The London Pulpit Part 9

"Departing leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time."

But the coming age will not take your wisdom-will not follow your footmarks-will experiment for itself. Tell your pa.s.sionate son that the fair face he now dotes on, in ten years he will have forgotten, and he cannot believe you. It is just as vain to believe that the section who believe in Rome will cease to do so. Roman Catholicism has some congeniality with man, and therefore Protestantism will always be in danger from it-and the more honest this Protestantism is-the more it takes its stand upon the truth and nothing but the truth-the more it relinquishes the political ascendancy it has a.s.sumed, the greater that danger will become. Cardinal Wiseman is an ill.u.s.tration of this. Queen Elizabeth or Oliver Cromwell would have soon put a stop to Cardinal Wiseman's career, but they would have done so in spite of the principles of religious liberty. Now those principles are acknowledged, and England trusts in Exeter Hall-and Dr. c.u.mming. Protestantism may well be in danger.

One Sunday, hearing that the Cardinal was to preach at Brook Green, Hammersmith, I made the best of my way thither. The church was crowded, and I considered myself lucky in being shown by the woman who acted as pew-opener into a good seat. Yet this good luck had to be paid for. 'A shilling, sir, if you please,' said the woman curtseying. 'A what?' I repeated. 'A shilling, sir, if you please,' was the reply. The woman seemed to consider it so reasonable a charge that I of course complied with her request. At the same time, recollecting that for half that sum you are admitted into what I suppose is considered the dress circle in St. George's Cathedral, I did think that sixpence would have been sufficient. The service was conducted in the usual manner. It was longer than that of the Church of England as practised at St. Barnabas, and a good deal more attractive. After ma.s.s had been celebrated, there was a hush, and immediately a procession from the side door; what the procession consisted of I cannot say. My eyes, and those of every one else, I suppose, were turned upon the Cardinal alone.

And first let me describe the Cardinal's gown;-it was composed of rich red silk; besides he had a red cap, which he laid aside when preaching, and, in addition, he had a very handsome robe round his neck, and a lace or muslin gown of shorter extent than the red one, which came down to his feet. Only that fluent writer the Court newsman, or he who tells in the columns of the _Morning Post_ of the finery of Drawing Rooms, when the beauty of England prostrates itself before royalty, could do justice to the dress the Cardinal wore. Of course it was a grotesque one-but it was a finer dress than that of an English Bishop, who seems all sleeves, and if you do make an object of yourself, the more striking the object is the better-so that, as far as dress is concerned, the Cardinal beats one of our Archbishops hollow. I think also in his preaching he would be more than a match for them. Him you can hear. He is a tall, stately man.

There is an air of power about him. His voice is loud, and bra.s.sy, and unpleasant, but it is not monotonous, and his action is very animated and good. He stands before the altar, and takes a text which generally forms an appropriate introduction to his discourse, and delivers a well-reasoned, argumentative address, not cut up into heads, as the manner of some is, but connected and complete. With a fine voice, the Cardinal would be a very effective preacher. As it is, he does very well. I should say he has little imagination, little sentiment, little rhetoric, but that he has great stores of learning and power of argument.

He is very plausible, and seems very earnest and sincere, he preaches princ.i.p.ally of the peculiar doctrines of his Church; how it is the one on which G.o.d's Spirit rests; how it is the one true guide to heaven; how it has the one true Divine utterance, to which, if man do not listen, he is lost for ever. The Cardinal has a square, ma.s.sive face, with anything but a pleasant expression. He is yet in his prime. His hair is brown, his complexion fresh, but inclined to be dark. His eyes are concealed by spectacles. A fat, double chin, and large cheeks, minus whiskers, give him a very sensual appearance. But it is not a pleasant sensuality, the jolly sensuality of a Falstaff or an alderman, the sensuality suggestive of good dinners, with good company to flavour them. It is the sensuality of a proud, arrogant, and imperious monk.

Cardinal Wiseman is by birth a Spaniard, and by descent an Irishman. He was born in 1802. At an early age he was sent to St. Cuthbert's Catholic College at Ushaw, near Durham. From thence he was removed to the English College at Rome, where he was ordained a priest, and made a Doctor of Divinity. He was Professor for a time in the Roman University, and then made Rector of the English College at Ushaw. Dr. Wiseman came to England in 1835, and in the winter of that year delivered a Course of Lectures on the connection between Science and Revealed Religion, which, when published, obtained for him a high reputation for scholarship and learning in all divisions of the Christian church. He subsequently returned to Rome, and is understood to have been instrumental in inducing Pope Gregory XVI. to increase the Vicars Apostolic in England. The number was doubled, and Dr. Wiseman came back as coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, of the Midland District. He was appointed president of St. Mary's College, Oscott. In 1847 he again returned to Rome. This second visit led to further preferment. He was made Pro-Vicar Apostolic of the London District, in place of Dr. Griffiths, deceased. Subsequently he was appointed coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, and in 1849, on the death of Dr. Walsh, he became Vicar Apostolic of the London District. In August he went again to Rome, not expecting, as he says, to return, 'but delighted to be commissioned to come back' clothed in new dignity. In a Consistory held on the 30th of September, Nicholas Wiseman was elected to the dignity of Cardinal by the t.i.tle of Saint Prudentia, and was appointed Archbishop of Westminster-a t.i.tle which drove silly churchmen into fits, and which made even Dissenters wild. Under the Pope he is the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, and a Prince of the Church of Rome, at which place he now princ.i.p.ally resides. His sojourn in England is understood to be but temporary. He has published several sermons, and a few volumes, in support of transubstantiation and the other doctrines of the church of which he is such an ornament. But his literary reputation is princ.i.p.ally based on the series of lectures to which I have already referred.

The Cardinal has no great love for our age, and little love for England, if we are to judge by his epistle to his clergy on the Indian Mutiny. In a sermon on the Social and Intellectual State of England, compared with its Moral Condition, published in 1850, he asks, 'Are we convinced that the real moral tone of society in every part is on the increase? Is it not notorious that crimes, and crimes even that were unknown among us a few years ago-that deeds of violence which not even the hot pa.s.sionate blood of the South is here to palliate-that such crimes as these are increasing in the great ma.s.ses of our population? Is it not well known that the relations of the family are sadly isolated, and that mult.i.tudes live without a consciousness of their sacred nature? Are we improving the people in regard to these things? Are we doing anything to convince them more thoroughly, and upon true Church grounds, of their great duty to G.o.d, to society, to their families, and to themselves? I fear we must answer no; and I will say boldly that there are reasons why it should be so. There are immense obstacles in the religious inst.i.tutions of the country to this being possible-because it is not in their power to come home to the feelings, to the affections of the poor. They raise not up any who devote themselves to them-who sacrifice themselves for them-who find a higher reward than man can give in making themselves servants of the servants of G.o.d. And what is the visible result of this? That any great inst.i.tutions which make us think that we are acting so powerfully on the ma.s.ses, reach not to the very depths of the miseries which have to be probed, and which have to be healed. We are content with raising the position of the artizan, with making him more intelligent, with providing him with the means of education, with instructing him in his leisure hour to store his mind with knowledge. All this is good, and yet the inst.i.tutions that work upon that cla.s.s have not of their own nature a direct moral tendency.' All this may be true or not, yet it is clear that the inst.i.tutions which the Cardinal would recommend, equally fail, so far as morality is concerned. A Protestant is not less moral than a Catholic. The population of England is as moral as that of France.

Roman Catholic Ireland can boast no superiority over Protestant Scotland.

Luther has not to answer for all the sins of the world.

THE REV. DOCTOR WOLFF.

There are some people who maintain the Wandering Jew to be a myth. I believe the contrary-that he exists amongst us, and that he is known to men as Dr. Wolff. I hope the Hon. Mrs. Norton will make a note of this.

It is a fact of which she ought to be aware, as should Dr. Croly, and especially Dumas, otherwise his wondrous tale will be incomplete. Yes, Dr. Wolff is the Wandering Jew-not the melancholy personage of the poet and the novelist, but a fat jolly Jew, for whom 'the law having a shadow of good things to come' has ceased to exist, and to whom, if I may imagine by his portly presence and unctuous face, the good things have already come. We may look long ere we see in his countenance

'the settled gloom The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore, That dared not look beyond the tomb, That might not hope for peace before.'

On the contrary, all seems peace within and without, so far as Dr. Wolff is concerned. Had he any inward sorrow, had he been borne down by its agony, had the accents of despair been ever on his lip, and its terror ever glancing from his eye, he would have been a very different man.

Nevertheless, the Dr. is the Wandering Jew, but in reality, and not in romance; he becomes a Christian, marries a lady of t.i.tle, and becomes a clergyman of the English Church. Nominally, he is not of the London Pulpit. He has a local habitation and a name, but he is of no place. He is of an unsettled race. I have no doubt but that he preaches as much out of his own church as in it, and that he has as much right to be included in the London Pulpit as in any other. At this time his voice is often heard in London. It really is surprising that the Bishop, or some admiring friend, such as Mr. Henry Drummond, has never given him a metropolitan charge, or built him a chapel somewhere in the vicinity of the Clapham sect. One would have thought he would have done as well, at any rate, as Mr. Ridley Hersch.e.l.l, than whom he is a great deal more interesting, and not half so heavy. What is the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews about? What is Exeter Hall thinking of? Is Dr. Wolff too fat for sentiment? Must female youthful piety lavish its tenderness on a younger man? Does a converted Jew cease to be interesting, the same as common Evangelical curates, when their hair gets grey or their heads bald? Must a converted Jew, too, lose his charms as he gains flesh, as any ordinary Adonis of pious tea-tables? Alas! alas!

I fear these questions are to be answered in the affirmative. Woman is woman everywhere,

'As fickle as the shade, By the light quivering aspen made'-

in cave Adullam, or in the select Christian Society of Camberwell-as in the theatre or the ball-room, or, as Mr. Bunn would say, in halls of dazzling light. I stop not to moralize over the bitter fact. I merely lament it; and if I deduce a moral, it shall soon be told. It would be but to bid the male Cynthia of the pulpit make the best of his fleeting popularity-a popularity fading with the first dawn of the double chin, or the first bud of the grey hair. Dear brother, such is your inevitable fate. Stern destiny will make no exception in your favour. Other white hands will be pressed as warmly as your own. Other lips shall speak oracles, or move the heart of woman to laughter or to tears. For others, divine eyes shall moisten the best French cambric, and worsted slippers shall be worked by fairy hands. Every dog has his day.

On his legs, whether on the platform or in the pulpit, Dr. Wolff is one of the extraordinary men of our time. In shape he is somewhat of a tub.

Wrap it up in black cloth, put on it a big head with a fat face, let that face have small eyes, a slightly Jewish nose, and be of a light complection, jolly and sensual, and you have Dr. Wolff. To complete the picture, let the figure have a Bible in his right hand, and let him read from it incessantly with a foreign p.r.o.nunciation, but with a musical voice. As a preacher or a lecturer the Doctor is but an indifferent model. He gets off the rail as soon as he starts. He gives you a heterogeneous ma.s.s of raw material, gathered in every country under heaven. He talks of Bokhara as familiarly as we do of the Bank; he is as much at home in Palestine as we in Piccadilly. He begins a sentence with 'As I was last in Abyssinia,' as we should say, 'When we were last in Chancery-lane;' or he says, 'As I was smoking with the Schah of Persia,'

as we should speak of smoking a quiet pipe with Smithers of the Strand; and then he loses himself, shouts as if he were a war-horse going into battle-bursts out into unknown tongues-sings Hebrew melodies in what the distracted Puritan calls 'the blessed tongue of Canaan,' and has a wild look in his eye as if he were speaking to his own people by the silent waters and ruined temples of Babel, and not in a Christian church and speaking to Christian men. The Doctor is a rhapsodist, not a lecturer.

He belongs to the men who have died out amongst us, to the bards and scalds of ancient days. He is out of place amidst the conventional proprieties and ecclesiastical decorums of the modern church, and especially in that section of it which in this country is honoured with State patronage and pay. I wonder how Dr. Wolff ever could have become a clergyman-or ever settled down. Was it Lady Georgiana that produced the wondrous change, that tamed the rover of the desert, and turned him into a husband and a rector? It is wonderful what woman can do, yet even woman cannot accomplish everything. She cannot make the Doctor get into a pulpit and preach a sober sermon in a sober way. She cannot alter his wild and eccentric nature, which makes him an original, almost a mountebank, which in another man would be intolerable. I must candidly confess that with one or two exceptions no public man ventures so near the verge of absurdity as Dr. Wolff.

My own opinion is, that the Doctor, as I have already stated, is the Wandering Jew. It is only fair, however, to give facts which would lead the reader to an opposite opinion. The Doctor tells us himself he was born in 1796, in a little village in Bavaria, at which place his father was a Rabbi. At an early age, long before the reasoning power was developed, or before he had sufficient information to justify him in taking the step, he renounced the religion of his fathers, and set up for himself as a Roman Catholic. After wandering about the country, at times working for a living, and at times subsisting on the charity of friends, he made his way to Rome, and became a student, first at the Seminario Pontifico, then at the Propaganda. The Doctor seems to have stumbled at the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility, and to have been compelled to leave in consequence, and tries to make out a case of hardship in his dismissal. He says he was dismissed without a fair hearing. It does not seem so. In writing to his friends, he had said he would always be an enemy to the anti-Christian tyranny of Rome. No wonder then that Rome dismissed him. After wandering about the Continent, and learning to read and speak French as he rode on the rumble of Mr. Haldane's carriage from Montauban to Calais, he arrived in London in June, 1819, and became London Agent to the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.

In order that he might be better fitted for his work, he spent some time at Cambridge under the care of the late Dr. Lee. His journeyings and perils have been great. He has been sold as a slave thrice, condemned to death thrice. He has been attacked with cholera and typhus fever, and almost every Asiatic fever. He has been bastinadoed and starved. He has been carried away by pirates. For eighteen years he has traversed the most barbarous countries of the world, and yet he looks as if he had never known a sorrow or gone without a dinner in his life. He thus sums up his labours:-'I began in 1821, and accomplished in 1826, my missionary labours among the dispersed of my people in Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Crimea, Georgia, and the Ottoman Empire. My next labours among my brethren were in England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, and the Mediterranean, from 1826 to 1830. I then proceeded to Turkey, Persia, Turkistaun, Bokhara, Affghanistan, Cashmere, Hindostan, and the Red Sea, from 1831 to 1834.' In 1835 the Doctor left England for a Missionary tour in Abyssinia-thence for Bombay-thence for the United States. In June 1838 he received priest's orders from the Bishop of Dromore, and became curate of Linthwaite, near Huddersfield, where he had the princely income of 24 a-year-thence he moved in 1840 to the curacy of High Ryland, near Wakefield. In 1843, at the desire of the Stoddard and Conolly Committee, he undertook to ascertain the fate of those officers, and entered Cabul, where again he was in danger of death, but saved by the friendly power of Persia. He is now rector of the Isle of Brewers, Somersetshire, but has been recently in London, lecturing and preaching. Hence his parishioners see but little of him. He is here and there and everywhere. The Doctor should never have settled, or if he did settle it should have been in London, where there is something fresh, and wonderful, and stirring every day.

THE END.

JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.

_Just Published_, _price_ 3_s._ 6_d._, _bound in cloth_,

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED,

THE LONDON PULPIT.

BY JAMES EWING RITCHIE.

Contents: The Religious Denominations of London-Sketches of the Rev. J.

M. Bellew-Dale-Liddell-Maurice-Melville-Villiers-Baldwin Brown-Binney-Dr.

Campbell-Lynch-Morris-Martin-Brock-Howard Hinton-Sheridan Knowles-Baptist Noel-Spurgeon-Dr. c.u.mmins-Dr. James Hamilton-W. Forster-H.

Ierson-Cardinal Wiseman-Miall-Dr. Wolff, &c. &c.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

"Mr. Ritchie's pen-and-ink sketches of the popular preachers of London are as life-like as they are brilliant and delightful. The thought of producing them was a happy one, and has been carried out in the volume before us with much agreeable animation. The collection of silhouettes herein presented to our contemplation will be especially acceptable, we conjecture, to our country cousins, as a guide among the more generally known of the metropolitan ecclesiastics. It will be perceived at a glance that the writer has familiarized himself with the subject, before undertaking its treatment. Chapter after chapter brings the popular preachers of the Capital before our mind's eye in a sort of stately clerical procession."-_The Sun_.

"Without going so far as the late Sir Robert Peel, and saying that there are three ways of viewing this as well as every other subject, it will be allowed that the clerical body may be contemplated either from within one of their special folds, and under the influence of peculiar religious views, or in a purely lay historical manner, and, so we suppose we ought to say, from the 'platform of humanity' at large. The latter is the idea developed in Mr. Ritchie's volume, and cleverly and amusingly it is done.

One great merit is, that his characters are not unnecessarily spun out.

We have a few rapid dashes of the pencil, and then the mind is relieved by a change of scene and person . . . He displays considerable discrimination of judgment, and a good deal of humour."-_The Inquirer_.

"There is considerable verisimilitude in these sketches, though they are much too brief to be regarded as more than mere outlines. It is possible however to throw character even into an outline, and this is done with good effect in several of these smart and off-hand compositions."-_Tait_.

"It is lively, freshly written, at times powerful, and its facts carefully put together. It bears the stamp of an earnest spirit, eager in its search after truth, and strongly set against affectation and pretence of every sort."-_Globe_.

"Some of the sketches are very good."-_Literary Gazette_.

"They are penned in a just spirit, and are of a character to afford all the information that may be needed on the subjects to which they refer.

The author's criticisms on preachers and preaching are candid, and for the most part truthful. This book ought therefore to be popular."-_Observer_.

"They are written with vigour and freedom, and are marked by a spirit of fairness and justice-an admirable trait, if we recollect how much the spirit of partisanship governs such strictures as a rule."-_Weekly Dispatch_.

"A sketch of the comparative force of the religious denominations in London, and notes upon the chief popular preachers, orthodox or dissentient, republished from a newspaper-we think the Weekly News and Chronicle. The book, which is written in a sufficiently impartial spirit, will interest many people and offend few."-_Examiner_.

"In this volume we have within a moderate s.p.a.ce pen-and-ink sketches of most of the popular preachers of the metropolis. We are bound to say that they are drawn with fidelity, and that the admirers of each Sabbath orator whose mental lineaments are placed before us will easily recognise the prominent features of the original. Although brief, they evince discrimination and talent; a fluent style being one of their chief recommendations, not much s.p.a.ce is devoted to each. The writer only reviews the most striking characteristics, and his sympathies are manifestly with those who display most liberal and manly tendencies in their religious expositions."-_Sunday Times_.

"What Mr. Francis did some few years since for the parliamentary orators of the age, Mr. Ritchie has in the volume before us effected for the pulpit orators of the day. In brief but graphic delineations, he gives daguerreotypes, as it were, of the living manners of the chief popular preachers of various Christian denominations."-_The Church and State Gazette_.

Just Published, price 3_s._ 6_d._, bound in cloth,

THE NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON.