d.
Till Brock came, the Baptist congregations in the neighbourhood were very
meagre. Brock cannot do for his sect what Hall did, or what John Foster
did. By his writing he does not appeal to the religious cultivated mind
of England, nor by his graceful eloquence does he commend it to men of
taste; but he speaks to the practical English mind, to the shop-keeping
middle class, of whom I believe he was originally one, and to the door of
whose instinct and hearts he evidently holds the key. Scarlett
succeeded, we are told, because there sat listening in the jury-box
twelve Mr. Scarletts. For the same reason Mr. Brock succeeds. The men
he speaks to are men of like passions with himself.

THE REV. J. HOWARD HINTON, M.A.

In a very unaristocratic neighbourhood--in no more fashionable a locality
than that of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate Street--preaches the Rev. J.
Howard Hinton, till Mr. Brock came to London the acknowledged great man
of the Baptist denomination.

Nor was this title undeserved. If the possession of a powerful
mind--subtle, analytic, acute--a mind fertile in the destruction of
fallacies, and in the reception and exposition of great truths, gives its
possessor any weight at all, Mr. Hinton must, in any rank of life, have
occupied no mean place. Still more may be said in his favour, especially
in his character of a Christian minister--that his language is
forcible--that his own feelings are strong--that in season and out of
season it is evidently his aim to expound and declare, to the utmost of
his ability, Christian truth.

Yet Mr. Hinton has a very small congregation. I should think Devonshire
Square Chapel cannot contain more than five hundred hearers at the very
outside--a very small proportion, it must be admitted, of the intelligent
frequenters of public worship in London.

The real reason of this scant attendance, I suppose, is that Mr. Hinton
has no clap-trap about him--that he has none of the fascinating airs of
the popular Evangelical divine--that he has long past that time of life
when young ladies take an interest in their darling minister--and that,
if you wish to get any good from the preacher, you must not merely listen
to him, but must use your own intellectual powers as well--an exertion
far from common amongst the church and chapel goers of London. Six days
in the week those who have brains are working them in this crowded city,
and the seventh they wish to be a day of rest.