Concerning his creed, at the risk of wearying you, it must be permitted to
speak here; for only by grasping its leading features and its vast
unlikeness to the parent tree can a just estimate of Michael Tregenza be
arrived at. Luke Gospeldom had mighty little to do with the Gospel of Luke.
The sect numbered one hundred and thirty-four just persons, at war with
principalities and powers. They were saturated with the spirit of Israel in
the Wilderness, of Esau, when every man's hand was against him. At their
chapel one heard much of Jehovah, the jealous God, of the burning lakes and
the damnation reserved for mankind, as a whole. Every Luke Gospeler was a
Jehovah in his own right. They walked hand in hand with God; they realized
the dismay and indignation Newlyn must occasion in His breast; they
sympathized heartily with the Everlasting and would have called down fire
from Heaven themselves if they could. Many openly wondered that He delayed
so long, for, from a Luke Gospeler's point of view, the place with its
dozen other chapels--each held in error by the rest, and all at deadly war
among themselves--its most vile ritualistic church of St. Peter, its
public-houses, scandals, and strifes, was riper for destruction than Sodom.
However, the hundred and thirty-four served to stave off celestial
brimstone, as it seemed.
It is pitiable, in the face of the majestic work of John Wesley in
Cornwall, to see the shattered ruins of it which remain. When the Wesleys
achieved their notable revival and swept off the dust of a dead Anglicanism
which covered religious Cornwall like a pall in the days of the Georges,
the old Celtic spirit, though these heroes found it hard enough to
rekindle, burst from its banked-up furnaces at last and blazed abroad once
more. That spirit had been bred by the saint bishops of Brito-Celtic days,
and Wesley's ultimate success was a grand repetition of history, as extant
records of the ancient use of the Church in Cornwall prove. Its principle
was that he who filled a bishop's office should, before all things, conduct
and develop missionary enterprise; and the moral and physical courage of
the Brito-Celtic bishops, having long slumbered, awoke again in John
Wesley. He built on the old foundations, he gave to the laymen a power at
that time blindly denied them by the Church--the power which Irish and
Welsh and Breton missionary saints of old had vested in them.
Wesley--himself a giant--made wise use of the strong where he found them,
and if a man--tinker or tinner, fisher or jowster--could preach and grip an
audience, that man might do so. Thus had the founders of the new creed
developed it; thus does the Church to-day; but when John Wesley filled his
empty belly with blackberries at St. Hilary, in 1743; when he thundered
what he deemed eternal truth through Cornwall, year after year for half a
century; when he faced a thousand perils by sea and land and spent his
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