The Sun.
London, England, 1865-04-10 00:00:00

parently a much less unsuccessful specimen of femi-
nine eloquence in which no vir ex machind was
called in to assist at the tying together of a broken
clue. But the experiment, smoothly as it ran,
rather confirmed our boyish impression of the dis-
qualification of women as preachers, only substitu-
ting sincere regret at what seemed an unfortunate
and mistaken display of religioun for the cruel glee
with which thoughtless schoolboys are too apt to
gloat over a visible moral catastrophe to their fel-
low-creatures. We should be the last to deny to
women who possess any unique power of touching
the hearts of others the right to sacrifice private
feelings to the appeal of duty. But Mrs. Thistle-
thwaite does not, as far as we could judge, exercise
any such power at all. Being a woman, and a
pretty woman, and certainly in her own way very
much in earnest, of course she " draws" much better
than a man of the same mental qualifications as
herself. The little lecture-room which calls itself
the Marylebone Institute was crowded to excess
half an hour before Mrs. Thistlethwaite began, and
a motley assemblage, chiefly, we should say, of the
shopkeepers of the neighbourhood--not consisting
more of men than of women—struggled their
way into the bad air and bare standing-room of
the place as if they looked forward to receiving
a spiritual influence of no small power.
Mrs. Thistlethwaite is, we need scarcely say, a very
Darrow Evangelical. She explained in her introduc-
tory prayer that if there were any there led thither
by an idle curiosity to see a poor lost soul on whom
God had taken mercy, she trusted that idle curiosity
might be " solemnised" into a deeper feeling before
the service was over. This was the first stroke on
that chord, but it was by no means the last ; there
was throughout, that painful harping on a thin
string, that vibrating eagerness without force or
breadth, that flickering impetuosity, that chain of
vagrant associations sending off branches allusively
in all directions from the one reiterated entreaty to
abandon self-righteousness and accept the atoning
blood of Christ but ever returning to the same point
without finishing the other train of suggestion—in a
word, that reedy wail of conscientious spiritual
effort, desiring to feel itself divinely authorised, and
not quite succeeding in the attempt, which must
have made every one sad who listened thoughtfully.
To be conscious of a voluble flow of weak entreaty,
and to recognise the impossibility of meeting it half-
way by any act of will, is one of the most melancholy
of human experiences. At the end of her sermon
Mrs. Thistlethwaite gave out a hymn beginning, " I
do believe, I will believe," with spasmodic accentua-
tion of the " do" and " will," in which she entreated
all her audience with almost feverish eagerness to
join, evidently under a helpless kind of impression
that it was an " easy lesson" in belief, that if we
would only repeat the words with sufficient empha-
sis, we should manage the act of belief in time. And
this was expressive of the whole service. Mrs.
Thistlethwaite impressed us as entirely destitute of
any power to reach the deeper springs of faith in the
human heart, and as compelled, to make up for that
deficiency by nagging at the souls of her audience.
The truth is, that a woman, in order to exercise any
great religious influence, must, we take it, have much
of the mystic in her as well as a rare simplicity of
nature. Mrs. Thistlethwaite has nothing of the mys-
tic in her, and, though sincere enough, has not a rare
simplicity of nature. She is a little of an actress in her
elocution, and in reading the hymn gave the note of
admiration after "ashamed of Jesus !"with something
that we almost felt to be a pert pitch of indignation,
and when she came to the end of the hymn where
the prayer is breathed that Christ be not ashamed
of me I' she sank her voice to a theatric whisper, and
disappeared behind some one else during the sing-
ing with too dramatic an effect. We felt imme-
diately that there was none of that dreaminess about
her nature which alone could completely save a
woman in such a position from awkward self-con-
sciousness, and so it certainly proved. Even in
prayer she could not help citing her authority to
prove to God her familiarity with His word—" as
Thou has told us in the 17th Psalm" she said, in
speaking of "awaking up after God's likeness"—and
this was only one of many indications how little she
ever lost herself in the thoughts of the Bible, how
intent she was upon correct citation. The heavy,
drooping eyelids, the small, flexible, almost laugh-
ing mouth, and the quick, tossy movement of her
head, all told of a nature sufficiently excitable, but
not in the direction of either quietism or mysticism.
Subsequently the whole of the sermon showed that
Mrs. Thistlethwaite belongs to the school which de-
lights in theology only so far as it reveals a myste-
rious and gigantic transaction by which the soul is
extricated from an apparently hopeless dilemma at
great price. She did not dwell on the divine love
in its daily communion with human weakness—she
gloated over the " fountain filled with blood from
Immanuel's veins," according to the revolting
phraseology of one of her hymns, till the healing of
the great Physician sounded almost like a physiolo-
gical rather than a spiritual process, and the whole
air was filled with arterial and ensanguined images.
The preacher took a long passage out of Luke end-
ing with the parable of the Good Samaritan as
her text, so that we had at first some hope we
might be spared the usual caricature and distortion
current amongst the school of St. Paul's doctrine of
the Atonement, but it was soon evident that she re-
garded the whole passage as bearing directly on the
dogma inquestion. Shebegan at once by stating that all
are equally sinful, the baby just born as sinful as the
worst sinner, and all equally in need of redemption.
If we asked how this could be just, she replied that
God needed no justification for what He did. When
the Queen writes a letter about railways, do we ex-
pect her to justify her course ? We fear we do, and
if not, we fear Mrs. Thistlethwaite's argument would
only prove that God is not naturally the object of
love for any better reason than because He is so
powerful, and so cut the whole ground of faith from
under her feet. However, that conceded, she pro-
ceeded to lay down that as God has willed it so, we
all need redemption, and no works or fame of our
own, not even the mightiest works of the mightiest
writers, " like Macaulay's, for instance," will be of
any use to the soul that is not saved by Christ's
blood. Here was the mystery of redemption, the
" things hid from the wise and prudent"—like
Macaulay—" and revealed unto babes." Then fol-
lowed the question of the lawyer who stood up and
" tempted" or tried Christ, asking, " Master, what
shall Ido to be saved ?" Mrs. Thistlethwaite was
very hard upon this lawyer and knew all about him
—much more than the Evangelist appeared to know.
It was a matter of "perfect indifference to him,
PERFECT indifference," she reiterated, what answer
Christ would make ; he only put the question in
the vanity of indolent curiosity. She appeared to
draw this large inference from his calling Christ
master' only, remarking that Judas called Him
master and never ' Lord,' and she called atten-
tion to the more reverential address of good
master' of the rich young man whom Jesus loved.
This was hard upon the lawyer, and she was yet
harder upon him before she had done with him.
His What shall Ido ?' was self-righteousness—he
supposed he could do something to save himself.
Our Lord answered him so fully in order, said Mrs.
Thistlethwaite glibly, that He might " damn him
out of his own mouth"—which is surely introducing
hypothetical and supererogatory damnation into the
Bible very gratuitously indeed. Could she, we
thought, be really so anxious about our souls, when
she was so willing to damn—altogether hypotheti-
cally—this unfortunate lawyer about whom we know
nothing, and, in doing so, to attribute a purely
fanciful harshness to our Lord? Perhaps she was
after all ; but had in her own mind identified this
lawyer on account of the equivocal word " tempt"
with something very evil indeed. Then she com-
mented with great severity on his " willingness to
justify himself" in asking "Who is my neighbour?"
and told an irrelevant story of a young man, an
acquaintance of hers, who maintained he had ful-
filled the whole Law, and' who afterwards, as she
recounted eagerly—not cruelly, but with dogmatic
eagerness—showed what his self-righteousness was
worth by falling into open sin. And then she gave
her interpretation of the story of the good Samaritan.
The good Samaritan was not a Samaritan after all,
he was only a form of our Lord Himself, because
the Jews had taunted Him with being a Samaritan,
and having a devil. The robbed traveller was the
lost soul of man, whom the ministers of the law, the
priest and Levite, would and could not aid. The
good Samaritah was Christ, who poured in the oil and
wine of His own blood, and provided for the saved
soul afterwards at His own cost. Nothing good
could have been done by any human being. The
goon Samaritan was meant to be a type of real good-
ness, and therefore was not a human being, but the
incarnate Son of God. The "go and do likewise"
to the lawyer was pure irony in Christ—meant to
show the absolute impossibility of man's doing like-
wise without being first redeemed—they were the
words which " damned the lawyer out of his own
mouth." A shocking parody, as it seemed to us, of
the most beautiful of our Lord's parables ! Such,
illustrated with many readings out of the Epistle to
the Romans, was Mrs.Thistlethwaite's sermon. It
was not eloquent, it was wholly devoid of tender-
ness, and, as we have shown, full of harsh unfeminine

constructions of the Gospel. It was very far from
powerful. It was fluent, eager, excitable, variable,
diverging occasionally into sharp, thin controver-
sialism, as when she denounced our Church for
hanging up the tables of the Law over the altar as
if they could save any man, and explained that she
must do so whether it gave offence or not, nay, even
"if a hundred cannons were pointed at me,"—a
very wild supposition indeed, Mrs. Thistlethwaite.
But, on the whole, though an expression of the
religion of those who love strong excitements, who
have been saved themselves " so as by fire," the ser-
vice was not exciting, but melancholy—sincere
enough, but a thin, conscious, treble of appeal, full