ally fills its pulpit--for it is the Weigh-House
Chapel, and the preacher is the Rev. Thomas Binney.

Let us suppose it is a Sabbath morning, and the time half-past ten. A
stream of people has been flowing for the last quarter of an hour to the
door of the above-named chapel: a few in private carriages--some in
cabs--the rest on foot. The larger portion consists of males, and,
again, that majority consists of young men. They come, evidently, from
the shops and warehouses and counting-houses of this great metropolis.
They belong to the commercial classes. They are the raw material out of
which are evolved, in process of time, aldermen, merchant princes, and
Lord Mayors. They are such as Hogarth, were he alive now, would sketch
for his industrious apprentice. A few medical students from the
neighbouring hospitals, and men of law or literature from the more
aristocratic West, and you have the usual congregation to which the Rev.
Thomas Binney ministers in holy things.

It is something to preach to these twelve hundred living souls; to place
before them, immersed as they are in the business and bustle of this
world, the reality of that which is to come; so to speak that the voice
of God shall be more audible to them than that of gold. Yet, surely, if
it can be done by man, he can do it whom we now see, with reverent step,
ascending the pulpit stairs. What power there is in those great limbs,
that full chest, and magnificent head! Nature has been bountiful to him.
Such a man as that you can't raise in London or Manchester. You can
imagine him the child of the mountain and the flood--learning from nature
and his own great heart and the written Word--wild and strong and fierce
as the war-horse scenting the battle from afar. You see he has a warm
heart, human sympathies; that, in short, he is every inch a man--not a
scholastic pedant, nor an intellectual bigot, nor an emasculated priest.
Oh, it is pitiful to see in the pulpit, preaching in God's name, some
poor dwarf who has never had a doubt nor a hope nor a noble aim, and who
enunciates your damnation with the same heartlessness with which he tells
you two and two make four. There are too many of such in our
pulpits--men made ministers in some narrow routine of theological study,
in some college where they get as accurate an idea of the world against
which they have to warn men as the Chinese have of us.

It was not so in the grand old apostolic times. Paul, Pet