No More Great Preachers? Pessimistic View Given

1903

NO MORE GREAT PREACHERS?

Pessimistic View of London Christian Commonwealth on Pulpit Orators.

In an editorial lamenting the passing of Joseph Parker and Hugh Price Hughes, the Christian Commonwealth (London) takes occasion to note "the extraordinary dearth of really able and qualified men from whom successors may be found when famous pulpits lose their occupants." The same paper goes on to say:

"There never was a time since before the Reformation when pulpit eminence was so rare: when orthodox Christianity could produce so small a battalion of magnetic exhorters; when the church could count so few stars of the first magnitude in the theological firmament. The really great preachers amongst the 25,000 clergy could be counted on one hand. There are about as many nonconformist preachers of all denominations in this kingdom. The list of men of great pulpit power in each would be very small indeed — more meager by far than in the time of our fathers, and yet every great denomination is greater today than yesterday. In the days of Spurgeon there were a Punshon, a Vince, a Dale, an Aldis, a Wells, Bickersteth, a Magee, a Hugh Stowell Brown, a Samuel Wilberforce, a Birrell, a McLeod, a Tulloch, a Haycraft, a Guthrie, a Gilfillan, a Brock, a George Dawson — only to specify a few out of a host of men whom people everywhere and anywhere thronged to hear. And in the generation preceding, when the common people knew so little, yet they had a host of grand preachers to whom to listen — Melvill, Robertson, Parsons, Robert Hall, Sortaine, Chalmers, Dillon, Bishop Horsley, Christmas Evans, Williams of Wern, Charles Stovel, Toplady, Daniel Wilson, James Sherman, Hawker, Charles Simeon, Newman and Manning, before their papal perversion, and the potent itinerating leaders who thundered out loud echoes of the message left by John Wesley. Where shall we now look for anything like the number of pre-eminent preachers who in those days made England great, changed it from a colossal sink of corruption, such as Wesley found it, to the world's head center of righteousness and founded the Christian civilization on which we now have to build?"

—Davenport Daily Republican, Davenport, Iowa, March 5, 1903, page 3.