Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

To come to later times, of course my most vivid recollections are those connected with the late Mr. Spurgeon. In that region of the metropolis known as “over the water” the Baptists flourish as they do nowhere else, and some of their chapels have an interesting history. Amongst many of them rather what is called high doctrine is tolerated – not to say admired. They are the elect of God, preordained before the world was formed to enjoy an existence of beatific rapture, that shall continue when the world has passed away. Of one of the most popular preachers in that locality, the late Jemmy Wells, it is said that when told that one of his hearers had fallen out of a cart and broken his leg his reply was, “Oh, what a blessed thing it is he can’t fall out of the Covenant.” When one of the chapels in that locality was at low-water mark, there came to it the Rev. Charles Haddon Spurgeon – then little more than a boy, but already famous in East Anglia as a boy preacher – and never had a preacher a more successful career. There was no place in London that was large enough to contain the audiences that flocked to hear him. I first heard him at the Surrey Music Hall, and it was wonderful to see what hordes came there of saints and sinners, lords and ladies, City magnates and county squires, Anonymas from St. John’s Wood, Lady Clara Vere de Veres from Belgravia. It was the fashion to go there on a Sunday morning, just as it was the fashion a generation previously to rush to Hatton Garden to hear Edward Irving. The hall was handsome and light and airy, free from the somewhat oppressive air of Cave Adullam and Little Bethel, and there upon the platform which did duty for a pulpit stood a young man short of stature, broadly built, of a genial though not handsome countenance, with a big head and a voice it was a treat to listen to and audible in every part of that enormous building. What was the secret of his success? He was bold, he was original, he was humorous, and he was in earnest. He said things to make his hearers laugh, and what he said or did was magnified by rumour. Old stories of Billy Dawson and Rowland Hill were placed to Mr. Spurgeon’s credit. The caricaturists made him their butt. There was no picture more commonly displayed at that time than one entitled “Brimstone and Treacle” – the former representing Mr. Spurgeon, the latter Mr. Bellew, then a star of the first order in many an Episcopalian pulpit. Bellew soon ran through his ephemeral popularity – that of Mr. Spurgeon grew and strengthened day by day. Do you, like the late Sir James Graham, want to know the reason why? The answer is soon given. “I am going into the ministry,” said a youthful student to an old divine. “Ah, but, my dear friend, is the ministry in you?” Well, the ministry was in Mr. Spurgeon as it rarely is in any man; hence his unparalleled success.

One little anecdote will illustrate this. I have a friend whose father had a large business in the ancient city of Colchester. Mr. Spurgeon’s father was at one time in his employ. Naturally, he said a good deal of the preaching talent of his gifted son, and of the intention beginning to be entertained in the family circle of making a minister of him. The employer in question was a Churchman, but he himself offered to help Mr. Spurgeon in securing for his son the benefits of a collegiate education. The son’s reply was characteristic. He declined the offered aid, adding the remark that “ministers were made not in colleges but in heaven.”

In connection with Mr. Spurgeon’s scholastic career let me knock a little fiction on the head. There is a house in Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, famous now as the birthplace of Mrs. Garrett Anderson and her gifted sisters, which at one time was a school kept by a Mr. Swindell, and they told me at Aldeburgh this last summer that Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil there. This is not so. It is true Mr. Spurgeon was a pupil at Mr. Swindell’s, but it was at Newmarket, to which the latter had moved from Aldeburgh.

One or two Spurgeon anecdotes which have not yet appeared in print may be acceptable. At Hastings there are, or were, many High Church curates. A few years ago one of them did a very sensible thing. He had a holiday; he was in town and he went to the Tabernacle, getting a seat exactly under Mr. Spurgeon’s nose, as it were. It seems that during the week Mr. Spurgeon had been attending a High Church service, of which he gave in the pulpit a somewhat ludicrous account, suddenly finishing by giving a sort of snort, and exclaiming, “Methinks I smell ’em now,” much to the delight of the curate sitting underneath. Referring to Mr. Spurgeon’s nose, I am told he had a great admiration of that of his brother, a much more aristocratic-looking article that his own. “Jem,” he is reported to have said on one occasion, “I wish I had got your nose.” “Do you?” was the reply; “I wish I had got your cheek.” Let me give another story. On one occasion an artist wanted to make a sketch of Mr. Spurgeon for publishing. “What are you going to charge?” asked the preacher, as the artist appeared before him. “You must not make the price more than twopence; the public will give that for me – not a penny more. A photographer published a portrait of me at eighteenpence, and no one bought it.” This conversation took place on the occasion of a week-night service. At the close of the service the artist came up into the vestry to show his sketch. “Yes,” said Mr. Spurgeon, “it is all very well, but I should like to hear what others say about it. They say women and fools are the best judges of this kind of thing,” and accordingly the likeness was referred to a friend who happened to come into the room in the nick of time.

It always seemed to me the great characteristic of Mr. Spurgeon was good-natured jollity. He was as full of fun as a boy. I saw him once before getting into a wagonette pitch all the rugs on his brother’s head, who naturally returned the compliment – much to the amusement of the spectators. On one occasion I happened to be in the Tabernacle when the Baptist Union dined there, as it always did at the time of the Baptist anniversaries. I suppose there would be many hundreds present who enjoyed the ample repast and the accompanying claret and sherry. After the dinner was over Mr. Spurgeon came up to where I was sitting and, laying his hand on my shoulder and pointing to the long rows of empty bottles left standing on the table, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “Teetotalism does not seem to flourish among the brethren, does it?” And he was as kind as he was cheerful. Once and once only I had to write to him. He returned me a reply addressed to me in my proper name, and then – as I was writing weekly articles under a nom de plume in a highly popular journal – added, in a postscript, “Kind regards to – ” (mentioning my nom de plume). The anecdote is trivial, but it shows how genial and kind-hearted he was.

And to the last what crowds attended his ministry at the Tabernacle! One Saturday I went to dine with a friend living on Clapham Common. Going back to town early in the morning I got into an omnibus, and was amused by hearing the conductor exclaim, “Any more for the Tabernacle!” “Now, then, for the Tabernacle!” “This way for the Tabernacle!” and, sure enough, I found all my fellow-passengers got out when we arrived at the Tabernacle; nor was the ’bus in which I was riding the only one thus utilised. There was no end of omnibuses from all quarters drawing up at the entrance. According to the latest utterance of Mr. Herbert Beerbohm Tree, in this age of ours faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, love is regarded as but a spasm of the nervous system, life itself as the refrain of a music-hall song. At the Tabernacle the pastor and people were of a very different way of thinking.

And Mr. Spurgeon was no windbag —vox et præterea nihil; no darling pet of old women whose Christianity was flabby as an oyster. He was an incessant worker, and taught his people to work as well in his enormous church. Such was the orderly arrangement that, as he said, if one of his people were to get tipsy, he should know it before the week was out. He never seemed to lose a moment. “Whenever I have been permitted,” he wrote on one occasion, “sufficient respite from my ministerial duties to enjoy a lengthened tour or even a short excursion, I have been in the habit of carrying with me a small note-book, in which I have jotted down any illustrations that occurred to me on the way. The note-book has been useful in my travels as a mental purse.” Yet the note-book was not intrusive. A friend of mine took Mr. Spurgeon in his steam yacht up the Highlands. Mr. Spurgeon was like a boy out of school – all the while naming the mountains after his friends.

It is also to be noted how the public opinion altered with regard to Mr. Spurgeon. When he came first to London aged ministers and grey-haired deacons shook their heads. What could they think of a young minister who could stop in the middle of his sermon, and say, “Please shut that window down, there is a draught. I like a draught of porter, but not that kind of draught”? It was terrible! What next? was asked in fear and trepidation. These things were, I believe, often said on purpose, and they answered their purpose. “Fire low,” said a general to his men on one occasion. “Fire low,” said old Jay, of Bath, as he was preaching to a class of students. Mr. Spurgeon fired low. It is astonishing how that kind of preaching tells. I was travelling in Essex last summer, and in the train were two old men, one of whom lived in Kelvedon, where Mr. Spurgeon was born, who had sent the Baptist preacher some fruit from Kelvedon, which was, as he expected, thankfully received. “Did you see what Mr. Spurgeon says in this week’s sermon?” said he to the other. “No.” “Why, he said the devil said to him the other day, ‘Mr. Spurgeon, you have got a good many faults,’ and I said to the devil, ‘So have you,’” and then the old saints burst out laughing as if the repartee was as brilliant as it seemed to me the reverse; but I leave censure to the censorious. In his early youth, Sadi, the great Persian classic, tells us, he was over much religious, and found fault with the company sleeping while he sat in attendance on his father with the Koran in his lap, never closing his eyes all night. “Oh, emanation of your father,” replied the old man, “you had better also have slept than that you should thus calumniate the failings of mankind.”

CHAPTER XII.
Memories of Exeter Hall

As the season of the May Meetings draws near, one naturally thinks of Exeter Hall and its interesting associations. When I first came to London it had not long been open, and it was a wonder to the young man from the country to see its capacious interior and its immense platform crowded in every part. It had a much less gorgeous interior than now, but its capacities for stowing away a large audience still remains the same; and then, as now, it was available alike for Churchmen and Dissenters to plead the claims of the great religious societies, but it seems to me that the audiences were larger and more enthusiastic at that early date, though I know not that the oratory was better. Bishops on the platform were rare, and the principal performer in that line was Bishop Stanley, of Norwich, a grotesque-looking little man, but not so famous as his distinguished son, the Dean of Westminster. Leading Evangelical ministers from the country – such as James, of Birmingham, who had a very pathetic voice, and Hugh McNeile, of Liverpool, an Irishman, with all an Irishman’s exuberance of gesture and of language – were a great feature. At times the crowds were so great that a meeting had to be improvised in the Lower Hall, then a much darker hall than it is now, but which, at any rate, answered its end for the time being. The missionary meetings were the chief attraction. Proceedings commenced early, and were protracted far into the afternoon; but the audience remained to the last, the ladies knitting assiduously all the while the report was being read, and only leaving off to listen when the speaking began. Perhaps the most crowded meeting ever held there – at any rate, in my time – was when Prince Albert took the chair to inaugurate Sir Fowell Buxton’s grand, but unfortunate, scheme for the opening up of the Congo. He spoke in a low tone, and with a somewhat foreign accent. Bishop Wilberforce’s oratory on that occasion was overpowering; the Prince’s eyes were rivetted on him all the while. Sir Robert Peel spoke in a calm, dignified, statesmanlike manner, but the expression of his face was too supercilious to be pleasing. And there was Daniel O’Connell – big, burly, rollicking – who seemed to enjoy the triumph of his own presence, though not permitted to speak. The other time when I remember an awful crush at Exeter Hall was at an anti-slavery meeting, when Lord Brougham took the chair; an M.P. dared to attack his lordship, and his reply was crushing, his long nose twitching all the while with a passion he was unable to repress. He looked as angry as he felt. Amongst the missionaries, the most popular speakers were John Williams, the martyr of Erromanga, and William Knibb, the famous Baptist missionary from Jamaica, and Livingstone’s father-in-law, the venerable Dr. Moffat, who, once upon his legs, seemed as if he could never sit down again. Williams was a heavy man in appearance, but of such evident goodness and earnestness that you were interested in what he said nevertheless. William Knibb was, as far as appearance went, quite the reverse; a fiery speaker, the very picture of a demagogue, the champion of the slave, and a terrible thorn in the sides of the slave-owners. Of women orators we had none in those primitive times, and some of the American women who had come to speak at one or other of the Anti-Slavery Conventions – at that time of constant occurrence – were deeply disappointed that, after coming all the way from America on purpose to deliver their testimony, they were not allowed to open their mouths. It was at Exeter Hall that I first heard Mr. Gough, the Temperance advocate – an actor more than an orator, but of wonderful power.

It was at Crosby Hall that I first heard George Dawson. I think it was at one of the meetings held there in connection with what I may call the anti-Graham, demonstration. On the introduction, in 1843, by Sir James Graham of his Factories Education Bill, the Dissenters assailed it with unexpected vehemence. They denounced it as a scheme for destroying the educational machinery they had, at great expense, provided, and for throwing the care of the young into the hands of the clergy of the Church of England. It was in the East of London that the opposition to this measure originated, and a committee was formed, of which Dr. Andrew Reed was chairman, and his son, afterwards Sir Charles, who lived to become Chairman of the London School Board, was secretary. The agitation spread all over the country, and delegates to a considerable number on one occasion found their way to Crosby Hall. In the course of the proceedings a young man in the gallery got up to say that he came from Birmingham to show how the popular feeling had changed there from the time when Church-and-State mobs had sacked the Dissenting chapels, and driven Dr. Priestley into exile. “Your name, sir?” asked the chairman. “George Dawson,” was the reply, and there he stood in the midst of the grave and reverend seigneurs, calm, youthful, self-possessed, with his dark hair parted in the middle, a voice somewhat husky yet clear. He was a Baptist minister, he said, yet he looked as little like one as it was possible to imagine.

It was a little later, that is, in 1857, Mr. Samuel Morley made his début in political life, at a meeting in the London Tavern, of which he was chairman, to secure responsible administration in every department of the State, to shut all the back doors which lead to public employment, to throw the public service open to all England, to obtain recognition of merit everywhere, and to put an end to all kinds of promotion by favour or purchase. Mr. Morley’s speech was clear and convincing – more business-like than oratorical – and he never got beyond that. The tide was in his favour – all England was roused by the tale The Times told of neglect and cruel mismanagement in the Crimea. Since then Government has done less and the people more. Has the change been one for the better?

One of the most extraordinary meetings in which I ever took a part was an Orange demonstration in Freemasons’ Hall, the Earl of Roden in the chair. I was a student at the time, and one of my fellow-students was Sir Colman O’Loghlen, the son of the Irish Master of the Rolls. He was a friend of Dan O’Connell’s, and he conceived the idea of getting all or as many of his fellow-students as possible to go to the meeting and break it up. We walked accordingly, each one of us with a good-sized stick in his hand, to the Free-Mason’s Tavern, the mob exclaiming, as we passed along, “There go the Chartists,” and perhaps we did look like them, for none of us were overdressed. In the hall we took up a conspicuous position, and waited patiently, but we had not long to wait. As soon as the clergy and leading Orangemen on the platform had taken their seats, we were ready for the fray. Apart from us, the audience was not large, and we had the hall almost entirely to ourselves. Not a word of the chairman’s address was audible. There was a madman of the name of Captain Acherley who was in the habit, at that time, of attending public meetings solely for the sake of disturbing them, who urged us on – and we were too ready to be urged on. With our voices and our sticks we managed to create a hideous row. The meeting had to come to a premature close, and we marched off, feeling that we had driven back the enemy, and achieved a triumph. Whether we had done any good, however, I more than doubt. There were other and fairer memories, however, in connection with Freemasons’ Hall. It was there I beheld the illustrious Clarkson, who had come in the evening of his life, when his whole frame was bowed with age, and the grasshopper had become a burden, to preside at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. All I can remember of him was that he had a red face, grey hair, and was dressed in black. There, and at Exeter Hall, Joseph Sturge, the Apostle of Peace, was often to be seen. He was a well-made man, with a singularly pleasant cast of countenance and attractive voice, and, as was to be expected, as cool as a Quaker. Another great man, now forgotten, was Joseph Buckingham, lecturer, traveller, author, and orator, M.P. for Sheffield.

In the City the places for demonstrations are fewer now than they were. The London Tavern I have already mentioned. Then there was the King’s Arms, I think it was called, in the Poultry, chiefly occupied by Dissenting societies. At the London Coffee House, at the Ludgate Hill corner of the Old Bailey, now utilised by Hope Brothers, but interesting to us as the scene of the birth and childhood of our great artist, Leech, meetings were occasionally held; and then there was the Crown and Anchor, in the Strand, on your left, just before you get to Arundel Street, where Liberals, or, rather, Whigs, delighted to appeal to the people – the only source of legitimate power. It was there that I heard that grand American orator, Beecher, as he pleaded, amidst resounding cheers, the cause of the North during the American Civil War, and the great Temperance orator, Gough, who took Exeter Hall by storm. But it was to Exeter Hall that the tribes repaired – as they do now. When I first knew Exeter Hall, no one ever dreamt of any other way of regenerating society. Agnosticism, Secularism, Spiritualism, and Altruism had not come into existence. Their professors were weeping and wailing in long clothes. Now we have, indeed, swept into a younger day, and society makes lions of men of whom our fathers would have taken no heed. We have become more tolerant – even Exeter Hall has moved with the times. Perhaps one of the boldest things connected with it was the attempt to utilise it for public religious worship on the Sunday. Originally some of the Evangelical clergy had agreed to take part in these services, but the rector of the parish in which Exeter Hall was situated disapproved, and consequently they were unable to appear. The result was the services were conducted by the leading ministers of other denominations, nor were they less successful on that account.