POPULAR PREACHERS.

Church of England.

THE REV. J. C. M. BELLEW, S.C.L.

One of the wonders to us, looking back upon the middle ages, rich in all the experience they lacked, is their faith in heathenism as a fact, long after heathenism as a theology had given way to the victorious Cross. It seems not only as if many Christian churches were erected on what were once pagan temples, but as if, under new names, the old pagan superstitions still lingered, as if their hold on the heart of man were too firm to be driven out by any doctrine, however new or true. In the middle ages, before a Bacon had led forth the sciences from their house of bondage—before men had ceased to theorize, and to believe alone in facts, and the truths facts utter, what confidence, for instance, was given to that pagan science, or jargon, for it ought not to be called a science, named astrology. The old heathen gods still remained. Jupiter and Mars, Saturn, and Venus, and Mercury, were still the arbiters of human destinies. Take up the great philosopher of that age—Cardan for instance—and you shall read in him more of the mysterious influences of the heathen’s Jupiter than of the Christian’s God. Every educated man exclaimed in language as plain, though not, perhaps, so poetical, as that of Max Piccolomini, that—

‘Still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names, And to yon starry world they now are gone, Spirits or gods that used to share this earth With man as with their friend; and to the lover Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky Shoot influence down, and even at this day ’T is Jupiter who brings whate’er is great, And Venus who brings everything that’s fair.’

Something like this in the Christian world prevails. Thus is it the Old Testament binds with iron grasp men who profess to take their religion from the New. They tell you the law was the schoolmaster—that it was the shadow of good things to come, and yet for all that they do and plan, the Old Testament is their perpetual precedent. Instead of the recognised version, ‘All Scripture is given for instruction,’ some of the good people we have referred to seemed as if they read confusion. The old Commonwealth men blundered terribly in this way; but every age has had men guilty of similar blunders. Poor Granville Sharpe had an interview with Mr. Pitt, to plead the cause of humanity, and wasted the golden opportunity by attempting to explain to that great Minister—to whom the explanation was all unintelligible—the meaning of the little horn in Daniel. In spite of Christianity, men still cling to Jewish rites and Jewish creeds, as if the Temple of Solomon still wore its ancient splendour, as if the seed of Abraham still enjoyed their sacred birthright, as if the sceptre had not departed from Judah, and Shiloh had never come. Go into the churches of the metropolis any time you like, and the probability is that in more than half the texts will be taken from the Old Testament, and the certainty is, that in almost all, all the arguments and illustrations will have a similar source. Thus we have a composite order of preaching. It seems as if the preacher knew not on which side to take his stand, under which king to speak or die. The hand is Esau’s, but the voice is Jacob’s. You hear as much of David as of Christ, as much of the ceremonial of a worship of form and ceremony, as of the simplicity introduced by Him who was born in a manger, and had not where to lay his head. To break free from all this—to act in the living present—to let the dead past bury its dead—to speak to the men of to-day in the language of to-day, is a great advantage to a preacher, even if it require, on his part, a little extra care in the composition of his sermons; and no one knows this better than the popular Assistant Minister of St. John’s, Waterloo Place, Regent Square, London—the Rev. Mr. Bellew, formerly of St. John’s Cathedral, Calcutta.

To give a man the position Mr. Bellew has acquired, however, something further is needed. Peculiar qualities of thought or utterance, especially the latter, are essential to a man if he would be talked of on all sides—run after by fine lords and ladies—in request all over London for charity sermons—and admitted to plead in the august presence of Lord Mayors and Princes of the blood. In the first place, then, it must be remembered that Mr. Bellew preaches with all the studied earnestness of the actor, and every syllable tells as distinctly as if it were Macready declaiming on the stage. Then he is an Irishman, and what Irishman is not fluent and born to drive in the pulpit; and what is wonderful, though an Irish Protestant, Mr. Bellew avoids the rôle, somewhat overdone, of a McNeile, or a McGee, or a Maguire, and does not commit the absurdity of making his every sermon a wearisome protest against Popery and the Pope. Why should Irish clergymen get wild on this head? It is not, says Goëthe, by attacking the false, but by proclaiming the true, that good is to be done. And it is the same in religion; the Irish Protestants have little to complain of—their history is written in the tears and blood of millions whom they have wronged for ages. By the violation of all right—by means that will ever stain the Irish Protestant Church with shame—by laws the most infamous the malice of man could devise, have they got to be where they are; let them take the goods the gods provide and be thankful. If anything could make a man sympathize with Roman Catholics, it would be the history of the Protestant Church since its first establishment there by the strong arm of law. On all other matters Mr. Bellew seems equally to avoid the errors of partisanship; he ignores the foolish ceremonial disputes of his own Church—the petty doctrinal discussions, which are the more fiercely agitated the more trivial and worthless they in reality are. His Christianity is something proud, and majestic, and divine,—a universal remedy for a universal disease,—not a skeleton of dead doctrine, or a bone of contention, or an obsolete word, but a living, healthy, beneficent power.

But Mr. Bellew has other attractions. Not only are his sermons broad and catholic in tone,—not only are they enunciated with oratorical effect,—not only are they heightened by the charm of a commanding presence,—but they are in themselves highly polished, full of passages of rare eloquence, and retain the attention of the hearers. They all open well, the exordium is always spirited, and its tone is maintained to the end of the discourse. Thus one commences as follows, “Eternity is the answer to life’s question—immortality is the hallowed reward of life’s holy works.” Another has, “Life is the expression of religion.” In another we get a quotation from Tacitus pregnant with meaning, “Truth is established by investigation and delay.” Then the circumstances of the text are well brought out. If Paul speaks at Corinth, we see that licentious city with its groves and temples; if on Mars’ hill he proclaims an Unknown God, the orator, with a lustre on his face brighter than any genius could bestow, is in our midst; around him are the restless Athenians, and in the background, the marble statues of their deities—of silver-eyed Minerva, and Apollo, lord of the silver bow. If some divine word of the Great Teacher himself is the subject of discourse, then the Hebrew landscape is painted as only those can paint who have trod the steps—as Mr. Bellew has done—where, more than eighteen centuries ago, the Christ and his sorrowing disciples trod. Occasionally a little pompous verbosity may be detected; instead of simply telling us how the earth’s great ones are despised too often by the world, Mr. Bellew says, ‘My experience of life, and the more I read from all history, sacred and profane, modern and ancient, is this—the veritable heroes of humanity have generally been decorated with the epithets of popular insult.’ This is a little too much in the mouthing vein, and reminds us of the singular encomium on Mr. Bellew in the Morning Herald, to the effect that our preacher ‘unveils the plan of salvation in the most graceful and attractive manner’—as if Mr. Bellew was a Madame Mantilini, and the plan of salvation was the last new fashion. Perhaps for this singular criticism Mr. Bellew is in some part accountable. Our readers may have seen a caricature of two popular preachers, under the title of Brimstone and Treacle. Brimstone is supposed to represent the youthful hero of the Surrey Music Hall: the pulpit Adonis, curled and scented and lack-a-daisical, called Treacle, is supposed, though very wrongly, for Mr. Bellew is no man-milliner, to typify the subject of this sketch. In spite of grey hair and sallow cheeks, Mr. Bellew has somewhat too much the appearance of a lady’s man, and his Christianity is evidently that which will do credit to the best society; nor is this to be wondered at. Has he not an uncle a Bishop, and has he not the élite of the beau-monde to hear him?

THE REV. THOMAS DALE, M.A.

In the good old times, before the Reform Bill was carried and the Constitution destroyed, at a period long prior to the introduction of cheap ’busses and penny steamers and the new police, stood an old church in the north of London, in which the parishioners of St. Pancras were accustomed to meet for public worship. In spite of its unadorned appearance, it was a venerable pile. According to some, it was the last church in England where the bell tolled for mass, and in which any rites of the Roman Catholic religion were celebrated. In its burying-ground twenty generations now sleep the sleep of death. Grimaldi the clown, Woollet the engraver, William Godwin, Mary Wolstonecraft, Walker, immortalized by his Pronouncing Dictionary, Woodhead, the reputed author of the ‘Whole Duty of Man,’ Jeremy Collier, the writer against stage plays and the successful combatant of Dryden, Ned Ward, author of the ‘London Spy,’ Theobald, the hero of the early editions of the ‘Dunciad’ and the editor of ‘Shakspeare,’ Boswell’s friend, the Corsican Paoli, here await the resurrection morn. What passions, what hopes, what virtue and vice, what loved and loving forms, what withered anatomies, have here been laid down! Tread gently!—every bit of dust you tread on was once a man and a brother. Tread reverently! for here human hearts bursting with agony—the mother weeping for her children, the lover for his bride—have seen the last of all they hoped for under the sun. You may hear a good sermon here from the old text: ‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ Such is the lesson we learn here—that all the shows of the world are poor and little worth—that false is

‘—the light on glory’s plume, As fading hues of even. And love, and hope, and beauty’s bloom, Are blossoms gather’d for the tomb— There’s nothing true but heaven!’

But we may not linger here. Time came and went, and, as usual, wrought wonders. St. Pancras ceased to be St. Pancras in the fields. It was laid out in broad streets and handsome squares. It was lit up with gas. It echoed to the roll of carriages. It witnessed the introduction of flunkies, with glaring livery and tremendous calf. Upon its broad pavements flaunted, in all their bravery, city lords and city ladies. Of course, the old church would not do for such as they. Early Christians might worship God in a barn, but modern ones, rich and respectable—of course, if they are rich they must be respectable—would not for the life of them do anything so ungenteel. So a new place—the first stone of which was laid by a Royal Duke, notorious for his debts and his connexion with Mrs. Clarke,—was built, with a pulpit made out of the old well-known Fairlop oak, on the model of a certain great heathen edifice, and the St. Pancras new church reared its would-be aristocratic head. Alas! alas! it was on the unfashionable side of Russell-square. That difficulty was insurmountable, and so the church has to stand where it does. However, the frequenters try to forget the unpleasant fact, and to make themselves as genteel as they can.

Take your stand there at eleven on the Sabbath morning. What a glare of silks and satins—of feathers—of jewels—of what cynics would call the pomps and vanities of the world! With what an air does that delicate young female—I beg her pardon, I mean young lady—foot it, with Jeames behind carrying her Book of Common Prayer! United Belgravia could hardly do the thing in better style. Enter the church, and you will see the same delightful air of fashionable repose. If the grace that is divine be as common there as the grace that is earthly, Mr. Dale’s charge must be a happy flock indeed. With what an air does it bow at the name of Jesus! with what a grace does it confess itself to consist of ‘miserable sinners!’ One would hardly mind, in the midst of such rich city merchants and their charming daughters, being a miserable sinner himself. Such opulent misery and fashionable sin seem rather enviable than otherwise. At any rate, the burden of such misery and such sin seems one easily to be borne.

But prayers are over, and yon immense congregation has quietly settled into an attitude of attention. All eyes are turned in the direction of the pulpit. We look there as well, and see a man rather below the average height, with fresh complexion, mild grey eyes beneath light-coloured eyebrows, with a common-place forehead, and a figure presenting altogether rather a pedantic appearance. This is the Rev. Thomas Dale, M.A. He looks as if the world had gone easy with him; and truly it has, for he is a popular Evangelical preacher—perhaps, next to Mr. Melville, the most popular preacher in the English Church. He is a popular poet—he is Vicar of St. Pancras, and Canon of St. Paul’s.

Mr. Dale reads, and reads rapidly; his enunciation is perfectly distinct; his voice is somewhat monotonous, but musical; his action is very slight. You are not carried away by his physical appearance, nor, as you listen, does the preacher bear you irresistibly aloft. His sermons are highly polished, but they are too invariably the same. There are no depths nor heights in them. They are all calm, subdued, toned down. They do not take you by storm: you miss the thunder and the lightning of such men as Melville and Binney. Mr. Dale’s sermons are, like himself and like his poetry, polished and pleasing. All that man can do by careful study Mr. Dale has done; but he lacks inspiration, the vis vivida, the vision and the faculty divine, which, if a man have not, ‘This brave overhanging firmament—this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’—‘is but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’ Yet Mr. Dale has an immense congregation. I take it that he suits the level of the city magnates that crowd his pews. Philosophy, poetry, passion are quite out of the reach of such men, whose real god is the Stock Exchange, and whose real heaven is the three per cents.

Another and a better reason of Mr. Dale’s immense congregation is, that his charity is unremitting—given in the best way, in the shape of work instead of alms—and irrespective of the religious sect of the recipient. I have heard of several such cases that do him much honour. And, after all, in the pulpit as well as elsewhere, conduct tells more than character in the long run. Hence his personal influence is great; and, of course, that helps to fill the church. Nor can we much wonder. What eloquence is stronger than that of a holy, a useful, a devoted life? Acts speak stronger than words. I see more power in an act of charity, done in the name of religion and of God, than in the passionate and fascinating gorgeous rhetoric of an hour.

Mr. Dale is a good Greek scholar, and has translated Sophocles. It is easy to see why Sophocles should better suit him than Æschylus or Euripides—the polish of the one would please him better than the wild grandeur of the others. Of him, as a poet, I cannot speak very highly. His versification is correct—his sentiment is good. To the very large class of readers who will accept such substitutes for poetry as the real thing, our divine is a poet of no mean order. ‘What we want, sir,’ said a publisher to me the other day, ‘is a lively religious novel.’ Mr. Dale’s poetry answers to these conditions: hence its success.

His poetry was a great help to his popularity. When he was rector of the parish of St. Bride’s, and evening lecturer at St. Sepulchre, he was more intimately connected than at present with literary pursuits, and was much run after. About that time Annuals were the rage, and Mr. Dale edited a religious Annual called ‘The Iris,’ and young ladies learnt his verses by heart, or copied them into their albums. At one time Mr. Dale was Professor of English Language and Literature at the University College, in Gower Street. However, as a Tory and a Churchman, he seems to have found himself out of his element there, and left it for King’s College, Strand, at which place he held a similar appointment. It was thought that church preferment had something to do with this; that his chances were, in consequence, in danger; that in high quarters the University College was regarded with an unfavourable eye: so Mr. Dale threw it overboard. Such was the rumour at the time. Of course, to some men, such conduct may seem only wise—prudent; but if ministers of religion thus shape their conduct, with a view to worldly success, what chance have they of regenerating the world? If such things be done in the green tree, what may we not expect in the dry? A teacher of living Christianity surely should be the last to desert a cause, merely because it is weak, and unfashionable, and poor!

As a writer, Mr. Dale has been most untiring. His first poem came out in 1820. It was the ‘Widow of Nain,’ and was read with delight in religious circles. In 1822 he published another poem, called ‘Irad and Adah, a Tale of the Flood; with Specimens of a New Translation of the Psalms.’ About this time the poetic inspiration appears to have died, for since only a few occasional verses have appeared from Mr. Dale’s pen, and henceforth he seems to have betaken himself to prose. In 1830 he published a volume of ‘Sermons, Doctrinal and Practical;’ in 1835, ‘The Young Pastor’s Guide;’ in 1836, ‘A Companion to the Altar;’ in 1844, ‘The Sabbath Companion;’ in 1845, ‘The Good Shepherd: an Exposition of the 23rd Psalm;’ in 1847, ‘The Golden Psalm, being an Exposition, Practical, Experimental, and Prophetical, of Psalm xvi.’ Besides these publications, he has printed several occasional sermons. He has now attained a high position in the Establishment, which certainly can boast few more faithful or laborious men. Originally not intended for the Church, his subsequent success has justified his devotion of himself to her service. Altogether his lot has been cast in ‘pleasant ‘places,’ and he has had ‘a goodly heritage.’

THE HON. AND REV. R. LIDDELL.

St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, has done what it is a very hard thing to do, created a sensation in this our phlegmatic and eating and drinking and money-making and merry-making age. It professes to be a Puseyite, and not a Protestant, place of worship. Puseyism, says a red-haired Saxon, foaming with indignation, is next door to Roman Catholicism, and a Puseyite Church is half-way to Rome. True, my perturbed brother—true. But what of that? Some are inclined to think that Church of Englandism is akin to Roman Catholicism, and that all its churches are halfway to Rome. That brutal old tyrant, Henry the Eighth, was a Roman Catholic at heart, and had faith in himself as an infallible Pope. His genuine daughter did the same. Laud, who lacked the discretion of that strong-minded woman whose

‘Christ was the Word that spake it, He took the bread and brake it, And what the Word did make it, That I believe and take it,’

is a splendid specimen of ingenious mystification on the vexata questio of transubstantiation,—I question whether Charles James Bloomfield, Bishop of London, could have returned a more confused and unmeaning response,—died for his Roman Catholic tendencies. To this day England remembers who it was, with red, swollen face, and brown apparel, and collar with a spot of blood on it, made his maiden speech in Parliament by indignantly informing the House that Dr. Alabaster had preached flat Popery at St. Paul’s, and in our own day Mr. Gorham has failed in obtaining a legal decision against the Roman Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration. The mistake is, in supposing that the Church as by law established is Low Church. If it were so, then, of course, out ought to go the whole crop of Puseyite priests, in spite of the tears and hysterics of female piety. On the contrary, the Church of England is like the happy family in Trafalgar-square. Beasts of the most opposite description there dwell together in peace and unity. Dogs and cats there sleep side by side. In the prospect of a common maintenance natural enmities are forgotten. Conformity is impossible. I cannot use my brother’s words with his exact meaning. I must put my own interpretation on the creeds and articles to which I subscribe, and so long as the State Church is a chaotic mass of heterogeneous materials—so long as it has no definite voice, nor law—so long as bishop clashes with bishop, and at times with himself,—for we may have here a Puseyite, there an Evangelical, here a fox-hunting divine,—there must be everywhere heart-burning and scandal, and the degradation of Christianity itself. But, exclaims my vehement red-faced Saxon friend, you are making Papists by letting the Puseyites remain. I don’t know that. Papacy is alien to human nature, or it is not. If it is not, you cannot get rid of it. If cut down to-day, it will sprout up again to-morrow. It springs from a tendency, I take it, in the human heart. In a mild form, that tendency gently blooms as Puseyism. A cold in one man may, by means of gruel, be removed in a week. In another man, it may deepen into deadly decline. Puseyism may retain as many in the English Church as it may send to Rome. Your Low Churchman may say the Puseyite has no business in the Church at all. Well, the other may say the same of him, and there is no one to decide as to who is right. King James II. said, Hooker’s Apology made him a Papist, but Hooker was not responsible for this, and is still rightly looked on as one of the brightest ornaments of the Church of England as by law established. Men make strange leaps. Many a convert to Rome has been won from the ranks of Methodism. Many an infidel has been born and bred in the very bosom of the Roman Church. A Puseyite may become a Papist, but he also may not, and so may other men. Some people say there is Popery everywhere. I listen to a Wesleyan Reformer, for instance, and he tells me that the Conference is Popish, and that the President is the Pope. If so, it is hard to blame the Puseyites for exhibiting the priestly tendency, more or less apparent, as some affirm, in all priests.

I imagine the crime of Puseyism, in the eyes of most churchmen, is the crime of a pretty woman in an assembly of haggard crones. The Puseyite place of worship is always neat and clean, and worth looking at, and it attracts when others fail to do so. The causes of it must be various. Why does one graceful woman robe herself in simple muslin, and another dazzle you with her gorgeous attire? You may be a philosopher. If that woman can be your companion, can feel as you feel, and love as you love, you care not for her attire. But she knows that the world has a different opinion. The Puseyite becomes an object of interest. On a small, very small scale, he is a hero. True, to fight about little ceremonials argues the possession of a brain of but limited power, but his opponents are in a similar position. If you deny worship to be the simple genuine feeling of the heart—if you make no provision for that—if you turn it into a form, why then, possibly, the more of a form it is the better. I confess the way in which they intone the service at St. Paul’s is pleasant to listen to. It is not worship, I grant. Neither is mumbling the thousandth time over a printed form of words worship. What a dull thing an opera would be, read, and not sung. It is true people do not make love, or do business, or address each other in music, in real life, but in an opera they do, and the effect is great. So it is with the Church of England service. Intoned it may be unintelligible or theatrical, but it is attractive nevertheless. It is not natural, but what of that? The soul bowed down with a sense of sin, yearning for peace and pardon, in its agony and despair will vent itself in broken sentences, and will turn away from all ceremony—from even the sublime liturgy of the Church of England, as poor, and cold, and vain, inadequate to the expression of its hopes and fears. But why those who go to church as a form find fault with the people of St. Paul’s because their form is a little more attractive than their own, I confess I cannot understand.

But I have forgotten the Hon. and Rev. R. Liddell, M.A., a man of small mental calibre, who has done the next best thing to achieving greatness, and has achieved notoriety. In a letter he wrote to the late Bishop of London (in which he wickedly told his lordship if he had ‘any distinct wish upon the subject, he is ready to comply with it,’ as if Charles James ever had any distinct wish with reference to Church matters), he styles himself a loyal son of the Church. At any rate, he is a brother of Lord Ravensworth, and perhaps that is almost as good. His public career is now of about twenty years’ standing. Originally, he was curate of Barking, Essex; thence he removed to Hartlepool; and when it was found desirable to send Mr. Bennett to Frome (not Rome), Mr. Liddell was selected to fill his vacant place. It is questionable whether any successor could have been appointed more agreeable to Mr. Bennett. Mr. Liddell has certainly followed most religiously in the steps of his predecessor. St. Barnabas is what it was pretty nearly in Mr. Bennett’s time. In St. Paul’s a little more discretion is shown, and if you are struck with any difference in the manner of performing divine service at St. Paul’s to that used in other places, you draw a comparison in favour of the former. The congregation is exceedingly wealthy and aristocratic. You are struck as much with its air of high life as with its High Church appearance, and having thus a double charm, I need not add that St. Paul’s is crowded in every part. If success be a true test, Mr. Liddell is most indisputably in the right.

As a preacher, Mr. Liddell does not shine. Pale, with light hair and complexion—rich, for the place is worth £1500 a-year at the least—he would all through life have remained an obscure, gentlemanly man, had he not fortunately fallen in with the Puseyite tendencies of a large and influential section in the English Church. His voice is clear but not full; and, as one of his bitterest opponents told me, he can preach a good sermon when he likes. But his teaching is not that which can do the man much good. Eschewing the common evangelical doctrines, and holding views inconsistent with free inquiry and the growth of manly thought, he has but little left him to do in his discourses but to expatiate on the sanctity of the priestly office, and the mysterious powers possessed by the Church. These are his favourite topics. To win the truth—to lead a god-like life—to bring back man, the wanderer, to heaven and to God, seem minor matters at St. Paul’s, so long as the pillars are wreathed with costly flowers, and that the service is intoned. And to this teaching the world of fashion in its unfathomable puerility submits, and men who are our legislators, men who are high in rank and influence, men whose example is law all over the land, take it for truth. Mr. Liddell styles his congregation highly educated and devout. He is right in that statement. Men who have sat under him and his predecessor, who have believed them with unshrinking reverence, who have taken every statement as the truth, have been highly educated, but in a wrong direction. Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails his teaching? Is not his mission grander and more comprehensive than he deems it? Has not man something better to do than to learn to bow, to intone, to admire flowers, and to look at painted glass? In the universe around him, can the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does not his own Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If it be not so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for—worth dying for; if it be so, the minister and the ‘highly educated’ and devout congregation at St. Paul’s have made a terrible mistake—a mistake which the friends of pure and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.

THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.

‘If I saw,’ wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840,—‘if I saw any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without a word of protest against aught that is.’ Since then Wilberforce has become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary; Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King’s College deprive him of the Professor’s Chair.

The real difficulty—which Sterling deemed invincible—which has proved too strong for Professor Maurice, is that, whilst there is such a thing as development in religion, the Church of England is not the place for it. The Church of England was a compromise; but it was a compromise between Geneva and Rome, and a compromise now dating three hundred years. It was never deemed that it would require a wider platform, or that it would have in its pulpits men of larger vision or of more catholic view than the men it had already. If it had a view at all, it took, like Lot’s wife, a backward glance to the tabernacle and its service—to the law delivered amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai’s sacred head. It looked not to the future. It knew not that there were,

‘Somewhere underneath the sun, Azure heights yet unascended, palmy countries to be won.’

It made no provision for the growth of man’s free and unfettered thought. Consequently it is the Church of England only in name. Out of its pale, divorced from it, there is more of intellectual life and independent thought than there is in it. This is the condition of its existence. It is associated with certain creeds and articles and rites: harmonizing with them, you have a position in society, you have a certain yearly stipend, and chances of something better, as Samuel of Oxford knows well. The Church of England was never meant to be the nursery for thought. You have made up your mind immediately you matriculate at her Universities. Your career for the future is to maintain those articles. In a word, you must conform. The task has been hard, and few great men have stooped to it, and fewer still have done so and lived.

But a man must not quarrel with the conditions he has imposed on himself. You have your choice. You wish to preach the truth. Well, you can do so, in the Church or out of it; but in the one case you are more or less tied. You may preach the truth; but it must be Church’s truth, if you take the Church’s pay. Of course, this is a disagreeable position to an independent man; at the same time, it is not without its corresponding advantages. You get into good society, you have a respectable living, you may marry an heiress, or become tutor to a Prime Minister or a Prince. Outside the Church men of intellect generally have taken their stand, for it is perilous to tamper with convictions in order to maintain a position.

It is easy to see how, in Maurice’s own case, what power has been thrown away in this tantalizing task. Had he started fresh, with no creed for him to conform to, with no position to maintain, he would have been a far more vigorous thinker than he has ever been. But he has ever had to come back to the Church—to the doctrines and teachings of men. A Church that shall embrace the religious life and thought of England, coëxistent with the nation, after all is but a dream. Were there such a Church, Maurice would hold no mean rank in it. But the State Church is not such, and cannot be such, unless its articles and creeds be glossed over with a Jesuitry not more ingenious than fatal to all moral growth. But each generation tries the hopeless task. The men of intellect and purpose in the Church have felt themselves in a false position, and have laboured to get out of it. They have trusted to one and then another. For a long time Mr. Maurice has been the coming man. The Church was once more to be a power—to have the nation’s heart—to enlist the nation’s intellect on its side. Writing in his usual bitterness, Carlyle says:

‘The builder of this universe was wise, He plann’d all souls, all systems, planets, particles! The plan he shaped his worlds and æons by, Was—Heavens!—was thy small Nine-and-Thirty Articles.’

Mr. Maurice has accepted this language as sober truth, and has made that truth the pole-star of his ministerial life.

Most of our readers know Lincoln’s-inn-fields. It abounds with lawyers. In one part of it surgeons are plucked, and in another, clients. It has a small chapel not far from Chancery-lane, and if the residents of Lincoln’s-inn-fields attended it, there would be but little room for strangers. However, this is not the case, and thus I managed to get in. It is a curious old place. It was built by Inigo Jones; and the then popular and admired, but now forgotten, Dr. Donne, preached the consecration sermon. The walls have reëchoed to the oratory of Secker and Tillotson. The windows are of stained glass, and one of them, containing St. John the Baptist, was executed at the expense of William Noy, the famous Attorney-General of Charles I. In the crypt, underneath the chapel, are buried, Alexander Broome, the cavalier song-writer; Secretary Thurloe, who had chambers in the Inn; and that stern Puritan, William Prynne, who wrote about ‘The Unloveliness of Love Locks.’ During Term time this chapel is open for worship every afternoon at three; and the preacher is the Rev. Mr. Maurice.

Considering the position Mr. Maurice has attained, and the notoriety attaching to his name, your first feeling is one of wonder that he has not a larger congregation. After writing more books on theology than any other clergyman of the day—after teaching more youth—after mixing up himself more with the working classes than almost any other man I know of—one is surprised that Mr. Maurice’s audience is not larger; and I can only account for it by supposing that his task is impossible, and that he is fighting a hopeless fight; or on the supposition that, after all, Mr. Maurice’s place is not the pulpit, but the professor’s chair: yet that he has a numerous class of followers, the sale of his books is an unanswerable proof—a sale, however, much commoner amongst Dissenters, I have good reason to suppose, than amongst the clergy of the Established Church. Mr. Maurice has the true appearance of the professor—short dark hair, sallow face, precise manner: all indicate the man of study and thought. His voice is clear and agreeable, though not strong. His reading is very rapid, but, at the same time, emphatic. As to action, he has none. He aims more at what he says than how he says it; and, if you listen, you will find food for thought in every phrase. You can hardly imagine that the man before you has been charged with heresy, he seeming to differ in no other respect from other clergymen, save in his superior power of ratiocination and in the wider inductions on which he bases his doctrines.

What Mr. Maurice’s opinions are he has taken full care to place before the world. He is a churchman in the fullest sense of the term. ‘I have contended,’ he writes in his ‘Kingdom of Christ,’ ‘that a Bible without a Church is inconceivable; that the appointed ministers of the Church are the appointed instruments for guiding men into a knowledge of the Bible; that the notion of private judgment is a false notion; that inspiration belongs to the Church, and not merely to the writers of the Bible; that the miracles of the New Testament were the introduction of a new dispensation, and were not merely a set of strange acts belonging to a particular time; lastly, that the Gospel narratives must be received as part of the necessary furniture of the Church.’ One would have thought such churchmanship as this would have satisfied any one. However, the cry of heresy has been raised, principally, it seems, because he denies the doctrine of eternal damnation—an awful doctrine, we do not venture to affirm or condemn here. Because he has done this, he has been branded with infidelity; and The Record, and The Morning Advertiser—neither of them journals distinguished for talent, but rather the reverse—hounded on the public indignation against Mr. Maurice, forgetting that no man has so earnestly laboured to Christianize—not the dark tribes of Polynesia, for then these journals would have been redolent with his praise—but the savages with white faces and dark hearts that we meet in our streets every day.

It is melancholy to think that wretched theologians may aim their small shot at such a man, merely because his idea of God and Christianity may be less fearful, more loving and humane, than their own. Surely a man may love God and his neighbour as himself—may believe Christ suffered for the sins of the world—without being hooted by every ignorant or unreasoning fool, because, on other matters—matters merely speculative—matters too dark for man ever to fully inquire into or completely to understand—his opinions differ from their own. Proud as we are of our press, yet such exhibitions should make us mourn, that at times it can so far forget Christian charity and common sense, and descend so low. One thing is clear, that there is no tribunal in the Church that can satisfactorily settle the question of heresy; and another thing is clear, that whilst so many men differing so widely from each other are in the Church, the question with the majority of them cannot be one of principle but of pay. Churchmen should be the last to raise the cry of heresy, for it is a revelation to the world of what must ever be their weakness and their shame.

Mr. Maurice, after all, is thrown away where he is: all his life he has been in an uncongenial position. The son of a dissenting minister, the habits he acquired have clung to him from his earliest youth. Hazlitt tells us how a man so nurtured grows up in a love of independence and of truth; and such a one will find it hard to retain a connection long with any human organization and creed. Then, as the brother-in-law of Sterling, Maurice would naturally be led to modes of thought and action other than those the Church had been in the habit of sanctioning. Eminently religious, he never could have been what he was to have been, a lawyer; but as an independent writer on religion, as a co-worker with Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, for instance, what might he not have done? Another mistake of Maurice’s is, that his mission is to the poor. His style is the very last that would be popular with such. In the pulpit or out, Maurice preaches not to the public, but to the select few—to literary loungers—to men of ample time and elevated taste—to men of thought rather than of action—to men freed from the hard necessities of life, and who can leisurely sit and listen to his notes of ‘linked sweetness long drawn out.’ Hence is it that he is more a favourite with intellectual dissenters than with churchmen, and that I believe at Lincoln’s-inn-fields his congregation is made up more of the former than the latter. They love his efforts at self-emancipation; they admire his scholarship, his piety, his taste. They eminently appreciate him, as he, like the intellectual power of the poet,

‘Through words and things Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way.’

The absence in him of all that is cold and priestly—his human sympathies—his love to the erring and the weak and the doubting, whom he would reclaim, are qualities with which the better class of religionists would heartily sympathize, and with which perhaps they would sympathize all the more that they come to them couched in language of dream-like beauty, all glorious, though misty with ‘exhalations of the dawn.’

As a writer, Mr. Maurice is well known for his ‘History of Metaphysical Philosophy,’ his ‘View of the Religions of the World,’ his ‘Articles of the Church considered with Reference to the Roman Catholic Controversy,’ and his ‘Essays,’ which are more especially intended to grapple with the difficulties Unitarians feel in connection with orthodox doctrine. They have all obtained an extensive sale; but they are not for the public; not for the men who buy and sell and get gain—who rise early and sit up late; but for the student and divine. Hence it is that Maurice and the school with whom he acts, such as Kingsley, Hare, and Trench, can never reanimate the Church of England, nor win the operatives over to it. That they do great good, I admit; that they have a mission, I grant; but not where they fondly deem it to be. There is a destiny that shapes their ends, and the issues, I doubt not, must be for the good of man’s soul, for the cause of truth, for the glory of God.

THE REV. H. MELVILLE, M.A.

The great John Foster (who, by-the-bye, in his essay on ‘Decision of Character,’ has much mischief to answer for, as every obstinate mule quotes his authority when, against all advice and entreaty and common sense, he persists in going wrong—poor Haydon always quoted Foster) wrote one of his best essays, ‘On the Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion.’ The professors of Evangelical religion, I think, scarcely forgave him. The sanctuary, it was thought, should have a shibboleth of its own. In its peculiar terms and general formation it should differ from the ordinary language of other men. If persons of taste were kept away—if the men of intellect and science and learning stood aloof—it mattered little; for the wisdom of the world was folly, and it was ordained that it was to be brought to nought by the weak in years and understanding—‘out of the mouth of sucklings and babes.’ The religious, I fear, some of them with a certain kind of pride—for there is a pride in the Church as well as in the world, and we all know whose

‘Darling sin Is the pride that apes humility’—

took pleasure in their cant terms, and sprinkled them as plentifully in their sermons and prayers as ever did skilful cook in time-honoured Christmas pudding. Wilberforce once took Pitt to hear Cecil. When they came out, Wilberforce tells us he was surprised by Pitt telling him he could not understand a word of the discourse. There was nothing wonderful in that. Pitt had never been to hear an Evangelical preacher before. His world had been a different one. He was a stranger amongst strangers. Their language was not his, and conveyed no meaning to his ear. Greek or Hebrew would have been as intelligible to him. Pitt’s case was a common one then, and is a common one now. Foster’s Essay has lost none of its point or power. There are still not unfrequently in the services of our churches and chapels, in the peculiar phraseology of the pulpit, some grounds for the aversion of men of taste to Evangelical religion. However, there are illustrious exceptions: one of the most illustrious of these is Henry Melville.

Would you hear him, reader, then for awhile you must leave the shop or the counting-house, and penetrate with us to the very heart of our great metropolis. The Golden Lecture, as it is called, a lectureship, I believe, belonging to the Mercers’ Company, and worth about £400 a-year, is delivered every Tuesday morning, and Melville is the lecturer. The church of St. Margaret, in Lothbury, is the spot selected, and it is an appropriate place for a Golden Lecture, for everywhere around you, you have—

‘Gold and gold, and nothing but gold, Yellow and hard, and shining and cold!’

On one side is the bank that hides such treasures in its mysterious and well-guarded cells. An hour’s quiet walk in one of them, my good sir, would make you and me independent for life. Every step of our way we are surrounded by gigantic companies; We walk on enchanted ground; we breathe enchanted air. Fortunes here are made and lost in a day. It was well that the piety of our forefathers selected such a spot, that once in the bustle of the week God’s voice might be heard as well as that of Mammon.

But it is time we enter St. Margaret’s.

Like most city churches, it is small and cold and mouldy—seeming to belong more to the past than the present age. However, for once, it is alive again. The old seats once more abound with beauty, and wealth, and fashion—or, at any rate, with so much of them as belong to City dames. We have left the roar of Cheap-side and Cornhill; but, after all, we have the world with us here as well as there. For awhile we shall forget it, for there is the preacher, and already the magic of his voice has charmed every ear. I know no more magnificent voice. I know no statelier air. It always carries me back in fancy to the days of the elder Pitt—or to the earlier times of Bolingbroke—or to that still earlier day when the Hebrew Paul preached, and the Roman Felix trembled on his seat of splendour and of power.

Tall, of dark complexion, with grey hair and blue eyes, with a face lit up with genius—the most brilliant preacher in the English Church: such is Henry Melville. His action is simple and singular. When he commences scarcely any is observable. Then as he flies along, and warms as he proceeds, the head is dropped with a convulsive jerk, and the right hand is raised, and the climax is ejaculated (for so rapid is his delivery it can scarcely be called preaching) with a corresponding emphasis. No sooner is the text enunciated than he plunges at once into his subject, developing and illustrating his meaning with a brilliancy and rapidity unparalleled in the pulpit at the present day. You are kept in breathless attention. The continuity of thought is unbroken for an instant. Every sentence is connected with that which precedes or follows; and, as the preacher goes on his way like a giant, every instant mounting higher, every instant pouring out a more gorgeous rhetoric, every instant climbing to a loftier strain, you are reminded of some monster steam-ship ploughing her way across the Atlantic, proudly asserting her mastery over the mountain-waves, landing her precious cargo safe in port. When she started, you trembled for her safety; she was so lavish of her power that you feared it would fail her when she needed it most. But on she wends her gallant way, scattering around her the mad waves as in play. I can compare Melville with nothing else, as he stands in that pulpit—in that sea of human souls—drowning all discord by his own splendid voice, mastering all passions by his own irresistible will, piercing all scepticism by his own living faith.

And yet Melville is not what some understand by the term, ‘an intellectual preacher.’ He does not aim to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christian truth—to convince men whose understandings reject it. With the large class who are perpetually halting between two opinions, who to-day are convinced by one man, and to-morrow by another—who have lost themselves hopelessly in German mysticism—Melville has no sympathy whatever. I never heard him use the terms objective and subjective in my life. Of honest intellectual doubt, with all its pain and horror, he seems to have no idea. Melville always is as positive as Babington Macaulay himself. In no circumstances could he have been a Blanco White, or a Francis Newman, or a Froude. As a churchman he stands rigidly inside the pale of the Church. His God is a personal God. His Christ descended into hell. His heaven has a golden pavement, and shining thrones. Wordsworth tells us—

‘Feebly must they have felt, who in old times Array’d with vengeful whips the furies. Beautiful regards were turned on me, The face of her I loved.’

Melville never could have written that. His hell is physical, not mental. It is a bottomless pit where the smoke of their torment ever ascends—where the worm never dies—where the fire is not quenched. In all other matters his vision seems similarly clear, and intense, and narrow. Beside the Church, whose creed he preaches, and whose articles he has subscribed, and whose emoluments he pockets, he knows no other. His Holy Catholic Church is that which the State pays to and supports. His successors of the Apostles are those whom Episcopalian bishops ordain. His redeemed and sanctified ones consist only of those who have been confirmed. According to him, error from the pulpits of the State Establishment is sanctified, owing to some mysterious power its pulpits possess. Pulpits outside the Church are not only destitute of that power, but, alas! destitute also of all saving grace. I have called Melville a brilliant preacher. He is that; but his brilliancy, like that of Sheridan, is the result of intense preparation. I write not this to disparage him. I consider it much in his favour. In these days, when the pulpit contains so small a part of the learning or the intellect of the age, no pulpit preparation can be too intense, or elaborate, or severe. It is said Melville writes and re-writes his sermons till they arrive at his standard of perfection. It is said he not unfrequently devotes a week to the composition of a single discourse. I can quite believe it. Every sentence is in its proper place—every figure is correct—every word tells—and the whole composition bears the stamp of subdued and chastened power.

Considering how rich the Church to which Mr. Melville belongs is, and how transcendently his talents outshine the mild mediocrities by which its pulpits are adorned, Mr. Melville cannot be considered to have been very successful in the way of patronage. His income from Camden-town Chapel, Camberwell—a place of worship belonging to a relative—was about £1000 a-year: he resigned that when he was made President of Haileybury College. As Chaplain of the Tower, I believe, he has about £300 a-year. I have already stated what his Golden Lectureship is worth. Certainly, he is not a poor man, but, compared with some of his brethren, he cannot be considered very rich. He has published several sermons. ‘Fraser,’ some years since, in a severe criticism on them, detected several remarkable coincidences between passages in them and in Chalmers’ Sermons—of whose style, certainly, Melville strongly reminds one. But I am not aware that the criticism did Melville much harm; and he is still in as great request as ever. I am told there is no such successful preacher of charity sermons in London: no other preacher is so successful in taking money at the doors. As an orator, in the Church or out of it, no man can produce a greater effect. He strikes the chords with a master’s hands. At his bidding strong men tremble and despair, or believe and live.

THE HON. AND REV. MR. VILLIERS.

I know not that there is a happier berth in the world than that of a fashionable Evangelical preacher in this enlightened city and enlightened age. See him in the pulpit, adored by the women, envied by the men! Wherever he goes he is made much of. The shops in his neighbourhood abound with his portrait; his signature graces a thousand albums; young ladies of all ages and conditions work him his worsted slippers; his silver teapot and his easy chair are the contributions of his flock. If there be an elysium on earth, it is his private residence. If a man is to be deemed fortunate this side the grave, it is he. If mortal ever slept upon a bed of roses, such is his enviable fate. In old times men suffered for their religion; were deemed as dirt and dishonour; were things to point at and to shun. In old times they had to suffer more than this: the man who would be loyal to his conscience or his God might not look for happiness and peace on earth. He had to wander in sheepskins and goatskins; he had to renounce father, mother, sister, brother—all that was dear to him as his own life. From the fair enjoyments of the world and the bright love of woman he had to tear himself away. A sad, solitary life, and a bitter and bloody death, were what Christianity entailed on you in the olden time. Ay, you must have been a strong man then to have borne its yoke. And yet, sustained by a living faith, young, tender, delicate women bore it as if it were a wreath of flowers. Men might talk of self-denial and taking up the cross then: they did so then. But they are gone; and now, if you wish to learn self-denial and take up the cross, you must renounce Christianity. Its sleek and popular minister can tell you little either of one or the other. Religion now dresses in silk and satin, goes to court, has all Belgravia hallooing at her heels. Her ways indeed are ways of pleasantness, and her paths, paths of peace. Dr. Watts was right—

‘Religion never was design’d, To make our pleasure less.’

Take, for instance, the honourable and reverend rector of St. George’s, Bloomsbury. As the brother of a Lord, Mr. Villiers has great claims on a British public; as a canon of St. Paul’s, the rector of a well-filled church, still greater. Bloomsbury Square is not exactly high life, but it is respectable. The better sort of professional men and merchants abound in it. Its neighbourhood is a step in a genteel direction. It is not part and parcel of that vulgar place, the City. It is on the way to the West-end. One might live in a worse place. Its natives are civilised, eschew steel forks, and affect silver spoons. Most of them speak English, and a few have carriages of their own. The place has seen better days; but it is not altogether of the past. It abounds with the latest fashions. It can talk of the last new novel. Even its religion smacks of the genteel—carries a morocco prayer-book, with silver clasps, is followed by a page with buttons of shining hue, and has its services performed by men of honourable and exalted name. Many in the Church have been born in low stations—have risen up to high rank, nevertheless. Still it is a merit to be of aristocratic descent, and even in the Church that fact is as patent as in the world. It is only in Turkey that birth carries no weight—but then the Turk is but little better than one of the wicked.

Independently, however, of these considerations, Mr. Villiers must have been a popular preacher. He is a fine, well-made man; his figure is prepossessing—a great thing in a public speaker. Weak, stunted, deformed, wretched-looking men have no business in the pulpit. A man should have a portly presence there. He should also have a fine voice, and Mr. Villiers is singularly happy in this respect. In the Church there is not a man who can read its stately service with more effect. And that service, well read to the hearer in a fitting mood, is a sermon itself. Nor does Mr. Villiers’ merit end here. He is no dull drone when the service is over and the sermon has begun. With downcast eye he reads no moral essay that touches no conscience and fires no heart. On the contrary, he is exceedingly active and energetic in the pulpit. He looks his congregation in the face—he directs his discourse to them. He takes care that not a single word shall lose its aim. His musical voice is heard distinctly in every part of his crowded and enormous church. Mr. Villiers is not an intellectual preacher; nor is he a man of original mind; nor does he revivify old themes, so as to make them seem fresh and new. The common truths of orthodox Christianity are those which form the staple of his discourses. To convert the sinner and edify the saint are his aim. Philosophy and the world’s lore he passes by. His plainness makes him popular. The poorest can understand what he says, and they love to hear him, especially when he denounces the fashionable follies of high life. Against such fashions Mr. Villiers is always ready to protest. The theatre and the ballroom are the objects of his bitterest denunciations; the frequenters of such places find no mercy at his hands. Of course this plainness delights his congregation. As they frequent neither the one nor the other, they care little what harsh things he says of those who do.

Out of the pulpit we know little of Mr. Villiers. One does not hear of him at Exeter Hall. The Freemasons’ Tavern seldom echoes the sound of his voice. His parish duties seem to absorb him. He does not publish a new volume of theology every month, like Dr. Cumming, though he has published a volume or two of his Sermons, and some of his Lectures to Young Men. To be sure he has enough to do where he is. But still many ministers attempt much more, and his preaching cannot be a very severe tax on his mental powers. Robert Montgomery published a book, called ‘The Gospel before the Age’—the Gospel of Mr. Villiers certainly has no such claim. The school to which he belongs has very little reference to the age—has a very easy way of settling all the problems of the heart—never seems to imagine that there can be two sides to a question at all. This makes it very easy work for preacher and people. Such being the case, the wonder is not that Mr. Villiers preaches so well, but that, with his powerful voice and action, he does not do it better. Since the above was written Episcopalianism in Bloomsbury has sustained a loss—Mr. Villiers is now a bishop.

The Independent Denomination.

THE REV. THOMAS BINNEY.

All the world, I take it, is acquainted with the Monument, which,

‘Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies.’

You have been to see it, or you have passed it as you have rushed to take the boat to Greenwich, or Hamburg, or the ‘Diggins.’ In either of these cases, unless you had been too much absorbed, you might have seen a plain, substantial building, evidently devoted to public worship. There is nothing peculiar about its appearance; but there is something peculiar in the man who generally fills its pulpit—for it is the Weigh-House Chapel, and the preacher is the Rev. Thomas Binney.

Let us suppose it is a Sabbath morning, and the time half-past ten. A stream of people has been flowing for the last quarter of an hour to the door of the above-named chapel: a few in private carriages—some in cabs—the rest on foot. The larger portion consists of males, and, again, that majority consists of young men. They come, evidently, from the shops and warehouses and counting-houses of this great metropolis. They belong to the commercial classes. They are the raw material out of which are evolved, in process of time, aldermen, merchant princes, and Lord Mayors. They are such as Hogarth, were he alive now, would sketch for his industrious apprentice. A few medical students from the neighbouring hospitals, and men of law or literature from the more aristocratic West, and you have the usual congregation to which the Rev. Thomas Binney ministers in holy things.

It is something to preach to these twelve hundred living souls; to place before them, immersed as they are in the business and bustle of this world, the reality of that which is to come; so to speak that the voice of God shall be more audible to them than that of gold. Yet, surely, if it can be done by man, he can do it whom we now see, with reverent step, ascending the pulpit stairs. What power there is in those great limbs, that full chest, and magnificent head! Nature has been bountiful to him. Such a man as that you can’t raise in London or Manchester. You can imagine him the child of the mountain and the flood—learning from nature and his own great heart and the written Word—wild and strong and fierce as the war-horse scenting the battle from afar. You see he has a warm heart, human sympathies; that, in short, he is every inch a man—not a scholastic pedant, nor an intellectual bigot, nor an emasculated priest. Oh, it is pitiful to see in the pulpit, preaching in God’s name, some poor dwarf who has never had a doubt nor a hope nor a noble aim, and who enunciates your damnation with the same heartlessness with which he tells you two and two make four. There are too many of such in our pulpits—men made ministers in some narrow routine of theological study, in some college where they get as accurate an idea of the world against which they have to warn men as the Chinese have of us.

It was not so in the grand old apostolic times. Paul, Peter, James, and John preached of what they had seen and heard and known and felt. Too generally the modern preacher tells you what he has read, and which, parrot-like, he repeats. It is not so with Binney. You see all that man has to go through, he must have gone through—that scepticism must have stared him in the face—that passion must have appealed to him in her most seductive forms—that the great problem of life he has not taken upon trust, but unriddled for himself—that he has gone through the Slough of Despond—passed by Castle Doubting, and sees the gilt and the rouge in Vanity Fair: or, as he says himself in his life, ‘the man has conquered the animal, and the God the man.’ Such a man has a right to preach to me. If he has known, felt, thought, suffered, more than I, he is master, and I listen. Such a man is Binney. I can yet read in his face the record of passion subdued, of thought protracted and severe, of doubt conquered by a living faith.

Well, the service has been begun. The congregation has joined in praise; and now it is hushed and still, while in accents feeble at first, but gradually becoming louder and more distinct, the preacher prays. The liturgy of the English Church is beautiful and touching, but it is cold and unvarying. It does not, with its eternal sameness, answer to the shifting moods of the human soul. Such prayers as those of Binney do. They bear you with them. Your inward eye opens and refines. Earth grows more distant, and heaven more near. For once you become awe-struck and devout. For once there comes a cloud between you and the world and the battle of life. You are on the mount, and breathe a purer air. Your heart has been touched, and you are ready for the preacher and his discourse. At first you hardly hear it. The great man before you seems nervous, awkward, as a raw student. He runs his fingers through his scanty hairs. He takes out half a dozen pocket-kerchiefs and blows his nose. Being asthmatic, you are compelled to cough, and you have immediately the preacher stopping, to turn on you a withering glance. But at length you catch, like a gleam of sunshine in a November fog, a fine thought in fine language. Your attention is riveted. What you hear is fresh and original, very different to the common run of pulpit discourses. The preacher warms, his eye sparkles, his voice becomes loud, his action energetic. You listen to powerful reasoning and passionate appeal. Binney has been compared to Coleridge. I don’t think the comparison good. He is far more like Carlyle. The latter, a Christian, with a good digestion, would preach precisely as Binney. Binney is a Christian Carlyle, with the same poetry and power, the same faculty of realizing great and sterling thoughts; but with a light upon his way and in his heart which Carlyle has never known.

I have said Binney is not the kind of man born in great cities. You see that in his physical frame; it is also evident in his mental character. Everything about him is free and independent. Whatever he is, he is no narrow-hearted sectarian, shut up in his own creed, having no sympathies outside his own church. I take it that he sees also a certain kind of goodness in the world; that he does not feel

‘What a wretched land is this That yields us no supplies;’

that he thinks life is to be enjoyed, and that genius, and wit, and beauty, are far from sinful in themselves. The result is, Binney’s experience of life is greater than that of most ministers, and he keeps abreast of the age. He studies to understand its thought, to answer its questionings, to lead it up to God.

And yet this man—with his great Catholic heart, standing by himself, tied down by no creed or common organisation—because, in a moment of excitement, seeing what was to him a dearth of truth and life in the Establishment, he said that it destroyed more souls than it saved, has been looked upon as the incarnation of all that is fierce and narrow in political Dissent. Never was a bigger blunder made. As regards all such matters, Binney is a latitudinarian. I dare say even sharp-scented theologians may see a little of what they call heresy occasionally wrapped up in the sermons of the Weigh-House Chapel. The charge is a common one in the mouths of those who would make a man an offender for a word. The curse of the pulpit and the pew, hitherto, has been that such snarling critics have abounded in each. To such, Binney is a terrible stumbling-block. They cannot understand him, and yet they dare not condemn.

Mr. Binney is still in the prime of life. He was born somewhere in the north, where they have bigger heads and frames than we southerns have. He was educated at Wymondley College; he was then settled, as the phrase is, at Bedford, from which place he moved to Newport, in the Isle of Wight. About twenty years since, he was invited to the Weigh-House Chapel, where ever since he has remained. His income from that source must be very respectable, as the Weigh-House Chapel congregation is pretty well to do in the world, and can afford to pay its pastor handsomely. As an author, Mr. Binney has gained extensive popularity, although he has not done much in that respect; and his first work, the ‘Life of the Rev. S. Morrell,’ a friend and fellow-student of his own, was a most extraordinary performance—just the thing a man like Binney would write when young. It has, however, long been out of print. His principal work is ‘Discourses on the Practical Power of Faith.’ His sermons have been his most frequent publications, and his Lecture on Sir F. Buxton—a lecture delivered to young men, with whom Mr. Binney is always popular—has been reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic, as I believe also has been his last published work, ‘How to Make the Best of Both Worlds.’ I believe, also, Mr. Binney has written some poetry. I recollect a few powerful lines, with his name to them, commencing with—

‘Eternal light—eternal light, How pure that soul must be, That, placed within thy searching sight, It shrinks not—but with calm delight Can live and look on thee.’

His sermons often are prose poems. Occasionally they are common-place. We are all dull at times; but they are generally lit up with

‘The light that never shone On shore or sea.’

I fancy, sometimes, Mr. Binney imagines that he has now made his position, and that, therefore, less exertion is required on his part than formerly. A weaker man would have sunk into the idol of a coterie long before this. A minister is never safe. Popularity is often a fatal boon. Some men it withers up at once.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about our subject has yet to be said. Though the popular pastor of a popular London congregation, he is still plain Thomas Binney—still without the very questionable honour of an American D.D. appended to his name.

THE REV. BALDWIN BROWN, B.A.

The pulpit is an old institution—next to the theatre, perhaps the oldest we have. To almost every generation of men on this small isle set in the silver sea it has revealed all that it has had to communicate relative to this world or the next. ‘Thanks to the aid of the temporal arm,’ writes Thierry of Edbald, King of Kent, ‘the faith of Christ arose once more, never again to be extinguished, on both banks of the Thames.’ Before that the pulpit had been introduced, and it remained powerful when England, at a monarch’s nod, forcibly dissolved the spiritual union she had so soon contracted and so long maintained with Rome. To the Protestants the pulpit was more essential than to the Catholics. To the Protestants who dissented from the Established Church it became more important still. Without it they were nothing. Dissenting vitality depends upon the pulpit. If that be weak and cold, unable to get at the heart and to act upon the passions of the multitude, Dissent melts like snow beneath the warm breath of the south. If it be otherwise, Dissent flourishes and grows strong. The history of sects is the history of individuals. Whitfield, Wesley are instances. In the Church of England it is otherwise. That has a status independent of the pulpit. Without any particular individual, it has a service elaborate and solemn and complete, and more attractive than from its eternal monotony, in spite of Puseyite natural attempts to the contrary, one would imagine would be the case. Yet it is becoming confessed the Dissenting pulpit has ceased to be what it was. I own I hardly understand why. Tom Moore tells in his diary that no exercise of talent brings so immediate a result as oratory. I believe every one who has ever got upon his legs will say the same thing, and where can the orator have a wider field than in the pulpit? At the best, the senate or the bar have nothing of equal interest. I believe the difficulty may be partly explained in two ways. In the first place, the pulpit is too much a repetition of creeds and theologies that are becoming extinct; and in the second place, there is a dead weight in the pews which masters the pulpit, and deadens its intellectual life. I believe many a minister says things in private conversation that he has not courage enough to utter in the pulpit, and that when he tries to do so, owing to the vagueness of theological terms, what he says in one sense is understood by his hearers in another. No wonder then that the pulpit is so barren of power, and that many a man of gifts and parts in our days of universal reading prefers the press to the pulpit, and chooses rather to teach with his pen than with the living voice. Yet the pulpit is not wholly deserted. It can still boast its consecrated talent. It has still in it men who would have succeeded, had they tried other professions—who have something more to distinguish them than a sleek appearance or a fluent voice. To this class does the Reverend Baldwin Brown belong.

Some years back Clayland’s Chapel was erected in the Clapham-road. A dissenting D.D., famed for his eloquence and wit—for his book against the theatre—for his encounter with Sidney Smith—for the strict orthodoxy of his reviews in the Evangelical Magazine—and for sundry indiscretions not quite so orthodox, became its minister. The reverend gentleman failed to gather around him a flock. He preached and none came to hear him. The pews were unoccupied, and the quarterly returns were small. He abandoned the chapel, and with dubious fame, and an appearance somewhat too much that of a bon vivant for the minister of a religion of self-denial and mortification of the flesh, went down to Warwickshire to become the pastor of a village congregation, and in time to die. Clayland’s chapel then was placed under the care of the Rev. Baldwin Brown, then a young man fresh from Highbury College, to which place he had gone after completing his education at University College, becoming a graduate of the London University, and having been, I believe, called to the bar. Mr. Brown is now in the prime of life. He cannot be much above thirty. He attained his position earlier than ministers generally do. His father was a man of some standing in the world, as well as in his own denomination. His uncles were no less distinguished personages than Drs. Liefchild and Raffles, and last, and not least, he had that easy confidence in his own powers, which are great, and his attainments, which are greater, without which you may have the eloquence of Paul, or the piety of John, and yet no more move the world or the most insignificant portion of it than a child can arrest a steam engine, or than a lady’s parasol can still a storm.

Mr. Brown’s settlement at Clayland’s Chapel has been successful. The cause—to borrow the conventional phrase—has prospered; the chapel has been filled, and the church has considerably increased. His fame has grown. He has become a man of note. At Exeter Hall his voice is often heard. Undoubtedly some of his success is due to the circumstances I have already mentioned, but undoubtedly the greater part of it is due to himself alone. It is something for a man to find a position already made for him. It saves him many a year of herculean and unregarded toil; but to keep a position is almost as difficult as to make it, and this Mr. Brown has succeeded in doing. The reason of this must be sought for in Mr. Brown himself. The man must have some speciality to fit him for his work, or he cannot be successful in it. That Mr. Brown has this is, I take it, beyond a doubt; nor can you long attend upon his ministry without finding such is the case. Mr. Brown’s distinguishing characteristic is freshness. There is nothing stale or conventional about him. He evidently preaches what he thinks. His speech is a living speech, not a monotonous repetition of old divinity. He has wandered out of the conventional circle. He has come in contact with great minds. He has had a richer experience than generally falls to the lot of the divine. He views things broadly and in a manly manner, not from the narrow platform of a sect. His faith is a living one. His Christianity is practical—that by which men may shape their life as well as square their creed. Instead of wandering weakly and sentimentally in other lands and in other ages, he brings his mind and heart to bear upon the realities of the present day. The questions of our age, not of past ages, he discusses in his pulpit. The day that passes over him is the day to which he devotes his energies. He gives you an idea of earnestness and activity and independence—of a mind well educated and drawn out—filled with Christian truth, and earnest in the application of that truth. He is not a great rhetorician—his strength seems to be in his common sense. If the Bible be true, the sooner man gets that idea into his head and acts according to it, the better. If man have to obey the Divine law, the sooner he submits himself to it the happier he will be in this life as well as in that which is to come. I know there is nothing new in this,—that other men attempt to teach the same thing,—that all divines are saying it one way or another every Sunday; but the merit of Mr. Brown is that he says it as a man of common-sense would say it to men possessed of common-sense—that he does not wrap his meaning in the unreal verbiage of a mystic and unreal theology—that he takes his teachings, and arguments, and illustrations from real life—and that he talks of religion as men of the world of consols and railways; and no man can do this, to whom religion is not the business of his life. In personal appearance there is nothing particularly remarkable about Mr. Brown. He is tall—thin—of light complexion, a very different style of man to the fat, indolent-looking old gentlemen that figure in the picture gallery of a certain popular religious magazine, but with an appearance of intellectual activity and readiness for his work and age, to which few of the good old conventional divines now happily gathered to their fathers ever seem to have had an idea.

THE REV. JOHN CAMPBELL, D.D.

If the reader has ever been in the habit of attending public meetings, he must occasionally have seen an amendment proposed by a man evidently in a minority, yet proposed nevertheless. The man who does this is a man of confidence, of good lungs and nerve. First, the meeting will not hear him at all. ‘Down, down!’ is the universal cry. But the man stands firm, fixes his arms across his breast in the manner of the ‘Napoleon musing at St. Helena’ of the late Mr. Haydon. He knows that that angry hubbub cannot last long: that the indignant public will be out of breath in five minutes; that the more frantic it is now, the more exhausted and quiet it will be anon; and, with a calm smile of pity, he waits the result. All that he has to do is simply to stand still, and, if he does this long enough, there is no meeting on the face of the earth that can refuse him a hearing.

In some such manner has the Rev. John Campbell made good his position in the religious world, or rather in that one section of the Congregational body over which he rules with a rod of iron. At times there has been a hubbub, but the Doctor knows no hubbub, however loud and angry, can last long; and to the mass, destitute alike of information and principles, it is a real blessing to get hold of a firm, dogmatic man, who knows his own mind, and who will kindly take care of theirs. Fluent in pen, meagre in attainment, seemingly master of no one subject, yet writing vehemently on all, the Doctor is precisely the man to give the law to that low class of readers more or less present in all religious denominations. It is easy to see what he is, and what he is not. He is not an accomplished orator, for he eschews the graces of the platform. He is not a man of learning, for learning softens the manners. He is not a man of lofty grasp of thought, for he has never said a word, or written a line, that is not narrow and sectarian and one-sided. But he is hard, energetic, confident, loud in voice, and boisterous in manner; as unabashed as the Duke of York’s monument in Waterloo Place.

You can see what manner of a man Dr. Campbell is in the twinkling of an eye. It is not often he preaches now; but if you chance to be at the Tabernacle, in the City Road, when he does preach, you will feel the description of him is correct. The memory of that Apostle in an age of sensualism and sin, George Whitfield, still sheds a fragrance round the dreary-looking chapel, in which some few hundreds, chiefly of the poorer sort of small tradesmen, meet, Sabbath after Sabbath, and where the Editor of the ‘Christian Witness,’ of the ‘Christian Penny Magazine,’ and of the ‘British Standard,’ occasionally harangues. If you go, gentle reader, take with you a good stock of patience, for you will not find the service easy, or the sermon short. There, in the very pulpit where Whitfield, the persuasive, the silver-tongued, stood—the Whitfield, whom lords and ladies flocked to hear; who lit up with light and life a wicked and adulterous generation—an age destitute alike of faith and heart and hope—you will see a big cumbrous man, of severe face and repulsive manner, with a voice harsh and rough as a mountain-stream. The face is almost hidden between two uncomfortable collars, which create your sympathy for the unfortunate mortal in such an unpleasant fix. Continuing your search, however, you see piercing eyes beneath bushy brows, a nose of a decided character, a most firm chin, and a head of thick grey hair, the obstinate irregularities of which would throw a fashionable hair-dresser into despair. Moore wrote of Castlereagh that—

‘He gave out his small beer with the air of a chap Who thinks to himself, ’T is prodigious fine tap.’

Just so preaches Dr. Campbell. In the pulpit he has it all his own way. You cannot contradict him. You cannot even intimate dissent; and he harangues with the air of a judge. Evidently the congregation has been dragooned into what it is, for the preacher gives no sign of intelligence or vigour. He takes a text and preaches from it. The divisions of the sermon are the sentences of the text, and he talks in the most desultory manner imaginable. The oratory belongs to the deadly-lively school, and consists of mild common-places, pumped out with a ferocity reminding one of the stern Puritans of the olden time, but rather out of place in the Tabernacle in which the Doctor reigns supreme, and which we suppose is licensed for public worship, according to Act of Parliament. Moderate your expectations if you go there. Dr. Campbell has been far too busy a man to master the thought and aspect and characteristics of our age. Of what man in England, in London, in the nineteenth century, is aiming at, he seems to have but a remote idea. So blind is he that, if he wants a heathen, he puts on his spectacles and reads you an account of one out of some old Missionary Magazine. Nor does the Doctor atone for this by the beauty of his style and the perspicuity of his tone. His voice is husky and, at times, inaudible; his manner, bad. Sheridan had a bad voice, so had Fox, so had Burke; but these men were orators, nevertheless. Dr. Campbell is not one, and never was one. He builds up no lofty structure. He bears you on no unfaltering wing far,

‘Far above this lower world, Up where eternal ages roll.’

He overflows with no brilliant eloquence, and burns with no celestial fire. He never ascends into the region of beauty and splendour, and life and light. His is not the magic art to take you from step to step along the Christian path, till your soul heaves, and you exclaim, ‘It is good to be here!’ On the contrary, he leaves you flat and cold and dull. He amplifies, and waves his right arm, and quotes texts, and repeats a feeble sentence emphatically; but that is all; he makes no progress. In going from Edinburgh to Stirling, by water, you are carried backwards and forwards, by the winding of the stream, in the most remarkable manner. You see Stirling long before you approach. You keep going, and yet you don’t seem going on. Dr. Campbell winds just in the same way. You have talk without effect; action without progress; words without thought.

The real truth is, Dr. Campbell is one of the failures of the age. His ‘Martyr of Erromanga’ has been his only creditable work. No man has talked more, or done less. He attempts too much. He would be everything, and is nothing. Superficiality has ever been his bane. A fatal copiousness of words has ruined him. More golden opportunities than those he has had, no man ever had. A failure in the pulpit, he turned himself to the press; and a powerful body, with an organization in almost every town and village in the land, rallied round him as their chief. To circulate his publications the most gigantic efforts were made. The ‘pulpits were tuned,’ the Sunday-school was invaded, the congregation was taken by storm. Like most men whose invective powers are strong, the Doctor can flatter, and he did so with a vengeance. The model church was the church which took in the most of the Doctor’s publications. The successful minister was the minister who sold the most of them. The people of whom the Doctor had hopes were the people who subscribed 4s. 4d. per quarter to Bolt Court.

But the Doctor can bear no rival; he must reign supreme. John Childs, of Bungay, and Dr. Adam Thomson, of Coldstream, destroyed the Bible monopoly; but Dr. Campbell had the command of the press, and took the credit to himself. An eminent publisher started a newspaper and a religious magazine, and the Doctor looked coldly on him till he sold the newspaper and gave up the magazine. When the ‘Anti-State-Church Society’ was formed, the Doctor was one of its members, but it had a ruling spirit who was not the pastor of the Tabernacle, and the Doctor’s zeal soon died away. The Doctor also professes to be with the Teetotalers; but they don’t all go to Bolt Court, and the Doctor damns them with faint praise. If the Congregationalists grow restive, it matters little; they have no chance against him; they have been delivered over to the Doctor, body and soul. It is in vain they struggle to be free. Will the Doctor publish what would militate against himself? Will the Doctor withhold from publishing when it gives him the chance of an easy triumph? Of course, a man is a fool to enter into a controversy with a newspaper editor. The editor is omnipotent; you must give in. If it is folly to kick against the pricks, it is the height of folly to encounter the editor of a newspaper. Hence the Doctor’s triumphs have been easy; but they have been due more to the weakness of his foes than to any strength of his own.

As to the utter weakness of the Doctor in execution, let us turn to the ‘British Banner.’ A man may be heavy, rambling, in the pulpit; but with his pen he may be quite the reverse. The ‘Banner,’ when under the Doctor’s care, was a failure. That was to have been a paper to Christianize the world; to win over the discontented infidelity and chartism of our age; to pervade the land with a living Christian faith: for this, Doctor Campbell had a support such as was never given to man before. The Doctor told us that there was an infidel press; that that infidel press circulated by tens of thousands; and that it behoved Christian men to try and arrest such a state of things. Christian men believed the Doctor, and invested him with tremendous power. And what has been the consequence? That the world has a fresh sectarian paper, and that the readers of the infidel press remain just where they were. Is this a success?

Take another test. The London weekly papers exchange with the country ones; the consequence is, many of the leaders appearing in the former are reprinted in the latter. This is about the best test you can have of what a newspaper is. The editors of the country papers are very fair representatives of the intelligence of the age. What they reprint must be generally good. You would expect this to be so, and it actually is the case. The papers which have the highest reputation for talent and clearness of view are precisely the papers most quoted from. But who ever saw a reprint of a leader from the ‘British Banner’? If the leaders in the ‘Banner’ were as distinguished for the vigour of language, for the correctness of their views, they would be reprinted as extensively as the papers the ‘Banner’ was intended to supersede. If the Doctor’s aim were good, if it were desirable to start a paper that should be Christian, and yet popular, so that it should circulate everywhere, the Doctor’s failure has been complete; for he has not only not done so, but he has hindered the men who would.

Like most vituperative men, Dr. Campbell is terribly thin-skinned. You may praise, but you must not blame. He seems conscious that honest criticism would tear him to shreds and tatters. We heard of a Scottish paper in the habit of giving pulpit portraits. It was expected the Doctor would be served up in course of time. The Doctor let it be understood that, if anything of the kind were done, he would write the paper into the Broomielaw: and the matter dropped.

The last time I heard the Doctor he was preaching about the Chinese. He told us, what most of us knew well before, that China was a very large country, that it had a wall eighteen hundred miles long, that Confucius lived three or four hundred years before Christ; but there was one thing he did not tell us—that the Chinese call a man of talk, and swagger, and rhodomontade, a paper tiger. But perhaps the Doctor was wise, as comparisons are odious. After all, that such a man, with his fulsome eulogies and violent invective, should have come to be a power, is a melancholy fact—a fact indicating that Dissent will have to undergo a very formidable purifying process before men of taste, and intellect, and learning will be found willing to join its ranks.

THE REV. THOMAS T. LYNCH.

The one great want of the metropolitan pulpit is men abreast of the age, who can sympathize with its pulsation, can respond to its wants, can permeate it with a living faith. The majority of the men in the pulpit cease to be such when they get there. Of the human heart, as it is fevered with passion, or boils over with desire, they know nothing. They see men under a mask. Smith does not talk to his minister as he does to Brown; with Brown he is facetious—occasionally a little loose—and, after a good dinner and a bottle of wine, speaks in terms almost of approval of fashionable follies. The minister comes in and the conversation is changed—allusions are made to the ‘Evangelical Magazine’—the Missionary Society is referred to—something is said of Sunday Schools, and the world for a time is dropped. Smith, junior, acts in a similar way. Before his minister he assumes a virtue, if he have it not—is sedate—quiet, anything, in short, but what his intimates find him to be. It seems to be the condition of the pulpit that it shall see life under a mask; and as to thought, that does not move in the regular time-worn ruts, that is condemned at once. It is not the thought of the pulpit, and it therefore must be false. It may be born of vigorous intellect; it may have been nursed by years of severe thought; to get at it, the thinker may have sacrificed many an early friendship—many a cherished association—many a sacred tie; but, nevertheless, the pulpit would blast it with its stern anathemas, and pronounces it a crime. Occasionally, a man in the pulpit can act differently. Some few years back, when Professor Scott, then of University College, London, now of Owen’s College, Manchester, was in town, it seemed as if an honest attempt was made to meet and win to Christianity the philosophy that was genuine and earnest and religious, though it squared with the creed of no church, and took for its textbook the living heart of man rather than the written Word. In our time the same thing is attempted. The man who has had the courage to make the attempt—and to whom honour should be given for it—is the Rev. Thomas Lynch.

Judged by externals, the Rev. Thomas Lynch is a failure. He is a small spare man; his bodily presence is contemptible; he is a reed shaken by the wind. You get no idea of the church militant when you look at him,