I fear there is very little difference between the Church and the world. In both the tide seems strongly set in favour of ignorance, presumption, and charlatanism. In the case of Mr. Spurgeon, they have both agreed to worship the same idol. Nowhere more abound the vulgar, be they great or little, than at the Royal Music Hall on a Sunday morning. Mr. Spurgeon’s service commences at a quarter to eleven, but the doors are opened an hour and a half previously, and all the while there will be a continuous stream of men and women—some on foot, some in cabs, many in carriages—all drawn together by this world’s wonder. The motley crowd is worth a study. In that Hansom, now bearing a decent country deacon staying at the Milton, you and Rose dashed away to Cremorne. Last night, those lovely eyes were wet with tears as the Piccolomini edified the fashionable world with the representation of the Harlot’s career. That swell was drinking pale ale in questionable company in the Haymarket—that gay Lorette was sinning on a gorgeous
scale. This man was paying his needlewomen a price for their labour, on which he knows it is impossible for them morally to live; and that was poisoning a whole neighbourhood by the sale of adulterated wares.
A very mixed congregation is this one at the Surrey Gardens. The real flock—the aborigines from Park Street Chapel—are a peculiar people,—very plain, much given to the wearing of clothes of an ancient cut—and easy of recognition. The men are narrow, hard, griping, to look at—the women stern and unlovely, yet they, and such as they alone, if we are to believe them, are to walk the pearly streets of the New Jerusalem, and to sit down with martyrs and prophets and saints—with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
‘The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.’ Here is a peer, and there his tailor. Here Lady Clara de Vere kills a weary hour, and there is the poor girl who sat up all night to stitch her ladyship’s costly robe. Here is a blasphemer come to laugh, there a saint to pray. Can these dry bones live? Can the preacher touch the heart of this listening mass? Breathed on by a spell more potent than
his own, will it in its anguish and agony exclaim, What must we do to be saved? You think how this multitude would have melted beneath the consecrated genius of a Chalmers, or a Parsons, or a Melville, or an Irving,—and look to see the same torrent of human emotions here. Ah, you are mistaken—Mr. Spurgeon has not the power to wield ‘all thoughts, all passions, all delights.’ It is not in him to ‘shake the arsenal, and fulmine over Greece.’ In the very midst of his fiercest declamation, you will find his audience untouched; so coarse is the colouring, and clumsy the description, you can sit calm and unmoved through it all—and all the while the haughty beauty by your side will fan herself with a languor Charles Matthews in ‘Used Up’ might envy. Look at the preacher;—the riddle is solved. You see at once that he is not the man to soar, and soaring bear his audience, trembling and enraptured, with him in his heavenward flight.
Isaiah, the son of Amos, when he received his divine commission, exclaimed, ‘Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!’ but the popular minister of New Park Street Chapel has no such trembling forebodings;
no thought of his own unworthiness, no fear that he is trespassing on sacred ground, or that he is attempting a task beyond his powers, impedes the utterance of his fluent tongue. Not a trace of the scholarship, or reading, or severe thought, or God-sent genius, or of that doubt in which there lives more faith than in half the creeds, will you find in the whole of his harangue.
On the pulpit, or rather the platform, Mr. Spurgeon imitates Gough, and walks up and down, and enlivens his sermons with dramatic representations. He is ‘hail fellow, well-met’ with his hearers. He has jokes and homely sayings and puns and proverbs for them. Nothing is too sacred for his self-complacent grasp; he is as free and unrestrained in God’s presence as in man’s. Eternity has unveiled its mysteries to him. In the agonies of the lost, in the joys of the redeemed, there is nothing for him to learn. His ‘sweet Saviour,’ as he irreverently exclaims, has told him all. Of course, at times there is a rude eloquence on his lips, or, rather, a fluent declamation, which the mob around takes for such. The orator always soars with his audience. With excited thousands waiting his lightest word, he cannot remain passionless and unmoved. Words
and thoughts are borne to him from them. There is excitement in the hour; there is excitement in the theme; there is excitement in the living mass; and, it may be, as the preacher speaks of a physical hell and displays a physical heaven, some sensual nature is aroused, and a change may be effected in a man’s career. Little causes may produce great events; one chance word may be the beginning of a new and a better life; but the thoughtful hearer will learn nothing, will be induced to feel nothing, will find that as regards Christian edification he had much better have staid at home. At the best Mr. Spurgeon will seem to him a preacher of extraordinary volubility. Most probably he will return from one of Mr. Spurgeon’s services disgusted with the noisy crowding, reminding him of the Adelphi rather than the house of God; disgusted with the common-place prayer; disgusted with the questionable style of oratory; disgusted with the narrowness of the preacher’s creed, and its pitiful misrepresentations of the glorious gospel of the blessed God; disgusted with the stupidity that can take for a divine afflatus brazen impudence and leathern lungs. Most probably he will come back confessing that
Mr. Spurgeon is the youngest, and the loudest, and the most notorious preacher in London—little more; the idol of people who dare not go to theatres, and yet pant for theatrical excitement.