Part 2

In 1798 the general monthly prayer meeting of the London Missionary Society was held at Hornton Street, and the Rev. Dr. Haweis, it is stated in the Church book, preached from the text, “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord.” {23a} The entry deserves special remark. Dr. Haweis was rector of Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, and an intimate friend of the Countess of Huntingdon. At that period a few Evangelical clergymen were accustomed to preach in Nonconformist pulpits. The famous John Berridge, rector of Everton, was of the number; and Fletcher of Madeley frequently ministered the word of life to Methodist congregations. Dr. Haweis delivered the first annual sermon on behalf of the London Missionary Society in Spafields chapel; and on previous occasions preached in places of worship belonging to the Countess’s connection. Whether it was owing to that circumstance, I do not know, but as early as 1767 an unpleasantness arose, which raised a question as to whether he ought to retain his rectory; and the Rev. Martin Madan, of the Lock Hospital—who, by the way, is buried at Kensington—advised him to retain it, a piece of advice which, we are told, subjected Mr. Madan “to much obloquy.” {23b} Preaching by clergymen in dissenting chapels was deemed an irregularity, but some bishops winked at it. Whether or not the practice be legal became a topic of inquiry a few years ago, and counsel’s opinion was taken on the subject. My friend Dr. Stanley at that period expressed a wish to occupy Kensington pulpit before I resigned the pastorate, and an arrangement for the purpose was deferred in consequence of a controversy on the general subject, which arose at the time. Counsel’s opinion proved unfavourable, and the matter dropped. But I may mention that the Rev. Samuel Minton, whilst still a Church of England incumbent, preached for me one Sunday evening not long before counsel gave the opinion to which reference has been made.

It is interesting to remember that Dr. Haweis was a warm friend to the London Missionary Society, and that after having offered four hundred pounds for sending the Gospel to Tahiti, he said: “For many years I have planned, prayed, and sought for an opening for a mission among the heathen. My dear Lady Huntingdon has concurred with me in attempting it.” {24a} And again: “My former experience has convinced me that only by a general union of all denominations could a broad basis be laid for a mission.” {24b}

That at so early a period of this history such a service should be held was an augury for good. It showed that the insignificant band of Christians worshipping in Hornton Street cherished sympathies so large that they swept over the world, and offered prayers that the proclamation of the Gospel might reach the ends of the earth. From the beginning the Kensington Church associated itself with the history of missionary trials and missionary success. Disaster at the antipodes sent a thrill of pain, and success there created a pulsation of joy amongst the obscure worshippers. Hearts mourned over the capture of the _Duff_, and in after years over the massacre of Tongataboo, the imprisonment and death of Smith in Demerara, the murder of John Williams on the beach of Eromanga, and the persecutions of early converts by the Queen of Madagascar. From time to time the countenances of worshippers have brightened on the arrival of good tidings from the South Seas, from India, from China, from Caffreland, from the West Indies. And I mention this because I believe that much of the prosperity enjoyed by Kensington Congregationalists is owing to their early and ever since continued co-operation in missionary work. The keynote of their zeal and joy was struck at that meeting which it is so gratifying to remember.

Mr. Lake’s ministry at Kensington ceased in 1800 or 1801; and the only notice I have found of his subsequent history, is that he at length quitted “the Dissenting interest for a curacy in the Established Church, where he sustained a respectable and useful character to the day of his death.” {25}

II. THE SECOND PASTORATE. _THE REV. JOHN CLAYTON_. 1801–1804.

“THE congregation of Hornton Street Chapel, Kensington, being deprived of the ministerial labours of the Rev. John Lake, by his resignation, and remaining destitute of a stated overseer in the Lord till the month of May, 1801, united in a call soliciting Mr. John Clayton, assistant to the Rev. John Winter, of Newbury, Berks, to undertake the office of their pastor.” {28} The invitation was in the name of “the trustees, church, and subscribers,” and received about one hundred signatures. Mr. Clayton’s reply is not given, but the records state that he paid a visit and preached two Sabbaths in the month of June; and on the second Sabbath of August, 1801, he entered upon his stated labours.

Mr. Clayton was educated partly at Homerton College, partly at Edinburgh University; and after the completion of his preparatory studies he spent a short time at Newbury, as assistant to the Rev. John Winter. He had only just come of age when he was invited to the Kensington pastorate. Having won for himself a good report from the people of the Berkshire town, as one who had done his work “with the ability of a theologist and the faithfulness of a minister of Christ,” he was praised by the senior pastor, who wrote to the young man’s father, saying, “I see that he has now a call to depart with a prospect of usefulness by preaching the Gospel in another place. I therefore readily commend him to the Lord, and the word of His grace, and shall rejoice to hear that all our hopes are realized among the people of Kensington.”

Mr. Clayton was ordained in Hornton Street Chapel the twenty-first of October, 1801. The Rev. W. Humphreys, of Hammersmith, delivered the introductory discourse, and the charge to the minister was given by his father, the Rev. John Clayton, pastor of the Church assembling in the ancient Weigh House, not far from the London Monument. This gentleman, dignified and courtly, had come under the influence of Lady Huntingdon, and to the time of his death remained attached to the doctrines dear to the countess. His dissent was of a moderate type, and he did not share in political views prevalent amongst his brethren; in that respect his son resembled him. He cultivated friendships with evangelical clergymen, especially Newton and Cecil. When I was about to enter college I received from him counsel and encouragement; and I remember well a discourse which he preached at Norwich fifty years ago, from the words, “Let us go again and visit our brethren in every city where we have preached the word of the Lord, and see how they do.” He had visited the place forty years before, and now came, he said, to see “_how they did_,” and to make inquiries relative to their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare. “Have you made your wills?” asked the venerable patriarch, with his thickly powdered head.

“The charge he delivered at Kensington to his son was a most faithful and solemn exposition of ministerial duties, enforced with amazing vigour and pungency of expression; indeed at times there was a trenchant fearlessness of utterance almost amounting to invective against timeserving, hesitating, cowardly preachers who kept back the truth or proclaimed smooth things to gratify graceless spirits.” {29}

“I have not language [he said] of indignant severity sufficiently strong to express the contemptible cowardice, hypocrisy, and soul-murdering cruelty of those who adopt an indefinite phraseology in order (such is the plenitude of their prudence and moderation) that none may suspend their devotion, but that a heterogeneous mass of nominal Calvinists and real Arians and Socinians may be assembled (for united they cannot be) in one society. Frost unites sticks and stones, moss, leaves, and weeds; the sun separates them. Into the secret of that frosty liberality may you, my son, never enter, and to the assembly of its advocates never be thou united.

“Your testimony is to contain nothing but the truth. Sermons should not consist in declamation, but be calculated to convey solid instruction. You must teach, and not trifle away time in exhibiting fine thoughts or playing upon words. Let not your testimony be encumbered with what is foreign. Be like Paul, who could say, ‘Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have obtained mercy, we faint not; but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.’

“Your testimony should be borne with zeal, in the heat of which do not lay aside Christian meekness towards opposers. At the same time, take care that you do not grow lukewarm and indifferent under the specious pretext of meekness. An unfaithful, accommodating pastor, perhaps, applauds himself for carrying it fair with all sorts of people, whereas this peaceable kind of preaching, in neither condemning heretics and worldly-minded persons, nor being condemned by them, is no other than a sign of his being himself in a state of condemnation and death. That person betrays the truth who ceases zealously to defend it, or to oppose its professed adversaries, either from fear of giving occasion of offence, or through a false love of peace. The shepherd should not only feed the flocks, but also _drive away_ the grievous wolves.”

When Mr. Clayton had spent a year and a half in the seclusion of what was then a rural hamlet, he met with an accident whilst riding on horseback, an exercise to which he was addicted throughout life. The accident suspended his work for a while, and during that period his brother George helped to supply his lack of service. There was considerable resemblance between the two brothers. Each had a commanding appearance and a sonorous voice. Both were accustomed to express themselves in measured, ornate sentences, the style of which was caught in a measure from their good father, who loved his sons, and discriminated between them by saying “John had the best stock of goods, but George had the best shop window.” The attainments and mental abilities of the elder certainly were superior to those of the younger; yet perhaps the younger presented what he had to say in a manner more ingenious and with even more attractive diction than his brother John. They became, as they grew older, types of a class at the time large and influential, chiefly known by their intense and popular evangelical ministrations, their exemplary discharge of pastoral duties, their zealous support of catholic institutions for the spread of the Gospel, their gentlemanly demeanour in society, and their large intercourse with ministers and people of all denominations.

Let me avail myself of the following reminiscences of Mr. Clayton’s preaching by my beloved friend, the Rev. J. C. Harrison, who attended at the Poultry when Mr. Clayton was minister there. They will, with some slight modification, apply to his preaching at Kensington.

“He was an admirable preacher. In the course of the year you were sure to hear all the main doctrines of the Christian faith clearly explained, or if not formally expounded, thrown into a fuller light by some practical appeal of which he made them the foundation. When he took up a book of the New Testament, like the Acts of the Apostles, and founded on it a series of discussions, he would draw out the spirit of the narrative with great fidelity and effect, and would rise not unfrequently into real eloquence. He was amongst his flock hearing the tale of their sorrows or their joys, their mental conflicts or their bodily sufferings, and becoming thereby acquainted with all varieties of life and experience, all kinds of spiritual disease, all phases of Christian character: seeking meanwhile how to meet difficulties and soothe sorrow, and correct morbid feelings, and turn tears of sadness into smiles of joy, and thus he got together the materials for portraitures of spiritual character drawn to the life, and these he wrought into the texture of his Sunday sermon. It is difficult to imagine the help which such discourses afforded to all classes of true Christian hearers. He mixed with all sorts and conditions of men, lawyers, doctors, merchants, tradesmen, mechanics; and as he was a felicitous and ready converser, he not only threw out shrewd hints and sparkling sayings for their advantage, but gained from them a vast amount of information respecting their mode of life, their opinions and practices, their weak points and strong points, their gains and losses, their desperate anxieties and temptations, or their exhilarating successes; and with these facts from life, in his memory, he spoke in his sermons, ‘not as one that beateth the air,’ but as one who had been behind the scenes, and knew whereof he affirmed. His strokes were not delivered at random, but went straight to the mark. He could reprove, exhort, advise, comfort, as if he were himself involved every day in the whirl and wear of life. True his usual style of speech was rather Johnsonian, intermingled with forms of expression so entirely his own that you could only call them Claytonian; but those who knew him well, found that he talked very much as he preached, in rhetorically shaped sentences, with a singularly felicitous peculiarity of phrase coined in his own mind, and occasionally with a good-humoured subsidence into some pointed colloquialism which told all the more forcibly from its contrast with his ordinary mode. They felt, therefore, that what he said was thoroughly genuine, the utterance of a true man and not at all of a quack, or as he would have said, of an empiric. But whether experimental or practical, his sermons were richly and heartily evangelical, full of the very spirit of the Gospel. As some of his old-fashioned hearers used to say, ‘You could always reckon on sixteen ounces to the pound.’”

Mr. Clayton was an exemplary pastor. After he removed to Camomile Street and the Poultry, he visited his people in a most methodical way, dividing London into districts, and going from house to house, week after week, to comfort sorrowing hearts, to share in domestic joys, to guide the perplexed, and to stimulate the lukewarm; this I know, and therefore it may be inferred that he looked well after the few sheep in the Kensington fields, feeding them by day, and watching over them by night. He used to talk of the large “ring fence” round his church in the city; the ring fence round his church in the suburb was small, and hence we may be sure that his pastoral duties were, during his pastorate at Hornton Street, thoroughly performed. A gentleman by birth and education, with large sympathies easily evoked, tears and smiles coming at a moment’s bidding, apt at telling anecdotes, full of humour if not wit, he was a companion loved in a circle wider than his own congregation; his genial friendliness and neighbourly visits helped no doubt to promote the cause of Evangelical Nonconformity.

A number of minutes occur in the record of affairs, relative to matters of a temporal kind, during Mr. Clayton’s ministry; but there are no entries relative to the admission of members or other strictly religious proceedings. One subject in particular excited the pastor’s solicitude, namely, that the chapel property should be put in trust, which accordingly was done; and in connection with this many discussions arose touching what was needful for discharging pecuniary liabilities. It is plain from what follows that Mr. Clayton was not satisfied with “the mixture of temporals with spirituals,” as he called it; and on Christmas Day, 1804, he publicly assigned reasons for relinquishing the pastoral office. Various rumours were afloat, which he briefly contradicted as “untrue,” and then told his friends that if they were asked “Why has Mr. Clayton left Kensington?” they were to reply, “That it was his earnest wish to be nearer the immediate circle of his ministerial connections and religious friends; that his desire was to be united to a Church whose members more fully coincided with him in sentiment on several subjects, more especially on the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; and particularly that he might find a place where he might not be habitually perplexed with secular arrangements, and where he might in some degree enjoy that tranquillity which he deemed so necessary in the present state of his health.” “I have the pleasure,” he added, “to inform you all, that last year this chapel was vested in the hands of nine trustees, who are engaged to see that no minister shall ever be settled here who does not preach the gospel agreeably to the tenets of the Assembly’s Catechism.”

Mr. Biggs, the collector and secretary, also resigned his office, and Mr. Walker was appointed in his room.

On the 31st of October, 1805, it was resolved, “at a meeting held in the vestry,” that Mr. Hamilton, of Brighton, should be invited to become pastor, and an invitation accordingly was drawn up, and signed by two deacons and between eighty and ninety other persons.

To the invitation Mr. Hamilton sent a negative reply, addressed to “the Church of Christ assembling for religious worship in Hornton Street, Kensington, and the subscribers to that interest.”

Meetings afterwards occurred at intervals for the settlement of pecuniary affairs, until the month of January, 1807, when by the direction of “the managers, with the members and subscribers approving,” the secretary, Mr. Walker, wrote to Mr. Leifchild, a student at Hoxton Academy, who had occupied Kensington pulpit with great acceptance, to become minister of the chapel. Mr. Leifchild replied that he could not leave the Academy before the next Christmas, nor accept any call before the next midsummer. In August of the same year a meeting was held at Mr. Broadwood’s house, and it was resolved to secure Mr. Leifchild not less than £160 per annum, with an addition of whatever the chapel might bring in above that sum. On the 3rd of January, 1808, the members of the chapel resolved to invite Mr. Leifchild to the pastorate, and in March he accepted the invitation.

III. THE THIRD PASTORATE. _THE REV. DR. LEIFCHILD_. 1808–1824.

“BEFORE accepting the call to Kensington,” he said, as we learn from the Memoir by his son, “while returning from a visit to that place, I heard at the house of a friend that Rowland Hill had announced me to preach at Surrey Chapel on the following Tuesday evening.” He went and preached, and was surprised at the risibility of the audience, which was explained when he heard that Mr. Hill had crept up into the gallery behind the pulpit, and in his own comical way expressed assent to one part and dissent from another part of the discourse. The veteran came into the vestry and asked the young man to become his curate at Wotton-under-Edge. The latter declined the overture, when the former replied, “That reminds me of young men setting up in business before they have served their apprenticeship.” {37} Just before that evening service, the minister of Surrey Chapel had written to Mr. Wilson, Treasurer of Hoxton Academy, saying, “I hear much of a young man of the name of Leifchild. It was supposed that he was going to _settle_ (a bad word for a young recruiting spiritual officer) at Kensington; but that there is a set of formal stupid Presbyterians there, who by no means suit his taste, and that he is consequently still waiting for the further directing hand of Providence, to know where he is to go.” {38a} Mr. Hill was mistaken. John Leifchild did _settle_ at Kensington, and was ordained there in June, 1808, when Dr. Simpson, his tutor, delivered the charge. Dr. Simpson, it may be remarked, was a man of singular spiritual power. Many can argue, illustrate, persuade, and impress, but he could _inspire_; and the accounts given of him in this respect by his students were enthusiastic. “I received a charge from his lips at my ordination over the Church at Kensington,” says his admiring pupil, “which I can never forget. Much of the attention I afterwards met with in that official connection I ascribe to the affectionate manner in which he addressed me.” {38b}

The new pastor does not give a flattering account of the congregation which formed his maiden charge. “There was a great prejudice,” he says, “in the town against Dissenters. Many of my hearers resided at a distance or held situations in London, and some of the managers of the chapel, who were Scotchmen, were not very spiritual. Of the deacons, some resided in London, and one was very old. He also was a Scotchman, but a very good man. He had been a gardener on a nobleman’s estate, and now lived on a small income, respected for his piety and integrity. He was my best help, but died after a long and lingering illness.” “During that period I never found him otherwise than pious, resigned, and cheerful. He always had a guinea to spare for any religious object of importance, although his income did not exceed £50 per annum. One of the managers was worth at least £20,000, and was as niggardly as Duncan was generous. ‘Here, Duncan,’ exclaimed this wealthy man, on the occasion of an important collection at the chapel, ‘Here, Duncan, will you put this in the plate for me?’ handing two half-crowns. ‘I will, sir,’ replied Duncan, ‘_with my own guinea_.’ This was said with a good intent, but it hardly agreed with the Master’s precept, ‘Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.’”

Within little more than a year after the new pastor’s settlement, George the Third’s jubilee was held,—an event which of course produced excitement in Kensington, for whilst the royal old gentleman was popular all over the country, beyond what the present generation is apt to believe, he stood particularly high in the affections of the Kensingtonians, who were familiar with his face and figure, as he dashed along in his coach and four, attended by his body guard, through the Court suburb. The cry of his approach, and the distant sight of the soldiers and outriders brought people to the front, lifting their hats as he passed by. With Dissenters he was especially popular, and the Hornton Street congregation loved him all the more because he liked Saunders, the coachman, and read his tracts. So in the loyal demonstrations of October, 1809, they came prominently forward, and established on the 25th of the month a school for “children of both sexes and of all religious denominations.”

Soon after the jubilee had been celebrated, the Nonconformist part of English Christendom was thrown into excitement by Lord Sidmouth’s Bill for abridging the liberty of preaching, under pretence of rectifying an abuse. He complained that licences to preach were sought in order to evade parish duties and militia service, and urged that there should be put upon grants of licence certain restrictions which Dissenters did not approve. The deputies of the three denominations rose in determined opposition to this intermeddling with religious liberty, and petitions against it poured into the Houses of Parliament. The Kensington people joined other Nonconformists in resisting the mischievous scheme, and promised the London committee “the utmost assistance and cordial co-operation”; they also subscribed towards defraying expenses incurred by this “well meant and well timed” assertion of religious freedom. {40}