Such a sight had never been seen in Cornwall before: on this Sunday
morning an hour after sunrise every road leading to the village of
Porthawn had its procession of men, women, and children, going to hear
the preacher. The roads became dusty, as dry roads do when an army of
soldiers passes over them; and here was an army of soldiers along, with
its horse and foot and baggage-waggons--such an army as had never been
in the West since the days of Monmouth's Rebellion; and this great march
was the beginning of another rebellion, not destined to fail as the
other had failed. Without banners, without arms, with no noise, with no
shoutings of the captains, this great force marched to fight--to take
part in an encounter that proved more lasting in its effects than
any recorded in the history of England since the days of the Norman
Invasion.
The Cornish crowds did not know that they were making history. The
people had heard rumours of the preacher who had awakened the people of
Somersetshire from their sleep of years, and who, on being excluded
from the churches which had become Sabbath dormitories, had gone to the
fields where all was wakefulness, and had here spoken to the hearts of
tens of thousands.
The reports that spread abroad by the employment of no apparent agency
must have contained some element that appealed with overwhelming power
to the people of the West. The impulse that drove quiet folk from their
homes and induced them to march many miles along dusty roads upon the
morning of the only day of the week that gave them respite from toil was
surely stronger than mere curiosity. They did not go into the wilderness
to see a reed shaken by the wind. There was a seriousness of purpose
and a sincerity about these people which must have been the result of a
strong feeling among them that the existing order of things was lacking
in some essentials--that the Church should become a stimulating force to
them who were ready to perish, and not remain the apathetic force that
it was when at its best, the atrophying influence that it was when at
its worst.
That the ground was ready for the sowing was the opinion of Wesley,
though few signs had been given to him to induce this conclusion, but
that he had not misinterpreted the story of the Valley of Dry Bones was
proved by the sight of the multitudes upon the roads--upon the moorland
sheep-tracks--upon the narrow lanes where the traffic was carried on by
pack-horses. There they streamed in their thousands. Farmers with their
wives and children seated on chairs in their heavy waggons, men astride
of everything that was equine--horses and mules and asses--some with
their wives or sisters on the pillion behind them, but still more riding
double with a friend.
On the wayside were some who were resting, having walked seven or eight
or ten miles, and had seen the sun rise over the hills on that scented
Spring morning. Some were having their breakfast among the primroses
under the hedges, some were smoking their pipes before setting forth to
complete their journey. Mothers, were nursing their infants beneath the
pink and white coral of the hawthorns.
“'Tis a fair,” said Hal Holmes to his friend, Dick Pritchard, who was
seated by his side in a small pony cart made by himself during the
winter.
“Salvation Fair,” hazarded the water-finder. “Salvation Fair I would
call it if only I was bold enough.”
The smith shook his head.
“That is how it will be styled by many, I doubt not,” he said. “And
being as it must be, a strange mixture of the two--a church-going and a
fairgoing--I have my fears that 'twill fall 'twixt the two. If the thing
was more of a failure 'twould be a huge success. You take me, Dick?”
“Only vague, Hal--only vague, man,” replied the water-finder, after a
long cogitating pause. “When you spake the words there came a flash upon
me like the glim from the lanthorn when 'tis opened sudden. I saw the
meaning clear enough like as 'twere a stretch of valley on an uneven
night of moonlight and cloud. Seemed as if there was a rift in your
discourse and the moon poured through. But then the clouds fled across
and I walk in the dark. Say 't again, Hal, and it may be that 'twill be
plain. I have oft thought that your speech lit up marvellous well.”
The blacksmith grinned.
“Maybe that is by reason of my work with the forge,” he said. “The
furnace is black enough until I give it a blast with the bellows and
then 'tis a very ruby stone struck wi' lightning.”
“Maybe--ay, very likely,” said the little man doubtfully.
The smith grinned again.
“You don't altogether see it with my eyes, friend,” he said. “How could
you, Dick, our trades being natural enemies the one to t'other? My best
friend is fire, yours is water. But what was on my mind this moment was
the likelihood that the light-hearted may be fain to treat this great
serious field gathering as though it were no more than a fair. Now,
I say still that if 'twas no more than a gathering together of two or
three parishes none would think of it in light of a fair, but being as
'tis--a marvel of moving men and women--why, then, there may be levity
and who knows what worse.”
“Ay, it looks as if the carcase of the hills was alive and moving with
crawling maggots,” remarked Dick. The summit of the hill on the road
had been reached, and thus a view was given him and his companion of
the hollow in the valley beyond, which was black with the slow-moving
procession.
And there were many who, while anxious for the success of the meeting,
shared Hal Holmes's fears and doubts as to its result. What impression
could one man make upon so vast an assembly in the open air, they asked
of each other. They shook their heads.
These were the sober-minded people who sympathised with the aims of
the preacher--God-fearing men and women to whom his hopes had been
communicated. They knew that hundreds in that procession on the march to
the meeting-place were no more serious than they would be had they been
going to a fair. They were going to meet their friends, and they were
impelled by no higher motives than those which were the result of the
instinct of the gregarious animals. Many of them lived far away from a
town or even a village, in the wilder parts of the Duchy, and they laid
hold on an opportunity that promised to bring them in contact with a
greater crowd than they had ever joined before. The joy of being one of
the crowd was enough for them; the preaching was only an insignificant
incident in the day's proceedings. The sober-minded, knowing this,
were afraid that in these people the spirit of levity might be aroused,
especially if they could not hear the words of the preacher, and the
consequences would be disastrous.
And doubtless there were hundreds of the dwellers along the coast who
would have been pleased if grief came to an enterprise that threatened
their employment as smugglers or the agents of smugglers. Smuggling and
wrecking were along the coast, and pretty far inland as well, regarded
as a legitimate calling. Almost everyone participated in the profits of
the contraband, and the majority of the clergy would have been very
much less convivial if they had had to pay the full price for their
potations. Preaching against such traffic would have been impolitic
as well as hypocritical, and the clergy were neither. The parson who
denounced his congregation for forsaking the service on the news of a
wreck reaching the church was, probably, a fair type of his order.
His plea was for fair play. “Let us all start fair for the shore, my
brethren.”
Such men had a feeling that the man who had come to preach to the
multitude would be pretty sure to denounce their fraud; or if he did
not actually denounce it he might have such an influence upon their
customers as would certainly be prejudicial to the trade. This being
so, how could it be expected that they should not look forward to the
failure of the mission?
And there was but a solitary man to contend against this mixed
multitude! There was but one voice to cry in that wilderness--one voice
to awaken those who slept. The voice spoke, and its sound echoed round
the wide world.
He stood with bared head, with a rock for his pulpit, on a small plateau
overlooking a long stretch of valley. On each side there was an uneven,
sloping ground--rocks overgrown with lichen, and high tufts of coarse
herbage between, with countless blue wild flowers and hardy climbing
plants. The huge basin formed by the converging of the slopes made a
natural amphitheatre, where ten thousand people might be seated. Behind
were the cliffs, and all through the day the sound of the sea beating
around their bases mingled with the sound of many voices. A hundred feet
to the west there hung poised in its groove the enormous rocking stone
of Red Tor.
Perhaps amongst the most distant of his hearers there was one who might
never again have an opportunity of having the word that awakens spoken
in his hearing. There might be one whose heart was as the ground in
Summer--waiting for the seed to be sown that should bring forth fruit,
sixtyfold or an hundredfold. That was what the man thought as he looked
over the vast multitude. He felt for a moment overwhelmed by a sense
of his responsibility. He felt that by no will of his own he had been
thrust forward to perform a miracle, and he understood clearly that the
responsibility of its performance rested with him.
For a moment the cry of the overwhelmed was in his heart.
“It is too much that is laid upon me.”
For a moment he experienced that sense of rebellion which in a supreme
moment of their lives--the moment preceding a great achievement for
the benefit of the world--takes possession of so many of the world's
greatest, and which has its origin in a feeling of humility. It lasted
but for a moment. Then he found that every thought of his mind--every
sense of his soul--was absorbed by another and greater force. He had
a consciousness of being possessed by a Power that dominated every
sensation of his existence. That Power had thrust him out from himself
as it were, and he felt that he was standing by wondering while a voice
that he did not know to be his own went forth, and he knew that it
reached the most remote of the people before him. It was like his own
voice heard in a dream. For days there had been before his eyes the
vision that had come to the prophet--the vision of the Valley of Dry
Bones. He had seemed to stand by the side of the man to whom it had been
revealed. He had always felt that the scene was one of the most striking
that had ever been depicted; but during the week it was not merely its
mysticism that had possessed him. He felt that it was a real occurrence
taking place before his very eyes.
And now he was standing on his rock looking all through that long
valley, and he saw--not the thousands of people who looked up to him,
but ranks upon ranks and range upon range of dead men's bones, bleaching
in the sunshine--filling up all the hollows of the valley forsaken of
life, overhung by that dread legend of a battle fought so long ago
that its details had vanished. There they stretched, hillocks of white
bones--ridges of white bones--heaps upon heaps. The winds of a thousand
years had wailed and shrieked and whistled, sweeping through the valley,
the rains of a thousand years had been down upon them--hail and snow
had flung their pall of white over the whiteness of the things that lay
there, the lightnings had made lurid the hollow places in the rocks, and
had rent in sunder the overhanging cliffs--there was the sign of such
a storm--the tumbled tons of black basalt that lay athwart one of the
white hillocks--and on nights of fierce tempest the white foam from the
distant sea had been borne through the air and flung in quivering
flakes over cliffs and into chasm--upon coarse herbage and the blue rock
flowers. But some nights were still. The valley was canopied with stars.
And there were nights of vast moonlight, and the white moonlight spread
itself like a great translucent lake over the white deadness of that
dreary place....
The man saw scene after scene in that valley as in a dream. And then
there came a long silence, and out of that silence he heard the voice
that said: “Can these dead bones live?”
There was another silence before the awful voice spoke the command:
“Let these bones live!”
Through the moments of silence that followed, the sound of the sea was
borne by a fitful breeze over the cliff face and swept purring through
the valley.
Then came the moment of marvel. There was a quivering here and
there--something like the long indrawing of breath of a sleeper who has
slept for long but now awakens--a slow heaving as of a giant refreshed,
and then in mysterious, dread silence, with no rattling of hollow
skeleton limbs, there came the great moving among the dry bones, and
they rose up, an exceeding great army.
Life had come triumphant out of the midst of
Death. That was what the voice said. The whole valley, which had been
silent an hour before, was now vibrating, pulsating with life--the
tumult of life which flows through a great army--every man alert, at his
post in his rank--waiting for whatever might come--the advance of the
enemy, the carrying out of the strategy of the commander.
Life had come triumphant out of the midst of death, and who would dare
now to say that the deepest spiritual life might not lie hidden from
sight among the bleaching heaps of dead bones that strewed the valley
from cliffy to cliffs--hidden but only waiting for the voice to cry
aloud:
“Let these bones live!”
“Oh, that that Dread Voice would speak through me!” cried the preacher.
That was the first time he became conscious of the sound of his own
voice, and he was startled. He had heard that other voice speaking,
carrying him away upon the wings of its words down through the depths
of that mystic valley, but now all was silent and he was standing with
trembling hands and quivering lips, gazing out over no valley of mystery
alive with a moving host, but over a Cornish vale of crags; and yet
there beneath his eyes were thousands of faces, and they looked like
the faces of such as had been newly awakened after a long
sleep--dazed--wondering--waiting....
He saw it. The great awakening had come to these people, and now they
were waiting--for what?
He knew what he had to offer them. He knew what was the message with
which he had been entrusted--the good news which they had never heard
before.
And he told it with all simplicity, in all humility, in all
sincerity--the evangel of boundless love--of illimitable salvation, not
from the wrath to come--he had no need to speak of the Day of Wrath--his
theme wras the Day of Grace--salvation from the distrust of God's
mercy--salvation from the doubts, from the cares of the world, from the
lethargy that fetters the souls of men, from the gross darkness and from
the complacency of walking in that darkness.
He let light in upon their darkness and he forced them to see the
dangers of the dark, and, seeing, they were overwhelmed. For the first
time these people had brought before their eyes the reality of sin--the
reality of salvation. They had had doctrines brought before them in the
past, but the tale of doctrines had left them unmoved. They had never
felt that doctrines were otherwise than cold, impassioned utterances.
Doctrines might have been the graceful fabrics that clothed living
truths, but the truth had been so wrapped up in them that it had
remained hidden so far as they were concerned. They had never caught a
glimpse of the living reality beneath.
But here was the light that showed them the living thing for which they
had waited, and the wonder of the sight overwhelmed them.
The voice of the preacher spoke to them individually. That was the sole
mystery of the preaching--the sole magnetism (as it has been called) of
the preacher.
And that was the sole mystery of the manifestation that followed. Faces
were streaming with tears, knees were bowed in prayer; but there were
other temperaments that were forced to give expression to their varied
feelings--of wonder, of humiliation, of exultation. These were not to be
controlled. There were wild sobbings, passionate cries, a shout or
two of thanksgiving, an outburst of penitence--all the result of the
feelings too strong to be controlled, and all tokens of the new life
that had begun to pulsate in that multitude--all tokens that the Valley
which had been strewn with dry bones had heard the voice that said:
“Let these dry bones live.”
There was a great moving among the dry bones, and they stood up, an
exceeding great army.