Some English and Scotch Preachers.

Edinburgh, August 25, 1902.

I once received a letter from the late Rev. Dr. William S. Lacy, saying that he had been trying to make use of a certain work in one of the departments of theological study, and asking if I could suggest something "less fearfully jejune," an expression which I have ever since regarded as a masterpiece of characterization. The first sermon I heard in Europe, preached in a cathedral, in 1896, by a clergyman of the English Church, reminded me of it, for it gave me an intense craving for something "less fearfully jejune." One of my ministerial companions remarked that it was about such a discourse as one would expect from a member of the junior class in Union Seminary, which I thought was rather hard on the juniors. The other five sermons that I heard from ministers of the Church of England that year, preached respectively by Canon Holland, Dean Farrar, Dr. Wace, Rev. H. R. Haweis, and Mr. Gray, of Heidelberg, were certainly not jejune, whatever else may be said of them. At Heidelberg we had the good fortune to meet Prof. Gildersleeve, of Baltimore, who is quite at home in the German university towns, and who was very kind to us in every way. He took us to the English Church there. Mr. Gray is a quiet, thoughtful, and edifying preacher—the right kind of man, I should say, for a community of that sort. Canon Holland—a man of far more freshness and vigor—preached in St. Paul's, and, though powerfully built, and with a resonant and well-managed voice, could be heard by only a small portion of the large congregation. It is said that the late Canon Liddon, the foremost preacher of the English Church in his time, broke himself down prematurely by the extraordinary exertions he made to project his voice to the limits of the great crowds which gathered in that vast building to hear him. I have an eccentric friend in New England who calls the cathedrals "Gothic devils," because they hinder the preaching of the gospel. St. Paul's is not Gothic, of course, but it is worse, perhaps, in point of acoustics than any Gothic church whatsoever.

We had the singular good fortune, in 1896, to hear Dean Farrar one evening in Westminster Abbey in a discourse which displayed, to the best possible advantage, the exceeding opulence of his rhetoric. He was trying to raise money for the restoration of Canterbury Cathedral in a manner worthy of its approaching thirteen hundredth anniversary, and his discourse was a review of the work of the English Church and the English nation during these thirteen centuries. What a combination of man and subject and place that was! The most rhetorical eminent preacher of the day, discussing with all the exuberance of his splendid diction such a subject as "England," ecclesiastical and civil, for the last thirteen hundred years, in such a place as Westminster Abbey, surrounded by the tombs and statues of England's mighty dead, the wearers of her crown, and the possessors of her genius, her soldiers, and sailors, and statesmen, her painters, and poets, and philosophers, and preachers—

The rich music, the soft light, the dim arches, the white statues, the stirring theme, the sympathetic voice, the luxuriant rhetoric—as the preacher referred, for instance, to "the sea which England has turned from an estranging barrier into an azure marriage ring for the union of the nations"—all conspired to make a unique impression. Dean Farrar's ornate style cloys on the taste sometimes when one reads his books, but when listening to his sermons it was not so. He was a very effective preacher, and, in the notable discourse to which I have just referred, he did not once overlay his thought too thickly with glittering verbiage. As for the other parts of the service I have only to say again that it is an unspeakable pity that a noble service like that of the Church of England (in which, as to its essence, all evangelical people can heartily unite) should be so commonly made a mere matter of mechanical routine, and artificial and absurd recitation.

Mr. Haweis looked like a small edition of the late Henry Ward Beecher—long hair, smooth face, large mouth, but with a peculiar, penetrating voice, and an abrupt, jerky manner. He was unconventional and racy to the last degree, and cut a good many "monkey shines" in the pulpit, which were all the more startling because of his elaborate white clerical vestments—such as resting his elbow on the desk, with his chin in his hand, for the space of five minutes, talking all the time as fast as Phillips Brooks, except for the peculiar "ah! ah!" which he interjected between sentences from time to time, as if unable to find the word he wanted—then letting himself down, and hanging over the pulpit on his armpits, with his arms in front and his body behind. His sermon didn't have anything to do with his text, so far as I could see. He was a Broad Churchman, as broad as Dean Stanley. In fact, he was like the dog of which the train man said, in answer to an inquiry as to the dog's destination, "I don't know, an' 'ee don't know, an' nobody don't know. 'Ee's et his tag."

Dr. Wace, in whom I was interested as one of the stoutest knights who have recently measured lances with the agnostics, preached a well written sermon, in a dull and lifeless way, to a handful of people at Lincoln's Inn Chapel. But we should not forget that there are many Presbyterian ministers who, as one of our secretaries of foreign missions once said, "carry a load of dogmatic theology into the pulpit, and dump it on the people, laboring all the time under the delusion that in so doing they are preaching the gospel."

Some years ago a child was asked, "Who is the Prime Minister of England?" and replied, not unnaturally, "Mr. Spurgeon." That Spurgeon has been called up still higher, but in the great Metropolitan Tabernacle, which he built in London, thousands of people still gather Sunday after Sunday to hear the gospel preached by his son and successor, the Rev. Thomas Spurgeon. Of course, he cannot bend the bow of Ulysses. But, for that matter, there is no preacher living who can. Still he is a clear, earnest, effective preacher. We were at the opposite end of the church from him, but heard every word distinctly.

Another dissenting minister, who continues to draw great crowds in London, is Dr. Joseph Parker, and he is probably the ablest preacher in the city, though on the day I first heard him, in 1896, he was so indistinct in his utterances at times that I found it almost impossible to follow him. There was an air of self-importance about him which I trust was only apparent. We heard him again the other day, when he occupied his pulpit for the first time after a long illness. He was quite feeble, and there were only occasional brief flashes of the volcanic fires which used to flame and thunder through his preaching.

I heard the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes also, the leading Methodist preacher of London, in a faithful and striking exposition of Haggai, an excellent expository sermon, just what I did not expect from him, as he has at times been charged with sensationalism.

The Moravians, as is well known, lead the whole Christian world in zeal and liberality in the cause of Foreign Missions. At the Moravian chapel in Fetter Lane we heard a clear and helpful sermon from Mr. Waugh, the minister in charge. After the service he kindly showed us all through the Mission House, the centre of that unique propaganda which, with comparatively small resources, has given the pure gospel to so many remote and needy portions of the globe, and set the pace for all the churches in the work of carrying out the Great Commission. This chapel has some associations with John Wesley; and, remembering the obligations under which he lay to these earnest, evangelical Christians of the Unitas Fratrum, and the part since played by the great Methodist Church in the evangelization of the world, we felt that the Moravian Mission House was an appropriate place in which to recall the character and services of that rightly venerated epoch-maker and man of God who said, "My parish is the world."

I heard a number of rich sermons from Dr. John Hunter, Gipsy Smith, Dr. Thornton, Rev. R. J. Campbell, and Mr. Connell. But the strongest, most spiritual and most comforting sermon I heard in London was preached by the Rev. J. Monro Gibson, D. D., pastor of St. John's Wood Presbyterian Church. That also was an expository sermon, as the best preaching so often is.

The only other man of mark whom I heard in the metropolis was General Booth, organizer, leader, and absolute monarch of the Salvation Army, an old man of spare frame, with shaggy, grisled hair and beard. His voice is not a good one, but he commands perfect attention, and his sermon, which was evidently well thought out, and which, if I remember aright, had but one undignified remark in it, showed the true nature of sin, and laid hold of the conscience with power. When we entered Exeter Hall, which was already nearly full of people, we saw on the platform a band of sixty musicians, in scarlet uniforms, leading the multitude with violins, cornets and drums, in a hymn sung lustily to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne." When the General came on the platform a few minutes later, they received him with a cheer. His sermon was followed by the usual uproarious proceedings. With these, of course, I have no sympathy, nor with the absolute despotism of General Booth, but the Salvation Army has done a vast deal of good among "the submerged tenth." The census taken this year by the London News shows, however, that the Salvation Army is on the decline in that city, and the reason assigned for it is the lack of a body of trained preachers.

But Scotland is the land of preachers. The greatest Scotchman that ever lived was a preacher, and to him, John Knox, Scotland is more indebted for what she is to-day than to any other man.

"The Scotch, it is well known, are more remarkable for the exercise of their intellectual powers than for the keenness of their feelings; they are, therefore, more moved by logic than by rhetoric, and more attracted by acute and argumentative reasoning on doctrinal points than influenced by the enthusiastic appeals to the heart and to the passions, by which the popular preachers in other countries win the favor of their hearers." So wrote Sir Walter Scott, and no doubt there is truth in it; but we must not underestimate the quickness and depth of their feelings. It was an apparently hard-natured Scotchman of our own day who wrote the following more balanced estimate, "It's a God's mercy I was born a Scotchman, for I do not see how I could ever have been contented to be anything else. The little, plucky, dour nation, set in her own ways, and getting them, too, level-headed and shrewd, and yet so lovingly weak, so fond, so led away by song or story, so easily touched to fine issues, so real, so true." Carlyle said Burns was the Æolian harp of nature against which the rude winds of adversity blew, only to be transmuted in their passage into heavenly music. But no people without tender and strong feelings could have produced or appreciated such a poet as Burns. (By the way, I was astonished to discover, in 1896, that there were more than thirty thousand visitors annually to the birthplace of Burns, as against only twenty thousand to the birthplace of Shakespeare.) Moreover, no people without the right kind of feeling, and plenty of it—aye, and of enthusiasm, too—could have accomplished what Scotland has done. With a rigorous climate and a small country, much of it wild and untillable mountain and moor, and with fewer people in the whole country than in the city of London, Scotland—

and to-day she wields an influence in the world out of all proportion to her population and resources. In fact, the Scotch are in many respects the greatest people of modern times.

But I have wandered from my subject, which was Scotch preaching and preachers. I heard four eminent men in Edinburgh, on my first visit there six years ago—Prof. A. B. Davidson, Prof. Marcus Dods, Dr. Alexander Whyte, and Dr. George Matheson. Prof. Davidson's voice, manner and style were much better adapted to a small class-room, with its detailed linguistic and exegetical methods, than to popular preaching in a large church. But if there was some disappointment in regard to the preaching of the learned and famous author of the Hebrew grammars, and the father of the whole liberal, not to say radical, movement in Biblical Criticism, which has swept all Scotland into its vortex, there was none in regard to that of his brilliant colleague, Dr. Dods. Many of my readers are familiar with the late Dr. Henry C. Alexander's high estimate of Dr. Dods' work on New Testament Introduction, which he used as a textbook in Union Seminary, and with the general excellence of his luminous and suggestive commentaries, though some of them are unfortunately marred by the obtrusion of views which are not altogether satisfactory. But probably few readers, even of his best books, would have expected from him a sermon so sane, and sound, and spiritual as that which I heard from him. It was fully written, and very quietly read, with absolutely no action, and with a modest and even diffident manner, but before he had uttered half a dozen sentences, the originality and power of the thought, and the freshness and vigor of the language, laid the hearer under the spell of a master, and, as he proceeded, first with keen analysis and irrefutable argument, and then with those considerations which can never be adduced save by a man who has had experience, who knows sin, and struggle, and salvation, your sense of the preacher's power was succeeded, or rather accompanied, by a sense of his sympathy, and you were ready to accompany him to his high practical conclusion, and left the church assured that he had, under God, given you a real and abiding spiritual uplift.

The only other man who impressed me deeply, on my former visit to Edinburgh, was Dr. Matheson. He is antipodal to Prof. Dods in his style of preaching. He is blind, as you know, and was led in from the vestry to the pulpit, a large man, with gray hair and beard, and a ruddy and radiant face, despite his sightless eyes, as though he walked continually in the white vision of the Invisible. His short, fervent, pointed prayers seemed to put every earnest hearer into sensible communion with the Father of our spirits, and his sermon on the great disappointments and mysteries of life was most satisfying and comforting, and was delivered with rare animation and unction, the rich fancy and glowing language justifying the remark made to me afterwards by an eminent Scotchman, that Matheson was a poet as well as a preacher. I must add that some of my friends who went to hear him afterwards, on the ground of my enthusiastic recommendation, were disappointed, saying that his exegesis was illegitimate, and that he treated his text after the manner of Origen and the Allegorizers. But we must remember that even Spurgeon was often guilty of that. This does not excuse it, of course. It only shows that a man may sometimes do it, and yet be a great preacher.

Dr. Whyte, of Free St. George's, is reckoned by many the ablest preacher in Edinburgh. I was in his church on my former visit to Scotland, when he preached a deeply moving sermon in connection with a communion service. Unfortunately for us, he was absent from the city during the whole of our stay this time. But his brilliant young associate, the Rev. Hugh Black, leaves one no ground for complaint as to the quality of the preaching in Edinburgh in the summer. He is a very highly cultivated man, and an original and suggestive preacher, but with no special advantages of manner. He is slender, pallid, nervous, with a rather pleasing voice in its lower tones, but of limited range, breaking if he attempts to raise it. This shuts him out from some of the best oratorical effects. But what he lacks in voice and manner he makes up in richness of matter, and finish of style. He is well known as the author of Friendship and Culture and Restraint, two books which have had a wide circulation in America. We have made his church our regular place of worship, and have been drawn away from it only occasionally by the desire to hear such well-known veterans as Dr. McGregor, of St. Cuthbert's Established Church, and Dr. Hood Wilson, the retiring pastor of Barclay Free Church. This last, by the way, is a curious, but rather striking stone building, with the most hideous interior I have ever seen. It is a night-mare of bad taste.

We have heard at other times Prof. Orr, author of various works of value in the department of Dogmatic Theology, the Rev. P. Carnegie Simpson, of Glasgow, author of The Fact of Christ, and the Rev. Thomas Burns, F. R. S. E., author of a unique and sumptuous work on Old Scottish Communion Plate.

To Mr. Burns I am indebted for an introduction to Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, and for a delightful hour at tea with the famous archÆologist and author in his house at Edinburgh, where he spends most of the summer. He generally lives on a houseboat on the Nile in winter, and the weather in Edinburgh this summer has been such as to make him long for that houseboat, and that soft Egyptian climate more than ever. When we reached the city a month ago, we found much the same kind of weather that greeted Mary Queen of Scots on her return from France, and of which John Knox wrote as follows, "The very face of heaven did manifestlie speak what comfort was brought to this country with hir—to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety—for in the memorie of man never was seen more dolorous face of the heavens than was at her arryvall ... the myst was so thick that skairse micht onie man espy another; and the sun was not seyn to shyne two days befoir nor two days after." We had mists a plenty, but it was the cold weather and the rain that interfered most with our plans. It actually did rain nearly every day, and often four or five times a day, not mere showers, but drenching rains. In fact, the kind of weather we had nearly all the time, not only in Edinburgh, but throughout Scotland and England, gave us a keen appreciation of the following story of the London weather which we find in the Manchester Guardian:

"The scene was a Strand omnibus. A leaden sky was overhead, the rain poured down uncompromisingly, mud was underfoot. A red-capped Parsee, who had been sitting near the dripping driver, got down as the conductor came up. 'What sort o' chap is that,' asked the driver. 'Don't yer know that,' answered the conductor. 'Why, that's one o' them Indians that worship the sun!' 'Worships the sun?' said the shivering driver. 'I suppose 'e's come over 'ere to 'ave a rest!'

"This recalls the reply given on one occasion by an Eastern potentate to Queen Victoria, who asked him whether his people did not worship the sun. 'Yes, your Majesty,' said the Oriental, 'and if you saw him you would worship him also.'"

However, if I begin to write about Scotch weather, I shall never get back to my proper subject, which is Scotch preaching.