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.