The American Pastor in Europe ... Edited, with an introduction and notes, by the Rev. John Cumming

Introduction

AND NOTES. BY- THE KEY. JOHN CUJDtING, D.D., F.R.S.E. LONDON: lUcjUARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON BTBEET, 1860. LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET.

INTRODUCTION.

. Dr. Cross, the eloquent writer of this entertaining work, whom I had the pleasure of frequently meeting in London, has made some strictures in it on English preachers — some times overdone, but always brilliant. A preacher himself, he has paid particular attention to preachers in England. In introducing his interesting sketches to the public, it occurred to me that this would be a fit opportunity of paying him a few English shillings for his very many American dollars. I have therefore covered the few pages assigned me, not by praises of the very useful and very amusing book I have the pleasure of editing, but by some remarks on American preachers, who are selected as representatives of classes, and therefore likely to be more interesting and instructive to us. Henry Ward Beecher. Henry Ward Beecher is a remarkable, though somewhat eccentric, preacher. ' The Plymouth Church,' Brooklyn, is a sort of audience hall, having very few of the usual and distinctive features of a place of Christian worship.

In the large pulpit we shall find on Sundays a respectable-looking person who writes notes, and looks about him, and makes himself singularly at home, before service begins. He wears neither cassock, gown, nor surplice, nor bands, nor

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. any particle of the clerical uniform. His voice is possessed of no extraordinary power, nor is it musical. His manner is commonplace in all respects. But notwithstanding all these mediocrities of the outer man, he is the most popular and effective American preacher of the day. He owes his power wholly to the depth and force and originality of his thoughts, and the homely, yet neither vulgar nor ungraceful, expression of them ; above all, to the honest but not preten tious faithfulness with which he inveighs against hypocrisy in every guise, and immorality in every rank. He regards every doctrine of the Bible not as a mere part of a theological system, however precious, but as bearing on man in some of the varied phases of his every-day life. To have any value he holds that a doctrine must be vital : — ' We must know (he remarks') how to act, how to con trol passions, how to resist temptations, how to be self sacrificing and loving.

If a person will bring to me a fresh blue violet this beautiful spring morning, 1 would thank him ; and so, if any one has a little flower of Christian experience, which has blossomed forth from the wintry snows through the warmth and light of God's love, I would thank him for it . I would give more for it than for acres of dried hay Theological systems are good in their place. They have their place, as ail sciences have, but that place is not the pulpit. What people need from the pulpit is religious food — the bread of life. There is no science in nature. God makes nature, and man makes science. There are ' the flowers and fruits, and man makes the science of botany. There are the stars and the sun, and out of their regular motions man makes the science of astronomy. All these sciences are well in their place.

But when I want a bunch of flowers, I do not thank a man who brings me calyxes, and petals, and pistils, and stamens, scientifically analyzed and labelled. When I want something to eat, I do not thank one for bringing me the component parts of bread and butter

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. V and coffee, chemically analyzed and scientifically arranged — the starch in one paper, and the saccharine matter in another, and the catfein in another. No, I want them mixed as nature mixes them ; and so I want the Gospel given to me as Christ gave it, naturally, from his great heart, with all the freshness and beauty of life experience.' These are some of the leading principles which give his preaching what such a line is sure to create— a just appre ciation and great popularity. He repudiates, and most justly, every system which exalts the government of God above God Himself, and substitutes laws for a living Presence, and makes Deity subservient to them. The heart of human nature yearns for what will still its fervid beatings, and soothe its irritation, and satisfy its longings, and to present this is his aim.

A sound theology ought to be the actual possession of the preacher, but it is a life giving and life-sustaining preaching that must be the ministry of the pulpit. Carbon in the living tree is delightful and fruit-bearing. Carbon in the diamond is bright and precious, but cold and indigestible. There is something large and comprehensive in the sympathies of Mr. Beecher. His heart has outgrown the restraints and trammels of ecclesiastical party. If it has a defective polarity, it leans and oscillates rather strongly in the opposite direction : — ' Let us approach a communion table as if the Saviour were here, as he was at the supper of old. If there be in this congregation any strangers, let them come. I will not ask for their creeds. I will not inquire if they be "church members in good and regular standing."

If there is any one here who, in penitence and longing for a pure life, has apprehended Christ and found him precious to his soul, it is not we, it is Christ who invites him.' VI

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. Mr. Beecher turns oftenest to the sunny side of life, and loves to dwell on all that feeds the happiness of the human heart. He will not pick up withered leaves if there be any green ones. He seems to revel in a bright religious light. ' When one's friends die we should go to the grave, not singing mournful psalms, but scattering flowers. Death was wrecked long ago. Christ has taken the crown from the tyrant. When Christians walk in black and sprinkle the ground with tears, then is the time when they should illuminate. As the disciples found the angels in Christ's grave, so in the grave where any of his loved disciples lie are angels of consolation, if we would only see them.' Mr. Beecher has been accused, in common with some other faithful men, of preaching politics. In this charge there is no doubt some truth.

His views of the duties and responsibilities of the pulpit seem much more expanded and comprehensive than those of many of his contemporaries. Certainly his vindication of his conduct in this matter is neither powerless nor inapplicable : — 'Nothing can more sharply exhibit the miserable imbe cility which has come upon us, than the inability of men to perceive the difference between preaching " politics," "social reform," &c, and preaching God's truth in such a way that it shall sit in judgment upon these thino-s and every other deed of men, to try them, to explore and analyze them, and to set them forth, as upon the back ground of eternity, in their moral character, and in their relation to man's duty and God's requirements. ' Shall the whole army of human deeds go roaring along the public thoroughfares, and Christian men be whelmed in the general rush, and no man be found to speak the real moral nature of human conduct ?

Is the pulpit too holy, and the Sabbath too sacred, to bring individual courses and developments of society to the bar of God's Word for trial ? Those who think so, and are crying out about the

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. VII desecration of the pulpit with secular themes, are the lineal descendants of those Jews who thought the Sabbath so sacred that our Saviour desecrated it by healing the withered hand. Would to God that the Saviour would visit His Church and heal withered hearts!' He is a man of a thoroughly practical mind. He seems to despise all trifling with great themes, all prettiness of speech, all 'playing at preaching.' With him it is an earnest and fruitful work, and no solemnity of utterance is in his mind an apology for dry and dull sermons : — ' Consecrated dullness is no better than flippant folly. If a window fails to let the light through, it makes little difference whether the obscuration comes from the web of a big, lazy spider, or from the nimble vieavings of a hundred pert little spiders.

God's truth really, earnestly, pungently spoken, for a direct and practical purpose, with distinct results con stantly following, that is preaching, no matter what are the particular methods of speech. Doubtless some are better than others. But every sincere and truthful man must use that way by which God has enabled him to achieve success ; some by solid statements, some by inex orable reasonings, some by illustration and fancy, some by facts and stories — just as God has given power to each one. But the test is the same in the highest and the lowest. Fruit must follow. The truth of God must shine through the human instrument and evince its divinity by signs following — the awakening of the conscience, conviction of sin, conversion to God, and a life redeemed from selfishness and set aglow with Christian goodness and benevolence.' We ought never to forget that truth should be full of life and sap, breaking into blossom and bowing down with its heavy harvest of fruit. Religion should be set forth in forms and relations applicable to the age, such as Apostles would preach were they living in this nineteenth

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. century of ours. That preacher is sure to put forth power who preaches truth for to-day adapted to the trials and temptations, the necessities and griefs of those who are busy working out the problem of life ; who preaches it not in antiquated formulas, and crabbed technicalities — stilted, high, and hard — but in the garb of every-day life : who loves to set forth religion around the fireside in garbs that may not decorate but do not disguise — in the counting-house and in the markets of the world. What can be more graphic or true than the following : — ' The tides come twice a day in New York harbour, but they only come once in seven days in God's harbour of the sanctuary. They rise on Sunday, but ebb on Monday, and are down and out all the rest of the week. Men write over their store door, " Business is business," and over the church door, " Religion is religion ;" and they say to religion, " Never come in here," and to business, " Never go in there."

" Let us have no secular things in the pulpit," they say ; " we get enough of them through the week in New York. There all is stringent and biting selfishness, and knives, and probes, and lancets, and hurry, and work, and worry. Here we want repose, and sedatives, and healing balm. All is prose over there ; here let us have poetry. We want to sing hymns and to hear about Heaven and Calvary: in short we want the pure Gospel, without any worldly intermixture." And so they desire to spend a pious, quiet Sabbath, full of pleasant imaginings and peaceful reflections ; but when the day is gone all is laid aside. They will take by the throat the first debtor whom they meet, and exclaim, " Pay me what thou owest. It is Monday." And when the minister ventures to hint to them something about their duty to their fellow-men, they say, " Oh, you stick to your preaching.

You do not know how to collect your own debts, and cannot tell what a man may have to do in his intercourse with the world." God's law is not allowed to go into the week. If the merchant spies it in his store, he throws it over the counter. If the clerk sees it in the bank, he kicks it out at the door. If it

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. IX is found in the street, the multitude pursue it, pelting it with stones, as if it were a wolf escaped from a menagerie, and shouting, " Back with you. You have got out of Sun day." There is no religion in all this. It is mere senti mentalism. Religion belongs to every day : to the place of business as much as to lhe church. High in an ancient belfry there is a clock, and once a week the old sexton winds it up; but it has neither dial-plate nor hands. The pendulum swings, and there it goes, ticking, ticking, day in and day out, unnoticed and useless. What the old clock is, in its dark chamber keeping time to itself, but never showing it, that is the mere sentimentality of religion, high above life, in the region of airy thought ; perched up in the top of Sunday, but without dial or point to let the people know what o'clock it is, of Time or of Eternity.' Such outspoken preaching will of course give offence.

The mills and the docks and factories must be horrified. The Stock Exchange would expel the preacher. But the preacher is right notwithstanding. Some of his pithy remarks are fit to be household words : — ■ ' A helping word to one in trouble is like a switch on a railway track — but one inch between wreck and ruin and smooth on-rolling prosperity. ' Slavery is a state of suppressed war. ' A grindstone that has no grit in it, how long would it take to make an axe sharp? Affairs that have no pinch in them, how long would they take to make a man? ' A man who is in the right knows that he is in the majority, for God is on his side. ' The human heart is like an artist's studio. You can tell what the artist is doing, not so much by his completed pictures, but by the half-finished sketches and designs which are hanging on his wall.

So you can tell the course of a nun's life not so much by his well-defined purposes as by the half-formed plans, the faint day-dreams, which are hung in all the chambers of his heart.' Mr. Beecher is the preacher for the people. His sermons X

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. are not fierce, vulgar, and vituperative declamation, with out a scintillation of genius, however sincerely meant. Theyr are pregnant with celestial fire, rich in suggestive and original thought. Here and there we find nuggets of gold and gems of the first water. Yet he never loses sight of the end of a sermon, which is to profit, or of the hearers of it who are ignorant, sinful, and unhappy. He says quaint things, but never coarse and equivocal. Our clergy may copy and study his excellences, and avoid his inter spersed and sometimes provocative remarks. He is not a model, but he is better — he is capital, available capital, on which others may draw, and send what they draw into currency in thoughts and words that will do the world a vast deal of good. He has carried into manhood the freshness and the exu berant force of earlier days, and overflows, therefore, with sympathy and communion with all living and growing things.

He says occasionally an indiscreet thing, but rarely, if ever, a tame thing. Yet some of his epigrammatic sayings are occasionally forced. The originality of the following does not atone for their constrained character : — ' She was a woman, and by so much nearer to God as that makes one. ' To some men the mere fact of existence, the simple walking through the air and light, gives more pleasure than others find in the whole round of so called plea sures. ' A man's religion is not a thing all made in Heaven, and then let down and shoved into him. It is his own conduct and life. A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life. ' Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly fiddled on by the fingers of joy. ' When men complain to me of low spirits, I tell them to

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. XI take care of their health, to trust in the Lord, and to do good, as a cure. 'Attempt to be aristocratic in the church, and the Church dies. Its true power consists in cutting the loaf of society from top to boltom.' Theodore Ledyard Cuyler. Another preacher, not so popular perhaps as Ward Beecher, but a vigorous thinker and an able speaker, is Theodore Ledyard Cuyler. He is picturesque and varied in his style, homely in his preferences, and altogether a useful and able exponent of his own school of teaching. He ranks with what are called in America ' the Reforming Preachers' — that is, the class who ally their influence to every good movement that touches and raises the down trodden and depressed sections of society. There is in this a practical good sense which commends religion to those who are otherwise indisposed to listen to its claims.

Speaking of city missions, he observes : — ' By this time you may inquire, Where is the remedy ? What can we do? To these inquiries we would reply that as no clean result can come from an unclean source, the primal remedy is to purify the sources themselves. This work is a double one. It must be applied both to the body and to the soul. The external man and the internal man should both be reformed. Each one of these pro cesses is essential. The second is by far the most important ; but in order to reach it the first one must not be neglected. For it is no easy work to Christianize a ragged outcast with a half-dozen layers of filth all over his frame, and no bread in his mouth but what he gets by begging and stealing. It is no easy task to Christianize a child by two hours of Sabbath-school teaching, while the Devil has undisputed control over that child through all the hours of all the other six days of the week. It is no easy matter to make a vagrant girl obey either the seventh or the eighth commandment, if absolute want is driving her to theft, or

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. to the sale of her womanhood to buy her bread. The soul must be cared for and the physical condition too. The Bible and the tract should be given to these outcasts ; but a preliminary step is to do all we can to provide for them a clean face and a clean dress, and a better chance to live without crime. Let us endeavour to give them employ ment. To help them into places of livelihood. Let them learn to be not paupers, but producers ; not mendicants and plunderers, but self-respecting self-supporters. And then, with this care for the perishing body, let us give them the Gospel. Not as a cold abstraction or a theologie dogma do they need it, but as a plain simple method of salvation, and as a practical rule of life. Let them have it free and warm and loving ; just as it burst from Heaven in its fullness, just as it breathed from Calvary in its tenderness.

Let it come to them in every possible channel — through the teacher, through the tract visitor, through the school.' These remarks are pregnant with good sense. They are not in any degree calculated to compromise Christian principle, and yet in every respect they tend to convince the mere secular man of the world that the religion of the Bible is not a mere transcendental, airy, and intangible theory, suited to the schools, but helpless in less rarefied strata of the atmosphere. They must see in it an every day fountain of inspiration, strength, and success — mighty in a kitchen as in a palace — reaching the highest, and bending down to the humblest, and blessing and glorify ing all the bonds and ties of social life. This is what is wanted in our own country'. We have too much theology and too little religion in our pulpits — too much about systems and dogmas, however important in their relative positions and superpositions in the Chris tian system, and far too little of that homely, intelligent, and common-sense use of those grand truths which shine with the splendour but also with the usefulness of stars,

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. XIII guiding the sailor on the trackless sea, and lessening the darkness of a moonless night. Dr. Storrs Dr. Storrs, of Brooklyn, is another of those masculine American minds who, ignorant or disdainful of theological dilettantism, give themselves up in the truth to the greatest good of the greatest number. Dr. Storrs is anything but dull, tame, or prosaic. Nay, on subjects that rise above the every-day relations of religion, and touch the springs and fountains of truth, he is not only eloquent, but power ful, and rich, and argumentative. Let us take a sample, not from his sermons, but his speeches. His subject is that fine one, the authorised version of the English Bible. He says : — ' And now consider what influence this version has put into our literature — I might say into all the history and life of the English people.

It comes to us with authority from our childhood. Its words are heard amid circumstances best adapted to make them impressive — on the Sabbath, in the churches, in the family devotions. They have been taught in even the common schools of our land ; blessed be God for that ! They have become wrought, we may say, into the very substance and texture of our thoughts, our associations, our earliest and most cherished expressions. And so they act mightily as an educating power on the popular mind. They have done so for generations. They act even upon the higher departments of literature. What delicate, fairylike forms this tough and oaken Saxon so skilfully combined with the more majestic Roman poetry, in those beautiful "Songs of Zion" to which reference has been made. Who has not observed in the great senatorial orator of our times, that when he rises to the highest point of eloquence, the very pitch of his power, he reverts to the simple biblical phrase that was familiar to us in childhood? And it is by that that he shakes the heart of his hearers with his wonderful force. For what would we give up the influences which this version has

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. put in our literature? For what would we give up the version itself? There is a company of gentlemen, I be lieve, in this city who are desiring and endeavouring to put this out of use, and to substitute another for it prepared according to their notions. I do not speak certainly as a member of a committee, or of any society, but simply as a Christian man, indebted too deeply to our most noble version, to be willing to give it up, when I say that no man, in my judgment, intelligently weighing this matter, would think for a moment of such an exchange. Give up our version, sir ? Why, it was nine hundred years in coming to its completion ! It is hallowed with such memories as scarcely belong to another human work. It stretches back one of its far-reaching roots to the very cell of Bede. It strikes down another beneath the burnt ashes of Wickliffe.

It sends another under the funeral pile of Tyndale. It twists another round the stake where Cranmer was burned. Give up this version for a trim and varnished new one ! Nay, verily. Those broad contorted arms have wrestled with the fierce winds of opinion for two hundred years. The sweet birds of heaven have loved to come and sing among them, and they sing there still. Their leaves are leaves of life and healing. There is not a text pendant on those boughs but has the stuff of religion and literature in it. They have given of their ribbed strength to every enterprise for human welfare. Give up this version ! It is our American inheritance. It came over in the May flower. It was brought by Oglethorpe to Georgia. It has spread across our land ; it has been the joy of generations to sit under its shadow ; it will stand while the hills stand.

Sir, I think we will not give up this oak of the ages for any modern tulip-tree at present.' With the exception of the eulogy pronounced by Dr. Newman, the eloquent but erring oratorian, we do not know a more striking and just estimate. Besides these, there are numbers of vigorous minds in America. They have all some faults; they often indulge in modes of expression alien to our taste, and generally work at high pressure. Still they are a powerful race ;

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. XV eminently original and vigorous, they do themselves and us credit. If our children are so healthy, what a noble mother must they have had ! The Pioneer Preachers. The pioneer preachers of America are a remarkable race. One of themselves thus defines the character: — ' The pioneer preacher is a man of stamina and a man of humour — an urgent sort of man, whose soul is permeated by the truth of what he says — speaking right out what he has to say and doing right on what he has to do. True they have their faults. They are inferior in the niceties, and elegancies, and refinements, and beauties of civilized society ; but, with all their downright directness, they are men of great hearts and tender susceptibiliiies. These pioneer preachers need no patronage nor pity ; they can take care of themselves, and they do it.

If any one in the east fails to find his ideal of ministerial character — sublimfe courage, indomitable energy, daring self-forgetfulness, a Christian piety which is self-abnegation — let him go, even in the present clay, west of the Mississippi, and he will find there some noble pioneers hastening with the bread of life to the starving inhabitants, and scattering manna in the wilderness unto eternal life.' These men, justly or not, but sincerely, believe they have a commission from Heaven to go into the deserts aud sequestered log-cabins with the first wave of civilization that rolls along the prairies, and to tell every human being of a great deliverance. They preach in kitchens, in cabins, from branches of trees, on the saddle, and from stumps. They have little book-learning ; they have no manual but the Bible.

They live on sixty dollars a year, travel every month three hundred miles on foot, swim across rivers, sleep on the earth, live on corn-bread and bacon, and sow broadcast living seeds that ripen into harvests whicli others

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. with less labour joyously reap. Among the most powerful of these eccentric lights of the desert was William Burke. His height was above six feet, and his frame powerfully knit together. His voice was possessed of tremendous power — so much so that it was said he thundered rather than spoke. One day he preached in the open air to at least ten thousand persons. His sermon literally broke in crashes among the surging multitude, swaying them to and fro like a forest stricken by a terrific gale. It is a well authenticated fact that successive hundreds of the audience fell down like corn before the scythe of the mower under his preaching. There is no doubt whatever that powerful and lasting impressions were made, but the results almost invariably proved that impulse without intelligence ;s most unsafe, and strong excitement, unsustained by careful and early education, is too apt to run into fanaticism.

Many a squatter in the forest was refreshed and cheered by a hearty though uncultivated eloquence, but many a wild enthusiast, ignorant and earnest, on recrossing the margin of civiliza tion, set up as the founder of a sect. Hence from these men sprung ' The Hard-shell Baptists,' ' The Soft-shells,' ' The Jerkers,' &c. Among the most laborious of these lights of the wilderness was Bishop Asbury, of the Methodist Episcopal body. His labours were Herculean, and his success so great that he became the founder of a denomination which numbers one-fifth of the population of the United States. One of his most powerful associates was James Craven, a man of uncompromising hatred towards slavery and alcohol. One day, preaching in Virginia, he spoke thus : — ' Here are a great many professors of religion to-day.

You are sleek, fat, good-looking, yet something is the matter. You have seen wheat which was plump, round, and good-looking to the eye, but when you weighed it you

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. XVII found it only came to forty -five pounds to the bushel, instead of sixty or sixty-three. Take a kernel of that wheat between your thumb and finger, hold it up, squeeze it, and pop goes the weevil. Now, you good-looking pro fessors of religion, you are plump and round, but you only weigh some forty-five pounds to the bushel. What is the matter? When you are taken between the thumb of the Law and the finger of the Gospel, held up to the light and squeezed, out pops the whisky bottle.' Another celebrated pioneer was LIaxley. He excelled in home-thrusts. One day he addressed his audience as follows : — ' Ah ! yes, you sisters here at church look as sweet and smiling as if you were angels ; and one of you says to me, " Come and take dinner with me, brother Haxlev." I go. When I arrive you say, " Sit down while I see about dinner," and you go into the kitchen, and then I hear somebody cry out, " Don't missus, don't !" and I hear the sound of blows, and the poor girl screaming, and the lovely sisier a whalin' and trouncin' Sallie in the kitchen ; and when she has got through she conies back looking as smiling and sweet as a summer dayr, as if she had just come from sayin' her prayers.