Now we come to a Saint who had a life so full of adventures that a
book twice as big as this one would be needed to contain the stories
that might be told about him alone.
Unlike any of the other 'Quaker Saints' in this book, he was by birth
a Frenchman and came of noble family. His name was Etienne de Grellet.
He was born nearly a century after the death of George Fox; but he
probably did not know that such a person had ever existed, never even
heard Fox's name, until long after he was grown up. If Etienne de
Grellet, the gay young nobleman of the French court, had been told
that his story would ever be written in a book of 'Quaker Saints' he
would, most likely, have raised his dark eyebrows and have looked
extremely surprised.
'_Quakère? Qu'est-ce que c'est alors, Quakère? Quel drôle de mot! Je
ne suis pas Quakère, moi!_' he might have answered, with a disdainful
shrug of his high, narrow, aristocratic French shoulders. Yet here he
is after all!
* * * * *
Etienne de Grellet was born at Limoges in France, in the year 1773.
His childhood was passed in the stormy years when the cloud was
gathering that was to burst a little later in the full fury of the
French Revolution. His father, Gabriel de Grellet, a wealthy merchant
of Limoges, was a great friend and counsellor of Louis XVI. and Marie
Antoinette. As a reward for having introduced into the country the
manufacture of finer porcelain than had ever before been made in
France he was ennobled by the king, whom he often used to attend in
his private chapel. Limoges china is still celebrated all over the
world; and at that time the most celebrated of its china-makers was M.
de Grellet, the king's friend.
Naturally the sons of this successful merchant and nobleman were
brought up in great luxury. Etienne and his brothers were not sent to
a school, but had expensive tutors to teach them at home. Their
parents wanted their children to be well educated, honourable,
straightforward, generous, and kind; to possess not only
accomplishments but good qualities. Yet Etienne felt, when he looked
back in later days, that something had been left out in their
education that was, perhaps, the most important thing of all.
When he was quite a little boy he was taken to visit one of his aunts
who was a nun in a convent near Limoges. The rules of this convent
were so strict that the nuns might not even see their relations who
came to visit them. They might only speak to them from the other side
of two iron gratings, between the bars of which a thick curtain was
hung. The little boy thought it very strange to be taken from his
beautiful home, full of costly furniture, pictures, and hangings, and
to be brought into the bare convent cell. Then he looked up and saw an
iron grating, and heard a voice coming through the folds of a thick
curtain that hung behind it. He could hear the voice, but he might
never see the face of the aunt who spoke to him. At night at home, as
he lay in his comfortable bed, he used to think of his aunt and the
other nuns 'rising three times in the night for prayer in the church,
from the hard boards which formed their couch, even the luxury of a
straw pallet being denied them.' 'Which is the real life,' he used to
ask himself, 'the easy comfortable life that goes on round me every
day, or that other, difficult life hidden behind the folds of the
thick curtain?'
Child though he was, Etienne felt that his aunt loved him, although he
had never seen her. This helped him to feel that, although unseen, God
was loving him too. As he grew older he wondered: 'Perhaps everything
we see here is like the bars of a grating, or a thick curtain. Perhaps
there is some one on the other side who is speaking to us too.'
Etienne was only about five or six years old when he made the great
discovery that GOD IS THERE, hidden behind the screen of visible
things all round us. After this, he longed to be able to speak to God
and to listen to God's voice, as he was able to listen to his unseen
aunt's voice speaking to him from behind the curtain in the convent.
No one ever taught him to pray; but presently he discovered that too
for himself. One day, when he was only six years old, his tutor gave
him a Latin lesson to learn that was much too difficult for him.
Etienne took the book up to his bedroom, and there, all alone, he read
it over and over and did his very best to learn it. But the unfamiliar
Latin words would not stay in his memory. At last he closed the book
in despair and went to his bedroom window and looked out. He gazed
over the high roofs of the city, away over the wide plain in which
Limoges lay, to the distant mountain, blue against the sky.
Everything looked fair and peaceful. As he gazed, the thought came to
him, 'God made the plain and the river and the mountains. God made
this whole beautiful world in which I live. If God can create all
these things, surely He can give me memory also.' He knelt down at the
foot of his bed and prayed, for the first time in his life, that his
Unseen Friend would help him to master the difficult lesson. Taking up
the book again, he read the hard Latin words once more, very
attentively. This time the words stayed in his memory and did not fade
away. Often afterwards, he found that if he prayed all his lessons
became easier. He could not, of course, learn them without effort, but
after he had really prayed earnestly, he found he could remember
things better. Then one day he learned the Lord's prayer. Long years
after, when he was an old man, he could still recall the exact spot in
his beautiful home where, as a little boy, he had first learned to
say, 'Our Father.' Etienne and his family belonged to the Roman
Catholic Church. On Sundays they went to the great cathedral of
Limoges; but the service there always seemed strange and far away to
Etienne.[41] The music, the chanting, the Latin words that were said
and sung by bishops and priests in their gorgeous robes, did not seem
to him to have anything to do with the quiet Voice that spoke to the
boy in the silence of his own heart.
When Etienne and his brothers were old enough they were sent to
several different colleges and schools. Their last place of
instruction was the celebrated College of the Oratorians at Lyons.
Among other things, the students of this College were taught to move
so quietly that fifty or a hundred boys went up or down the stone
steps of the College all together, without their feet making the least
noise.
Etienne tells us in his diary: 'as we were educated by Roman Catholics
and in their principles we were required to confess once a month,'
that is, to tell a priest whatever they had done that was wrong, and
receive the assurance of God's forgiveness from him.
The priest to whom Etienne regularly made his confession was 'a pious,
conscientious man,' who treated him with fatherly care. When the boy
told him of his puzzles, and asked how it could be necessary to
confess to any man, since God alone could forgive sins, he received a
kind, helpful answer. 'Yet,' he says, 'my reasoning faculties brought
me to the root of the matter; from created objects to the
Creator--from time to eternity.' After he was confirmed at College he
hoped that his heart would be changed and made different; but he found
that he was still much the same as before. Before leaving the College
he and the other students who were also departing received the
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper at Mass. This was to Etienne a very
solemn time. But, he says, as soon as he was out in the world again,
the remembrance of it faded away. He settled that he had no use for
religion in his life, and determined to live for pleasure and
happiness alone. 'I sought after happiness,' his diary says, 'in the
world's delights. I went in pursuit of it from one party of pleasure
to another; but I did _not_ find it, and I wondered that the name of
pleasure could be given to anything of that kind.'
In his dissipated life after leaving College, he gave up saying his
prayers, and gradually he lost his belief that GOD WAS THERE. He read
unbelieving books, which said that God did not exist, and that the
Unseen world was only a delusion and a dream. For a time Etienne gave
himself up to doubt and denial as well as to dissipation. He was in
this restless state when the French Revolution broke out and caught
him, like a butterfly in a thunderstorm. New questions surged over
him. 'If there is a God after all, why should He allow these horrors
to happen?' But no answer came. Or perhaps he had forgotten how to
listen.
'Towards the close of 1791,' he writes, 'I left my dear Father's
house, and bade him, as it proved, a lasting farewell, having never
seen him since.' At this time, Etienne accompanied his brothers and
many other nobles into Germany, to join the French Princes who were
endeavouring to bring about a counter-revolution and restore the king,
Louis XVI.
On this dangerous journey the young men met with many narrow escapes.
Courage came naturally to Etienne. 'I was not the least moved,' he
writes in his diary, 'when surrounded by people and soldiers, who
lavished their abuses upon us, and threatened to hang me to the
lamp-post. I coolly stood by, my hands in my pockets, being provided
with three pairs of pistols, two of which were double-barrelled. I
concluded to wait to see what they would do, and resolved, after
destroying as many of them as I could, to take my own life with the
last.'
Happily the necessity for extreme courses did not arise. He was, he
says, 'mercifully preserved,' and no violent hands were laid upon him,
though he and his companions suffered a short detention, after which
they succeeded in safely joining the French Princes and their
adherents at the city of Coblentz on the Rhine. Here Etienne spent the
following winter and spring surrounded, he tells us, by many
temptations.
'I was fond of solitude,' continues the diary, 'and had many retired
walks through the woods and over the hills. I delighted to visit the
deserted hermitages, which formerly abounded on the Rhine. I envied
the situation of such hermits, retired from the world, and sheltered
from its many temptations; for I thought it impossible for me to live
a life of purity while continuing among my associates. I looked
forward wishfully to the time when I could thus retire; but I saw also
that, unless I could leave behind me my earthly-mindedness, my pride,
vanity, and every carnal propensity, an outward solitude could afford
me no shelter.
'Our army entered into France the forepart of the summer of 1792,
accompanied by the Austrians and Prussians. I was in the King's Horse
Guards, which consisted mostly of the nobility. We endured great
hardships, for many weeks sleeping on the bare ground, in the open
air, and were sometimes in want of provisions. But that word _honour_
so inflamed us, that I marvel how contentedly we bore our privations.'
Towards the approach of winter, owing to various political changes,
the Princes' army was obliged to retire from France, and soon after
was disbanded. 'Etienne had been present at several engagements; he
had seen many falling about him, stricken by the shafts of death; he
had stood in battle array, facing the enemy ready for the conflict;
but, being in a reserve corps, he was preserved from actually shedding
blood, having never fought with the sword, or fired a gun.'
In after years, he was thankful to remember that although he had been
perfectly willing to take life, he had never actually done so in his
soldier days. After the retreat of the French army, he and his
brothers set out for Amsterdam. On the way, however, they were made
prisoners of war, and condemned to be shot. 'The execution of the
sentence was each moment expected, when some sudden commotion in the
hostile army gave them an opportunity to make their escape.' Their
lives thus having been spared a second time they reached Holland in
safety.
The young men were puzzled what to do next. They could not bear to
leave their beloved parents at distant Limoges, and yet it was
impossible to reach them or to help them in any way. France was a
dangerous place for people with a 'de' in their names in those days,
and for young men of military age most dangerous of all. Finally,
Etienne and his brother Joseph settled to go to South America.
'Through the kind assistance of a republican General, a friend of the
family, they obtained a passage on board a ship bound for Demerara,
where they arrived in the First month of 1793, after a voyage of about
forty days.'
Unfortunately this long voyage had not taken them away from scenes of
violence. The Revolution in France was terrible, but the horrors of
slavery in South America were, if possible, even worse. The New World
seemed no less full of tragedy than the Old. Etienne saw there
husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters torn
apart, most cruelly beaten, often sold like cattle to tyrannical
masters, never to see each other's faces again.
Amid such scenes Etienne grew more than ever full of despairing
thoughts, more than ever inclined to believe that there could not be a
God ruling a world where these evils were allowed to go unpunished.
'Such was the impression made upon Etienne by the scenes of cruelty
and anguish he witnessed, that, many years after, the sound of a whip
in the street would chill his blood, in the remembrance of the agony
of the poor slaves; and he felt convinced that there was no excess of
wickedness and malice which a slave-holder, or driver, might not be
guilty of.'
Etienne and Joseph stayed in Demerara for more than two years. In the
spring of 1795 they left South America and settled in Long Island near
New York. There, they made friends with a certain Colonel Corsa, a man
who had served in the British army, and who had a daughter who spoke
French. As the two brothers at this time knew no English it was a
great cheer to them in their loneliness to be able to visit at this
hospitable house. One day Colonel Corsa happened to speak of William
Penn. Etienne had already heard of the Quaker statesman, George Fox's
friend, and when the young girl said she possessed Penn's writings
Etienne asked to borrow them. He took back to his lodgings with him a
large folio book, intending, with the help of a dictionary, to
translate it in order to improve his English. Great was his
disappointment when he found that the book contained nothing about
politics or statesmanship. It was about religion; and at this time
Etienne thought that religion was all a humbug and delusion.
Therefore he shut up the book and put it away, though he did not
return it to its owner. One evening, about this time, as he was
walking in the fields alone, suddenly the Voice he had heard in his
childhood spoke to him once more, close by and terribly clear:
'ETERNITY, ETERNITY, ETERNITY.' These three words, he says, 'reached
my very soul,--my whole man shook,--it brought me, like Saul, to the
ground.' The sinfulness and carelessness of his last few years passed
before him. He cried out, 'If there is no God, doubtless there is a
hell.'
His soul was almost in hell already, for hell is despair, and Etienne
was very nearly despairing at that moment. Only one way out remained,
the way of prayer, the little mossy pathway that he used to tread when
he was a child, but that he had not trodden, now, for many years.
Tangled, mossy, and overgrown that path was now, but it still led out
from the dark wood of life where Etienne had almost lost his way and
his hope.
Etienne took that way. With his whole heart he prayed for mercy and
for deliverance from the sin and horror that oppressed him. When no
answer came at once he did not stop praying, but continued day and
night, praying, praying for mercy. Perhaps he scarcely knew to whom
his prayer was addressed; but it was none the less a real prayer.
He expected that the answer to it would come in some startling form
that he could recognise the first minute and say: 'There! Now God is
answering my prayer!'
Instead, the answer came far more simply than he had expected. God
often seems to choose to answer prayers in such a gentle, natural
fashion, that His children need to watch very carefully lest they take
His most radiant messengers, His most wonderful messages, almost as a
matter of course. Only if they recognise God's Love in all that comes,
planning how things shall happen, they can see His hand arranging even
the tiniest details of their lives, fitting them all in, and making
things work out right. Then they understand how truly wonderful His
answers are.
The answer to Etienne's prayer came through nothing more extraordinary
than that same old folio book which he had borrowed from his friend
Miss Corsa, and had put away, thinking it too dull to translate. He
took it out again, and opened upon a part called 'No Cross, No Crown.'
'I proceeded,' he says, 'to read it with the help of my dictionary,
having to look for the meaning of nearly every word.'
When he had finished, he read it straight through again. 'I had never
met with anything of the kind before,' and all the time he was reading
the Voice inside his heart kept on saying, 'Yes, Yes, Yes, that is
true!'
'I now withdrew from company, and spent most of my time in retirement,
and in silent waiting upon God. I began to read the Bible, with the
aid of my dictionary, for I had none then in French. I was much of a
stranger to the inspired records. I had not even seen them before that
I remember; what I had heard of any part of their contents, was only
detached portions in Prayer Books.
'Whilst the fallow ground of my heart was thus preparing, my brother
and myself, being one day at Colonel Corsa's, heard that a Meeting was
appointed to be held next day in the Friends' Meeting-house, by two
Englishwomen, to which we were invited. The Friends were Deborah Darby
and Rebecca Young. The sight of them brought solemn feelings over me;
but I soon forgot all things around me; for, in an inward silent frame
of mind, seeking for the Divine presence, I was favoured to find _in_
me, what I had so long, and with so many tears, sought for _without_
me. My brother, who sat beside me, and to whom the silence, in which
the forepart of the meeting was held, was irksome, repeatedly
whispered to me, "Let us go away." But I felt the Lord's power in such
a manner, that a secret joy filled me, in that I had found Him after
whom my soul had longed. I was as one nailed to my seat. Shortly
after, one or two men Friends in the ministry spoke, but I could
understand very little of what they said. After them Deborah Darby and
Rebecca Young spoke also; but I was so gathered in the temple of my
heart before God, that I was wholly absorbed with what was passing
there. Thus had the Lord opened my heart to seek Him where He is to be
found.
'My brother and myself were invited to dine in the company of these
Friends, at Colonel Corsa's. There was a religious opportunity after
dinner, in which several communications were made. I could hardly
understand a word of what was said, but, as Deborah Darby began to
address my brother and myself, it seemed as if the Lord opened my
outward ear, and my heart. She seemed like one reading the pages of my
heart, with clearness describing how it had been, and how it was with
me. O what sweetness did I then feel! It was indeed a memorable day. I
was like one introduced into a new world; the creation, and all
things around me, bore a different aspect, my heart glowed with love
to all.... O how can the extent of the Lord's love, mercy, pity, and
tender compassion be fathomed!'
After the visit of the two Friends had made this change in his life
Etienne decided to give up his French name and title, and to be no
longer Etienne de Grellet, the French nobleman, but plain Stephen
Grellet, the teacher of languages. Later on, he was to become Stephen
Grellet the Quaker preacher; but the time for that had not yet come.
After Deborah Darby's visit he went regularly to the Friends' Meetings
in Long Island, but they were held for the most part in complete
silence, and sad to say not one of the Friends ever spoke to him
afterwards. He missed their friendliness all the more because the
people he was lodging with could not bear his attending Quaker
Meetings, and tried to make him give up going to such unfashionable
assemblies. His brother, Joseph, also could not understand what had
come to him, and both Joseph and the lodging-house people teased poor
Stephen about his Quaker leanings, till he, who had been brave enough
when his life was in danger, was a coward before their mockery. He did
not want to give up going to his dear Meeting, but he hated to be
ridiculed. At first he tried to give up Meeting, but this disobedience
gave him, he says, 'a feeling of misery.' When the next Sunday came he
tried another plan. He went to the Meeting-house by roundabout ways
'through fields and over fences, ashamed to be seen by any one on the
road.' When he reached the Meeting-house by these by-lanes, the door
was closed. No Meeting was to be held there that day. The Friends
happened to have gone to another place. Stephen, therefore, sat down,
'in a retired place and in a very tried state,' to think the whole
question over again, with much humility. He decided that henceforth,
come what might, he would not be a coward; and he kept his resolution.
The next Sunday he went to Meeting 'though it rained hard and I had
about three miles to walk.' Henceforward he attended Meeting
regularly, and at last his brother ceased reproaching him for his
Quakerism, and one Sunday he actually came to Meeting too. This time
Joseph also enjoyed the silence and followed the worship. 'From that
time he attended meetings diligently, and was a great comfort to me.
But, during all that period,' Stephen continues, 'we had no
intercourse with any of the members of the religious Society of
Friends.' These Friends still took no notice of the two strangers.
They seem to have been Friends only in name.
About this time bad news came from France. 'My dear mother wrote to me
that the granaries we had at our country seat had been secured by the
revolutionary party, as well as every article of food in our town
house. My mother and my younger brother were only allowed the scanty
pittance of a peck of mouldy horse-beans per week. My dear father was
shut up in prison, with an equally scanty allowance. But it was before
I was acquainted with the sufferings of my beloved parents, that the
consideration of the general scarcity prevailing in the country led me
to think how wrong it was for me to wear powder on my head, the ground
of which I knew to be pride.' He gave up powder from this time. It
would not be much of a sacrifice nowadays, but it was a very real one
then, when powder was supposed to be the distinguishing mark of a
gentleman. The two brothers were now obliged to learn to support
themselves. All their estates in France had been seized. 'Our means
began to be low, and yet our feelings for the sufferings in which our
beloved parents might be involved, caused us to forget ourselves,
strangers in a strange country, and to forward them a few hundred
dollars we had yet left.'
It was no easy matter to find employment. The brothers went on to New
York, and there at last the Friends were kind: Friends in deed and not
in name only. They found a situation for Joseph in New York itself,
and arranged for Stephen to go to Philadelphia, where he was more
likely to find work.
And at Philadelphia the Friends were, if possible, even kinder to him
than the Friends at New York. They were spiritual fathers and mothers
to him, he says, and seemed to know exactly what he was feeling. 'They
had but little to say in words, but I often felt that my spirit was
refreshed and strengthened in their company.' At Philadelphia, he had
many offers of tempting employment, but he decided to continue as a
teacher of languages in a school. He gave his whole mind to his school
work while he was at it, and out of school hours wandered about
entirely care free. But although he was a teacher of languages and
although the English of his Journals is scrupulously careful, it has
often a slight foreign stiffness and formality. He was often afraid in
his early years of making mistakes and not speaking quite correctly.
There is a story that long afterwards, when he was in England and was
taking his leave of some schoolgirls, he wished to say to them that
he hoped they might be preserved safely. But in the agitation of his
departure he chose the wrong words. His parting injunction, therefore,
never faded from the girls' memory: 'My dear young Friends, may the
Lord _pickle_ you, His dear little _muttons_.'
If, even as an old man, Stephen was liable to fall into such pitfalls
as this, it is easy to understand that in his earlier years the fear
of making mistakes must have been a real terror to him, especially
when he thought of speaking in Meeting. Very soon after he became a
Friend he felt, with great dread, that the beautiful, comforting
messages that refreshed his own soul were meant to be shared with
others. Months, if not years, of struggle followed, before he could
rise in his place in Meeting and obey this inward prompting. But
directly he did so, his fears of making a mistake, or being laughed
at, vanished utterly away. After agony, came joy. 'The Lord shewed me
how He is mouth, wisdom and utterance to His true and faithful
ministers; that it is from Him alone that they are to communicate to
the people, and also the _when_ and the _how_.' At that first Meeting,
after Stephen had given his message and sat down again, several
Friends, whose blessing he specially valued, also spoke and said how
thankful they were for his words. Among those present that day was
that same William Savery, who, in the last story, had a bundle of
valuable hides stolen from his tanyard, and punished the thief, when
he came to return the hides, by loading him with kindness and giving
him a good situation.
Certainly William Savery would not tell the story of 'the man who was
not John Smith' to Stephen Grellet on that particular day; for
Stephen was so filled with the thankful wonder that follows obedience,
that he had no thought for outside things. 'For some days after this
act of dedication,' he says, 'my peace flowed as a river.' In the
autumn of this year (1796), Stephen Grellet, the French nobleman,
became a Friend. About two years later, he was acknowledged as a
Minister by the Society.
'In those days,' he writes, 'my mind dwelt much on the nature of the
hope of redemption through Jesus Christ.... I felt that the best
testimony I could bear was to evince by my life what He had actually
done for me.'
Henceforth Stephen's life was spent in trying to make known to others
the joy that had overflowed his own soul. He did indeed 'put the
things that he had learned in practice,' as he journeyed over both
Europe and America, time after time, visiting high and low. His life
is one long record of adventures, of perils surmounted, of hairbreadth
escapes, of constant toil and of much plodding, humdrum service too.
His message brought him into the strangest situations, as he gave it
fearlessly. He sought an interview with the Pope at Rome in order to
remonstrate with him about the state of the prisons in the Papal
States. Stephen gave his message with perfect candour, and afterwards
entered into conversation with the Pope. Finally, he says, 'As I felt
the love of Christ flowing in my heart towards him, I particularly
addressed him.... The Pope ... kept his head inclined and appeared
tender, while I thus addressed him; then rising from his seat, in a
kind and respectful manner, he expressed his desire that "the Lord
would bless and protect me wherever I went," on which I left him.'
Not satisfied with that, though it seems wonderful enough, Stephen
another time induced the Czar of all the Russias, Alexander I., to
attend Westminster Meeting. Both these stories are well worth telling.
But there is one story about Stephen, better worth telling still, and
that is how the Voice that guided him all over the world sent him one
day 'preaching to nobody' in a lonely forest clearing in the far
backwoods of America.