Miscellaneous.

Aristophanes, were he alive now, I imagine, instead of aiming his wit at the philosophers, would have a turn with the theologians. Theirs is the real cloud-land. In spite of the inherent conservatism of human nature in theology, you cannot keep up the old landmarks. Nay, such is the perverseness of human nature, that the more you try to do so the less chance there seems of your succeeding. To the reign of the Saints succeeded the madness and the profligacy of the Restoration. Lord Bolingbroke always said it was Dr. Manton’s Commentary on the 119th Psalm, which his mother, much against his inclination, compelled him to read, which made an infidel of him. Holyoake, the leader of the Secularists, was brought up in the Sunday School at Birmingham. Thomas Cooper, theauthor of the ‘Purgatory of Suicides,’ was a Methodist local preacher. William Johnson Fox, who has done as much as any man to destroy orthodoxy in persons of intelligence and position in society, was at one time pastor of an Independent church. Sterling was long a clergyman of the Church of England, and poor Blanco White traversed every point of the religious compass, earnestly seeking rest, and unfortunately finding none.

Is there, then, no religious truth? Is man ever to be surrounded by doubt—to be ever void of a living faith—from age to age to turn an anxious eye above, and there see

‘no God, no heaven, in the void world—The wide, deep, lampless, grey, unpeopled world’?

Is it all dark cloud-land when we have done with this fever we call life? Religion is man’s attempt to answer this question. A church is an attempt to answer it in a certain way. The true church is the church which gives the true answer. But who is to decide? ‘The Catholic and Apostolic Church,’ says one; ‘the Bible,’ says another. But, then, who is to decide as to which is the Catholic and Apostolic Church, or as towhat the Bible says? In all these cases the final appeal must be made to the intellect of man. But man’s intellect grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength. I am not to-day, either in body or in mind, what I was yesterday. To-morrow I shall be a different man again. Changing myself, how can I subscribe an unchanging creed? ‘Excelsior’ is my motto. I believe that

‘through the ages one increasing purpose runs,And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns.’

And it is vain, therefore, that you seek to tie me to a creed, or to stereotype what should be a growing faith. My aim is loyalty to my conscience and God. Where they lead I follow.

In some such way, I imagine, has Mr. Forster, late pastor of the Congregational chapel, Kentish Town, reasoned. Originally a minister in Jersey, he was invited to the metropolis about twelve years since. At that time he was an ardent Calvinist. The investigation which led him to abandon unconditional election, the final perseverance of the saints, and the special influence of the Holy Spirit, shattered the whole system of opinions in which he had been educated, andwhich he had hitherto faithfully upheld. Other changes followed. His views of the Trinity were modified. The consequence was, when a new chapel was built for him, in Kentish Town, it was agreed that all definition of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, should be avoided, and that the clause, ‘This place is erected for the worship of God, as the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Spirit,’ should be placed at the head of the deed.

After further investigation, Mr. Forster found that he could not even subscribe to that—that he had ceased to regard Christ as a mediator at all—and, consequently, he resigned the charge of a church, which, owing to his labours, had become flourishing and great. Now his banner bears the motto of ‘Free Inquiry.’ He preaches in a handsome chapel in Camden Town. His church calls itself a Free Church. It promises to be a successful one. It is well attended, though it has much to contend against. The orthodox will not forgive Mr. Forster his desertion of their camp; and the Unitarians, who, in their way, are often as narrow-minded and dogmatic as the most orthodox themselves, cannot exactly hold out the right hand of fellowship toa man who professes to be free—who claims to know no master—whose appeal is to the law and to the testimony, rather than to the doctrines and opinions of men.

Thus Mr. Forster gravitates, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth. Yet his condition is by no means a rare one. That a large number sympathise with him, the attendance at his chapel is convincing proof. Coming out from the orthodox, he bears testimony against them. In his farewell sermon to his Kentish Town congregation he says: ‘How little have the contents of the Bible to do with men’s personal belief! How seldom are men taught to rely on their own powers in the investigation of the truth! How few are the Christians who sit at the feet of Jesus, or frequent the apostolic college! If Dissenters have renounced the infallibility of the Pope, have they not bowed their necks to a yoke almost as heavy and galling? If they have given up the Thirty-nine Articles, have they on that account conceded to each other the right of judging all things for themselves? If the Trentine pandects are not retained as the law of their religious faith and life, are they not bound by the Institutesof Calvin, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Assembly’s Catechism, the Minutes of Conference, and the Sermons of Wesley—the creeds of chapel trust-deeds, the Congregational Union Confession of Faith, or by the writings of Howe, Watts, Doddridge, Gill, Fuller, Hall, Priestly, Watson, Channing, and of other great men, who ought to be dear to their hearts, but not lords of their faith? Are we not all of us more or less guilty of this servility? Have we not yet to learn that there is novia media—no middle way between Reason and Rome? There is, unhappily, floating over us an invisible and unexpressed opinion, to which all, in the main, must agree. It hovers over the pulpit and the pew; over the church and congregation; over the professor’s chair and the students’ form; over the family and the school; over the Bible and the Commentary. All thought, all sentiment, all investigation, all conclusions, all teachings, are controlled by it. It is this which checks free inquiry; shuts the mouths of those who have convictions which fit not the Procrustes’ bed, according to which all opinions are to be shortened or stretched; makes hypocrites of those who cannot afford to keep a conscience,or have not courage to brave the consequences of honesty; turns the pulpit too often into the chair of restraint, concealment, or compromise. Wherever this tyranny is obeyed, there cannot be much depth of conviction, vitality of sentiment, growth of knowledge, and improvement of religious life. If this principle were applied to science, it would paralyse all the energies of investigation, and make the wheels of progress stand still. If churches will not respect individual liberty—will not let their ministers and members investigate the Scriptures, and theology, the fruit of other men’s examination of the Scriptures, as fearlessly, impartially, and rigidly as men inquire into Nature and the human results of searching into Nature—such as astronomy, chemistry, and any other branch of science—then it is the duty of every Christian, in God’s name, and the name of human nature, to resist the imposition. It may cost him friends, income, reputation, station, and much which he highly values. He is bound, at whatever sacrifice, to maintain his inborn and inalienable freedom. In this way the yoke of the creeds would be broken. The churches would be turned into the seats of liberty. A noble, manly piety would grow upamong us. The truth, whatever it is, would be discovered. A new state of things would be instituted. Every man would be respected as he rejected human authority over his conscience—refused to allow uninspired men to make his creed as his furniture, his bread, or books—tested all opinions by the light of his own reason—chose to give an account of his convictions, or the use of his powers in obtaining his convictions, to none but his Maker. Self-respect, love of truth, reverence to God, benevolence to men, call upon us all to stand by our native right and duty of searching into all truth contained in all creeds, confessions of faith, catechisms, and all other documents, whether human or divine. The obligation lies in our power of searching into whatever concerns our moral culture, spiritual life, and religious duty.’

Mr. Forster, in accordance with the sentiments here advocated, has left the Congregational body with which he was connected, and has founded a Free Church. Whether that church will answer the wants of our age, time will prove. If the work be good, it will stand. If it be better than old-fashioned sectarianism, it will remain. If it speak to the heart of man, it cannot die. Mr.Forster has great qualifications for his task. He is in the prime of life. His manner in the pulpit is pleasing. His sermons evince careful preparation, and the possession of a considerable amount of intellectual power. At times he rises into eloquence. Some of his published sermons are inferior to none that have been published in our time, and have been received well in quarters where, generally, little favour is shown to the pulpit exercises of divines.

Though unwearied in the discharge of pastoral duties, Mr. Forster has found time for other labours. Of the Temperance Reformation he has been one of the ablest and most eloquent advocates, and often has Exeter Hall reëchoed his impassioned advocacy in its behalf. He carries abstinence to an extent rare in this country, and abstains entirely from the use of animal food. At one time he was an ardent member of the party of Anti-State Churchmen, of which the late member for Rochdale is the glory and defence. Latterly he seems to have mixed but little with that body. We can well imagine that his time has been otherwise occupied—that his situation must have been one of growing difficulty and danger—that the claims, on the one side, of achurch orthodox on all great questions, and of truth and duty, or what seemed to him as such, on the other, must have cost him many a weary day and sleepless night. That he burst his bonds and became free—that he tore away the associations of a life—argues the possession of honesty and conscientiousness, and fits him to be the preacher of the free inquiry of which he has afforded so signal an example in himself.

‘Can you tell me where Mr. Fox’s Chapel is?’ said I to a young gentleman who had evidently been in the habit of passing it every Sunday. ‘No, indeed, I cannot,’ was the reply. I put the same question to a policeman, and with the same result. Yet South Place, Finsbury Square, is a place of no little pretension. It has been the home of rational religion for some years—of the religion of humanity—of religion purified from formalism, bibliolatry, and cant. There the darkness of the past has been rolled away, andthe light of a new and better day appeared; and yet the scene of all this was unknown to the dwellers in the immediate neighbourhood. There is a light so dazzling that it can only be seen from afar, that close to it you can see nothing. It may be this is the light radiating from South Place.

‘There is a religion of humanity,’ writes Mr. Fox, ‘though not enshrined in creeds and articles—though it is not to be read merely in sacred books, and yet it may be read in all, whenever they have anything in them of truth and moral beauty; a religion of humanity which goes deeper than all, because it belongs to the essentials of our moral and intellectual constitution, and not to mere external accidents—the proof of which is not in historical agreement or metaphysical deduction, but in our own conscience and consciousness; a religion of humanity which unites and blends all other religions, and makes one the men whose hearts are sincere, and whose characters are true, and good, and harmonious, whatever may be the deductions of their minds, or their external profession; a religion of humanity which cannot perish in the overthrow of altars or the fall of temples, which survives them all, and which, were every derivedform of religion obliterated from the face of the world, would recreate religion, as the spring recreates the fruits and flowers of the soil, bidding it bloom again in beauty, bear again its rich fruits of utility, and fashion for itself such forms and modes of expression as may best agree with the progressive condition of mankind.’

And this religion of humanity is to be met with in Finsbury Square. I am not aware there is anything new about it. Every school-boy is familiar with it in Pope’s Universal Prayer; but latterly, in Germany, in England, and across the Atlantic, it has been preached with an eloquence of peculiar fascination and power. Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson have been the high priests in the new temple, which fills all space, and whose worship is all time. In England, as an organisation, whatever it may have done as a theory, it has not succeeded. Here William Johnson Fox, originally a student at the Independent Academy, Homerton, then a Unitarian minister, and now the member for Oldham, and the ‘Publicola’ of the ‘Dispatch,’ has been its most eloquent advocate. If any man could have won over the people to it, he,with his unrivalled rhetoric—rhetoric which, during the agitation of the Anti-Corn-Law League, will be remembered as surpassing all that has been heard in our day—would have done it; and yet Fox never had his chapel more than comfortably full—not even when the admission was gratis, and any one who wished might walk in. But now the place has a sadly deserted appearance. You feel cold and chilly directly you enter. The mantle of Fox has not fallen on his successor; and what Mr. Fox could not accomplish, most certainly the Rev. Mr. Ierson will not perform.

At half-past eleven service every Sunday morning commences at the chapel in South Place. You need not hurry: there will be plenty of room for bigger and better men than yourself. The worship is of the simplest character. Mr. Ierson commences with reading extracts from various philosophical writers, ancient and modern; then there is singing, not congregational, but simply that of a few professionals. The metrical collection used, I believe, is one made by Mr. Fox, and is full of beautiful poetry and sublime sentiments; but the congregation does not utter it—it merely listens whileit is uttered by others for it. Singing is followed by prayer. ‘Prayer,’ says Montgomery (James, not Robert)—

‘is the soul’s sincere desire,Uttered or unexpress’d,The motion of a hidden fire,That trembles in the breast.’

Mr. Ierson’s prayer is nothing of the kind: no fire trembles in the breast while it is offered up. It is a calm, rational acknowledgment of Divine power and goodness and beauty. Then comes an oration of half an hour, the result of no very hard reading, and the week’s worship is at an end, and the congregation, principally a male one, departs, not much edified, or enlightened, or elevated, but, perhaps, a little puffed up, as it hears how the various sects of religionists all, like sheep, go astray. Such must be the inevitable result. You cannot lecture long on the errors of Christians, without feeling convinced of your own superiority. The youngest green-horn in the chapel has a self-satisfied air. Beardless though he be, he is emancipated. The religion which a Milton could make the subject of his immortal strains—which a Newton could find it consistent with philosophy to accept—which hasfound martyrs in every race, and won trophies in every clime—he can pass by as an idle tale or an old wife’s dream.

Mr. Ierson himself is better than the imaginary disciple I have just alluded to. He has got to his present position, I believe, by honest conviction and careful study. Originally, I think, he was a student at the Baptist College, Stepney; then he became minister over a Baptist congregation at Northampton, and there finding his position at variance with his views, he honestly relinquished his charge. I fear such honesty is not so common as it might be. I believe, in the pulpit and the pew, did it exist, our religious organisations would assume a very different aspect. The great need of our age, it seems to me, is sincerity in religion—that men and women, that pastor and people, should plainly utter what they think. I believe there is a greater freedom in religious thought than really appears to be the case. ‘How is it,’ said I to a Unitarian, the other day, ‘that you do not make more progress?’ ‘Why,’ was the answer, ‘we make progress by other sects taking our principles, while retaining their own names:’ and there was truth in the reply.

Still, it is better that a man who ceases to be a Churchman, or a Baptist, or an Independent, should say and act as Mr. Ierson has done. He will lose nothing in the long run by honesty—not that I take it Mr. Ierson has achieved any great success, but he gives no sign of any great talent. He is not the man to achieve any great success. People who believe his principles will stop at home unless there is in the pulpit a man who can draw a crowd. Fox could scarcely do this. Such men as Ronge, or Ierson, or Macall, who lectured to some forty people in the Princess’s Concert Booms, cannot do it at all. Mr. Brooke might, if he could be spared from Drury Lane—so could Macready or Dickens, or Thackeray; but in these matters everything depends upon the man.

Of course the first question is, thus emancipated—Why worship at all? why rise betimes on a Sunday, shave at an early hour, put on your best clothes, and, mindless of city fog and dirt, rush hurriedly to South Place, Finsbury Square? If I take the New Testament literally, I take with it the command relative to the assembling of ourselves together, and have a scriptural precedent for a course sometimes verywearisome and very much against the grain; but with free reason, an emancipated man, the case is altered. I am in a different position altogether. Custom is all very well to the holders of customary views. I expect a secret feeling lies at the bottom, that, after all, church and chapel going is good—that worship in public is a service acceptable to Deity.

It may be, and this I believe is the great secret of the success of churches and chapels, that people don’t know how to spend their Sundays, especially in country towns, without going to a place of worship. You cannot dine directly you have had your breakfast; you must allow an interval. Now, you cannot, especially if it looks as if it would rain, and your best hat might be damaged, fill up that time better than in a place of worship. So, even Mr. Ierson gets a congregation, although it is made up of people who see in him a man not a whit more qualified to teach religious truth than themselves, and who maintain the right of individual reason, in matters of religion, to its fullest extent. He has no claim to being heard; yet they go to hear him. They claim the right of private judgment; yet they take his. Worship, in itsordinary sense, they deem unnecessary; yet they approach to it as nearly as they can. Such is the incongruity between the religious instinct on the one side, and the logical faculty on the other—an incongruity, however, proclaiming that, reason as you will, man is a religious animal after all; that he has the faculty of worship, and must worship; that, take from him his sacred books—his Shaster, his Koran, or Bible—still the heart is true to its old instincts, and believes, and adores, and loves. True is it, that man, wherever he may be, whatever his creed or colour, still

‘Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven.’

Are the days of Pentecost gone never to return? Have miracles ceased from amongst men? Cannot signs and wonders still be wrought by men filled with the Holy Ghost? The larger part of the Christian Church answers this question in the negative. It teaches thatthe miracles are dumb, that the need of them has past away, that in the fulness of time the Divine will was made known, and that the Church needs not now the signs and wonders by which that revelation was attested and declared.

A large body, however, has lately sprung up amongst us, holding opposite views. Enter their churches, and, according to them, the gift of tongues still exists—signs and wonders are still manifest—miracles are still wrought. Still, as much as in apostolic times, does the Divine afflatus dwell in man, and the man so endued becomes a prophet, and declares the will of God in known or unknown tongues.

For some time past, a magnificent Gothic Cathedral has been in process of being built in Gordon Square. It stands near where once stood Coward College, and where still stands University Hall, a Unitarian College, and not far from the University College, which a certain Ex-Lord-Chancellor took under his especial care. On Christmas Day it was thrown open for the performance of the worship of ‘The Holy Catholic Apostolic Church,’ a body better, perhaps, known to the community at large as Irvingites, or followers of Edward Irving.Originally, I believe, the sect sprang up in Scotland, and Edward Irving merely joined it, and the form of worship which now prevails was not fully established till after his death. After Irving left the Scotch Church, the body took refuge in Newman Street, where they have remained till the present magnificent place was opened. There are to be seven cathedrals in London; each cathedral is to have four places of worship attached to it; and to each service in a cathedral appertain an evangelist, an apostle, a prophet, and an angel. The angel is the presiding spirit, an apostle seems to be what a bishop is in the English Church. There is an apostle for England, another for France, another for America, and another for Germany. To every cathedral there are twenty-four priests. The angel is magnificently clad in purple, the sign of authority. The next order, the prophets, wear blue stoles, indicative of the skies whence they draw their inspiration. The evangelists wear red as a sign of their readiness to shed their blood in the cause.

The Cathedral is well attended: upwards of 1000 communicants are connected with it. Service takes place in it several times a-day,and on the Sunday evening a sermon is preached, which is intended to enlighten and to win over such as are not connected with the church. Many distinguished persons are office-bearers in the church, such as Admiral Gambier, the Hon. Henry Parnell, J. P. Knight, R.A., Mr. Cooke, the barrister, Major Macdonald; while Lady Dawson, Lady Bateman, Lady Anderson, are amongst its members. Henry Drummond, the eccentric M.P. for East Surrey, has the credit of being connected with this place; but, while it is true that he is an Irvingite, it is not true that he is an office-bearer of the church. Those who join the church offer a tenth of their annual income towards its support, and this promise, it is believed, year after year is faithfully kept. The Cathedral itself is an evidence of the liberality of the people. Attached to the church is a small, but very elegant, chapel, which is to be used on rare occasions, and which was raised by the ladies, who contributed the magnificent sum of £4000 in aid of the work. The chief beauty of the church, however, is the altar, which is carved out of all sorts of coloured marble, and is superbly decorated. The service-book put into yourhands is called ‘The Liturgy and Divine Offices of the Church,’ but I do not learn from the members of the body that they think themselves exclusively the church, and that there is no salvation out of their pale. They merely profess to be one portion of the church, to take within their comprehensive fold members of all other churches; and this, to a very considerable extent, has been the case. The Irvingites have taken their converts not from the world, but the church. They have made proselytes, not Christians: the members of other churches have come over to them. In their ranks are many Dissenters and Churchmen, and amongst their priests are many who have been clergymen in connection with the Dissenters or the Church of England. They profess to be above the common distinction by which sect is fenced off from sect—Catholic and Protestant come alike to them.

The Liturgy appears to be compiled from the rituals of the Greek, Anglican, and Roman Churches, with a slight preponderance to the latter. The apostle of the church is Mr. John Cardall, formerly a lawyer’s clerk, but called to his present office, as he himself states, abouttwenty years ago, by the voice of prophecy. This call is acknowledged by the community. He rules the whole body with irresponsible authority. He is the final appeal. On his decision everything rests. He claims spiritual preëminence over not only the churches in his own communion, but over all the churches of all baptized Christians throughout the world, nay, over all bishops, priests, and deacons, Anglican, Greek, or Roman, not excepting even the Pope himself. The Liturgy and Service-book is understood to be his compilation. He has also published a work, entitled ‘Readings upon the Liturgy,’ which is privately circulated, and is said, by those who have seen it, to be an interesting and peculiar book, abounding in the interpretations of the symbols and types of the Old Testament, and an ingenious endeavour to adapt them to the purposes of the Christian Church at the present day. In the Liturgy, besides what is found in that of the English Church, there are prayers for the dead, invocation of saints, transubstantiation. The authority of the church, the power of the priesthood, and the existence of actual living apostles to rule the church universal, are acknowledged and enjoined.The chief minister of the church, or, as he is called, the angel or bishop, is Mr. Christopher Heath, who, for many years, carried on business in the neighbourhood of the Seven Dials. He was also called miraculously to his present post. The other ministers, of whom there are a vast number, are all well paid for their services, on an average much better than many London incumbents. Several of them have been military men: they are not formally educated for their work, but called to it. They are not man-made ministers—they claim a Divine sanction and power. Nor are they taken from the well-educated classes. They assert that the Spirit may qualify any man, no matter how humble his occupation or his birth. Some of them, I am told, have been tailors, tinkers, shoemakers, barbers, but are now filled with divine light, and may do the signs and wonders done by the apostles in an earlier day.

With apostolic pretensions, these men are careless of apostolic simplicity. They must meet, not in an upper room, but in a gorgeous cathedral; they must array themselves in grotesque garments; they must have tapers and incense—Roman Catholic forms and ceremonies.One would have thought that the name of Edward Irving would have been kept free from such things; that his followers would have been above them; that they would as much as most realize the spirituality of Him who dwells not in houses made with hands, and whose temple is the lowly and contrite heart. Genius like Irving’s would have lent grandeur to a barn; and now the master is gone, and having no more an orator to enchant them, the church worships in fretted aisles—treads mosaic pavements—rejoices in fine music and elaborate ceremonial.

Thus always is it: when nature fails, men have recourse to art. We have no actors now, but, instead, we have a stage splendidly decorated, regardless of expense. We put Shakspere on the stage in a way that would astonish Shakspere himself: but we have no Shakspere. Is not this a sign of weakness? When a beauty betakes herself to jewellery, and invests herself with borrowed graces, is it not a sign that Time is dealing in his old-fashioned cruel way with the rose upon her cheek and the lustre in her eye? and is it not so with the Irvingite Church? Is not its pomp and splendour a sign that it is notso rich in apostolic gifts as it claims to be? Paul, I think, would hardly feel himself at home in Gordon Square.

Since the above was written, the Census Report has appeared. It has a sketch supplied by a member of the Catholic Apostolic Church. From it we learn that that Church makes no exclusive claim to its title. It acknowledges it to be the common title of the one church baptized unto Christ. The members of that body deny that they are separatists from the Established Church. They recognise the continuance of the church from the days of the first apostles, and of the three orders of bishops, priests, and deacons, by succession from the apostles. They justify their meeting in separate congregations from the charge of schism, on the ground of the same being permitted and authorized by an ordinance of paramount authority, which they believe God has restored for the benefit of the whole church. And, so far from professing to be another sect, they believe that their special mission is to unite the scattered members of the one body of Christ. The speciality of that religious belief—that by which they are distinguished from other Christian communities—consists in their holding apostles and prophets to be abiding ministeries in the church.

In these latter days men have come to think that no man has a right to enter a pulpit unless he prefixes Rev. to his name—unless he wears a white handkerchief round his neck, and scorns to get a living except from the revenues of the Church. With them a daw

‘is reckoned a religious bird,Because it keeps a cawing from the steeple.’

You have been ordained, therefore some mysterious virtue attaches to you. You have ceased to be a man, and become a priest. You live in a different world to what we common-place sinners do. The priest has a different tailor to the rest of mankind. We can tell him by his superfluity of white linen and superabundance of black cloth. We can tell him by the downcast eye and the short-cut hair. We know him not by his works, by the beauty of his living faith,or the savour of his holy life, but by his dress. The tailor makes us. One dummy it adorns with red, and that is a soldier. Another it dresses in fashionable costume, and that is the star of Bond-street and the lion of the ball-room. Another it arrays in antiquated vest and sober black, and that’s the divine. Manners do not make the man, but the tailor does.

Yet, happily, the world is not given up to universal flunkeyism. We have still some who recognise the god-like and divine in man; women not everlastingly falling in love with new bonnets, or manhood not utterly lost in the contemplation of new atrocities in the way of checks for trowsers or stupendous collars for the neck. Strange as it may seem, it is no more strange than true, that there are some who can see poets in shoemakers or whisky-gaugers; heroism in the daughters of fishermen; philosophy in Norwich weaver boys; apostles in tent-makers or Jewish sailors; and something greater and grander still in the ‘Galilean Lord and Christ,’ the faith in whose divine mission has made Europe and America the home of civilisation, of intelligence, and life. Faith inreality has not yet died out amongst us. There are still men who dare to take their stand on living and eternal truths—who look beyond the crust, and see the gem within—who see duty urging them on, and become insensible to aught else. Such men make martyrs—missionaries—reformers; on a small scale, such are village Hampdens or Miltons, inglorious and mute. Such men are sure, sooner or later, to have an earnest crowd of devotees, to exercise a powerful influence on their age, to be the teachers and founders of a school.

Of this class, undoubtedly, Edward Miall, the editor of the ‘Nonconformist,’ is one of the latest. Originally a student at Wymondley College, then ‘settled,’ as the phrase is, at Ware, then the pastor of a respectable congregation at Leicester, he was M.P. for John Bright’s own borough of Rochdale, and is, as theTimesconfesses, a distinguished Nonconformist. I imagine few of my readers require a description of his thin and wiry frame. As a platform speaker, or as a mere orator, Miall is not very effective; he delights his admirers, but he does not do more. In the pulpit, few men are more fitted to shine. Men enter a place ofworship under different feelings to those with which they run to Exeter Hall or the London Tavern. In the one case you are in something of a reverential mood, and you are not disappointed by the want of physical power. With eternity for his theme, the preacher soon causes you to forget a feeble voice or a bodily presence not adapted for effect. The sermonising tone is in keeping with the pulpit, and if every word seem to have an air of preparation, and to tell of labour, you think that it is only after mature preparation a man should speak of religious truth to his fellow-men. Calm self-possession is essential to the sanctuary, and there you miss not theabandonwhich elicits the cheers of an excited audience.

In the pulpit, Miall could always command attention. His manner, if somewhat artificial and prim, evinced the possession of a mind earnest and decided. His language was nervous; his views were broad and catholic. You felt that the man before you was no reproducer of other men’s thoughts, no worn-out echo, no empty sound; that the Christianity he preached he had found to be good for the intellect and soul of man; that it was the foundation of allhis knowledge; that on that, as a great fact, he had rested all the hopes and aspirations of his life. Seemingly void of all animalism—a rock with a gleam of sunlight on it—an incarnate idea—a voice crying in the wilderness—a reed, but not shaken with the wind—Edward Miall is an admirable illustration of what a man with a principle may do. It was a bold step for him to give up the pulpit and to start a newspaper; it was a still bolder thing to circulate that newspaper in the Dissenting world, with unmistakable quotations from Shakspeare staring you flat in the face, and to accustom that world, used to a very watery style of composition, to language remarkable for its elegance and power.

The effect was startling. Miall at once became the object of the intensest hero-worship. The old idols were utterly cast out and destroyed. Old gentlemen, who had led a pompous life for half a century, suddenly found themselves of no account. Their power had passed away as a dream. Students in Dissenting Colleges went overen masseto this second Daniel. It was a time of intense political excitement. The corn laws taxed the poor man’s food; Chartism reared its hideous head; everywhere angry discontentprevailed. Miall thought the time had come for Christian men to interfere; he felt that the struggle for political rights was not inconsistent with the utmost purity of Christian life; that the Church, by its sanction of existing abuses and its reverential worship of the powers that were, had done much to alienate the popular mind from Christianity itself; he felt that the Church, loaded with State pay, would always be liable to suspicion, however excellent her creed or pure her clergy; and he felt, therefore, that in asking men’s political rights, and the dissolution of the union between Church and State, he should demonstrate to the world that Christianity meant something more than corn-laws, or tithes, or the celebrated Chandos clause—something more than a comfortable living for younger sons. It is false to suppose that Miall left the pulpit when he left Leicester. His labours in his new sphere were but a continuation of his labours in the old. In everything he was unchanged. He was merely continuing his Leicester work, appealing, not to a county-town, but to the nation at large. He had changed his platform; but his mission remained the same. Instead of using a feeble voice, he had recourse to a powerfulpen. His pulpit was the editorial chair, his church the English race.

Place Miall in the pulpit, and a glance will tell you the man. You can see he has been brought up in a divinity college; he has all the prim and unfashionable air of youths reared in such secluded spots. His pale face tells of thought. You see in his small clear eye that thought crystallises in his brain. His clenched hand, his determined teeth, his shrugged-up shoulders, prepare you for the tenacity with which he clings to what thoughts come to him. On the hustings and elsewhere, Miall is the same—not elated when applauded, not depressed when reviled; unbending, imperturbable, mild of demeanour, yet inflexible in purpose. Yet, after all, his success has been more personal than in what he has done. Who ever talks of complete suffrage now?—yet that was Miall’s darling idea when he first appeared in the political world, and the Association which calls him father—which is to emancipate religion from the fetters of the State—it must yet be confessed by its most ardent admirers, has got a considerable amount of work to do.

It does seem strange that so pale, calm,unmoved a man as Mr. Miall seems to be, should have wandered out of the pulpit and the study, with its old books and everlasting commentaries, and exchanged all that elysian dream-land for the fever of politics and the bustle of the newspaper. It seems stranger still that he should have succeeded, that he should have found favour with our turbulent democracy, not partial to the use of soap, or particularly passionate in their attachment to abstract principles. Strangest of all is it that he should have managed to be returned as an M.P. We should have been the last to have prophesied for Miall such a career. Cato at the theatre, Colonel Sibthorp at a Peace Congress, an Irish patriot speaking common-sense, could not surprise us more. Yet that Miall has achieved what he has, shows how much may be done by the possessor of a principle. Miall is a principle, an abstract principle embodied—that man is everything, that the human being is divine, that the inspiration of the Almighty has given the meanest of us understanding. From the Bible he got that principle, and that is the unerring test by which every case is weighed and every difficulty solved. In religion it ledhim to reject ecclesiastical organisations and claims, the traditions of the Fathers, the pretensions of divines—everything by which the priest is exalted and the people kept down. In politics, the same rule held good. If all men are equal—if God has made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth—what need for aristocratic usurpation or the legislation of a class? If all are equal before God, surely they should all be equal before man. Thus, when angry Chartism was asking for universal suffrage, and the Church was preaching contentment and the duty of submission to superiors, and the danger to religion when a man became political, Miall felt that the time had come for him to step out of the conventional circle of the pulpit into a wider and freer sphere, and to show that Christianity was not alien to human right, and that a man might love God and his brother-man as well. It does seem strange now that men should ever have doubted so plain a truth. How it was doubted some few years since, only men like Miall can tell. Miall’s Anti-State-Churchism was also obtained by a similar process. If there were no need of priests, if every man could be a priest unto God, what need of State patronageand pay? At the best they could but corrupt and enervate the Church. It was teaching it to rely on a worthless arm of flesh rather than on the living God.

With such views, Miall may surely be included in the ‘London Pulpit.’ Tried by his own theory, he is a legitimate subject for a sketch. The truth he held in Leicester he holds in London, and he is still as much a divine in the ‘Nonconformist’ office as when he was pastor of an Independent Church. Occasionally he preaches in one or other of the metropolitan pulpits, and the studied discourse read—but read with admirable distinctness—is of a kind to make you regret that Miall is so seldom seen where he is fitted to do so much. If you have not an orator before you in the common acceptation of the term, you have before you a master of argument, gifted with a clearness of expression and a high order of thought, rare anywhere, especially in the pulpit now-a-days. Buckingham wrote of Hobbes’ style, that

‘Clear as a beautiful transparent skin,Which never hides the blood, yet holds it in;Like a delicious stream it ever ran,As smooth as woman and as strong as man.’

Of Miall’s style precisely the same may be said. It is always as clear, sometimes as cold, as ice. As a still further proof of Miall’s claim to be considered a religious teacher, witness his ‘British Churches’ and his ‘Basis of Faith,’—books eminently adapted for the age in which we live. Yet Miall can speak to the poor, and does so. The teetotalers have built a hall called the Good Samaritan Hall, on Saffron Hill. It is a low neighbourhood. It is surrounded by the dwellings of the poor, and it is erected there as a light for that dark spot, by means of which the drunkard may emerge into a higher life. The last time I heard Miall was there: the room was full. On a table, dressed in an old blue great coat, stood Miall, preaching to men and women, gathered from the highways and byways, from the crowds for whose souls no one cares. Surely that was a finer sight than if, arrayed in lawn, he was preaching to the fashion and wealth of Vanity Fair.

Roman Catholicism seems part and parcel of human nature. Luther was not more a product of his age than Leo X. That one man should be a Papist seems as natural as that another man should be a Protestant. Our sects and schisms are not a very edifying sight. The greater number of them are eternally wrangling, and uttering at the best but discordant sounds. Few of them make any provision for the sensuous, for the love of decency and order and solemn ceremonial, which is characteristic of some minds. Many of them are actually contemptible when you come into close collision with them, and examine their working, and watch their effect. The harder, the more literal, the more matter-of-fact they are, the greater is the chance that some subjected to their discipline should rebel against it and become converts to the ancient faith. Mr. Lucas was a Quaker till he became the editor of theTablet. It is very probable that Robert Owen may yet die in communion with Rome. The Roman Catholic Churchoffers unity—rest for the tempest-tossed—and to the young and the ardent and the impassioned an attractive worship and an imposing form.

By the side of it—the Protestant substitute for it—the Evangelical Alliance seems a poor thing indeed. Hence it is that the cry of Roman Catholic ascendancy has always been raised ever since the Church of England appropriated its wealth and seated itself in its place. It always has been in danger from the Church of Rome, and it always will. Human nature is always the same. What has grown out of it at one time will grow out of it another. Heresy, as Sir Thomas Browne well put it, is like the river Arethusa, which in one place is lost sight of, but only to reappear further on. Each age has its own development. Each age but repeats the past, as the son in his turn reproduces the blunders and the youthful follies of his sire.

It is true we get wise, and—

“Departing leave behind usFootprints on the sands of time.”

But the coming age will not take your wisdom—will not follow your footmarks—will experiment for itself. Tell your passionate son that the fair face he now dotes on, in ten years hewill have forgotten, and he cannot believe you. It is just as vain to believe that the section who believe in Rome will cease to do so. Roman Catholicism has some congeniality with man, and therefore Protestantism will always be in danger from it—and the more honest this Protestantism is—the more it takes its stand upon the truth and nothing but the truth—the more it relinquishes the political ascendancy it has assumed, the greater that danger will become. Cardinal Wiseman is an illustration of this. Queen Elizabeth or Oliver Cromwell would have soon put a stop to Cardinal Wiseman’s career, but they would have done so in spite of the principles of religious liberty. Now those principles are acknowledged, and England trusts in Exeter Hall—and Dr. Cumming. Protestantism may well be in danger.

One Sunday, hearing that the Cardinal was to preach at Brook Green, Hammersmith, I made the best of my way thither. The church was crowded, and I considered myself lucky in being shown by the woman who acted as pew-opener into a good seat. Yet this good luck had to be paid for. ‘A shilling, sir, if you please,’ said the woman curtseying. ‘A what?’I repeated. ‘A shilling, sir, if you please,’ was the reply. The woman seemed to consider it so reasonable a charge that I of course complied with her request. At the same time, recollecting that for half that sum you are admitted into what I suppose is considered the dress circle in St. George’s Cathedral, I did think that sixpence would have been sufficient. The service was conducted in the usual manner. It was longer than that of the Church of England as practised at St. Barnabas, and a good deal more attractive. After mass had been celebrated, there was a hush, and immediately a procession from the side door; what the procession consisted of I cannot say. My eyes, and those of every one else, I suppose, were turned upon the Cardinal alone.

And first let me describe the Cardinal’s gown;—it was composed of rich red silk; besides he had a red cap, which he laid aside when preaching, and, in addition, he had a very handsome robe round his neck, and a lace or muslin gown of shorter extent than the red one, which came down to his feet. Only that fluent writer the Court newsman, or he who tells in the columns of theMorning Postof the finery of DrawingRooms, when the beauty of England prostrates itself before royalty, could do justice to the dress the Cardinal wore. Of course it was a grotesque one—but it was a finer dress than that of an English Bishop, who seems all sleeves, and if you do make an object of yourself, the more striking the object is the better—so that, as far as dress is concerned, the Cardinal beats one of our Archbishops hollow. I think also in his preaching he would be more than a match for them. Him you can hear. He is a tall, stately man. There is an air of power about him. His voice is loud, and brassy, and unpleasant, but it is not monotonous, and his action is very animated and good. He stands before the altar, and takes a text which generally forms an appropriate introduction to his discourse, and delivers a well-reasoned, argumentative address, not cut up into heads, as the manner of some is, but connected and complete. With a fine voice, the Cardinal would be a very effective preacher. As it is, he does very well. I should say he has little imagination, little sentiment, little rhetoric, but that he has great stores of learning and power of argument. He is very plausible, andseems very earnest and sincere, he preaches principally of the peculiar doctrines of his Church; how it is the one on which God’s Spirit rests; how it is the one true guide to heaven; how it has the one true Divine utterance, to which, if man do not listen, he is lost for ever. The Cardinal has a square, massive face, with anything but a pleasant expression. He is yet in his prime. His hair is brown, his complexion fresh, but inclined to be dark. His eyes are concealed by spectacles. A fat, double chin, and large cheeks, minus whiskers, give him a very sensual appearance. But it is not a pleasant sensuality, the jolly sensuality of a Falstaff or an alderman, the sensuality suggestive of good dinners, with good company to flavour them. It is the sensuality of a proud, arrogant, and imperious monk.

Cardinal Wiseman is by birth a Spaniard, and by descent an Irishman. He was born in 1802. At an early age he was sent to St. Cuthbert’s Catholic College at Ushaw, near Durham. From thence he was removed to the English College at Rome, where he was ordained a priest, and made a Doctor of Divinity. He was Professor for a time in the Roman University, and then madeRector of the English College at Ushaw. Dr. Wiseman came to England in 1835, and in the winter of that year delivered a Course of Lectures on the connection between Science and Revealed Religion, which, when published, obtained for him a high reputation for scholarship and learning in all divisions of the Christian church. He subsequently returned to Rome, and is understood to have been instrumental in inducing Pope Gregory XVI. to increase the Vicars Apostolic in England. The number was doubled, and Dr. Wiseman came back as coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, of the Midland District. He was appointed president of St. Mary’s College, Oscott. In 1847 he again returned to Rome. This second visit led to further preferment. He was made Pro-Vicar Apostolic of the London District, in place of Dr. Griffiths, deceased. Subsequently he was appointed coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, and in 1849, on the death of Dr. Walsh, he became Vicar Apostolic of the London District. In August he went again to Rome, not expecting, as he says, to return, ‘but delighted to be commissioned to come back’ clothed in new dignity. In a Consistory held on the 30th of September, Nicholas Wiseman was elected to the dignity ofCardinal by the title of Saint Prudentia, and was appointed Archbishop of Westminster—a title which drove silly churchmen into fits, and which made even Dissenters wild. Under the Pope he is the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, and a Prince of the Church of Rome, at which place he now principally resides. His sojourn in England is understood to be but temporary. He has published several sermons, and a few volumes, in support of transubstantiation and the other doctrines of the church of which he is such an ornament. But his literary reputation is principally based on the series of lectures to which I have already referred.

The Cardinal has no great love for our age, and little love for England, if we are to judge by his epistle to his clergy on the Indian Mutiny. In a sermon on the Social and Intellectual State of England, compared with its Moral Condition, published in 1850, he asks, ‘Are we convinced that the real moral tone of society in every part is on the increase? Is it not notorious that crimes, and crimes even that were unknown among us a few years ago—that deeds of violence which not even the hot passionate blood of theSouth is here to palliate—that such crimes as these are increasing in the great masses of our population? Is it not well known that the relations of the family are sadly isolated, and that multitudes live without a consciousness of their sacred nature? Are we improving the people in regard to these things? Are we doing anything to convince them more thoroughly, and upon true Church grounds, of their great duty to God, to society, to their families, and to themselves? I fear we must answer no; and I will say boldly that there are reasons why it should be so. There are immense obstacles in the religious institutions of the country to this being possible—because it is not in their power to come home to the feelings, to the affections of the poor. They raise not up any who devote themselves to them—who sacrifice themselves for them—who find a higher reward than man can give in making themselves servants of the servants of God. And what is the visible result of this? That any great institutions which make us think that we are acting so powerfully on the masses, reach not to the very depths of the miseries which have to be probed, and which have to be healed. We are content with raising the positionof the artizan, with making him more intelligent, with providing him with the means of education, with instructing him in his leisure hour to store his mind with knowledge. All this is good, and yet the institutions that work upon that class have not of their own nature a direct moral tendency.’ All this may be true or not, yet it is clear that the institutions which the Cardinal would recommend, equally fail, so far as morality is concerned. A Protestant is not less moral than a Catholic. The population of England is as moral as that of France. Roman Catholic Ireland can boast no superiority over Protestant Scotland. Luther has not to answer for all the sins of the world.

There are some people who maintain the Wandering Jew to be a myth. I believe the contrary—that he exists amongst us, and that he is known to men as Dr. Wolff. I hope the Hon. Mrs. Norton will make a note of this. It is a fact of which she ought to be aware, as shouldDr. Croly, and especially Dumas, otherwise his wondrous tale will be incomplete. Yes, Dr. Wolff is the Wandering Jew—not the melancholy personage of the poet and the novelist, but a fat jolly Jew, for whom ‘the law having a shadow of good things to come’ has ceased to exist, and to whom, if I may imagine by his portly presence and unctuous face, the good things have already come. We may look long ere we see in his countenance

‘the settled gloomThe fabled Hebrew wanderer bore,That dared not look beyond the tomb,That might not hope for peace before.’

On the contrary, all seems peace within and without, so far as Dr. Wolff is concerned. Had he any inward sorrow, had he been borne down by its agony, had the accents of despair been ever on his lip, and its terror ever glancing from his eye, he would have been a very different man. Nevertheless, the Dr. is the Wandering Jew, but in reality, and not in romance; he becomes a Christian, marries a lady of title, and becomes a clergyman of the English Church. Nominally, he is not of the London Pulpit. He has a local habitation and a name, but he is of noplace. He is of an unsettled race. I have no doubt but that he preaches as much out of his own church as in it, and that he has as much right to be included in the London Pulpit as in any other. At this time his voice is often heard in London. It really is surprising that the Bishop, or some admiring friend, such as Mr. Henry Drummond, has never given him a metropolitan charge, or built him a chapel somewhere in the vicinity of the Clapham sect. One would have thought he would have done as well, at any rate, as Mr. Ridley Herschell, than whom he is a great deal more interesting, and not half so heavy. What is the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews about? What is Exeter Hall thinking of? Is Dr. Wolff too fat for sentiment? Must female youthful piety lavish its tenderness on a younger man? Does a converted Jew cease to be interesting, the same as common Evangelical curates, when their hair gets grey or their heads bald? Must a converted Jew, too, lose his charms as he gains flesh, as any ordinary Adonis of pious tea-tables? Alas! alas! I fear these questions are to be answered in the affirmative. Woman is woman everywhere,

‘As fickle as the shade,By the light quivering aspen made’—

in cave Adullam, or in the select Christian Society of Camberwell—as in the theatre or the ball-room, or, as Mr. Bunn would say, in halls of dazzling light. I stop not to moralize over the bitter fact. I merely lament it; and if I deduce a moral, it shall soon be told. It would be but to bid the male Cynthia of the pulpit make the best of his fleeting popularity—a popularity fading with the first dawn of the double chin, or the first bud of the grey hair. Dear brother, such is your inevitable fate. Stern destiny will make no exception in your favour. Other white hands will be pressed as warmly as your own. Other lips shall speak oracles, or move the heart of woman to laughter or to tears. For others, divine eyes shall moisten the best French cambric, and worsted slippers shall be worked by fairy hands. Every dog has his day.

On his legs, whether on the platform or in the pulpit, Dr. Wolff is one of the extraordinary men of our time. In shape he is somewhat of a tub. Wrap it up in black cloth, put on it a big head with a fat face, let that face have small eyes, a slightly Jewish nose, and be of a light complection,jolly and sensual, and you have Dr. Wolff. To complete the picture, let the figure have a Bible in his right hand, and let him read from it incessantly with a foreign pronunciation, but with a musical voice. As a preacher or a lecturer the Doctor is but an indifferent model. He gets off the rail as soon as he starts. He gives you a heterogeneous mass of raw material, gathered in every country under heaven. He talks of Bokhara as familiarly as we do of the Bank; he is as much at home in Palestine as we in Piccadilly. He begins a sentence with ‘As I was last in Abyssinia,’ as we should say, ‘When we were last in Chancery-lane;’ or he says, ‘As I was smoking with the Schah of Persia,’ as we should speak of smoking a quiet pipe with Smithers of the Strand; and then he loses himself, shouts as if he were a war-horse going into battle—bursts out into unknown tongues—sings Hebrew melodies in what the distracted Puritan calls ‘the blessed tongue of Canaan,’ and has a wild look in his eye as if he were speaking to his own people by the silent waters and ruined temples of Babel, and not in a Christian church and speaking to Christian men. The Doctor is a rhapsodist, not a lecturer. Hebelongs to the men who have died out amongst us, to the bards and scalds of ancient days. He is out of place amidst the conventional proprieties and ecclesiastical decorums of the modern church, and especially in that section of it which in this country is honoured with State patronage and pay. I wonder how Dr. Wolff ever could have become a clergyman—or ever settled down. Was it Lady Georgiana that produced the wondrous change, that tamed the rover of the desert, and turned him into a husband and a rector? It is wonderful what woman can do, yet even woman cannot accomplish everything. She cannot make the Doctor get into a pulpit and preach a sober sermon in a sober way. She cannot alter his wild and eccentric nature, which makes him an original, almost a mountebank, which in another man would be intolerable. I must candidly confess that with one or two exceptions no public man ventures so near the verge of absurdity as Dr. Wolff.

My own opinion is, that the Doctor, as I have already stated, is the Wandering Jew. It is only fair, however, to give facts which would lead the reader to an opposite opinion. The Doctor tells us himself he was born in 1796, in alittle village in Bavaria, at which place his father was a Rabbi. At an early age, long before the reasoning power was developed, or before he had sufficient information to justify him in taking the step, he renounced the religion of his fathers, and set up for himself as a Roman Catholic. After wandering about the country, at times working for a living, and at times subsisting on the charity of friends, he made his way to Rome, and became a student, first at the Seminario Pontifico, then at the Propaganda. The Doctor seems to have stumbled at the doctrine of the Pope’s infallibility, and to have been compelled to leave in consequence, and tries to make out a case of hardship in his dismissal. He says he was dismissed without a fair hearing. It does not seem so. In writing to his friends, he had said he would always be an enemy to the anti-Christian tyranny of Rome. No wonder then that Rome dismissed him. After wandering about the Continent, and learning to read and speak French as he rode on the rumble of Mr. Haldane’s carriage from Montauban to Calais, he arrived in London in June, 1819, and became London Agent to the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. In order that hemight be better fitted for his work, he spent some time at Cambridge under the care of the late Dr. Lee. His journeyings and perils have been great. He has been sold as a slave thrice, condemned to death thrice. He has been attacked with cholera and typhus fever, and almost every Asiatic fever. He has been bastinadoed and starved. He has been carried away by pirates. For eighteen years he has traversed the most barbarous countries of the world, and yet he looks as if he had never known a sorrow or gone without a dinner in his life. He thus sums up his labours:—‘I began in 1821, and accomplished in 1826, my missionary labours among the dispersed of my people in Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Crimea, Georgia, and the Ottoman Empire. My next labours among my brethren were in England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, and the Mediterranean, from 1826 to 1830. I then proceeded to Turkey, Persia, Turkistaun, Bokhara, Affghanistan, Cashmere, Hindostan, and the Red Sea, from 1831 to 1834.’ In 1835 the Doctor left England for a Missionary tour in Abyssinia—thence for Bombay—thence for the United States. In June 1838 he received priest’s orders fromthe Bishop of Dromore, and became curate of Linthwaite, near Huddersfield, where he had the princely income of £24 a-year—thence he moved in 1840 to the curacy of High Ryland, near Wakefield. In 1843, at the desire of the Stoddard and Conolly Committee, he undertook to ascertain the fate of those officers, and entered Cabul, where again he was in danger of death, but saved by the friendly power of Persia. He is now rector of the Isle of Brewers, Somersetshire, but has been recently in London, lecturing and preaching. Hence his parishioners see but little of him. He is here and there and everywhere. The Doctor should never have settled, or if he did settle it should have been in London, where there is something fresh, and wonderful, and stirring every day.

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