From this time he was the "pet speaker" of the place. His lectures at the Mechanics' Institute were delivered frequently, and became immensely popular. The lecture-room was far too small for the eager listeners who crowded to hear him. "A large market room" was taken, and here, when he lectured, there was no space for many who wished to hear him. He preached on Sundays in the villages around, and at length was asked to occupy a pulpit in Farnham itself. "I remember," says one of his friends, "his first sermon in the old Congregational Chapel. The place was crammed to excess, by people too who were not in the habit of attending such places."
All this time, this "carpenter, and son of a carpenter," worked diligently at his trade; but a sudden vacancy occurring in the management of the Farnham British Schools, he was asked to become the master. He did so. He left the carpenter's bench on a Saturday, and became schoolmaster on the following Monday. This, however, was but a temporary arrangement, for he was at the time negotiating with the managers of Stepney College to become a pupil there; and, an opportunity shortly afterwards occurring, which he had very promptly to accept or refuse, he somewhat abruptly vacated his seat as a schoolmaster, and became once more a scholar.
This was in 1848. He remained in the college four years, and he soon learned to laugh heartily at his Farnham Latin and his Farnham lectures. He was in the habit, while at the college, of going on Sundays to hear the best preachers in the Metropolis, and he has told me that he often walked from Stepney to Camberwell to hear Melvill, who was then the most popular preacher in London.
At the end of his academic career he was invited to become the minister at Mount Zion Chapel, in Birmingham. How he laboured here every one in the town can testify, and I need not say one word; but there is one fact that should be more generally known, as it shows one result of his work. In the year before he came to Birmingham (1851), the sum collected in this chapel for the Baptist Missions was £28 4s. 11d. The report for 1874--the last under his care--gives the amount collected in the year as £332 5s. 5d.
I am obliged to omit much that is interesting, but I have at least shown that his childhood's home was comfortable and respectable, and that he did not spend his boyhood among companions unworthy of him. In his native town his memory is as warmly cherished as it is in Birmingham. His last public act there was to preach the first sermon in a new and remarkably handsome Congregational Church, and it is said that on that occasion, the number of people who sought to hear him was so great, that the Church, although a spacious one, would not contain the half of them. "There was no room to receive them; no, not so much as about the door."
