It was in accordance with these ideas that the Sunday morning services in South Place were carried on.
After Mr. Fox came Mr. Ierson, and a nearer approximation to regular Unitarianism. But the place did not prosper; there were far too many empty benches. He was succeeded by a gentleman formerly
a Baptist minister, but who had outgrown his sect, and for a little while there was harmony and progress. Again there was an interregnum. “Seekers are,” said old Oliver Cromwell, “next best to finders.” In London, especially in these unsettled days of free inquiry, are many such, and to such the pulpit of South Place was freely offered. I do not fancy as a rule seekers are good preachers. To say anything effectually you must have something to say. To make others weep you must weep yourself. With mere negations you can never sway the minds or influence the lives of men. In orthodox places of worship there is often much of dreariness. The clergyman whose heart is not in his work is a miserable spectacle for gods and men, but the dreariness of heterodoxy is infinitely greater; and of all things under the sun the most miserable in the clerical way is the sight of a would-be philosopher feebly diluting or expanding, as the case may be, windy platitudes or transcendental moonshine. Under such an infliction, as it may well be imagined, South Place did not flourish greatly. At length, in due course, a man appeared to continue the work which Mr. Fox had originated. His name is Mr. M. D. Conway. I believe he is of American origin, and
evidently under him the cause is in a prosperous state. When I say prosperous, the term is not to be understood as it would be in orthodox circles. The latter class of religionists, when they say that a place is prosperous imply by the use of such language that a place of worship is well filled; that men are turned from sin to holiness, from serving the devil to serving God, that the place is a centre of religious life and activity, and that all, young and old, rich and poor, are to the best of their power and means co-operating in Christian work. Prosperity in this sense cannot be predicated of South Place. Its doors are only opened once a week. There is no religious, or educational, or philanthropical agency connected with the chapel; but there are more attendants than there were, and that encourages Mr. Conway and his friends. Indeed, there is a talk amongst them of establishing a Sunday-school. At the same time it seems to me that the class of people who go to South Place are not socially or intellectually what they were in Mr. Fox’s time—when the Cortaulds would come up all the way from Braintree to hear Mr. Fox, when City lawyers like the late Mr. Ashurst, and City magnates like the late Mr. Dillon, were amongst the audience; when on a Sunday morning might be seen
there such men as Sir J. Bowring, or Macready, or Charles Dickens, and others equally well known to fame. They left when Mr. Fox left. I believe Mr. P. Taylor, M.P., still keeps up a connexion, more or less fitful and uncertain, with the place. Sir Sydney Waterlow also still retains a couple of sittings, but he is rarely there. Nevertheless, the congregation has greatly increased; the chapel is quite three parts full. Still they use the little book of hymns and anthems selected by Mr. Fox; and the musical part of the service, always a great matter at South Place, is as well conducted and as attractive as ever.
Mr. Conway is a very advanced thinker. The character of his preaching and praying is purely theistic. He wars with dogmas in every form. It may be a wing to-day, a fetter to-morrow. For him there are no sacred books, or rather he places them all on an equality. For his motto he goes to India, and quotes the Brahma Somaj. In this respect he is a true follower of the late Mr. Fox, whose fascinating oratory owed very little of its charm to that which orthodox Unitarians or orthodox Christians hold highest and holiest; whose aim was more to pull down than to build up, and who had a greater faculty for the exposition of Christian fallacies than for the
enunciating of truths and principles needful to humanity in its hour of temptation, distress, danger, or death. Few have his exquisite humour, his power of sarcasm, his acquaintance with modern literature, his copious command of polished language, his expressive yet calm delivery, his gentleness almost as touching as that of woman; but that which was lacking in him often made men his inferiors in intellect, his superiors in the art of arousing the spiritually dead, or in giving to the moral wastes in our midst the vigour, the beauty, the fertility of life.
THE SECULARISTS.
It is a sign of the times when Infidelity visits the workshop or the factory, and challenges the admiration of the men in fustian—the men whose hard labours and horny hands have helped to make England what it is, and who in an increasing ratio are making their influence felt on the Exchange where capital seeks investment, in the ancient halls where the teachers of the next generation are training, in the study of the political philosopher, in Parliaments where practical people assemble to legislate after their necessarily imperfect fashion for the general weal. It is said of Sir Godfrey Kneller that he
was deeply shocked at hearing a common labourer invoking imprecations on his own head. Some such feeling must be entertained by the old-fashioned, scholarly sceptics at all times met with in highly intellectual communities. Religion was a good thing for the poor; it taught them to know their place, to be humble, industrious, and not to murmur when deprived by human agency of the rights to which all are born, or when by the same agency they were made to bear innumerable wrongs. For such religion was intended; and for such considerations it was right and proper that it should be accepted by society—sanctioned by the law—its ministers rewarded and salaried by the State. It was under the influence of some such feeling that Napoleon the Great is reported to have said, if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one; and in a proportionate manner do the philosophers feel alarm and indignation when the working man, for whom such trouble has been taken,—for whom religion has, as it were, been discovered,—for whom an Establishment, the most richly endowed with this world’s goods in Christendom, rejoices to call itself the poor man’s Church,—turns round, and, in his coarse, rough way, says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am much obliged to you.