Religious Work and Religious Life, 1813–1833
ly the preceding chapters of this Book I have attempted to trace the rise of !Mr James’s fame as a preacher, and have narrated the prominent events of his history from 1S13 to 1833, — his long and dangerous illness, the death of his first wife, his second marriage, the erection of a larger meeting-house, the part he took in the ecclesiastical movements and controversies of his time. The most important pro-inces of his history, the vicissitudes of his personal religious life, and his quiet work among his own people, can receive no adequate illustration. To record definite proofs of a minister’s spiritual earnestness and fidelity, to illustrate his candour and boldness in privately reproving sin, his patience and gentleness with the wayward and self-willed, the tenderness of his sympathy with the bereaved, the sick, the poor, his kindly advice given to the young, his persevering endeavours to reclaim the profligate, his unwearying vigUance in assisting and guiding persons whose religious troubles required special and personal attention, is beyond the power of a biographer. But I have formed a conception of what kind of a person Mv James was during these twenty years, and instead of attempting to string together a number of illustrative facts, I will state what that conception is. The significance of a man’s life is not declared by exhibiting any number of isolated instances of well-doing or ill-doing. His life consists, not in par-LIFE OP JOHN ANGELL JAIIES.
ticular actions -wliicli often live in the memory, because they are exceptional, but in settled habits which can hardly be crystallised into anecdotes.
In these twenty years Mr James’s congregation increased from four or five hundred to nearly two thousand; and the church from about one hundred and fifty to about five hundred. The reverence and affection he inspired in the hearts of his people preserved them in unbroken peace, preventing many causes of disquiet, and enabling him, when trouble and perplexity arose, so to guide the action of the church as to secure, if not perfect unanimity, general consent and confidence.
It was during this period that he became known in all parts of the country as a stimulating and impressive religious orator. The restless, dissipating life of a popular preacher, travelling incessantly from county to county, occupying a new pulpit or a new platform every successive evening for a month together, reaching home weary and jaded at the end of the week, and starting on a new journey early on Monday morning, was the life which Mr James was at this time in some danger of living. He never permitted himself to be quite hurried away by the strong and deceptive current of entreaty, flattery, and excitement, which might have swept him from the anchorage of a devout retirement and unostentatious pastoral work; but for a time he must have been in serious peril.
The injurious influences against which a popular preacher has to struggle are not sufficiently considered, either by the silly idolaters of his power or by the harsh critics of his imperfections, and they are grave enough to make those who may be disposed to sigh over the obscurity of their ministerial work content and grateful; and grave enough to alarm any man who, instead of attempting to make his ministry efi’ective in producing the noblest results, is so foolish as to covet tumultuous admiration.
It is no inconsiderable evil that the popular preacher loses the moral and religious benefit of order and regularity in his personal habits. The monastic rule appointing to every hour its proper functions, though likely to produce stagnation in a sluggish nature, r.ELlGIOUS WORK AND RELIGIOUS LIFE, 1813-1833. 217
protects the active and the vigorous from many evils; external order is an assistance to calm self-control, and to what the mystical writers call “recollection.” The minister whose work lies round about his own home may secure to a considerable extent the advantages of this discipline. He has his time for study, his time for work among the people outside, his time for rest, and above all his time for prayer; and though he will not attempt to enforce the systematic division of his hours with rigid exactness, the approach to method in his life is healthful and invigorating.
But if once a minister chances to achieve a noisy reputation for the oddity, or the beauty, or the brilliance of his sermons, he will find it very difiicult to resist the temptation to desert his home, and his more private and noiseless work, that he may dazzle, amaze, or impress congregations that are eager to hear him all over the country; if he yield, his inward life is likely to become as restless and unquiet as his outward life, and his piety, instead of being calm and profound, will probably become vague, desultory, and fitful.
The irregularity of a popular preacher’s life, though a serious elnl, is perhaps less obviously injurious than some of its other characteristics. While constantly travelling from town to town, he is likely to find that necessities he can scarcely evade, often allow him no time or opportunity for protracted meditation and prayer. Nor is it spiritually healthy for him to be incessantly engaged in authoritative teaching and exhortation.
Preaching does not exercise and strengthen the gentleness, the patience, the perseverance, which are developed by the more private functions of the ministry; the visitation of the sick and the troubled and the poor, seems an almost indispensable protection against the self-exaltation into which an attractive preacher is in danger of being betrayed. Even that kind of humility which is produced in a true-hearted student by the perplexities of many of his studies, and by the transcendent greatness of the illustrious teachers of the human race, the famous preacher whose days and nights are spent in liaranguing crowded congregations has no chance of acquiring. The excitement he creates he must largely
LIFE OF JOHN ANGELL JAMES.
feel himself, and to be agitated day after day with violent emotions will not promote the depth of his religious affections.
Moreover, he is exposed to terrible and constant temptations to utter more than his heart feels, to exaggerate and intensify the expression of his spiritual fervour and zeal for human salvation. Sometimes the preacher must be weary, and long to be with Christ “in a desert place,” for quietness and rest, but the throngs that fill the pews and aisles demand his thrUling climaxes and his passionate appeals; they exj)ect to catch the contagion of his enthusiasm; and if he shrink, as he probably wUl, from disappointing them, he will use, vfith a vehemence and solemnity which imply present earnestness, language which was natural and true when first he wrote it, for it was the unstrained expression of his inward ardour, but which is now most false, for the ardour has quite gone down. If he speak extemporaneously, his danger will be greater still, for he will perhaps lash himself into a rhetorical excitement, and utter words and thoughts which imply the most solemn and awful vision of the eternal world, rapturous fellowship with God, Christ-like agony for the conversion or sanctifi cation of his hearers, while the great currents of his religious nature are stagnant or frozen.
To all these dangers Mr James was exposed during a considerable part of the period between 1813 and 1833, and his natural temperament and the complexion of his youthful piety made him peculiarly susceptible to their influence. At Poole and Gosport, and during the early years of his ministry in Birmingham, although he acknowledged and enforced the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ over every faculty and energy of human nature, the ideal of Christian holiness by which his life was practically influenced gave a very exaggerated value to excited religious affections. He was fascinated by the conception of a fervid and enthusiastic devotion, and resolved to attain it. Tears produced by the contemplation of the more pathetic passages of Christ’s history, or of the awful destiny of the finally impenitent, appeared to him an important evidence of advancing piety. It is probable that in prayer his chief concern was to raise his own nature into intense
RELIGIOUS WOEK AND EELIGIOrS LIFE, 1S13-1S33. 219
and ardent activity, as though it were the strength of our human feeling which achieves spiritual victories; almost forgetting the responsive grace and power of God in the endeavour to imitate and reproduce the agonising earnestness which has characterised the devotions of illustrious saints. In preaching, vehement passion, which, whether exhibited by an actor, or by a political orator, or by a preacher, produces immediate and violent agitation, was more eagerly sought for than those penetrating elements of spiritual power which, whUe they permanently affect the lowest depths of man’s religious nature, often leave the surface unmoved.
The disappointments and discouragements of the earlier years of his ministry, the admii’able practical goodness of his first wife, his serious and prolonged illness, prepared him in some measure to meet the perils of his popularity. Whether he escaped altogether unharmed, cannot now be easUy determined, but it is natural to suppose that as the immediate results of his troubles gradually wore off, he would need some other corrective Influences to save him from the vanity and religious shallowness which are the besetting sins of the popular preacher.
These were supplied. A few years after his marriage to his second wife her influence over his whole character became very powerful She was a woman of unusual moral vigour. Her conceptions of duty inclined her rather to asceticism than to laxity; and her piety was fervent and elevated. The life of INIrs Fletcher of Madeley was one of her favourite books. When she came to Birmingham, she resolved to do her utmost to discourage “worldliness” among the more wealthy people in her husband’s congregation, to relieve the loneliness and hardships of the poor, and to endeavour with all her energy to increase the efficiency of the various institutions connected with the church. Her earnest devotion to the people could not have been without: its effect in maintaining and strengthening in her husband’s mind a conviction of the worthlessness of mere transient excitement and popular applause, and of the transcendent spiritual value of his quiet labours among his own congregation.
About the year 1827 he began to form an intimate friendship with several American ministers, and it is my conviction that he owed very much of the religious earnestness of the last thirty years of his ministry to his intercourse with them. Selections from his correspondence with Dr Patton and Dr Sprague are appended to this Book. He had many other friends in the States with whom he corresponded, though less frequently.
Of still greater importance in relation to Mr James’s religious life was his partial retirement from general public work in consequence of a severe nervous aflfection, which gradually increased towards the close of the period of which I am now writing, and at last became so distressing that the prospect of any public engagement away from home became a source of terror to him. Of this it will be necessary to speak more fully in the next Book; but before 1883 it had compelled him greatly to diminish his general activity. The quietness thus enforced upon him did much to develop the maturity and depth of Christian life, which won for him the affectionate reverence of devout men of all churches and all creeds.