sis,' Crosse removed to the Vicarage of Brad- | preachers, many persons walking on Sunday ford, where he remained until his death at ten and twelve miles each way to hear them. a very advanced age. Possessed, through One good work started by Venn still flourhis wife, of an ample fortune, he lived and ishes-the Elland Society, established to dressed in the meanest way, in order to assist candidates for holy orders, of good spend his income on the poor and in advanc- character and ability, but straitened means. ing the cause of missions. On one occasion It had the warm support of William Wilthe vicarage was broken into whilst the berforce, and numbers amongst the 250 family was at church, and some twenty clergy who have been aided by its funds the guineas were carried off by the thieves. honoured names of Samuel Marsden, the It serves me right,' was Crosse's remark apostle of New Zealand, Thomason of on being told of it, I ought to have given India, and Henry Kirke White. The poputhem away to the poor.' Crowds flocked to lar estimate of Venn may be gathered from his ministry, churchyard, as well as church, the inquiry of a workman to one of the conbeing often filled. When missionary ser- gregation at Huddersfield Church, where mons were preached, Baptist, Wesleyan, Venn had been preaching two years after and Congregational ministers suspended their he resigned the living. What, hast been evening services and attended the parish to hear 'towd (i.e. the old) trumpet again !' church with their congregations. Broken in health, blind, and eighty years old, he got his death-blow through persisting that he would preach, although he was seriously indisposed; his only reply to all remonstrance being, It's only a cold; you know I always preach away a cold.' He left his entire fortune for charitable uses, and with part of it the well-known Crosse theological scholarships at Cambridge are endowed.

Yet all these yield in rugged picturesqueness to William Grimshaw, for twenty years perpetual Curate of Haworth, the home of the Brontes, amongst a population then described as very ignorant, brutish, and wicked.' By dint of unwearied self-denial, devotion and intrepidity, Grimshaw gained the hearts of this lawless people. Their keen West Riding estimate of money was enlisted on his side by his lofty refusal to exact his church dues by legal proceedings, and by his courageous determination to enlarge his church without the aid of a rate, a proceeding in that day almost without parallel; their strong love of equality and hos

Hammond Roberson, Curate of Dewsbury the original of Parson Yorke, was a man of sterner mould, and perhaps better fitted to deal with the rough and brutal manners of his flock. The operations of spinning and weaving were then carried on at the work-pitality was captivated by the example of a men's homes, and Sunday was the day commonly selected for scouring and milling the cloth, for hanging it on the tenters to dry, and for preparing the warps for the looms. Such work was varied with drunkenness, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, and bull-baiting. Against the latter Roberson made a determined stand, and summoned the ringleaders to Wakefield; but the case was dismissed, as the magistrates sympathized with the sport; and Roberson was followed home, a distance of some miles, by a mob who hooted and insulted him all the way with the most disgraceful language. He was not to be daunted nor deterred from his purpose, so he indicted his opponents at the York Assizes, and obtained a verdict against them. He has the credit of having founded the first Sunday-school in Yorkshire (this was in 1783); and here the first four ordained English clergymen sent out by the Church Missionary Society had their early training. He also built and endowed the church at Liversedge in the year 1816.

gentleman who, without a word to his guests to intimate his purpose, would give up to them his own bed-chamber, and go himself to sleep in the hayloft, and who did not disdain himself to clean the boots of any strangers that had lodged under his roof; and their admiration for courage and hard work was extorted by his energy, which never flagged, and his boldness, which never blenched before a difficulty; until at length his authority over them was almost unbounded. Woe to the man whose demeanour was careless during the Church prayers! Grimshaw would stop to rebuke the offender, and would not proceed until the whole congregation were upon their knees. Woe to the skulkers who lingered during divine service at the public-house! whilst the psalm was being sung before the sermon, he would hurry out of church, and drive them in before him, to listen to a discourse two hours long. The village blacksmith did not venture on the Lord's day to replace a lost horseshoe for a passing stranger until the parson's leave had first been obtained; and the village races, a scene of profligacy and riot which had caused him much pain, were suppressed, as their sup

porters themselves asserted, by the parson's prayers. In idle weeks he preached twelve or fourteen times in busy ones as much as thirty; often, it must be admitted, beyond his own parish boundaries and without permission for his intrusion; with what success may be learned from himself. When I first came into this country I could not in half a day's ride-north, south, east or west-hear of one serious person, and now I have at my sacraments, according to the weather, from 300 to 500 communicants, of the far greater part of whose spiritual condition I can give almost as particular an account as I can of my own.' Grimshaw died in his fifty-fifth year, of putrid fever, contracted in the discharge of his pastoral duty, leaving a reputation not yet forgotten in Haworth, thus pithily summed up by one who knew him well: 'He was an instrument that was never out of tune.'

Meanwhile men, whose hearts were stirred at the sight of such spiritual destitution, threw themselves into the ranks of Dissent, as the only available channel for Christian work, with all the ardour of recent conviction, and all the crudity of untrained and uneducated minds. Strange expressions were employed, and stranger scenes enacted, amongst enthusiasts who had accepted the doctrines of the necessity for instantaneous conversion, and the futility of all good works. So dear to them was the conception of salvation by faith only, that St. James's exhortation to manifest faith by works was promptly rejected as a mistaken translation, or as a spurious insertion of the Papists. Rough men, deeply and sincerely moved, spoke in terms whose coarseness, though it may disgust politer ears, scarcely grated on the feelings of those who were accustomed to similar phraseology in daily life. Thus arose, unhappily, a sad irreverence, the fruit of imperfect teaching, want of innate sense of fitness, and the indiscriminate handling of sacred subjects in familiar language: an irreverence which survived to a very recent period, and broke forth in strange utterance at times.* Yet he would

It is mortifying to learn that men such as these, the very salt of the earth in their day and generation, produced results which were hardly of lasting benefit to the Church. Burning, as they were, with zeal, they either overlooked or disregarded the authority of the Church as a divine institution. Preaching was with them So pre-eminently the one purpose of all public worship, and conversion the one aim of all preaching, as to throw every other duty and object into deep shadow. The individual was everything, the society nothing. And so they scattered broadcast the seed from which Dissent reaped an abundant harvest. Crosse and Grimshaw avowedly sympathized with and encouraged Methodism. Venn subscribed to the erection of Independent Chapels. The Church-left * A Wesleyan local preacher, innocent alike without effectual supervision in the days of paradox and propriety, is said to have delivof dignfied Episcopal indifference; withered the following gloss on 2 Cor. xii. 10: 'When I am weak, then am I strong.' 'Come, out efficient organization for grappling with now, Mr. Paul, you mustn't think of gammonthe growing necessities of the district; ing us in that way either; it's rather too barewithout adequate consciousness either of faced a contradiction.' The following example her own capacity or of her responsibility of preaching, in what Grimshaw used to call slumbered on.* Hard times and bad har- much more happily. The Scripture says, "A 'market language,' is conceived and carried out vests, from 1810 to 1812, brought much little leaven leavens the whole lump; the suffering and consequent riot. Wheat was whole lump of what? Why, of wheat. The world is a great mighty cornfield; this cornfield must be sheared, and the wheat put in the garner of the Church, and it must be threshed by the Holy Spirit, and ground by repentance and kneaded by faith, and the balm put into it and made into loaves; and then baked in the oven of divine love and made into a kind of shewbread, showing forth the praises of Him who hath called us out of darkness into His marvellous light.' The text of this discourse was, 'Is there no balm in Gilead,' &c., and an early paragraph graphically described the preacher's wife, Sally, as vainly inquiring up and down the town for balm' or yeast, and obliged, in consequence, to defer her baking.

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*It would have been well if some of them had only slumbered. In remote districts strange irregularities prevailed unknown, and therefore unchecked, by those in authority. A Craven vicar a few years since was thus addressed by his parish clerk: Aye, sir, times are strangely altered since we used to chase the parson every Sunday afternoon, holding on by his pony's tail until his wig fell off.' This final indignity, it was explained, always made the parson's wrath boil over, so that it could only be appeased by the present of a bottle of gin, wherewith the divine would ride home in restored good hu

mour.

fatally mistake the whole spirit of Dissent | Ripon, no less than 119 churches, being an at this juncture who did not recognise the average of one in every two months, during fervid though undisciplined piety, and the his episcopate of twenty years, and that intense energy of even some of its most these churches, with their social and spiriterratic prophets. Local biographies record ual influences, have had districts assigned with touching simplicity how the heart of a to them which now contain a population of colliery superintendent was reached by the more than 370,000 souls :— words of the Church Service at the reception of the Holy Communion; and that of a young sportsman by a pointed remark, an arrow shot at a venture, addressed to him, as he stalked with dogs and gun across the moor both yearned to do some work for Christ; both had been brought up Churchmen, yet both joined the Methodists. The Million Fund and the Peel Act did something, and active godly clergymen were not wanting in many places; but, for a season, Dissent seemed likely to carry all before it. If a young woman were missed from her place in church or school, it was a common explanation,She has turned religious, and is gone to chapel.'

'Another association, with the formation of which Bishop Longley's name is connected, is the Diocesan Board of Education. By means of this society, established in 1841, a vast impulse was given to the extension of popular education according to the principles of the Established Church; and it was owing in great measure to the work of that institution that at the close of his episcopate, with only twelve exceptions, every parish in the diocese possessed the means of instruction in some Church school.'-Report of the Church Congress, p. 21.

The principle on which both these diocesan societies were administered was that they should provide a central fund, from which grants should be made to assist local effort Two events contributed more than all else afforded was almost priceless. Yet this was throughout the diocese. The stimulus thus to stem the tide and turn it in the Church's not the whole benefit which they effected. favour. The first was the creation of the Their grants not only encouraged the comsee of Ripon, and Dr. Longley's appoint-pletion of many a building which, without ment to the new diocese, in 1836; the

second was the election of Dr. Hook to the vicarage of Leeds in 1837.

It is not creditable to the Church at large that we possess no permanent record of Bishop Longley's lengthened and successful episcopate. His jurisdiction at Ripon extended over a large portion of the North Riding, and nearly the whole of the West Riding, and his loving zeal and earnestness in promoting Church extension were soon widely felt throughout the diocese. In his opening address as President of the Church Congress, held at Leeds in 1872, the present Bishop of Ripon gracefully acknowledged the obligations of the Church to his predecessor :

'Bishop Longley gave the first impulse to Church extension in the West Riding, and his name is never mentioned in Yorkshire without

such aid, would never have been commenced, but, by the conditions on which they insisted, the stability and suitability of the structures were secured. The larger towns, such as Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, and Huddersfield, in turn formed their own Church Extension Societies on the same system. Thus charity begat charity in ever-extending

circles.

At what cost of pains and labour this work was effected, those only can appreciate who enjoyed the Bishop's closest intimacy. Yet a few details kindly supplied by one who was the Bishop's commissary and Dr. Hook's curate, and the valued friend of both,* may not be out of place. When he first came to the diocese, Dr. Longley found it necessary to awaken interest by his own personal application to those who could afford the necessary aid, awakening feelings of reverence and affection. and the correspondence thus entailed upon Within two years of his appoint-him was enormous. Frequently, on returnment to the see, Bishop Longley organised a Diocesan Society for Church extension. He ing from visiting some part of his charge, proposed by its means to promote the increase which he was obliged at that time to do of Church accommodation, the erection of in his own carriage, he would find from 300 new churches and parsonage houses, and to 500 letters awaiting his reply. Poputhe better endowment of the poorer benefices. lar feeling for a time ran high against him His proposals were liberally supported by all as the leader of the clergy; and when he classes in the diocese.'-Report of the Church attended to consecrate a church at StanCongress, p. 20. ningley, he was surrounded by an angry mob, who saluted him with shouts of 'Burke the bishop.' Amidst all the difficul

We reserve for the present the statistics of new churches built since 1836; but some estimate of the importance of the work thus inaugurated may be gathered from the fact that Dr. Longley consecrated, as Bishop of

*The Rev. Canon Jackson, the highly respected vicar of St. James's, Leeds.

were the largest and handsomest chapels in | of sympathy were irresistible. Those who the kingdom, and each contained 3000 sittings.'

heard him preach, or even read prayers, were riveted by his earnestness, set-off by a voice unrivalled in sweetness and volume. The first Sunday he officiated in the parish church, he had not proceeded far in the prayers, when a godly old Dissenter in the congregation struck his hand upon one knee, and exclaimed aloud,' He'll do, he'll do!' His genuine kindness and power of adaptation are illustrated by a dialogue between two old women, overheard by one of his curates, and repeated by Hook with intense amusement in after years:-1st Old Woman: Aye, but I loikes the Vicar to come and see me when I'm ill.' 2nd Old Woman: Eh! and so does I; he talks so loike an old woman! ' With the workpeople his popularity at last was immense; but old-fashioned notions of propriety were at times sorely scandalized at seeing the Vicar of Leeds walking arm-in-arm with some grimy operative.

The religious life of the town was what might have been expected under such circumstances, and mainly resided in the Wesleyan community; indeed, what earnest ness and piety there was in the Church was of the Wesleyan type. Dissenters frequently attended the parish church, and Churchmen went without scruple to Dissenting chapels. Over and over again, in his earlier letters from Leeds, Dr. Hook says: 'Methodism is the established religion in Leeds, and it is Methodism that pious Church people unconsciously talk. If you ask a man the ground of his hope, he will say immediately he feels that he is saved; however great a miser he may be.' In a letter describing his church services in 1837, he writes: The congregation is composed half of Methodists, and when you say anything which gives satisfaction, up_comes to the pulpit a long, deep groan.' Two anecdotes of this period speak volumes as to the condition of the prevalent Church life and feeling. A parish churchwarden went one Sunday morning to St. John's, and meeting a friend as he came out, observed, 'We'I let every man,' he said, 'ride his own have been having a sermon and collection for a Christian Knowledge Society; can you tell me what the Society is for?' And a late Vicar of St. John's, on seeing a young man at Holy Communion, remarked, I have been Vicar for thirty years, but I never before saw a young man at the Lord's table.'

To the discouragement occasioned by such a state of things, there was added the anxiety caused by the depression of trade in Dr. Hook's early days in Leeds, and by the bitter political antagonism of Radicals and Chartists. For the first five years or more he had to fight a hard battle. It was customary to hold vestry meetings in the chancel of the parish church, and, at one of the first which Hook attended, some of those present sat upon the Holy Table (until he compelled them to move), and hats and coats were piled upon it. The election of the churchwardens, eight in number, was made the occasion of violent efforts by the Secularists and Dissenters to thwart the Vicar by putting in a majority of the adherents. One Eastertide several Chartists were elected, but they soon said, 'We loike the Vicar, and if he tells us our duties we will do them.' Hook continued on the best terms with them, and declared at the end of their term of office that he never met with a more honourable or trustworthy set His charm of manner and power

<of men.

Every means which the Church sanctions was employed to win back to the Church the alienated and teeming masses. Hook was too large-hearted to tie others down to his own precise mode of thought or action.

hobby, and only try to keep him straight.' Soon after his incumbency began, a considerable number of Methodists, including three preachers, joined the Established Church, but expressed a wish to continue their custom of class-meetings.''By all means,' said Hook, and I will be your classleader. The glorious strength and beauty of the West Riding gift of song-a gift in which the district excels every other part of England-was enlisted to render our marvellous Liturgy in all the beauty of holiness,' and to make the choral services at Leeds parish church, then, as now, unequalled in many of our large cathedrals. By teaching and example, the pre-eminent importance of worship over the mere hearing of sermons was enforced, and when strangers inquired whether the Vicar was going to preach, the verger, no doubt duly instructed in his part, took delight in baffling their curiosity with the reply, that doubtless a minister would be provided.' Opportunities for divine worship were multiplied, and services and administrations of the sacraments were fixed at hours which would allow of the attendance of the factory workers.

6

'It has been reported,' said the Vicar, in a the services of this church, preaching has been sermon preached in 1848, that in attention to neglected; but I question much whether in any church in England more sermons have been de