In these latter days men have come to think that no man has a right to
enter a pulpit unless he prefixes Rev. to his name--unless he wears a
white handkerchief round his neck, and scorns to get a living except from
the revenues of the Church. With them a daw
'is reckoned a religious bird,
Because it keeps a cawing from the steeple.'
You have been ordained, therefore some mysterious virtue attaches to you.
You have ceased to be a man, and become a priest. You live in a
different world to what we common-place sinners do. The priest has a
different tailor to the rest of mankind. We can tell him by his
superfluity of white linen and superabundance of black cloth. We can
tell him by the downcast eye and the short-cut hair. We know him not by
his works, by the beauty of his living faith, or the savour of his holy
life, but by his dress. The tailor makes us. One dummy it adorns with
red, and that is a soldier. Another it dresses in fashionable costume,
and that is the star of Bond-street and the lion of the ball-room.
Another it arrays in antiquated vest and sober black, and that's the
divine. Manners do not make the man, but the tailor does.
Yet, happily, the world is not given up to universal flunkeyism. We have
still some who recognise the god-like and divine in man; women not
everlastingly falling in love with new bonnets, or manhood not utterly
lost in the contemplation of new atrocities in the way of checks for
trowsers or stupendous collars for the neck. Strange as it may seem, it
is no more strange than true, that there are some who can see poets in
shoemakers or whisky-gaugers; heroism in the daughters of fishermen;
philosophy in Norwich weaver boys; apostles in tent-makers or Jewish
sailors; and something greater and grander still in the 'Galilean Lord
and Christ,' the faith in whose divine mission has made Europe and
America the home of civilisation, of intelligence, and life. Faith in
reality has not yet died out amongst us. There are still men who dare to
take their stand on living and eternal truths--who look beyond the crust,
and see the gem within--who see duty urging them on, and become
insensible to aught else. Such men make
martyrs--missionaries--reformers; on a small scale, such are village
Hampdens or Miltons, inglorious and mute. Such men are sure, sooner or
later, to have an earnest crowd of devotees, to exercise a powerful
influence on their age, to be the teachers and founders of a school.
Of this class, undoubtedly, Edward Miall, the editor of the
'Nonconformist,' is one of the latest. Originally a student at Wymondley
College, then 'settled,' as the phrase is, at Ware, then the pastor of a
respectable congregation at Leicester, he was M.P. for John Bright's own
borough of Rochdale, and is, as the _Times_ confesses, a distinguished
Nonconformist. I imagine few of my readers require a description of his
thin and wiry frame. As a platform speaker, or as a mere orator, Miall
is not very effective; he delights his admirers, but he does not do more.
In the pulpit, few men are more fitted to shine. Men enter a place of
worship under different feelings to those with which they run to Exeter
Hall or the London Tavern. In the one case you are in something of a
reverential mood, and you are not disappointed by the want of physical
power. With eternity for his theme, the preacher soon causes you to
forget a feeble voice or a bodily presence not adapted for effect. The
sermonising tone is in keeping with the pulpit, and if every word seem to
have an air of preparation, and to tell of labour, you think that it is
only after mature preparation a man should speak of religious truth to
his fellow-men. Calm self-possession is essential to the sanctuary, and
there you miss not the _abandon_ which elicits the cheers of an excited
audience.
In the pulpit, Miall could always command attention. His manner, if
somewhat artificial and prim, evinced the possession of a mind earnest
and decided. His language was nervous; his views were broad and
catholic. You felt that the man before you was no reproducer of other
men's thoughts, no worn-out echo, no empty sound; that the Christianity
he preached he had found to be good for the intellect and soul of man;
that it was the foundation of all his knowledge; that on that, as a great
fact, he had rested all the hopes and aspirations of his life. Seemingly
void of all animalism--a rock with a gleam of sunlight on it--an
incarnate idea--a voice crying in the wilderness--a reed, but not shaken
with the wind--Edward Miall is an admirable illustration of what a man
with a principle may do. It was a bold step for him to give up the
pulpit and to start a newspaper; it was a still bolder thing to circulate
that newspaper in the Dissenting world, with unmistakable quotations from
Shakspeare staring you flat in the face, and to accustom that world, used
to a very watery style of composition, to language remarkable for its
elegance and power.
The effect was startling. Miall at once became the object of the
intensest hero-worship. The old idols were utterly cast out and
destroyed. Old gentlemen, who had led a pompous life for half a century,
suddenly found themselves of no account. Their power had passed away as
a dream. Students in Dissenting Colleges went over _en masse_ to this
second Daniel. It was a time of intense political excitement. The corn
laws taxed the poor man's food; Chartism reared its hideous head;
everywhere angry discontent prevailed. Miall thought the time had come
for Christian men to interfere; he felt that the struggle for political
rights was not inconsistent with the utmost purity of Christian life;
that the Church, by its sanction of existing abuses and its reverential
worship of the powers that were, had done much to alienate the popular
mind from Christianity itself; he felt that the Church, loaded with State
pay, would always be liable to suspicion, however excellent her creed or
pure her clergy; and he felt, therefore, that in asking men's political
rights, and the dissolution of the union between Church and State, he
should demonstrate to the world that Christianity meant something more
than corn-laws, or tithes, or the celebrated Chandos clause--something
more than a comfortable living for younger sons. It is false to suppose
that Miall left the pulpit when he left Leicester. His labours in his
new sphere were but a continuation of his labours in the old. In
everything he was unchanged. He was merely continuing his Leicester
work, appealing, not to a county-town, but to the nation at large. He
had changed his platform; but his mission remained the same. Instead of
using a feeble voice, he had recourse to a powerful pen. His pulpit was
the editorial chair, his church the English race.
Place Miall in the pulpit, and a glance will tell you the man. You can
see he has been brought up in a divinity college; he has all the prim and
unfashionable air of youths reared in such secluded spots. His pale face
tells of thought. You see in his small clear eye that thought
crystallises in his brain. His clenched hand, his determined teeth, his
shrugged-up shoulders, prepare you for the tenacity with which he clings
to what thoughts come to him. On the hustings and elsewhere, Miall is
the same--not elated when applauded, not depressed when reviled;
unbending, imperturbable, mild of demeanour, yet inflexible in purpose.
Yet, after all, his success has been more personal than in what he has
done. Who ever talks of complete suffrage now?--yet that was Miall's
darling idea when he first appeared in the political world, and the
Association which calls him father--which is to emancipate religion from
the fetters of the State--it must yet be confessed by its most ardent
admirers, has got a considerable amount of work to do.
It does seem strange that so pale, calm, unmoved a man as Mr. Miall seems
to be, should have wandered out of the pulpit and the study, with its old
books and everlasting commentaries, and exchanged all that elysian
dream-land for the fever of politics and the bustle of the newspaper. It
seems stranger still that he should have succeeded, that he should have
found favour with our turbulent democracy, not partial to the use of
soap, or particularly passionate in their attachment to abstract
principles. Strangest of all is it that he should have managed to be
returned as an M.P. We should have been the last to have prophesied for
Miall such a career. Cato at the theatre, Colonel Sibthorp at a Peace
Congress, an Irish patriot speaking common-sense, could not surprise us
more. Yet that Miall has achieved what he has, shows how much may be
done by the possessor of a principle. Miall is a principle, an abstract
principle embodied--that man is everything, that the human being is
divine, that the inspiration of the Almighty has given the meanest of us
understanding. From the Bible he got that principle, and that is the
unerring test by which every case is weighed and every difficulty solved.
In religion it led him to reject ecclesiastical organisations and claims,
the traditions of the Fathers, the pretensions of divines--everything by
which the priest is exalted and the people kept down. In politics, the
same rule held good. If all men are equal--if God has made of one blood
all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth--what need for
aristocratic usurpation or the legislation of a class? If all are equal
before God, surely they should all be equal before man. Thus, when angry
Chartism was asking for universal suffrage, and the Church was preaching
contentment and the duty of submission to superiors, and the danger to
religion when a man became political, Miall felt that the time had come
for him to step out of the conventional circle of the pulpit into a wider
and freer sphere, and to show that Christianity was not alien to human
right, and that a man might love God and his brother-man as well. It
does seem strange now that men should ever have doubted so plain a truth.
How it was doubted some few years since, only men like Miall can tell.
Miall's Anti-State-Churchism was also obtained by a similar process. If
there were no need of priests, if every man could be a priest unto God,
what need of State patronage and pay? At the best they could but corrupt
and enervate the Church. It was teaching it to rely on a worthless arm
of flesh rather than on the living God.
With such views, Miall may surely be included in the 'London Pulpit.'
Tried by his own theory, he is a legitimate subject for a sketch. The
truth he held in Leicester he holds in London, and he is still as much a
divine in the 'Nonconformist' office as when he was pastor of an
Independent Church. Occasionally he preaches in one or other of the
metropolitan pulpits, and the studied discourse read--but read with
admirable distinctness--is of a kind to make you regret that Miall is so
seldom seen where he is fitted to do so much. If you have not an orator
before you in the common acceptation of the term, you have before you a
master of argument, gifted with a clearness of expression and a high
order of thought, rare anywhere, especially in the pulpit now-a-days.
Buckingham wrote of Hobbes' style, that
'Clear as a beautiful transparent skin,
Which never hides the blood, yet holds it in;
Like a delicious stream it ever ran,
As smooth as woman and as strong as man.'
Of Miall's style precisely the same may be said. It is always as clear,
sometimes as cold, as ice. As a still further proof of Miall's claim to
be considered a religious teacher, witness his 'British Churches' and his
'Basis of Faith,'--books eminently adapted for the age in which we live.
Yet Miall can speak to the poor, and does so. The teetotalers have built
a hall called the Good Samaritan Hall, on Saffron Hill. It is a low
neighbourhood. It is surrounded by the dwellings of the poor, and it is
erected there as a light for that dark spot, by means of which the
drunkard may emerge into a higher life. The last time I heard Miall was
there: the room was full. On a table, dressed in an old blue great coat,
stood Miall, preaching to men and women, gathered from the highways and
byways, from the crowds for whose souls no one cares. Surely that was a
finer sight than if, arrayed in lawn, he was preaching to the fashion and
wealth of Vanity Fair.