“This early bud, so young and fair,
Called hence by early doom,
Just came to show how sweet a flower
In Paradise should bloom.”
But these little papers of this excellent man circulated wherever the English language was spoken or read, and the spirit of their pages penetrated farther than the pages themselves; while they seem to present in a more pleasant, winning and portable form the spirit of the Revival, divested of much of the ruggedness which had, naturally, characterized its earlier pens.
Indeed, if some generalisation were needed to express the phase into which the Revival was passing, at this, the earlier part of the present century, it should be called the “literary.” Eminent names were appearing, and eminent pens, to gather up the elements of faith which had moved the minds and tongues of men in past years, and to arrest the conscience through the eye. This opens up a field so large that we cannot do justice to it in these brief sketches. To name here only one other writer;—Thomas Scott, the commentator on the Bible, and author of The Force of Truth, is acknowledged to have exerted an influence the greatness of which has been described in glowing terms by men such as Sir. James Stephen and John Henry Newman.
CHARLES SIMEON.
No idea can be formed by those of the present generation of the immense influence Charles Simeon exercised over the mind of the Church of England. He was the leader of the growing evangelical party in the Church; his doctrines were exactly those which had been the favourite on the lips of Whitefield, Berridge, Grimshaw, and Newton. His family was ancient and respectable, he was the son of a Berkshire squire. He had been educated at Eton, and afterwards at King’s College, Cambridge; he became very wealthy. His accession to the life of the Revival seemed like an immense addition of natural influence: he was faithful and earnest, and, in the habits of his mind and character, exactly what we understand by the thorough English gentleman; almost may it be said that he made the Revival “gentlemanly” in clergymen. He opened the course of his fifty-six years’ ministry in Cambridge amidst a storm of persecution; the church wardens attempted to crush him, the pews of his church were locked up, and he was even locked out of the building. Through all this he passed, and he became, for the greater part of the long period we have mentioned, the most noted preacher of his town and university; and he published, certainly, in his Horæ Homileticæ a greater number of attempts at opening texts in the form of sermons, than had ever been given to the world. Simeon devoted his own fortune and means for the purchase of advowsons, in order that the pulpits of churches might be filled by the representatives of his own opinions. No history of the Revival can be complete without noticing this phase, which scattered over England, far more extensively than can be here described, a new order of clergyman, who have maintained in their circles evangelical truth, and have held no inconsiderable sway over the mind of the country.
We only know history through men; events are only possible through men, of whose mind and activity they are the manifestation. This brief succession of sketches has been very greatly a series of portraits standing out prominently from the scenery to which the character gave effect; but of this singular, almost simultaneous movement, how much has been left unrecorded! It remains unquestionably true that no adequate and perfectly impartial review of the Revival has ever yet been written.