The Pilgrim (2 page)

One day, when I was thirteen years of age, my father and I compared our experiences in Grammar School. They were much alike. We lingered awhile over the little things: how when the fire was low in winter and our ink froze, we worked the points of our quills across the surface of the paper to avoid blots and blemishes. We rejoiced together at the beauty of the Latin language. My father could still inflect in every detail any noun or verb.

He said then that I was to go to Emmanuel College, the most godly college at Cambridge, wherein I would take a degree as a Bachelor of Divinity and follow him in his calling as a Minister of Christ. Father said, “With God's grace, you will one day shine your light before men that they may see His good works and glorify our Father, which is in heaven.”

I said, “I have no faith in Christ. I have no power to turn unto Him.”

Said he, “Have patience. I was naught but a year older than you when I was born anew.”

I wept often over my unrequited desire for salvation.

My father said, “Your hearty desire for salvation is surely the first evidence that grace is at work in your soul.”

So I sought Christ without faith in His grace. I felt it was hypocritical to study at Emmanuel for a Bachelor of Divinity and become a Minister. My father could not afford to send me as a pensioner, in the amount of some forty-five pounds per annum. Satan tempted me to go as a sizar and earn my rations by waiting upon my fellow students, to continue my studies of Latin not in the service of Christ but for its beauty. I was lewdly disposed to beauteous language and could not renounce my satanical yearning for the pleasure it gave me.

Musing in the midst of my dumps, I felt my lack of faith in God's grace more keenly than before. To tell you true, until I was but recently regenerated, I feared that I loved language more than I loved Christ.

My father had been converted in church, when his Minister preached a sermon, the subject being John 10:30. My father had repeated the verse aloud: “I and my Father are one.” He was pierced to the heart by the mystery and miracle of the Incarnation. He said to me, “I became very hot for the Gospel. I love the Gospel. Not because I believe it, but because I feel it—the wealth, peace, liberty that arise from it.”

I copied down my father's words in swiftwriting, the cipher which I had learned at his behest from my schoolmaster, James Bolt, who wrote down my father's sermons and lectures in cipher for four shillings a year. (My learning swiftwriting as a boy was a special Providence of God that enabled me to make copious notes and then write this Confession of Faith.) After I finished writing down his words, my father scanned the straight lines and curves on my paper and said, “The divers and sundry things that make up the natural world are ciphers writ by God and we must learn to decipher them, just as we have learned to foretell an early spring by the age of the moon at the beginning of January.”

I was restless during my last year of Grammar School. I was convinced that I was not destined by God to serve Christ as His Minister. What was I to do with my life? Whither would I go? I envied the apprentices and idle boys of the town who, in the evenings, met to be merry, quaffed ale in the taverns, and played at cards and dice. After work, they lived for pleasure, with no thought of heaven or hell. On May Day, before dawn, they went into Conant's wood with girls and gathered the dew to drink. Then they all danced around the Maypole on the village green. I fancied joining them in Satan's revels. I confessed that to my father, who basted me with a stick.

I welcomed his punishment, though it did no good. Puberty was upon me. The Devil often tempted me, and I surrendered to lust and oft had traffic with myself. I grieved for my soul and betook myself to God by praying. He did not respond to me.

• • •

Soon after I finished Grammar School, my father said to me, “My son, I will reveal my heart to you. I am much afraid of breaking the law of the realm because of the fate of the preacher Daniel Harvey, from Foxton. You would not remember him, but his memory festers in my mind. Some years ago, he was tried in London, tortured, and sentenced to death for having in his possession a sermon he wrote against wearing the surplice. Mind you, he never preached it but only wrote it out. He was racked, needles were pushed under his fingernails, and his private parts were burned with a torch. He was kept in an iron cage called the Little One in which he could not stand upright. The Lord took him during the third night.

“Know your father for what I am—a sinful coward! I call for a reformation of the church but want the courage to set a proper example of a godly shepherd to my flock. A soiled surplice! I wear a soiled surplice. What a piddling protest to the papist Church of England. But I am sore afraid of the rack and the torch.”

He then said to me, “Even though I'm a vile wretch who cannot close with Christ because of my cowardice, you must have reverence for me. You are enjoined by Scripture to honor me.”

• • •

Ere every Sabbath dinner, before the servants, Ben Tucker spake the following, taught him by my father: “O Lord our God, seeing thou hast ordained sundry degrees and states of men in this life, and among them Thou hast appointed me to be a servant, give me the grace to serve in my vocation faithfully.”

Then my father always said, “The Lord's Day is the market day of the soul, on which we lay on spiritual food for the following week. It is a day that enriches the Elect.”

He fasted on the Sabbath before his morning's sermon. After he and his household returned home to dine, he locked himself in his chamber for about the space of an hour. When I inquired of him what he did therein, he replied, “I pray for forgiveness.”

My father gave communion to his congregation about ten times a year. It was the practice of the former Minister of St. James to give communion to servants and other common people at five in the morning, with a cheap claret, whilst masters and dames, their children, rich tradesmen, and their families took communion at nine of the clock with a fine muscatel. Over the objection of my father's church wardens, who wanted to spare the cost and preserve the order of the realm, he gave communion to his whole congregation at five in the morning and served it with the dear muscatel. He said to me, “There is but one division in my congregation—nay, the entire world—and that is between the damned and the saved.”

During my last two years at Grammar School, I often visited Mary in her small cottage on Old Parish Lane. My father bade Ben accompany me, carrying his oaken staff, to protect me from the nightwalkers with cudgels and knives who had eluded the watch. I remember in particular trudging through the mud one wet October night. We passed The Sign of the Rose on New Street, outside of which, amongst a crowd, the constable had hold of Squire Wilton, who had stabbed the tapster of the inn to the heart. I looked through the window and espied the tapster's corpse lying upon its back in a puddle of blood upon the floor. The sole of his left shoe had a big hole therein.

Arriving at Mary's cottage, I said to her and Ben, “It was the first corpse I have ever seen.”

'Twas Mary who rejoined, “Aye, but not the last, my dearest boy.”

Said I, “What makes you say so?”

“I dreamed it,” said she.

It began to rain. Mary's cottage had a leaky thatched roof. Her four daughters, aged in years from two to twelve, were huddled together in a dry corner, midst the three spinning wheels and the loom. They kept their sow within-door.

Mark kissed Mary tenderly on the forehead. The sow snorted. Mary divided a big round cheese that she had taken with my father's permission. Mark denied himself a bite. He had passed the day keeping watch over his master's cows as they grazed upon the stubble of his master's harvested corn. Mark smelled of cow dung. Bess, being twelve years of age, had tended her younger sisters while spinning yarn for Wells, the clothier.

Said Mary, “That tapster was a bottle-nosed rogue. He's burning in hell, with a burst stomach and steaming guts.”

• • •

Toward the end of December, we had extreme frost and much snow, so that many died of cold upon the highways. The town was filled with wandering beggars, bedlams, and vagabonds. My father examined them all, mixing wholesome instructions with severe reproofs. If they had passes to travel by, he scanned them thoroughly, and when he found them false or counterfeit, he sent for the constable, who made new passes and sent the wanderers to their last place of settlement or birth.

My father was righteous also unto the poor of Winterbourne. In January, five small thatched houses at the west side of the North gate burnt, casting their twenty-one ragged inhabitants out into the icy street. My father collected seven pounds and ten shillings in our three churches and distributed it amongst them.

All that winter, the smallpox was very thick in Winterbourne. Ten men and women, twelve elder folk, and thirteen children died. The deeply pitted faces and hands of the survivors sickened me. My father, the two other rectors in the town, the barber-surgeon, and our physician, Doctor Troth, tended the stricken. Doctor Troth's fee for his ministrations was two shillings; only five people could afford his service. He believed that having survived the malady in his childhood, he could not catch it again. (I could not look upon his pitted face or hands without being desirous of vomiting.) My father declared special days of prayer, fasting, and humiliation for his congregation so that God might have mercy and remove the pestilence from His sinful people.

I lived in dread of dying from the sickness or, worse, becoming disfigured from it. I suffered the insufficience of faith in my soul. I zealously kept the Sabbath, not daring to eat or dwell upon irreverent things. I devoted myself to listening to my father's sermons, reading Scripture, and praying. It availed me nothing; my soul stayed plunged in the depths. And though I could not know it then, the visitation of smallpox was a dire portent to me from Heaven, being the reason why I have dwelt at length upon it here.

• • •

Come March, I worked with Ben in my father's garden. We planted red cabbage, carrots, spearmint, onions, sage, Runcival peas, lavender, sorrel, roses, and parsnips, &c.

I remember Ben, after a rain, hanging his shirt to dry upon a gooseberry bush in the garden. I gazed upon his scars, saying, “I have never heard you trouble yourself about the state of your soul.”

Ben answered in his mild voice, “My soul was full of sores that Christ, through your father, hath healed. I'm already in Abraham's bosom. This world be now heaven enough for me.”

• • •

Mary was near her time. In the beginning of July, a neighbor of Mary's sought me out at home. Mark, haunted for three months by a quivering fever, was taken by the Lord in June. And it seemed Mary was near her time as well. The neighbor said that Mary had, ten days before, been delivered of a boy she had named Mark. Satan, the enemy of mankind, had blinded Mary's judgment. She told her aforementioned neighbor, “Without a father, my babe is better off dead than alive.”

I hastened to visit her, with a loaf of white bread, a cheese, some dressed beef, and a pot of ale in my knapsack. Mary's four daughters were with kindly neighbors. She nibbled the beef, took one draught of ale, and said to me, “Look you, my dear boy. Our sow died of the white measles. I sold the loom for money to pay a barber-surgeon to thrice bleed my poor Mark and provide him with medicine. I need money for food. I have not tuppence left to rub together. I will come to ruin and disgrace by reason of poverty.”

She wore a filthy shift. She said, “My poor boykin hath the hiccups and puked on me.” While suckling her babe, she said thrice, “I must go to work. I must go to work. I must go to work.”

The babe fell asleep. She laid him in his basket, lay down upon a bundle of moldy straw, and slept. I swilled the rest of the ale and watched over her for almost four hours. Along about five of the clock in the afternoon, I could not hold my water any longer and went outside to relieve myself. When I returned, I found her hugging the naked little corpse to her breast. The babe's much swelled little tongue stuck out between its tiny purple lips.

Mary said, “My poor boykin—my little heart—puked on me again, and I strangled him. The Devil bade me do it!”

She hugged the little corpse to her breast and sang a song I knew well from street singers in the town.

O death, rock me asleep,

Bring me to quiet rest,

Toll on thou passing bell,

Let thy sound

My death tell,

For I must die,

There is no remedy,

For now I die.

God forgive me, I loved her still, even though she was a murderer.

Mary was arrested, imprisoned, and, at the next session of the Assizes, condemned to be hanged. Justice Baron Digby allowed her to speak.

“Pity me!” said Mary. “I was doomed by God ere the creation of the world to harken unto Satan and strangle my babe—my precious boykin!—that just after he lived ten days. I am damned! I will burn in hellfire. So pity me! Damned ere the creation of the world! Wherefore? What did I do ere the creation of the world to warrant this fate? Answer me! Who is this hurtful God that hath condemned me? Damn Him that damned me!”

Justice Baron Digby ordered Mary to be gagged.

My father and I visited her in gaol upon the day before her hanging. Her four daughters were there to bid her farewell. She enjoined my father, “Good master, my poor daughters here now abide in the Hospital, amidst other orphans, wherein they spin and card and make bonelace from before the dawn till the coming of the night. Look in on them from time to time, I beseech thee.”

I kissed her calloused palms and wet them with my tears. I said, “You are a murderer and a blasphemer—a damned soul—but I love you. God forgive me, I shall always love you!”

She said, “Thank you, master, for your kind words. I love you, too.”