King’s Weigh House Chapel, now swept away by the underground railway just opposite the Monument. Binney was a king among men, standing head and shoulders above his fellows. All that was intelligent in Dissenting London, among the young men especially, heard him gladly. Yet all over the land there were soulless deacons and crabbed old parsons, whose testimony no man regarded, who said Binney was not orthodox. He lived long enough to trample that charge down. He lived to see the new era when men, sick of orthodoxy, hailed any utterance from whatever quarter, so that it were God-fearing and sincere. As you listened to Binney struggling to evolve his message out of his inner consciousness, you felt that you stood in the presence of a man who dwelt in the Divine presence, to whom God had revealed Himself, whose eye could detect the sham, and whose hot indignation was terrible to listen to.
Let me chronicle a few more names. Dr. Andrew Reed, whose occasional sermons at other places—I never heard him at Wycliffe Chapel—were most effective; Morris of Fetter Lane, who preached to a crowded audience with what seemed to me at the time a slight touch of German mysticism; Stratten, far away in Paddington, whom rich people loved to listen to, as he was supposed to be a man of means himself; and old Leifchild at Craven Chapel, filled to overflowing with a crowd who
knew, however the dear old man might prose in the opening of his sermon, he would go off with a bang at the end. But I may not omit two Churchmen who, if they had not Melville’s power, had an equal popularity. One was the Hon. and Rev. Baptist Noel, who preached in a church, long since pulled down, in Bedford-row. He was tall, gentlemanly, silver-tongued, and perfectly orthodox. His people worshipped him, for was he not the son of a lord? His influence in London was immense, but he left the Church for conscientious reasons, and became a Baptist minister. That was a blow to his popularity which he never got over, though he lived to a grand old age. Another popular Evangelical preacher was Dale, who preached at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street. He was a poet and more or less of a literary man; but he had more worldly wisdom than Baptist Noel. Dale was a Professor of Literature at University College; but it was understood that University College, with its liberal institutions, with its Dissenters and Jews, was no place for a Churchman who wished to rise. Dale saw this, gave up his professorship in Gower Street, and reaped a rich reward.
London was badly off for illuminati fifty years ago. The only pulpit effectually filled was that of South Place, Finsbury, where W. Johnson Fox, the celebrated orator and critic,
lectured. He had been trained to be an orthodox divine at Homerton. One day he said to me, “The students always get very orthodox as they get to the end of their collegiate career, and are preparing to settle, as the phrase is.” Fox, it seems, was the exception that proves the rule. He was eloquent and attractive as preacher and lecturer. Dickens and Macready and Foster were, I believe, among his hearers. At any rate, he had a large following, and died an M.P. Lectures on all things sacred and profane were unknown in London fifty years ago. I once heard Robert Dale Owen somewhere at the back of Tottenham Court Road Chapel, but he was a weariness of the flesh, and I never went near him again. The provinces occasionally sent us popular orators; one was Raffles, of Liverpool, a man who looked as if the world had used him well. I well remember how he dealt in such alliteration as “the dewdrop glittering in the glen.” Then there was Parsons of York, with his amazing rhetoric, all whispered with a thrill that went to every heart, as he preached in Surrey Chapel, where also I heard Jay of Bath, who, however, left on me no impression other than he was a wonderful old man for his years. Sherman, the regular preacher there, was a great favourite with the ladies—almost as much as Dr. Cumming, a dark, scholarly-looking man, who held forth in a court just opposite Drury
Lane Theatre, and whose prophetic utterances obtained for him a popularity he would otherwise have sought in vain. It makes one feel old to write of these good men who have long since passed away, not, however, unregretted, or without failing to leave behind them
Footprints on the sands of Time.
When I first became familiar with the Dissenting world of London the most bustling man in it was the Rev. Dr. John Campbell, who preached in what was then a most melancholy pile of buildings known as the Tottenham Court Road Chapel, the pulpit of which had been at one time occupied by the celebrated George Whitfield. In or about 1831 Dr. Campbell became the minister, and at the same time found leisure to write in The Patriot newspaper; to fight and beat the trustees of the Tottenham Court Road, who had allowed the affairs of the chapel to get into a most disorderly state; to make speeches at public meetings; to write in a monthly that has long ceased to exist—The Eclectic Review—a review to which I had occasionally the honour of contributing when it was edited by Dr. Price;—and to publish a good many books which had a fair sale in his day. Dr. Campbell had also much to do with the abolition of the Bible printing monopoly—a movement originated by Dr. Adam Thomson, of Coldstream,
powerfully supported by one of my earliest friends, Mr. John Childs, a spirited and successful printer at Bungay, whose one-volume editions of standard authors, such as Bacon’s works, Milton’s, and Gibbon’s “Decline and Pall of the Roman Empire,” are still to be seen on the shelves of second-hand booksellers. The Queen’s Printer affected to believe that the Bible could not be supplied to the public with equal efficiency or cheapness on any other system than that which gave him the monopoly of printing, but as it was proved before a Committee of the House of Commons that the Book could be printed at much less cost and in every way equal to the copies then in existence, the monopoly was destroyed.
In 1830 there came into existence the Congregational Union of England and Wales, of which Dr. Campbell became one of the leading men. He was at the same time editor of The Christian Witness and The Christian’s Penny Magazine—the organs of the Union—both of which at that time secured what was then considered a very enormous sale. When in 1835 Mr. Nasmith came to London to establish his City Mission Dr. Campbell was one of his earliest supporters and friends. The next great work which he took in hand was the establishment of The British Banner, a religious paper for the masses, in answer to an appeal made to him by the committee of