James Ritchie - The London Pulpit

Could anything be weaker or in worse taste than that?

The pulpit has ceased to offend by any such exhibitions. The men in the pews have advanced, and the men in the pulpit have had to do the same. Men of science and of intellect and literature must have men of science and of intellect and literature to preach to them. It is power the ministry lacks. It fails because it is of the past – uses the language of the past – prays the prayers of the past. Instead of seeking a revival in the churches, it had better seek its own revival. We have some twelve hundred clergy (Church and Dissent) in this great Babylon, and yet the devoutest worshipper can scarce name a dozen as superior men. Yet preaching is not the difficult thing ministers affirm. Literary men, enterprising merchants, sharp attorneys, aspiring barristers, honourable M.P.s, work infinitely harder, though professing infinitely inferior aims. A popular actor certainly seeks no richer reward than a popular parson; but the former will throw into his performance a life of which the latter appears to have no idea. For the men who care not for the manner but the matter, the pulpit has still less to offer. Where, then, is the wonder that in London, where men are not driven to church or chapel – where they do not lose caste because they do not observe the required customs of respectable society – the mass are beyond the reach of the preacher’s voice, listening, it may be, to the sermons on our stones and in our streets – the sermons the world’s great ones and illustrious leaders preach, when they worship railway kings, or erect statues to royal debauchees? What wonder is it then that in life’s busy scene the still small voice of the pulpit grows weaker every hour?

One of the wonders to us, looking back upon the middle ages, rich in all the experience they lacked, is their faith in heathenism as a fact, long after heathenism as a theology had given way to the victorious Cross. It seems not only as if many Christian churches were erected on what were once pagan temples, but as if, under new names, the old pagan superstitions still lingered, as if their hold on the heart of man were too firm to be driven out by any doctrine, however new or true. In the middle ages, before a Bacon had led forth the sciences from their house of bondage – before men had ceased to theorize, and to believe alone in facts, and the truths facts utter, what confidence, for instance, was given to that pagan science, or jargon, for it ought not to be called a science, named astrology. The old heathen gods still remained. Jupiter and Mars, Saturn, and Venus, and Mercury, were still the arbiters of human destinies. Take up the great philosopher of that age – Cardan for instance – and you shall read in him more of the mysterious influences of the heathen’s Jupiter than of the Christian’s God. Every educated man exclaimed in language as plain, though not, perhaps, so poetical, as that of Max Piccolomini, that —

Something like this in the Christian world prevails. Thus is it the Old Testament binds with iron grasp men who profess to take their religion from the New. They tell you the law was the schoolmaster – that it was the shadow of good things to come, and yet for all that they do and plan, the Old Testament is their perpetual precedent. Instead of the recognised version, ‘All Scripture is given for instruction,’ some of the good people we have referred to seemed as if they read confusion. The old Commonwealth men blundered terribly in this way; but every age has had men guilty of similar blunders. Poor Granville Sharpe had an interview with Mr. Pitt, to plead the cause of humanity, and wasted the golden opportunity by attempting to explain to that great Minister – to whom the explanation was all unintelligible – the meaning of the little horn in Daniel. In spite of Christianity, men still cling to Jewish rites and Jewish creeds, as if the Temple of Solomon still wore its ancient splendour, as if the seed of Abraham still enjoyed their sacred birthright, as if the sceptre had not departed from Judah, and Shiloh had never come. Go into the churches of the metropolis any time you like, and the probability is that in more than half the texts will be taken from the Old Testament, and the certainty is, that in almost all, all the arguments and illustrations will have a similar source. Thus we have a composite order of preaching. It seems as if the preacher knew not on which side to take his stand, under which king to speak or die. The hand is Esau’s, but the voice is Jacob’s. You hear as much of David as of Christ, as much of the ceremonial of a worship of form and ceremony, as of the simplicity introduced by Him who was born in a manger, and had not where to lay his head. To break free from all this – to act in the living present – to let the dead past bury its dead – to speak to the men of to-day in the language of to-day, is a great advantage to a preacher, even if it require, on his part, a little extra care in the composition of his sermons; and no one knows this better than the popular Assistant Minister of St. John’s, Waterloo Place, Regent Square, London – the Rev. Mr. Bellew, formerly of St. John’s Cathedral, Calcutta.

To give a man the position Mr. Bellew has acquired, however, something further is needed. Peculiar qualities of thought or utterance, especially the latter, are essential to a man if he would be talked of on all sides – run after by fine lords and ladies – in request all over London for charity sermons – and admitted to plead in the august presence of Lord Mayors and Princes of the blood. In the first place, then, it must be remembered that Mr. Bellew preaches with all the studied earnestness of the actor, and every syllable tells as distinctly as if it were Macready declaiming on the stage. Then he is an Irishman, and what Irishman is not fluent and born to drive in the pulpit; and what is wonderful, though an Irish Protestant, Mr. Bellew avoids the rôle , somewhat overdone, of a McNeile, or a McGee, or a Maguire, and does not commit the absurdity of making his every sermon a wearisome protest against Popery and the Pope. Why should Irish clergymen get wild on this head? It is not, says Goëthe, by attacking the false, but by proclaiming the true, that good is to be done. And it is the same in religion; the Irish Protestants have little to complain of – their history is written in the tears and blood of millions whom they have wronged for ages. By the violation of all right – by means that will ever stain the Irish Protestant Church with shame – by laws the most infamous the malice of man could devise, have they got to be where they are; let them take the goods the gods provide and be thankful. If anything could make a man sympathize with Roman Catholics, it would be the history of the Protestant Church since its first establishment there by the strong arm of law. On all other matters Mr. Bellew seems equally to avoid the errors of partisanship; he ignores the foolish ceremonial disputes of his own Church – the petty doctrinal discussions, which are the more fiercely agitated the more trivial and worthless they in reality are. His Christianity is something proud, and majestic, and divine, – a universal remedy for a universal disease, – not a skeleton of dead doctrine, or a bone of contention, or an obsolete word, but a living, healthy, beneficent power.