Well, the service has been begun. The congregation has joined in praise; and now it is hushed and still, while in accents feeble at first, but gradually becoming louder and more distinct, the preacher prays. The liturgy of the English Church is beautiful and touching, but it is cold and unvarying. It does not, with its eternal
sameness, answer to the shifting moods of the human soul. Such prayers as those of Binney do. They bear you with them. Your inward eye opens and refines. Earth grows more distant, and heaven more near. For once you become awe-struck and devout. For once there comes a cloud between you and the world and the battle of life. You are on the mount, and breathe a purer air. Your heart has been touched, and you are ready for the preacher and his discourse. At first you hardly hear it. The great man before you seems nervous, awkward, as a raw student. He runs his fingers through his scanty hairs. He takes out half a dozen pocket-kerchiefs and blows his nose. Being asthmatic, you are compelled to cough, and you have immediately the preacher stopping, to turn on you a withering glance. But at length you catch, like a gleam of sunshine in a November fog, a fine thought in fine language. Your attention is riveted. What you hear is fresh and original, very different to the common run of pulpit discourses. The preacher warms, his eye sparkles, his voice becomes loud, his action energetic. You listen to powerful reasoning and passionate appeal. Binney has been compared to Coleridge. I don’t think
the comparison good. He is far more like Carlyle. The latter, a Christian, with a good digestion, would preach precisely as Binney. Binney is a Christian Carlyle, with the same poetry and power, the same faculty of realizing great and sterling thoughts; but with a light upon his way and in his heart which Carlyle has never known.
I have said Binney is not the kind of man born in great cities. You see that in his physical frame; it is also evident in his mental character. Everything about him is free and independent. Whatever he is, he is no narrow-hearted sectarian, shut up in his own creed, having no sympathies outside his own church. I take it that he sees also a certain kind of goodness in the world; that he does not feel
‘What a wretched land is this
That yields us no supplies;’
that he thinks life is to be enjoyed, and that genius, and wit, and beauty, are far from sinful in themselves. The result is, Binney’s experience of life is greater than that of most ministers, and he keeps abreast of the age. He studies to understand its thought, to answer its questionings, to lead it up to God.
And yet this man—with his great Catholic
heart, standing by himself, tied down by no creed or common organisation—because, in a moment of excitement, seeing what was to him a dearth of truth and life in the Establishment, he said that it destroyed more souls than it saved, has been looked upon as the incarnation of all that is fierce and narrow in political Dissent. Never was a bigger blunder made. As regards all such matters, Binney is a latitudinarian. I dare say even sharp-scented theologians may see a little of what they call heresy occasionally wrapped up in the sermons of the Weigh-House Chapel. The charge is a common one in the mouths of those who would make a man an offender for a word. The curse of the pulpit and the pew, hitherto, has been that such snarling critics have abounded in each. To such, Binney is a terrible stumbling-block. They cannot understand him, and yet they dare not condemn.
Mr. Binney is still in the prime of life. He was born somewhere in the north, where they have bigger heads and frames than we southerns have. He was educated at Wymondley College; he was then settled, as the phrase is, at Bedford, from which place he moved to Newport, in the Isle of Wight. About twenty years since, he was
invited to the Weigh-House Chapel, where ever since he has remained. His income from that source must be very respectable, as the Weigh-House Chapel congregation is pretty well to do in the world, and can afford to pay its pastor handsomely. As an author, Mr. Binney has gained extensive popularity, although he has not done much in that respect; and his first work, the ‘Life of the Rev. S. Morrell,’ a friend and fellow-student of his own, was a most extraordinary performance—just the thing a man like Binney would write when young. It has, however, long been out of print. His principal work is ‘Discourses on the Practical Power of Faith.’ His sermons have been his most frequent publications, and his Lecture on Sir F. Buxton—a lecture delivered to young men, with whom Mr. Binney is always popular—has been reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic, as I believe also has been his last published work, ‘How to Make the Best of Both Worlds.’ I believe, also, Mr. Binney has written some poetry. I recollect a few powerful lines, with his name to them, commencing with—