ways sweeping to a climax, which, when reached and mastered,
was a relief to all. I think he was made Canon of St. Paul's. He also
was the Golden Lecturer somewhere near the Bank--an appropriate locality.
His sermons were highly finished--I am told he laboured at them all the
week. He was a preacher--nothing less, nothing more.

Next there rises before me the vision of Howard Hinton--a big,
cadaverous, grey-haired man, preaching in a small chapel on the site in
Shoreditch now occupied by the Great Eastern Railway. The congregation
was not large, but it was very select; I fancy it represented the _elite_
of the London Baptists. He was a very fascinating preacher by reason of
his great subtlety of thought, and at times he was terribly impressive,
as his big, burly frame trembled with emotion, and his choked-up
utterance intimated with what agony he had sought to deliver his soul
from blood-guiltiness, as, wailing and weeping, he anticipated the awful
doom of the impenitent. I must own I got wearied of his metaphysical
subtleties, which seemed to promise so much, and whose conclusions were
so lame and impotent, ever disappointing; and it often seemed to me that
his celebrated son--the late James Hinton--too soon removed, as it seemed
to many of us--inherited not a little of his father's ingenuity in this
respect. But he was a grand man; you felt it in his presence, and still
more as you walked home thinking of what he said.

Amongst the Independents--as they were termed--the leading men were the
Brothers Clayton: one preaching at the Poultry, the other in Walworth, to
large congregations--fine portly men, and able in their way, though it
was an old-fashioned one. Nor must Dr. Bengo Collyer be forgotten--a
fat, oily man of God, as Robert Hall called him, who had at one time
great popularity, and whom the Duke of Kent had been to hear preach.

It is a curious sign of the times--the contrast between what exists now
and what existed then--as regards theological speculation. We are now
sublimely indifferent whether a preacher is orthodox or the reverse,
whatever that may mean, so long as we feel his utterances are helpful in
the way of Christian work and life. It was not so fifty years ago.
Ministers scanned their brethren in the ministry severely, and the
deacon, with his Matthew Henry and Doddridge, sat grimly in his pew,
eager to note the deflection of the preacher in the pulpit from the
strait and narrow line of