A curious incident in the annals of Minehead in days of old is that of the furious onslaught of the Church upon an unfortunate lad, a native of the place, who, sailing in a ship afterwards captured by Turkish pirates, was taken prisoner, and his life spared on condition that he embraced the Mohammedan religion. The desirability of life, and the practical certainty of this youthful sailor that one religion was as good as another, when a choice was offered between death and the acceptance of a new creed, may perhaps be readily understood. But the youth’s refusal to add himself to the noble army of martyrs outraged the susceptibilities of the flatulent divines of the period, who, when he at last returned home and told his story, made so great an affair of it that nothing would properly serve the occasion but a public recantation of error. We may, therefore, vividly picture to ourselves that scene in Minehead church on Sunday, March 16th, 1627, when the more or less penitent, but certainly very frightened and astonished, lad was had in front of the pulpit, before the whole congregation, and, standing there in the Turkish breeches in which he had returned home, made to listen to the windy discourse of the Reverend Mr. Edward Kellet, who preached the sermon afterwards printed under the title of A Return from Argier. We may presume “Algiers” to be meant; but early seventeenth-century folk were more than a little uncertain in these matters. The central, harrowing fact of this occasion was, however, the length of that homily, which fills seventy-eight closely printed pages, and must therefore have occupied considerably over an hour in delivery. This is the manner of it, as set forth by the printer and published and sold in Paternoster Row for the edification of the godly:
“A Return from Argier: A Sermon preached at Minhead, in the County of Somerset, the 16th of March, 1627, the re-admission of a Relapsed Christian into our Church. By Edward Kellet, Doctor of Divinity.”
For the benefit of purchasers in London and elsewhere, who were not acquainted with the circumstances, the following explanation was made to preface the sermon:—
“A Countryman of ours goinge from the Port of Mynhead in Somersetshire, bound for the streights, was taken by Turkish Pyrats, and made a slave at Argier, and liuing there in slauerie, by frailty and weaknesse, forsooke the Christian Religion, and turned Turke, and liued so some yeares; and in that time seruing in a Turkish ship, which was taken by an Englishman of warre, was brought backe againe to Mynhead, where being made to vnderstand the grieuousnesse of his Apostacy, was very penitent for the same, and desired to be reconciled to the Church, into which he was admitted by the authority of the Lord Bishop of that Dioces, with aduise of some great and learned Prelates of this Kingdome and was enioyned pennance for his Apostacy: and at his admission, and performance thereof, these two Sermons were Preached the third Sunday in Lent, Anno 1627, one the Forenoone, the other in the afternoone.”
Jeremy 3. 22. “Return, ye backsliding Children, and I will heal your backslidings. Behold, we come unto thee, for thou art the Lord our God.”
The amount of pedantic verbiage in the Reverend Mr. Kellet’s hour-long discourse is really appalling. That his congregation comprehended even the half of it is not to be supposed, and that the “penitent” himself but dimly understood what all the trouble was about may easily be imagined. But there can, at any rate, be no manner of doubt that the Doctor of Divinity enjoyed himself very much on this occasion: thundering forth denunciations barbed with quotations from musty theological works and fortified by apposite texts, which he must most laboriously have raked together; for those were the days before Cruden’s and other Concordances to the Scriptures had come into being. I will be more merciful to my readers than was Kellet to his congregation, and pretermit the most part of his sententious phrases and his excerpts from the patriarchs. But let the following stand as a taste of his quality.
“You,” said he, pointing a scornful finger at the baggy-breeched penitent standing there, “you whom God suffered to fall, and yet of His infinite mercy vouchsafed graciously to bring home, not only to your country and kindred, but to the profession of your first faith and to the Church of Sacraments again; let me say to you (but in a better hour) as sometime Joshua to Achan: ‘Give glory to God, sing praises to Him who hath delivered your soul from the nethermost hell.’ When I think upon your Turkish attire, that embleme of apostacy and witness of your wofull fall, I do remember Adam and his figge-leave breeches; they could neither conceal his shame, nor cover his nakedness. I do think vpon David clad in Saul’s armour and his helmet of brasse. ‘I cannot goe with these,’ saith David. How could you hope in this unsanctified habit to attain Heaven? How could you clad in this vnchristian weede; how could you, but with horror and astonishment thinke on the white robe of the innocent Martyrs which you had lost? How could you goe in these rewards of iniquity and guerdons of apostacie? and with what face could you behold your selfe and others? I know you were young. So was Daniel and the three Children: so were Dioscurus the Confessor, and Ponticus, the Martyr: adde (if you please) English Mekins, who all at fifteen yeares of age enured manfully whatsoever the furie of the persecutors pleased to inflict vpon them.”
The preacher then proceeded to remark:
“We are bound without failing to resist unto the death. You who go down to the sea in ships, and occupy your business in great waters, are reckoned by Pittacus as neither amongst the dead nor the living. The grave is always open before your face, and only the thickness of an inch exists between you and eternity.”
Altogether, the lot of the seafaring community was revealed to this Minehead congregation in an entirely new light. They had never heard of Pittacus before, and had really, you know, fancied themselves alive, and not in the dreadful tertium quid pictured by that classical philosopher.