In a very unaristocratic neighbourhood—in no more fashionable a locality than that of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate Street—preaches the Rev. J. Howard Hinton, till Mr. Brock came to London the acknowledged great man of the Baptist denomination. Nor was this title undeserved. If the possession of a powerful mind—subtle, analytic, acute—a mind fertile in the destruction of fallacies, and in the reception and exposition of great truths, gives its possessor any weight at all, Mr. Hinton must, in any rank of life, have occupied no mean place. Still more may be said in his favour, especially in his character of a Christian minister—that his language is forcible—that his own feelings are strong—that in season and out of season it is evidently his aim to expound and declare, to the utmost of his ability, Christian truth. Yet Mr. Hinton has a very small congregation. I should think Devonshire Square Chapel cannot contain more than five hundred hearers at the very outside—a very small proportion, it must be admitted, of the intelligent frequenters of public worship in London. The real reason of this scant attendance, I suppose, is that Mr. Hinton has no clap-trap about him—that he has none of the fascinating airs of the popular Evangelical divine—that he has long past that time of life when young ladies take an interest in their darling minister—and that, if you wish to get any good from the preacher, you must not merely listen to him, but must use your own intellectual powers as well—an exertion far from common amongst the church and chapel goers of London. Six days in the week those who have brains are working them in this crowded city, and the seventh they wish to be a day of rest. They take the Sabbath as a pleasant opiate—as a kind of spiritual Godfrey’s Cordial for the soul—that they may go back to the world with renewed energy and power. To such Mr. Hinton does not preach: with such he is no favourite. No singer of sweet songs—no player upon pleasant instruments is he. Tall, sickly with the work and study of a life, grey-haired, inelegant as all book-worms and men of thought—with the exception of Sir Bulwer Lytton—are, with a voice by no means melodious, but tremulous with emotion as it is played upon by the soul within: such is Howard Hinton. If you stay to listen—if you have sense enough to see the heart in that ungainly frame and the intellect in that capacious brain—you will hear a sermon that will repay you well. From whatever subject he is preaching on Mr. Hinton always manages to extract something new; you are really instructed by his sermons; your views become clearer and more enlarged; you understand better the Christian scheme. Mr. Hinton is more than what I have here implied. He is something more than a great reasoner or acute divine. He has a heart, and he speaks out of it to you. He excites your emotions as well as convinces your understanding. There is flame as well