him physically—at any rate, they robbed his bones of all flesh, and made his outward frame as spare as possible. It is to be wished also that they had endowed him with better health. Yet his figure cannot be termed ungraceful or his appearance unattractive. In his dress he is scrupulously neat. Even on weekday services he wears the white handkerchief, which when round the neck denotes that you are a swell on your way to dinner, or a waiter, or a gentleman of the clerical profession. His grey eye is full of enthusiasm, and kindles up a pale, dark face that otherwise might be dull. His voice is stronger and clearer than you would expect. You are agreeably surprised to find how animated and vigorous he can become. After all, and in spite of ill-health, time has dealt not ungently with Mr. Lynch. He is a trifle bald, and you can detect a greyish tint in his hair—that is all; but Mr. Lynch, I imagine, is not one of those who age fast. He has a happy cheerfulness apparently, which compensates for the poetic sensitiveness which frets away many a man’s, life, and which made a hard-headed Wordsworth write—
“We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
Whereof come in the end despondency and madness.”
Indeed, Mr. Lynch’s cheerfulness is evidently, ever
welling up out of his heart and colouring all his thoughts and words. In his services this is everywhere apparent. He has much of the lithe action of the comedian, and he stands ever, like Garrick, between tragedy and comedy, one moment ready to make you smile, and the next touching all that is most earnest, most serious, most devout in our common nature. He leans on his little desk, his hands before him, and talks away, sweetly and devoutly, about things that interest all—things that have a spiritual bearing, things that are secular and profane, only to the secular and profane. There are not very many people to hear him; but then, they are hearers, and there is sympathy between the preacher and the pews. The Iron Duke said, “When you begin to turn in bed, it is time for you to get up.” In a similar way it may be said, when the people begin to turn to look at the clock it is time the preacher or lecturer was done. The other night I found Mr. Lynch’s service occupied nearly two hours, yet it did not seem wearisome or long. The service was commenced with chanting, and prayer, and reading scripture, and singing. Then there was a text, and a lecture or sermon from that text. On the occasion to which I refer the subject was John Howe, as an
illustration of that passage in Proverbs which predicates of the man diligent in his business that he shall stand before kings—a prediction literally verified in the case of John Howe, who was chaplain to Oliver Cromwell—a man greater than any king—and who had friendly converse with that Protestant hero, William the Third, the best king England ever had. Very vividly did Mr. Lynch bring out all that was noblest and brightest in John Howe’s character and career, dwelling with evident unction on the many pregnant titles of Howe’s works, which he seemed much to prefer to the works themselves, and in which he was right; for Howe’s thoughts, it must be conceded, are not couched in the form and language most easy of apprehension to the men of to-day; and from the past, with some rare exceptions—those, of course, written in a dead language being the chief—it is vain to extract literature for the study and edification of the present. Religion is no exception to a universal law; indeed, more than anything else, it is required of him who preaches it that he should speak to living men in the living language of to-day—not according to formulas that have long died out, or in terms that have long become extinct; and this specially may be said of Mr. Lynch, that as much as any one he realizes
this great law, and does use language and illustration and argument familiar to the men and women of London in this latter day—that he does not cease to be a man when in the pulpit, and deal with abstraction rather than with real life. When Mr. Lynch began his ministerial career this virtue was rarer than it is now, and of this desirable result Mr. Lynch deserves, at any rate, some of the credit. Be that as it may, the writer has one other thing to say. It seems to him that these Thursday evening lectures of Mr. Lynch’s deserve a wide support. There are many in London who would be glad enough to attend. There are many living out of town who would find it worth while stopping an hour or two later on a Thursday evening. The service commences at a quarter past seven; and I believe generally Mr. Lynch takes some specific subject, such as “John Howe,” or “Bells,” or anything which seems to him notable. The writer heard also on the night in which he was there something about questions asked and answered; but on that he can say, as he knows, nothing.
CHAPTER IX.
the unitarians.
“In the apostolical Fathers we find,” writes the Rev. Islay Burns, “for the most part only the simple Biblical statements of the deity and humanity of Christ in the practical form needed for general edification. Of those fathers Ignatius is the most deeply imbued with the conviction that the crucified Jesus is God incarnate, and indeed frequently calls Him, without qualification, God. The development of Christology in the scientific doctrine of the Logos begins with Justin and culminates in Origen. From him there proceed two opposite modes of conception, the Athanasian and the Arian, of which the former at last triumphs in the Council of Nice, and confirms its victory in the Council of Constantinople.” By the Ebionites Christ was regarded as a mere man. By the Gnostics he was considered as superhuman; but in that capacity as one of a very numerous class. The doctrine of the absolute unity of God, alike in essence and personal subsistence, was held by the
Monachians, who are divided respectively into Dynamistic and Modalistic. As the latter held that the whole fulness of the Deity dwelt in Christ and only found in him a peculiar mode of manifestation, it was assumed that the natural inference was that the Father himself had died on the Cross. Hence to these heretics the name of Patripassians was applied by the orthodox. Sabellius, who maintained a Trinity, not of divine Persons but of successive manifestations under the names Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was one of the chief Patripassians. The Arian controversy, as Dean Stanley shows, turned on the relations of the divine persons before the first beginning of time.
If Dean Stanley be correct, at this time the Abyssinian Church is agitated by seventy distinct doctrines as to the union of the two natures in Christ. It is clear, then, no one man can epitomize all that has been uttered and written on this pregnant theme, over which the Church contended fiercely three hundred years. “Latin Christianity,” writes Dean Milman, “contemplated with almost equal indifference Nestorianism and all its prolific race, Eutychianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism.” When the Reformation quickened free inquiry and religious