I doubt whether the cynical old poet who wrote “The Pleasures of Memory,” would have included in that category the recollections of the famous preachers whom he might have heard. Yet possibly he might, as his earliest predilections, we were told, were for the pulpit, and all have, more or less, of the parsonic element in them. The love to lecture, the desire to make their poor ignorant friends as sensible as themselves, the innate feeling that one is a light and guide in a wildering maze exist more or less in us all. “Did you ever hear me preach?” said Coleridge one day to Lamb. “Did I ever hear you do anything else?” was the reply. And now, when we have got an awakened Christianity and a forward ministry, it is just as well to run over the list of our old popular ministers to remind the present generation that great men have filled the London pulpits and quickened the London conscience and aroused the London intellect before ever it was born. It is the more necessary to do this as the fact is that no one has so short-lived a popularity as the orator: whether in Exeter Hall, whether on the stage, whether in the pulpit, what comes in at one ear soon goes out at the other. The memory of a great preacher dies as soon as his breath leaves the body—often before. The pulpit of to-day differs in one respect in toto from the past. The preacher who would succeed now must remember that this is the age of advertisement, that if he has a talent he must not wrap it in a napkin. He must write letters to newspapers; he must say odd things that make men talk about him; he must manage to be the subject of newspaper gossip; he must cling to the skirts of some public agitation—in fact, his light must be seen and his voice heard everywhere.

It was not so in the times when, half a century ago, I had more to do with the London pulpit than I have now. Some of the men in it were giants. One was Melville, who preached somewhere over the water—Camberwell way. He was a High Churchman; he had a grand scorn of the conventicle. I should say he was a Tory of the Tories—a man who would be impossible in a London suburban church now; but what a crowd he drew to hear him, as he, like a mighty, rushing wind, swept over the heads of an audience who seemed to hang upon his lips! He was tall, dark, with a magnificent bass voice that caused every sentence he read—for he read, and rapidly—to vibrate from the pulpit to the furthest corner of the church. His style was that of the late Dr. Chalmers, always sweeping to a climax, which, when reached and mastered, was a relief to all. I think he was made Canon of St. Paul’s. He also was the Golden Lecturer somewhere near the Bank—an appropriate locality. His sermons were highly finished—I am told he laboured at them all the week. He was a preacher—nothing less, nothing more.

Next there rises before me the vision of Howard Hinton—a big, cadaverous, grey-haired man, preaching in a small chapel on the site in Shoreditch now occupied by the Great Eastern Railway. The congregation was not large, but it was very select; I fancy it represented the Élite of the London Baptists. He was a very fascinating preacher by reason of his great subtlety of thought, and at times he was terribly impressive, as his big, burly frame trembled with emotion, and his choked-up utterance intimated with what agony he had sought to deliver his soul from blood-guiltiness, as, wailing and weeping, he anticipated the awful doom of the impenitent. I must own I got wearied of his metaphysical subtleties, which seemed to promise so much, and whose conclusions were so lame and impotent, ever disappointing; and it often seemed to me that his celebrated son—the late James Hinton—too soon removed, as it seemed to many of us—inherited not a little of his father’s ingenuity in this respect. But he was a grand man; you felt it in his presence, and still more as you walked home thinking of what he said.

Amongst the Independents—as they were termed—the leading men were the Brothers Clayton: one preaching at the Poultry, the other in Walworth, to large congregations—fine portly men, and able in their way, though it was an old-fashioned one. Nor must Dr. Bengo Collyer be forgotten—a fat, oily man of God, as Robert Hall called him, who had at one time great popularity, and whom the Duke of Kent had been to hear preach.

It is a curious sign of the times—the contrast between what exists now and what existed then—as regards theological speculation. We are now sublimely indifferent whether a preacher is orthodox or the reverse, whatever that may mean, so long as we feel his utterances are helpful in the way of Christian work and life. It was not so fifty years ago. Ministers scanned their brethren in the ministry severely, and the deacon, with his Matthew Henry and Doddridge, sat grimly in his pew, eager to note the deflection of the preacher in the pulpit from the strait and narrow line of orthodoxy, and to glow with unholy zeal as he found him missing his footing on the tight-rope. In London there was such a man in the shape of Thomas Binney, who had come from the Isle of Wight to the King’s Weigh House Chapel, now swept away by the underground railway just opposite the Monument. Binney was a king among men, standing head and shoulders above his fellows. All that was intelligent in Dissenting London, among the young men especially, heard him gladly. Yet all over the land there were soulless deacons and crabbed old parsons, whose testimony no man regarded, who said Binney was not orthodox. He lived long enough to trample that charge down. He lived to see the new era when men, sick of orthodoxy, hailed any utterance from whatever quarter, so that it were God-fearing and sincere. As you listened to Binney struggling to evolve his message out of his inner consciousness, you felt that you stood in the presence of a man who dwelt in the Divine presence, to whom God had revealed Himself, whose eye could detect the sham, and whose hot indignation was terrible to listen to.

Let me chronicle a few more names. Dr. Andrew Reed, whose occasional sermons at other places—I never heard him at Wycliffe Chapel—were most effective; Morris of Fetter Lane, who preached to a crowded audience with what seemed to me at the time a slight touch of German mysticism; Stratten, far away in Paddington, whom rich people loved to listen to, as he was supposed to be a man of means himself; and old Leifchild at Craven Chapel, filled to overflowing with a crowd who knew, however the dear old man might prose in the opening of his sermon, he would go off with a bang at the end. But I may not omit two Churchmen who, if they had not Melville’s power, had an equal popularity. One was the Hon. and Rev. Baptist Noel, who preached in a church, long since pulled down, in Bedford-row. He was tall, gentlemanly, silver-tongued, and perfectly orthodox. His people worshipped him, for was he not the son of a lord? His influence in London was immense, but he left the Church for conscientious reasons, and became a Baptist minister. That was a blow to his popularity which he never got over, though he lived to a grand old age. Another popular Evangelical preacher was Dale, who preached at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street. He was a poet and more or less of a literary man; but he had more worldly wisdom than Baptist Noel. Dale was a Professor of Literature at University College; but it was understood that University College, with its liberal institutions, with its Dissenters and Jews, was no place for a Churchman who wished to rise. Dale saw this, gave up his professorship in Gower Street, and reaped a rich reward.

London was badly off for illuminati fifty years ago. The only pulpit effectually filled was that of South Place, Finsbury, where W. Johnson Fox, the celebrated orator and critic, lectured. He had been trained to be an orthodox divine at Homerton. One day he said to me, “The students always get very orthodox as they get to the end of their collegiate career, and are preparing to settle, as the phrase is.” Fox, it seems, was the exception that proves the rule. He was eloquent and attractive as preacher and lecturer. Dickens and Macready and Foster were, I believe, among his hearers. At any rate, he had a large following, and died an M.P. Lectures on all things sacred and profane were unknown in London fifty years ago. I once heard Robert Dale Owen somewhere at the back of Tottenham Court Road Chapel, but he was a weariness of the flesh, and I never went near him again. The provinces occasionally sent us popular orators; one was Raffles, of Liverpool, a man who looked as if the world had used him well. I well remember how he dealt in such alliteration as “the dewdrop glittering in the glen.” Then there was Parsons of York, with his amazing rhetoric, all whispered with a thrill that went to every heart, as he preached in Surrey Chapel, where also I heard Jay of Bath, who, however, left on me no impression other than he was a wonderful old man for his years. Sherman, the regular preacher there, was a great favourite with the ladies—almost as much as Dr. Cumming, a dark, scholarly-looking man, who held forth in a court just opposite Drury Lane Theatre, and whose prophetic utterances obtained for him a popularity he would otherwise have sought in vain. It makes one feel old to write of these good men who have long since passed away, not, however, unregretted, or without failing to leave behind them

Footprints on the sands of Time.

When I first became familiar with the Dissenting world of London the most bustling man in it was the Rev. Dr. John Campbell, who preached in what was then a most melancholy pile of buildings known as the Tottenham Court Road Chapel, the pulpit of which had been at one time occupied by the celebrated George Whitfield. In or about 1831 Dr. Campbell became the minister, and at the same time found leisure to write in The Patriot newspaper; to fight and beat the trustees of the Tottenham Court Road, who had allowed the affairs of the chapel to get into a most disorderly state; to make speeches at public meetings; to write in a monthly that has long ceased to exist—The Eclectic Review—a review to which I had occasionally the honour of contributing when it was edited by Dr. Price;—and to publish a good many books which had a fair sale in his day. Dr. Campbell had also much to do with the abolition of the Bible printing monopoly—a movement originated by Dr. Adam Thomson, of Coldstream, powerfully supported by one of my earliest friends, Mr. John Childs, a spirited and successful printer at Bungay, whose one-volume editions of standard authors, such as Bacon’s works, Milton’s, and Gibbon’s “Decline and Pall of the Roman Empire,” are still to be seen on the shelves of second-hand booksellers. The Queen’s Printer affected to believe that the Bible could not be supplied to the public with equal efficiency or cheapness on any other system than that which gave him the monopoly of printing, but as it was proved before a Committee of the House of Commons that the Book could be printed at much less cost and in every way equal to the copies then in existence, the monopoly was destroyed.

In 1830 there came into existence the Congregational Union of England and Wales, of which Dr. Campbell became one of the leading men. He was at the same time editor of The Christian Witness and The Christian’s Penny Magazine—the organs of the Union—both of which at that time secured what was then considered a very enormous sale. When in 1835 Mr. Nasmith came to London to establish his City Mission Dr. Campbell was one of his earliest supporters and friends. The next great work which he took in hand was the establishment of The British Banner, a religious paper for the masses, in answer to an appeal made to him by the committee of The Patriot newspaper. The first number of the new journal appeared in 1848, and gained a circulation hitherto unknown in a weekly paper, and this in time was succeeded by The British Standard. As time passed on Dr. Campbell became less popular. He had rather too keen a scent for what was termed neology. In one case his zeal involved him in a libel suit and the verdict was for the plaintiff, who was awarded by the jury forty shillings damages instead of the £5,000 he had claimed. In the Rivulet Controversy, as it was termed, Dr. Campbell was not quite so successful. Mr. Lynch was a poet, and preached, as his health was bad, to a small but select congregation in the Hampstead Road. He published a volume of refined and thoughtful poetry which has many admirers to this day. The late Mr. James Grant—a Scotch baker who had taken to literature and written several remarkably trashy books, the most popular of which was “Random Recollections of the House of Commons,”—at that time editor of the publican’s paper, The Morning Advertiser, in his paper described the work of Mr. Lynch as calculated to inspire pain and sadness in the minds of all who knew what real religion was. Against this view a powerful protest was made by many leading men of the body to which Mr. Lynch belonged. At this stage of the controversy Dr. Campbell struck in by publishing letters addressed to the principal professors of the Independent and Baptist colleges of England, showing that the hymns of Mr. Lynch were very defective as regards Evangelical truth—containing less of it than the hymns ordinarily sung by the Unitarians. The excitement in Dissenting circles was intense. The celebrated Thomas Binney, of the King’s Weigh House Chapel, took part with Mr. Lynch and complained of Dr. Campbell in the ensuing meetings of the Congregational Union, and so strong was the feeling on the subject that a large party was formed to request the Congregational Union formally to sever their official connexion with Dr. Campbell—a matter not quite so easy as had been anticipated. One result, however, was that Dr. Campbell gave up the editing of The British Banner and established The British Standard to take its place, in which the warfare against what is called Neology was carried on with accelerated zeal. In 1867 the Doctor’s laborious career came to an end happily in comfort and at peace with all. His biographers assure the reader that Dr. Campbell’s works will last till the final conflagration of the world. Alas! no one reads them now.

To come to later times, of course my most vivid recollections are those connected with the late Mr. Spurgeon. In that region of the metropolis known as “over the water” the Baptists flourish as they do nowhere else, and some of their chapels have an interesting history. Amongst many of them rather what is called high doctrine is tolerated—not to say admired. They are the elect of God, preordained before the world was formed to enjoy an existence of beatific rapture, that shall continue when the world has passed away. Of one of the most popular preachers in that locality, the late Jemmy Wells, it is said that when told that one of his hearers had fallen out of a cart and broken his leg his reply was, “Oh, what a blessed thing it is he can’t fall out of the Covenant.” When one of the chapels in that locality was at low-water mark, there came to it the Rev. Charles Haddon Spurgeon—then little more than a boy, but already famous in East Anglia as a boy preacher—and never had a preacher a more successful career. There was no place in London that was large enough to contain the audiences that flocked to hear him. I first heard him at the Surrey Music Hall, and it was wonderful to see what hordes came there of saints and sinners, lords and ladies, City magnates and county squires, Anonymas from St. John’s Wood, Lady Clara Vere de Veres from Belgravia. It was the fashion to go there on a Sunday morning, just as it was the fashion a generation previously to rush to Hatton Garden to hear Edward Irving. The hall was handsome and light and airy, free from the somewhat oppressive air of Cave Adullam and Little Bethel, and there upon the platform which did duty for a pulpit stood a young man short of stature, broadly built, of a genial though not handsome countenance, with a big head and a voice it was a treat to listen to and audible in every part of that enormous building. What was the secret of his success? He was bold, he was original, he was humorous, and he was in earnest. He said things to make his hearers laugh, and what he said or did was magnified by rumour. Old stories of Billy Dawson and Rowland Hill were placed to Mr. Spurgeon’s credit. The caricaturists made him their butt. There was no picture more commonly displayed at that time than one entitled “Brimstone and Treacle”—the former representing Mr. Spurgeon, the latter Mr. Bellew, then a star of the first order in many an Episcopalian pulpit. Bellew soon ran through his ephemeral popularity—that of Mr. Spurgeon grew and strengthened day by day. Do you, like the late Sir James Graham, want to know the reason why? The answer is soon given. “I am going into the ministry,” said a youthful student to an old divine. “Ah, but, my dear friend, is the ministry in you?” Well, the ministry was in Mr. Spurgeon as it rarely is in any man; hence his unparalleled success.

One little anecdote will illustrate this. I have a friend whose father had a large business in the ancient city of Colchester. Mr. Spurgeon’s father was at one time in his employ. Naturally, he said a good deal of the preaching talent of his gifted son, and of the intention beginning to be entertained in the family circle of making a minister of him. The employer in question was a Churchman, but he himself offered to help Mr. Spurgeon in securing for his son the benefits of a collegiate education. The son’s reply was characteristic. He declined the offered aid, adding the remark that “ministers were made not in colleges but in heaven.”

In connection with Mr. Spurgeon’s scholastic career let me knock a little fiction on the head. There is a house in Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, famous now as the birthplace of Mrs. Garrett Anderson and her gifted sisters, which at one time was a school kept by a Mr. Swindell, and they told me at Aldeburgh this last summer that Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil there. This is not so. It is true Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil at Mr. Swindell’s, but it was at Newmarket, to which the latter had moved from Aldeburgh.

One or two Spurgeon anecdotes which have not yet appeared in print may be acceptable. At Hastings there are, or were, many High Church curates. A few years ago one of them did a very sensible thing. He had a holiday; he was in town and he went to the Tabernacle, getting a seat exactly under Mr. Spurgeon’s nose, as it were. It seems that during the week Mr. Spurgeon had been attending a High Church service, of which he gave in the pulpit a somewhat ludicrous account, suddenly finishing by giving a sort of snort, and exclaiming, “Methinks I smell ’em now,” much to the delight of the curate sitting underneath. Referring to Mr. Spurgeon’s nose, I am told he had a great admiration of that of his brother, a much more aristocratic-looking article that his own. “Jem,” he is reported to have said on one occasion, “I wish I had got your nose.” “Do you?” was the reply; “I wish I had got your cheek.” Let me give another story. On one occasion an artist wanted to make a sketch of Mr. Spurgeon for publishing. “What are you going to charge?” asked the preacher, as the artist appeared before him. “You must not make the price more than twopence; the public will give that for me—not a penny more. A photographer published a portrait of me at eighteenpence, and no one bought it.” This conversation took place on the occasion of a week-night service. At the close of the service the artist came up into the vestry to show his sketch. “Yes,” said Mr. Spurgeon, “it is all very well, but I should like to hear what others say about it. They say women and fools are the best judges of this kind of thing,” and accordingly the likeness was referred to a friend who happened to come into the room in the nick of time.

It always seemed to me the great characteristic of Mr. Spurgeon was good-natured jollity. He was as full of fun as a boy. I saw him once before getting into a wagonette pitch all the rugs on his brother’s head, who naturally returned the compliment—much to the amusement of the spectators. On one occasion I happened to be in the Tabernacle when the Baptist Union dined there, as it always did at the time of the Baptist anniversaries. I suppose there would be many hundreds present who enjoyed the ample repast and the accompanying claret and sherry. After the dinner was over Mr. Spurgeon came up to where I was sitting and, laying his hand on my shoulder and pointing to the long rows of empty bottles left standing on the table, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “Teetotalism does not seem to flourish among the brethren, does it?” And he was as kind as he was cheerful. Once and once only I had to write to him. He returned me a reply addressed to me in my proper name, and then—as I was writing weekly articles under a nom de plume in a highly popular journal—added, in a postscript, “Kind regards to —” (mentioning my nom de plume). The anecdote is trivial, but it shows how genial and kind-hearted he was.

And to the last what crowds attended his ministry at the Tabernacle! One Saturday I went to dine with a friend living on Clapham Common. Going back to town early in the morning I got into an omnibus, and was amused by hearing the conductor exclaim, “Any more for the Tabernacle!” “Now, then, for the Tabernacle!” “This way for the Tabernacle!” and, sure enough, I found all my fellow-passengers got out when we arrived at the Tabernacle; nor was the ’bus in which I was riding the only one thus utilised. There was no end of omnibuses from all quarters drawing up at the entrance. According to the latest utterance of Mr. Herbert Beerbohm Tree, in this age of ours faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, love is regarded as but a spasm of the nervous system, life itself as the refrain of a music-hall song. At the Tabernacle the pastor and people were of a very different way of thinking.

And Mr. Spurgeon was no windbag—vox et prÆterea nihil; no darling pet of old women whose Christianity was flabby as an oyster. He was an incessant worker, and taught his people to work as well in his enormous church. Such was the orderly arrangement that, as he said, if one of his people were to get tipsy, he should know it before the week was out. He never seemed to lose a moment. “Whenever I have been permitted,” he wrote on one occasion, “sufficient respite from my ministerial duties to enjoy a lengthened tour or even a short excursion, I have been in the habit of carrying with me a small note-book, in which I have jotted down any illustrations that occurred to me on the way. The note-book has been useful in my travels as a mental purse.” Yet the note-book was not intrusive. A friend of mine took Mr. Spurgeon in his steam yacht up the Highlands. Mr. Spurgeon was like a boy out of school—all the while naming the mountains after his friends.

It is also to be noted how the public opinion altered with regard to Mr. Spurgeon. When he came first to London aged ministers and grey-haired deacons shook their heads. What could they think of a young minister who could stop in the middle of his sermon, and say, “Please shut that window down, there is a draught. I like a draught of porter, but not that kind of draught”? It was terrible! What next? was asked in fear and trepidation. These things were, I believe, often said on purpose, and they answered their purpose. “Fire low,” said a general to his men on one occasion. “Fire low,” said old Jay, of Bath, as he was preaching to a class of students. Mr. Spurgeon fired low. It is astonishing how that kind of preaching tells. I was travelling in Essex last summer, and in the train were two old men, one of whom lived in Kelvedon, where Mr. Spurgeon was born, who had sent the Baptist preacher some fruit from Kelvedon, which was, as he expected, thankfully received. “Did you see what Mr. Spurgeon says in this week’s sermon?” said he to the other. “No.” “Why, he said the devil said to him the other day, ‘Mr. Spurgeon, you have got a good many faults,’ and I said to the devil, ‘So have you,’” and then the old saints burst out laughing as if the repartee was as brilliant as it seemed to me the reverse; but I leave censure to the censorious. In his early youth, Sadi, the great Persian classic, tells us, he was over much religious, and found fault with the company sleeping while he sat in attendance on his father with the Koran in his lap, never closing his eyes all night. “Oh, emanation of your father,” replied the old man, “you had better also have slept than that you should thus calumniate the failings of mankind.”