THEMINISTER OF MERCY.
Leicester has the appearance of a new town as you glance at it, in your rapid course on the Midland Counties Railway. And, if the "locomotives" halt for a few minutes at a point on the line where you have a full view of the goodly borough, the momentary impression which numerous ancient church-towers gives you of the real antiquity of the place is soon effaced by the extensive rows of newly-built houses that stretch away on every side till they appear to cover almost the entire populous area on which you are gazing. Successive gusts of prosperity for the manufacturers, occurring at various periods during the last forty years,—too often followed by severe depressions,—have in fact swelled the town to more than double its size at the close of the last century.
Yet a few days' sojourn in the borough would afford a lover of antiquity no inferior treat. The massive wall and arched vaults of a ruin, believed tohave formed part of a temple of Janus during the ages that Britain was under Roman sway,—the ivied remains of the noble abbey where the imperious and vice-regal Wolsey "laid his bones,"—the sternly frowning "Newarke," or entrance-tower to the castle of the Grantmesnels, Bellomonts, Blanchmaines, De Montforts, Plantagenets, and other proud Earls of Leicester,—the solitary wooded mound on which the castle itself anciently stood,—the rich minute carving of the old churches,—the quaint interior of the old town-hall,—the grotesque exterior of much of the really ancient part of the town, composed of dwellings striped with timber and plaster, and decked with ornamented or overhanging gables,—dwellings wherein the soldiers of the fated kingly Crookt-back were billeted on the night before Bosworth-field,—these, and sundry other features of historic chronicle and change, could not fail to awaken eager interest in an antiquarian. Our story, however, concerns itself less with the outward than the inward, and regards rather the misery of the living than the pride of the dead.
Passing along the ancient line of highway from York to London, from the churchless burial-yard of St. Leonard, over the old North bridge, revealing the meandering Soar and the meadows of the old monks; by the curious Gothic west-door of the very ancient church of All Saints, that almost compels you to stop and look at it; and then, by the transversestreets, where the venerable "high cross" was taken down but a few years ago, and reaching that part of the ancient principal line of street called "Southgate," where modern Goths so lately took down that most interesting historical relic, the house in which the last regal Plantagenet slept the night before his death; (a splendid gable filled with a world of old English associations, and breathing a wholesome lesson to despotism from every atom of its mouldering substance!) the traveller would come to a ruinous-looking entry of a street on his right, bearing the chivalrous designation of "Red Cross Street." At the door of a low, crumbling house about halfway down this ancient bye-street, a dissenting minister stopped one winter's evening some eight-and-twenty years ago, to make his usual call of duty and benevolence. His gentle knock, however, was not answered; and, before he could repeat it, he was saluted hastily by a rich manufacturer, a member of his congregation, who was passing by on some business errand.
"You are the very man I wanted to see," said the minister in a very earnest tone, seizing the manufacturer by one arm, as if he feared the man of business might feel disposed to escape him: "I want half an hour's conversation with you, sir."
"But I cannot stay now, sir," replied the manufacturer; "will you join me in my morning ride in the gig to-morrow? Do, sir; it will do you good."
"I will, I will; thank you, sir," answered the minister, in a quick, nervous way that seemed to be usual with him; and they shook hands with great apparent fervour, and bid each other "good night."
The dissenting minister did not find entrance into the low, ruined-looking house, until a neighbour or two had forced open the door. A light was then brought, and a picture of affecting interest was revealed. A venerable silver-haired man lay breathing his last; and by the side of his humble bed, with folded hands, knelt she who had been the partaker of his joys and sorrows for sixty years, lost to all consciousness except that of mental prayer for her departing husband. The sound of the minister's voice seemed to arouse her for a moment; but she relapsed again into complete obliviousness of all things, save the one absorbing feeling created by the view of that gasping pallid form that lay before her. So the minister knelt, likewise; and when the neighbours who had entered with him had followed his example he prayed audibly and earnestly, yet so reverently and pathetically, that, while he prayed and wept, the neighbours thought themselves in the presence of some superior being, with a soul of compass to embrace and bless the whole human race, rather than a mere mortal. The face of the dying man kindled, too, with wondrous feeling, when he heard the sounds of that well-known and beloved voice, though he had seemed past consciousness but a few momentsbefore. And when the minister paused in his petition, and saw the aged man's look fixed upon him, he said, with unutterable sweetness and tenderness,—
"William, my dear old friend, is all well within?—is your hope still blooming and full of immortality?"
The aged man raised his withered right hand with a last effort—waved it thrice—smiled with an ineffable smile,—and expired!
The minister was raising the aged and speechless widow from her kneeling posture, and placing her in an arm-chair, when her married daughter and several other neighbours entered the house of death. The minister recognised the daughter, and, after committing the widow earnestly to her care, emptied his waistcoat pocket of the silver it contained, and gave it, without counting, into the hands of the astonished young woman, who stood staring, while the good man snatched up his hat, and, saying "God bless you all! I'll call again to-morrow: God bless you all!" hurried away in a moment.——
A tall, grave-looking man, in the habit of a gentleman, bowed courteously to the dissenting minister, as he was turning the corner of the High Street, and, addressing him by his name, uttered the customary observations on the severity of the weather.
"Ah, my dear sir," spake the dissenting minister, unable, from the state of his feelings, to answer inthe same strain, "I wish I had had you with me a quarter of an hour ago."
"Why, sir?" asked the gentleman.
"That you might have seen, for yourself, how a Christian can die," answered the minister.
"Ah!" replied the gentleman, with a look of serious concern, "there you, and all truly Christian ministers, find a field of more exalted enterprise than the whole world of turmoil and strife, put together, can furnish. I envy you, my dear sir—I envy you, more than I can express to you."
"It is, indeed, a field of exalted, of truly glorious enterprise, the visiting of death-beds—the pouring of heavenly consolation into the spirit that is leaving its frail clay tabernacle, and the gladdening of the human wretchedness which is left to mourn and weep," burst forth the good minister, forgetting that he stood in the bleak, cold, open street, and not in his pulpit; "but, oh, my good friend, what a dark, disconsolate scene would your Free-thinking make of the chamber of death, were it as universally spread as you wish it to be!"
"It is there where you always have the advantage of me, sir," rejoined the gentleman; "I have acknowledged it, again and again; and I feel the force of that reflection so powerfully, sometimes, that I half resolve to spend the remainder of my life in some scheme of philanthropy, and, meanwhile, join in persuading men to believe Christianity, althoughI do not believe its historical evidences are worth a straw——"
"But that would be wrong, sir!" said the minister interrupting the other, very earnestly.
"So I think, sir," continued the gentleman; "and yet I feel sometimes as if I should become guilty of a crime by striving to take away what I regard as a pleasant deceit from men,—their chance, by imbibing a full confidence in Christianity, of expiring not merely with calmness, but with rapturous joy and triumph. Free-thinking will never enable even the largest intellect, the most highly cultivated man, to die thus; much less will it give such a death to an imperfectly educated or ignorant man. But then, I reflect again, that it would be morally and veritably criminal in me to join in strengthening what I sincerely believe to be falsehood."
"And so it would, sir," said the dissenting minister, taking the gentleman's arm, who offered it, that they might walk on to avoid some degree of the cold; "so it would, sir: it would render you a very contemptible creature. Let me tell you, sir, that with all the delight I experience in fulfilling some little of my duty as a Christian minister, the remembrance of it would not move me one inch towards the bed of a dying man with the view of offering him the consolations of revealed religion—if I believed such consolations to be a mere farce. I would scorn to mock him with false hopes. You know how deeplyI regret your scepticism, my dear sir; but I would not see you veil it through a spurious tenderness. No, sir: truth and sincerity are the purest jewels in human character; even pity and benevolence, themselves, are gems of inferior water."
"I wish all Christians were like yourself," said the gentleman, after a pause of admiration for the great and good being with whom he felt it a real privilege to walk; "but I see so little practice of goodness from the hundreds around me who profess a religion that enthrones it, that the sight tends much to confirm me in my old opinions."
"Indeed, sir," observed the minister, in a very grave tone, "I must tell you that you will be guilty of great self-deceit, if you imagine that the wickedness of hypocrites, or the slackness of lukewarm professors, will form a valid excuse for your rejection of Christ's mission, should you, one day, prove it true."
"I know it, my dear sir," replied the gentleman; "I know it well; though I thank you for your kind and well-meant zeal in reminding me of it. I will tell you one thought of mine, however,—and it is one that fixes itself very forcibly before my judgment,—if callousness to the sufferings of their workmen continues to increase among the manufacturers as rapidly as it has increased for the last ten years, Christianity will be openly scoffed at by the poor of the next generation, in the very streets where we are now walking."
"You have only expressed what I expressed last Sunday morning from my own pulpit, sir," returned the minister,—seeming too deeply affected with his strong belief of the probability of such an event to be able to add more.
"I hear that the wretched framework-knitters suffer more and more from abatements of wages and other encroachments upon their means of subsistence, of the most unfeeling and unprincipled character," resumed the gentleman; "and although hundreds are without work at the present time, and the complaints of suffering from want of food, fuel, and clothing, are so loud and frequent, yet not a single rich manufacturer of the many that profess religion, in Leicester, proposes to open a public subscription for the poor, according to the humane custom of past times. I heard a whisper that you had begun to stir up the languid charity of some of your friends towards the commencement of a subscription: was I rightly informed, sir?"
"It is the very subject I intend to broach to Mr.——, to-morrow morning," replied the minister, with an enthusiastic glow suffusing his expressive face.
"Please place your own name for that sum somewhere on the list," said the gentleman, taking a note for 20l.out of his pocket-book and giving it to the minister.
The good preacher was trying to stifle his gratefultears, in order to thank the sceptic,—but the latter bowed and strode away; and the good preacher, as he walked towards his own house in deep reflective silence, had many thoughts of the true interpretation of such words as "infidel" and "Christian" that would have startled his audience, if he had uttered them before it on the following Sunday.
In spite of an agonised bodily system, the minister was early abroad the next morning, and his glorious brow beamed with pleasure, when the maid-servant announced that the rich manufacturer's gig was at the door, and the conversation was near that he hoped would result in the effective commencement of a subscription to relieve the misery, and hunger, and cold, and disease, under which the depressed stockingers and their families were groaning that severe winter. Yet the philanthropist, with all his guilelessness, knew the man he had to deal with, and proceeded in a somewhat circumlocutory way to his object. In the end, he enforced the claims of man as a brother, the admirableness and divinity of charity, and the indefeasible rights of the working man as a substantial agent in the creation of wealth, with so much of the potentiality of his transcendent eloquence, that the manufacturer, in spite of the resistance his heart's avarice made to the godlike theme, assented to the proposal that he should begin the public subscription. But how heart-stricken with grief and shame did the golden-tongued pleader feel when, on producing thelittle book he had prepared for collecting the names of subscribers, the rich manufacturer hesitated as soon as he had written his name, bit the end of his cedar pencil, and then hastily put five pounds at the end of his name! The minister did not thank him, for his soul was too noble to permit his tongue to utter one word which his heart would not accompany: but he had, again, some peculiar thoughts about the true interpretation of the words "infidel" and "Christian."
Neither was the good man to be damped by such an inauspicious beginning; but begging Mr.——would not drive on again till he, the minister, had got safely out of the gig, bid the rich churl "good morning," posted away to the house of another "of whom the world was not worthy," but with whom Leicester was likewise blessed at that time: the Rev. Mr. Robinson, vicar of St. Mary's, stayed till that good man formed a little collecting book, and then left him to divide the work of canvassing the town for names to form the subscription list. Assisted occasionally by others, the dissenting minister persevered, till, in the lapse of several days, and at the cost to himself of excruciating visitations of increased pain in the night season, he completed such a list as gave effectual relief to the hundreds of his suffering fellow-creatures then inhabiting Leicester.
That labour was no sooner ended than he commenced a close inquiry into the real state of thestaple trade of the town; and, finding that the reports of oppression and extortion, the foul fruits of avaricious competition, were not exaggerated, he sat down and wrote an appeal in behalf of the suffering framework-knitters that might have jeopardied the favour and acceptance of a less able preacher with the wealthier members of his congregation.
It might be imprudent to go on: the starving stockingers of Leicester have no longer such an advocate; and, as highly as some profess to esteem the memory of the truly good, they may feel angered by this introduction of a portrait which, as imperfectly as it is delineated, they will already have recognised to their shame. If a stranger to old Leicester should ask whose is the portrait this faint limning is intended to call to memory, it is hoped it will not be deemed an act of desecration to introduce, in a volume of merely fugitive essays, a name too truly holy to be lightly mentioned,—a name inscribed, ineffaceably, in English literature, by the sunbeam of his peerless and hallowed eloquence to whom it belonged,—the name ofRobert Hall.