It was over one of these old City churches, probably the most famous of them, that the youthful Isaac Watts was called to preside as the pastor. The congregation or church contained a number of eminent persons; its pastors had been eminent men; here a few years before ministered Joseph Caryl. From the pulpit of this place probably were poured forth those prelections on the Book of Job, assuredly in more than one sense a monument to the memory of Patience! Vast and mammoth-like, a megatherium of books, the most huge commentary ever written, but a structure of learning, with eloquence and evangelical truth, if large in bulk almost equal in worth. Over this church, more recently, had presided a greater man in the person of the mighty John Owen, the friend of Cromwell, and, during the Protectorate, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. The place of meeting was in Mark Lane, and in the congregation there were present some whose character and lives might a little daunt any preacher, much more a very youthful one. There were many in that congregation able to carry the memory back through the days of England’s fiery trials, through the years of war and of persecution, and the times when the City was alive in its own defence. They had heard the cry, “To your tents, O Israel!” when, in an ill-omened hour, Charles I. came to the City; they had seen the Thames alive with barge and boat as the members were escorted back to Westminster; some had served in the camp with the Ironsides, and some had seen Sir Harry Vane hailed to the scaffold; there were officers of the old Commonwealth army, members of the old Long Parliament, strong merchants and magistrates who had stood up for the liberties of the City and of England; there, in that congregation, scattered over the place were clustering remnants of the immediate members and descendants of Cromwell’s family, none more remarkable than that most singular woman, Mrs. Bendish, Bridget Ireton, the grand-daughter of Cromwell, of whom all contemporaries spoke as hearing just the same relation to her grandfather in character that Elizabeth bore to Henry VIII.—a woman with a most remarkable life; there was Charles Fleetwood, her mother’s second husband; there was Charles Desborough, the brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell; there was that fine old English gentleman Sir John Hartopp, and Lady Hartopp, who was a daughter of Charles Fleetwood, and thus allied to Mrs. Bendish; there was Lady Vere Wilkinson, and Lady Haversham, a daughter of the Earl of Anglesey, and the wife of John Thompson Earl of Haversham; and there, last as we mention them, but far from least in importance in the life of Watts, Sir Thomas and Lady Abney.