with how little instrumentality Mr. Martin produces so great an effect. He looks perfectly unimpressible—as if the world’s vanities never could charm him—as if he passed his life in some hermit’s dismal cell, and not in the city’s passionate and restless crowd. You would fancy that he was the inhabitant of an altogether different sphere, that he never laughed or smiled or read ‘Punch;’ and this appearance, I take it, is some help to his pulpit success. Charles Fox said it was impossible for any one to be as wise as Lord Thurlow looked. I would not go so far as to say that no man can be as devout as Mr. Martin looks, but certainly his appearance must be in his favour with the large class who attend public worship, although his nasal twang is not very agreeable, and his face itself is more indicative of the priest of narrow thought and of ascetic habits, than of the man with glowing sympathies and generous life.
In the pulpit all this tells. Wait awhile, if you are sceptical, and you will soon be convinced of the fact. The mass around you will soon be permeated by the preacher’s power. As he unfolds his subject—as he goes directly to the point—as, with plain and terrible language,
he warns men of sin, and of its fearful results—as he expatiates on the terrors and splendours of a world to come—as he realises the day when the trumpet shall sound, when the grave shall give up its spoil, when the dead, small and great, shall stand before God—you see that he has got at the heart of his audience—that it hangs upon his lips—that he sways it at his will—that at his bidding it trembles and despairs—or that it believes and hopes, and loves and lives. And all this seems done with little effort, in the boldest and plainest language possible.
A man of one book is always a formidable foe. Mr. Martin is a man of one book. That one book, as he reads it, proclaims one fact—salvation by the cross; and to proclaim that fact is the one mission of his life, and the one message on his lips. Out of that book other men may get more; out of it Mr. Martin gets but one great and all-absorbing idea. This being the case, one is not surprised that Mr. Martin is not met with frequently out of the pulpit, or that what little he has published has been in the sermon line. He has identified himself with Ragged Schools and the Early
Closing Movement, and the United Kingdom Alliance for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic; and has, I believe, written and spoken in their favour. But the pulpit is his peculiar sphere: there he is great—there he has no rival near the throne—there he speaks as one having authority, as an accredited ambassador from God to man. In thus acting he shows his wisdom; for there he has achieved a success which men of greater brilliancy, of wider intellectual power, have often sought in vain. Cowper draws his model preacher:
—‘Simple, grave, sincere—
In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain,
And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste,
And natural in gesture; much impress’d
Himself, as conscious of his awful charge,
And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds
May feel it too; affectionate in look,
And tender in address, as well becomes
A messenger of grace to guilty man.’
Mr. Martin might have sat for the portrait.
THE REV. A. J. MORRIS.
The Rev. A. J. Morris is an Independent, alias a Congregational, minister at Holloway. Of course my fashionable readers don’t know where Holloway is. I may as well then briefly inform them that it is a suburb of London, not far from Islington and the New Cattle Market. Holloway belongs to the Dissenting part of London. The metropolis is cut up into sections:—Quakers congregate in Tottenham, and Edmonton, and Stoke Newington; Jews in Houndsditch; the Low Church party is very strong in Clapham; at the east, down by the river, there is an immense number of Baptists; in that large district, known at election times as the Tower Hamlets, Dissenting chapels are plentiful as blackberries, while in the more fashionable districts of Chelsea and Brompton you will hardly find one. The philosopher of Malmesbury (Sir W. Molesworth could have shown you the passage in the Leviathan) argues that a man should always be of the religion of his country, and thus is it these sects have become
hereditary in their respective localities. You never hear of Puseyism in the Tower Hamlets; you might as soon expect to find the Italian Opera there as a St. Barnabas. Almost all the Dissenting families of London have been born, brought up, and gathered to their fathers in one locality. To this day the Dissenters of London are buried on almost the very spot where De Foe wrote his satires, and Dr. Watts his hymns.