On the Hearth

Whatever other gifts I may be deficient in—and they are many—I fancy I have cause to be thankful for a good memory. Indeed, I would not have begun this autobiography had I not been conscious beforehand that its writing, in my hours of ease, would be of greater pleasure than of labour to me. In turning up one circumstance after another in my history, I find each with its family and relatives rising again in living form before my mind. Similarly, when looking over an old packet of letters, every letter has its unwritten associations, here and there a letter making one think of others which have been reduced to ashes by fire, but which cannot be burnt out of the memory. Some are read with a sense of satisfaction, others bring painful recollections, others stir up our whole nature, awaking feelings and ideas we had thought lost for ever, but which had lived on, hidden away in the caverns of the mind and the crannies of the memory.

Although I register the night of brother Bob’s excommunication among the dark nights of my life, it is not without its bright side. The occurrence made me meditate seriously upon the nature of religion, and what it was which constituted the importance and sacredness of church membership. I already had some sort of notion that there was a great difference between religious people and “people of the world,” as my mother called them; but I am afraid it came to no more than this—that the former partook of the Lord’s Supper once a month, did not get drunk, or curse and swear, and that the latter, not belonging to the Society, were “at liberty to commit any sin they chose. But somehow, that night, I got to doubt this view, and began to think that something more than the one 1 have named went to make up the difference. Without being able to bring myself to believe that he would, I asked myself would Bob, now that he was no longer a church member, get drunk occasionally? Would he curse and swear, now and again? Would he give over reading the Bible and other good books, and kick up a row in the house like Peter the potter? I questioned, also, whether Bob, out of the Society, would be a worse or more wretched creature than John Lloyd in it. That, too, was quite as impossible, to my mind. What was it, then, which made a man religious? The occurrence, moreover, made me form a high opinion of my mother’s piety. Possibly it was the conversation which ensued between her and brother Bob which caused me thus to regard her. I will try and reproduce this conversation as accurately as my memory will serve. Of course mother did not know I had heard the whole of the inquiry into Bob’s case, and it wouldn’t have been well had she found out that I and Will Bryan had stowed ourselves away in the chapel-loft. When all went in a body to chapel, the last to leave the house would hide the door-key under the water-tub, so that the first to return might gain a speedy entrance to our castle. That was one of the family secrets. As it was I who, of necessity, must be first home on this night, I hurried along and just managed to be for a couple of minutes seated before mother came.in. Although nearly out of breath, I endeavoured to appear as if I had been expecting her for some time. I told her she had been very long coming. “Every wait is a long one,” was all her reply, made as she hung her blue cloak and great bonnet on the nail behind the door. Bob must have taken a turn with his companions after leaving the Society, because supper had been some time prepared before he came in. After long waiting, he made his appearance, looking sad and dispirited. He sat down without a word, and took up a book to read. It was not without much coaxing that he came up to the supper-table, and I speedily saw that neither he nor mother made much impression upon the food. Having had a great load taken off my mind, so far as the discipline of the church concerned me personally, and reflecting that it would be a pity such good provision should go to waste, I did my best to put as much of it out of sight as I could. Supper over, Bob again took up his book, and mother drew her chair nearer the fire. I knew from her manner that she meant to start a conversation. She had a habit, when gathering her thoughts together, of pleating her apron.

“Well, my boy,” she presently said, “this has been rather a bad night in your and my history. Poor as I am, I would rather than a hundred pounds if what took place to-night hadn’t happened.”

Bob, who spoke a little more grammatically than mother, said in reply:—

“I do not see, mother, why you should look at the matter in that light. It will make no difference in my conduct. Being in the Society does not guarantee a man’s salvation, nor being out of it his perdition.”

“Rhys,” said mother, turning to me,”you had better go to bed.”

“Directly,” said I, laying my head upon the table, and pretending to sleep. I am not sure I did not snore. Such a sly young fox was I! My behaviour threw both off their guard.

“Bob,” resumed my mother, “I trust you do not mean what you say. You have been saying so many things of late, since you’ve taken to coddle with these old English books, that it’s difficult for me to think you do.”

“Mother,” said Bob, whom I heard putting his book down, “you know very well there is no deceit in me, and that nothing in the world is so hateful to me as hypocrisy. I, a thousand times, prefer being expelled from the church for telling the truth, to being suffered to remain in it by showing myself mealymouthed, and speaking the thing I neither believe nor feel. I know my excommunication must be a sad blow to you, mother, and for that I am sorry; but the church having chosen so to deal with me, I have nothing in the world to say.”

“What! my son,” exclaimed my mother. “Do you set no store by church membership?”

“I do not,” was the reply, “if I must buy that membership by double-dealing. You have never yet heard me talk about myself or complaining, but you know very well that neither my father nor you once thought of giving me a day’s schooling. I was allowed to grow up ignorant of all things save those of the Bible. I was sent into the mine at an age when I ought to have been at school, and I was an experienced collier before I was sixteen. Directly I became sensible of my want of education, in my spare hours I set myself, with all my energy, to learn English, and that without help from any living soul, and with you constantly complaining that I wasted the candles. To say the least, I have been as faithful at chapel as any of my own age. I have been a teacher in the Sunday School since I was seventeen. I am not praising myself, but you know that since the bother with my father, I have worked hard, and done my best to keep a home for you and Rhys; and what would have become of you had I gone away You know I never in my life spent a penny in dissipation, and that all the money I could scrape together was devoted either to buying books or subscribing towards the church. Besides this, I have endeavoured, for years, to impart to my brother all the knowledge I possessed, so that he, if possible, might become something better than the poor collier I am myself. Seeing that brother oppressed and beaten most unmercifully, I did what anyone with a grain of humanity in his composition would have done—I rushed on the oppressor and rescued the oppressed, as David did the lamb from the lion’s jaws. But this, in the Society’s sight, was a great sin, especially in that of some of the members, who, doubtless, must feel very happy now that they are rid of a depraved creature like me.”

“Do you know what?” said mother, “your words have much the sound of self-righteousness. You make me think of that man who began the prayer meeting in the temple of old. You have his tinkle about you, to a T. There is as little of the publican ring in your voice, now you are at home, as there was in it in the Society. What has come over you, tell me You have shown a wonderful stiffness of late. Pray for grace, my son; pray that you may feel the rope, and see your filthy rags. Brought before your betters at the Quarter Sessions it would be all right to talk of your virtues; in the Society before the Great Judge, the less you speak of them the better, save by the names wherewith Paul baptized them—“dung and loss.” Do you know, Bob, I have suspected for some time that there were notions forming in your heart which you never found in the Bible; and that has cost me many a sleepless night.”

“You, mother, know me best, of all people,” said Bob feelingly, “and I must be bad indeed, when my own mother can entertain so poor an opinion of me. I, no doubt, am the biggest scamp in the neighbourhood. Well, be it so.”

“No, my son, not so, either,” said mother. ‘As a good son to his mother, there isn’t your superior in the six counties. I never had any trouble with you in that way, and I am very thankful to you and the Great King for your kindness in working so hard to keep a home for your mother and brother. It is of your soul I am speaking now. It matters little whether have a crust or not; but it matters everything, my darling boy, that your soul and mine should be under the dispensation of the Spirit of God. Blessed be His name, He never gives me rest, and I believe He means to make something of me. O that I had room to think He spoke also unto you! To see you so little affected by your excommunication breaks my heart, my poor boy. Without are the dogs—without are the tempest and the storm. You have gone out from the circle of the covenant and the intercession; you have lost the shelter, my dear Bob,”

“It was the church that decided whether it was within or without I should be; it was the church that repudiated me, not me the church,” replied Bob.

“No, my son,” rejoined my mother. ‘It was your own doing entirely, and you ought to be ashamed of it. It was your refusal to repent and admit your sin which made the church expel you. How often to-night, did Thomas Bowen beg, and you decline, to own your fault and ask forgiveness? No, to the church your excommunication was a very painful matter; but what else could you look for if you did not repent? It is useless your expecting forgiveness of God or man without repentance.”

“I can’t fall in with the opinions of old-fashioned people, when my own run counter to them,” said Bob. “What do you think Mr. Brown, the clergyman, said to me to-day, when I mentioned the matter to him? Why, he laughed at the whole thing, and expressed a hope that the licking I gave the old Soldier would do him good.”

“Bob!” cried mother, not a little warmed, “don’t you talk of the great doctrines of the Gospel as old-fashioned, in my hearing, it’s best for you.”

“I did not do so,” observed Bob.

“You did something very much like it,” returned mother. “Repentance, you’ll find, is a fashion you will have to “all in’ with, or you’ll never enter into the Life. It is a fashion, Bob, that has made thousands conquerors to all eternity. But I’ll tell you when it will become an old fashion: when the summer hath ended, and the harvest of the soul shall have gone by. Many will be found turning to the old fashion when it is too late. Pray, my son, lest you be one of them. As to Mr. Brown, I don’t think much of him. A nice one he is to guide our youth. If I wanted something for my soul’s good I’d never go to him, for, most likely, I should find him out in the fields a-rabbit shooting. Every respect to Mr. Brown as a good neighbour, but well was it said, by Thomas of Nant, of him and his sort. Although Thomas was not all that he should be, still he hit it off at times fairly well:—

Would that Mr. Brown had half the spirit of the old Vicar of Llandovery. This is what the Vicar would have said to you, if I remember rightly:—

And your conscience knows whether it is Mr. Brown or the old Vicar who is in the right.”

Every respect,’ to use your own words, to the old Vicar,” returned Bob; “but I do not believe that God is “ierce and cruel’ at any time, much less towards me for what I did to the old Soldier. The Bible teaches me that ‘God is Love.’”

“What!” I cried my mother. “You are surely not going to contradict the good old Vicar, who knew his Bible a thousand times better than you do, hundreds of years before you were born? You never spoke a truer word than that ‘God is Love.’ But for that, good-bye to the life eternal and election by grace, as I heard Mr. ’Lias say on the Green at Bala—blessed be his memory! Who could speak better—better, indeed, who, a quarter as well as Mr. ’Lias—of

But had you heard him hold forth God’s justice and wrath towards the wicked, it would have made your hair stand on end. If you are going to cherish notions of that kind, Bob, I’d as lief have Wesley as you, every bit. No, my son, the vicar is quite right—God is ever displeased with the ungodly, and that you know, better than I can tell you.”

“I have neither the spirit nor the desire for a discussion with you, mother,” remarked Bob.

“I’m not so sure about that,” replied mother. “More’s the pity, it is only too much spirit, by a good deal, you have got as a rule. I had some secret hope it was a fit of obstinacy that had come over you in the Society, and that your heart was better than your tongue after all. But I see I’ve been mistaken, and I see, moreover, I’ve been to blame for not having long ago remonstrated with you upon your condition. I have nothing now left but to pray, my son, that God’s Spirit shall visit your soul, Well,” she added, with a sigh, “there is greater need now, than at any time I can think of, for a revival of religion that will bring the proud spirit of people down and the people themselves to their religious duty.”

“When He cometh,” said Bob, “He will have much more to do than that. He will have a great heap of miserliness and niggardliness—which now pass under the name of economy— to clean out of the churches. Hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, want of Christian charity—now designated sanctity, exactitude, and zeal for church discipline—will come under the same disguises then as they did to meet me to-night. But on that day—if ever it arrive—it will be revealed that some of those folk who clamoured loudest for my expulsion, are cankered and rotten with worldliness and filthy lucre, that they sell Jesus Christ for thirty pieces of silver every day they get up out of bed. When that visitation comes, of which you speak, I shall expect to find myself amongst a numerous company which I shall be ashamed to recognise.”

“You leave out one thing,” said my mother. “On that day everybody will have his hand upon his own heart-plague—not picking out the motes in other people, and indulging in his own self-justification. Peter, look you, did not think of pointing to Judas’s betrayal as a reason why he should not repent for his denial. No, he went out and wept bitterly, and I would like to see a little of the same spirit in you, my son.”

And at this stage mother began to cry, a proceeding which, as 1 have already observed, had at all times the effect of putting an end to the argument on Bob’s part.

Having given full vent to her feelings, mother caught me by the collar and shook me sharply, little thinking I had been wide awake the whole time—a fact of which she never became aware. After going to bed, I mused a great deal over what I had heard, especially the references to my father. But that night passed like every other. Mother’s appeals had not much effect on Bob. After his excommunication it was seldom he spoke of religious matters, or of the chapel, although he continued his attendance. In the house he kept very quiet, almost always reading, and never ceasing to impart all the knowledge he was possessed of to me. What would I give to-night had I nothing more unpleasant to relate of him?