Christopher Crayon's Recollections / The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

by J. Ewing Ritchie

The Patriot newspaper. The first number of the new journal appeared in 1848, and gained a circulation hitherto unknown in a weekly paper, and this in time was succeeded by The British Standard. As time passed on Dr. Campbell became less popular. He had rather too keen a scent for what was termed neology. In one case his zeal involved him in a libel suit and the verdict was for the plaintiff, who was awarded by the jury forty shillings damages instead of the £5,000 he had claimed. In the Rivulet Controversy, as it was termed, Dr. Campbell was not quite so successful. Mr. Lynch was a poet, and preached, as his health was bad, to a small but select congregation in the Hampstead Road. He published a volume of refined and thoughtful poetry which has many admirers to this day. The late Mr. James Grant—a Scotch baker who had taken to literature and written several remarkably trashy books, the most popular of which was “Random Recollections of the House of Commons,”—at that time editor of the publican’s paper, The Morning Advertiser, in his paper described the work of Mr. Lynch as calculated to inspire pain and sadness in the minds of all who knew what real religion was. Against this view a powerful protest was made by many leading men of the body to which Mr. Lynch belonged. At this stage of the controversy Dr. Campbell struck in by publishing letters addressed to the principal

professors of the Independent and Baptist colleges of England, showing that the hymns of Mr. Lynch were very defective as regards Evangelical truth—containing less of it than the hymns ordinarily sung by the Unitarians. The excitement in Dissenting circles was intense. The celebrated Thomas Binney, of the King’s Weigh House Chapel, took part with Mr. Lynch and complained of Dr. Campbell in the ensuing meetings of the Congregational Union, and so strong was the feeling on the subject that a large party was formed to request the Congregational Union formally to sever their official connexion with Dr. Campbell—a matter not quite so easy as had been anticipated. One result, however, was that Dr. Campbell gave up the editing of The British Banner and established The British Standard to take its place, in which the warfare against what is called Neology was carried on with accelerated zeal. In 1867 the Doctor’s laborious career came to an end happily in comfort and at peace with all. His biographers assure the reader that Dr. Campbell’s works will last till the final conflagration of the world. Alas! no one reads them now.

To come to later times, of course my most vivid recollections are those connected with the late Mr. Spurgeon. In that region of the metropolis known as “over the water” the Baptists flourish as they do nowhere else, and

some of their chapels have an interesting history. Amongst many of them rather what is called high doctrine is tolerated—not to say admired. They are the elect of God, preordained before the world was formed to enjoy an existence of beatific rapture, that shall continue when the world has passed away. Of one of the most popular preachers in that locality, the late Jemmy Wells, it is said that when told that one of his hearers had fallen out of a cart and broken his leg his reply was, “Oh, what a blessed thing it is he can’t fall out of the Covenant.” When one of the chapels in that locality was at low-water mark, there came to it the Rev. Charles Haddon Spurgeon—then little more than a boy, but already famous in East Anglia as a boy preacher—and never had a preacher a more successful career. There was no place in London that was large enough to contain the audiences that flocked to hear him. I first heard him at the Surrey Music Hall, and it was wonderful to see what hordes came there of saints and sinners, lords and ladies, City magnates and county squires, Anonymas from St. John’s Wood, Lady Clara Vere de Veres from Belgravia. It was the fashion to go there on a Sunday morning, just as it was the fashion a generation previously to rush to Hatton Garden to hear Edward Irving. The hall was handsome and light and airy, free from the somewhat oppressive

air of Cave Adullam and Little Bethel, and there upon the platform which did duty for a pulpit stood a young man short of stature, broadly built, of a genial though not handsome countenance, with a big head and a voice it was a treat to listen to and audible in every part of that enormous building. What was the secret of his success? He was bold, he was original, he was humorous, and he was in earnest. He said things to make his hearers laugh, and what he said or did was magnified by rumour. Old stories of Billy Dawson and Rowland Hill were placed to Mr. Spurgeon’s credit. The caricaturists made him their butt. There was no picture more commonly displayed at that time than one entitled “Brimstone and Treacle”—the former representing Mr. Spurgeon, the latter Mr. Bellew, then a star of the first order in many an Episcopalian pulpit. Bellew soon ran through his ephemeral popularity—that of Mr. Spurgeon grew and strengthened day by day. Do you, like the late Sir James Graham, want to know the reason why? The answer is soon given. “I am going into the ministry,” said a youthful student to an old divine. “Ah, but, my dear friend, is the ministry in you?” Well, the ministry was in Mr. Spurgeon as it rarely is in any man; hence his unparalleled success.

One little anecdote will illustrate this. I have a friend whose father had a large business

in the ancient city of Colchester. Mr. Spurgeon’s father was at one time in his employ. Naturally, he said a good deal of the preaching talent of his gifted son, and of the intention beginning to be entertained in the family circle of making a minister of him. The employer in question was a Churchman, but he himself offered to help Mr. Spurgeon in securing for his son the benefits of a collegiate education. The son’s reply was characteristic. He declined the offered aid, adding the remark that “ministers were made not in colleges but in heaven.”

In connection with Mr. Spurgeon’s scholastic career let me knock a little fiction on the head. There is a house in Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, famous now as the birthplace of Mrs. Garrett Anderson and her gifted sisters, which at one time was a school kept by a Mr. Swindell, and they told me at Aldeburgh this last summer that Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil there. This is not so. It is true Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil at Mr. Swindell’s, but it was at Newmarket, to which the latter had moved from Aldeburgh.

One or two Spurgeon anecdotes which have not yet appeared in print may be acceptable. At Hastings there are, or were, many High Church curates. A few years ago one of them did a very sensible thing. He had a holiday; he was in town and he went to the Tabernacle, getting a seat exactly under Mr. Spurgeon’s nose, as it were. It seems that during the

week Mr. Spurgeon had been attending a High Church service, of which he gave in the pulpit a somewhat ludicrous account, suddenly finishing by giving a sort of snort, and exclaiming, “Methinks I smell ’em now,” much to the delight of the curate sitting underneath. Referring to Mr. Spurgeon’s nose, I am told he had a great admiration of that of his brother, a much more aristocratic-looking article that his own. “Jem,” he is reported to have said on one occasion, “I wish I had got your nose.” “Do you?” was the reply; “I wish I had got your cheek.” Let me give another story. On one occasion an artist wanted to make a sketch of Mr. Spurgeon for publishing. “What are you going to charge?” asked the preacher, as the artist appeared before him. “You must not make the price more than twopence; the public will give that for me—not a penny more. A photographer published a portrait of me at eighteenpence, and no one bought it.” This conversation took place on the occasion of a week-night service. At the close of the service the artist came up into the vestry to show his sketch. “Yes,” said Mr. Spurgeon, “it is all very well, but I should like to hear what others say about it. They say women and fools are the best judges of this kind of thing,” and accordingly the likeness was referred to a friend who happened to come into the room in the nick of time.