Of course the first question is, thus emancipated—Why worship at all? why rise betimes on a Sunday, shave at an early hour, put on your best clothes, and, mindless of city fog and dirt, rush hurriedly to South Place, Finsbury Square? If I take the New Testament literally, I take with it the command relative to the assembling of ourselves together, and have a scriptural precedent for a course sometimes very
wearisome and very much against the grain; but with free reason, an emancipated man, the case is altered. I am in a different position altogether. Custom is all very well to the holders of customary views. I expect a secret feeling lies at the bottom, that, after all, church and chapel going is good—that worship in public is a service acceptable to Deity.
It may be, and this I believe is the great secret of the success of churches and chapels, that people don’t know how to spend their Sundays, especially in country towns, without going to a place of worship. You cannot dine directly you have had your breakfast; you must allow an interval. Now, you cannot, especially if it looks as if it would rain, and your best hat might be damaged, fill up that time better than in a place of worship. So, even Mr. Ierson gets a congregation, although it is made up of people who see in him a man not a whit more qualified to teach religious truth than themselves, and who maintain the right of individual reason, in matters of religion, to its fullest extent. He has no claim to being heard; yet they go to hear him. They claim the right of private judgment; yet they take his. Worship, in its
ordinary sense, they deem unnecessary; yet they approach to it as nearly as they can. Such is the incongruity between the religious instinct on the one side, and the logical faculty on the other—an incongruity, however, proclaiming that, reason as you will, man is a religious animal after all; that he has the faculty of worship, and must worship; that, take from him his sacred books—his Shaster, his Koran, or Bible—still the heart is true to its old instincts, and believes, and adores, and loves. True is it, that man, wherever he may be, whatever his creed or colour, still
‘Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven.’
THE IRVINGITES.
Are the days of Pentecost gone never to return? Have miracles ceased from amongst men? Cannot signs and wonders still be wrought by men filled with the Holy Ghost? The larger part of the Christian Church answers this question in the negative. It teaches that
the miracles are dumb, that the need of them has past away, that in the fulness of time the Divine will was made known, and that the Church needs not now the signs and wonders by which that revelation was attested and declared.
A large body, however, has lately sprung up amongst us, holding opposite views. Enter their churches, and, according to them, the gift of tongues still exists—signs and wonders are still manifest—miracles are still wrought. Still, as much as in apostolic times, does the Divine afflatus dwell in man, and the man so endued becomes a prophet, and declares the will of God in known or unknown tongues.
For some time past, a magnificent Gothic Cathedral has been in process of being built in Gordon Square. It stands near where once stood Coward College, and where still stands University Hall, a Unitarian College, and not far from the University College, which a certain Ex-Lord-Chancellor took under his especial care. On Christmas Day it was thrown open for the performance of the worship of ‘The Holy Catholic Apostolic Church,’ a body better, perhaps, known to the community at large as Irvingites, or followers of Edward Irving.