As a specimen of the popular element which is at work among the uneducated classes to make the people itself of England its real church, it is worth while to observe what Mr. Spurgeon is doing. His chapel stands on the southern side of the Thames, between the Victoria and Surrey Theatres, where the British subject is served with the domestic and nautical drama. On those stages the language struts and aspirates, and the effects are borrowed from Vauxhall and Cremorne for plays which are constructed to hold the greatest possible amount of cockneyism and grotesqueness, with the principal object of showing how villany and murder are uniformly overcome by virtue, whose kettle sings upon the hob above a pile of buttered muffins at last; and the pit, which came in for a shilling, pays the extra tribute of a tear. These shop-keepers of the Surrey side sit on Sunday beneath Mr. Spurgeon's platform, whose early preaching betrayed the proximity of the theatres, but was for that very reason admirably seasoned to attract his listeners. If he ever did slide down the rail of his pulpit-stairs, as reported, in order to dramatize the swift descent of the soul into iniquity, and then painfully climb up again to show its difficult return, the action was received, doubtless, in its full ethical import, and shook the suburban heart. His blunt and ordinary language, sinning frequently against taste, and stooping sometimes to be coarse, was the very vehicle to take his hearers up at the pit-door, theatrical or theological, and send them in wholesomer directions. It was a fortunate—his co-religionists would say providential—adaptation of an earnest and religious man to the field of his labor. For, as time passed, the phrases and demeanor of his preaching improved,—their absurdities have, no doubt, been caricatured by the London press,—and the temper of the man was more plainly observed to be sincere, fervent, and devoted to a certain set of religious preconceptions. The want of culture and of general intelligence was not so lamentable in such a neighborhood. He led, by many lengths, the Victoria and Surrey stage. If he had more deeply reflected upon the subjects which he handled like a simple-hearted boy, he would have failed to keep four thousand men and women warm in the hollow of his hand from Sunday to Sunday, for a dozen years, and to organize their whole moral and religious activity in forms that are admirably adapted to carry on the work of popular dissent.
His audience represents the district, and is an advertisement of the kind of spiritual instruction which it needs and gets. Not many large heads sit in the pews; narrowness, unreflecting earnestness, and healthy desires are imprinted upon the faces upturned towards his clear and level delivery. He is never exactly vapid, and he never soars. His theology is full of British beer; but the common-sense of his points and illustrations relative to morals and piety is a lucid interval by which the hearers profit. They follow his textual allusions in their little Bibles, and devoutly receive the crude and amusing interpretations as utterances of the highest exegetical skill. But their faces shine when the discourse moralizes; it seems to take them by the button, so friendly it is,—but it looks them closely in the eye, without heat and distant zeal, with great, manly expostulation, rather, and half-humorous argument, that sometimes make the tears stand upon the lids. The florid countenances become a shade paler with listening, the dark complexions glow with a brooding religiosity. It is plain that he has a hungry people, and feeds them with what suits their frames the best. His clear voice, well fuelled by a full, though rather flabby frame, rolls into all the galleries and corners of the vast building without effort; his gestures are even and well balanced; and you are, in fact, surprised to see how good a natural orator he is. You went to hear him, expecting to find some justification for the stories which impute to him a low and egotistic presence, and a delivery that depends upon broadness for its effects. But he appears unpretending, in spite of the satisfied look which he casts around the congregation when he first steps to the railing of the platform. He is evidently conscious that he owns the building and the audience; but, content with that, he makes no attempt to put them in his pocket; on the contrary, he almost instantly becomes seriously engaged in transferring into them his lesson for the day. His style of extemporaneous speaking is conversational,—the better English suspect all other styles,—and this of itself shows what improvement has taken place in the Surrey region. If at first he indulged in rant, he has now subsided into an even vein; he puts things plumply, and tells his feelings gravely, and makes his points without quackery. So it is plain that when he gives notice of a contribution for his college, in which young men are trained for the ministry, and states simply, in justification, that one hundred and fifty have already left it, and are now engaged in preaching the dissenting word, he is to be regarded as one of the decided influences which are now at work to bring the people up to self-consciousness, self-respect, and political importance.
It is very characteristic that the National Church is called an Establishment,—in other words, something that stays where it was put some time ago. The thing which ought to move first, and move continually through all the avenues of the public life, to keep them clear of the obstructions of ignorance and superstition, and prevent the great travel and intercourse of thought from stagnating, is the thing in England which is most unwilling to stir. Already a fearful accumulation of passengers and vehicles, whose patience is nearly exhausted, is anxious to be let through in time to keep appointment with the world's grave business. Young thoughts are hurrying to be indorsed; mature paper dreads to be protested; the hour of the world's liberal exchange is about to strike. Depend upon it, at the critical moment, when the pressure in the rear becomes the most emphatic, the people in the omnibus will have to get out and assist the passengers in drawing it to one side, where it will remain a long time unmolested.
But the first thing which you say concerning the men and institutions of England is, that they are established. In America some things are finished before they are done; but there are no tottering trestle-bridges in the routes of English enterprise to let the travellers through. When a business firm becomes fairly built up, it lasts a hundred years or more. Shop-signs are not taken down except by the weather; new fronts grow so slowly along the ancient streets that they appear to be deposited by secretion, like corals and shells. I took a book to a printer, and found he was the grandson of the man who published "Junius" in 1769, doing business in the same dingy court and office, with the old regularity and deliberation. When I said, that, for want of time, I should have to risk formidable errata and print at the rate of sixty-four pages a day, he plainly suspected me of derangement and of a desire to impart my condition to his machinery. On repeating it with calmness, he set it down for Yankee braggadocio, and assured me that not an author in England could print at that rate. Then he went to work. They detest being hurried, but their latent momentum is very great. Limited suffrage and many administrative abuses will feel it soon, as similar things have felt it before.
But you are deceived at first, and anticipate deterioration rather than improvement for the people of England. The city of London, with its two and a half millions of inhabitants, looks like a huge stone that has been pried over a sweet well; nobody need expect to draw water there any more; fresh ones must be dug, we say, in America, in Russia, to reach primitive human nature again, and set it free to make the wilderness blossom. London looks as if it had slowly grown from the soil and the climate, like a lichen that clings closely to its rocky site. The heavy, many-storied buildings of Portland stone are blackened by the smoke till they appear more like quarries then habitations; the swarms of human beings look ephemeral as moths. The finest architecture becomes in a few years indistinguishable, and delicate ornamentation is as much superfluous as among the weather-stained cliffs and boulders of the coast. Monumental inscriptions are smutted and half-obliterated, but the scurf protects the monument. Under the huge pile of St. Paul's the ceaseless traffic of human passions passes as through a defile of the hills. When the lights spring forth towards evening, and sparkle on the great dull masses, it seems as if the buildings had been there forever, and forever would be, endowed with some elemental process which puts forth the lighting. Newgate itself, without windows towards the street, a huge angle of dead walls, with heavy iron fetters suspended over the gateways, and statues so blackened in their niches as to dispel the illusion that they ever did or could suggest humanity, is a settled gloom in the midst of the city, like the thought of a discouraged and defeated man. It has a terrible suggestion that crime is established in London,—immutable methods of being guilty and of being condemned—all old, old, and irrepealable.
From Primrose Hill, beyond Regent's Park, and towards the open country, the profile of the city can be seen at one view, as it emerges from the smoke, is heavily described athwart it, and plunges into it again, like a great, silent feature of the earth itself, lifted in an atmosphere whose density seems to be a part of the antiquity. Hidden in that smoke the streets roll night and day, like great arteries, to feed, replace, repair, business, pleasure, and misery, but to change it no more than the blood changes the tricks of an old brain or the settled beating of a stubborn heart.
These are some of the physical aspects which seduce a traveller into the impression that the vigor and glory of England have culminated, and would fall apart sooner than take on new forms or yield to the moulding power of popular ideas.
The impression is deepened by the feeling of hostility to American institutions, and by the special dislike of the North, which the past four years have betrayed. The commercial and ruling classes had been skilfully prepared, by applications of Southern sentiment, for the declaration of neutrality, which was supposed to contain the triple chance of destroying a dangerous republic, of securing unlimited supplies of cotton by free-trade, and of erecting in the South an oligarchic form of government. Under the circumstances, they felt that neutrality was a kind of merit in them, and a magnanimity which the declining North ought to have hailed with enthusiasm, as it showed that England scorned to take a more deadly advantage of our perilous position. This anti-Northern feeling is, and always has been, confined to the Tory classes, in and out of the Government, to the rich and their dependants, to the confirmed High-Churchmen. Even an American resident, if he was wealthy, and liked the Church of England, and had settled down into a British country-seat with British ways of living, would be sure to misrepresent the North, to be pleased at its defeats and annoyed by its successes, partly from commercial and partly from pro-slavery considerations. The America which he remembered, and regretted that he could not still be proud of, was the America where Pierce and Buchanan were Presidents, where Jefferson Davis and John B. Floyd were Secretaries of War. He had, in short, become a Tory; for Toryism is regard for usages at the expense of men. He and the English Tory desired the triumph of Slavery, because it was the best thing for the negro, and the quietest thing for trade and government. The only difference between them is, that he would own slaves, if he had an opportunity, while the Englishman would not, partly because his own servants are so excellent. But both of them would subscribe to the Boston "Courier." The English Tory hates to have the poor classes of London use the railways on the Lord's Day, to go and find God's beauty in the Crystal Palace and the daisy-haunted fields. One of the most striking spectacles in London is found on Sunday, by standing on some bridge that spans the Thames, to watch the little river-steamers, black with human beings, that shoot like big water-bugs from the piers every five minutes, and fussily elbow their way down-stream to various places of resort. On that day people cluster like bees all over the omnibuses, till the vehicle looks like a mere ball of humanity stuck together, rolling down to some excursion-train. This is a bitter sight to an old-fashioned Churchman.[A] The American Tory will hate any day that releases the poor and the oppressed into God's glorious liberty. One of the most worthy and offensive men you can meet in London is the American Tory of this description: worthy, because honest and clean and free from vice; offensive, because totally destitute of republican principle. If stripped of his wealth, he might become a rich man's invaluable flunky, and carry the decorous prayer-book to church, bringing up the rear of the family with formalism. Toryism has a profound respect for external godliness, and remembers that the Southerner sympathizes with bishops, who, like Meade of Virginia, preach from the text, "Servants, obey your masters," and, like Polk of Louisiana, convert old sermons upon the divine sanction of Slavery into cartridge-paper. We must recollect, too, that a good many educated Englishmen dislike republican institutions because they have identified the phrase with all the atrocious things which successive pro-slavery administrations have conceived and perpetrated; for the Englishman is dull at understanding foreign politics, and reads the "Times," though he strongly avers that he is not influenced by it. An administration appears to an Englishman to be the country; he has not yet heard an authoritative interpretation of republicanism, for a Washington cabinet has not till lately spoken the mind of the common people. But when he understands us better he will dread us all the more, because the people in all countries speak the same language in expressing the same wants; and when universal suffrage puts universal justice on its throne in America, injustice will everywhere uneasily await the ballot which shall place it in the minority. The dislike of the English Tory is already passing into this second stage, when his hope of a dissolved Union gives place to his dread of a regenerated country that hastens to propagate its best ideas.
There were three elements in this anti-Northern feeling. First, a sympathy with the smaller and feebler party. This is a trait which puts the English people by the side of the Turk in the Crimea, the Circassian in the Caucasus, the Pole, the Dane,—which inspired Milton's famous letter, in the name of Cromwell, that espoused the cause of the Waldenses. In fact, wherever the smaller and weaker party has no relations with England, the country hurries to protect it. But where, as in the case of the Irish, the Sepoy, the New-Zealander, the Caffre, and the Chinese, England's interest is touched by the objections of people to her own harsh and inveterate rule, she has no magnanimity, and forgets the sentiments of her nobler minds. The same Cromwell who threatened Europe in behalf of the Waldenses contrived the massacre of the Irish at Drogheda. So when sympathy with the distant South harmonized with dread of the North, she was willingly misled by Southern agents to see a war of conquest and aggression.
The second element is a fear of the ultimate consequences of a Union reconstructed without Slavery; for then Mr. Bright may argue in favor of universal suffrage, uninterrupted by allusions to the arrogance and coarseness, the boastful and aggressive spirit belonging to a pro-slavery America. "Why do you desire the dissolution of the Union?" asked one Englishman of another. "Oh, I have no reason, except that the Americans are so bounceable I want to see them humbled." But we were the weakest when Slavery made us so loud-mouthed and vaporing; we shall be strongest when the cause of our boasting has disappeared. When a country is fully conscious of the principles that belong to it, and sees them cleansed with her children's blood, through eyes that stand full with tears, she will invite, but no longer threaten; and the flag which she once waved in the face of all mankind to exasperate will rain persuasion as often as it is unfurled.