J. Ewing Ritchie

“ Have you peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ? Have you the witness of God’s Spirit with your own that you are a child of God? Is the love of God shed abroad in your heart? Has no sin, outward or inward, dominion over you? Do you desire to be told of all your faults? Do you desire that every one of us should tell you from time to time whatever we fear—whatever we hear concerning you—that in doing this we should cut to the quick and search your heart to the bottom? ”

“ Yet it is a place of surpassing interest, one of the hallowed spots of London, where sinners have wept, where souls have rejoiced, where the power and presence of God have been marvellously displayed. Let us go there; we pass along a passage till we come into a very old-fashioned meeting-house. There we shall find plenty of room. There are two hundred communicants, and at certain times they are all present, but they are scattered far and wide, and in general the place has a very deserted look. The benches—there are no pews—are most uncommonly hard to sit on. ”

“ All is poor, something like a theatre by daylight, or a fancy ball when the delusions of gas have been dispelled by the too candid and impartial rays of the sun. There are the tapers and the usual processions, the vestments of various colours, and the music ever flowing, while at the altar end the priests are bowing and kneeling and scattering incense, and performing the service of the mass. If you have to listen to a sermon, it will not be a long one; and if you be a Protestant, it will strike you as verbose in style and un-English in tone. ”

“ It is the devil who makes me bad; and it is a great help to the ignorant and uneducated, not merely to have spiritual states shadowed forth in earthly language, but to feel that, after all, heaven is here in the shape of comfortable dwellings, wives and children, raiment to wear, and a bellyfull. “This is great encouragement to the saints in their pilgrimages here in old Babylon, and stimulates them to more diligence in building up the kingdom of God, and delivering themselves from the yoke of tyranny and oppression, to enjoy the liberty of the people of God in the valleys of the mountains.” ”

“ He had been told that in leaving Manchester and coming to the Poultry he was moving into a crooked place. In explanation he stated he did not look for the ordinary course of a minister. He looked at London, that immeasurable centre; he thought of the young men who come strangers to the metropolis, and with no friends to guide and guard them; and if he did not get people to come and hear him on the Sunday, he trusted they would do so on the Thursday, when there would be a service from twelve to one, when he would aim simply to touch the heart with a sense of sin and forgiveness. ”

“ The soul of the good man was wearied, as well it might be, with these differences, so trifling yet so fiercely discussed, with this waste of power, with this spirit of wrangling and contention, with these quarrels of Christian with Christian, when the world was only to be made better, and the true Church only to be built up, by a holy life. In our time the tendency of some minds to fly off into fresh sects is greater, perhaps, than ever. ”

“ In Queen Elizabeth’s time it was enacted that the Councils of Nicæa, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon were equally judges of heresy as the High Court of Parliament with the assent of the English clergy in their Convocation. No wonder, in these days, when Churchmen are prone to rely on Church claims rather than on Bible teaching—when, of little faith, and timid as to the future, they trust rather to hazy traditions than to living truths—no wonder the Greek Church has become to them an object of special reverence; that they long to form a union with it. ”

“ All that is wanted to make you believe that you are in a Roman Catholic place of worship is a little incense, a few more banners, a little more life in the pulpit, and, above all, the presence of considerable numbers of the poorest of the poor. Here, indeed, the resemblance fails; there are no poor, comparatively speaking. Everyone is distressingly genteel; and I could swear more than once when I have been present, the preacher, so fashionable has been his lisp, has been, if not Lord Dundreary himself, at any rate his own “brother Thwam.” ”

“ If London is demonstrative, as when a Garibaldi appears upon the stage, foremost of those who meet to do him honour is Mr. Holyoake. In the House of Commons he is similarly prominent. In the Speaker’s gallery or in the lobby you may see him all night long, here speaking to a member, there listening to one as if the care of all the country rested on his shoulders. I don’t fancy Mr. Holyoake is the great man he takes himself to be. I deny his right to be the exponent of the class of whom he condescends to be the ornament and shield. ”

“ It is on Sunday, a day when the asylum is closed to the public. Far and near this bright sunshiny afternoon there seems resting over all a Sabbath calm. On the neighbouring rails no trains are running; the doors of the Station Hotel are shut; no traffic occupies the road and distracts your attention. You gaze on fields as yet yellow with no ripening corn, meadows as yet uncarpeted by flowers, trees as yet leafless. Farther off on the distant ridge we see lofty mansions. ”

“ It is painful to turn from its white walls and rafters to the crowd beneath and realize how much darker and more cheerless is the human face when it is void of intelligence. In this chapel you do not see the worse cases, they are properly concealed from the spectator’s eye; it is enough to know that they are equally wisely and carefully tended with those before you. The women are far more troublesome than the men. ”

“ Every day saw the birth of a new one amongst a people of subtle intellect and endowed with a language wonderfully contrived to express the most delicate and phantasmal forms of belief. We laugh at the schoolmen, at their barbarous Latin and incomprehensible disputations. No one now ventures to discuss how many angels could stand upon the point of a needle, but in the early ages of the Church the Fathers wasted their lives in disputations equally windy and barren of practical result. ”

“ Amidst the perplexities of a theology ever shifting in external phraseology, where man’s wisdom has darkened God’s light as revealed in His Word, where the miasma of doubt has repressed and stinted Christian life, he walks with a masculine tread, and he does so not from ignorance but from knowledge, because he knows how difficult is the way, how dark the path, how easily error comes to us in the form of truth, how the devil himself can assume the shape and borrow the language of an angel of light. ”

“ In like manner, history leads you to a similar conclusion as to the Roman Church. History, with an impartial pen, tells us how the Roman heresy sprang up, and grew, and reigned in every land. History robs Romanism of all its terror and of all its power. We see it, with plain, unblinded eyes, to be a heresy gradually enlarging its claims in accordance with the increasing ambition of its prelates, and the increasing credulity of its devotees. ”

“ I wonder, too, while looking on the dead graves and the long grass, whether it occurs to him that in that region of all unclean and deadly sin it especially behoves the preacher, in preference to ingenious speculation or antiquarian research, to impress on the heart and consciences of men the yearning, living love of God. It is not in the calm retreat, the silent shade, that vice and irreligion can be confronted and changed into purity and piety. ”

“ In this our day one of the expiring sects of Christendom is that of the Sandemanians. At no time have they been a very powerful denomination either from their numbers, their influence, or their wealth. They have never yet made their mark upon the world, nor are they likely to do so now. The late Professor Faraday was one of their elders, and for a time conferred on them a little of his world-wide reputation; but one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one great man confer greatness on a church. The eccentricity of men of genius is proverbial. ”

“ Why, as the priest takes you from one sacred station to another, shows you where the Saviour fainted beneath the load of the cross, where Saint Veronica wiped His face with her handkerchief, where the print of the Saviour’s foot yet remains,—when we all know that the Jerusalem of the Saviour’s time is some eighty feet below the surface, and that all these assertions are absolutely false, you feel indignant, and, if you have the smallest iota of intellect left, after listening to the priestly legends, return a considerably sounder Protestant than you went. ”

“ James Martineau, a man universally honoured in all sections of the universal church, confesses:—“I am constrained to say that neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects, or productions of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavourably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought and character far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity. I am conscious that my deepest obligations, as a learner from others, are in almost every department to writers not of my own creed. ”

“ It is not only the Bible we must consult, God has written His Word in life and humanity. They were not Theists; Christ was a name symbolical of humanity, and they were, as a matter of fact, Christian men. Nor would they get rid of Christian phraseology as long as the feeling of the heart clothes itself in language hallowed by the use of ages. A change is passing over society, and we have now to study religion in connexion with nature, science, progress, life. Still, nothing that has nourished the soul of man can die. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Men say that body is not what it was; that it is losing its power; that it has little hold upon the people; that it makes no converts. It may be so, but if it has many such ministers as Mr. Grubb in its midst, as much as any it is fitted with a living ministry which will go out into the highways and hedges and bring back to the fold those who have wandered far away. His appeal is not to the high and mighty, to the rich, the learned, or the great, but to the poorest of the poor. Mr. Grubb’s mission is evidently a special one. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is a sign of respectability to attend a place of worship, and people who come to church in neat broughams, who are partial to diamond studs, who wear brilliants on their fingers, are eminently respectable; still there were poor sinners there, and the place was full, and many were evidently deeply smitten, for the apostolic fervour of the pulpit crept from row to row till the sinner and the sceptic ceased to sneer, and all seemed mastered and subdued. Before the service began half the audience seemed engaged in silent prayer, and at the close that silent prayer was resumed. ”

“ If I were a preacher of any denomination, I would have Swedenborg’s works by me. They should be the fruitful source of many an argument to illustrate or arouse; but if in the future the pulpit is to maintain its place and power, the Swedenborgians, unless they turn over a new leaf, must retire into the background. Look at Cross Street, Hatton Garden, for instance, on a Sunday night; you will not find thirty people there; yet it stands in the midst of a teeming population, where the devil preaches to a crowded congregation every day and every hour. ”

“ 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 has almost become a proverb, that in the third generation they will pass through the chapel to the church. Half the great mercantile houses of London and the empire were founded by Dissenters whose sons, as they have grown rich and cultivated, feel more and more the awkward isolation of Dissent. Increasingly this feeling is spreading among Dissenters, and the Church, if it were wise—its history is a career of blunder upon blunder—would have laid its plans to recover such. All the levers of society have been at its disposal. The Establishment rolls in wealth ”

“ In London they are not a numerous class. They have places of worship in the Milton Hall, Camden Town, and in College Street, Chelsea. The truth is, as regards chapels and churches, public worship is as much a social as a religious institution. Fashion has a great deal to do with the attendance. It is the fashion to go to church. It is not the fashion to run after new sects or preachers of new doctrines. In a flourishing church there are societies which bring people into contact with one another—these promote in their turn, like the far-famed ale of Trinity, “brotherly neighbourhood.” ”