Canon Liddon and the Bishop of Peterborough stand out as unquestionably
the two first preachers of the Established Church of England. There is a
story of a private soldier having gone to St. Paul’s on an afternoon when
Dr. Liddon was to preach. The printed paper with the hymn was handed to
him, but not understanding that it was offered gratis he refused it with
a shake of the head, saying: “You don’t suppose I should be here if I had
got any money?” Most of the people who go to hear the eloquent Canon are
different from this soldier, for they would pay—and very liberally—to
get seats near the pulpit. On the afternoons of the Sundays when Dr.
Liddon is in residence, the Cathedral presents an extraordinary sight
with its huge nave and aisles densely thronged. So far as the preacher’s
voice will reach people stand, straining eyes and ears, and fortunately
Dr. Liddon’s voice resounds well under the dome; though now and then
it becomes indistinct through the preacher’s speaking too fast in his
excitement. Two other things occasionally mar Dr. Liddon’s delivery.
Shortness of sight makes him often stoop to consult Bible or notes, and
again he bows the head in a marked manner when he utters the holy name;
but when he thus bends he goes on speaking, so that his words fall on
the pulpit cushion and are deadened, which produces upon people who are
at a little distance off, the effect of continual stoppages and gaps
in the sermon. No other defects beside these, however, can be noted in
orations which for beauty of language, elevation of thought and lucidity
in reasoning, could not be surpassed. We have heard Dr. Liddon many
times at Oxford and in London, and have observed that the impression
produced by his eloquence was always the same, no matter who might be
listening to him. We remember, in particular, a sermon of his on the
text: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” It was absolutely
magnificent to hear him prophesy the gradual progress of the world toward
a higher state. Every man, from the greatest to the least, was made to
feel his share of responsibility in advancing or retarding the evolution
of mankind, and while the consequences of evil were pointed out as
extending to incalculable lengths, there was a sublime hopefulness in the
promise that the smallest good offering brought to the Creator would be
multiplied by Him as the “five loaves were multiplied.”
Optimism—which is nothing but great faith—pervades Dr. Liddon’s
preaching. He never leaves his hearers under the apprehension that in any
struggle between the good and the bad forces of this world, the bad are
going to get the best of it. He knows human nature too well, however, to
exaggerate what can be done by any single human being. “The first lesson
in true wisdom”—he said in one of his most recent sermons—“is the limited
nature of our faculties, the reality and extent of our ignorance;” and
there is a curious mixture of religious and mundane philosophy in the
following remarks about the presumption of St. Peter, a few minutes
before he denied his Master:
We only weaken ourselves by dwelling upon mischiefs which we can
not hope to remedy. We have only a certain amount of thought,
of feeling, of resolve, each one of us, to dispose of. And when
this has been expended unavailingly on the abstract, on the
intangible, it is expended; it is no longer ours, and we can not
employ it when and where we need it close at home.… Peter failed
as he did, because he had expended his moral strength in words,
and had no sufficient force to dispose of when the time came for
action and for suffering.
These observations made in a grand sermon, “The Lord was not in the
fire,” may also be quoted:
Religious passion carried to the highest point of enthusiasm is
a great agency in human life; but religious passion may easily
be too inconsiderate, too truculent, too entirely wanting in
tenderness and in charity, to be in any sense divine. Christendom
has been ablaze again and again with fires: and those fires are
not extinct in our own day and country, of which it may certainly
be said that the Lord is not in them.
The Bishop of Peterborough has not often been heard in London of late
years, but whenever he is advertised to preach, crowds flock to hear him.
He need not be compared with Liddon, for the personal appearance, style,
and opinions of the two men are quite different. But whereas the Canon
sometimes preaches above the understanding of dull men, the Bishop’s
eloquence never soars much above earth. It is a rousing eloquence,
spirited, combative, often sarcastic and always directed against some
evil which is preoccupying public attention at the time being. Dr. Magee
is not merely a hater, but an aggressive enemy of “humbug,” clothe
itself in what garb it may. With his animated Celtic features, long
upper lip, large mouth, energetic nose and shaggy eyebrows, with his
gruffness and broad smile which breaks up the whole of his face into
comical lines, he has all the look of a humorist. The glance all round
which he takes at his congregation when he has got into the pulpit, is
that of a master. His first words arrest attention, and if some unlucky
man drops a book during his exordium, that man will stare hard at the
pulpit and pretend to have no connection whatever with the book, lest his
lordship’s eyes should suddenly be turned upon him like two fiery points
of interrogation. Presently, when the Bishop warms to his work, his arms
hit out from the shoulder like piston-rods wrapped in lawn; down come
his large hands with great slaps on his book or cushion, and if he is
preaching in a church where the beadle has not heard of his little ways
and has not been careful to give the cushions a beating, enough dust will
be raised to make a fine powdering for the heads of the people in the pew
beneath.
Plainspoken and shrewd, discussing all questions with easy arguments,
never stooping to subtleties, clear in his delivery, happy in the choice
of words, he keeps his hearers bound like Ogmius, that god of eloquence
among the Gauls who used to be represented with chains flowing out of
his mouth. On occasions he rises to the highest flights of oratory, but
never loses sight of his congregation, who have always been carried
along by him through the successive degrees of his own enthusiasm. He
should be heard delivering a charity sermon, for this is a duty which he
discharges in no perfunctory fashion. He masters his subject thoroughly;
speaks of the poor or afflicted for whom he is pleading like one who
knows them; and his advice as to supplying their wants is never dictated
by eccentric philanthropy, but springs from that true benevolence which
has common sense for its source. He was being asked to interest himself
in a carpenter’s clever young apprentice whom some good people wanted to
send to college. “Let him first graduate as a good carpenter,” said the
Bishop; “when he has become a skilled craftsman, so that he is proud of
his trade and can fall back upon it if others fail, then will be the time
to see if he is fit for anything better.”
A popular vote would probably give the position of third amongst the
best preachers of the day to Archdeacon Farrar. In his own church of
St. Margaret, the Archdeacon shines with a subdued light. Those who
have chatted with him by his own fireside, and know him to be the most
amiable, unaffected of _causeurs_, those who remember him at Harrow as
a most genial boy-loving master, will miss nothing of the good-natured
simplicity which they liked in him, if they hear him in his own church
discoursing about matters that concern his parish. But in the Abbey he is
different. There, his massive face settles into a hard, expressionless
look; his voice, which is loud and roughish, is pitched in a monotonous
key; and his manner altogether lacks animation, even when his subject
imperatively demands it. To illustrate any common reflection on the
vicissitudes of life, the Archdeacon drags in the destruction of Pompeii
with the latest mining accident; the overthrow of Darius with that of
Osman Digna, the rainbow that appeared to Noah with Mr. Norman Lockyer’s
explanations of recent glorious sunsets; and all these juxtapositions
come down so pat as to suggest the irreverent idea that the book which
the venerable preacher was studying during the prayers must have been an
annotated copy of Maunders’s “Treasury of Knowledge.”
Mr. Spurgeon stands head and shoulders above all the Non-conformist
preachers. Somebody once expressed a regret that the great Baptist
minister was not a member of the Establishment, to which the late Bishop
of Winchester answered by quoting a portion of the tenth commandment. But
Mr. Spurgeon was much more aggressive in those days than he is now; he
has softened much of late years, and churchmen can go to hear him without
fear of being offended. On the days when he preaches his Tabernacle holds
a multitude. It is a huge hall, and to see gallery upon gallery crowded
with eager faces—some six thousand—all turned toward the pastor whose
voice has the power of troubling men to the depths of their hearts, is a
stirring sight. Mr. Spurgeon’s is not a high-class congregation, and the
preacher knows that its understanding can best be opened by metaphors and
parables borrowed from the customs of the retail trade, and with similes
taken from the colloquialisms of the streets. Laughter is not forbidden
at the Tabernacle, and the congregation often breaks into titters, but
the merriment is always directed against some piece of hypocrisy which
the preacher has exposed, and it does one good to hear. He says:
“You are always for giving God short measure, just as if He had
not made the pint pot.”
“You don’t expect the Queen to carry your letters for nothing,
but when you are posting a letter heavenward you won’t trouble to
stick a little bit of Christian faith on the right-hand corner of
the envelope, and you won’t put a correct address on either, and
then you wonder the letter isn’t delivered, so that you don’t get
your remittance by next post.”
“You trust Mr. Jones to pay you your wages regularly, and you say
he’s a good master, but you don’t think God can be trusted like
Mr. Jones; you won’t serve him because you don’t believe in the
pay.”
“You have heard of the man who diminished his dose of food every
day to see on how little he could live, till he came to half a
biscuit and then died; but, I tell you, most of you have tried on
how little religion you could live, and many of you have got to
the half-biscuit dose.”
These whimsicalities, always effective, constitute but the foam of Mr.
Spurgeon’s oratory; the torrent which casts them up is broad, deep and of
overwhelming power. Mr. Spurgeon is among preachers as Mr. Bright among
parliamentary orators. All desire to criticise vanishes, every faculty
is subdued into admiration, when he has concluded a sermon with a burst
of his truly inspired eloquence, leaving the whole of his congregation
amazed and the vast majority of its members anxious or hopeful, but in
any case roused as if they had seen the heavens open. We are compelled
to add that Mr. Spurgeon has in the Baptist communion no co-minister
wielding a tenth of his power, and that those who, having gone to the
Tabernacle to hear him, have to listen to some other man, will be
disappointed in more ways than one.—_Temple Bar._