A Book Of Quaker Saints Part 38

'I thought some hot supper would be good for thee, neighbour Smith,'

said Mrs. Savery in her gentle voice, as she handed him some coffee in one of her favourite blue willow-pattern cups. But John Smith did not take the cup from her. Instead, he turned his back abruptly, went over to the high carved fireplace, and leaning down looking into the glowing coals, said in a choked voice, 'It is the first time I ever stole anything, and I can tell you I have felt very bad about it ever since. I don't know how it is. I am sure I didn't think once that I should ever come to be a thief. First I took to drinking and then to quarrelling. Since I began to go downhill everybody gives me a kick; you are the first people who have offered me a helping hand. My wife is sickly and my children are starving. You have sent them many a meal, G.o.d bless you! Yet I stole the hides from you, meaning to sell them the first chance I could get. But I tell you the truth when I say, drunkard as I am, it is the first time I was ever a thief.'

'Let it be the last time, my friend,' replied William Savery, 'and the secret shall remain between ourselves. Thou art still young, and it is within thy power to make up for lost time. Promise me that thou wilt not take any strong drink for a year, and I will employ thee myself in the tanyard at good wages. Perhaps we may find some employment for thy family also. The little boy can, at least, pick up stones. But eat a bit now, and drink some hot coffee; perhaps it will keep thee from craving anything stronger tonight.'

So saying, William Savery advanced, and taking his guest by the arm, gently forced him into a chair. Mrs. Savery pushed the cup towards him, and heaped his plate with her excellent meat-pies. The stranger took up the cup to drink, but his hand trembled so much that he could not put it to his lips. He tried to swallow a small mouthful of bread, but the effort nearly choked him. William Savery, seeing his guest's excited state, went on talking in his grave kind voice, to give him time, and help him to grow calm.

'Doubtless thou wilt find it hard to abstain from drink at first,' he continued, 'but keep up a brave heart for the sake of thy wife and children, and it will soon become easy. Whenever thou hast need of coffee tell my wife, Mary, and she will give it thee.'

Mary Savery's blue eyes shone as she nodded her head; she did not say a word, for she saw that her guest was nearly at an end of his composure. Gently she laid her hand on his rough sleeve as if to try to calm and rea.s.sure him. But even her light touch was more than he could bear at that moment. Pus.h.i.+ng the food and drink away from him untasted, he laid both his arms on the table, and burying his head, he wept like a child.

The husband and wife looked at each other. 'Can I do anything to help him?' Mary's eyes asked her husband in silence. 'Leave him alone for a little; he will be better when this fit of tears is over,' his wise glance answered back.

William Savery was right. The burst of weeping relieved John Smith's over-wrought feelings. Besides, he really was almost faint with hunger. In a few moments, when the coffee was actually held to his lips, he found he could drink it--right down to the bottom of the cup.

As if by magic, the cup was filled up again, and then, very quickly, the meatpies too began to disappear.

At each mouthful the man grew calmer. It was an entirely different John Smith who took leave of his kind friends an hour later. Again they followed him to the door. 'Try to do well, John, and thou wilt always find a friend in me,' William Savery said, as they parted. Mary Savery added no words--she was never a woman given to much talk. Only she slipped her fingers into her guest's hand with a touch that said silently, 'Fare thee well, _friend_.'

The next day John Smith entered the tanyard, not this time slinking in as a thief in the darkness, but introduced by the master himself as an engaged workman. For many years he remained with his employer, a sober, honest, and faithful servant, respected by others and respecting himself. The secret of the first visit was kept. William and Mary Savery never alluded to it, and John Smith certainly did not, though the memory of it never left him and altered all the rest of his life.

Long years after John Smith was dead, William Savery, in telling the story, always omitted the man's name. That is why he has to be called John Smith, because no one knows now, no one ever will know, what his real name may have been. 'But,' as William Savery used to say when he was prevailed on to tell the story, 'the thing to know and remember is that it is possible to overcome Evil with Good.'

x.x.xI. HOW A FRENCH n.o.bLE BECAME A FRIEND

_Sentences from 'No Cross, No Crown,'

by WILLIAM PENN._

_'Come, Reader, hearken to me awhile; I seek thy salvation; that is my plot; thou wilt forgive me.'_

_'Thou, like the inn of old, hast been full of guests; thy affections have entertained other lovers; there has been no room for thy Saviour in thy soul ... but his love is after thee still, & his holy invitation continues to save thee.'_

_'Receive his leaven, & it will change thee; his medicine and it will cure thee; he is as infallible as free; without money and with certainty.... Yield up the body, soul & spirit to Him that maketh all things new: new heavens & new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new works, a new life & conversation....'_

_'The inward, steady righteousness of Jesus is another thing than all the contrived devotion of poor superst.i.tious man.... True wors.h.i.+p is an inward work; the soul must be touched and raised in its heavenly desires by the heavenly Spirit....

So that souls of true wors.h.i.+ppers see G.o.d: and this they wait, they pant, they thirst for.'_

_'Wors.h.i.+p is the supreme act of man's life.'_

x.x.xI. HOW A FRENCH n.o.bLE BECAME A FRIEND

Now we come to a Saint who had a life so full of adventures that a book twice as big as this one would be needed to contain the stories that might be told about him alone.

Unlike any of the other 'Quaker Saints' in this book, he was by birth a Frenchman and came of n.o.ble family. His name was Etienne de Grellet.

He was born nearly a century after the death of George Fox; but he probably did not know that such a person had ever existed, never even heard Fox's name, until long after he was grown up. If Etienne de Grellet, the gay young n.o.bleman of the French court, had been told that his story would ever be written in a book of 'Quaker Saints' he would, most likely, have raised his dark eyebrows and have looked extremely surprised.

'_Quakere? Qu'est-ce que c'est alors, Quakere? Quel drole de mot! Je ne suis pas Quakere, moi!_' he might have answered, with a disdainful shrug of his high, narrow, aristocratic French shoulders. Yet here he is after all!

Etienne de Grellet was born at Limoges in France, in the year 1773.

His childhood was pa.s.sed in the stormy years when the cloud was gathering that was to burst a little later in the full fury of the French Revolution. His father, Gabriel de Grellet, a wealthy merchant of Limoges, was a great friend and counsellor of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. As a reward for having introduced into the country the manufacture of finer porcelain than had ever before been made in France he was enn.o.bled by the king, whom he often used to attend in his private chapel. Limoges china is still celebrated all over the world; and at that time the most celebrated of its china-makers was M.

de Grellet, the king's friend.

Naturally the sons of this successful merchant and n.o.bleman were brought up in great luxury. Etienne and his brothers were not sent to a school, but had expensive tutors to teach them at home. Their parents wanted their children to be well educated, honourable, straightforward, generous, and kind; to possess not only accomplishments but good qualities. Yet Etienne felt, when he looked back in later days, that something had been left out in their education that was, perhaps, the most important thing of all.

When he was quite a little boy he was taken to visit one of his aunts who was a nun in a convent near Limoges. The rules of this convent were so strict that the nuns might not even see their relations who came to visit them. They might only speak to them from the other side of two iron gratings, between the bars of which a thick curtain was hung. The little boy thought it very strange to be taken from his beautiful home, full of costly furniture, pictures, and hangings, and to be brought into the bare convent cell. Then he looked up and saw an iron grating, and heard a voice coming through the folds of a thick curtain that hung behind it. He could hear the voice, but he might never see the face of the aunt who spoke to him. At night at home, as he lay in his comfortable bed, he used to think of his aunt and the other nuns 'rising three times in the night for prayer in the church, from the hard boards which formed their couch, even the luxury of a straw pallet being denied them.' 'Which is the real life,' he used to ask himself, 'the easy comfortable life that goes on round me every day, or that other, difficult life hidden behind the folds of the thick curtain?'

Child though he was, Etienne felt that his aunt loved him, although he had never seen her. This helped him to feel that, although unseen, G.o.d was loving him too. As he grew older he wondered: 'Perhaps everything we see here is like the bars of a grating, or a thick curtain. Perhaps there is some one on the other side who is speaking to us too.'

Etienne was only about five or six years old when he made the great discovery that G.o.d IS THERE, hidden behind the screen of visible things all round us. After this, he longed to be able to speak to G.o.d and to listen to G.o.d's voice, as he was able to listen to his unseen aunt's voice speaking to him from behind the curtain in the convent.

No one ever taught him to pray; but presently he discovered that too for himself. One day, when he was only six years old, his tutor gave him a Latin lesson to learn that was much too difficult for him.

Etienne took the book up to his bedroom, and there, all alone, he read it over and over and did his very best to learn it. But the unfamiliar Latin words would not stay in his memory. At last he closed the book in despair and went to his bedroom window and looked out. He gazed over the high roofs of the city, away over the wide plain in which Limoges lay, to the distant mountain, blue against the sky.

Everything looked fair and peaceful. As he gazed, the thought came to him, 'G.o.d made the plain and the river and the mountains. G.o.d made this whole beautiful world in which I live. If G.o.d can create all these things, surely He can give me memory also.' He knelt down at the foot of his bed and prayed, for the first time in his life, that his Unseen Friend would help him to master the difficult lesson. Taking up the book again, he read the hard Latin words once more, very attentively. This time the words stayed in his memory and did not fade away. Often afterwards, he found that if he prayed all his lessons became easier. He could not, of course, learn them without effort, but after he had really prayed earnestly, he found he could remember things better. Then one day he learned the Lord's prayer. Long years after, when he was an old man, he could still recall the exact spot in his beautiful home where, as a little boy, he had first learned to say, 'Our Father.' Etienne and his family belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. On Sundays they went to the great cathedral of Limoges; but the service there always seemed strange and far away to Etienne.[41] The music, the chanting, the Latin words that were said and sung by bishops and priests in their gorgeous robes, did not seem to him to have anything to do with the quiet Voice that spoke to the boy in the silence of his own heart.

When Etienne and his brothers were old enough they were sent to several different colleges and schools. Their last place of instruction was the celebrated College of the Oratorians at Lyons.

Among other things, the students of this College were taught to move so quietly that fifty or a hundred boys went up or down the stone steps of the College all together, without their feet making the least noise.

Etienne tells us in his diary: 'as we were educated by Roman Catholics and in their principles we were required to confess once a month,'

that is, to tell a priest whatever they had done that was wrong, and receive the a.s.surance of G.o.d's forgiveness from him.

The priest to whom Etienne regularly made his confession was 'a pious, conscientious man,' who treated him with fatherly care. When the boy told him of his puzzles, and asked how it could be necessary to confess to any man, since G.o.d alone could forgive sins, he received a kind, helpful answer. 'Yet,' he says, 'my reasoning faculties brought me to the root of the matter; from created objects to the Creator--from time to eternity.' After he was confirmed at College he hoped that his heart would be changed and made different; but he found that he was still much the same as before. Before leaving the College he and the other students who were also departing received the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper at Ma.s.s. This was to Etienne a very solemn time. But, he says, as soon as he was out in the world again, the remembrance of it faded away. He settled that he had no use for religion in his life, and determined to live for pleasure and happiness alone. 'I sought after happiness,' his diary says, 'in the world's delights. I went in pursuit of it from one party of pleasure to another; but I did _not_ find it, and I wondered that the name of pleasure could be given to anything of that kind.'

In his dissipated life after leaving College, he gave up saying his prayers, and gradually he lost his belief that G.o.d WAS THERE. He read unbelieving books, which said that G.o.d did not exist, and that the Unseen world was only a delusion and a dream. For a time Etienne gave himself up to doubt and denial as well as to dissipation. He was in this restless state when the French Revolution broke out and caught him, like a b.u.t.terfly in a thunderstorm. New questions surged over him. 'If there is a G.o.d after all, why should He allow these horrors to happen?' But no answer came. Or perhaps he had forgotten how to listen.

'Towards the close of 1791,' he writes, 'I left my dear Father's house, and bade him, as it proved, a lasting farewell, having never seen him since.' At this time, Etienne accompanied his brothers and many other n.o.bles into Germany, to join the French Princes who were endeavouring to bring about a counter-revolution and restore the king, Louis XVI.

On this dangerous journey the young men met with many narrow escapes.

Courage came naturally to Etienne. 'I was not the least moved,' he writes in his diary, 'when surrounded by people and soldiers, who lavished their abuses upon us, and threatened to hang me to the lamp-post. I coolly stood by, my hands in my pockets, being provided with three pairs of pistols, two of which were double-barrelled. I concluded to wait to see what they would do, and resolved, after destroying as many of them as I could, to take my own life with the last.'

Happily the necessity for extreme courses did not arise. He was, he says, 'mercifully preserved,' and no violent hands were laid upon him, though he and his companions suffered a short detention, after which they succeeded in safely joining the French Princes and their adherents at the city of Coblentz on the Rhine. Here Etienne spent the following winter and spring surrounded, he tells us, by many temptations.

'I was fond of solitude,' continues the diary, 'and had many retired walks through the woods and over the hills. I delighted to visit the deserted hermitages, which formerly abounded on the Rhine. I envied the situation of such hermits, retired from the world, and sheltered from its many temptations; for I thought it impossible for me to live a life of purity while continuing among my a.s.sociates. I looked forward wishfully to the time when I could thus retire; but I saw also that, unless I could leave behind me my earthly-mindedness, my pride, vanity, and every carnal propensity, an outward solitude could afford me no shelter.

'Our army entered into France the forepart of the summer of 1792, accompanied by the Austrians and Prussians. I was in the King's Horse Guards, which consisted mostly of the n.o.bility. We endured great hards.h.i.+ps, for many weeks sleeping on the bare ground, in the open air, and were sometimes in want of provisions. But that word _honour_ so inflamed us, that I marvel how contentedly we bore our privations.'

Towards the approach of winter, owing to various political changes, the Princes' army was obliged to retire from France, and soon after was disbanded. 'Etienne had been present at several engagements; he had seen many falling about him, stricken by the shafts of death; he had stood in battle array, facing the enemy ready for the conflict; but, being in a reserve corps, he was preserved from actually shedding blood, having never fought with the sword, or fired a gun.'

In after years, he was thankful to remember that although he had been perfectly willing to take life, he had never actually done so in his soldier days. After the retreat of the French army, he and his brothers set out for Amsterdam. On the way, however, they were made prisoners of war, and condemned to be shot. 'The execution of the sentence was each moment expected, when some sudden commotion in the hostile army gave them an opportunity to make their escape.' Their lives thus having been spared a second time they reached Holland in safety.