/IN PAXTON HOOD. .'/' AND PREACHER I FROM THE LIBRARY OF REV. LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON, D. D BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO THE LIBRARY OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/edwinppOOgidd From a Photograph byMwatl. Eklru: Light Siudw m New Bond S 1 /^//r^^< f/flZisfa EDWIN PAXTON HOOD POET AND PREACHER. % JIUmortal. BY GEORGE H. GIDDIXS Eonton : JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14, FLEET STREET. 1886. CONTENTS PAGE Introductory ... .. 1 Biographical ... 3 In the Pulpit ... .. 15 Author — .. 112 Poet ... • • • • • • .. 132 Hymnologist ... ... • • .. 138 Lecturer • • • • • ... 151 Characteristics ... ... • • ... 160 Reminiscences ... • • ... 177 Premonitions • • ... 187 Entering into Rest ... ... ... 190 " This is the Last of Earth ' ... 193 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. ) INTRODUCTION. IN that altogether delightful and discrimin- ating book, " The Lamps of the Temple," which, although published anonymously, was soon discovered to be the production of Paxton Hood — the crisp, nervous, incisive style betray- ing it — is a chapter on John Pulsford, having for its motto-text a line from Sir John Cheke ad- dressed to Latimer : " I have an ear for other divines, but I have a heart for you"' We are sorely tempted to appropriate the quota- tion and head the initial chapter of these memorial pages with words so apt and true. The friendly reader who may accompany us through the following chapters will not fail to discover that they have been written con amove. Their true raison d'etre is the consciousness l 2 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. the writer lias of having been brought into contact with a brave and beautiful spirit, of having felt all the stimulus such a contact could not fail to evolve. He desires to lay with a reverent hand a simple wreath of flowers upon his grave. BIOGRAPHICAL. EDWIN PAXTON HOOD was born m Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, October 24, 1820, and was the son of a naval officer who had served, through all the Nelson victories, in the old Temeraire. He entered life in the same year as Baldwin Brown (whom he closely resembled in several notable respects), and closed it, or, shall we say, emerged into its fuller and completer development, just a year after his life-long friend ; a singular coincidence in the closing hours of the two men being that both were suddenly summoned to their rest just as they were making their final preparations for the summer holiday, and the goal of both being Switzerland. He was doubly orphaned at the age of seven, and was committed to the kind care of Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, of Deptford. He was educated privately, and was in no wise indebted to academic training for that wide popularity 4 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. and potent influence he was so singularly to win and wield. He was a scholar in the Sabbath School of the Eev. William Chapman, of the Greenwich Tabernacle ; and afterwards, removing to Lewisham, became the amanuensis of the Kev. Thomas Timp- son, Minister of Union Chapel, Lewisham, of which church he had become a member in 1835. It was while a scholar in the Greenwich School that he obtained that first little triumph of which he used to tell so quaintly. On a certain anniversary occasion when Rowland Hill was the preacher, it fell to the lot of young Paxton to repeat a chapter, according to one of the time-honoured cus- toms of the place. The chapel was thronged with people, drawn thither by the interest of the occasion and the presence of the great preacher and humorist from Surrey Chapel. In spite of the novelty of the position, — for it was his first public appearance, — the lad acquitted himself very creditably, and at the close, Rowland Hill, who had been watching and listening with very close interest, said kindly to the boy, " You — have — repeated — BIOGRAPHICAL. 5 that — chapter — very — well, — and — if — you — come — down — into— the — vestry — after — the — service, — I'll — give — you — Sixpence. " It was during his stay with Mr. Timpson that he began to devour The Penny Maga- zine, and other periodical literature, and fell under that spell of books which was destined to colour and control the whole of his after years. So great was his avidity for books that it is said, that in order to procure one he was most desirous of possessing, he once went almost without food for three days. While quite a lad (under fourteen), he joined the "West Kent Young Men's Society, and, although some demur had been made to his admission on account of his youth, an objec- tion overruled in consideration of his already decided literary tastes and abilities, he was chosen to read the first essay to the society. Shortly after this he became usher in an academy, and engaged in the preparation of a number of educational manuals of considerable value and repute. Before attaining his twenty-fifth year, he was actively at work for several publishers, and had been kindly taken notice of and 6 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. encouraged by the author of " The Pleasures of Memory," Samuel Sogers, at his house at 22, St. James's Street. The high value he attached to such a friendship was evinced by his dedication of a small volume to his patron in 1846. It is interesting to think of his visit to the great Nestor of literature in those days, and of the visit which Eogers in his turn had made to dear, dogmatic old Dr. Johnson. But young Hood's visit was the greater success ; for, as Eogers w T ould often tell his visitors, he had never got beyond ringing the bell at the old house at Bolt Court, his courage failed him at the last moment, and he ran away before the door was opened. They tell us that Eogers was full of sarcasm and splenetic spite, and yet the man who for three-quarters of a century had been the literary lion of London, who had received in his cheerful parlour, looking pleasantly out upon the Green Park, Wordsworth, Haydon, Scott, Wilkie, Sydney Smith, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Campbell, Thomas Moore, Caroline Norton, Keats, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and, indeed, every man and woman of mark in art and letters, had some very genial words for BIOGRAPHICAL. 7 3 r oung Hood, and said to him one day, " You have written lines, Mr. Hood, which have gladdened an old man's heart. " From 1837 to 1845, we find him in church fellowship at Midway Place, Deptford. Removing to London, he entered upon an active literary life, reading and writing inces- santly, and working hard as a lecturer at mechanics' institutes and as an advocate of the then unpopular cause of Temperance. Entering fully upon this campaign, he visited all parts of the country, his head- quarters being at Fulford, York. Here he wrote and published those twenty volumes entitled, " Paxton Hood's Library for Y r oung Men," which have so fascinated and stimu- lated so many thoughtful minds. It was while pursuing this active life of lecturer and Temperance advocate that, in 1845, he came under the influence of the author of " Anti - Bacchus " and " The Mental and Moral Dignity of Woman" — the Rev. Benjamin Parsons, of Ebley — whose " Life ' he was to write years afterwards with such a warm and reverent hand. At Fulford, in 1847. he married Miss "Wagstaff, of York. It was a 8 EDWIN PAXT0N HOOD. marriage of very real affection and promise, but the young wife died in giving birth to her first child, and " there fell upon his house a sudden. gloom. ,: Like all brave men, he found the surest and most effective anodyne in work ; and shortly after this heavy sorrow he compiled his " Encyclopaedia of Peace Facts. " At the suggestion of Mr. Parsons, and through his agency, he settled in the little village pastorate of North Nibley in .1852, with a stipend of some £40, and assisted his friend and mentor in the quiet ministra- tions at Ebley. A year later and he was united in marriage to Miss Elizabeth Barnby, of Hull, and again there seemed to loom before him a tender and beautiful home life. But not yet was the rest- fulness to come. She bore him gentle com- panionship for but two brief years, and then consumption did its work, and the little home at Nibley was hushed and darkened once more. How full those early years were of poverty, anxiety, disappointment, suffering, bereave- ment ! Looking upon his bright face and listening to his cheery laughter, you might never have guessed he had passed through so BIOGRAPHICAL. 9 dense a cloud ; but if you had the spiritual insight, you might have detected it in the deep, subjective teaching, the spiritual unfolding of the after years. The little town of North Nibley, Dursley, Gloucestershire, on the Cam, has a history that looks back as far as the pages of Domes- day Book ; the pleasant little place there embosomed among the hills lying midway between Cheltenham, Gloucester, and Bristol. It was the birthplace of Fox, the Bishop of Hereford, one of the supporters of the Refor- mation, and is famous for its quarries of tufa stone, its pin manufactories, its many looms, and its ruins of the ancient castle of the Lords of Berkeley. In all his subsequent wanderings Paxton Hood ever turns lovingly and tenderly towards this idyllic life in the Gloucester wolds — these scenes of his earliest ministry. " Beautiful Ebley ! " he says; " how the hills girdle it round, fringed with the magnificent skirting of waving trees ! Beautiful Ebley ! with its ancient meeting- house, so old-world-like and grotesque ; its unadorned pews and pulpit and rude organ strains, and its lovely little parsonage, so 10 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. quiet and holy, and its study looking out upon the place of graves ! Beautiful and serene burial spot ; a cemetery for its external beauty ; a garden, breathing beauty and fragrance round the sepulchre ; and the school house, with the low hum of children murmuring on the ear ; — or, if the Sabbath morning has called to worship, look at the crowds winding round the chapel-walks till the time of service has arrived, and then, in the temple, so rude and plain, what arrests you? — the earnest silence and love of that plain people — farmers, labourers, blacksmiths, weavers. Let us breathe a blessing on the spot ; let us breathe a prayer over that congregation ; for, as it rises before us, it is hallowed in our eyes ! " Looking back along the faded years, how we feel we should have liked to mingle with those simple village folk, and in the holy calm of those quiet Sabbath evenings have listened to the plain pulpit talk. But beautiful as was such a pastoral scene as this, and hallowed such associations, a wider arena awaited him, in the more feverish atmosphere of the City. The simplest prescience might predicate a larger area for the energies of a man like the BIOGRAPHICAL. 11 Village Pastor of Nibley. It is not surprising, therefore, that after some two or three vears in simple ministrations like these we find him coming up to London, and officiating for some months at Sion Chapel, Whitechapel, — one of the old conventicles built by the Countess of Huntingdon in 17U0, and almost precisely similar in form and arrangement to the old Surrey Chapel in Blackfriars, with its memories of Eowland Hill and James Sher- man ; or Spa Fields, Clerkenwell, so long the scene of the faithful labours of Thomas Thoresby. Like many another of these quaint old structures, it was rich in association. Here had come and laboured Owen of Bath and Cooper of Dublin ; stately George Clayton and that rugged old Matthew Wilks, of whose singularities here and at the Tabernacle in Moorfields, Paxton Hood was never tired of telling ; and genial James Sherman, and John Sortain, and Benjamin Parsons, the " Oberlin of Gloucestershire. " For a long time it was a place of " fallen fortunes," and has long been replaced by a building bearing the old historic name a little further east. Here Mr. 12 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Hood laboured for some months amidst many discouragements and serious difficulties, the church even then having fallen to a very low ebb. He had been introduced to the deacons by his revered friend and counsellor, Benjamin Parsons, who thus kindly and wisely writes to him when somewhat dejected and dispirited by the apparently sterile soil and unpropitious outlook: — " Tou must not be discouraged; you had better congregations than I had for my first Sabbaths. Every man in preaching must make his own fortune. He must have four things to real success : 1st, piety ; 2nd, talent ; 3rd, learning, elocution, &c. ; 4th, he must have God's Holy Spirit to bless his labours. I am more than ever convinced that the ministerial gift is from Christ. No gift on earth is equal to it. To make mankind and womankind thinking, pure, benevolent, God-like, is the most glorious employment on earth, the most praised in heaven. Lecturing to mechanics' institutes will be better paid here, but the salvation of souls will yield a better revenue hereafter. Why not pray to be baptized for the ministry, to be willing to bear its cross and BIOGRAPHICAL. 13 poverty ? If you are faithful, ' the crown of life ' will repay all." His own description of the place, published in his " Lamps of the Temple," is sufficiently graphic : " Does the reader know Sion Chapel, in Whitechapel, in London? It is the most huge and unwieldy place of worship we ever entered ; we feel almost inclined to say the most ugly, comfortless, and ungainly . . . with sittings to the number of three thousand five hundred which may be let, in addition to the immense space devoted to the free sittings." It was while labouring in the sequestered and unpropitious village church at Nibiey, that the congregation then worshipping at Twyford Hall, Caledonian Eoad, heard of him, and, on the introduction of his friend the Eev. T. Lloyd, late of St. Ives, he was invited to preach for them. The acceptance of such a request led very speedily to an invitation to the pastorate of the church, the new build- ing for which was just nearing completion in the Offord Eoad, Barnsbury, — his generous friend, the Eev. Dr. Morton Brown, of Chel- tenham, bearing gracious testimony on his behalf. He entered upon this ministry in 1857, 14 EDWIN PAXT0N HOOD. the Rev. Dr. Landels preaching the opening sermon in the new church : and at the Reco£- nition Service, shortly afterwards, we find the venerable Dr. Bennett offering the customary prayer, and his congenial friend and neigh- bour, Alfred Morris — whom he had sketched so appreciatively a few years previously in the " Lamps of the Temple " — preaching the ser- mon from the text, " As a man is, so is his strength.'' His wide departure from many of the treasured traditions and canons of pulpit mode and manner, and the undoubted eccen- tricity of thought and tone, had startled many of the "brethren " from their calm somnoles- cence and sense of decency and order, and as a consequence he had been well-nigh ostra- cised from some of the little cliques and coteries of the day. Coming to Barnsbury, however, was entering upon a fresher life, with a freer inspiration ; and very soon the pulpit of Offord Boad was the centre of a large-souled, cultured, sympathetic circle ; and so great was the proportion of young men attracted to the place that in a few months more than three hundred members were BIOGRAPHICAL. 15 enrolled in the Literary and Christian Insti- tute of which he was President. The same memorable year of his settlement at Barnsbury marked his third marriage. This time it was to be an enduring affection, a com- panionship that was to last for twenty-eight years, and was to prove to him the one great abiding blessing of his life. She who thus entered into his life, almost contemporaneously with his union with the beloved people of Offord Road, was Miss Lavinia Oughton, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Oughton, of Kingston, Jamaica. In every possible sense the wedded life was a happy, beautiful, and mutually helpful one, and she who had through long years borne him brave company, and lovingly ministered to him throughout his strangely chequered life, now mourns him in the shade and solitude of a widowed home. The newly-opened church was soon filled by an earnest, intelligent, appreciative audience. " Outsiders " — the restless ones who, while not outside all sympathy with Christianity, are nevertheless drawn into no church relation- ships — were attracted by this new preacher and poet, who put things so pertinently. 16 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. They fell under the spell of his eloquence they were charmed with his earnestness, and experienced a strange, electric touch in his enthusiasm. Here w r as a living man in the pulpit — full of nervous sensibility, with an unwonted felicity of expression, and with the broad arrow of fidelity to conviction stamped legibly upon all he said and did. In listening to Paxton Hood you knew you had a real, living man before you — not a duodecimo edition of " Theology/' printed on gilt-edged, rose-pink paper, and bound in calf. The world has need of men of his stamp. If you would kindle a flame in others you must have the fire yourself ; you must breathe the mountain air yourself if you would quicken the respiration of those who are fainting for a fuller life ; the winds of heaven must fan your cheek and beat about your brows if your voice is to peal through the valley of dry bones with vibrations that shall make them live. There was a ring of earnestness in all Paxton Hood's written or spoken words. You knew the man meant all he said, and desired in very earnest that you should believe it too. He was as much " possessed " of the truth he was en- BIOGRAPHICAL. 17 deavouring to unfold and to enforce as was Paul at Athens, Savonarola at Florence, Hermit Peter at Amiens, Bernard at Clairvaux, or Luther at Worms. The preaching of those years was a power, and the memories of it are sacred and sacra- mental. What other sermons linger in our memories, and pulse and throb, even after the long interval of years, as these do? That rest- ful one, " Safe to Land" ; that suggestive one, " The Sanctity of Touch " ; those lofty specu- lations, " Law, Nature, and Man"; or that on "The Samaritans," or "Divine Mirrors," or " The Power of an Invisible Presence " t What vivid impressions we preserve of those "Dark Sayings on a Harp," "The Art of Life," "Christ's Knowledge of Man," "The World's Great Hour," " The Power of a Sleep- less Night," "The Hidden Life," "Unful- filled Lives," " The Spectre's Question," "Doing and Dreaming," "The New Con- sciousness," " The Heavenly Liturgy," "Outward Bound," "Homeward Bound, ' : " Shadows of Good Things to Come," " The Story without an End," " The Jealous God," " God's Terrible Things" ! — those musings on 18 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. the Book of Job ; those meditations on " The Pilgrim's Progress " ; that startling sermon from the text, "Wherefore I was not dis- obedient to the heavenly vision " ; or that comforting one from the words, " And he wor- shipped, leaning upon the top of his staff" ! His sermons were pre-eminently suggestive. To enter into them at all was practically to lay out for yourself a w T eek of thought and amplification. He led you to the fringe of some great forest, and, pointing you along its leafy avenues, bade you enter and gather of the rich ripe fruit for yourself. In a sense, his was the true Socratic method. Having linked you on to some great mystery, or started you upon some road to the elucidation of such, you were startled at times by your own dis- coveries. Bitter disappointment lay before any who, going to hear Paxton Hood, expected all the thinking to be done for them while they, as placid spectators at a play, were simply gratified by a pleasant and powerful performance. " I would aim rather," he says, in his " Lamps, Pitchers, and Trum- pets," " to radiate than to vibrate, to enlighten than astonish." BIOGRAPHICAL, 19 After listening to Paxton Hood, we say, you were conscious of suggestions. He never took a text and exhausted it, leaving you only with the sense of wonderment, or dazzled with the dexterity of his art. You came away with material for many a quiet hour of meditation. Frequently the thought was only hinted at. It was not a luxurious listening to some sooth- ing and soporific music stealing over the soul, but an hour of mental and spiritual activity. You were wafted upon the wings of no azure fancy or rosy speculation into the lotus-eaters' paradise ; but, in quickening pulse and throb- bing heart, you felt fresh impulses stirring the spirit and calling all your faculties into action. Old truths were presented so strikingly that you were fain to say, " I never saw it in this wise; " or, at other times, thoughts that had often floated around you, nebular and impal- pable, were given to them a definiteness and shape that startled you, as he gave them a voice distinct and clear. It was shortly after his coming to Offord Eoad we first heard him, in those old impres- sionable days when we were wont to indulge in the dissipation of running to hear the great ■ -^^cwge- 1W*» »v> i , -> » « -. ,.<. omiUiHi 20 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. preachers of the day. Many were our Sunday pilgrimages to the Weigh House, to listen to Thomas Binney ; or at Hampstead Road, to T. T. Lynch. "We had been taken to hear Dr. John Harris and Dr. Pye Smith and Dr. Joseph Beaumont ; and now the taste created in those juvenile days had grown and de- veloped, and we listened appreciatively to Dr. Archer at Oxendon Street, and Samuel Martin at Westminster, Dr. Bayley at Argyle Square, Dr. Hamilton at Regent Square, to Baldwin Brown, and to George Dawson, on his occasional visits to South Place. One me- morable Sunday afternoon, a friend, with like eclectic tastes, announced that he had made a new discovery at Barnsbury; "Shakespeare in the pulpit " was the laconic verdict. That same evening we found our way to Offord Road. We knew not why, but we had imagined a man w T ith the voice and physique of Dr. Dale, of Birmingham. The first sight and sound were alike disappointing. Instead of the young, stalwart, vigorous, raven-haired man, with the clarion voice, was a meagre frame and a shrill shriek. All was different to our anticipation, and the first few moments were of doubt. But BIOGEAPIIICAL. 21 there was an accent as well as a tone, and a strange introspection in the prayer that was a new experience. Never had prayer before seemed so really a thing of spiritual contact ; and, then, the text was a peculiar one: "I will give unto him a white stone." A sermon different from all others, recalling no other style ; but lingering with a tenacity that no other preaching had ever done before, nor since. A more unconventional pulpit method it were almost impossible to imagine. How the man throbbed and palpitated beneath the influences of the occasion and the place ! How erratic, say some ! Yes ! Sometimes, in one of his lark-like flights, he would startle us by a verse of song — clear, resonant, thrilling ! "Singing in a sermon!" how very im- proper ! How it w^ould disturb the delightful placidities of some of our dignified divines, the "men of light and leading," who walk never but along the well-trodden paths ; Matthew Arnold's men of "culture" and "lucidity," who are so beautifully correct; and, like Ingoldsby's acolytes in Eheims Ca- thedral, are such " nice little boys " ! 00, EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. In view of very many of our modern pulpit performances, we have come to consider that preaching is almost a lost art amongst us. In place of introspection and subjectivity on the one hand, and of sympathetic powder of communication, of healthy stimulus and en- kindling, on the other, we have pretty plati- tudes and puerilities. The pulpit is often either commonplace and vulgar or statuesque and cold. Its traditions of fervid zeal and warm pulsations of life are faded and for- gotten. There are, of course, some very notable exceptions to such a generalisation, and we may, perhaps, be pardoned for think- ing that many such may be included within the limits of our modern Congregationalism, which compares most favourably with all other sections of the church, and furnishes, perhaps, some of the most noteworthy examples of pulpit power. Of course, among the ex- ceptions to which we refer, there is a vastly healthier mood and tone than that which dis- tinguished the men of a former generation. We have certainly outgrown that " kind of cold crystallisation of sanctified Chester- iieldism, for ever fearing to offend/' as BIOGRAPHICAL. Paxton Hood characterises very much of the old school. In our boyhood days there was a word often employed to designate the dignified dialectics of some of the memorable men of those times. We were wont to call them " prosy." The word has perhaps dropped out from our voca- bulary, but the quality is not extinct. Who, however, by the utmost stretch of the most vivid imagination, could ever thus regard and designate the Preacher of Offord Koad ? Who ever heard a dull sermon from Paxton Hood ? It might sometimes require a con- siderable amount of effort to follow him in some of his more daring speculations, from the simple fact that he moved at times in a world to which you were, perhaps, a stranger — lived in experiences to which you had not attained ; but, even if unable to follow him in some of his highest aerial flights, you were conscious of influences and impulses that were fresh and invigorating. You may be very sen- sible of an inspiration as you listen to the symphonies of Bach or the sonatas of Beethoven, even though you be incapable of very clearly defining the glint and glow 24 EDWIN PAXT0N HOOD. of the glamour they have thrown around yon. Such was Hood sometimes, for he was the subject of many of those moods and monitions known only to the poet soul ! And how varied were those tones, how changing the expe- riences ! Sometimes, the low, quiet whisper, as of a soul oppressed with a nameless sorrow, and anon the elan as of a strong fighter eager for the fray. Now, low murmurs as of breaking waves upon the shore, or soughing of the night wind, as he invited you to quiet meditations, and then, " by a way that you knew not," in swallow-like flights, up, up to the blue em- pyrean ; and then the winds, you knew not whence nor whither, blew about you, and the hywl of the preacher hovered and beat about you with its passionate energy, its resistless force. "With what celerity he moved, and yet with what intensity of thought and keenness of insight ! His words were wings, his sentences rhythambic and melodious, and as they moved they rippled into song. Very truly, perhaps, we may gauge the real fitness of the preacher by his power to stir into activity the moral and spiritual inertia of his hearers. In the preaching of Paxton Hood there was BIOGRAPHICAL. 25 ever the assurance that it was all the outcome of a very real and definite experience, that what he was supremely anxious should become yours had most indubitably been first his. He saw clearly, but only in proportion as he felt exquisitely. As Emerson very pithily puts it, " No man has a right perception of any truth who has not been reacted on by it." Here was a man of convictions, and hence his words were tonics for doubt-enfeebled spirits. " I will listen to any one's convictions/' said Goethe, " but pray keep your doubts to your- self, I have plenty of my own.' He could and did most heartily sympathise with you if you had been wandering in the cold cloud regions of the "Everlasting Xo " ; he had but little for you if you w T ere only wallowing in the " Centre of Indifference." His en- deavour was ever to lead you, through the healthy avenues of happy activities, from the mephitic glooms of sceptical inanitions, into the bracing atmosphere of faith and hope. How r frequently it comes to pass that the mental poverty of the preacher is concealed as some may think, revealed as the more dis- criminating affirm, by the stately army of — ». — '.. 26 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. words that file along with elephantine tread ! How often that the emphasis of the whole business is an affair " rather of italic letters/' as Alfred Morris said, "than of large thoughts." Choice as was the diction, and full the vocabu- lary, of Paxton Hood, the word was ever the vehicle of the idea, the vesture of the thought. We cannot conceive of Paxton Hood ap- proaching any subject of his pulpit meditation with the rule and compass of the mathe- matician, or the scalpel of the surgeon. As he got into the heart of it you saw the quickened glance, you felt the increased mo- mentum of the pulse. Do we not rightly say that the heart sees farther than the head ? That which is intended to awaken a new con- sciousness, enkindle a dying impulse, inform with pow T er a decrepit faith, must come pulsing out of a heart with a red baptism of blood upon it, hot with a passionate earnestness, yet spoken oftenest to the tremulous accom- paniment of tears. Sometimes his words rushed past you like the Ehone — impetuous, swift, impatient, a mighty torrent — you were fain to hold your breath ; sometimes they were short, crisp, sententious; sometimes elaborate BIOGRAPHICAL. 27 pictures, with all the graces of form and colour, tone, and clever chiaroscuro; sometimes quick arrows of light, flashes as of lurid lightning across a sable sky. Yet, whatever the fashion of the drapery, beneath its folds were very real and living thoughts ; the one necessitated and suggested the other ; and high and above all the mere mechanism was the true geist, the soul, that looked out from every lattice to quicken, illuminate, inflame ! A key to very much of Paxton Hood's pulpit method may be found in the preface to his first collected volume of Sermons, in which he says: — "I own myself to be much more desirous to convey ideas and impulses than the graces of sesquipedalian periods in the pulpit. I must do my best to interest my hearers, and therefore I am usually desirous of dropping the links by which I reached the rivet, and would much rather be esteemed a disciple of Henry Smith, or Thomas Adams, or Robert Eobinson as a preacher, than Robert Hall, Dr. Me All, or even Jeremy Taylor." In 1862 he accepted the pressing invitation of the church at Queen Square, Brighton, and ■U..L J.'jjg" , - ' .. >J^i ! .l.g.H. .■»JL!g^V»CJ>!ai,U 3H.-WCU U ' I HU..I L„ ■■ I «q.-.iUlu»i!»« » « i ! > 28 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. was succeeded at Offord Eoad by the Eev. John Pulsford, of Hull, author of that glorious book, "Quiet Hours," of "Christ and His Seed," and " The Supremacy of Man." There was a depth of wisdom the members of the church at Offord Eoad displayed in their selection of a successor to Paxton Hood. Searching through the whole catalogue of ministerial names in the " Congregational Year Book," no more appropriate choice could have been made than in John Pulsford, of Hull. He came to them on the introduc- tion and enthusiastic recommendation of Pax- ton Hood, who years before had spoken so eloquently and warmly of the author of " Quiet Hours"; retired from all association with outside movements, almost as much alone " as Eichter at Bayreuth, or Kant at Konigs- burg." He had spoken of him as " Emerson Christianised. " " The hearer," he says, "feels that he is with Moses, a face shining after talking with the Divine," and that he ahvays reminded him of the exquisite little poem, " Das Stille Land," of the Swiss poet, Salis. In Brighton Paxton Hood remained twelve years, attracting there, as everywhere, a BIOGRAPHICAL. 29 cultured and appreciative congregation, and, as was his wont, making troops of friends. Very happy were many of the experiences of these years on the Sussex coast ; and very helpful was the work done there. His influ- ence was, in many particulars, analogous to that of the revered and beautiful Frederick Robertson, and the rewards and the penalties of such were not dissimilar. Amongst the formidable difficulties with which he had, however, to contend, was that frightful incubus that lies so heavily and so frequently, like a dread nightmare, upon so many an Independent pastor — a heavy debt. How often such an encumbrance presses so heavily as to deaden the liveliest energies and nullify all spiritual power ! Paxton Hood was keenly alive to such effects as these, and with characteristic industry set to work to the re- moval of the cause. By dint of sheer hard work, by lecturing and writing, and in many another way, he succeeded in clearing off a long outstanding debt of £1,800, and in raising an additional £5,000 for the various institu- tions of the church. How susceptible he was to the freezing influences of these dreadful —•--.-:"- ----- ~.. ,.•-... .-.-..- . .... ..,,.. . fc 30 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. church debts was manifested in the heartily appreciative manner in which he spoke to us of his deacons soon after his settlement at Falcon Square, how " they had left him free from all the financial cares and burdens of the place." During all this time the former prosperity of Offord Road had been gradually and mournfully declining. John Pulsford had, after a stay of six years, left London for Edinburgh, and the place seemed to lose its spirit and its power. It ever must be, in the history of any church, an important and difficult crisis when the relationship between itself and a pastor of a singularly accentuated individuality is severed. We can hardly imagine a church in greater straits than this at Offord Eoad. John Puls- ford was, as we have said, perhaps the very happiest selection as a successor to Paxton Hood. Both were men of strongly marked personality, and at the same time there was between them so much sympathy of thought and mode of presentment ; but when John Pulsford, in his time, was transferred to another sphere of service, the difficulty was aggravated and intensified, and so it came to "on' BIOGRAPHICAL. 31 pass that although the men who followed were beyond all questioning, good and Godly men, yet, having a less significant and distincti cachet upon their thought and method, the fortunes of Offord Koad drifted to a very low ebb. It was under these circumstances and repre- sentations that Paxton Hood, in 1873, in an ill-advised hour as some have thought, con- sented to return. The old debt that had been so heavy a burden in the old days remained. He came back in obedience to a generous instinct, and this time the " call " was to a smaller stipend. The work had languished. Many of those who had clustered around him in those early years of his first ministry there, had entered into new Church relationships, and although many of the warmest of his oldest friends were left to fight under the old flag together, the church was, in many essential respects, a different one. The place was the same, and had all the beautiful and sacred associations of the voiceful past still clinging to it — but the church was different. No wonder, then, that in less than five short years the ties were again 32 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. broken — broken in very real sadness, as we can testify — and the pastor removed to Cavendish Chapel, Manchester. Well do we remember that farewell service at Offord Road. How affectionately he spoke of the pleasant associations of the place, of the warm friendships that had been formed, of the tender links about to be severed ; and then, pointing from pew to pew, of the many whom he had known and loved who had " gone home, to be forever with the Lord" — "the place is full of ghosts," he said ; and then, how reverently and lovingly he spoke of the many "to whom it has been my chief delight as it has been my highest honour to minister"; of Dr. John Young, the former minister of Albion Chapel, Moorgate, the author of " The Christ of History," who had been a very frequent attendant upon his ministry ; of Dr. Living- stone, who had come hither one Sabbath even- ing to worship ; of the Cuthbertsons ; of Dr. Leifchild, and Dr. Davies, of the Eeligious Tract Society; of Mr. Stratten, Dr. George Macdonald, and of many w r ho had cheered him by their presence and sympathy. AVhat a hand- shaking it was ; and how reluctant we all were BIOGRAPHICAL. 33 to leave the place endeared to us by such precious memories, and which, as a pastor, was to know him no more. Into that hour there seemed to be pressed very much of the pathos of that memorable parting at Ephesus, when Paul almost broke the leal and loving hearts of his faithful friends by the assurance that they should " see his face no more." The new relationship at Manchester was not destined to be as happy a one as those into which he had formerly entered. There was the same magnetic influence to draw around the Cavendish pulpit the thoughtful and the earnest ; again young men discovered in the new comer one to whom they might take, with certainty of comprehension and sympathy, their perplexities and doubts ; but there was a leaven there, working silently but surely, destined by-and-by to disturb the serenity and blight the promise of the bright begin- ning. The political fortunes of the country had been committed to the hands of my Lord Beaconsfield, and, marvel of marvels, the " Jingo " spirit of which he was the source and the inspiration, found its way to Man- 3 WU-t ■ ■" g ui E MjH Wiil m ,i ^ j i a ^ un c v 34 EDWIN PAXT0N HOOD. Chester, and even within the recesses of a Congregational church. The man who loved and reverenced William Ewart Glad- stone could hardly have been expected to possess much respect for Benjamin Disraeli. To recognise earnestness, rigid sense of right, and religious tone in the one, was necessarily to have small love for the gilt and tinsel, the speciousness and theatricality of the other. When, therefore, to the glittering follies of the Beaconsfield Cabinet was added the crowning iniquity of the Afghan War, no wonder the righteous soul of the old Peace Delegate was roused within him, was lashed into a very real and lofty indignation, and that his voice denounced the crime with no uncer- tain sound. His vigorous protests against the " spirited ' foreign policy of the Government of the day provoked the ire of some of the Tory members of the diaconate ; they denounced the fearless advocate of right against might, and of prin- ciple against policy, whether "spirited" or otherwise; a breach was made, and very soon it became clearly evident that to carry on the work of a successful Christian min- BIOGRAPHICAL. OO istry under such conditions was impossible. Mr. Hood resigned his pastorate in 1880, and after ministering for twelve months to a large number of faithful friends " who had not bowed the knee to Baal," in the Hulme Town Hall, he resolved to seek rest and recreation for perturbed spirit and aching heart and tired brain in a lengthened sojourn in the United States. But the vituperation, the heartlessness, the attempts to wound through the ostracism of faithful friends, had done their work, and the seeds of the fatal malady were sown. On the eve of his departure a public break- fast was given in his honour by his loyal friends at Cavendish, and a cheque for £200 handed to him as a testimony of their admira- tion of his manly protests against the evil policy of the Government at the time of the General Election. We cannot refrain from quoting part of a letter, written to the chairman of the committee on this occasion, by the late Eight Hon. Henry Fawcett, M.P., the Postmaster - General : — " It is a great disappointment to me that I shall not be able, in consequence of a longstanding ^ > V >OT»V Va »— S»-«W>- 36 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. engagement, to be present at the farewell luncheon to the Rev. E. Paxton Hood. I should have been particularly glad to have had an opportunity of attending a gathering, the object of which is to do honour to one who, I have no hesitation in saying, has always been amongst the foremost to protest against injustice, and to help on every cause calcu- lated to promote the well-being of the people. It is now more than seventeen years since I met Mr. Paxton Hood, on the occasion of my first contest at Brighton. At that time the absorbing political question was the American Civil War. Mr. Paxton Hood was one of the staunchest supporters of the North, and the eloquent appeals he then made on behalf of the cause of human freedom, produced an im- pression on me I shall never forget." The happy relationship of pastor and people thus rudely and roughly severed, he deter- mined, as we have said, to seek solace for a chafed spirit and a dream too soon dispelled in a sea voyage and a visit to America. Anent this visit, The Christian World said : " Had he happened to be a dull, perfectly safe man, reticent on all public questions, distin- BIOGRAPHICAL. 37 guished for ' tact ' rather than for boldness, it is probable he would not now have been free to visit ' our kin beyond sea ' ; but being a man of genius, and not one of the ' orthodox dry sticks/ which Mr. Pulsford tried to burn up a few weeks ago, and apt, therefore, to say and do things that startle and vex the official mind, he has been permitted to go upon his travels.' He w T as absent during some months, visiting all parts of the Union ; making the acquaint- ance of many of the most prominent of its poets, preachers, and men of letters ; preach- ing and lecturing in many of its most famous churches, and writing a series of graphic, cheery, chatty letters to The Christian World. Amid the multifarious labours of that distinc- tively busy life, he found time for frequent foreign travel. In the course of his lecturing tours and preaching ' peregrinations, he had w r andered through every English county, and in various summer holidays he had roamed through France and Germany, Holland and Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, and even through Sweden and Norway, gathering ever fresh materiel, and receiving ever new impres- sions. This sojourn on the American Continent » •'• *» ? ™ ' " •? msr. 38 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. was not the least pleasurable of these experi- ences, and he referred again and again during these last years to the impressions of those months, and his determination to renew them at no very distant date. On his return from America, he, in 1882, received and accepted a pressing invitation to the pastorate of the church at Falcon Square, vacant by the transfer of the Kev. Justin Evans to Clement Duke's old pulpit in the Middleton Eoad, Dalston. What far-reaching memories has this old City church, — a history that looks back upon the old Puritan times, and with traditions that are inspirations ! With the sole exception of the City Temple — to which the old church worship- ping in the Poultry migrated — founded but two years previously, it is the oldest Independent Church in London ; formed by Philip Nye, one of the " Dissenting Brethren V of the Westminster Assembly ejected on the termi- nation of the Commonwealth. Here, in a glorious succession of faithful men have followed — Thomas Cole, John Singleton, Daniel Neale, the Historian of the Puritans, Eoger Pickering, Dr. Seaman, John Howe, BIOGRAPHICAL. 39 Chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, Dr. Thomas Jacomb, Dr. Daniel Williams, the founder of the famous library, John Shower, Thomas Reynolds, John Spademan, Samuel Rosewell, Jeremiah Smith, Daniel Mayo, Thomas Bures, Samuel Hayward, John Chater, Jacob Dalton, William Smith, David Bogue, Thomas Wills, Robert Caldwell, Evan John Jones, Dr. Bennett, John Bartlett, John Sidney Hall, George Critchley, and W. Justin Evans. Befitting life's close, these last years at Falcon Square seem to have passed very quietly and serenely ; asperities had been softened, experiences had mellowed, sorrows had refined ; not but that the individuality of the man was as pronounced and sharply defined as ever. Some of his latest pulpit utterances here, were those on " The Gospel in our Modern Poets," in which the teachings of the great Prophet-Bards, Tennyson, Browning, Long- fellow, and others, were considered, expounded, and applied. That such unorthodox work as this should provoke the opposition of narrow bigotry and " learned ignorance," va scrns dire. The forty years of Paxton Hood's public life were in every respect eventful ones, and 40 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. commenced before the great changes imme- diately preceding them had lost their early vigour and freshness. The new order of things induced by the passing of the Reform Bill had hardly had time to shape themselves into a concrete form. The Repeal of the Corn Laws had only quite recently still further accentuated these changes, while on matters ecclesiastical and religious, the great Oxford movement of Pusey, Keble, and Newman had given them a totally new complexion. The old leaven had not been entirely eradicated, the new was still in its initial processes of fermentation. These forty years cover an interval which may be best described as transitional ; an era of restless activities and new departures. The greatest event of the last nineteen centuries, perhaps, the French Revolution of 1789, found a very natural and further development in that of 1848, which, soon overleaping the narrow limits of its earliest arena in the valley of the Seine, found an ampler theatre over nearly the whole European Continent. The torch of Freedom had again been kindled in Paris, and, if but a fitful flame, the lurid light was reflected in the capitals of Hungary and Italy, Germany BIOGRAPHICAL. 41 and England, and from out those troublous times there stepped forth men like Garibaldi, Cavour, Kossuth, Mazzini, and Louis Blanc. The forces stirring the political and social life of those years permeated all departments of human activity, colouring and controlling science, literature, art. The year 1851 came and went, and with it not only the Great Aladdin Palace in Hyde Park, but alack ! and alas ! the bright millen- nial glories it had symbolised and predicted. The Temple of Janus was at length once more to be closed and for ever, and yet within a space of thirty years ensuing, Europe was destined again and yet again to be wrapped in flame and deluged in blood. In quick succession to the universal hand-shaking, the enthusiastic toasts and pyrotechnic jubilations of the World's Fair, followed the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the colossal Civil War in America, the Austro-Prussian, Russo-Turkish, Franco-Russian, and other sanguinary cam- paigns, fought with all the advantages of the latest "resources of civilisation " that human ingenuity and Satanic malignity could devise ; together with some of the most iniquitous in mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm* 42 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. which this country has ever been engaged, the foul slaughter of Sikhs and Kaffirs, Chinese, Burmese, Abyssinians, Ashantees, Maoris, Boers, Zulus, Afghans, and Soudanese, each deepening with a darker shade of shame. In these years the map of Europe has been almost entirely rearranged ; many have been the " Monarchs retired from business" ; small states groaning beneath the ban of kingcraft and priestcraft have been merged in larger and perhaps freer ones, and the nightmare reign of " Napoleon le Petit," w r hich had its inception in the dark and dastardly Coup d'Etat of 1851, collapsed in night and ruin, only to lead the way for the unification of a powerful and enlightened German Empire. We have spoken of the Tractarian move- ment in the Establishment. These same years saw still another and a greater chasm in the serried ranks of Wesleyan Methodism ; the last dogmatic despotism of the Conference and the leaping into life of a freer and robuster offshoot destined to develop into the Methodist Free Church. Almost every Church communion has been rent and torn by internal strife in these eventful years, memorable to Congregationalists BIOGRAPHICAL. 43 alas ! by the cruel and merciless persecution of the gentle author of " The Rivulet." On the other hand, they have seen, thanks to the per- sistent obstinacy and fearless pertinacity of the Liberation Society, the abolition of church- rates, some measure of burial and marriage law reform, and the abolition of the State Church in Ireland. If they have been made remarkable by Home's pronunciamento of the dogma of Papal infallibility, they have been rendered illustrious by the emancipation of the negro slaves in America, and the enfran- chisement of the people. They have wit- nessed also gigantic strides in Temperance and Social Purity, and the passing of the Education Act of 1870, destined, perhaps, to become more potent in the work of national progress than anything beside. Every department of mental culture has been quickened to a healthier life, and the times have been pregnant with mightiest achievements in the domains of Science, Liter- ature, and Art. In these, perhaps, feverish activity and daring speculation have been most singularly apparent. Darwin, Haeckel, Tyndal, Huxley, Helmholtz, and Pasteur have changed 4^ a ^^ l i ll v , l .F,..i..i>i ww p«iiii | I L i , i M l ... ii .i iii UUW.R.^U LmwMlJHJU-1.ilUW.WJUfcJJ g bP.i l 44 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. the whole current of all previous scientific thought and teaching. Evolution has passed from its early province of affrighting earnest, believing souls, into one at least of hypothesis if not of demonstration. Art in all its depart- ments has been marvellously prolific, and these forty years include the names of Millais and Leighton, Holman Hunt, Josef Israels, Meissonier, Gustave Dore, Munkacsy, Balfe, Wallace, Verdi, Gounod, Auber, Rossini, Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Meyerbeer. It has had its fresh departures in its pre-Eaphaelite and aesthetic coteries ; while as to the depart- ment of Letters, no similar period has been so remarkable for its fecundity : Carlyle, Emer- son, Victor Hugo, Tennyson, the Brownings, the Brontes, George Eliot, Dickens, Long- fellow, Bulwer, Euskin, and Thackeray, have made the age an Augustan one indeed. It w r as into these turbulent, troublous , vigorous and exuberant years that Paxton Hood was thrown ; he was cast upon the stormful tides, he entered into the varying moods, and reflected them all in the restless activities of his own many-coloured and event- ful life. IN THE PULPIT. IN reading the sermons of Paxton Hood how conscious we become that they can give at best but a very poor impression of what they were when they thrilled from his lips, when they were accompanied by the quick glance and sympathetic tone and appropriate gesture. Very strikingly and impressively he intimates such a reflection in his own sketch of Thomas Binney. "In nothing," he says, " is death so painfully triumphant as in that he carries away the accent and the smile and the subtle power of soul which runs along the sentences and informs them with something more than themselves and bids them live." There was a marvellous magnetism in his mode. He was master of all your emotions, and could almost a volontc provoke your smiles or impel your tears, kindle your loves, subdue your hates, and play upon your passions like a skilful organist upon his instrument. 46 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Paxton Hood was ever impressed with the magnificent mission of the pulpit, its possi- bilities and responsibilities, its requirements and its rewards ; and ever, too, of the duties and destinies of the Church, as a protest against the materialism and the flippancy of a cold and sceptical age. His conception of a " Church " was ever a large one. Well do we remember him in the old St. Martin's Hall, in Long Acre, at one of the Liberation Society's meetings, as he advocated the fetter- less freedom of the Church ; how he raised the enthusiasm of that crowded audience to a white heat of passionate earnestness, and then, when the storm had in part subsided, how, in a lower key, but in tones that linger even yet more lovingly in our ears, he said: " The Church! what is the Church? The Church is not a building, not an Ecele- siasticism . . . but voices and spirits that touch angels and touch God — that is the Church ! " Here are some earnest words of his upon this serious business of preaching: — "It is an age of intense and vivid mental action ; an age of knowledge and thought and indue- IN THE PULPIT. 47 tion ; an age in which men have surren- dered their habits of primitive faith, and yet demand reasons that shall meet upon the proper region of faith — the world of the emo- tional and the intuitional. Never before did man so long for ' the evidence of things not seen/ and never before did the road to the unseen appear so impassable and steep. It is an age profoundly metaphysic and self-con- scious, yet an age in which man is too im- patient to examine his consciousness. The men of thought have cast behind them tra- ditional faith and traditional worship. His- torical faith, it is seen more clearly than ever, is no saving faith. The base of belief must be, not in our father's consciousness but in our own. . . . Christian minister, can you do anything for it and with it? If you cannot, you had better leave it alone. Every time you attempt to reply to the infidelity to which you cannot reply, you pour now blood, fresh life into your adversary ; your power to meet your sceptical friend depends on your occupancy of a reserved ground of argument and experience — a field he has never entered — a region over which he has never travelled and of which he 48 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. did not even know the existence. As long as he only sees you beckoning him to a continent round which he has coasted, he may say, ' I have been there ; I found no rest for the sole of my foot there ; I know that land better than you ; I lost myself in its labyrinths and swamps. No ! Yonder is not the promised land, and you, I see, cannot guide me to it.' " The profession of the preacher must be en- circled and impelled by quite other conditions than the lawyer's or physician's ; the ethics of jurisprudence and the diagnoses of disease may be approached professionally, the pulpit is hors ligne. To touch men's spirits and quicken men's moral perceptions, to deal with men's souls, is the most serious of all businesses with which a man can intermeddle ; sorry work will be made of it if his ideal be not a lofty one, if he fail to comprehend, in the quite unconven- tional acceptation of the word, the dignity of the pulpit. Men speak in tones of hesitancy of the eternal verities of our Faith, or affectedly toy with the treacherous foe that is eating the heart out of it. Men are yearning for an IN THE PULPIT. 49 atmosphere free of the moral miasma of our low valleys of doubt and indistinctness, are struggling to emerge from the dense adumbra- tions of incertitude, and they are met with a great " Perhaps." They are impatient of shift- ing sand, and, instead of solid rock, they are comforted with an Hypothesis. They are con- scious of an ever-deepening twilight, and eyes are eager for the " City that hath founda- tions," unsteady fingers point them along away that ends too often in the " City of Dreadful Night/' Very much of the old faith seems- to be undergoing a process of disintegration,- Much of its fervour is drifting into decadence, many of its old and cherished forms are sinking into desuetude and death. Everything seems pointing to, and panting for, a readjust- ment. Iconoclastic hands are raised against many of its treasured traditions. The induc- tive is replacing very much of the deductive. The scientific method is applied to all details of religion as to all other matters. The air is charged with a new life ; new modes of thought and new presentments of truth are demanded. If dogmatic teaching as such is declining, a teaching distinct and authoritative is required. 4 50 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. The era is a transitional one, and men are wanted to meet the exigencies of the situation. Paxton Hood, by the possession of many and varied qualities was one of such. There are always men coming into our churches, with a very deep sense of life's mystery, with a very real experience of its battle and burden, who are ever looking at life's dark questions through the lens of tears, who are fainting for the comforting word and the strengthening solace of sympathy. "What they want is not psychological analysis, meta- physical anatomy, spiritual vivisection, but a strong tonic that shall brace up enfeebled energies and revivify fast fading hopes. Is it not a heartless taunt to meet such with an attenuated edition of the Atomic Theory, with puerile platitudes respecting molecular par- ticles, or mystical reveries upon elective affinities ? In such a church there may be something approaching mental plethora, there certainly will be an ever-deepening spiritual atrophy. To meet successfully conditions like these a man is wanted who, amid the fashion- able agnosticism that has entered and per- meated'so much of our modern religious life, is IN THE PULPIT. 51 " not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ " ; who can point with unerring finger to a higher and healthier life ; can so teach and testify, impel and influence ; can lead them through the dark corridors of doubt and diffidence, awakening the living consciousness that the via lacis is and ever must be the via cruris, that salva- tion in its deepest and truest sense is ever through the sacrifice and propitiation of the Christ. Men were wont at times to scan the " Year- Book " to learn at what University the preacher of Offord Eoad had graduated. He was wont to answer all such supercilious com- ment by the assertion that it was at Nibley, amidst its poverty and sorrow, its corroding anxieties and dark bereavements, that he passed his "college course." Scientific divinity, apologetics, exegesis, of necessity enter into the training and life of the theologian ; a more encyclopaedic knowledge, a nearer relationship to the kaleidoscopic moods and experiences of men, are necessary to the mental and moral equipment of the teacher of religion. To deny the advantages of academic train- ing in times like these would be to expose one- 52 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. self to the well-merited satire of all thoughtful minds ; and yet the question presents itself at times — in this department, that of the vocation of the Christian preacher and teacher, — has a strictly theological training at all times de- veloped the highest type of such ? To meet the needs of the thoughtful men of our churches, does Cheshunt invariably exceed in value the training of Lombard Street and Cheapside ? Is not the semi-recluse life of a theological student, admirable in a sacerdotal church like the Eoman Catholic, detrimental at times to our Free Church life, in that it cuts off from all practical relationship, i.e., sympathy, with the peculiar trials, temptations, difficulties of those whose lives are spent in more active energies and environments? Of course, its effect is according to the perceptive or recep- tive faculty of the subject. Perhaps the whole range of Paxton Hood's religious teaching may best be summarised in the words of F. W. Robertson, of Brighton, in reference to his own — a most apt and compre- hensive characterisation. " The principles on which I have taught are — First, the establish- ment of positive truth instead of the negative IN THE PULPIT. 53 destruction of error. Secondly, that truth is made up of two opposite propositions, and not found in a via media between the tw r o. Thirdly, that spiritual truth is discerned by the spirit instead of intellectually in proposi- tions ; and, therefore, truth should be taught suggestively not dogmatically. Fourthly, that belief in the human character of Christ's humanity must be antecedent to belief in His Divine origin. Fifthly, that Christianity, as its teachers should, works from the inward to the outward, and not vice versa. Sixthly, the soul of goodness in things evil." With very real delight we quote our Preacher on this theme of the method and mission of the pulpit. " The only point of interest w T e have been able to see in any preacher is his power over mind to rouse and awaken or con- trol it, as the body of any man is interest- ing only as it is the representative of the spirit within. Who is the most suc- cessful minister ? What is your standard o success ? Who is most capable of meet- ing spiritual wants and necessities? Who is most fitted to give the aliment and food to train up to mental and moral manhood ? 54 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Who is felt to be the most simple yet lofty in his conceptions and his teachings ? "Who exercises the most durable influence over the faith and the life ? This man, wherever he is, is the most successful teacher ; his is the most honoured pulpit; he is the most capable in- structor. We protest against a stereotyped ministration. Our settled conviction is that the pulpit lags behind the age. The pulpit is too dignified, is too fastidious, is too polite, too pedantic, too nonchalantic. . . . There is too much faith in the intellectual letter, too little in the moral life. There is mighty faith in worn-out and threadbare technicalities. The people of the land are waiting for a Christianity warm from the Cross of Jesus. Such a Christianity will not be in vain in its teachings. But new colleges will not aid it much, for what is needed is not so much in- tellectual sympathy and training, but moral sympathy, moral discipline ; these are the only mighty teachers, these are the unfailing pro- fessors. We would inquire of our minister , Have you suffered? Has God made you capable of suffering ? Have you had to bear a very weighty cross ? In reality, have you IN THE PULPIT. 55 seen Jesus ? In reality, have your experiences been deep ? No man has any right to preach who has not, in deep, terrible, awful reality known the affirmation of all these questions. No man has any right to preach who has not had the impress of the finger of God and the Cross of Jesus burnt into his soul.' , Here is a significant passage from one of his arlier books anent the difference between morning and evening services, which will com- mend itself especially to those to whom he ministered : — " Morning services have more of gentleness ; the audience is smaller, more Christian, and more loving. It is almost a test of a minister's Christian life. Does he find himself more at home preaching morning or evening? The holier heart will love the morning usually the best, for it will address the nobler auditory ; in the evening there is more of human passion, more of effort, more of display. John would preach best in the morn- ing, talking to little children ; Peter would preach best at night, impulsive, fervid, vehe- ment." Mr. Hood's sermons were well thought out ; had been burnt in upon brain and heart. Some- 58 - EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. times he would read from long and carefully collated notes, but ever the sudden inspiration was the most memorable feature in the sermon, and produced not only the most immediate but the longest-lived results. According to the dictum of Quintillian, Paxton Hood's elo- quence was of the highest order, for it was mostly extemporaneous. Stepping aside from all those closely riveted thoughts that had been so cleverly linked together in the study, he would seize upon a fleeting emotion, grasp and enchain a new conception born of the passing circumstance. Well do we remember how one memorable Sunday evening he sud- denly wove into the texture of his discourse the scream of a railway engine rushing along at the rear of the chapel. He would seize the lightning of the passing storm, and dash it into his picture. Yes, it is quite true he was interjectional, rhapsodical at moments if you will — all this, but He was always more desirous to bring an idea prominently before you and to fix your gaze upon it until you recognised it as he recognised it, than to captivate you with its delicate drapery or graceful setting. He was, IX THE PULPIT. 57 too, not so anxious, like Bossuet, to prove religion to you, as, like Fenelon, to make you love it. Speculations about God must rise to the loftier platform of faith in God. That is a wise word of Joseph Cook, of Boston : " The Seer is the Logician who melts his logic in the fire of his emotion." Paxton Hood was not destitute of logical sequence, of synthesis and syllogism, bat to him the logical faculty never so obtruded itself as to remind you of the classified skeleton in a museum of comparative anatomy ; it was there, truly there, but covered with symmetri- cal flesh and polished skin, giving structural form and solidity to the whole. The age is a composite one, on the one side the inquiring, anxious, earnest souls, per- plexed amid the endless jargon of the schools, feeling out w T ith trembling finger in the dark- ness "if haply they may find out God"; a cultured dilettantism on the other, seeking lucidity in the fitful flare of the ignis fatuus or the pale, cold light of moonbeam and star- beam. Traditionalism, with its parchments and its scrolls, hanging the grave-clothes of an effete Faith upon the shoulders of the man who 58 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. is struggling to be free ; and Sensationalism, with its aesthetics frosting the lattice through which the wearied watcher looks out upon the unseen ; and Positivism, with its mathemati- cal rule and compass seeking to solve life's problems without a soul. Men are hungering and thirsting for some- thing that will meet their deepest needs ; and Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, and Herbert Spencer, and Haeckel, and Eenan offer them their synthetic philosophies, their theosophies and teleologies, their ideologies and sociologies and cosmogonies, their pan- theisms and positivisms, — and "the still, sad music of humanity " only deepens to an ever- drearier dirge and minor tone. What men want is not a summer arbour of pretty rose- leaf fancies, but a firm fortress of rock-founda- tioned faiths. "We want the man who can insinuate him- self into our confidences and affections — one who can interpret the young man's dream and offer some solution to the young man's doubt ; one who can enter into the experiences of the old man who has outgrown all his friends and finds it so difficult to form a new relationship ; IN THE PULPIT. 59 one who has words that throb in their hearti- ness for the enthusiasm, of young manhood and womanhood — words that thrill in their tenderness for hearts that ache with sorrow and are burdened with care ; words of cheer for the despondent, and of comfort for the sad ; words that meet the loneliness of some and the super-sensitiveness of others ; — who can bring the Cana-joy to the table at the wedding feast, and the beautiful tenderness of Bethany to the dark desolation of the chamber of death. Unless the preacher and teacher is a 11 myriad-minded man," how many of the experiences of his people elude his grasp, and pass quite outside and away from his sympathy and contact? but, should he essay to counsel and direct when unrelated by any identity of experience and impression, it must be with ever-certain failure, or even worse than such. There is a striking passage in that most manly and helpful book, " Yeast," of Charles Kingsley's, where Lancelot relates his visit to the vicar, to whom he went, in his doubts and difficulties, for leading and guidance : — "'I went to him to be comforted and guided. 60 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. He received me as a criminal. He told me that my first duty was penitence ; that as long as I lived the life I did [the poor fellow's chief delinquency lay in the fact that he was not a member of his Church], he could not dare to cast his pearls before swine by answering my doubts ; that I was in a state incapable of appreciating spiritual truths ; and, therefore, he had no right to tell me any.' 'And what,' said Argemone, 'did he tell you?' 1 Several spiritual lies instead, I thought.' " Paxton Hood was never impatient of doubt, but devoutly sympathetic with it. He knew too well that to endeavour to dam up the gurgling rivulet that pants toward a wider sea of knowledge is but to force it to overleap its banks, and form a marsh of scepticism and infidelity. The mode of statement of a truth is ever tentative, and here there can be no finality. Fundamental truths are, and must be per force, immutable ; the fashion of their vesture is ever changing. Truths are eternal, formula evolve. How momentous is the mission and work of the Christian preacher and teacher ; and with what a variety of mental, moral, and spiritual IN THE PULPIT. Gl conditions is he brought in contact ! Victims of life's dull monotony and hard exigency, of ever-deferred hope and deepening shadow, of corroding care and depressing doubt. Men and women weary w T ith the wear and worry of the week ; hearts with well-nigh all the hope crushed out, breaking hearts — there are always breaking hearts — and unless there is a very deep tenderness in the tone, and a very earnest and incisive quiver in it too, unless the man throbs with life and palpitates with passion, and is aglow with the sense of the tremendous possibilities before him, he will be powerless to lift a single cloud, to pierce a single gloom. He has but one short hour to plead, inform, impel, with a whole week waiting with its cruel indifference and the stultifying influences of its cold scepticism, its selfish maxims, and its greed of gain, to deaden and efface. Some men have large stores of mental wealth — a rich harvest of long-accumulated knowledge, gleanings from all fields of litera- ture, crystals and gems from all mines of scientific lore, and yet, somehow, they have lost the key ; the treasures are all carefully locked up, but for all practical purposes they 62 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. are only so much priceless lumber. De Quincey says, in one of his most thoughtful essays, that "it is impossible to forget anything.' ' As a metaphysical dictum this may be true and capable of logical proof, and yet there are not infrequent instances of the possessors of so many intellectual acquisitions labouring under a mental plethora, their lore and learning being in very truth an emharras de richesses ; and although it may be metaphysically correct to say that it is "impossible to forget, " they yet may as truly be said to lack the power of remembering. Or if, on some rare occasion, the stores are revealed, and their possessor is tempted to a dispensation of them, the dole is so small that you are painfully reminded of the leathern jack at the postern of St. Cross — Dole, and not largesse, is the measure of their gift. In the case of Paxton Hood, you were welcome to all he had. He knew just where to lay his finger upon his treasure. He was ever " seeking to communicate," all items of knowledge, "unconsidered trifles, " quaint and curious lore, found their niche, their ap- propriate setting, their practical utility. In a sense, far removed from its most vulgar IN THE PULPIT. 63 interpretation, Paxton Hood was a popular preacher. Although he could attract an im- mense following in some of the largest halls and churches in the land, his most enduring work was that which was accomplished in the comparatively small churches at Barnshury and Brighton. With rare exceptions, it is not the great church, with its luxurious belongings, its undoubted "respectability," its "attractive" service, and its large " collections," that exerts the truest, most beneficent, and most enduring influence. The Old Weigh House, wdth its rich memorials and sanctified associations, has passed away before the encroachments of our restless civilisation, and Thomas Binney sleeps soundly in Abney Park, but its traditions are a treasured possession, its influence radiates yet. Thomas Lynch ministered to but a meagre audience in that unpretentious little chapel in the Hampstead Boad; but the gentle spirit still moves amongst us. The whole question of popularity is an interesting and a difficult one. There are men to the front to-day, and who have been to the front for long years, who present some of the most difficult of problems, as you ask yourself, 64 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. "Whence? and "Wherefore ? Some, doubtless, are living on a reputation of a quarter of a century since, the very raison d'etre of which has been long forgotten. Some have been borne into their places on the waves of con- flicting but fortuitous circumstances. Others by something bizarre in manner or piquant in tone. Others by a clever knack of keeping themselves continually en evidence. There are not wanting men in our larger churches whose notoriety arises mainly from the fact that they are in the larger churches. Some because of their political proclivities — men who provoke applause upon the party platform, and never impel an impulse in a prayer-meeting. Some whose diction is faultless, but who were never known to kindle a spiritual emotion in any human soul ; men far more concerned with the graces of style and the niceties of language than the yearnings of burdened hearts, the aspirations of contrite spirits. The story of their ministry is one long success, minus the conversion of sinners — wealthy audiences, aesthetic ornamentation, attractive architec- ture, scientific music; but the experience of a contrite heart seeking leading over the IN THE PULPIT. 65 threshold into " the peace that passeth under- standing M would be a startling and a perplex- ing one. In all such organisations claiming to be centres of spiritual activity, the great desidera- tum must surely be a trembling sensibility, linking itself instinctively to the burdens and disappointments, the doubts and despondencies, of aching hearts ; a grand capacity for sym- pathy; an insight so clear that it can point with unerring finger the way from the soul's restlessness to rest; a love so compelling that its highest aspiration is to lead the sinner to the Saviour; a voice that has tears in it, and yet so enthusiastic and assuring that it can quicken into courage the despairing, and say with a Christ-like power to the winds and waves of fear and fainting, " Peace, be still ! ' Oh ! rare and beautiful faculty, that of in- spiring languid purpose, setting in motion noble impulse, flushing the brow with an un- wonted enthusiasm, enkindling the heart with a strange fire. Paxton Hood could do that. We remember once, long years ago, listen- ing to him one Sunday evening in St. James's 5 66 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Hall. He was preaching on " The Deceitful- ness of the Human Heart," and had been showing how the Bible, from which his text had been chosen, and the Sunday paper, that perhaps many had been reading, were both telling the same story. He was illustrating his point by a very racy, and very pertinent personal experience, when a Frenchman sit- ting by our side, and who had but a very im- perfect knowledge of English, raised himself from his seat as the points in the story w r ere passed, rising to his feet, and finally standing on the seat, till at the climax he could restrain himself no longer, but clapping his hands, ex- claimed, "Bravo ! bravo! " So much for the dramatic setting, and for the aptness of the application. There was rare wisdom in the advice once given to a student by Wendell Phillips, " Eemember to talk up to your audience and not down to it. The commonest audience can relish the best thing you can say, if you know how to say it." You may predicate with tolerable certainty of the preachers of talent — you may prophesy with an almost assured fulfilment the several heights to which they will attain, the depths IN THE PULPIT. 67 to which they will delve and dive, of the whole complexion and compass of their thought ; but of men of Paxton Hood's fibre, all such mental and moral measurement was out of the question. His moods were many-sided, his methods would startle you sometimes ; but they were his methods, and you came to see that no other form or fashion would so appro- priately clothe and reveal the inspiration and the thought. Yet was there ever that indefinable air of refinement which the most cultured taste could approve and appreciate thrown around all his pulpit ministrations. There were no ad captandum ravings thrown out as baits for a specious popularity ; no vulgar eccentri- city of style and speech ; no inane ravings or sensational harangues to " split the ears of the groundlings" and earn a cheap and ephe- meral notoriety. He was a popular preacher in the best and highest of senses, and although he never failed to attract numerous and sym- pathetic audiences, they were always largely recruited from the ranks of the cultured ; there was always a goodly contingent of those square heads you were wont to discover at 68 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. the Weigh House, at Hampstead Road, or Holloway. His sermons — or shall we call them his meditations ?— were rich arabesques, tinged and toned with delicate colouring and graceful ornament ; soft, subdued pictures, prismatic splendours ; poem, apologue, parable, proverb, metaphor, personal reminiscence and expe- rience, sarcasm, invective, epigram, idiomatic force, fire, pathos, all pressed into the service. He was the interpreter of the great mind, — lives of the men and women who have moulded and modulated the tone of the times. He met your every mental and moral mood. His illustrations, with which he was wont to enforce and accentuate his teaching, were gleaned in the world of Nature and the world of books. He had looked long and often into Nature's wondrous heart, and listened to the infinite variety of its pulsings ; he had looked, too, into the throbbing heart of man ; and so it came to pass that all his words were invested with the highest of all pulpit value — suggestive- ness. "Well said The Freeman, in reviewing his first published volume of sermons : — " There is enough in it to set up half-a-dozen ordinary preachers ; " and The Nonconformist : — " Few IN THE PULPIT. 69 volumes of sermons that come to our hands are the product of so much mental energy and glowing feeling." All writers and leaders of thought, poetry, philosophy, fiction, were re- cognised and arrested — Carlyle, Emerson, Strauss, Renan, Jean Paul Eichter, Plato, Aristotle, Theodore Parker, Chunder Sen, Novalis, Spinoza, Schiller, Schelling, Sweden- borg, Helmholtz, Haeckel, Lotze, Lessing, Jacob Bohmen, Descartes, Darwin, Tyndal, Huxley, Dugald Stewart, Stuart Mill, Goethe, Robert Browning, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Shelley, Ruskin, Robertson, Fichte, Kant, Comte, Hegel, George Eliot, Thackeray, Shakespeare — their words and teaching were all fused in the alembic of our preacher's brain, and transmuted for the work of the place and the hour. He seemed to drink in Nature ; he sym- pathised with her every mood and passion ; his very voice betrayed his intimacy with her, and was often the clear echo of her tone. Sometimes there was a plaintive moan in it, like the soughing of the night-w T ind in a forest of pines ; sometimes it had the mournful surge and swell of the sea in it ; and sometimes it 70 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. went lilting up to the heavens like the carol of the lark. He was a true artist in words. Some of his pictures were like the broad canvases of Velasquez or Paul de la Roche, others like the illuminated initials of an old missal, deftly wrought by the delicate fingers of a reverent monk. He appropriated the thought-life of all the master minds with which he communed, and for whom he had so warm an enthusiasm, whether they appealed to him through the medium of the spoken or the written word. He appropriated — of course he did! — but he gave the gem a new setting. There was transfusion in the transmigration, and often the simple garnet which he culled from its original casket blazed out a ruby in its new relationship. The gift of idealisation is sometimes equal to the genius of a new creation. The " Madonna' ' of Raffaelle was only a glorified Contadina from the suburbs of Rome. He was ever abreast of the current literature and thought of the day, and ever ready to seize and transfix all matters of passing in- terest. When Holman Hunt's great picture, IN THE PULPIT. 71 "The Finding of Christ in the Temple," first struck the popular fancy, and compelled atten- tion by its lofty aim and purpose, he turned it into a sermon, with the text, "Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business ? " A few days after the burial of Humboldt, at Berlin, came that striking sermon entitled, " Cosmos." The death of his revered friend, Benjamin Parsons, called forth " The Burning and the Shining Light," and that of Havelock the sermon, " Ehrenbreitstein : or, the Broad Stone of Honour." When that long nightmare reign of " Napo- leon le Petit" that begun in the Coup d'Etat of 1851, had received its rude awakening, when the great fifth act of the tragi-comedy had been played, that act which had opened at Saarbriick and closed at Sedan, he thought that the pulpit might not inappropriately have something pertinent to the occasion to say, and that stirring sermon was preached at Hare Court, Canonbury, and afterwards pub- lished under the title of "King Bramble" and having for its text the parable of Jotham. And when Gustave Dore's immense accom- plishment, " Christ Leaving the Pretorium," 72 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. took all London by storm, he preached a ser- mon on it, and which, for a long time, was used at the gallery in Bond Street as a kind of guide or companion to the picture. A propos of this sermon, it may not be inappropriate here to insert a translation of the generous letter it called forth from the eloquent pen of the great French artist : — "Friday, September 5th, 1873. " Deae Sir, — I have just received some printed copies of the sermon that you have done me the honour to deliver on the subject of my picture of ' Jesus Leaving the Pretor- ium.' I hasten to tell you, Sir, how grateful and flattered I am by such an act, and I regret not being in London at this moment the better to express to you personally my thanks for your most kind and obliging words. Be good enough to believe, dear Sir, that, looking back to the hours of success which have been given me in the course of my career, I have never felt so honoured and proud as in learn- ing that my name had been pronounced in a religious place and before a Christian assem- bly, and I have never found a satisfaction more IN THE PULPIT. 73 tender and true, or an encouragement more high and powerful. " (Signed) Gu. Dore." Surely none who heard them as they w r ere delivered years ago, at Offord Eoad, will forget those thoughtful Sunday evening discourses on " The Seven Lamps of the Christian Church/' suggested by John Buskin's " Seven Lamps of Architecture.'' How remarkable were some of the texts he selected, and then, as Dr. John Young said of him (and he was one of his most frequent hearers at Offord Koad) : " He never said what you expected to hear said on any text.' 1 The man w r as sui generis. His sermons had a method and an accent that were unique. They were so utterly unlike any others, so healthy in imagination, so gleaming with fancy, such bright coruscations and scintillations of thought and poesy ; how they linger in our memory, thrilling, palpitating, throbbing, even now, with life and impetus and fire ! In his mind-life there was very much that was in common with Thomas Binney and Thomas Lynch, with Baldwin Brown and Alfred Morris and John Pulsford — yet still unlike ; and then his prayers were Paxton Hoodish — 74 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. and what prayers ! Oh ! those quiet Sabbath evenings at Offord Koad ! the holy hush that brooded there ; the service of song ; the very mode of reading out the hymns giving them new shapes and forms, new inspirations and music. But especially the prayers — prayers that above all others, not even excepting those of dear John Pulsford himself — met our con- ceptions of what prayer really is and ought to be. The benediction with which he invariably closed up the day's service was very compre- hensive and beautiful : " May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be on, and in, and with us all — in the perfect peace which passeth all understanding, in the love which is unspeakable and full of glory, and in the joy of the Holy Ghost, through the might, and mercy, and merit of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen and Amen." Bishop Hall says somewhere, " That sermon goes surest to the heart that comes from the heart." Apart altogether from all considera- tions of method and manner, limitless stores of knowledge, spontaneity of word and thought, graces of rhetoric and elocutionary IN THE PULPIT. 75 skill, there was ever an accent about our preacher, a personality so marked, an indivi- duality so sharp and distinct, that gave to all his words a force and fascination that were unique. Here was a living man, " burdened' 1 as the old prophets had it, with the weight and magnificence of his message. " A skeleton/ ' he says, " may bear a torch, but it cannot inflate a trumpet with the breath of life ; life is needed to rouse by the thrilling tone the pulsations of life in others ; they make preachers of power usually who inflate the trumpet by their own experience. " Here are some sentences that live in our memories, to stimulate, suggest, console : — "Sorrow is work, for what so strengthens character as sorrow ? and what so discrimi- nates character into its primal elements as sorrow ? Sorrow is the rain which descends to the very roots of our being. Sorrow has an influence on the heart like that of the atmo- spheric action on the hard rocks and hills ; it loosens, it softens, it disintegrates, it levels ; and from the mould it makes the flowers and the fruits of the heart, as the flowers and fruits of the earth, spread their bloom. " 76 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. " Death is the great consecrator. Oh ! the dead — the dead ; how beautiful they are ! How reverently we mention their names ! " " The grateful soul is the sunshine of any home, and the ungrateful soul is its east wind." " "We no longer can be satisfied with, ' It is written ; ' we must further say, * It is felt.' " " Sympathy is relationship." " The education of our sympathies is the assurance of our immortal being and destiny ; true sorrow gives birth to true sympathy. Many are the avenues and the channels along which our sympathies may flow ; but we may be sure of this — until our feelings flow out of them- selves, they are never truly ours." " How divine is work : to draw the silken thread of spirit through the hard needle of difficulty." " Christ took up the emotions of Nicodemus rather than his words. He saw the really anxious inquirer behind that studied and placid countenance of scholastic indifference." " A child's idea and thought of God is the purest and only truthful anthropomorphism. Very different are the impertinences of philo- IN THE PULPIT. r il sophy, dictating to me how and in what manner I must conceive or not conceive of God." " Contentment does not stand on the plat- form of an If, and make stipulations when certain things shall be attained. No ; it is a delightful dwelling in the Valley of Humilia- tion, and ' counting it all joy ' — sojourning in the ' strange country/ and counting it to be a 'land of promise/ " Taking Poe's " Kaven "asa theme, he said : — " Eavens always hang their black wings over lazy souls. If you want to scare a raven, do your work ; pour your soul energetically into work. If you think, let thought flow out into action. . . . Do not use thought merely as opium — the musing, dreaming, stultifying opium of "the soul. They are not worth a thought ; your Goethes, your Mephistophelian, dreaming men, your men with a hard heart, and a cold, callous grey eye, that looks into humanity, and into nature, and into eternity, and into a woman's eye, and into a man's heart, and sees no faith, I abominate." " Opinion is not religion. Your religion is in your emotions — not in your opinions. So 78 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. long as your religion is an attempt to frame a creed, or to get right in your body of divinity, you must be unhappy. " " Metaphysics, logic, and mathematics are like three blind brothers running hand in hand through the world, feeling their way, and mis- taking the touch of the finger for the demon- stration of the eye ; they all need the beautiful sister called Faith to open their real vision. " " Nervousness is a term used to describe the fine sheathing of the soul ; nervousness is man's capacity for mental and moral suffer- ing." The sermon on " The New Consciousness " opens with some startling, but nevertheless some very true words : — " The infatuation of knowledge is the curse of life ; to know, the desire to know, unsettles life. We honour the knower, the man who has eaten most of the sad fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; this is the man society honours ! Yet what is most of our knowledge ? Think of a man in a churchyard spelling out the inscriptions on the stones — a clever archaeologist ; why, you would not say this added much to his worth of attain- IN THE PULPIT. 79 ment, because lie was able cleverly to de- cipher the inscriptions. Yet the world is a vast, wide churchyard, and what we call knowledge is much such a reading of in- scriptions. " Very tender and touching are these words in the " Songs of the Samaritans " : — " Surely all Samaritans are neither holy nor grateful ; but oh, saintly people, if you could hear, as God hears, the hymns of praise that ascend from the cells of workhouses and infir- maries ; from the stone walls of prisons ; from the hearts of Magdalenes ; from the dark back- streets and alleys, where fine ladies would never soil their satin by condescending to breathe ; from men who have been criminal and women who have been vicious — if you could hear all these Samaritan hymns rising from the heart of this great metropolis, it would deepen and widen your perception of the Divine mercy and goodness." What a far-reaching thought is embodied in those opening sentences of the sermon on " The Sanctity of Touch " :— " Touch is the key to all the senses. Touch is the principle of all the senses. Perhaps, 80 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. also, I shall be right if I say that it is the most subtle of all the senses. There is no sensation without touch ; sight is touch ; fragrance is touch ; we give that name to what is the sense of resistance ; but all things are known to us and are related to us by touch. Touch is the internal, sensitive principle, it is the principle of communication and of recep- tion and of translation. We are told that particles are constantly floating off to touch the sensitive body, to bid the door of sensation spring open ; and I think you must have felt that while those avenues are touched by their proper affinities, there are other senses within which are not touched, and never awakened, but which might own and yield to the appro- priate key." And how peaceful is this close to his sermon on " The Spectre's Question/' in the Book of Job : — " Spectre, we will not call thee ! We will even choose to walk by faith and not by sight. . . . We will bend over the sacred pages of Moses and the Prophets till, by walking in love, we shall walk in light ; till, from the fellowship of the saints below, we rise to the fellowship of IN THE PULPIT. 81 the just made perfect above ; and from the mists of earth we rise to enter into the joy of the Lord. Oh, ye dead! oh, ye dead ! oh, ye happy dead ! We cannot touch the veil that curtains your dreadfully beautiful abodes ; we resign ourselves to your absence for a season, till Ave ' see you walking in your air of glory,' and drink it in as our native atmosphere too.' And here, too, is a comforting word from the sermon on the text, and again from Job, "Why is light given to a man whose way is hid ? " :— " Art thou the man w T hose way is hid ? and does it seem to thee thy ' way is hid from the Lord ? ' But is not this because God is our last and highest end? He hides himself, even as we read that ' Jesus departed and did hide Himself from them.' But God never fails us, never will. The revelation of His glory and His grace grows upon us. All else fails us but He ! Youth passes ; its romance and the crowds w T e loved drift away from us ; they have not been unfaithful to us ; they obeyed a law of life and exemplified a world-wide expe- rience ; the pressure of life parted us. Their middle life, the grand period of cruel mis- 6 82 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. understandings, when suspicions and circum- ventions abound around us and in us ; a suc- cession of acquaintanceships and numberless friendships ; then the solitary haven of old age. And then we see that God has outlived and outlasted all ; the Friend never doubtful, the Acquaintance who loved us better, so it almost seemed, the more evil He knew of us. He has been faithful and true. We said, He hides Himself; and so, indeed, He did, but the hiding toas a revealing ." Here is another exquisite passage, which we transcribe from his sermon on " Action and Grief" :— ' " The great lesson our Lord intended to preach was even this : life is not a complaint, but an action ; it is not to be spent in grieving, but in doing. What a tendency there is to walk with the dead ! — dead hours, dead friends, dead scenes ! — to live in the past, to roam through the churchyards and among the tombs of life. In the human heart are two vaults. There are two wine-cups at the sacrament of life — one is filled with the black w T ine of memory, and utterly drugged with rosemary and rue, and the other with the red IN THE PULPIT. 83 wine of hope. Mix them, and they mingle almost the whole emotions of life. In fact, the times spent with memory seem the most profitless ; the truth is, all that memory could do for us is done in the passing deed. Life is in action, in following more than in musing. The music of the harp is beautiful ; but that has not served the world so well as the music of the hammer, and even all poetry is action — all true poetry is. Some poets rend the heavens with a great grief; some unlock the heavens by a great hope. They smile upon the coffins of the dead, and so cleave the hearts of the living — it is all action, it is feeling ; but feeling shaking its robes from churchyard dust, and passing through the lych gate again into the busy pathway ; not forgetting the churchyard, but feeling most sacredly in the heart that the dead are not there, " The past should not be a tombstone, but a garden — a place in which we bury so that the buried may bloom. " Thus your life is in to-day — useless the mourning and grieving over the impossible and the unattainable. Follow Me ! There is the catholicon for all sorrow if you can drink it." 84 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Here is another, extracted from one of his earliest sermons at Offord Road, and entitled " Meditations in a New Church " : — "Beautiful is the season of awakening nature and spring — beautiful is the dawning day of summer ; there is new life in the garden, the forest, and the field — beautiful! The hard reign of the winter is over, the birds have come back to us, the flowers appear on the earth — Nature is awake again, is alive again, after her long sleep ; the morning and the even- ing twilights are sacred to all sacred thoughts. Spring is here, in a tree in this gloomy Lon- don, behind my house, the green and the gold vie with each other when the sunbeams strike their bright arrows among the boughs. I think I heard the nightingale's shrill service of song strike up like a holy flake of music from nature's breast, from whence also we have heard many songs. Oh, how the heart rejoices in the spring ; can the time ever come when I can be indifferent to its return ? to see the clouds, the cold eastern clouds, sail away, the season of the sharp and biting wind, and the icy breath ! In the May boughs, in the lengthening twilight, in the note of the bird, IN THE PULPIT. 85 in the gentle clew, in the fragrance of the flowers, in the echoing woods and hills, choral with the ring of waterfalls and rivulets rushing on their way, there is the glad voice — spring is here ! Nature has been in her coffin long enough ; God has touched the bier, and said, i Damsel, I say unto thee, arise ! ' and she that was dead has heard the voice, and has come forth. The heart acknowledges the sway of the new life ; so ever life lies deeper than death ; the grave of death is only the urn, the sacred depository of life." Here is still another we cannot refrain from transcribing : — " When we have touched Christ with the trembling, fearful fingers of faith, then we reach afterward to a higher state, and touch Him with the hallowed hands of holy love — touch Him, first, to be healed by Him, then you shall touch Him by-and-by to crown and consecrate Him. Even as the Gospels give to us three histories of the anointings of Christ : — there was the anointing of Contrition, when that poor woman fell prone on the marble floor, and anointed His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head ; she could not 86 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. rise to look upon Him, she could only show her tenderness in her tears, and those shed from the lowliest abasement ; there was the anointing of Devotion — and contrition will rise to devotion — when the alabaster box of precious ointment was shed upon the head of the Saviour, and the sacred fragrance filled the room ; still humble, still desiring to touch Him, not only to show our contrition, but to prepare His crown — their devotion rises to Affection, and with Joseph anoints the whole body of the Saviour — loves all His body and all His work — touches Him in sacred musings, in hallowed holy meditations, and every hour finds something to love and to embalm/' There are some most suggestive words in that sermon on " Thomas " — words most pertinent to very mush of our modern Church attitude towards the Samaritans : — 11 Thomas is a sceptic, a doubter in the school of the Apostles ; and how like it is to the sim- plicity of the Scripture narratives, to place such a record in such a place as the history of his doubts. Little sympathy the doubter has had from the Church. No ! The usual course has been summarily to expel and excom- IN THE PULPIT. 87 municate such. I am afraid we have almost lost our hold and influence over the doubters. Let the dogmatic theologist learn from the Lord how to treat the delinquencies of heresy." Not infrequently the pathetic passage all tremulous with tears is followed by some quaint word or epigrammatic utterance that is very startling, as for instance, in that tenderly beautiful sermon on "The Sanctity of Touch," when describing the Syrophoe- nician woman pressing through the crowd to touch the hem of Christ's garment. " She had sought," he says, "help from many physicians ; but the story seems to intimate, with a quaint naivete, that physicians then, like physicians now, were more remarkable for what they cost than what they cured. . . . She had spent her last penny — all that she had— and all in vain : rather the worse ! She had received as much good from it all as a man in a con- demned cell would receive from a body of theology — rather the worse!" Or, again : — " Men are constantly seeking to change their conditions ; in fact, are desiring to live anywhere rather than at home. . . . 88 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. I find that when I leave home I am compelled to take w r ith me one who has kept me company now many a long year — myself. I have often thought it would be very pleasant to go some- where without myself. I have brought the same individuality with me I had before I started ; I could not shake that off. Ah ! what a new sensation that would be ! and whenever we sigh after those strange and bright places, that is what we desire — a new sensation. Internal satisfaction will make happiness anywhere, and internal disquiet can find happiness nowhere.'' "What a marvellous sermon is that on " God's Terrible Things." Here is a vivid word - picture we remember listening to : — " I remember, years since, visiting, one bright, mocking day, a village on the coast, near the scene of the horrible tragedy of Hartley — you come to it as you walk along that fine coast from Tynemouth — a quiet little village called Cullercoats. The broad sea lay in her bewitching and entrancing beauty. Yon went down to the village as to a bav ; but as I walked along among its houses — there were no streets — every house was mourning. IX THE PULPIT. 89 I forget how many boats had been lost in the wild tempest a night or two since ; there was a sob of agony in every house. A mother, with a babe in her arms, weeping over the brave young husband ; the daughter weeping over the grey hair of the aged fisherman. I saw them, The women weeping and rending their hair For those who would never come back to the town. I did not think of Paley's selfish aphorism, 1 It's a happy world after all/ just then, although the sea was bright, and birds were sailing pensively overhead ; rather should I have said, ' By terrible tilings dost Thou answer us, God.' Natural theology has little to say in reply to such scenes as these." Here is a plain, outspoken utterance upon the value of natural theology : — " On the whole I do not thank Nature for her consolations. I have tried them ; they end in turning me into a Stoic or a stone. I have interrogated Nature ; I see how much she will give me. Go to a weeping widow, or husband, by the side of the dreadful coffin, and carry your volume of natural theology ! Go to the poor in the workhouse and talk natural theology ! Go to 90 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. a cottage in a famine and talk natural theology ! Read a lecture on natural theology on a battle- field ! Why, it is one of those terrible pieces of cold-stone mockery that would drive a brave heart deaf — dumb — frantic — mad ! Beautiful ! beautiful ! Eead some pages of Seneca, or Boetius, or Paley when your house is in flames — your wife dying — your only boy lying dead ! " Or this, from that thoughtful meditation on u God's Terrible Things " :— " Why, what a life of fear our life is altogether. The father comes home from a long journey ; he has been warm- ing his heart with thoughts about his little son — he has a treasury of toys for his little son ; and as he jumps from the cab his wife meets him at the door, and says, ' I am so glad you have come, baby is dying, he cannot live long ; ' and by-and-by you see the strong, hard man over- whelmed, and burying his face in the little coffin. Why, all this is very common ; and thus we walk in perpetual panic, until we rise out of our fears into the thought of God's infinite and all-embracing love. Till then we are delivered from fear to fear. And thus the world is full of terrible things." We fain would linger. We read again and IN THE PULPIT. 91 again, and still we say: "This man met our experiences as never man met them before." Every encounter and circumstance of the week seemed pressed into the Sunday service ; every field walk and riverside ramble yielded a wealth of parable and illustration with which to enforce his teaching. Men and books and ivied rui£,poem and picture, suggested thought and metaphor to stimulate and help. Here are one or two examples culled from notebook or printed page : — " The other day I went over an old house, built four hundred years since, among the wolds in Wiltshire. It was one of those great wilderness mansions our ancestors were wont to rear. I went through cham- bers on chambers — sixty-four. I went through the long gallery, where the portraits of dead beauties and iron soldiers, now all dust, looked down from the walls. I went through the armoury, where coats of mail, and swords, and halberts, and buff jerkins, and helmets, and drinking-jacks of other ages seemed strangely to meet together; and I will tell you what most impressed me, and what most abidingly lingers on my spirit now. I stepped up stair- ways that, in the dark night, had been splashed 92 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. with a suicide's blood ; and I went into a chamber where the ghosts of a murder com- mitted three hundred years since still freeze the spirit. I lifted the ancient arras and tapestry, and walked through the old chapel, and at last, after wending my way through a wilderness of oak panels, and by secret chambers and ancient carvings, I was permitted to enter the bedchamber of the master and mistress of this vast old hall. And, splendid as the room was, with all the mystery and the pomp and impressiveness of the ancient day, and all the conveniences of the modern, something struck me more than all. Simply worked on cardboard, so plain that the eye could easily see it, so fixed over the mantel- shelf that the last ray of the night-lamp shone upon it, and the first sunbeam stealing in from the old park, with its gnarled and antlered tenants, illuminated it, there was the inscrip- tion, 'Bear ye one another's burdens,' That text, in that wild, weird old hall, was like a wall- flower casting its scent out of the rents of a ruin, or a lily twined amidst old armour, so appro- priately it seemed to shine with a ray over the room. I could not but feel some movements IN THE PULPIT. 93 in me of reverent affection to the gentle fingers that had wrought so great, so sweet a motto to place it there." Here is another : — "I shall never forget when I visited the ruins of the house of Lady Jane Grey at Bradgate, in Leicester- shire, and saw the whole floor of the room in which she sat covered with snow- drops. How sweetly significant it seemed of her gentleness, beauty, grace, and piety ! and they growing there in the rains from age to age ! Nor less suggestive, but con- veying quite another lesson, when I visited Colchester Castle, and climbed its vast, grey, antique fortifications, to find it fringed all round with wall-flowers — like a very flower of repentance, w^afting its scent through the torn clefts and pinnacles of jDride ! " Here is another picture, drawn from travel and personal experience : — " I went into a German church in one of the old quaint cities of the Middle Ages, as twilight-time was falling over the old building, to hear an organ. The building was dark as I entered it, for only a single candle struggled with the gloom that possessed the aisles and 94 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. nave, the columns and arches and old monu- ments, and made all things weird and spectral. Some hundred people sat there, and the strange thing began its wonderful work of sound, calling up all the faculties from their chambers — the watchmen of the soul — from their citadels and cells. How it groaned through the old building ! How those won- derful sounds throbbed against the pillars, and shook them, and rumbled along beneath our feet, and travelled thrillingly and palpi- tatingly overhead among the arches. You know what an organ can do ; how it can sigh, and start, and storm, and rage ; and how it can madden, and how it can soothe. And then, when the wonderful creature I was listening to had poured out these preludes of its power, it began to utter some marvellous delirium of music, I think Mendelssohn's Walpurgis Night; it imposed on the imagination the whole scenery of a wild tempest — a storm of Nature among heaths and mountains ! the thunder rolled near and far among the crags ! the rain hissed in the wind, the flash of the lightning went by you ! the storm possessed — it overwhelmed you ! the blasts of the tempest, and the bolts of the IN THE PULPIT. 95 thunder, were like giant spirits striving together in night and solitude ; while fear, and terror, and awe, and horror, held revelry and carnival. And then, I will tell you what came — I had never heard it before — I thought it was a human voice. Amidst the hurricane on the organ it rose so clear, so calm, so ineffably restful and light, so high over the surges and the wailing of the rain, the thunder and the wind. It was the vox humana stop — that won- drous simulation — the human voice stop — the mightiest marvel of all the artifices of music ; the storm continued, but still it sung on, and rose on the wings of light and sound, over all the hurricanes that hurried from the pipes and the keys. Then I thought of the one Human Voice stop in time, and said: ' Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?' ' The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved; He uttered His voice; the earth melted.' Amidst the crash of kingdoms, thrones, peoples and opinions ; amidst panics, and horrors, and fears, and travails, one voice, and only one, has been heard — One human voice, able to sway all storms, to pierce and sing in the heavens, high above those lower 96 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. regions where the tempests have their home. It is ' He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth' Who hath spoken to us by His Son, the voice including every human chord. l In the world ye shall have tribulation , but in Me ye shall have peace,' ' Come unto Me, and I will give you rest' " Another example of vivid word-painting as well as of aptness of illustration, is the opening of his sermon on The Fatherhood of God : — "On the great Northern sea, while I was pass- ing from Gottenburgto Christiania, as the night came down over the dark waves — its wild soli- tary fiords and islands breaking the monotony of the vast seas, with their two or three dreary huts, their lone villages, or even the church, which seemed to startle and add to the desola- tion of the scene — in the wildness of that vast and awful sea, for many miles I had seen, flaring out over the black billows, on the right hand, a red light — so far it flamed. I watched long its friendly and revolving fires. I said at last to one of the Danish sailors, ' What is the name of that light yonder ? ' ' The Pateb Noster Skene ! ' he said. I actually started with delight at IN THE PULPIT. 97 his reply, for you know what that meant — Our Father s beautiful light ! A glorious name for a lighthouse ! There it stood on a lone island, in the midst of the moaning, leaden-coloured, melancholy main — the Pater Noster Shene. Exactly a week afterwards, I passed over those seas again in the night ; but it was not, as before, over a tranquil sea. The billows plunged and roared ; in the deep night the tolling thunder followed the beckoning fingers of the white, blue, and red lightning round the whole horizon. The rain rushed down in a deluge, the wind lashed and whistled through the shrouds and the sails ; it swept away the standard compass from our deck into the sea. We fled along on the vans of the wave and the wind ; but there, still calmly over the stormy billows, as over the gentle evening wave, shone out the Pater Noster Shene — the same lustrous light to guide, to assure, to strengthen ! We did not see the hand which trimmed the flame ; we only saw the light. It was there, the same itself as over the calm, shimmering, moonlit sea; it illuminated and dispelled the worst terrors of the storm ; it delivered us from the power of darkness — the lighthouse of the Pater 7 98 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Noster Skene ! Was it possible to see it and not to think of the teaching of the Divine Word, ' We are the offspring of God ? * God is the light of the spiritual world — of the natural also. We seem to prove His existence by the discovery that without Him all returns to darhiess. Oh rare, and high, and glorious truth ! Truth for the hour of gladness and the season of gloom ; for the time of the soft twilight of peace and the night of storm. The Pater Noster Skene — our Father's beautiful light ! We are His offspring ! " How you were startled sometimes by the quite unexpected turns of thought that seemed to flash out from his quiet meditations ! As when, in preaching from the words, " For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God," he says, "All death is only spirit yield- ing itself up to superior attractions — the body unable to hold out any longer against the strong grasp of the spirit-world ; and is not this oppo- sition of the earth-nature and the spirit-nature the cause of all disease ? " In quite another mood is the following — exquisite in its tender simplicity — it is from his sermon on "Pkogbess, the law of the Cheis- IN THE PULPIT. 99 tian Life " : — " The bov likes not to think of the time when he was a child ; but the old man does. The boy is too near to it, and he does not see the simplicity contained in it. Yes ! a strange sight it is for the memory of the father to turn back upon, as he walks to chapel with that fine young man — and to remember the little toddling boy crowing in his mother's arms, or running along the garden walk to meet him, or to think of the days when, return- ing from school, rejoicing in the happy fellow- ship of the family — don't be offended, young man, if you are here with your father ; it does your heart good to shed some tears round the grave of your youth. Ah ! my friends, strange, is it not, to think of that, to look on the young man by your side and to see what ' going from strength to strength ' comes to at last ? " Or again, from the same meditation : — "Ah! how wonderful, too, it is to notice the amazing resources of weakness : have we not entered the room where the poor consumptive girl — hectic with that false and dreadful beauty lightening over the cheeks — awakened our won- der, to find that weakness sometimes more than a match for our strength. ? Have we not found 100 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. an experience, and a fortitude beyond our reach ? And when we vainly essayed to console, we found ourselves clasped in the arms of a consolation, rising like a heaven over, and round, the broken wing of our despair. Dying yet ' going from strength to strength' " He was a master of parable, and, in very truth, can there be any real teaching that is not in its very essence parabolic ? All lan- guage, what is it but symbolism ? All Art is parable. Music and song, painting and sculp- ture, and carving and architecture, what are they all but symbolic sermons, preaching the highest and deepest of truths ? In the adol- escence of the nation as in the infancy of the man, this is the only possible presentment of truth, if it is to be effective, if it is to convey ideas that are to be comprehensible to the understanding, and are by and by to mould and educate character. (i One illustration,' : he remarked on one occasion, "is worth a thousand abstractions. " His word-pictures throbbed with life. You heard the clang and clash of arms, the tramp of feet, the clarion call to combat, the victor's ringing song ; or there came to you the softened strains of the IN THE PULPIT. 101 angelus borne across the waves ; or you heard the minster melody as it floated along the dusky aisle ; you saw the white-robed chorister, the curling column of purple smoke that rose from swinging thurible — they were living pictures that his deft fingers drew. Here are a few of his parables and allegories — teaching by picture and anecdote : — "In my pocket edition of 'Pilgrim's Pro- gress/ by Bunyan, junior (which, by-the-bye, has never been printed), I find that the last hill in the chain of the Delectable Mountains to which Christian was led, was that called Mount Evidence ; from whence there was so clear a sight of the Celestial City, that on fine days it could be seen without glasses. Now, I saw, while they were standing on Mount Evidence, the shepherds bade them look over, w r hich, when the pilgrims did, they saw three other hills beneath them. Then the pilgrims inquired what they were, and the shepherds told them they were called Mount Prophecy, Mount Miracle, and Mount History, and that many persons came over them by Mount Error, and so arrived safely on Mount Evidence at last. Furthermore, the shepherds said that 102 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. many of those persons whom they saw on Mount Prophecy and Mount History w r ould never reach Mount Evidence, but that, when the fogs came on, they would be dashed to pieces amongst the caves of Mount Error. Yes, you may see and not believe. ' It is with the heart man believeth unto righteousness/ " Here is another of his allegories : — " Once, in my night visions, I beheld, and lo ! I stood before a vast stone church ; I thought that the petrifying waters of time and the rolling ages had turned all the mighty temple of the praises and faith of the human heart into stone. I entered ; it was very vast and mighty, but cold — how cold. Methought I paced to and fro its aisles, the only live being in it, for it seemed to me that all its occupants were frozen into stone. The pulpit was stone, the minister was stone, and at its stony altar a stony priest conducted the mum- mery of a stony service. I thought I heard, as it were, the muttered chant of prayers, but as they ascended they froze and turned to solid frost and hung in icicles on the roof and corbel of the place ; it was all stone. Then methought I saw, as it were, a dove brood over IN THE PULPIT. 103 the place, and I beard voices saying : ' Come from the four winds, oh breath, and breathe on these stones.' And lo ! I saw the stones alive, stones no more, but souls. And the seats became tenanted with life, and the pulpit with life, and the altar and priest be- came alive. And, still more strange, the icicles on the roof and corbel became sym- pathies, and the roof melted, and in its place behold living beings. Old things had passed aw T ay, and, instead of the cold stone taber- nacle, I stood in ' the general assembly and church of the first borniohose names are icritten in heaven,' and I beheld Mount Sion thronged w T ith the spirits of just men made perfect' " Here is another : — " The senses of man, which many denominate his reason, are like the walls of a stone turret ; man locked up to his reason is like a bird in that stony room ; there is a window, but the blind is down. ' Faith, sweet child, draw up the blind, and let us look out ; draw up the window, and we can fly away.' Faith draws up the blind, and Death, beautiful Death ! draws up the window and lets out the Bird.'' Or, to quote again from u John Bunyan, 104 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. jun." : — " There was one room at the Interpre- ter's House into which, when Christian went, he beheld only a beautiful lily, with its rich green mantling leaf, and its chaste white flower, which, when Pilgrim beheld, he said : ' "What means this ? ' Then said Mr. Interpreter : 1 Thou art always to consider this, for in it thou art to see what thou hast been, and what God will have thee to be ; like that lily thou hast been taken out of the earth, and what beauty -and excellence thou hast is not thine but thy Master's ; and as that lily thou dost there t>ehold drinks the water from her cup, and ^receives, without a question, her Master's goodness, so must thou remember that He who -made her redeemed thee, as well as made thee, -and thou must know and consider that He who made her so fair and sweet, although she *was only intended to bloom for a short season, snoved heaven and earth to bless thee, because thou wast made in His image; and as the rain, the water, and air, and light are all necessary to make the lily beautiful, so the blood and sacrifice of Christ, and His Spirit, and His prayers, and His life, and His death are thy life, and light, and sun, and rain. Thou must IN THE PULPIT. 105 consider that if thy Father could create a lily, the same power who created that can redeem thee. ' Such words were once heard in Mr. Interpreter's House." Here is another of his simple, thought- suggesting apologues : — "A violet shed its modest beauties at the turfy foot of an old oak. It lived there many days dur- ing the kind summer in obscurity. The winds and the rain came and fell, but they did not hurt the violet. Storms often crashed among the boughs of the oak. And one day, said the oak : ' Are you not ashamed of your- self when you look up at me, you little thing down there, when you see how large I am, and how small you are ; when you see how small a space you fill, and how widely my branches are spread ? ' ' No/ said the violet, ' we are both ichat God made us t and ive are where God has placed us ; and God has given us both some- thing. He has given to you strength, to me sweetness ; and I offer Him back my fragrance, and am thankful.' ' Sweetness is all nonsense,' said the oak; ' a few days, a month at most, where and what will you be ? You'll die, and the place of your grave won't lift the ground 106 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. higher by a blade of grass. I hope to stand some time — ages, perhaps — and then, when I am cut down, I shall be a ship to bear men over the sea, or a coffin to hold the dust of a prince. What is your lot to mine ? ' ' But, 9 cheerfully breathed the violet back, ' we are both what God made us, and we are both where He placed us. I suppose I shall die soon. I hope to die fragrantly, as I have lived fragrantly. You must be cut down at last ; it does not matter, that I see, a few days, or a few ages, my littleness or your largeness, it comes to the same thing at last. We are what God made us. We are where God placed us. God gave you strength ; God gave me sweetness.' " Here, too, is a vivid picture and parable : — " Once, in a wild storm and hurricane, it was given me to see a poor soul flying through the tempest, over a wild moor, houseless ; the lightning blazed across the heath, and revealed one house ; thither fled the soul. ' Who lives here?' 'Justice.' 'Oh! Justice, shelter me, for the storm is very dreadful/ But Justice said : ' I cannot shelter thee ; I kindled the lightnings and the hurricane from whence you fly.' And I saw the poor spirit IN THE PULPIT. 107 hasten over the plain, and the storm-flash lit up another house, and thither fled the soul. 1 Who lives here?' 'Truth: ' Oh ! Truth, shelter me.' ' Nay/ said the white-robed woman, Truth's handmaid, ' hast thou loved Truth so much that thou canst fly to her for shelter? Not so, there is no shelter here.' And away, in weariness, sped the soul amidst the wild night. Still through the gleams of the blue heavens looked out a third house through the rain. * Who lives here ? ' said the lost soul. ' Peace: ' Oh ! Peace, let me in.' ' Nay, nay ; none enter into the house of Peace but those w T hose hearts are peace.' And then, near to the house of Peace, rose another house, white and beautiful through the livid light. ■ Who lives here ? ' ' Mercy. Fly in hither, poor soul, for this is the house built for thy shelter and home ! ' " The following is full of force: — "If I could paint, I would sketch Reason and Faith going on their journey through the world. How would I paint them ? I would paint Faith like a little child—' for of such is the kingdom of heaven ' — leading Eeason like a giant — like a stone-blind Belisarius, on his way. 108 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Reason has no eye. It is only a hand, although it is constantly crying : ' Except I can see.' ' I cannot see/ says Reason. The little child, Faith, says ' The flowers are springing — con- sider the lilies how they grow.' ' I cannot see the lilies/ says the Blind Giant. ' The birds are fed/ says Faith ; ' consider the fowls ! ' ' Ah ! I cannot see the fowls ! ' ' The Word is very nigh thee/ says Faith, 'even in thy heart/ i Ah ! I cannot see the Word/ says the Blind Giant." How forcibly the following little story opens the sermon of " Christ's Knowledge of Man " : — " There was a great occasion, when a meeting was held in Yorkshire some twelve hun- dred years since, at Godmundham, on the occa- sion of the attempt made by the good missionary, Paulinus, to introduce Christianity into the northern parts of the kingdom. The meeting was held in a rude building, although it was presided over by the king — King Edwin — and attended by all the jarls, and priests, and soldiers of the land in that rude age. It was winter, a fire was kindled in the rude Saxon hall, and a bird, driven by the inclemency of the weather, fled in through some broken IN THE PULPIT. 109 rafters, and, after hovering about a little while, flew out on the opposite side of the building ; then there arose in the hall an aged jarl, and said: " Oh ! king, I have thought man's life is like that sparrow ; it came, we know not whence it came, and it goes, w r e know not whither it goes ; and if the teacher can tell us whence we came, or whither we are going, Oh ! king, let us hear him. ,, The following is quaint and sweet, and savours of "Holy Mr. Herbert": — " In the course of my travels, I have wandered into two countries. I should like to describe their geography well. I remember the first was called The Country of Complaint, a dry, marshy, riverless region, the people are a melancholy, bilious race, the3 r never sing, they only sigh and groan and are troubled ; no flowers grow there save a hard fir, or rue, or rosemary ; it is winter all the year, a dreary, Northern climate of frosty hearts and tearful eyes. Oh, how glad I was to escape thence, and to visit The Land of Thankfulness, that sweet, well-watered region; there the people always sing ; there Paul lived, and Abraham pitched his tent : it is a beautiful country of 110 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. green pastures and still waters ; and there I found a beautiful flower called Promise, which bloomed all the year long. Oh, sweet land of Thankfulness ; may I be a dweller in thy fields, •and my cottage be built, and my days be passed in thee." How sweet, and tender, and helpful is this little allegory: — " There was a poor mother standing by a very little coffin and very little grave, and weeping as if her heart would break — and it was near break- ing. Then there came to her, as she stood there, an old man, and he said, ' My child, my daughter, listen ! There was a shep- herd, and he led a flock ; and in the flock was one sheep with a very little lamb by its side. Do you listen? Now the sheep loved the lamb very dearly, and followed the lamb wher- ever it went, and strayed away after the lamb, far from the fold. Then the shepherd, who saw that the sheep might be lost, and the lamb too, in some pit, or on some wild moor, caught up and carried the lamb in his arms away to the fold. And the sheep came meekly and patiently by the shepherd's side. Then it followed the shepherd then, for he had the lamb too.' " IN THE PULPIT. Ill And where shall we place our preacher ? With what other Christian Teachers can we group him ? In what circle can we provide for him congenial companionship ? Perhaps we might not unwisely claim for him communion with Thomas Binney and Frederick Robertson, with Alfred Morris, Baldwin Brown, Thomas Lynch, John Pulsford and Theodore Hunger. Of course he differs in some essential respects from each and all of these, in some senses his was a more eclectic mode, and certainly his activities were displayed in a wider arena than any of them, but we claim a general concensus of style of thought, of aim, of influence and character. AUTHOR. IT is when we think of Paxton Hood as a writer of books that our sense of wonder is most powerfully excited, as we are brought face to face with his marvellous capa- city for work. His fecundity well-nigh rivalled that of Lope de Vega. How, with his con- stant preaching and pastoral engagements, his platform speeches, frequent lectures, incessant contributions to the periodical press, his " jour- neyings oft," his immense correspondence, and all the myriad occupations falling to the share of a public man, he contrived to write and publish the extraordinary number of books he did, is, and ever must be, an insoluble mystery. When the well-nigh effete 'Eclectic passed from the ponderous hands of its predecessor into his, in order that it might make its appearance on the promised day of publication he wrote the whole number himself, essays, articles, sketches, criticisms — every one. Talking of criticism reminds us of one such AUTHOR. 113 which appeared in an early number of the newly-revived Beview. which for terseness and common sense is surely almost unique. A book was written, doubtless by a very well-in- tentioned and good man, and sent for review. It consisted of some hundreds of pages, and was intended as a " Help " to preachers, with skeletons of sermons and all kinds of materiel for sermon making. The book w^as " reviewed" in some such sentence as this : " To those who can preach this book is unnecessary; to those who cannot it is useless." In addition to the Eclectic he edited for two years The Preacher's Lantern, and, when it passed out of the hands of Dr. Gladstone, The Argonaut, which was enriched, under his editorship, with some of Mr, Wyke Bayliss's most valuable papers on art, and with many of his own " Voluntaries on Como." His " World of Anecdote," " World of Moral and Religious Anecdote/' " World of Proverb and Parable," M Gold Fringes, " " Laurel Leaves from the Forests of Germany,"' and "Master Minds of the West," although, perhaps, mainly compilations,^ evince a most * This can scarcely be said of the " "World of Proverb and Parable," which is certainly an original work. 8 114 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. extensive reading and a most catholic taste, and go far to justify Mr. Spurgeon's dictum when speaking of Mr Hood's untiring labours in the fields of literature, that " he knew more of many books than any other man " ; and of Dr. Bevan's at the memorial service at Stoke Newington, that " he had written more books than many men had read." Of others, so varied in manner and matter that it is difficult to allocate them, we may cite : " The Day, the Book, and the Teacher," Century Volume of the Sunday School Union ; and " Robert Baikes : a Musical Memoir, " a Service of Song first given during the Centenary Festival at Finsbury Chapel; " The Villages of the Bible " ; " The Age and its Architects "; "Vignettes of the Great Bevival of the Eighteenth Century " ; " Blind Amos and his Velvet Principles " ; " Bye-Path Meadow " " Lamps of the Temple"; " Self Formation Twelve Chapters for Young Thinkers " "Moral Manhood"; "The Dark Days of Queen Mary " ; " The Golden Days of Queen Bess " ; " The Literature of Labour " ; " Self- Education " ; " Lamps, Pitchers, and Trum- pets " ; " The Hammer and the Ploughshare : AUTHOR. 115 a Book for Labourers"; "The Peerage of Poverty" (first and second series); "Frag- ments of Thought and Composition " ; " Bepre- sentative Women "; " The Shekinah Opened "; " Genius and Industry : the Achievements of Mind among the Cottages " ; " Common Sense " ; " The Mental and Moral Philosophy of Laughter ; a Vista of the Ludicrous Side of Life '*; " Old England : Scenes from Life in the Hall and the Hamlet, by the Forest and the Fireside "; " Scottish Characteristics"; "Dream- land and Ghostland : Visits and Wanderings there in the Nineteenth Century"; "The King's Windows"; "The King's Sceptre"; u rjr^ throne f Eloquence," and the quite recently issued volume, "The Vocation of the Preacher." From amongst a long list of Biographical Memorials and Sketches we may mention " Wordsworth : a Biography " ; " Isaac Watts : His Life and Writings, his Homes and Friends " ; " The Earnest Minister : Memorials of the Eev. Benjamin Parsons, of Ebley"; "Life of Eobert Hall"; " Andrew Mar veil ; the Model Englishman"; "John Milton: the Patriot Poet"; "Charles Dickens: His 116 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Genius and Life " ; " William Cobbett : the Last of the Saxons"; "Bulwer: the Wit, Philosopher, and Poet " ; " Socrates : the Moral Eeformer of Ancient Athens"; " Sweden- borg: a Biography and an Exposition"; " Christmas Evans : the Preacher of Wild Wales"; "Thomas Binney: His Mind-Life and Opinions, Denominational, Doctrinal, and Devotional " ; " Oliver Cromwell : his Life, Times, Battle-fields, and Contemporaries " ; and " Thomas Carlyle : Philosopher, Thinker, Theologian, Historian, and Poet." In addition to many printed single sermons, including the one entitled " Havelock : the Broad Stone of Honour " ; " King Bramble " ; and that on " Dore's Picture — Christ Leaving the Prceiorium," he published two volumes entitled respectively " The Preaching of the Lilies," and "Dark Sayings on a Harp." Selections from among a large number of fugitive poetical pieces have been issued; a volume of " Melodies," songs written to popular airs and sung by him during his long campaign in the temperance cause ; " Our Hymn Book," a supplementary collection mostly original, for use at Offord Boad ; " Harmonies of Verse AUTHOR. 317 and Tune," a valedictory volume issued on his retirement from Barnsbury ; "Songs of the Cross and the Crown," " Songs of the Willow and Palm," and "The Maid of Nuremburg," poems written in Switzerland and Italy. One of the very earliest of his productions in a literary way was the little brochure entitled " The Moral Reformer's Almanac," full of " wise saws," and replete with that rich and rare commodity, common sense. Through all these long years of book-writing and publishing he w r as contributing uninter- ruptedly to the periodical press ; and in the current numbers of the " Sunday at Home" and " Leisure Hour," at the time of his death, are tw T o most readable and fascinating papers dealing respectively with the " Voyage of the Mayflower" and the " Home of the Harring- tons." His "Memorial of Thomas Binney " has, perhaps rightly, been censured as bearing too evident traces of undue haste. It was written and issued from the press in a very few days, and yet it drew from the pen of C. H. Spurgeon the warm and appreciative words : " Paxton Hood has done for the departed all 118 EDWIN PAXT0N HOOD. that is necessary, and has done it in a style at once attractive, popular, and admirable. "We feel half inclined to ask for an early dismission that Mr. Hood may sketch lis in the same genial manner, and make as generous a use of any facts about us worth noticing. "We feel inclined to quote half the book." The appearance of his book upon Sweden- borg called forth a very harsh criticism from The Monthly Christian Spectator. The re- viewer evidently did not understand the " Exposition/' The Seer's sympathy, which the writer possessed, was an experience quite outside and beyond that of the reviewer. The tone of this "review" was as gracious as was that of The Becord when it dealt with that gentle and beautiful spirit, Jb\ W. Eobertson, of Brighton, or when The British Banner un- furled its folds above the quiet " Eivulet " of T. T. Lynch. In Mr. Hood's preface to his book there is a very characteristic utterance, which explains his attitude towards the men to whom he was at- tracted: — " ' Then, of course, you are a Sweden- borgian ? ' said a friend to me the other day, after looking over the sheets of my book, and I AUTHOR. 119 said, ' Why so ? ' and he could give me no better answer why I should be so, than that I had written a life, and attempted to expound the tenets of Emanuel Swedenborg ! I have, also, written and attempted some exposition of John Milton, but I have never been called a Miltonist ; and of Andrew Marvell, yet I have never been styled a Marvellian ! Cannot a man spell out and accurately record an inscrip- tion on an Egyptian Sarcophagus without being mistaken for a gipsy or a descendant of the Pharoahs? I am no more a Sweden- borgian than I am a Bunyanist, a Howeist, a Bernardite, a Franciscan, a Moreist, a Behmenite, or a Lawite. The sayings and thoughts of all great and true men are precious to me, and I hope I can both receive them and retail them without parting with myself." In answer to this the reviewer says : " Why Mr. Hood should hesitate to avow himself a Swedenborgian after w T hat he has published in this * Biography and Exposition ' we cannot understand. . . . If he is not aSwedenbor- gian after this, all we can say is that w T e think he ought to be." This appeared in May, 1855. 120 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. In the number of the same periodical for the following month is a letter from "A New Churchman/ ' in which the writer disowns all sympathy with E. P. Hood, from the simple fact that his views of the great Swedish seer were such that clearly he could never be a Swedenborgian. The criticism called forth a spirited rejoinder, which, let us say in all fairness, the Editor of The Christian Spectator was courteous enough to find space for. There is one passage in this reply that is altogether too Paxton Hoodish to omit. " I thank you for inserting the letter of * A New Churchman ; ! that, you see, tells you that I certainly am not a Swedenborgian, and as I am disclaimed by both your reviewer and the * New Churchman,' — cast as it were out of both their synagogues, I really now begin to congratulate myself on having written a toler- ably fair book.' , The book is a very succinct unfolding of Swedenborg's System and Teaching, and a very concise resume of the main incidents of his marvellously busy life. The salient points of his complicated system are considered under the several heads or chapters entitled, " Theo- AUTHOR. 121 sophy," " Homology, " " Psychology, " " Sacred Hieroglyphics," " The World of Souls," and " Initial Letters." One of the earliest, as it is one of the best, of his books, was " The Lamps of the Temple," a series of clever sketches of some of the master minds of the Pulpit, who were mould- ing the thought of the time when he first entered upon ministerial work. The style was a most captivating one — analogical and analy- tical ; exuberant in its imagery and abounding in trope and metaphor ; incisive in manner, felicitous in illustration, filled with all the graces of choicest diction, ornamented with alliteration and antithesis, and presenting you not with polished petrifactions, but with men who "lived and moved and had their being ' in the pictures which he drew. Some of bis most sententious writing is to be found in this book, and some of the most exact and appreciative criticism. "With but three exceptions— sturdy Charles Haddon Spurgeon, venerable James Martineau, and beloved John Pulsford— they are all gone ; sketcher and sketched alike, all gone ! Richard Winter Hamilton and Cardinal Wiseman, George 122 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Gilfillan and George Dawson, Bobert Newton, Joseph Beaumont, James Parsons, Edward Andrews, Henry Melville, Benjamin Parsons, Christmas Evans, John Elias, Williams of Wern, Alfred Morris, Thomas Binney, Edwin Paxton Hood. We have only space for a few citations from this attractive book ; they shall consist of brief characterisations of some of the men he has sketched, and which have seemed to ns peculiarly happy and appropriate ; for ex- ample, of Mr. Spurgeon he writes : — "His is not a court style, his speech does not look well when dressed in cambric, lace, and pointed ruffles, with bag- wig and steel sword ; it is a bluff, hearty, farmer-like style, and its beauties, although frequent and very real, are rather like a wild flower, or huge rose in a farmer's Sunday coat than elegant vase-flowers in the duchess's drawing-room, or the wreath for the head of the young Countess of Mayfair. Mr. Spurgeon only talks well when he talks like a plain, clear-headed, broad-hearted Saxon soul." This, too, is very clever of George Dawson : — " It is a strong, energetic style, it is plain AUTHOR. 123 and grotesque, it is the Monk Bcde translating Goethe or Coleridge for the benefit of his countrymen ; it is like a carving of Carlyle, set up on a corbel, or in a niche of an old Saxon minster." Or, again, this of Joseph Beaumont : — " The master of rhetorical analogy we have called our dear, good, meek-spirited Dr. Beaumont. It is his method not to put things after one another, like a logician, but by the side of each other, like a painter." This, too, is as true as striking in his sketch of Henry Melvill : — " Over imagina- tive minds Mr. Melvill's sermons have the same wild and extraordinary influence wielded by Martin's pictures ; the tendency, while he rushes rapidly by you, is to build any vast and awful forms of grotesque magnificence — to stretch out the eye to far- flashing constellations and zodiacs distant in space — to watch the mystic outraying of strange lightnings round colossal thrones and Titan monarchies. This, it may seem, is no very desirable kind of preaching for an inflammable youth." Speaking of some of George Gilfillan's 124 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. performances as the great originator of our modern art of " Interviewing,'' he says : — " The next most atrocious thing to murdering a man is to Gilfillanise him." To those who know and love John Pulsford, the following will commend itself as very exact : — " The preaching of Pulsford, like the writing of Richter, reminds us of all soft, soothing, lulling tones in Nature. The voices of flutes over the still mountain lakes at evening, or beneath the moonlight night — bells wafted on a calm Sabbath-day to a listener on the mountain height — an organ from some lake-girt and taper-illumined minster at midnight — such are the images which rise to our mind ; or, say in a word, it is the music of crystals shooting into shape, and beauty, and cohe- sion, — aerial, soft, but clear." And again : — "Mr. Pulsford is a Transcendentalist ; he believes in 'a peace passing all understanding'; he believes in ' a love passing knowledge.' " This picture of Dr. Bichard Winter Hamil- ton strikes us as felicitous : — " Dr. Hamilton never appeared to us as an orator. His character was rather bardic ; his words did sweep forth as Vatic words ; they were AUTHOR. 125 too high-wrought for ordinary discoursing — too magniloquent and pompous ; but this was more marked from the sudden jerking of his sentences. They reminded you of soldiers falling upon each others' ranks ; the sentences stood up five feet high, all properly pipe-clayed and polished ; they gave you the idea of fellows most uncomfortably close together ; the word to halt had been given in such a hurry that they had not time to get into their places without inconveniencing each other." So, too, this of James Martineau :— " We cannot but think that, in some mea- sure, he lost sight of his vocation when he entered the pulpit ; especially we think so when we see him standing halting between the, to him, two syrens of Logic and Poetry. "We venture to think withal that he has done injury to his nature by his use of dialectic weapons. Nature baptized him for a poet. We must think that the pulpit of his denomination clothed him in the mail of a logical and theo- logical Abelard." It is scarcely surprising that his estimate of Thomas Binney is eminently an appreciative one. He says of him:— " He can say and 126 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. do anything ; his power of thinking is con- siderably beyond his power of uttering ; but his power of humour is quite equal to his power of thought ; and that which he seems to us frequently too lazy to convey by words, he conveys by a gesture, a look, a wave of the hand, a shrug of the shoulders. . . . You have the idea during the whole time of his discoursing to you that he is improvising, that he is thinking while preaching, that ideas are struggling within him for utterance, and frequently he appears to be taken captive by his ideas. . . . We know no other preacher who so truly preaches to his auditors the reality that life is a battle, and who presents the warfare in so hearty and glorious a tone ; he never whines sentimentally about the shots that fly over the field ; he does not scent his hearers with rose-water philanthropies ; he points to the opposing forces or the ambushed foes ; life's temptations, and sorrows, and dis- appointments, and says : ' Up, and at them ! ' . . . His ideas are frequently not merely origi- nal, but they present themselves sometimes in the highest regions of poetic apprehension ; philo- sophy robed in poetry and crowned with piety." AUTHOR. 127 Here, too, are some most appropriate cha- racterisations of Alfred Morris : — " His preach- ing is too calm, too aphorismatical, too dignified to suit the popular taste, even of Independency. He speaks too much from the intuitional, and too little from the sensational We confess to being very fond of the aphoristic style of Mr. Morris. We are fond of a flowing manner, and we are fond of the sententious. Minds of that order to which Mr. Morris's belong usually express themselves in that clear, curt, and defined way, they cannot stay to polish the cornices of a building, they like to say their word and leave it to its own suggestive course ; and very pleasant, indeed, it is to find the thought leavening and working within the mind. ,, Some of his choicest chapters in "Moral Manhood," " Self Formation,'' and " The Peerage of Poverty," are those which he entitles " Episodes " or "Landing Stages" — we can only mention them and pass on — "The Moral Philosophy of Crutches," "The Pilgrimage of Panamethystos," " Backbone People," the "Apology for Enthusiasm," "Toll Bars and Turnpikes," "The Two Old 128 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Schoolmasters : Bamboo and Bamboozle, " " Won't, Can't, and Try," " The Moral Satis- faction of Pulling up a Weed," " The Eace of the Iron Kings," " The Order of Vagabonds,' ' " The Soul of a Watch," " The Value of a Worm," " Industry and Song," and " The Home of Taste." And " Self-Formation " — to which we re- member hearing a most enthusiastic tribute from Mr. Hood's predecessor at Falcon- square, the Bev. Justin Evans — what a wise and altogether helpful book it is! Dealing first of all with Definitions, as to what Self-Education is, and in what it consists, the young thinker is conducted by gentle gradations along the path of mental and moral progress. He is informed how to observe, and what to observe ; what and how to read ; how to think, — deduc- tive and inductive methods of ratiocination ; how to pursue truth, and how successively to educate the body, the mind, the taste, the memory, and, through the bracing atmo- spheres of moral and mental freedom, to build up the man, the citizen, the Christian. Brave helps, indeed, for earnest hearts and souls ! few have stimulated to a higher degree the AUTHOR. 129 nascent plans and purposes of young and reverent spirits. His " Wordsworth : a Biography " (published inl85G) was pronounced by The Nonconformist to be his best book ; and we are not indisposed to endorse the verdict. Few men by the idiosyncrasy of their mental conditions, could have more appropriately undertaken such a task; there was much coincidence of thought and feeling between the great Subjective Poet of the Century, and his biographer. The oracular utterances of the Poet of Eydal Mount were caviare to the multitude ; many of his moods required interpreting. Long and solitary communings w r ith Nature had made him in- trospectional. He had listened to her mystic voice ; had conversed with her in her deepest and darkest moods ; and had caught the occult accent of her speech. He had pene- trated her mephitic glooms and densest ad- umbrations, and when he emerges from this sequestered life, it is with the nimbus round the brow and the veil over the face. Paxton Hood's book is an elucidation, a translation of the strange runic dialect into the vulgar tongue. 9 130 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. M The Age and its Architects " was published in 1850, a year previous to the appearance of " The Lamps of the Temple," and manifests w r hat he has so signally proved in all his later utterances, his deep penetration — his power to appreciate and appropriate facts and ideas, and, clothing them in a new vesture, to send them forward in new relationships, and with a fuller significance. Most of the great social questions and problems of the day are dealt with ; facts are collected and collated, and pertinent suggestions as to the solution of the difficulties discussed are presented to the thoughtful reader. The varied aspects of sociology are dealt with severally in ten chapters, entitled respectively, " The Develop- ment of the Ages," " The Victorian Common- wealth," " The Physique and Morale of a Great City," " The Arcadias of England, ,! " The Doings of the People," " The Sins of the People," " The Mission of the School- master," " Woman, the Reformer," " West- ward Ho ! " and " Modern Utopias." And what can we say of " Blind Amos," and his method of measurement by touch; of that unerring " Velvet Principle," and all that AUTHOR. 131 wealth of " Proverb and Parable for the Young Folk " ? Mr. Binney wrote to him in reference to this little book, that "If he were rich enough he would circulate it by millions.' , It reminds us of John Todd and George Moggridge, those cherished friends and guides of early days ; but there is a charm about the book which was wanting in even the preg- nant pages of the " Student's Manual," and we confess that we prefer " Blind Amos " even to dear "Old Humphrey." The young child is fascinated by the story, and graver men find a very rich mine of stimulus and suggestion in its wise and weighty words. POET, TAKING the word "poet" in its truest sense, associating with it all that it ety- mologically implies, it would seem superfluous to devote any pages to a consideration of Paxton Hood in this connection. The ex- tracts already cited from his pulpit utterances abundantly testify to and illustrate it. His was in very deed "the vision and the faculty divine." "Poet 5 is synonymous with "prophet," " seer," " thinker," " revealer," " interpreter." Carlyle says that sometimes the prophet seizes upon the * sacred mysteries from the moral side, while the poet approaches them from , the aesthetic, but confesses to so intimate a cor- relation as practically to forbid the severance. To the casual on-looker — we dare not say observer — the universe is a huge confusion, without form and well-nigh void. The scientist would pass it through his alembics and crucibles, measure it with his rule and POET. 133 compass, fathom it with his plumb-line. The philosopher detects something in it, and en- deavours to account for it ; he would disin- tegrate it, collate and classify it. The logi- cian would reduce it all to an affair of svn- thesis and syllogism. The poet puts his ear to its bosom, listens to the faint and far-off music beating in the heart of it. The poet is, and ever must be, per se greater than the philosopher ; yet sometimes they touch and intermingle. Browning is a philosopher, and Fichte was a poet. The harmony of science and religion will be re- stored and maintained through the intuitions and interpretations of the poet rather than by the guesses or even the demonstrations of the philosopher. The eye of Alfred Tennyson or Robert Browning is clearer and more penetrat- ing than that of Herbert Spencer or Alexander Bain. The rhythmic form is, perhaps, the least important. Carlyle says : " We are all poets when we read a poem well," and Emer- son : " A countryman is a poet when he stops to look at a rainbow." Do we not recognise in " Les Miscrables " of Victor Hugo a noble epic, and in Carlyle's 134 EDWIN PAXT0N HOOD. " History of the French Eevolution " one of the completest and truest dramatic poems in the language ? Yet the ultimate work of the poet is expressed metrically and musically. The highest effort of the poet is to distinguish the eternal differences between the intrinsic and extrinsic worth and meaning of things. But we have to speak of Paxton Hood in the more conventional and commonly accepted way. Frequent were his incursions upon the domain of poetry, and many a graceful lyric we have culled from the fugitive pages of the periodic Press. Were they collected and pub- lished they would fill a very respectable volume. Very much of his prose falls easily into cadence ; his sentences were frequently rhyth- mical. His poems were always smooth and chaste, and some of them had an idyllic grace of thought and diction that was very sweet. "We wonder how many of our readers ever met with those companion poems written while sitting on a stone in the New Forest — the Monody and the Trenody on " The Old Forest Days; or, Sentiment and Common Sense"? or " The Three Ships " ? or " The Farmer of St. Ives "? "We should like to transcribe his POET. 135 "Song of the Seed," "The Old Bridge of Faith," the valedictory verses " To Brighton Bells," the " Poem Addressed to Longfellow on his Seventy-fifth Birthday," and many another. We have, however, only space for one or two shorter illustrations of his verse. Here is one of his hearty songs sung often by him in his Lectures and Speeches on Peace : — The Old Iron Hammer. The soldier may boast of his grandeur and glory, And tell of the thunders that rolled o'er the field; He may hold up his weapon all dripping and gory, And sing of the splendours that shone on his shield ; But we have no battle-song, breathing of clamour ; We hold up no weapon all dripping with gore : So a song for the Hammer, the old iron hammer, The Hammer shall conquer when swords are no more ! The banner may fan it, the trumpet before it May bray forth its praises with loud brazen breath, But we will but sing of the death-shadow o'er it, Its pathway of ruin, of danger and death : While the soldier, besworded, may lift up the banner, We'll tell him the blacksmith must glory restore ; So a song for the Hammer, the old iron hammer ! The Hammer shall conquer when swords are no more ! Round the forge in the village the blacksmiths are singing, A hammer is fashioned— lo ! there, where it lies ; In the far- distant forests the anvils are ringing ; On the waste and the desert the proud cities rise. 136 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Thou ancient truth -bringer, thou mighty world-tamer, Great symbol of labour, triumphant once more ! A ] l hail to the Hammer, the old iron hammer ! The Hammer shall conquer when swords are no more ! He could hold the attention and win the hearts of the rustics on the village green, and throw a spell over the cultured congregations of Hare Court and the Weigh House. He could write hymns of Temperance that could raise the enthusiasm of plain country folk, and write " Evening Voluntaries on Como " that charm by their measured music, and are of the kind that poets love. Here is one, written at Caddenabbia, in Italy, in 1874 : — The Little Mountain Church. There's a little white church, but my foot cannot find it, It stands on a crag with a tall moiint behind it, And far, far beneath it the sweet chafing waters, The lake cool and clear. Oh ! thou dear little church on the far away mountain, As fresh to my heart as the fall of the fountain ; And far, far beneath it the sweet chafing waters — The lake cool and clear. And how did the hands of the builder come near thee, Oh ! thou tall beetling crag ? what a terror to rear thee I So far, far above o'er the sweet chafing waters, The lake cool and clear. POET. 137 Oh ! whisper and say how the worshippers find thee, Oh, church on the crag, with the tall mount behind thee ; So far, far above o'er the sweet chafing waters, The lake cool and clear. Is the way thro* the sweet meadow, there just below it? Is the way o'er j'on narrow ledge, foot cannot know it ? So dread and so dark o'er the sweet chafing waters, The lake, cool and clear. What hand wakes the sound from the belfry up yonder ? "What matins ! what vespers ! I wonder, I ponder, As I rock far beneath on the sweet chafing waters, The lake cool and clear. Oh ! thou little white church, tho' my foot cannot find thee, I shall think of thee long when I've left thee behind me; And far, far away from the sweet chafing waters, The lake cool and clear. I shall say, little church, on the far-away mountain, Thou art fresh to my heart as the fall of a fountain ; So far, far above o'er the sweet chafing waters, Or the wild chafing waters, The lake cool and clear. HYMNOLOGIST. PEEHAPS of all the several parts of our Sabbath worship, the loftiest in tone and wealthiest in blessing, is the Service of Song. Music appeals so winsomely, so irresistibly to our souls, the kinship of soul and song is so intimate and real. The great preachers of the past live oftenest only in the traditions of their names : the great singers live ever in their songs — a perpetual inheritance of the Church. The holy hymn that quivers into expression in village chapel or city church to-day, is the same that throbbed beneath the domes of the great cathedrals of the past — so long as it enshrines the heart's need and the spirit's yearning and the soul's desire, it is "not for a century, but for all time." Sermons are some- times the most evanescent of all the forms of human speech — hymns have a perennial life. And so down the aisles of the centuries march God's singers — striking their harps and chant- HYMNOLOGIST. 139 ing their litanies, the echoes cf which are never to die ; but, having been wafted along the tides of human experience, and pulsed through the corridors of human hearts, and whispered by the pillows of dying saints, are at last to merge into that great tempest cf harmony that shall sweep through the golden gates of " The City," and vibrate in the great " Hallelujah Chorus " of the redeemed. Praises pealed along the Roman catacombs from the lips of Christian fugitives — praises rang through the arena as holy maidens were folded in the tiger's grim embrace ; praises pealed from w ? ild crag and mossy glen, from brave old Covenanters and Waldenses, from martyr's pyre, from dungeon darkness, and fell death's last agony. All through the centuries, we say, the heavenly liturgy has rung, chanted by the lip and breaking from the heart of Bernard and Ambrose and Xavier, and echoed in the later strains of Doddridge and Toplady, Watts and Wesley, Cowper and Newton, Ken and Keble, Newman and Faber, Lynch and Paxton Hood. There was a beautiful eclecticism in Paxton Hood's Service of Song — the litany of praise 140 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. throbbed in the great hymns of the Church that surge and swell along the ages, like those of Watts and Wesley, Newton, Doddridge and Toplady, Cowper, Montgomery and Addison — but often the quaint verses of John Banyan and George Herbert were the wings with which you accomplished your spirit flights — or you were invited to join in hymns selected from Alfred Tennvson's "In Memoriam," or Philip Bailey's " Festus " — or to unite in the quiet musings of John Keble, or John Henry Newman, or Frederick Faber, or Thomas Lynch, Bay Palmer, and Adelaide Proctor and Frances Havergal — or to enter into the experi- ences of John Bowring and Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or gentle Bernard Barton. Of all Paxton Hood's writings, his hymns, perhaps, are destined to live longest in the memories and affections of men. Many of them have found a place in the most catholic and cherished of our hymnals. His conceptions of life were so genial, and of the spiritual life especially so high and pure. They met so many experiences ; appealed so plaintively and winsomely to so many moods. To the sorrowful HYMNOLOGIST. 141 they came so soothingly, and withal so hope- fully ; to the diffident they are cheery and bright; to the sad and heavy-hearted so sunny and so bracing. His name, we say, will live chiefly as it will stream like a bright red lamp along the avenues of his hymns. Although his hymns w r ere suffused with a tender pathos and he entered most readily and vividly into the sadder experiences of men, there was never a hint of morbidity in his nature. He had a horror of all false sentiment. Even in his more sorrowful hours there were gleams of sunshine, glints of hope. A characteristic story is told of him, illustrat- ing his sympathy with the gladder inspiration : Engaged to preach in a place and among a people strange to him, he entered the pulpit at the moment an aged deacon was reading out, in doleful tones, the lines intended to lead the Service of Song with which the morning's devotion opened : — My thoughts on awful subjects roll, Damnation and the dead. Starting to his feet, in tones that thrilled through the frigidities of the old place, he exclaimed, " Stop ! stop ! my thoughts do not 142 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. ' roll ' on such a subject at all ! I am going to preach on the love of God, and the hymn I intended was — ' Ere the blue Heavens were stretched abroad, From everlasting was the Word.' '* When many of his more ephemeral produc- tions are forgotten, and over very much, too, of his weightier work " oblivion shall grow over it like grass," men will never tire of sing- ing his Sursam Cor da, — " Lift up your hearts to things above," or " 0, walk with Jesus," or " Jesus lives and Jesus leads," or " Tears and terrors," or " Harps of gold." Men w T ill com- fort one another with the sweet assurance, " There's a beautiful land where the rains never beat," or charm their sorrows into song with that sweet lyric, " Sing a hymn to Jesus when the heart is faint. ' ; "What a calming and comforting hymn is that : — The eagle builds on the mountain's breast, And sports with the lightnings free ; But sweeter far is the dove's low nest On the bough of the household tree. Sweet is the nest where the dove may build In the dark and the lonely grove ; But the true dove's nest is a spirit filled By the wings of a holy love. HYMNOLOGIST. 143 Her silvery wing may skirt the sky ; But where'er the wings may roam — Though they wander far or wander high — They return to the nest at home. And the thoughts of a heart that God hath blest, Though they wander o'er sky and sea, Come brooding back, like a dove> to the nest In the quiet household tree. O Spirit of Jesus, make Thy rest In this stony heart of mine ; And hymns shall arise like songs from a nest, But the praises shall all be Thine. And soon I shall have as the wings of a dove, As I fly to my skyward rest, To pass to my golden grove above And build in the true dove's nest. The writing of many of these hymns beguiled the tedium of long railway journeys. Many fell into rhyme and rhythm as a kind of musical accompaniment to his footfalls over many a field-path and in many a forest ramble. There is a quaintness about some of his hymns that is very pleasant, and reminds you of John Bunyan and George Herbert, of both of whom he was never tired of talking in those quiet Sabbath evening meditations, as, for instance, "A Pilgrim to the Holy Land," " Come, be of good cheer, brother," and those 144 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. memorable lines he wrote one evening seated upon the Portland Breakwater, and with which he closes his sermon on " Doing and Dreaming ; or, the Wise and Foolish Builders " : — Saviour and Master, These sayings of Thine, Help me to make them Doings of mine. Here is another sweet hymn. "We remem- ber, the first time we heard it, asking him where the tune to which he had wedded it might be obtained. " Oh/' he said, "it is in manuscript. I heard it once in a French cathedral, some years ago, and it struck me as so sweet that I pencilled it down, and wrote these words to accompany it — " After the darkness, lo, the light Shall all the past repair : ! The perfect bliss, the spotless sight, It is not here but there. So still I sing in every state, Always where'er I be ; — Be still, my heart, be still and wait, He loveth thee. " 0, but for Him I could not sing, However fair my lot ; For dark night droops, and dark things spring Eound me on every spot HYMXOLOGIST. 145 But now I sing with joy elate, Always where'er I be ; — Be still, my heart ; be still and wait, He loveth thee. " And now, whatever things I see, The mighty or the fair ; I know the best is waiting me, For perfect things are there. A child of grace and not of fate, I sing, where'er I be ; — Be still, my heart; be still and wait, He loveth thee. " My God will end where He began, His end cannot be pain ; The glory of the Incarnate Son Must be eternal gain. So till in His eternal state, His meaning thou shalt see ; — Be still, my heart ; be still and wait, He loveth thee." The next has a very pathetic history attached to it : Mr. Hood wrote it one day in a railway carriage on his way up to London froni Nibley. He sent it to his wife, who w r as then nearing her end, and staying at Hall with her parents ; but before it arrived she had passed away into "the Golden City.' , What a significance it gave to some of the lines, as the full weight of this new and sorrowful experience dawned fully upon him. 10 146 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. There is a golden city Beyond the bridgeless river, And all the blest who find its rest Shall rest in joy for ever. Its walls are all salvation, Its gates are high evangels ; Come to the Golden City, And share the bliss of angels. "Within the Golden City Our white-robed friends are walking All happy hearts are meeting there, All of the old ways talking ; And God hath hushed their weeping, Beyond all human pity ; And parted hearts are greeting Within the Golden City. On earth all things deceive us, All lovely things are dying ; Love only comes to leave us ; Our singing turns to sighing. Poor, frail, and fainting mortals, We need each other's pity ; We long to see the portals Of our own Golden City. And so each shape of beauty, But warns us not to love it, Because it veils the something More beautiful above it. On earth in tears we wander, And all our best loves grieve us ; In the Golden City yonder They'll love us, and not leave us. HYMNOLOGIST. 147 Come to the Golden City, O friends, I must be going ! I hear my Lord's own voice — I hear The sounds of music flowing. World, flesh, and devil, let me pass ! What care I for your pity ? I'm. going o'er the sea of glass, On to the Golden City. Speaking of the sad episode following upon the writing of this hynin we cannot refrain from transcribing extracts from the letters which our revered and much loved friend, John Pulsford, sent him while his heart was bleeding and lacerated beneath the blow. How it has been given to all of us to experience the poverty of all human words to speak comfort in such crises as these ! But the lines we reprint seem to us about the most tender it would be possible to indite in such a season — how utterly uncon- ventional, how tenderly beautiful they are ! — " Newton Abbot. " Oh, my dear, dear, dear brother ! how suddenly, from a luxurious revelling in the en- chantments of this neighbourhood, my heart filled with pain, grew heavy and sombre, and yearned in me for you ! Your black loss !— 148 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. your wild bitterness ! I know well the affright- ment, the distraction, that feeling of the soul that it cannot be ! And why do I speak to you w r hen I know that the creature cannot help or comfort you? I do it, far more from a neces- sity in me, than from any idea that I can mini- ster healing to the broken heart. Yet my brother must not ' lie on his face/ as though there were no hope ; as though nothing were to be done in this hour ; as though nothing were to be learned. The hour is precious and largely freighted with pure treasure. Court the awful, and, if possible, say to the blackness of darkness, ' Thou art not quite black ' ! and it will unlock its bosom and show thee the hidden pearl, and whisper to thee the sweet secret. This hour is worth all previous hours to thee, dear brother. Be still and strong in the all and always tranquil power ; and new atmospheres will embosom thee, and new waters refresh thee ; and the new life-fire will baptize and inspire thee. We must see to it that everything shall serve us, and nothing undo us. God is Alive ! The dark, dark event, is the garment He wears and in which He seeks to come very near to HYMNOLOGIS.T. 149 the quick of thee, that he may impress thee not for ordinary good but for EXTRA-orefo'nar//. And your darling wife will not be less precious to you, nor less sacred, nor less useful, because she has slipped the shell. The kernel is entire and waits for you in the House of Life. This always was a House of Death, and never can be anything else but a house of death. Happy are they who have found ' the way out/ and have escaped. Don't be afraid of sorrow, my dear brother, don't wish for comfort. Lie under the night, and let the whole cross lie on thee ; and in the night, when it is darkest, light will arise, and out of the cross balm will flow. And from the dove-world to which vour dove has flown, the sweet-singing turtle-dove, out of the bosom of God, will descend upon you, and ' great will your peace be.' — Your earnest, affectionate, and faithful, John Puls- pord." " My poor, dear, stricken brother may rely upon it, I should have hurried to him had I been in Hull. Your words of the 2nd I did not get till yesterday, the 6th. The outermost garment of your meek, loving household-angel is now clean gone from your eyes and embraces. 150 EDWIN PAXTON HOOD. Oh, it is cruel hard, — it is wildly agonising ; — I know it. But don't say ' all your hopes are cut off J Oh, no ! It is only the flesh that says so. The flesh is first to speak, but itself is a fallacy, and it always speaks in fallacies ; your sweetest, dearest, deepest hopes, inextin- guishable hopes, are but now budding; perhaps not budding yet, only germinating in death. You know nothing is quickened except it die. How sweet and pure in her lily whiteness is your darling! and not far from yon— sensually and fallaciously far, but spiritually, actually most near. Oh, ,90 near ; nearer than flesh can ever be to flesh. And you shall see her again, and embrace her right tenderly. Is this no hope ? She is but gone to ' the green pastures ' a few days before you. There is no doubt of your following her. In the meantime no space can be between hearts that are one. The one thing, which is the only real thing, and the only true substance, incorruptible, and living, and enduring eternally, that one thing is every- where. In Him there is precious, actual unity, and fellowship that is, and must be for ever. The outer corrupt substance is a cheat, and all the bonds and endearments that have their \ HYMNOLOGIST. 151 ground in it are infatuatingly plausible, but terrible cheats. We all find it out sooner or later, and so learn the first lesson towards essential life and peace. You must come to us soon as you can after we return home, — not to forget your bosom one, but to re- member her sweetly, and to realise together with me the actual Fatherland, w T herein we both have treasures. — Most lovingly in the life of Jesus in me, John Pulsford." Oh! dear people of Offord Koad, we say to ourselves, while transcribing this, what mini- stries have been yours ! Edwin Paxton Hood and John Pulsford ! 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