School Life

Autobio- My education for this world commenced at a day school in Blandgi’aphical,

ford, and through my whole career my training has always been imperfect. My mind has had but little proper culture, so that I am a wonder to myself, when I consider what God has done by me. Having in boyhood contracted some improper associations, I was sent off to boarding-school at the age of eight years. But my father, not himself aware of the benefit of a good education and but little acquainted with schools, made a most unwise selection. It was a village school for the sons of the neighbouring farmers, kept by a man whose qualifications extended literally no further than to teach writing and common arithmetic*

Here I lost two precious years in learning nothing. Nothing was taught but writing and ciphering. All the religion of this school consisted in our going to church on Sundays, and hearing prayers read in the morning. It is not to be wondered at that I never had a religious thought or feeling here, and by bad associates became wicked, even to swearing. The whole ambition of the master seemed to consist in making us good penmen, in which with me he never succeeded. My next school was at Wareham,

* At this school I have heard him say that the boys had to take their towels in their hands every morning and run off to a neighbouring brook to wash — an arrangement rather more bracing than pleasant. — Edit. kept by !Mr Kell, an Arian minister. This was a classical school, Autobioand in eveiy way incomparably superior to the other. There I ^P*”*^ remauied rather more than two years, during which I learned Latin, and had some general instruction; after which I was sent back for a short time to the former school to get up my penmanship. But my mother, and perhaps my father, seemed to be so impressed with the want of all religious instruction, that I was allowed to go home every other Sabbath. My whole boyhood and school days passed by without any decided reUgious thought or feeling.

In looking back at the system of education which in those days generally prevailed, and comparing it with what is now supplied, I am profoundly astonished at the vast improvement which in this respect has since then taken place. With the exception of Latin and Greek, more general knowledge is now communicated in our common day schools for the labouring classes than was at that time imparted in ordinary boarding-schools.

Thus finished my childhood in vanity and folly. I was yet “without God and vrithout hope in the world”

All the stories of Mr James’s school days that he himself was EditoriaL accustomed to tell, and all that I have been able to collect from his old schoolfellows and playmates, shew that he was a bright, merry boy, with exulting animal spirits, and a kindly, generous temper. He was not very clever in class, but was a good hand at trap-ball and rounder; and in the rough fun of the playground, and in the practical jokes so dear to thorough English lads, he was always forward. Some boyish sins he fell into, but he was always brave and generous, and was never suspected of a lie.

He often used to tell with great glee how, on one Guy Fawkes’ night, he had the audacity to let oflP a squib at a soldier, which singed the warrior’s whiskers, and greatly provoked his fury; and how, on another, having filled his pockets with fireworks, all his thunder prematurely exploded, and began to blaze away so fiercely that he had to be put under the spout of the pump in order to save him from as tragic and fiery a fate as that to which the

LIFE OF JOHN ANGELL JAMES.

immortal conspirator had doomed the rulers of the English nation. To convict all unbelievers, the pump is still at the back of the old house, with his father’s and mother’s initials upon it.

While preparing this biography, a kind note reached me from

Mr James C of Bingham, an old schoolfellow of IMr James’s,

with whom he once had a “battle-royal, which lasted half-anhour; “but, writes Mr 0,” after the battle was over we soon

forgot our encounter, and were afterwards very good friends.” Thirty years passed before the combatants met again; and, having talked over the heroic deeds of their boyhood, Mr James looked his old foe and old friend in the face, and said with genuine and affecting earnestness, “My dear friend, I hope we are one in Christ.”

It was not unnatural that even his mother should acknowledge to a neighbour that her “son John was her chief trouble,” and deplore that he made no progress at school; or that she derived little comfort from her friend’s assurance that as the boy was clever at his play, she need not trouble her heart about him, “he’ll do well enough by and by.”

Perhaps with individuals as with nations, their military glory is remembered and sung when their more peaceful though greater achievements are forgotten; but whatever the cause, most of the recollections of those who knew Mr James in early days celebrate his pugilistic prowess rather than his learning. Once he is said to have thrashed a lad for calling him a “pug-nosed Presbyterian,” an insult flung at his religion as well as his person, which an ardent, impetuous, broad-chested boy could hardly be expected to endure. Old Mr Fisher, father of the two gentlemen of that name now living at Blandford, was travelling once in the west of the county, and put up at an inn kept by a Blandford man-Naturally enough the innkeeper began to inquire about the townspeople, and as the conversation ran on, he exclaimed, “There were two boys of the name of James that went to school with me — what has become of them?”

“One of them,” was the reply, “has become an eminent Nonconformist minister.”

“Ay, which is that?”
“John Angell.”

“What! thik [Dorsetshire for that] thick-headed fool — why, he was fit for nothing but fighting!”

The general religious influences under which he lived during his boyhood were very feeble. He had to thank God for his mother’s piety, but for little besides.

The IndejDendent congregation of which his parents were adherents, like most of the Presbyterian, and many of the Independent churches of the last century, was paralysed by respectability and dulness. The effeminate refinement which had nearly proved the death of our literature, had invaded the pulpit and destroyed its authority and power. As the warmth and vigour of Dryden had given place to the cold timidity of Pope, as the sinewy directness of Locke had given place to the gliding gracefulness of Addison; so in the pulpit. Barrow and South, to say nothing of earlier and perhaps greater names, were forgotten, and Tillotson with his imitators reigned in their stead. Even when the tide had turned, and the French Revolution had made men impatient of mere finished correctness in general literature, preachers were still expected to be elegant and cold; and in good society Dr Blair was the model preacher.

This enfeebling fastidiousness was at once a cause and an efiect of spiritual declension. In Doddridge and Watts, the spiritual energy which wrought mightily in the Puritans of the age of Elizabeth, and afterwards in many of the great Churchmen who ofiered a blind homage to the first two Stuarts, as well as in the illustrious divines of the Commonwealth and the confessors of 1662, had exhausted itself. At the close of the seventeenth century, Burnet, who was generous enough to applaud religious earnestness wherever he discovered it, said that the strictness of piety for which Dissenters had been distinguished was rapidly disappearing. The few eminent Nonconformists who were living immediately before the great revival under Whitfield and Wesley, mourn over the decay of spiritual earnestness among the members of their churches, and the prevalent latitudiuarianism in matters

LIFE OF JOHN ANGELL JAMES.

of doctrine. Doddridge confesses and deplores that for churches holding a moderate Calvinistic creed, It was hard to find ministers. The whole country was under a blight. In the Church of England evangelical orthodoxy had scarcely a refuge except in her Articles, and devoutness was to be found only in her Liturgy. Nearly all the Presbyterian pulpits, once occupied by the relentless but fervent Calvinists of the Commonwealth, were now filled with men who began by evading all definite statements on the chief articles of the Evangelical Confession, the divinity of the Lord Jesus, and the expiatory character of His death, and ended by distinctly denying them. Occupied in constructing endless demonstrations of the existence of God, and in weary controversies with a heartless scepticism, the divines of that age neglected and forgot the central and vital truths of the Christian faith. To pass from the theology of Puritanism to the folios which ensure the Boyle Lecturers a torpid immortality, is to exchange the tropics for an Arctic winter.

The churches of the Independent order suffered less severely during that age of darkness than their neighbours; but they were not wholly uninjured. Some became Arian. Others retained through a protracted period of spiritual slumber their old creed, and were at last re-awakened by the dawn of the great Evangelical Revival. The Independent church at Blandford belonged to the latter class, but in Mr James’s boyhood the slumber had been but slightly disturbed. The minister, Mr Pield, was a man whose personal religious habits and ideal of ministerial responsibilities had been formed when the religious temperature of the country was at its lowest point; his ministry commenced in the year 1753.*

He was a man of excellent character, a tolerably good scholar, and a gentleman, but a drowsy preacher. He is suspected to have held, though ha never frankly avowed, Arian doctrines; when

* It is worth recording, and may serve to correct the mistake of those who suppose that Independent churches are such hotbeds of faction and restlessness that no minister can continue long in any one pastorate, that the Blandford church bad only three ministers during a period of more than one hundred and fifty years. The Rev. Malachi Blake was minister for more than fifty years, the Rev. Henry Field for sixty-seven, and the Rev. Richard Keynes for fifty-three.

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away from home his pulpit was often supplied by ministers who openly professed the Arian creed. His congregation included many of the most respectable inhabitants of Blandford, and he was held in veiy general affection and respect.

Good Mrs James, however, was often weary of the coldness and formality of the services at the Independent meeting. Many a time on a winter evening she called one of her boys to light the lantern and walk with her to the homely room where the Methodist preachers were stirring the blood and firing the devotion of their simple-hearted hearers. She found there less polish but more power, and believed that the dignified discourses of her own minister were well exchanged for the rude eloquence of less cultivated but more fervent men.

Although for a time she had no reason to suppose that her eldest son was at all affected by what he heard, who can venture to afiirm that the stirring sermons he listened to at his mother’s side in the Methodist conventicle produced no impression on his boyish heart? At least they must have helped to teach him that lesson which he often and solemnly endeavoured to teach others, that the gospel, though preached by unlearned men, is always and everywhere “the power of God unto salvation.”