A Preacher's Life: An Autobiography and an Album

Exham, though but a village in size,

-* — L is historically and archseologically “no mean city.” Its venerable Abbey, the hoary church of the parish, has outlasted the coming and the going of twelve hundred years. Then where were the jerry-built towns of yesterday’s England? Before Syria was conquered by Omar, cowled monks were gathered on the banks of the Tyne. Before liniments and lotions for rheumatism were dreamt of, the old, old Tyne-folk were glad to have the quack surgeon walk nine times round the rheumracked sufferer, — “Malignusobligavit: angelus curavit: dominus salvavit,” — the quack being enjoined by his books to “spit thy spittle on the joint, and it will soon be well with him.” Years before the Council assembled In TrullOy the Al)bey of Hexham claimed the right of sanctuary within the radius of a mile. Before the Third Council was hekl at Constantinople, Queen Etheldrid gave the regality of Hexham to Wilfrid, the local head of the Roman Church. Fifty years before the sacred pictures were condemned by the Fourth Church Council, Trumhriht was consecrated first bishop of Hexham. Before Charlemagne had commended in the Council of Frankfort the veneration of sacred pictures, Acca, our glorious bishop, had embellished with lavish splendour the Abbey under whose shadow I was born. Before the Filioqiie clause was inserted in the Creed at the Council of Aixla-Chapelle, Ethelbehrt was the last bishop buried at Hexham. Am I not justified, therefore, in claiming to be a citizen of “no mean city “? A historical sanctity seems to cling to that Tyneside shrine, and to invest all its people with an unwritten, but indisjjutable, right to be in an illustrious line. There is an old-fashionedness about the most modern of us, — a weird kind of dour silence and reserve which means, being psychologically interpreted, that sleeping dogs should not be wantonly roused. The heredity that goes back but a space of twelve days may have a mushroom flavour, the heredity which goes back twelve hundred years, and even then was venerable, covers all yester-EARLY day’s things with the shamefacedness of conscious inexperience. I know we did not always sustain the highest level of our history, but we comfort ourselves with the ghastly and humbling recollection that even Adam — whether of Moses or of Darwin — did not long sustain his best traditions.

The Englishman who was born in 1830, as I was, may be expected to have some knowledge of the Genesis of modern things, for immediately before that pregnant period social England was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Feudal England, hearing a pistol-shot in the air, woke up and looked round sleepily and Avonderiugly. The night AA’as past, and a white light glimmered on the eastern hills.

The piquant life lived in my father’s house brought me into daily contact with a good deal that was going on — or had been going on within a short radius of years — in the bigger world. The best Radicals and Dissenters in the little town met under my father’s roof night after night, and all the Nonconformist ministers foregathered round his hospitable hearth, the feast ahvays being hot coffee and piles of buttered leavened bread; there, from. secular and from reverend lips, I heard that the British world might at any moment be enveloped in flames. Before telling how thai was, I must make a note or two of childhood’s memories, which, though trivial ii themselves, I cannot now but regard as full of suggestion and rough forecast of many reforms and rearrangements. The solemn threat under which all children of my grade were brought up was, that if Ave did anything wrong Ave should certainly be sent to “Botany Bay.” That was enough to make the stoutest heart quail and to blanch the faces of whole schools. Botany Bay, though known to be a geographical term, was a mystery to our young minds; and mystery, especially moral mystery, has played a great part in the education of the world. We heard of Botany Bay as more advanced minds might have heard of bottomless perdition. There was only one word more terrible to boyish miscreants than Botany Bay, and that appalling word was Van Diemen’s Land. No boy not lost to self-respect could pronounce that word flippantly; indeed, hardly any boy could be persuaded to pronounce it at all. As boys — very little and very superstitious boys — we felt instinctively that Van Diemen’s Land was a bad land, full of brimstone, and

EARLY prEMORTES vull of unholy suggestion. AYhen it was Reported amongst us that the grandfather of h’ne of the hoys had actually hcen in Van Si)iemen’s Land (Avhetlier at his own expense olv not was a secret), our respect for the hoy di’as rudely and A isihly modified. But time I+oftens all things, and some things are Ifeven sanctified by time. One of these things proved to he Van Diemen’s Land itself. At a Methodist meeting in the north, the people had been singing a hymn in which the line “We are marching through Emmanuel’s ground “occurs, and at the close of the hymn one good old man, whose emotion was in excess of his intelligence, fervently prayed,” Grant that when this life is over every one of us may have a cottage in ‘an Diemen’s Land.” “Who can fully exi)lain the laws of mental association The poor man somehow got it into his head that Emmanuel’s ground and Van Diemen’s Land were practically one and the same thing, and thus already the minor prophets had unconsciously foreseen the better future of colonial civilisation and progress, and had hopefully haptised an old name into a ncAV meaning.

All this time I was at once happily and sadly conscious of silently passing through a deep religious experience. To me it has, i I may say so without being misunderstood been ahvays natural to pray. Prom a chilj*^- I “felt after “God; I expected Him; tarried for Him as for one with whom I ha “> an appointment. I have never lost that fee ing of expectancy and nearnesiv The idea praying by the clock, or statedly, or sevei^ times a day with my window open towards Jerusalem, would never occur to me, for it is my delight of delights to pray without ceasing. I would as soon think of breathing seven times a day as of praying seven times a day. Intermission is in other things, never in prayer. My boyhood was steeped in prayer, When I prayed in public T was often asked if I wrote my prayers and committed them to memory. Never! No sentence have I ever prayed from memory! I have let the eager and even clamorous heart say what it would to the condescending and ever-listening Father.

Par off in my boyhood I see two living figures that can never fade from memory. One was the Rev. Michael Singleton, and the other the Rev. William Airey. The first was the Roman Catholic priest of the town, who, according to local Protestant interpretation,

EARLY ^rE^[ORIE,S V ickeclly represented “the man of sin,” “the mystery of iniquity,” and various “little horns “in Daniel and elsewhere. Michael Singleton was, though personally benign, an oJficial terror to all Protestants. And yet he did not look it! — that was the mischief of it! If Ave could have seen” the horn “Ave could have run away from it, or Ave could have tthroAvn stones at it; but it was not to be seen. It might be up the man’s sleeve, or in his boots, or under his suspiciously ample cloak, or inside his silk hat; the fact that Ave were talking about” a horn “did not for a moment affect our use of metaphor or our suspicion of possi])ilities. We Were told by our protesting sires that the wickedness came in exactly at the point of uncertainty as to where the” horn “Was. Mr. Singleton was the gentlest of men, with a smile that was itself a certificate and a fortune. Once the Roman Catholic priest spoke to me, and thus AAdthout knowing it he made an epoch in my life! Little by little it became known in the Sunday school, in Which I was first a scholar and long after-Avards a teacher, that I had been syoken to l)y “the man of sin,” “the mystery of iniquity,” and “the little horn “in Daniel; and some bitter Protestants eagerly looked in ray face in expectation that blotches might at any moment break out. Thus early in life became a local “character.” The dear ol priest, seeing that my waistcoat pocket w{ ’ bulging out, merely touched the protrusioand paternally (in an ecclesiastical sens. smiled; and when I showed him a pocket tui I of cherry stones he looked as if he could have! played at “odds and evens’’ and enjoyetl himself as he used to do in his long-forgotter boyhood. But, again, just as before, that waS where the mischief came in! That was thei hypocrisy and the baseness of the wholt|| thing! Local Protestants, who knew nothing) about the toleration which is born of intelli-; gence, declared that the poking of my littlei wallet of cherry stones was neither more nor less than the deeply calculated trick of the “mother of harlots,” cunningly hiding her cruel purpose behind the smile of a falsei benignity. Local Protestants of a certairiv grade hated Romanism all the more thaiJ’ intellectually they knew little or nothing ’ about it, except that Mr. Singleton said his prayers in Latin and lighted candles in his I church when there was no need of artificial light. Some good people had even a pre-’ judice against the Latin tongue because it was somehow related to the Papal religion. These prejudices are, when viewed from the highest standpoint, of course very small and contemptible, but they played no unimportant part in the conviction and intercourse of a parish that was governed by instinct rather than by educated reason.

Keep reading