arduous days "in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fasting often,
in cold and nakedness"; when, in fine, this stupendous man achieved the
foundations of Methodism, the harvest was overripe, at any rate, in
Cornwall. No Nonconformist was he, though few enough of his followers
to-day remember that, if they ever knew it. He worked for his church; he
was a link between it and his party; his last prayer was for church and
king--a fact which might have greatly shocked the Luke Gospelers had such
come to their ears. For John Wesley was their only saint, and they honestly
believed that they alone of all Methodist communities were following in his
footsteps. Poor souls! they lived as far from what Wesley taught as it is
easily possible to conceive. As for Gray Michael, he was under the
impression that he and his sect worthily held aloft the true light which
Wesley brought in person to Newlyn, and he talked with authority upon the
subject of his master and his master's doings. But he knew little about the
founder of Methodism in reality, and still less about the history of the
Methodist movement. Had he learned that John Wesley himself was once
accused of Popish practices; had he known that not until some years after
the great preacher's death did his party, in conference assembled, separate
itself from the Church of England, he had doubtless been much amazed.
Though saturated with religious feeling, the man was wholly ignorant of
religious history in so far as it affected his own country. To him all
saints not mentioned in Scripture were an abomination and invention of
Rome. Had he been informed that the venerable missionary saints of his
mother land were in no case Romish, another vast surprise must have awaited
him.
Let it not for an instant be supposed that the Luke Gospelers represented
right Methodism. But they fairly exemplified a sorry side of it; those
little offshoots of which dozens have separated from the parent tree; and
they exhibited most abundantly in themselves that canker-worm of Pharisaism
which gnaws at the root of all Nonconformity. This offense, combined with
such intolerance and profound ignorance as was to be found amid the Luke
Gospelers, produced a community merely sad or comic to consider according
to the point of view.
An instance of Michael Tregenza's attitude to the Church will illustrate
better than analysis the lines of thought on which he served his Creator.
Once, when she was thirteen, Joan had gone to an evening service at St.
Peter's, because a friend had dared her to do so. Her father was at sea and
she believed the delinquency could by no possibility reach his ears. But a
Luke Gospeler heard the dread tidings and Michael Tregenza was quickly
informed of his daughter's lapse. He accused Joan quietly enough, and she
confessed.
"Then you'm a damned maiden," he said, "'cause you sinned open-eyed."
He thought the matter over for a week, and finally an idea occurred to him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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