The First Crossing
III
THE FIRST CROSSING
To Mrs. Lawrence Aet. 42.
AT SEA, JAN. 18, 1874
It seems very strange to break off so completely from my old life in this way, and to look forward to one so utterly new.
Oh how I do hope there won't be any change in any of you while I am away, except to grow more trusting.
Don't you grow any older any of you —tell dear sweet sister Sarah Little this too—don't get any fatter nor any thinner, nor any anything, but just let me come back and find the same old two and six- 'pences I left a week ago.
I cannot bear the thought of any change.
To Miss Sarah Beck Aet. 42.
STOKE NEWINGTON, fan. 22, 1874 Robert met us at a station a little out of London, and there was a jubilant meeting : only that he looked so very Englishy, that we hardly knew him at first.
— He seems pretty well just now, and I do trust it will be permanent.
He is working very hard, and I am amazed that it does not kill him.
He seems to expect nothing else but that I will plunge into the work with 1 E1.W.S. and her four children settled into the furnished house at Stoke Newington, which her husband had rented for his family, and from which she wrote to an English friend.
L.P.S. aI
A RELIGIOUS
REBEL equal zeal, but I have not felt any guidance as yet in reference to it, except in the direction of the Friends.
John Taylor spoke to me to-day about giving a series of Bible Lessons in Devonshire Place Meeting
House.
But I told him I really could not consent to do it unless the Friends had first heard me, and were fully alive to the purport of my message.
He therefore proposed, and we agreed, to invite a number of Friends to come to our house next 4th day evening to hear one of my lessons, and this evening the invitations have all been sent out.
So thou must imagine me on that evening before this tribunal.
I do hope they will like me, for I burn to see this glorious life of faith becoming once more the realised experience of my dearly loved Society.
But if they do not like me, then I shall know God has not chosen me to help in the great work among Friends here, and shall be perfectly content.
My heart does yearn over Friends so.
Feb. 7, 1874 My meeting here last 4th day evening passed off quite satisfactorily, I think, and yesterday the Friends met for the purpose of deciding whether to invite me to give them a series of Bible readings.
A note from J. Taylor this morning says they were unanimous in wishing it, and he is to come this evening to tell me about the arrangements.
To Miss Sarah Beck Aet. 42.
March 25, 1874 I am going to-day by appointment to meet the Duchess of Sutherland, at a Lady Ashburton's ; and *See Note I at end of Chapter.
THE FIRST CROSSING
then to lunch with Lady Gainsborough, and I must hasten off to get ready.
To Mrs. Henry Ford Barclay 3 Aet. 42.
VENTNOR, June 5, 1874 Whenever I think of you, I always think at the same time of an old legend of a lovely lady, upon whose house the sunshine always rested, even when all was storm and darkness around.
The fame of this reached the ears of the Bishop, who went to see her that he might discover by what austerities or self-denials she had gained such wondrous favour.
But he found that they all came from the utter simplicity and childlikeness of her faith, and that her life had no austerities in it, but only great love.
To her husband, Robert Pearsall Smith Aet. 43.
; PHILADELPHIA, April 27, 1875 I cannot ever again go into any English household, and ask their servants to lift our heavy American trunks.
I do not suppose they will think a woman's book worth attacking, but in case they might, thee had better wash thy hands of it at once by proclaiming everywhere what an irrepressible wife thee has, who will say her say in her own way, and cannot be tamed.
For I shall not alter a line to please anybody.
Every line I write is a pure favour to the world, and I ask no favours from anybody.?
1 One of the Gurneys; she had married the brewer, who lived at Monkhams, in Essex.
2 She was referring, of course, to her most famous book, The Christian' s Secret of a Happy Life.
A RELIGIOUS REBEL
The separation from thee is very hard, but if it is right for thee to go, we must try and bear it cheerfully, for I am sure it is not right for me to go around with thee, now while the children need me so constantly.
We shall have to take up our cross in the matter of being separated, if thee must go.
I notice what thee says about not going back into business again, but have not said anything about it.
I cannot advise.
I suppose the Lord will care for us, if . thee really feels it thy duty ; but indeed, my darling husband, I cannot consent to live on other people.
I am sure it would not be right.
I can go and live over at the Barracks and economise, or I can go to work to gain our living myself.
But I cannot " sponge ", or live on collections or subscriptions.
PLEAsE do not ask me to do this.
I can see plainly that the Lord is calling thee to a life of devotion to His service, and I rejoice in it.
But I am sure it can be managed without our living on other people.
To her parents, Fohn and Mary Whitall Aet. 43.
MONKHAMS, ESSEX, May 26, 1875
At eleven we took the express train from Liverpool for London, with 27 articles of luggage, none of which, however, I am thankful to say, were very large.
It is the English fashion to travel with any amount of boxes, bandboxes, and bundles, and bags, but no heavy trunks, and while it is bothersome to the owner, it is
Beer merciful to the porters, and I fully approve Or it.
The worst of it is having no checks, and the necessity one is under of running after your luggage and looking it up at every change of train.
When we got to
THE FIRST CROSSING .
Willesden, the station at London where we were to meet Robert and change cars for Dalston, Robert and I just had to rush, without even exchanging a kiss, to hunt up the luggage, and did not dare to take time even to contemplate one another's countenances until it was all safely deposited in a small pyramid on the platform.
I could introduce some improvements into their railway arrangements here, if they would only consult me!
A very flagrant need of their travelling routes is water.
I went into a restaurant that was in the Depot and said to the woman there very mildly, " Can you tell me where I can get a drink of water?"
She was surrounded with bottles of wine, but no sign or token' was to be seen of any other drink. She looked at me in perfect amazement, and exclaimed in a tone of wonder, "Water!?"
"Yes," I replied; " water, water to drink."
'I suppose you can get it somewhere outside," she said much in the same way as she might have said, '' She supposed there were unicorns somewhere in the world, although she did not know where."
I do confess I felt like explaining matters to her with a little American enthusiasm.
_ We then tried the railway porters, who were standing about, and they said in the same dazed sort of way that they supposed there was some in the restaurant.
But we explained that we had tried there without success.
They consulted together and seemed utterly perplexed, but finally one man brightened up, as though he had at last hit it, and beckoned to us to follow him.
We obeyed, and after going down quite a flight of stairs to an underground platform, he unlocked a private room, and there triumphantly showed us a hydrant, with a broken glass goblet beside it. We hailed it with joy, as you may imagine.
A RELIGIOUS
REBEL Robert really seems very well, in spite of his heavy work, and the accounts he gives of the work on the Continent are even more marvellous than the letters were.
It really seems as if the whole German and Swiss Churches were moved to their very centre by his message of a full and a present salvation.
Hundreds are being converted just by the singing of that hymn *¢ Jesus erretet mich jetzt'.
Such is the enthusiasm that an order has come to a London photographer for 2000 of Robert's pictures, and the photographer has made so much money that he actually gave Robert
£50—nearly $300.00—to sit again.
A new way of making money, is it not?
And now it is evening, and Robert's one holiday has come to an end.
'To-morrow: morning we go in to Mr. Cowper Temple's to breakfast with Gladstone, who is coming there on purpose to meet Robert and have a talk with him.
[LATER] This morning we went to Friends' Meeting.
It was a very large meeting, and quite an interesting one.
Edward Backhouse gave a ringing testimony to full salvation, that did my very soul good.
His wife told me afterwards that she could hardly help laughing at the delighted expression of my face.
Charles Braithwaite and I kept nodding at one another all the while, across the meeting.
Edward Backhouse has come to attend the Conference, and so had Isaac Brown, who also spoke beautifully.
'' H.W.S.'", the irrepressible, must also needs have her say.
And behold, I found afterward that I had been preaching to John Bright and his wife and daughters.
Mr. Cowper Temple introduced me to them after meeting, and I had quite a little talk.
So now I have seen both Gladstone and Bright,
THE FIRST CROSSING
England's two great statesmen.
I must tell you one thing that Bright said to Mr. Cowper Temple about my speaking—that I was one of the few people who could preserve a natural conversational manner on their legs.
I think myself, to preserve it in Friends' meeting was quite as much.
But then I do feel so at home with all the dear Friends here, and they do make me so welcome, that I hardly could help being natural.
To her parents Aet. 43.
MONKHAMS, WOODFORD, June 13, 1875 Robert has had another £100 given him on account of the sale of his picture.
Eight thousand have been sent for from Germany! ...
I have the prospect of this nice time of rest .
. but I am only afraid the dear Swiss friends who were at Brighton will find me out, and make me hold meetings.
I have actually been thinking of disguising myself in a fashionable bonnet to avoid discovery, and Mrs. Cowper Temple proposed lending me one.
NOTE I (p. 22) She does not mention in her letters the awkward—indeed the critical— incident at this meeting, which very nearly ruined her Evangelical prospects in England; Lady Mount Temple (then Mrs. Cowper Temple) has recorded it in her Life of Lord Mount Temple : "' Hannah was sitting in a little circle of excellent orthodox friends, who had assembled to hear some of the good things that she had to impart, and she was there on examination.
'* She happened to have seen a funeral in the street, and as she spoke of it, we all put on the conventional look of sadness.
'Oh,' she said, 'when I meet a funeral I always give thanks for the brother or sister delivered from the trials and pains of this mortal state.'
How wonderful, I thought, and I could not help exclaiming, 'Is that possible?
Do you feel this about everybody ?'
I was indeed an enfant terrible.
She stopped a moment and looked around.
She was amongst a party of evangelicals, at a time when the universal hope was deemed a heresy,
A RELIGIOUS
REBEL and she was on her trial.
She owns that she went through a few moments of conflict.
But truth prevailed, and looking up, with her | bright glance, she said, ' Yes, about everybody, for I trust in the love
_of God.'
I yielded my heart at once to this manifestation of trust an love and candour."'
Logan Pearsall Smith, in Unforgotten Years, has described this event somewhat differently ; his mother, he says, had already been suspected of views not altogether sound on the matter of eternal torment.
Her husband andj her friends, who were in the know, advised circumspection, and "she had agreed that it would be wiser to give evasive answers on this point"', but, when the delicate moment came, "' she could not, she avowed to the assembled company, believe that the God she worshipped as a God of love was capable of such awful cruelty ; sinners, of course, He punished, but that He had decreed that their torments should be unending was to her a horrible belief.
Her audience were inexpressibly dismayed by this declaration ; the myrtle, in Keats's phrase 'sickened in a thousand wreaths'; the company was on the point of breaking up in confusion when from the depths of that great drawing-room there floated forward, swathed in rich Victorian draperies and laces, a tall and stately lady, who kissed my mother, and said,
' My dear, I don't believe it either.'
This lady, of course, was Mrs.
Cowper Temple."
He adds that but for this spectacular intervention, his parents might never have taken to preaching in England, "and the ties and friendships which drew us all back again to England would never have been formed'.
For—or so he implies—it was the worldly greatness of her new friend which saved H.W.S. from the consequences of her heresy. rd Logan Pearsall Smith, it must be admitted, possessed a picturesque and sometimes imaginative memory ; but it may be that Lady Mount
Temple over-decorously softened, in her telling of it, this momentous incident.
Lady Mount Temple was a Tollemache, and was the second wife of Lord Mount Temple (his first wife had been a Gurney).
"As well as being a hospitable leader of the evangelicals (Broadlands became almost a second home to the Pearsall Smiths), and a politician of advanced and high-minded views, he was a patron of the arts.
Rossetti used to stay at his house ; Christina Rossetti was invited there ; and, as a friend of Ruskin's, he was an original trustee of the Guild of St. George.
The religious conferences at Broadlands, where H.W.S. often preached, became famous.
Logan Pearsall Smith collected some descriptions of ae from obituary notices of Lady Mount Temple ; the house, it is said, was filled to the attics and many of the guests overflowed into the inns of Romsey.
Famous people attended, in the company of others less famous, and among the orators there had been noticed "a Jew who had been converted by studying the Law of Sacrifice, a negress who had been a slave, and a working printer who taught that sin was a disease', s