The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-03-20 00:00:00

THE STOTTEERIDGE OBSERVER.

rarely seen clearer and more definite evidences of
the presence and power of the Spirit of God in the
hearts of men than in the case of those converts. With
respect to the difference of Mr. Moody's services from
those ordinarily held, the general opinion was that it
would be better if they had brighter and more cheer-
ful music. At this some persons began to clap and
applaud; but Mr. Moody immediately rose and, with
hands upraised, said, "I hope we'll never have any
applause in the prayer-meeting. Let us not forget
ourselves!" After a prayer from Mr. Edwards, Lord
Radstock read a letter from Russia descriptive of the
work going on there. Shortly after the Doxology was
sung, and, with Mr. Moody's benediction, the large
audience dispersed.

At the Agricultural Hall on Monday night, owing
probably to the announcement that Mr. Moody would
not take part in the proceedings, but that he intended
to devote his attention to the "inquiry room," there
were not so many persons present as had been the case
at former gatherings. The two side galleries were
almost deserted; but the body of the hall and the
gallery fronting the platform were thronged. Pre-
cisely at half-past seven Mr. Ira D. Sankey came upon
the platform accompanied by the Rev. James Spur-
geon. The Rev. Mr. Billing asked "the anxious and
inquiring ones who have been at previous meetings
quietly to retire to meet Mr. Moody in St, Mary's
Hall,' which is attached to the building. Whilst
some of the congregation were making their
way to the "inquiry room," and the reserved
seats were being filled up, Mr. Sankey asked the
audience to sing the hymn, "I am so glad that
our Father in Heaven." Prayer was then offered
by the Rev. James Spurgeon, after which the
hymn, "Jesus, lover of my soul," was sung. The 55th
chapter of Isaiah, beginning with the well-known
worth, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the
waters," &c,, was afterwards read by the Rev. James
Spurgeon, with a running commentary interpolated.
The Rev. W. Dale having offered up prayer, Mr.
Sankey sang the hymn "Sowing the seed by the day-
light fair," the choir and congregation joining in the
refrain. The Rev. James Spurgeon then deliverd an
address from the words, "And did all drink the same
spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock
that followed them: and that Rock was Christ." In
the course of his sermon he dwelt upon the necessity
of that "water of life" to save their souls. At the
close of the sermon a number of the congregation went
to the "inquiry room," where Mr. Moody was en.
gaged.

The Times of Tuesday has the following leader on the
mission of Messrs. Moody and Sankey :

The two Americans who for some time past have
been conducting a remarkable religious movement in
the North have at length addressed themselves to the
Metropolis, and the vast and various population of this
City is invited to hear and judge for itself. Judgment,
perhaps, is not exactly the faculty with which these
gentlemen are most concerned; they invite belief and
sympathy, and they appeal to the heart rather than to
the head. Still, criticism is inevitable, and they have
already encountered a good deal of it. Revivals are not
a novelty, and have not always proved in the end satis-
factory, and a great part of the public are not a little
e.nxions to know what is the kind of influence which has
been collecting congregations of many thousands, and,
as is said, influencing for good a great proportion of
them, in the Northern towns. On the latter point,
indeed, the balance of favourable testimony is very
considerable; and if only it be true that Messrs.
Moody and Sankey have roused numbers of people to
a more moral and more elevated life, mere criticism of
their methods is somewhat ungenerous and out of
place. But the world is suspicious of religious en-
thusiasm, reasonably, perhaps, with respect to some
modern instances of it, but certainly unreasonable on
the whole. It is mainly by great fermentations of
faith and zeal that the world itself has been lifted
to its present level—a level, low as it may be, far
higher than that of the past. Still, there are such
things as spurious kinds of excitement, and when
the London Clergy were invited a little time ago
to meet Mr. Moody in a Conference they were, not
unnaturally, rather irresponsive. Mr. Moody sur-
prised them on that occasion by taking for granted
their sympathy with the purpose of his mission, and
discussing his plan of operations. He is, at all events,
a man who takes his own line, and leaves you to fol-
low or not, just as you please. However, he is now in
the north of London, and he proposes to go in turn to
the South, the East, and the West. He is to be heard
nearly every night at the Agricultural Hall, and the
largest building in London is converted into an open
Church, not only for the inhabitants of London itself,
but for numbers to whom London is more accessible
than any other place which the Americans are likely
to visit.

They will see in the audience itself a spectacle not to
be forgotten. In our Churches and Chapels even the
two or three thousand people collected are, for the
most part, broken up into sections, and are rarely seen
as a whole. But the Agricultural Hall brings them
together in one vast mass, and the sense of association
becomes extraordinarily powerful. The singing, in
particular, acquires a new force with such a volume and
unison of sound. Mr. Sankey sings his solos with
skill, but it may be doubted whether either the
words or the execution would of themselves be effec-
tive. When the hymns, however, are sung in unison
by the greater part of the audience the effect is irre-
sistible. The tunes are at least melodibus, and
melody from thousands of human voices sweeps in-
dividuals into its swell like the waves of the sea.
Much of Mr. Moody's success may, perhaps,
be attributed to this influence, the more fairly
as, by bringing Mr. Sankey in his train, he
himself acknowledges the usefulness of such an aid.
To assign, however, a great part of the effect pro-
duced to the numbers and to the music is no dis-
paragement to tie work itself. For that matter,
every Church and every Christian gathering, even
down to the typical "two or three,* is an admission
that men are for some purposes better influenced in
bodies than as individuals, and these are not days
when any considerable sect of Christians can oon-
sis tently disparage the influence of music. They
are all trying to outdo one another in new hymns,
new tunes, and elaborate musical services. Mr.
Sankey simply confines himself to the kind of tunes
and to the mode of singing with which multitudes can
be most readily brought into harmony. Both the
crowds and the music, however they may contribute to
the general result, are perfectly legitimate aids, and it
is a mere matter of good sense for a preacher to employ
such influences for predisposing his hearers to listen to
him. But people would not come together for weeks
in large towns like Birmingham merely to hear im-
pressive singing nor to yield to the impulse of associa-
tion. They come to hear Mr. Moody, and the main
question is, what has he to say? That appears to be
always very simple, and, so far as it concerns what
may be called the artistic side of it, not more re-
markable than Mr. Sankey's singing. A good
many people seem to come away disappointed, and
wonder what is the secret of the success of preaching
which has so little of what they deem oratorical. It is
straightforward, racy, full of American humour,
often, it must be owned, a little vulgar. It is not
pleasant sometimes to hear venerable narratives
and events around which a halo of hallowed imagi-
nation has gathered presented as if they were good
American stories, picked up the other day in
Chicago. Theological ears are likely to be offended
by a disregard not merely of delicacies of expres-
sion, but by a sense that truths of wide and mys-
terious import are narrowed and hardened. But
to the great majority of the audience all these
defects are scarcely appreciable. What they are
conscious of is that they are being told some very
home truths by a very simple and earnest man, and
that he is perfectly confident he is showing them the
means of becoming better men and women, and of
having a better hope in this world and the next. As
the preacher last night, who was not Mr. Moody, put
it very well, if you wake a man out of sleep and make
him aware there is a fire in his house, it is a time for
using the first fire-escape you may bring him, not for
discussing which kind of tire-escape is the best. Mr.
Moody tells his hearers that most of them need to be
"saved," and that all of them can be saved if they
will believe in a Saviour whom he proclaims. A
vast number among them knew that the first
part of this statement is perfectly true, what-
ever may be its precise theological interpretation.
They are very ill-satisfied with themselves at heart,
and would be thankful to be assured of a means of
becoming better. What wonder if they listen eagerly
to a man who tells them that he has found this
" Salvation' " and, who impresses upon them the con-
viction that he knows what he means' and is speaking
out of a real experience? In the dinatwilight through
which an immense number of men and women are
groping their way through life, not without many
falls and much self-distrust, it is inevitable that a
strong clear voice, however strange its tones, should
attract confidence and win a following. Mr. Moody
calls unhesitatingly to this struggling, canfuqed mass
to follow him, and to follow him in :direction which,
on the whole, is guaranteed by an ancient and sacred
experience, and he is obeyed.

If there are those who are rather inclined to exhort
Mr. Moody's hearers to caution than to give him en-
couragement, let them ask themselves one or two
broad and simple questions. By all means let them
be cautious in controlling and directing the results of
such a movement, and do their utmost to obviate that
worst of illusions that all the work of a new life is done
when a man is "converted." But, in the first place,
is any Chi istian Church in this Metropolis in a position
to say that it can aff,ird to dispense with any vigo-
rous effort to rouse the mass of our people to a more
Christian life? The congregations who are to be seen
in our churches and chapels are but a fraction of the
hundreds of thousands around them, of whom multi-
tudes are living a little better than mere animal exist-
ence. If any considerable proportion of them can be
roused to the mere desire of something higher, an
immense step is gained; and if the churches are really
a higher influence still, Mr. Moody will at least have
prepared them abetter material to work upon.

them. In using instruments he limits himself to those
which convey or communicate his humaa power, but
rejects all that increase it. Titian would refuse to quicken
his touch by elec tri city, and Michael Angelo to substitute
the steam-hammer for his mallet. Ile would try, in
his lecture, to show them things which they might see
with human eyes if they tried to see them. No one
honoured the past labour and respected the present
rest of the late Sir Charles Lyell more than his scholar
who spoke to them; but his great theory of the c.on-
stancy and power of existing phenomena was only in a
measure proved. There were, broadly speaking, three
great demonstrable periods of the earth's history—that
in which it was crystalized; that in which it was sculp-
tured ; and that in which it was now being unsculptured
or defaced. Those three periods interlace with each
other and graduate into each other as the periods of
human life do. Something dies in the child on the
day that it is born; something is born in the man on
the day.that he dies. Nevertheless, his life is broadly
divided into youth, strength, and decrepitude. In such
clear sense, the earth had its three ages, of whose
duration we know as yet nothing, except that it has
been greater than any man had imagined. lathe first
period the rocks were soft. Snowdon was probably a
depression; in the second the mountains were cut out
by forces which we do not yet know anything definite
about. In the third period the valleys excavated in
the second are being filled up, and the mountains
elevated in the second are being rubbed down. Of
the agents in this action, the visible glaciers of to-day,
the first thing he had to say was that they are
fluid. Therefore they do not scramble down, nor
tumble down, nor crawl down, nor creep down,
but flow down. They don't move like leeches,
nor like centipedes, nor like serpents, nor like
stones, but like what they are made of—water.
The next thing about them was, he supposed, new;
r at all events, though he suspected it, he did not know
it himself till very lately, for he had never been under
the bottom of a glacier to look. But last year he was
able, at Chomouni, to traverse the bed of a glacier,
which had been 200 ft. thick, but which had retired
from its bed, and he saw that modern glaciers were not
making their beds deeper, but filling them up. Now,
as to the first point, the " flowing " of glaciers, what
does the word mean? The spring of a fountain or of a
sea (breaker into spray is not flowing. But when the
sea is retiring from the shingle we call that flowing, and
the definition of the word is the motion of liquid or
viscous matter over or beside solid matter under the
action of gravity, without any other impelling force.
There are two methods in which a stream or glacier flows.
The first is by withdrawing a part of its ma,ss in front, the
vacancy left by which another part supplies from
behind. That is deduction, the method of a contin-
uous stream. The second way is when the mass
behind presses in upon the masses before. That is in-
jection—the way in which a cataract falls into a pool,
or a fountain into a basin. The Mer de Glace is
deduced down its narrow channel like a river, and
another glacier down its steep ravines, and both were
once injected into a pool of ice in the valley below;
and the glacier of the Rhone is so still. Glaciers are
of viscous and clinging material, most like honey. One
of the points which even Forbes regarded with some
embarrassment was the annual rise of the surface of
the glacier heaved from below in winter to supply the
summer's waste, as it the ice had a power of reproduc-
tion. Now if you open a pot of honey and take out a
good table spoonful of it, you will see the surface
generally ebb in the pot. Put the table spoonful back
in a lump at one side and you will see the surface
generally flow in the pot. The lump you have put in
at the side does not diffuse itself over the rest, but it
sinks into the rest, and the entire surface rises
round it to its former level. In like manner every
pound of snow put on at the top of Mont Blanc
makes the surface of the glaciers rise at the bottom.
It is worth making an effort to conceive the real
periods of time involved in glacier motion. At the
centre of any great glacier stream, low down where
the ice is softest and moves fastest, its maximum
average rate will not pass 21t. in the twenty-four hours.
The minute hand of a watch moves five or six times
as fast. If, therefore, your ice breaker rises at all,
it rises through years of surge, returns through years
of recoil. The little ripple of the stream breaks on the
shore with quick repetition ; the Atlantic wave slowly
uplifts itself to plunge, and slowly appeases its thunder;
the ice-wave, if there be one, would be to the Atlantic
as the ocean's is to the brook's. The question if there
be such a wave is of vital importance to that of
glacier action on crag. Mr. Ruskin added that he
would give a definition of a glacier which be requested
his audience to take note of :—lt is a tide which
takes a year to rise, a cataract which takes 50 to fall, a
torrent that is ribbed like a dragon, and a rock that is
diffused like a lake.

ordination drunkenness, and desertion. Years ago,
when a soldier's pay was only 6d. per diem—when he
was cheated 43iit of a portion of that—one can under-
stand why a certain amount of reticence was necessary;
and that while the large bounty, honour and glory
should be paraded to the front, the small wage, bad food,
&c., should be kept well to the rear. But now, when
a private's pay in the Artillery and Cavalry, with foe&
is equal to from 14s. to 17s. 6d. a week—and in the
Army Service Corps and the Household Troops con-
siderably more, with all the other advantages I have
already mentioned—the necessity for such procedure is
gone.

As some may doubt a soldier having so much as I
have stated I need only mention as a proof the follow-
ing facts—namely, a Dragoon on joining receives is. 2d.
daily, with llb of meat and lib. of bread as rations,
the latter being equal at present to lid, more in money.
His pay may therefore be calculated at 2s. id. per
diem, an amount he can augment subsequently
by good-conduct pay to half-a-crown. Of this he has
to pay-for tea, washing, vegetables, &c' . 4d., so that
even a recruit has 10d. every day to c 3.11 his own, and
I may add that very few civilians earning 245.
weekly can afford to spend one-fourth of their wages
in luxuries. To put the case still Plainer, I show below
ahat a Dragoon receives in pay, food, and kind when
he joins :—Pay for seven days, at is. 21. daily, Bs. 2d.;
food—bread and meat for the same time, at 11d.,
6s. 5d.; lodging, fuel, and light, 3s. ; medical attend-
ance, &c., Cd. ; clothing, boots, &c., 2s. 6d.; use of
books, education' and amusements - supplied, 6d.; ad-
vantages derived by purchasing from the canteen, is.
—total, £1 2s. Id. _ _ _

Between the lives of a soldier and a farm labourer
there is certainly a wide difference; and it has always
been a mystery to me how men would willingly slave
for Bs. or 10s. a week when they could get better pay
and superior treatment by enlisting. Apologizing for
the great length of this letter,—l am, Sir, your very
faithful servant,
WILLIAM DOUGLAS, late 10th Royal Hussars.
16, Overstone-road, Hammersmith, W.