The London Pulpit

THE REV. F. D. MAURICE

‘If I saw,’ wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840, – ‘if I saw any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without a word of protest against aught that is.’ Since then Wilberforce has become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary; Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King’s College deprive him of the Professor’s Chair.

The real difficulty – which Sterling deemed invincible – which has proved too strong for Professor Maurice, is that, whilst there is such a thing as development in religion, the Church of England is not the place for it. The Church of England was a compromise; but it was a compromise between Geneva and Rome, and a compromise now dating three hundred years. It was never deemed that it would require a wider platform, or that it would have in its pulpits men of larger vision or of more catholic view than the men it had already. If it had a view at all, it took, like Lot’s wife, a backward glance to the tabernacle and its service – to the law delivered amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai’s sacred head. It looked not to the future. It knew not that there were,

It made no provision for the growth of man’s free and unfettered thought. Consequently it is the Church of England only in name. Out of its pale, divorced from it, there is more of intellectual life and independent thought than there is in it. This is the condition of its existence. It is associated with certain creeds and articles and rites: harmonizing with them, you have a position in society, you have a certain yearly stipend, and chances of something better, as Samuel of Oxford knows well. The Church of England was never meant to be the nursery for thought. You have made up your mind immediately you matriculate at her Universities. Your career for the future is to maintain those articles. In a word, you must conform. The task has been hard, and few great men have stooped to it, and fewer still have done so and lived.

But a man must not quarrel with the conditions he has imposed on himself. You have your choice. You wish to preach the truth. Well, you can do so, in the Church or out of it; but in the one case you are more or less tied. You may preach the truth; but it must be Church’s truth, if you take the Church’s pay. Of course, this is a disagreeable position to an independent man; at the same time, it is not without its corresponding advantages. You get into good society, you have a respectable living, you may marry an heiress, or become tutor to a Prime Minister or a Prince. Outside the Church men of intellect generally have taken their stand, for it is perilous to tamper with convictions in order to maintain a position.

It is easy to see how, in Maurice’s own case, what power has been thrown away in this tantalizing task. Had he started fresh, with no creed for him to conform to, with no position to maintain, he would have been a far more vigorous thinker than he has ever been. But he has ever had to come back to the Church – to the doctrines and teachings of men. A Church that shall embrace the religious life and thought of England, coëxistent with the nation, after all is but a dream. Were there such a Church, Maurice would hold no mean rank in it. But the State Church is not such, and cannot be such, unless its articles and creeds be glossed over with a Jesuitry not more ingenious than fatal to all moral growth. But each generation tries the hopeless task. The men of intellect and purpose in the Church have felt themselves in a false position, and have laboured to get out of it. They have trusted to one and then another. For a long time Mr. Maurice has been the coming man. The Church was once more to be a power – to have the nation’s heart – to enlist the nation’s intellect on its side. Writing in his usual bitterness, Carlyle says:

Mr. Maurice has accepted this language as sober truth, and has made that truth the pole-star of his ministerial life.

Most of our readers know Lincoln’s-inn-fields. It abounds with lawyers. In one part of it surgeons are plucked, and in another, clients. It has a small chapel not far from Chancery-lane, and if the residents of Lincoln’s-inn-fields attended it, there would be but little room for strangers. However, this is not the case, and thus I managed to get in. It is a curious old place. It was built by Inigo Jones; and the then popular and admired, but now forgotten, Dr. Donne, preached the consecration sermon. The walls have reëchoed to the oratory of Secker and Tillotson. The windows are of stained glass, and one of them, containing St. John the Baptist, was executed at the expense of William Noy, the famous Attorney-General of Charles I. In the crypt, underneath the chapel, are buried, Alexander Broome, the cavalier song-writer; Secretary Thurloe, who had chambers in the Inn; and that stern Puritan, William Prynne, who wrote about ‘The Unloveliness of Love Locks.’ During Term time this chapel is open for worship every afternoon at three; and the preacher is the Rev. Mr. Maurice.

Considering the position Mr. Maurice has attained, and the notoriety attaching to his name, your first feeling is one of wonder that he has not a larger congregation. After writing more books on theology than any other clergyman of the day – after teaching more youth – after mixing up himself more with the working classes than almost any other man I know of – one is surprised that Mr. Maurice’s audience is not larger; and I can only account for it by supposing that his task is impossible, and that he is fighting a hopeless fight; or on the supposition that, after all, Mr. Maurice’s place is not the pulpit, but the professor’s chair: yet that he has a numerous class of followers, the sale of his books is an unanswerable proof – a sale, however, much commoner amongst Dissenters, I have good reason to suppose, than amongst the clergy of the Established Church. Mr. Maurice has the true appearance of the professor – short dark hair, sallow face, precise manner: all indicate the man of study and thought. His voice is clear and agreeable, though not strong. His reading is very rapid, but, at the same time, emphatic. As to action, he has none. He aims more at what he says than how he says it; and, if you listen, you will find food for thought in every phrase. You can hardly imagine that the man before you has been charged with heresy, he seeming to differ in no other respect from other clergymen, save in his superior power of ratiocination and in the wider inductions on which he bases his doctrines.

What Mr. Maurice’s opinions are he has taken full care to place before the world. He is a churchman in the fullest sense of the term. ‘I have contended,’ he writes in his ‘Kingdom of Christ,’ ‘that a Bible without a Church is inconceivable; that the appointed ministers of the Church are the appointed instruments for guiding men into a knowledge of the Bible; that the notion of private judgment is a false notion; that inspiration belongs to the Church, and not merely to the writers of the Bible; that the miracles of the New Testament were the introduction of a new dispensation, and were not merely a set of strange acts belonging to a particular time; lastly, that the Gospel narratives must be received as part of the necessary furniture of the Church.’ One would have thought such churchmanship as this would have satisfied any one. However, the cry of heresy has been raised, principally, it seems, because he denies the doctrine of eternal damnation – an awful doctrine, we do not venture to affirm or condemn here. Because he has done this, he has been branded with infidelity; and The Record, and The Morning Advertiser– neither of them journals distinguished for talent, but rather the reverse – hounded on the public indignation against Mr. Maurice, forgetting that no man has so earnestly laboured to Christianize – not the dark tribes of Polynesia, for then these journals would have been redolent with his praise – but the savages with white faces and dark hearts that we meet in our streets every day.

It is melancholy to think that wretched theologians may aim their small shot at such a man, merely because his idea of God and Christianity may be less fearful, more loving and humane, than their own. Surely a man may love God and his neighbour as himself – may believe Christ suffered for the sins of the world – without being hooted by every ignorant or unreasoning fool, because, on other matters – matters merely speculative – matters too dark for man ever to fully inquire into or completely to understand – his opinions differ from their own. Proud as we are of our press, yet such exhibitions should make us mourn, that at times it can so far forget Christian charity and common sense, and descend so low. One thing is clear, that there is no tribunal in the Church that can satisfactorily settle the question of heresy; and another thing is clear, that whilst so many men differing so widely from each other are in the Church, the question with the majority of them cannot be one of principle but of pay. Churchmen should be the last to raise the cry of heresy, for it is a revelation to the world of what must ever be their weakness and their shame.

Mr. Maurice, after all, is thrown away where he is: all his life he has been in an uncongenial position. The son of a dissenting minister, the habits he acquired have clung to him from his earliest youth. Hazlitt tells us how a man so nurtured grows up in a love of independence and of truth; and such a one will find it hard to retain a connection long with any human organization and creed. Then, as the brother-in-law of Sterling, Maurice would naturally be led to modes of thought and action other than those the Church had been in the habit of sanctioning. Eminently religious, he never could have been what he was to have been, a lawyer; but as an independent writer on religion, as a co-worker with Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, for instance, what might he not have done? Another mistake of Maurice’s is, that his mission is to the poor. His style is the very last that would be popular with such. In the pulpit or out, Maurice preaches not to the public, but to the select few – to literary loungers – to men of ample time and elevated taste – to men of thought rather than of action – to men freed from the hard necessities of life, and who can leisurely sit and listen to his notes of ‘linked sweetness long drawn out.’ Hence is it that he is more a favourite with intellectual dissenters than with churchmen, and that I believe at Lincoln’s-inn-fields his congregation is made up more of the former than the latter. They love his efforts at self-emancipation; they admire his scholarship, his piety, his taste. They eminently appreciate him, as he, like the intellectual power of the poet,

The absence in him of all that is cold and priestly – his human sympathies – his love to the erring and the weak and the doubting, whom he would reclaim, are qualities with which the better class of religionists would heartily sympathize, and with which perhaps they would sympathize all the more that they come to them couched in language of dream-like beauty, all glorious, though misty with ‘exhalations of the dawn.’

As a writer, Mr. Maurice is well known for his ‘History of Metaphysical Philosophy,’ his ‘View of the Religions of the World,’ his ‘Articles of the Church considered with Reference to the Roman Catholic Controversy,’ and his ‘Essays,’ which are more especially intended to grapple with the difficulties Unitarians feel in connection with orthodox doctrine. They have all obtained an extensive sale; but they are not for the public; not for the men who buy and sell and get gain – who rise early and sit up late; but for the student and divine. Hence it is that Maurice and the school with whom he acts, such as Kingsley, Hare, and Trench, can never reanimate the Church of England, nor win the operatives over to it. That they do great good, I admit; that they have a mission, I grant; but not where they fondly deem it to be. There is a destiny that shapes their ends, and the issues, I doubt not, must be for the good of man’s soul, for the cause of truth, for the glory of God.

THE REV. H. MELVILLE, M.A

The great John Foster (who, by-the-bye, in his essay on ‘Decision of Character,’ has much mischief to answer for, as every obstinate mule quotes his authority when, against all advice and entreaty and common sense, he persists in going wrong – poor Haydon always quoted Foster) wrote one of his best essays, ‘On the Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion.’ The professors of Evangelical religion, I think, scarcely forgave him. The sanctuary, it was thought, should have a shibboleth of its own. In its peculiar terms and general formation it should differ from the ordinary language of other men. If persons of taste were kept away – if the men of intellect and science and learning stood aloof – it mattered little; for the wisdom of the world was folly, and it was ordained that it was to be brought to nought by the weak in years and understanding – ‘out of the mouth of sucklings and babes.’ The religious, I fear, some of them with a certain kind of pride – for there is a pride in the Church as well as in the world, and we all know whose

took pleasure in their cant terms, and sprinkled them as plentifully in their sermons and prayers as ever did skilful cook in time-honoured Christmas pudding. Wilberforce once took Pitt to hear Cecil. When they came out, Wilberforce tells us he was surprised by Pitt telling him he could not understand a word of the discourse. There was nothing wonderful in that. Pitt had never been to hear an Evangelical preacher before. His world had been a different one. He was a stranger amongst strangers. Their language was not his, and conveyed no meaning to his ear. Greek or Hebrew would have been as intelligible to him. Pitt’s case was a common one then, and is a common one now. Foster’s Essay has lost none of its point or power. There are still not unfrequently in the services of our churches and chapels, in the peculiar phraseology of the pulpit, some grounds for the aversion of men of taste to Evangelical religion. However, there are illustrious exceptions: one of the most illustrious of these is Henry Melville.

Would you hear him, reader, then for awhile you must leave the shop or the counting-house, and penetrate with us to the very heart of our great metropolis. The Golden Lecture, as it is called, a lectureship, I believe, belonging to the Mercers’ Company, and worth about £400 a-year, is delivered every Tuesday morning, and Melville is the lecturer. The church of St. Margaret, in Lothbury, is the spot selected, and it is an appropriate place for a Golden Lecture, for everywhere around you, you have —

On one side is the bank that hides such treasures in its mysterious and well-guarded cells. An hour’s quiet walk in one of them, my good sir, would make you and me independent for life. Every step of our way we are surrounded by gigantic companies; We walk on enchanted ground; we breathe enchanted air. Fortunes here are made and lost in a day. It was well that the piety of our forefathers selected such a spot, that once in the bustle of the week God’s voice might be heard as well as that of Mammon.

But it is time we enter St. Margaret’s.

Like most city churches, it is small and cold and mouldy – seeming to belong more to the past than the present age. However, for once, it is alive again. The old seats once more abound with beauty, and wealth, and fashion – or, at any rate, with so much of them as belong to City dames. We have left the roar of Cheap-side and Cornhill; but, after all, we have the world with us here as well as there. For awhile we shall forget it, for there is the preacher, and already the magic of his voice has charmed every ear. I know no more magnificent voice. I know no statelier air. It always carries me back in fancy to the days of the elder Pitt – or to the earlier times of Bolingbroke – or to that still earlier day when the Hebrew Paul preached, and the Roman Felix trembled on his seat of splendour and of power.

Tall, of dark complexion, with grey hair and blue eyes, with a face lit up with genius – the most brilliant preacher in the English Church: such is Henry Melville. His action is simple and singular. When he commences scarcely any is observable. Then as he flies along, and warms as he proceeds, the head is dropped with a convulsive jerk, and the right hand is raised, and the climax is ejaculated (for so rapid is his delivery it can scarcely be called preaching) with a corresponding emphasis. No sooner is the text enunciated than he plunges at once into his subject, developing and illustrating his meaning with a brilliancy and rapidity unparalleled in the pulpit at the present day. You are kept in breathless attention. The continuity of thought is unbroken for an instant. Every sentence is connected with that which precedes or follows; and, as the preacher goes on his way like a giant, every instant mounting higher, every instant pouring out a more gorgeous rhetoric, every instant climbing to a loftier strain, you are reminded of some monster steam-ship ploughing her way across the Atlantic, proudly asserting her mastery over the mountain-waves, landing her precious cargo safe in port. When she started, you trembled for her safety; she was so lavish of her power that you feared it would fail her when she needed it most. But on she wends her gallant way, scattering around her the mad waves as in play. I can compare Melville with nothing else, as he stands in that pulpit – in that sea of human souls – drowning all discord by his own splendid voice, mastering all passions by his own irresistible will, piercing all scepticism by his own living faith.

And yet Melville is not what some understand by the term, ‘an intellectual preacher.’ He does not aim to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christian truth – to convince men whose understandings reject it. With the large class who are perpetually halting between two opinions, who to-day are convinced by one man, and to-morrow by another – who have lost themselves hopelessly in German mysticism – Melville has no sympathy whatever. I never heard him use the terms objective and subjective in my life. Of honest intellectual doubt, with all its pain and horror, he seems to have no idea. Melville always is as positive as Babington Macaulay himself. In no circumstances could he have been a Blanco White, or a Francis Newman, or a Froude. As a churchman he stands rigidly inside the pale of the Church. His God is a personal God. His Christ descended into hell. His heaven has a golden pavement, and shining thrones. Wordsworth tells us —

Melville never could have written that. His hell is physical, not mental. It is a bottomless pit where the smoke of their torment ever ascends – where the worm never dies – where the fire is not quenched. In all other matters his vision seems similarly clear, and intense, and narrow. Beside the Church, whose creed he preaches, and whose articles he has subscribed, and whose emoluments he pockets, he knows no other. His Holy Catholic Church is that which the State pays to and supports. His successors of the Apostles are those whom Episcopalian bishops ordain. His redeemed and sanctified ones consist only of those who have been confirmed. According to him, error from the pulpits of the State Establishment is sanctified, owing to some mysterious power its pulpits possess. Pulpits outside the Church are not only destitute of that power, but, alas! destitute also of all saving grace. I have called Melville a brilliant preacher. He is that; but his brilliancy, like that of Sheridan, is the result of intense preparation. I write not this to disparage him. I consider it much in his favour. In these days, when the pulpit contains so small a part of the learning or the intellect of the age, no pulpit preparation can be too intense, or elaborate, or severe. It is said Melville writes and re-writes his sermons till they arrive at his standard of perfection. It is said he not unfrequently devotes a week to the composition of a single discourse. I can quite believe it. Every sentence is in its proper place – every figure is correct – every word tells – and the whole composition bears the stamp of subdued and chastened power.