The London Pulpit

by J. Ewing Ritchie

Of this class, undoubtedly, Edward Miall, the editor of the ‘Nonconformist,’ is one of the latest. Originally a student at Wymondley College, then ‘settled,’ as the phrase is, at Ware, then the pastor of a respectable congregation at Leicester, he was M.P. for John Bright’s own borough of Rochdale, and is, as the Times confesses, a distinguished Nonconformist. I imagine few of my readers require a description of his thin and wiry frame. As a platform speaker, or as a mere orator, Miall is not very effective; he delights his admirers, but he does not do more. In the pulpit, few men are more fitted to shine. Men enter a place of

worship under different feelings to those with which they run to Exeter Hall or the London Tavern. In the one case you are in something of a reverential mood, and you are not disappointed by the want of physical power. With eternity for his theme, the preacher soon causes you to forget a feeble voice or a bodily presence not adapted for effect. The sermonising tone is in keeping with the pulpit, and if every word seem to have an air of preparation, and to tell of labour, you think that it is only after mature preparation a man should speak of religious truth to his fellow-men. Calm self-possession is essential to the sanctuary, and there you miss not the abandon which elicits the cheers of an excited audience.

In the pulpit, Miall could always command attention. His manner, if somewhat artificial and prim, evinced the possession of a mind earnest and decided. His language was nervous; his views were broad and catholic. You felt that the man before you was no reproducer of other men’s thoughts, no worn-out echo, no empty sound; that the Christianity he preached he had found to be good for the intellect and soul of man; that it was the foundation of all

his knowledge; that on that, as a great fact, he had rested all the hopes and aspirations of his life. Seemingly void of all animalism—a rock with a gleam of sunlight on it—an incarnate idea—a voice crying in the wilderness—a reed, but not shaken with the wind—Edward Miall is an admirable illustration of what a man with a principle may do. It was a bold step for him to give up the pulpit and to start a newspaper; it was a still bolder thing to circulate that newspaper in the Dissenting world, with unmistakable quotations from Shakspeare staring you flat in the face, and to accustom that world, used to a very watery style of composition, to language remarkable for its elegance and power.

The effect was startling. Miall at once became the object of the intensest hero-worship. The old idols were utterly cast out and destroyed. Old gentlemen, who had led a pompous life for half a century, suddenly found themselves of no account. Their power had passed away as a dream. Students in Dissenting Colleges went over en masse to this second Daniel. It was a time of intense political excitement. The corn laws taxed the poor man’s food; Chartism reared its hideous head; everywhere angry discontent

prevailed. Miall thought the time had come for Christian men to interfere; he felt that the struggle for political rights was not inconsistent with the utmost purity of Christian life; that the Church, by its sanction of existing abuses and its reverential worship of the powers that were, had done much to alienate the popular mind from Christianity itself; he felt that the Church, loaded with State pay, would always be liable to suspicion, however excellent her creed or pure her clergy; and he felt, therefore, that in asking men’s political rights, and the dissolution of the union between Church and State, he should demonstrate to the world that Christianity meant something more than corn-laws, or tithes, or the celebrated Chandos clause—something more than a comfortable living for younger sons. It is false to suppose that Miall left the pulpit when he left Leicester. His labours in his new sphere were but a continuation of his labours in the old. In everything he was unchanged. He was merely continuing his Leicester work, appealing, not to a county-town, but to the nation at large. He had changed his platform; but his mission remained the same. Instead of using a feeble voice, he had recourse to a powerful

pen. His pulpit was the editorial chair, his church the English race.

Place Miall in the pulpit, and a glance will tell you the man. You can see he has been brought up in a divinity college; he has all the prim and unfashionable air of youths reared in such secluded spots. His pale face tells of thought. You see in his small clear eye that thought crystallises in his brain. His clenched hand, his determined teeth, his shrugged-up shoulders, prepare you for the tenacity with which he clings to what thoughts come to him. On the hustings and elsewhere, Miall is the same—not elated when applauded, not depressed when reviled; unbending, imperturbable, mild of demeanour, yet inflexible in purpose. Yet, after all, his success has been more personal than in what he has done. Who ever talks of complete suffrage now?—yet that was Miall’s darling idea when he first appeared in the political world, and the Association which calls him father—which is to emancipate religion from the fetters of the State—it must yet be confessed by its most ardent admirers, has got a considerable amount of work to do.

It does seem strange that so pale, calm,

unmoved a man as Mr. Miall seems to be, should have wandered out of the pulpit and the study, with its old books and everlasting commentaries, and exchanged all that elysian dream-land for the fever of politics and the bustle of the newspaper. It seems stranger still that he should have succeeded, that he should have found favour with our turbulent democracy, not partial to the use of soap, or particularly passionate in their attachment to abstract principles. Strangest of all is it that he should have managed to be returned as an M.P. We should have been the last to have prophesied for Miall such a career. Cato at the theatre, Colonel Sibthorp at a Peace Congress, an Irish patriot speaking common-sense, could not surprise us more. Yet that Miall has achieved what he has, shows how much may be done by the possessor of a principle. Miall is a principle, an abstract principle embodied—that man is everything, that the human being is divine, that the inspiration of the Almighty has given the meanest of us understanding. From the Bible he got that principle, and that is the unerring test by which every case is weighed and every difficulty solved. In religion it led