Canon Liddon and the Bishop of Peterborough stand out as unquestionably the two first preachers of the Established Church of England. There is a story of a private soldier having gone to St. Paul’s on an afternoon when Dr. Liddon was to preach. The printed paper with the hymn was handed to him, but not understanding that it was offered gratis he refused it with a shake of the head, saying: “You don’t suppose I should be here if I had got any money?” Most of the people who go to hear the eloquent Canon are different from this soldier, for they would pay—and very liberally—to get seats near the pulpit. On the afternoons of the Sundays when Dr. Liddon is in residence, the Cathedral presents an extraordinary sight with its huge nave and aisles densely thronged. So far as the preacher’s voice will reach people stand, straining eyes and ears, and fortunately Dr. Liddon’s voice resounds well under the dome; though now and then it becomes indistinct through the preacher’s speaking too fast in his excitement. Two other things occasionally mar Dr. Liddon’s delivery. Shortness of sight makes him often stoop to consult Bible or notes, and again he bows the head in a marked manner when he utters the holy name; but when he thus bends he goes on speaking, so that his words fall on the pulpit cushion and are deadened, which produces upon people who are at a little distance off, the effect of continual stoppages and gaps in the sermon. No other defects beside these, however, can be noted in orations which for beauty of language, elevation of thought and lucidity in reasoning, could not be surpassed. We have heard Dr. Liddon many times at Oxford and in London, and have observed that the impression produced by his eloquence was always the same, no matter who might be listening to him. We remember, in particular, a sermon of his on the text: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” It was absolutely magnificent to hear him prophesy the gradual progress of the world toward a higher state. Every man, from the greatest to the least, was made to feel his share of responsibility in advancing or retarding the evolution of mankind, and while the consequences of evil were pointed out as extending to incalculable lengths, there was a sublime hopefulness in the promise that the smallest good offering brought to the Creator would be multiplied by Him as the “five loaves were multiplied.”

Optimism—which is nothing but great faith—pervades Dr. Liddon’s preaching. He never leaves his hearers under the apprehension that in any struggle between the good and the bad forces of this world, the bad are going to get the best of it. He knows human nature too well, however, to exaggerate what can be done by any single human being. “The first lesson in true wisdom”—he said in one of his most recent sermons—“is the limited nature of our faculties, the reality and extent of our ignorance;” and there is a curious mixture of religious and mundane philosophy in the following remarks about the presumption of St. Peter, a few minutes before he denied his Master:

These observations made in a grand sermon, “The Lord was not in the fire,” may also be quoted:

The Bishop of Peterborough has not often been heard in London of late years, but whenever he is advertised to preach, crowds flock to hear him. He need not be compared with Liddon, for the personal appearance, style, and opinions of the two men are quite different. But whereas the Canon sometimes preaches above the understanding of dull men, the Bishop’s eloquence never soars much above earth. It is a rousing eloquence, spirited, combative, often sarcastic and always directed against some evil which is preoccupying public attention at the time being. Dr. Magee is not merely a hater, but an aggressive enemy of “humbug,” clothe itself in what garb it may. With his animated Celtic features, long upper lip, large mouth, energetic nose and shaggy eyebrows, with his gruffness and broad smile which breaks up the whole of his face into comical lines, he has all the look of a humorist. The glance all round which he takes at his congregation when he has got into the pulpit, is that of a master. His first words arrest attention, and if some unlucky man drops a book during his exordium, that man will stare hard at the pulpit and pretend to have no connection whatever with the book, lest his lordship’s eyes should suddenly be turned upon him like two fiery points of interrogation. Presently, when the Bishop warms to his work, his arms hit out from the shoulder like piston-rods wrapped in lawn; down come his large hands with great slaps on his book or cushion, and if he is preaching in a church where the beadle has not heard of his little ways and has not been careful to give the cushions a beating, enough dust will be raised to make a fine powdering for the heads of the people in the pew beneath.

Plainspoken and shrewd, discussing all questions with easy arguments, never stooping to subtleties, clear in his delivery, happy in the choice of words, he keeps his hearers bound like Ogmius, that god of eloquence among the Gauls who used to be represented with chains flowing out of his mouth. On occasions he rises to the highest flights of oratory, but never loses sight of his congregation, who have always been carried along by him through the successive degrees of his own enthusiasm. He should be heard delivering a charity sermon, for this is a duty which he discharges in no perfunctory fashion. He masters his subject thoroughly; speaks of the poor or afflicted for whom he is pleading like one who knows them; and his advice as to supplying their wants is never dictated by eccentric philanthropy, but springs from that true benevolence which has common sense for its source. He was being asked to interest himself in a carpenter’s clever young apprentice whom some good people wanted to send to college. “Let him first graduate as a good carpenter,” said the Bishop; “when he has become a skilled craftsman, so that he is proud of his trade and can fall back upon it if others fail, then will be the time to see if he is fit for anything better.”

A popular vote would probably give the position of third amongst the best preachers of the day to Archdeacon Farrar. In his own church of St. Margaret, the Archdeacon shines with a subdued light. Those who have chatted with him by his own fireside, and know him to be the most amiable, unaffected of causeurs, those who remember him at Harrow as a most genial boy-loving master, will miss nothing of the good-natured simplicity which they liked in him, if they hear him in his own church discoursing about matters that concern his parish. But in the Abbey he is different. There, his massive face settles into a hard, expressionless look; his voice, which is loud and roughish, is pitched in a monotonous key; and his manner altogether lacks animation, even when his subject imperatively demands it. To illustrate any common reflection on the vicissitudes of life, the Archdeacon drags in the destruction of Pompeii with the latest mining accident; the overthrow of Darius with that of Osman Digna, the rainbow that appeared to Noah with Mr. Norman Lockyer’s explanations of recent glorious sunsets; and all these juxtapositions come down so pat as to suggest the irreverent idea that the book which the venerable preacher was studying during the prayers must have been an annotated copy of Maunders’s “Treasury of Knowledge.”

Mr. Spurgeon stands head and shoulders above all the Non-conformist preachers. Somebody once expressed a regret that the great Baptist minister was not a member of the Establishment, to which the late Bishop of Winchester answered by quoting a portion of the tenth commandment. But Mr. Spurgeon was much more aggressive in those days than he is now; he has softened much of late years, and churchmen can go to hear him without fear of being offended. On the days when he preaches his Tabernacle holds a multitude. It is a huge hall, and to see gallery upon gallery crowded with eager faces—some six thousand—all turned toward the pastor whose voice has the power of troubling men to the depths of their hearts, is a stirring sight. Mr. Spurgeon’s is not a high-class congregation, and the preacher knows that its understanding can best be opened by metaphors and parables borrowed from the customs of the retail trade, and with similes taken from the colloquialisms of the streets. Laughter is not forbidden at the Tabernacle, and the congregation often breaks into titters, but the merriment is always directed against some piece of hypocrisy which the preacher has exposed, and it does one good to hear. He says:

These whimsicalities, always effective, constitute but the foam of Mr. Spurgeon’s oratory; the torrent which casts them up is broad, deep and of overwhelming power. Mr. Spurgeon is among preachers as Mr. Bright among parliamentary orators. All desire to criticise vanishes, every faculty is subdued into admiration, when he has concluded a sermon with a burst of his truly inspired eloquence, leaving the whole of his congregation amazed and the vast majority of its members anxious or hopeful, but in any case roused as if they had seen the heavens open. We are compelled to add that Mr. Spurgeon has in the Baptist communion no co-minister wielding a tenth of his power, and that those who, having gone to the Tabernacle to hear him, have to listen to some other man, will be disappointed in more ways than one.—Temple Bar.