and unspotted from the world? I want not theories of grace, but
what shall make men practically do what they theoretically believe. It
is a human world we live in. Every heart you meet is trembling with
passion, or bursting with desire. On every tongue there is some tale of
joy or woe. If, by mysterious ties, I am connected with the Infinite and
Divine, by more palpable ties I am connected with what is finite and
human: and I want the preacher to remember that fact. The Hebrew Christ
did it, and the result was that his enemies were constrained to confess
that 'never man spake like this man,' and that the 'common people heard
him gladly.'

Dr. Cumming preaches as if you had no father or mother, no sister or
brother, no wife or child, no human struggles and hopes--as if the great
object of preaching was to fill you with Biblical pedantry, and not to
make the man better, wiser, stronger than before: perhaps it may be
because this is the case that the church is so thronged. You need not
tremble lest your heart be touched, and your darling sin withered up by
the indignant oratory of the preacher. He is far away in Revelation or
in Exodus, telling us what the first man did, or the last man will do;
giving you, it may be, a creed that is scriptural and correct, but that
does not interest you--that has neither life, nor love, nor power--as
well adapted to empty space as to this gigantic Babel of competition, and
crime, and wrong, in which I live and move.

The service at Crown Court Chapel is very long; the Scotch measure the
goodness of their services by their length. You must be well drilled if
you are not weary before it is over. The chapel itself is a singular
place. You enter by an archway. The gallery steps are outside; the
shape is broad and short; a galley runs on three sides, and in one is
placed the pulpit, which boasts, what is now so rare, a sounding-board.
As no space is left unoccupied, the chapel must contain a large number of
persons. The singing is very beautiful--better, I think, than that of
any other place of worship in London. There is some sense in that, for
the Scottish version of the Psalms of King David is not one whit more
refined, or less bald and repulsive, than that of our own Sternhold and
Hopkins, or Tate. But, nevertheless, the singing is very beautiful. Dr.
Cumming himself looks not a large man, but a sturdy determined man, with
good intellectual power, and that power well cultiv