Chapter 31
So saying, William Savery advanced, and taking his guest by the arm, gently forced him into a chair. Mrs. Savery pushed the cup towards him, and heaped his plate with her excellent meat-pies. The stranger took up the cup to drink, but his hand trembled so much that he could not put it to his lips. He tried to swallow a small mouthful of bread, but the effort nearly choked him. William Savery, seeing his guest's excited state, went on talking in his grave kind voice, to give him time, and help him to grow calm.
'Doubtless thou wilt find it hard to abstain from drink at first,' he continued, 'but keep up a brave heart for the sake of thy wife and children, and it will soon become easy. Whenever thou hast need of coffee tell my wife, Mary, and she will give it thee.'
Mary Savery's blue eyes shone as she nodded her head; she did not say a word, for she saw that her guest was nearly at an end of his composure. Gently she laid her hand on his rough sleeve as if to try to calm and reassure him. But even her light touch was more than he could bear at that moment. Pushing the food and drink away from him untasted, he laid both his arms on the table, and burying his head, he wept like a child.
The husband and wife looked at each other. 'Can I do anything to help him?' Mary's eyes asked her husband in silence. 'Leave him alone for a little; he will be better when this fit of tears is over,' his wise glance answered back.
William Savery was right. The burst of weeping relieved John Smith's over-wrought feelings. Besides, he really was almost faint with hunger. In a few moments, when the coffee was actually held to his lips, he found he could drink it--right down to the bottom of the cup. As if by magic, the cup was filled up again, and then, very quickly, the meatpies too began to disappear.
At each mouthful the man grew calmer. It was an entirely different John Smith who took leave of his kind friends an hour later. Again they followed him to the door. 'Try to do well, John, and thou wilt always find a friend in me,' William Savery said, as they parted. Mary Savery added no words--she was never a woman given to much talk. Only she slipped her fingers into her guest's hand with a touch that said silently, 'Fare thee well, _friend_.'
The next day John Smith entered the tanyard, not this time slinking in as a thief in the darkness, but introduced by the master himself as an engaged workman. For many years he remained with his employer, a sober, honest, and faithful servant, respected by others and respecting himself. The secret of the first visit was kept. William and Mary Savery never alluded to it, and John Smith certainly did not, though the memory of it never left him and altered all the rest of his life.
Long years after John Smith was dead, William Savery, in telling the story, always omitted the man's name. That is why he has to be called John Smith, because no one knows now, no one ever will know, what his real name may have been. 'But,' as William Savery used to say when he was prevailed on to tell the story, 'the thing to know and remember is that it is possible to overcome Evil with Good.'
XXXI. HOW A FRENCH NOBLE BECAME A FRIEND
_Sentences from 'No Cross, No Crown,' by WILLIAM PENN._
_'Come, Reader, hearken to me awhile; I seek thy salvation; that is my plot; thou wilt forgive me.'_
_'Thou, like the inn of old, hast been full of guests; thy affections have entertained other lovers; there has been no room for thy Saviour in thy soul ... but his love is after thee still, & his holy invitation continues to save thee.'_
_'Receive his leaven, & it will change thee; his medicine and it will cure thee; he is as infallible as free; without money and with certainty.... Yield up the body, soul & spirit to Him that maketh all things new: new heavens & new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new works, a new life & conversation....'_
_'The inward, steady righteousness of Jesus is another thing than all the contrived devotion of poor superstitious man.... True worship is an inward work; the soul must be touched and raised in its heavenly desires by the heavenly Spirit.... So that souls of true worshippers see God: and this they wait, they pant, they thirst for.'_
_'Worship is the supreme act of man's life.'_
XXXI. HOW A FRENCH NOBLE BECAME A FRIEND
Now we come to a Saint who had a life so full of adventures that a book twice as big as this one would be needed to contain the stories that might be told about him alone.
Unlike any of the other 'Quaker Saints' in this book, he was by birth a Frenchman and came of noble family. His name was Etienne de Grellet. He was born nearly a century after the death of George Fox; but he probably did not know that such a person had ever existed, never even heard Fox's name, until long after he was grown up. If Etienne de Grellet, the gay young nobleman of the French court, had been told that his story would ever be written in a book of 'Quaker Saints' he would, most likely, have raised his dark eyebrows and have looked extremely surprised.
'_Quakère? Qu'est-ce que c'est alors, Quakère? Quel drôle de mot! Je ne suis pas Quakère, moi!_' he might have answered, with a disdainful shrug of his high, narrow, aristocratic French shoulders. Yet here he is after all!
* * * * *
Etienne de Grellet was born at Limoges in France, in the year 1773. His childhood was passed in the stormy years when the cloud was gathering that was to burst a little later in the full fury of the French Revolution. His father, Gabriel de Grellet, a wealthy merchant of Limoges, was a great friend and counsellor of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. As a reward for having introduced into the country the manufacture of finer porcelain than had ever before been made in France he was ennobled by the king, whom he often used to attend in his private chapel. Limoges china is still celebrated all over the world; and at that time the most celebrated of its china-makers was M. de Grellet, the king's friend.
Naturally the sons of this successful merchant and nobleman were brought up in great luxury. Etienne and his brothers were not sent to a school, but had expensive tutors to teach them at home. Their parents wanted their children to be well educated, honourable, straightforward, generous, and kind; to possess not only accomplishments but good qualities. Yet Etienne felt, when he looked back in later days, that something had been left out in their education that was, perhaps, the most important thing of all.
When he was quite a little boy he was taken to visit one of his aunts who was a nun in a convent near Limoges. The rules of this convent were so strict that the nuns might not even see their relations who came to visit them. They might only speak to them from the other side of two iron gratings, between the bars of which a thick curtain was hung. The little boy thought it very strange to be taken from his beautiful home, full of costly furniture, pictures, and hangings, and to be brought into the bare convent cell. Then he looked up and saw an iron grating, and heard a voice coming through the folds of a thick curtain that hung behind it. He could hear the voice, but he might never see the face of the aunt who spoke to him. At night at home, as he lay in his comfortable bed, he used to think of his aunt and the other nuns 'rising three times in the night for prayer in the church, from the hard boards which formed their couch, even the luxury of a straw pallet being denied them.' 'Which is the real life,' he used to ask himself, 'the easy comfortable life that goes on round me every day, or that other, difficult life hidden behind the folds of the thick curtain?'
Child though he was, Etienne felt that his aunt loved him, although he had never seen her. This helped him to feel that, although unseen, God was loving him too. As he grew older he wondered: 'Perhaps everything we see here is like the bars of a grating, or a thick curtain. Perhaps there is some one on the other side who is speaking to us too.'
Etienne was only about five or six years old when he made the great discovery that GOD IS THERE, hidden behind the screen of visible things all round us. After this, he longed to be able to speak to God and to listen to God's voice, as he was able to listen to his unseen aunt's voice speaking to him from behind the curtain in the convent.
No one ever taught him to pray; but presently he discovered that too for himself. One day, when he was only six years old, his tutor gave him a Latin lesson to learn that was much too difficult for him. Etienne took the book up to his bedroom, and there, all alone, he read it over and over and did his very best to learn it. But the unfamiliar Latin words would not stay in his memory. At last he closed the book in despair and went to his bedroom window and looked out. He gazed over the high roofs of the city, away over the wide plain in which Limoges lay, to the distant mountain, blue against the sky. Everything looked fair and peaceful. As he gazed, the thought came to him, 'God made the plain and the river and the mountains. God made this whole beautiful world in which I live. If God can create all these things, surely He can give me memory also.' He knelt down at the foot of his bed and prayed, for the first time in his life, that his Unseen Friend would help him to master the difficult lesson. Taking up the book again, he read the hard Latin words once more, very attentively. This time the words stayed in his memory and did not fade away. Often afterwards, he found that if he prayed all his lessons became easier. He could not, of course, learn them without effort, but after he had really prayed earnestly, he found he could remember things better. Then one day he learned the Lord's prayer. Long years after, when he was an old man, he could still recall the exact spot in his beautiful home where, as a little boy, he had first learned to say, 'Our Father.' Etienne and his family belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. On Sundays they went to the great cathedral of Limoges; but the service there always seemed strange and far away to Etienne.[41] The music, the chanting, the Latin words that were said and sung by bishops and priests in their gorgeous robes, did not seem to him to have anything to do with the quiet Voice that spoke to the boy in the silence of his own heart.
When Etienne and his brothers were old enough they were sent to several different colleges and schools. Their last place of instruction was the celebrated College of the Oratorians at Lyons. Among other things, the students of this College were taught to move so quietly that fifty or a hundred boys went up or down the stone steps of the College all together, without their feet making the least noise.
Etienne tells us in his diary: 'as we were educated by Roman Catholics and in their principles we were required to confess once a month,' that is, to tell a priest whatever they had done that was wrong, and receive the assurance of God's forgiveness from him.
The priest to whom Etienne regularly made his confession was 'a pious, conscientious man,' who treated him with fatherly care. When the boy told him of his puzzles, and asked how it could be necessary to confess to any man, since God alone could forgive sins, he received a kind, helpful answer. 'Yet,' he says, 'my reasoning faculties brought me to the root of the matter; from created objects to the Creator--from time to eternity.' After he was confirmed at College he hoped that his heart would be changed and made different; but he found that he was still much the same as before. Before leaving the College he and the other students who were also departing received the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper at Mass. This was to Etienne a very solemn time. But, he says, as soon as he was out in the world again, the remembrance of it faded away. He settled that he had no use for religion in his life, and determined to live for pleasure and happiness alone. 'I sought after happiness,' his diary says, 'in the world's delights. I went in pursuit of it from one party of pleasure to another; but I did _not_ find it, and I wondered that the name of pleasure could be given to anything of that kind.'
In his dissipated life after leaving College, he gave up saying his prayers, and gradually he lost his belief that GOD WAS THERE. He read unbelieving books, which said that God did not exist, and that the Unseen world was only a delusion and a dream. For a time Etienne gave himself up to doubt and denial as well as to dissipation. He was in this restless state when the French Revolution broke out and caught him, like a butterfly in a thunderstorm. New questions surged over him. 'If there is a God after all, why should He allow these horrors to happen?' But no answer came. Or perhaps he had forgotten how to listen.
'Towards the close of 1791,' he writes, 'I left my dear Father's house, and bade him, as it proved, a lasting farewell, having never seen him since.' At this time, Etienne accompanied his brothers and many other nobles into Germany, to join the French Princes who were endeavouring to bring about a counter-revolution and restore the king, Louis XVI.
On this dangerous journey the young men met with many narrow escapes. Courage came naturally to Etienne. 'I was not the least moved,' he writes in his diary, 'when surrounded by people and soldiers, who lavished their abuses upon us, and threatened to hang me to the lamp-post. I coolly stood by, my hands in my pockets, being provided with three pairs of pistols, two of which were double-barrelled. I concluded to wait to see what they would do, and resolved, after destroying as many of them as I could, to take my own life with the last.'
Happily the necessity for extreme courses did not arise. He was, he says, 'mercifully preserved,' and no violent hands were laid upon him, though he and his companions suffered a short detention, after which they succeeded in safely joining the French Princes and their adherents at the city of Coblentz on the Rhine. Here Etienne spent the following winter and spring surrounded, he tells us, by many temptations.
'I was fond of solitude,' continues the diary, 'and had many retired walks through the woods and over the hills. I delighted to visit the deserted hermitages, which formerly abounded on the Rhine. I envied the situation of such hermits, retired from the world, and sheltered from its many temptations; for I thought it impossible for me to live a life of purity while continuing among my associates. I looked forward wishfully to the time when I could thus retire; but I saw also that, unless I could leave behind me my earthly-mindedness, my pride, vanity, and every carnal propensity, an outward solitude could afford me no shelter.
'Our army entered into France the forepart of the summer of 1792, accompanied by the Austrians and Prussians. I was in the King's Horse Guards, which consisted mostly of the nobility. We endured great hardships, for many weeks sleeping on the bare ground, in the open air, and were sometimes in want of provisions. But that word _honour_ so inflamed us, that I marvel how contentedly we bore our privations.'
Towards the approach of winter, owing to various political changes, the Princes' army was obliged to retire from France, and soon after was disbanded. 'Etienne had been present at several engagements; he had seen many falling about him, stricken by the shafts of death; he had stood in battle array, facing the enemy ready for the conflict; but, being in a reserve corps, he was preserved from actually shedding blood, having never fought with the sword, or fired a gun.'
In after years, he was thankful to remember that although he had been perfectly willing to take life, he had never actually done so in his soldier days. After the retreat of the French army, he and his brothers set out for Amsterdam. On the way, however, they were made prisoners of war, and condemned to be shot. 'The execution of the sentence was each moment expected, when some sudden commotion in the hostile army gave them an opportunity to make their escape.' Their lives thus having been spared a second time they reached Holland in safety.
The young men were puzzled what to do next. They could not bear to leave their beloved parents at distant Limoges, and yet it was impossible to reach them or to help them in any way. France was a dangerous place for people with a 'de' in their names in those days, and for young men of military age most dangerous of all. Finally, Etienne and his brother Joseph settled to go to South America. 'Through the kind assistance of a republican General, a friend of the family, they obtained a passage on board a ship bound for Demerara, where they arrived in the First month of 1793, after a voyage of about forty days.'
Unfortunately this long voyage had not taken them away from scenes of violence. The Revolution in France was terrible, but the horrors of slavery in South America were, if possible, even worse. The New World seemed no less full of tragedy than the Old. Etienne saw there husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters torn apart, most cruelly beaten, often sold like cattle to tyrannical masters, never to see each other's faces again.
Amid such scenes Etienne grew more than ever full of despairing thoughts, more than ever inclined to believe that there could not be a God ruling a world where these evils were allowed to go unpunished.
'Such was the impression made upon Etienne by the scenes of cruelty and anguish he witnessed, that, many years after, the sound of a whip in the street would chill his blood, in the remembrance of the agony of the poor slaves; and he felt convinced that there was no excess of wickedness and malice which a slave-holder, or driver, might not be guilty of.'
Etienne and Joseph stayed in Demerara for more than two years. In the spring of 1795 they left South America and settled in Long Island near New York. There, they made friends with a certain Colonel Corsa, a man who had served in the British army, and who had a daughter who spoke French. As the two brothers at this time knew no English it was a great cheer to them in their loneliness to be able to visit at this hospitable house. One day Colonel Corsa happened to speak of William Penn. Etienne had already heard of the Quaker statesman, George Fox's friend, and when the young girl said she possessed Penn's writings Etienne asked to borrow them. He took back to his lodgings with him a large folio book, intending, with the help of a dictionary, to translate it in order to improve his English. Great was his disappointment when he found that the book contained nothing about politics or statesmanship. It was about religion; and at this time Etienne thought that religion was all a humbug and delusion. Therefore he shut up the book and put it away, though he did not return it to its owner. One evening, about this time, as he was walking in the fields alone, suddenly the Voice he had heard in his childhood spoke to him once more, close by and terribly clear: 'ETERNITY, ETERNITY, ETERNITY.' These three words, he says, 'reached my very soul,--my whole man shook,--it brought me, like Saul, to the ground.' The sinfulness and carelessness of his last few years passed before him. He cried out, 'If there is no God, doubtless there is a hell.'
His soul was almost in hell already, for hell is despair, and Etienne was very nearly despairing at that moment. Only one way out remained, the way of prayer, the little mossy pathway that he used to tread when he was a child, but that he had not trodden, now, for many years. Tangled, mossy, and overgrown that path was now, but it still led out from the dark wood of life where Etienne had almost lost his way and his hope.
Etienne took that way. With his whole heart he prayed for mercy and for deliverance from the sin and horror that oppressed him. When no answer came at once he did not stop praying, but continued day and night, praying, praying for mercy. Perhaps he scarcely knew to whom his prayer was addressed; but it was none the less a real prayer.
He expected that the answer to it would come in some startling form that he could recognise the first minute and say: 'There! Now God is answering my prayer!'
Instead, the answer came far more simply than he had expected. God often seems to choose to answer prayers in such a gentle, natural fashion, that His children need to watch very carefully lest they take His most radiant messengers, His most wonderful messages, almost as a matter of course. Only if they recognise God's Love in all that comes, planning how things shall happen, they can see His hand arranging even the tiniest details of their lives, fitting them all in, and making things work out right. Then they understand how truly wonderful His answers are.
The answer to Etienne's prayer came through nothing more extraordinary than that same old folio book which he had borrowed from his friend Miss Corsa, and had put away, thinking it too dull to translate. He took it out again, and opened upon a part called 'No Cross, No Crown.' 'I proceeded,' he says, 'to read it with the help of my dictionary, having to look for the meaning of nearly every word.'
When he had finished, he read it straight through again. 'I had never met with anything of the kind before,' and all the time he was reading the Voice inside his heart kept on saying, 'Yes, Yes, Yes, that is true!'
'I now withdrew from company, and spent most of my time in retirement, and in silent waiting upon God. I began to read the Bible, with the aid of my dictionary, for I had none then in French. I was much of a stranger to the inspired records. I had not even seen them before that I remember; what I had heard of any part of their contents, was only detached portions in Prayer Books.
'Whilst the fallow ground of my heart was thus preparing, my brother and myself, being one day at Colonel Corsa's, heard that a Meeting was appointed to be held next day in the Friends' Meeting-house, by two Englishwomen, to which we were invited. The Friends were Deborah Darby and Rebecca Young. The sight of them brought solemn feelings over me; but I soon forgot all things around me; for, in an inward silent frame of mind, seeking for the Divine presence, I was favoured to find _in_ me, what I had so long, and with so many tears, sought for _without_ me. My brother, who sat beside me, and to whom the silence, in which the forepart of the meeting was held, was irksome, repeatedly whispered to me, "Let us go away." But I felt the Lord's power in such a manner, that a secret joy filled me, in that I had found Him after whom my soul had longed. I was as one nailed to my seat. Shortly after, one or two men Friends in the ministry spoke, but I could understand very little of what they said. After them Deborah Darby and Rebecca Young spoke also; but I was so gathered in the temple of my heart before God, that I was wholly absorbed with what was passing there. Thus had the Lord opened my heart to seek Him where He is to be found.