July Month of the Precious Blood

July comes as the climax of the year, when the months have reached their solstice with the sun. The earth’s conversion is complete—she is born anew in the woods where the trees are heavy and dark with their full summer leafage, in the hedgerow where the honeysuckle hangs thick trails over the already thick briar-rose, in the fields where the hay is cut, and where the corn stands sunburnt and nearly ready for harvest.

Along the side of the Down the poppies grow in a scarlet streak—like blood. They splash the growing corn, and they flower too in the chalky aridity of the quarry outside the field. They are the brave pennons of July—gay and blood-red, the colour of life pulsing and triumphant, the colour of the field’s salvation and the earth’s victory.

James Weller “got salvation,” and in the year 1842 was published at Robertsbridge in Sussex, a little book called “The Wonders of Free Grace.” It is the story of Weller’s short life—packed into many halting, ungrammatical sentences, between dull brown covers, the colour of the lanes he trod. Yet if things were to appear in their hidden reality that book would be seen printed and bound in poppy scarlet, for it is written in blood—the heart’s blood of the “little man of Kent” and the Precious Blood which redeemed that heart and made it new.

“I was born in sin.” There is something Pauline in the opening phrase, which, however, means no more than that his parents were “very ignorant of the power of godliness.” They were poor simple people, the father a farm labourer earning a lean, uncertain living on the farms round Headcorn.

Little James was a puny child, terrified with dreams. A frail constitution and a hard life worked an excitable mind to the edge of religious mania, though in those days he had learned none of the jargon of damnation which Calvinism was to teach him later—he was a child of the Church, which provided for his physical as well as for his spiritual needs, since his family seem to have “come on the Parish” at a very early date.

When his father died they were left quite destitute, and the rigorous old Poor Law “put out” the wretched James to work on various farms. The spiritual history of those years reads like the blacker parts of “Grace Abounding”—he was convinced that he had committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. Many times he felt urged to take his own life, and he seems to have been unable to pass a pond or brook or well without contemplating in it release from the existence which was fast becoming unbearable. But he lived on, alternating frightful impulses towards suicide and dreams of a devouring hell, with hopes of release, of discovery and union—sometimes coming to him through the ministrations of the various sects in which he sought relief, sometimes in the pages (opened with ritual casualness) of that Book which, however, often scattered its comfort with trumpet-blasts of judgment.

Very different from the straining carefulness of his spiritual life was the extremely haphazard way in which he managed his worldly affairs. He drifted from farm to farm with his inefficient labour—many a hearty Kentish kick and curse must have followed him as he roamed head-in-air, soul-in-hell, through the tasks of his day. He was always ill, always poor, and yet at the age of twenty-one he married in Frittenden church a girl as penniless as himself. Then a painful internal complaint began to afflict him. He grew unable for all but the lightest farm work, and soon became so ill that he had to go into the infirmary at Maidstone. Here he fell under the influence of a pious Baptist lady, who visited him on behalf of the “Benefit Society for the Sick,” and to her he owed his deliverance from his “legal struggles,” since she taught him the doctrines of Election and of Uncovenanted Grace. But there was a bad time to be lived through first. His agonies of soul increased, the sortes biblicæ yielded only blasts of damnation, and then the day came when “I clearly saw the justice of God in my eternal overthrow, and actually bade adieu to the world with an Amen to my own destruction.” Immediately upon this surrender followed Illumination—“a sweet glowing, a brilliant light like the shining of silver. I sprang up and sang and wept and cried aloud for joy.”

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.

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.