The Agonies of Conversion
Such incidents as this were rare among those who were undergoing the process of Conversion, but it was generally accompanied by long spasms of conviction of sin, when, as one memoir-writer records, “all the crimes of his life passed before him in black array, when he felt that if he could but bury himself in a cave or den of the earth, and forego all intercourse with mankind, it would be to purchase pardon and peace easily and cheaply.... Life was but the dreadful expectation of that fatal hour when the fiend would be commissioned to seize and carry off the guilty soul to its abode of everlasting misery.”[323] Another diarist records that, as he went down toward the great breach of Badajoz, he was repeating to himself very forcibly, “You will be in hell before daylight” all the time, till he received a disabling wound. This rifleman, when he experienced conversion, received therewith an unexpected gift of metrical exposition. His autobiography is curiously sprinkled with his impromptu verses such as—
“Then why let our minds be encumbered
’Bout what such poor worms may befall,
When the hairs of our head are all numbered
By Him who reigns King over all?”
And again—
“I shall go where duty calls me,
Patient bearing what befalls me,
Jesus Christ will bring me through!
Bullets, cannon balls or death
Cannot hurt ‘the better part,’
So I’ll list to what He saith
Till He bids me home depart.”[324]
This ecstatic confidence of the converted man is very clearly expressed in many a little book. A Guards’ sergeant, whose memoirs I have had occasion to quote in earlier chapters, mentions that, all through the hard experience of his brigade at Talavera, he was comforted by the thought that, however disastrous the day was looking, “the Lord can save us now.”
“Standing between the enemy and my own men, with the shot ploughing up the ground all about me, the Lord kept me from all fear, and I got back to my place in the line without injury and without agitation. Indeed, who should be so firm as the Christian soldier, who has the assurance in his breast that to depart and to be with Christ is far better than to continue toiling here below?”[325] On another occasion this diarist, in a long waiting spell before a dangerous disembarkation, found Wesley’s two hundred and twenty-seventh hymn running in his mind all the morning, to the inexpressible comfort of his soul during an anxious time.
This kind of comfortable ecstasy did not by any means preclude a ready and competent employment of musket and bayonet. One or two of the notable personal exploits of the Peninsular War were done by “saints.” There is a special mention in several diaries, regimental and general, of John Rae, of the 71st, a well-known Methodist, who at the combat of Sobral (October 14, 1810), being the last man of the skirmishers of his battalion to retire, was beset by three French tirailleurs, on whom he turned, and shot one and bayoneted the other two in the twinkling of an eye. He received a medal for his conduct from his brigadier, who had been an eye-witness of the affair.[326]
Wellington’s Views on Religion
The attitude of Wellington toward religion at large, and religious soldiers in particular, was very much what one might have expected from his peculiar blend of personal characteristics. He was a sincere believer in Christianity as presented by the Church of England, but he had not been in the least affected by recent evangelical developments, and his belief was of a rather dry and official sort; an officer who took to public preaching and the forming of religious societies was only two or three degrees less distasteful to him than an officer who was foul-mouthed in his language and openly contemned holy things. I fancy that the Duke would have been inclined to regard both as “ungentlemanly.” Religion with him was the due recognition of the fact that man has a Creator, who has imposed upon him a code of laws and a system of morality which it is man’s duty to remember, and so far as he may, to observe. He was quite ready to acknowledge that he had his own failings, but trusted that they were not unpardonable ones. The two or three Evangelical enthusiasts who had the courage to tackle him in his later days on the subject of his soul, got small profit thereby.[327]