empty benches. He was succeeded by a gentleman formerly a Baptist
minister, but who had outgrown his sect, and for a little while there was
harmony and progress. Again there was an interregnum. "Seekers are,"
said old Oliver Cromwell, "next best to finders." In London, especially
in these unsettled days of free inquiry, are many such, and to such the
pulpit of South Place was freely offered. I do not fancy as a rule
seekers are good preachers. To say anything effectually you must have
something to say. To make others weep you must weep yourself. With mere
negations you can never sway the minds or influence the lives of men. In
orthodox places of worship there is often much of dreariness. The
clergyman whose heart is not in his work is a miserable spectacle for
gods and men, but the dreariness of heterodoxy is infinitely greater; and
of all things under the sun the most miserable in the clerical way is the
sight of a would-be philosopher feebly diluting or expanding, as the case
may be, windy platitudes or transcendental moonshine. Under such an
infliction, as it may well be imagined, South Place did not flourish
greatly. At length, in due course, a man appeared to continue the work
which Mr. Fox had originated. His name is Mr. M. D. Conway. I believe
he is of American origin, and evidently under him the cause is in a
prosperous state. When I say prosperous, the term is not to be
understood as it would be in orthodox circles. The latter class of
religionists, when they say that a place is prosperous imply by the use
of such language that a place of worship is well filled; that men are
turned from sin to holiness, from serving the devil to serving God, that
the place is a centre of religious life and activity, and that all, young
and old, rich and poor, are to the best of their power and means
co-operating in Christian work. Prosperity in this sense cannot be
predicated of South Place. Its doors are only opened once a week. There
is no religious, or educational, or philanthropical agency connected with
the chapel; but there are more attendants than there were, and that
encourages Mr. Conway and his friends. Indeed, there is a talk amongst
them of establishing a Sunday-school. At the same time it seems to me
that the class of people who go to South Place are not socially or
intellectually what they were in Mr. Fox's time--when the Cortaulds would
come up all the way from Braintree to hear Mr. Fox, when