"SO RUN THAT YE MAY OBTAIN."
Mrs. Stobart, yawning by the neatly swept hearth in her cottage
parlour, while her husband sat silent over a book, read an account of
Antonia's party in a semi-religious newspaper, prefaced with a pious
denunciation of the worldling's extravagant luxury. She insisted on
reading the description to her husband, and as she was a slow reader,
bored him to extinction.
"How fine it must have been!" she sighed at the end. "Oh, how I should
love to have been there! What a pity you put her off with an excuse
when she asked us to visit her!"
"My dear Lucy, what an idle thought! Your clothes for such a party
would cost a hundred pounds; and how would you like to think that you
carried on your person the money that would feed a score of orphan
children for the winter?"
"Then is everybody wicked who gives such assemblies or goes to them?
Sure if they all spent their superfluous wealth upon charity, instead
of fine clothes and musicians and wax candles, there need be nobody
starving or homeless in England."
"'Tis a problem the world has not solved yet, Lucy; but for my own part
I think the man who squanders his fortune upon pomp and luxury can have
no more appreciation of gospel truth than the heathen has who never
heard of a Redeemer."
"Then you think Lady Kilrush is no better than a heathen?"
"Alas! poor wretch, did she not confess herself so in your hearing--an
infidel, blind to the light of revelation, deaf to the message of
pardon? We can but pity her, Lucy, and pray that God's hour may come
for her as it came for you and me. She has a fine nature, and I cannot
think she will be left in outer darkness."
"Unless she is one of those that were predestined to eternal perdition
before they were born," said Lucy.
"You know I have never countenanced that gospel of despair, and I
deplore that so fine a preacher as Mr. Whitefield should have taken up
such gloomy views."
"She might have sent us a card for her ball," murmured Lucy. "'Twould
have been civil, even though she guessed you would not take me."
The discontented sigh which followed the complaining speech showed
George Stobart that his wife was still among the unregenerate.
His religion was of a stern temper, and he could not suffer this
unchristian peevishness to pass unreproved.
"Do you think, madam, that a journeyman printer's daughter would be in
her place among dukes and duchesses at a fashionable assembly? 'Twas
not for such a life I chose you."
Lucy, who always trembled at her husband's frown, though she never
refrained from provoking his anger, replied with her accustomed
argument of tears. George saw the slim shoulders shaken by suppressed
sobs, flung his book aside in a rage, and began to pace the cottage
parlour, whose narrow bounds he was not yet accustomed to. In mild
weather the half-glass door stood ever open, and he could pass to the
grass plot outside when his impatient mood was on; but with a November
rain beating against the casement there was no escape, and he felt like
a caged bear.
Finding her stifled sobs unregarded, Lucy began again, in the same
complaining voice--
"I thought a gentleman's wife was fit company even for dukes and
duchesses; and if it comes to fathers, I have less need to be ashamed
of mine, though he starved and beat me, than Lady Kilrush has of hers,
who was in jail for running away with a farmer's cash-box. 'Twas all in
the evening paper when his lordship married her."
"Good God!" cried George, "are women by nature mean and petty? The
first desire of a gentleman's wife, madam, should be to think and act
like a lady, and to-day you do neither. I wish we had never seen Lady
Kilrush, since an hour of her company has made you dissatisfied with
a life for which I thought Heaven designed you. To sigh for balls and
drums--you, who never danced a step in your life! And do you think when
I left the army--the calling I loved--I meant to hang upon the skirts
of fashion, stand in doorways, or elbow and shove in supper-rooms? I
renounced all such idle pleasures when I left His Majesty's service and
took up arms for Christ, whose soldier and servant I am."
Lucy, now entirely repentant, looked up at him with streaming eyes,
shivering at his indignation, but admiring him.
"How handsome you are when you are angry!" she cried. "You are so
good and noble, and I am so vile a sinner. 'Tis Satan tempting
me. He makes me forget what a worm I am. He makes me proud and
ungrateful--ungrateful to you, my dear, my honoured husband; ungrateful
to God who gave me your love."
She slipped from her chair to the ground, and knelt there, weeping
passionately, her pretty auburn hair falling over her face and neck,
whose delicate whiteness showed like ivory between loose locks of
burnished gold.
Her husband had recovered his self-command, lifted her tenderly from
the ground, and held her against his breast. How pretty she was, how
artless and childlike, and how brutal it was in him to be so angry at
her poor little frivolous yearnings for fine clothes and fine company,
music and candlelight! He kissed her on the forehead and lips in a
gentle silence, led her to her chair, and then resumed his book.
"'Tis I am the sinner, Lucy," he said after a pause, during which her
needle travelled slowly along the seam of the shirt she was making for
him. "I did very ill to be so hot and impatient about a trifle. But
these long empty days vex me. I hope I may be of the proper stuff for a
Christian; but sure I should never have done for a hermit. I want to be
up and doing."
"Indeed, George, you work too hard as it is. A long day at home should
be a rest for you."
"I am not one of those who relish rest. Come, I will read to you, if
you choose."
"I love to hear you read."
"Yes, and sit and dream of your baby, or your new tea-things, and
scarce know whether I have been reading Milton or the Bible when I have
done," he said gently, as he might have spoken to a child.
"You have such a beautiful voice. I love your voice better than the
things you read. But let it be 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and I will listen
to every word. I always think Christian is you. I can see you when I
follow him with my thoughts."
Her husband smiled at the gentle flattery, and brought Bunyan's
delightful story from the modest bookcase which held but some two score
of classics and pious works--William Law, Dr. Watts, the writers loved
and chosen by the followers of the New Light.
"Dost remember where we left your Christian?" he asked.
"'Twas when he was alone in the Valley of Humiliation, just before
Apollyon met him," she answered quickly, though had the book been
"Paradise Lost," she would have hardly known whether 'twas before
or after the fall when they left Adam and Eve. He read aloud till
teatime, and read to himself after tea till the hour of evening prayer
and Scripture exposition, to which the little nursemaid and a stout
maid-of-all-work were summoned; and so the long day closed at an hour
when West End London, from Wimpole Street to Whitehall, was alive with
chairs and linkmen, French horns and dancing feet. In this cottage on
the common there was a silence that made the chirp of the crickets a
burden.
* * * * *
George Stobart was not a quietist. Religion unsupported by philanthropy
would not have sufficed him for happiness. He could not spend half
his life upon his knees in a rapture of self-humiliation--could not
devote hours to searching his own heart. Once and for all he had been
convinced of sin, assured that the road he had been travelling was a
road that led to the gates of hell, and that in travelling it he had
carried many weaker sinners along with him, and so had been a murderer
of souls. Once and for all he had been assured of the free grace of
God, and believed himself appointed to do good work--a brand snatched
from the burning, whose duty it was to snatch other brands, to compel
the lost sheep to come into the fold.
He loved to be up and doing. He had the soldier's temper, and must be
fighting some one or something; nor could he keep in his chamber and
wrestle with impalpable devils. He could not fight, like Luther, with
the evil that was within him till he materialized the inward tempter,
saw Satan standing before him, and flung his inkpot at a visible foe.
Abstract piety could not satisfy George Stobart. He caught himself
yawning over Law's "Serious Call," and "The Imitation of Christ."
In the beginning of the Great Revival, when the Oxford Methodists
and the Moravian Christians had been as one brotherhood in the
meeting-house by Fetter Lane, an enthusiast, by name Molther, had put
forward a new way of salvation, which was to be "still." Those who
desired to find faith were to give up the public means of grace. They
were not even to pray or to read the Scriptures, nor to attempt to do
any good works.
John Wesley's fine common sense had repudiated this doctrine,
whereupon there had been confusion and falling away among the Fetter
Lane society; and the great leader had withdrawn to a chapel and
dwelling-house of his own creation, in a disused foundry for cannon,
near Finsbury Square. It was here that George Stobart had found faith,
and it was in Wesley's strong and active crusade against sin and
suffering that he found satisfaction.
After somewhat reluctantly entering upon his career as an itinerant
preacher, when the magnitude of the work, the multitudes eager to
hear the Word of God, revealed themselves to him, John Wesley, again
reluctantly, enlisted the help of lay preachers. The Church had shut
her doors upon him--that Anglican Church of which he had ever been a
true and staunch apostle--and he had to do without the Church. He saw
before him the people of England awakened from the torpor of a century
of automatic religion, and saw that he needed more labourers in this
vast vineyard than the Church could give him.
For the last two years George Stobart had been one of Wesley's
favourite helpers, and had accompanied his chief in several of those
itinerant journeys which made half England Wesleyan. He preached at
Bristol, rode with Wesley, preaching at every stage of the journey,
from Bristol to Falmouth, where he stood shoulder to shoulder with him
in one of the worst riots the Christian hero ever faced. He was with
him through the roughest encounters in Lancashire, stood beside him on
the Market Cross at Bolton, when the great wild mob surged round them
and stones flew thick and fast, and where, as if by a miracle, while
many of the rabble were hurt, the preacher remained untouched.
In all this, in the effect of his own preaching, in the hazards and
adventures of those long rides across the face of a country where most
things were new, Stobart found unalloyed delight. He loved his mission
in the streets and alleys of Lambeth, his visits to the London jails,
for here he had to wrestle with the devils of ignorance and blasphemy,
to preach cleanliness to men and women who had been born and reared in
filth, to meet the wants of a multitude with a handful of silver, to
give counsel, sympathy, compassion, where he could not give bread. This
was work that pleased him. Here he felt himself the soldier and servant
of Christ.
It was in the religion of the chamber that Stobart fell short of the
mark. He loved the Word of God when God spoke by the lips of His Son;
but he had not that reverent affection for the Old Testament which
Wesley had urged upon him as essential to true religion. For the
grandeur, the poetry of Holy Writ he had the highest appreciation; but
there were many pages of the sacred volume in which he looked in vain
for the light of inspiration. If he could have read his Bible in the
same inquiring spirit that Samuel Coleridge brought to it, he might
have been better satisfied with the book and with himself; but Wesley
had forbidden any such liberal interpretation of the Scriptures. Every
line, every word, every letter was to be accepted as the law of God.
He was dissatisfied with himself for his coldness, for wandering
thoughts, for the dying out of that sacred fire which John Wesley's
preaching had kindled in his soul at the time of his conversion. But
he told himself that such a fire can burn but once in a lifetime. 'Tis
like the burning bush in which Moses beheld his God. That stupendous
vision comes once, and once only. It has done its purifying work, and
burnt out sin. But between the starting-point of the converted penitent
and the Christian's crown, how long and difficult the race! George
Stobart had felt his footsteps flagging on the stony road. He had not
lost courage. The dogged determination to win that eternal crown was
still with him; but he had lost something of his first enthusiasm, that
romantic temper in which it had pleased him to prove his sincerity by
the sacrifice of fortune and station, and by a marriage which would
have seemed impossible to him in his unregenerate days.
* * * * *
A week after Lady Kilrush had given her great entertainment there came
a letter from her, addressed to Mrs. Stobart, and the very seal upon
it was as precious in the sight of the printer's daughter as if it had
been a jewel.
"Look, George, what a beautiful seal--a naked boy with a helmet, and
two snakes twisted round his cane. Who can have written to me? Why, the
name is signed outside, 'Townshend.' Sure I know nobody of that name."
"'Tis but the frank, child. The letter is from Lady Kilrush."
"How can you tell that?"
"I could swear to her hand among a hundred. Not the penmanship of one
woman in a thousand shows such strength of will."
"Can one's writing show one's mind? I should never have thought it.
I wonder if 'tis a card for her next assembly. Oh, George, don't be
angry! I should like, once in my life, only once, to go to a party."
Her husband sighed as he patted her shoulder, with the gentle touch
that only strong men have, and which always soothed her.
"Read your letter," he said; "'tis no card."
She took her scissors from her work-basket and carefully cut round the
seal--loth to spoil anything so beautiful, though her heart beat fast
with expectation. George read the letter aloud over her shoulder.
* * * * *
"St. James's Square, November 15th.
"DEAR MADAM,
"I hope that neither you nor Mr. Stobart have forgot your
polite promise to visit me, and that you will do me the
favour of dining with me at four o'clock next Monday,
when Lady Margaret Laroche, the Duchess of Portland, Mr.
Townshend, and some other of my most agreeable acquaintance,
will be good enough to give me their company in the evening.
As you live so far off, I shall venture to send my coach
to fetch you before dark, and I shall be best pleased if
you will spend the night in St. James's Square, and return
home at your leisure and convenience on Tuesday. Knowing
Mr. Stobart's serious mind, I did not presume to send you
a card for my ball last week, as I should be sorry for any
invitation of mine to seem an empty compliment.
"Pray persuade your husband, and my cousin by marriage, to
gratify me by bidding you write 'Yes,' and believe me, with
much respect,
"Your sincere friend and servant,
"ANTONIA KILRUSH."
"Must I say no, George?" Lucy asked, with a quivering lip, ready to
burst into tears.
"Nay, child, I made you unhappy t'other day, and was miserable for two
days after at the thought I had been a brute. If it would please you to
visit her ladyship----"
"Please me! I should feel as if I was flying over the moon."
"But you could not fly over the moon in a grogram gown. You need not
vie with her Grace of Portland, but I doubt you have no clothes fit for
company, and my purse is empty."
"But I have my wedding gown," she cried, clapping her hands--"the gown
I bought at Clapham with the pocket-money your mother gave me, a crown
piece at a time, and that I saved till it was over three guineas. And I
bought a pearl grey silk, and your mother's woman helped me make it,
and then when I told you what I had done you were vexed at my vanity,
and would not let me wear it; so I was married in my old stuff gown,
and the pearl grey silk has never been worn. The Duchess will not have
a newer gown than mine, if you'll let me go."
"'When I was a child I thought as a child,'" quoted George. "Well,
dearest, thou shalt have thy childish pleasure. To have seen how idle
and empty a thing fine company is may make thee love our serious life
better."