Here and There in London

by J. Ewing Ritchie

One reason of this wretched state of things we have hinted at. The removal of the city population,

we may be told, is another: but the population in the neighbourhood of these places is sufficient to fill them were the population given to church-going. With all due deference, we would fain ask the clergy if they do not fail to attract the public, owing to their themes and manner of treating them? Some preachers always manage to bring in the Old Testament dispensation. The preacher is dwelling among the priests and Levites: perpetually he tells you what the Jews did and did not; how they were a stiff-necked people; how they went after strange gods; how their nation was blotted out, and their temple razed to the ground, and their very name became a reproach. Man needs not the Hebrew learning, but the Christian faith; not the voice that thundered from Sinai, but the accents of mercy that were heard on Calvary in that awful hour when the earth trembled, when the grave gave up its dead, when the veil of the Temple was rent in twain, and the Son of Man died upon the cross. The preacher of the class we have referred to almost seems to think otherwise: he ignores the present, and lives only in the past. He is worse than a lawyer with his precedents. His dialect is obsolete, and a stumbling-block to

active, earnest, intelligent living men, whether rich or poor. He is like a man with corks, who is afraid to cut them off, and strike out boldly for himself. He cannot ask you for a penny for a new church without showing how liberally the Jews supported the public worship of their day. He is great in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. He seems as if he could have no faith in Christianity unless he could lock it up with Old Testament texts. “I fear,” writes Erasmus, in his “Age of Religious Revolution,” “two things—that the study of Hebrew will promote Judaism, and that the study of philology will revive Paganism.” Really we sometimes are inclined to believe that the first fear has been realised. Many a preacher reminds us of Bishop Corbett’s “Distracted Puritan,” when he says—

“In the blessed tongue of Canaan
I placed my chiefest pleasure,
’Till I prick’d my foot with a Hebrew root,
And it bled beyond all measure.”

We can well imagine many a preacher thus speaking, and feel disposed to wish that such might prick their feet with Hebrew roots till they wholly discontinue their references to extinct forms of worship, and apply the truth that Christ

came to preach to man’s present position—to the hopes and fears—to the struggles and duties—to the passions and vanities of to-day. There is progress everywhere. Why should preaching be the exception? If, as is admitted, the eloquence of the bar or senate has declined, may we not naturally conclude that in that of the pulpit there has been a falling off as well, especially when we remember how much the press has supplemented the latter? Verily, the clergy, whether in or out of the Establishment, must exert themselves. The nation demands that the enormous wealth and patronage possessed by the latter be devoted to something more than refined enjoyment or epicurean ease. It is not churches we want, but parsons. An orator can preach anywhere, as well from an old tub as from a pulpit, costly and consecrated, and curiously wrought.

AN OMNIBUS YARD.

In one of the remotest of the Fejee Islands some Wesleyan missionaries, in the year 1851, landed a pair of horses. We read general excitement prevailed at the towns near, and a great muster gathered on the beach at the day of landing. It was long before the native mind got reconciled to the phenomenon. The people, we are told, were terrified if approached by a horse. They would jump into the river, run up cocoa-nut and other trees, and climb houses for safety while the animal passed their place. In England this stage of terror has long been passed, and horses themselves are gradually giving place to steam.

Nevertheless, for short traffic—for transit to places where the snort of the steam engine will never be heard—for crooked ways inimical to machinery—for the convenience of those who like to be taken up and set down at their own doors—for the comfort of the nervous, whose firm belief is, that for the regular railway traveller

a fatal smash is only a question of time, the London omnibus is a permanent institution. It is difficult to perceive how people managed before it had an existence—when the fare from Highbury to the Bank was a shilling, and when the traveller for the journey from Highgate to London, along the dreary wastes of Holloway, paid no less than half-a-crown, and when even for that exorbitant sum, as it would now be deemed, you had no chance of a trip unless you had booked your place. In those times happy—yea, thrice happy—were the fathers of families living beyond the sound of Bow bells. In these, how can a man help going to the bad, rise he ever so early, or sit he up ever so late, eat he ever so of the bread of carefulness, if mamma and daughters can ride from the furthest suburbs—from remote Peckham or airy Paddington—for the ridiculously small sum of sixpence, or even less, in a vehicle as luxuriously fitted up as a private carriage, to the shops so tempting to the female mind of the fashionable and dissipated West? Happily the evil is tending to cure itself. The ladies have acquired a mode of dressing which simply renders, in the majority of cases, the use of an omnibus an impossibility.