The one great want of the metropolitan pulpit is men abreast of the age, who can sympathize with its pulsation, can respond to its wants, can permeate it with a living faith. The majority of the men in the pulpit cease to be such when they get there. Of the human heart, as it is fevered with passion, or boils over with desire, they know nothing. They see men under a mask. Smith does not talk to his minister as he does to Brown; with Brown he is facetious—occasionally a little loose—and, after a good dinner and a bottle of wine, speaks in terms almost of approval of fashionable follies. The minister comes in and the conversation is changed—allusions are made to the ‘Evangelical
Magazine’—the Missionary Society is referred to—something is said of Sunday Schools, and the world for a time is dropped. Smith, junior, acts in a similar way. Before his minister he assumes a virtue, if he have it not—is sedate—quiet, anything, in short, but what his intimates find him to be. It seems to be the condition of the pulpit that it shall see life under a mask; and as to thought, that does not move in the regular time-worn ruts, that is condemned at once. It is not the thought of the pulpit, and it therefore must be false. It may be born of vigorous intellect; it may have been nursed by years of severe thought; to get at it, the thinker may have sacrificed many an early friendship—many a cherished association—many a sacred tie; but, nevertheless, the pulpit would blast it with its stern anathemas, and pronounces it a crime. Occasionally, a man in the pulpit can act differently. Some few years back, when Professor Scott, then of University College, London, now of Owen’s College, Manchester, was in town, it seemed as if an honest attempt was made to meet and win to Christianity the philosophy that was genuine and earnest and religious, though it squared with
the creed of no church, and took for its textbook the living heart of man rather than the written Word. In our time the same thing is attempted. The man who has had the courage to make the attempt—and to whom honour should be given for it—is the Rev. Thomas Lynch.
Judged by externals, the Rev. Thomas Lynch is a failure. He is a small spare man; his bodily presence is contemptible; he is a reed shaken by the wind. You get no idea of the church militant when you look at him,
‘Of the drum ecclesiastic,
Beat with fist instead of a stick.’
He is none of your bully ‘Bottoms,’ to roar ‘so that the Duke will say, let him roar again.’ His chapel is in the very unfashionable neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road. His hearers are few and far between. Out of the immense crowd of church and chapel goers in this great city, not three hundred can be got to hear him; and yet I know no man better worth your hearing. Your popular orators, your Dan O’Connells and your Dr. Leifchilds, are big men—and yet your small men have often the organization favourable to the development of poetry and thought. So is it with Mr. Lynch. It is the old Gospel he preaches; but he handles it in a
new and fresh form. What is wearisome from others, comes with a peculiar fascination from him. The truths common-place men have made prosaic and common-place, the magic of his genius can render quite the reverse. His is the rare power, given to the true poet alone, ‘to clothe the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn;’ and his also is the still rarer power to show piety—
‘Sitting as a goddess bright,
In the circle of her light.’
You see that Christianity to him is life and power—no form of words, but a reality; that it fills his heart; that it works in his intellect; that it sanctifies his utterance. Hence it comes fresh to you as it does to him; it is alive with the light of genius and of God; with him it is applicable to the conditions of existence, to man’s need and nature—no tinkling cymbal—no empty brass. A brother and a man preaches to you; your equal in philosophy, in thought, in lettered lore; your superior in what is greater and nobler still. Yes, that frail man, with an imperfect frame—with a voice so weak that you can scarcely hear him—with an appearance so homely that you would never think that in such a casket a soul of any greatness could be enshrined—
can speak to you of the great things of God—of righteousness, and temperance, and the judgment to come, so that you—worldly scoffer or philosophic sceptic though you be—must listen with admiration and respect.