Chapter 7

In what Mr. Morris himself says, however, you will find no occasion for a smile. What he says is worth hearing. In this unsettled age you will see that he has settled convictions--that his religion is a real thing--that it is that which his intellect has fed on--that by which he has squared his life--that by the truth of which he lives, and by the lamp of which he is prepared to find his way when he comes to the valley of the shadow of death. The peculiarity of Mr. Morris as a preacher seems to me to be healthy manliness. He preaches as a man to men. Those whom he addresses are most of them engaged in business, and his aim is to teach them that Christianity is as fit for the counting-house as it is for the closet--as fit for the week-day as the Sabbath--as fit for the world as it is for the church. Some men once in the pulpit seem to forget that there is such a thing as the living present. They are perpetually dwelling on the past, trying to make dry bones live. They can tell you what the old divines said. They can quote their favourite commentators. They can parody the religion of men whose religion at any rate was a real thing, but that is all. Of our times they have no idea. Of the human heart, as it beats and burns in this age of the--

"Steamship and the railway, and the thoughts that move mankind,"

they are profoundly ignorant. They are strangers in a strange land. Amongst us but not of us--of an alien race and speaking an alien tongue--with garments, it may be, unspotted by the world, but without the strength and the heart and the rich experience which contact with, and mastery over, the world alone can give. Mr. Morris is not one of this class--nor is he a painter of idle pictures, whose talk is of fields ever clothed in living green--of white garments--of pavements of sapphire and of shining thrones--nor is he a dreamy sentimentalist lisping out the attributes of the Majesty of heaven and of earth in terms of maudlin endearment, as some drivelling dotard might tell of the goodness and the virtue and the precocious cleverness of the child of his old age. Were Mr. Morris either of these, he might have a larger audience--he might be a more popular preacher--but he certainly would be a less useful one. He thinks, and he gives you something to think about as well. His own creed he has not taken upon trust, nor does he want you to do so either. He has a clear, definite conception of spiritual realities, and he aims to give you the same. Mr. Morris has not genius--but he has intellect clear and strong--perhaps a little deficient in fire, and a habit rare, but invaluable in a minister, of independent thought and action. As a preacher he ranks high in his denomination. Out of the pulpit he is almost unknown. As a platform orator I know not that he has any actual existence at all. I imagine he belongs to that growing class in all denominations who have less faith in public religious meetings every year.

As a writer, Mr. Morris has acquired some little reputation; not that he has written much, but that what little he has done has been well done. His chief performance is, 'Religion and Business, or Spiritual Life in one of its Secular Departments.' The _Spectator_--a journal not much given to theology, especially that of Dissent--was compelled to confess it was a 'series of able and thoughtful lectures on the union of Christianity and business, addressed apparently to a Nonconformist congregation. The topic is treated forcibly, without the mannerism frequent among dissenters, and the rules of life enforced are not impracticably rigid.' He has also published several sermons; 'Christ, the Spirit of Christianity,' is one. A 'Review of the Year 1850' is another; and another is the 'Roar of the Lion,' which, as it was suggested by the papal aggression, and was praised in the _British Banner_, was, I should fear, an inferior production. His last work is, 'Glimpses of Great Men; or, Biographic Thoughts of Moral Manhood,' a work intended to illustrate, by the examples of Oberlin, Hampden, Luther, Fox, Bunyan, Cromwell, Milton, Moore, De Foe, Knox, Whitfield, Foster, Irving, Christian heroism in its beauty and power. The sketches are short but practical and to the point, well worthy especially of the attention of the young, for whose benefit they were more especially designed.

The Baptist Denomination

THE REV. WILLIAM BROCK.

In the times of Robert Hall, when the talents of that rather over-rated orator gave the Baptists a lift in public estimation, and made them respectable, save in the eyes of gentlemen of very strict Church principles, the Rev. Mr. Kinghorn, a strange spare man, a keen debater, and a great Hebrew scholar, presided over a select Baptist congregation, at St. Mary's, Norwich.

Norwich at that time was very literary. William Taylor, the first Englishman to sound the German Ocean, and to return laden with its spoils of heresy and erudition, lived there; as did also Wilkin, the Editor of the best edition of that rare light of Norwich, Sir Thomas Brown, and William Youngman, a severe critic, though a writer little known beyond the city in which he so long resided. At that time Norwich drove a considerable trade in logic as well as in woollens. The whole city had a disputatious air. The weaver-boys--and William Johnson Fox, now M.P. for Oldham, was one of them--learned to dispute and define and doubt. There Harriet Martineau philosophised in petticoats, and George Borrow, at its grammar-school, fitted himself for the romance of his future life. In a city thus given to thought were required, in the pulpit, men of superior power--especially in the Dissenting pulpit; for, while the clergyman of the Establishment can say "Hear the Church!" his Dissenting brother can only say "Hear me!" and that he must say to people, the condition of whose existence is free thought.

At Norwich, Mr. Kinghorn, it was considered, was equal to his post, and held it long. He gathered around him a congregation rich and intelligent. He instilled into their minds the strictest principles of Baptism. To their communion-table none were to be admitted--no matter how pure their creed, how consistent their life, how Christian their heart--unless they had been the subject of water immersion. It seems strange that men should ever have quarrelled about such trifling matters; and yet to their heaven Mr. Kinghorn and his flock would admit none but the totally baptised. (If sectarians had their own way, what a place this world would be!) But, in time, Mr. Kinghorn obeyed the common law and died, and the church had to seek out a successor.

After several ministers had preached on probation, the choice fell upon the Rev. William Brock--then, I believe, a student fresh from the Baptist College at Stepney. The choice was a happy one. The cause prospered, the church increased, the place was enlarged, and still the pews were full. It was considered a great treat to hear Mr. Brock. Of course the female sex fluttered round the new pastor. Of course the gentlemen fluttered round them. An air of taste pervaded the chapel. It was called "the fashionable watering-place."

But this was not to last for ever: a time was coming when the pastor would be removed. Amongst the great railway contractors, one of them, it seems, was a Baptist, and an M.P. Sir M. Peto--for it is he to whom I allude--became M.P. for Norwich, and bought an estate in the neighbourhood. This naturally led to his connection with Mr. Brock, and this connection led to Mr. Brock's removal to London. In the immediate neighbourhood of the baronet's residence, Russell Square, there was no popular Baptist preacher. To go every Sunday to Devonshire Square, where the _elite_ of the Baptists did congregate, was a long and dreary ride. It were far better that the mountain should come to Mahomet than that Mahomet should go to the mountain. Sir M. Peto did not wish in vain. These great railway contractors can do what they like. In a very short while a very fashionable chapel was built in the neighbourhood of Bedford Square. It stands out in bold relief by the side of a tawdry Episcopalian chapel-of-ease and a French Protestant place of worship. As soon as the new chapel was completed, Mr. Brock was duly installed as pastor.

Mr. Brock's _debut_ in London was a decided success. The chapel, which, I should think, could contain fifteen hundred hearers, is invariably crammed. If you are late, it is with difficulty you will get standing room. The genteel part of the chapel is down stairs, and if you do get a seat, you will find it a very comfortable one indeed. In a very snug pew, at the extreme end on the right, you will see Sir M. Peto and his family. Half-way down on your left you will see the spectacles and long head of Dr. Price, Editor of the 'Eclectic Review.' Lance, the beautiful painter of fruits and flowers, also attends here, but I believe you will find him in the gallery. The people all round you look comfortable and well fed, and no one presents a more comfortable and well-fed appearance than the Rev. W. Brock himself.

There he stands, in that handsome pulpit, in that richly-ornamented chapel, with all those genteel people beneath him and around him--a stout, square-built man--a true type of Saxon energy and power--without the slightest pretensions to elegance or grace. Such men as he are not the men young ladies run after, fall in love with, get to write in their albums, buy engravings of for their boudoirs; but, nevertheless, with their strong passionate speech, and indomitable pluck, they are the men who move the world. During the war, we are told, it was the weight of the British soldiery that carried everything before it. The Frenchman might be more scientific, more agile, more skilful every way, but the moment the word was given to charge, resistance was hopeless--you might as well try to stay the progress of a torrent or an avalanche. What the Englishman is in the field, Brock is in the pulpit. You are borne down by his weight. He gives you no chance. On comes the tide, and you are swept away. You are learned--evidently the man before you has little more than the average learning picked up in a hurry, in a second-rate academic institution. You like to theorise on the beautiful and divine--the preacher before you cares nothing for your flimsy network, born of Plato and Schelling. You explain away and refine--Brock does nothing of the kind: 'It is in the Bible--it is there!' he exclaims, and that is sufficient for him. You may say it is absurd, it is opposed to reason and common-sense. You can no more move Brock than you can the Monument.

I take it, this is the secret of Brock's success: he is positive and dogmatic, and people want something positive and dogmatic. It is only one day in the week that Smithers can spare for theology; and, wearied with the cares of six working days, he requires the theology he gets on the seventh shall be positive and plain. With the monk in 'Anastasius,' he feels that life is too short to hear both sides. The British public does not like to be bothered. It likes everything settled for it, and not by it. Hence it is Macaulay's 'History of England' is so popular. Your popular preacher must be dogmatic: the more dogmatic he is, the more popular he will be. Brock's earnest dogmatism does everything for him. There is no great beauty in his style, there are no bursts of splendour in his sermons, there is no speculation in his eye; but he has a vehement tone, is plain, affectionate, practical, full of point and power.

Brock is one of the Catholic Baptists, and will admit to the table of their common Lord all who believe in Christ as their common head. He has not improved by his removal to London. He preached better sermons in Norwich than here, and he has got a slight affectation which I don't remember at Norwich. He mouths his a's as if he had, to use a common phrase, an apple-dumpling in his mouth, and occasionally painfully reminds you of a vulgar man trying to speak fine; but I believe this is unconsciously done on his part. At Norwich he was an ardent politician, advocated complete suffrage, defended the Anti-State-Church movement, and is, I believe, one of the few leading London Dissenting ministers who still fraternise with the Association now known as the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control. As a platform orator, he is very effective: he is everywhere the same--everywhere you see the same hearty dogmatism and genial sincerity. You may differ from such a man, but you cannot dislike him; you would rather have him for a friend than a foe. To his own denomination he is a tower of strength. He is the first man who has made the Baptists popular at the West-end. Till Brock came, the Baptist congregations in the neighbourhood were very meagre. Brock cannot do for his sect what Hall did, or what John Foster did. By his writing he does not appeal to the religious cultivated mind of England, nor by his graceful eloquence does he commend it to men of taste; but he speaks to the practical English mind, to the shop-keeping middle class, of whom I believe he was originally one, and to the door of whose instinct and hearts he evidently holds the key. Scarlett succeeded, we are told, because there sat listening in the jury-box twelve Mr. Scarletts. For the same reason Mr. Brock succeeds. The men he speaks to are men of like passions with himself.

THE REV. J. HOWARD HINTON, M.A.

In a very unaristocratic neighbourhood--in no more fashionable a locality than that of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate Street--preaches the Rev. J. Howard Hinton, till Mr. Brock came to London the acknowledged great man of the Baptist denomination.

Nor was this title undeserved. If the possession of a powerful mind--subtle, analytic, acute--a mind fertile in the destruction of fallacies, and in the reception and exposition of great truths, gives its possessor any weight at all, Mr. Hinton must, in any rank of life, have occupied no mean place. Still more may be said in his favour, especially in his character of a Christian minister--that his language is forcible--that his own feelings are strong--that in season and out of season it is evidently his aim to expound and declare, to the utmost of his ability, Christian truth.

Yet Mr. Hinton has a very small congregation. I should think Devonshire Square Chapel cannot contain more than five hundred hearers at the very outside--a very small proportion, it must be admitted, of the intelligent frequenters of public worship in London.

The real reason of this scant attendance, I suppose, is that Mr. Hinton has no clap-trap about him--that he has none of the fascinating airs of the popular Evangelical divine--that he has long past that time of life when young ladies take an interest in their darling minister--and that, if you wish to get any good from the preacher, you must not merely listen to him, but must use your own intellectual powers as well--an exertion far from common amongst the church and chapel goers of London. Six days in the week those who have brains are working them in this crowded city, and the seventh they wish to be a day of rest. They take the Sabbath as a pleasant opiate--as a kind of spiritual Godfrey's Cordial for the soul--that they may go back to the world with renewed energy and power. To such Mr. Hinton does not preach: with such he is no favourite. No singer of sweet songs--no player upon pleasant instruments is he. Tall, sickly with the work and study of a life, grey-haired, inelegant as all book-worms and men of thought--with the exception of Sir Bulwer Lytton--are, with a voice by no means melodious, but tremulous with emotion as it is played upon by the soul within: such is Howard Hinton. If you stay to listen--if you have sense enough to see the heart in that ungainly frame and the intellect in that capacious brain--you will hear a sermon that will repay you well. From whatever subject he is preaching on Mr. Hinton always manages to extract something new; you are really instructed by his sermons; your views become clearer and more enlarged; you understand better the Christian scheme. Mr. Hinton is more than what I have here implied. He is something more than a great reasoner or acute divine. He has a heart, and he speaks out of it to you. He excites your emotions as well as convinces your understanding. There is flame as well as light in that pulpit--flame, perhaps, all the more glowing that you did not expect to find it there. On all subjects Mr. Hinton is an independent, an original, and a fearless preacher. On some he is peculiar--on most he is far ahead of the denomination to which he belongs. This is, especially, the case with regard to the strict observance of the Sabbath. Mr. Hinton believes that it was made for man, not man for it--a fact of which the denominations which pride themselves on being Evangelical seem to have become utterly oblivious. Mr. Hinton sees in Christianity a principle at variance with the observance of set times. He sees in man's nature abundant reason why the man who does not profess to be religious should not be chained down to a form. He sees the man of genuine religion will so shape his life that every day shall be a Sabbath, and be religiously observed; and that, if he be not religious, it is worse than mockery to ask him religiously to observe a day. It is to the credit of Mr. Hinton that he has ably and faithfully preached this doctrine--a doctrine which, if it be much longer denied by the clergy of this country, threatens to be attended with most disastrous results. It is dangerous to establish an institution which the Author of Christianity never made; and if ministers choose to say that Christianity is inconsistent with fresh air--inconsistent with the preservation of physical life--inconsistent with the laws the God of nature has ordained, the certainty is that the lower classes in 'populous cities pent,' who toil from morning till night six days in the week, will do as they now practically do--reject Christianity altogether.

I have said Mr. Hinton's theology is original. A short sketch of it will soon make this clear. Thus, while he holds the doctrine of human depravity, he contends that 'No man is subject to the wrath of God, in any sense or degree, because of Adam's sin, but every man stands as free from the penal influences of his first parent's crime as though Adam had never existed, or as though he himself were the first of mankind.' Calvinism Mr. Hinton _in toto_ explodes. He says: 'Without being moved thereto by the Spirit of God, and without any other influence than the blessing which God always gives to the use of means, you are competent to alter your mind towards God by obeying the dictates of your own conscience, and employing the faculties of your own being. Think on your ways, and you will turn your feet to God's testimonies. This is what God requires you to do in order to obtain deliverance from His wrath; and, except you do it without regard to any communication of His Spirit, he leaves you to perish.' At times Mr. Hinton seems to contradict himself. But, after all, is not the theme one on which the human intellect can never be perfectly consistent and clear?

At one time Mr. Hinton was much in public life. In the Anti-Slavery agitation he took a conspicuous part. He was also connected with the Anti-State-Church Association, and is still a great advocate of voluntary education. Within the last few months several able letters have appeared, from his pen, on this subject, in the 'Daily News.' But on the platform he is not often heard, as was his wont. Mr. Hinton was settled, I believe, originally, at Reading, where he won a high reputation--I am told the Rev. Mr. Milman, the poet, who resided in Reading at the time, always spoke of Mr. Hinton as by far 'the most original-minded man among us'--and came to London when Dr. Price resigned, on account of ill health, the pastorate of the church in Devonshire Square. Mr. Hinton then became his successor.

His publications are various. The following list will show his industry at least: 'Athanasia,' in four books; 'On Immortality in 1849;' 'Letters written during a Tour in Germany in 1851;' 'Memoirs of William Knibb, the celebrated Missionary in Jamaica;' 'A History of the United States of North America;' 'Theology, or an Attempt towards a Consistent View of the Whole Counsel of God;' 'The Work of the Holy Spirit in Conversion Considered;' 'Elements of Natural History; or, an Introduction to Systematic Zoology, chiefly according to the Classification of Linnaeus.' Besides, Mr. Hinton has written pamphlets in favour of Voluntaryism in religion and education, and published sermons innumerable. In the pulpit or the press, his labours are most unremitting. He may be denied the possession of great talent, but all must admit his power of persevering toil.

The only drawback in connection with Mr. Hinton, I am told, is that his temper is rather uncontrollable--that he is rather more rugged than need be: indeed you will not attend long at Devonshire Square before you find this to be the case. It is a pity it should be so. A man should have more command over himself. Young preachers may be put out by a cough, or any other sign of indifference; but old practised hands should have long outgrown that.

SHERIDAN KNOWLES.

A playwright in the pulpit seems an anomaly. The stage and the pulpit have generally been at bitter war. Jeremy Collier had the best of it in his day, and I believe would have the best of it in ours. The stage with its paint and sawdust and glaring gas--the stage as it is--is the last place to which an earnest man would turn with hope. Originally religious, it has long ceased to be such. It has become simply an amusement--if the reproduction of all that is heartless and flippant and rotten in society be considered as such. Our English Catos don't go to the theatre at all, and when one who is not a Cato goes there, it becomes to him a sight melancholy rather than otherwise, unless he have sunk altogether into the unhappy life of that dullest of all dogs, a gay man about town. As to the stage being a school of morals, the idea is the most preposterous that ever entered the head of man. At the best, when it collects a goodly company--when it is lit up with beauty--when it resounds with merriment--when it is electrified by wit--it is a pleasant place for the consumption of an idle hour. More it is not now. More it has never been since people could read and write. More it can never be.