arth--what need for
aristocratic usurpation or the legislation of a class? If all are equal
before God, surely they should all be equal before man. Thus, when angry
Chartism was asking for universal suffrage, and the Church was preaching
contentment and the duty of submission to superiors, and the danger to
religion when a man became political, Miall felt that the time had come
for him to step out of the conventional circle of the pulpit into a wider
and freer sphere, and to show that Christianity was not alien to human
right, and that a man might love God and his brother-man as well. It
does seem strange now that men should ever have doubted so plain a truth.
How it was doubted some few years since, only men like Miall can tell.
Miall's Anti-State-Churchism was also obtained by a similar process. If
there were no need of priests, if every man could be a priest unto God,
what need of State patronage and pay? At the best they could but corrupt
and enervate the Church. It was teaching it to rely on a worthless arm
of flesh rather than on the living God.

With such views, Miall may surely be included in the 'London Pulpit.'
Tried by his own theory, he is a legitimate subject for a sketch. The
truth he held in Leicester he holds in London, and he is still as much a
divine in the 'Nonconformist' office as when he was pastor of an
Independent Church. Occasionally he preaches in one or other of the
metropolitan pulpits, and the studied discourse read--but read with
admirable distinctness--is of a kind to make you regret that Miall is so
seldom seen where he is fitted to do so much. If you have not an orator
before you in the common acceptation of the term, you have before you a
master of argument, gifted with a clearness of expression and a high
order of thought, rare anywhere, especially in the pulpit now-a-days.
Buckingham wrote of Hobbes' style, that

'Clear as a beautiful transparent skin,
Which never hides the blood, yet holds it in;
Like a delicious stream it ever ran,
As smooth as woman and as strong as man.'

Of Miall's style precisely the same may be said. It is always as clear,
sometimes as cold, as ice. As a still further proof of Miall's claim to
be considered a religious teacher, witness his 'British Churches' and his
'Basis of Faith,'--books eminently adapted for the age in which we live.
Yet Miall can speak to the poor, and does so. The teetotalers have built
a hall called the Good