Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
DISTINGUISHED MEN OF CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PHILANTHROPY—JOSEPH STURGE AND REV. JOHN ANGELL JAMES.
FOLLOWING the order of these concentric circles of arts and influences, we now come to that of Christian philanthropy. And no town in England has produced a more perfect example of this great grace than Birmingham.
Joseph Sturge, take him all in all, did not have, and did not leave his like in England, or in any other country or age. That is my own personal impression; and I knew him intimately during the golden autumn of his great and good life. Many and illustrious have been the philanthropists who have blest the centuries with their thoughts and works of benevolence. Nothing gives more striking proof of the breathing of a divine spirit upon human hearts than the production of such men and women. Now there are several different forms and forces even of genuine, Christian philanthropy. For there is often a form without a working force; and a form, too, that is not to be condemned or turned out of the fellowship of useful and pleasant charities. There is a general, even, diffusive goodwill to men that spreads itself out like a wide and sunny smile of good-nature. It is light, but not heat; still light is good for the eye, and the genial light of such inactive benevolence, if it does not actually produce the working charities, is grateful to society, and is far more useful even than ornamental. Then there is what may be called eccentric philanthropy, or a benevolence with a comet's orbit, narrow in the centre, but running to an extreme length and a sharp point in some special direction. These eccentric philanthropists have been most valuable and illustrious workers for human good. Their deeds and dispositions have brightened the pages of history with the beautiful sunshine of benevolence. They are the men and women who fix the eye and heart intently upon some particular form of moral evil or physical suffering, and sight and feeling grow more and more intense as they look and think upon the subject of their concentrated efforts. For a time, it may be, each has his own field all to himself, and it is large and the work is arduous, and he cannot even look over into another, much less lend a hand to the labour that other field demands. Such a philanthropist was John Howard. He was a man of great benevolence to his kind, but it ran virtually all in one direction and was concentrated upon one great evil—the terrible condition of prisons in his own and other countries. This great field of perilous labour was enough—and more than enough—for every thought and every effort he gave to the public good. No one could be so ungrateful to his memory as to inquire whether he ever said or wrote a word against war, slavery, or intemperance. Elizabeth Fry had her especial field, like Howard, and her large benevolence was concentrated in like manner upon it.
But this was the distinguishing characteristic of Good Joseph Sturge: his philanthropy was as, spherical as the sun itself, and the space it illuminated and warmed was as spherical as the sun's light on the face of the earth. His heart was so full of love to God and man that it shone out of him equidistantly in every direction. Indeed it seemed a star set alight in the firmament of human society, with beams as warm as the sun's. And well they might be, for they were the sun's, and lost but little light or heat in the reflection, he lived so near to it. What John Howard was to the prisons of Europe Joseph Sturge was to the house of African bondage. What John Howard felt and did for white men and women in the misery of their horrible cells. Joseph Sturge felt and did for the myriads of negro slaves scourged to their unrequited toil under British or American masters. No man in England ever gave more thought and effort to their emancipation and enlightenment than he did. But all he felt and worked for them did not affect the rotundity of his philanthropy; indeed it seemed to perfect as well as expand its sphere; and in that sphere he laboured so steadily and evenly, that now he is gone, one can hardly say for what enterprise of benevolence he was most distinguished. If he had not wrought in so many different fields, he might have been called the John Howard of the anti-slavery cause. But the cause of universal peace and brotherhood of the peoples was equally dear to his great heart, and no man living or dead ever gave to that cause a warmer sympathy, a greater hope, a larger or steadier faith, or a more generous and munificent hand. No one knows this by more personal and intimate evidence than myself. His heart was shining at its full with the same sunlight when journeying by night through Russian snows to St. Petersburgh to say an earnest word for peace to Nicholas, as when he walked among the negro cabins in the torrid zone to gather evidence of their condition for the British Parliament. It was the same light that beamed like the smile of God on his broad serene face as he walked from cottage to cottage in the desolated hamlets of Finland after the Crimean war, pouring the oil and wine of his Christian sympathy into wounds still bleeding from the rough hands of his countrymen; making the hearts of houseless widows sing for joy at the gifts he brought in his hands and the gracious words he spoke to them out of his eyes for lack of other speech they could understand.
And yet, after all that he felt and did for Freedom and Peace and the brotherhood of nations, the cause of Temperance seemed equally dear to him, and he gave to it an advocacy as earnest and unwearied up to his last day on earth. In the great Anti-Corn-Law movement he was a tower of strength. Not that he made eloquent speeches from the platform, or powerful arguments in the press for the repeal of taxes on the people's bread. His strength did not lie in these intellectual forces; but in the irresistible and all-conquering power of a great principle. Never was a man more distrustful of expediency, of compromise with wrong, of a sliding-scale of obedience to the true and right. If he had seen in his youth what Constantine saw written in letters of fire on a cross planted on the clouds, "Εν τουτο ηικω," In this conquer, he could not have taken hold of a whole principle and carried it into the breach with more unswerving faith and courage. "Total and immediate" was the flag he raised against every great wrong which he attacked. It was this he reared against that mongrel compromise with slavery, the apprentice system in the West Indies; and he would fight under no other against the Corn Laws. He not only carried it into that great field as the banner of his own action, but he rallied to it even many of the leaders of the movement who were on the point of being seduced into a compromise with the upholders of the unjust system. At this crisis of the movement, its most dangerous stage, when the two great political parties were so nearly balanced that each was bidding high for the adhesion of the Anti-Corn-Law League, no man saw the peril of the temptation so clearly as Joseph Sturge. He was on the point of leaving for America on an anti-slavery mission; but he wrote an earnest letter to the Council of the League, offering to raise his subscription from £100 to £200 for the year, on the distinct understanding that they were on no account to yield up the principle of total and immediate abolition. Mr. Cobden, who had the greatest reverence for his strong, deep, and clear sense of truth, right, and duty, wrote to him thus: "A letter from you in the 'Anti-Corn-Law Circular,' published at the present time, exhorting us to stand firm to principles, and promising your co-operation so long as we do so, would be a rallying point for all the good and true men, and would shame the wanderers and bring them back to our ranks."
No truer friend of the great masses of the people ever lived in England. To all that made for their well-being he gave an earnest sympathy and unwearied effort, and he gave both without the alloy or imputation of a selfish sentiment or object. No man could have had a stronger distaste for the tactics of partisan warfare or for the excitement of parliamentary life, and nothing but a deep and honest sense of the political rights of the unenfranchised people could have constrained him to offer himself as a candidate for a seat in the House of Commons. Although he was defeated at the polls by small majorities, the moral influence of the principles and sentiments he put forth in his addresses and speeches was worth more to the great cause of the people than half-a-dozen seats in Parliament filled by the lukewarm doctrinaires of political expediency.
No class of the wronged or needy so took hold of his large and feeling heart as the little vagrant, ignorant children—some of them worse than fatherless—who seemed to be set on the steepest and slipperiest declivities of temptation, to slide into the depths of vicious life and misery. I was with him when he visited the Rauhe Haus, near Hamburgh, and witnessed the deep interest with which he studied the character and working of that admirable institution for the rescue and education of juvenile vagrants. Immediately on his return to England he set to work to found a similar establishment, and the Reformatory Home, as it may justly be called, at Stoke Prior, near Bromsgrove, where about sixty young outcasts are clothed, fed, and educated, is one of the last works of his benevolent life.
On the spring morning of the 14th of May, 1859, that purified and waiting spirit heard the whisper among the flowers of its earthly home, "Come up higher!" and serene at the sudden call, it went up higher to join the holy fellowships for which it had been fitted, and which might well be the happier for its presence and communion. Although the people of Birmingham knew and revered the manner of man they had in Joseph Sturge, they know not the depth of that sentiment of reverence and esteem they had entertained for him until the sudden news ran through the streets and lanes and into the humblest cottages and garrets of the poor, "Joseph Sturge is dead!!"
Never since the town had a being and a name had a death so moved the population. It seemed to touch all classes and political parties with the same sympathy and sorrow. The press, the pulpits of all denominations, and public men testified to this sentiment. As the Rev. John Angell James said in his sermon: "The lengthened cortége, the closed shops, the crowded streets, the long procession of respectable men, the mixture of ministers and members of all religious denominations, the seriousness and sorrow that sat on every countenance, which in mournful silence seemed to say, 'We have lost a benefactor'—the numerous sermons which from the pulpits of various denominations paid a tribute to his memory, all proclaimed the respect in which he was held, and which was in fact a public honour put not only upon the benefactor, but upon philanthropy itself." Speaking of the funeral, his biographer justly remarks: "It was indeed an instructive spectacle which Birmingham presented that day, when the whole town, the seat of the largest manufacture of small fire-arms in the world, bowed in reverence over the bier of Joseph Sturge, the man of peace. It was a tribute paid, not to rank, or station, or eloquence, for he had none of these, but to virtue alone."
Although monuments of brass or marble are not needed to perpetuate the memory of such a man as Joseph Sturge, they are useful to show to subsequent generations how he was regarded by the men of his own day and community. Such a statue has a value beyond all the grace that a sculptor's genius can impart. These marble forms of men and women standing in the market-places and at the cross-roads of the people are the precious stones of nations. Birmingham erected such a memorial to Joseph Sturge, and placed it at the confluence of five roads, or at "The Five Ways," just at the entrance of the town on the south-west. The coincidences of the locality are felicitous and striking. Freedom, Peace, Temperance, Charity, and Godliness were the five ways of his good and beautiful life; and it was truly a happy accident to place his monument at such a point. Then the statue itself shows a happy inspiration in the sculptor. Standing among the emblems of his love and good works, the serene and benevolent face seems to beam with the living smile of a beating heart, and the half-extended arm and the open palm to be warm with the pulse of their old sweet life, as if still inviting the African slave-child or the homeless orphan to climb up against his bosom.
The Rev. John Angell James was a contemporary and co-resident with Joseph Sturge, and no town in England or in any other country ever had two more impressive lives than theirs breathing, walking, and working in its midst at the same time. I think it can be truly said, that for the last century, the English Independents have had no minister who has made a deeper or better mark upon the public mind than John Angell James. In every faculty of influence his was eminently fitted to produce this impression. He was not a profound scholar; he pretended to no classical culture. On his way from the humble walks and avocations of common life to the pulpit, he passed the side-paths of ancient erudition with neither time nor need to enter them. The spirit that called him to his ministry was ever present in him, whispering "This is the way," when he glanced wistfully into those rich affluents of ancient lore. So he made but little if any acquaintance with Demosthenes or Cicero, Homer or Virgil, on the straight and narrow path of his education; but much with the Author and Finisher of his faith. With a single eye and heart for His service, the ardent young man not only forgot the things that were behind, but the things that were on either side of him, keeping the mark and prize of his high calling only and ever in view. And he attained both beyond his own expectation and the best thought of his early friends. He came to the pulpit without the loss of a single lock of his young manhood's strength. That classical culture that so often exhausts the vital heat of the soul in producing mental brilliance, had not sobered or softened the pulse of a single faculty within him. He entered upon his work with all his young enthusiasm at full glow, and with all his great-eyed hope and faith, looking out grandly into the future. Thus, at the outset of his ministry, he threw into it all the native eloquence of his heart; and his lips could not help bring eloquent with its utterances. Sometimes when the two were moved with unusual inspiration, he gave them larger poetical license, and they ran with a rush and a rhapsody into the floweriest meads of rhetoric. Some of his published addresses on special anniversaries or occasions, are deeply marked with these characteristics; more frequently those delivered in the first years of his ministry. But this should not be ascribed to the youthful ecstasies of an exuberant imagination in the speaker. At the time when he delivered his most florid addresses, grave members of the British Parliament and platform orators adopted a style and diction equally ornate. The public taste for glowing and redundant metaphor pervaded every assembly, religious or political; and what would now offend, then delighted the ears of an audience. Sheridan would hardly have ventured to deliver one of his rhapsodies in the hearing of the present orators of the House of Commons. Thus public taste, as it were, creates both its own standards and examples of excellence.
Mr. James was born in Blandford, in Dorsetshire, in 1785; and after a short term of academical and theological education at what might be called the private school of Dr. Bogue at Gosport, was settled as the pastor of Carr's Lane Chapel, Birmingham, in September, 1805. He was then hardly twenty years of age, but had been "put on the preaching list" when he was but little more than seventeen; so that his pulpit teachings and his own tuition in theology literally commenced at the same time. With this small stock of educational preparation he entered upon the work before him. The first were the testing years of his life and character. Like hundreds of young men who have ascended to the pulpit and platform, he was exposed to the imminent peril of that fluency of speech and richness of voice which have carried away nine in ten of them upon a noisy current of shallow thought into the dead sea of oblivion. For several years he seems to have yielded to these seductive and effeminating facilities of delivery. Few men could have been more tempted to obey their impulse and guidance. His voice was susceptible of all the music of poetic and pathetic modulation. He could play his florid metaphors and easily-worded sentences upon it as upon an instrument of ten strings. Then, breathing into the strain all the fervour of deep and sincere feeling, what more could he need to become an effective preacher, and build up a great fellowship and congregation in Carr's Lane Chapel? In the course of a few years, however, he found, to a hopeful and salutary grief, that one thing was lacking to his ministry—deeply-studied thought. He forthwith set himself bravely to its elaboration. He seized hold of all the helps in his reach. He read with earnest and persevering reflection; and the more he read and reflected the more he distrusted those qualities on which he had hitherto greatly relied. His sermons and addresses began to grow in intellectual vigour; and he began to rise as a preacher. He was invited to preach a sermon in London. It made an impression not only for its graces of elocution, but for its intellectual force and logical structure. He was soon after invited to speak at an annual meeting of the London Missionary Society, at that time presenting about the only forum to ministers of different denominations for platform speeches. This was a long stride, and he at first shrank from it. But encouraged by an old friend and adviser to make the effort, he did so with a large measure of success. Referring to it, he says: "It so happened that I was rather happy in my speech, which elicited some very encouraging terms of approbation, at which I was as much surprised as gratified. From that time I commenced my career as a speech-maker—a business of which, though I have not been unsuccessful in it. I was never very fond."
Not long after this, when he was about twenty-six years of age, he made a more elaborate and extended speech at the annual meeting of the Birmingham Auxiliary to the British and Foreign Bible Society. He threw all the force and fervour of his imagination, heart, soul, mind, and strength into this oration, which even in later years he regarded as the best he ever delivered. It inaugurated for him a new era and area of influence, which at that time began to be felt beyond the boundaries of his own country. This address was printed by the London committee of the Society, as a full and effective exposition of its principles and objects. It was circulated by thousands, and read by persons of all denominations throughout the kingdom. This was followed by other productions, generally sermons and addresses delivered on special occasions, then prepared and sometimes amplified into a considerable volume for the press. "The Sunday School Teachers' Guide" was a book thus expanded from a single address; and in a few years it passed through twenty editions. His power as a public speaker and writer came to be well known throughout the country, and large audiences assembled to listen to him wherever he appeared. The greatest oratorical effort he ever made was perhaps his address in behalf of the London Missionary Society, in Surrey Chapel, in May, 1819. It lasted two hours, and was delivered without reference to a single written note, and without a moment's hesitation. He was then at the meridian of his manhood and of his reputation as a speaker. "At the close of the first hour," says his biographer, "the preacher requested permission to pause for a few minutes, and the people sang a hymn. Such was the excitement of the congregation, that during this temporary interruption of the discourse, oranges were thrown into the pulpit to refresh the exhausted orator. The hymn finished, he rose again, and, recovering his strength, thundered on for another hour."
It is doubtful if any address delivered from the pulpit ever was listened to with more enthusiastic admiration than this brilliant oration. It is said that even the place and the subject did not restrain old men in the front gallery from giving audible manifestations of their applause. As he approached the autumn of life, his power in the pulpit became more perceptible and impressive. It was when the autumnal tints of those concluding years had touched his great bushy head and beard and strongly-marked features, that I first saw and heard him. The earnestness of his soul in his work, his voice, mellowed like a sabbath bell that had called a dozen generations to the sanctuary, the deep solemnity of his manner, the sheen of a godly life that seemed to surround him like a halo, the very reflection of the thoughts he had put forth upon the world through his books—all gave to his discourse a power which I had never seen equalled in any other minister on either side of the Atlantic. I first met him the first hour of my first visit to Birmingham in 1846. Without any introduction or previous acquaintance. I had ventured to write to him a year or two prior to my coming to England, and had the great pleasure of receiving a most cordial letter in reply. When, therefore, he gave me his hand next after Joseph Sturge, at the house of that good man, he seemed to impersonate, to their fullest conception, all the ideas I had formed of his character, as well as to deepen the reverence with which it had inspired me. His personal kindness, and the deep interest he manifested in the peace and anti-slavery movements, and other philanthropic enterprises of the day, have made for me a memory which I shall ever cherish as a rich treasure. This sentiment of esteem and reverence grew deeper at every subsequent interview, and I seldom visited Birmingham without seeing him and listening to him in Carr's Lane Chapel. But however large his congregation, and however often he may be able to address other audiences, the most eloquent minister can reach but a comparatively few persons with his voice. He must put his thoughts to press in order to reach and move the million. This John Angell James did, to a degree and effect which no other minister, of any denomination, has attained for the last century. It is doubtful if Baxter or even Bunyan has been so widely read. Mr. James gave to the world, as the best legacy of his life, seventeen volumes, some of which have had a vast circulation. His "Anxious Inquirer after Salvation Directed and Encouraged" must rank only second to Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" in number of copies printed and circulated in different languages and countries. No man in writing a book could be more deeply impressed with the conviction that he was moved by the spirit of God than was the author of this remarkable volume. That conviction seemed to be deeper at the end than at the beginning of the work. He charges its readers to "take it up with something of the awe that warns you how you touch a holy thing." Thousands on both sides of the Atlantic have taken it up in this way to all the benefit which its author hoped of it.
In addition to all the graces and strength of his faculties as a preacher and writer. Mr. James was endowed with an executive and originating mind of great tact and power. He was virtually the founder and father of the Spring Hill College. Birmingham, for the education of Independent ministers. Although few ever reached the eminence he attained with so little academic and classical culture, no one could have a greater sense of its value and necessity. It was his earnest and unwearied aim to raise the scholastic standard of the ministers of all the Nonconformist denominations, and to elevate them to the level and reputation of Oxford and Cambridge graduates. The institution at Spring Hill was, therefore, the object of his large and generous solicitude, and he laboured for its well-being and well-doing in season and out of season. His earnest public and private appeals brought to its aid liberal contributions. He was a father to all the young men it educated for the ministry, and watched over, counselled, and encouraged them with the kindliest suavity of Christian affection, and assisted many of them in time of need from his own purse.
But his executive and originating talent was next brought into action on a larger field. He now became virtually the founder and father of "The Evangelical Alliance," of whose objects and operations the whole civilized world has heard much in the last twenty years. He had long been exercised with grief at the alienations or seeming estrangements existing between different branches of the Christian church holding the same fundamental doctrines of religious faith. He writes, "One morning, at my private devotions. I was much led out in prayer on this subject, and a suggestion came forcibly to my mind to do something to effect a union of Christians in some visible bond. I rose from my knees and sketched out a rough scheme of union. The May meeting of the Congregational Union soon followed. At that meeting. I called the attention of the brethren present to the subject before them. Indeed, this was my chief object in going to the meeting." From that "rough scheme of union" was shaped and laid the basis of an organization that unites a vast number of churches in both hemispheres in sentiment and action, for the purity and spread of the Christian faith.
Mr. James himself was a living bond of union between English and American churches. His letters to eminent ministers in the United States would make a large and interesting volume. No man in England ever did more to draw together the two countries by the liens of Christian fellowship and sympathy; and both have common and equal cause to hold at equal value the legacy of his life and labours. While giving his best efforts to the organization of an Evangelical Alliance which should embrace and unite the Protestant churches in both hemispheres, he illustrated what such a vast communion should be, feel, and do, by becoming himself the soul and centre of an inner and smaller Evangelical Alliance in Birmingham. And the great one he founded would do well to take his little home fellowship as a pattern in spirit and action. Church and Dissent never fraternized more beautifully than in the Christian sympathy and companionship between John Angell James and the Rev. Dr. Miller, the eminent clergyman of the Established Church in Birmingham, who will leave the record of a great and good life for some one to write. No minister in England was a more out-and-out Nonconformist than Mr. James, and perhaps no clergyman more a "churchman" than Dr. Miller. But that in which they agreed was far holier and lovelier than that in which they differed; and even the psalmist, if he had seen their manner of walk and conversation with each other, might have recognized the original of his ideal: "Behold, how goodly and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" When Mr. James was approaching his end, and was prostrated by an alarming attack of his disease. Dr. Miller offered prayer for his recovery on Sunday morning in his church. This drew from the venerable invalid a touching expression of gratitude, not only for such a token of sympathy, but for others of the same spirit.
Mr. James died the 1st of October, 1859, a few months after good Joseph Sturge was called to his rest and reward. Thus the two men, so united in sympathy and loving fellowship in good works during their lives, were separated in their deaths by only a small space of time. Their graves lie but a little way apart—one in the yard of the Friends' Meeting House in Bull Street, the other under the pulpit he filled for half a century in Carr's Lane. The shadow of a great sorrow lay dark and heavy on the town from one funeral to the other. For no other town ever had two such men living in it one year and buried in it the next.