Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
in front of the preacher, facing the audience and just within the railing of the stage. The instant the reading of the hymn was over, he raised the tune, the congregation rising. The Niagara of song made me fairly dizzy for a minute. Everybody sang. After a few lines, it was impossible to refrain from singing. One was caught up and swept on by the cataract. He might not know the air. He might have neither ear nor voice for music. He was kept in time and tune by the strong current of sound. There was no organ or other musical instrument, nor was the voice of the precentor especially powerful. It was as if we were guided by one overmastering mind and spirit constraining the least emotional to be “conjubilant in song” with the thousands upon thousands of his fellows. Congregational psalmody, such as this, without previous rehearsal or training, is phenomenal.
A prayer followed, as remarkable in its way as the singing. Comprehensive, devout, simple, it was the pleading of man in the felt presence of his Maker;—the key-note—“Nevertheless, I will talk with Thee!” Next to Mr. Spurgeon’s earnestness his best gift is his command of good, nervous English—fluency which is never verboseness. Knowing exactly what he means to say, he says it—fully and roundly—and lets it alone thereafter. He is neither scholarly, nor eloquent, in any other sense than in these. He read a chapter, giving an exposition of each verse in terse, familiar phrase. There was another hymn, and he announced his text:
“Rather rejoice because your names are written in Heaven!”
I should hardly name humility as a characteristic of prayer or sermon; yet, for one whose boldness of speech often approximates dogmatism, he is singularly free from self-assertion. His sermon was more like a lecture-room talk than a discourse prepared for, and delivered to a mixed multitude. His quotations from Holy Writ were abundant and apt, evincing a retentive memory and ready wit. One-third of the sermon was in the very words of Scripture. His habitual employment of Bible phrases has lent to his own composition a quaint savor. He makes lavish use of “thee” and “thou,” jumbling these inelegantly with “you” in the same sentence.
For example:—He described a man who had been useful and approved as a church-member: (always addressing his own people)—“The Master has allowed you to work for many days in His vineyard, and paid thee good wages, even given thee souls for thy hire.”
In what shape reverses came to the prosperous laborer we were not told, but that he did see others outstrip him in usefulness and honors:
“You are bidden by the Master to take a lower—maybe the lowest seat. Ah, then, my friend, thou hast the dumps!”
I heard him say in another sermon: “If my Lord were to offer a prize for a joyful Christian I am afraid there are not many of you who would dare try for it. And if you did, I fear me much you would not draw even a third prize.”
Occasionally he is coarse in trope and expression. I hesitate to record a sentence that shocked me to disgust as being not only in atrocious taste and an unfortunate figure of speech, but, to my apprehension, irreverent:
“If we are not filled, it is because we do not hang upon and suck at those blessed breasts of God’s promises as we might and should do.”
His illustrations are like his diction—homely. There was not a new grand thought, nor a beautiful passage, rhetorically considered, in any discourse we ever heard from him; not a trace of such fervid imagination as draws men, sometimes against their will, to hear Gospel truth in Talmage’s Tabernacle, or of Beecher’s magnificent genius. We have, in America, scores of men who are little known outside of their own town, or State, who preach the Word as simply and devoutly; who are, impartially considered, in speech more weighty, in learning incomparably superior to the renowned London Nonconformist. Yet we sat—between six and seven thousand of us—and listened to him for nearly an hour, without restlessness or straying attention. Yes! and went again and again, to discover, if possible, as the boys say of the juggler—“how he did it.”
In giving out the notices for the week, Mr. Spurgeon thanked the regular attendants of the church for having complied with the request he had made on the preceding Sabbath morning, and “stopped away at night,” thus leaving more room for strangers. “I hope still more of you will stop at home this evening,” he concluded in a tone of jolly fellowship the people appeared to comprehend and like. He was clearly thoroughly at one with his flock.
At night we also “stopped away,” but not at home. After much misdirection and searching, we found the alley—it was nothing better—leading to Dr. Cummings’s church in Crown Court, Long Acre. It was small, very small in our sight while the remembered roominess of the Tabernacle lingered with us—plain as a Primitive Methodist Chapel in the country; badly lighted, and the high, straight pews were not half filled. The author of “Voices of the Dead” and “Lectures upon the Apocalypse” is a gray-haired man a little above medium height. His shoulders were bowed slightly—the bend of the student, not of infirmity; his features were clear-cut and spirituelle. He preached that night in faith and hope that were pathetic to us who had read his prophecies—or his interpretation of Divine prophecy—as long ago as 1850, and recalled the fact that the time set for the fulfilment of some of these had passed.
His text was Rev. i. 3: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things that are written therein—for THE TIME IS AT HAND!”
He believed it. One read it in every word and gesture; in the rapt look of the eyes so long strained with watching for the nearer promise—the dayspring—of His coming; in the calm assurance of mien and tone, the dignity of a seer, whom Heaven was joined with earth to authenticate. He spoke without visible notes; his only gesture a slight lifting of both hands, with a fluttering, outward movement. We listened vainly for some token in his spoken composition of the epigrammatic, often antithetical style, that gives nerve and point to his published writings. The interesting, albeit desultory talk was, he informed us, the first of a series of sermons upon the Apocalypse he designed to deliver in that place from Sabbath to Sabbath. He had been diligently engaged of late in recasting the horoscope of the world. That was not the way he put it. But he did say that he had reviewed the calculations upon which his published “Lectures” were based, and would make known the result of his labors in the projected series.
He preferred, it was said, the obscure corner in which he preached to any other location, and had refused the offer of a lady of rank to build him a better church, in a better neighborhood. I suppose he thought it would outlast him—and into the millennial age.
I read, but yesterday, in an English paper, that he had retired from pulpit duties, in confirmed ill-health, and that after his long life of toil he is very poor. Some of his wealthy friends propose to pension him. And we remember so well when his “Voices of the Night”—“The Day”—“The Dead” were read by more thousands and tens of thousands than now flock to hear Spurgeon; when the “Lectures upon the Apocalypse” were a bugle-call, turning the eyes of the Christian world to the so long rayless East. We recall, too, the title of another of his books, with the vision of the bent figure and eyes grown dim with waiting for the glory to be revealed—and another text from his beloved Revelation:
“These are they that have come out of Great Tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
CHAPTER IV.
The Two Elizabeths.
IF the English autumn be sad, and the English spring be sour, the smiling beauty of the English summer should expel the memory of gloom and acerbity from the mind of the tourist who is not afflicted with bronchitis. In England they make the ch very hard, and pronounce the i in the second syllable as in kite. They ought to know all about bronchitis, for it lurks in every whiff of east wind, and most of the vanes have rusted upon their pivots in their steadfast pointing to that quarter.
The east