e is
licensed for public worship, according to Act of Parliament. Moderate
your expectations if you go there. Dr. Campbell has been far too busy a
man to master the thought and aspect and characteristics of our age. Of
what man in England, in London, in the nineteenth century, is aiming at,
he seems to have but a remote idea. So blind is he that, if he wants a
heathen, he puts on his spectacles and reads you an account of one out of
some old Missionary Magazine. Nor does the Doctor atone for this by the
beauty of his style and the perspicuity of his tone. His voice is husky
and, at times, inaudible; his manner, bad. Sheridan had a bad voice, so
had Fox, so had Burke; but these men were orators, nevertheless. Dr.
Campbell is not one, and never was one. He builds up no lofty structure.
He bears you on no unfaltering wing far,

'Far above this lower world,
Up where eternal ages roll.'

He overflows with no brilliant eloquence, and burns with no celestial
fire. He never ascends into the region of beauty and splendour, and life
and light. His is not the magic art to take you from step to step along
the Christian path, till your soul heaves, and you exclaim, 'It is good
to be here!' On the contrary, he leaves you flat and cold and dull. He
amplifies, and waves his right arm, and quotes texts, and repeats a
feeble sentence emphatically; but that is all; he makes no progress. In
going from Edinburgh to Stirling, by water, you are carried backwards and
forwards, by the winding of the stream, in the most remarkable manner.
You see Stirling long before you approach. You keep going, and yet you
don't seem going on. Dr. Campbell winds just in the same way. You have
talk without effect; action without progress; words without thought.

The real truth is, Dr. Campbell is one of the failures of the age. His
'Martyr of Erromanga' has been his only creditable work. No man has
talked more, or done less. He attempts too much. He would be
everything, and is nothing. Superficiality has ever been his bane. A
fatal copiousness of words has ruined him. More golden opportunities
than those he has had, no man ever had. A failure in the pulpit, he
turned himself to the press; and a powerful body, with an organization in
almost every town and village in the land, rallied round him as their
chief. To circulate his publications the most gigantic efforts were
made. The 'pulpits were tuned,' the Sunday-school was inv