The Love That Prevailed

by Frank Frankfort Moore

But long before the company were satisfied Wesley was on his horse riding slowly down to Ruthallion Mill.

He felt deeply pained by his experience in the inn parlour. So this was what Mr. Hartwell had hinted at in his letter—this assumption of the divine gift of the prophet by Pritchard. And the subject of his prophecy was one that every charlatan who had existed had made his own! He himself could remember more than one such prediction being made by men who were both ignorant and vain. One of them had afterwards stood in the pillory and another—the more sincere—had gone to a mad-house. It seemed to him strange that they should have had a following, but beyond a doubt their prediction had been widely credited, and the men themselves had achieved a notoriety which was to them the equivalent to fame. They had had their followers even after the date which they named in their prophecies had gone by without any disaster to the world. It seemed that the people were so glad at escaping that they had no room in their thoughts for any reproach for the false prophet.

He knew, however, that in the case of Richard Pritchard, the same leniency would not be shown. He knew that his own detractors—and they were many who regarded his innovations as a direct menace to the Church—would only be too glad of the chance which was now offered to them of ridiculing him and his out-of-doors preaching, pointing out, as they most certainly would, that Richard Pritchard represented the first fruit of his preaching, and that his assumption of the authority of a prophet was the first fruit of his Methodism.

But it was not only by reason of the possible injury that would be done to the movement which he had inaugurated in Cornwall that he was vexed.

He had been greatly pained to observe the spirit in which the most awful incident on which the mind of man could dwell was referred to by the men in the inn parlour—men fairly representative of the people of the neighbourhood. The Day of Wrath had been alluded to with levity by some, in a spirit of ridicule by others; while one man had made it the subject of a wager, and another had made it an excuse for drunkenness!

He was grieved and shocked to reflect that it was Pritchard's connection with his mission that had produced this state of things. He felt certain that if the man had remained outside the newly founded organisation, he would not have taken it upon himself to speak as a prophet.

But he felt that he could not lay the blame for what had occurred at the door of anyone whom he had appointed to help him in his work, and who had advanced the claims of Pritchard, for who could have foreseen that a man who seemed abnormally modest and retiring by nature should develop such a spirit? Beyond a doubt the man's weak head had been turned. He had become possessed of a craving after notoriety, and now that he had achieved it, he would be a very difficult person to deal with. This Wesley perceived when he began to consider how to deal with the source of the affair.

The most difficult point in this connection was his feeling that the man was quite sincere in his belief, that upon him the spirit of prophecy had descended. He felt sure that the man was unaware of the existence of any motive in his own heart apart from the desire to utter a warning and a call to repentance to the people of the world, as Jonah the prophet, had done to the people of Nineveh.

That fact, Wesley perceived, made it a matter of great difficulty both to silence Pritchard, and to hold him up as a charlatan.

He was indeed greatly perplexed in mind as he rode down the valley path leading to the Mill.