Part 3

Directly after his conversion came Weller’s brief sweet experience of the Joyful Mysteries. There is a touching account of his first happy moments in the midst of poverty and sickness, and the cares of his young increasing family which would not even allow privacy for his devotional raptures.—“Having no place to retire to, I have wrapped myself in the curtains of my bed, and in silent breathings poured out my soul to God in the sweetest strains possible.”

But trouble was never far from a nature combining the philosophy of Micawber as to the affairs of this world with that of Mrs. Gummidge as to the next. All through life his happiness was to be threatened by the presiding evils of both states—Debt and Damnation. He tried various means of livelihood, combining them with a new-found vocation as a preacher. A little school, a baker’s shop, severally failed, and for some time he tried to support himself by a peddling sale of books and tea. Luckily he was gifted with an ingenuous humility which allowed him thankfully to accept any gift, whether of money, food or clothing, no matter how grudgingly it was bestowed—grateful to the Lord who had provided for him as for Elijah out of the hard, unsympathetic beaks of ravens.

He received also small sums of money for his preaching, which had a certain favour among the ‘dens’ of Kent. It had begun merely by an account of his conversion to a few sympathisers at Maidstone, but later he had learned, like most converts, to make a universal application of his private experiences, and laid huge stress on the doctrines of Predestination and Election and Free Grace. While still at Maidstone he had joined the Baptists, but the Baptists at Maidstone were Arminians, whereas his nature and the circumstances of his conversion inclined him towards Calvinism. He thought of joining the Calvinists, who had small congregations at Smarden and other hamlets. But “my pen cannot describe the exercises of my mind on the thought of leaving the Arminian Baptists. It would make many of my former friends my foes.” Far away at Oxford a similar conflict was at about the same time raging in the breast of Newman, and this mute inglorious Newman was to follow the same course as his famous contemporary. He seceded, and became a Particular Baptist.

The next few years are a history of struggle, contempt, debt, care, family trials, dependence on the charity of the Elect, whose very cast-off clothing he and his children wore. But the greatest experience of his regenerate life was at hand—the Word which was to send him out of his native and familiar Kent into unknown Sussex, carrying his Gospel to the Gentiles. The call came to him as it had come to the Apostle Paul from the Man of Macedonia—“Come over and help us.” The Man of Sussex was a “miller in Ticehurst, a perfect stranger to me,” whom he met on the Headcorn Road. “He had passed but a few rods, when these words were powerfully impressed upon my mind—‘that man comes out of Sussex to invite you to go down there to preach.’ At which I immediately said ‘Dear Lord, I am not fit to go into Sussex.’” However, he dared not refuse so imperative a summons, enforced through the continual impression on his mind of the words “I will send thee far hence to the Gentiles.” To the Gentiles he went, the barbarians of Shovers Green, from whom soon afterwards came a definite call. He went in the greatest agony of mind, full of doubts and fears and distresses, but in spite of this his preaching was found acceptable to the little knot of believers at the cross-roads beyond Bantony. Here he continued going once a fortnight for some time, though in due course opposition arose—he was accused of being “an Antinomian, a Huntingtonian, a High Calvinist, a Beemanite,” and a large party withdrew from the chapel, though as others came from surrounding parishes, he still had a good congregation. However, in time the disaffected party got the upper hand, and there seems to have been a sort of riot—“an unusual concourse of people in the public road, with loud hollowings and shouts of Horrible! ‘Bominable! Stuff!” In the end, Weller’s career as an apostle of the Gentiles came to rather a tame conclusion in his being dismissed by the Deacon, who paid him his salary and told him that his services would be no further required.

However, his work was only apparently ended. Soon afterwards he received a call to Mayfield, with occasional returns to Frittenden and Smarden, and finally he detached himself altogether from Kent and became a regular preacher at Burwash, whither followed him the loyal part of his congregation at Shovers Green. The story of his life at Burwash is his usual mixture of good works and bad debts; however, his circumstances both spiritual and material, seem to have grown more stable. His ministry was becoming famous among the farms, and in 1842 a friend at Robertsbridge offered to “give me a house to turn into a chapel, with a lease of fifty years and ten pounds per annum towards the support of the cause. This gave me fresh reasons for prayer.” The offer was accepted, and the foundation stone was laid in November 1842, the opening taking place in January of the next year. Preachers came respectively from London and the Upper Dicker, and “were much favoured in their own souls; but as for myself, I was sorely tried the whole of the day with my own debts and those of the chapel.”

So ends the story of the “Wonders of Free Grace.” Weller did not long enjoy his more established existence, for he died five years after coming to Robertsbridge. But his Bethel and his book remain, both akin in their ugliness and humility. One reads the book with much the same feelings as one looks at the Bethel. It is written entirely without art—a wordy stammering narrative, mixed with minute reports of dreams, spiritual experiences, marvellous conversions, digests of sermons and Calvinistic arguments. It is all obscure, voluble, earnest and naive.

A remarkable and poignant thing is his utter blindness to the beauty spread round him in the fields of Sussex and Kent. He seems to have tramped the Kentish lanes, gone to and fro among the red villages of the Sussex weald, crossed the still, sweet valleys of the Rother and the Glotten Brook, without a thought for their loveliness. This exile in darkest Geneva was blind to all beauty save that which reached him in occasional, tortured flashes from the Thick Darkness where God was. The coloured, wooded country round Sissinghurst, the brooding, merging greens of the Rother Marshes, the farm-patched mound of the Isle of Oxney, the flushed hillock of ancient Rye had no voice for the messenger of Grace. Even the coming of Spring, to be to the earth what conversion is to the man, to do yearly for the Benenden meadows what Free Grace had done once for James Weller, brought no sympathetic thrill to the heart which saw only its own Particular mercies. As he groped and stumbled on his way, nature walked beside him through her mysteries, from the Spring Annunciation to the Falling Asleep of December. He might have had the comfort of her beauty, the fellowship of her experience, but he went aloof—the Protestant, the individualist, his eyes cast down up the narrow lane of his salvation where his footsteps were marked in blood.

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To the Catholic Christian there is a special glamour about such stories as this of James Weller, of conversion and salvation outside the normal sphere of the Covenanted Mercies. They are like stories of men who win their way across uncharted seas in unseaworthy craft—of men who miss their way up a mountain, yet, somehow, arrive at the summit, bleeding and exhausted, by another path. So powerful is the Precious Blood that it can work its changes on mankind apart from the means appointed for its operation. Unlike the old life, the New Life is not bound by its own laws, and again and again it amazes us with miracles. “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder and perish....”

The normal channel of the Precious Blood as it flows from the Sacred Heart of Christ, making us all partakers of his divine humanity, is the sacramental system of his Church, which is his Body. But just as there can be contacts between mind and mind without the agency of the body—though such contacts must always be abnormal, uncertain and unsatisfactory—so there is contact between the New Life and human lives which as yet stand outside the body of its functioning. And as these telepathic unions between mind and mind have a special glamour about them which perhaps we do not find in ordinary human intercourse, so these uncovenanted graces of the New Life give us a new thrill as of power unguessed and unrealised.

It is true that there is always something a little terrible about the experiences of the separated saints. They are not quite natural, and therefore not quite spiritual. Where the conversion is not too subjective to last, the New Life often has to grow in an atmosphere of fear—fear of sin and fear of hell, or fear even of the homely shapes of earth, which the separated Saint sees unredeemed, as vessels of wrath.

It is for our sins that the Precious Blood does not flow in the veins of Christ’s Body only. As long ago on Calvary, it is still poured upon the ground. The spear of schism pierces his side, and thereout flows blood and water—the sacraments poured out in death. It is through our guilt that men such as James Weller obtain their Particular Mercies. We have pierced his heart, and it is because his heart is broken that there is grace not only for us but for all the children of God that are scattered abroad.

August _Month of the Most Pure Heart of Mary_

The sun has set, but there is still colour in the sky and colour on the sea. Pale streaks of rose lie along the horizon, both on cloud and on water. The sea, where it meets the sky is a lightless pink, where it touches the land a lightless blue. It is strange, this lightless colour of the sea. Under all the riches of its summer twilight changes the sea seems lifeless. There is a deadness too in the sky now that the sun has gone. It is all like a painted memory of something once seen, a dream of something once alive. Then a wind goes over the waters, and suddenly a point of living light is kindled, as the first star shines out in the lifeless sky. The planet named long ago after the goddess of beauty is still the star of the sleeping August sea. It shines one tiny brilliant point of light in all that rose-blue lifelessness of sky and sea. Round it and beneath it clouds and water waken into darkness, so that by the time the other stars have kindled, and the moon has risen, the whole dead scene has come to life again in glowing depths of gold and blue.

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The human race flowered in Mary. Sown in the garden of man’s universal dream, tended and watered by the Law of the chosen race, the Rose of Sharon bloomed to be fertilised by Godhead. Mary stands alone as the single perfect flower brought forth by that sad sowing of the human race. Rich was the soil and many were the gardeners, yet only one blossom opened perfectly to the sun.

So once again the adventure of life could be made, the suitable medium having been found. The medium of the natural life that first came wonderfully to an inorganic world was the sea, in which organic life arose—Aphrodite, beautiful and fertile, born of the sea-foam. The medium of the supernatural life that came wonderfully into nature was the pure will of Mary when she proclaimed herself the handmaid of the Lord. Her name signifies saltness, bitterness, in fact, the salt and bitter sea—there is no flowering in her name—but her perfect will is the star of the sea, which makes a guiding path across its mystery—the star which yet is not a star, but a planet blazing with reflected glory.

Thus she is the rose to symbolise that she is the flower of all life, the flower of the long growth of the ages; she is also the sea to proclaim that she is the virgin source of the New Life, of the ages yet to come; she is the star of the sea to show the guidance of her perfect will, perfect only in its reflection of the glories of the will of God. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” When Mary speaks these words a new star is kindled, and the dead world comes alive in the night.

The sanctified myths of Genesis point to the failure of the purpose of life through the corruption of a woman. This need not involve the belief that the first perversion of free will came through woman as distinct from man. Eve symbolises the feminine principle in things—the receiver, the reflector, the material, the medium. Through the wrong choice of the first human wills, the medium of creation was spoiled, and the human race became in its tendencies a part of nature rather than of supernature. Intended for the spouse of heaven, it turned instead to Adam—Edom—red earth, and by turning earthwards away from heaven, to the knowledge of good and evil, it lost its purpose even in regard to the earth it turned to, its powers of redemption, its functions as mediator, and cursed became the ground for our sake.

Mary too stands as a symbol—the symbol of the restoration of the lost purpose of life through the sanctification of a woman. The medium, the receptacle is rehabilitated in Mary, “spiritual vessel, wondrous vessel of devotion,” and becomes the vehicle of the divine. By the Holy Ghost, Mary is made the spouse of heaven and the mother of heaven’s Lord.

The body which the Redeemer took of his Virgin Mother was not an inheritance of the flesh only, but the inheritance of a human heart and will. We all receive from our parents a heart and will made crooked by a perverted inheritance, in other words by sin. The heart and will of our Lord were clean and straight and without sin. His psychological processes were as God intended them to be—an orderly development from primitive yet honourable instincts moving towards completeness, which is perfection. “The sin is in the will.” There was no sin in the will of Mary, which was simply the will of God, so she was able to give her son what no other human parent has been able to give. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth proclaims that he took from her the feminine principle only—the vessel, the vehicle—while Godhead provided the masculine or quickening element. If he had been born according to nature he would have belonged to nature, but he was born the mediator of two worlds, the natural and the supernatural—“by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.” Once more the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters, and the New Creation is begun.

It was Mary’s privilege to give our Lord all that he took of manhood. She gave him human nature at its best—the perfect vehicle. She gave him not only a human body but a human mind—and she did more than give. What she had already given she trained and guided. Again and again, psychologists tell us, even a good inheritance will be wasted by the mistakes of the parents during the first years of their child. The delicate child-mind may be hopelessly warped and spoiled by the mishandling of those that train it. The more we learn of the discoveries of modern psychology the more we are impressed by the terrific responsibility of the Mother of God. To her care was committed not only her infant’s tender body, but his beautiful, perfect, sensitive mind. Those early years which psychologists tell us make or mar a whole life were entirely in her keeping. It was for her to sow the seed of early impressions, to impart the first teaching. Only the glory of her own submitted will could have guided her through the ocean of her motherhood’s cares—that will which was simply the perfect reflection of the will of God.

The spirit of God moves over the face of the waters, and the waters become a miraculous source of life. Above the waters a single star is bright with the reflected glory of the sun.

September _Month of the Sorrows of Mary_

There is a new sharpness in the air—the first sharpness of Winter returning. There is a sharpness which is only just not the sharpness of frost on the dew that lies so late and thick upon the morning grass. The winds sleep, and the air is bound. But this sharpness and stillness are not as in frozen January, for they are no longer sterile—they are rich, fruitful, golden. Up into the still air ascends the straight blue smoke-column of the bonfires that consume the dross of summer, and in that burning there is a sweetness, a richness that makes the heart beat quickly and almost chokes the breath. There is no perfume like that of a September garden fire, burning away the summer in an agony of sweetness. The smoke of it goes up like incense through the gold and blue of the afternoon. The breath of the earth is like incense as she turns slowly to her sleep. The earth is emptied of her harvests, but not of their perfume—it hangs still about her, perfume of the crops she has brought forth, corn and hops and hay, merged into one rich sweetness in the September sunshine. She is stripped but she still is sweet, indeed sweeter in this autumn spoliation than ever in her sun-baked fertilities of Summer, just as the trees are lovelier in their golden dying than in the pale austerity of their budding or in the green monotony of their July crown. The trees are still bearing fruit. The crimson of the apples hides among the golden green of the leaves. September is the month of the fruitful trees, of the harvest of the golden bough. The field has given up the last of her harvests, but the orchard is still heavy, and in the wild trees of the woods the acorns, the nuts, the sloes are ripe among the yellowing leaves.

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Two women stand at the foot of two trees. The women are weeping, the trees are heavy with fruit. Eve stands at the foot of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—Mary stands at the foot of the Cross. Both are Matres Dolorosæ—sorrowful mothers—Eve the mother of all living, Mary the mother of life. Eve has betrayed her children, through the perverse choice of her will, but weeps for herself rather than for them—Mary has been redeemed by her child through the offering of her will, and she weeps for him alone.

The sorrows of Mary are fertile sorrows—the ground watered by her tears is rich for all mankind, whereas the tears of Eve water only thorns and thistles, cockle and darnel. The sorrows of Mary are sweet as the perfume of the September fires, they go up as incense to heaven. The sorrows of Eve are bitter as the smoke of green wood, and the gusts of her self-love blow them along the ground.

It is not the first time that Eve and Mary have stood over against each other in the scheme of the ages. They are both the medium of creation, vessels of life, the material of the active, creative principle of the universe. But in Eve this material has failed, it thwarts the life that works in it, so that its energies are not only cramped but perverted. Eve fights against the power that uses her—hence her own suffering, and the apparent failure of the power, due to the defects of its instrument. For Eve has discovered herself, and uses her will for her own purposes, with the result that both her own purposes and the purposes of God as far as she is concerned are lost. She knows both good and evil, but can use neither. The serpent deceived her by biting his own tail and calling himself eternity, hence she is caught in the round of things and cannot escape.

Mary stands at the foot of the Cross as the second Eve. Once more the creative principle has sought a medium, and this time the medium has responded perfectly, so that the work of the new creation of the new heavens and the new earth has not been foiled by its instrument. Mary used her freedom, her will, not for herself but to further the purposes of God. She became as it were the collaborator of God by yielding herself as his handmaiden. As a reward he has made her a sharer of his joys and sorrows. The sorrows of Mary are fertile because they are the sorrows of the Cross. Every one of them, from the flight into Egypt till the moment when she holds the slain body of her son upon her knees, every one of them draws life from the fountain of the Precious Blood. The mother standing there weeps no vain tears of selfish grief nor vain regret—her sorrows are already united with the sacrifice of her Son, she offers them to God with his, for the purposes of redemption. Her sorrows are fruitful for the assistance of the world on its new ways, in company with all human sorrow which is offered at the foot of the Cross. They are part of the new processes of life—the sublimation of the old laws whereby nature groaned and travailed towards higher things; they are part of the supernatural evolution, in which sorrow is eucharistic, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

The sorrows of Mary go up to heaven in perfume, like the fires of September. Her motherhood burns in an agony of sweetness. She is the rich earth, scented and fertile, at the foot of the golden bough, now ripe for harvest.

October _Month of the Holy Angels_

The sky is black. The great moonless arch sweeps from horizon to horizon, high over the zenith. It is black, and utterly unlit except for a golden shimmer, a dust of light, which is less light than radiance, as it were a bloom upon the grape of darkness. Here and there against this background of darkness and dim bloom, the nearer constellations swing their homely shapes—the chair, the horse, the plough; and high across the heavens is the span of that great road, track of the sun’s chariot astray in mortal hands, the road of stars, where they lie like dust.

Looking up into the sky, into the blackness lit by radiant dust, we almost forget the earth under our feet. It shrinks in all this hugeness of space, and we ourselves shrink with it till we cry the age-long cry of those that watch the stars—“What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels....”

We see the earth as one of the smaller planets revolving round one of the smaller of the myriad suns that are as small dust in the small corner of the universe that is before our eyes. We see mankind as one of innumerable forms of life, some known, some unknown. Important in his small sphere, what is he in the spaceless immensity of the stars? Where does he rank in the scale of being, with its hierarchies that tower above him into eternity? Is he only a little lower than the angels?

We cannot count the suns we see—we cannot imagine the counting of the suns we do not see. We cannot count the miles, nor the years of the sky. We can only gaze upon it as it hangs above us in this moment of time, and use for our homely ends the faint glimpses we have down here of its wonderful order....

A red star suddenly cleaves the heavens. It appears to fly through them, though in reality it is far below them, burning because of its contact with the earth’s atmosphere, and only for that reason visible. It streaks the sky with a fading crimson gleam—then sinks among the woods and is lost.

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“How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning,”