"I love to hear you read."
"Yes, and sit and dream of your baby, or your new tea-things, and scarce know whether I have been reading Milton or the Bible when I have done," he said gently, as he might have spoken to a child.
"You have such a beautiful voice. I love your voice better than the things you read. But let it be 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and I will listen to every word. I always think Christian is you. I can see you when I follow him with my thoughts."
Her husband smiled at the gentle flattery, and brought Bunyan's delightful story from the modest bookcase which held but some two score of classics and pious works—William Law, Dr. Watts, the writers loved and chosen by the followers of the New Light.
"Dost remember where we left your Christian?" he asked.
"'Twas when he was alone in the Valley of Humiliation, just before Apollyon met him," she answered quickly, though had the book been "Paradise Lost," she would have hardly known whether 'twas before or after the fall when they left Adam and Eve. He read aloud till teatime, and read to himself after tea till the hour of evening prayer and Scripture exposition, to which the little nursemaid and a stout maid-of-all-work were summoned; and so the long day closed at an hour when West End London, from Wimpole Street to Whitehall, was alive with chairs and linkmen, French horns and dancing feet. In this cottage on the common there was a silence that made the chirp of the crickets a burden.
George Stobart was not a quietist. Religion unsupported by philanthropy would not have sufficed him for happiness. He could not spend half his life upon his knees in a rapture of self-humiliation—could not devote hours to searching his own heart. Once and for all he had been convinced of sin, assured that the road he had been travelling was a road that led to the gates of hell, and that in travelling it he had carried many weaker sinners along with him, and so had been a murderer of souls. Once and for all he had been assured of the free grace of God, and believed himself appointed to do good work—a brand snatched from the burning, whose duty it was to snatch other brands, to compel the lost sheep to come into the fold.
He loved to be up and doing. He had the soldier's temper, and must be fighting some one or something; nor could he keep in his chamber and wrestle with impalpable devils. He could not fight, like Luther, with the evil that was within him till he materialized the inward tempter, saw Satan standing before him, and flung his inkpot at a visible foe. Abstract piety could not satisfy George Stobart. He caught himself yawning over Law's "Serious Call," and "The Imitation of Christ."
In the beginning of the Great Revival, when the Oxford Methodists and the Moravian Christians had been as one brotherhood in the meeting-house by Fetter Lane, an enthusiast, by name Molther, had put forward a new way of salvation, which was to be "still." Those who desired to find faith were to give up the public means of grace. They were not even to pray or to read the Scriptures, nor to attempt to do any good works.