The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

by M. E. Braddon

Sitting on the river bank in the summer quiet, in the rosy afterglow, amidst tall sedges and wild flowers that love the river, with his child prattling at his knee, playing with his watch-ribbon, asking questions that were never answered, and his wife seated at his side supremely content in having won him to give her so much of his company, George Stobart meditated upon the great mistake of his life—his marriage!

He remembered how lovely a creature the printer's daughter had seemed to him in her ecstasy of faith, how divine a thing the soul newly awakened to a sense of sin, and a desire for saving grace. His heart had gone out to her in an overwhelming wave of enthusiasm, a feeling so exalted, so different from any passion of his unregenerate years, that he had welcomed it as the one pure and perfect love of his life. He thought God had given him this friendless, ill-used girl to be his helpmeet, the sharer of all his aspirations, his lifelong labours in the service of Christ, as of that impassioned hour in Wesley's Chapel.

Soon, too soon, he had discovered the shallow nature behind that hysterical emotion, the tepid piety which alone remained after the fervour of newly awakened feelings. Too soon he had found that petty interests and trivial domestic cares and joys filled the measure of his wife's mind; that she thought more of her tea-trays and her sofa-covers than of thousands of Kingswood miners won from Satan to Christ; that he must never look to her for sympathy with his highest aspirations, hardly for interest in his everyday work among the poor.

When he suggested that she should help in his day nurseries or his infant schools, she refused with a shudder, lest she should bring home small-pox or scarlet fever to little Georgie. That fear of pestilence hung like a funeral pall over Lambeth Marsh; and all his efforts to popularize inoculation could do very little against dense ignorance, and terror of a preventive measure that seemed as bad as the disease.

"If I've got to have the small-pox anyhow, I'd sooner leave it to Providence," was the usual argument.

His marriage, so gravely resolved, with such generous disdain of worldly advantage, had not brought him happiness. The fellowship in thought and feeling, which is the soul of marriage, was wanting in a union that had yet every appearance of domestic affection, and which sufficed for the wife's content. She was happy, looking no deeper than the surface of things, and finding content in the calm prosperity of her life, the absence of poverty and ill-usage. His marriage was a mistake, and to the man who had taken upon himself, as he had done, the service of Christ's poor, any marriage must needs be a mistake. For the itinerant preacher, for the man with a suffering populace depending on his care, home ties were fetters that needs must gall. He could not serve two masters. He must be a half-hearted philanthropist or a neglectful husband; only an occasional preacher or a deserter of his home. He remembered the priests he had met and conversed with in France, men who had no claims, no interests outside their Church and their parish; and it seemed to him that he had bound himself with a servitude that made his service of Christ a dead letter.

His mission work must end if he was to do his duty at home. His career as John Wesley's helper had been the most absorbing episode in his life—a source of unbounded satisfaction to mind and conscience. He had gloried in the result of his labours, never questioning, in his own fervid faith, whether conversions so sudden would stand the test of time. He had counted every convert as a gain for ever, every flood of tears as a cleansing stream. But, precious though this work had been to him, conscience urged him to renounce it. His first duty was to make a home for the woman he had sworn to love and cherish. To this end he would try to become a priest of the Established Church, strive to obtain a London living, however small, and confine his service of Christ within a narrow radius, till fortune should widen his area of work. He had loved his freedom hitherto, the power to work for his own hand; but for Lucy's sake he would bend his shoulders to the Episcopal yoke, and enter on a phase of humble obedience to authority, prepared at any hour to be called to account for his opinions, and to be hampered and constrained in his gospel teaching. He would have to suffer, as others of the Oxford Methodists and their disciples had suffered, from the tyranny of ecclesiastical intolerance; but he would face all difficulties, submit to many restrictions, to make a home for his wife. And then there was always the hope that the Church of England would be swept from the great dismal swamp of formalism on the strong tide of the Great Revival, which ran higher and wider with every year of Wesley's and Whitefield's life. The teaching begun by Whitefield among the prisoners in Gloucester jail, by Wesley in the humble meeting-house in Fetter Lane, had spread over England, Scotland, and Ireland with an irresistible force, and must finally make its power felt in the Established Church.

From the market cross and the country side, from the colliers of Bristol and the miners of Cornwall, from the wild fervour of services and sermons under starlit skies, from congregations numbered by thousands, George Stobart was prepared to restrict the scope of his work to an obscure London pulpit or a poverty-stricken parish, content if in so doing his conscience could be at rest. But the outlook was dreary, and he began to measure the length of his earthly pilgrimage, and foresaw the long progress of eventless years, some little good done, perhaps, some souls gained for Christ, many small sorrows alleviated, but all his work shut within a narrow space, controlled by other people's opinions.

One agony which other men of deep religious feeling have suffered was spared to John Wesley's helper. His faith knew no shadow of change. His absolute belief in his God and his Saviour remained to him in the lowest depth of mental depression. He might feel himself a creature of sinful impulses, an outcast from God, but he never doubted the existence of that God, or the reality of that hereafter the hope of which lies at the root of all religion. The paradise of saints, the infinite joys of eternity, hung on the balance of good and evil, a stupendous stake, which most men played for with such wild recklessness, till the lights of this life began to fade, and the awful possibilities of that other life beyond the veil flashed on their troubled souls.

He was startled from the automatic monotony of his life by a letter whose superscription so agitated him that his shaking hand could scarcely break the seal. Indeed, he did not break it for some moments, but sat with the letter in his hand, staring at the familiar writing—Antonia's writing, a strong and firm penmanship, every letter definite and upright, somewhat resembling Joseph Addison's. Oh, how embued with sin, how trapped and entangled in Satan's net, must his soul be when only the sight of Antonia's writing could so move him!