Stimulating Preachers

OF the many distinguished ministers by

w whom I was in youthful days most impressed, some special personalities rise at the bidding of my grateful memory. I do not know how far time may have thrown a glamour over the past, nor do I know how I should vary my estimates at this moment, but I do feel that the ministry of fifty years ago had a quality and a force almost impossible to discover in the ministry of to-day. One should not flippantly throw away even the exaggerations of early intellectual and religious life. Some of my pulpit recollections connect themselves immediately with my boyhood, and others are associated with my ripest years; but whether the one or the other, they are as precious treasures not to be appraised in the plain figures of mean gold. Allow that some of these memories are fictitious rather than real, even the fictitiousness has had an educating and uplifting influence upon my whole life. Quite possibly some of the sermons of half a century ago would not appear to me to be so brilliant if I heard them to-day, but I must for ever think of them as I heard them from their several speakers, and so thinking of them I am a better man for listening to such spiritual and practical eloquence. The men of fifty years ago are not to be judged by the standards of to-day. Being what they were for their own time, we are entitled to infer that they would have been to this day relatively what they were to their own.

Ear away in the early shadows I see a man remarkable for physical massiveness and memorable for one of the finest vocal organs I ever listened to. The voice itself was “a song without words.” It is almost a pity that there is not some way of doing by the voice what is done by the organ. The organ has no words, — in the technical sense of the term it has no songs, — yet it affects the whole soul with wondrous impressiveness. In the organ we have expression without words, without argument, without the narrowness and harshness of controversy; yet the organ has an argument of its own — a pathos quite unique — a persuasiveness not to be resisted without conscious injustice to the thrilling appeal. Niagara conducts no formal argument, yet it happily excites the whole range of feeling, setting the intellect itself within a new and effective environment. Orpheus has no contention with our prejudices, yet we stop to listen and go away the better for the haunting music. If we could have” “thrill” dissociated from special theological pleading, the great preacher to whom I refer. Dr. Robert Newton, would stand alone in his vocal glory. His was a royal voice. There have ])een voices profounder and shriller and more caressing, but no voice ever excelled Dr. Newton’s in range, in variety, in what I may call all the finer shades of expressiveness. I have heard him pronounce the word “salvation” in a tone which itself was argumentative — almost, indeed, a whole volume of Evangelical tlieology-. If Charles Wesley wished to know how much there was in one of his hymns, he ought to have lived long enough to hear Dr. NeAvton read it. In my recollection he stands alone for ability to bring out of a hymn all its experience and tenderness and unction. Reading, I regret to say, has not l)een cultivated as it ought to have been. In my early days ministers read the hymn from beginning to end, and then they gave it out two lines at a time, and not seldom they gave the people some hint of the special spiritual meaning of the lines they were singing. It would be an error to suppose that such treatment of the hymn robbed it of any of its value; I can testify that this manner of reading a hymn has often had its happy spiritual effect upon great congregations. What applied to the reading of hymns applied in the case of Dr. Newton equally to the reading of Holy Scripture. When I last heard him read the Bible I could have been well satisfied to regard the reading as a whole and final service. The reading was sIoav, reverent, spiritual, and worthy of the Book which supplied its subject. Dr. Newton was by no means an “intellectual” man: technically he was illiterate, without any shadow of pretence to academic learning; yet there was about him a quality that could not be mistaken for plebeianism or mere respectability. A farm servant to begin with (I have seen the cart which he has loaded with farm produce), he was a gentleman, a nobleman, a royalty to enrl with; Jovelike in aspect, with the port of a Kean, with the unction of an Aquinas, yet with the simplicity of a brother and a true apostle of Christ. He made a space for himself everywhere, and probably to no man of his day was the primacy assigned with less of doubt as to his qualification for its occupancy. With the slenderest intellectual equipment, and with absolutely no academical theological training, Dr. Newton had a Gospel to preach — a simple, practical, experimental Gospel; and when men heard it, they knew that it was in very deed no fable of man’s invention. Dr. Newton addressed himself to the realities of life. He had the tongue of the learned, in that he was able to speak a word in season to him that was weary. If preaching means metaphysical subtlety, audacious speculation, or

dreaming about clouds whilst slumbering on a bed of roses, then Robert Newton had no claim to be accounted a preacher. But if preaching means speaking from heart to heart things concerning God and eternity, sin and repentance, service and sanctification, then Dr. Newton stood out — and stands out to-day in my imagination — with the brightness and repose of a planet. Newton was not a reader of his own neat

A PKEACHER’S LIFE

essays; he was a spontaneous, direct, and efPective speaker, and he spoke with the happier emphasis because he confined himself, to a large extent, within the limits of his own personal experience of divine mysteries and their outstanding effects on the lives of simple-minded and honest believers. Always confining himself to the middle line of human experience and action, he carried with him a whole audience instead of only a section; he preached to human nature in its broadest aspects, rather than to society broken up into sects and classes. This, I have noticed, is the secret of all true popular preaching. Preaching must be broadly human to be popular. You cannot reach the populace through an academy, but you may often reach an academy through the populace. It seems to me in looking back that the old preachers were stronger in personal experience than are the preachers of to-day. They had fewer intellectual temptations to resist. The pew did not ply them with so many curious questions. In my early days jjreaching was religious; within recent years it has become intellectual, with an occasional religious flavour. Things have quite altered in this respect. The first preaching was ji’eligious, with an occasio4al intellectual outlook; to-day religion is intellectual, with an occasional religious reference. In some places of worship people have to ask whether they are in a lyceum or in a church, in a hall of science or in a house of prayer. Wherein the pulpit has lost religiousness it has lost power. Robert Newton’s name may well stand as the type of man whose first concern it was to seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, assured that all other things, wherever necessary, would be added. The direction and warning given in the Sermon on the Mount apply to preaching as well as to everything else. Jesus Christ would seem to say through the medium of that great discourse: “Take no thought for your preaching, what ye shall say as to words, temporary criticism, fioAvers of rhetoric, and the idolatry of science: for after all these things do the Gentile artists seek; but seek ye first and foremost in your preaching the kingdom of God and His righteousness, be first and foremost intensely religious, and all these minor tributaries and accessories shall, if necessary — Avliich is very doubtful — be added unto you.”

A man in some resijccts resembling Dr. Newton, and in others differing widely froni. him, greatly charmed my budding imagination. I refer to Dr. Morley Punshon. There have been many little Punshons, but not one of them has worthily worn the mantle of the original. Youths are often charmed by impetuous volleys of rhetorical words. In this sense Dr. Punshon stood quite alone, so far as I know, in the Methodism of his day. In Dr. Punshon’s preaching there was no hint of spontaneity, by which I mean that nothing was spoken under the inspiration of the moment. Dr. Morley Punshon wrote his sermons from beginning to end, and repeated them with literal accuracy and with energetic and happy effect. Punshon’s style was climacteric, being based, in fact, upon the method of James Parsons, of York, the most climacteric preacher of his day. The voices of the two men were very different, yet, paradoxical as it may seem, they were identical. The voice of Parsons seemed to be more a shadow than a substance; the voice of Punshon was that very shadoAV carried up into power and resonance of a remarkable quality. If Punshon had come first we should have said that the voice of Parsons was the echo, but coming second we can best express the reality by describing Parsons’ voice as the ear and Punshon’s voice as “the full corn in the ear.” Remarkable effects Averc produced by the preaching of Punshon. He thought in metaphor. His sentences were examples in sculpture, — sometimes he carved in wood, sometimes in marble, and now and again he seemed to be engraving precious stones. Everything about the preaching was rhetorical, theatrical, external, and thunder-like. It would, however, be a great mistake if any man regarded Punshon’s discourses as mere conjuring in words. We cannot read his lectures without feeling that he made the most careful preparation for their delivery. They are full of literal fact, literary allusion, and historical induction. The anatomy was not always seen in consequence of the purple and fine linen, the crimson and gold with which it was clothed. I would accuse myself of great injustice if I did not always think of Punshon’s preaching as a very happy influence in my own early life. My youthful contemporaries always anticipated his visits with pleasure, and always remembered them with gratitude. In the matter of influencing all sorts of people Methodist preaching has always had a large range of operation. Robert Newton and Morley Punshon did more than preach in metropolitan pulpits; they went about from village to village and preached as eloquently and fervently in the smallest places as in the greatest. So much must he said in praise of what the Methodists descrihe as “travelling preaching.” Episcopalians and Congregationalists stand as a rule in one place and minister to one people. It is almost impossible for them to undertake any extensive evangelistic work in the villages. That they do a good deal in this way no one will dispute, but that they do nothing in coniijarison with itinerant Methodism is a fact about which there cannot be two opinions. 3 The first time I heard Robert Newton was in a town of about three thousand inhabitants; the last time I heard him was in City Road Chapel, London. He was as much at home in the one as in the other. He did not go to a village as if he were performing an act of condescension; he went to it as a mere matter of course, because it was part of what we may call his parish. The necessities of Methodism gave the whole country the advantages of such a ministry, — now in the north, now in the south, noAV in the agricultural districts, and now in great manufacturing centres. The first time I heard Morley Punshon was in a mining village of fewer than five hundred inhabitants; the last time I heard him was in the City Temple, London.

He would preach the same sei’mon in the village as in the City. He did not seem to be putting oft” the village with anything that came most easily to hand; he spent himself as thoroughh when addressing two hundred peasants as when addressing the Conference itself. This always struck me as characteristic of the preacjiing of Mr. Spurgeon. I have heard him in a chapel which could not accommodate more than three hundred people, and I have heard him in the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and in both cases he was equally apostolic and intent upon his purpose. Who can estimate the influence of the great Methodist ministry, ranging over cities and towns and villages and out-of-the-way hamlets? The visits of such men as I have described formed epochs in the history of agricultural England. How the visits of great men were anticipated! What recollections of their services were passed from mouth to mouth! How young men felt encouraged in their best reading and in their best religious service! No imagination can conceive the profound and blessed effect which Methodism has had upon English life. It is one of my happiest recollections that when the Methodist preacher came to a town or village lie conducted the whole service himself. I have known instances in other denominations where one man has given out the hymns, another man has read the lesson, another man has offered the prayer, and another man has preached the sermon. In the case of the Methodist itinerants, such a man as Robert Newton took the service from l)eginning to end, and was thus enabled to secure proportionate and effective distribution of the parts

I have taken Dr. Newton and Dr. Punshon as types of a special order of preaching. To their honoured names I must add others which did not, perhaps, to the same extent appeal to popular imagination, though in many respects they represent an intellectual life in no degree inferior. One of the most elfective Methodist preachers I ever heard was Dr. Joseph Beaumont, a man who had no roof to his mouth, and who yet managed to do his work as one who had no need to ask consideration or indulgence. Though a Methodist minister, he was a doctor of medicine. He was one of the men to be found in every denomination who have ideas which do not immediately secure popular acceptance. He was an orator rather than a statesman. He saw his subjects sharply and ideally. He was intensely yoetic in his temperament. Eor these reasons probably he would have made a poor President of the Conference if his brethren had ever conferred upon him that distinction. Many of his obiter dicta were too satiric to be quite relished l)y persons who take daily cave of their own respectability. Dr. Beaumont once said: “Poor old Newton! he has not an idea in either hemisphere of his brain.” This remark would be made without any ill-nature, yet it is easy to see how it indicates a kind of spirit that would stand in the way of any man’s official advancement. Once in a great public meeting the air had become so intolerably hot as to cause Beaumont to cry out at the top of his voice, “Smash that window and let in the Lord!” A very different man was John Rattenbury — emotional, hortatory, and quietly passionate. If his tears could have converted the world, the process would not have been long delayed. He had quite an apostolic love of souls. Rattenbury was neither philosopher, nor orator, nor statesman, and yet it was easy to detect some trace of each in his fervent nature. Different, again, was George B. Macdonald, whose ministry I remember with the deepest gratitude. I remember his playing like a master upon a whole congregation, bringing them to tears and not a few of them to spiritual decision. When I heard him he spoke with the repose of mastery. He had a plain tale to tell, and he told it in lucid English. He had a great appeal to make, and the very quietness of his utterance acted like a charm upon all who listened to it. George Macdonald gave me the impression of a man who knew his subject, and knew exactly what he could do with it, and who was quite content with the talents which God had entrusted to his care, without troubling himself with any vexatious ambitions.

I knew three of the men avIio led what was then called the Wesleyan Reform movement. We used to whisper their names as if afraid of being overheard. Their awful names were Everett, Dunn, and Griffith. They were often thought of as three volcanoes about to explode, but never doing it to any great extent. They were what to-day would be called “Progressives.” Everything in Methodism was wrong, and they were the men who were divinely called to put everything right. They were all men of ability and of unimpeachable character. They always distrusted — perhaps detested — what they regarded as the official element in Methodism. They were reformers, agitators, malcontents, and driven before a new conception of things as by a great wind, which might be called Eiiroclydon. They are better understood to-day than they were in their own time, and I have no doubt would be spoken of respectfully by many of the older men who remember with a shudder the earthquake which they caused. I have heard James Everett say that he never knew any one who could pray with such power and tenderness as Jabez Bunting, yet Bunting’s was the policy which Everett disliked and distrusted, I well remember that the pamphlets of Everett, Dunn, and Griffith used to be read almost stealthily, and yet I know instances in which they were read with undisguised eagerness and relish. Probably there is not a quack medicine in the world that is not backed with a hundred testimonials; probably there is not a reformer who has not an overflowing Adullam; jirobably there is not a crank who has not sometimes been mistaken for a prophet. The Wesleyan reformers were neither impostors, nor adventurers, nor self-seekers. They were thoroughly in earnest. If they were injudicious they could shelter themselves behind

A PREACHER’tS LIFE

all the reformers who have led the world; and if sometimes they incurred the charge of egotism, it certainly was an egotism most unselfish and expensive. The movement which these men originated has resulted in what is now known as the United Methodist Free Church, distinguished among the tribes of Israel for intelligence, spirituality, and apostolic consecration.

In connection with these memories it would give me great personal pleasure to put down here my estimate of not a few public benefactors who went by the designation of “local ireachers.” Their names were, of course, unknown beyond the immediate neighbourhood in which they laboured, and, therefore, to quote them would be to appeal to a very limited though appreciative public. The local preachers of England have always attracted my grateful attention as a body of men who have done, and are doing, the greatest possible good in their respective spheres. Perhaps some of my readers may wonder what a local preacher is, so I may explain that he is a man who visits the villages in order to preach the Gospel to peasants and others, and who, though engaged in business, is enabled to preach in many places great and small what he knows of the kingdom of God. The local preacher is a voluntary labourer. It must not be imagined that he attains his position without culture and examination; he has to satisfy certain tests before he can be put upon the preachers’ plan. Many men engaged in business during the whole week will preach for a dozen Sundays in succession, in a dozen difPerent places. Townspeople can hardly realise what it is for villagers to have amongst them for a whole day a man from some busy centre who takes with him something of the larger world, and thus connects the peasantry with the great far-away public. The local preacher will walk from three to ten miles on a Sunday that he may conduct religious services, without fee or reward. In many ways he acts as a village pastor without either the name or the remuneration of official status. Before my mind at this moment I have four local preachers in the north of England, two of whom were magistrates, and the other two occupied strong fiduciary positions. All four had libraries not to be found in the houses of some men who would think it refined and polite to sneer at them. Tavo of these local preachers were not only deeply read in philosophy and history, but could also consult the Greek Testament with facility and profit. Of course they were only “local preachers,” — they were not described as reverend. They had not been ordained by official hands. They would be looked down upon with contempt by all persons who considered themselves to be in the direct apostolical succession. By these persons a local preacher would be looked upon as a curiosity, — as something that had escaped from the Zoological Gardens owing to the carelessness of hired custodians. How funny it was that a man should be both a draper and a preacher, or a blacksmith and a preacher, or a farm-labourer and a preacher! What must many a vicar have thought of such curiosities! What could any self-respecting bishop do but smile, more in pity than in contempt, when he heard that a man made shoes on the week-days, and went out to preach on the Sunday? To the official and courtly mind such anomalies would be extremely comical, if they were not scandalously iniquitous. Yet the local preachers of England have done an incalculably blessed work for their country. I have sometimes wished that we were all “local preachers.” I have sometimes claimed that I am in very deed a local preacher myself, and I have sustained the claim by the fact that for more than thirty years I have, as a preacher, been standing in one public place. To my mind Congregationalism has lost great opportunities by not sufficiently developing the public talents of business men. I am a heretic amongst my brethren in many of these things. I would encourage eveiy man to preach to whom God has given the talent of preaching. I would ajDpoint laymen to carry on official work which is often done by ministers. I would have working evangelists and pastors —

that is to say, men who in the villages support themselves by manual labour and preach the Gosjiel on Sundays. I have met a minister who never accepted a penny from any public fund, whose name is on the official list of ministers, but who worked as a labouring man and took from the people what they could afford, and thus pastor and peojile maintained an independent relation to one another. This cannot by any means be always the case; but I distinctly contend that wherever it is the l)est thing that can be done, it should be done without any fear of incurring social contempt. I have ahvays been a working man myself. I should be quite pi-epared, if Providence so ordained, to go into any village and support myself by some kind of labour, and preach the Gospel on Sundays and at other times, gratefully receiving whatever contributions the people might be disposed to give, on the ground that the “labourer is worthy of his hire.” In substance this is what local preachers have always done. They have not done it in one village, but they have done it in the villages of their respective counties. The principle is the same. If the irregular minister could not live in the village in which he preached, he might find occupation within walking distance of it. I am well aware of all the suggested difficulties connected with such an arrangement; but sometimes we have to decide between alternative difficulties, and in this decision I believe fewer difficulties will be found on the side of local ireachiug without pastoral status than on the other side. Throughout my career I have noticed that men never lose caste by being jilainly and simply what they are in reality without pretence or affectation, doing their work with an honest heart and as in the sight of God. I may give some idea of the importance which I attach to local preaching, when it is intelligent and edifying, if I say that if either the “regular” ministers must go or the local preachers, I should certainly allow the “regular” ministers to disappear. I do not want either of them to disappear, I am only speaking about an alternative course, and I give this opinion without fear or hesitation.

Lord Brougham could hardly he classed as a local preacher, and yet on the solitary occasion upon which I heard him he delivered an energetic address on missions to the West Coast of Africa. On the platform Lord Brougham and Bishop Wilberforce were the principal figures. The meeting was held in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, which, needless to say, was crowded from floor to ceiling. Some idea of the numbers present may be conceived from the opening sentence in Brougham’s speech: “In addressing this, the largest assembly I have ever seen under one roof, may I hope that its patience may be in proportion to its magnitude?” There is more in this sentence than first appears. It conveyed the finest rebuke that was ever addressed to an imjiatieut throng. A very learned man had just moved an elaborate resolution, and he moved it in so verbose and halting a way that the people signified their desire that he should sit down. The learned man was not a discerner of the signs of public meetings, so he took the muffled stamping of thousands of feet as a token that he was being listened to with interest and appreciation. Wilberforce well knew the contrary, and signified the same by many a furtive glance at the tedious speaker. Brougham immediately succeeded, and when the storm of applause abated he uttered the sentence which I have just quoted. The meeting was more than patient with the venerable Demosthenes. The preceding speaker has said something about ancient Carthage, and the master of assemblies followed it up by saying that there was one thing Avliich ancient Carthage had never done, and that was to organise volunteers for her own defence. The point of this remark was, that at the time the volunteer movement in England was in its first and most eager development. Thus from end to end of the speech Brougham, whose snoAA^y head aa as a kind of Mont Blanc on the elevated platform, constantly touched the intelligence and the sentiment of his enraptured audience. I cannot call the Bishop of Oxford either a local preacher or a layman, but I may refer to him in this connection simply because he immediately followed the great oration of Lord Brougham, — which was a Demosthenic philippic against the whole policy of Spain. It would not have been surprising if the meeting had culminated in the speech of Lord Brougham, l)ut as a matter of fact Wilberforce carried it to a higher and more impressive level. His speech opened with a reference to Lord Brougham which might well have formed a paragraph in a book consisting of illustrations of rhetoric and eloquence. The Bight Reverend Prelate began by recounting the great contemporaries of Brougham’s middle life. He mentioned them by name, and paid a fitting tribute to each. Then he said that there were masses of rock which were known to geologists as “outliers,” — rocks that had withstood all the encroachments of the most tempestuous seas; then, turning to Brougham, he said that in the venerable ex-Chancellor they saw a fine example of a living “outlier” who had survived the cataclysm of time. I can never forget the dignity and the power with which this sentence was uttered. Many people were not unnaturally amused at the idea of Lord Brougham l)eing found, through some mysterious accident of Providence, on the platform of a missionary meeting. But he

A PREACHEirS LIFE

was found there, and the figure which he made will never fade from my memory.

One of the men who deeply impressed me in my teens was Frederick Douglas, the famed anti-slavery orator. Douglas was the very form and fashion of a man. Tall, black, with large, gleaming eyes and a A’oice of wonderful compass, he was just the speaker to handle any audience with adequate power. Douglas was a rhetorician. His was not the rhetoric of sentiment, but the passion of a man who had bled under the slave-driver’s lash. He might have expressed every sentiment of his speech without producing a thousandth part of the effect which followed his electric tones. In the audience there was a man who stood up and said to Douglas, in an insolent and rasping tone, “You are a liar!” At that moment Douglas took fire. “He calls me a liar!” And then in a torrent of indignation, the like of which is seldom heard, he hurled back with infinite eifect the scandalous accusation. The meeting became so excited that its temper could only be appeased by the expulsion of the man who had caused the vulgar interruption.

John B. Gough is a name that occurs to me in this connection, simply because he also hailed from the United States. I knew Goiigh somewhat intimately, and the more I knew of him the more I esteemed the integrity and the simplicity of his character. From beginning to end Gough was dramatic; here and there, indeed, he was almost theatrical. Henry Ward Beecher once said to me that if there was anything in an anecdote Gough was the man to get it out. His orations were not all anecdotes, nor were they funny stories, nor were they exhibitions of mere conjuring in words. There was always a substratum of sound and useful reasoning, and occasionally an insight into the philosophy of a question which astonished the people avIio came to hear sensational declamation. Taking the whole of any single oration I ever heard Gough deliver, I should describe it as quite a marvellous mixture of argument, anecdote, wit, pathos, and thrilling appeal. I do not believe that Gough ever committed a speech to memory, but he repeated his speeches so often as to give the impression that he was going through a formal recitation. John B. Gough has visited ray house, and I have visited his, and after many communications with him, direct and indirect, I gladly give it as my opinion that Gough was not only a hrilliant cleclaimer, but an honest and high-minded man, capable of doing the most generous and unselfish actions.

If I wanted a direct and even startling contrast to J. B. Gough, I would find it in Henry Rogers, the famous Edinburgh reviewer. For several years I was brought into occasional relation to this critical and voluminous essayist. He was President of Lancashire Independent College when I saw him most closely. That an Independent minister might have been editor of the Edinburgh Review is no common incident in the history of Nonconformity. Por such an editorship Henry Rogers had everj’ qualification. His vast reading, his critical instinct, his penetrating wit, and his infinite capacity for taking pains combined to fit him for that supreme literary function. The three volumes of his collected “Essays and Reviews” show the very wide range within which he had conducted his most careful critical studies. The “Eclipse of Faith” is one of the most powerful defences of the Christian religion which has appeared in modern times, yet that powerful assault upon infidelity and unbelief (published

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anonymously) was described in a religious newspaper of the day as, “Another dart from the quiver of the enemy.” So much for the literary omniscience which can review a hook without reading it. I was in the house of the editor when he came home on the night of pulilishing that unpardonable misrepresentation, when he exclaimed, “I would have recalled the whole edition of the paper if the printing had not gone so far.” So much, I repeat, for a certain kind of reviewing! The infinite mischief of such reviewing is that many people accept it as honest and final criticism. What an Edinburgh reviewer that false critic would have made! Under his influence how wondrously the European mind would have been directed in its choice of literature! No man was more amused with the revicAv than was Henry Rogers himself.