appeal. Binney has been compared to Coleridge. I don't think
the comparison good. He is far more like Carlyle. The latter, a
Christian, with a good digestion, would preach precisely as Binney.
Binney is a Christian Carlyle, with the same poetry and power, the same
faculty of realizing great and sterling thoughts; but with a light upon
his way and in his heart which Carlyle has never known.

I have said Binney is not the kind of man born in great cities. You see
that in his physical frame; it is also evident in his mental character.
Everything about him is free and independent. Whatever he is, he is no
narrow-hearted sectarian, shut up in his own creed, having no sympathies
outside his own church. I take it that he sees also a certain kind of
goodness in the world; that he does not feel

'What a wretched land is this
That yields us no supplies;'

that he thinks life is to be enjoyed, and that genius, and wit, and
beauty, are far from sinful in themselves. The result is, Binney's
experience of life is greater than that of most ministers, and he keeps
abreast of the age. He studies to understand its thought, to answer its
questionings, to lead it up to God.

And yet this man--with his great Catholic heart, standing by himself,
tied down by no creed or common organisation--because, in a moment of
excitement, seeing what was to him a dearth of truth and life in the
Establishment, he said that it destroyed more souls than it saved, has
been looked upon as the incarnation of all that is fierce and narrow in
political Dissent. Never was a bigger blunder made. As regards all such
matters, Binney is a latitudinarian. I dare say even sharp-scented
theologians may see a little of what they call heresy occasionally
wrapped up in the sermons of the Weigh-House Chapel. The charge is a
common one in the mouths of those who would make a man an offender for a
word. The curse of the pulpit and the pew, hitherto, has been that such
snarling critics have abounded in each. To such, Binney is a terrible
stumbling-block. They cannot understand him, and yet they dare not
condemn.

Mr. Binney is still in the prime of life. He was born somewhere in the
north, where they have bigger heads and frames than we southerns have.
He was educated at Wymondley College; he was then settled, as the phrase
is, at Bedford, from which place he moved to Newport, in the Isle of
Wight. About twenty years since, he was invited to the