Читать книгу The Great Acceptance: The Life Story of F. N. Charrington - Thorne Guy - Страница 2

There is a certain passage at the end of the "Apostles," by Ernest Renan, which has always seemed to me to be one of singularly penetrating beauty.

Translated, it runs as follows: "I am impatient to tell again that unparalleled epic, to depict those roads stretching infinitely from Asia to Europe, along which they sowed the seed of the Gospel, those waves over which they fared so often under conditions so diverse. The great Christian Odyssey is about to begin. Already the Apostolic barque has shaken forth her sails; the wind is blowing, and aspires for naught save to bear upon its wings words of Jesus."

I am reminded of this passage now, as I begin to tell of Frederick Charrington's life work for Christ. The Great Acceptance has been made, the journey is about to begin. The soldier has girded on his sword and is marching to battle.

Among the first work which the young man undertook was that of helping in a night-school under the direction of the Rev. Joseph Bardsley, then Rector of Stepney. During his work among the very rough he heard of something of the same sort which was being carried on by two young men in the neighbourhood, and not far from the night-school itself. One was Mr. Hugh Campbell, junior, the other Mr. E. H. Kerwin, who has been secretary of the Tower Hamlets Mission ever since its inception, and one of Mr. Charrington's most loyal helpers.

Mr. Campbell and Mr. Kerwin conducted their Evangelistic work in a hayloft over a stable. It was all the shelter that they had, it was all they could afford, and yet from Mr. Charrington's association with it has sprung a mission so wide-reaching in its effects, so world-embracing in the influence that has radiated from it, that we may well marvel at such results from a beginning so humble.

Not long ago I was telling the story of these early days to a lady whose life has been passed in works of charity. She smiled when I spoke of the little hayloft, and she said, "The Light of the World streamed forth from the manger at Bethlehem."

One evening Mr. Charrington visited his new friends and made personal experience of their efforts.

He found the entrance to the stable guarded by a small boy, who showed him up a terribly rickety staircase of open boards to a long room lighted with cheap paraffin lamps which hung from the rafters.

There was a platform, none too elaborately constructed, at one end of the loft, and the floor was covered with rude benches.

The odour of the stable below ascended in all its pristine richness and mingled with the smell of the crude oil lamps, while the atmosphere was still further complicated by the fact that the roof of the hayloft was a low one, and the ventilation almost non-existent.

Yet, on that night, with a congregation of the roughest and most untaught lads to be found in that part of the East End, in such unpropitious surroundings, the guest nevertheless heard addresses to the lads about the love of Christ for them, which made a lasting impression on his mind.

As he stood at the end of the hall and watched, something must have come to him to tell of the mighty work that, under God's blessing, he himself was destined to do in the future. New and unaccustomed as was the scene, strange as some of the methods must have been to him, yet, at that moment, some hinting, some prophetic vision, came to him. He had arrived at last upon the field. He was present at a mere skirmish with the forces of evil, but it was a foretaste of the great battle to come. He had arrived at the front.

He has told me that as he watched and listened he thought, "This is far more like real work for the Lord than my own more secular night-school work," and when the service was nearly over, as the lads sang —

such an impression was made upon his mind that within another night or two he was again present at the service. He proposed at once that he should join forces with his friends, and brought immediately a fresh and burning enthusiasm, a fierce energy, a daring originality, which almost at once began to alter the whole character of the little mission.

The difficulties, the discouragements, were enormous. The neighbours who surrounded this oasis in the desert were entirely unsympathetic. They scoffed and jeered at the whole thing. Hard words, however, break no bones – there are few men living who believe more thoroughly in the adage than Mr. Charrington – but hard words were not the only thing that the young missioners had to endure.

The man from whom the stable loft was rented was a burly, ruffianly fellow, who, when under the influence of drink, would do his best to upset the meetings.

Once this man burst into the room with an explosion of horrible oaths. He was in a fury, his face was livid with hate, and with every circumstance of violent speech, he bawled out that his poor horse, who had to work hard for its living all day long, could not sleep on account of the noise made by the lads singing hymns!

This ferocious, but singularly ineffectual person, on another occasion stood at the foot of the staircase leading to the loft with a horrible bulldog by his side, daring his tenants to approach the scene of their devotions.

But little circumstances like these had no effect whatever upon the work. Every form of opposition was only like the call of a linnet in a hedge as a regiment of soldiers marches down the road.

Boy after boy came thronging to the standard which the friends had unfurled, and the hayloft became far too small for the purpose. At this moment the Rector of Stepney very kindly placed his schoolroom at the disposal of the three Evangelists. This kindly act, however, was not productive of much success. The lads who attended the meetings were of such a low character – I quote the opinion of the parents of the day-scholars who attended the schools – that the day work began to be seriously interfered with, and "respectable" people complained.

To overcome this difficulty, and perhaps not a very unreasonable opposition on the part of the parents of the day-scholars, a capacious workshop was next taken at Hertford Place, and fitted up by Mr. Charrington's father, at a cost of three hundred pounds, as a mission hall for boys. Another room was rented in Heath Street, Stepney, and this was for girls. In both these halls religious services were held nightly by Mr. Charrington and his friends. There is a brief account in my possession of what was being done at this period, which Mr. Charrington wrote a little later.

He said —

"These premises in Hertford Place, situated at the back of the building represented in our engraving, were secured in May 1870, and fitted up as a school and mission room for boys. Here we had accommodation for over three hundred lads, and the rooms were soon filled with some of the most troublesome roughs of the neighbourhood, including a number of boys known as 'The Mile End Gang,' who had long been a trouble to the police. This gang was soon broken up, in consequence of several of its members, including their leader, professing conversion. An interesting incident occurred soon after this. A number of lads from Whitechapel, known as the 'Kate Street Gang,' or 'The Forty Thieves,' all of whom were by their own rules convicted thieves, came down one Sunday night, with thick sticks up their sleeves to fight our boys; but after our gaining their confidence, and assuring them that we were not in connection with the police, they were induced to enter the building and join in the boys' Sunday evening service.

"After we had continued these meetings for some time, many of the parents expressed a wish to attend them. At first we could not see our way to accede to their request, but after a time they became so pressing that we agreed to hold a service for them at the close of the boys' meeting. These services soon became so crowded that we had to seek a larger building.

"We started a Boys' Home, which was an outcome of the work among the lads. Often after a service boys would come and plead for their companions, who were without home or shelter for the night. This led to our taking a small house in the court in which we were working, and fitting it up for their accommodation. The numbers so increased, however, that we had to take another cottage, and finally, with the aid of kind friends, we purchased a building, which was previously a beer-bottling warehouse.

"In connection with the Home was a savings bank, which gave the boys the opportunity of putting by their spare money. Many instances could be given of the good resulting from the training in this home. Many of our lads were sent to Great Yarmouth, where, through the agency of the Rev. Mr. Nicholson, they were employed on the fishing smacks. Through the kindness of Lord Polwarth, with whom I stayed at his place on the borders of Scotland, several lads were sent to Scotland, and gave the greatest satisfaction. A boy came to us direct from prison. After a time he was sent to Yarmouth. A few months afterwards he had a holiday, and called to see the Master of the House. The first thing he said was, 'I have come to pay you what I owe, and to thank you for enabling me to make a fresh start in life.' The Home was exclusively for boys who were willing to maintain themselves by their own industry. Over 1000 boys received the benefits it affords. Many of them were orphans."

Frederick Charrington had by this time definitely given up his huge inheritance, had left a luxurious home, and had taken a house in Stepney Green. In one of a series of long talks with Mr. T. Richardson, Registrar of the Eastern Telegraph Company, his life-long friend and helper, I have gathered some curious and amusing details about the life lived in Stepney by the young Evangelist.

"In his early days," Mr. Richardson told me, "Mr. Charrington's one idea was for self-denial – personal asceticism."

This early ideal he has persisted in throughout his life. Like other workers for God in different fields, he has chosen celibacy as his lot, in order to give his whole time and all his interests to his work.

"He took a house in the East End," Mr. Richardson continued, "near the brewery, and in furnishing it went in for self-denial with an almost monkish enthusiasm. Although it is many years ago, I remember it all perfectly well. He had only a table and one or two chairs, and when there was nothing else to sit upon, an empty packing-case did as well as anything else. He had no carpet at all. One day his mother came to see him, and was dreadfully distressed to see him living like this. Expostulations on the part of Frederick were in vain, and Mrs. Charrington drove immediately to the biggest furnisher's in the City of London and told them to take no denial, but to go at once and furnish her son's house properly.

"He was red-hot and full of enthusiasm. I remember we had been out to a meeting together one night, and somewhere about one or two o'clock in the morning we found ourselves sitting on a costermonger's barrow in a blind alley. Charrington clutched me by the arm and almost shook me. 'We must do something,' he said, 'we must do something to call attention to this cursed liquor traffic. We must get a gang of men armed with cudgels and go and smash the fronts of the public-houses. We shall never do anything till we call attention to it!'"

I shall have much to say shortly of the beginnings of what is perhaps the greatest Temperance crusade that England has ever known, but meanwhile these little glimpses I am able to afford my readers of the quaint house in Stepney so many years ago are curiously interesting.

"Mr. Charrington's house," – so Mr. Richardson told me – "was the house of call in the neighbourhood, and by strange coincidence, everybody went there about mealtimes! Once, when Mr. Marcus Rainsford was staying in what was locally nicknamed the 'Monastery,' a certain zealous and holy man of God looked in. It was during the evening. Now, a peculiarity of the gentleman to whom I refer is, that when he goes anywhere, he never knows when it is time to leave. On the particular occasion that I remember, he stayed on and on until he missed the last omnibus that could take him to his home. He said to Mr. Charrington, 'You will have to put me up for the night.' Mr. Charrington told him that he hadn't a spare bed. Accordingly, Mr. – , nothing daunted, replied that he would sleep with Mr. Rainsford if he didn't mind. Mr. Rainsford did not seem at all delighted at the prospect, and said he preferred to take his rest undisturbed as a rule, but that for one night, at any rate, he didn't mind.

"Accordingly, the matter was arranged thus, and in the morning Mr. – got up first. There was a bathful of water in the bedroom, and the guest inquired if he could take his bath at once. Mr. Rainsford was still almost asleep, and mumbled some sort of an assent. When Mr. – had completed his ablutions, he asked Mr. Rainsford where he should empty the water, and Rainsford, who was by no means awake yet, and who hated being disturbed, growled out that he could pour it out of the window. The too literal Mr. – obeyed blindly, with the result that the bath-water descended in an unbroken stream upon the poor old housekeeper, who was breaking coal in the area below."

It must indeed have been a most curious establishment at Stepney Green! Comfort, as ordinary people know it, appears to have been entirely absent. The strangest characters foregathered there, all day and all night the place hummed like a hive. Mr. Charrington, as will be seen later, has always had a fondness for strange pets. In the house at Stepney a monkey was added to the entourage, and shortly afterwards a well-known Evangelistic preacher, who must also, I beg leave to think, have been a considerable prig, called at the "Monastery." Mr. Charrington, who was smoking his inevitable pipe, introduced this person to the monkey. The Evangelist threw back his head, rolled his eyes upwards, and lifted his hands. "Not very spiritual, Charrington," he said, "not very spiritual!" "I wonder if your tom-cat is very spiritual?" was Mr. Charrington's retort.

Mr. Mowll, who is now vicar of Christ Church, Brixton, a college friend of Keith Falconer, who frequently visited the house at Stepney Green, always went to bed very late indeed. One night he rigged up a figure of a man with cushions and an overcoat, put a hat on its head and a pipe in its mouth, and then went to bed, leaving all the gas burning. The next morning, when the housekeeper went into the room to dust it, the poor thing was frightened out of her life to find, as she thought, a strange man sitting there in the full glare of the gas. She was so upset that Mr. Mowll, a most ardent Temperance reformer, was perhaps rightly punished by having to fetch the old lady some brandy from the nearest public-house.

These incidents are all trivial enough, but I give them as illustrating the happy and boyish natures of the young men who found themselves together under the leadership of Mr. Charrington. When the bathroom tap was left on, and the whole house was flooded, their equanimity was not disturbed. When there was no proper dinner, they ate bread and cheese. The vagaries of the housekeeper, the odd behaviour of the monkey, were all subjects for mirth. The moral of this sort of life is obvious enough. These men cared nothing for personal comfort or pleasure. Their life was lived in an unceasing warfare with the powers of evil. Their swords were always girded on – the rest was as nothing.

The late Earl of Kintore stayed for some little time at the East End house, and, as it unhappily turned out, just before his death. As he was leaving after his visit he shook his host's old housekeeper – whose name was Mrs. Pilgrim – by the hand and said, "Well, good-bye. You're a pilgrim and I'm a stranger, and we shall soon be at home." As a matter of fact the earl died suddenly only a fortnight afterwards.

I continue the record of the early beginnings of the great work that was to come, for it was now that the East End Conference Hall first came into being.

"About this time Mr. Charrington received a letter from the late Mr. Pemberton Barnes, who was said to own the largest number of houses of any one in the world (then nearly a stranger to him), stating that he held a site known as Carlton Square, which he was anxious to devote to a Christian work. He had originally intended it for the erection of a church, but being deterred by the rapid advances of Ritualism, of which he was an opponent, he resolved to build a mission hall instead. The result was the erection of the present building, which seated 600 persons, and was opened on Friday, November 1, 1872.

"The following extract is from The Christian of that day.

"'Another very interesting movement has been inaugurated in the East End. On the 1st of this month a new and very elegant iron structure, capable of accommodating 600 people, was opened for public worship and evangelistic effort of various kinds. T. B. Smithies, Esq., editor of the British Workman, presided, and addresses were given by Revs. Jack Kennedy, H. Barton, Dr. Sharpe, Dr. Barnardo, and other friends. A statement of the circumstances which led to the erection was made by Mr. F. N. Charrington, the honorary superintendent, who said, some time ago, being anxious to establish a boy's lodging house, he asked Mr. Pemberton Barnes to devote an old house (situated in the East End, and belonging to him) to that purpose; but Mr. Barnes said he had, unfortunately, given it into the hands of the builders a week previously, and so the matter dropped. A short time ago, however, he had received a letter from that gentleman saying he was desirous of doing something for the Lord; he owned a square on which he proposed building a house with a small hall attached. Mr. Charrington visited him the next day, and Mr. Barnes agreed to build a hall in which the Gospel might be preached, and in which the work would be thoroughly unsectarian. The meetings held on the four Sunday evenings since the opening have been numerously attended, and not one has passed without distinct testimony of blessing received by some of those present. With much regret we add that Mr. Pemberton Barnes, the kind friend to whom the East End of London is indebted for this addition to its means of evangelisation, died within a fortnight of its opening.'"

At this East End Conference Hall Mr. Charrington took up the question of adult baptism. His work there was in no sense at all sectarian, nor has it ever been so from those early days until the present moment – a point which I shall enlarge upon at some length when I come to the story of the Great Assembly Hall itself and my own experiences there.

At the same time, Mr. Charrington's own personal conviction was that a form of baptism by immersion was warranted by his interpretation of Scripture, and was a means for good. Mr. Richardson, in one of our conferences, has told me the following curious anecdote. There was a baptistry built in the new hall at Carlton Square, but there was no water laid on. Accordingly, Mr. Charrington sent to the great brewery in the Mile End Road and asked for a supply of wagons containing hogsheads of water to be sent to the hall. The request was immediately complied with, but there was considerable consternation among the neighbours of the new mission when they saw great brewery wagons delivering barrels at the hall – barrels which it certainly never occurred to them, contained nothing but harmless water.

In addition to this central hall, interesting work was also being done in Bethnal Green, where there was a building attached to the now rapidly growing mission in Bonner's Lane. The neighbourhood, in 1875, was a singularly interesting one. It took its name from the fact that Bishop Bonner, of infamous memory, in the days of "Bloody Mary," had his palace in the immediate vicinity, and additional antiquarian interest was that the faith the then Bishop of London sought to extinguish was afterwards propagated in that very neighbourhood by the French Protestants, who settled there in 1572. The descendants of these people occupied the neighbourhood at the time Mr. Charrington started work there, and extremely picturesque their lives and habits were. A record has been placed in my hands, and it tells of a day when green fields and trees made pleasant a quarter now a wilderness of bricks.

I read —

"I know an old inhabitant who has seen the changes of the last fifty years, and he told me that a man he knew kept a farm a few hundred yards from Bonner Lane. This man's great desire was to possess a hundred black cows. For years he tried to collect them, but never managed to collect more than ninety-nine. As soon as he made the number up to a hundred, one always died, or was lost; and the old man said to him, 'It always reminds me of the lost sheep in Scripture.' The neighbourhood is well known by the name of Twig Folly, and there is an inscription placed upon some houses built by a man who obtained his property in the following way. There was living there a man who made twig baskets. He was greatly troubled by the boys robbing him of his fruit. One day, seeing a boy in one of his fruit trees, he shouldered his gun and shot him. Fearing the consequences, he made over all his property to a friend, on condition that he himself should have it back at the expiration of whatever punishment he might get. But when he came to claim his property, he found his friend not so faithful as he had anticipated; for, instead of delivering it up, he kept it. In building these houses with the proceeds of the property, the friend asked a neighbour what he should name them, and received the following reply: 'What could be better than to name them after the old twig basket maker, for his folly?' So it was named Twig Folly.

"The place is now inhabited by the working-classes. A few of the old silk weavers are still left, who carry on a small trade which cannot be very remunerative. In our hall for the last three months some happy hours have been spent by many who formerly could never be induced to enter any place of worship.

"The plan of the services has been as follows: Meeting on Sunday evenings at six o'clock, and going out with a band of good singers, we invite the people in; then small handbills are distributed, setting forth the order of the services, which consist of singing by a good choir formed for the purpose, and a short address; sometimes a few will tell their experiences. We have by this means been able to fill the hall. This has greatly encouraged us, for if we can obtain such a good congregation in the summer months, we may expect nothing less in the winter. But we are thankful that we can go further and say, that many who have lived without God, and been careless as to their future state, have been awakened and converted. A man came in one Sunday, and stayed after the service to be spoken to. He said he was a prize-fighter, and on the Wednesday following he was to fight. But before he left that night, he delivered his will over to God, and determined by His grace to lead a new life and to keep away from the fight. He has been seen since, and we are thankful to say that he kept his word."

The work in Bonner Lane went on for some three years. After that the activities at the Central Hall demanded so much of the Evangelist's time that it was felt impossible to give the necessary supervision to the offshoot of the mission.

Mr. Charrington was therefore glad to leave this field of labour in the hands of the Rev. T. Bowman Stephenson, who purchased the Hall from the chief organisation and carried on the work himself, though still with friendly relations with the organisers of the chief mission.

How my readers feel about this record I shall never be able to know. I myself am impatient to proceed to a certain point where the immense drama of Frederick Charrington's evangelistic life may be said to commence. But in a life of this sort it is obviously necessary to continue the story of small beginnings.

Throughout all these accounts of what happened in those early days I see Mr. Charrington as the main force, the apostle. But I see him thus only in imagination, only in the light of what he afterwards did. His own memories of this period in his career are simply those of a man who remembers that he was always hard at work, was always sacrificing himself, his money, and his time for the good of others. But the picturesqueness of the days which were to come so soon has somewhat obscured in my mind – and I know in his also – the intimate and personal point of view.

At the same time, as this life is written once and for all, the story of the beginnings must be faithfully told, and told in such detail as I can.