'Can you tell me where Mr. Fox's Chapel is?' said I to a young gentleman
who had evidently been in the habit of passing it every Sunday. 'No,
indeed, I cannot,' was the reply. I put the same question to a
policeman, and with the same result. Yet South Place, Finsbury Square,
is a place of no little pretension. It has been the home of rational
religion for some years--of the religion of humanity--of religion
purified from formalism, bibliolatry, and cant. There the darkness of
the past has been rolled away, and the light of a new and better day
appeared; and yet the scene of all this was unknown to the dwellers in
the immediate neighbourhood. There is a light so dazzling that it can
only be seen from afar, that close to it you can see nothing. It may be
this is the light radiating from South Place.
'There is a religion of humanity,' writes Mr. Fox, 'though not enshrined
in creeds and articles--though it is not to be read merely in sacred
books, and yet it may be read in all, whenever they have anything in them
of truth and moral beauty; a religion of humanity which goes deeper than
all, because it belongs to the essentials of our moral and intellectual
constitution, and not to mere external accidents--the proof of which is
not in historical agreement or metaphysical deduction, but in our own
conscience and consciousness; a religion of humanity which unites and
blends all other religions, and makes one the men whose hearts are
sincere, and whose characters are true, and good, and harmonious,
whatever may be the deductions of their minds, or their external
profession; a religion of humanity which cannot perish in the overthrow
of altars or the fall of temples, which survives them all, and which,
were every derived form of religion obliterated from the face of the
world, would recreate religion, as the spring recreates the fruits and
flowers of the soil, bidding it bloom again in beauty, bear again its
rich fruits of utility, and fashion for itself such forms and modes of
expression as may best agree with the progressive condition of mankind.'
And this religion of humanity is to be met with in Finsbury Square. I am
not aware there is anything new about it. Every school-boy is familiar
with it in Pope's Universal Prayer; but latterly, in Germany, in England,
and across the Atlantic, it has been preached with an eloquence of
peculiar fascination and power. Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson
have been the high priests in the new temple, which fills all space, and
whose worship is all time. In England, as an organisation, whatever it
may have done as a theory, it has not succeeded. Here William Johnson
Fox, originally a student at the Independent Academy, Homerton, then a
Unitarian minister, and now the member for Oldham, and the 'Publicola' of
the 'Dispatch,' has been its most eloquent advocate. If any man could
have won over the people to it, he, with his unrivalled
rhetoric--rhetoric which, during the agitation of the Anti-Corn-Law
League, will be remembered as surpassing all that has been heard in our
day--would have done it; and yet Fox never had his chapel more than
comfortably full--not even when the admission was gratis, and any one who
wished might walk in. But now the place has a sadly deserted appearance.
You feel cold and chilly directly you enter. The mantle of Fox has not
fallen on his successor; and what Mr. Fox could not accomplish, most
certainly the Rev. Mr. Ierson will not perform.
At half-past eleven service every Sunday morning commences at the chapel
in South Place. You need not hurry: there will be plenty of room for
bigger and better men than yourself. The worship is of the simplest
character. Mr. Ierson commences with reading extracts from various
philosophical writers, ancient and modern; then there is singing, not
congregational, but simply that of a few professionals. The metrical
collection used, I believe, is one made by Mr. Fox, and is full of
beautiful poetry and sublime sentiments; but the congregation does not
utter it--it merely listens while it is uttered by others for it.
Singing is followed by prayer. 'Prayer,' says Montgomery (James, not
Robert)--
'is the soul's sincere desire,
Uttered or unexpress'd,
The motion of a hidden fire,
That trembles in the breast.'
Mr. Ierson's prayer is nothing of the kind: no fire trembles in the
breast while it is offered up. It is a calm, rational acknowledgment of
Divine power and goodness and beauty. Then comes an oration of half an
hour, the result of no very hard reading, and the week's worship is at an
end, and the congregation, principally a male one, departs, not much
edified, or enlightened, or elevated, but, perhaps, a little puffed up,
as it hears how the various sects of religionists all, like sheep, go
astray. Such must be the inevitable result. You cannot lecture long on
the errors of Christians, without feeling convinced of your own
superiority. The youngest green-horn in the chapel has a self-satisfied
air. Beardless though he be, he is emancipated. The religion which a
Milton could make the subject of his immortal strains--which a Newton
could find it consistent with philosophy to accept--which has found
martyrs in every race, and won trophies in every clime--he can pass by as
an idle tale or an old wife's dream.
Mr. Ierson himself is better than the imaginary disciple I have just
alluded to. He has got to his present position, I believe, by honest
conviction and careful study. Originally, I think, he was a student at
the Baptist College, Stepney; then he became minister over a Baptist
congregation at Northampton, and there finding his position at variance
with his views, he honestly relinquished his charge. I fear such honesty
is not so common as it might be. I believe, in the pulpit and the pew,
did it exist, our religious organisations would assume a very different
aspect. The great need of our age, it seems to me, is sincerity in
religion--that men and women, that pastor and people, should plainly
utter what they think. I believe there is a greater freedom in religious
thought than really appears to be the case. 'How is it,' said I to a
Unitarian, the other day, 'that you do not make more progress?' 'Why,'
was the answer, 'we make progress by other sects taking our principles,
while retaining their own names:' and there was truth in the reply.
Still, it is better that a man who ceases to be a Churchman, or a
Baptist, or an Independent, should say and act as Mr. Ierson has done.
He will lose nothing in the long run by honesty--not that I take it Mr.
Ierson has achieved any great success, but he gives no sign of any great
talent. He is not the man to achieve any great success. People who
believe his principles will stop at home unless there is in the pulpit a
man who can draw a crowd. Fox could scarcely do this. Such men as
Ronge, or Ierson, or Macall, who lectured to some forty people in the
Princess's Concert Booms, cannot do it at all. Mr. Brooke might, if he
could be spared from Drury Lane--so could Macready or Dickens, or
Thackeray; but in these matters everything depends upon the man.
Of course the first question is, thus emancipated--Why worship at all?
why rise betimes on a Sunday, shave at an early hour, put on your best
clothes, and, mindless of city fog and dirt, rush hurriedly to South
Place, Finsbury Square? If I take the New Testament literally, I take
with it the command relative to the assembling of ourselves together, and
have a scriptural precedent for a course sometimes very wearisome and
very much against the grain; but with free reason, an emancipated man,
the case is altered. I am in a different position altogether. Custom is
all very well to the holders of customary views. I expect a secret
feeling lies at the bottom, that, after all, church and chapel going is
good--that worship in public is a service acceptable to Deity.
It may be, and this I believe is the great secret of the success of
churches and chapels, that people don't know how to spend their Sundays,
especially in country towns, without going to a place of worship. You
cannot dine directly you have had your breakfast; you must allow an
interval. Now, you cannot, especially if it looks as if it would rain,
and your best hat might be damaged, fill up that time better than in a
place of worship. So, even Mr. Ierson gets a congregation, although it
is made up of people who see in him a man not a whit more qualified to
teach religious truth than themselves, and who maintain the right of
individual reason, in matters of religion, to its fullest extent. He has
no claim to being heard; yet they go to hear him. They claim the right
of private judgment; yet they take his. Worship, in its ordinary sense,
they deem unnecessary; yet they approach to it as nearly as they can.
Such is the incongruity between the religious instinct on the one side,
and the logical faculty on the other--an incongruity, however,
proclaiming that, reason as you will, man is a religious animal after
all; that he has the faculty of worship, and must worship; that, take
from him his sacred books--his Shaster, his Koran, or Bible--still the
heart is true to its old instincts, and believes, and adores, and loves.
True is it, that man, wherever he may be, whatever his creed or colour,
still
'Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven.'