JOSEPH PARKER.
NO one, we think, who has any acquaintance with the feelings current in leading Nonconformist circles twenty years ago would deny that the prominence to which Dr. Joseph Parker had then already attained was regarded as a subject for regret, and almost for apology, or even protest. The Congregational body, to which he belonged, were justly proud at that day of the presence in their ministry of a group of men who inherited and illustrated its best and highest traditions. Only lately had they lost the noble personality of Alexander Raleigh, and the names of John Stoughton, Henry Alton, Eusta.ce Conder, Henry Reynolds, and R. W. Dale do not exhaust but exemprly a list of then living divines whose repute for learning, culture, dignity of tone and bearing, and depth of spirituality commanded respect in every quarter com- petent to judge of such qualities. Among those—both ministers and laity—to whom the names of such men as these were as household words it was held to be some- thing incongruous that what was in many respects the most conspicuous Congregational pulpit in the country should be occupied by a preacher distinctly deficient in some of the characteristics most esteemed by all who cherished the memory of Watts and of Doddridge. Dr. Parker's oratorical gifts were acknowledged, the orthodoxy of his views was not impugned, nor was the correctness of his private character ever called in question. None the less, however, was it felt that his position at the City Temple constituted something approaching to a misrepresentation of the idoc of Congregationalism,—a misrepresentation not the less annoying because without doubt the position that Dr. Parker occupied had been alto- gether created by himself. He was a Christian; he was a Congregationalist. That could not be denied. And with- out doubt he had obtained the ear of the City. But the result of it all would be that the City Temple pulpit, which attracted not only many eminent Englishmen, but all kinds of people from the provinces and from abroad who were sojourning in London, would be supposed to be typical. The kind of thing to be heard any Sunday or Thursday on the Holborn Viaduct would be thought to be —only probably at its best —what commended itself to the judgment and taste of Congregationalists as a whole. They would be supposed, in a word, to be generally sympathetic towards a style of pulpit address which, what- ever its merits, embraced frequent appeals to the hearers' sense of humour, and an egotistical, not to say a self- advertising, pose on the part of the preacher. And as these things were not at all generally to their minds, but quite otherwise, many of them felt misrepresented and a little aggrieved.
Yet though the sketch just given is, we think, quite a fair one, the facts did not prevent Dr. Parker from being chosen Chairman of the Congregational Union in 1884; and that tribute, the highest expression which the ministers of the body concerned can give to their respect for and sense of the importance of any member of their number, was emphasised by repetition in 1901. The explanation of these apparent inconsistencies forms an interesting problem. Dr. Parker's first election to the Chair of the Congrega- tional Union caused, no doubt, much heart-searching, and even, in anticipation, some talk of secession. Yet none occurred, and when seventeen years later the choice was renewed, we are not aware that in any quarter it was regarded as other than a natural recognition of the long-established eminence of the minister of the City Temple. Can it be said that during the last twenty years of his life any considerable modification took place in the leading features of Dr. Parker's character and his methods of fulfilling his ministry ? We do not think that that is alleged. What he had been that in the main he continued to be. If as the years went on there was a diminishing difference in some respects between the standards of judgment and taste by which he was governed and those which had been prevalent in the great religious body to which he belonged, it was theirs which had moved towards his rather than his towards theirs. This, indeed, is only to say that among Englishmen of Puritan antecedents, as among Englishmen generally, there was in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and there continues at the beginning of the twentieth, an appreciable diminu- tion in wonted national reserve and restraint in the upi.bion of feeling, an appreciable increase of tendency towards the free exhibition of personal ambitions and idiosyncrasies. Thus the proportion of Congregationalists to whom Dr Parker's histrionic style and humorous eccen- tricities gave annoyance was very distinctly smaller in 1901 than in 1882. Also, it would not be unfair to say that at the later period there happened to be a smaller number of ministers in that body of generally recognised outstanding gifts of intellect and character than was the case at the earlier period. If, however, it may be said that the considerations to which we have so far called attention in connection with Dr. Parker's undoubted and prolonged eminence as a Congregational preacher are but very partially honorific either to him or to British Nonconformity, we hasten to add that, in our view, the later opinion did much fuller justice than the earlier to the real extent and importance of his powers. The fact that week in, week out, on Sundays and Thursdays, for eight-and-twenty years, he drew together the congregations which assembled in the City Temple constitutes, as it seems to us, a conclusive proof alike of the genuineness of his oratorical gifts and of the genuine- ness and intensity of his faith in the Gospel message which he delivered. Nothing that was not genuine, whether in oratory or in religious belief, would have endured that test. City men would have wearied of the mere weaver of words, however richly coloured, however variously shot, the fabrics which he succeeded in pre- senting to them. Even more certainly would they have found out and rejected the man who, setting up as a preacher of the Christian faith, was not himself profoundly possessed by a conviction of its truth. But City men did not weary of Dr. Parker, nor did they turn from him as from a religious poseur. We do not mean, indeed, that all dislikes were allayed, that all dis- paraging criticism ceased, that no bitter epigrams summing up the man and his faith continued to be uttered. But we do mean that despite what we should agree in holding to be serious faults of taste, despite what we cannot help calling a certain loudness of personality which deeply repelled many, Dr. Parker retained in the main, because he deserved to retain, the inward, as well as the outward, ear of a great and varied audience. He did so, first, because he was an orator, not indeed of the highest rank, but essentially a member of that rare and divinely gifted order, possessing its singular combination of insight into men's hearts and minds with an artistic sense in the use of language and, above all, a rich imagination. He retained, and perhaps even increased, his audience, secondly, because he talked to them habitually, but with constant freshness and point, of things in which he firmly believed, and which they knew to be of the most intimate concern to their welfare here and hereafter. Prejudice against him, as we have said, did not disappear. Indeed, it was impossible that it should. But, in our belief, the great majority of those who went to hear him with anything approaching to an open mind, even if their points of view were widely remote from his, came away feeling that he had real teaching to give on the highest subjects, and that he strenuously applied great powers towards making that teaching as effective and as permanent as possible. There is a striking passage in one of his sermons on the Gospel of St. John, published in the many volumes of the "People's Bible," which, we believe, gives the true key to his ministry, and indicates the essential com- munity between his preaching and that of all the great Christian preachers who have ever stood up to win the world for their Master. The sermon is entitled "Bread and Water." "Jesus," said the preacher, "is not a phenomenon, He is bread ; Christ is not a curiosity, He is water. As surely as we cannot live without bread we cannot live truly without Christ; if we know not Christ we are not living, our movement is a mechanical flutter, our pulse is but the stirring of an animal life. It is in this way, then, that Jesus Christ is to be preached. It is even so I would ever preach Him. I would call Him the water of life ; I would speak of Him as the true bread sent down from heaven ; I would tell men that it is impossible to live without Him ; I would say, with heightening passion, with glowing and ineffable love, that He only, even the holy Christ of God, can satisfy the hunger and the thirst of the soul of man." Even this very sermon is by no means exempt from faults of taste and temper. But we need not quote them now, or ever. The man who uttered the words we have cited was a great Christian preacher. With whatever shortcomings and causes of offence, he used for the highest of purposes one of the richest of human endowments, the value of which, though some strangely in these days depreciate it, can never be rated low by any man with a true conception of the heights and depths of human nature.
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