certain favour among the ‘dens’ of Kent. It had begun merely by an
account of his conversion to a few sympathisers at Maidstone, but later
he had learned, like most converts, to make a universal application of
his private experiences, and laid huge stress on the doctrines of
Predestination and Election and Free Grace. While still at Maidstone he
had joined the Baptists, but the Baptists at Maidstone were Arminians,
whereas his nature and the circumstances of his conversion inclined him
towards Calvinism. He thought of joining the Calvinists, who had small
congregations at Smarden and other hamlets. But “my pen cannot describe
the exercises of my mind on the thought of leaving the Arminian
Baptists. It would make many of my former friends my foes.” Far away at
Oxford a similar conflict was at about the same time raging in the
breast of Newman, and this mute inglorious Newman was to follow the same
course as his famous contemporary. He seceded, and became a Particular
Baptist.
The next few years are a history of struggle, contempt, debt, care,
family trials, dependence on the charity of the Elect, whose very
cast-off clothing he and his children wore. But the greatest experience
of his regenerate life was at hand—the Word which was to send him out of
his native and familiar Kent into unknown Sussex, carrying his Gospel to
the Gentiles. The call came to him as it had come to the Apostle Paul
from the Man of Macedonia—“Come over and help us.” The Man of Sussex was
a “miller in Ticehurst, a perfect stranger to me,” whom he met on the
Headcorn Road. “He had passed but a few rods, when these words were
powerfully impressed upon my mind—‘that man comes out of Sussex to
invite you to go down there to preach.’ At which I immediately said
‘Dear Lord, I am not fit to go into Sussex.’” However, he dared not
refuse so imperative a summons, enforced through the continual
impression on his mind of the words “I will send thee far hence to the
Gentiles.” To the Gentiles he went, the barbarians of Shovers Green,
from whom soon afterwards came a definite call. He went in the greatest
agony of mind, full of doubts and fears and distresses, but in spite of
this his preaching was found acceptable to the little knot of believers
at the cross-roads beyond Bantony. Here he continued going once a
fortnight for some time, though in due course opposition arose—he was
accused of being “an Antinomian, a Huntingtonian, a High Calvinist, a
Beemanite,” and a large party withdrew from the chapel, though as others
came from surrounding parishes, he still had a good congregation.
However, in time the disaffected party got the upper hand, and there
seems to have been a sort of riot—“an unusual concourse of people in the
public road, with loud hollowings and shouts of Horrible! ‘Bominable!
Stuff!” In the end, Weller’s career as an apostle of the Gentiles came
to rather a tame conclusion in his being dismissed by the Deacon, who
paid him his salary and told him that his services would be no further
required.
However, his work was only apparently ended. Soon afterwards he received
a call to Mayfield, with occasional returns to Frittenden and Smarden,
and finally he detached himself altogether from Kent and became a
regular preacher at Burwash, whither followed him the loyal part of his
congregation at Shovers Green. The story of his life at Burwash is his
usual mixture of good works and bad debts; however, his circumstances
both spiritual and material, seem to have grown more stable. His
ministry was becoming famous among the farms, and in 1842 a friend at
Robertsbridge offered to “give me a house to turn into a chapel, with a
lease of fifty years and ten pounds per annum towards the support of the
cause. This gave me fresh reasons for prayer.” The offer was accepted,
and the foundation stone was laid in November 1842, the opening taking
place in January of the next year. Preachers came respectively from
London and the Upper Dicker, and “were much favoured in their own souls;
but as for myself, I was sorely tried the whole of the day with my own
debts and those of the chapel.”
So ends the story of the “Wonders of Free Grace.” Weller did not long
enjoy his more established existence, for he died five years after
coming to Robertsbridge. But his Bethel and his book remain, both akin
in their ugliness and humility. One reads the book with much the same
feelings as one looks at the Bethel. It is written entirely without
art—a wordy stammering narrative, mixed with minute reports of dreams,
spiritual experiences, marvellous conversions, digests of sermons and
Calvinistic arguments. It is all obscure, voluble, earnest and naive.
A remarkable and poignant thing is his utter blindness to the beauty
spread round him in the fields of Sussex and Kent. He seems to have
tramped the Kentish lanes, gone to and fro among the red villages of the
Sussex weald, crossed the still, sweet valleys of the Rother and the
Glotten Brook, without a thought for their loveliness. This exile in
darkest Geneva was blind to all beauty save that which reached him in
occasional, tortured flashes from the Thick Darkness where God was. The
coloured, wooded country round Sissinghurst, the brooding, merging
greens of the Rother Marshes, the farm-patched mound of the Isle of
Oxney, the flushed hillock of ancient Rye had no voice for the messenger
of Grace. Even the coming of Spring, to be to the earth what conversion
is to the man, to do yearly for the Benenden meadows what Free Grace had
done once for James Weller, brought no sympathetic thrill to the heart
which saw only its own Particular mercies. As he groped and stumbled on
his way, nature walked beside him through her mysteries, from the Spring
Annunciation to the Falling Asleep of December. He might have had the
comfort of her beauty, the fellowship of her experience, but he went
aloof—the Protestant, the individualist, his eyes cast down up the
narrow lane of his salvation where his footsteps were marked in blood.
* * * * *
To the Catholic Christian there is a special glamour about such stories
as this of James Weller, of conversion and salvation outside the normal
sphere of the Covenanted Mercies. They are like stories of men who win
their way across uncharted seas in unseaworthy craft—of men who miss
their way up a mountain, yet, somehow, arrive at the summit, bleeding
and exhausted, by another path. So powerful is the Precious Blood that
it can work its changes on mankind apart from the means appointed for
its operation. Unlike the old life, the New Life is not bound by its own
laws, and again and again it amazes us with miracles. “Behold, ye
despisers, and wonder and perish....”
The normal channel of the Precious Blood as it flows from the Sacred
Heart of Christ, making us all partakers of his divine humanity, is the
sacramental system of his Church, which is his Body. But just as there
can be contacts between mind and mind without the agency of the
body—though such contacts must always be abnormal, uncertain and
unsatisfactory—so there is contact between the New Life and human lives
which as yet stand outside the body of its functioning. And as these
telepathic unions between mind and mind have a special glamour about
them which perhaps we do not find in ordinary human intercourse, so
these uncovenanted graces of the New Life give us a new thrill as of
power unguessed and unrealised.
It is true that there is always something a little terrible about the
experiences of the separated saints. They are not quite natural, and
therefore not quite spiritual. Where the conversion is not too
subjective to last, the New Life often has to grow in an atmosphere of
fear—fear of sin and fear of hell, or fear even of the homely shapes of
earth, which the separated Saint sees unredeemed, as vessels of wrath.
It is for our sins that the Precious Blood does not flow in the veins of
Christ’s Body only. As long ago on Calvary, it is still poured upon the
ground. The spear of schism pierces his side, and thereout flows blood
and water—the sacraments poured out in death. It is through our guilt
that men such as James Weller obtain their Particular Mercies. We have
pierced his heart, and it is because his heart is broken that there is
grace not only for us but for all the children of God that are scattered
abroad.
August
_Month of the Most Pure Heart of Mary_
The sun has set, but there is still colour in the sky and colour on the
sea. Pale streaks of rose lie along the horizon, both on cloud and on
water. The sea, where it meets the sky is a lightless pink, where it
touches the land a lightless blue. It is strange, this lightless colour
of the sea. Under all the riches of its summer twilight changes the sea
seems lifeless. There is a deadness too in the sky now that the sun has
gone. It is all like a painted memory of something once seen, a dream of
something once alive. Then a wind goes over the waters, and suddenly a
point of living light is kindled, as the first star shines out in the
lifeless sky. The planet named long ago after the goddess of beauty is
still the star of the sleeping August sea. It shines one tiny brilliant
point of light in all that rose-blue lifelessness of sky and sea. Round
it and beneath it clouds and water waken into darkness, so that by the
time the other stars have kindled, and the moon has risen, the whole
dead scene has come to life again in glowing depths of gold and blue.
* * * * *
The human race flowered in Mary. Sown in the garden of man’s universal
dream, tended and watered by the Law of the chosen race, the Rose of
Sharon bloomed to be fertilised by Godhead. Mary stands alone as the
single perfect flower brought forth by that sad sowing of the human
race. Rich was the soil and many were the gardeners, yet only one
blossom opened perfectly to the sun.
So once again the adventure of life could be made, the suitable medium
having been found. The medium of the natural life that first came
wonderfully to an inorganic world was the sea, in which organic life
arose—Aphrodite, beautiful and fertile, born of the sea-foam. The medium
of the supernatural life that came wonderfully into nature was the pure
will of Mary when she proclaimed herself the handmaid of the Lord. Her
name signifies saltness, bitterness, in fact, the salt and bitter
sea—there is no flowering in her name—but her perfect will is the star
of the sea, which makes a guiding path across its mystery—the star which
yet is not a star, but a planet blazing with reflected glory.
Thus she is the rose to symbolise that she is the flower of all life,
the flower of the long growth of the ages; she is also the sea to
proclaim that she is the virgin source of the New Life, of the ages yet
to come; she is the star of the sea to show the guidance of her perfect
will, perfect only in its reflection of the glories of the will of God.
“Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” When Mary speaks these words a new
star is kindled, and the dead world comes alive in the night.
The sanctified myths of Genesis point to the failure of the purpose of
life through the corruption of a woman. This need not involve the belief
that the first perversion of free will came through woman as distinct
from man. Eve symbolises the feminine principle in things—the receiver,
the reflector, the material, the medium. Through the wrong choice of the
first human wills, the medium of creation was spoiled, and the human
race became in its tendencies a part of nature rather than of
supernature. Intended for the spouse of heaven, it turned instead to
Adam—Edom—red earth, and by turning earthwards away from heaven, to the
knowledge of good and evil, it lost its purpose even in regard to the
earth it turned to, its powers of redemption, its functions as mediator,
and cursed became the ground for our sake.
Mary too stands as a symbol—the symbol of the restoration of the lost
purpose of life through the sanctification of a woman. The medium, the
receptacle is rehabilitated in Mary, “spiritual vessel, wondrous vessel
of devotion,” and becomes the vehicle of the divine. By the Holy Ghost,
Mary is made the spouse of heaven and the mother of heaven’s Lord.
The body which the Redeemer took of his Virgin Mother was not an
inheritance of the flesh only, but the inheritance of a human heart and
will. We all receive from our parents a heart and will made crooked by a
perverted inheritance, in other words by sin. The heart and will of our
Lord were clean and straight and without sin. His psychological
processes were as God intended them to be—an orderly development from
primitive yet honourable instincts moving towards completeness, which is
perfection. “The sin is in the will.” There was no sin in the will of
Mary, which was simply the will of God, so she was able to give her son
what no other human parent has been able to give. The doctrine of the
Virgin Birth proclaims that he took from her the feminine principle
only—the vessel, the vehicle—while Godhead provided the masculine or
quickening element. If he had been born according to nature he would
have belonged to nature, but he was born the mediator of two worlds, the
natural and the supernatural—“by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.”
Once more the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters, and the
New Creation is begun.
It was Mary’s privilege to give our Lord all that he took of manhood.
She gave him human nature at its best—the perfect vehicle. She gave him
not only a human body but a human mind—and she did more than give. What
she had already given she trained and guided. Again and again,
psychologists tell us, even a good inheritance will be wasted by the
mistakes of the parents during the first years of their child. The
delicate child-mind may be hopelessly warped and spoiled by the
mishandling of those that train it. The more we learn of the discoveries
of modern psychology the more we are impressed by the terrific
responsibility of the Mother of God. To her care was committed not only
her infant’s tender body, but his beautiful, perfect, sensitive mind.
Those early years which psychologists tell us make or mar a whole life
were entirely in her keeping. It was for her to sow the seed of early
impressions, to impart the first teaching. Only the glory of her own
submitted will could have guided her through the ocean of her
motherhood’s cares—that will which was simply the perfect reflection of
the will of God.
The spirit of God moves over the face of the waters, and the waters
become a miraculous source of life. Above the waters a single star is
bright with the reflected glory of the sun.
September
_Month of the Sorrows of Mary_
There is a new sharpness in the air—the first sharpness of Winter
returning. There is a sharpness which is only just not the sharpness of
frost on the dew that lies so late and thick upon the morning grass. The
winds sleep, and the air is bound. But this sharpness and stillness are
not as in frozen January, for they are no longer sterile—they are rich,
fruitful, golden. Up into the still air ascends the straight blue
smoke-column of the bonfires that consume the dross of summer, and in
that burning there is a sweetness, a richness that makes the heart beat
quickly and almost chokes the breath. There is no perfume like that of a
September garden fire, burning away the summer in an agony of sweetness.
The smoke of it goes up like incense through the gold and blue of the
afternoon. The breath of the earth is like incense as she turns slowly
to her sleep. The earth is emptied of her harvests, but not of their
perfume—it hangs still about her, perfume of the crops she has brought
forth, corn and hops and hay, merged into one rich sweetness in the
September sunshine. She is stripped but she still is sweet, indeed
sweeter in this autumn spoliation than ever in her sun-baked fertilities
of Summer, just as the trees are lovelier in their golden dying than in
the pale austerity of their budding or in the green monotony of their
July crown. The trees are still bearing fruit. The crimson of the apples
hides among the golden green of the leaves. September is the month of
the fruitful trees, of the harvest of the golden bough. The field has
given up the last of her harvests, but the orchard is still heavy, and
in the wild trees of the woods the acorns, the nuts, the sloes are ripe
among the yellowing leaves.
* * * * *
Two women stand at the foot of two trees. The women are weeping, the
trees are heavy with fruit. Eve stands at the foot of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil—Mary stands at the foot of the Cross. Both
are Matres Dolorosæ—sorrowful mothers—Eve the mother of all living, Mary
the mother of life. Eve has betrayed her children, through the perverse
choice of her will, but weeps for herself rather than for them—Mary has
been redeemed by her child through the offering of her will, and she
weeps for him alone.
The sorrows of Mary are fertile sorrows—the ground watered by her tears
is rich for all mankind, whereas the tears of Eve water only thorns and
thistles, cockle and darnel. The sorrows of Mary are sweet as the
perfume of the September fires, they go up as incense to heaven. The
sorrows of Eve are bitter as the smoke of green wood, and the gusts of
her self-love blow them along the ground.
It is not the first time that Eve and Mary have stood over against each
other in the scheme of the ages. They are both the medium of creation,
vessels of life, the material of the active, creative principle of the
universe. But in Eve this material has failed, it thwarts the life that
works in it, so that its energies are not only cramped but perverted.
Eve fights against the power that uses her—hence her own suffering, and
the apparent failure of the power, due to the defects of its instrument.
For Eve has discovered herself, and uses her will for her own purposes,
with the result that both her own purposes and the purposes of God as
far as she is concerned are lost. She knows both good and evil, but can
use neither. The serpent deceived her by biting his own tail and calling
himself eternity, hence she is caught in the round of things and cannot
escape.
Mary stands at the foot of the Cross as the second Eve. Once more the
creative principle has sought a medium, and this time the medium has
responded perfectly, so that the work of the new creation of the new
heavens and the new earth has not been foiled by its instrument. Mary
used her freedom, her will, not for herself but to further the purposes
of God. She became as it were the collaborator of God by yielding
herself as his handmaiden. As a reward he has made her a sharer of his
joys and sorrows. The sorrows of Mary are fertile because they are the
sorrows of the Cross. Every one of them, from the flight into Egypt till
the moment when she holds the slain body of her son upon her knees,
every one of them draws life from the fountain of the Precious Blood.
The mother standing there weeps no vain tears of selfish grief nor vain
regret—her sorrows are already united with the sacrifice of her Son, she
offers them to God with his, for the purposes of redemption. Her sorrows
are fruitful for the assistance of the world on its new ways, in company
with all human sorrow which is offered at the foot of the Cross. They
are part of the new processes of life—the sublimation of the old laws
whereby nature groaned and travailed towards higher things; they are
part of the supernatural evolution, in which sorrow is eucharistic, a
sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
The sorrows of Mary go up to heaven in perfume, like the fires of
September. Her motherhood burns in an agony of sweetness. She is the
rich earth, scented and fertile, at the foot of the golden bough, now
ripe for harvest.
October
_Month of the Holy Angels_
The sky is black. The great moonless arch sweeps from horizon to
horizon, high over the zenith. It is black, and utterly unlit except for
a golden shimmer, a dust of light, which is less light than radiance, as
it were a bloom upon the grape of darkness. Here and there against this
background of darkness and dim bloom, the nearer constellations swing
their homely shapes—the chair, the horse, the plough; and high across
the heavens is the span of that great road, track of the sun’s chariot
astray in mortal hands, the road of stars, where they lie like dust.
Looking up into the sky, into the blackness lit by radiant dust, we
almost forget the earth under our feet. It shrinks in all this hugeness
of space, and we ourselves shrink with it till we cry the age-long cry
of those that watch the stars—“What is man that thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower
than the angels....”
We see the earth as one of the smaller planets revolving round one of
the smaller of the myriad suns that are as small dust in the small
corner of the universe that is before our eyes. We see mankind as one of
innumerable forms of life, some known, some unknown. Important in his
small sphere, what is he in the spaceless immensity of the stars? Where
does he rank in the scale of being, with its hierarchies that tower
above him into eternity? Is he only a little lower than the angels?
We cannot count the suns we see—we cannot imagine the counting of the
suns we do not see. We cannot count the miles, nor the years of the sky.
We can only gaze upon it as it hangs above us in this moment of time,
and use for our homely ends the faint glimpses we have down here of its
wonderful order....
A red star suddenly cleaves the heavens. It appears to fly through them,
though in reality it is far below them, burning because of its contact
with the earth’s atmosphere, and only for that reason visible. It
streaks the sky with a fading crimson gleam—then sinks among the woods
and is lost.
* * * * *
“How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning,”
It is easier to drop the counting of years and go outside time. Created
will exists, and has power of itself. In part it has made the evil
choice, it has turned away from the Creative Will which is both its
source and goal. It has become evil. It is at war with good. There is
war in heaven. Michael and his angels fight against the dragon; and the
dragon fights and his angels, but they prevail not, neither is their
place found any more in heaven. “And the great dragon was cast out, that
old serpent, called the Devil and Satan ... he was cast out into the
earth, and his angels were cast out with him.... Woe to the inhabiters
of the earth, and of the sea: for the devil is come down unto you,
having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”
Evil, in itself, must die, since life subsists alone in God. Therefore
every existence cut off from him must end. The dragon must perish apart
from the Lord and Giver of life, his only hope is to establish an
indirect and factitious union with his God in time. This he achieves
through the material universe with which he is able to ally himself and
which itself is sustained by God. He maintains his life through the
elements—he becomes the Prince of the Power of the Air.
He enters the cycle of evolution, and we can follow his trail through
natural law—in the cruelty and futility of nature, which we cannot
believe formed part of her Creator’s original design. As life develops,
becomes more subtle, rich and various, we see the adversary’s growth
more explicitly revealed, till at last in animal consciousness, with its
capacity for fury and pain, he attains a new power and satisfaction. The
world is like a beautiful tree with a worm gnawing at its
roots—twisting, stunting, and warping it, so that the fruit shrivels
among the wilting leaves. Jömungund gnaws at the root of Yggdrasil.
But a new wonder happens upon the earth. To consciousness is added mind
and will. Created will makes a new appearance—in time. Here is a great
new opportunity, both for good and evil. If the adversary can obtain
power over this new form of conscious will, he can prolong indefinitely
his own life and activity—perhaps even obtain once more a holding in
eternal things, by means of this new creature which has been made in the
image of God. On the other hand, man may by a right use of his free will
redeem the world, save nature from her curse of cruelty and futility,
and set her free to return to the kingdom of God. Then the evil one and
his angels would fail and perish—they would be cast out of earth as
before they were cast out of heaven, and be unable to maintain any
longer through creation their illicit hold on life.