Plainspoken and shrewd, discussing all questions with easy arguments, never stooping to subtleties, clear in his delivery, happy in the choice of words, he keeps his hearers bound like Ogmius, that god of eloquence among the Gauls who used to be represented with chains flowing out of his mouth. On occasions he rises to the highest flights of oratory, but never loses sight of his congregation, who have always been carried along by him through the successive degrees of his own enthusiasm. He should be heard delivering a charity sermon, for this is a duty which he discharges in no perfunctory fashion. He masters his subject thoroughly; speaks of the poor or afflicted for whom he is pleading like one who knows them; and his advice as to supplying their wants is never dictated by eccentric philanthropy, but springs from that true benevolence which has common sense for its source. He was being asked to interest himself in a carpenter’s clever young apprentice whom some good people wanted to send to college. “Let him first graduate as a good carpenter,” said the Bishop; “when he has become a skilled craftsman, so that he is proud of his trade and can fall back upon it if others fail, then will be the time to see if he is fit for anything better.”
A popular vote would probably give the position of third amongst the best preachers of the day to Archdeacon Farrar. In his own church of St. Margaret, the Archdeacon shines with a subdued light. Those who have chatted with him by his own fireside, and know him to be the most amiable, unaffected of causeurs, those who remember him at Harrow as a most genial boy-loving master, will miss nothing of the good-natured simplicity which they liked in him, if they hear him in his own church discoursing about matters that concern his parish. But in the Abbey he is different. There, his massive face settles into a hard, expressionless look; his voice, which is loud and roughish, is pitched in a monotonous key; and his manner altogether lacks animation, even when his subject imperatively demands it. To illustrate any common reflection on the vicissitudes of life, the Archdeacon drags in the destruction of Pompeii with the latest mining accident; the overthrow of Darius with that of Osman Digna, the rainbow that appeared to Noah with Mr. Norman Lockyer’s explanations of recent glorious sunsets; and all these juxtapositions come down so pat as to suggest the irreverent idea that the book which the venerable preacher was studying during the prayers must have been an annotated copy of Maunders’s “Treasury of Knowledge.”
Mr. Spurgeon stands head and shoulders above all the Non-conformist preachers. Somebody once expressed a regret that the great Baptist minister was not a member of the Establishment, to which the late Bishop of Winchester answered by quoting a portion of the tenth commandment. But Mr. Spurgeon was much more aggressive in those days than he is now; he has softened much of late years, and churchmen can go to hear him without fear of being offended. On the days when he preaches his Tabernacle holds a multitude. It is a huge hall, and to see gallery upon gallery crowded with eager faces—some six thousand—all turned toward the pastor whose voice has the power of troubling men to the depths of their hearts, is a stirring sight. Mr. Spurgeon’s is not a high-class congregation, and the preacher knows that its understanding can best be opened by metaphors and parables borrowed from the customs of the retail trade, and with similes taken from the colloquialisms of the streets. Laughter is not forbidden at the Tabernacle, and the congregation often breaks into titters, but the merriment is always directed against some piece of hypocrisy which the preacher has exposed, and it does one good to hear. He says:
“You are always for giving God short measure, just as if He had not made the pint pot.”
“You don’t expect the Queen to carry your letters for nothing, but when you are posting a letter heavenward you won’t trouble to stick a little bit of Christian faith on the right-hand corner of the envelope, and you won’t put a correct address on either, and then you wonder the letter isn’t delivered, so that you don’t get your remittance by next post.”
“You trust Mr. Jones to pay you your wages regularly, and you say he’s a good master, but you don’t think God can be trusted like Mr. Jones; you won’t serve him because you don’t believe in the pay.”
“You have heard of the man who diminished his dose of food every day to see on how little he could live, till he came to half a biscuit and then died; but, I tell you, most of you have tried on how little religion you could live, and many of you have got to the half-biscuit dose.”
These whimsicalities, always effective, constitute but the foam of Mr. Spurgeon’s oratory; the torrent which casts them up is broad, deep and of overwhelming power. Mr. Spurgeon is among preachers as Mr. Bright among parliamentary orators. All desire to criticise vanishes, every faculty is subdued into admiration, when he has concluded a sermon with a burst of his truly inspired eloquence, leaving the whole of his congregation amazed and the vast majority of its members anxious or hopeful, but in any case roused as if they had seen the heavens open. We are compelled to add that Mr. Spurgeon has in the Baptist communion no co-minister wielding a tenth of his power, and that those who, having gone to the Tabernacle to hear him, have to listen to some other man, will be disappointed in more ways than one.—Temple Bar.
