Could anything be weaker or in worse taste than that?
The pulpit has ceased to offend by any such exhibitions. The men in the pews have advanced, and the men in the pulpit have had to do the same. Men of science and of intellect and literature must have men of science and of intellect and literature to preach to them. It is power the ministry lacks. It fails because it is of the past—uses the language of the past—prays the prayers of the past. Instead of seeking a revival in the churches, it had better seek its own revival. We have some twelve hundred clergy
(Church and Dissent) in this great Babylon, and yet the devoutest worshipper can scarce name a dozen as superior men. Yet preaching is not the difficult thing ministers affirm. Literary men, enterprising merchants, sharp attorneys, aspiring barristers, honourable M.P.s, work infinitely harder, though professing infinitely inferior aims. A popular actor certainly seeks no richer reward than a popular parson; but the former will throw into his performance a life of which the latter appears to have no idea. For the men who care not for the manner but the matter, the pulpit has still less to offer. Where, then, is the wonder that in London, where men are not driven to church or chapel—where they do not lose caste because they do not observe the required customs of respectable society—the mass are beyond the reach of the preacher’s voice, listening, it may be, to the sermons on our stones and in our streets—the sermons the world’s great ones and illustrious leaders preach, when they worship railway kings, or erect statues to royal debauchees? What wonder is it then that in life’s busy scene the still small voice of the pulpit grows weaker every hour?
POPULAR PREACHERS.
Church of England.
THE REV. J. C. M. BELLEW, S.C.L.
One of the wonders to us, looking back upon the middle ages, rich in all the experience they lacked, is their faith in heathenism as a fact, long after heathenism as a theology had given way to the victorious Cross. It seems not only as if many Christian churches were erected on what were once pagan temples, but as if, under new names, the old pagan superstitions still lingered, as if their hold on the heart of man were too firm to be driven out by any doctrine, however new or true. In the middle ages, before a Bacon had led forth the sciences from their house of bondage—before men had ceased to theorize, and to believe alone in facts, and the truths facts utter, what confidence, for instance, was given to that
pagan science, or jargon, for it ought not to be called a science, named astrology. The old heathen gods still remained. Jupiter and Mars, Saturn, and Venus, and Mercury, were still the arbiters of human destinies. Take up the great philosopher of that age—Cardan for instance—and you shall read in him more of the mysterious influences of the heathen’s Jupiter than of the Christian’s God. Every educated man exclaimed in language as plain, though not, perhaps, so poetical, as that of Max Piccolomini, that—
‘Still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names,
And to yon starry world they now are gone,
Spirits or gods that used to share this earth
With man as with their friend; and to the lover
Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky
Shoot influence down, and even at this day
’T is Jupiter who brings whate’er is great,
And Venus who brings everything that’s fair.’
Something like this in the Christian world prevails. Thus is it the Old Testament binds with iron grasp men who profess to take their religion from the New. They tell you the law was the schoolmaster—that it was the shadow of good things to come, and yet for all that they do and plan, the Old Testament is their perpetual