politician, advocated complete suffrage, defended the Anti-State-Church movement, and is, I believe, one of the few leading London Dissenting ministers who still fraternise with the Association now known as the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control. As a platform orator, he is very effective: he is everywhere the same—everywhere you see the same hearty dogmatism and genial sincerity. You may differ from such a man, but you cannot dislike him; you would rather have him for a friend than a foe. To his own denomination he is a tower of strength. He is the first man who has made the Baptists popular at the West-end. Till Brock came, the Baptist congregations in the neighbourhood were very meagre. Brock cannot do for his sect what Hall did, or what John Foster did. By his writing he does not appeal to the religious cultivated mind of England, nor by his graceful eloquence does he commend it to men of taste; but he speaks to the practical English mind, to the shop-keeping middle class, of whom I believe he was originally one, and to the door of whose instinct and hearts he evidently holds the key. Scarlett succeeded, we are told, because there sat listening in the
jury-box twelve Mr. Scarletts. For the same reason Mr. Brock succeeds. The men he speaks to are men of like passions with himself.
THE REV. J. HOWARD HINTON, M.A.
In a very unaristocratic neighbourhood—in no more fashionable a locality than that of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate Street—preaches the Rev. J. Howard Hinton, till Mr. Brock came to London the acknowledged great man of the Baptist denomination.
Nor was this title undeserved. If the possession of a powerful mind—subtle, analytic, acute—a mind fertile in the destruction of fallacies, and in the reception and exposition of great truths, gives its possessor any weight at all, Mr. Hinton must, in any rank of life, have occupied no mean place. Still more may be said in his favour, especially in his character of a Christian minister—that his language is forcible—that his own feelings are strong—that in season and out of season it is evidently his aim to expound and
declare, to the utmost of his ability, Christian truth.
Yet Mr. Hinton has a very small congregation. I should think Devonshire Square Chapel cannot contain more than five hundred hearers at the very outside—a very small proportion, it must be admitted, of the intelligent frequenters of public worship in London.
The real reason of this scant attendance, I suppose, is that Mr. Hinton has no clap-trap about him—that he has none of the fascinating airs of the popular Evangelical divine—that he has long past that time of life when young ladies take an interest in their darling minister—and that, if you wish to get any good from the preacher, you must not merely listen to him, but must use your own intellectual powers as well—an exertion far from common amongst the church and chapel goers of London. Six days in the week those who have brains are working them in this crowded city, and the seventh they wish to be a day of rest. They take the Sabbath as a pleasant opiate—as a kind of spiritual Godfrey’s Cordial for the soul—that they may go back to the world with renewed energy and power. To such Mr. Hinton does
not preach: with such he is no favourite. No singer of sweet songs—no player upon pleasant instruments is he. Tall, sickly with the work and study of a life, grey-haired, inelegant as all book-worms and men of thought—with the exception of Sir Bulwer Lytton—are, with a voice by no means melodious, but tremulous with emotion as it is played upon by the soul within: such is Howard Hinton. If you stay to listen—if you have sense enough to see the heart in that ungainly frame and the intellect in that capacious brain—you will hear a sermon that will repay you well. From whatever subject he is preaching on Mr. Hinton always manages to extract something new; you are really instructed by his sermons; your views become clearer and more enlarged; you understand better the Christian scheme. Mr. Hinton is more than what I have here implied. He is something more than a great reasoner or acute divine. He has a heart, and he speaks out of it to you. He excites your emotions as well as convinces your understanding. There is flame as well as light in that pulpit—flame, perhaps, all the more glowing that you did not expect to find it there. On all subjects Mr. Hinton is an independent,
an original, and a fearless preacher. On some he is peculiar—on most he is far ahead of the denomination to which he belongs. This is, especially, the case with regard to the strict observance of the Sabbath. Mr. Hinton believes that it was made for man, not man for it—a fact of which the denominations which pride themselves on being Evangelical seem to have become utterly oblivious. Mr. Hinton sees in Christianity a principle at variance with the observance of set times. He sees in man’s nature abundant reason why the man who does not profess to be religious should not be chained down to a form. He sees the man of genuine religion will so shape his life that every day shall be a Sabbath, and be religiously observed; and that, if he be not religious, it is worse than mockery to ask him religiously to observe a day. It is to the credit of Mr. Hinton that he has ably and faithfully preached this doctrine—a doctrine which, if it be much longer denied by the clergy of this country, threatens to be attended with most disastrous results. It is dangerous to establish an institution which the Author of Christianity never made; and if ministers choose to say that Christianity is inconsistent with fresh air—