DR. PARKER AT THE POULTRY
“What are you doing?” said lately one of London’s biggest D.D.’s to a visitor from the country. “Oh, sir, I am in the ministry now,” was the somewhat exulting reply. “Ah, but, my brother,” said the querist again, “is the ministry in you?” Rather an important question that, and a question to which, alas! many ministers would be unable to give a very satisfactory reply. When I see a nervous, timid, feeble, hesitating, wavering brother in the pulpit, I think of the Doctor’s question as one from which such a man would instinctively shrink.
Dr. Parker belongs to another and a rarer class. The ministry is in him as a divine call, and not as an accidental profession. He speaks as one having authority. In an age of negation, and mistrust, and little faith, he is as positive as if spiritual truths had been audible to his bodily ear and seen with the bodily eye. 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. He has got good standing ground, but he knows how treacherous is the soil, and what pitfalls lie open to catch the rash, and reckless, and overconfident. His is the strength of the athlete who has become what he is by years of careful training, protracted conflicts, and painful discipline, and in all his words, and they are many, you can hear as it were the ring of victory and assured success. Physically he looks and speaks like a man. What he says he means, and what he means he believes. He is not the kind of man to write an apology for Christianity; he would laugh to scorn the idea. He can laugh at much, because, as Hobbes says, to do so implies superiority, and Dr. Parker, strong in his faith in the everlasting Gospel, has an immense feeling of superiority; and as you listen he takes you up with him into his coign of vantage, and you laugh too. It is good to see wit as well as logic and learning in the pulpit; to feel up in that serene height, where the preacher has it all himself, and none may gainsay him, there is humanity there, a flesh and blood reality, and not a respectable academic ghost in whose brain there is hollowness and in whose eye there is no fire of speculation. What a head the man has – ample, well formed, well and fairly developed. What a voice the man has – strong as a mountain torrent, impetuous, irresistible, mastering all, carrying like a Niagara all before it. Dr. Parker is better off than Paul. Apparently the earthen vessel in which he has his treasure is of admirable adaptation and utility.
London has gained and Manchester has lost Dr. Parker. Already he has made himself no stranger in London. To many his “Ecce Deus” has commended itself as the work of a vigorous thinker, and all have confessed that his “Springdale Abbey” was full of very clever talk. No ordinary preacher could have written such books, that was clear. In Manchester he had become a success. How came he to be such? Partly I have explained the reason. In the first place, in an age of doubt, of negative theology, of blinding and bewildering speculation – when between the so-called Christian and the Cross in all its eternal lustre has risen up a fog of gloom – when the Gospel of unbelief and despair has come into fashion, so that when we listen for the shout of psalm or the holy exultation of prayer, we hear instead
“An agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come since the making of the world.”
Dr. Parker has a living faith. And then again he has a deep sense of what the pulpit requires, and an unmitigated scorn of that kind of preaching which is too common there. “Almighty God has to tolerate more puerility in His service than any monarch on earth. If Christianity had not been Divine it would have been ruined by many of its own preachers long ere this. The wonder is, not that it has escaped the cruel hand of the infidel (it can double up a whole array of crazy atheists), but that it has survived the cruel kindness of its shallow expositors.” Whose language, you ask, is this? Why, Dr. Parker’s own. The preacher who can thus censure his fellows is bound to guard sacredly and constantly against that which he condemns, and to come to his pulpit with every feeling attuned and with every energy aroused for its gigantic work. Give to such a man the requisite brain and tongue, let him have the requisite delivery, let his lips be touched by that spirit which and you have a Dr. Parker. He has come to London – a difficult thing for any man to do, but in this case the step has been undertaken under peculiarly difficult circumstances. Time was when the City was the home of citizens, and many of the wealthiest and most influential of them went to the Poultry. That time has long gone by. It was when deacons shook their heads at Mr. Binney as not quite sound. Of all places on the earth the most deadly on a Sunday is the City of London, and especially that part of it in which the Poultry stands. At St. Mildred’s, close by, it is impossible, or seems to be so, to collect a decent congregation. Will Dr. Parker succeed better? Some sort of answer was given to the question, when to a crowded and attentive congregation he preached what I may term his inaugural discourse. If I say it was an eloquent display I shall excite the Doctor’s indignation, as he contemned the use of such phraseology in his sternest and most indignant manner. Nor indeed with regard to the discourse in question would the phrase be literally correct. No one can doubt the Doctor’s eloquence, but in speaking of himself and his hopes and purposes in connexion with the Poultry – in showing the grand principles upon which he took his stand, and by means of which he was placed beyond the fear of failure, he aimed at something more than eloquent display. “I am preaching to myself as well as to you,” said the Doctor in the course of his sermon; and such was in reality the case. For the work which he has to do, for the programme which he trusts to work out, truly indeed does the Doctor need the guidance of that Providence which shall go before, and which shall make the crooked places straight. This, indeed, was the Doctor’s text. You will find it in Isaiah xlv. 2. From the beginning to the end of the service this was the leading and appropriate idea. He commenced with Cowper’s magnificent hymn, “God moves in a mysterious way.” The portion of Scripture read was Christ’s commission to the seventy to go and preach the Gospel all over the world; the prayer was an acknowledgment that the human will should be subordinated to the Divine; and it was “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,” which formed the closing song.
“Touched Isaiah’s lips with hallowed fire,”
As Dr. Parker told us he was going to publish his sermon (his sermons now appear weekly, under the title of “The City Temple”), I need say little of the discourse, of which I have already given the text. It began with a reference to the triumph and danger of liberty – that man might go whether with God or without Him. Man was free, nor was his religion one of slavery. To those who considered such a statement to be a grand contradiction of what we know of eternal decrees, it was sufficient to reply that it could only be harmonized in the ecstasy of light and love. God will not make everything straight, but only in proportion as we trust Him and live with Him will our difficulties diminish. As to his text in particular, remarked Dr. Parker, it was first a warning – there are crooked places. It was a promise – the crooked places God would make straight: all that we required was patience. Also it was a plan – God would go before us. Say some, that is God’s sovereignty – that is the omnipotent Jehovah. No, it indicated His love, His tenderness, His care. In such an idea we do not dwarf God, but exalt Him. Then came the limitation of the promise. This going before was a question of character. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord. That, however, was no motive for carelessness, but the reverse. The Doctor, in conclusion, spoke of himself. 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. He also intended to use the printing-press. He had great faith in the printed page. It remained to be read at spare moments when a man had nothing to do. Finally, said Dr. Parker, he spoke with fear and trembling, but he came there with a strong determination to succeed, and he appealed to all around to do their duty – not to carp, or criticise, or say unkind words, but to resolve to labour and to be guided by heavenly power and wisdom. At the close of the service there was a collection. After this the immense congregation streamed out into the open air, much to the astonishment of casual passengers, who did not understand what was the matter. The Poultry has a prosperous look, and they have got a new pulpit there almost as rotund, and bright, and buoyant as Dr. Parker himself.
I know not how the Sunday service succeeds, but the Thursday morning service is wonderfully well filled. In this busy age it is scarcely credible that in the busiest part of London, and at the busiest hour of the day, a chapel as large as the Poultry can be crowded, and is regularly crowded, with merchants and men of business and others. Yet such is the case, and Dr. Parker has succeeded in an attempt which, until he tried it, certainly seemed hazardous in the extreme. If the Doctor seems a little bombastic, it may well be forgiven him under these circumstances, especially when we remember that no preacher can succeed in convincing others that he is worth hearing till he has become firmly convinced of that fact himself. A modest man I fear is out of place anywhere, but most of all so in the pulpit. It was in wisdom that Dr. Parker was selected for his post. I should think he is a preacher pre-eminently adapted to the young. Judged not by what he has done, but by years, the Doctor is almost a young man himself. There is youthful vigour in his full round face, in his small dark eyes; and certainly there is no small store of youthful enthusiasm in his heart. In his black hair and beard there is no suggestive tinge of grey. If he has passed through and left the golden portals of youth behind, it can only be but recently that he has done so, and there is still in him somewhat of its grace and glory. In another respect also the choice of Dr. Parker was appropriate. The Poultry Chapel is in the very heart of London; the chances were that most of the young men present – and, I might add, of the old ones too – were more or less engaged in some secular avocations. In like manner, so the writer has always understood, the Doctor’s youthful years were passed. Hence it came to pass the old Poultry Chapel is in a flourishing state. The Doctor seemed in his right place, and, if we may judge from appearances, the people seemed to think so.
MR. LYNCH’S THURSDAY EVENINGS
In a great city like London there are many sources of pleasure completely overlooked. If people complain that life is dull – that it is monotonous – that it presents to them few objects of interest or attraction – I fancy they have chiefly themselves to blame. No man or woman either with heart or head need lead a barren life either in the country or in town. There is always something to do, to see, or to hear, and in London especially is there much to hear of which Londoners know but little. Such, at any rate, was the reflection of the writer one Thursday night as he made his way along the Hampstead Road to a neat little iron church on the left-hand side as you go from the City, and just before you reach Mornington Crescent. Every Sunday morning there preaches there the Rev. Thomas Lynch, the author of some choice prose and poetry – a man at whom there was a dead set made by certain religionists a few years ago, but who has long outlived that, and to whom that time of trial and of trouble was undoubtedly a most blessed event, inasmuch as it taught the gentle author of the “Rivulet” his strength, both as regards himself and as regards the best of our religious teachers; and inasmuch as it demonstrated to all anew, and more clearly than ever, how hard, how cruel, how unmerciful dogmatic theologians could become. At that time Mr. Lynch was preaching in a chapel in one of the streets running from Tottenham Court Road into Fitzroy Square. He is now nearer Camden Town, and preaches in a building between which and the pastor there seems to be a kind of resemblance and sympathy; at any rate, as much as can exist between what is abstract and concrete – between matter and mind. The church is no Gothic edifice, hoary with time, but slender and modern, and, as much as possible, graceful. You wonder it has not been swept away by the storms of winter. A similar feeling exists when you look at Mr. Lynch. There are great mountains of men, whose tread is terrible, whose laugh is volcanic, whose heads are rugged rocks, whose bodies are bulls of Bashan, whose speech is as the roar of an angry sea, whose faces in summer parch you up like burning suns, or in winter darken you with angry clouds. To this genus Mr. Lynch does in no way belong. The fairies who assisted at Mr. Lynch’s birth did very little for him physically – at any rate, they robbed his bones of all flesh, and made his outward frame as spare as possible. It is to be wished also that they had endowed him with better health. Yet his figure cannot be termed ungraceful or his appearance unattractive. In his dress he is scrupulously neat. Even on weekday services he wears the white handkerchief, which when round the neck denotes that you are a swell on your way to dinner, or a waiter, or a gentleman of the clerical profession. His grey eye is full of enthusiasm, and kindles up a pale, dark face that otherwise might be dull. His voice is stronger and clearer than you would expect. You are agreeably surprised to find how animated and vigorous he can become. After all, and in spite of ill-health, time has dealt not ungently with Mr. Lynch. He is a trifle bald, and you can detect a greyish tint in his hair – that is all; but Mr. Lynch, I imagine, is not one of those who age fast. He has a happy cheerfulness apparently, which compensates for the poetic sensitiveness which frets away many a man’s, life, and which made a hard-headed Wordsworth write —
“We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
Whereof come in the end despondency and madness.”
Indeed, Mr. Lynch’s cheerfulness is evidently, ever welling up out of his heart and colouring all his thoughts and words. In his services this is everywhere apparent. He has much of the lithe action of the comedian, and he stands ever, like Garrick, between tragedy and comedy, one moment ready to make you smile, and the next touching all that is most earnest, most serious, most devout in our common nature. He leans on his little desk, his hands before him, and talks away, sweetly and devoutly, about things that interest all – things that have a spiritual bearing, things that are secular and profane, only to the secular and profane. There are not very many people to hear him; but then, they are hearers, and there is sympathy between the preacher and the pews. The Iron Duke said, “When you begin to turn in bed, it is time for you to get up.” In a similar way it may be said, when the people begin to turn to look at the clock it is time the preacher or lecturer was done. The other night I found Mr. Lynch’s service occupied nearly two hours, yet it did not seem wearisome or long. The service was commenced with chanting, and prayer, and reading scripture, and singing. Then there was a text, and a lecture or sermon from that text. On the occasion to which I refer the subject was John Howe, as an illustration of that passage in Proverbs which predicates of the man diligent in his business that he shall stand before kings – a prediction literally verified in the case of John Howe, who was chaplain to Oliver Cromwell – a man greater than any king – and who had friendly converse with that Protestant hero, William the Third, the best king England ever had. Very vividly did Mr. Lynch bring out all that was noblest and brightest in John Howe’s character and career, dwelling with evident unction on the many pregnant titles of Howe’s works, which he seemed much to prefer to the works themselves, and in which he was right; for Howe’s thoughts, it must be conceded, are not couched in the form and language most easy of apprehension to the men of to-day; and from the past, with some rare exceptions – those, of course, written in a dead language being the chief – it is vain to extract literature for the study and edification of the present. Religion is no exception to a universal law; indeed, more than anything else, it is required of him who preaches it that he should speak to living men in the living language of to-day – not according to formulas that have long died out, or in terms that have long become extinct; and this specially may be said of Mr. Lynch, that as much as any one he realizes this great law, and does use language and illustration and argument familiar to the men and women of London in this latter day – that he does not cease to be a man when in the pulpit, and deal with abstraction rather than with real life. When Mr. Lynch began his ministerial career this virtue was rarer than it is now, and of this desirable result Mr. Lynch deserves, at any rate, some of the credit. Be that as it may, the writer has one other thing to say. It seems to him that these Thursday evening lectures of Mr. Lynch’s deserve a wide support. There are many in London who would be glad enough to attend. There are many living out of town who would find it worth while stopping an hour or two later on a Thursday evening. The service commences at a quarter past seven; and I believe generally Mr. Lynch takes some specific subject, such as “John Howe,” or “Bells,” or anything which seems to him notable. The writer heard also on the night in which he was there something about questions asked and answered; but on that he can say, as he knows, nothing.
CHAPTER IX.
the unitarians
“In the apostolical Fathers we find,” writes the Rev. Islay Burns, “for the most part only the simple Biblical statements of the deity and humanity of Christ in the practical form needed for general edification. Of those fathers Ignatius is the most deeply imbued with the conviction that the crucified Jesus is God incarnate, and indeed frequently calls Him, without qualification, God. The development of Christology in the scientific doctrine of the Logos begins with Justin and culminates in Origen. From him there proceed two opposite modes of conception, the Athanasian and the Arian, of which the former at last triumphs in the Council of Nice, and confirms its victory in the Council of Constantinople.” By the Ebionites Christ was regarded as a mere man. By the Gnostics he was considered as superhuman; but in that capacity as one of a very numerous class. The doctrine of the absolute unity of God, alike in essence and personal subsistence, was held by the Monachians, who are divided respectively into Dynamistic and Modalistic. As the latter held that the whole fulness of the Deity dwelt in Christ and only found in him a peculiar mode of manifestation, it was assumed that the natural inference was that the Father himself had died on the Cross. Hence to these heretics the name of Patripassians was applied by the orthodox. Sabellius, who maintained a Trinity, not of divine Persons but of successive manifestations under the names Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was one of the chief Patripassians. The Arian controversy, as Dean Stanley shows, turned on the relations of the divine persons before the first beginning of time.
If Dean Stanley be correct, at this time the Abyssinian Church is agitated by seventy distinct doctrines as to the union of the two natures in Christ. It is clear, then, no one man can epitomize all that has been uttered and written on this pregnant theme, over which the Church contended fiercely three hundred years. “Latin Christianity,” writes Dean Milman, “contemplated with almost equal indifference Nestorianism and all its prolific race, Eutychianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism.” When the Reformation quickened free inquiry and religious life, Socinus appeared; the epitaph on his tomb shows what his friends thought of his doctrine. “Luther took off the roof of Babylon, Calvin threw down the walls, Socinus dug up the foundations.” Furious persecution was the fate of the holders of his opinions; Servetus was burnt by Calvin; and Joan Bocher was sentenced to a similar fate by the boy-king Edward VI. for denying the doctrine of the Trinity. With tears in his eyes as he signed the warrant, he appealed to the Archbishop. “My Lord Archbishop, in this case I resign myself to your judgment; you must be answerable to God for it.”
Unitarianism has made way in England. When Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act became law the Unitarians in England were a small sect, and had not a single place of worship. It was not till 1779 that it ceased to be required of Dissenting ministers that they should subscribe to the Articles of the Church of England previous to taking the benefit of the Toleration Act, and even this small boon was twice thrown out in the Upper House by the King’s friends and the Bishops. In 1813, however, one of the most cruelly persecuting statutes which had ever disgraced the British code received its death-blow, and the Royal assent was given to an Act repealing all laws passed against those Christians who impugn the commonly received doctrine of the Trinity. It was no easy matter to get this act of justice done; the Bishops and the Peers were obstinate. In 1772, we read, the Bishop of Llandaff made a most powerful speech, and produced from the writings of Dr. Priestley passages which equally excited the wonder and abhorrence of his hearers, and drew from Lord Chatham exclamations of “Monstrous! horrible! shocking!” A few years after we find Lord North contending it to be the duty of the State to guard against authorizing persons denying the doctrine of the Trinity to teach. Even as late as 1824, Lord Chancellor Eldon doubted (as he doubted everything that was tolerant in religion or liberal in politics) as to the validity of this Act, and hinted that the Unitarians were liable to punishment at common law for denying the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet the Unitarians have a remote antiquity. They can trace their descent to Apostolic times, and undoubtedly were an important element in the National Church, in the days of William and the Hanoverian succession.
Dr. Parr, says Mr. Barker, “spoke to me of the latitudinarian divines with approbation. He agreed with me in thinking that the most brilliant era of the British Church since the Reformation was when it abounded with divines of that school;” and certainly Unitarians may claim to be represented at the present day in Broad Churchmen within the Establishment, and in divines of a similar way of thinking without. They have been much helped by their antagonists. No man was less of a Unitarian than the late Archbishop Whately, yet, in a letter to Blanco White, he candidly confessed, “Nothing in my opinion tends so much to dispose an intelligent mind towards anti-Trinitarian views as the Trinitarian works.”
As a sect, the Unitarians are a small body, and at one time were much given to a display of intelligent superiority as offensive in public bodies as in private individuals. They were narrow and exclusive, and had little effect on the masses, who were left to go to the bad, if not with supercilious scorn, at any rate with genteel indifference. There was in the old-fashioned Unitarian meeting-houses something eminently high and dry. In these days, when we have ceased to regard heaven – to quote Tom Hood – as anybody’s rotten borough, we smile as a handful of people sing —
“We’re a garden walled around,
Planted and made peculiar ground;”
yet no outsider a few years ago could have entered a Unitarian chapel without feeling that such, more or less, was the abiding conviction of all present. “Our predominant intellectual attitude,” Mr. Orr confesses to be one reason of the little progress made by the denomination. A Unitarian could no more conceal his sect than a Quaker. Generally he wore spectacles; his hair was always arranged so as to do justice to his phrenological development; on his mouth there always played a smile, half sarcastic and half self-complacent. Nor was such an expression much to be wondered at when you remembered that, according to his own idea, and certainly to his own satisfaction, he had solved all religious doubts, cleared up all religious mysteries, and annihilated, as far as regards himself, human infirmities, ignorance, and superstition. It is easy to comprehend how a congregation of such would be eminently respectable and calm and self-possessed; indeed, so much so, that you felt inclined to ask why it should have condescended to come into existence at all. Mrs. Jarley’s waxworks, as described by that lady herself, may be taken as a very fair description of an average Unitarian congregation at a no very remote date. Little Nell says, “I never saw any waxworks, ma’am; is it funnier than Punch?” “Funnier?” said Mrs. Jarley, in a shrill voice, “it is not funny at all.” “Oh,” said Nell, with all possible humility. “It is not funny at all,” repeated Mrs. Jarley; “it’s calm, and what’s that word again – critical? No, classical – that’s it; it’s calm and classical. No low beatings and knockings about; no jokings and squeakings like your precious Punch’s, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility.” Now it was upon this coldness and gentility that the Unitarians took their stand; they eliminated enthusiasm, they ignored the passions, and they failed to get the people, who preferred, instead, the preaching of the most illiterate ranter whose heart was in the work.
In our day a wonderful change has come over Unitarianism. It is not, and it never was, the Arianism born of the subtle school of Alexandrian philosophy, and condemned by the orthodox Bishops at Nicea; nor is it Socinianism as taught in the sixteenth century, still less is it the Materialism of Priestley. Men of the warmest hearts and greatest intellects belonging to it actually disown the name, turn away from it as too cold and barren, and in their need of more light, and life, and love, seek in other denominations what they lack in their own. The Rev. 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. In philosophy I have had to unlearn most that I had imbibed from my early text-books and the authors in chief favour with them. In Biblical interpretation I derive from Calvin and Whitby the help that fails me in Crell and Belsham. In devotional literature and religious thought I find nothing of ours that does not pale before Augustine Tauler and Pascal; and in the poetry of the Church it is the Latin or the German hymns, or the lines of Charles Wesley or Keble, that fasten on my memory and heart, and make all else seem poor and cold.” This is the language of many beside Mr. Martineau – of all, indeed, to whom a dogmatic theology is of little import compared with a Christian life.
Let us attempt to describe Unitarianism negatively. In one of his eloquent sermons in its defence, the late W. J. Fox said, “The humanity of Christ is not essential to Unitarianism; Dr. Price was a Unitarian as well as Dr. Priestley, so is every worshipper of the Father only, whether he believes that Christ was created before all worlds, or first existed when born of Mary. Philosophical necessity is no part of Unitarianism. Materialism is no part of Unitarianism. The denial of angels or devils is no part of Unitarianism.” Unitarianism has no creed, yet briefly it may be taken to be the denial of a Trinity of persons in the Godhead, or of the natural depravity of man, or that sin is the work of the devil, or that the Bible is a book every word of which was dictated by God, or that Christ is God united to a human nature, or that atonement is reconciliation of God to man. Furthermore, the Unitarians deny that regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit, or that salvation is deliverance from the punishment of sin, or that heaven is a state of condition without change, or that the torments of hell are everlasting. It may be that the Broad Churchman entertains very much the same opinions, but then the Unitarian minister has this advantage over the Church clergyman, that he is free. He has not signed articles of belief of a contrary character. He has not to waste his time and energy in sophistications which can deceive no one, still less to preach that doctrine so perilous to the soul, and destructive of true spiritual growth, and demoralizing to the nation, that a religious, conscientious man may sign articles that can have but one sense and put upon them quite another. Surely one of the most sickening characteristics of the age is that divorce between the written and the living faith, which, assuming to be progress, is in reality cowardice.