It is a sudden leap from the West Riding of Yorkshire to Truro, the charming little capital of Western Cornwall. We are here met by an imperishable and beautiful name, that of Samuel Walker, the minister; he was born in 1714, and died in 1761. His influence over his town was great and abiding, and Walker of Truro is a name which to this day retains its fragrance, as associated with the restoration of his town from wild depravity to purity and exemplary piety.
How impossible it is to do more than merely mention the names of men, every action of whose lives was consecrated, and every breath an ardent flame, all helping on and urging forward the great work of rousing a careless world and a careless Church. What an influence had William Romaine, who for a long time, it has been said, was one of the sights of London; it was rather drolly put when it was said, “People came from the country to see Garrick act and to hear Romaine preach!” Nor let our readers suppose that he was a mere sensational orator; he was a great scholar. We hear of him first as the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and the editor of the four volumes of Calasio’s Hebrew Concordance; then he caught the evangelic fire; he became one of the chaplains of the Countess of Huntingdon, and, so far as the Church of the Establishment was concerned, he was the most considerable light of London for a period of nearly fifty years; and very singular was his history in this relation, especially in some of the churches whose pulpits he filled. It seems singular to us now how even his great talents could obtain for him the place of morning lecturer at St. George’s, Hanover Square; but the charge was soon urged against him that he vulgarised that most fashionable of congregations, and most uncomfortably crowded the church. He was appointed evening lecturer at St. Dunstan’s in Fleet Street; but the rector barred his entrance into the pulpit, seating himself there during the time of prayers, so that the preacher might be unable to enter. Lord Mansfield decided that, after seven in the evening, the church was not the rector’s, but that Mr. Romaine was entitled to the use of it; then, at seven in the evening, the churchwardens closed the church doors, and kept the congregation outside, wearying them in the rain or in the cold. At length, the patience of the churchwardens gave way before the persistency of the people and the preacher; but it was an age of candles, and they refused to light the church, and Mr. Romaine often preached in a crowded church by the light of one candle. They paid him the merest minimum which he could demand, or which they were compelled to pay; sometimes only eighteen pounds a year. But he was a hardy man, and he lived on the plainest fare, and dressed in homespun cloth. He was dragged repeatedly before courts of law, but he was as difficult to manage here as in the church; he brought his judges to the statutes, none of which he had broken. Every effort was made to expel him from the Church, but he would not be cast out; and at last he appears to have settled himself, as such men generally do, into an irresistible fact. He became the Rector of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars. There he preached those sermons which were shaped afterwards into the favourite book of our forefathers, The Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith. Born in 1714, he died in 1795. His last years were clothed with a pleasant serenity, although, perhaps, some have detected in his character marks of a severity, probably the result of those conflicts which, through so many years, he had with such remarkable consistency sustained.
ST. ANN’S, BLACKFRIARS.
And surely we ought to mention, in this right noble band, John Newton; but he brings us near to the time when the passion of the Revival was settling itself into organisation and calm; when the fury of persecution was ceasing; Methodism was becoming even a respectable and acknowledged fact. John Newton was born in 1725, and died in 1807. All his sympathies were with the theology and the activities of the revivalists; but before he most singularly found himself the Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, and St. Mary Woolchurch, he had led a life which, for its marvellous variety of incident, reads like one of Defoe’s fictions.
St. Mary Woolnoth.
John Newton.
But his parlour in No. 8 Coleman Street Buildings, on a Friday evening, was thronged by all the dignitaries of the evangelical movement of his day. As he said, “I was a wild beast on the coast of Africa, but the Lord caught me and tamed me; and now you come to see me as people go to see the lions in the Tower.” A grand old man was John Newton, the young sailor transformed into the saintly old rector; there he sat with few traces of the parson about him, in his blue pea-jacket, and his black neckerchief, liking still to retain something of the freedom of his old blue seas; full of quaint wisdom, which never, like that of his friend Berridge, became rude or droll; quietly sitting there and meditating; his enthusiastic life apparently having subsided into stillness, while the Hannah Mores, Wilberforces, Claudius Buchanans, and John Campbells, went to him to find their enthusiasm confirmed. The friend of Cowper, who surely deserves to be called the Poet Laureate of the Revival—himself the author of some of the sweetest hymns we still sing; the biographer of his own wonderful career, and of the life of his friend and brother-in-arms, William Grimshaw; one of the finest of our religious letter-writers; with capacities within him for almost everything he might have thought it wise to undertake, he now seems to us appropriately to close this small gallery we have attempted to present. When the spirit of the Revival was either settling into firmness and consolidation, or striking out into those new and marvellous fields of labour—its natural outgrowth—which another chapter may present succinctly to the eye, John Newton, by his great experience of men, his profound faith, his steady hand and clear eye, became the wise adviser and fosterer of schemes whose gigantic enterprise would certainly have astonished even his capacious intelligence.
In closing this chapter it is quite worth while to notice that, various as were the characters of these men, and of their innumerable comrades, to whom we do homage, although we have no space even to mention their names, their strength arose from the certainty and the confidence with which they spoke; there was nothing tentative about their teaching. That great scholar, Sir William Hamilton, says that “assurance is the punctum saliens, that is the strong point of Luther’s system;” so it was with all these men, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen;” it was the full assurance of knowledge; and it gave them authority over the men with whom they wrestled, whether in public or private. Whitefield and Wesley alike, and all their followers, had strong faith in God. They were believers in the personal regard of God for the souls of men; and every idea of prayer supposes some such personal regard, whether offered by the highest of high Calvinists, or the simplest primitive Methodist; the whole spirit of the Revival turned on this; these men, as they strongly believed, were able, by the strong attractive force of their own nature, to compel other minds to their convictions. Their history strongly illustrates that that teaching which oscillates to and fro in a pendulous uncertainty is powerless to reform character or influence mind.