ous scale. This man
was paying his needlewomen a price for their labour, on which he knows it
is impossible for them morally to live; and that was poisoning a whole
neighbourhood by the sale of adulterated wares.

A very mixed congregation is this one at the Surrey Gardens. The real
flock--the aborigines from Park Street Chapel--are a peculiar
people,--very plain, much given to the wearing of clothes of an ancient
cut--and easy of recognition. The men are narrow, hard, griping, to look
at--the women stern and unlovely, yet they, and such as they alone, if we
are to believe them, are to walk the pearly streets of the New Jerusalem,
and to sit down with martyrs and prophets and saints--with Abraham, and
Isaac, and Jacob--at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

'The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls
his kibe.' Here is a peer, and there his tailor. Here Lady Clara de
Vere kills a weary hour, and there is the poor girl who sat up all night
to stitch her ladyship's costly robe. Here is a blasphemer come to
laugh, there a saint to pray. Can these dry bones live? Can the
preacher touch the heart of this listening mass? Breathed on by a spell
more potent than his own, will it in its anguish and agony exclaim, What
must we do to be saved? You think how this multitude would have melted
beneath the consecrated genius of a Chalmers, or a Parsons, or a
Melville, or an Irving,--and look to see the same torrent of human
emotions here. Ah, you are mistaken--Mr. Spurgeon has not the power to
wield 'all thoughts, all passions, all delights.' It is not in him to
'shake the arsenal, and fulmine over Greece.' In the very midst of his
fiercest declamation, you will find his audience untouched; so coarse is
the colouring, and clumsy the description, you can sit calm and unmoved
through it all--and all the while the haughty beauty by your side will
fan herself with a languor Charles Matthews in 'Used Up' might envy.
Look at the preacher;--the riddle is solved. You see at once that he is
not the man to soar, and soaring bear his audience, trembling and
enraptured, with him in his heavenward flight.

Isaiah, the son of Amos, when he received his divine commission,
exclaimed, 'Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean
lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!' but the
popular minister of New Park Street Chapel has no such trembling
forebodings; no thought of his own u