The London Pulpit Part 3

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 ill.u.s.trious exceptions: one of the most ill.u.s.trious 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 lectures.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 G.o.d'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 fas.h.i.+on-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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed (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 ill.u.s.trating 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-s.h.i.+p ploughing her way across the Atlantic, proudly a.s.serting 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 pa.s.sions 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 cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d is a personal G.o.d. His Christ descended into h.e.l.l. His heaven has a golden pavement, and s.h.i.+ning 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 h.e.l.l 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 dest.i.tute of that power, but, alas! dest.i.tute 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 outs.h.i.+ne 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 Lectures.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 alb.u.ms; 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 G.o.d 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 fas.h.i.+ons. 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 b.u.t.tons of s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.ses by. His plainness makes him popular. The poorest can understand what he says, and they love to hear him, especially when he denounces the fas.h.i.+onable follies of high life. Against such fas.h.i.+ons 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. c.u.mming, 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 pa.s.sed 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 wors.h.i.+p. 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 cla.s.ses. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d's name, some poor dwarf who has never had a doubt nor a hope nor a n.o.ble aim, and who enunciates your d.a.m.nation 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 pa.s.sion 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-pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d.

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 lat.i.tudinarian. 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 princ.i.p.al 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 sh.o.r.e 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.