in its agony and despair will vent itself in broken
sentences, and will turn away from all ceremony—from even the sublime
liturgy of the Church of England, as poor, and cold, and vain, inadequate
to the expression of its hopes and fears. But why those who go to church
as a form find fault with the people of St. Paul’s because their form is
a little more attractive than their own, I confess I cannot understand.
But I have forgotten the Hon. and Rev. R. Liddell, M.A., a man of small
mental calibre, who has done the next best thing to achieving greatness,
and has achieved notoriety. In a letter he wrote to the late Bishop of
London (in which he wickedly told his lordship if he had ‘any _distinct_
wish upon the subject, he is ready to comply with it,’ as if Charles
James ever had any distinct wish with reference to Church matters), he
styles himself a loyal son of the Church. At any rate, he is a brother
of Lord Ravensworth, and perhaps that is almost as good. His public
career is now of about twenty years’ standing. Originally, he was curate
of Barking, Essex; thence he removed to Hartlepool; and when it was found
desirable to send Mr. Bennett to Frome (not Rome), Mr. Liddell was
selected to fill his vacant place. It is questionable whether any
successor could have been appointed more agreeable to Mr. Bennett. Mr.
Liddell has certainly followed most religiously in the steps of his
predecessor. St. Barnabas is what it was pretty nearly in Mr. Bennett’s
time. In St. Paul’s a little more discretion is shown, and if you are
struck with any difference in the manner of _performing_ divine service
at St. Paul’s to that used in other places, you draw a comparison in
favour of the former. The congregation is exceedingly wealthy and
aristocratic. You are struck as much with its air of high life as with
its High Church appearance, and having thus a double charm, I need not
add that St. Paul’s is crowded in every part. If success be a true test,
Mr. Liddell is most indisputably in the right.
As a preacher, Mr. Liddell does not shine. Pale, with light hair and
complexion—rich, for the place is worth £1500 a-year at the least—he
would all through life have remained an obscure, gentlemanly man, had he
not fortunately fallen in with the Puseyite tendencies of a large and
influential section in the English Church. His voice is clear but not
full; and, as one of his bitterest opponents told me, he can preach a
good sermon when he likes. But his teaching is not that which can do the
man much good. Eschewing the common evangelical doctrines, and holding
views inconsistent with free inquiry and the growth of manly thought, he
has but little left him to do in his discourses but to expatiate on the
sanctity of the priestly office, and the mysterious powers possessed by
the Church. These are his favourite topics. To win the truth—to lead a
god-like life—to bring back man, the wanderer, to heaven and to God, seem
minor matters at St. Paul’s, so long as the pillars are wreathed with
costly flowers, and that the service is intoned. And to this teaching
the world of fashion in its unfathomable puerility submits, and men who
are our legislators, men who are high in rank and influence, men whose
example is law all over the land, take it for truth. Mr. Liddell styles
his congregation highly educated and devout. He is right in that
statement. Men who have sat under him and his predecessor, who have
believed them with unshrinking reverence, who have taken every statement
as the truth, have been highly educated, but in a wrong direction.
Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails his teaching? Is not his
mission grander and more comprehensive than he deems it? Has not man
something better to do than to learn to bow, to intone, to admire
flowers, and to look at painted glass? In the universe around him, can
the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does not his own
Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If it be not
so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for—worth dying for; if it be so,
the minister and the ‘highly educated’ and devout congregation at St.
Paul’s have made a terrible mistake—a mistake which the friends of pure
and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.
THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.
‘If I saw,’ wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840,—‘if I saw
any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could
reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own
minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I
could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without
a word of protest against aught that is.’ Since then Wilberforce has
become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary;
Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now
raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King’s College deprive him
of the Professor’s Chair.
The real difficulty—which Sterling deemed invincible—which has proved too
strong for Professor Maurice, is that, whilst there is such a thing as
development in religion, the Church of England is not the place for it.
The Church of England was a compromise; but it was a compromise between
Geneva and Rome, and a compromise now dating three hundred years. It was
never deemed that it would require a wider platform, or that it would
have in its pulpits men of larger vision or of more catholic view than
the men it had already. If it had a view at all, it took, like Lot’s
wife, a backward glance to the tabernacle and its service—to the law
delivered amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai’s sacred head. It looked
not to the future. It knew not that there were,
‘Somewhere underneath the sun,
Azure heights yet unascended, palmy countries to be won.’
It made no provision for the growth of man’s free and unfettered thought.
Consequently it is the Church of England only in name. Out of its pale,
divorced from it, there is more of intellectual life and independent
thought than there is in it. This is the condition of its existence. It
is associated with certain creeds and articles and rites: harmonizing
with them, you have a position in society, you have a certain yearly
stipend, and chances of something better, as Samuel of Oxford knows well.
The Church of England was never meant to be the nursery for thought. You
have made up your mind immediately you matriculate at her Universities.
Your career for the future is to maintain those articles. In a word, you
must conform. The task has been hard, and few great men have stooped to
it, and fewer still have done so and lived.
But a man must not quarrel with the conditions he has imposed on himself.
You have your choice. You wish to preach the truth. Well, you can do
so, in the Church or out of it; but in the one case you are more or less
tied. You may preach the truth; but it must be Church’s truth, if you
take the Church’s pay. Of course, this is a disagreeable position to an
independent man; at the same time, it is not without its corresponding
advantages. You get into good society, you have a respectable living,
you may marry an heiress, or become tutor to a Prime Minister or a
Prince. Outside the Church men of intellect generally have taken their
stand, for it is perilous to tamper with convictions in order to maintain
a position.
It is easy to see how, in Maurice’s own case, what power has been thrown
away in this tantalizing task. Had he started fresh, with no creed for
him to conform to, with no position to maintain, he would have been a far
more vigorous thinker than he has ever been. But he has ever had to come
back to the Church—to the doctrines and teachings of men. A Church that
shall embrace the religious life and thought of England, coëxistent with
the nation, after all is but a dream. Were there such a Church, Maurice
would hold no mean rank in it. But the State Church is not such, and
cannot be such, unless its articles and creeds be glossed over with a
Jesuitry not more ingenious than fatal to all moral growth. But each
generation tries the hopeless task. The men of intellect and purpose in
the Church have felt themselves in a false position, and have laboured to
get out of it. They have trusted to one and then another. For a long
time Mr. Maurice has been the coming man. The Church was once more to be
a power—to have the nation’s heart—to enlist the nation’s intellect on
its side. Writing in his usual bitterness, Carlyle says:
‘The builder of this universe was wise,
He plann’d all souls, all systems, planets, particles!
The plan he shaped his worlds and _æons_ by,
Was—Heavens!—was thy small Nine-and-Thirty Articles.’
Mr. Maurice has accepted this language as sober truth, and has made that
truth the pole-star of his ministerial life.
Most of our readers know Lincoln’s-inn-fields. It abounds with lawyers.
In one part of it surgeons are plucked, and in another, clients. It has
a small chapel not far from Chancery-lane, and if the residents of
Lincoln’s-inn-fields attended it, there would be but little room for
strangers. However, this is not the case, and thus I managed to get in.
It is a curious old place. It was built by Inigo Jones; and the then
popular and admired, but now forgotten, Dr. Donne, preached the
consecration sermon. The walls have reëchoed to the oratory of Secker
and Tillotson. The windows are of stained glass, and one of them,
containing St. John the Baptist, was executed at the expense of William
Noy, the famous Attorney-General of Charles I. In the crypt, underneath
the chapel, are buried, Alexander Broome, the cavalier song-writer;
Secretary Thurloe, who had chambers in the Inn; and that stern Puritan,
William Prynne, who wrote about ‘The Unloveliness of Love Locks.’ During
Term time this chapel is open for worship every afternoon at three; and
the preacher is the Rev. Mr. Maurice.
Considering the position Mr. Maurice has attained, and the notoriety
attaching to his name, your first feeling is one of wonder that he has
not a larger congregation. After writing more books on theology than any
other clergyman of the day—after teaching more youth—after mixing up
himself more with the working classes than almost any other man I know
of—one is surprised that Mr. Maurice’s audience is not larger; and I can
only account for it by supposing that his task is impossible, and that he
is fighting a hopeless fight; or on the supposition that, after all, Mr.
Maurice’s place is not the pulpit, but the professor’s chair: yet that he
has a numerous class of followers, the sale of his books is an
unanswerable proof—a sale, however, much commoner amongst Dissenters, I
have good reason to suppose, than amongst the clergy of the Established
Church. Mr. Maurice has the true appearance of the professor—short dark
hair, sallow face, precise manner: all indicate the man of study and
thought. His voice is clear and agreeable, though not strong. His
reading is very rapid, but, at the same time, emphatic. As to action, he
has none. He aims more at what he says than how he says it; and, if you
listen, you will find food for thought in every phrase. You can hardly
imagine that the man before you has been charged with heresy, he seeming
to differ in no other respect from other clergymen, save in his superior
power of ratiocination and in the wider inductions on which he bases his
doctrines.
What Mr. Maurice’s opinions are he has taken full care to place before
the world. He is a churchman in the fullest sense of the term. ‘I have
contended,’ he writes in his ‘Kingdom of Christ,’ ‘that a Bible without a
Church is inconceivable; that the appointed ministers of the Church are
the appointed instruments for guiding men into a knowledge of the Bible;
that the notion of private judgment is a false notion; that inspiration
belongs to the Church, and not merely to the writers of the Bible; that
the miracles of the New Testament were the introduction of a new
dispensation, and were not merely a set of strange acts belonging to a
particular time; lastly, that the Gospel narratives must be received as
part of the necessary furniture of the Church.’ One would have thought
such churchmanship as this would have satisfied any one. However, the
cry of heresy has been raised, principally, it seems, because he denies
the doctrine of eternal damnation—an awful doctrine, we do not venture to
affirm or condemn here. Because he has done this, he has been branded
with infidelity; and _The Record_, and _The Morning Advertiser_—neither
of them journals distinguished for talent, but rather the reverse—hounded
on the public indignation against Mr. Maurice, forgetting that no man has
so earnestly laboured to Christianize—not the dark tribes of Polynesia,
for then these journals would have been redolent with his praise—but the
savages with white faces and dark hearts that we meet in our streets
every day.
It is melancholy to think that wretched theologians may aim their small
shot at such a man, merely because his idea of God and Christianity may
be less fearful, more loving and humane, than their own. Surely a man
may love God and his neighbour as himself—may believe Christ suffered for
the sins of the world—without being hooted by every ignorant or
unreasoning fool, because, on other matters—matters merely
speculative—matters too dark for man ever to fully inquire into or
completely to understand—his opinions differ from their own. Proud as we
are of our press, yet such exhibitions should make us mourn, that at
times it can so far forget Christian charity and common sense, and
descend so low. One thing is clear, that there is no tribunal in the
Church that can satisfactorily settle the question of heresy; and another
thing is clear, that whilst so many men differing so widely from each
other are in the Church, the question with the majority of them cannot be
one of principle but of pay. Churchmen should be the last to raise the
cry of heresy, for it is a revelation to the world of what must ever be
their weakness and their shame.
Mr. Maurice, after all, is thrown away where he is: all his life he has
been in an uncongenial position. The son of a dissenting minister, the
habits he acquired have clung to him from his earliest youth. Hazlitt
tells us how a man so nurtured grows up in a love of independence and of
truth; and such a one will find it hard to retain a connection long with
any human organization and creed. Then, as the brother-in-law of
Sterling, Maurice would naturally be led to modes of thought and action
other than those the Church had been in the habit of sanctioning.
Eminently religious, he never could have been what he was to have been, a
lawyer; but as an independent writer on religion, as a co-worker with
Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, for instance, what might he not have done?
Another mistake of Maurice’s is, that his mission is to the poor. His
style is the very last that would be popular with such. In the pulpit or
out, Maurice preaches not to the public, but to the select few—to
literary loungers—to men of ample time and elevated taste—to men of
thought rather than of action—to men freed from the hard necessities of
life, and who can leisurely sit and listen to his notes of ‘linked
sweetness long drawn out.’ Hence is it that he is more a favourite with
intellectual dissenters than with churchmen, and that I believe at
Lincoln’s-inn-fields his congregation is made up more of the former than
the latter. They love his efforts at self-emancipation; they admire his
scholarship, his piety, his taste. They eminently appreciate him, as he,
like the intellectual power of the poet,
‘Through words and things
Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way.’
The absence in him of all that is cold and priestly—his human
sympathies—his love to the erring and the weak and the doubting, whom he
would reclaim, are qualities with which the better class of religionists
would heartily sympathize, and with which perhaps they would sympathize
all the more that they come to them couched in language of dream-like
beauty, all glorious, though misty with ‘exhalations of the dawn.’
As a writer, Mr. Maurice is well known for his ‘History of Metaphysical
Philosophy,’ his ‘View of the Religions of the World,’ his ‘Articles of
the Church considered with Reference to the Roman Catholic Controversy,’
and his ‘Essays,’ which are more especially intended to grapple with the
difficulties Unitarians feel in connection with orthodox doctrine. They
have all obtained an extensive sale; but they are not for the public; not
for the men who buy and sell and get gain—who rise early and sit up late;
but for the student and divine. Hence it is that Maurice and the school
with whom he acts, such as Kingsley, Hare, and Trench, can never
reanimate the Church of England, nor win the operatives over to it. That
they do great good, I admit; that they have a mission, I grant; but not
where they fondly deem it to be. There is a destiny that shapes their
ends, and the issues, I doubt not, must be for the good of man’s soul,
for the cause of truth, for the glory of God.
THE REV. H. MELVILLE, M.A.
The great John Foster (who, by-the-bye, in his essay on ‘Decision of
Character,’ has much mischief to answer for, as every obstinate mule
quotes his authority when, against all advice and entreaty and common
sense, he persists in going wrong—poor Haydon always quoted Foster) wrote
one of his best essays, ‘On the Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical
Religion.’ The professors of Evangelical religion, I think, scarcely
forgave him. The sanctuary, it was thought, should have a shibboleth of
its own. In its peculiar terms and general formation it should differ
from the ordinary language of other men. If persons of taste were kept
away—if the men of intellect and science and learning stood aloof—it
mattered little; for the wisdom of the world was folly, and it was
ordained that it was to be brought to nought by the weak in years and
understanding—‘out of the mouth of sucklings and babes.’ The religious,
I fear, some of them with a certain kind of pride—for there is a pride in
the Church as well as in the world, and we all know whose
‘Darling sin
Is the pride that apes humility’—
took pleasure in their cant terms, and sprinkled them as plentifully in
their sermons and prayers as ever did skilful cook in time-honoured
Christmas pudding. Wilberforce once took Pitt to hear Cecil. When they
came out, Wilberforce tells us he was surprised by Pitt telling him he
could not understand a word of the discourse. There was nothing
wonderful in that. Pitt had never been to hear an Evangelical preacher
before. His world had been a different one. He was a stranger amongst
strangers. Their language was not his, and conveyed no meaning to his
ear. Greek or Hebrew would have been as intelligible to him. Pitt’s
case was a common one then, and is a common one now. Foster’s Essay has
lost none of its point or power. There are still not unfrequently in the
services of our churches and chapels, in the peculiar phraseology of the
pulpit, some grounds for the aversion of men of taste to Evangelical
religion. However, there are illustrious exceptions: one of the most
illustrious of these is Henry Melville.
Would you hear him, reader, then for awhile you must leave the shop or
the counting-house, and penetrate with us to the very heart of our great
metropolis. The Golden Lecture, as it is called, a lectureship, I
believe, belonging to the Mercers’ Company, and worth about £400 a-year,
is delivered every Tuesday morning, and Melville is the lecturer. The
church of St. Margaret, in Lothbury, is the spot selected, and it is an
appropriate place for a Golden Lecture, for everywhere around you, you
have—
‘Gold and gold, and nothing but gold,
Yellow and hard, and shining and cold!’
On one side is _the_ bank that hides such treasures in its mysterious and
well-guarded cells. An hour’s quiet walk in one of them, my good sir,
would make you and me independent for life. Every step of our way we are
surrounded by gigantic companies; We walk on enchanted ground; we breathe
enchanted air. Fortunes here are made and lost in a day. It was well
that the piety of our forefathers selected such a spot, that once in the
bustle of the week God’s voice might be heard as well as that of Mammon.
But it is time we enter St. Margaret’s.
Like most city churches, it is small and cold and mouldy—seeming to
belong more to the past than the present age. However, for once, it is
alive again. The old seats once more abound with beauty, and wealth, and
fashion—or, at any rate, with so much of them as belong to City dames.
We have left the roar of Cheap-side and Cornhill; but, after all, we have
the world with us here as well as there. For awhile we shall forget it,
for there is the preacher, and already the magic of his voice has charmed
every ear. I know no more magnificent voice. I know no statelier air.
It always carries me back in fancy to the days of the elder Pitt—or to
the earlier times of Bolingbroke—or to that still earlier day when the
Hebrew Paul preached, and the Roman Felix trembled on his seat of
splendour and of power.
Tall, of dark complexion, with grey hair and blue eyes, with a face lit
up with genius—the most brilliant preacher in the English Church: such is
Henry Melville. His action is simple and singular. When he commences
scarcely any is observable. Then as he flies along, and warms as he
proceeds, the head is dropped with a convulsive jerk, and the right hand
is raised, and the climax is ejaculated (for so rapid is his delivery it
can scarcely be called preaching) with a corresponding emphasis. No
sooner is the text enunciated than he plunges at once into his subject,
developing and illustrating his meaning with a brilliancy and rapidity
unparalleled in the pulpit at the present day. You are kept in
breathless attention. The continuity of thought is unbroken for an
instant. Every sentence is connected with that which precedes or
follows; and, as the preacher goes on his way like a giant, every instant
mounting higher, every instant pouring out a more gorgeous rhetoric,
every instant climbing to a loftier strain, you are reminded of some
monster steam-ship ploughing her way across the Atlantic, proudly
asserting her mastery over the mountain-waves, landing her precious cargo
safe in port. When she started, you trembled for her safety; she was so
lavish of her power that you feared it would fail her when she needed it
most. But on she wends her gallant way, scattering around her the mad
waves as in play. I can compare Melville with nothing else, as he stands
in that pulpit—in that sea of human souls—drowning all discord by his own
splendid voice, mastering all passions by his own irresistible will,
piercing all scepticism by his own living faith.
And yet Melville is not what some understand by the term, ‘an
intellectual preacher.’ He does not aim to demonstrate the
reasonableness of Christian truth—to convince men whose understandings
reject it. With the large class who are perpetually halting between two
opinions, who to-day are convinced by one man, and to-morrow by
another—who have lost themselves hopelessly in German mysticism—Melville
has no sympathy whatever. I never heard him use the terms objective and
subjective in my life. Of honest intellectual doubt, with all its pain
and horror, he seems to have no idea. Melville always is as positive as
Babington Macaulay himself. In no circumstances could he have been a
Blanco White, or a Francis Newman, or a Froude. As a churchman he stands
rigidly inside the pale of the Church. His God is a personal God. His
Christ descended into hell. His heaven has a golden pavement, and
shining thrones. Wordsworth tells us—
‘Feebly must they have felt, who in old times
Array’d with vengeful whips the furies.
Beautiful regards were turned on me,
The face of her I loved.’
Melville never could have written that. His hell is physical, not
mental. It is a bottomless pit where the smoke of their torment ever
ascends—where the worm never dies—where the fire is not quenched. In all
other matters his vision seems similarly clear, and intense, and narrow.
Beside the Church, whose creed he preaches, and whose articles he has
subscribed, and whose emoluments he pockets, he knows no other. His Holy
Catholic Church is that which the State pays to and supports. His
successors of the Apostles are those whom Episcopalian bishops ordain.
His redeemed and sanctified ones consist only of those who have been
confirmed. According to him, error from the pulpits of the State
Establishment is sanctified, owing to some mysterious power its pulpits
possess. Pulpits outside the Church are not only destitute of that
power, but, alas! destitute also of all saving grace. I have called
Melville a brilliant preacher. He is that; but his brilliancy, like that
of Sheridan, is the result of intense preparation. I write not this to
disparage him. I consider it much in his favour. In these days, when
the pulpit contains so small a part of the learning or the intellect of
the age, no pulpit preparation can be too intense, or elaborate, or
severe. It is said Melville writes and re-writes his sermons till they
arrive at his standard of perfection. It is said he not unfrequently
devotes a week to the composition of a single discourse. I can quite
believe it. Every sentence is in its proper place—every figure is
correct—every word tells—and the whole composition bears the stamp of
subdued and chastened power.
Considering how rich the Church to which Mr. Melville belongs is, and how
transcendently his talents outshine the mild mediocrities by which its
pulpits are adorned, Mr. Melville cannot be considered to have been very
successful in the way of patronage. His income from Camden-town Chapel,
Camberwell—a place of worship belonging to a relative—was about £1000
a-year: he resigned that when he was made President of Haileybury
College. As Chaplain of the Tower, I believe, he has about £300 a-year.
I have already stated what his Golden Lectureship is worth. Certainly,
he is not a poor man, but, compared with some of his brethren, he cannot
be considered very rich. He has published several sermons. ‘Fraser,’
some years since, in a severe criticism on them, detected several
remarkable coincidences between passages in them and in Chalmers’
Sermons—of whose style, certainly, Melville strongly reminds one. But I
am not aware that the criticism did Melville much harm; and he is still
in as great request as ever. I am told there is no such successful
preacher of charity sermons in London: no other preacher is so successful
in taking money at the doors. As an orator, in the Church or out of it,
no man can produce a greater effect. He strikes the chords with a
master’s hands. At his bidding strong men tremble and despair, or
believe and live.
THE HON. AND REV. MR. VILLIERS.
I know not that there is a happier berth in the world than that of a
fashionable Evangelical preacher in this enlightened city and enlightened
age. See him in the pulpit, adored by the women, envied by the men!
Wherever he goes he is made much of. The shops in his neighbourhood
abound with his portrait; his signature graces a thousand albums; young
ladies of all ages and conditions work him his worsted slippers; his
silver teapot and his easy chair are the contributions of his flock. If
there be an elysium on earth, it is his private residence. If a man is
to be deemed fortunate this side the grave, it is he. If mortal ever
slept upon a bed of roses, such is his enviable fate. In old times men
suffered for their religion; were deemed as dirt and dishonour; were
things to point at and to shun. In old times they had to suffer more
than this: the man who would be loyal to his conscience or his God might
not look for happiness and peace on earth. He had to wander in
sheepskins and goatskins; he had to renounce father, mother, sister,
brother—all that was dear to him as his own life. From the fair
enjoyments of the world and the bright love of woman he had to tear
himself away. A sad, solitary life, and a bitter and bloody death, were
what Christianity entailed on you in the olden time. Ay, you must have
been a strong man then to have borne its yoke. And yet, sustained by a
living faith, young, tender, delicate women bore it as if it were a
wreath of flowers. Men might talk of self-denial and taking up the cross
then: they did so then. But they are gone; and now, if you wish to learn
self-denial and take up the cross, you must renounce Christianity. Its
sleek and popular minister can tell you little either of one or the
other. Religion now dresses in silk and satin, goes to court, has all
Belgravia hallooing at her heels. Her ways indeed are ways of
pleasantness, and her paths, paths of peace. Dr. Watts was right—
‘Religion never was design’d,
To make our pleasure less.’
Take, for instance, the honourable and reverend rector of St. George’s,
Bloomsbury. As the brother of a Lord, Mr. Villiers has great claims on a
British public; as a canon of St. Paul’s, the rector of a well-filled
church, still greater. Bloomsbury Square is not exactly high life, but
it is respectable. The better sort of professional men and merchants
abound in it. Its neighbourhood is a step in a genteel direction. It is
not part and parcel of that vulgar place, the City. It is on the way to
the West-end. One might live in a worse place. Its natives are
civilised, eschew steel forks, and affect silver spoons. Most of them
speak English, and a few have carriages of their own. The place has seen
better days; but it is not altogether of the past. It abounds with the
latest fashions. It can talk of the last new novel. Even its religion
smacks of the genteel—carries a morocco prayer-book, with silver clasps,
is followed by a page with buttons of shining hue, and has its services
performed by men of honourable and exalted name. Many in the Church have
been born in low stations—have risen up to high rank, nevertheless.
Still it is a merit to be of aristocratic descent, and even in the Church
that fact is as patent as in the world. It is only in Turkey that birth
carries no weight—but then the Turk is but little better than one of the
wicked.
Independently, however, of these considerations, Mr. Villiers must have
been a popular preacher. He is a fine, well-made man; his figure is
prepossessing—a great thing in a public speaker. Weak, stunted,
deformed, wretched-looking men have no business in the pulpit. A man
should have a portly presence there. He should also have a fine voice,
and Mr. Villiers is singularly happy in this respect. In the Church
there is not a man who can read its stately service with more effect.
And that service, well read to the hearer in a fitting mood, is a sermon
itself. Nor does Mr. Villiers’ merit end here. He is no dull drone when
the service is over and the sermon has begun. With downcast eye he reads
no moral essay that touches no conscience and fires no heart. On the
contrary, he is exceedingly active and energetic in the pulpit. He looks
his congregation in the face—he directs his discourse to them. He takes
care that not a single word shall lose its aim. His musical voice is
heard distinctly in every part of his crowded and enormous church. Mr.
Villiers is not an intellectual preacher; nor is he a man of original
mind; nor does he revivify old themes, so as to make them seem fresh and
new. The common truths of orthodox Christianity are those which form the
staple of his discourses. To convert the sinner and edify the saint are
his aim. Philosophy and the world’s lore he passes by. His plainness
makes him popular. The poorest can understand what he says, and they
love to hear him, especially when he denounces the fashionable follies of
high life. Against such fashions Mr. Villiers is always ready to
protest. The theatre and the ballroom are the objects of his bitterest
denunciations; the frequenters of such places find no mercy at his hands.
Of course this plainness delights his congregation. As they frequent
neither the one nor the other, they care little what harsh things he says
of those who do.
Out of the pulpit we know little of Mr. Villiers. One does not hear of
him at Exeter Hall. The Freemasons’ Tavern seldom echoes the sound of
his voice. His parish duties seem to absorb him. He does not publish a
new volume of theology every month, like Dr. Cumming, though he has
published a volume or two of his Sermons, and some of his Lectures to
Young Men. To be sure he has enough to do where he is. But still many
ministers attempt much more, and his preaching cannot be a very severe
tax on his mental powers. Robert Montgomery published a book, called
‘The Gospel before the Age’—the Gospel of Mr. Villiers certainly has no
such claim. The school to which he belongs has very little reference to
the age—has a very easy way of settling all the problems of the
heart—never seems to imagine that there can be two sides to a question at
all. This makes it very easy work for preacher and people. Such being
the case, the wonder is not that Mr. Villiers preaches so well, but that,
with his powerful voice and action, he does not do it better. Since the
above was written Episcopalianism in Bloomsbury has sustained a loss—Mr.
Villiers is now a bishop.
The Independent Denomination.
THE REV. THOMAS BINNEY.
All the world, I take it, is acquainted with the Monument, which,
‘Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies.’
You have been to see it, or you have passed it as you have rushed to take
the boat to Greenwich, or Hamburg, or the ‘Diggins.’ In either of these
cases, unless you had been too much absorbed, you might have seen a
plain, substantial building, evidently devoted to public worship. There
is nothing peculiar about its appearance; but there is something peculiar
in the man who generally fills its pulpit—for it is the Weigh-House
Chapel, and the preacher is the Rev. Thomas Binney.
Let us suppose it is a Sabbath morning, and the time half-past ten. A
stream of people has been flowing for the last quarter of an hour to the
door of the above-named chapel: a few in private carriages—some in
cabs—the rest on foot. The larger portion consists of males, and, again,
that majority consists of young men. They come, evidently, from the
shops and warehouses and counting-houses of this great metropolis. They
belong to the commercial classes. They are the raw material out of which
are evolved, in process of time, aldermen, merchant princes, and Lord
Mayors. They are such as Hogarth, were he alive now, would sketch for
his industrious apprentice. A few medical students from the neighbouring
hospitals, and men of law or literature from the more aristocratic West,
and you have the usual congregation to which the Rev. Thomas Binney
ministers in holy things.
It is something to preach to these twelve hundred living souls; to place
before them, immersed as they are in the business and bustle of this
world, the reality of that which is to come; so to speak that the voice
of God shall be more audible to them than that of gold. Yet, surely, if
it can be done by man, he can do it whom we now see, with reverent step,
ascending the pulpit stairs. What power there is in those great limbs,
that full chest, and magnificent head! Nature has been bountiful to him.
Such a man as that you can’t raise in London or Manchester. You can
imagine him the child of the mountain and the flood—learning from nature
and his own great heart and the written Word—wild and strong and fierce
as the war-horse scenting the battle from afar. You see he has a warm
heart, human sympathies; that, in short, he is every inch a man—not a
scholastic pedant, nor an intellectual bigot, nor an emasculated priest.
Oh, it is pitiful to see in the pulpit, preaching in God’s name, some
poor dwarf who has never had a doubt nor a hope nor a noble aim, and who
enunciates your damnation with the same heartlessness with which he tells
you two and two make four. There are too many of such in our pulpits—men
made ministers in some narrow routine of theological study, in some
college where they get as accurate an idea of the world against which
they have to warn men as the Chinese have of us.
It was not so in the grand old apostolic times. Paul, Peter, James, and
John preached of what they had seen and heard and known and felt. Too
generally the modern preacher tells you what he has read, and which,
parrot-like, he repeats. It is not so with Binney. You see all that man
has to go through, he must have gone through—that scepticism must have
stared him in the face—that passion must have appealed to him in her most
seductive forms—that the great problem of life he has not taken upon
trust, but unriddled for himself—that he has gone through the Slough of
Despond—passed by Castle Doubting, and sees the gilt and the rouge in
Vanity Fair: or, as he says himself in his life, ‘the man has conquered
the animal, and the God the man.’ Such a man has a right to preach to
me. If he has known, felt, thought, suffered, more than I, he is master,
and I listen. Such a man is Binney. I can yet read in his face the
record of passion subdued, of thought protracted and severe, of doubt
conquered by a living faith.
Well, the service has been begun. The congregation has joined in praise;
and now it is hushed and still, while in accents feeble at first, but
gradually becoming louder and more distinct, the preacher prays. The
liturgy of the English Church is beautiful and touching, but it is cold
and unvarying. It does not, with its eternal sameness, answer to the
shifting moods of the human soul. Such prayers as those of Binney do.
They bear you with them. Your inward eye opens and refines. Earth grows
more distant, and heaven more near. For once you become awe-struck and
devout. For once there comes a cloud between you and the world and the
battle of life. You are on the mount, and breathe a purer air. Your
heart has been touched, and you are ready for the preacher and his
discourse. At first you hardly hear it. The great man before you seems
nervous, awkward, as a raw student. He runs his fingers through his
scanty hairs. He takes out half a dozen pocket-kerchiefs and blows his
nose. Being asthmatic, you are compelled to cough, and you have
immediately the preacher stopping, to turn on you a withering glance.
But at length you catch, like a gleam of sunshine in a November fog, a
fine thought in fine language. Your attention is riveted. What you hear
is fresh and original, very different to the common run of pulpit
discourses. The preacher warms, his eye sparkles, his voice becomes
loud, his action energetic. You listen to powerful reasoning and
passionate appeal. Binney has been compared to Coleridge. I don’t think
the comparison good. He is far more like Carlyle. The latter, a
Christian, with a good digestion, would preach precisely as Binney.
Binney is a Christian Carlyle, with the same poetry and power, the same
faculty of realizing great and sterling thoughts; but with a light upon
his way and in his heart which Carlyle has never known.
I have said Binney is not the kind of man born in great cities. You see
that in his physical frame; it is also evident in his mental character.
Everything about him is free and independent. Whatever he is, he is no
narrow-hearted sectarian, shut up in his own creed, having no sympathies
outside his own church. I take it that he sees also a certain kind of
goodness in the world; that he does not feel
‘What a wretched land is this
That yields us no supplies;’
that he thinks life is to be enjoyed, and that genius, and wit, and
beauty, are far from sinful in themselves. The result is, Binney’s
experience of life is greater than that of most ministers, and he keeps
abreast of the age. He studies to understand its thought, to answer its
questionings, to lead it up to God.
And yet this man—with his great Catholic heart, standing by himself, tied
down by no creed or common organisation—because, in a moment of
excitement, seeing what was to him a dearth of truth and life in the
Establishment, he said that it destroyed more souls than it saved, has
been looked upon as the incarnation of all that is fierce and narrow in
political Dissent. Never was a bigger blunder made. As regards all such
matters, Binney is a latitudinarian. I dare say even sharp-scented
theologians may see a little of what they call heresy occasionally
wrapped up in the sermons of the Weigh-House Chapel. The charge is a
common one in the mouths of those who would make a man an offender for a
word. The curse of the pulpit and the pew, hitherto, has been that such
snarling critics have abounded in each. To such, Binney is a terrible
stumbling-block. They cannot understand him, and yet they dare not
condemn.
Mr. Binney is still in the prime of life. He was born somewhere in the
north, where they have bigger heads and frames than we southerns have.
He was educated at Wymondley College; he was then settled, as the phrase
is, at Bedford, from which place he moved to Newport, in the Isle of
Wight. About twenty years since, he was invited to the Weigh-House
Chapel, where ever since he has remained. His income from that source
must be very respectable, as the Weigh-House Chapel congregation is
pretty well to do in the world, and can afford to pay its pastor
handsomely. As an author, Mr. Binney has gained extensive popularity,
although he has not done much in that respect; and his first work, the
‘Life of the Rev. S. Morrell,’ a friend and fellow-student of his own,
was a most extraordinary performance—just the thing a man like Binney
would write when young. It has, however, long been out of print. His
principal work is ‘Discourses on the Practical Power of Faith.’ His
sermons have been his most frequent publications, and his Lecture on Sir
F. Buxton—a lecture delivered to young men, with whom Mr. Binney is
always popular—has been reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic, as I
believe also has been his last published work, ‘How to Make the Best of
Both Worlds.’ I believe, also, Mr. Binney has written some poetry. I
recollect a few powerful lines, with his name to them, commencing with—
‘Eternal light—eternal light,
How pure that soul must be,
That, placed within thy searching sight,
It shrinks not—but with calm delight
Can live and look on thee.’
His sermons often are prose poems. Occasionally they are common-place.
We are all dull at times; but they are generally lit up with
‘The light that never shone
On shore or sea.’
I fancy, sometimes, Mr. Binney imagines that he has now made his
position, and that, therefore, less exertion is required on his part than
formerly. A weaker man would have sunk into the idol of a coterie long
before this. A minister is never safe. Popularity is often a fatal
boon. Some men it withers up at once.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about our subject has yet to be said.
Though the popular pastor of a popular London congregation, he is still
plain Thomas Binney—still without the very questionable honour of an
American D.D. appended to his name.
THE REV. BALDWIN BROWN, B.A.
The pulpit is an old institution—next to the theatre, perhaps the oldest
we have. To almost every generation of men on this small isle set in the
silver sea it has revealed all that it has had to communicate relative to
this world or the next. ‘Thanks to the aid of the temporal arm,’ writes
Thierry of Edbald, King of Kent, ‘the faith of Christ arose once more,
never again to be extinguished, on both banks of the Thames.’ Before
that the pulpit had been introduced, and it remained powerful when
England, at a monarch’s nod, forcibly dissolved the spiritual union she
had so soon contracted and so long maintained with Rome. To the
Protestants the pulpit was more essential than to the Catholics. To the
Protestants who dissented from the Established Church it became more
important still. Without it they were nothing. Dissenting vitality
depends upon the pulpit. If that be weak and cold, unable to get at the
heart and to act upon the passions of the multitude, Dissent melts like
snow beneath the warm breath of the south. If it be otherwise, Dissent
flourishes and grows strong. The history of sects is the history of
individuals. Whitfield, Wesley are instances. In the Church of England
it is otherwise. That has a status independent of the pulpit. Without
any particular individual, it has a service elaborate and solemn and
complete, and more attractive than from its eternal monotony, in spite of
Puseyite natural attempts to the contrary, one would imagine would be the
case. Yet it is becoming confessed the Dissenting pulpit has ceased to
be what it was. I own I hardly understand why. Tom Moore tells in his
diary that no exercise of talent brings so immediate a result as oratory.
I believe every one who has ever got upon his legs will say the same
thing, and where can the orator have a wider field than in the pulpit?
At the best, the senate or the bar have nothing of equal interest. I
believe the difficulty may be partly explained in two ways. In the first
place, the pulpit is too much a repetition of creeds and theologies that
are becoming extinct; and in the second place, there is a dead weight in
the pews which masters the pulpit, and deadens its intellectual life. I
believe many a minister says things in private conversation that he has
not courage enough to utter in the pulpit, and that when he tries to do
so, owing to the vagueness of theological terms, what he says in one
sense is understood by his hearers in another. No wonder then that the
pulpit is so barren of power, and that many a man of gifts and parts in
our days of universal reading prefers the press to the pulpit, and
chooses rather to teach with his pen than with the living voice. Yet the
pulpit is not wholly deserted. It can still boast its consecrated
talent. It has still in it men who would have succeeded, had they tried
other professions—who have something more to distinguish them than a
sleek appearance or a fluent voice. To this class does the Reverend
Baldwin Brown belong.
Some years back Clayland’s Chapel was erected in the Clapham-road. A
dissenting D.D., famed for his eloquence and wit—for his book against the
theatre—for his encounter with Sidney Smith—for the strict orthodoxy of
his reviews in the _Evangelical Magazine_—and for sundry indiscretions
not quite so orthodox, became its minister. The reverend gentleman
failed to gather around him a flock. He preached and none came to hear
him. The pews were unoccupied, and the quarterly returns were small. He
abandoned the chapel, and with dubious fame, and an appearance somewhat
too much that of a _bon vivant_ for the minister of a religion of
self-denial and mortification of the flesh, went down to Warwickshire to
become the pastor of a village congregation, and in time to die.
Clayland’s chapel then was placed under the care of the Rev. Baldwin
Brown, then a young man fresh from Highbury College, to which place he
had gone after completing his education at University College, becoming a
graduate of the London University, and having been, I believe, called to
the bar. Mr. Brown is now in the prime of life. He cannot be much above
thirty. He attained his position earlier than ministers generally do.
His father was a man of some standing in the world, as well as in his own
denomination. His uncles were no less distinguished personages than Drs.
Liefchild and Raffles, and last, and not least, he had that easy
confidence in his own powers, which are great, and his attainments, which
are greater, without which you may have the eloquence of Paul, or the
piety of John, and yet no more move the world or the most insignificant
portion of it than a child can arrest a steam engine, or than a lady’s
parasol can still a storm.
Mr. Brown’s settlement at Clayland’s Chapel has been successful. The
cause—to borrow the conventional phrase—has prospered; the chapel has
been filled, and the church has considerably increased. His fame has
grown. He has become a man of note. At Exeter Hall his voice is often
heard. Undoubtedly some of his success is due to the circumstances I
have already mentioned, but undoubtedly the greater part of it is due to
himself alone. It is something for a man to find a position already made
for him. It saves him many a year of herculean and unregarded toil; but
to keep a position is almost as difficult as to make it, and this Mr.
Brown has succeeded in doing. The reason of this must be sought for in
Mr. Brown himself. The man must have some speciality to fit him for his
work, or he cannot be successful in it. That Mr. Brown has this is, I
take it, beyond a doubt; nor can you long attend upon his ministry
without finding such is the case. Mr. Brown’s distinguishing
characteristic is freshness. There is nothing stale or conventional
about him. He evidently preaches what he thinks. His speech is a living
speech, not a monotonous repetition of old divinity. He has wandered out
of the conventional circle. He has come in contact with great minds. He
has had a richer experience than generally falls to the lot of the
divine. He views things broadly and in a manly manner, not from the
narrow platform of a sect. His faith is a living one. His Christianity
is practical—that by which men may shape their life as well as square
their creed. Instead of wandering weakly and sentimentally in other
lands and in other ages, he brings his mind and heart to bear upon the
realities of the present day. The questions of our age, not of past
ages, he discusses in his pulpit. The day that passes over him is the
day to which he devotes his energies. He gives you an idea of
earnestness and activity and independence—of a mind well educated and
drawn out—filled with Christian truth, and earnest in the application of
that truth. He is not a great rhetorician—his strength seems to be in
his common sense. If the Bible be true, the sooner man gets that idea
into his head and acts according to it, the better. If man have to obey
the Divine law, the sooner he submits himself to it the happier he will
be in this life as well as in that which is to come. I know there is
nothing new in this,—that other men attempt to teach the same thing,—that
all divines are saying it one way or another every Sunday; but the merit
of Mr. Brown is that he says it as a man of common-sense would say it to
men possessed of common-sense—that he does not wrap his meaning in the
unreal verbiage of a mystic and unreal theology—that he takes his
teachings, and arguments, and illustrations from real life—and that he
talks of religion as men of the world of consols and railways; and no man
can do this, to whom religion is not the business of his life. In
personal appearance there is nothing particularly remarkable about Mr.
Brown. He is tall—thin—of light complexion, a very different style of
man to the fat, indolent-looking old gentlemen that figure in the picture
gallery of a certain popular religious magazine, but with an appearance
of intellectual activity and readiness for his work and age, to which few
of the good old conventional divines now happily gathered to their
fathers ever seem to have had an idea.
THE REV. JOHN CAMPBELL, D.D.
If the reader has ever been in the habit of attending public meetings, he
must occasionally have seen an amendment proposed by a man evidently in a
minority, yet proposed nevertheless. The man who does this is a man of
confidence, of good lungs and nerve. First, the meeting will not hear
him at all. ‘Down, down!’ is the universal cry. But the man stands
firm, fixes his arms across his breast in the manner of the ‘Napoleon
musing at St. Helena’ of the late Mr. Haydon. He knows that that angry
hubbub cannot last long: that the indignant public will be out of breath
in five minutes; that the more frantic it is now, the more exhausted and
quiet it will be anon; and, with a calm smile of pity, he waits the
result. All that he has to do is simply to stand still, and, if he does
this long enough, there is no meeting on the face of the earth that can
refuse him a hearing.
In some such manner has the Rev. John Campbell made good his position in
the religious world, or rather in that one section of the Congregational
body over which he rules with a rod of iron. At times there has been a
hubbub, but the Doctor knows no hubbub, however loud and angry, can last
long; and to the mass, destitute alike of information and principles, it
is a real blessing to get hold of a firm, dogmatic man, who knows his own
mind, and who will kindly take care of theirs. Fluent in pen, meagre in
attainment, seemingly master of no one subject, yet writing vehemently on
all, the Doctor is precisely the man to give the law to that low class of
readers more or less present in all religious denominations. It is easy
to see what he is, and what he is not. He is not an accomplished orator,
for he eschews the graces of the platform. He is not a man of learning,
for learning softens the manners. He is not a man of lofty grasp of
thought, for he has never said a word, or written a line, that is not
narrow and sectarian and one-sided. But he is hard, energetic,
confident, loud in voice, and boisterous in manner; as unabashed as the
Duke of York’s monument in Waterloo Place.
You can see what manner of a man Dr. Campbell is in the twinkling of an
eye. It is not often he preaches now; but if you chance to be at the
Tabernacle, in the City Road, when he does preach, you will feel the
description of him is correct. The memory of that Apostle in an age of
sensualism and sin, George Whitfield, still sheds a fragrance round the
dreary-looking chapel, in which some few hundreds, chiefly of the poorer
sort of small tradesmen, meet, Sabbath after Sabbath, and where the
Editor of the ‘Christian Witness,’ of the ‘Christian Penny Magazine,’ and
of the ‘British Standard,’ occasionally harangues. If you go, gentle
reader, take with you a good stock of patience, for you will not find the
service easy, or the sermon short. There, in the very pulpit where
Whitfield, the persuasive, the silver-tongued, stood—the Whitfield, whom
lords and ladies flocked to hear; who lit up with light and life a wicked
and adulterous generation—an age destitute alike of faith and heart and
hope—you will see a big cumbrous man, of severe face and repulsive
manner, with a voice harsh and rough as a mountain-stream. The face is
almost hidden between two uncomfortable collars, which create your
sympathy for the unfortunate mortal in such an unpleasant fix.
Continuing your search, however, you see piercing eyes beneath bushy
brows, a nose of a decided character, a most firm chin, and a head of
thick grey hair, the obstinate irregularities of which would throw a
fashionable hair-dresser into despair. Moore wrote of Castlereagh that—
‘He gave out his small beer with the air of a chap
Who thinks to himself, ’T is prodigious fine tap.’
Just so preaches Dr. Campbell. In the pulpit he has it all his own way.
You cannot contradict him. You cannot even intimate dissent; and he
harangues with the air of a judge. Evidently the congregation has been
dragooned into what it is, for the preacher gives no sign of intelligence
or vigour. He takes a text and preaches from it. The divisions of the
sermon are the sentences of the text, and he talks in the most desultory
manner imaginable. The oratory belongs to the deadly-lively school, and
consists of mild common-places, pumped out with a ferocity reminding one
of the stern Puritans of the olden time, but rather out of place in the
Tabernacle in which the Doctor reigns supreme, and which we suppose is
licensed for public worship, according to Act of Parliament. Moderate
your expectations if you go there. Dr. Campbell has been far too busy a
man to master the thought and aspect and characteristics of our age. Of
what man in England, in London, in the nineteenth century, is aiming at,
he seems to have but a remote idea. So blind is he that, if he wants a
heathen, he puts on his spectacles and reads you an account of one out of
some old Missionary Magazine. Nor does the Doctor atone for this by the
beauty of his style and the perspicuity of his tone. His voice is husky
and, at times, inaudible; his manner, bad. Sheridan had a bad voice, so
had Fox, so had Burke; but these men were orators, nevertheless. Dr.
Campbell is not one, and never was one. He builds up no lofty structure.
He bears you on no unfaltering wing far,
‘Far above this lower world,
Up where eternal ages roll.’
He overflows with no brilliant eloquence, and burns with no celestial
fire. He never ascends into the region of beauty and splendour, and life
and light. His is not the magic art to take you from step to step along
the Christian path, till your soul heaves, and you exclaim, ‘It is good
to be here!’ On the contrary, he leaves you flat and cold and dull. He
amplifies, and waves his right arm, and quotes texts, and repeats a
feeble sentence emphatically; but that is all; he makes no progress. In
going from Edinburgh to Stirling, by water, you are carried backwards and
forwards, by the winding of the stream, in the most remarkable manner.
You see Stirling long before you approach. You keep going, and yet you
don’t seem going on. Dr. Campbell winds just in the same way. You have
talk without effect; action without progress; words without thought.
The real truth is, Dr. Campbell is one of the failures of the age. His
‘Martyr of Erromanga’ has been his only creditable work. No man has
talked more, or done less. He attempts too much. He would be
everything, and is nothing. Superficiality has ever been his bane. A
fatal copiousness of words has ruined him. More golden opportunities
than those he has had, no man ever had. A failure in the pulpit, he
turned himself to the press; and a powerful body, with an organization in
almost every town and village in the land, rallied round him as their
chief. To circulate his publications the most gigantic efforts were
made. The ‘pulpits were tuned,’ the Sunday-school was invaded, the
congregation was taken by storm. Like most men whose invective powers
are strong, the Doctor can flatter, and he did so with a vengeance. The
model church was the church which took in the most of the Doctor’s
publications. The successful minister was the minister who sold the most
of them. The people of whom the Doctor had hopes were the people who
subscribed 4s. 4d. per quarter to Bolt Court.
But the Doctor can bear no rival; he must reign supreme. John Childs, of
Bungay, and Dr. Adam Thomson, of Coldstream, destroyed the Bible
monopoly; but Dr. Campbell had the command of the press, and took the
credit to himself. An eminent publisher started a newspaper and a
religious magazine, and the Doctor looked coldly on him till he sold the
newspaper and gave up the magazine. When the ‘Anti-State-Church Society’
was formed, the Doctor was one of its members, but it had a ruling spirit
who was not the pastor of the Tabernacle, and the Doctor’s zeal soon died
away. The Doctor also professes to be with the Teetotalers; but they
don’t all go to Bolt Court, and the Doctor damns them with faint praise.
If the Congregationalists grow restive, it matters little; they have no
chance against him; they have been delivered over to the Doctor, body and
soul. It is in vain they struggle to be free. Will the Doctor publish
what would militate against himself? Will the Doctor withhold from
publishing when it gives him the chance of an easy triumph? Of course, a
man is a fool to enter into a controversy with a newspaper editor. The
editor is omnipotent; you must give in. If it is folly to kick against
the pricks, it is the height of folly to encounter the editor of a
newspaper. Hence the Doctor’s triumphs have been easy; but they have
been due more to the weakness of his foes than to any strength of his
own.
As to the utter weakness of the Doctor in execution, let us turn to the
‘British Banner.’ A man may be heavy, rambling, in the pulpit; but with
his pen he may be quite the reverse. The ‘Banner,’ when under the
Doctor’s care, was a failure. That was to have been a paper to
Christianize the world; to win over the discontented infidelity and
chartism of our age; to pervade the land with a living Christian faith:
for this, Doctor Campbell had a support such as was never given to man
before. The Doctor told us that there was an infidel press; that that
infidel press circulated by tens of thousands; and that it behoved
Christian men to try and arrest such a state of things. Christian men
believed the Doctor, and invested him with tremendous power. And what
has been the consequence? That the world has a fresh sectarian paper,
and that the readers of the infidel press remain just where they were.
Is this a success?
Take another test. The London weekly papers exchange with the country
ones; the consequence is, many of the leaders appearing in the former are
reprinted in the latter. This is about the best test you can have of
what a newspaper is. The editors of the country papers are very fair
representatives of the intelligence of the age. What they reprint must
be generally good. You would expect this to be so, and it actually is
the case. The papers which have the highest reputation for talent and
clearness of view are precisely the papers most quoted from. But who
ever saw a reprint of a leader from the ‘British Banner’? If the leaders
in the ‘Banner’ were as distinguished for the vigour of language, for the
correctness of their views, they would be reprinted as extensively as the
papers the ‘Banner’ was intended to supersede. If the Doctor’s aim were
good, if it were desirable to start a paper that should be Christian, and
yet popular, so that it should circulate everywhere, the Doctor’s failure
has been complete; for he has not only not done so, but he has hindered
the men who would.
Like most vituperative men, Dr. Campbell is terribly thin-skinned. You
may praise, but you must not blame. He seems conscious that honest
criticism would tear him to shreds and tatters. We heard of a Scottish
paper in the habit of giving pulpit portraits. It was expected the
Doctor would be served up in course of time. The Doctor let it be
understood that, if anything of the kind were done, he would write the
paper into the Broomielaw: and the matter dropped.
The last time I heard the Doctor he was preaching about the Chinese. He
told us, what most of us knew well before, that China was a very large
country, that it had a wall eighteen hundred miles long, that Confucius
lived three or four hundred years before Christ; but there was one thing
he did not tell us—that the Chinese call a man of talk, and swagger, and
rhodomontade, a paper tiger. But perhaps the Doctor was wise, as
comparisons are odious. After all, that such a man, with his fulsome
eulogies and violent invective, should have come to be a power, is a
melancholy fact—a fact indicating that Dissent will have to undergo a
very formidable purifying process before men of taste, and intellect, and
learning will be found willing to join its ranks.
THE REV. THOMAS T. LYNCH.
The one great want of the metropolitan pulpit is men abreast of the age,
who can sympathize with its pulsation, can respond to its wants, can
permeate it with a living faith. The majority of the men in the pulpit
cease to be such when they get there. Of the human heart, as it is
fevered with passion, or boils over with desire, they know nothing. They
see men under a mask. Smith does not talk to his minister as he does to
Brown; with Brown he is facetious—occasionally a little loose—and, after
a good dinner and a bottle of wine, speaks in terms almost of approval of
fashionable follies. The minister comes in and the conversation is
changed—allusions are made to the ‘Evangelical Magazine’—the Missionary
Society is referred to—something is said of Sunday Schools, and the world
for a time is dropped. Smith, junior, acts in a similar way. Before his
minister he assumes a virtue, if he have it not—is sedate—quiet,
anything, in short, but what his intimates find him to be. It seems to
be the condition of the pulpit that it shall see life under a mask; and
as to thought, that does not move in the regular time-worn ruts, that is
condemned at once. It is not the thought of the pulpit, and it therefore
must be false. It may be born of vigorous intellect; it may have been
nursed by years of severe thought; to get at it, the thinker may have
sacrificed many an early friendship—many a cherished association—many a
sacred tie; but, nevertheless, the pulpit would blast it with its stern
anathemas, and pronounces it a crime. Occasionally, a man in the pulpit
can act differently. Some few years back, when Professor Scott, then of
University College, London, now of Owen’s College, Manchester, was in
town, it seemed as if an honest attempt was made to meet and win to
Christianity the philosophy that was genuine and earnest and religious,
though it squared with the creed of no church, and took for its textbook
the living heart of man rather than the written Word. In our time the
same thing is attempted. The man who has had the courage to make the
attempt—and to whom honour should be given for it—is the Rev. Thomas
Lynch.
Judged by externals, the Rev. Thomas Lynch is a failure. He is a small
spare man; his bodily presence is contemptible; he is a reed shaken by
the wind. You get no idea of the church militant when you look at him,
‘Of the drum ecclesiastic,
Beat with fist instead of a stick.’
He is none of your bully ‘Bottoms,’ to roar ‘so that the Duke will say,
let him roar again.’ His chapel is in the very unfashionable
neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road. His hearers are few and far
between. Out of the immense crowd of church and chapel goers in this
great city, not three hundred can be got to hear him; and yet I know no
man better worth your hearing. Your popular orators, your Dan O’Connells
and your Dr. Leifchilds, are big men—and yet your small men have often
the organization favourable to the development of poetry and thought. So
is it with Mr. Lynch. It is the old Gospel he preaches; but he handles
it in a new and fresh form. What is wearisome from others, comes with a
peculiar fascination from him. The truths common-place men have made
prosaic and common-place, the magic of his genius can render quite the
reverse. His is the rare power, given to the true poet alone, ‘to clothe
the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn;’ and
his also is the still rarer power to show piety—
‘Sitting as a goddess bright,
In the circle of her light.’
You see that Christianity to him is life and power—no form of words, but
a reality; that it fills his heart; that it works in his intellect; that
it sanctifies his utterance. Hence it comes fresh to you as it does to
him; it is alive with the light of genius and of God; with him it is
applicable to the conditions of existence, to man’s need and nature—no
tinkling cymbal—no empty brass. A brother and a man preaches to you;
your equal in philosophy, in thought, in lettered lore; your superior in
what is greater and nobler still. Yes, that frail man, with an imperfect
frame—with a voice so weak that you can scarcely hear him—with an
appearance so homely that you would never think that in such a casket a
soul of any greatness could be enshrined—can speak to you of the great
things of God—of righteousness, and temperance, and the judgment to come,
so that you—worldly scoffer or philosophic sceptic though you be—must
listen with admiration and respect.
A tale is told of a certain divine who was much given to a practice
common in the Scotch Church, though not very popular here—of exposition.
Once upon a time, when remonstrated with, the worthy preacher, with a
candour deserving of all praise, replied, that he did so because, when he
was persecuted in one text, he could flee to another. Mr. Lynch needs no
such practice. His Bible is no sealed book, but a revelation of light,
and splendour, and truth. To him there is nothing common, or barren, or
unclean. All is food for his intellect, always active—and his fancy,
always copious and rich. Nor even does that, luxuriant though it be,
lead him astray. All the while he is in earnest, illustrating, as he
himself writes in that choice book of his, ‘Theophilus Trinal’—that
‘the powers that play in fancy,
Can a holy earnest show,
As the colours of the bubble
Shine serenely in the bow.’
His theology we will describe in his own words. In the book we have
already referred to, he writes: ‘Human nature, like ancient Job, is foul
and sore with disease, spirit-worn, and weary with incessant strivings of
heart. The Philosophies, as friends, come with their sympathy and
wisdom; but their words are dark clouds, edged brightly, which reveal the
splendours of truth behind them, but disclose not the orb; and to the
parched heart they are but as clouds, with a wind indeed, but without
rain. But after the discoursings of philosophy with human nature, there
is heard the voice of God, saying, “I am; behold my works; hope and
believe!” As experience enlarges, spiritual questions accumulate, till
at the last they pass into one great question concerning the world and
human life, which the heart expresses not in words, but which fills it
with a mute agony of wonder. To this question there is no answer, or
hope of any, till the voice of God is heard, saying, “I am!” This voice
from a whisper rises till it has the sound of many waters. Happy are we
if we believe and feel that the man of sorrows, and of success after
sorrows, Jesus, the Son of God, is still his real and sufficient
representative. He is God’s surety to the world. He, bearing the sins
of the world, bears also its difficulties. In the faith of Christ have
the men of many generations found fixed standing-place, immovably secure.
In him they have heard the voice, “I am!” “Here we rest,” they have
said; “our God, we will not distrust thee!” He bears the golden key of
love that shall unlock the secret of the world. This key is a key of
escape from a prison; key of entrance to a palace. Oftentimes, in life,
we may seem as those who struggle in a wide stormy sea, knowing their
strength only by the greatness of their ineffectual efforts. Yet are we
safe. For though we may feel as if rather drifting in a slight skiff
over boisterous waters than making way over them in a strong vessel, yet
if, after dreary days, Columbus found the land which reason taught him to
hope for, much more shall we reach the country promised to the faithful.’
Having thus referred to ‘Theophilus Trinal,’ a book which has already
reached a second edition, we may as well add here that Mr. Lynch has
published a sermon explanatory of his views and aims, and Four Lectures
delivered at Manchester, on various forms of Literature, and is, and has
been for some time, one of the principal contributors to a magazine
called the ‘Christian Spectator’—a magazine understood to be intimately
connected with that section of the religious world of which Edward Miall,
late M.P., and Editor of the ‘Nonconformist,’ is the great exponent and
type. In this sketch it is impossible altogether to ignore the Lynch
Controversy; let me describe it in a few words. In 1856 Mr. Lynch
published a volume of religious poems called the Rivulet, some of them
for private perusal, some for public worship. The Eclectic Review had a
favourable notice of the book; the Morning Advertiser was sorely offended
with this review, and, in the style of criticism peculiar to that
journal, proceeded to show that the Rivulet was deeply tainted with
deadly heresy. Some leading ministers of the denomination to which Mr.
Lynch belonged generously declared their belief that Mr. Lynch was a man
to be honoured for his Christian creed and life, whatever the reviewer
might think. This led to a still further storm. Not content with
attacking Mr. Lynch, the Morning Advertiser made the protesting ministers
the subjects of its censure. The British Banner endorsed all these
charges, and gave to them, to the immense delight of the Record on one
side and the Reasoner on the other, a wider circulation. Considerable
confusion followed—reverend gentlemen and Christian laymen quarrelled
with all that bitterness which usually distinguishes the divine—pamphlets
and letters were plentiful as blackberries. Actually the Congregational
Union postponed their autumnal meeting on account of the strife thus
generated. The upshot of the whole matter was, that the publicans
complained, and the Advertiser for a time directed its attention to more
congenial subjects than those connected with theology—that Dr. Campbell’s
connection with the British Banner was terminated, and that Mr. Lynch had
a much speedier sale for his poems than, I fear, otherwise he would have
had.
That Mr. Lynch has no larger congregation, I take it, is a reproach to
the Christian Church. One would think that there was a divorce between
it and talent and taste, or Mr. Lynch would preach to crowded benches.
As it is, however, more time is left him for the press, and, after all,
the world is ruled by what is read, not heard. The spoken word may
die—the printed one must live. What of truth there is in that is
immortal. It will forever bud and blossom and bear fruit.
In conclusion, it may be as well to state here that Mr. Lynch is a
minister of the Congregational body, and that his chapel is in Grafton
Street, Tottenham Court Road; that he was educated at Highbury College,
and then became minister of a small body of seceders from Dr. Leifchild’s
congregation. He is young yet. He is older in thoughts than in years.
His inner life has been of richer growth than his outer one. A popular
preacher he can never become; but to men of thought, especially to men of
literature—to the school of Tennyson and Coleridge—his will always be a
welcome name.
THE REV. S. MARTIN.
Is the language of the Psalmist, descriptive of himself, universally
true? Is it true that man is born in sin, and shapen in iniquity; that
he is depraved; that he hates what is good, and loves what is bad? If it
be so, that fact, of itself, sufficiently accounts for the war ever
carried on between faith and reason, the church and the world. If it be
so, it is vain that philosophy attempts to break down the line of
demarcation, and to lead men to what it deems a purer faith. At its best
and highest it is powerless—nothing better than, in the language of
Carlyle, ‘Thrice refined pabulum of transcendental moonshine.’
The only remedy for this is to return to the practice of the Wesleys and
the Whitfields of an earlier day, to proclaim the naked truth: That man
is a rebel against God—that he is destined to eternal perdition—and that
every step he takes, till his heart be touched by divine grace, and won
by the attraction of the cross, leads him further and further in his
downward way. It is a terrible doctrine, this; yet, strange to say, it
is a popular one. The men who preach it are the most popular preachers.
Their Gospel tramples on intellect, and they do the same. According to
them, the weak things of the world, and the things that are despised, are
powerful to bring to nought things that are; and, therefore, they take
their stand above the science and literature and philosophy of man, which
they hold but as dirt in comparison with the truths they teach and the
discoveries they reveal. Their appeal is not to the intellect or the
taste. For neither do they care. They display no pride of learning, no
affluence of imagination, no pomp of words. They abound with no thoughts
rich and rare. The perilous paths which the human intellect finds for
itself, when in wandering mazes lost, they altogether ignore.
Hence their immense success. The common mass of church and chapel goers
are not given, by mental speculation, to trains of abstract and
protracted thought. Generally, their education is of the most limited
description, consisting of little more than is requisite for the ordinary
business of ordinary life. The London _bourgeoise_ are not a very
learned folk. Were a Coleridge set down amongst them they would say,
‘Much learning hath made this man mad.’ They would at any time prefer a
Hall to a John Foster, or such a man as Robert Montgomery to Professor
Maurice or Mr. Lynch. But they can be reached through the heart, and
they love so to be reached. Nor on religious matters is this very
difficult to do so. The chief requirements are simplicity and
earnestness—that you should not reason, but command and appeal. The more
simply and authoritatively this is done, of course, the better it is
done. An audience does not love to be distracted, or to have its mental
powers severely taxed; but it comes to be excited, to be quickened, to be
delivered for a time from the things which are seen and temporal, and to
realise those which are unseen and eternal. The men who aim straight at
this end—if they have at all the requisite amount of voice and manner—are
sure to have an audience fit, and not few.
Thus Mr. Martin has won his way, and become a power in the pulpit. About
fifteen years since, he came to London from a provincial college—a
college which the self-satisfied young gentlemen of Highbury, with their
acknowledged popular preaching talents, regarded in much the same way as
Nazareth was regarded by the Jews. A new chapel had just been erected in
Lambeth by the Congregationalists, and immediately Mr. Martin filled it.
Where there had been a few wretched hovels there rose up a temple crowded
with worshippers. Every part was full. The preacher was young; his
style was exceedingly simple; but he had the calm self-possession of a
man with a mission to men’s souls, and he had a clear voice, and a manner
grave and, at times, pathetic or severe. It was seldom that men had
seen, on such young shoulders, so old a head; and the Dissenting world
rushed to hear the boyish preacher who seemed miraculously endued with
the wisdom and gravity of age, and whose popularity even seemed to have
left him simple and unaffected, in spite of it all. In time, a new
chapel was erected in Westminster, not far from the residence of royalty;
and of that chapel Mr. Martin became the minister. There he yet remains,
and there his popularity is as great as ever. You are lucky if you get a
seat, the chapel, which has recently been enlarged, being always full.
Mr. Martin’s forte is seriousness. He appears always solemn and devout.
In the man himself you see no sign of great intellectual power. Dressed
in sober black, close buttoned to the chin, you see a young man, with a
pale heavy face, worn down by work. You may listen a long time before
fire flashes from those eyes and lips, or before that brain thinks out of
the commonest style of pulpit thought. It is really remarkable with how
little instrumentality Mr. Martin produces so great an effect. He looks
perfectly unimpressible—as if the world’s vanities never could charm
him—as if he passed his life in some hermit’s dismal cell, and not in the
city’s passionate and restless crowd. You would fancy that he was the
inhabitant of an altogether different sphere, that he never laughed or
smiled or read ‘Punch;’ and this appearance, I take it, is some help to
his pulpit success. Charles Fox said it was impossible for any one to be
as wise as Lord Thurlow looked. I would not go so far as to say that no
man can be as devout as Mr. Martin looks, but certainly his appearance
must be in his favour with the large class who attend public worship,
although his nasal twang is not very agreeable, and his face itself is
more indicative of the priest of narrow thought and of ascetic habits,
than of the man with glowing sympathies and generous life.
In the pulpit all this tells. Wait awhile, if you are sceptical, and you
will soon be convinced of the fact. The mass around you will soon be
permeated by the preacher’s power. As he unfolds his subject—as he goes
directly to the point—as, with plain and terrible language, he warns men
of sin, and of its fearful results—as he expatiates on the terrors and
splendours of a world to come—as he realises the day when the trumpet
shall sound, when the grave shall give up its spoil, when the dead, small
and great, shall stand before God—you see that he has got at the heart of
his audience—that it hangs upon his lips—that he sways it at his
will—that at his bidding it trembles and despairs—or that it believes and
hopes, and loves and lives. And all this seems done with little effort,
in the boldest and plainest language possible.
A man of one book is always a formidable foe. Mr. Martin is a man of one
book. That one book, as he reads it, proclaims one fact—salvation by the
cross; and to proclaim that fact is the one mission of his life, and the
one message on his lips. Out of that book other men may get more; out of
it Mr. Martin gets but one great and all-absorbing idea. This being the
case, one is not surprised that Mr. Martin is not met with frequently out
of the pulpit, or that what little he has published has been in the
sermon line. He has identified himself with Ragged Schools and the Early
Closing Movement, and the United Kingdom Alliance for the Suppression of
the Liquor Traffic; and has, I believe, written and spoken in their
favour. But the pulpit is his peculiar sphere: there he is great—there
he has no rival near the throne—there he speaks as one having authority,
as an accredited ambassador from God to man. In thus acting he shows his
wisdom; for there he has achieved a success which men of greater
brilliancy, of wider intellectual power, have often sought in vain.
Cowper draws his model preacher:
—‘Simple, grave, sincere—
In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain,
And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste,
And natural in gesture; much impress’d
Himself, as conscious of his awful charge,
And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds
May feel it too; affectionate in look,
And tender in address, as well becomes
A messenger of grace to guilty man.’
Mr. Martin might have sat for the portrait.
THE REV. A. J. MORRIS.
The Rev. A. J. Morris is an Independent, _alias_ a Congregational,
minister at Holloway. Of course my fashionable readers don’t know where
Holloway is. I may as well then briefly inform them that it is a suburb
of London, not far from Islington and the New Cattle Market. Holloway
belongs to the Dissenting part of London. The metropolis is cut up into
sections:—Quakers congregate in Tottenham, and Edmonton, and Stoke
Newington; Jews in Houndsditch; the Low Church party is very strong in
Clapham; at the east, down by the river, there is an immense number of
Baptists; in that large district, known at election times as the Tower
Hamlets, Dissenting chapels are plentiful as blackberries, while in the
more fashionable districts of Chelsea and Brompton you will hardly find
one. The philosopher of Malmesbury (Sir W. Molesworth could have shown
you the passage in the Leviathan) argues that a man should always be of
the religion of his country, and thus is it these sects have become
hereditary in their respective localities. You never hear of Puseyism in
the Tower Hamlets; you might as soon expect to find the Italian Opera
there as a St. Barnabas. Almost all the Dissenting families of London
have been born, brought up, and gathered to their fathers in one
locality. To this day the Dissenters of London are buried on almost the
very spot where De Foe wrote his satires, and Dr. Watts his hymns.
In spite, however, of this intuitive faith in the past, a faith no logic,
no mental illumination, can root out or destroy, dissent has its new
chapels and new men. Of these latter the Rev. A. J. Morris is one.
People who read Mr. Ruskin, and talk sentimentally about architecture—a
practice very rare among architects themselves—will see in Mr. Morris’s
chapel something of the character of the man. It is new, but still it
appropriates to itself what is graceful and useful in the past. For
instance, it has more of an Episcopalian character than dissenting
chapels at the time of its erection generally had. Up to that time
dissenters had prided themselves on the uncomely and unpoetical aspect of
the places in which they met for public worship. Your dissenting chapel
was generally a square, built of the ugliest red brick, and rendered
hideous internally by square deal boxes, called pews, in which the people
sat under a common-place divine, generally as plain as the place. Such
was the meeting-house, as it was termed in the hallowed days of dissent,
in the good old times. The whole affair was an abomination to men of
taste. Mr. Morris has introduced a great reform—he has abolished the pew
system. He has as graceful a gothic chapel as heart could desire; his
place of worship is reverential and in keeping with its character. ‘That
man of primitive piety,’ as glorious old Isaak Walton termed him, Mr.
George Herbert, says in his Temple:—
‘quit thy state,
All equal are within the church’s gate.’
Such certainly is the language of Mr. Morris’s chapel, and such I imagine
more or less would be the language of Mr. Morris himself.
Having entered the chapel and got a seat, a matter of some little
difficulty,—for the place, which is not very large, is almost always
full,—of course you naturally look in the direction of the pulpit. There
you will see a man in the prime of life, of average size, with a light
complexion, with a head nearly bald, and with what little hair it can
boast of a colour popularly known as sandy. The head is well shaped,
round and compact, and complete. Mr. Morris’s appearance is that of a
recluse, of a student of books and his own thoughts rather than of
manners and of men. He wears no gown, but, nevertheless, has an
ecclesiastical appearance, partly possibly resulting from the fact of his
wearing an M.B. waistcoat. M.B., perhaps it may be as well to observe on
the authority of a late Edinburgh Reviewer, means Mark of the Beast, and
was a term used by clerical tailors to denote those square, closely
buttoned vests, much affected at one time by curates and other young
people suspected of a Puseyite tendency. Mr. Morris’s voice is loud, but
not very agreeable. He has a singular mannerism which is anything but
pleasant till you are used to it, and when, as was the case the last time
I heard him preach, the reverend gentleman asks—‘Ow shall we lay up for
ourselves treasure in Eaven?’ you are apt to forget the gravity of the
occasion, and to indulge yourself with a feeble smile.
In what Mr. Morris himself says, however, you will find no occasion for a
smile. What he says is worth hearing. In this unsettled age you will
see that he has settled convictions—that his religion is a real
thing—that it is that which his intellect has fed on—that by which he has
squared his life—that by the truth of which he lives, and by the lamp of
which he is prepared to find his way when he comes to the valley of the
shadow of death. The peculiarity of Mr. Morris as a preacher seems to me
to be healthy manliness. He preaches as a man to men. Those whom he
addresses are most of them engaged in business, and his aim is to teach
them that Christianity is as fit for the counting-house as it is for the
closet—as fit for the week-day as the Sabbath—as fit for the world as it
is for the church. Some men once in the pulpit seem to forget that there
is such a thing as the living present. They are perpetually dwelling on
the past, trying to make dry bones live. They can tell you what the old
divines said. They can quote their favourite commentators. They can
parody the religion of men whose religion at any rate was a real thing,
but that is all. Of our times they have no idea. Of the human heart, as
it beats and burns in this age of the—
“Steamship and the railway, and the thoughts that move mankind,”
they are profoundly ignorant. They are strangers in a strange land.
Amongst us but not of us—of an alien race and speaking an alien
tongue—with garments, it may be, unspotted by the world, but without the
strength and the heart and the rich experience which contact with, and
mastery over, the world alone can give. Mr. Morris is not one of this
class—nor is he a painter of idle pictures, whose talk is of fields ever
clothed in living green—of white garments—of pavements of sapphire and of
shining thrones—nor is he a dreamy sentimentalist lisping out the
attributes of the Majesty of heaven and of earth in terms of maudlin
endearment, as some drivelling dotard might tell of the goodness and the
virtue and the precocious cleverness of the child of his old age. Were
Mr. Morris either of these, he might have a larger audience—he might be a
more popular preacher—but he certainly would be a less useful one. He
thinks, and he gives you something to think about as well. His own creed
he has not taken upon trust, nor does he want you to do so either. He
has a clear, definite conception of spiritual realities, and he aims to
give you the same. Mr. Morris has not genius—but he has intellect clear
and strong—perhaps a little deficient in fire, and a habit rare, but
invaluable in a minister, of independent thought and action. As a
preacher he ranks high in his denomination. Out of the pulpit he is
almost unknown. As a platform orator I know not that he has any actual
existence at all. I imagine he belongs to that growing class in all
denominations who have less faith in public religious meetings every
year.
As a writer, Mr. Morris has acquired some little reputation; not that he
has written much, but that what little he has done has been well done.
His chief performance is, ‘Religion and Business, or Spiritual Life in
one of its Secular Departments.’ The _Spectator_—a journal not much
given to theology, especially that of Dissent—was compelled to confess it
was a ‘series of able and thoughtful lectures on the union of
Christianity and business, addressed apparently to a Nonconformist
congregation. The topic is treated forcibly, without the mannerism
frequent among dissenters, and the rules of life enforced are not
impracticably rigid.’ He has also published several sermons; ‘Christ,
the Spirit of Christianity,’ is one. A ‘Review of the Year 1850’ is
another; and another is the ‘Roar of the Lion,’ which, as it was
suggested by the papal aggression, and was praised in the _British
Banner_, was, I should fear, an inferior production. His last work is,
‘Glimpses of Great Men; or, Biographic Thoughts of Moral Manhood,’ a work
intended to illustrate, by the examples of Oberlin, Hampden, Luther, Fox,
Bunyan, Cromwell, Milton, Moore, De Foe, Knox, Whitfield, Foster, Irving,
Christian heroism in its beauty and power. The sketches are short but
practical and to the point, well worthy especially of the attention of
the young, for whose benefit they were more especially designed.
The Baptist Denomination
THE REV. WILLIAM BROCK.
In the times of Robert Hall, when the talents of that rather over-rated
orator gave the Baptists a lift in public estimation, and made them
respectable, save in the eyes of gentlemen of very strict Church
principles, the Rev. Mr. Kinghorn, a strange spare man, a keen debater,
and a great Hebrew scholar, presided over a select Baptist congregation,
at St. Mary’s, Norwich.
Norwich at that time was very literary. William Taylor, the first
Englishman to sound the German Ocean, and to return laden with its spoils
of heresy and erudition, lived there; as did also Wilkin, the Editor of
the best edition of that rare light of Norwich, Sir Thomas Brown, and
William Youngman, a severe critic, though a writer little known beyond
the city in which he so long resided. At that time Norwich drove a
considerable trade in logic as well as in woollens. The whole city had a
disputatious air. The weaver-boys—and William Johnson Fox, now M.P. for
Oldham, was one of them—learned to dispute and define and doubt. There
Harriet Martineau philosophised in petticoats, and George Borrow, at its
grammar-school, fitted himself for the romance of his future life. In a
city thus given to thought were required, in the pulpit, men of superior
power—especially in the Dissenting pulpit; for, while the clergyman of
the Establishment can say “Hear the Church!” his Dissenting brother can
only say “Hear me!” and that he must say to people, the condition of
whose existence is free thought.
At Norwich, Mr. Kinghorn, it was considered, was equal to his post, and
held it long. He gathered around him a congregation rich and
intelligent. He instilled into their minds the strictest principles of
Baptism. To their communion-table none were to be admitted—no matter how
pure their creed, how consistent their life, how Christian their
heart—unless they had been the subject of water immersion. It seems
strange that men should ever have quarrelled about such trifling matters;
and yet to their heaven Mr. Kinghorn and his flock would admit none but
the totally baptised. (If sectarians had their own way, what a place
this world would be!) But, in time, Mr. Kinghorn obeyed the common law
and died, and the church had to seek out a successor.
After several ministers had preached on probation, the choice fell upon
the Rev. William Brock—then, I believe, a student fresh from the Baptist
College at Stepney. The choice was a happy one. The cause prospered,
the church increased, the place was enlarged, and still the pews were
full. It was considered a great treat to hear Mr. Brock. Of course the
female sex fluttered round the new pastor. Of course the gentlemen
fluttered round them. An air of taste pervaded the chapel. It was
called “the fashionable watering-place.”
But this was not to last for ever: a time was coming when the pastor
would be removed. Amongst the great railway contractors, one of them, it
seems, was a Baptist, and an M.P. Sir M. Peto—for it is he to whom I
allude—became M.P. for Norwich, and bought an estate in the
neighbourhood. This naturally led to his connection with Mr. Brock, and
this connection led to Mr. Brock’s removal to London. In the immediate
neighbourhood of the baronet’s residence, Russell Square, there was no
popular Baptist preacher. To go every Sunday to Devonshire Square, where
the _élite_ of the Baptists did congregate, was a long and dreary ride.
It were far better that the mountain should come to Mahomet than that
Mahomet should go to the mountain. Sir M. Peto did not wish in vain.
These great railway contractors can do what they like. In a very short
while a very fashionable chapel was built in the neighbourhood of Bedford
Square. It stands out in bold relief by the side of a tawdry
Episcopalian chapel-of-ease and a French Protestant place of worship. As
soon as the new chapel was completed, Mr. Brock was duly installed as
pastor.
Mr. Brock’s _début_ in London was a decided success. The chapel, which,
I should think, could contain fifteen hundred hearers, is invariably
crammed. If you are late, it is with difficulty you will get standing
room. The genteel part of the chapel is down stairs, and if you do get a
seat, you will find it a very comfortable one indeed. In a very snug
pew, at the extreme end on the right, you will see Sir M. Peto and his
family. Half-way down on your left you will see the spectacles and long
head of Dr. Price, Editor of the ‘Eclectic Review.’ Lance, the beautiful
painter of fruits and flowers, also attends here, but I believe you will
find him in the gallery. The people all round you look comfortable and
well fed, and no one presents a more comfortable and well-fed appearance
than the Rev. W. Brock himself.
There he stands, in that handsome pulpit, in that richly-ornamented
chapel, with all those genteel people beneath him and around him—a stout,
square-built man—a true type of Saxon energy and power—without the
slightest pretensions to elegance or grace. Such men as he are not the
men young ladies run after, fall in love with, get to write in their
albums, buy engravings of for their boudoirs; but, nevertheless, with
their strong passionate speech, and indomitable pluck, they are the men
who move the world. During the war, we are told, it was the weight of
the British soldiery that carried everything before it. The Frenchman
might be more scientific, more agile, more skilful every way, but the
moment the word was given to charge, resistance was hopeless—you might as
well try to stay the progress of a torrent or an avalanche. What the
Englishman is in the field, Brock is in the pulpit. You are borne down
by his weight. He gives you no chance. On comes the tide, and you are
swept away. You are learned—evidently the man before you has little more
than the average learning picked up in a hurry, in a second-rate academic
institution. You like to theorise on the beautiful and divine—the
preacher before you cares nothing for your flimsy network, born of Plato
and Schelling. You explain away and refine—Brock does nothing of the
kind: ‘It is in the Bible—it is there!’ he exclaims, and that is
sufficient for him. You may say it is absurd, it is opposed to reason
and common-sense. You can no more move Brock than you can the Monument.
I take it, this is the secret of Brock’s success: he is positive and
dogmatic, and people want something positive and dogmatic. It is only
one day in the week that Smithers can spare for theology; and, wearied
with the cares of six working days, he requires the theology he gets on
the seventh shall be positive and plain. With the monk in ‘Anastasius,’
he feels that life is too short to hear both sides. The British public
does not like to be bothered. It likes everything settled for it, and
not by it. Hence it is Macaulay’s ‘History of England’ is so popular.
Your popular preacher must be dogmatic: the more dogmatic he is, the more
popular he will be. Brock’s earnest dogmatism does everything for him.
There is no great beauty in his style, there are no bursts of splendour
in his sermons, there is no speculation in his eye; but he has a vehement
tone, is plain, affectionate, practical, full of point and power.
Brock is one of the Catholic Baptists, and will admit to the table of
their common Lord all who believe in Christ as their common head. He has
not improved by his removal to London. He preached better sermons in
Norwich than here, and he has got a slight affectation which I don’t
remember at Norwich. He mouths his a’s as if he had, to use a common
phrase, an apple-dumpling in his mouth, and occasionally painfully
reminds you of a vulgar man trying to speak fine; but I believe this is
unconsciously done on his part. At Norwich he was an ardent politician,
advocated complete suffrage, defended the Anti-State-Church movement, and
is, I believe, one of the few leading London Dissenting ministers who
still fraternise with the Association now known as the Society for the
Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control. As a platform
orator, he is very effective: he is everywhere the same—everywhere you
see the same hearty dogmatism and genial sincerity. You may differ from
such a man, but you cannot dislike him; you would rather have him for a
friend than a foe. To his own denomination he is a tower of strength.
He is the first man who has made the Baptists popular at the West-end.
Till Brock came, the Baptist congregations in the neighbourhood were very
meagre. Brock cannot do for his sect what Hall did, or what John Foster
did. By his writing he does not appeal to the religious cultivated mind
of England, nor by his graceful eloquence does he commend it to men of
taste; but he speaks to the practical English mind, to the shop-keeping
middle class, of whom I believe he was originally one, and to the door of
whose instinct and hearts he evidently holds the key. Scarlett
succeeded, we are told, because there sat listening in the jury-box
twelve Mr. Scarletts. For the same reason Mr. Brock succeeds. The men
he speaks to are men of like passions with himself.
THE REV. J. HOWARD HINTON, M.A.
In a very unaristocratic neighbourhood—in no more fashionable a locality
than that of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate Street—preaches the Rev. J.
Howard Hinton, till Mr. Brock came to London the acknowledged great man
of the Baptist denomination.
Nor was this title undeserved. If the possession of a powerful
mind—subtle, analytic, acute—a mind fertile in the destruction of
fallacies, and in the reception and exposition of great truths, gives its
possessor any weight at all, Mr. Hinton must, in any rank of life, have
occupied no mean place. Still more may be said in his favour, especially
in his character of a Christian minister—that his language is
forcible—that his own feelings are strong—that in season and out of
season it is evidently his aim to expound and declare, to the utmost of
his ability, Christian truth.
Yet Mr. Hinton has a very small congregation. I should think Devonshire
Square Chapel cannot contain more than five hundred hearers at the very
outside—a very small proportion, it must be admitted, of the intelligent
frequenters of public worship in London.
The real reason of this scant attendance, I suppose, is that Mr. Hinton
has no clap-trap about him—that he has none of the fascinating airs of
the popular Evangelical divine—that he has long past that time of life
when young ladies take an interest in their darling minister—and that, if
you wish to get any good from the preacher, you must not merely listen to
him, but must use your own intellectual powers as well—an exertion far
from common amongst the church and chapel goers of London. Six days in
the week those who have brains are working them in this crowded city, and
the seventh they wish to be a day of rest. They take the Sabbath as a
pleasant opiate—as a kind of spiritual Godfrey’s Cordial for the
soul—that they may go back to the world with renewed energy and power.
To such Mr. Hinton does not preach: with such he is no favourite. No
singer of sweet songs—no player upon pleasant instruments is he. Tall,
sickly with the work and study of a life, grey-haired, inelegant as all
book-worms and men of thought—with the exception of Sir Bulwer
Lytton—are, with a voice by no means melodious, but tremulous with
emotion as it is played upon by the soul within: such is Howard Hinton.
If you stay to listen—if you have sense enough to see the heart in that
ungainly frame and the intellect in that capacious brain—you will hear a
sermon that will repay you well. From whatever subject he is preaching
on Mr. Hinton always manages to extract something new; you are really
instructed by his sermons; your views become clearer and more enlarged;
you understand better the Christian scheme. Mr. Hinton is more than what
I have here implied. He is something more than a great reasoner or acute
divine. He has a heart, and he speaks out of it to you. He excites your
emotions as well as convinces your understanding. There is flame as well
as light in that pulpit—flame, perhaps, all the more glowing that you did
not expect to find it there. On all subjects Mr. Hinton is an
independent, an original, and a fearless preacher. On some he is
peculiar—on most he is far ahead of the denomination to which he belongs.
This is, especially, the case with regard to the strict observance of the
Sabbath. Mr. Hinton believes that it was made for man, not man for it—a
fact of which the denominations which pride themselves on being
Evangelical seem to have become utterly oblivious. Mr. Hinton sees in
Christianity a principle at variance with the observance of set times.
He sees in man’s nature abundant reason why the man who does not profess
to be religious should not be chained down to a form. He sees the man of
genuine religion will so shape his life that every day shall be a
Sabbath, and be religiously observed; and that, if he be not religious,
it is worse than mockery to ask him religiously to observe a day. It is
to the credit of Mr. Hinton that he has ably and faithfully preached this
doctrine—a doctrine which, if it be much longer denied by the clergy of
this country, threatens to be attended with most disastrous results. It
is dangerous to establish an institution which the Author of Christianity
never made; and if ministers choose to say that Christianity is
inconsistent with fresh air—inconsistent with the preservation of
physical life—inconsistent with the laws the God of nature has ordained,
the certainty is that the lower classes in ‘populous cities pent,’ who
toil from morning till night six days in the week, will do as they now
practically do—reject Christianity altogether.
I have said Mr. Hinton’s theology is original. A short sketch of it will
soon make this clear. Thus, while he holds the doctrine of human
depravity, he contends that ‘No man is subject to the wrath of God, in
any sense or degree, because of Adam’s sin, but every man stands as free
from the penal influences of his first parent’s crime as though Adam had
never existed, or as though he himself were the first of mankind.’
Calvinism Mr. Hinton _in toto_ explodes. He says: ‘Without being moved
thereto by the Spirit of God, and without any other influence than the
blessing which God always gives to the use of means, you are competent to
alter your mind towards God by obeying the dictates of your own
conscience, and employing the faculties of your own being. Think on your
ways, and you will turn your feet to God’s testimonies. This is what God
requires you to do in order to obtain deliverance from His wrath; and,
except you do it without regard to any communication of His Spirit, he
leaves you to perish.’ At times Mr. Hinton seems to contradict himself.
But, after all, is not the theme one on which the human intellect can
never be perfectly consistent and clear?
At one time Mr. Hinton was much in public life. In the Anti-Slavery
agitation he took a conspicuous part. He was also connected with the
Anti-State-Church Association, and is still a great advocate of voluntary
education. Within the last few months several able letters have
appeared, from his pen, on this subject, in the ‘Daily News.’ But on the
platform he is not often heard, as was his wont. Mr. Hinton was settled,
I believe, originally, at Reading, where he won a high reputation—I am
told the Rev. Mr. Milman, the poet, who resided in Reading at the time,
always spoke of Mr. Hinton as by far ‘the most original-minded man among
us’—and came to London when Dr. Price resigned, on account of ill health,
the pastorate of the church in Devonshire Square. Mr. Hinton then became
his successor.
His publications are various. The following list will show his industry
at least: ‘Athanasia,’ in four books; ‘On Immortality in 1849;’ ‘Letters
written during a Tour in Germany in 1851;’ ‘Memoirs of William Knibb, the
celebrated Missionary in Jamaica;’ ‘A History of the United States of
North America;’ ‘Theology, or an Attempt towards a Consistent View of the
Whole Counsel of God;’ ‘The Work of the Holy Spirit in Conversion
Considered;’ ‘Elements of Natural History; or, an Introduction to
Systematic Zoology, chiefly according to the Classification of Linnæus.’
Besides, Mr. Hinton has written pamphlets in favour of Voluntaryism in
religion and education, and published sermons innumerable. In the pulpit
or the press, his labours are most unremitting. He may be denied the
possession of great talent, but all must admit his power of persevering
toil.
The only drawback in connection with Mr. Hinton, I am told, is that his
temper is rather uncontrollable—that he is rather more rugged than need
be: indeed you will not attend long at Devonshire Square before you find
this to be the case. It is a pity it should be so. A man should have
more command over himself. Young preachers may be put out by a cough, or
any other sign of indifference; but old practised hands should have long
outgrown that.
SHERIDAN KNOWLES.
A playwright in the pulpit seems an anomaly. The stage and the pulpit
have generally been at bitter war. Jeremy Collier had the best of it in
his day, and I believe would have the best of it in ours. The stage with
its paint and sawdust and glaring gas—the stage as it is—is the last
place to which an earnest man would turn with hope. Originally
religious, it has long ceased to be such. It has become simply an
amusement—if the reproduction of all that is heartless and flippant and
rotten in society be considered as such. Our English Catos don’t go to
the theatre at all, and when one who is not a Cato goes there, it becomes
to him a sight melancholy rather than otherwise, unless he have sunk
altogether into the unhappy life of that dullest of all dogs, a gay man
about town. As to the stage being a school of morals, the idea is the
most preposterous that ever entered the head of man. At the best, when
it collects a goodly company—when it is lit up with beauty—when it
resounds with merriment—when it is electrified by wit—it is a pleasant
place for the consumption of an idle hour. More it is not now. More it
has never been since people could read and write. More it can never be.
Yet even the stage has had its saints, as in old times the world gave up
its high-spirited and gay to the cause of God. If emperors have become
monks, it is not wonderful nor surpassing the bounds of probability that
men should give up writing plays and take to writing sermons instead. A
few years back Gerald Griffin exchanged the world for a monastery. In
our own day Sheridan Knowles is an example of a still greater change, for
he has left the stage for the pulpit, and has consecrated the evening of
his life to the advocacy of Christian truth. I fear in this latter
character he is not so successful as in his former. Well do I remember
him at the Haymarket. It was the first time I ever was inside a theatre.
The enjoyment of the evening, I need not add, was intense. A first visit
to a theatre is always enough to bewilder the brain. You never see men
of such unsullied honour—women of such gorgeous beauty—scenes of such
thrilling interest in real life—and when I learned that the drama itself
was the production of Knowles, my admiration of him knew no bounds. But
I confess in the pulpit he did not appear to me to so great an advantage.
It may be that I am older. It may be that time has robbed me, as he does
every one else, of the wonder and enthusiasm which, to the eye of youth,
makes everything it looks on beautiful and bright. It may be that I, as
every one else does, feel daily more deeply—
‘The inhuman dearth
Of noble natures;’
but nevertheless the fact, I fear, is but clear, that Knowles does not
shine in the pulpit as he did on the stage, which he has now renounced
some years. Of course he has a crowd to hear him, for a player turned
parson is a nine days’ wonder, and run after as such. The question is
not, can he read well? not, can he convey his thoughts in elegant
language? not, can he compose a lecture which, to his own satisfaction,
at least, can demolish insolent popes and self-conceited Unitarians,
against which classes he principally labours; but can he preach—preach so
that men are awe-struck—acknowledge a divine influence, and shudder as
they look back on the buried past? I fear this question must be answered
in the negative.
Let us imagine ourselves in one of the numerous Baptist chapels of the
metropolis—for to that denomination of Christians does Mr. Knowles
belong—while he is preaching in the pulpit. You see a shrewd,
sharp-looking old gentleman, dressed in black, with a black
silk-handkerchief around his neck, and with a voice clear and forcible as
the conventional old sea-captain of the stage. He takes a text but
remotely connected with his discourse, and begins. You listen with great
interest at first. The preacher is lively and animated, and is
apparently very argumentative, and nods his head at the conclusion of
each sentence in a most decided manner, as if to intimate that he had
very considerably the best of the argument. Now, this is all very well
for five minutes, or even ten; but when you find this lasting for an
hour—with no heads for you to remember—you naturally grow very weary.
Knowles, I imagine from his preaching, seems to think argument is his
forte; never was a man more mistaken in his life. His sermons are
bundles of little bits of arguments tied up together as a heap of old
sticks, and just as dry. He seems an honest, dogmatic man, certainly not
a great one, and clearly but a moderate preacher after all. A man may
eschew the conventionalities of the stage, and the conventionalities of
the pulpit, and yet fail. Mr. Knowles is a case in point. As a
lecturer, I am told he has been very successful in Scotland. He seems to
suit the Scotch better than the English. He lectures against Popery, and
the Scotch will always listen with kindly feelings to the man who does
that. I don’t imagine that in London Mr. Knowles will do much. He is
very controversial. Theology is to him a new study, and he rushes into
it with all the zeal of a juvenile enthusiast. This suits the Scotch,
but not the English. We are a more tolerant folk. We are all orthodox,
of course, but our orthodoxy takes a milder form. We tolerate a clever
George Dawson, an infliction against which Scotland rigidly rebels. We
may be one nation, but we are far from being one people. We yet live on
different fare.
I have already said Mr. Knowles is a Baptist. He has been connected with
that sect ever since he left the stage and became a religious man. It
was in Glasgow, I believe, that he, to use the common phrase of the
evangelical sects, came to a knowledge of the truth. It was in
consequence of his attendance on the ministry of the Rev. Mr. Innes, a
Baptist minister in that city, that the change took place—and that he was
led to look upon the world, and man, and his relation to them both, in a
new light. It was in Glasgow that he was baptized, and became a member
of the church. That he should turn preacher was natural. Accustomed to
address public audiences, there was no necessity why he should give up
the practice, and there were many reasons why he should not.
Accordingly, every Sunday almost he is engaged in preaching, and
occasionally takes lecturing engagements in the country. He is also
Professor of Elocution at the Baptist College, Stepney—a teacher of
deportment—a clerical Turvey-drop to the pious youth of that respectable
institution. This is all very well. If art is of use—if it can make the
eloquent more eloquent, and the dull less so—its aid should surely be
invoked by the Christian Church.
I would only add, that Mr. Knowles is an Irishman,—that he was born in
1784,—and that his plays, especially the Hunchback, still retain
possession of the stage.
THE HON. AND REV. BAPTIST NOEL.
Next in estimation in this great democratic country to a real live lord
is a real live lord’s relative. If you can’t shake hands with a real
peer, it is something to shake hands with his brother. It is impossible
to get people to believe that human nature is everywhere the same; that
God has made of one blood peers and people, black and white. In this
unsettled age, perhaps, faith in the peerage is as abiding a conviction
as any whatever. Nor is it limited to what is called the world. The
Church participates deeply in the folly; no piety is so acceptable, has
so genuine an odour, as piety in high life; no homage is considered so
graceful to the Lord as the religion of a lord. A lord at a Bible
meeting—a lord stammering a few unconnected common-places about
Missionary Societies or the conversion of the Jews—a lord writing a book
on the Millennium, throws the religious world into a state of heavenly
rapture.
This, I take it, is the origin of the success of the Hon. and Rev.
Baptist Noel as a preacher in this great metropolis. If Baptist Noel is
not a lord himself, he is of lordly origin. His mother was a peeress in
her own right, and, as a tenth son, he must have a little blue blood in
his veins. His sister is, or was, a lady in waiting to the Queen. His
brother is an earl. He himself, at one time, was one of the royal
chaplains. He is redolent, then, of high life: what a delightful thought
for the London shopkeepers and tradesmen, who were wont to resort to St.
John’s Chapel, Bedford Row! I really believe that these good people felt
that by going to hear him they were killing two birds with one
stone—getting into the very best society, and at the same time
worshipping the God of heaven and of earth.
But this is not Baptist Noel’s only claim. His position has done much
for him; but his real merits have done much more. It is something to
find a man who is brought up to the Church, honestly devoting himself to
his sacred calling; scorning the pomps and allurements of the world; in
season and out of season a faithful minister of Christ. With his high
rank, with his family influence and the family livings—for to suppose
that the family has not such, is to deny that it is a respectable family
at all—though a younger son, Baptist Noel might have led a haughty and
luxurious life—a life of sensual indulgence or lettered ease. For such a
course he could have quoted precedents enough. But religious truth had
sunk deeply into his heart. His creed was no scholastic dogma, but a
living faith. With his inner eye he had seen the vanities of this world,
and the awful realities of the next; that all men were guilty before God;
and that it was only by faith in the atonement that the guilt could be
wiped away. Hence his perseverance, his single-mindedness, his zeal, He
preached, not to please men’s fancies, but to save men’s souls—not to
lull them into a deceitful peace, but to induce them to fly for mercy
from the wrath to come. True to this unvaried theme, Baptist Noel leaves
to others gorgeously to declaim, or learnedly to define, or coldly to
moralize. Evidently with him, for such matters, life is too short and
eternity too long.
Hence he is one of the plainest preachers of the metropolis. He aims at
your heart, not at your head. He touches your affections, if he cannot
master your understanding. He may win you over by his gentleness, though
he fail to convince you by his power.
Such, as a preacher, is Baptist Noel. Immediately he rises in the pulpit
you feel that you have that undefinable mystery, a gentleman, before you.
Few, indeed, are the gentlemen who surpass him in elegance of appearance,
or urbanity of manner. He is about fifty-five years of age, tall, and of
a fine figure; his hair is of a light brown colour, his complexion is
fair and pale, his face long, and his features handsome. He has a high
forehead, deep-set blue eyes, a long and rather aquiline nose, and an
expressive mouth. His voice is rich and silvery, not ‘harsh and
crabbed,’ but
‘Musical as is Apollo’s lute;’
and so indeed it ought, for Baptist Noel rarely concludes his sermons
within an hour. If his eloquence be compared to that of a stream, it
must be that of no mountain country, but of peaceful plains, of one of
which it may be said that
‘through delicious meads
The murmuring stream its winding water leads.’
He is remarkably fluent; his sentences are particularly smooth and well
constructed, and his voice gently modulated: of action, he can be said
scarcely to have any. Baptist Noel is a thorough Englishman in this
respect.
As a thinker, he has been more remarkable for his freedom and candour
than for his consistency and depth. He has always held, in the main,
what are called Evangelical views, but his views have not always been on
all matters the same. At one time he was an opponent of Millenarian
views—he then became strenuous in their favour—now he has returned to his
original opinions, and opposes them as warmly as before. He acted a
similar part with reference to the British and Foreign Bible Society, and
his amiable little tract, on the Unity of the Church, was considered very
inconsistent, by Churchmen and Dissenters alike, with his position as a
minister of the Establishment.
As a writer Mr. Noel’s principal work has been that on the Union of
Church and State, in which he justified, at considerable length, his
secession from the Establishment. He has also published an account of a
tour in Ireland, to which he was sent on a visit of inspection by the
Whigs a few years since; and he has also written a little poetry, some of
which has found its way into print. It is hardly necessary to say that
it is of that common character which it is said neither gods nor men
allow.
To many, Mr. Noel’s whole career as a Churchman was very offensive. They
had no idea of a clergyman of the Church of England standing on the same
platform with a Dissenting brother. I believe, by his conduct, Baptist
Noel drew down upon himself more than one Episcopal rebuke; and,
therefore, few were surprised when the time came when he burst the bonds
that had long held him, and became the minister of the Baptist church,
John Street, Bedford Row—a church formed by the Rev. John Harrington
Evans, like Mr. Noel, originally a clergyman of the Establishment. Still
the effort was a bold one. By such a step he had nothing to gain, and
much to lose. Worldly considerations would have prompted him to remain
where he was. I honour him that he obeyed the dictates of conscience.
Men do so rarely, and, when they do so, they are but rarely honoured.
The religious world made much more of Baptist Noel when he was in the
Church than now. Scarcely a religious public meeting was held in the
metropolis without Mr. Noel being put down in the bills as one of the
speakers: now his voice is rarely heard.
This is strange, but true. Regret it as we may, such is the fact. It
was when Baptist Noel preached at St. John’s that he was run after. What
crowds filled that dreary place! How difficult it was to get a seat
there! The dingy, dirty old building itself was enough to draw a crowd.
It was built for that fiery, foolish priest, Sacheverell. Scott, famed
for his Commentary on the Bible, was a curate there. There also preached
the scarcely less celebrated Cecil. In his steps followed Daniel Wilson,
the Bishop of Calcutta. Wilberforce had worshipped there. The building
itself was a fact and a sermon as well. The place had a religion of its
own. The neighbouring pulpit in which Baptist Noel now officiates has
nothing of the kind. Perhaps, however, the less Dissent is encumbered
with tradition or history the better. As it is, the soul is sluggish
enough. Leaden custom lies too heavy on us all.
THE REV. C. H. SPURGEON.
I fear there is very little difference between the Church and the world.
In both the tide seems strongly set in favour of ignorance, presumption,
and charlatanism. In the case of Mr. Spurgeon, they have both agreed to
worship the same idol. Nowhere more abound the vulgar, be they great or
little, than at the Royal Music Hall on a Sunday morning. Mr. Spurgeon’s
service commences at a quarter to eleven, but the doors are opened an
hour and a half previously, and all the while there will be a continuous
stream of men and women—some on foot, some in cabs, many in carriages—all
drawn together by this world’s wonder. The motley crowd is worth a
study. In that Hansom, now bearing a decent country deacon staying at
the Milton, you and Rose dashed away to Cremorne. Last night, those
lovely eyes were wet with tears as the Piccolomini edified the
fashionable world with the representation of the Harlot’s career. That
swell was drinking pale ale in questionable company in the Haymarket—that
gay Lorette was sinning on a gorgeous scale. This man was paying his
needlewomen a price for their labour, on which he knows it is impossible
for them morally to live; and that was poisoning a whole neighbourhood by
the sale of adulterated wares.
A very mixed congregation is this one at the Surrey Gardens. The real
flock—the aborigines from Park Street Chapel—are a peculiar people,—very
plain, much given to the wearing of clothes of an ancient cut—and easy of
recognition. The men are narrow, hard, griping, to look at—the women
stern and unlovely, yet they, and such as they alone, if we are to
believe them, are to walk the pearly streets of the New Jerusalem, and to
sit down with martyrs and prophets and saints—with Abraham, and Isaac,
and Jacob—at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
‘The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls
his kibe.’ Here is a peer, and there his tailor. Here Lady Clara de
Vere kills a weary hour, and there is the poor girl who sat up all night
to stitch her ladyship’s costly robe. Here is a blasphemer come to
laugh, there a saint to pray. Can these dry bones live? Can the
preacher touch the heart of this listening mass? Breathed on by a spell
more potent than his own, will it in its anguish and agony exclaim, What
must we do to be saved? You think how this multitude would have melted
beneath the consecrated genius of a Chalmers, or a Parsons, or a
Melville, or an Irving,—and look to see the same torrent of human
emotions here. Ah, you are mistaken—Mr. Spurgeon has not the power to
wield ‘all thoughts, all passions, all delights.’ It is not in him to
‘shake the arsenal, and fulmine over Greece.’ In the very midst of his
fiercest declamation, you will find his audience untouched; so coarse is
the colouring, and clumsy the description, you can sit calm and unmoved
through it all—and all the while the haughty beauty by your side will fan
herself with a languor Charles Matthews in ‘Used Up’ might envy. Look at
the preacher;—the riddle is solved. You see at once that he is not the
man to soar, and soaring bear his audience, trembling and enraptured,
with him in his heavenward flight.
Isaiah, the son of Amos, when he received his divine commission,
exclaimed, ‘Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean
lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!’ but the
popular minister of New Park Street Chapel has no such trembling
forebodings; no thought of his own unworthiness, no fear that he is
trespassing on sacred ground, or that he is attempting a task beyond his
powers, impedes the utterance of his fluent tongue. Not a trace of the
scholarship, or reading, or severe thought, or God-sent genius, or of
that doubt in which there lives more faith than in half the creeds, will
you find in the whole of his harangue.
On the pulpit, or rather the platform, Mr. Spurgeon imitates Gough, and
walks up and down, and enlivens his sermons with dramatic
representations. He is ‘hail fellow, well-met’ with his hearers. He has
jokes and homely sayings and puns and proverbs for them. Nothing is too
sacred for his self-complacent grasp; he is as free and unrestrained in
God’s presence as in man’s. Eternity has unveiled its mysteries to him.
In the agonies of the lost, in the joys of the redeemed, there is nothing
for him to learn. His ‘sweet Saviour,’ as he irreverently exclaims, has
told him all. Of course, at times there is a rude eloquence on his lips,
or, rather, a fluent declamation, which the mob around takes for such.
The orator always soars with his audience. With excited thousands
waiting his lightest word, he cannot remain passionless and unmoved.
Words and thoughts are borne to him from them. There is excitement in
the hour; there is excitement in the theme; there is excitement in the
living mass; and, it may be, as the preacher speaks of a physical hell
and displays a physical heaven, some sensual nature is aroused, and a
change may be effected in a man’s career. Little causes may produce
great events; one chance word may be the beginning of a new and a better
life; but the thoughtful hearer will learn nothing, will be induced to
feel nothing, will find that as regards Christian edification he had much
better have staid at home. At the best Mr. Spurgeon will seem to him a
preacher of extraordinary volubility. Most probably he will return from
one of Mr. Spurgeon’s services disgusted with the noisy crowding,
reminding him of the Adelphi rather than the house of God; disgusted with
the common-place prayer; disgusted with the questionable style of
oratory; disgusted with the narrowness of the preacher’s creed, and its
pitiful misrepresentations of the glorious gospel of the blessed God;
disgusted with the stupidity that can take for a divine afflatus brazen
impudence and leathern lungs. Most probably he will come back confessing
that Mr. Spurgeon is the youngest, and the loudest, and the most
notorious preacher in London—little more; the idol of people who dare not
go to theatres, and yet pant for theatrical excitement.
When Mr. Whiteside finished his five hours’ oration on Kars, Lord
Palmerston replied, that the honourable gentleman’s speech was highly
creditable to his physical powers. A similar reply would be suitable to
Mr. Spurgeon. You come away, having gained nothing except it may be a
deeper disgust for the class of preachers of which Mr. Spurgeon is a
type. We have heard somewhat too much of Negative Theology—it is time we
protest against the Positive Theology of such men as Mr. Spurgeon. There
are no doubts or difficulties in his path. The last time I heard the
reverend gentleman, he had the audacity to assure us that the reason God
allowed wicked men to live was, that as he knew they were to be damned,
he thought they might have a little pleasure first. Mr. Spurgeon is one
of the elect. His flock are in the same happy condition. God chooses
them out of the ruins of the fall, and makes them heirs of everlasting
life, while he suffers the rest of the world to continue in sin, and
consummate their guilt by well-deserved punishment. If he sins, it
matters little; ‘for that vengeance incurred by me has already fallen
upon Christ my substitute, and only the chastisement shall remain for
me.’ Mr. Spurgeon has heard people represent ‘God as the Father of the
whole universe. It surprises me that any readers of the Bible should so
talk.’ To the higher regions of thought Mr. Spurgeon seems an utter
stranger—all his ideas are physical; when he speaks of the Master, it is
not of his holy life or divine teaching, but his death. ‘Christians,’ he
exclaims, ‘you have here your Saviour. See his Father’s _vengeful_ sword
sheathed in his heart—behold his death-agonies—see the clammy sweat upon
his brow—mark his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth—hear his sighs
and groans upon the cross.’ Again, he exclaims, ‘Make light of thee,
sweet Jesus! Oh, when I see thee _with thy shirt of gore_, wrestling in
Gethsemane—when I behold him _with a river of blood_ rolling down his
shoulders,’ &c. All his sermons abound with similar instances of
exaggerated misconception.
Mr. Spurgeon steps on the very threshold of great and glorious thoughts,
and stops there. Of God he speaks as irreverently as of Christ. ‘Oh!’
cries the sinner, ‘I will not have thee for a God.’ ‘Wilt thou not?’
says he, and he gives him over to the hand of Moses; Moses takes him a
little and applies the club of the law, drags him to Sinai, where the
mountain totters over his head, the lightnings flash, and thunders
bellow, and then the sinner cries, ‘O God, save me!’ ‘Ah! I thought thou
wouldst not have me for a God.’ ‘O Lord, thou shalt be my God,’ says the
poor trembling sinner; ‘I have put away my ornaments from me. O Lord,
what wilt thou do unto me? Save me! I will give myself to thee. Oh!
take me!’ ‘Ay,’ says the Lord, ‘I knew it; I said that I will be their
God; and I have made thee willing in the day of my power.’ ‘I will be
their God, and they shall be my people.’ Here is another passage.
Preaching at Shipley, near Leeds, our young divine alluded to Dr. Dick’s
wish, that he might spend an eternity in wandering from star to star.
‘For me,’ exclaims Mr. Spurgeon, ‘let it be my lot to pursue a more
glorious study. My choice shall be this: I shall spend 5000 years in
looking into the wound in the left foot of Christ, and 5000 years in
looking into the wound in the right foot of Christ, and 10,000 years in
looking into the wound in the right hand of Christ, and 10,000 years more
in looking into the wound in the left hand of Christ, and 20,000 years in
looking into the wound in his side.’ Is this religion? Are such
representations, in an intellectual age, fitted to claim the homage of
reflective men? Will not Mr. Spurgeon’s very converts, as they become
older—as they understand Christianity better—as the excitement produced
by dramatic dialogues in the midst of feverish audiences dies away—feel
this themselves? And yet this man actually got nearly 24,000 to hear him
on the Day of Humiliation. Such a thing seems marvellous. If popularity
means anything, which, however, it does not, Mr. Spurgeon is one of our
greatest orators.
It is true it is not difficult to collect a crowd in London. If I simply
stand stock still in Cheapside in the middle of the day, a crowd is
immediately collected. The upper class of society requires finer weapons
than any Mr. Spurgeon wields; but he preaches to the people in a homely
style—and they like it, for he is always plain, and never dull. Then his
voice is wonderful, of itself a thing worth going to hear, and he has a
readiness rare in the pulpit, and which is invaluable to an orator.
Then, again, the matter of his discourses commends itself to uneducated
hearers. We have done with the old miracle plays, wherein God the Father
appears upon the stage in a blue coat, and wherein the devil has very
visible hoofs and tail; but the principle to which they appealed—the love
of man for dramatic representations rather than abstract truths—remains,
and Mr. Spurgeon avails himself of it successfully. Another singular
fact—Mr. Spurgeon would quote it as a proof of its truth—is that what is
called high doctrine—the doctrine Mr. Spurgeon preaches—the doctrine
which lays down all human pride—which teaches us we are villains by
necessity, and fools by a divine thrusting on—is always popular, and,
singular as it may seem, especially on the Surrey side of the water.
In conclusion, let me not be understood as blaming Mr. Spurgeon. We do
not blame Stephani when Caliban falls at his feet and swears that he’s ‘a
brave god and bears celestial liquor.’ Few ministers get people to hear
them. Mr. Spurgeon has succeeded in doing so. It may be a pity that the
people will not go and hear better preachers; but in the meanwhile no one
can blame Mr. Spurgeon that he fearlessly and honestly preaches what he
deems the truth.
The Presbyterian Body.
THE REV. JOHN CUMMING, D.D.
A tale is told of a fashionable lady residing at a fashionable
watering-place, at which a fashionable preacher preached. Of course the
fashionable chapel was filled. It was difficult to get a seat: few could
get more than standing-room. Our fashionable heroine, according to the
tale, thither wended her way one Sabbath morning; but, alas! the ground
was preoccupied. There was no room. Turning to her daughters with a
well-bred smile, she exclaimed: ‘Well, my dears, at any rate we have done
the genteel thing!’ and, self-satisfied, she departed home, her piety
being of that not uncommon order, that requires a comfortable
well-cushioned seat to itself. For some reason or other, it is now
considered the genteel thing to go to Dr. Cumming, and the consequence
is, that Crown Court Chapel overflows, and that pews are not to be had
there on any terms. I should have said that nowhere was there such a
crowd as that you see at Dr. Cumming’s, if I did not recollect that I had
just suffered a similar squeeze over the way, when I went to see the
eminent tragedian, Mr. Brooke.
I believe the principle of there being such a crowd is the same in both
cases. The great mass of spectators see in Mr. Brooke a man of fine
physical endowments, and a very powerful voice. They are not judges of
good acting; they cannot see whether or not an actor understands his
part; they have no opinion on the subject at all: but Mr. Brooke has a
name, and they run to hear him. It is the same with Dr. Cumming. The
intrepid females, the genteel young men, who go to hear him, are no more
judges of learning and ability than any other miscellaneous London mob:
but Dr. Cumming has a name. Carriages with strawberry leaves deposit
high-born ladies at his chapel. Lord John Russell goes to hear him.
Actually, he has preached before the Queen. So the chapel is crammed, as
if there was something wonderful to see and hear.
I confess I am of a contrary opinion. I cannot—to quote the common
phrase of religious society—‘sit under’ Dr. Cumming. I weary of his Old
Testament and his high-dried Scotch theology, and his Romanist
antipathies, and his Millennial hopes. ‘You tell me, Doctor,’ I would
say to him, ‘that I am a sinner—born in sin, and shapen in iniquity—that
I am utterly and completely bad. Why not, then, speak to me so as to do
me good? I care nothing for the Pope! Immured as I am in the business
of the world—with difficulty earning my daily bread—I have little time to
think of the Millennium, or to discuss whether the Jewish believer, some
two thousand years ago, saw in his system anything beyond it and above
it—anything brighter and better than itself. The student, in his cell,
may discuss such questions—as the schoolmen of the middle ages sought to
settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle—but I, and
men like me, need to be ministered to in another way. Men who preach to
me must not wrestle with extinct devils, but with real ones. What I want
is light upon the living present, not upon the dead and buried past.
Around me are the glare and splendour of life—beauty’s smile—ambition’s
dream—the gorgeousness of wealth—the pride of power. Are these things
worth living for? Is there anything for man higher and better? and, if
so, how can I drown the clamour of their seductive voices, and escape
into a more serene and purer air?’ And how am I to know that these
professing Christians, so well dressed, listening with such complacency
while Dr. Cumming demolishes Cardinal Wiseman—are better than other men?
As tradesmen, are they upright? As members of the commonwealth, are they
patriotic? As religious men, are their lives pure and unspotted from the
world? I want not theories of grace, but what shall make men practically
do what they theoretically believe. It is a human world we live in.
Every heart you meet is trembling with passion, or bursting with desire.
On every tongue there is some tale of joy or woe. If, by mysterious
ties, I am connected with the Infinite and Divine, by more palpable ties
I am connected with what is finite and human: and I want the preacher to
remember that fact. The Hebrew Christ did it, and the result was that
his enemies were constrained to confess that ‘never man spake like this
man,’ and that the ‘common people heard him gladly.’
Dr. Cumming preaches as if you had no father or mother, no sister or
brother, no wife or child, no human struggles and hopes—as if the great
object of preaching was to fill you with Biblical pedantry, and not to
make the man better, wiser, stronger than before: perhaps it may be
because this is the case that the church is so thronged. You need not
tremble lest your heart be touched, and your darling sin withered up by
the indignant oratory of the preacher. He is far away in Revelation or
in Exodus, telling us what the first man did, or the last man will do;
giving you, it may be, a creed that is scriptural and correct, but that
does not interest you—that has neither life, nor love, nor power—as well
adapted to empty space as to this gigantic Babel of competition, and
crime, and wrong, in which I live and move.
The service at Crown Court Chapel is very long; the Scotch measure the
goodness of their services by their length. You must be well drilled if
you are not weary before it is over. The chapel itself is a singular
place. You enter by an archway. The gallery steps are outside; the
shape is broad and short; a galley runs on three sides, and in one is
placed the pulpit, which boasts, what is now so rare, a sounding-board.
As no space is left unoccupied, the chapel must contain a large number of
persons. The singing is very beautiful—better, I think, than that of any
other place of worship in London. There is some sense in that, for the
Scottish version of the Psalms of King David is not one whit more
refined, or less bald and repulsive, than that of our own Sternhold and
Hopkins, or Tate. But, nevertheless, the singing is very beautiful. Dr.
Cumming himself looks not a large man, but a sturdy determined man, with
good intellectual power, and that power well cultivated, but all in the
dry Scotch way; though so little does the Doctor’s speech betray him,
that you would scarcely notice that his pronunciation was that of a
native of the ‘Land of Cakes.’ He is young-looking, his hair is dark,
and his complexion is brown. As he wears spectacles, of course, I can
say nothing about his eyes; or, as he wears a gown and bands, as to the
robustness of his frame. He looks agile and well set; strong in the
faith, and master of texts innumerable wherewith to support that faith.
A polished, graceful, self-contained, and self-satisfied man. He may be
a man of large heart and sympathies; but he has not the appearance of
one. He rather seems a man great in small things, tediously proper and
scrupulously correct—a great gun, I imagine, at an Evangelical
tea-table—and, with his ultra Protestantism (he is a countryman of Miss
Cuninghame’s, and every Scotchman hates Popery as a certain personage
does holy water), he is a tremendous favourite at Exeter Hall. Indeed, I
do not know that there is at this time a more popular performer on those
boards, and he is a favourite with people whose favour pecuniarily is
worth something—with people who can afford to buy his books. Hence,
also, he is one of the most copious religious writers of our day.
It is vain to attempt to give an account of the Doctor’s works, when
‘every month brings forth a new one:’ their name is Legion. There is
only one man who can be compared with Dr. Cumming in this respect, and
that is that notoriously hardened sinner, Mr. G. P. R. James.
I read in one place of Dr. Cumming that ‘he has everything in his favour;
his singularly handsome person, his brilliant flow of poetic thoughts,
his striking talents, and his burning Protestant zeal, combine to make
him one of the most interesting speakers of the day; and when we add to
all this, his modest simplicity and humility (qualities as becoming in
one of his years, as they are rare in one of his powers), we need not
wonder that he is generally admired and beloved.’ Another admirer
writes: ‘When hearing Dr. Cumming, one is reminded of the description of
“Silver-tongued Smith,” one of the celebrated preachers of Elizabeth’s
time. But though the subject of our sketch is truly silver-tongued, the
solemnity, at times, almost the severity, of his manner preserves him
from anything like tameness. Perhaps there is not a firmer or more
fearless preacher than the Doctor—a fact which has been proved over and
over again of late, as his Romish antagonists have found to their cost.
Dr. Cumming’s manner in the pulpit is pleasing. He seldom uses any other
action than a gentle waving of the hand, or the turning from one part of
his congregation to the other. He is no cushion-thumper, and depends for
effect more upon what he says than on the graces of action. Not that he
is ungraceful at all—far from that: what we mean is, that he is in this
respect directly the opposite of those pulpit fops who flourish their
bordered pieces of inspiration-lawn in the pulpit, and throw themselves
into such attitudes as compels one to believe that the looking-glass is
almost as essential a preparation for the pulpit as the Bible itself.’
Dr. Cumming is a warm supporter of Establishments, a sworn foe of
liberalism, which he declares to have ‘charity on its mantle, and hell in
its heart.’ He is a good hater. These things may fit him to be the idol
of Crown Court, but do little more. The large vision which looks before
and after, which makes man a philosopher, which teaches him to see the
good in all human developments of thought and action, and calmly and
lovingly to abide their legitimate results, has been denied him. The
consequence is, he has sunk into the apostle of a coterie, and ‘gives up
to party what was meant for mankind.’
THE REV. JAMES HAMILTON, D.D.
It is a remarkable fact that a Scotchman has never led the House of
Commons. The real reason is, I imagine, that Scotchmen are not generally
very oratorical. The Scots suffer from the _fercidum ingenium_ which old
Buchanan claimed for them, undoubtedly; but it does not generally assume
an oratorical form: it finds other ways of development. It leads Sawney,
junior, to bid farewell to the porridge of the paternal roof, to cross
the Tweed, to travel in whatever dark and distant land gold is to be had,
and a fortune to be won. But there it stops. Joseph Hume was a model of
a Scotch orator. There was not a duller dog on the face of the earth
than that most excellent and honoured man. One would as soon listen to a
lecture from Elihu Burritt, or sit out a pantomime, as listen to a speech
from the Scottish Joseph.
So it is with the Scottish pulpit. It is generally hard and heavy,
destitute of life and power, abstruse, metaphysical, learned, and
consequently dull. Yet there have been splendid exceptions. The fiery
and holy Chalmers was one, and Edward Irving was another. The Scottish
Church in Regent Square was at one time a place of no common repute.
Irving, with his splendid face, half fiend half angel—with his intellect
hovering between insanity and genius, the companion of fanatics and
philosophers—there
‘Blazed the comet of a season.’
To this day his name yet lives. In spite of the delusions and follies
with which his name was connected—in spite of the reaction, the natural
result of all enthusiasm, no matter what—Irvingite churches remain
amongst us to this present hour. But at one time they threatened to
pervade the land. All London flocked to Regent Square Church: the
religious world was in a state of intense excitement. Timid men and
nervous women went there, Sunday after Sunday, till they became almost
mad. Unknown tongues were heard; strange sights were seen. Some thought
the end of the world had come, and were seized with trembling and fear.
It was a time of wonder, and mystery, and awe; but it passed away, as
such things in this world of ours must pass away. The great magician
died. The crowd that had wondered and wept at his bidding, went to
wonder and weep elsewhere.
Under such circumstances, to attempt to fill the vacant pulpit was no
easy task; and yet that it has been done, and done successfully, is
evinced by Dr. Hamilton’s success. It is a fact that he preaches there
every Sunday to a crowded church; that there, where there were divers
prophesyings and bewilderment universal, now order reigns; that the only
voice that you hear there now, besides that of the preacher, is that of
the precentor, as he reads the bald version of the Psalms, to which the
modern Scotch stick as immovably as did their fathers to the Covenant in
the days of Montrose. This is an undeniable fact. Nor does it surprise
you when the Doctor makes his appearance in the pulpit. At first,
perhaps, you are rather surprised. There is certainty nothing taking
about the man. He looks tall, strong, and awkward, with a cloudy face,
and a fearfully drawling voice; a man, not timid, but not striking—plain
and unaffected—better fitted for the study than for the fashion of May
Fair. If you look closer, you will see indications of a calm, untroubled
heart, with deep wells of fine feeling, of tenderness and strength
combined. But still the Doctor is not the man to make a sensation at
first sight—very few ministers are. One can understand this in a way.
In certain families, it is said, the good-looking are put into the
army—if fools, into the Church. Yet, generally, the jewel is worthy of
the casket. If the one be rich and beautiful, the other is so as well.
Plain and slouching as he is, I am told the Doctor succeeded in engaging
the affections of a lady possessed of considerable property. But this is
by no means remarkable: clergymen of every denomination make as many
successful marriages as most men. One would think that they took the
common wicked standard of wicked men, and judged a woman’s worth by the
extent of her purse. I fear that there are as many fortune-hunters in
the Church as there are in the world.
If ‘Hudibras’ had been written in our day, we should at once have
supposed that Dr. Hamilton had helped the poet to a hero. Like Hudibras,
the Doctor
‘scarce can ope
His mouth, but out there flies a trope.’
He has been called the Moore of the pulpit. An admiring critic says of
him: ‘Like the poet of “Lalla Rookh,” he possesses vivid imagination,
brilliant fancy, and sparkling phraseology. His sentences are strings of
pearls, and whatever subject he touches he invariably adorns. His
affluence of imagery is surprising. To illustrate some particular
portion of Scripture, he will lay science, art, and natural history under
contribution, and astonish us by the vastness of his acquirements, and
his tact in availing himself of the stores of knowledge which, from all
sources, he has garnered up in his mind. But plenteous as are the
flowers of eloquence with which he presents us, their perfume, their
sweetness, do not cloy. We listen in absolute wonderment as he pours
forth a stream of eloquence, whose surface exhibits the iridescent hues
of loveliness—one tint as it fades away being succeeded by another and a
brighter. And a pure spirit of earnest piety pervades the whole of the
sermon, the only drawback of which, to southern ears, being the broad
Scotch accent in which it is delivered.’
Perhaps this character is a little coloured. Something must be set down
in it for effect. Still the characteristic of the Doctor’s oratory,
whether in the pulpit or on the platform, is poetry. He is a prose poet,
and his genius makes everything it touches rich and rare. As becomes a
divine, he sees everything through an Eastern medium. He is at home in
the Holy Land. Jerusalem is as dear to him as London. All the scenes of
sacred story, in the dead and buried past, live before him, and are
realized by him as much, if not more, than the most exciting scenes of
the living present. He follows the Christ as he treads the path of
sorrow—sees him in the manger—in the temple disputing with the doctors—in
the crowded streets followed by an awe-struck Hebrew mob—alone in the
wilderness—or dying, amidst fanatic scorn and hate, a triumphant death:
and the Doctor tells you these things as if he were there—as if they had
but happened yesterday—as if he had come fresh from them all. Hence
there is a pictorial charm in his preaching, such as is possessed but by
few, and excelled by none.
This is also characteristic of the Doctor’s writing. He has used the
press extensively. I see he has just issued an account of one of the
sufferers in that unhappy missionary expedition to the island of Terra
del Fuego, the result of which was the slow death, by hunger, of the
parties engaged. His cheap series of tracts, entitled ‘Happy Home,’ are
considered, by the religious world, exquisite productions. They are much
in demand. This, however, is easily accounted for. The pastor of a rich
London congregation can always have a good sale for his works. The
wealthy members of his church will buy them for distribution; even the
very poor will make an effort to procure them. Bad or good, they are
sure to have a respectable sale. Happily, in Dr. Hamilton’s case, this
respectable sale is deserved. His publications have the same beauties as
his sermons. It is to be regretted that the small tracts, published by
well-meaning men, with the best of motives, should be so little adapted
to that end. In reality, they do more harm than good. The very class
they are intended for do not read them; and those who do are precisely
the class that need to be stimulated into some life higher and grander
than your small tract-writer can generally conceive of. It is to the
credit of Dr. Hamilton that he does not disdain to write little books on
great subjects, and thus seek to rescue the tract system from the
contempt into which, owing to the injudiciousness of its friends, it has
so extensively fallen.
We have only to add here, that the Doctor sides with the Free Scotch
Church, and that, of that remarkable movement, he was one of the earliest
and warmest friends.
Miscellaneous.
THE REV. WILLIAM FORSTER.
Aristophanes, were he alive now, I imagine, instead of aiming his wit at
the philosophers, would have a turn with the theologians. Theirs is the
real cloud-land. In spite of the inherent conservatism of human nature
in theology, you cannot keep up the old landmarks. Nay, such is the
perverseness of human nature, that the more you try to do so the less
chance there seems of your succeeding. To the reign of the Saints
succeeded the madness and the profligacy of the Restoration. Lord
Bolingbroke always said it was Dr. Manton’s Commentary on the 119th
Psalm, which his mother, much against his inclination, compelled him to
read, which made an infidel of him. Holyoake, the leader of the
Secularists, was brought up in the Sunday School at Birmingham. Thomas
Cooper, the author of the ‘Purgatory of Suicides,’ was a Methodist local
preacher. William Johnson Fox, who has done as much as any man to
destroy orthodoxy in persons of intelligence and position in society, was
at one time pastor of an Independent church. Sterling was long a
clergyman of the Church of England, and poor Blanco White traversed every
point of the religious compass, earnestly seeking rest, and unfortunately
finding none.
Is there, then, no religious truth? Is man ever to be surrounded by
doubt—to be ever void of a living faith—from age to age to turn an
anxious eye above, and there see
‘no God, no heaven, in the void world—
The wide, deep, lampless, grey, unpeopled world’?
Is it all dark cloud-land when we have done with this fever we call life?
Religion is man’s attempt to answer this question. A church is an
attempt to answer it in a certain way. The true church is the church
which gives the true answer. But who is to decide? ‘The Catholic and
Apostolic Church,’ says one; ‘the Bible,’ says another. But, then, who
is to decide as to which is the Catholic and Apostolic Church, or as to
what the Bible says? In all these cases the final appeal must be made to
the intellect of man. But man’s intellect grows with his growth, and
strengthens with his strength. I am not to-day, either in body or in
mind, what I was yesterday. To-morrow I shall be a different man again.
Changing myself, how can I subscribe an unchanging creed? ‘Excelsior’ is
my motto. I believe that
‘through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns.’
And it is vain, therefore, that you seek to tie me to a creed, or to
stereotype what should be a growing faith. My aim is loyalty to my
conscience and God. Where they lead I follow.
In some such way, I imagine, has Mr. Forster, late pastor of the
Congregational chapel, Kentish Town, reasoned. Originally a minister in
Jersey, he was invited to the metropolis about twelve years since. At
that time he was an ardent Calvinist. The investigation which led him to
abandon unconditional election, the final perseverance of the saints, and
the special influence of the Holy Spirit, shattered the whole system of
opinions in which he had been educated, and which he had hitherto
faithfully upheld. Other changes followed. His views of the Trinity
were modified. The consequence was, when a new chapel was built for him,
in Kentish Town, it was agreed that all definition of God, Christ, and
the Holy Spirit, should be avoided, and that the clause, ‘This place is
erected for the worship of God, as the Father, through the Son, and by
the Holy Spirit,’ should be placed at the head of the deed.
After further investigation, Mr. Forster found that he could not even
subscribe to that—that he had ceased to regard Christ as a mediator at
all—and, consequently, he resigned the charge of a church, which, owing
to his labours, had become flourishing and great. Now his banner bears
the motto of ‘Free Inquiry.’ He preaches in a handsome chapel in Camden
Town. His church calls itself a Free Church. It promises to be a
successful one. It is well attended, though it has much to contend
against. The orthodox will not forgive Mr. Forster his desertion of
their camp; and the Unitarians, who, in their way, are often as
narrow-minded and dogmatic as the most orthodox themselves, cannot
exactly hold out the right hand of fellowship to a man who professes to
be free—who claims to know no master—whose appeal is to the law and to
the testimony, rather than to the doctrines and opinions of men.
Thus Mr. Forster gravitates, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and
earth. Yet his condition is by no means a rare one. That a large number
sympathise with him, the attendance at his chapel is convincing proof.
Coming out from the orthodox, he bears testimony against them. In his
farewell sermon to his Kentish Town congregation he says: ‘How little
have the contents of the Bible to do with men’s personal belief! How
seldom are men taught to rely on their own powers in the investigation of
the truth! How few are the Christians who sit at the feet of Jesus, or
frequent the apostolic college! If Dissenters have renounced the
infallibility of the Pope, have they not bowed their necks to a yoke
almost as heavy and galling? If they have given up the Thirty-nine
Articles, have they on that account conceded to each other the right of
judging all things for themselves? If the Trentine pandects are not
retained as the law of their religious faith and life, are they not bound
by the Institutes of Calvin, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the
Assembly’s Catechism, the Minutes of Conference, and the Sermons of
Wesley—the creeds of chapel trust-deeds, the Congregational Union
Confession of Faith, or by the writings of Howe, Watts, Doddridge, Gill,
Fuller, Hall, Priestly, Watson, Channing, and of other great men, who
ought to be dear to their hearts, but not lords of their faith? Are we
not all of us more or less guilty of this servility? Have we not yet to
learn that there is no _via media_—no middle way between Reason and Rome?
There is, unhappily, floating over us an invisible and unexpressed
opinion, to which all, in the main, must agree. It hovers over the
pulpit and the pew; over the church and congregation; over the
professor’s chair and the students’ form; over the family and the school;
over the Bible and the Commentary. All thought, all sentiment, all
investigation, all conclusions, all teachings, are controlled by it. It
is this which checks free inquiry; shuts the mouths of those who have
convictions which fit not the Procrustes’ bed, according to which all
opinions are to be shortened or stretched; makes hypocrites of those who
cannot afford to keep a conscience, or have not courage to brave the
consequences of honesty; turns the pulpit too often into the chair of
restraint, concealment, or compromise. Wherever this tyranny is obeyed,
there cannot be much depth of conviction, vitality of sentiment, growth
of knowledge, and improvement of religious life. If this principle were
applied to science, it would paralyse all the energies of investigation,
and make the wheels of progress stand still. If churches will not
respect individual liberty—will not let their ministers and members
investigate the Scriptures, and theology, the fruit of other men’s
examination of the Scriptures, as fearlessly, impartially, and rigidly as
men inquire into Nature and the human results of searching into
Nature—such as astronomy, chemistry, and any other branch of science—then
it is the duty of every Christian, in God’s name, and the name of human
nature, to resist the imposition. It may cost him friends, income,
reputation, station, and much which he highly values. He is bound, at
whatever sacrifice, to maintain his inborn and inalienable freedom. In
this way the yoke of the creeds would be broken. The churches would be
turned into the seats of liberty. A noble, manly piety would grow up
among us. The truth, whatever it is, would be discovered. A new state
of things would be instituted. Every man would be respected as he
rejected human authority over his conscience—refused to allow uninspired
men to make his creed as his furniture, his bread, or books—tested all
opinions by the light of his own reason—chose to give an account of his
convictions, or the use of his powers in obtaining his convictions, to
none but his Maker. Self-respect, love of truth, reverence to God,
benevolence to men, call upon us all to stand by our native right and
duty of searching into all truth contained in all creeds, confessions of
faith, catechisms, and all other documents, whether human or divine. The
obligation lies in our power of searching into whatever concerns our
moral culture, spiritual life, and religious duty.’
Mr. Forster, in accordance with the sentiments here advocated, has left
the Congregational body with which he was connected, and has founded a
Free Church. Whether that church will answer the wants of our age, time
will prove. If the work be good, it will stand. If it be better than
old-fashioned sectarianism, it will remain. If it speak to the heart of
man, it cannot die. Mr. Forster has great qualifications for his task.
He is in the prime of life. His manner in the pulpit is pleasing. His
sermons evince careful preparation, and the possession of a considerable
amount of intellectual power. At times he rises into eloquence. Some of
his published sermons are inferior to none that have been published in
our time, and have been received well in quarters where, generally,
little favour is shown to the pulpit exercises of divines.
Though unwearied in the discharge of pastoral duties, Mr. Forster has
found time for other labours. Of the Temperance Reformation he has been
one of the ablest and most eloquent advocates, and often has Exeter Hall
reëchoed his impassioned advocacy in its behalf. He carries abstinence
to an extent rare in this country, and abstains entirely from the use of
animal food. At one time he was an ardent member of the party of
Anti-State Churchmen, of which the late member for Rochdale is the glory
and defence. Latterly he seems to have mixed but little with that body.
We can well imagine that his time has been otherwise occupied—that his
situation must have been one of growing difficulty and danger—that the
claims, on the one side, of a church orthodox on all great questions, and
of truth and duty, or what seemed to him as such, on the other, must have
cost him many a weary day and sleepless night. That he burst his bonds
and became free—that he tore away the associations of a life—argues the
possession of honesty and conscientiousness, and fits him to be the
preacher of the free inquiry of which he has afforded so signal an
example in himself.
THE REV. HENRY IERSON.
‘Can you tell me where Mr. Fox’s Chapel is?’ said I to a young gentleman
who had evidently been in the habit of passing it every Sunday. ‘No,
indeed, I cannot,’ was the reply. I put the same question to a
policeman, and with the same result. Yet South Place, Finsbury Square,
is a place of no little pretension. It has been the home of rational
religion for some years—of the religion of humanity—of religion purified
from formalism, bibliolatry, and cant. There the darkness of the past
has been rolled away, and the light of a new and better day appeared; and
yet the scene of all this was unknown to the dwellers in the immediate
neighbourhood. There is a light so dazzling that it can only be seen
from afar, that close to it you can see nothing. It may be this is the
light radiating from South Place.
‘There is a religion of humanity,’ writes Mr. Fox, ‘though not enshrined
in creeds and articles—though it is not to be read merely in sacred
books, and yet it may be read in all, whenever they have anything in them
of truth and moral beauty; a religion of humanity which goes deeper than
all, because it belongs to the essentials of our moral and intellectual
constitution, and not to mere external accidents—the proof of which is
not in historical agreement or metaphysical deduction, but in our own
conscience and consciousness; a religion of humanity which unites and
blends all other religions, and makes one the men whose hearts are
sincere, and whose characters are true, and good, and harmonious,
whatever may be the deductions of their minds, or their external
profession; a religion of humanity which cannot perish in the overthrow
of altars or the fall of temples, which survives them all, and which,
were every derived form of religion obliterated from the face of the
world, would recreate religion, as the spring recreates the fruits and
flowers of the soil, bidding it bloom again in beauty, bear again its
rich fruits of utility, and fashion for itself such forms and modes of
expression as may best agree with the progressive condition of mankind.’
And this religion of humanity is to be met with in Finsbury Square. I am
not aware there is anything new about it. Every school-boy is familiar
with it in Pope’s Universal Prayer; but latterly, in Germany, in England,
and across the Atlantic, it has been preached with an eloquence of
peculiar fascination and power. Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson
have been the high priests in the new temple, which fills all space, and
whose worship is all time. In England, as an organisation, whatever it
may have done as a theory, it has not succeeded. Here William Johnson
Fox, originally a student at the Independent Academy, Homerton, then a
Unitarian minister, and now the member for Oldham, and the ‘Publicola’ of
the ‘Dispatch,’ has been its most eloquent advocate. If any man could
have won over the people to it, he, with his unrivalled rhetoric—rhetoric
which, during the agitation of the Anti-Corn-Law League, will be
remembered as surpassing all that has been heard in our day—would have
done it; and yet Fox never had his chapel more than comfortably full—not
even when the admission was gratis, and any one who wished might walk in.
But now the place has a sadly deserted appearance. You feel cold and
chilly directly you enter. The mantle of Fox has not fallen on his
successor; and what Mr. Fox could not accomplish, most certainly the Rev.
Mr. Ierson will not perform.
At half-past eleven service every Sunday morning commences at the chapel
in South Place. You need not hurry: there will be plenty of room for
bigger and better men than yourself. The worship is of the simplest
character. Mr. Ierson commences with reading extracts from various
philosophical writers, ancient and modern; then there is singing, not
congregational, but simply that of a few professionals. The metrical
collection used, I believe, is one made by Mr. Fox, and is full of
beautiful poetry and sublime sentiments; but the congregation does not
utter it—it merely listens while it is uttered by others for it. Singing
is followed by prayer. ‘Prayer,’ says Montgomery (James, not Robert)—
‘is the soul’s sincere desire,
Uttered or unexpress’d,
The motion of a hidden fire,
That trembles in the breast.’
Mr. Ierson’s prayer is nothing of the kind: no fire trembles in the
breast while it is offered up. It is a calm, rational acknowledgment of
Divine power and goodness and beauty. Then comes an oration of half an
hour, the result of no very hard reading, and the week’s worship is at an
end, and the congregation, principally a male one, departs, not much
edified, or enlightened, or elevated, but, perhaps, a little puffed up,
as it hears how the various sects of religionists all, like sheep, go
astray. Such must be the inevitable result. You cannot lecture long on
the errors of Christians, without feeling convinced of your own
superiority. The youngest green-horn in the chapel has a self-satisfied
air. Beardless though he be, he is emancipated. The religion which a
Milton could make the subject of his immortal strains—which a Newton
could find it consistent with philosophy to accept—which has found
martyrs in every race, and won trophies in every clime—he can pass by as
an idle tale or an old wife’s dream.
Mr. Ierson himself is better than the imaginary disciple I have just
alluded to. He has got to his present position, I believe, by honest
conviction and careful study. Originally, I think, he was a student at
the Baptist College, Stepney; then he became minister over a Baptist
congregation at Northampton, and there finding his position at variance
with his views, he honestly relinquished his charge. I fear such honesty
is not so common as it might be. I believe, in the pulpit and the pew,
did it exist, our religious organisations would assume a very different
aspect. The great need of our age, it seems to me, is sincerity in
religion—that men and women, that pastor and people, should plainly utter
what they think. I believe there is a greater freedom in religious
thought than really appears to be the case. ‘How is it,’ said I to a
Unitarian, the other day, ‘that you do not make more progress?’ ‘Why,’
was the answer, ‘we make progress by other sects taking our principles,
while retaining their own names:’ and there was truth in the reply.
Still, it is better that a man who ceases to be a Churchman, or a
Baptist, or an Independent, should say and act as Mr. Ierson has done.
He will lose nothing in the long run by honesty—not that I take it Mr.
Ierson has achieved any great success, but he gives no sign of any great
talent. He is not the man to achieve any great success. People who
believe his principles will stop at home unless there is in the pulpit a
man who can draw a crowd. Fox could scarcely do this. Such men as
Ronge, or Ierson, or Macall, who lectured to some forty people in the
Princess’s Concert Booms, cannot do it at all. Mr. Brooke might, if he
could be spared from Drury Lane—so could Macready or Dickens, or
Thackeray; but in these matters everything depends upon the man.
Of course the first question is, thus emancipated—Why worship at all? why
rise betimes on a Sunday, shave at an early hour, put on your best
clothes, and, mindless of city fog and dirt, rush hurriedly to South
Place, Finsbury Square? If I take the New Testament literally, I take
with it the command relative to the assembling of ourselves together, and
have a scriptural precedent for a course sometimes very wearisome and
very much against the grain; but with free reason, an emancipated man,
the case is altered. I am in a different position altogether. Custom is
all very well to the holders of customary views. I expect a secret
feeling lies at the bottom, that, after all, church and chapel going is
good—that worship in public is a service acceptable to Deity.
It may be, and this I believe is the great secret of the success of
churches and chapels, that people don’t know how to spend their Sundays,
especially in country towns, without going to a place of worship. You
cannot dine directly you have had your breakfast; you must allow an
interval. Now, you cannot, especially if it looks as if it would rain,
and your best hat might be damaged, fill up that time better than in a
place of worship. So, even Mr. Ierson gets a congregation, although it
is made up of people who see in him a man not a whit more qualified to
teach religious truth than themselves, and who maintain the right of
individual reason, in matters of religion, to its fullest extent. He has
no claim to being heard; yet they go to hear him. They claim the right
of private judgment; yet they take his. Worship, in its ordinary sense,
they deem unnecessary; yet they approach to it as nearly as they can.
Such is the incongruity between the religious instinct on the one side,
and the logical faculty on the other—an incongruity, however, proclaiming
that, reason as you will, man is a religious animal after all; that he
has the faculty of worship, and must worship; that, take from him his
sacred books—his Shaster, his Koran, or Bible—still the heart is true to
its old instincts, and believes, and adores, and loves. True is it, that
man, wherever he may be, whatever his creed or colour, still
‘Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven.’
THE IRVINGITES.
Are the days of Pentecost gone never to return? Have miracles ceased
from amongst men? Cannot signs and wonders still be wrought by men
filled with the Holy Ghost? The larger part of the Christian Church
answers this question in the negative. It teaches that the miracles are
dumb, that the need of them has past away, that in the fulness of time
the Divine will was made known, and that the Church needs not now the
signs and wonders by which that revelation was attested and declared.
A large body, however, has lately sprung up amongst us, holding opposite
views. Enter their churches, and, according to them, the gift of tongues
still exists—signs and wonders are still manifest—miracles are still
wrought. Still, as much as in apostolic times, does the Divine afflatus
dwell in man, and the man so endued becomes a prophet, and declares the
will of God in known or unknown tongues.
For some time past, a magnificent Gothic Cathedral has been in process of
being built in Gordon Square. It stands near where once stood Coward
College, and where still stands University Hall, a Unitarian College, and
not far from the University College, which a certain Ex-Lord-Chancellor
took under his especial care. On Christmas Day it was thrown open for
the performance of the worship of ‘The Holy Catholic Apostolic Church,’ a
body better, perhaps, known to the community at large as Irvingites, or
followers of Edward Irving. Originally, I believe, the sect sprang up in
Scotland, and Edward Irving merely joined it, and the form of worship
which now prevails was not fully established till after his death. After
Irving left the Scotch Church, the body took refuge in Newman Street,
where they have remained till the present magnificent place was opened.
There are to be seven cathedrals in London; each cathedral is to have
four places of worship attached to it; and to each service in a cathedral
appertain an evangelist, an apostle, a prophet, and an angel. The angel
is the presiding spirit, an apostle seems to be what a bishop is in the
English Church. There is an apostle for England, another for France,
another for America, and another for Germany. To every cathedral there
are twenty-four priests. The angel is magnificently clad in purple, the
sign of authority. The next order, the prophets, wear blue stoles,
indicative of the skies whence they draw their inspiration. The
evangelists wear red as a sign of their readiness to shed their blood in
the cause.
The Cathedral is well attended: upwards of 1000 communicants are
connected with it. Service takes place in it several times a-day, and on
the Sunday evening a sermon is preached, which is intended to enlighten
and to win over such as are not connected with the church. Many
distinguished persons are office-bearers in the church, such as Admiral
Gambier, the Hon. Henry Parnell, J. P. Knight, R.A., Mr. Cooke, the
barrister, Major Macdonald; while Lady Dawson, Lady Bateman, Lady
Anderson, are amongst its members. Henry Drummond, the eccentric M.P.
for East Surrey, has the credit of being connected with this place; but,
while it is true that he is an Irvingite, it is not true that he is an
office-bearer of the church. Those who join the church offer a tenth of
their annual income towards its support, and this promise, it is
believed, year after year is faithfully kept. The Cathedral itself is an
evidence of the liberality of the people. Attached to the church is a
small, but very elegant, chapel, which is to be used on rare occasions,
and which was raised by the ladies, who contributed the magnificent sum
of £4000 in aid of the work. The chief beauty of the church, however, is
the altar, which is carved out of all sorts of coloured marble, and is
superbly decorated. The service-book put into your hands is called ‘The
Liturgy and Divine Offices of the Church,’ but I do not learn from the
members of the body that they think themselves exclusively the church,
and that there is no salvation out of their pale. They merely profess to
be one portion of the church, to take within their comprehensive fold
members of all other churches; and this, to a very considerable extent,
has been the case. The Irvingites have taken their converts not from the
world, but the church. They have made proselytes, not Christians: the
members of other churches have come over to them. In their ranks are
many Dissenters and Churchmen, and amongst their priests are many who
have been clergymen in connection with the Dissenters or the Church of
England. They profess to be above the common distinction by which sect
is fenced off from sect—Catholic and Protestant come alike to them.
The Liturgy appears to be compiled from the rituals of the Greek,
Anglican, and Roman Churches, with a slight preponderance to the latter.
The apostle of the church is Mr. John Cardall, formerly a lawyer’s clerk,
but called to his present office, as he himself states, about twenty
years ago, by the voice of prophecy. This call is acknowledged by the
community. He rules the whole body with irresponsible authority. He is
the final appeal. On his decision everything rests. He claims spiritual
preëminence over not only the churches in his own communion, but over all
the churches of all baptized Christians throughout the world, nay, over
all bishops, priests, and deacons, Anglican, Greek, or Roman, not
excepting even the Pope himself. The Liturgy and Service-book is
understood to be his compilation. He has also published a work, entitled
‘Readings upon the Liturgy,’ which is privately circulated, and is said,
by those who have seen it, to be an interesting and peculiar book,
abounding in the interpretations of the symbols and types of the Old
Testament, and an ingenious endeavour to adapt them to the purposes of
the Christian Church at the present day. In the Liturgy, besides what is
found in that of the English Church, there are prayers for the dead,
invocation of saints, transubstantiation. The authority of the church,
the power of the priesthood, and the existence of actual living apostles
to rule the church universal, are acknowledged and enjoined. The chief
minister of the church, or, as he is called, the angel or bishop, is Mr.
Christopher Heath, who, for many years, carried on business in the
neighbourhood of the Seven Dials. He was also called miraculously to his
present post. The other ministers, of whom there are a vast number, are
all well paid for their services, on an average much better than many
London incumbents. Several of them have been military men: they are not
formally educated for their work, but called to it. They are not
man-made ministers—they claim a Divine sanction and power. Nor are they
taken from the well-educated classes. They assert that the Spirit may
qualify any man, no matter how humble his occupation or his birth. Some
of them, I am told, have been tailors, tinkers, shoemakers, barbers, but
are now filled with divine light, and may do the signs and wonders done
by the apostles in an earlier day.
With apostolic pretensions, these men are careless of apostolic
simplicity. They must meet, not in an upper room, but in a gorgeous
cathedral; they must array themselves in grotesque garments; they must
have tapers and incense—Roman Catholic forms and ceremonies. One would
have thought that the name of Edward Irving would have been kept free
from such things; that his followers would have been above them; that
they would as much as most realize the spirituality of Him who dwells not
in houses made with hands, and whose temple is the lowly and contrite
heart. Genius like Irving’s would have lent grandeur to a barn; and now
the master is gone, and having no more an orator to enchant them, the
church worships in fretted aisles—treads mosaic pavements—rejoices in
fine music and elaborate ceremonial.
Thus always is it: when nature fails, men have recourse to art. We have
no actors now, but, instead, we have a stage splendidly decorated,
regardless of expense. We put Shakspere on the stage in a way that would
astonish Shakspere himself: but we have no Shakspere. Is not this a sign
of weakness? When a beauty betakes herself to jewellery, and invests
herself with borrowed graces, is it not a sign that Time is dealing in
his old-fashioned cruel way with the rose upon her cheek and the lustre
in her eye? and is it not so with the Irvingite Church? Is not its pomp
and splendour a sign that it is not so rich in apostolic gifts as it
claims to be? Paul, I think, would hardly feel himself at home in Gordon
Square.
Since the above was written, the Census Report has appeared. It has a
sketch supplied by a member of the Catholic Apostolic Church. From it we
learn that that Church makes no exclusive claim to its title. It
acknowledges it to be the common title of the one church baptized unto
Christ. The members of that body deny that they are separatists from the
Established Church. They recognise the continuance of the church from
the days of the first apostles, and of the three orders of bishops,
priests, and deacons, by succession from the apostles. They justify
their meeting in separate congregations from the charge of schism, on the
ground of the same being permitted and authorized by an ordinance of
paramount authority, which they believe God has restored for the benefit
of the whole church. And, so far from professing to be another sect,
they believe that their special mission is to unite the scattered members
of the one body of Christ. The speciality of that religious belief—that
by which they are distinguished from other Christian communities—consists
in their holding apostles and prophets to be abiding ministeries in the
church.
EDWARD MIALL, ESQ.
In these latter days men have come to think that no man has a right to
enter a pulpit unless he prefixes Rev. to his name—unless he wears a
white handkerchief round his neck, and scorns to get a living except from
the revenues of the Church. With them a daw
‘is reckoned a religious bird,
Because it keeps a cawing from the steeple.’
You have been ordained, therefore some mysterious virtue attaches to you.
You have ceased to be a man, and become a priest. You live in a
different world to what we common-place sinners do. The priest has a
different tailor to the rest of mankind. We can tell him by his
superfluity of white linen and superabundance of black cloth. We can
tell him by the downcast eye and the short-cut hair. We know him not by
his works, by the beauty of his living faith, or the savour of his holy
life, but by his dress. The tailor makes us. One dummy it adorns with
red, and that is a soldier. Another it dresses in fashionable costume,
and that is the star of Bond-street and the lion of the ball-room.
Another it arrays in antiquated vest and sober black, and that’s the
divine. Manners do not make the man, but the tailor does.
Yet, happily, the world is not given up to universal flunkeyism. We have
still some who recognise the god-like and divine in man; women not
everlastingly falling in love with new bonnets, or manhood not utterly
lost in the contemplation of new atrocities in the way of checks for
trowsers or stupendous collars for the neck. Strange as it may seem, it
is no more strange than true, that there are some who can see poets in
shoemakers or whisky-gaugers; heroism in the daughters of fishermen;
philosophy in Norwich weaver boys; apostles in tent-makers or Jewish
sailors; and something greater and grander still in the ‘Galilean Lord
and Christ,’ the faith in whose divine mission has made Europe and
America the home of civilisation, of intelligence, and life. Faith in
reality has not yet died out amongst us. There are still men who dare to
take their stand on living and eternal truths—who look beyond the crust,
and see the gem within—who see duty urging them on, and become insensible
to aught else. Such men make martyrs—missionaries—reformers; on a small
scale, such are village Hampdens or Miltons, inglorious and mute. Such
men are sure, sooner or later, to have an earnest crowd of devotees, to
exercise a powerful influence on their age, to be the teachers and
founders of a school.
Of this class, undoubtedly, Edward Miall, the editor of the
‘Nonconformist,’ is one of the latest. Originally a student at Wymondley
College, then ‘settled,’ as the phrase is, at Ware, then the pastor of a
respectable congregation at Leicester, he was M.P. for John Bright’s own
borough of Rochdale, and is, as the _Times_ confesses, a distinguished
Nonconformist. I imagine few of my readers require a description of his
thin and wiry frame. As a platform speaker, or as a mere orator, Miall
is not very effective; he delights his admirers, but he does not do more.
In the pulpit, few men are more fitted to shine. Men enter a place of
worship under different feelings to those with which they run to Exeter
Hall or the London Tavern. In the one case you are in something of a
reverential mood, and you are not disappointed by the want of physical
power. With eternity for his theme, the preacher soon causes you to
forget a feeble voice or a bodily presence not adapted for effect. The
sermonising tone is in keeping with the pulpit, and if every word seem to
have an air of preparation, and to tell of labour, you think that it is
only after mature preparation a man should speak of religious truth to
his fellow-men. Calm self-possession is essential to the sanctuary, and
there you miss not the _abandon_ which elicits the cheers of an excited
audience.
In the pulpit, Miall could always command attention. His manner, if
somewhat artificial and prim, evinced the possession of a mind earnest
and decided. His language was nervous; his views were broad and
catholic. You felt that the man before you was no reproducer of other
men’s thoughts, no worn-out echo, no empty sound; that the Christianity
he preached he had found to be good for the intellect and soul of man;
that it was the foundation of all his knowledge; that on that, as a great
fact, he had rested all the hopes and aspirations of his life. Seemingly
void of all animalism—a rock with a gleam of sunlight on it—an incarnate
idea—a voice crying in the wilderness—a reed, but not shaken with the
wind—Edward Miall is an admirable illustration of what a man with a
principle may do. It was a bold step for him to give up the pulpit and
to start a newspaper; it was a still bolder thing to circulate that
newspaper in the Dissenting world, with unmistakable quotations from
Shakspeare staring you flat in the face, and to accustom that world, used
to a very watery style of composition, to language remarkable for its
elegance and power.
The effect was startling. Miall at once became the object of the
intensest hero-worship. The old idols were utterly cast out and
destroyed. Old gentlemen, who had led a pompous life for half a century,
suddenly found themselves of no account. Their power had passed away as
a dream. Students in Dissenting Colleges went over _en masse_ to this
second Daniel. It was a time of intense political excitement. The corn
laws taxed the poor man’s food; Chartism reared its hideous head;
everywhere angry discontent prevailed. Miall thought the time had come
for Christian men to interfere; he felt that the struggle for political
rights was not inconsistent with the utmost purity of Christian life;
that the Church, by its sanction of existing abuses and its reverential
worship of the powers that were, had done much to alienate the popular
mind from Christianity itself; he felt that the Church, loaded with State
pay, would always be liable to suspicion, however excellent her creed or
pure her clergy; and he felt, therefore, that in asking men’s political
rights, and the dissolution of the union between Church and State, he
should demonstrate to the world that Christianity meant something more
than corn-laws, or tithes, or the celebrated Chandos clause—something
more than a comfortable living for younger sons. It is false to suppose
that Miall left the pulpit when he left Leicester. His labours in his
new sphere were but a continuation of his labours in the old. In
everything he was unchanged. He was merely continuing his Leicester
work, appealing, not to a county-town, but to the nation at large. He
had changed his platform; but his mission remained the same. Instead of
using a feeble voice, he had recourse to a powerful pen. His pulpit was
the editorial chair, his church the English race.
Place Miall in the pulpit, and a glance will tell you the man. You can
see he has been brought up in a divinity college; he has all the prim and
unfashionable air of youths reared in such secluded spots. His pale face
tells of thought. You see in his small clear eye that thought
crystallises in his brain. His clenched hand, his determined teeth, his
shrugged-up shoulders, prepare you for the tenacity with which he clings
to what thoughts come to him. On the hustings and elsewhere, Miall is
the same—not elated when applauded, not depressed when reviled;
unbending, imperturbable, mild of demeanour, yet inflexible in purpose.
Yet, after all, his success has been more personal than in what he has
done. Who ever talks of complete suffrage now?—yet that was Miall’s
darling idea when he first appeared in the political world, and the
Association which calls him father—which is to emancipate religion from
the fetters of the State—it must yet be confessed by its most ardent
admirers, has got a considerable amount of work to do.
It does seem strange that so pale, calm, unmoved a man as Mr. Miall seems
to be, should have wandered out of the pulpit and the study, with its old
books and everlasting commentaries, and exchanged all that elysian
dream-land for the fever of politics and the bustle of the newspaper. It
seems stranger still that he should have succeeded, that he should have
found favour with our turbulent democracy, not partial to the use of
soap, or particularly passionate in their attachment to abstract
principles. Strangest of all is it that he should have managed to be
returned as an M.P. We should have been the last to have prophesied for
Miall such a career. Cato at the theatre, Colonel Sibthorp at a Peace
Congress, an Irish patriot speaking common-sense, could not surprise us
more. Yet that Miall has achieved what he has, shows how much may be
done by the possessor of a principle. Miall is a principle, an abstract
principle embodied—that man is everything, that the human being is
divine, that the inspiration of the Almighty has given the meanest of us
understanding. From the Bible he got that principle, and that is the
unerring test by which every case is weighed and every difficulty solved.
In religion it led him to reject ecclesiastical organisations and claims,
the traditions of the Fathers, the pretensions of divines—everything by
which the priest is exalted and the people kept down. In politics, the
same rule held good. If all men are equal—if God has made of one blood
all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth—what need for
aristocratic usurpation or the legislation of a class? If all are equal
before God, surely they should all be equal before man. Thus, when angry
Chartism was asking for universal suffrage, and the Church was preaching
contentment and the duty of submission to superiors, and the danger to
religion when a man became political, Miall felt that the time had come
for him to step out of the conventional circle of the pulpit into a wider
and freer sphere, and to show that Christianity was not alien to human
right, and that a man might love God and his brother-man as well. It
does seem strange now that men should ever have doubted so plain a truth.
How it was doubted some few years since, only men like Miall can tell.
Miall’s Anti-State-Churchism was also obtained by a similar process. If
there were no need of priests, if every man could be a priest unto God,
what need of State patronage and pay? At the best they could but corrupt
and enervate the Church. It was teaching it to rely on a worthless arm
of flesh rather than on the living God.
With such views, Miall may surely be included in the ‘London Pulpit.’
Tried by his own theory, he is a legitimate subject for a sketch. The
truth he held in Leicester he holds in London, and he is still as much a
divine in the ‘Nonconformist’ office as when he was pastor of an
Independent Church. Occasionally he preaches in one or other of the
metropolitan pulpits, and the studied discourse read—but read with
admirable distinctness—is of a kind to make you regret that Miall is so
seldom seen where he is fitted to do so much. If you have not an orator
before you in the common acceptation of the term, you have before you a
master of argument, gifted with a clearness of expression and a high
order of thought, rare anywhere, especially in the pulpit now-a-days.
Buckingham wrote of Hobbes’ style, that
‘Clear as a beautiful transparent skin,
Which never hides the blood, yet holds it in;
Like a delicious stream it ever ran,
As smooth as woman and as strong as man.’
Of Miall’s style precisely the same may be said. It is always as clear,
sometimes as cold, as ice. As a still further proof of Miall’s claim to
be considered a religious teacher, witness his ‘British Churches’ and his
‘Basis of Faith,’—books eminently adapted for the age in which we live.
Yet Miall can speak to the poor, and does so. The teetotalers have built
a hall called the Good Samaritan Hall, on Saffron Hill. It is a low
neighbourhood. It is surrounded by the dwellings of the poor, and it is
erected there as a light for that dark spot, by means of which the
drunkard may emerge into a higher life. The last time I heard Miall was
there: the room was full. On a table, dressed in an old blue great coat,
stood Miall, preaching to men and women, gathered from the highways and
byways, from the crowds for whose souls no one cares. Surely that was a
finer sight than if, arrayed in lawn, he was preaching to the fashion and
wealth of Vanity Fair.
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
Roman Catholicism seems part and parcel of human nature. Luther was not
more a product of his age than Leo X. That one man should be a Papist
seems as natural as that another man should be a Protestant. Our sects
and schisms are not a very edifying sight. The greater number of them
are eternally wrangling, and uttering at the best but discordant sounds.
Few of them make any provision for the sensuous, for the love of decency
and order and solemn ceremonial, which is characteristic of some minds.
Many of them are actually contemptible when you come into close collision
with them, and examine their working, and watch their effect. The
harder, the more literal, the more matter-of-fact they are, the greater
is the chance that some subjected to their discipline should rebel
against it and become converts to the ancient faith. Mr. Lucas was a
Quaker till he became the editor of the _Tablet_. It is very probable
that Robert Owen may yet die in communion with Rome. The Roman Catholic
Church offers unity—rest for the tempest-tossed—and to the young and the
ardent and the impassioned an attractive worship and an imposing form.
By the side of it—the Protestant substitute for it—the Evangelical
Alliance seems a poor thing indeed. Hence it is that the cry of Roman
Catholic ascendancy has always been raised ever since the Church of
England appropriated its wealth and seated itself in its place. It
always has been in danger from the Church of Rome, and it always will.
Human nature is always the same. What has grown out of it at one time
will grow out of it another. Heresy, as Sir Thomas Browne well put it,
is like the river Arethusa, which in one place is lost sight of, but only
to reappear further on. Each age has its own development. Each age but
repeats the past, as the son in his turn reproduces the blunders and the
youthful follies of his sire.
It is true we get wise, and—
“Departing leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.”
But the coming age will not take your wisdom—will not follow your
footmarks—will experiment for itself. Tell your passionate son that the
fair face he now dotes on, in ten years he will have forgotten, and he
cannot believe you. It is just as vain to believe that the section who
believe in Rome will cease to do so. Roman Catholicism has some
congeniality with man, and therefore Protestantism will always be in
danger from it—and the more honest this Protestantism is—the more it
takes its stand upon the truth and nothing but the truth—the more it
relinquishes the political ascendancy it has assumed, the greater that
danger will become. Cardinal Wiseman is an illustration of this. Queen
Elizabeth or Oliver Cromwell would have soon put a stop to Cardinal
Wiseman’s career, but they would have done so in spite of the principles
of religious liberty. Now those principles are acknowledged, and England
trusts in Exeter Hall—and Dr. Cumming. Protestantism may well be in
danger.
One Sunday, hearing that the Cardinal was to preach at Brook Green,
Hammersmith, I made the best of my way thither. The church was crowded,
and I considered myself lucky in being shown by the woman who acted as
pew-opener into a good seat. Yet this good luck had to be paid for. ‘A
shilling, sir, if you please,’ said the woman curtseying. ‘A what?’ I
repeated. ‘A shilling, sir, if you please,’ was the reply. The woman
seemed to consider it so reasonable a charge that I of course complied
with her request. At the same time, recollecting that for half that sum
you are admitted into what I suppose is considered the dress circle in
St. George’s Cathedral, I did think that sixpence would have been
sufficient. The service was conducted in the usual manner. It was
longer than that of the Church of England as practised at St. Barnabas,
and a good deal more attractive. After mass had been celebrated, there
was a hush, and immediately a procession from the side door; what the
procession consisted of I cannot say. My eyes, and those of every one
else, I suppose, were turned upon the Cardinal alone.
And first let me describe the Cardinal’s gown;—it was composed of rich
red silk; besides he had a red cap, which he laid aside when preaching,
and, in addition, he had a very handsome robe round his neck, and a lace
or muslin gown of shorter extent than the red one, which came down to his
feet. Only that fluent writer the Court newsman, or he who tells in the
columns of the _Morning Post_ of the finery of Drawing Rooms, when the
beauty of England prostrates itself before royalty, could do justice to
the dress the Cardinal wore. Of course it was a grotesque one—but it was
a finer dress than that of an English Bishop, who seems all sleeves, and
if you do make an object of yourself, the more striking the object is the
better—so that, as far as dress is concerned, the Cardinal beats one of
our Archbishops hollow. I think also in his preaching he would be more
than a match for them. Him you can hear. He is a tall, stately man.
There is an air of power about him. His voice is loud, and brassy, and
unpleasant, but it is not monotonous, and his action is very animated and
good. He stands before the altar, and takes a text which generally forms
an appropriate introduction to his discourse, and delivers a
well-reasoned, argumentative address, not cut up into heads, as the
manner of some is, but connected and complete. With a fine voice, the
Cardinal would be a very effective preacher. As it is, he does very
well. I should say he has little imagination, little sentiment, little
rhetoric, but that he has great stores of learning and power of argument.
He is very plausible, and seems very earnest and sincere, he preaches
principally of the peculiar doctrines of his Church; how it is the one on
which God’s Spirit rests; how it is the one true guide to heaven; how it
has the one true Divine utterance, to which, if man do not listen, he is
lost for ever. The Cardinal has a square, massive face, with anything
but a pleasant expression. He is yet in his prime. His hair is brown,
his complexion fresh, but inclined to be dark. His eyes are concealed by
spectacles. A fat, double chin, and large cheeks, minus whiskers, give
him a very sensual appearance. But it is not a pleasant sensuality, the
jolly sensuality of a Falstaff or an alderman, the sensuality suggestive
of good dinners, with good company to flavour them. It is the sensuality
of a proud, arrogant, and imperious monk.
Cardinal Wiseman is by birth a Spaniard, and by descent an Irishman. He
was born in 1802. At an early age he was sent to St. Cuthbert’s Catholic
College at Ushaw, near Durham. From thence he was removed to the English
College at Rome, where he was ordained a priest, and made a Doctor of
Divinity. He was Professor for a time in the Roman University, and then
made Rector of the English College at Ushaw. Dr. Wiseman came to England
in 1835, and in the winter of that year delivered a Course of Lectures on
the connection between Science and Revealed Religion, which, when
published, obtained for him a high reputation for scholarship and
learning in all divisions of the Christian church. He subsequently
returned to Rome, and is understood to have been instrumental in inducing
Pope Gregory XVI. to increase the Vicars Apostolic in England. The
number was doubled, and Dr. Wiseman came back as coadjutor to Dr. Walsh,
of the Midland District. He was appointed president of St. Mary’s
College, Oscott. In 1847 he again returned to Rome. This second visit
led to further preferment. He was made Pro-Vicar Apostolic of the London
District, in place of Dr. Griffiths, deceased. Subsequently he was
appointed coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, and in 1849, on the death of Dr. Walsh,
he became Vicar Apostolic of the London District. In August he went
again to Rome, not expecting, as he says, to return, ‘but delighted to be
commissioned to come back’ clothed in new dignity. In a Consistory held
on the 30th of September, Nicholas Wiseman was elected to the dignity of
Cardinal by the title of Saint Prudentia, and was appointed Archbishop of
Westminster—a title which drove silly churchmen into fits, and which made
even Dissenters wild. Under the Pope he is the head of the Roman
Catholic Church in England, and a Prince of the Church of Rome, at which
place he now principally resides. His sojourn in England is understood
to be but temporary. He has published several sermons, and a few
volumes, in support of transubstantiation and the other doctrines of the
church of which he is such an ornament. But his literary reputation is
principally based on the series of lectures to which I have already
referred.
The Cardinal has no great love for our age, and little love for England,
if we are to judge by his epistle to his clergy on the Indian Mutiny. In
a sermon on the Social and Intellectual State of England, compared with
its Moral Condition, published in 1850, he asks, ‘Are we convinced that
the real moral tone of society in every part is on the increase? Is it
not notorious that crimes, and crimes even that were unknown among us a
few years ago—that deeds of violence which not even the hot passionate
blood of the South is here to palliate—that such crimes as these are
increasing in the great masses of our population? Is it not well known
that the relations of the family are sadly isolated, and that multitudes
live without a consciousness of their sacred nature? Are we improving
the people in regard to these things? Are we doing anything to convince
them more thoroughly, and upon true Church grounds, of their great duty
to God, to society, to their families, and to themselves? I fear we must
answer no; and I will say boldly that there are reasons why it should be
so. There are immense obstacles in the religious institutions of the
country to this being possible—because it is not in their power to come
home to the feelings, to the affections of the poor. They raise not up
any who devote themselves to them—who sacrifice themselves for them—who
find a higher reward than man can give in making themselves servants of
the servants of God. And what is the visible result of this? That any
great institutions which make us think that we are acting so powerfully
on the masses, reach not to the very depths of the miseries which have to
be probed, and which have to be healed. We are content with raising the
position of the artizan, with making him more intelligent, with providing
him with the means of education, with instructing him in his leisure hour
to store his mind with knowledge. All this is good, and yet the
institutions that work upon that class have not of their own nature a
direct moral tendency.’ All this may be true or not, yet it is clear
that the institutions which the Cardinal would recommend, equally fail,
so far as morality is concerned. A Protestant is not less moral than a
Catholic. The population of England is as moral as that of France.
Roman Catholic Ireland can boast no superiority over Protestant Scotland.
Luther has not to answer for all the sins of the world.
THE REV. DOCTOR WOLFF.
There are some people who maintain the Wandering Jew to be a myth. I
believe the contrary—that he exists amongst us, and that he is known to
men as Dr. Wolff. I hope the Hon. Mrs. Norton will make a note of this.
It is a fact of which she ought to be aware, as should Dr. Croly, and
especially Dumas, otherwise his wondrous tale will be incomplete. Yes,
Dr. Wolff is the Wandering Jew—not the melancholy personage of the poet
and the novelist, but a fat jolly Jew, for whom ‘the law having a shadow
of good things to come’ has ceased to exist, and to whom, if I may
imagine by his portly presence and unctuous face, the good things have
already come. We may look long ere we see in his countenance
‘the settled gloom
The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore,
That dared not look beyond the tomb,
That might not hope for peace before.’
On the contrary, all seems peace within and without, so far as Dr. Wolff
is concerned. Had he any inward sorrow, had he been borne down by its
agony, had the accents of despair been ever on his lip, and its terror
ever glancing from his eye, he would have been a very different man.
Nevertheless, the Dr. is the Wandering Jew, but in reality, and not in
romance; he becomes a Christian, marries a lady of title, and becomes a
clergyman of the English Church. Nominally, he is not of the London
Pulpit. He has a local habitation and a name, but he is of no place. He
is of an unsettled race. I have no doubt but that he preaches as much
out of his own church as in it, and that he has as much right to be
included in the London Pulpit as in any other. At this time his voice is
often heard in London. It really is surprising that the Bishop, or some
admiring friend, such as Mr. Henry Drummond, has never given him a
metropolitan charge, or built him a chapel somewhere in the vicinity of
the Clapham sect. One would have thought he would have done as well, at
any rate, as Mr. Ridley Herschell, than whom he is a great deal more
interesting, and not half so heavy. What is the Society for Promoting
Christianity among the Jews about? What is Exeter Hall thinking of? Is
Dr. Wolff too fat for sentiment? Must female youthful piety lavish its
tenderness on a younger man? Does a converted Jew cease to be
interesting, the same as common Evangelical curates, when their hair gets
grey or their heads bald? Must a converted Jew, too, lose his charms as
he gains flesh, as any ordinary Adonis of pious tea-tables? Alas! alas!
I fear these questions are to be answered in the affirmative. Woman is
woman everywhere,
‘As fickle as the shade,
By the light quivering aspen made’—
in cave Adullam, or in the select Christian Society of Camberwell—as in
the theatre or the ball-room, or, as Mr. Bunn would say, in halls of
dazzling light. I stop not to moralize over the bitter fact. I merely
lament it; and if I deduce a moral, it shall soon be told. It would be
but to bid the male Cynthia of the pulpit make the best of his fleeting
popularity—a popularity fading with the first dawn of the double chin, or
the first bud of the grey hair. Dear brother, such is your inevitable
fate. Stern destiny will make no exception in your favour. Other white
hands will be pressed as warmly as your own. Other lips shall speak
oracles, or move the heart of woman to laughter or to tears. For others,
divine eyes shall moisten the best French cambric, and worsted slippers
shall be worked by fairy hands. Every dog has his day.
On his legs, whether on the platform or in the pulpit, Dr. Wolff is one
of the extraordinary men of our time. In shape he is somewhat of a tub.
Wrap it up in black cloth, put on it a big head with a fat face, let that
face have small eyes, a slightly Jewish nose, and be of a light
complection, jolly and sensual, and you have Dr. Wolff. To complete the
picture, let the figure have a Bible in his right hand, and let him read
from it incessantly with a foreign pronunciation, but with a musical
voice. As a preacher or a lecturer the Doctor is but an indifferent
model. He gets off the rail as soon as he starts. He gives you a
heterogeneous mass of raw material, gathered in every country under
heaven. He talks of Bokhara as familiarly as we do of the Bank; he is as
much at home in Palestine as we in Piccadilly. He begins a sentence with
‘As I was last in Abyssinia,’ as we should say, ‘When we were last in
Chancery-lane;’ or he says, ‘As I was smoking with the Schah of Persia,’
as we should speak of smoking a quiet pipe with Smithers of the Strand;
and then he loses himself, shouts as if he were a war-horse going into
battle—bursts out into unknown tongues—sings Hebrew melodies in what the
distracted Puritan calls ‘the blessed tongue of Canaan,’ and has a wild
look in his eye as if he were speaking to his own people by the silent
waters and ruined temples of Babel, and not in a Christian church and
speaking to Christian men. The Doctor is a rhapsodist, not a lecturer.
He belongs to the men who have died out amongst us, to the bards and
scalds of ancient days. He is out of place amidst the conventional
proprieties and ecclesiastical decorums of the modern church, and
especially in that section of it which in this country is honoured with
State patronage and pay. I wonder how Dr. Wolff ever could have become a
clergyman—or ever settled down. Was it Lady Georgiana that produced the
wondrous change, that tamed the rover of the desert, and turned him into
a husband and a rector? It is wonderful what woman can do, yet even
woman cannot accomplish everything. She cannot make the Doctor get into
a pulpit and preach a sober sermon in a sober way. She cannot alter his
wild and eccentric nature, which makes him an original, almost a
mountebank, which in another man would be intolerable. I must candidly
confess that with one or two exceptions no public man ventures so near
the verge of absurdity as Dr. Wolff.
My own opinion is, that the Doctor, as I have already stated, is the
Wandering Jew. It is only fair, however, to give facts which would lead
the reader to an opposite opinion. The Doctor tells us himself he was
born in 1796, in a little village in Bavaria, at which place his father
was a Rabbi. At an early age, long before the reasoning power was
developed, or before he had sufficient information to justify him in
taking the step, he renounced the religion of his fathers, and set up for
himself as a Roman Catholic. After wandering about the country, at times
working for a living, and at times subsisting on the charity of friends,
he made his way to Rome, and became a student, first at the Seminario
Pontifico, then at the Propaganda. The Doctor seems to have stumbled at
the doctrine of the Pope’s infallibility, and to have been compelled to
leave in consequence, and tries to make out a case of hardship in his
dismissal. He says he was dismissed without a fair hearing. It does not
seem so. In writing to his friends, he had said he would always be an
enemy to the anti-Christian tyranny of Rome. No wonder then that Rome
dismissed him. After wandering about the Continent, and learning to read
and speak French as he rode on the rumble of Mr. Haldane’s carriage from
Montauban to Calais, he arrived in London in June, 1819, and became
London Agent to the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.
In order that he might be better fitted for his work, he spent some time
at Cambridge under the care of the late Dr. Lee. His journeyings and
perils have been great. He has been sold as a slave thrice, condemned to
death thrice. He has been attacked with cholera and typhus fever, and
almost every Asiatic fever. He has been bastinadoed and starved. He has
been carried away by pirates. For eighteen years he has traversed the
most barbarous countries of the world, and yet he looks as if he had
never known a sorrow or gone without a dinner in his life. He thus sums
up his labours:—‘I began in 1821, and accomplished in 1826, my missionary
labours among the dispersed of my people in Palestine, Egypt,
Mesopotamia, Persia, Crimea, Georgia, and the Ottoman Empire. My next
labours among my brethren were in England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland,
and the Mediterranean, from 1826 to 1830. I then proceeded to Turkey,
Persia, Turkistaun, Bokhara, Affghanistan, Cashmere, Hindostan, and the
Red Sea, from 1831 to 1834.’ In 1835 the Doctor left England for a
Missionary tour in Abyssinia—thence for Bombay—thence for the United
States. In June 1838 he received priest’s orders from the Bishop of
Dromore, and became curate of Linthwaite, near Huddersfield, where he had
the princely income of £24 a-year—thence he moved in 1840 to the curacy
of High Ryland, near Wakefield. In 1843, at the desire of the Stoddard
and Conolly Committee, he undertook to ascertain the fate of those
officers, and entered Cabul, where again he was in danger of death, but
saved by the friendly power of Persia. He is now rector of the Isle of
Brewers, Somersetshire, but has been recently in London, lecturing and
preaching. Hence his parishioners see but little of him. He is here and
there and everywhere. The Doctor should never have settled, or if he did
settle it should have been in London, where there is something fresh, and
wonderful, and stirring every day.
* * * * *
THE END.
* * * * *
JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
* * * * *
_Just Published_, _price_ 3_s._ 6_d._, _bound in cloth_,
SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED,
THE LONDON PULPIT.
BY
JAMES EWING RITCHIE.
Contents: The Religious Denominations of London—Sketches of the Rev. J.
M. Bellew—Dale—Liddell—Maurice—Melville—Villiers—Baldwin Brown—Binney—Dr.
Campbell—Lynch—Morris—Martin—Brock—Howard Hinton—Sheridan Knowles—Baptist
Noel—Spurgeon—Dr. Cummins—Dr. James Hamilton—W. Forster—H.
Ierson—Cardinal Wiseman—Miall—Dr. Wolff, &c. &c.
* * * * *
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
“Mr. Ritchie’s pen-and-ink sketches of the popular preachers of London
are as life-like as they are brilliant and delightful. The thought of
producing them was a happy one, and has been carried out in the volume
before us with much agreeable animation. The collection of silhouettes
herein presented to our contemplation will be especially acceptable, we
conjecture, to our country cousins, as a guide among the more generally
known of the metropolitan ecclesiastics. It will be perceived at a
glance that the writer has familiarized himself with the subject, before
undertaking its treatment. Chapter after chapter brings the popular
preachers of the Capital before our mind’s eye in a sort of stately
clerical procession.”—_The Sun_.
“Without going so far as the late Sir Robert Peel, and saying that there
are three ways of viewing this as well as every other subject, it will be
allowed that the clerical body may be contemplated either from within one
of their special folds, and under the influence of peculiar religious
views, or in a purely lay historical manner, and, so we suppose we ought
to say, from the ‘platform of humanity’ at large. The latter is the idea
developed in Mr. Ritchie’s volume, and cleverly and amusingly it is done.
One great merit is, that his characters are not unnecessarily spun out.
We have a few rapid dashes of the pencil, and then the mind is relieved
by a change of scene and person . . . He displays considerable
discrimination of judgment, and a good deal of humour.”—_The Inquirer_.
“There is considerable verisimilitude in these sketches, though they are
much too brief to be regarded as more than mere outlines. It is possible
however to throw character even into an outline, and this is done with
good effect in several of these smart and off-hand compositions.”—_Tait_.
“It is lively, freshly written, at times powerful, and its facts
carefully put together. It bears the stamp of an earnest spirit, eager
in its search after truth, and strongly set against affectation and
pretence of every sort.”—_Globe_.
“Some of the sketches are very good.”—_Literary Gazette_.
“They are penned in a just spirit, and are of a character to afford all
the information that may be needed on the subjects to which they refer.
The author’s criticisms on preachers and preaching are candid, and for
the most part truthful. This book ought therefore to be
popular.”—_Observer_.
“They are written with vigour and freedom, and are marked by a spirit of
fairness and justice—an admirable trait, if we recollect how much the
spirit of partisanship governs such strictures as a rule.”—_Weekly
Dispatch_.
“A sketch of the comparative force of the religious denominations in
London, and notes upon the chief popular preachers, orthodox or
dissentient, republished from a newspaper—we think the Weekly News and
Chronicle. The book, which is written in a sufficiently impartial
spirit, will interest many people and offend few.”—_Examiner_.
“In this volume we have within a moderate space pen-and-ink sketches of
most of the popular preachers of the metropolis. We are bound to say
that they are drawn with fidelity, and that the admirers of each Sabbath
orator whose mental lineaments are placed before us will easily recognise
the prominent features of the original. Although brief, they evince
discrimination and talent; a fluent style being one of their chief
recommendations, not much space is devoted to each. The writer only
reviews the most striking characteristics, and his sympathies are
manifestly with those who display most liberal and manly tendencies in
their religious expositions.”—_Sunday Times_.
“What Mr. Francis did some few years since for the parliamentary orators
of the age, Mr. Ritchie has in the volume before us effected for the
pulpit orators of the day. In brief but graphic delineations, he gives
daguerreotypes, as it were, of the living manners of the chief popular
preachers of various Christian denominations.”—_The Church and State
Gazette_.
* * * * *
Just Published, price 3_s._ 6_d._, bound in cloth,
THE NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON.
BY
JAMES EWING RITCHIE,
AUTHOR OF “THE LONDON PULPIT.”
Contents: Introduction—Seeing a Man Hanged—Catherine-Street—The Bal
Masque—Up the Haymarket—Canterbury Hall—Ratcliff-Highway—Judge and Jury
Clubs—The Cave of Harmony—Discussion Clubs—Cider
Cellars—Leicester-Square—Dr. Johnson’s—The Sporting Public-house—The
Public-house with a Billiard-room—The Respectable Public-house—The
Hungerford Music Hall—Highbury Barn—Boxing Night—The
Mogul—Caldwell’s—Cremorne—The Costermongers’ Free and Easy—The Southwark
Music Hall—The Eagle Tavern—The Police Court—The Lunatic Asylum.
* * * * *
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
“We would wish for this little volume an attentive perusal on the part of
all to whom inclination or duty, or both, give an interest in the moral,
the social, and the religious condition of their fellow-men: above all,
we should wish to see it in the hands of bishops, and other
ecclesiastical dignitaries—of metropolitan rectors and fashionable
preachers—of statesmen and legislators—and of that most mischievous class
of men, well-meaning philanthropists. The picture of life in London, of
its manifold pitfalls of temptation and corruption, which are here
presented to the reader’s eye, is truly appalling. No one can rise from
it without a deep conviction that something must be done, ay, and that
soon, if the metropolis of the British Empire is not to become a modern
Sodom and Gomorrah. What that something is to be the writer does not
indeed indicate—that is not his object; what he aims at is, to let one
part of the world of London know how another part of the same world
spends its days, ay, and its nights. The disease is laid bare by him, it
is for others to devise the remedy.”—_John Bull_.
“Mr. Ritchie is favourably known to us; nor do we think this little
volume will detract from his reputation.”—_Daily News_.
“Not ill done in parts, it is not done in a fast spirit or affectedly;
and the moral tone throughout is healthy enough.”—_Illustrated London
News_.
“Mr. Ritchie’s sketches are lively and graphic in style, and convey
truthful pictures of some of the dark phases of London life. His book
may be regarded as supplementary to the Hand-books and Guides of the
Metropolis, which lightly touch upon topics which are here specially
described and vigorously commented on.”—_Literary Gazette_.
“We have derived considerable amusement, as well as some information,
from a perusal of this volume, whose somewhat fanciful title is, however,
very suggestive of its contents. These comprise the haunts chiefly of
our night-roving population. . . . All that is known in the shape of
haunts and habits is here delineated with an unexaggerated fidelity we
must bear testimony to. In effect, the whole is a very gloomy and
forcible piece of word painting—literal, true, and graphic. We accept
this little volume cordially, and recommend it as warmly to the attention
of our readers.”—_Weekly Dispatch_.
“The idea is excellent.”—_Tait_.
“This book is elegantly written; the style is even simple, and is
occasionally the vehicle of a manly pathos, somewhat stern, indeed, but
all the more real, perhaps, on that account. This book will be read with
pleasure and profit.”—_Weekly Times_.
“In the ‘Night Side of London,’ Mr. J. Ewing Ritchie draws a most
painful, but, we have reason to believe, not an over-coloured picture of
the fearful temptations which abound in our great metropolis. The evils
which seduce many a young man from the path of duty, and keep down the
poor in their poverty and degradation, are traced to the love of
intoxicating liquors, and the abundant facilities which are afforded for
the gratification of that fatal passion. Mr. Ritchie writes in an
earnest manner, and his book contains information which demands the
careful consideration of the moralist and the social
reformer.”—_Inquirer_.
“Almost every line bears the stamp of truth, and the rising generation
would do well to take great heed to its revelations. Of old, Rome had
its public censor of manners, and London needs such an officer as much as
ever did that ancient mistress of the world. Mr. Ritchie has performed
this office for us, and the community owes him its best
thanks.”—_People_.
“There is a matter-of-fact reality about the sketches, but they are
chiefly remarkable for the moral tone of the reflections. Generally
speaking, painters of these subjects rather throw a purple light over the
actual scenes, and say nothing of the consequences to which they lead;
Mr. Ritchie is ever stripping off the mask of the mock gaiety before him,
and pointing the end to which it must finally come.”—_Spectator_.
“Mr. Ritchie contents himself with a graphic and not over-drawn
description.”—_Economist_.
“It is written in a sketchy and dashing style, and is a most readable
work.”—_Sunday Times_.
“The book is a good book, and carefully written; so much so, that
notwithstanding the title and repulsive nature of the subject, it may be
perused by all classes without fear of offence. A knowledge of what goes
on in this huge metropolis, whether for good or evil, is desirable for
all who inhabit or frequent our Modern Babylon. And, as regards the dark
side of the picture, Mr. Ritchie deserves great credit for the tact and
delicacy with which he has embodied the information which this book
conveys.”—_Indian News_.
“Mr. Ritchie has long been known as a clever writer in some of the
newspapers. . . . Mr. Ritchie possesses a fluent and clear style.”—_The
Weekly Chronicle_.
“These graphic and powerful sketches, the result of keen, extensive
observation and high literary talent.”—_Alliance Weekly News_.
“We hail Mr. Ritchie as a social reformer, and trust he will not merely
rest satisfied with exposing, but will seek at the same time, by personal
effort, to illume, ‘The Night Side of London.’”—_The Weekly Journal of
the Scottish Temperance League_.
“We have kept Mr. Ritchie’s book lying on our table, hoping that we might
find an opportunity for making it the basis of an article on the fearful
evils which it discloses. We must be satisfied, however, for the
present, with recommending all our readers who are anxious to promote the
social and moral regeneration of our great cities to read it carefully;
and to remember, while they read, that London does not stand alone, but
that, all our larger towns are cursed with abominations, such as those
which Mr. Ritchie has so vigorously and effectually described.”—_Eclectic
Review_.
“It sketches and spreads out before us many of the Night Scenes of London
with great vividness and truth.”—_The Christian News_.
“It is a book of off-hand sketches, but they afford the reader many truly
instructive glimpses of those apples of Sodom and grapes of Gomorrah—the
amusements that are furnished for the metropolitan public by the vendors
of intoxicating liquors.”—_Evangelical Repository_.
“Anything of their sort more striking and vivacious cannot be conceived;
the more complete descriptions are as buoyant and racy as the briefer; a
few strokes of the pen place a scene clearly before the mental vision,
and in very few instances can it be reasonably charged upon the writer
that he is sacrificing fact to fancy, the literal to the ideal. Then
comes the caution, wisely insinuated, the moral reading of the gay
illusion, the exhibition of the interior corruption of the fruit, fair
and fascinating to behold. So suggestively, yet so skilfully, is this
done, that we should not be surprised to hear that the perusal of this
volume had drawn away many votaries of vice from its debasing follies.
Certain we are that the author’s dramatic style is used with wonderful
effect, and in a manner that we hope to see long employed on kindred
subjects and for kindred ends.”—_Weekly Record_.
* * * * *
LONDON: WILLIAM TWEEDIE, 337, STRAND.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The London Pulpit" ***
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