It was in 1740 that a young blacksmith introduced him to the people whom he had hitherto hated and despised—the Methodists. He heard John Wesley preach at the Foundry in the Moor Fields from the text, “I write unto you, little children, for your sins are forgiven you.” This set his soul on fire; he became a Methodist, notwithstanding the very vehement opposition of his wife, to whom he appears to have been very tenderly attached, and who herself was a very motherly and virtuous woman, but altogether indisposed to the new notions, as many people considered them. He improved in circumstances, and became a responsible managing clerk on a wharf at Wapping. While there Mr. Wesley repeatedly and earnestly pressed him to take charge of the charity school he had established at the Foundry. After long hesitation he did so; and it was here that while attending a service at five o’clock in the morning, he heard Mr. Wesley preach from the text, “I was sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.” By a most remarkable application of this charge to himself, Silas testifies that his mind was stirred with a strange compunction, as he thought that he had never cared for, or attempted to ameliorate the condition, or to minister to the souls of the crowds of those unhappy malefactors who then almost weekly expiated their offences, very often of the most trivial description, on the gallows. It seems that the hearing that sermon proved to be a most remarkable turning-point in the life of Silas. Through it he became most eminently useful during a very remarkable and painful career; and his after-life is surrounded by such a succession of romantic incidents that they at once equal, if they do not transcend, and strangely contrast with his wild adventures on the seas.
And here we may pause a moment to reflect how every man’s work derives its character from what he was before. What thousands of sailors, in that day, passed through all the trials which Silas passed, leaving them still only rough sailor men! In him all the roughness seemed only to strike down to depths of wonderful compassion and tenderness. Singular was the university in which he graduated to become so great and powerful a preacher! How he preached we do not know, but his words must have been warm and touching, faithful and loving, judging from their results; and as to his pulpit, we do not hear that it was in chapels or churches—his audience was very much confined to the condemned cell, and to the cart from whence the poor victims were “turned off,” as it was called in those days. In this work he found his singular niche. How long it often takes for a man to find his place in the work that is given him to do; and when the place is found, sometimes, how long it takes to fit nicely and admirably into the work itself! what sharp angles have, to be rubbed away, what difficulties to be overcome! It is wonderful, with all the horrible experiences through which this man had passed, and spectacles of cruelty so revolting that they seem almost to shake our faith, not merely in man, but even in a just and overruling God, that every sentiment of religion and tenderness had not been eradicated from his nature; but it would appear that the old gracious influences of childhood—the days of the Pilgrim’s Progress, and the wonderful vision when drowning beneath the waters, had never been effaced through all his strange and chequered career, although certainly not untainted by the sins of the ordinary sailor’s life. The work in which he was now to be engaged needed a very tender and affectionate nature; but ordinary tenderness starts back and is repelled by cruel and repulsive scenes. Told’s education on the seas, like that of a surgeon in a hospital, enabled him to look on harrowing sights of suffering without wincing, or losing in his tender interest his own self-possession.
It ought not to be forgotten that John Howard, the great prison philanthropist, belongs to the epoch of the Great Revival. Of him Edmund Burke said, “He had visited all Europe in a circumnavigation of charity, not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to collect medals or to collate manuscripts, but to dive into the depths of dungeons and to plunge into the infections of hospitals.” About the year 1760,[[13]] when he began his consecrated work, Silas Told, as a prison philanthropist upon a smaller, but equally earnest scale, attempted to console the prisoners of Newgate.
[13]. See [Appendix].
Shortly after hearing that sermon to which we have alluded, a messenger came to him at the school to tell him that there were ten malefactors lying under sentence of death in Newgate, some of them in a state of considerable terror and alarm, and imploring him to find some one to visit them. Here was the call to the work. The coincidences were remarkable: John Wesley’s sermon, his own aroused and tender state of mind produced by the sermon, and the occasion for the active and practical exercise of his feeling. So opportunities would meet us of turning suggestions into usefulness, if we watched for them.
The English laws were barbarous in those days; truly it has been said that a fearfully heavyweight of blood rests upon the conscience of England for the state of the law in those times. Few of those who have given such honour to the noble labours of John Howard and the loving ministrations of Elizabeth Fry ever heard of Silas Told. In a smaller sphere than the first of these, and in a much more intensely painful manner than the second, he anticipated the labours of both. He instantly responded to this first call to Newgate. Two of the ten malefactors were reprieved; he attended the remaining eight to the gallows. He had so influenced the hearts of all of them in their cell that their obduracy was broken down and softened—so great had been his power over them, that locked up together in one cell the night before their execution, they had spent it in prayer and solemn conversation. “At length they were ordered into the cart, and I was prevailed upon to go with them. When we were in the cart I addressed myself to each of them separately. The first was Mr. Atkins, the son of a glazier in the city, a youth nineteen years of age. I said to him, ‘My dear, are you afraid to die?’ He said, ‘No, sir; really I am not.’ I asked him wherefore he was not afraid to die? and he said, ‘I have laid my soul at the feet of Jesus, therefore I am not afraid to die.’ I then spake to Mr. Gardner, a journeyman carpenter; he made a very comfortable report of the true peace of God which he found reigning in his heart. The last person to whom I spoke was one Thompson, a very illiterate young man; but he assured me he was perfectly happy in his Saviour, and continued so until his last moments. This was the first time of my visiting the malefactors in Newgate, and then it was not without much shame and fear, because I clearly perceived the greater part of the populace considered me as one of the sufferers.”
The most remarkable of this cluster was one John Lancaster—for what offence he was sentenced to death does not appear; but the entire account Silas gives of him, both in the prison and at the place of execution, exhibits a fine, tender, and really holy character. The attendant sheriff himself burst into tears before the beautiful demeanour of this young man. However, so it was, that he was without any friend in London to procure for his body a proper interment; and the story of Silas admits us into a pretty spectacle of the times. After the poor bodies were cut down, Lancaster’s was seized by a surgeons’ mob, who intended to carry it over to Paddington. It was Silas’s first experience, as we have seen; and he describes the whole scene as rather like a great fair than an awful execution. In this confusion the body of Lancaster had been seized, the crowd dispersed—all save some old woman, who sold gin, and Silas himself, very likely smitten into extraordinary meditation by a spectacle so new to him—when a company of eight sailors appeared on the scene, with truncheons in their hands, who said they had come to see the execution, and gazed with very menacing faces on the vacated gallows from whence the bodies had been cut down. “Gentlemen,” said the old woman, “I suppose you want the man that the surgeons have got?” “Ay,” said the sailors, “where is he?” The old woman gave them to understand that the body had been carried away to Paddington, and she pointed them to the direct road. Away the sailors hastened—it may be presumed that Lancaster was a sailor, and some old comrade of these men. They demanded his body from the surgeons’ mob, and obtained it. What they intended to do with it scarcely transpires; it is most likely that they had intended a rescue at the foot of the gallows, and arrived too late. However, hoisting it on their shoulders, away they marched with it off to Islington, and thence round to Shoreditch; thence to a place called Coventry’s Fields. By this time they were getting fairly wearied out with their burden, and by unanimous consent they agreed to lay it on the step of the first door they came to: this done, they started off. It created some stir in the street, which brought down an old woman who lived in the house to the step of the door, and who exclaimed, as she saw the body, in a loud, agitated voice, “Lord! this is my son John Lancaster!” It is probable that the old woman was a Methodist, for to Silas Told and the Methodists she was indebted for a decent and respectable burial for her son in a good strong coffin and decent shroud. Silas and his wife went to see him whilst he was lying so, previous to his burial. There was no alteration of his visage, no marks of violence, and says Told, “A pleasant smile appeared on his countenance, and he lay as in sweet sleep.” A singularly romantic story, for it seems the sailors did not know at all to whom he belonged; and what an insight into the social condition of London at that time!
Told did not give up his connection with his school at the Foundry, but he devoted himself, sanctioned by John Wesley and his Church fellowship, to the preaching and ministering to all the poor felons and malefactors in London, including also, in this exercise of love, the work-houses for twelve miles round London; he believed he had a message of tender sympathy for those who were of this order, “sick and in prison.” It seems strange to us, who know how much he had suffered himself, that the old sailor possessed such a loving, tender, and affectionate heart; and yet he tells how, in the earlier part of these very years, he was haunted by irritating doubts and alarms: then came to him old mystical revelations, such as those he had known when drowning, reminding us of similar instances in the lives of John Howe and John Flavel; and the noble man was strengthened.
He went on for twenty years in the way we have described; and the interest of his autobiography compels the wish that it were much longer; for, of course, the largest amount of his precious life of labour was not set down, and cannot be recalled; and readers who are fond of romance will find his name in connection with some of the most remarkable executions of his time.
A singular circumstance was this: Four gentlemen—Mr. Brett, the son of an eminent divine in Dublin; Whalley, a gentleman of considerable fortune, possessed of three country-seats of his own; Dupree, “in every particular,” says Silas, “a complete gentleman;” and Morgan, an officer on board one of His Majesty’s ships of war—after dinner, upon the occasion of their being at an election for the members for Chelmsford, proposed to start forth, and, by way of recreation, rob somebody on the highway. Away they went, and chanced upon a farmer, whom they eased of a considerable sum of money. The farmer followed them into Chelmsford; they were all secured, and next day removed to London; they took their trials, and were sentenced, and left for execution. Told visited them all in prison. Morgan was engaged to be married to Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, the sister of the Duke of Hamilton. She repeatedly visited her affianced husband in the cell, and Told was with them at most of their interviews. It was supposed that, from the rank of the prisoners, and the character of their offence, there would be no difficulty in obtaining a reprieve; but the King was quite inexorable; he said, “his subjects were not to be in bodily fear in order that men might gratify their drunken whims.” Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, however, thrust herself several times before the King; wept, threw herself on her knees, and behaved altogether in such a manner that the King said, “Lady Betsy, there is no standing your importunity any further; I will spare his life, but on one condition—that he is not acquainted therewith until he arrives at the place of execution;” and it was so. The other three unfortunates were executed, and Lady Elizabeth, in her coach, received her lover into it as he stepped from the cart. It is a sad story, but it must have been a sweet satisfaction to the lady.