The Religious Life of London

by J. Ewing Ritchie

tacitly to assume that such is the natural and necessary condition of their denomination. It is with them as it used to be with the old orthodox Dissenters in well endowed places of worship some thirty or forty years ago. Of them, I well remember one in a leading seaport in the eastern counties. I don’t believe there was such another heavy and dreary place in all East Anglia, certainly there never was such a preacher; more learned, more solemn, more dull, more calculated in a respectable way to send good people to sleep, or to freeze up the hot blood and marrow of his youthful hearers. Once and but once there was a sensation in that chapel. It was a cold evening in the very depth of winter. There was ice in the pulpit, and ice in the pew. The very lamps seemed as if it was impossible for them to burn, as the preacher in his heaviest manner discoursed of themes on which seraphs might love to dwell. All at once rushed in a boy, exclaiming “Fire, fire!” The effect was electric—in a moment that sleepy audience was startled into life, every head was raised and every ear intent. Happily the alarm was a false one, but for once people were awake, and kept so till the sermon was done. It is the aim of Mr. Applebee in the same way to rouse up the Unitarians, and in a certain

sense he has succeeded. He has now been preaching some eighteen months in London, in the old chapel on Stoke Newington Green, where, for many years, Mrs. Barbauld was a regular attendant, and where long the pulpit was filled by no less a distinguished personage than Burke and George the Third’s Dr. Price; the result is that the chapel is now well filled. It is true it is not a very large one; nevertheless, till Mr. Applebee’s advent, it was considerably larger than the congregation. Before Mr. Applebee came to town he had produced a similar effect at Devonport; when he settled there he had to preach to a very small congregation, but he drew people around him, and ere he left a larger chapel had to be built. I take it a great deal of his popularity is due to his orthodox training. It is a fact not merely that Unitarianism ever recruits itself from the ranks of orthodoxy, but that it is indebted to the same source for its ablest, or rather most effective ministers.

In the morning Mr. Applebee preaches at Stoke Newington; in the evening he preaches at 245, Mile End. It seems as if in that teeming district no amount of religious agency may be ignored or despised. In the morning of the Sabbath as you walk there, you could scarce fancy you were in a Christian land. It

is true, church bells are ringing and the public-houses are shut up, and well-clad hundreds may be seen on their way to their respective places of worship, and possibly you may meet a crowd of two or three hundred earnest men in humble life singing revival hymns as they wend their way to the East London Theatre, where Mr. Booth teaches of heaven and happiness to those who know little of one or the other; nevertheless, the district has a desolate, God-forsaken appearance. There are butchers’ shops full of people, pie-shops doing a roaring trade, photographers all alive, as they always are, on a Sunday. If you want apples or oranges, boots or shoes, ready-made clothes, articles for the toilette or the drawing-room, newspapers of all sorts—you can get them anywhere in abundance in the district; and as you look up the narrow courts and streets on your left, you will see in the dirty, eager crowds around ample evidence of Sabbath desecration. I heard a well-known preacher the other day say it was easy to worship God in Devonshire. Equally true is it that it is not easy to worship Him in Mile End or Whitechapel. The Unitarians assume that a large number of intelligent persons abstain from attending a religious service on Sundays in the most part “because the doctrines

usually taught” are “adverse to reason and the plain teaching of Jesus Christ.” Under this impression they have opened the place in Mile End. In a prospectus widely circulated in the district, they publish a statement of their creed as follows: 1. That “there is but one God, one undivided Deity, and one Mediator between God and man—the man Christ Jesus.” 2. That “the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are the purest, the divinest, and truest;” His death consecrating His testimony and completing the devotion of His life; his resurrection and ascension forming the pledge and symbol of their own. 3. “That sin inevitably brings its own punishment, and that all who break God’s laws must suffer the penalty in consequence;” at the same time they “reject the idea with abhorrence that God will punish men eternally for any sins they may have committed or may commit.” Such is the formula of doctrine, on which as a basis the Unitarian Mission at Mile End has been established, and to a certain extent with some measure of success. It is charged generally against Unitarians that they have no positive dogma. The Unitarianism of Mr. Applebee has no such drawback. He has a definite creed, which, whether you believe it or not, at any rate you can understand. In the

eyes of many working men, that is of the class to whom he preaches at Mile End, he has also the additional advantage of being well known in the political arena. As a lecturer on behalf of advanced principles in many of our large towns he has produced a very great effect. I confess I have not yet overcome the horror I felt when I saw at the last election how night after night he spoke at Northampton on behalf of Mr. Bradlaugh’s candidature. Surely a secularist can have no claim as such on the sympathies of a Christian minister. Yet at Northampton Mr. Applebee laboured as if the success of Mr. Bradlaugh were the triumph of Gospel truth, and as if in the pages of the National Reformer the working men, to whom it especially appeals, might learn the way to life eternal. But Mr. Applebee is by no means alone. In Stamford Street Chapel and in Islington you have what I believe the Unitarians would consider still more favourable specimens of aggressive Unitarianism.

CHAPTER X.
the wesleyan methodists.

Tertullian wrote in his apology, or rather in his appeal, to the heathen persecutors on behalf of the Christians of his age, “We are but a people of yesterday, and yet we have filled every place belonging to you—cities, islands, castles, towns, assemblies, your very camps, your tribes, companies, palaces, senates, forum. We leave you your temples only. We can count your armies; our numbers in a single province will be greater.” The language was boastful, but it was founded on fact. Wesleyan orators might indulge in a similar rhetorical flourish. In 1729 John Wesley returned to Oxford, intending to reside there permanently as a tutor. He found that his brother Charles, then a student at Christ Church, had, during his absence, and chiefly through his influence, acquired views and feelings corresponding with his own, and had prevailed on two or three

young men to unite with him in receiving the Lord’s Supper weekly, and in cultivating strict morality in their conduct, and regularity in their demeanour. “Here is a new set of Methodists sprung up,” said one. The name took at once, and was thenceforth applied derisively to the little band. To this company John Wesley united himself; and of it his ardour and his wonderful talent of organization and for ruling his fellows soon made him the head. In the world’s history a hundred and thirty years is but a little while; the fathers and founders of Wesleyan Methodism have as it were but recently passed away. There may be some living now whose little eyes saw Wesley’s body carried to the grave in 1791, or whose young ears heard the last public utterances of the dying saint. And now it appears from the recently-published returns of the Conference that the total number of members, not mere attendants, at Wesleyan places of worship, is in Great Britain at the present time 342,380, being an increase of 5310; and there are upon trial besides for Church membership 24,926 candidates. A people which have thus grown, which have thus become a power in the State, to whom Dr. Pusey has appealed for aid, surely are well worth a study.

In an exhaustive work by Mr. Pierce we have, as it were, the inner life of Wesleyan Methodism, methodically arranged and placed in chronological order. “The attempt,” says the Rev. G. Osborn, D.D., in his Introductory Preface, “is made in honesty and candour; and has required a large amount of labour on the part of the compiler, which, however, his love and admiration of the system have made, if not absolutely pleasant, yet far less irksome than under other circumstances it would have been.” We must, in fairness, add that Mr. Pierce has certainly exhausted his theme, and his non-Wesleyan readers. A catechism of 800 large pages of small type is more trying than even that of the Assembly of Divines. Surely it was possible to do what Mr. Pierce has done in a more readable form. Still, however, his work is invaluable as a cyclopædia of Wesleyan faith, and organization, and practice.