realities, and he aims to give you the same. Mr. Morris has not genius—but he has intellect clear and strong—perhaps a little deficient in fire, and a habit rare, but invaluable in a minister, of independent thought and action. As a preacher he ranks high in his denomination. Out of the pulpit he is almost unknown. As a platform orator I know not that he has any actual existence at all. I imagine he belongs to that growing class in all denominations who have less faith in public religious meetings every year.
As a writer, Mr. Morris has acquired some little reputation; not that he has written much, but that what little he has done has been well done. His chief performance is, ‘Religion and Business, or Spiritual Life in one of its Secular Departments.’ The Spectator—a journal not much given to theology, especially that of Dissent—was compelled to confess it was a ‘series of able and thoughtful lectures on the union of Christianity and business, addressed apparently to a Nonconformist congregation. The topic is treated forcibly, without the mannerism frequent among dissenters, and the rules of life enforced are not impracticably rigid.’
He has also published several sermons; ‘Christ, the Spirit of Christianity,’ is one. A ‘Review of the Year 1850’ is another; and another is the ‘Roar of the Lion,’ which, as it was suggested by the papal aggression, and was praised in the British Banner, was, I should fear, an inferior production. His last work is, ‘Glimpses of Great Men; or, Biographic Thoughts of Moral Manhood,’ a work intended to illustrate, by the examples of Oberlin, Hampden, Luther, Fox, Bunyan, Cromwell, Milton, Moore, De Foe, Knox, Whitfield, Foster, Irving, Christian heroism in its beauty and power. The sketches are short but practical and to the point, well worthy especially of the attention of the young, for whose benefit they were more especially designed.
The Baptist Denomination
THE REV. WILLIAM BROCK.
In the times of Robert Hall, when the talents of that rather over-rated orator gave the Baptists a lift in public estimation, and made them respectable, save in the eyes of gentlemen of very strict Church principles, the Rev. Mr. Kinghorn, a strange spare man, a keen debater, and a great Hebrew scholar, presided over a select Baptist congregation, at St. Mary’s, Norwich.
Norwich at that time was very literary. William Taylor, the first Englishman to sound the German Ocean, and to return laden with its spoils of heresy and erudition, lived there; as did also Wilkin, the Editor of the best edition of that rare light of Norwich, Sir Thomas Brown, and William Youngman, a severe critic, though a writer little known beyond the city in
which he so long resided. At that time Norwich drove a considerable trade in logic as well as in woollens. The whole city had a disputatious air. The weaver-boys—and William Johnson Fox, now M.P. for Oldham, was one of them—learned to dispute and define and doubt. There Harriet Martineau philosophised in petticoats, and George Borrow, at its grammar-school, fitted himself for the romance of his future life. In a city thus given to thought were required, in the pulpit, men of superior power—especially in the Dissenting pulpit; for, while the clergyman of the Establishment can say “Hear the Church!” his Dissenting brother can only say “Hear me!” and that he must say to people, the condition of whose existence is free thought.
At Norwich, Mr. Kinghorn, it was considered, was equal to his post, and held it long. He gathered around him a congregation rich and intelligent. He instilled into their minds the strictest principles of Baptism. To their communion-table none were to be admitted—no matter how pure their creed, how consistent their life, how Christian their heart—unless they had been the subject of water immersion. It
seems strange that men should ever have quarrelled about such trifling matters; and yet to their heaven Mr. Kinghorn and his flock would admit none but the totally baptised. (If sectarians had their own way, what a place this world would be!) But, in time, Mr. Kinghorn obeyed the common law and died, and the church had to seek out a successor.