Chapter IV: Part 4

Brock is one of the Catholic Baptists, and will admit to the table of their common Lord all who believe in Christ as their common head. He has not improved by his removal to London. He preached better sermons in Norwich than here, and he has got a slight affectation which I don't remember at Norwich. He mouths his a's as if he had, to use a common phrase, an apple-dumpling in his mouth, and occasionally painfully reminds you of a vulgar man trying to speak fine; but I believe this is unconsciously done on his part. At Norwich he was an ardent politician, advocated complete suffrage, defended the Anti-State-Church movement, and is, I believe, one of the few leading London Dissenting ministers who still fraternise with the Association now known as the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control. As a platform orator, he is very effective: he is everywhere the same--everywhere you see the same hearty dogmatism and genial sincerity. You may differ from such a man, but you cannot dislike him; you would rather have him for a friend than a foe. To his own denomination he is a tower of strength. He is the first man who has made the Baptists popular at the West-end. Till Brock came, the Baptist congregations in the neighbourhood were very meagre. Brock cannot do for his sect what Hall did, or what John Foster did. By his writing he does not appeal to the religious cultivated mind of England, nor by his graceful eloquence does he commend it to men of taste; but he speaks to the practical English mind, to the shop-keeping middle class, of whom I believe he was originally one, and to the door of whose instinct and hearts he evidently holds the key. Scarlett succeeded, we are told, because there sat listening in the jury-box twelve Mr. Scarletts. For the same reason Mr. Brock succeeds. The men he speaks to are men of like passions with himself.

THE REV. J. HOWARD HINTON, M.A.

In a very unaristocratic neighbourhood--in no more fashionable a locality than that of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate Street--preaches the Rev. J. Howard Hinton, till Mr. Brock came to London the acknowledged great man of the Baptist denomination.

Nor was this title undeserved. If the possession of a powerful mind--subtle, analytic, acute--a mind fertile in the destruction of fallacies, and in the reception and exposition of great truths, gives its possessor any weight at all, Mr. Hinton must, in any rank of life, have occupied no mean place. Still more may be said in his favour, especially in his character of a Christian minister--that his language is forcible--that his own feelings are strong--that in season and out of season it is evidently his aim to expound and declare, to the utmost of his ability, Christian truth.

Yet Mr. Hinton has a very small congregation. I should think Devonshire Square Chapel cannot contain more than five hundred hearers at the very outside--a very small proportion, it must be admitted, of the intelligent frequenters of public worship in London.

The real reason of this scant attendance, I suppose, is that Mr. Hinton has no clap-trap about him--that he has none of the fascinating airs of the popular Evangelical divine--that he has long past that time of life when young ladies take an interest in their darling minister--and that, if you wish to get any good from the preacher, you must not merely listen to him, but must use your own intellectual powers as well--an exertion far from common amongst the church and chapel goers of London. Six days in the week those who have brains are working them in this crowded city, and the seventh they wish to be a day of rest. They take the Sabbath as a pleasant opiate--as a kind of spiritual Godfrey's Cordial for the soul--that they may go back to the world with renewed energy and power. To such Mr. Hinton does not preach: with such he is no favourite. No singer of sweet songs--no player upon pleasant instruments is he. Tall, sickly with the work and study of a life, grey-haired, inelegant as all book-worms and men of thought--with the exception of Sir Bulwer Lytton--are, with a voice by no means melodious, but tremulous with emotion as it is played upon by the soul within: such is Howard Hinton. If you stay to listen--if you have sense enough to see the heart in that ungainly frame and the intellect in that capacious brain--you will hear a sermon that will repay you well. From whatever subject he is preaching on Mr. Hinton always manages to extract something new; you are really instructed by his sermons; your views become clearer and more enlarged; you understand better the Christian scheme. Mr. Hinton is more than what I have here implied. He is something more than a great reasoner or acute divine. He has a heart, and he speaks out of it to you. He excites your emotions as well as convinces your understanding. There is flame as well as light in that pulpit--flame, perhaps, all the more glowing that you did not expect to find it there. On all subjects Mr. Hinton is an independent, an original, and a fearless preacher. On some he is peculiar--on most he is far ahead of the denomination to which he belongs. This is, especially, the case with regard to the strict observance of the Sabbath. Mr. Hinton believes that it was made for man, not man for it--a fact of which the denominations which pride themselves on being Evangelical seem to have become utterly oblivious. Mr. Hinton sees in Christianity a principle at variance with the observance of set times. He sees in man's nature abundant reason why the man who does not profess to be religious should not be chained down to a form. He sees the man of genuine religion will so shape his life that every day shall be a Sabbath, and be religiously observed; and that, if he be not religious, it is worse than mockery to ask him religiously to observe a day. It is to the credit of Mr. Hinton that he has ably and faithfully preached this doctrine--a doctrine which, if it be much longer denied by the clergy of this country, threatens to be attended with most disastrous results. It is dangerous to establish an institution which the Author of Christianity never made; and if ministers choose to say that Christianity is inconsistent with fresh air--inconsistent with the preservation of physical life--inconsistent with the laws the God of nature has ordained, the certainty is that the lower classes in 'populous cities pent,' who toil from morning till night six days in the week, will do as they now practically do--reject Christianity altogether.

I have said Mr. Hinton's theology is original. A short sketch of it will soon make this clear. Thus, while he holds the doctrine of human depravity, he contends that 'No man is subject to the wrath of God, in any sense or degree, because of Adam's sin, but every man stands as free from the penal influences of his first parent's crime as though Adam had never existed, or as though he himself were the first of mankind.' Calvinism Mr. Hinton _in toto_ explodes. He says: 'Without being moved thereto by the Spirit of God, and without any other influence than the blessing which God always gives to the use of means, you are competent to alter your mind towards God by obeying the dictates of your own conscience, and employing the faculties of your own being. Think on your ways, and you will turn your feet to God's testimonies. This is what God requires you to do in order to obtain deliverance from His wrath; and, except you do it without regard to any communication of His Spirit, he leaves you to perish.' At times Mr. Hinton seems to contradict himself. But, after all, is not the theme one on which the human intellect can never be perfectly consistent and clear?

At one time Mr. Hinton was much in public life. In the Anti-Slavery agitation he took a conspicuous part. He was also connected with the Anti-State-Church Association, and is still a great advocate of voluntary education. Within the last few months several able letters have appeared, from his pen, on this subject, in the 'Daily News.' But on the platform he is not often heard, as was his wont. Mr. Hinton was settled, I believe, originally, at Reading, where he won a high reputation--I am told the Rev. Mr. Milman, the poet, who resided in Reading at the time, always spoke of Mr. Hinton as by far 'the most original-minded man among us'--and came to London when Dr. Price resigned, on account of ill health, the pastorate of the church in Devonshire Square. Mr. Hinton then became his successor.

His publications are various. The following list will show his industry at least: 'Athanasia,' in four books; 'On Immortality in 1849;' 'Letters written during a Tour in Germany in 1851;' 'Memoirs of William Knibb, the celebrated Missionary in Jamaica;' 'A History of the United States of North America;' 'Theology, or an Attempt towards a Consistent View of the Whole Counsel of God;' 'The Work of the Holy Spirit in Conversion Considered;' 'Elements of Natural History; or, an Introduction to Systematic Zoology, chiefly according to the Classification of Linnaeus.' Besides, Mr. Hinton has written pamphlets in favour of Voluntaryism in religion and education, and published sermons innumerable. In the pulpit or the press, his labours are most unremitting. He may be denied the possession of great talent, but all must admit his power of persevering toil.

The only drawback in connection with Mr. Hinton, I am told, is that his temper is rather uncontrollable--that he is rather more rugged than need be: indeed you will not attend long at Devonshire Square before you find this to be the case. It is a pity it should be so. A man should have more command over himself. Young preachers may be put out by a cough, or any other sign of indifference; but old practised hands should have long outgrown that.

SHERIDAN KNOWLES.

A playwright in the pulpit seems an anomaly. The stage and the pulpit have generally been at bitter war. Jeremy Collier had the best of it in his day, and I believe would have the best of it in ours. The stage with its paint and sawdust and glaring gas--the stage as it is--is the last place to which an earnest man would turn with hope. Originally religious, it has long ceased to be such. It has become simply an amusement--if the reproduction of all that is heartless and flippant and rotten in society be considered as such. Our English Catos don't go to the theatre at all, and when one who is not a Cato goes there, it becomes to him a sight melancholy rather than otherwise, unless he have sunk altogether into the unhappy life of that dullest of all dogs, a gay man about town. As to the stage being a school of morals, the idea is the most preposterous that ever entered the head of man. At the best, when it collects a goodly company--when it is lit up with beauty--when it resounds with merriment--when it is electrified by wit--it is a pleasant place for the consumption of an idle hour. More it is not now. More it has never been since people could read and write. More it can never be.

Yet even the stage has had its saints, as in old times the world gave up its high-spirited and gay to the cause of God. If emperors have become monks, it is not wonderful nor surpassing the bounds of probability that men should give up writing plays and take to writing sermons instead. A few years back Gerald Griffin exchanged the world for a monastery. In our own day Sheridan Knowles is an example of a still greater change, for he has left the stage for the pulpit, and has consecrated the evening of his life to the advocacy of Christian truth. I fear in this latter character he is not so successful as in his former. Well do I remember him at the Haymarket. It was the first time I ever was inside a theatre. The enjoyment of the evening, I need not add, was intense. A first visit to a theatre is always enough to bewilder the brain. You never see men of such unsullied honour--women of such gorgeous beauty--scenes of such thrilling interest in real life--and when I learned that the drama itself was the production of Knowles, my admiration of him knew no bounds. But I confess in the pulpit he did not appear to me to so great an advantage. It may be that I am older. It may be that time has robbed me, as he does every one else, of the wonder and enthusiasm which, to the eye of youth, makes everything it looks on beautiful and bright. It may be that I, as every one else does, feel daily more deeply--

'The inhuman dearth
Of noble natures;'

but nevertheless the fact, I fear, is but clear, that Knowles does not shine in the pulpit as he did on the stage, which he has now renounced some years. Of course he has a crowd to hear him, for a player turned parson is a nine days' wonder, and run after as such. The question is not, can he read well? not, can he convey his thoughts in elegant language? not, can he compose a lecture which, to his own satisfaction, at least, can demolish insolent popes and self-conceited Unitarians, against which classes he principally labours; but can he preach--preach so that men are awe-struck--acknowledge a divine influence, and shudder as they look back on the buried past? I fear this question must be answered in the negative.

Let us imagine ourselves in one of the numerous Baptist chapels of the metropolis--for to that denomination of Christians does Mr. Knowles belong--while he is preaching in the pulpit. You see a shrewd, sharp-looking old gentleman, dressed in black, with a black silk-handkerchief around his neck, and with a voice clear and forcible as the conventional old sea-captain of the stage. He takes a text but remotely connected with his discourse, and begins. You listen with great interest at first. The preacher is lively and animated, and is apparently very argumentative, and nods his head at the conclusion of each sentence in a most decided manner, as if to intimate that he had very considerably the best of the argument. Now, this is all very well for five minutes, or even ten; but when you find this lasting for an hour--with no heads for you to remember--you naturally grow very weary. Knowles, I imagine from his preaching, seems to think argument is his forte; never was a man more mistaken in his life. His sermons are bundles of little bits of arguments tied up together as a heap of old sticks, and just as dry. He seems an honest, dogmatic man, certainly not a great one, and clearly but a moderate preacher after all. A man may eschew the conventionalities of the stage, and the conventionalities of the pulpit, and yet fail. Mr. Knowles is a case in point. As a lecturer, I am told he has been very successful in Scotland. He seems to suit the Scotch better than the English. He lectures against Popery, and the Scotch will always listen with kindly feelings to the man who does that. I don't imagine that in London Mr. Knowles will do much. He is very controversial. Theology is to him a new study, and he rushes into it with all the zeal of a juvenile enthusiast. This suits the Scotch, but not the English. We are a more tolerant folk. We are all orthodox, of course, but our orthodoxy takes a milder form. We tolerate a clever George Dawson, an infliction against which Scotland rigidly rebels. We may be one nation, but we are far from being one people. We yet live on different fare.

I have already said Mr. Knowles is a Baptist. He has been connected with that sect ever since he left the stage and became a religious man. It was in Glasgow, I believe, that he, to use the common phrase of the evangelical sects, came to a knowledge of the truth. It was in consequence of his attendance on the ministry of the Rev. Mr. Innes, a Baptist minister in that city, that the change took place--and that he was led to look upon the world, and man, and his relation to them both, in a new light. It was in Glasgow that he was baptized, and became a member of the church. That he should turn preacher was natural. Accustomed to address public audiences, there was no necessity why he should give up the practice, and there were many reasons why he should not. Accordingly, every Sunday almost he is engaged in preaching, and occasionally takes lecturing engagements in the country. He is also Professor of Elocution at the Baptist College, Stepney--a teacher of deportment--a clerical Turvey-drop to the pious youth of that respectable institution. This is all very well. If art is of use--if it can make the eloquent more eloquent, and the dull less so--its aid should surely be invoked by the Christian Church.

I would only add, that Mr. Knowles is an Irishman,--that he was born in 1784,--and that his plays, especially the Hunchback, still retain possession of the stage.

THE HON. AND REV. BAPTIST NOEL.

Next in estimation in this great democratic country to a real live lord is a real live lord's relative. If you can't shake hands with a real peer, it is something to shake hands with his brother. It is impossible to get people to believe that human nature is everywhere the same; that God has made of one blood peers and people, black and white. In this unsettled age, perhaps, faith in the peerage is as abiding a conviction as any whatever. Nor is it limited to what is called the world. The Church participates deeply in the folly; no piety is so acceptable, has so genuine an odour, as piety in high life; no homage is considered so graceful to the Lord as the religion of a lord. A lord at a Bible meeting--a lord stammering a few unconnected common-places about Missionary Societies or the conversion of the Jews--a lord writing a book on the Millennium, throws the religious world into a state of heavenly rapture.

This, I take it, is the origin of the success of the Hon. and Rev. Baptist Noel as a preacher in this great metropolis. If Baptist Noel is not a lord himself, he is of lordly origin. His mother was a peeress in her own right, and, as a tenth son, he must have a little blue blood in his veins. His sister is, or was, a lady in waiting to the Queen. His brother is an earl. He himself, at one time, was one of the royal chaplains. He is redolent, then, of high life: what a delightful thought for the London shopkeepers and tradesmen, who were wont to resort to St. John's Chapel, Bedford Row! I really believe that these good people felt that by going to hear him they were killing two birds with one stone--getting into the very best society, and at the same time worshipping the God of heaven and of earth.

But this is not Baptist Noel's only claim. His position has done much for him; but his real merits have done much more. It is something to find a man who is brought up to the Church, honestly devoting himself to his sacred calling; scorning the pomps and allurements of the world; in season and out of season a faithful minister of Christ. With his high rank, with his family influence and the family livings--for to suppose that the family has not such, is to deny that it is a respectable family at all--though a younger son, Baptist Noel might have led a haughty and luxurious life--a life of sensual indulgence or lettered ease. For such a course he could have quoted precedents enough. But religious truth had sunk deeply into his heart. His creed was no scholastic dogma, but a living faith. With his inner eye he had seen the vanities of this world, and the awful realities of the next; that all men were guilty before God; and that it was only by faith in the atonement that the guilt could be wiped away. Hence his perseverance, his single-mindedness, his zeal, He preached, not to please men's fancies, but to save men's souls--not to lull them into a deceitful peace, but to induce them to fly for mercy from the wrath to come. True to this unvaried theme, Baptist Noel leaves to others gorgeously to declaim, or learnedly to define, or coldly to moralize. Evidently with him, for such matters, life is too short and eternity too long.

Hence he is one of the plainest preachers of the metropolis. He aims at your heart, not at your head. He touches your affections, if he cannot master your understanding. He may win you over by his gentleness, though he fail to convince you by his power.

Such, as a preacher, is Baptist Noel. Immediately he rises in the pulpit you feel that you have that undefinable mystery, a gentleman, before you. Few, indeed, are the gentlemen who surpass him in elegance of appearance, or urbanity of manner. He is about fifty-five years of age, tall, and of a fine figure; his hair is of a light brown colour, his complexion is fair and pale, his face long, and his features handsome. He has a high forehead, deep-set blue eyes, a long and rather aquiline nose, and an expressive mouth. His voice is rich and silvery, not 'harsh and crabbed,' but

'Musical as is Apollo's lute;'

and so indeed it ought, for Baptist Noel rarely concludes his sermons within an hour. If his eloquence be compared to that of a stream, it must be that of no mountain country, but of peaceful plains, of one of which it may be said that

'through delicious meads
The murmuring stream its winding water leads.'

He is remarkably fluent; his sentences are particularly smooth and well constructed, and his voice gently modulated: of action, he can be said scarcely to have any. Baptist Noel is a thorough Englishman in this respect.

As a thinker, he has been more remarkable for his freedom and candour than for his consistency and depth. He has always held, in the main, what are called Evangelical views, but his views have not always been on all matters the same. At one time he was an opponent of Millenarian views--he then became strenuous in their favour--now he has returned to his original opinions, and opposes them as warmly as before. He acted a similar part with reference to the British and Foreign Bible Society, and his amiable little tract, on the Unity of the Church, was considered very inconsistent, by Churchmen and Dissenters alike, with his position as a minister of the Establishment.

As a writer Mr. Noel's principal work has been that on the Union of Church and State, in which he justified, at considerable length, his secession from the Establishment. He has also published an account of a tour in Ireland, to which he was sent on a visit of inspection by the Whigs a few years since; and he has also written a little poetry, some of which has found its way into print. It is hardly necessary to say that it is of that common character which it is said neither gods nor men allow.

To many, Mr. Noel's whole career as a Churchman was very offensive. They had no idea of a clergyman of the Church of England standing on the same platform with a Dissenting brother. I believe, by his conduct, Baptist Noel drew down upon himself more than one Episcopal rebuke; and, therefore, few were surprised when the time came when he burst the bonds that had long held him, and became the minister of the Baptist church, John Street, Bedford Row--a church formed by the Rev. John Harrington Evans, like Mr. Noel, originally a clergyman of the Establishment. Still the effort was a bold one. By such a step he had nothing to gain, and much to lose. Worldly considerations would have prompted him to remain where he was. I honour him that he obeyed the dictates of conscience. Men do so rarely, and, when they do so, they are but rarely honoured. The religious world made much more of Baptist Noel when he was in the Church than now. Scarcely a religious public meeting was held in the metropolis without Mr. Noel being put down in the bills as one of the speakers: now his voice is rarely heard.

This is strange, but true. Regret it as we may, such is the fact. It was when Baptist Noel preached at St. John's that he was run after. What crowds filled that dreary place! How difficult it was to get a seat there! The dingy, dirty old building itself was enough to draw a crowd. It was built for that fiery, foolish priest, Sacheverell. Scott, famed for his Commentary on the Bible, was a curate there. There also preached the scarcely less celebrated Cecil. In his steps followed Daniel Wilson, the Bishop of Calcutta. Wilberforce had worshipped there. The building itself was a fact and a sermon as well. The place had a religion of its own. The neighbouring pulpit in which Baptist Noel now officiates has nothing of the kind. Perhaps, however, the less Dissent is encumbered with tradition or history the better. As it is, the soul is sluggish enough. Leaden custom lies too heavy on us all.

THE REV. C. H. SPURGEON.

I fear there is very little difference between the Church and the world. In both the tide seems strongly set in favour of ignorance, presumption, and charlatanism. In the case of Mr. Spurgeon, they have both agreed to worship the same idol. Nowhere more abound the vulgar, be they great or little, than at the Royal Music Hall on a Sunday morning. Mr. Spurgeon's service commences at a quarter to eleven, but the doors are opened an hour and a half previously, and all the while there will be a continuous stream of men and women--some on foot, some in cabs, many in carriages--all drawn together by this world's wonder. The motley crowd is worth a study. In that Hansom, now bearing a decent country deacon staying at the Milton, you and Rose dashed away to Cremorne. Last night, those lovely eyes were wet with tears as the Piccolomini edified the fashionable world with the representation of the Harlot's career. That swell was drinking pale ale in questionable company in the Haymarket--that gay Lorette was sinning on a gorgeous scale. This man was paying his needlewomen a price for their labour, on which he knows it is impossible for them morally to live; and that was poisoning a whole neighbourhood by the sale of adulterated wares.

A very mixed congregation is this one at the Surrey Gardens. The real flock--the aborigines from Park Street Chapel--are a peculiar people,--very plain, much given to the wearing of clothes of an ancient cut--and easy of recognition. The men are narrow, hard, griping, to look at--the women stern and unlovely, yet they, and such as they alone, if we are to believe them, are to walk the pearly streets of the New Jerusalem, and to sit down with martyrs and prophets and saints--with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob--at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

'The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.' Here is a peer, and there his tailor. Here Lady Clara de Vere kills a weary hour, and there is the poor girl who sat up all night to stitch her ladyship's costly robe. Here is a blasphemer come to laugh, there a saint to pray. Can these dry bones live? Can the preacher touch the heart of this listening mass? Breathed on by a spell more potent than his own, will it in its anguish and agony exclaim, What must we do to be saved? You think how this multitude would have melted beneath the consecrated genius of a Chalmers, or a Parsons, or a Melville, or an Irving,--and look to see the same torrent of human emotions here. Ah, you are mistaken--Mr. Spurgeon has not the power to wield 'all thoughts, all passions, all delights.' It is not in him to 'shake the arsenal, and fulmine over Greece.' In the very midst of his fiercest declamation, you will find his audience untouched; so coarse is the colouring, and clumsy the description, you can sit calm and unmoved through it all--and all the while the haughty beauty by your side will fan herself with a languor Charles Matthews in 'Used Up' might envy. Look at the preacher;--the riddle is solved. You see at once that he is not the man to soar, and soaring bear his audience, trembling and enraptured, with him in his heavenward flight.

Isaiah, the son of Amos, when he received his divine commission, exclaimed, 'Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!' but the popular minister of New Park Street Chapel has no such trembling forebodings; no thought of his own unworthiness, no fear that he is trespassing on sacred ground, or that he is attempting a task beyond his powers, impedes the utterance of his fluent tongue. Not a trace of the scholarship, or reading, or severe thought, or God-sent genius, or of that doubt in which there lives more faith than in half the creeds, will you find in the whole of his harangue.

On the pulpit, or rather the platform, Mr. Spurgeon imitates Gough, and walks up and down, and enlivens his sermons with dramatic representations. He is 'hail fellow, well-met' with his hearers. He has jokes and homely sayings and puns and proverbs for them. Nothing is too sacred for his self-complacent grasp; he is as free and unrestrained in God's presence as in man's. Eternity has unveiled its mysteries to him. In the agonies of the lost, in the joys of the redeemed, there is nothing for him to learn. His 'sweet Saviour,' as he irreverently exclaims, has told him all. Of course, at times there is a rude eloquence on his lips, or, rather, a fluent declamation, which the mob around takes for such. The orator always soars with his audience. With excited thousands waiting his lightest word, he cannot remain passionless and unmoved. Words and thoughts are borne to him from them. There is excitement in the hour; there is excitement in the theme; there is excitement in the living mass; and, it may be, as the preacher speaks of a physical hell and displays a physical heaven, some sensual nature is aroused, and a change may be effected in a man's career. Little causes may produce great events; one chance word may be the beginning of a new and a better life; but the thoughtful hearer will learn nothing, will be induced to feel nothing, will find that as regards Christian edification he had much better have staid at home. At the best Mr. Spurgeon will seem to him a preacher of extraordinary volubility. Most probably he will return from one of Mr. Spurgeon's services disgusted with the noisy crowding, reminding him of the Adelphi rather than the house of God; disgusted with the common-place prayer; disgusted with the questionable style of oratory; disgusted with the narrowness of the preacher's creed, and its pitiful misrepresentations of the glorious gospel of the blessed God; disgusted with the stupidity that can take for a divine afflatus brazen impudence and leathern lungs. Most probably he will come back confessing that Mr. Spurgeon is the youngest, and the loudest, and the most notorious preacher in London--little more; the idol of people who dare not go to theatres, and yet pant for theatrical excitement.

When Mr. Whiteside finished his five hours' oration on Kars, Lord Palmerston replied, that the honourable gentleman's speech was highly creditable to his physical powers. A similar reply would be suitable to Mr. Spurgeon. You come away, having gained nothing except it may be a deeper disgust for the class of preachers of which Mr. Spurgeon is a type. We have heard somewhat too much of Negative Theology--it is time we protest against the Positive Theology of such men as Mr. Spurgeon. There are no doubts or difficulties in his path. The last time I heard the reverend gentleman, he had the audacity to assure us that the reason God allowed wicked men to live was, that as he knew they were to be damned, he thought they might have a little pleasure first. Mr. Spurgeon is one of the elect. His flock are in the same happy condition. God chooses them out of the ruins of the fall, and makes them heirs of everlasting life, while he suffers the rest of the world to continue in sin, and consummate their guilt by well-deserved punishment. If he sins, it matters little; 'for that vengeance incurred by me has already fallen upon Christ my substitute, and only the chastisement shall remain for me.' Mr. Spurgeon has heard people represent 'God as the Father of the whole universe. It surprises me that any readers of the Bible should so talk.' To the higher regions of thought Mr. Spurgeon seems an utter stranger--all his ideas are physical; when he speaks of the Master, it is not of his holy life or divine teaching, but his death. 'Christians,' he exclaims, 'you have here your Saviour. See his Father's _vengeful_ sword sheathed in his heart--behold his death-agonies--see the clammy sweat upon his brow--mark his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth--hear his sighs and groans upon the cross.' Again, he exclaims, 'Make light of thee, sweet Jesus! Oh, when I see thee _with thy shirt of gore_, wrestling in Gethsemane--when I behold him _with a river of blood_ rolling down his shoulders,' &c. All his sermons abound with similar instances of exaggerated misconception.

Mr. Spurgeon steps on the very threshold of great and glorious thoughts, and stops there. Of God he speaks as irreverently as of Christ. 'Oh!' cries the sinner, 'I will not have thee for a God.' 'Wilt thou not?' says he, and he gives him over to the hand of Moses; Moses takes him a little and applies the club of the law, drags him to Sinai, where the mountain totters over his head, the lightnings flash, and thunders bellow, and then the sinner cries, 'O God, save me!' 'Ah! I thought thou wouldst not have me for a God.' 'O Lord, thou shalt be my God,' says the poor trembling sinner; 'I have put away my ornaments from me. O Lord, what wilt thou do unto me? Save me! I will give myself to thee. Oh! take me!' 'Ay,' says the Lord, 'I knew it; I said that I will be their God; and I have made thee willing in the day of my power.' 'I will be their God, and they shall be my people.' Here is another passage. Preaching at Shipley, near Leeds, our young divine alluded to Dr. Dick's wish, that he might spend an eternity in wandering from star to star. 'For me,' exclaims Mr. Spurgeon, 'let it be my lot to pursue a more glorious study. My choice shall be this: I shall spend 5000 years in looking into the wound in the left foot of Christ, and 5000 years in looking into the wound in the right foot of Christ, and 10,000 years in looking into the wound in the right hand of Christ, and 10,000 years more in looking into the wound in the left hand of Christ, and 20,000 years in looking into the wound in his side.' Is this religion? Are such representations, in an intellectual age, fitted to claim the homage of reflective men? Will not Mr. Spurgeon's very converts, as they become older--as they understand Christianity better--as the excitement produced by dramatic dialogues in the midst of feverish audiences dies away--feel this themselves? And yet this man actually got nearly 24,000 to hear him on the Day of Humiliation. Such a thing seems marvellous. If popularity means anything, which, however, it does not, Mr. Spurgeon is one of our greatest orators.

It is true it is not difficult to collect a crowd in London. If I simply stand stock still in Cheapside in the middle of the day, a crowd is immediately collected. The upper class of society requires finer weapons than any Mr. Spurgeon wields; but he preaches to the people in a homely style--and they like it, for he is always plain, and never dull. Then his voice is wonderful, of itself a thing worth going to hear, and he has a readiness rare in the pulpit, and which is invaluable to an orator. Then, again, the matter of his discourses commends itself to uneducated hearers. We have done with the old miracle plays, wherein God the Father appears upon the stage in a blue coat, and wherein the devil has very visible hoofs and tail; but the principle to which they appealed--the love of man for dramatic representations rather than abstract truths--remains, and Mr. Spurgeon avails himself of it successfully. Another singular fact--Mr. Spurgeon would quote it as a proof of its truth--is that what is called high doctrine--the doctrine Mr. Spurgeon preaches--the doctrine which lays down all human pride--which teaches us we are villains by necessity, and fools by a divine thrusting on--is always popular, and, singular as it may seem, especially on the Surrey side of the water.

In conclusion, let me not be understood as blaming Mr. Spurgeon. We do not blame Stephani when Caliban falls at his feet and swears that he's 'a brave god and bears celestial liquor.' Few ministers get people to hear them. Mr. Spurgeon has succeeded in doing so. It may be a pity that the people will not go and hear better preachers; but in the meanwhile no one can blame Mr. Spurgeon that he fearlessly and honestly preaches what he deems the truth.

The Presbyterian Body.

THE REV. JOHN CUMMING, D.D.

A tale is told of a fashionable lady residing at a fashionable watering-place, at which a fashionable preacher preached. Of course the fashionable chapel was filled. It was difficult to get a seat: few could get more than standing-room. Our fashionable heroine, according to the tale, thither wended her way one Sabbath morning; but, alas! the ground was preoccupied. There was no room. Turning to her daughters with a well-bred smile, she exclaimed: 'Well, my dears, at any rate we have done the genteel thing!' and, self-satisfied, she departed home, her piety being of that not uncommon order, that requires a comfortable well-cushioned seat to itself. For some reason or other, it is now considered the genteel thing to go to Dr. Cumming, and the consequence is, that Crown Court Chapel overflows, and that pews are not to be had there on any terms. I should have said that nowhere was there such a crowd as that you see at Dr. Cumming's, if I did not recollect that I had just suffered a similar squeeze over the way, when I went to see the eminent tragedian, Mr. Brooke.

I believe the principle of there being such a crowd is the same in both cases. The great mass of spectators see in Mr. Brooke a man of fine physical endowments, and a very powerful voice. They are not judges of good acting; they cannot see whether or not an actor understands his part; they have no opinion on the subject at all: but Mr. Brooke has a name, and they run to hear him. It is the same with Dr. Cumming. The intrepid females, the genteel young men, who go to hear him, are no more judges of learning and ability than any other miscellaneous London mob: but Dr. Cumming has a name. Carriages with strawberry leaves deposit high-born ladies at his chapel. Lord John Russell goes to hear him. Actually, he has preached before the Queen. So the chapel is crammed, as if there was something wonderful to see and hear.

I confess I am of a contrary opinion. I cannot--to quote the common phrase of religious society--'sit under' Dr. Cumming. I weary of his Old Testament and his high-dried Scotch theology, and his Romanist antipathies, and his Millennial hopes. 'You tell me, Doctor,' I would say to him, 'that I am a sinner--born in sin, and shapen in iniquity--that I am utterly and completely bad. Why not, then, speak to me so as to do me good? I care nothing for the Pope! Immured as I am in the business of the world--with difficulty earning my daily bread--I have little time to think of the Millennium, or to discuss whether the Jewish believer, some two thousand years ago, saw in his system anything beyond it and above it--anything brighter and better than itself. The student, in his cell, may discuss such questions--as the schoolmen of the middle ages sought to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle--but I, and men like me, need to be ministered to in another way. Men who preach to me must not wrestle with extinct devils, but with real ones. What I want is light upon the living present, not upon the dead and buried past. Around me are the glare and splendour of life--beauty's smile--ambition's dream--the gorgeousness of wealth--the pride of power. Are these things worth living for? Is there anything for man higher and better? and, if so, how can I drown the clamour of their seductive voices, and escape into a more serene and purer air?' And how am I to know that these professing Christians, so well dressed, listening with such complacency while Dr. Cumming demolishes Cardinal Wiseman--are better than other men? As tradesmen, are they upright? As members of the commonwealth, are they patriotic? As religious men, are their lives pure and unspotted from the world? I want not theories of grace, but what shall make men practically do what they theoretically believe. It is a human world we live in. Every heart you meet is trembling with passion, or bursting with desire. On every tongue there is some tale of joy or woe. If, by mysterious ties, I am connected with the Infinite and Divine, by more palpable ties I am connected with what is finite and human: and I want the preacher to remember that fact. The Hebrew Christ did it, and the result was that his enemies were constrained to confess that 'never man spake like this man,' and that the 'common people heard him gladly.'

Dr. Cumming preaches as if you had no father or mother, no sister or brother, no wife or child, no human struggles and hopes--as if the great object of preaching was to fill you with Biblical pedantry, and not to make the man better, wiser, stronger than before: perhaps it may be because this is the case that the church is so thronged. You need not tremble lest your heart be touched, and your darling sin withered up by the indignant oratory of the preacher. He is far away in Revelation or in Exodus, telling us what the first man did, or the last man will do; giving you, it may be, a creed that is scriptural and correct, but that does not interest you--that has neither life, nor love, nor power--as well adapted to empty space as to this gigantic Babel of competition, and crime, and wrong, in which I live and move.

The service at Crown Court Chapel is very long; the Scotch measure the goodness of their services by their length. You must be well drilled if you are not weary before it is over. The chapel itself is a singular place. You enter by an archway. The gallery steps are outside; the shape is broad and short; a galley runs on three sides, and in one is placed the pulpit, which boasts, what is now so rare, a sounding-board. As no space is left unoccupied, the chapel must contain a large number of persons. The singing is very beautiful--better, I think, than that of any other place of worship in London. There is some sense in that, for the Scottish version of the Psalms of King David is not one whit more refined, or less bald and repulsive, than that of our own Sternhold and Hopkins, or Tate. But, nevertheless, the singing is very beautiful. Dr. Cumming himself looks not a large man, but a sturdy determined man, with good intellectual power, and that power well cultivated, but all in the dry Scotch way; though so little does the Doctor's speech betray him, that you would scarcely notice that his pronunciation was that of a native of the 'Land of Cakes.' He is young-looking, his hair is dark, and his complexion is brown. As he wears spectacles, of course, I can say nothing about his eyes; or, as he wears a gown and bands, as to the robustness of his frame. He looks agile and well set; strong in the faith, and master of texts innumerable wherewith to support that faith. A polished, graceful, self-contained, and self-satisfied man. He may be a man of large heart and sympathies; but he has not the appearance of one. He rather seems a man great in small things, tediously proper and scrupulously correct--a great gun, I imagine, at an Evangelical tea-table--and, with his ultra Protestantism (he is a countryman of Miss Cuninghame's, and every Scotchman hates Popery as a certain personage does holy water), he is a tremendous favourite at Exeter Hall. Indeed, I do not know that there is at this time a more popular performer on those boards, and he is a favourite with people whose favour pecuniarily is worth something--with people who can afford to buy his books. Hence, also, he is one of the most copious religious writers of our day.

It is vain to attempt to give an account of the Doctor's works, when 'every month brings forth a new one:' their name is Legion. There is only one man who can be compared with Dr. Cumming in this respect, and that is that notoriously hardened sinner, Mr. G. P. R. James.

I read in one place of Dr. Cumming that 'he has everything in his favour; his singularly handsome person, his brilliant flow of poetic thoughts, his striking talents, and his burning Protestant zeal, combine to make him one of the most interesting speakers of the day; and when we add to all this, his modest simplicity and humility (qualities as becoming in one of his years, as they are rare in one of his powers), we need not wonder that he is generally admired and beloved.' Another admirer writes: 'When hearing Dr. Cumming, one is reminded of the description of "Silver-tongued Smith," one of the celebrated preachers of Elizabeth's time. But though the subject of our sketch is truly silver-tongued, the solemnity, at times, almost the severity, of his manner preserves him from anything like tameness. Perhaps there is not a firmer or more fearless preacher than the Doctor--a fact which has been proved over and over again of late, as his Romish antagonists have found to their cost. Dr. Cumming's manner in the pulpit is pleasing. He seldom uses any other action than a gentle waving of the hand, or the turning from one part of his congregation to the other. He is no cushion-thumper, and depends for effect more upon what he says than on the graces of action. Not that he is ungraceful at all--far from that: what we mean is, that he is in this respect directly the opposite of those pulpit fops who flourish their bordered pieces of inspiration-lawn in the pulpit, and throw themselves into such attitudes as compels one to believe that the looking-glass is almost as essential a preparation for the pulpit as the Bible itself.'

Dr. Cumming is a warm supporter of Establishments, a sworn foe of liberalism, which he declares to have 'charity on its mantle, and hell in its heart.' He is a good hater. These things may fit him to be the idol of Crown Court, but do little more. The large vision which looks before and after, which makes man a philosopher, which teaches him to see the good in all human developments of thought and action, and calmly and lovingly to abide their legitimate results, has been denied him. The consequence is, he has sunk into the apostle of a coterie, and 'gives up to party what was meant for mankind.'

THE REV. JAMES HAMILTON, D.D.

It is a remarkable fact that a Scotchman has never led the House of Commons. The real reason is, I imagine, that Scotchmen are not generally very oratorical. The Scots suffer from the _fercidum ingenium_ which old Buchanan claimed for them, undoubtedly; but it does not generally assume an oratorical form: it finds other ways of development. It leads Sawney, junior, to bid farewell to the porridge of the paternal roof, to cross the Tweed, to travel in whatever dark and distant land gold is to be had, and a fortune to be won. But there it stops. Joseph Hume was a model of a Scotch orator. There was not a duller dog on the face of the earth than that most excellent and honoured man. One would as soon listen to a lecture from Elihu Burritt, or sit out a pantomime, as listen to a speech from the Scottish Joseph.

So it is with the Scottish pulpit. It is generally hard and heavy, destitute of life and power, abstruse, metaphysical, learned, and consequently dull. Yet there have been splendid exceptions. The fiery and holy Chalmers was one, and Edward Irving was another. The Scottish Church in Regent Square was at one time a place of no common repute. Irving, with his splendid face, half fiend half angel--with his intellect hovering between insanity and genius, the companion of fanatics and philosophers--there

'Blazed the comet of a season.'

To this day his name yet lives. In spite of the delusions and follies with which his name was connected--in spite of the reaction, the natural result of all enthusiasm, no matter what--Irvingite churches remain amongst us to this present hour. But at one time they threatened to pervade the land. All London flocked to Regent Square Church: the religious world was in a state of intense excitement. Timid men and nervous women went there, Sunday after Sunday, till they became almost mad. Unknown tongues were heard; strange sights were seen. Some thought the end of the world had come, and were seized with trembling and fear. It was a time of wonder, and mystery, and awe; but it passed away, as such things in this world of ours must pass away. The great magician died. The crowd that had wondered and wept at his bidding, went to wonder and weep elsewhere.