The visitor to Gloucester will be surely struck by a quaint old house in Southgate Street—still standing almost unaltered, save that the basement is now divided into two shops. A few years since the old oak timbers were braced, stained, and varnished. It is a fine specimen of the better class of English residences of a hundred and fifty years since, and is still remarkable in the old city, owing very much to the good taste which governed their renovation. This was the printing-office of Robert Raikes, a notice in the Gloucester Journal, dated August 19, 1758, announcing his removal from Blackfriars Square to this house in Southgate Street. The house now is in the occupation of Mrs. Watson. The house where Raikes lived and died is nearly opposite. It will not be difficult for the spectator to realise the pleasant image of the old gentleman, dressed, after the fashion of the day, in his blue coat with gold buttons, buff waistcoat, drab kerseymere breeches, white stockings, and low shoes, passing beneath those ancient gables, and engaged in those various public and private duties which we have attempted to record. A century has passed away since then, and the simple lessons the philanthropist attempted to impart to the young waifs and strays he gathered about him have expanded into more comprehensive departments of knowledge. The originator of Sunday-schools would be astonished were he to step into almost any of those which have branched out from his leading idea. It is still expanding; it is one of the most real and intense activities of the Universal Church; but among the immense crowds of those who, in England and America, are conducting Sunday-school classes, it is, perhaps, not too much to say, that in not one is there a more simple and earnest desire to do good than that which illuminated the life, and lends a sweet and charming interest to the memory, of Robert Raikes.
CHAPTER XI
THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD.
Dr. Abel Stevens, in his History of Methodism, says, “I congratulate myself on the opportunity of reviving the memory of Silas Told;” and speaks of the little biography in which Silas himself records his adventures as “a record told with frank and affecting simplicity, in a style of terse and flowing English Defoe might have envied.”
Such a testimony is well calculated to excite the curiosity of an interested reader, especially as the two or three incidents mentioned only serve to whet the appetite for more of the like description. The little volume to which he refers has been for some years in the possession of the author of this volume. It is indeed an astonishing book; its alleged likeness to Defoe’s charmingly various style of recital of adventures by sea and by land is no exaggeration, whilst as a piece of real biography it may claim, and quite sustain, a place side by side with the romantic and adventurous career of John Newton; but the wild wonderfulness of the story of Silas seems to leave Newton’s in the shade. Like Newton, Told was also a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, and a believer, in special providences; and well might he believe in such who was led certainly along as singular a path as any mortal could tread. The only other memorial besides his own which has, we believe, been penned of him—a brief recapitulations-well describes him as honest, simple, and tender. Silas Told accompanied, in that awful day, numbers of persons to the gallows, and attempted to console sufferers and victims in circumstances of most harrowing and tragic solemnity: he certainly furnished comfortable help and light when no others were willing or able to sympathise or to help. John Wesley loved him, and when Silas died he buried him, and says of him in his Journal: “On the 20th of December, 1778, I buried what was mortal of honest Silas Told. For many years he attended the malefactors in Newgate without fee or reward; and I suppose no man, for this hundred years, has been so successful in that melancholy office. God had given him peculiar talents for it, and he had amazing success therein; the greatest part of those whom he attended died in peace, and many of them in the triumph of faith.” Such was Silas Told.
But before we come to those characteristic circumstances to which Wesley refers, we must follow him through some of the wild scenes of his sailor life. He was born in Bristol in 1711; his parents were respectable and creditable people, but of somewhat faded families. His grandfather had been an eminent physician in Bunhill Row, London; his mother was from Exeter. * * *
Silas was educated in the noble foundation school of Edward Colston in Bristol. The life of this excellent philanthropist was so remarkable, and in many particulars so like his own, that we cannot wonder that he stops for some pages in his early story to recite some of the remarkable phenomena in Colston’s life. Silas’s childhood was singular, and the stories he tells are especially noticeable, because in after-life the turn of his character seems to have been especially real and practical. Thus he tells how, when a child, wandering with his sister in the King’s Wood, near Bristol, they lost their way, and were filled with the utmost consternation, when suddenly, although no house was in view, nor, as they thought, near, a dog came up behind them, and drove them clear out of the wood into a path with which they were acquainted; especially it was remarkable that the dog never barked at them, but when they looked round about for the dog he was nowhere to be seen. Careless children out for their own pleasure, they sauntered on their way again, and again lost their way in the wood—were again bewildered, and in greater perplexity than before, when, on a sudden looking up, they saw the same dog making towards them; they ran from him in fright, but he followed them, drove them out of the labyrinths, and did not leave them until they could not possibly lose their way again. Simple Silas says, “I then turned about to look for the dog, but saw no more of him, although we were now upon an open common. This was the Lord’s doings, and marvellous in our eyes.”
When he was twelve years of age, he appears to have been quite singularly influenced by the reading of the Pilgrim’s Progress; and late in life, when writing his biography, he briefly, but significantly, attempts to reproduce the intense enjoyment he received—the book evidently caught and coloured his whole imagination. At this time, too, he was very nearly drowned, and while drowning, so far from having any sense of terror, he had no sense nor idea of the things of this world, but that it appeared to him he rushingly emerged out of thick darkness into what appeared to him a glorious city, lustrous and brilliant, the light of which seemed to illuminate the darkness through which he had urged his way. It was as if the city had a floor like glass, and yet he was sure that neither city nor floor had any substance; also he saw people there; the inhabitants arrayed in robes of what seemed the finest substance, but flowing from their necks to their feet; and yet he was sensible too that they had no material substance; they moved, but did not labour as in walking, but glided as if carried along by the wind; and he testifies how he felt a wonderful joy and peace, and he never forgot the impression through life, although soon recalled to the world in which he was to sorrow and suffer so much. It is quite easy to see John Bunyan in all this; but while he was thus pleasantly happy in his visionary or intro-visionary state, a benevolent and tender-hearted Dutchman, who had been among some haymakers in a field on the banks of the river, was striking out after him among the willow-bushes and sedges of the stream, from whence he was brought, body and soul, back to the world again. Such are the glimpses of the childhood of Silas.
Then shortly comes a dismal transition from strange providences in the wood, and enchanting visions beneath the waves, to the singularly severe sufferings of a seafaring life. The ships in that day have left a grim and ugly reputation surviving still. The term “sea-devil” has often been used as descriptive of the masters of ships in that time. Silas seems to have sailed under some of the worst specimens of this order. About the age of fourteen he was bound apprentice to Captain Moses Lilly, and started for his first voyage from Bristol to Jamaica. “Here,” he says, “I may date my first sufferings.” He says the first of his afflictions “was sea-sickness, which held me till my arrival in Jamaica;” and considering that it was a voyage of fourteen weeks, it was a fair spell of entertainment from that pleasant companion. They were short of water, they were put on short allowance of food, and when having obtained their freight, while lying in Kingston harbour, their vessel, and seventy-six sail of ships, many of them very large, but all riding with three anchors ahead, were all scattered by an astonishing hurricane, and all the vessels in Port Royal shared the same fate. He tells how the corpses of the drowned sailors strewed the shores, and how, immediately after the subsidence of the hurricane, a pestilential sickness swept away thousands of the natives. “Every morning,” he says, “I have observed between thirty and forty corpses carried past my window; being very near death myself, I expected every day to approach with the messenger of my dissolution.”
During this time he appears to have been lying in a warehouse, with no person to take care of him except a negro, who every day brought to him, where he was laid in his hammock, Jesuit’s bark.