suburban population to our unreformed Liturgy. Superficial observers may not at a glance see the connexion; and may be disposed (as indeed has been done) to ridicule the idea.* But deep thinkers will recognise sound sense and sterling wisdom, as well as kind feeling towards the lower orders, in the following remarks:

Burglaries and garotting are very unpleasant to us, disturb our comfortable firesides, produce indignant diatribes against those in authority, and homilies on transportation-a very expensive way, but one very pleasing to the imagination of the easy-going and well-to-dobecause it gets rid of a disquieting idea generated by the troublesome convict class, if we think they are still hanging about us. But Providence has written in legible characters in the history of this unfortunate class that it is not by such methods that the evil is to be dealt with; and that nothing but this feeling of insecurity would be powerful enough to compel us to the exertion necessary to wipe out this and a hundred stains upon our Christian civilisation. I suppose we may take it for granted that the influence of religion can alone change a man's will, can make a bad man into a good one, and that this influence cannot be successfully brought to bear without the sympathising action of one mind upon another. The problem is, how can this be increased to the requisite extent ?

It is in London and our great towns that the mischief is continually producing and reproducing itself. It is in our metropolis and its satellites that large aggregations of poor people have been allowed to squat, wholly uncared for, having no kindly superintendence, moral or physical, to light the lamp of life as a guide to their ways, to succour them in distress, and encourage them in the warfare of existence. We have been told of a district of cinder-sifters, Londoners over the border, and so forth. Efforts are no doubt being made to reach these breeding grounds of our criminal population, but the Bishop of London's charge, just delivered, shows us how large an amount of waste still remains unreclaimed. Every one who knows anything of the matter must be convinced that an effort much greater than any that has yet been witnessed must be made if we are really to scotch the snake (destroy him utterly we never can) which every now and then rears his crest in so menacing a shape, and almost frightens us from our propriety. This onslaught must be made by the Church Catholic, and not as we have hitherto attempted it-as is thus described by Mr. Burke :—

'The hon. gentleman would have us fight this confederacy of the powers of darkness with the single arm of the Church of England;

*See, for example, an article in the Literary Churchman for Dec., 1862.

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would have us fight not only against infidelity, but fight at the same time with all other denominations except our own. In the moment we make a front against the common enemy we have to combat with all those who are the natural friends of our cause. Strong as we are, we are not equal to this.'

This was spoken nearly a century ago. We of the National Church have ever since obstinately shut our ears to the voice of one who spoke as few men ever have spoken, and our eyes to what was passing around us, and here we are just as much as ever in need of this advice, which has now stiffened into a standing reproach to us. If any one can suggest any other remedy which will be more efficacious, let him stand up and say so; and if our reason approves it, by all means let us join hand in hand to secure its adoption; but if not, let us members of the National Church seriously take to heart the heavy responsibility which weighs upon us. It is we who are responsible. It is the schismatic provisions of our Act of Uniformity, and our decrepit Canons, coupled with our refusal to attempt the smallest remedy-the separation between our clergy and laity, caused principally by our making a kind of sacerdotal inequality; our stately and tautological liturgy and formularies, with their obsolete phraseology and iron binding of rubrics, which has sown formalism broadcast throughout the land-these and such like matters must we of the National Church consider with a view to reform, unless we are prepared to encounter and refute the charge of being ourselves the stumbling-block in the way of that united effort of the Christian Church in this country which, until the contrary is proved, I shall venture to say is the only remedy to the social evils now complained of, which are by no means confined to the breeding of a convict-class, but of which that class is its most terrible and matured development. -I am, &c., EBURY.

Moor Park, Dec. 17, 1862."

LETTER CXVIII.

AN HOUR WITH SPURGEON.-NO. I. THE CONVENTICLE.

"Fas est et ab hoste doceri."-VIRGIL.

"I will provoke you to jealousy by them that are no people; and by a foolish nation I will anger you."-Rom. x. 19.

SIR,-Your columns being now released from reporting the debates in Parliament, you will perhaps allow me space for a somewhat free discussion of a subject equal, if not superior, in

interest to many which have of late engaged the attention of the public. I allude to the mode of conducting Divine Service under the system of the Established Church, compared with that of certain classes of Nonconformists. It is a question of great delicacy, which I will endeavour to approach with all gravity, and regard to the feelings of the respective parties between whom it will be necessary for me occasionally to draw an invidious comparison.

Those who have read my previous Letters will remember that about two years ago, in consequence of the riots at St. George's-in-the-East, I was induced to pay a Sunday morning's visit to the scene of so much painful notoriety, in order to be an eye-witness, and as far as possible an impartial judge, of the conduct of both parties in that irreligious war. The temporary excitement in those parts has now happily subsided; but it is by no means to be regretted that a faithful record should be thus preserved of the why and the wherefore things ran to such a height as at one time to require the intervention of not less than three or four hundred policemen to keep the peace during the performance of Divine Service in that Church.†

A somewhat similar motive induced me, being in town and not otherwise engaged, to pay a visit for the first time on Sunday last to the celebrated Tabernacle of Mr. Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

"What!"-I hear from the readers of the Guardian and English Churchman-" a Clergyman of the Church of Eng

* Revived, however, in 1876, from the same unhappy cause, at St. James', Hatcham, under the Rev. Arthur Tooth, of law-resisting notoriety. See observations on this subject in an able pamphlet, entitled, Pathway to Rome, by W. Martin Brown, late of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. Second Edition, pp. 25-7. Nisbet & Co., Berners Street, London. 1878. This tract cannot be too extensively circulated, as exhibiting in short compass the evil of Ritualism, with its only remedy-REVISION OF THE PRAYER-book.

+ See Vol. I., Letters LXIV.-LXVI., pp. 379-399.

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land going to hear Spurgeon! and on Sunday morning too. Surely he might be better employed preaching himself; or, at least, if he has such itching ears, listening to Trench or Wordsworth at Westminster Abbey."

Softly, my good friend. It is precisely because I am a Clergyman of the Church of England, that I went to "the Tabernacle" on a Sunday morning; and it was also for the very reason that you allege that I gave the preference to Spurgeon on that occasion over the two divines you mention, both of whom I have more than once sat painfully under at Great St. Mary's, Cambridge, or in the gorgeous Abbey, Westminster. Other people have itching ears, besides myself; nay, the majority I fear of the public,-as my experience as a minister of religion, extending now over thirty years, has fully convinced me. So for once, methought, there could be no harm in making myself one of that said public with a view to seeing and judging of the sort of bait that thus attracts thousands Sunday after Sunday to a Nonconformist place of worship, while so many of our own Churches are barely half filled on the Lord's Day.

*

I have heard it said over and over again by brethren of my cloth, and have partly experienced the truth of the saying myself, that it is impossible for a Clergyman to fill his Church on a Sunday morning. Good congregations may be sometimes drawn in a town, or even in a tolerably sized country village, at six or seven o'clock in the evening, possibly even in an afternoon, but as for expecting to fill your Church between eleven and one o'clock in the forenoon, the thing is hopeless, and no one but a raw curate three months in Holy Orders would think of such a thing. Being anxious, therefore, to see if there were no remedy for this defect in our

Now over five-and-forty years;-and I can confidently affirm that for one person who attends the Church for the simple purpose of prayer and praise, ten at least are drawn by the attraction of an able preacher.

constitution, I resolved to take a peep into the enemy's camp, and ascertain by what art, magic, or spell it is that Spurgeon (for so I had been told) has drawn regularly Sunday by Sunday, for years together, enormous congregations at that unseasonable hour, and kept them together;-the same process being repeated in the evening of the same day.

Now making all due allowance for the very advantageous situation of the Tabernacle, and awarding to Mr. Spurgeon an unusual amount of power as a preacher, I cannot believe the effects would be so great and so lasting, were he not aided by the strong contrast his mode of conducting the service exhibits to that of the Establishment, whose system (it is to be feared), by keeping from Church a large portion of the population on the Sabbath, opens at all times a field for preachers of very inferior powers, and of course acts with proportionate advantage to the Conventicle and disadvantage to the Church, when the former is in the hands of a man of energy and gifts like those of Mr. Spurgeon.*

It is some fifty years since Sydney Smith observed, that while orthodox divines were idly busy in freezing common sense amidst whole acres and furlongs of empty benches in our well-endowed Churches and Cathedrals, the should-be congregation were being gesticulated away by some unauthorised teacher, who in holy fervour was pouring forth his ungrammatical nonsense, mounted on a tar barrel outside the walls of a wooden and reed-thatched barn. The tar barrel and the barn are not now easily to be found, unless haply in the coal-districts of South Wales, or the moorlands of Lancashire and the West Riding. But in their place what do we meet with? In hundreds of instances they

A very fair description of the Service at the Tabernacle, and of Mr. Spurgeon himself as a Preacher, is given in "Unorthodox London," pp. 62-70, by the Rev. C. Maurice Davies, D.D. London, 1874.