Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/256

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242
EMINENT LIBERALS OUT OF PARLIAMENT.

who, for a pretence, make long prayers, is not incurred. No prayers are offered up. There has been substituted what is called "meditations," or moral soliloquies, and the finest music. The whole atmosphere of the chapel is "advanced" to such a degree that Unitarians of the older school, when they occasionally enter it, are almost as puzzled as orthodox Trinitarians what to make of it. The average intellectual level of the congregation is, I should imagine, the highest in London. Men and women who could not be induced to listen to any other preacher go readily to hear Mr. Conwa3^ Nowhere will you find a finer collection of human heads; and yet Mr. Conway is not an orator in any sense of the word.

His predecessor, the celebrated W. J. Fox, "Publicola" of "The Dispatch," and member of Parliament for Oldham, was a different man. He combined all the qualities of a popular, if heretic, preacher. It is what Mr. Conway says, and not how he says it, that attracts. He is hardly even a scholar in the English and strictly technical sense of the term, and in matters of detail he is occasionally inaccurate. But he is an original and fearless thinker,—a born instructor of other men in whatever is true, beautiful, and good, with an ear delicately attuned to catch the faintest accents of the "still, small voice" of conscience. What he hears in the closet he has the courage to proclaim from the housetop. His discourses consequently bear an oracular impress. They have, moreover, an aroma of mysticism, faint but sweet,—a breath of New England transcendentalism peculiarly grateful to unaccustomed Cockney nostrils. It were curious to speculate what would happen if say Spurgeon and Conway were to exchange pulpits for a