This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday
night. Being Saturday night, I had
accomplished but the half of my uncommercial
journey; for, its object was to compare the play on
Saturday evening, with the preaching in the same
Theatre on Sunday evening.

Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six
on the similarly damp and muddy Sunday evening.
I returned, to this Theatre. I drove up to
the entrance (fearful of being late, or I should
have come on foot), and found myself in a large
crowd of people who, I am happy to state, were
put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having
nothing to look at but the mud and the closed
doors, they looked at me, and highly enjoyed the
comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me to
draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark
corner, they at once forgot me, and applied
themselves to their former occupation of looking
at the mud and looking in at the closed
doors: which, being of grated iron-work, allowed
the lighted passage within to be seen. They
were chiefly people of respectable appearance,
odd and impulsive as most crowds are, and making
a joke of being there as most crowds do.

In the dark corner I might have sat a long
while, but that a very obliging passer-by informed
me that the Theatre was already full, and that
the people whom I saw in the street were all
shut out for want of room. After that, I lost
no time in worming myself into the building,
and creeping to a place in a Proscenium box
that had been kept for me.

There must have been full four thousand
people present. Carefully estimating the pit
alone, I could bring it out as holding little less
than fourteen hundred. Every part of the house
was well filled, and I had not found it easy to
make my way along the back of the boxes to
where I sat. The chandeliers in the ceiling
were lighted; there was no light on the stage;
the orchestra was empty. The green curtain
was down, and packed pretty closely on chairs
on the small space of stage before it were some
thirty gentlemen, and two or three ladies. In
the centre of these, in a desk or pulpit covered
with red baize, was the presiding minister. The
kind of rostrum he occupied, will be very well
understood, if I liken it to a boarded-up fire-
place turned towards the audience, with a
gentleman in a black surtout standing in the stove
and leaning forward over the mantelpiece.

A portion of Scripture was being read when
I went in. It was followed by a discourse, to
which the congregation listened with most
exemplary attention and uninterrupted silence and
decorum. My own attention comprehended
both the auditory and the speaker, and shall
turn to both in this recalling of the scene,
exactly as it did at the time.

"A very difficult thing," I thought, when
the discourse began, "to speak appropriately to
so large an audience, and to speak with tact.
Without it, better not to speak at all. Infinitely
better, to read the New Testament well, and to
let that speak. In this congregation there is
indubitably one pulse; but I doubt if any power
short of genius can touch it as one, and make
it answer as one."

I could not possibly say to myself as the
discourse, proceeded, that the minister was a good
speaker. I could not possibly say to myself
that he expressed an understanding of the
general mind and character of his audience. There
was a supposititious working-man introduced
into the homily to make supposititious objections
to our Christian religion and be reasoned down,
who was not only a very disagreeable person,
but remarkably unlike life—very much more
unlike it than anything I had seen in the
pantomime. The native independence of character
this artisan was supposed to possess, was
represented by a suggestion of a dialect that I
certainly never heard in my uncommercial travels,
ad with a coarse swing of voice and manner
anything but agreeable to his feelings I should
conceive, considered in the light of a portrait,
and as far away from the fact as a Chinese
Tartar. There was a model pauper introduced
in like manner, who appeared to me to be
the most intolerably arrogant pauper ever
relieved, and to show himself in absolute want
and dire necessity of a course of Stone Yard.
For, how did this pauper testify to his having
received the gospel of humility? A gentleman
met him in the workhouse, and said (which I
myself really thought good-natured of him), "Ah,
John? I am sorry to see you here. I am sorry to
see you so poor." "Poor, sir!" replied that man,
drawing himself up, "I am the son of a Prince!
My father is the King of Kings. My father is
the Lord of Lords. My father is the ruler of all
the Princes of the Earth!" &c. And this was
what all the preacher's fellow-sinners might
come to, if they would embrace this blessed
book—which I must say it did some violence to
my own feelings of reverence, to see held out at
arm's length at frequent intervals and soundingly
slapped, like a slow lot at a sale. Now, could I
help asking myself the question, whether the
mechanic before me who must detect the preacher
as being wrong about the visible manner of
himself and the like of himself, and about such
a noisy lip-server as that pauper, might not, most
unhappily for the usefulness of the occasion,
doubt that preacher's being right about things
not visible to human senses?

Again. Is it necessary or advisable to address
such an audience continually, as " fellow-
sinners"? Is it not enough to be fellow-creatures,
born yesterday, suffering and striving to-day,
dying to-morrow? By our common humanity, my
brothers and sisters, by our common capacities
for pain and pleasure, by our common laughter
and our common tears, by our common aspiration
to reach something better than ourselves, by our
common tendency to believe in something good,
and to invest whatever we love or whatever we
lose with some qualities that are superior to
our own failings and weaknesses as we know
them in our own poor hearts—by these. Hear
me!—Surely, it is enough to be fellow-creatures.
Surely, it includes the other designation and
some touching meanings over and above.