him to reject ecclesiastical organisations and claims, the traditions of the Fathers, the pretensions of divines—everything by which the priest is exalted and the people kept down. In politics, the same rule held good. If all men are equal—if God has made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth—what need for aristocratic usurpation or the legislation of a class? If all are equal before God, surely they should all be equal before man. Thus, when angry Chartism was asking for universal suffrage, and the Church was preaching contentment and the duty of submission to superiors, and the danger to religion when a man became political, Miall felt that the time had come for him to step out of the conventional circle of the pulpit into a wider and freer sphere, and to show that Christianity was not alien to human right, and that a man might love God and his brother-man as well. It does seem strange now that men should ever have doubted so plain a truth. How it was doubted some few years since, only men like Miall can tell. Miall’s Anti-State-Churchism was also obtained by a similar process. If there were no need of priests, if every man could be a priest unto God, what need of State patronage
and pay? At the best they could but corrupt and enervate the Church. It was teaching it to rely on a worthless arm of flesh rather than on the living God.
With such views, Miall may surely be included in the ‘London Pulpit.’ Tried by his own theory, he is a legitimate subject for a sketch. The truth he held in Leicester he holds in London, and he is still as much a divine in the ‘Nonconformist’ office as when he was pastor of an Independent Church. Occasionally he preaches in one or other of the metropolitan pulpits, and the studied discourse read—but read with admirable distinctness—is of a kind to make you regret that Miall is so seldom seen where he is fitted to do so much. If you have not an orator before you in the common acceptation of the term, you have before you a master of argument, gifted with a clearness of expression and a high order of thought, rare anywhere, especially in the pulpit now-a-days. Buckingham wrote of Hobbes’ style, that
‘Clear as a beautiful transparent skin,
Which never hides the blood, yet holds it in;
Like a delicious stream it ever ran,
As smooth as woman and as strong as man.’
Of Miall’s style precisely the same may be said. It is always as clear, sometimes as cold, as ice. As a still further proof of Miall’s claim to be considered a religious teacher, witness his ‘British Churches’ and his ‘Basis of Faith,’—books eminently adapted for the age in which we live. Yet Miall can speak to the poor, and does so. The teetotalers have built a hall called the Good Samaritan Hall, on Saffron Hill. It is a low neighbourhood. It is surrounded by the dwellings of the poor, and it is erected there as a light for that dark spot, by means of which the drunkard may emerge into a higher life. The last time I heard Miall was there: the room was full. On a table, dressed in an old blue great coat, stood Miall, preaching to men and women, gathered from the highways and byways, from the crowds for whose souls no one cares. Surely that was a finer sight than if, arrayed in lawn, he was preaching to the fashion and wealth of Vanity Fair.
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
Roman Catholicism seems part and parcel of human nature. Luther was not more a product of his age than Leo X. That one man should be a Papist seems as natural as that another man should be a Protestant. Our sects and schisms are not a very edifying sight. The greater number of them are eternally wrangling, and uttering at the best but discordant sounds. Few of them make any provision for the sensuous, for the love of decency and order and solemn ceremonial, which is characteristic of some minds. Many of them are actually contemptible when you come into close collision with them, and examine their working, and watch their effect. The harder, the more literal, the more matter-of-fact they are, the greater is the chance that some subjected to their discipline should rebel against it and become converts to the ancient faith. Mr. Lucas was a Quaker till he became the editor of the Tablet. It is very probable that Robert Owen may yet die in communion with Rome. The Roman Catholic Church
offers unity—rest for the tempest-tossed—and to the young and the ardent and the impassioned an attractive worship and an imposing form.
By the side of it—the Protestant substitute for it—the Evangelical Alliance seems a poor thing indeed. Hence it is that the cry of Roman Catholic ascendancy has always been raised ever since the Church of England appropriated its wealth and seated itself in its place. It always has been in danger from the Church of Rome, and it always will. Human nature is always the same. What has grown out of it at one time will grow out of it another. Heresy, as Sir Thomas Browne well put it, is like the river Arethusa, which in one place is lost sight of, but only to reappear further on. Each age has its own development. Each age but repeats the past, as the son in his turn reproduces the blunders and the youthful follies of his sire.
It is true we get wise, and—