Davidson's well meant effort to attract outsiders, and to keep up a large
Sunday-afternoon service, now that the novelty of the thing has passed
away, seems as successful as ever. He and his people have lately moved
into the new hall, a most commodious building, and right well do they
fill it. It will be much to be regretted if this scheme fall through for
want of funds. It appears much good has resulted from it. Not a week
passes but cases occur in which it has been shown how awakening have been
the addresses delivered. A service that only lasts an hour is a
desideratum. No one could have listened to Mr. Grubb without feeling how
his kind of address is pre-eminently adapted to encourage and stimulate
the religious life, to arrest the attention of the impenitent, and to
touch especially the hearts of the young. Mr. Grubb takes no text,
preaches no formal sermon, aims at no rhetorical flight, does not strike
you as being very intellectual, or very original, or very learned. It
may be that he is all three--it certainly is not for me to say that he is
not--but whether he be so or not, it is clear that he judges and judges
rightly that, at the Agricultural Hall on a Sunday afternoon what is
wanted is not the glare of the rhetorician, not the learning of the
divine, not the elaborate argument of the trained logician, not the fancy
of the poet, not the dramatic action of the elocutionist, but the tender
beseeching of one who, saved by Divine mercy himself, and assured of all
its fulness and omnipotence, would force a similar boon on all around.
It was thus he preached on Sunday afternoon. He seemed to speak out of
the depth of a holy love, in language very simple, abounding with the
commonest, and, as some might think, most worn of Scripture quotations,
yet with a pathos that, as it came from the heart, at once reached the
hearts of all his hearers. A more homely or plainer-looking man than Mr.
Grubb you don't often see. As he stood there, with his sunburnt, honest
face, with his suit of sober black and grey, with his rustic air, you
felt that his power (for there was not a single unattentive hearer) was
such as a Whitefield or a Wesley wielded, and which has never been
exerted in our world in vain. Man's fallen state, his need of pardon,
his need of pardon now, the danger of delay, the duty of all instantly to
receive the proffered grace--such were his themes. He told them he had
stood by the death-bed of a woman