4Q 



MINISTRY AT STAND. 



[Chap. III. 



He wrote to me soon after — " I am disgracefully happy ; con- 

 tented, but not without a relish for better things." 



At this time there was a great deal of distress and dis- 

 content in the manufacturing districts. A fellow-student, who 

 was then minister at Chowbent, said that forty thousand pikes 

 had been distributed in his neighbourhood. The Chartists 

 sought their political remedy, while others were earnestly 

 striving against the Corn-laws. Philip preached extempore on 

 "The ends, causes, and duties of the present distress." He 

 chose a striking text : Isaiah viii. 21, "It shall come to pass, 

 that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and 

 curse their king and their God." The next Sunday, a petition 

 which he had prepared, referring to the injurious effect of the 

 Corn-laws on the moral and intellectual condition of the people, 

 was read from the pulpit. Seeing the connexion of sin and 

 misery, he was not so sanguine as some of his friends as to the 

 happiness which Free Trade would produce; and he relates 

 the pain he felt when, at a religious meeting at Cockey Moor, 

 the reference to commercial as well as civil and religious liberty 

 opened the way to some stormy declamation. " The ministers, 

 most of whom I had never seen before, welcomed me. cor- 

 dially, and all seemed to have some particular remembrance 

 of my father's kindness." He had engaged to speak on plans 

 for the spread of Christian truth, but the chairman introduced 

 the word Unitarian. He begged, however, to speak on topics 

 on which all Christians could agree. "I began by thanking 

 them for the warm manner in which they had received me 

 as my father's son ; said that wherever I went it was the same, 

 for his sake : that I was glad of an opportunity of connecting 

 his name with this sentiment, as, though he would probably 

 be known to most as a controversialist, it was his great delight 

 to spread the true spirit of Christianity." Philip occasionally, 

 but rarely, entered on doctrinal questions in the pulpit; and 

 when he did, he had no pleasure in recording the presence of 

 strangers : there were often many there. On his first Trinity 

 Sunday, he referred to the rubric directing the omission of the 

 words " Holy Father," on that day, in the Communion Service 

 of the Church of England. 



