THE REV. THOMAS BINNEY.
All the world, I take it, is acquainted with the Monument, which,
‘Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies.’
You have been to see it, or you have passed it as you have rushed to take the boat to Greenwich, or Hamburg, or the ‘Diggins.’ In either of these cases, unless you had been too much absorbed, you might have seen a plain, substantial building, evidently devoted to public worship. There is nothing peculiar about its appearance; but there is something peculiar in the man who generally fills its pulpit—for it is the Weigh-House Chapel, and the preacher is the Rev. Thomas Binney.
Let us suppose it is a Sabbath morning, and the time half-past ten. A stream of people has
been flowing for the last quarter of an hour to the door of the above-named chapel: a few in private carriages—some in cabs—the rest on foot. The larger portion consists of males, and, again, that majority consists of young men. They come, evidently, from the shops and warehouses and counting-houses of this great metropolis. They belong to the commercial classes. They are the raw material out of which are evolved, in process of time, aldermen, merchant princes, and Lord Mayors. They are such as Hogarth, were he alive now, would sketch for his industrious apprentice. A few medical students from the neighbouring hospitals, and men of law or literature from the more aristocratic West, and you have the usual congregation to which the Rev. Thomas Binney ministers in holy things.
It is something to preach to these twelve hundred living souls; to place before them, immersed as they are in the business and bustle of this world, the reality of that which is to come; so to speak that the voice of God shall be more audible to them than that of gold. Yet, surely, if it can be done by man, he can do it whom we now see, with reverent step, ascending
the pulpit stairs. What power there is in those great limbs, that full chest, and magnificent head! Nature has been bountiful to him. Such a man as that you can’t raise in London or Manchester. You can imagine him the child of the mountain and the flood—learning from nature and his own great heart and the written Word—wild and strong and fierce as the war-horse scenting the battle from afar. You see he has a warm heart, human sympathies; that, in short, he is every inch a man—not a scholastic pedant, nor an intellectual bigot, nor an emasculated priest. Oh, it is pitiful to see in the pulpit, preaching in God’s name, some poor dwarf who has never had a doubt nor a hope nor a noble aim, and who enunciates your damnation with the same heartlessness with which he tells you two and two make four. There are too many of such in our pulpits—men made ministers in some narrow routine of theological study, in some college where they get as accurate an idea of the world against which they have to warn men as the Chinese have of us.
It was not so in the grand old apostolic times. Paul, Peter, James, and John preached of what they had seen and heard and known and felt.
Too generally the modern preacher tells you what he has read, and which, parrot-like, he repeats. It is not so with Binney. You see all that man has to go through, he must have gone through—that scepticism must have stared him in the face—that passion must have appealed to him in her most seductive forms—that the great problem of life he has not taken upon trust, but unriddled for himself—that he has gone through the Slough of Despond—passed by Castle Doubting, and sees the gilt and the rouge in Vanity Fair: or, as he says himself in his life, ‘the man has conquered the animal, and the God the man.’ Such a man has a right to preach to me. If he has known, felt, thought, suffered, more than I, he is master, and I listen. Such a man is Binney. I can yet read in his face the record of passion subdued, of thought protracted and severe, of doubt conquered by a living faith.