Kitabı oku: «The London Pulpit», sayfa 5
THE REV. JOHN CAMPBELL, D.D
If the reader has ever been in the habit of attending public meetings, he must occasionally have seen an amendment proposed by a man evidently in a minority, yet proposed nevertheless. The man who does this is a man of confidence, of good lungs and nerve. First, the meeting will not hear him at all. ‘Down, down!’ is the universal cry. But the man stands firm, fixes his arms across his breast in the manner of the ‘Napoleon musing at St. Helena’ of the late Mr. Haydon. He knows that that angry hubbub cannot last long: that the indignant public will be out of breath in five minutes; that the more frantic it is now, the more exhausted and quiet it will be anon; and, with a calm smile of pity, he waits the result. All that he has to do is simply to stand still, and, if he does this long enough, there is no meeting on the face of the earth that can refuse him a hearing.
In some such manner has the Rev. John Campbell made good his position in the religious world, or rather in that one section of the Congregational body over which he rules with a rod of iron. At times there has been a hubbub, but the Doctor knows no hubbub, however loud and angry, can last long; and to the mass, destitute alike of information and principles, it is a real blessing to get hold of a firm, dogmatic man, who knows his own mind, and who will kindly take care of theirs. Fluent in pen, meagre in attainment, seemingly master of no one subject, yet writing vehemently on all, the Doctor is precisely the man to give the law to that low class of readers more or less present in all religious denominations. It is easy to see what he is, and what he is not. He is not an accomplished orator, for he eschews the graces of the platform. He is not a man of learning, for learning softens the manners. He is not a man of lofty grasp of thought, for he has never said a word, or written a line, that is not narrow and sectarian and one-sided. But he is hard, energetic, confident, loud in voice, and boisterous in manner; as unabashed as the Duke of York’s monument in Waterloo Place.
You can see what manner of a man Dr. Campbell is in the twinkling of an eye. It is not often he preaches now; but if you chance to be at the Tabernacle, in the City Road, when he does preach, you will feel the description of him is correct. The memory of that Apostle in an age of sensualism and sin, George Whitfield, still sheds a fragrance round the dreary-looking chapel, in which some few hundreds, chiefly of the poorer sort of small tradesmen, meet, Sabbath after Sabbath, and where the Editor of the ‘Christian Witness,’ of the ‘Christian Penny Magazine,’ and of the ‘British Standard,’ occasionally harangues. If you go, gentle reader, take with you a good stock of patience, for you will not find the service easy, or the sermon short. There, in the very pulpit where Whitfield, the persuasive, the silver-tongued, stood – the Whitfield, whom lords and ladies flocked to hear; who lit up with light and life a wicked and adulterous generation – an age destitute alike of faith and heart and hope – you will see a big cumbrous man, of severe face and repulsive manner, with a voice harsh and rough as a mountain-stream. The face is almost hidden between two uncomfortable collars, which create your sympathy for the unfortunate mortal in such an unpleasant fix. Continuing your search, however, you see piercing eyes beneath bushy brows, a nose of a decided character, a most firm chin, and a head of thick grey hair, the obstinate irregularities of which would throw a fashionable hair-dresser into despair. Moore wrote of Castlereagh that —
‘He gave out his small beer with the air of a chap
Who thinks to himself, ’T is prodigious fine tap.’
Just so preaches Dr. Campbell. In the pulpit he has it all his own way. You cannot contradict him. You cannot even intimate dissent; and he harangues with the air of a judge. Evidently the congregation has been dragooned into what it is, for the preacher gives no sign of intelligence or vigour. He takes a text and preaches from it. The divisions of the sermon are the sentences of the text, and he talks in the most desultory manner imaginable. The oratory belongs to the deadly-lively school, and consists of mild common-places, pumped out with a ferocity reminding one of the stern Puritans of the olden time, but rather out of place in the Tabernacle in which the Doctor reigns supreme, and which we suppose is licensed for public worship, according to Act of Parliament. Moderate your expectations if you go there. Dr. Campbell has been far too busy a man to master the thought and aspect and characteristics of our age. Of what man in England, in London, in the nineteenth century, is aiming at, he seems to have but a remote idea. So blind is he that, if he wants a heathen, he puts on his spectacles and reads you an account of one out of some old Missionary Magazine. Nor does the Doctor atone for this by the beauty of his style and the perspicuity of his tone. His voice is husky and, at times, inaudible; his manner, bad. Sheridan had a bad voice, so had Fox, so had Burke; but these men were orators, nevertheless. Dr. Campbell is not one, and never was one. He builds up no lofty structure. He bears you on no unfaltering wing far,
‘Far above this lower world,
Up where eternal ages roll.’
He overflows with no brilliant eloquence, and burns with no celestial fire. He never ascends into the region of beauty and splendour, and life and light. His is not the magic art to take you from step to step along the Christian path, till your soul heaves, and you exclaim, ‘It is good to be here!’ On the contrary, he leaves you flat and cold and dull. He amplifies, and waves his right arm, and quotes texts, and repeats a feeble sentence emphatically; but that is all; he makes no progress. In going from Edinburgh to Stirling, by water, you are carried backwards and forwards, by the winding of the stream, in the most remarkable manner. You see Stirling long before you approach. You keep going, and yet you don’t seem going on. Dr. Campbell winds just in the same way. You have talk without effect; action without progress; words without thought.
The real truth is, Dr. Campbell is one of the failures of the age. His ‘Martyr of Erromanga’ has been his only creditable work. No man has talked more, or done less. He attempts too much. He would be everything, and is nothing. Superficiality has ever been his bane. A fatal copiousness of words has ruined him. More golden opportunities than those he has had, no man ever had. A failure in the pulpit, he turned himself to the press; and a powerful body, with an organization in almost every town and village in the land, rallied round him as their chief. To circulate his publications the most gigantic efforts were made. The ‘pulpits were tuned,’ the Sunday-school was invaded, the congregation was taken by storm. Like most men whose invective powers are strong, the Doctor can flatter, and he did so with a vengeance. The model church was the church which took in the most of the Doctor’s publications. The successful minister was the minister who sold the most of them. The people of whom the Doctor had hopes were the people who subscribed 4s. 4d. per quarter to Bolt Court.
But the Doctor can bear no rival; he must reign supreme. John Childs, of Bungay, and Dr. Adam Thomson, of Coldstream, destroyed the Bible monopoly; but Dr. Campbell had the command of the press, and took the credit to himself. An eminent publisher started a newspaper and a religious magazine, and the Doctor looked coldly on him till he sold the newspaper and gave up the magazine. When the ‘Anti-State-Church Society’ was formed, the Doctor was one of its members, but it had a ruling spirit who was not the pastor of the Tabernacle, and the Doctor’s zeal soon died away. The Doctor also professes to be with the Teetotalers; but they don’t all go to Bolt Court, and the Doctor damns them with faint praise. If the Congregationalists grow restive, it matters little; they have no chance against him; they have been delivered over to the Doctor, body and soul. It is in vain they struggle to be free. Will the Doctor publish what would militate against himself? Will the Doctor withhold from publishing when it gives him the chance of an easy triumph? Of course, a man is a fool to enter into a controversy with a newspaper editor. The editor is omnipotent; you must give in. If it is folly to kick against the pricks, it is the height of folly to encounter the editor of a newspaper. Hence the Doctor’s triumphs have been easy; but they have been due more to the weakness of his foes than to any strength of his own.
As to the utter weakness of the Doctor in execution, let us turn to the ‘British Banner.’ A man may be heavy, rambling, in the pulpit; but with his pen he may be quite the reverse. The ‘Banner,’ when under the Doctor’s care, was a failure. That was to have been a paper to Christianize the world; to win over the discontented infidelity and chartism of our age; to pervade the land with a living Christian faith: for this, Doctor Campbell had a support such as was never given to man before. The Doctor told us that there was an infidel press; that that infidel press circulated by tens of thousands; and that it behoved Christian men to try and arrest such a state of things. Christian men believed the Doctor, and invested him with tremendous power. And what has been the consequence? That the world has a fresh sectarian paper, and that the readers of the infidel press remain just where they were. Is this a success?
Take another test. The London weekly papers exchange with the country ones; the consequence is, many of the leaders appearing in the former are reprinted in the latter. This is about the best test you can have of what a newspaper is. The editors of the country papers are very fair representatives of the intelligence of the age. What they reprint must be generally good. You would expect this to be so, and it actually is the case. The papers which have the highest reputation for talent and clearness of view are precisely the papers most quoted from. But who ever saw a reprint of a leader from the ‘British Banner’? If the leaders in the ‘Banner’ were as distinguished for the vigour of language, for the correctness of their views, they would be reprinted as extensively as the papers the ‘Banner’ was intended to supersede. If the Doctor’s aim were good, if it were desirable to start a paper that should be Christian, and yet popular, so that it should circulate everywhere, the Doctor’s failure has been complete; for he has not only not done so, but he has hindered the men who would.
Like most vituperative men, Dr. Campbell is terribly thin-skinned. You may praise, but you must not blame. He seems conscious that honest criticism would tear him to shreds and tatters. We heard of a Scottish paper in the habit of giving pulpit portraits. It was expected the Doctor would be served up in course of time. The Doctor let it be understood that, if anything of the kind were done, he would write the paper into the Broomielaw: and the matter dropped.
The last time I heard the Doctor he was preaching about the Chinese. He told us, what most of us knew well before, that China was a very large country, that it had a wall eighteen hundred miles long, that Confucius lived three or four hundred years before Christ; but there was one thing he did not tell us – that the Chinese call a man of talk, and swagger, and rhodomontade, a paper tiger. But perhaps the Doctor was wise, as comparisons are odious. After all, that such a man, with his fulsome eulogies and violent invective, should have come to be a power, is a melancholy fact – a fact indicating that Dissent will have to undergo a very formidable purifying process before men of taste, and intellect, and learning will be found willing to join its ranks.
THE REV. THOMAS T. LYNCH
The one great want of the metropolitan pulpit is men abreast of the age, who can sympathize with its pulsation, can respond to its wants, can permeate it with a living faith. The majority of the men in the pulpit cease to be such when they get there. Of the human heart, as it is fevered with passion, or boils over with desire, they know nothing. They see men under a mask. Smith does not talk to his minister as he does to Brown; with Brown he is facetious – occasionally a little loose – and, after a good dinner and a bottle of wine, speaks in terms almost of approval of fashionable follies. The minister comes in and the conversation is changed – allusions are made to the ‘Evangelical Magazine’ – the Missionary Society is referred to – something is said of Sunday Schools, and the world for a time is dropped. Smith, junior, acts in a similar way. Before his minister he assumes a virtue, if he have it not – is sedate – quiet, anything, in short, but what his intimates find him to be. It seems to be the condition of the pulpit that it shall see life under a mask; and as to thought, that does not move in the regular time-worn ruts, that is condemned at once. It is not the thought of the pulpit, and it therefore must be false. It may be born of vigorous intellect; it may have been nursed by years of severe thought; to get at it, the thinker may have sacrificed many an early friendship – many a cherished association – many a sacred tie; but, nevertheless, the pulpit would blast it with its stern anathemas, and pronounces it a crime. Occasionally, a man in the pulpit can act differently. Some few years back, when Professor Scott, then of University College, London, now of Owen’s College, Manchester, was in town, it seemed as if an honest attempt was made to meet and win to Christianity the philosophy that was genuine and earnest and religious, though it squared with the creed of no church, and took for its textbook the living heart of man rather than the written Word. In our time the same thing is attempted. The man who has had the courage to make the attempt – and to whom honour should be given for it – is the Rev. Thomas Lynch.
Judged by externals, the Rev. Thomas Lynch is a failure. He is a small spare man; his bodily presence is contemptible; he is a reed shaken by the wind. You get no idea of the church militant when you look at him,
‘Of the drum ecclesiastic,
Beat with fist instead of a stick.’
He is none of your bully ‘Bottoms,’ to roar ‘so that the Duke will say, let him roar again.’ His chapel is in the very unfashionable neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road. His hearers are few and far between. Out of the immense crowd of church and chapel goers in this great city, not three hundred can be got to hear him; and yet I know no man better worth your hearing. Your popular orators, your Dan O’Connells and your Dr. Leifchilds, are big men – and yet your small men have often the organization favourable to the development of poetry and thought. So is it with Mr. Lynch. It is the old Gospel he preaches; but he handles it in a new and fresh form. What is wearisome from others, comes with a peculiar fascination from him. The truths common-place men have made prosaic and common-place, the magic of his genius can render quite the reverse. His is the rare power, given to the true poet alone, ‘to clothe the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn;’ and his also is the still rarer power to show piety —
‘Sitting as a goddess bright,
In the circle of her light.’
You see that Christianity to him is life and power – no form of words, but a reality; that it fills his heart; that it works in his intellect; that it sanctifies his utterance. Hence it comes fresh to you as it does to him; it is alive with the light of genius and of God; with him it is applicable to the conditions of existence, to man’s need and nature – no tinkling cymbal – no empty brass. A brother and a man preaches to you; your equal in philosophy, in thought, in lettered lore; your superior in what is greater and nobler still. Yes, that frail man, with an imperfect frame – with a voice so weak that you can scarcely hear him – with an appearance so homely that you would never think that in such a casket a soul of any greatness could be enshrined – can speak to you of the great things of God – of righteousness, and temperance, and the judgment to come, so that you – worldly scoffer or philosophic sceptic though you be – must listen with admiration and respect.
A tale is told of a certain divine who was much given to a practice common in the Scotch Church, though not very popular here – of exposition. Once upon a time, when remonstrated with, the worthy preacher, with a candour deserving of all praise, replied, that he did so because, when he was persecuted in one text, he could flee to another. Mr. Lynch needs no such practice. His Bible is no sealed book, but a revelation of light, and splendour, and truth. To him there is nothing common, or barren, or unclean. All is food for his intellect, always active – and his fancy, always copious and rich. Nor even does that, luxuriant though it be, lead him astray. All the while he is in earnest, illustrating, as he himself writes in that choice book of his, ‘Theophilus Trinal’ – that
‘the powers that play in fancy,
Can a holy earnest show,
As the colours of the bubble
Shine serenely in the bow.’
His theology we will describe in his own words. In the book we have already referred to, he writes: ‘Human nature, like ancient Job, is foul and sore with disease, spirit-worn, and weary with incessant strivings of heart. The Philosophies, as friends, come with their sympathy and wisdom; but their words are dark clouds, edged brightly, which reveal the splendours of truth behind them, but disclose not the orb; and to the parched heart they are but as clouds, with a wind indeed, but without rain. But after the discoursings of philosophy with human nature, there is heard the voice of God, saying, “I am; behold my works; hope and believe!” As experience enlarges, spiritual questions accumulate, till at the last they pass into one great question concerning the world and human life, which the heart expresses not in words, but which fills it with a mute agony of wonder. To this question there is no answer, or hope of any, till the voice of God is heard, saying, “I am!” This voice from a whisper rises till it has the sound of many waters. Happy are we if we believe and feel that the man of sorrows, and of success after sorrows, Jesus, the Son of God, is still his real and sufficient representative. He is God’s surety to the world. He, bearing the sins of the world, bears also its difficulties. In the faith of Christ have the men of many generations found fixed standing-place, immovably secure. In him they have heard the voice, “I am!” “Here we rest,” they have said; “our God, we will not distrust thee!” He bears the golden key of love that shall unlock the secret of the world. This key is a key of escape from a prison; key of entrance to a palace. Oftentimes, in life, we may seem as those who struggle in a wide stormy sea, knowing their strength only by the greatness of their ineffectual efforts. Yet are we safe. For though we may feel as if rather drifting in a slight skiff over boisterous waters than making way over them in a strong vessel, yet if, after dreary days, Columbus found the land which reason taught him to hope for, much more shall we reach the country promised to the faithful.’
Having thus referred to ‘Theophilus Trinal,’ a book which has already reached a second edition, we may as well add here that Mr. Lynch has published a sermon explanatory of his views and aims, and Four Lectures delivered at Manchester, on various forms of Literature, and is, and has been for some time, one of the principal contributors to a magazine called the ‘Christian Spectator’ – a magazine understood to be intimately connected with that section of the religious world of which Edward Miall, late M.P., and Editor of the ‘Nonconformist,’ is the great exponent and type. In this sketch it is impossible altogether to ignore the Lynch Controversy; let me describe it in a few words. In 1856 Mr. Lynch published a volume of religious poems called the Rivulet, some of them for private perusal, some for public worship. The Eclectic Review had a favourable notice of the book; the Morning Advertiser was sorely offended with this review, and, in the style of criticism peculiar to that journal, proceeded to show that the Rivulet was deeply tainted with deadly heresy. Some leading ministers of the denomination to which Mr. Lynch belonged generously declared their belief that Mr. Lynch was a man to be honoured for his Christian creed and life, whatever the reviewer might think. This led to a still further storm. Not content with attacking Mr. Lynch, the Morning Advertiser made the protesting ministers the subjects of its censure. The British Banner endorsed all these charges, and gave to them, to the immense delight of the Record on one side and the Reasoner on the other, a wider circulation. Considerable confusion followed – reverend gentlemen and Christian laymen quarrelled with all that bitterness which usually distinguishes the divine – pamphlets and letters were plentiful as blackberries. Actually the Congregational Union postponed their autumnal meeting on account of the strife thus generated. The upshot of the whole matter was, that the publicans complained, and the Advertiser for a time directed its attention to more congenial subjects than those connected with theology – that Dr. Campbell’s connection with the British Banner was terminated, and that Mr. Lynch had a much speedier sale for his poems than, I fear, otherwise he would have had.
That Mr. Lynch has no larger congregation, I take it, is a reproach to the Christian Church. One would think that there was a divorce between it and talent and taste, or Mr. Lynch would preach to crowded benches. As it is, however, more time is left him for the press, and, after all, the world is ruled by what is read, not heard. The spoken word may die – the printed one must live. What of truth there is in that is immortal. It will forever bud and blossom and bear fruit.
In conclusion, it may be as well to state here that Mr. Lynch is a minister of the Congregational body, and that his chapel is in Grafton Street, Tottenham Court Road; that he was educated at Highbury College, and then became minister of a small body of seceders from Dr. Leifchild’s congregation. He is young yet. He is older in thoughts than in years. His inner life has been of richer growth than his outer one. A popular preacher he can never become; but to men of thought, especially to men of literature – to the school of Tennyson and Coleridge – his will always be a welcome name.
