and none came to hear him. The pews were unoccupied, and the quarterly returns were small. He abandoned the chapel, and with dubious fame, and an appearance somewhat too much that of a bon vivant for the minister of a religion of self-denial and mortification of the flesh, went down to Warwickshire to become the pastor of a village congregation, and in time to die. Clayland’s chapel then was placed under the care of the Rev. Baldwin Brown, then a young man fresh from Highbury College, to which place he had gone after completing his education at University College, becoming a graduate of the London University, and having been, I believe, called to the bar. Mr. Brown is now in the prime of life. He cannot be much above thirty. He attained his position earlier than ministers generally do. His father was a man of some standing in the world, as well as in his own denomination. His uncles were no less distinguished personages than Drs. Liefchild and Raffles, and last, and not least, he had that easy confidence in his own powers, which are great, and his attainments, which are greater, without which you may have the eloquence of Paul, or the piety of John, and yet no more
move the world or the most insignificant portion of it than a child can arrest a steam engine, or than a lady’s parasol can still a storm.
Mr. Brown’s settlement at Clayland’s Chapel has been successful. The cause—to borrow the conventional phrase—has prospered; the chapel has been filled, and the church has considerably increased. His fame has grown. He has become a man of note. At Exeter Hall his voice is often heard. Undoubtedly some of his success is due to the circumstances I have already mentioned, but undoubtedly the greater part of it is due to himself alone. It is something for a man to find a position already made for him. It saves him many a year of herculean and unregarded toil; but to keep a position is almost as difficult as to make it, and this Mr. Brown has succeeded in doing. The reason of this must be sought for in Mr. Brown himself. The man must have some speciality to fit him for his work, or he cannot be successful in it. That Mr. Brown has this is, I take it, beyond a doubt; nor can you long attend upon his ministry without finding such is the case. Mr. Brown’s distinguishing characteristic is freshness. There is nothing stale or conventional
about him. He evidently preaches what he thinks. His speech is a living speech, not a monotonous repetition of old divinity. He has wandered out of the conventional circle. He has come in contact with great minds. He has had a richer experience than generally falls to the lot of the divine. He views things broadly and in a manly manner, not from the narrow platform of a sect. His faith is a living one. His Christianity is practical—that by which men may shape their life as well as square their creed. Instead of wandering weakly and sentimentally in other lands and in other ages, he brings his mind and heart to bear upon the realities of the present day. The questions of our age, not of past ages, he discusses in his pulpit. The day that passes over him is the day to which he devotes his energies. He gives you an idea of earnestness and activity and independence—of a mind well educated and drawn out—filled with Christian truth, and earnest in the application of that truth. He is not a great rhetorician—his strength seems to be in his common sense. If the Bible be true, the sooner man gets that idea into his head and acts according to it, the better. If man have to obey
the Divine law, the sooner he submits himself to it the happier he will be in this life as well as in that which is to come. I know there is nothing new in this,—that other men attempt to teach the same thing,—that all divines are saying it one way or another every Sunday; but the merit of Mr. Brown is that he says it as a man of common-sense would say it to men possessed of common-sense—that he does not wrap his meaning in the unreal verbiage of a mystic and unreal theology—that he takes his teachings, and arguments, and illustrations from real life—and that he talks of religion as men of the world of consols and railways; and no man can do this, to whom religion is not the business of his life. In personal appearance there is nothing particularly remarkable about Mr. Brown. He is tall—thin—of light complexion, a very different style of man to the fat, indolent-looking old gentlemen that figure in the picture gallery of a certain popular religious magazine, but with an appearance of intellectual activity and readiness for his work and age, to which few of the good old conventional divines now happily gathered to their fathers ever seem to have had an idea.
THE REV. JOHN CAMPBELL, D.D.
If the reader has ever been in the habit of attending public meetings, he must occasionally have seen an amendment proposed by a man evidently in a minority, yet proposed nevertheless. The man who does this is a man of confidence, of good lungs and nerve. First, the meeting will not hear him at all. ‘Down, down!’ is the universal cry. But the man stands firm, fixes his arms across his breast in the manner of the ‘Napoleon musing at St. Helena’ of the late Mr. Haydon. He knows that that angry hubbub cannot last long: that the indignant public will be out of breath in five minutes; that the more frantic it is now, the more exhausted and quiet it will be anon; and, with a calm smile of pity, he waits the result. All that he has to do is simply to stand still, and, if he does this long enough, there is no meeting on the face of the earth that can refuse him a hearing.
In some such manner has the Rev. John Campbell made good his position in the religious world, or rather in that one section of the Congregational
body over which he rules with a rod of iron. At times there has been a hubbub, but the Doctor knows no hubbub, however loud and angry, can last long; and to the mass, destitute alike of information and principles, it is a real blessing to get hold of a firm, dogmatic man, who knows his own mind, and who will kindly take care of theirs. Fluent in pen, meagre in attainment, seemingly master of no one subject, yet writing vehemently on all, the Doctor is precisely the man to give the law to that low class of readers more or less present in all religious denominations. It is easy to see what he is, and what he is not. He is not an accomplished orator, for he eschews the graces of the platform. He is not a man of learning, for learning softens the manners. He is not a man of lofty grasp of thought, for he has never said a word, or written a line, that is not narrow and sectarian and one-sided. But he is hard, energetic, confident, loud in voice, and boisterous in manner; as unabashed as the Duke of York’s monument in Waterloo Place.
You can see what manner of a man Dr. Campbell is in the twinkling of an eye. It is not often he preaches now; but if you chance to be