AN EVANGELICAL PREACHER,
“You must go and hear the Church Spurgeon,”
said an intelligent lady, residing not a hundred miles from Highbury New Park, to the writer.
“Who is he?” we asked.
“The Rev. Gordon Calthrop,” was the reply. “He preaches in a temporary iron church, St. Augustine’s, Highbury New Park.”
Soon afterwards, on a certain Sunday, we made our way to the church in question. There was very little difficulty in finding it out. As you enter Highbury New Park, leaving Dr. Edmond’s new church on the right, you come into a region of broad roads and handsome villas, into which poverty, which has an unpleasant knack of pushing itself where it is not wanted, actually seems ashamed to intrude. In these houses, almost countryfied, standing in the midst of well-trimmed lawns, shaded by leafy shrubs, between which flowers of the richest beauty bud and blossom, only rich people and people apparently well-to-do dwell, and they all attend at Mr. Calthrop’s church. Follow any of them, as on a Sunday morning the hour of service draws nigh, and bells far and near are calling men to prayer, and you find yourself at St. Augustine’s. Close by, a handsome ecclesiastical structure is rapidly rising, which is to hold 1400 people. That is the permanent
church, the foundation-stone of which was laid by the Bishop of London, and where, it is hoped and believed, Mr. Calthrop may labour for many years to come. As it is, he has been preaching in this iron church, which will seat about nine hundred, for the last five years. He came there a stranger, fearful of the future, doubting what would be the issue. The church was quite a new one. The neighbourhood had been but recently built on, but he came with a heart full of zeal, with an experience ripe and varied, and in a little while it was apparent to himself and his friends that the step he had taken was fully justified by the result. Now he has a crowded church, more than 250 communicants, and a people ever ready to respond to his appeal, and rich in that charity without which a religious profession is but little better than sounding brass. The sacrament money at St. Augustine’s, as they have no poor of their own, is distributed amongst those of neighbouring churches. One of the noticeable features in connexion with the place is the attendance of young men from the neighbouring College of St. John’s. For the benefit of my readers let me add, that what was Highbury College is now a place of training for ministerial work in connexion with
the Church of England—of young men who have not had, owing to unavoidable circumstances, the benefit of a University education, but who nevertheless are the right stuff out of which to make useful preachers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. On Sundays they find employment as Sunday-school teachers in various parts of the metropolis; also on that day, with a view to future usefulness, they go to hear such eminent clergymen as may be preaching in the City or the West-end, but mostly they attend at St. Augustine’s, and under Mr. Calthrop’s preaching they prepare for the great work themselves.
Nor do I know that they could have a better model. Mr. Calthrop is not the Church of England Spurgeon. I am not aware that the Church of England has a Spurgeon. I know none of the other Christian churches of our day that have. It is only once in an age that a Mr. Spurgeon appears, but Mr. Calthrop has no need to fear comparison with Mr. Spurgeon or any one else. Personally, he is much smaller than the far-famed Baptist orator Mr. Spurgeon, and in figure and face very much resembles the late Douglas Jerrold. His voice is one of wonderful sweetness and power, and as he reads the Liturgy of his Church you feel that with him it is no empty form, to be repeated
parrot-like and with railway speed, but the voice of a people humbled on account of sin, and standing trusting, yet trembling, in the presence of their God. Exquisitely can he render all its pathos, all its tenderness, all its sorrow, all its fulness of exultation, all its ecstasy of Christian hope. From the reading-desk to the pulpit the transition is easy and natural. At a distance there is something youthful in his look; but in his grey hair, in his face lined with thought, in his eye, which seems ever looking far off, as if here was not the boundary of his horizon, as if it had realized something of the glory which is to come; you see that already golden youth has past, and that you have before you one who has attained to the strength and steadiness, and ripeness and experience, of Christian manhood. He will not detain you long, nor will he weary you with learning, nor will he aim to dazzle the intellect and neglect the heart. In language of poetical simplicity will he unfold and illustrate his text, and force home on the hearts and consciences of all, its lessons. There is nothing of the pretension of the priest about him, nor does he delight in the terrors of the law. Evidently he is the servant of one whose yoke is easy, and whose burden is light; and such is his freshness