J. Ewing Ritchie

“ There he stands, in that handsome pulpit, in that richly-ornamented chapel, with all those genteel people beneath him and around him—a stout, square-built man—a true type of Saxon energy and power—without the slightest pretensions to elegance or grace. Such men as he are not the men young ladies run after, fall in love with, get to write in their albums, buy engravings of for their boudoirs; but, nevertheless, with their strong passionate speech, and indomitable pluck, they are the men who move the world. ”

“ If you can’t shake hands with a real peer, it is something to shake hands with his brother. It is impossible to get people to believe that human nature is everywhere the same; that God has made of one blood peers and people, black and white. In this unsettled age, perhaps, faith in the peerage is as abiding a conviction as any whatever. Nor is it limited to what is called the world. The Church participates deeply in the folly; no piety is so acceptable, has so genuine an odour, as piety in high life; no homage is considered so graceful to the Lord as the religion of a lord. ”

“ Our boast is, that every man is free to worship God according to the dictates of his own heart—that religious inquiry is unfettered amongst us—that every man who chooses may form a sect for himself. The advantages of this state of things preponderate over its disadvantages. The philosopher may despise, and the Christian of a generous heart and catholic aspirations may regret, that such should be the case—may think it better that men had wider views—better that we should stand on a broader platform than a sectarian one: but we may not quarrel with the conditions of religious existence. ”

“ Fluent in pen, meagre in attainment, seemingly master of no one subject, yet writing vehemently on all, the Doctor is precisely the man to give the law to that low class of readers more or less present in all religious denominations. It is easy to see what he is, and what he is not. He is not an accomplished orator, for he eschews the graces of the platform. He is not a man of learning, for learning softens the manners. He is not a man of lofty grasp of thought, for he has never said a word, or written a line, that is not narrow and sectarian and one-sided. ”

“ What the Englishman is in the field, Brock is in the pulpit. You are borne down by his weight. He gives you no chance. On comes the tide, and you are swept away. You are learned—evidently the man before you has little more than the average learning picked up in a hurry, in a second-rate academic institution. You like to theorise on the beautiful and divine—the preacher before you cares nothing for your flimsy network, born of Plato and Schelling. You explain away and refine—Brock does nothing of the kind: ‘It is in the Bible—it is there!’ he exclaims, and that is sufficient for him. ”

“ Enter the church, and you will see the same delightful air of fashionable repose. If the grace that is divine be as common there as the grace that is earthly, Mr. Dale’s charge must be a happy flock indeed. With what an air does it bow at the name of Jesus! with what a grace does it confess itself to consist of ‘miserable sinners!’ One would hardly mind, in the midst of such rich city merchants and their charming daughters, being a miserable sinner himself. Such opulent misery and fashionable sin seem rather enviable than otherwise. ”

“ His Christianity is practical—that by which men may shape their life as well as square their creed. Instead of wandering weakly and sentimentally in other lands and in other ages, he brings his mind and heart to bear upon the realities of the present day. The questions of our age, not of past ages, he discusses in his pulpit. The day that passes over him is the day to which he devotes his energies. He gives you an idea of earnestness and activity and independence—of a mind well educated and drawn out—filled with Christian truth, and earnest in the application of that truth. ”

“ It is something to preach to these twelve hundred living souls; to place before them, immersed as they are in the business and bustle of this world, the reality of that which is to come; so to speak that the voice of God shall be more audible to them than that of gold. Yet, surely, if it can be done by man, he can do it whom we now see, with reverent step, ascending p. 77the pulpit stairs. What power there is in those great limbs, that full chest, and magnificent head! Nature has been bountiful to him. Such a man as that you can’t raise in London or Manchester. ”

“ The liturgy of the English Church is beautiful and touching, but it is cold and unvarying. It does not, with its eternal p. 79sameness, answer to the shifting moods of the human soul. Such prayers as those of Binney do. They bear you with them. Your inward eye opens and refines. Earth grows more distant, and heaven more near. For once you become awe-struck and devout. For once there comes a cloud between you and the world and the battle of life. You are on the mount, and breathe a purer air. Your heart has been touched, and you are ready for the preacher and his discourse. ”

“ I know there is nothing new in this,—that other men attempt to teach the same thing,—that all divines are saying it one way or another every Sunday; but the merit of Mr. Brown is that he says it as a man of common-sense would say it to men possessed of common-sense—that he does not wrap his meaning in the unreal verbiage of a mystic and unreal theology—that he takes his teachings, and arguments, and illustrations from real life—and that he talks of religion as men of the world of consols and railways; and no man can do this, to whom religion is not the business of his life. ”

“ Not a trace of the scholarship, or reading, or severe thought, or God-sent genius, or of that doubt in which there lives more faith than in half the creeds, will you find in the whole of his harangue.
On the pulpit, or rather the platform, Mr. Spurgeon imitates Gough, and walks up and down, and enlivens his sermons with dramatic representations. He is ‘hail fellow, well-met’ with his hearers. He has jokes and homely sayings and puns and proverbs for them. Nothing is too sacred for his self-complacent grasp; he is as free and unrestrained in God’s presence as in man’s. ”

“ It would be but to bid the male Cynthia of the pulpit make the best of his fleeting popularity—a popularity fading with the first dawn of the double chin, or the first bud of the grey hair. Dear brother, such is your inevitable fate. Stern destiny will make no exception in your favour. Other white hands will be pressed as warmly as your own. Other lips shall speak oracles, or move the heart of woman to laughter or to tears. For others, divine eyes shall moisten the best French cambric, and worsted slippers shall be worked by fairy hands. ”

“ If all are equal before God, surely they should all be equal before man. Thus, when angry Chartism was asking for universal suffrage, and the Church was preaching contentment and the duty of submission to superiors, and the danger to religion when a man became political, Miall felt that the time had come for him to step out of the conventional circle of the pulpit into a wider and freer sphere, and to show that Christianity was not alien to human right, and that a man might love God and his brother-man as well. It does seem strange now that men should ever have doubted so plain a truth. ”

“ You see he has a warm heart, human sympathies; that, in short, he is every inch a man—not a scholastic pedant, nor an intellectual bigot, nor an emasculated priest. Oh, it is pitiful to see in the pulpit, preaching in God’s name, some poor dwarf who has never had a doubt nor a hope nor a noble aim, and who enunciates your damnation with the same heartlessness with which he tells you two and two make four. ”

“ Genius like Irving’s would have lent grandeur to a barn; and now the master is gone, and having no more an orator to enchant them, the church worships in fretted aisles—treads mosaic pavements—rejoices in fine music and elaborate ceremonial.
Thus always is it: when nature fails, men have recourse to art. We have no actors now, but, instead, we have a stage splendidly decorated, regardless of expense. ”

“ In this unsettled age you will see that he has settled convictions—that his religion is a real thing—that it is that which his intellect has fed on—that by which he has squared his life—that by the truth of which he lives, and by the lamp of which he is prepared to find his way when he comes to the valley of the shadow of death. ”

“ Cumming preaches as if you had no father or mother, no sister or brother, no wife or child, no human struggles and hopes—as if the great object of preaching was to fill you with Biblical pedantry, and not to make the man better, wiser, stronger than before: perhaps it may be because this is the case that the church is so thronged. You need not tremble lest your heart be touched, and your darling sin withered up by the indignant oratory of the preacher. ”

“ There are in our midst, men devoted to a sacred calling—men who, though in the world, are not of it—who profess more than others to realise the splendours and the terrors of the world to come—to whom Deity has mysteriously made known his will. Society accepts their pretensions, for, after all, man is a religious animal, and, with Bacon, would rather believe all the fables in the Koran than that this universe were without a God. For good or bad these men have a tremendous power. The orator from the pulpit has always an advantage over the orator who merely speaks from the public platform. ”

“ It may be this is the light radiating from South Place.
‘There is a religion of humanity,’ writes Mr. Fox, ‘though not enshrined in creeds and articles—though it is not to be read merely in sacred books, and yet it may be read in all, whenever 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 ”

“ Dale’s immense congregation is, that his charity is unremitting—given in the best way, in the shape of work instead of alms—and irrespective of the religious sect of the recipient. I have heard of several such cases that do him much honour. And, after all, in the pulpit as well as elsewhere, conduct tells more than character in the long run. Hence his personal influence is great; and, of course, that helps to fill the church. Nor can we much wonder. What eloquence is stronger than that of a holy, a useful, a devoted life? Acts speak stronger than words. ”

“ There, in the very pulpit where Whitfield, the persuasive, the silver-tongued, stood—the Whitfield, whom lords and ladies flocked to hear; who lit up with light and life a wicked and adulterous generation—an age destitute alike of faith and heart and hope—you will see a big cumbrous man, of severe face and repulsive manner, with a voice harsh and rough as a mountain-stream. ”

“ You see all that man has to go through, he must have gone through—that scepticism must have stared him in the face—that passion must have appealed to him in her most seductive forms—that the great problem of life he has not taken upon trust, but unriddled for himself—that he has gone through the Slough of Despond—passed by Castle Doubting, and sees the gilt and the rouge in Vanity Fair: or, as he says himself in his life, ‘the man has conquered the animal, and the God the man.’ Such a man has a right to preach to me. ”

“ The stage with its paint and sawdust and glaring gas—the stage as it is—is the last place to which an earnest man would turn with hope. Originally religious, it has long ceased to be such. It has become simply an amusement—if the reproduction of all that is heartless and flippant and rotten in society be considered as such. Our English Catos don’t go to the theatre at all, and when one who is not a Cato goes there, it becomes to him a sight melancholy rather than otherwise, unless he have sunk altogether into the unhappy life of that dullest of all dogs, a gay man about town. ”

“ Tom Moore tells in his diary that no exercise of talent brings so immediate a result as oratory. I believe every one who has ever got upon his legs will say the same thing, and where can the orator have a wider field than in the pulpit? At the best, the senate or the bar have nothing of equal interest. I believe the difficulty may be partly explained in two ways. In the first place, the pulpit is too much a repetition of creeds and theologies that are becoming extinct; and in the second place, there is a dead weight in the pews which masters the pulpit, and deadens its intellectual life. ”

“ Martin’s forte is seriousness. He appears always solemn and devout. In the man himself you see no sign of great intellectual power. Dressed in sober black, close buttoned to the chin, you see a young man, with a pale heavy face, worn down by work. You may listen a long time before fire flashes from those eyes and lips, or before that brain thinks out of the commonest style of pulpit thought. ”

“ Is it all dark cloud-land when we have done with this fever we call life? Religion is man’s attempt to answer this question. A church is an attempt to answer it in a certain way. The true church is the church which gives the true answer. But who is to decide? ‘The Catholic and Apostolic Church,’ says one; ‘the Bible,’ says another. ”