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?
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.’
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.
‘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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
‘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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
Advertisements — THE LONDON PULPIT. — THE NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON.
Just Published, price
3s. 6d., bound in cloth,
second
edition, revised and
enlarged,
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
3s. 6d., bound in cloth,
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.