written I have received another letter from another outside firm, offering me fifty shares in the precious company at thirteen shillings a share. The writers add, as the dividend of ten per cent. will be paid almost immediately, they are well worth my attention. I suppose this sort of thing pays. The worst of it is that the class thus victimised are the class least able to bear a pecuniary loss. I happen to know of a case in which a man with an assumed name, trading at the West End, gained a large sum of money—chiefly from clergymen and widows—by offering worthless shares, certain to pay large dividends in a week or two, at a tremendous sacrifice. As a rule the victims to this state of things say nothing of their losses. They are ashamed when they think how easily they have been persuaded to part with their cash. It is time, however, that public attention should be called to the matter, that the eyes of the public were opened, and that the game of these gentry were be stopped.
CHAPTER XI.
The Old London Pulpit.
I doubt whether the cynical old poet who wrote “The Pleasures of Memory,” would have included in that category the recollections of the famous preachers whom he might have heard. Yet possibly he might, as his earliest predilections, we were told, were for the pulpit, and all have, more or less, of the parsonic element in them. The love to lecture, the desire to make their poor ignorant friends as sensible as themselves, the innate feeling that one is a light and guide in a wildering maze exist more or less in us all. “Did you ever hear me preach?” said Coleridge one day to Lamb. “Did I ever hear you do anything else?” was the reply. And now, when we have got an awakened Christianity and a forward ministry, it is just as well to run over the list of our old popular ministers to remind the present generation that great men have filled the London pulpits and quickened the London conscience and aroused the London intellect before ever it was born. It is the more necessary to do this as the fact is that no one has so short-lived a popularity as
the orator: whether in Exeter Hall, whether on the stage, whether in the pulpit, what comes in at one ear soon goes out at the other. The memory of a great preacher dies as soon as his breath leaves the body—often before. The pulpit of to-day differs in one respect in toto from the past. The preacher who would succeed now must remember that this is the age of advertisement, that if he has a talent he must not wrap it in a napkin. He must write letters to newspapers; he must say odd things that make men talk about him; he must manage to be the subject of newspaper gossip; he must cling to the skirts of some public agitation—in fact, his light must be seen and his voice heard everywhere.
It was not so in the times when, half a century ago, I had more to do with the London pulpit than I have now. Some of the men in it were giants. One was Melville, who preached somewhere over the water—Camberwell way. He was a High Churchman; he had a grand scorn of the conventicle. I should say he was a Tory of the Tories—a man who would be impossible in a London suburban church now; but what a crowd he drew to hear him, as he, like a mighty, rushing wind, swept over the heads of an audience who seemed to hang upon his lips! He was tall, dark, with a magnificent bass voice that caused every sentence he read—for he read, and rapidly—to vibrate from the
pulpit to the furthest corner of the church. His style was that of the late Dr. Chalmers, always sweeping to a climax, which, when reached and mastered, was a relief to all. I think he was made Canon of St. Paul’s. He also was the Golden Lecturer somewhere near the Bank—an appropriate locality. His sermons were highly finished—I am told he laboured at them all the week. He was a preacher—nothing less, nothing more.
Next there rises before me the vision of Howard Hinton—a big, cadaverous, grey-haired man, preaching in a small chapel on the site in Shoreditch now occupied by the Great Eastern Railway. The congregation was not large, but it was very select; I fancy it represented the élite of the London Baptists. He was a very fascinating preacher by reason of his great subtlety of thought, and at times he was terribly impressive, as his big, burly frame trembled with emotion, and his choked-up utterance intimated with what agony he had sought to deliver his soul from blood-guiltiness, as, wailing and weeping, he anticipated the awful doom of the impenitent. I must own I got wearied of his metaphysical subtleties, which seemed to promise so much, and whose conclusions were so lame and impotent, ever disappointing; and it often seemed to me that his celebrated son—the late James Hinton—too soon removed, as it seemed to many of us—inherited not a little of
his father’s ingenuity in this respect. But he was a grand man; you felt it in his presence, and still more as you walked home thinking of what he said.
Amongst the Independents—as they were termed—the leading men were the Brothers Clayton: one preaching at the Poultry, the other in Walworth, to large congregations—fine portly men, and able in their way, though it was an old-fashioned one. Nor must Dr. Bengo Collyer be forgotten—a fat, oily man of God, as Robert Hall called him, who had at one time great popularity, and whom the Duke of Kent had been to hear preach.
It is a curious sign of the times—the contrast between what exists now and what existed then—as regards theological speculation. We are now sublimely indifferent whether a preacher is orthodox or the reverse, whatever that may mean, so long as we feel his utterances are helpful in the way of Christian work and life. It was not so fifty years ago. Ministers scanned their brethren in the ministry severely, and the deacon, with his Matthew Henry and Doddridge, sat grimly in his pew, eager to note the deflection of the preacher in the pulpit from the strait and narrow line of orthodoxy, and to glow with unholy zeal as he found him missing his footing on the tight-rope. In London there was such a man in the shape of Thomas Binney, who had come from the Isle of Wight to the