THE OLD LONDON PULPIT.
I doubt whether the cynical old poet who wrote "The Pleasures of Memory,"
would have included in that category the recollections of the famous
preachers whom he might have heard. Yet possibly he might, as his
earliest predilections, we were told, were for the pulpit, and all have,
more or less, of the parsonic element in them. The love to lecture, the
desire to make their poor ignorant friends as sensible as themselves, the
innate feeling that one is a light and guide in a wildering maze exist
more or less in us all. "Did you ever hear me preach?" said Coleridge
one day to Lamb. "Did I ever hear you do anything else?" was the reply.
And now, when we have got an awakened Christianity and a forward
ministry, it is just as well to run over the list of our old popular
ministers to remind the present generation that great men have filled the
London pulpits and quickened the London conscience and aroused the London
intellect before ever it was born. It is the more necessary to do this
as the fact is that no one has so short-lived a popularity as the orator:
whether in Exeter Hall, whether on the stage, whether in the pulpit, what
comes in at one ear soon goes out at the other. The memory of a great
preacher dies as soon as his breath leaves the body--often before. The
pulpit of to-day differs in one respect _in toto_ from the past. The
preacher who would succeed now must remember that this is the age of
advertisement, that if he has a talent he must not wrap it in a napkin.
He must write letters to newspapers; he must say odd things that make men
talk about him; he must manage to be the subject of newspaper gossip; he
must cling to the skirts of some public agitation--in fact, his light
must be seen and his voice heard everywhere.
It was not so in the times when, half a century ago, I had more to do
with the London pulpit than I have now. Some of the men in it were
giants. One was Melville, who preached somewhere over the
water--Camberwell way. He was a High Churchman; he had a grand scorn of
the conventicle. I should say he was a Tory of the Tories--a man who
would be impossible in a London suburban church now; but what a crowd he
drew to hear him, as he, like a mighty, rushing wind, swept over the
heads of an audience who seemed to hang upon his lips! He was tall,
dark, with a magnificent bass voice that caused every sentence he
read--for he read, and rapidly--to vibrate from the pulpit to the
furthest corner of the church. His style was that of the late Dr.
Chalmers, always sweeping to a climax, which, when reached and mastered,
was a relief to all. I think he was made Canon of St. Paul's. He also
was the Golden Lecturer somewhere near the Bank--an appropriate locality.
His sermons were highly finished--I am told he laboured at them all the
week. He was a preacher--nothing less, nothing more.
Next there rises before me the vision of Howard Hinton--a big,
cadaverous, grey-haired man, preaching in a small chapel on the site in
Shoreditch now occupied by the Great Eastern Railway. The congregation
was not large, but it was very select; I fancy it represented the _elite_
of the London Baptists. He was a very fascinating preacher by reason of
his great subtlety of thought, and at times he was terribly impressive,
as his big, burly frame trembled with emotion, and his choked-up
utterance intimated with what agony he had sought to deliver his soul
from blood-guiltiness, as, wailing and weeping, he anticipated the awful
doom of the impenitent. I must own I got wearied of his metaphysical
subtleties, which seemed to promise so much, and whose conclusions were
so lame and impotent, ever disappointing; and it often seemed to me that
his celebrated son--the late James Hinton--too soon removed, as it seemed
to many of us--inherited not a little of his father's ingenuity in this
respect. But he was a grand man; you felt it in his presence, and still
more as you walked home thinking of what he said.
Amongst the Independents--as they were termed--the leading men were the
Brothers Clayton: one preaching at the Poultry, the other in Walworth, to
large congregations--fine portly men, and able in their way, though it
was an old-fashioned one. Nor must Dr. Bengo Collyer be forgotten--a
fat, oily man of God, as Robert Hall called him, who had at one time
great popularity, and whom the Duke of Kent had been to hear preach.
It is a curious sign of the times--the contrast between what exists now
and what existed then--as regards theological speculation. We are now
sublimely indifferent whether a preacher is orthodox or the reverse,
whatever that may mean, so long as we feel his utterances are helpful in
the way of Christian work and life. It was not so fifty years ago.
Ministers scanned their brethren in the ministry severely, and the
deacon, with his Matthew Henry and Doddridge, sat grimly in his pew,
eager to note the deflection of the preacher in the pulpit from the
strait and narrow line of orthodoxy, and to glow with unholy zeal as he
found him missing his footing on the tight-rope. In London there was
such a man in the shape of Thomas Binney, who had come from the Isle of
Wight to the King's Weigh House Chapel, now swept away by the underground
railway just opposite the Monument. Binney was a king among men,
standing head and shoulders above his fellows. All that was intelligent
in Dissenting London, among the young men especially, heard him gladly.
Yet all over the land there were soulless deacons and crabbed old
parsons, whose testimony no man regarded, who said Binney was not
orthodox. He lived long enough to trample that charge down. He lived to
see the new era when men, sick of orthodoxy, hailed any utterance from
whatever quarter, so that it were God-fearing and sincere. As you
listened to Binney struggling to evolve his message out of his inner
consciousness, you felt that you stood in the presence of a man who dwelt
in the Divine presence, to whom God had revealed Himself, whose eye could
detect the sham, and whose hot indignation was terrible to listen to.
Let me chronicle a few more names. Dr. Andrew Reed, whose occasional
sermons at other places--I never heard him at Wycliffe Chapel--were most
effective; Morris of Fetter Lane, who preached to a crowded audience with
what seemed to me at the time a slight touch of German mysticism;
Stratten, far away in Paddington, whom rich people loved to listen to, as
he was supposed to be a man of means himself; and old Leifchild at Craven
Chapel, filled to overflowing with a crowd who knew, however the dear old
man might prose in the opening of his sermon, he would go off with a bang
at the end. But I may not omit two Churchmen who, if they had not
Melville's power, had an equal popularity. One was the Hon. and Rev.
Baptist Noel, who preached in a church, long since pulled down, in
Bedford-row. He was tall, gentlemanly, silver-tongued, and perfectly
orthodox. His people worshipped him, for was he not the son of a lord?
His influence in London was immense, but he left the Church for
conscientious reasons, and became a Baptist minister. That was a blow to
his popularity which he never got over, though he lived to a grand old
age. Another popular Evangelical preacher was Dale, who preached at St.
Bride's, Fleet Street. He was a poet and more or less of a literary man;
but he had more worldly wisdom than Baptist Noel. Dale was a Professor
of Literature at University College; but it was understood that
University College, with its liberal institutions, with its Dissenters
and Jews, was no place for a Churchman who wished to rise. Dale saw
this, gave up his professorship in Gower Street, and reaped a rich
reward.
London was badly off for _illuminati_ fifty years ago. The only pulpit
effectually filled was that of South Place, Finsbury, where W. Johnson
Fox, the celebrated orator and critic, lectured. He had been trained to
be an orthodox divine at Homerton. One day he said to me, "The students
always get very orthodox as they get to the end of their collegiate
career, and are preparing to settle, as the phrase is." Fox, it seems,
was the exception that proves the rule. He was eloquent and attractive
as preacher and lecturer. Dickens and Macready and Foster were, I
believe, among his hearers. At any rate, he had a large following, and
died an M.P. Lectures on all things sacred and profane were unknown in
London fifty years ago. I once heard Robert Dale Owen somewhere at the
back of Tottenham Court Road Chapel, but he was a weariness of the flesh,
and I never went near him again. The provinces occasionally sent us
popular orators; one was Raffles, of Liverpool, a man who looked as if
the world had used him well. I well remember how he dealt in such
alliteration as "the dewdrop glittering in the glen." Then there was
Parsons of York, with his amazing rhetoric, all whispered with a thrill
that went to every heart, as he preached in Surrey Chapel, where also I
heard Jay of Bath, who, however, left on me no impression other than he
was a wonderful old man for his years. Sherman, the regular preacher
there, was a great favourite with the ladies--almost as much as Dr.
Cumming, a dark, scholarly-looking man, who held forth in a court just
opposite Drury Lane Theatre, and whose prophetic utterances obtained for
him a popularity he would otherwise have sought in vain. It makes one
feel old to write of these good men who have long since passed away, not,
however, unregretted, or without failing to leave behind them
Footprints on the sands of Time.
When I first became familiar with the Dissenting world of London the most
bustling man in it was the Rev. Dr. John Campbell, who preached in what
was then a most melancholy pile of buildings known as the Tottenham Court
Road Chapel, the pulpit of which had been at one time occupied by the
celebrated George Whitfield. In or about 1831 Dr. Campbell became the
minister, and at the same time found leisure to write in _The Patriot_
newspaper; to fight and beat the trustees of the Tottenham Court Road,
who had allowed the affairs of the chapel to get into a most disorderly
state; to make speeches at public meetings; to write in a monthly that
has long ceased to exist--_The Eclectic Review_--a review to which I had
occasionally the honour of contributing when it was edited by Dr.
Price;--and to publish a good many books which had a fair sale in his
day. Dr. Campbell had also much to do with the abolition of the Bible
printing monopoly--a movement originated by Dr. Adam Thomson, of
Coldstream, powerfully supported by one of my earliest friends, Mr. John
Childs, a spirited and successful printer at Bungay, whose one-volume
editions of standard authors, such as Bacon's works, Milton's, and
Gibbon's "Decline and Pall of the Roman Empire," are still to be seen on
the shelves of second-hand booksellers. The Queen's Printer affected to
believe that the Bible could not be supplied to the public with equal
efficiency or cheapness on any other system than that which gave him the
monopoly of printing, but as it was proved before a Committee of the
House of Commons that the Book could be printed at much less cost and in
every way equal to the copies then in existence, the monopoly was
destroyed.
In 1830 there came into existence the Congregational Union of England and
Wales, of which Dr. Campbell became one of the leading men. He was at
the same time editor of _The Christian Witness_ and _The Christian's
Penny Magazine_--the organs of the Union--both of which at that time
secured what was then considered a very enormous sale. When in 1835 Mr.
Nasmith came to London to establish his City Mission Dr. Campbell was one
of his earliest supporters and friends. The next great work which he
took in hand was the establishment of _The British Banner_, a religious
paper for the masses, in answer to an appeal made to him by the committee
of _The Patriot_ newspaper. The first number of the new journal appeared
in 1848, and gained a circulation hitherto unknown in a weekly paper, and
this in time was succeeded by _The British Standard_. As time passed on
Dr. Campbell became less popular. He had rather too keen a scent for
what was termed neology. In one case his zeal involved him in a libel
suit and the verdict was for the plaintiff, who was awarded by the jury
forty shillings damages instead of the 5,000 pounds he had claimed. In
the Rivulet Controversy, as it was termed, Dr. Campbell was not quite so
successful. Mr. Lynch was a poet, and preached, as his health was bad,
to a small but select congregation in the Hampstead Road. He published a
volume of refined and thoughtful poetry which has many admirers to this
day. The late Mr. James Grant--a Scotch baker who had taken to
literature and written several remarkably trashy books, the most popular
of which was "Random Recollections of the House of Commons,"--at that
time editor of the publican's paper, _The Morning Advertiser_, in his
paper described the work of Mr. Lynch as calculated to inspire pain and
sadness in the minds of all who knew what real religion was. Against
this view a powerful protest was made by many leading men of the body to
which Mr. Lynch belonged. At this stage of the controversy Dr. Campbell
struck in by publishing letters addressed to the principal professors of
the Independent and Baptist colleges of England, showing that the hymns
of Mr. Lynch were very defective as regards Evangelical truth--containing
less of it than the hymns ordinarily sung by the Unitarians. The
excitement in Dissenting circles was intense. The celebrated Thomas
Binney, of the King's Weigh House Chapel, took part with Mr. Lynch and
complained of Dr. Campbell in the ensuing meetings of the Congregational
Union, and so strong was the feeling on the subject that a large party
was formed to request the Congregational Union formally to sever their
official connexion with Dr. Campbell--a matter not quite so easy as had
been anticipated. One result, however, was that Dr. Campbell gave up the
editing of _The British Banner_ and established _The British Standard_ to
take its place, in which the warfare against what is called Neology was
carried on with accelerated zeal. In 1867 the Doctor's laborious career
came to an end happily in comfort and at peace with all. His biographers
assure the reader that Dr. Campbell's works will last till the final
conflagration of the world. Alas! no one reads them now.
To come to later times, of course my most vivid recollections are those
connected with the late Mr. Spurgeon. In that region of the metropolis
known as "over the water" the Baptists flourish as they do nowhere else,
and some of their chapels have an interesting history. Amongst many of
them rather what is called high doctrine is tolerated--not to say
admired. They are the elect of God, preordained before the world was
formed to enjoy an existence of beatific rapture, that shall continue
when the world has passed away. Of one of the most popular preachers in
that locality, the late Jemmy Wells, it is said that when told that one
of his hearers had fallen out of a cart and broken his leg his reply was,
"Oh, what a blessed thing it is he can't fall out of the Covenant." When
one of the chapels in that locality was at low-water mark, there came to
it the Rev. Charles Haddon Spurgeon--then little more than a boy, but
already famous in East Anglia as a boy preacher--and never had a preacher
a more successful career. There was no place in London that was large
enough to contain the audiences that flocked to hear him. I first heard
him at the Surrey Music Hall, and it was wonderful to see what hordes
came there of saints and sinners, lords and ladies, City magnates and
county squires, Anonymas from St. John's Wood, Lady Clara Vere de Veres
from Belgravia. It was the fashion to go there on a Sunday morning, just
as it was the fashion a generation previously to rush to Hatton Garden to
hear Edward Irving. The hall was handsome and light and airy, free from
the somewhat oppressive air of Cave Adullam and Little Bethel, and there
upon the platform which did duty for a pulpit stood a young man short of
stature, broadly built, of a genial though not handsome countenance, with
a big head and a voice it was a treat to listen to and audible in every
part of that enormous building. What was the secret of his success? He
was bold, he was original, he was humorous, and he was in earnest. He
said things to make his hearers laugh, and what he said or did was
magnified by rumour. Old stories of Billy Dawson and Rowland Hill were
placed to Mr. Spurgeon's credit. The caricaturists made him their butt.
There was no picture more commonly displayed at that time than one
entitled "Brimstone and Treacle"--the former representing Mr. Spurgeon,
the latter Mr. Bellew, then a star of the first order in many an
Episcopalian pulpit. Bellew soon ran through his ephemeral
popularity--that of Mr. Spurgeon grew and strengthened day by day. Do
you, like the late Sir James Graham, want to know the reason why? The
answer is soon given. "I am going into the ministry," said a youthful
student to an old divine. "Ah, but, my dear friend, is the ministry in
you?" Well, the ministry was in Mr. Spurgeon as it rarely is in any man;
hence his unparalleled success.
One little anecdote will illustrate this. I have a friend whose father
had a large business in the ancient city of Colchester. Mr. Spurgeon's
father was at one time in his employ. Naturally, he said a good deal of
the preaching talent of his gifted son, and of the intention beginning to
be entertained in the family circle of making a minister of him. The
employer in question was a Churchman, but he himself offered to help Mr.
Spurgeon in securing for his son the benefits of a collegiate education.
The son's reply was characteristic. He declined the offered aid, adding
the remark that "ministers were made not in colleges but in heaven."
In connection with Mr. Spurgeon's scholastic career let me knock a little
fiction on the head. There is a house in Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, famous
now as the birthplace of Mrs. Garrett Anderson and her gifted sisters,
which at one time was a school kept by a Mr. Swindell, and they told me
at Aldeburgh this last summer that Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil there. This
is not so. It is true Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil at Mr. Swindell's, but it
was at Newmarket, to which the latter had moved from Aldeburgh.
One or two Spurgeon anecdotes which have not yet appeared in print may be
acceptable. At Hastings there are, or were, many High Church curates. A
few years ago one of them did a very sensible thing. He had a holiday;
he was in town and he went to the Tabernacle, getting a seat exactly
under Mr. Spurgeon's nose, as it were. It seems that during the week Mr.
Spurgeon had been attending a High Church service, of which he gave in
the pulpit a somewhat ludicrous account, suddenly finishing by giving a
sort of snort, and exclaiming, "Methinks I smell 'em now," much to the
delight of the curate sitting underneath. Referring to Mr. Spurgeon's
nose, I am told he had a great admiration of that of his brother, a much
more aristocratic-looking article that his own. "Jem," he is reported to
have said on one occasion, "I wish I had got your nose." "Do you?" was
the reply; "I wish I had got your cheek." Let me give another story. On
one occasion an artist wanted to make a sketch of Mr. Spurgeon for
publishing. "What are you going to charge?" asked the preacher, as the
artist appeared before him. "You must not make the price more than
twopence; the public will give that for me--not a penny more. A
photographer published a portrait of me at eighteenpence, and no one
bought it." This conversation took place on the occasion of a week-night
service. At the close of the service the artist came up into the vestry
to show his sketch. "Yes," said Mr. Spurgeon, "it is all very well, but
I should like to hear what others say about it. They say women and fools
are the best judges of this kind of thing," and accordingly the likeness
was referred to a friend who happened to come into the room in the nick
of time.
It always seemed to me the great characteristic of Mr. Spurgeon was
good-natured jollity. He was as full of fun as a boy. I saw him once
before getting into a wagonette pitch all the rugs on his brother's head,
who naturally returned the compliment--much to the amusement of the
spectators. On one occasion I happened to be in the Tabernacle when the
Baptist Union dined there, as it always did at the time of the Baptist
anniversaries. I suppose there would be many hundreds present who
enjoyed the ample repast and the accompanying claret and sherry. After
the dinner was over Mr. Spurgeon came up to where I was sitting and,
laying his hand on my shoulder and pointing to the long rows of empty
bottles left standing on the table, with a twinkle in his eye, said,
"Teetotalism does not seem to flourish among the brethren, does it?" And
he was as kind as he was cheerful. Once and once only I had to write to
him. He returned me a reply addressed to me in my proper name, and
then--as I was writing weekly articles under a _nom de plume_ in a highly
popular journal--added, in a postscript, "Kind regards to ---"
(mentioning my _nom de plume_). The anecdote is trivial, but it shows
how genial and kind-hearted he was.
And to the last what crowds attended his ministry at the Tabernacle! One
Saturday I went to dine with a friend living on Clapham Common. Going
back to town early in the morning I got into an omnibus, and was amused
by hearing the conductor exclaim, "Any more for the Tabernacle!" "Now,
then, for the Tabernacle!" "This way for the Tabernacle!" and, sure
enough, I found all my fellow-passengers got out when we arrived at the
Tabernacle; nor was the 'bus in which I was riding the only one thus
utilised. There was no end of omnibuses from all quarters drawing up at
the entrance. According to the latest utterance of Mr. Herbert Beerbohm
Tree, in this age of ours faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, love is
regarded as but a spasm of the nervous system, life itself as the refrain
of a music-hall song. At the Tabernacle the pastor and people were of a
very different way of thinking.
And Mr. Spurgeon was no windbag--_vox et praeterea nihil_; no darling pet
of old women whose Christianity was flabby as an oyster. He was an
incessant worker, and taught his people to work as well in his enormous
church. Such was the orderly arrangement that, as he said, if one of his
people were to get tipsy, he should know it before the week was out. He
never seemed to lose a moment. "Whenever I have been permitted," he
wrote on one occasion, "sufficient respite from my ministerial duties to
enjoy a lengthened tour or even a short excursion, I have been in the
habit of carrying with me a small note-book, in which I have jotted down
any illustrations that occurred to me on the way. The note-book has been
useful in my travels as a mental purse." Yet the note-book was not
intrusive. A friend of mine took Mr. Spurgeon in his steam yacht up the
Highlands. Mr. Spurgeon was like a boy out of school--all the while
naming the mountains after his friends.
It is also to be noted how the public opinion altered with regard to Mr.
Spurgeon. When he came first to London aged ministers and grey-haired
deacons shook their heads. What could they think of a young minister who
could stop in the middle of his sermon, and say, "Please shut that window
down, there is a draught. I like a draught of porter, but not that kind
of draught"? It was terrible! What next? was asked in fear and
trepidation. These things were, I believe, often said on purpose, and
they answered their purpose. "Fire low," said a general to his men on
one occasion. "Fire low," said old Jay, of Bath, as he was preaching to
a class of students. Mr. Spurgeon fired low. It is astonishing how that
kind of preaching tells. I was travelling in Essex last summer, and in
the train were two old men, one of whom lived in Kelvedon, where Mr.
Spurgeon was born, who had sent the Baptist preacher some fruit from
Kelvedon, which was, as he expected, thankfully received. "Did you see
what Mr. Spurgeon says in this week's sermon?" said he to the other.
"No." "Why, he said the devil said to him the other day, 'Mr. Spurgeon,
you have got a good many faults,' and I said to the devil, 'So have
you,'" and then the old saints burst out laughing as if the repartee was
as brilliant as it seemed to me the reverse; but I leave censure to the
censorious. In his early youth, Sadi, the great Persian classic, tells
us, he was over much religious, and found fault with the company sleeping
while he sat in attendance on his father with the Koran in his lap, never
closing his eyes all night. "Oh, emanation of your father," replied the
old man, "you had better also have slept than that you should thus
calumniate the failings of mankind."