My uncle, Cecil King, strayed into a Wesleyan chapel between Charlestown and Holmbush on 17 April 1843, and this is his account of it. “I found them singing, and took the opportunity of entering an empty seat. Soon after, the congregation turned round to pray, and I followed their example. There were no lights in the chapel, so that one could scarcely discern anything. They had not commenced the prayer when a woman gave a deep groan. I turned round, thinking she might be ill, and just then a man cried out ‘Lord have mercy upon us.’ I could not tell what was the matter, and began to look about me in astonishment, but I now heard the prayer beginning, and was preparing to pay attention, when cries of ‘Praised be the Lord,’ ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord,’ arose in wild confusion. ‘Amens’ and other exclamations assailed my ears each moment, and presently I could hear one raising his voice above all others to let them know that he was praying. ’Twas a scene too ridiculous for one accustomed to the meekness of the Church.” He was sixteen then—he died when he was twenty—and he was on a walking tour in Cornwall with a friend of his, Tom Oliver. They both kept careful journals of the tour, and Oliver’s was printed afterwards. It gives the opening of the hymn they heard, “We most of us can pray aloud, | we all of us can groan, | but God can tell,” etc.
They had a letter of introduction from one of my great-uncles to Mr Joseph Treffry, and found him at home in the old palace at Fowey. He was then a man of sixty. He showed them round, but rather chilled them. “A man inhabiting perhaps not more than one room or two in that magnificent building, the locks of whose doors grated with rust.... A man who seems to care for nobody, whose only happiness consists in spending money.” But his money was well spent. He built the breakwater at Par harbour entirely at his own expense, and likewise the great Treffry viaduct, which was near completion then. He made mines pay, got railroads built, and brought prosperity to everything he touched—he was doing as much for that part of Cornwall as King Smith was doing for the Scillies; and, like him, he was autocratic. I remember an old man in the islands quoting the Song of Solomon in speaking to me of their former King, “He was terrible as an army with banners.”
People say that there was too much luxury in England in the years before the War, but I doubt if there was much. I could only see people doing small things in an ostentatious way, whereas real luxury consists in doing big things as a matter of course. It was real luxury, I think, to keep the sea out with a breakwater, and bridge a great big valley with a granite viaduct, and then go on with other schemes, as Treffry did: also, perhaps, to build an arch of polished jasper thirty feet high, eleven feet wide and eight feet thick. But he was not a Nero with a Golden House, and he built his jasper archway into medieval walls at Fowey.
Nero made much the same mistake, not with the Golden House itself, but with his landscape-gardening there: it took up too much space right in the heart of Rome, and the site was quite unsuitable. He might have done his gardening so much better in the Alban hills, or better still at Capri, where Tiberius had already done so much. Look round that island from its highest point, and then look down from the Palatine on to the slopes below: it makes you feel that Nero was a fool to take to gardening there.
I have seen a ribald pamphlet accusing Mrs Grundy of the gravest improprieties. Tiberius was the Mrs Grundy of his generation—she might have written his message to the Senate in 22 A.D. with its condemnation of men and women dressing so much alike, ‘promiscas viris et feminis vestes.’ It is in Tacitus, Annales, III. 53; and in Suetonius, Tiberius, 35, there are instances enough of his severity to ladies who were not respectable. The fast set paid him out by inventing tales about him. No such tales were current till he tried to pull these people up; and the tales were only about his life at Capri. He was respectable at Rome and Rhodes and every other place; and nobody could really know what happened at Capri, as the public was shut out.
Tiberius must have gone to heaven, as Dante met him there, Paradiso, VI. 86; and if people won’t take Dante’s word for it, I may refer them to a former Vicar of Widdicombe, the Rev. John Rendle. He was a Wrangler in 1781 and got a Fellowship, and was Vicar of Widdicombe from 1790 till his death in 1815; and in 1814 he produced a History of Tiberius, the first Defender of the true Faith. The book shows perfect mastery of the evidence, and an adroitness in destructive criticism that might have made his fortune at the Bar. And his contention is that all those tales about Tiberius were invented out of spite: not, however, because he was a Mrs Grundy, but because he was at heart a Christian.
If he was a Christian, he must have been a very early Christian; and by all accounts the early Christians were very much pleasanter people than some of their successors. But, whether he was a Christian or not, he certainly was one of the three men who made Christianity possible. Augustus and he kept the world at peace during the whole period of Gospel history; and Christ looked to Cæsar—that is, Tiberius—to manage all the rough work of the world, and let people in Judæa have peace and quietness and no responsibilities. Herod was the other of those three great men. People make a fuss about his massacring some Innocents: they forget that there might not have been any Bethlehem or any Innocents there to massacre, if he had not governed the country so successfully during his long reign.
Whitewashing goes on apace. Dean Milman whitewashed Savonarola in 1855, and in 1905 Baron Corvo whitewashed the entire Borgia family; and in due season all the villains of history will be arrayed in shining white. Meanwhile it is hard on those whose turn is yet to come, as they are suffering by comparison now. Dreyfus has been whitewashed, and Bazaine has not: yet he was the worse treated of the two—a packed tribunal, with charges framed in such a way that the accused could not put in his real defence.
Whitewash is an admirable thing, but people always lay it on too thick; and Rendle not only makes Tiberius ‘a believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ’ but makes him ‘the nursing father of the infant Catholic Church.’ Tacitus calls Christianity an ‘exitiabilis superstitio,’ and says that it arose in the reign of Tiberius, was kept down for a time, and then broke out again, Annales, XV. 44; and he also says that a ‘gravissimum exitium’ was brought in very artfully by Tiberius himself, was kept down for a time, and then broke out again, Annales, I. 73. Rendle argues that this ‘exitium’ must have been the ‘exitiabilis superstitio’ of Christianity, and not Espionage, as the context would lead one to suppose. Having satisfied himself of this by a careful examination of Tacitus and other good authorities, he goes on to admit inferior authorities without any examination at all, if only they concur in this. And thus he admits Tertullian, Apologeticus, 5, which says that Tiberius sent a Message to the Senate, recommending Christianity; and although the Senate rejected it, Tiberius did not change his mind, but used his powers to protect the Christians.
According to Rendle, Tiberius sent this message to the Senate in the fourteenth year of his reign, whereas the Gospel of Luke says that Christ was not baptized until the fifteenth. Of course, the fifteenth is impossible if Christ was born before the death of Herod and was then in his thirtieth year, for this (as Athanasius saw) is the real meaning of the phrase ‘about thirty years old, beginning,’ which is translated so ridiculously in the Authorised version and so evasively in the Revised. But instead of saying that ‘fifteenth’ is a slip of the pen or something of the sort, Rendle takes the view that Luke is using ‘fifteenth’ in a Lucasian or Pickwickian sense for ‘tenth.’ It is a pity we have no more of this chronology. The book announces “a similar Volume by the same Author—a Chronological Arrangement of all the Events recorded in the New Testament.” But he died the year after, and the new book never came out.