he has a wide field over which his oratory may range. It cannot all be barren from Dan to Beersheba. In the second place, according to the Independent Religious Reformers, the great want of our times is such as they are. “It is well known,” they tell us, “that
although the orthodox religious establishments are earnestly supported, they cannot gain the hearts of the people. The intelligence of England has outgrown the old creeds and formulas. Theism is secretly approved by thousands.” The time, then, is ripe for such a mission as Dr. Perfitt proposes. The hour has come, and he is the man. It is not in his negative and critical aspect that he is to be judged. In the position in that respect he has assumed there is no novelty. Unfortunately, the Church of England, like all established churches, more or less lays itself open to the most irreverent criticism. The new wine cannot be put in the old bottles. We can quite agree with him that “the majority of the clergy have no just conception of what, according to the nature of things, they are called upon to do;” that St. Paul would find himself sadly out of place were he called upon to preach to the congregation of a fashionable suburban church; and that there would indeed be a flutter and commotion raised were “the Archbishop of Canterbury, cutting himself adrift from the level of Belgravia, to stand out before men denouncing woe upon the butterflies of fashion and the Dundrearies of Parliament as Jesus denounced the Scribes and Pharisees of old.” But the saying these things
does not constitute a man the founder of a new and better sect. Mr. Froude tells us “the clergyman of the nineteenth century subscribes the Thirty-nine Articles with a smile as might have been worn by Samson when his Philistine mistress bound his arms with the cords and withs.” It is scarcely possible to write a bitterer thing of the clergy, yet Mr. Froude is not, so far as we are aware, an Independent Religious Reformer. Even of the Church of which such hard things may be said, and justly said, we may argue that its theory of the identity of Church and State is a noble one, and that the dream of such men as “the judicious Hooker,” of Coleridge, of Dr. Arnold, is that of all who, in stately cathedral or humble conventicle, pray Sunday after Sunday to the common Father, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done upon earth as it is in heaven.” Man is a religious animal; the heart is true to its old instincts. There is no peace for his soul, no rest for the sole of the foot, no shelter for him in the storm, no brightness in the cloud, no glory in the sun, no hope in life, no life in death, unless he can believe, adore, and love. But we have forgotten Dr. Perfitt. Well, we need be in no hurry. If you go to Newman Street you will find very few people
there by eleven. The exclusively religious service, as one of the hearers informed us it was, generally commences at a quarter past, where in the large hall about a hundred may be collected together, the majority, of course, males, chiefly of the lower section, I should imagine, of the middle class. There is music; then the Doctor reads a chapter of the Bible, and takes it to pieces; then there is more music; then a prayer, and a half-hour’s sermon, from a regular text, according to the fashion of the orthodox, but generally coming to a very unorthodox conclusion. Indeed, the former come off hardly at the Doctor’s hands. He demolished them as easily as if they were so many men of straw; President Edwards, Richard Baxter, Mr. Spurgeon, the apostles, and their great Teacher, all look very small by the side of the clear, logical, learned, fluent, sarcastic, infallible Doctor, who is the heir of all the ages under the sun; who talks of Zoroaster, and Vedas, and Shasters; who is as familiar with Brahma and Buddha as if he had assisted at their birth, and who knows what’s o’clock in Sanscrit better than you or I, my good sir, in ordinary English. After the sermon comes the collection, and the congregational dinner-hour, for the sale of the beer for which, the neighbouring publics open just as the Independent
Religious Reformers, exhausted by the Doctor’s omniscience, require the refreshing fluid.
“Hae, sirs!” said an elderly female in a remote part of Scotland, as for the first time she saw a black man; “hae, sirs, what canna be done for the penny!” Assuredly some such feeling must be entertained by the listener who for the first time hears Dr. Perfitt in his rostrum in Cambridge Hall. For a pound a year you may have this pleasure every Sunday, and become one of the Independent Reformers. What more can man desire?
SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY SQUARE.
The religion of humanity has been for a time dominant in South Place, Finsbury Square. Its oldest and original teacher in connexion with the place was the late W. Johnson Fox, M.P., a popular writer and eloquent orator, who did much in his day and generation on behalf of freedom in trade, in politics, and religion, and did it well. Nor did he labour in vain as regards himself. Born in an humble position, he became a student at Homerton College and an orthodox Dissenter. In a little while he joined the Unitarians, and then left them for a freer and fuller religious creed and form of worship. He had many friends.
His letters, signed “Publicola,” in the Weekly Dispatch, were the delight of the working classes; and his Anti-Corn-law orations charmed all, and there were tens of thousands who had the privilege of listening to them. He was returned to Parliament by the electors of Oldham, and a monument erected to his memory there still perpetuates his name. He died at a ripe old age, ever having preserved the character of an independent and honourable man. As a religious teacher he was no extraordinary success. It was rarely indeed that South Place was very full. Of course, the hearers were the very élite of the human race. Wherever you go—especially among sects not particularly orthodox or popular—the men and women with whom you come in contact are no ordinary men and women. By a happy dispensation of Providence they fail to see themselves as others see them, and are as firmly convinced of their own intellectual superiority over a benighted British public as they are of the truth of their principles and of their ultimate success.
“There is a religion of humanity,” said Mr. Fox, “though not enshrined in articles and creeds, though it is not to be read merely in sacred books, and yet it may be read in all wherever they have anything in them of truth and moral beauty,—a religion of humanity which goes deeper than all because it belongs to the essentials of our moral and intellectual constitution, and not to mere external accidents, the proof of which is not in historical agreement or metaphysical deduction, but in our own conscience and consciousness,—a religion of humanity which unites and blends all other religions, and makes one the men whose hearts are sincere, and whose characters are true, and good, and harmonious, whatever may be the deductions of their minds or their external profession,—a religion of humanity which cannot perish in the overthrow of altars or the fall of temples, which survives them all, and which, were every derived form of religion obliterated from the face of the earth, would recreate religion as the spring recreates the fruits and flowers of the soul, bidding it bloom again in beauty, bear again its rich fruits of utility, and fashion for itself such forms and modes of expression as may best agree with the progressive condition of mankind.”