Few young believers showed more religious zeal than I did in those days. On Sunday morning there was a prayer on rising, and one before leaving home. At half-past seven the teachers were invited to meet at chapel to pray for a blessing on the work of the day. When school commenced at nine o'clock the superintendent opened it with prayer, and closed it at eleven with another prayer. Then came the morning service of the chapel, at which I was present with my class. That included three prayers. At two o'clock school began again, opening and ending with prayers by the superintendent, or by some teacher who was asked "to engage" in it, in his stead. At the close of the school, another prayer-meeting of teachers was held, for a blessing on the work done that day. At half-past six evening service took place, which included three more prayers. Afterwards, devout members of the congregation held a prayer-meeting on behalf of the work of the church. At all these meetings I was present, so that, together with graces before and after meals three times a day, and evening prayers at time of rest, heaven heard from me pretty frequently on Sundays. Many times since I have wondered at the great patience of God towards my unconscious presumption in calling attention so often to my insignificant proceedings. Atonement ought to include the sin of prayers.
Nor was this all. At chapels in Birmingham (1834), when anniversary sermons had been preached on Sunday by some ministers of mark, there would commonly be a public meeting on Monday at which they would speak, and to which I would go. On Tuesday evening I went to the Cherry Street Chapel, where the best Wesleyan preachers in the town were to be heard. On Wednesday I often attended the Carr's Lane sermon. Thursday would find me at the Bradford Street chapel, where there usually sat before me a beautiful youth, whose sensuous grace of motion gave me as much pleasure as the sermon. I remember it because it was there I first became conscious of the charm of human strength and proportion. I had the Greek love of beauty in boys—not in the Greek sense, of which I knew nothing.
On Friday I generally went to the public prayer-meeting in Cherry Street, because Wesleyans were bolder and more original in their prayers than other Christians. In frequenting Wesleyan chapels I could not help noticing that their great preachers were also men of great build, of good width in the lower part of the face. Afterwards I found that their societies elsewhere were mostly composed of persons of sensuous make. Their preachers having strong voices, and drawing inspiration mainly from feeling, they had boldness of speech; and those who had imagination had a picturesque expression. Independents and Baptists often tried to solve doubts, which showed that their convictions were tempered by thought to some extent; but the Wesleyan knew nothing of thought—he put doubt away. He did not recognise that the Questioning Spirit came from the Angel of Truth. To the Wesleyans, inquiry is but the fair-seeming disguise of the devil, and to entertain it is of the nature of sin. These preachers, therefore, knowing nothing of the other side, were under none of the restrictions imposed by intelligence, and they denounced the sceptics with a force which seemed holy from its fervour, and with a ferocity which only ignorance could inspire. So long as I knew less than they, their influence over me continued. Yet it was not vigorous denunciation which first allured me to them, though it long detained me among them—it was the information I had received, that they believed in universal salvation, which had fascination for me. There was something generous in that idea beyond anything taught me, and my heart cleaved to the people who thought it true. This doctrine came to me with the force of a new idea, always enchanting to the young. Had I been reared among Roman Catholics, I should have worshipped at the church of All Souls instead of the church of One Soul. Any Church whose name seemed least to exclude my neighbours would have most attracted me.
All the fertility of attendance at chapels recounted did not, as the reader will suppose, produce any weariness in me, or make me tired of Christianity. The incessant Bible reading, hymns, prayer, and evangelical sermons of Carr's Lane, Thorpe Street, and Inge Street did tire me. There was no human instruction in their spiritual monotony. My mind aches now when I think of those days. When I took courage to visit various chapels, the variety of thought gave me ideas. The deacons of the Inge Street Chapel bade me beware that "the rolling stone gathered no moss."* Yet I did gather moss.
* Thomas Tusser, of the sixteenth century, to whom the
phrase is ascribed, said: "The stone that is rolling can
gather no moss."
Though I was then hardly fifteen, the other teachers would gently ask me if I would engage in prayer in their meetings, which meant praying aloud among them. The idea made me tremble. I was very shy, and the sound of my own voice was as a thing apart from me, for which I was responsible, and which I could not control. Then, what should I say? To say what others said, to utter a few familiar scriptural phrases, diluted by ignorant earnestness, seemed to me, even at that time, an insipid offering of praise. Then it occurred to me to notice any newness of thought and expression I heard in week-day discourses, and with them I composed small prayers, which brought me some credit when I spoke them, as they were unlike any one else's. But only once—at a Friday night's church meeting—did I pray with natural freedom. Afterwards I avoided requests to pray, as I thought it unreal to be thinking more of the terms of the prayer than the simple spirit of it, and I hoped that one day fitting language would become natural to me.
It is proof that my mind was as free from scientific inspiration as any saint's, since I had no misgiving as to the effect of prayer. If Christianity were preached for the first time now to well-to-do people, able to help themselves, it would be treated like Mormonism in America; but to the poor who have neither money nor reflection, Christianity, as a praying power, is a very real thing. People who have no idea that help will, or can, come in any other way, are glad to think that it may come from heaven. It had never been explained to me that low wages were caused by there being too many labourers in the market, or that ill-health is caused by poor food and hard condition. It was my daily habit to pray for things most necessary and always deficient, not for myself alone, but for others to whom in their need I would give, at any cost to myself—to whom, if disinterested prayers were answered, any God of sympathy would give. Yet, though no prayer was answered, it did not strike me that that method of help failed. Prayer was no remedy, yet I did not see its futility. Had I spent a single hour only in "dropping a bucket into an empty well, never drawing any water up," I should not have continued the operation without further inquiry. It never struck me that, if preachers could obtain material aid by prayer, or knew any form of supplication by which it could be obtained, they might grow rich in a day by selling copies of that priceless formula. No Church would be needy, no believer would be poor.
In those days Christianity was a very real thing to me. What was part of my conviction was also part of my life. So far as I had knowledge, I was like the parson of Chaucer, who—
"Christ's love and his Apostles twelve
Taught, and first he followed it himselve."
This I did with a zeal of spirit which neither knew nor sought any evasion of the letter.