SOME FAMOUS PREACHERS IN BRITAIN.

Binney. Hamilton Guthrie. Hall. Spurgeon. Duff and others

In attempting to recall my recollections of the eminent preachers whom I have known, I hardly know where to begin, or where to call a halt. I shall confine myself entirely to those who are no longer living, except as they may live in the memory of the service they wrought for their Divine Master and their fellow men. When I first visited London, in early September, 1842, the two ministers most widely known to Americans were Henry Melvill and Thomas Binney. Melvill was the most popular preacher in the Established Church. His place of worship was out at Camberwell, and I found it so packed that I had to get a seat on one of the steps in the gallery. He was a man of elegant bearing, and rolled out his ornate sentences in a somewhat theatrical tone, but the hushed audience drank in every syllable greedily. The splendid and thoroughly evangelical sermons which he orated most carefully were exceedingly popular in those days, and even yet they are well worth reading as superb specimens of lofty, devout and resonant oratory. On a very warm Sabbath evening I went into the business end of London to the “Weigh House Chapel” and heard Dr. Thomas Binney. He was the leader of Congregationalism, as Melvill was of the Church of England. On that warm evening the audience was small, but the discourse was prodigiously large. Binney had a kingly countenance, and a most unique delivery. His topic was Psalm 147th, 3d and 4th verses. “God is the Creator of the universe, and the comforter of the sorrowing.” He thrust one hand into his breeches pocket, and then ran his other hand through his hair, and began his sermon with the stirring words: “The Jew has conquered the world!” This was the prelude to a grand eulogy of the Psalms of David. He then unfolded the first part of his text in a most original style, made a long pause, scratched his head again, and said: “Now then, let us take some new thoughts, and then we are done.” The closing portion of the rich discourse was on the tender consolations of our Heavenly Father.

Thirty years afterwards Dr. Binney was invited to meet me at breakfast at the house of Dr. Hall, with “Tom Hughes,” Dr. Henry Allon and other notabilities. The noble veteran chatted very serenely, and offered a most majestic prayer while he remained sitting in his arm-chair. His physical disabilities made it difficult for him to stand; and very soon afterwards the grand old man went up to his crown. When I was spending two delightful days with Dr. McLaren, of Manchester, I described to him Binney’s remarkable sermon. “Were you there that night?” inquired McLaren. “So was I, and though only a boy of sixteen, I remember the whole of that discourse to this hour.” It was certainly a rare pulpit power that could fasten a discourse in two different memories for a whole half century.

Do many of the Londoners of this day remember Dr. James Hamilton, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Regent’s Square? They should do so, for in his time he was the most popular devotional writer of both sides of the Atlantic; and during my visit to London, in 1857, I was very happy to form his acquaintance. He was a most cordial and charming man, slender, tall, with dark eyes and hair, and a beaming countenance. When one entered Hamilton’s study he would hurry forward, seize his hands, and taking both in his, reply to your “How do you do, sir,” with “Come in, come in; I am nicely, I assure ye.” Would that all ministers were as cordial and approachable. When I attended his church in Regent Square they were singing, when I came in, a Psalm from the old Scotch Version. The choristers sat in a desk below the pulpit. The singing was general through the church, and excellent in style. Dr. Hamilton preached in a gown, and, as the heat grew oppressive in the middle of his sermon, threw it off. The discourse was delivered with extremely awkward gestures, but in a voice of great sweetness. The text was: “My soul thirsteth for the Living God.” He described an arid wilderness, hot and parched, and down beneath it a mighty vein of water into which an artesian well was bored, and forthwith the waters gushed up through it and swept over all the dry desert, making it one emerald meadow. “So,” said he, “it is the incarnate Jesus flowing up through our own dusty, barren desert humanity, and overflowing us with Heavenly life and grace, until what was once dreary and dead becomes a fruitful garden of the Lord.” The discourse was like a chapter from one of Hamilton’s savory volumes. Five years afterwards, I dined with Hamilton, and the Rev. William Arnot (who afterwards was his biographer), and I went to his church to deliver the preparatory discourse to the sacrament on the next Sabbath.

On my way up to London, I halted one night at Birmingham, and while out on a stroll, came upon the City Hall, which was crowded with a great meeting in aid of foreign missions. The heroic Robert Moffat, the Apostle of South Africa, was addressing the multitude, who cheered him in the old English fashion. Two years before that, Robert Moffat had met a young man in a boarding house in Aldersgate Street, London, and induced him to become a missionary in Africa. The young man was the sublimest of all modern missionaries, David Livingstone. Two years after that evening, Livingstone married Miss Mary Moffat (daughter of the man to whom I was listening), in South Africa, and she became the sharer of his trials and explorations. After Moffat had concluded his speech, a broad-shouldered, merry-faced man, with thick grey hair rose on the platform. “Who is that?” I inquired of my next neighbor. With a look of surprise that I should ask such a question in Birmingham, he said: “It is John Angell James.” He was the man whom Dr. Cox wittily described as “An angel vinculated between two Apostles.” He spoke very forcibly, in a hearty, humorous vein, and I could hardly understand how such a jovial old gentleman could be the author of such a serious work as “The Anxious Inquirer.” But I have since discovered that many of the most solemn and impressive preachers were men of most cheery temperament who could laugh heartily themselves when they were not making other people weep. Mr. James looked like an old sea captain; but he was an admirable pilot of awakened souls, whom thousands will bless through all eternity.

Dr. Thomas Guthrie, of Edinburgh, was once pronounced by the London Times to be “The most eloquent man in Europe.” Ruskin, Thackeray, Macaulay, and other men of renown joined in the crowd that thronged St. John’s Church when they were in Edinburgh; and a highland drover was once so excited that in the middle of a powerful sermon he called out: “Naw, sirs, heard ye ever the like o’ that?” My good wife made a run to Edinburgh while I was stopping behind in England, and on her return to me almost her first word was, “I have heard Guthrie; I am spoiled for every one else as long as I live.” Guthrie, “Lang Tam” (as the toughs on the “Cowgate” in Edinburgh used to call him), was built for a great orator. He was more than six feet high, and would be picked out in any crowd as one of God’s royal family. I once said to him: “You remind us Americans of our famous statesman, Henry Clay,” There was a striking resemblance in the long-armed figure, the broad mouth and lofty brow, and still more in the rich melody of voice, and magnetic rush of electric eloquence, “There must certainly be a personal likeness,” replied the Doctor, “for not long ago I went into the house of Mr. Norris, who came here from America, and said to myself, ’There is my portrait on the wall,’ but when I came nearer I espied under it the name of ‘Henry Clay.’” He used to say that in preaching he aimed at the three P’s: Prove, Paint and Persuade. His painting with the tongue was as vivid as Rembrandt’s painting with the brush. When I went to Edinburgh, in 1872, as a delegate to the two Presbyterian General Assemblies, Dr. Guthrie invited me to dine with him, and the gifted Dr. John Ker, of Glasgow, was in the company. After dinner, Guthrie literally took the floor, and poured out a flow of charming talk, interspersed with racy Scotch anecdotes. Among others told was one about the old Highland woman who said to him: “Doctor, nane of your modern improvements for me. I want naething but good old Dauvid’s Psalms, and I want’em all sung to Dauvid’s tunes, too.” On the evening when I addressed the Free Church Assembly, I was obliged to pass, on my way to the platform, the front bench, on which sat the veteran missionary, Alexander Duff, Principal Rainy, William Arnot, Dr. Guthrie and two or three other celebrities. I have not run such a gauntlet on a single bench in my life. When I had finished my address, Guthrie, clad in his gray overcoat, leaped up, and kindly grasped my hand, and I went back to my seat feeling an indescribable relief. Dr. Guthrie a short time after attempted to visit our country, but was arrested at Queenstown by a difficulty of the heart, and returned to Scotland, and lived but a short time afterwards.

Sly personal acquaintance with Newman Hall began during the darkest period of our Civil War, in August, 1862 Up to that time I had only known him as the author of that pithy and pellucid little booklet, “Come to Jesus,” which has belted the globe in forty languages, and been published to the number of nearly 4,000,000 of copies. When our Civil War broke out, Dr. Hall (with John Bright and Foster and Goldwin Smith) threw himself earnestly on the side of our Union He made public speeches for our cause over all England, and opened his house for parlor meetings addressed by loyal Americans who happened to be in London. He invited me to address one of these gatherings, but the necessity of my return home prevented my acceptance. Two years after the close of the war he made his first visit to the United States. He was received with enthusiastic ovations. Union Leagues gave him public welcomes, Congress invited him to preach in the House of Representatives; he delivered an address to the Bostonians on Bunker Hill; and every denomination, including the Episcopalians and Quakers, opened their pulpits to him everywhere. But the crowning act of his unique Americanism was the erection of the “Lincoln Tower” on his Church in London, as a tribute to Negro Emancipation, and a memorial to International amity. The love that existed between my brother, Dr. Hall, and myself was like the love of David and Jonathan. The letters that passed between us would number up into the hundreds, and his epistles had the sweet savor of “Holy Rutherford,” When he was in America, my house was his home, when I was in London, I spent no small part of my time in his delightful “Vine House,” up on Hampstead Hill. The house remains in the possession of his wife, a lady of high culture, intellectual gifts and of most devout piety. One reason for the close intimacy between my British brother and myself was that we were perfectly agreed on every social, civil and religious question, and we never had a chance to sharpen our wits on the hone of controversy. Our theology was all from the same Book, and our main purposes in life were similar. Many of my American readers heard Dr. Hall preach during some one of his three visits to the United States. What marrowy, soul-quickening sermons he poured forth in a clear, musical voice, and with a most earnest persuasiveness. Preaching was as easy to him as breathing. Including the Sabbath, he delivered seven or eight sermons in a week. Undoubtedly he delivered more discourses than any ordained minister during the nineteenth century. Peers and peasants, scholars and dwellers in the slums alike enjoyed his preaching of God’s message to immortal souls. His favorite theme was the sin-atoning work of Christ Jesus; and the numbers converted under his faithful preaching were exceedingly great. One of his discourses in this country on “Jéhovah Jireh,” was especially helpful, and one on “Touching the Hem of Christ’s Garment,” was a gem of spiritual beauty. He generally maintained an even flow of evangelical thought, but sometimes he rose into a burst of thrilling eloquence, as he did in Mr. Beecher’s church, when he made his noble appeal for Union between England and America. From his youth he was fond of street preaching. I have seen him gather a crowd, and hold them attentively while he sowed a few seeds of truth in their hearts.

I wish I had the space to describe some of the foregatherings that I have had with my twin brother in the Gospel. We visited Italy together, preached to “the Saints that are in Rome,” and went down into that room in the sub-basement of St. Clement’s where Paul is believed to have held meetings with them that were of Caesar’s household. We roamed out on the Appian Road, over which the great Apostle entered the Eternal City. So conscientious was my brother Hall in his teetotalism that though tired and thirsty, he never would touch the weak, common wine of the country, lest his example might be plead in favor of the drinking usages. We once went up to Olney and sat in Cowper’s summer house, and entered John Newton’s church, and the old sexton told Dr. Hall that he had been converted by “Come to Jesus.” We went together to Stonehenge, and as we passed over Salisbury Plain we recalled Hannah Moore’s famous shepherd who said: “The weather to-morrow will be what suits me, for what suits God, suits me always.” We spent a very delightful couple of days in rowing down the romantic river Wye, stopping for lunch at Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. In his home he was a hospitable Gaius, with open doors and hearts to friends from all lands. He had the merry sportiveness of a schoolboy, and when our long talks in his study were over, he would seize his hat and the chain of his pet dog, and cry out: “Come, brother, come, and let us have a tramp over the Heath.” He was a prodigious pedestrian, and at three score and ten he held his own over a Swiss glacier, with the members of the Alpine Club. He had hoped to equal his famous predecessor, Rowland Hill, and preach till he was ninety; but when he was near his eighty-sixth birthday he was stricken with paralysis, and never left his bed again. Those last two weeks were spent in the “Land of Beulah,” and in full view of “The Celestial City.” When asked if he suffered pain, he replied: “I have no pain, and nothing to disturb the solemnity of dying.” On the morning of February fourteenth he passed peacefully over the river, and, as Bunyan said of old Valiant-for-the-Truth, “The trumpets sounded for him on the other side.” No monarch on his throne is so to be envied as he who now wears that celestial crown.

Can anything new be said about Charles H. Spurgeon? Perhaps not, and yet I should be guilty of injustice to myself and to my readers if I failed to pay my love tribute to the most extraordinary preacher of the pure Gospel to all Christendom whom England produced in the last century.

I heard him when he was a youth of twenty-two years, in his Park Street Chapel; I heard him several times when he was at the zenith of his vigor; I spent many a happy hour with him in his charming home. On my last visit there I had a “good cry” when I saw his empty chair in its old place in the study. I did not form any personal acquaintance with him until the summer of 1872, and it soon ripened into a most warm and cordial friendship. On each of my visits to London since that time I have enjoyed an afternoon with him at his home. His first residence was Helensburg House in Nightingale Road, Clapham, a Southwest District of London. That beautiful home was his only, luxury; but he spent none of his ample income on any sort of social enjoyment, and what did not go for household expenses went for the support of his many religious enterprises. On my first visit to him he greeted me in his free and easy, open-handed way. I noticed that he was growing stouter than ever. “In me,” he jocularly said, “that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing,” We spent a joyous hour in his well filled library; he showed me fifteen stately volumes of his printed sermons which have since been more than doubled, besides several of his works translated into French, German, Swedish, Dutch and other languages. The most interesting object in the library was a small file of his sermon notes, each one on a half sheet of note paper, or on the back of an ordinary letter envelope. When I asked him if he “wrote his sermons out,” his answer was: “I would rather be hung.” His usual method was to select the text of his Sunday morning sermon on Saturday about six or seven o’clock, and spend half an hour in arranging a skeleton and put it on paper; he left all the phraseology until he reached the pulpit. During Sunday afternoon he repeated the same process in preparing his evening discourse. “If I had a month assigned me for preparing a sermon,” said he to me, “I would spend thirty days and twenty-three hours on something else and in the last hour I would make the sermon, and if I could not do it then I could not do it in a month.”

This sounds like a risky process, but it must be remembered that if Spurgeon occupied but a few minutes in arranging a discourse he spent five days of every week in thoroughly studying God’s Word in thorough thinking and in the perusal of the richest old writers on theology and experimental religion.

He was all the time, and everywhere filling up his cask, so that he had only to turn the spigot and out flowed the pure Gospel in the most transparent language. A stenographer took down the sermon, and it was revised by Mr. Spurgeon on Monday morning. He told me that for many years he went to his pulpit under such nervous agitation that it often brought on violent attacks of vomiting and produced outbreaks of perspiration, and he slowly outgrew that remarkable sort of physical suffering.

Twenty years ago Mr. Spurgeon exchanged Helensburgh House for the still more elegant mansion called “Westwood” on Beulah Hill, near Crystal Palace, Sydenham. It is a rural paradise. At each of the visits I paid him there, he used to come out with his banged-up soft hat, which he wore indoors half of the time, and with a merry jest on his lips. On my last visit, accompanied by my brother Hall, I found him suffering severely from his neuralgic malady, but it did not affect his buoyant humor. When I told him that my catarrhal deafness was worse than ever, he replied: “Well, brother, console yourself with the thought that in these days there is very little worth hearing.” He took my brother Hall, and myself out into his garden and conservatory and down to a rustic arbor, where we sat down and told stories. There were twelve acres of land attached to “Westwood,” and he had us into the meadow, where we laid down in the freshly mowed hay and inhaled its fragrance. Mrs. Spurgeon, a most gifted and charming lady, had a dozen cows and the profits of her dairy then supported a missionary in London; and the milk was sent around the neighborhood in a wagon labeled, “Charles H. Spurgeon, Milk Dealer.” After our return, the great preacher showed us a portfolio of caricatures of himself from Punch and other publications. At six o’clock we took supper and then came family worship all the servants being present Mr. Spurgeon followed my prayer with the most wonderful prayer that perhaps I have ever heard from human lips, and I said afterwards to my friend Hall, “To-night we got into ’the hidings of his power,’ for a man who can pray like that can outpreach the world.” In the soft hour of the gloaming we took our leave, and he went off to prepare his sermon for the morrow.

Spurgeon’s power lay in a combination of half a dozen great qualities. He was the master of a vigorous Saxon English style, the style of Cobbett and Bunyan and the old English Bible. He possessed a most marvelous memory it held the whole Bible in solution; it retained all the valuable truth he had acquired during his immensely wide readings and it enabled him to recognize any person whom he ever met before. Once, however, he met for the second time a Mr. Partridge and called him “Partridge.” Quick as a flash he said: “Pardon me, sir, I did not intend to make game of you,” He was a man of one Book, and had the most implicit faith in every jot and tittle of God’s Word. He preached it without defalcation or discount, and this prodigious faith made his preaching immensely tonic. His sympathies with all mankind were unbounded, and the juices of his nature were enough to float an ark full of living creatures. Joined to these gifts was a marvelous voice of great sweetness, and a homely mother-wit that bubbled out in all his talk and often in his sermons. Mightiest of all was his power of prayer, and his inner life was hid with Christ in God. As an organizer he had great executive abilities. His Orphanage, dozen missionary schools and theological training school will be among his enduring monuments. The last sermon I ever heard him deliver was in Dr. Newman Hall’s church on a week evening. He came hobbling into the study, his face the picture of suffering. He said to me, “Brother Cuyler, if I break down, won’t you take up the service and go on with it?” I told him that he would forget his pains the moment he got under way, and so it was, for he delivered a most nutritious discourse to us. When the service was over, he limped off to his carriage, wrapped himself in the huge cushions, and drove away seven miles to his home at Upper Norwood. That was the last time I ever saw my beloved friend.

It seems strange that I shall never behold that homely, honest countenance again; and since that time, London has hardly seemed to be London without him. It is a cause for congratulation that his son, the Reverend Thomas Spurgeon, is so successfully carrying forward the great work of his sainted father. If my readers would like a sample taste of the pure Spurgeonic it is to be found in this passage which he delivered to his theological students: “Some modern divines whittle away the Gospel to the small end of nothing; they make our Divine Lord to be a sort of blessed nobody; they bring down salvation to mere possibility; they make certainties into probabilities and treat verities as mere opinions. When you see a preacher making the Gospel smaller by degrees, and miserably less, till there is not enough of it left to make soup for a sick grasshopper, get you gone with him! As for me, I believe in an infinite God, an infinite atonement, infinite love and mercy, an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure, and of which the substance and reality is an Infinite Christ.”

I once asked Dr. James McCosh, who was the greatest preacher he ever heard. He replied, “Of course, it was my Edinboro Professor, Dr. Chalmers, but the grandest display of eloquence I ever listened to was Dr. Alexander Duff’s famous Plea for Foreign Missions, delivered before the Scottish General Assembly at a date previous to the disruption,” I can say Amen to Dr. McCosh, for the most overpowering oratory that I ever heard was Duff’s great missionary speech in the Broadway Tabernacle during his visit to America. In the immense crowd were two hundred ministers and the foremost laymen of the city. When the great missionary arose (he was then in the prime of his power), his first appearance was not impressive, for his countenance had no beauty and his gestures were grotesquely awkward. With one arm he huddled his coat up to his shoulder, with the other he sawed the air incontinently, and when intensely excited, he leapt several inches from the floor as if about to precipitate himself over the desk. All these eccentricities were forgotten when once the great heart began to open its treasures to us, and the subject of his resistless oratory began to enchain our souls. In his vivid description of “Magnificent India” its dusky crowds and its ancient temples, with its northern mountains towering to the skies; its dreary jungles haunted by the tiger; its crystalline salt fields flashing in the sun; and its Malabar hills redolent with the richest spices, were all spread out before us like a panorama.

When the Doctor had completed the survey of India, he opened his batteries on the sloth and selfishness of too many of Christ’s professed followers; he poured contempt upon the men who said: “They are not so green as to waste their money on the farce of Foreign Missions.” “No, no, indeed,” he continued, “they are not green, for greenness implies verdure, and beauty, and there is not a single atom of verdure in their parched and withered up souls.” Under the burning satire and mellowing pathos of his tremendous appeal for heathendom, tears welled out from every eye in the house. I leaned over toward the reporter’s table; many of the reporters had flung down their pens they might as well have attempted to report a thunder storm. As the orator drew near his close, he seemed like one inspired; his face shone as if it were, the face of an angel. Never before did I so fully realize the overwhelming power of a man who has become the embodiment of one great idea who makes his lips the mere outlet for the mighty truth bursting from his heart. After nearly two hours of this inundation of eloquence, he concluded with the quotation of Cowper’s magnificent verse,

“One song employs all nations,” etc

With the utmost vehemence he rung out the last line:

“Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round.”

He could not check his headway, and repeated the line a second time, louder than before, and then with a tremendous voice that made the walls reverberate, he shouted once more:

“Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round!”

and sunk back breathless and exhausted into his chair. “Shut up now this Tabernacle,” exclaimed Dr. James W. Alexander. “Let no man dare speak here after that.”