The London Pulpit Part 2

But prayers are over, and yon immense congregation has quietly settled into an att.i.tude of attention. All eyes are turned in the direction of the pulpit. We look there as well, and see a man rather below the average height, with fresh complexion, mild grey eyes beneath light-coloured eyebrows, with a common-place forehead, and a figure presenting altogether rather a pedantic appearance. This is the Rev.

Thomas Dale, M.A. He looks as if the world had gone easy with him; and truly it has, for he is a popular Evangelical preacher-perhaps, next to Mr. Melville, the most popular preacher in the English Church. He is a popular poet-he is Vicar of St. Pancras, and Canon of St. Paul's.

Mr. Dale reads, and reads rapidly; his enunciation is perfectly distinct; his voice is somewhat monotonous, but musical; his action is very slight.

You are not carried away by his physical appearance, nor, as you listen, does the preacher bear you irresistibly aloft. His sermons are highly polished, but they are too invariably the same. There are no depths nor heights in them. They are all calm, subdued, toned down. They do not take you by storm: you miss the thunder and the lightning of such men as Melville and Binney. Mr. Dale's sermons are, like himself and like his poetry, polished and pleasing. All that man can do by careful study Mr.

Dale has done; but he lacks inspiration, the _vis vivida_, the vision and the faculty divine, which, if a man have not, 'This brave overhanging firmament-this majestical roof fretted with golden fire'-'is but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.' Yet Mr. Dale has an immense congregation. I take it that he suits the level of the city magnates that crowd his pews. Philosophy, poetry, pa.s.sion are quite out of the reach of such men, whose real G.o.d is the Stock Exchange, and whose real heaven is the three per cents.

Another and a better reason of Mr. Dale's immense congregation is, that his charity is unremitting-given in the best way, in the shape of work instead of alms-and irrespective of the religious sect of the recipient.

I have heard of several such cases that do him much honour. And, after all, in the pulpit as well as elsewhere, conduct tells more than character in the long run. Hence his personal influence is great; and, of course, that helps to fill the church. Nor can we much wonder. What eloquence is stronger than that of a holy, a useful, a devoted life?

Acts speak stronger than words. I see more power in an act of charity, done in the name of religion and of G.o.d, than in the pa.s.sionate and fascinating gorgeous rhetoric of an hour.

Mr. Dale is a good Greek scholar, and has translated Sophocles. It is easy to see why Sophocles should better suit him than aeschylus or Euripides-the polish of the one would please him better than the wild grandeur of the others. Of him, as a poet, I cannot speak very highly.

His versification is correct-his sentiment is good. To the very large cla.s.s of readers who will accept such subst.i.tutes for poetry as the real thing, our divine is a poet of no mean order. 'What we want, sir,' said a publisher to me the other day, 'is a lively religious novel.' Mr.

Dale's poetry answers to these conditions: hence its success.

His poetry was a great help to his popularity. When he was rector of the parish of St. Bride's, and evening lecturer at St. Sepulchre, he was more intimately connected than at present with literary pursuits, and was much run after. About that time Annuals were the rage, and Mr. Dale edited a religious Annual called 'The Iris,' and young ladies learnt his verses by heart, or copied them into their alb.u.ms. At one time Mr. Dale was Professor of English Language and Literature at the University College, in Gower Street. However, as a Tory and a Churchman, he seems to have found himself out of his element there, and left it for King's College, Strand, at which place he held a similar appointment. It was thought that church preferment had something to do with this; that his chances were, in consequence, in danger; that in high quarters the University College was regarded with an unfavourable eye: so Mr. Dale threw it overboard. Such was the rumour at the time. Of course, to some men, such conduct may seem only wise-prudent; but if ministers of religion thus shape their conduct, with a view to worldly success, what chance have they of regenerating the world? If such things be done in the green tree, what may we not expect in the dry? A teacher of living Christianity surely should be the last to desert a cause, merely because it is weak, and unfashionable, and poor!

As a writer, Mr. Dale has been most untiring. His first poem came out in 1820. It was the 'Widow of Nain,' and was read with delight in religious circles. In 1822 he published another poem, called 'Irad and Adah, a Tale of the Flood; with Specimens of a New Translation of the Psalms.'

About this time the poetic inspiration appears to have died, for since only a few occasional verses have appeared from Mr. Dale's pen, and henceforth he seems to have betaken himself to prose. In 1830 he published a volume of 'Sermons, Doctrinal and Practical;' in 1835, 'The Young Pastor's Guide;' in 1836, 'A Companion to the Altar;' in 1844, 'The Sabbath Companion;' in 1845, 'The Good Shepherd: an Exposition of the 23rd Psalm;' in 1847, 'The Golden Psalm, being an Exposition, Practical, Experimental, and Prophetical, of Psalm xvi.' Besides these publications, he has printed several occasional sermons. He has now attained a high position in the Establishment, which certainly can boast few more faithful or laborious men. Originally not intended for the Church, his subsequent success has justified his devotion of himself to her service. Altogether his lot has been cast in 'pleasant 'places,' and he has had 'a goodly heritage.'

THE HON. AND REV. R. LIDDELL.

St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, has done what it is a very hard thing to do, created a sensation in this our phlegmatic and eating and drinking and money-making and merry-making age. It professes to be a Puseyite, and not a Protestant, place of worship. Puseyism, says a red-haired Saxon, foaming with indignation, is next door to Roman Catholicism, and a Puseyite Church is half-way to Rome. True, my perturbed brother-true.

But what of that? Some are inclined to think that Church of Englandism is akin to Roman Catholicism, and that all its churches are halfway to Rome. That brutal old tyrant, Henry the Eighth, was a Roman Catholic at heart, and had faith in himself as an infallible Pope. His genuine daughter did the same. Laud, who lacked the discretion of that strong-minded woman whose

'Christ was the Word that spake it, He took the bread and brake it, And what the Word did make it, That I believe and take it,'

is a splendid specimen of ingenious mystification on the _vexata questio_ of transubstantiation,-I question whether Charles James Bloomfield, Bishop of London, could have returned a more confused and unmeaning response,-died for his Roman Catholic tendencies. To this day England remembers who it was, with red, swollen face, and brown apparel, and collar with a spot of blood on it, made his maiden speech in Parliament by indignantly informing the House that Dr. Alabaster had preached flat Popery at St. Paul's, and in our own day Mr. Gorham has failed in obtaining a legal decision against the Roman Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration. The mistake is, in supposing that the Church as by law established is Low Church. If it were so, then, of course, out ought to go the whole crop of Puseyite priests, in spite of the tears and hysterics of female piety. On the contrary, the Church of England is like the happy family in Trafalgar-square. Beasts of the most opposite description there dwell together in peace and unity. Dogs and cats there sleep side by side. In the prospect of a common maintenance natural enmities are forgotten. Conformity is impossible. I cannot use my brother's words with his exact meaning. I must put my own interpretation on the creeds and articles to which I subscribe, and so long as the State Church is a chaotic ma.s.s of heterogeneous materials-so long as it has no definite voice, nor law-so long as bishop clashes with bishop, and at times with himself,-for we may have here a Puseyite, there an Evangelical, here a fox-hunting divine,-there must be everywhere heart-burning and scandal, and the degradation of Christianity itself.

But, exclaims my vehement red-faced Saxon friend, you are making Papists by letting the Puseyites remain. I don't know that. Papacy is alien to human nature, or it is not. If it is not, you cannot get rid of it. If cut down to-day, it will sprout up again to-morrow. It springs from a tendency, I take it, in the human heart. In a mild form, that tendency gently blooms as Puseyism. A cold in one man may, by means of gruel, be removed in a week. In another man, it may deepen into deadly decline.

Puseyism may retain as many in the English Church as it may send to Rome.

Your Low Churchman may say the Puseyite has no business in the Church at all. Well, the other may say the same of him, and there is no one to decide as to who is right. King James II. said, Hooker's Apology made him a Papist, but Hooker was not responsible for this, and is still rightly looked on as one of the brightest ornaments of the Church of England as by law established. Men make strange leaps. Many a convert to Rome has been won from the ranks of Methodism. Many an infidel has been born and bred in the very bosom of the Roman Church. A Puseyite may become a Papist, but he also may not, and so may other men. Some people say there is Popery everywhere. I listen to a Wesleyan Reformer, for instance, and he tells me that the Conference is Popish, and that the President is the Pope. If so, it is hard to blame the Puseyites for exhibiting the priestly tendency, more or less apparent, as some affirm, in all priests.

I imagine the crime of Puseyism, in the eyes of most churchmen, is the crime of a pretty woman in an a.s.sembly of haggard crones. The Puseyite place of worship is always neat and clean, and worth looking at, and it attracts when others fail to do so. The causes of it must be various.

Why does one graceful woman robe herself in simple muslin, and another dazzle you with her gorgeous attire? You may be a philosopher. If that woman can be your companion, can feel as you feel, and love as you love, you care not for her attire. But she knows that the world has a different opinion. The Puseyite becomes an object of interest. On a small, very small scale, he is a hero. True, to fight about little ceremonials argues the possession of a brain of but limited power, but his opponents are in a similar position. If you deny worship to be the simple genuine feeling of the heart-if you make no provision for that-if you turn it into a form, why then, possibly, the more of a form it is the better. I confess the way in which they intone the service at St. Paul's is pleasant to listen to. It is not worship, I grant. Neither is mumbling the thousandth time over a printed form of words worship. What a dull thing an opera would be, read, and not sung. It is true people do not make love, or do business, or address each other in music, in real life, but in an opera they do, and the effect is great. So it is with the Church of England service. Intoned it may be unintelligible or theatrical, but it is attractive nevertheless. It is not natural, but what of that? The soul bowed down with a sense of sin, yearning for peace and pardon, in its agony and despair will vent itself in broken sentences, and will turn away from all ceremony-from even the sublime liturgy of the Church of England, as poor, and cold, and vain, inadequate to the expression of its hopes and fears. But why those who go to church as a form find fault with the people of St. Paul's because their form is a little more attractive than their own, I confess I cannot understand.

But I have forgotten the Hon. and Rev. R. Liddell, M.A., a man of small mental calibre, who has done the next best thing to achieving greatness, and has achieved notoriety. In a letter he wrote to the late Bishop of London (in which he wickedly told his lordship if he had 'any _distinct_ wish upon the subject, he is ready to comply with it,' as if Charles James ever had any distinct wish with reference to Church matters), he styles himself a loyal son of the Church. At any rate, he is a brother of Lord Ravensworth, and perhaps that is almost as good. His public career is now of about twenty years' standing. Originally, he was curate of Barking, Ess.e.x; thence he removed to Hartlepool; and when it was found desirable to send Mr. Bennett to Frome (not Rome), Mr. Liddell was selected to fill his vacant place. It is questionable whether any successor could have been appointed more agreeable to Mr. Bennett. Mr.

Liddell has certainly followed most religiously in the steps of his predecessor. St. Barnabas is what it was pretty nearly in Mr. Bennett's time. In St. Paul's a little more discretion is shown, and if you are struck with any difference in the manner of _performing_ divine service at St. Paul's to that used in other places, you draw a comparison in favour of the former. The congregation is exceedingly wealthy and aristocratic. You are struck as much with its air of high life as with its High Church appearance, and having thus a double charm, I need not add that St. Paul's is crowded in every part. If success be a true test, Mr. Liddell is most indisputably in the right.

As a preacher, Mr. Liddell does not shine. Pale, with light hair and complexion-rich, for the place is worth 1500 a-year at the least-he would all through life have remained an obscure, gentlemanly man, had he not fortunately fallen in with the Puseyite tendencies of a large and influential section in the English Church. His voice is clear but not full; and, as one of his bitterest opponents told me, he can preach a good sermon when he likes. But his teaching is not that which can do the man much good. Eschewing the common evangelical doctrines, and holding views inconsistent with free inquiry and the growth of manly thought, he has but little left him to do in his discourses but to expatiate on the sanct.i.ty of the priestly office, and the mysterious powers possessed by the Church. These are his favourite topics. To win the truth-to lead a G.o.d-like life-to bring back man, the wanderer, to heaven and to G.o.d, seem minor matters at St. Paul's, so long as the pillars are wreathed with costly flowers, and that the service is intoned. And to this teaching the world of fashion in its unfathomable puerility submits, and men who are our legislators, men who are high in rank and influence, men whose example is law all over the land, take it for truth. Mr. Liddell styles his congregation highly educated and devout. He is right in that statement. Men who have sat under him and his predecessor, who have believed them with unshrinking reverence, who have taken every statement as the truth, have been highly educated, but in a wrong direction.

Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails his teaching? Is not his mission grander and more comprehensive than he deems it? Has not man something better to do than to learn to bow, to intone, to admire flowers, and to look at painted gla.s.s? In the universe around him, can the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does not his own Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If it be not so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for-worth dying for; if it be so, the minister and the 'highly educated' and devout congregation at St.

Paul's have made a terrible mistake-a mistake which the friends of pure and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.

THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.

'If I saw,' wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840,-'if I saw any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without a word of protest against aught that is.' Since then Wilberforce has become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary; Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King's College deprive him of the Professor's Chair.

The real difficulty-which Sterling deemed invincible-which has proved too strong for Professor Maurice, is that, whilst there is such a thing as development in religion, the Church of England is not the place for it.

The Church of England was a compromise; but it was a compromise between Geneva and Rome, and a compromise now dating three hundred years. It was never deemed that it would require a wider platform, or that it would have in its pulpits men of larger vision or of more catholic view than the men it had already. If it had a view at all, it took, like Lot's wife, a backward glance to the tabernacle and its service-to the law delivered amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai's sacred head. It looked not to the future. It knew not that there were,

'Somewhere underneath the sun, Azure heights yet unascended, palmy countries to be won.'

It made no provision for the growth of man's free and unfettered thought.

Consequently it is the Church of England only in name. Out of its pale, divorced from it, there is more of intellectual life and independent thought than there is in it. This is the condition of its existence. It is a.s.sociated with certain creeds and articles and rites: harmonizing with them, you have a position in society, you have a certain yearly stipend, and chances of something better, as Samuel of Oxford knows well.

The Church of England was never meant to be the nursery for thought. You have made up your mind immediately you matriculate at her Universities.

Your career for the future is to maintain those articles. In a word, you must conform. The task has been hard, and few great men have stooped to it, and fewer still have done so and lived.

But a man must not quarrel with the conditions he has imposed on himself.

You have your choice. You wish to preach the truth. Well, you can do so, in the Church or out of it; but in the one case you are more or less tied. You may preach the truth; but it must be Church's truth, if you take the Church's pay. Of course, this is a disagreeable position to an independent man; at the same time, it is not without its corresponding advantages. You get into good society, you have a respectable living, you may marry an heiress, or become tutor to a Prime Minister or a Prince. Outside the Church men of intellect generally have taken their stand, for it is perilous to tamper with convictions in order to maintain a position.

It is easy to see how, in Maurice's own case, what power has been thrown away in this tantalizing task. Had he started fresh, with no creed for him to conform to, with no position to maintain, he would have been a far more vigorous thinker than he has ever been. But he has ever had to come back to the Church-to the doctrines and teachings of men. A Church that shall embrace the religious life and thought of England, coexistent with the nation, after all is but a dream. Were there such a Church, Maurice would hold no mean rank in it. But the State Church is not such, and cannot be such, unless its articles and creeds be glossed over with a Jesuitry not more ingenious than fatal to all moral growth. But each generation tries the hopeless task. The men of intellect and purpose in the Church have felt themselves in a false position, and have laboured to get out of it. They have trusted to one and then another. For a long time Mr. Maurice has been the coming man. The Church was once more to be a power-to have the nation's heart-to enlist the nation's intellect on its side. Writing in his usual bitterness, Carlyle says:

'The builder of this universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles!

The plan he shaped his worlds and _aeons_ by, Was-Heavens!-was thy small Nine-and-Thirty Articles.'

Mr. Maurice has accepted this language as sober truth, and has made that truth the pole-star of his ministerial life.

Most of our readers know Lincoln's-inn-fields. It abounds with lawyers.

In one part of it surgeons are plucked, and in another, clients. It has a small chapel not far from Chancery-lane, and if the residents of Lincoln's-inn-fields attended it, there would be but little room for strangers. However, this is not the case, and thus I managed to get in.

It is a curious old place. It was built by Inigo Jones; and the then popular and admired, but now forgotten, Dr. Donne, preached the consecration sermon. The walls have reechoed to the oratory of Secker and Tillotson. The windows are of stained gla.s.s, and one of them, containing St. John the Baptist, was executed at the expense of William Noy, the famous Attorney-General of Charles I. In the crypt, underneath the chapel, are buried, Alexander Broome, the cavalier song-writer; Secretary Thurloe, who had chambers in the Inn; and that stern Puritan, William Prynne, who wrote about 'The Unloveliness of Love Locks.' During Term time this chapel is open for worship every afternoon at three; and the preacher is the Rev. Mr. Maurice.

Considering the position Mr. Maurice has attained, and the notoriety attaching to his name, your first feeling is one of wonder that he has not a larger congregation. After writing more books on theology than any other clergyman of the day-after teaching more youth-after mixing up himself more with the working cla.s.ses than almost any other man I know of-one is surprised that Mr. Maurice's audience is not larger; and I can only account for it by supposing that his task is impossible, and that he is fighting a hopeless fight; or on the supposition that, after all, Mr.

Maurice's place is not the pulpit, but the professor's chair: yet that he has a numerous cla.s.s of followers, the sale of his books is an unanswerable proof-a sale, however, much commoner amongst Dissenters, I have good reason to suppose, than amongst the clergy of the Established Church. Mr. Maurice has the true appearance of the professor-short dark hair, sallow face, precise manner: all indicate the man of study and thought. His voice is clear and agreeable, though not strong. His reading is very rapid, but, at the same time, emphatic. As to action, he has none. He aims more at what he says than how he says it; and, if you listen, you will find food for thought in every phrase. You can hardly imagine that the man before you has been charged with heresy, he seeming to differ in no other respect from other clergymen, save in his superior power of ratiocination and in the wider inductions on which he bases his doctrines.

What Mr. Maurice's opinions are he has taken full care to place before the world. He is a churchman in the fullest sense of the term. 'I have contended,' he writes in his 'Kingdom of Christ,' 'that a Bible without a Church is inconceivable; that the appointed ministers of the Church are the appointed instruments for guiding men into a knowledge of the Bible; that the notion of private judgment is a false notion; that inspiration belongs to the Church, and not merely to the writers of the Bible; that the miracles of the New Testament were the introduction of a new dispensation, and were not merely a set of strange acts belonging to a particular time; lastly, that the Gospel narratives must be received as part of the necessary furniture of the Church.' One would have thought such churchmanship as this would have satisfied any one. However, the cry of heresy has been raised, princ.i.p.ally, it seems, because he denies the doctrine of eternal d.a.m.nation-an awful doctrine, we do not venture to affirm or condemn here. Because he has done this, he has been branded with infidelity; and _The Record_, and _The Morning Advertiser_-neither of them journals distinguished for talent, but rather the reverse-hounded on the public indignation against Mr. Maurice, forgetting that no man has so earnestly laboured to Christianize-not the dark tribes of Polynesia, for then these journals would have been redolent with his praise-but the savages with white faces and dark hearts that we meet in our streets every day.

It is melancholy to think that wretched theologians may aim their small shot at such a man, merely because his idea of G.o.d and Christianity may be less fearful, more loving and humane, than their own. Surely a man may love G.o.d and his neighbour as himself-may believe Christ suffered for the sins of the world-without being hooted by every ignorant or unreasoning fool, because, on other matters-matters merely speculative-matters too dark for man ever to fully inquire into or completely to understand-his opinions differ from their own. Proud as we are of our press, yet such exhibitions should make us mourn, that at times it can so far forget Christian charity and common sense, and descend so low. One thing is clear, that there is no tribunal in the Church that can satisfactorily settle the question of heresy; and another thing is clear, that whilst so many men differing so widely from each other are in the Church, the question with the majority of them cannot be one of principle but of pay. Churchmen should be the last to raise the cry of heresy, for it is a revelation to the world of what must ever be their weakness and their shame.

Mr. Maurice, after all, is thrown away where he is: all his life he has been in an uncongenial position. The son of a dissenting minister, the habits he acquired have clung to him from his earliest youth. Hazlitt tells us how a man so nurtured grows up in a love of independence and of truth; and such a one will find it hard to retain a connection long with any human organization and creed. Then, as the brother-in-law of Sterling, Maurice would naturally be led to modes of thought and action other than those the Church had been in the habit of sanctioning.

Eminently religious, he never could have been what he was to have been, a lawyer; but as an independent writer on religion, as a co-worker with Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, for instance, what might he not have done?

Another mistake of Maurice's is, that his mission is to the poor. His style is the very last that would be popular with such. In the pulpit or out, Maurice preaches not to the public, but to the select few-to literary loungers-to men of ample time and elevated taste-to men of thought rather than of action-to men freed from the hard necessities of life, and who can leisurely sit and listen to his notes of 'linked sweetness long drawn out.' Hence is it that he is more a favourite with intellectual dissenters than with churchmen, and that I believe at Lincoln's-inn-fields his congregation is made up more of the former than the latter. They love his efforts at self-emanc.i.p.ation; they admire his scholarship, his piety, his taste. They eminently appreciate him, as he, like the intellectual power of the poet,

'Through words and things Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way.'

The absence in him of all that is cold and priestly-his human sympathies-his love to the erring and the weak and the doubting, whom he would reclaim, are qualities with which the better cla.s.s of religionists would heartily sympathize, and with which perhaps they would sympathize all the more that they come to them couched in language of dream-like beauty, all glorious, though misty with 'exhalations of the dawn.'

As a writer, Mr. Maurice is well known for his 'History of Metaphysical Philosophy,' his 'View of the Religions of the World,' his 'Articles of the Church considered with Reference to the Roman Catholic Controversy,'

and his 'Essays,' which are more especially intended to grapple with the difficulties Unitarians feel in connection with orthodox doctrine. They have all obtained an extensive sale; but they are not for the public; not for the men who buy and sell and get gain-who rise early and sit up late; but for the student and divine. Hence it is that Maurice and the school with whom he acts, such as Kingsley, Hare, and Trench, can never reanimate the Church of England, nor win the operatives over to it. That they do great good, I admit; that they have a mission, I grant; but not where they fondly deem it to be. There is a destiny that shapes their ends, and the issues, I doubt not, must be for the good of man's soul, for the cause of truth, for the glory of G.o.d.

THE REV. H. MELVILLE, M.A.

The great John Foster (who, by-the-bye, in his essay on 'Decision of Character,' has much mischief to answer for, as every obstinate mule quotes his authority when, against all advice and entreaty and common sense, he persists in going wrong-poor Haydon always quoted Foster) wrote one of his best essays, 'On the Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion.' The professors of Evangelical religion, I think, scarcely forgave him. The sanctuary, it was thought, should have a shibboleth of its own. In its peculiar terms and general formation it should differ from the ordinary language of other men. If persons of taste were kept away-if the men of intellect and science and learning stood aloof-it mattered little; for the wisdom of the world was folly, and it was ordained that it was to be brought to nought by the weak in years and understanding-'out of the mouth of sucklings and babes.' The religious, I fear, some of them with a certain kind of pride-for there is a pride in the Church as well as in the world, and we all know whose

'Darling sin Is the pride that apes humility'-