Awakening (40 page)

Times have changed: it's the age of the show, the performer. Isaiah seems to intuit this. The theatrical turns for which he has become renowned in Wiltshire and Dorset have raised expectations of a service of surpassing power and originality. Passed round the chapels and churches like a box of surprises, Isaiah is permanently in demand. Traditionalists are alienated by his antics, as when he produced a concertina in a village pulpit and sang along to this squeezebox, an instrument more appropriate to a public house or a fair. Deacons complained. And then again, the lad's theology, if that's what you could call it, is what some call heterodox and others gibberish. Just as the Pharisees set traps for Our young Lord, so his enemies have tempted callow Pastor Minety.

And in his inexperience he has taken the bait. Isaiah, backed against the ropes, has been understood to state that God could not make a frog.

The Creator of all things not capable of making a frog?

No, Isaiah is alleged to have parried. God would be bound to begin with spawn. The spawn would become tadpoles, the tadpoles frogs.

‘For shame!' the Alderbury deacons protested. Quarrels broke out at Fighelbourn and Cressington concerning the vexed issue of God's relation to the laws he had ordained. Mr Gosse's
Omphalos
has been
quoted by Plymouth Brethren in Cressington Market Place, on the related question of whether Adam possessed a navel. The Brethren, acknowledging that Adam, never born of woman, should logically have required no navel, nevertheless maintained that he was created as if he were a mature man of about twenty-five. Hence our great progenitor came into being complete with all manly parts. On the same principle the Adorable Workman created trees in Eden with growth rings that had never grown; He planted fossils in the earth representing the skeletons of animals that never existed. He created frogs according to the same principle.

An atheistical youngster from the Mechanics' Institute has spoken up for Mr Darwin and Mr Wallace and against the Creation as depicted in the Book of Genesis, claiming that Mr Gosse has made God into a liar and a fraud. The lad was knocked down by a fellow student in the name of the authority of the Book of Genesis. At the Mechanics' Institute a subsidiary row has broken out about male nipples. Were we once hermaphrodites or even, as Mr Darwin's book on barnacles might seem to imply, descendants of original females? The frogs have bred an avalanche of arguments on polyps and earthworms, spirogyra and animalcules undreamed of by Isaiah Minety.

But the pastor's conversions, especially amongst young people, are generally held to speak for themselves.

And besides, Mr Minety, somewhat concussed by it all, does not recall saying anything about frogs.

Much hangs on Isaiah's performance today. At breakfast Anna reads anxiety in his fiery cheeks; there's a mob of butterflies in his stomach. Isaiah closes his eyes and his lips move. He's praying for grace. She understands very well his blurtings about the frogs; it's on her conscience. The snatches of ill-digested zoological thought he has caught from her have set him thinking. And once that happens, Anna knows, the cork's out of the bottle.

Mr Spurgeon too is praying but in his case it is for his voice, having caught a cold on the train. Anna has been up and down to him in the night with hot drinks and eucalyptus balm. Oh, how he misses dear Wifey on these occasions, he confides. Susannah, his nurse and comforter, though far from well herself, never heeds her own sufferings when her husband's health is poor, for Mr Spurgeon's well-being is essential to Christ's church in this land. Anna asks if she should summon Mrs Spurgeon – or does he require a doctor? Unfortunately, she adds, the Pentecost doctor is not a Baptist or even a Dissenter.

‘I shall pray instead,' Mr Spurgeon says, shuddering, perhaps at the thought of an unknown High Anglican physician. ‘The Lord will heal me if it be His Will.'

He huddles in a limp and streaming state, unsure whether his voice will serve. He was minded, Mr Spurgeon says huskily, to speak on the Bible, telling the congregation that the Book has wrestled with him, smitten, comforted, smiled on him, clasped his hand, warmed and wept with him, sung with him, ministered to him. Why read anything else?

Anna bites her tongue. Her profane library is growing, locked away in her study. She has thought of chaining the books to prevent theft, as they did in mediaeval libraries. But she expects no further raids: Anna has made sure Beatrice knows that Mr Clifford himself approves of her collection and has promised a set of books on palaeontology and geology.

In the event, so many Christians attempt to crush into Florian Street that the service must be held in the open air and Mr Spurgeon, who daren't risk pneumonia, returns to Sarum House in a carriage.

A dais is erected from packing cases for the ministers; benches are carried out for the old and sick. Isaiah, mounting the improvised platform to open the meeting, is joined by the visiting ministers, gazing out at the sea of faces, an immense flock standing in attitudes of prayerful waiting. Gradually the quiet settles – they might as well be at a Quaker meeting – into a silence that covers the whole green.

Anna finds herself breathing more slowly, dipping down into calm reaches. The baby in its hidden interior, making its acrobatic vaults and dives, informs her, Here I am. I'm coming. I'll soon be with you, wait for me. For the moment I am you and you are me; isn't it lovely? Anna smiles an inward smile. Drawing her cloak around herself, she lays her hand on the swell of her belly.

In her pocket is her leather-bound red notebook, with a little pouch for the pencil. The baby is not – or not yet – her be-all and end-all. The quality of the crowd's stillness fascinates Anna. It builds a sense of expectation and then, when nothing happens, the silence becomes a thing in itself, a solid substance like rock, though by and by tremors of agitation begin to ruffle its surface. What are we waiting for? Why doesn't the pastor start? Or someone start for him?

Isaiah opens his mouth. At last. Nothing comes out and he closes it again. You hear the crying of the gulls, the clopping of horses, the laughter of children bowling hoops on the road. The huddled ministers consult amongst themselves. Isaiah looks across the heads of the multitude with a tranquil smile. Perhaps he's praying.

Whereupon a dumpy, dark-haired woman clambers up to the dais and announces that she has been asked to speak.

Who is she? Who has invited her? Not Isaiah, apparently, but he nods and takes a step backwards. Not the ring of pastors, who appear baffled.

‘Friends! My name is Phoebe Palmer the Evangelist and I come to you all the way from New York!' She opens her arms wide. ‘Via Huddersfield, England! Do not be startled that I raise my voice before all these folks! I'm not here to assert Women's Rights, so called. I believe Woman is happy in her legitimate sphere of influence. But – now I will say this,' and she wags her index finger at the congregation, a sparkle in her eye. ‘Pious men have inflicted a wrong on pious women, in gagging their mouths. Oh yes! God calls forth a woman – he says to her,
Phoebe
,
will you speak?
How could I refuse? Will you hear Jesus's words – not my words – of comfort?'

It's a relief that someone is saying something. Mr Ritter shakes Mrs Palmer by the hand, introducing her as an evangelist with whom he's happy to be acquainted. This acknowledgment is enough. And presumably Christian staged this, Anna thinks.

Mrs Palmer pithily outlines the shorter way to Holiness and how we can be holy now, this very moment, resting on Christ.

And we can continue to be holy. Complete sanctification is ours with conversion.

Easy as that!

Mrs Palmer's voice is a powerful, carrying instrument. It reaches from end to end of the green. What is she, some kind of Methodist? Yes, a Methodist. Ah, that explains it. No proper sense of sin. No understanding of predestination. No sense of a woman's place. But she possesses all an entertainer's confidence in manipulating a crowd, acting on a stage, performing before an audience. Phoebe Palmer, whichever way you take her, is a sensation.

She's naturally timid, the voluble little woman explains – but when God taps you on the shoulder, what can you do? ‘I'll give you my testimony and you will judge. Everything He did for me, He'll do for all of you, my dears.'

What impresses the crowd is Phoebe's account of how the death of three of her four children brought her to this ministry. Alexander, Phoebe's firstborn, died aged nine months in 1829. Her second son died in 1830, seven weeks old. Her fourth child, Eliza, was burnt to death in a fire which caught the gauze curtain of her cradle.

‘Can you conceive the grief of it?'

A murmur of assent rises from the women in the crowd.

‘I know you can, I see you can.'

Phoebe's head is bent, her hands are clasped; she stands still as a statue.

‘My Eliza is in heaven,' she says, pointing upwards. ‘Doing an angel service. And now I have resolved that the time I would have devoted to her shall be spent in work for Jesus. And if I'm diligent in carrying out my resolve, this child's death may result in the rebirth of many.'

And as suddenly as she appeared, Mrs Palmer quits the platform, rejoins her husband in the crowd and becomes an anonymous little woman in brown.

The hymn, ‘And Can It Be?',
rises on the west side of the green. And spreads.

And can it be that I should gain An interest in my Saviour's blood?

The body of the crowd catches fire:
Died he for me, who caused his pain?

As the chorus is reached, the entire green is alight.

Amazing love, how can it be That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

They're weeping; they're on their knees. The scene in the wake of Mrs Palmer's speech resembles the vast camp meetings led by Wesley and Whitefield.

A ragged boy of no more than ten raises his voice, to the astonishment of all, and a pauper woman from Fighelbourn, a Methodist, presses forward and shouts ‘O Jesus!' over and over again until she sinks from exhaustion. In the tumult around her, another woman, understood to be her next-door neighbour, stands over her and prays for her until she's hoarse. Both women have to be carried off, insensible.

Many hours pass in a delirium of ecstasy, or rather of competing raptures. One by one the preachers mount the dais to speak. But the Spirit is everywhere. Other lay preachers have arisen in different areas of the field and only those in direct proximity can hear their voices. In the eastern corner, the newly saved are gathered together in a flock, queuing to be interviewed by a group of lay preachers. For hours the crowd, growing rather than waning as news travels through the region, prays and weeps and sings. And faints, for there's nothing to eat or drink until enterprising pie-men appear.

As the twilit air thickens, Isaiah finds his voice and, with a few brief sentences, welcomes to Wiltshire the person of the risen Lord. He has witnessed Jesus walking amongst the people, dressed as a local shepherd and carrying over his shoulder a lamb. Isaiah has not imagined Him. He has seen Him – with his mortal eyes – in the flesh – as clearly as he stands here now. Jesus made his way barefoot and bleeding through the multitude, looking into each face, his hand raised in blessing.

Nothing will be the same now, Isaiah predicts. Inspiration will spread from town to town, the length and breadth of England. It will travel to the four corners of the earth. Peace on earth. The poor will be clothed, the hungry fed. Secularism will die, and the Anglican church will be disestablished. Science will bow to the Gospels. The world will be changed, you'll see.

Chapter 22

1871

A girl is – disgracefully – turning cartwheels in the Close. The carved saints and bishops and kings on the cathedral front stare over her head, all save one stone bishop who bends his neck and angles his reproachful gaze down at the cartwheeler. Beatrice, who is to meet Mr and Mrs Quarles here, has arrived, as ever, early. It hasn't been something she particularly relished, the invitation to the world of the Established Church and its grand men. The mediaeval cathedral seems to her somewhere between museum and mausoleum – but how its towering splendour draws you. At first she's as interested in the warm and breathing presence of the lively little girl as in the architectural wonder. And yet: look at the blond and beautiful stone. Look at the grandeur both of concept and craft, a monument fashioned in the days before modern engineering. Beatrice cranes her neck.

With raised eyebrows, she pays up her entrance fee: sixpence towards the cathedral fabric. The edifice is still being restored, its soaring columns and exquisite fan vaulting strengthened and beautified. The heart is lifted and sails way above your head. Slender Purbeck marble pillars rise to support the intricate vaulting like a forest of heavenly trees. And yet, and yet: Beatrice deplores the odious Chantry built with the filthiest lucre, so that monks could pray to exempt the souls of the rich from thousands of years in Purgatory. She recoils from the warrior barons in chain mail on their tombstones and from the bishops, condemned as ‘bite-sheeps' by her Puritan ancestors.

And yet, and yet.

As she walks into the echoing nave, Beatrice again spots the girl. This scrap of dauntless mischief has somehow or other found her way into the cathedral – doubtless eluding the entrance fee. She skips and whirls, flinging arms and legs about, giddy skirts spinning. Yes, go on, dance, you little warm moment in the cathedral's ancient chill. Several men in black cassocks are already striding towards her.