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Old Portraits, Modern Sketches, Personal Sketches and Tributes

J >> John Greenleaf Whittier >> Old Portraits, Modern Sketches, Personal Sketches and Tributes




"This temptation did put me to such scares, lest I should at sometimes, I
say, consent thereto, and be overcome therewith, that, by the very force
of my mind, my very body would be put into action or motion, by way of
pushing or thrusting with my hands or elbows; still answering, as fast as
the destroyer said, Sell him, I will not, I will not, I will not; no, not
for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds; thus reckoning, lest I
should set too low a value on him, even until I scarce well knew where I
was, or how to be composed again.

"But to be brief: one morning, as I did lie in my bed, I was, as at other
times, most fiercely assaulted with this temptation, to sell and part
with Christ; the wicked suggestion still running in my mind, Sell him,
sell him, sell him, sell him, sell him, as fast as a man could speak;
against which, also, in my mind, as at other times, I answered, No, no,
not for thousands, thousands, thousands, at least twenty times together;
but at last, after much striving, I felt this thought pass through my
heart, Let him go if he will; and I thought also, that I felt my heart
freely consent thereto. Oh, the diligence of Satan! Oh, the
desperateness of man's heart!

"Now was the battle won, and down fell I, as a bird that is shot from the
top of a tree, into great guilt, and fearful despair. Thus getting out
of my bed, I went moping into the field; but God knows with as heavy a
heart as mortal man, I think, could bear; where, for the space of two
hours, I was like a man bereft of life; and, as now, past all recovery,
and bound over to eternal punishment.

"And withal, that Scripture did seize upon my soul: 'Or profane person,
as Esau, who, for one morsel of meat, sold his birthright; for ye know,
how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was
rejected; for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it
carefully with tears."

For two years and a half, as he informs us, that awful scripture sounded
in his ears like the knell of a lost soul. He believed that he had
committed they unpardonable sin. His mental anguish 'was united with
bodily illness and suffering. His nervous system became fearfully
deranged; his limbs trembled; and he supposed this visible tremulousness
and agitation to be the mark of Cain. 'Troubled with pain and
distressing sensations in his chest, he began to fear that his breast-
bone would split open, and that he should perish like Judas Iscariot. He
feared that the tiles of the houses would fall upon him as he walked in
the streets. He was like his own Man in the Cage at the House of the
Interpreter, shut out from the promises, and looking forward to certain
judgment. "Methought," he says, "the very sun that shineth in heaven did
grudge to give me light." And still the dreadful words, "He found no
place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears," sounded
in the depths of his soul. They were, he says, like fetters of brass to
his legs, and their continual clanking followed him for months.
Regarding himself elected and predestined for damnation, he thought that
all things worked for his damage and eternal overthrow, while all things
wrought for the best and to do good to the elect and called of God unto
salvation. God and all His universe had, he thought, conspired against
him; the green earth, the bright waters, the sky itself, were written
over with His irrevocable curse.

Well was it said by Bunyan's contemporary, the excellent Cudworth, in his
eloquent sermon before the Long Parliament, that "We are nowhere
commanded to pry into the secrets of God, but the wholesome advice given
us is this: 'To make our calling and election sure.' We have no warrant
from Scripture to peep into the hidden rolls of eternity, to spell out
our names among the stars." "Must we say that God sometimes, to exercise
His uncontrollable dominion, delights rather in plunging wretched souls
down into infernal night and everlasting darkness? What, then, shall we
make the God of the whole world? Nothing but a cruel and dreadful
_Erinnys_, with curled fiery snakes about His head, and firebrands in His
hand; thus governing the world! Surely, this will make us either
secretly think there is no God in the world, if He must needs be such, or
else to wish heartily there were none." It was thus at times with
Bunyan. He was tempted, in this season of despair, to believe that there
was no resurrection and no judgment.

One day, he tells us, a sudden rushing sound, as of wind or the wings of
angels, came to him through the window, wonderfully sweet and pleasant;
and it was as if a voice spoke to him from heaven words of encouragement
and hope, which, to use his language, commanded, for the time, "a silence
in his heart to all those tumultuous thoughts that did use, like
masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noise
within him." About this time, also, some comforting passages of
Scripture were called to mind; but he remarks, that whenever he strove to
apply them to his case, Satan would thrust the curse of Esau in his face,
and wrest the good word from him. The blessed promise "Him that cometh
to me, I will in no wise cast out" was the chief instrumentality in
restoring his lost peace. He says of it: "If ever Satan and I did strive
for any word of God in all my life, it was for this good word of Christ;
he at one end, and I at the other. Oh, what work we made! It was for
this in John, I say, that we did so tug and strive; he pulled, and I
pulled, but, God be praised! I overcame him; I got sweetness from it.
Oh, many a pull hath my heart had with Satan for this blessed sixth
chapter of John!" Who does not here call to mind the struggle between
Christian and Apollyon in the valley!

That was no fancy sketch; it was the narrative of the author's own
grapple with the Spirit of Evil. Like his ideal Christian, he "conquered
through Him that loved him." Love wrought the victory the Scripture of
Forgiveness overcame that of Hatred.

He never afterwards relapsed into that state of religious melancholy from
which he so hardly escaped. He speaks of his deliverance as the waking
out of a troublesome dream. His painful experience was not lost upon
him; for it gave him, ever after, a tender sympathy for the weak, the
sinful, the ignorant, and desponding. In some measure, he had been
"touched with the feeling of their infirmities." He could feel for those
in the bonds of sin and despair, as bound with them. Hence his power as
a preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to all
the variety of spiritual conditions. Like Fearing, he had lain a month
in the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholy
bass of spiritual heaviness. With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into the
hands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along his
difficult way upon the crutches of Ready-to-halt. Who better than
himself could describe the condition of Despondency, and his daughter
Much-afraid, in the dungeon of Doubting Castle? Had he not also fallen
among thieves, like Little-faith?

His account of his entering upon the solemn duties of a preacher of the
Gospel is at once curious and instructive. He deals honestly with
himself, exposing all his various moods, weaknesses, doubts, and
temptations. "I preached," he says, "what I felt; for the terrors of the
law and the guilt of transgression lay heavy on my conscience. I have
been as one sent to them from the dead. I went, myself in chains, to
preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my conscience which I
persuaded them to beware of." At times, when he stood up to preach,
blasphemies and evil doubts rushed into his mind, and he felt a strong
desire to utter them aloud to his congregation; and at other seasons,
when he was about to apply to the sinner some searching and fearful text
of Scripture, he was tempted to withhold it, on the ground that it
condemned himself also; but, withstanding the suggestion of the Tempter,
to use his own simile, he bowed himself like Samson to condemn sin
wherever he found it, though he brought guilt and condemnation upon
himself thereby, choosing rather to die with the Philistines than to deny
the truth.

Foreseeing the consequences of exposing himself to the operation of the
penal laws by holding conventicles and preaching, he was deeply afflicted
at the thought of the suffering and destitution to which his wife and
children might be exposed by his death or imprisonment. Nothing can be
more touching than his simple and earnest words on this point. They show
how warm and deep were him human affections, and what a tender and loving
heart he laid as a sacrifice on the altar of duty.

"I found myself a man compassed with infirmities; the parting with my
wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling
the flesh from the bones; and also it brought to my mind the many
hardships, miseries, and wants, that my poor family was like to meet
with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who
lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I
thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces.

"Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion
in this world! thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold,
nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind
should blow upon thee. But yet, thought I, I must venture you all with
God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you: oh! I saw I was as a man
who was pulling down his house upon the heads of his wife and children;
yet I thought on those 'two milch kine that were to carry the ark of God
into another country, and to leave their calves behind them.'

"But that which helped me in this temptation was divers considerations:
the first was, the consideration of those two Scriptures, 'Leave thy
fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust
in me;' and again, 'The Lord said, verily it shall go well with thy
remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat them well in the time
of evil.'"

He was arrested in 1660, charged with "devilishly and perniciously
abstaining from church," and of being "a common upholder of
conventicles." At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to have
been conducted somewhat like that of Faithful at Vanity Fair, he was
sentenced to perpetual banishment. This sentence, however, was never
executed, but he was remanded to Bedford jail, where he lay a prisoner
for twelve years.

Here, shut out from the world, with no other books than the Bible and
Fox's Martyrs, he penned that great work which has attained a wider and
more stable popularity than any other book in the English tongue. It is
alike the favorite of the nursery and the study. Many experienced
Christians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel himself would
not willingly let it die. Men of all sects read it with delight, as in
the main a truthful representation of the 'Christian pilgrimage, without
indeed assenting to all the doctrines which the author puts in the month
of his fighting sermonizer, Great-heart, or which may be deduced from
some other portions of his allegory. A recollection of his fearful
sufferings, from misapprehension of a single text in the Scriptures,
relative to the question of election, we may suppose gave a milder tone
to the theology of his Pilgrim than was altogether consistent with the
Calvinism of the seventeenth century. "Religion," says Macaulay, "has
scarcely ever worn a form so calm and soothing as in Bunyan's allegory."
In composing it, he seems never to have altogether lost sight of the
fact, that, in his life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed
promise recorded by the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally
found on the Genevan side of the argument. Little did the short-sighted
persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they closed upon him the door of
Bedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to His
own glory and the worldwide renown of their victim. In the solitude of
his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had long
flitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape
and coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, and
arrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, no
longer self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace,
expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display
of its wonders. To this creative faculty of his mind might have been
aptly applied the language which George Wither, a contemporary prisoner,
addressed to his Muse:--

"The dull loneness, the black shade
Which these hanging vaults have made,
The rude portals that give light
More to terror than delight;
This my chamber of neglect,
Walled about with disrespect,--
From all these, and this dull air,
A fit object for despair,
She hath taught me by her might,
To draw comfort and delight."

That stony cell of his was to him like the rock of Padan-aram to the
wandering Patriarch. He saw angels ascending and descending. The House
Beautiful rose up before him, and its holy sisterhood welcomed him. He
looked, with his Pilgrim, from the Chamber of Peace. The Valley of
Humiliation lay stretched out beneath his eye, and he heard "the curious,
melodious note of the country birds, who sing all the day long in the
spring time, when the flowers appear, and the sun shines warm, and make
the woods and groves and solitary places glad." Side by side with the
good Christiana and the loving Mercy, he walked through the green and
lowly valley, "fruitful as any the crow flies over," through "meadows
beautiful with lilies;" the song of the poor but fresh-faced shepherd-
boy, who lived a merry life, and wore the herb heartsease in his bosom,
sounded through his cell:--

"He that is down need fear no fall;
He that is low no pride."

The broad and pleasant "river of the Water of Life" glided peacefully
before him, fringed "on either side with green trees, with all manner of
fruit," and leaves of healing, with "meadows beautified with lilies, and
green all the year long;" he saw the Delectable Mountains, glorious with
sunshine, overhung with gardens and orchards and vineyards; and beyond
all, the Land of Beulah, with its eternal sunshine, its song of birds,
its music of fountains, its purple clustered vines, and groves through
which walked the Shining Ones, silver-winged and beautiful.

What were bars and bolts and prison-walls to him, whose eyes were
anointed to see, and whose ears opened to hear, the glory and the
rejoicing of the City of God, when the pilgrims were conducted to its
golden gates, from the black and bitter river, with the sounding
trumpeters, the transfigured harpers with their crowns of gold, the sweet
voices of angels, the welcoming peal of bells in the holy city, and the
songs of the redeemed ones? In reading the concluding pages of the first
part of Pilgrim's Progress, we feel as if the mysterious glory of the
Beatific Vision was unveiled before us. We are dazzled with the excess
of light. We are entranced with the mighty melody; overwhelmed by the
great anthem of rejoicing spirits. It can only be adequately described
in the language of Milton in respect to the Apocalypse, as "a seven-fold
chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."

Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old English
confessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution baffled and in
the end overcame the tyranny of the Established Church in the reign of
Charles II. What Milton and Penn and Locke wrote in defence of Liberty,
Bunyan lived out and acted. He made no concessions to worldly rank.
Dissolute lords and proud bishops he counted less than the humblest and
poorest of his disciples at Bedford. When first arrested and thrown into
prison, he supposed he should be called to suffer death for his faithful
testimony to the truth; and his great fear was, that he should not meet
his fate with the requisite firmness, and so dishonor the cause of his
Master. And when dark clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for a
sufficient evidence that in the event of his death it would be well with
him, he girded up his soul with the reflection, that, as he suffered for
the word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth
from it. "I will leap," he says, "off the ladder blindfold into
eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou wilt
catch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!"

The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled the
false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in the
development of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its history is
bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts
of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say what we may of its
fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant enjoyment of newly
acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now venture to deny that
it was the golden age of England? Who that regards freedom above
slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and lamentation of those
interested in the continuance of the old order of things, against the
prevalence of sects and schism, but who, at the same time, as Milton
shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves
than the rending of the Church? Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with
the Defence of Unlicensed Printing before him? Who scoff at Quakerism
over the Journal of George Fox? Who shall join with debauched lordlings
and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers,
after rising from the perusal of Pilgrim's Progress? "There were giants
in those days." And foremost amidst that band of liberty-loving and God-
fearing men,

"The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,
Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight,"

stands the subject of our sketch, the Tinker of Elstow. Of his high
merit as an author there is no longer any question. The Edinburgh Review
expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared
that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those
which produced Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress.






THOMAS ELLWOOD.

Commend us to autobiographies! Give us the veritable notchings of
Robinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life long
since swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand the
very dust of which has become undistinguishable. The foolishest egotist
who ever chronicled his daily experiences, his hopes and fears, poor
plans and vain reachings after happiness, speaking to us out of the Past,
and thereby giving us to understand that it was quite as real as our
Present, is in no mean sort our benefactor, and commands our attention,
in spite of his folly. We are thankful for the very vanity which
prompted him to bottle up his poor records, and cast them into the great
sea of Time, for future voyagers to pick up. We note, with the deepest
interest, that in him too was enacted that miracle of a conscious
existence, the reproduction of which in ourselves awes and perplexes us.
He, too, had a mother; he hated and loved; the light from old-quenched
hearths shone over him; he walked in the sunshine over the dust of those
who had gone before him, just as we are now walking over his. These
records of him remain, the footmarks of a long-extinct life, not of mere
animal organism, but of a being like ourselves, enabling us, by studying
their hieroglyphic significance, to decipher and see clearly into the
mystery of existence centuries ago. The dead generations live again in
these old self-biographies. Incidentally, unintentionally, yet in the
simplest and most natural manner, they make us familiar with all the
phenomena of life in the bygone ages. We are brought in contact with
actual flesh-and-blood men and women, not the ghostly outline figures
which pass for such, in what is called History. The horn lantern of the
biographer, by the aid of which, with painful minuteness, he chronicled,
from day to day, his own outgoings and incomings, making visible to us
his pitiful wants, labors, trials, and tribulations of the stomach and of
the conscience, sheds, at times, a strong clear light upon
contemporaneous activities; what seemed before half fabulous, rises up in
distinct and full proportions; we look at statesmen, philosophers, and
poets, with the eyes of those who lived perchance their next-door
neighbors, and sold them beer, and mutton, and household stuffs, had
access to their kitchens, and took note of the fashion of their wigs and
the color of their breeches. Without some such light, all history would
be just about as unintelligible and unreal as a dimly remembered dream.

The journals of the early Friends or Quakers are in this respect
invaluable. Little, it is true, can be said, as a general thing, of
their literary merits. Their authors were plain, earnest men and women,
chiefly intent upon the substance of things, and having withal a strong
testimony to bear against carnal wit and outside show and ornament. Yet,
even the scholar may well admire the power of certain portions of George
Fox's Journal, where a strong spirit clothes its utterance in simple,
downright Saxon words; the quiet and beautiful enthusiasm of Pennington;
the torrent energy of Edward Burrough; the serene wisdom of Penn; the
logical acuteness of Barclay; the honest truthfulness of Sewell; the wit
and humor of John Roberts, (for even Quakerism had its apostolic jokers
and drab-coated Robert Halls;) and last, not least, the simple beauty of
Woolman's Journal, the modest record of a life of good works and love.

Let us look at the Life of Thomas Ellwood. The book before us is a
hardly used Philadelphia reprint, bearing date of 1775. The original was
published some sixty years before. It is not a book to be found in
fashionable libraries, or noticed in fashionable reviews, but is none the
less deserving of attention.

Ellwood was born in 1639, in the little town of Crowell, in Oxfordshire.
Old Walter, his father, was of "gentlemanly lineage," and held a
commission of the peace under Charles I. One of his most intimate
friends was Isaac Pennington, a gentleman of estate and good reputation,
whose wife, the widow of Sir John Springette, was a lady of superior
endowments. Her only daughter, Gulielma, was the playmate and companion
of Thomas. On making this family a visit, in 1658, in company with his
father, he was surprised to find that they had united with the Quakers, a
sect then little known, and everywhere spoken against. Passing through
the vista of nearly two centuries, let us cross the threshold, and look
with the eyes of young Ellwood upon this Quaker family. It will
doubtless give us a good idea of the earnest and solemn spirit of that
age of religious awakening.

"So great a change from a free, debonair, and courtly sort of behavior,
which we had formerly found there, into so strict a gravity as they now
received us with, did not a little amuse us, and disappointed our
expectations of such a pleasant visit as we had promised ourselves.

"For my part, I sought, and at length found, means to cast myself into
the company of the daughter, whom I found gathering flowers in the
garden, attended by her maid, also a Quaker. But when I addressed her
after my accustomed manner, with intention to engage her in discourse on
the foot of our former acquaintance, though she treated me with a
courteous mien, yet, as young as she was, the gravity of her looks and
behavior struck such an awe upon me, that I found myself not so much
master of myself as to pursue any further converse with her.

"We staid dinner, which was very handsome, and lacked nothing to
recommend it to me but the want of mirth and pleasant discourse, which we
could neither have with them, nor, by reason of them, with one another;
the weightiness which was upon their spirits and countenances keeping
down the lightness that would have been up in ours."

Not long after, they made a second visit to their sober friends, spending
several days, during which they attended a meeting, in a neighboring
farmhouse, where we are introduced by Ellwood to two remarkable
personages, Edward Burrough, the friend and fearless reprover of
Cromwell, and by far the most eloquent preacher of his sect and James
Nayler, whose melancholy after-history of fanaticism, cruel sufferings,
and beautiful repentance, is so well known to the readers of English
history under the Protectorate. Under the preaching of these men, and
the influence of the Pennington family, young Ellwood was brought into
fellowship with the Quakers. Of the old Justice's sorrow and indignation
at this sudden blasting of his hopes and wishes in respect to his son,
and of the trials and difficulties of the latter in his new vocation, it
is now scarcely worth while to speak. Let us step forward a few years,
to 1662, considering meantime how matters, political and spiritual, are
changed in that brief period. Cromwell, the Maccabeus of Puritanism, is
no longer among men; Charles the Second sits in his place; profane and
licentious cavaliers have thrust aside the sleek-haired, painful-faced
Independents, who used to groan approval to the Scriptural illustrations
of Harrison and Fleetwood; men easy of virtue, without sincerity, either
in religion or politics, occupying the places made honorable by the
Miltons, Whitlocks, and Vanes of the Commonwealth. Having this change in
view, the light which the farthing candle of Ellwood sheds upon one of
these illustrious names will not be unwelcome. In his intercourse with
Penn, and other learned Quakers, he had reason to lament his own
deficiencies in scholarship, and his friend Pennington undertook to put
him in a way of remedying the defect.

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