For the Faith: A Story of the Young Pioneers of Reformation in Oxford. Everett-Green Evelyn
humble persons were raking amid the ashes where the books had been burnt, as though to see whether some poor fragments might not have been left unconsumed; and when they failed to find even this-for others had been before them, and the task of burning had probably been well accomplished-they would put a handful of ashes into some small receptacle, and slip it cautiously into pocket or pouch.
One man, seeing Dalaber's gaze fixed upon him, went up to him almost defiantly and said:
"Are you spying upon us poor citizens, to whom is denied aught but the ashes of the bread of life?"
Dalaber looked him full in the face, and spoke the words he had heard from Clarke's lips the previous evening:
"Crede et manducasti."
Instantly the man's face changed. A light sprang into his eyes. He looked round him cautiously, and said in a whisper:
"You are one of us!"
There was scarce a moment's pause before Dalaber replied:
"I am one of you-in heart and purpose, at least, if not in actual fact."
He paced home through the streets in a tempest of conflicting emotions. But his mind was made up. Come what might-peril, suffering, or death-he had put his hand to the plough. He would not look back.
"Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life."
He seemed to walk to the accompaniment of these words; and when he reached Garret's house he went straight to the master, told his story, and knelt suddenly down before him.
"Bless me, even me also, O my father!" he exclaimed, in a burst of emotion to which his temperament made him subject, "for I would now be admitted as member of the Association of Christian Brothers."
Chapter III: A Neophyte
"And the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and he loved him as his own soul."
These words often came into the mind of the priest, Thomas Garret, during the three days which Anthony Dalaber spent at his house, hard by the rushing river, in the city of London.
There were ten years in age between them. Dalaber was a youth who had seen little of life beyond what he had learned in Oxford, whereas Garret had already passed through strange and perilous experiences. The one had so far lived amongst books, and with youthful companions of his own standing; the other had been a pioneer in one of the most dangerous movements of the day, and had seen what such courses might well lead him to. Storm and stress had been the portion of the one, a pleasant life of study and pleasure that of the other. It was only during the past six months that association with Clarke and some others of his way of thinking had aroused in Dalaber's mind a sense of restless discontent with existing ordinances, and a longing after purer, clearer light, together with a distaste and ofttimes a disgust at what he saw of corruption and simony amongst those who should have been the salt of the earth.
Had it not been for the talks he had heard of late, in Dr. Langton's house, he might have passed through his divinity studies at Oxford as his brother had done before him, content to drift with the stream, ignorant of the undercurrents which were already disturbing its apparently tranquil surface, and ready in due course to be consecrated to his office, and to take some benefice if he could get it, and live and die as the average priest of those times did, without troubling himself over the vexed questions of papal encroachment and traffic in pardons and indulgences which were setting Germany in a flame.
But he had been first aroused by seeing the light in Freda's eyes as these questions had been discussed in the hearing of her and her sister. From the first moment of his presentation to Dr. Langton's family Dalaber had been strongly attracted by the beautiful sisters, and especially by Freda, whose quick, responsive eagerness and keen insight and discrimination made a deep impression upon him. The soundness of her learning amazed him at the outset; for her father would turn to her to verify some reference from his costly manuscripts or learned tomes, and he soon saw that Latin and Greek were to her as her mother tongue.
When she did join in the conversation respecting the interpretation or translation of the Holy Scriptures, he had quickly noted that her scholarship was far deeper than his own. He had been moved to a vivid admiration at first, and then to something that was more than admiration. And the birth and growth of his spiritual life he traced directly to those impulses which had been aroused within him as he had heard Freda Langton speak and argue and ask questions.
That was how it had started; but it was Clarke's teaching and preaching which had completed the change in him from the careless to the earnest student of theology. Clarke's spirituality and purity of life, his singleness of aim, his earnest striving after a standard of holiness seldom to be found even amongst those who professed to practise the higher life, aroused the deep admiration of the impulsive and warm-hearted Dalaber. He sought his rooms, he loved to hear his discourses, he called himself his pupil and his son, and was the most regular and enthusiastic attender of his lectures and disputations.
And now he had taken a new and forward step. Suddenly he seemed to have been launched upon a tide with which hitherto he had only dallied and played. He was pushing out his bark into deeper waters, and already felt as though the cables binding him to the shores of safety and ease were completely parted.
It was in part due to the magnetic personality of Garret that this thing had come to pass. When Dalaber left Oxford it was with no idea that it would be a crisis in his life. He wished, out of curiosity, to be present at the strange ceremony to be enacted in St. Paul's Churchyard; and the knowledge that Clarke was going to London for a week on some private business gave the finishing touch to his resolution.
But it was not until he sat with Thomas Garret in his dark lodgings, hearing the rush of the river beneath him, looking into the fiery eyes of the priest, and hearing the fiery words which fell from his lips, that Dalaber thoroughly understood to what he had pledged himself when first he had uttered the fateful words, "I will be a member of the Association of Christian Brothers."
True, Clarke had, on their way to town, spoken to him of a little community, pledged to seek to distribute the life-giving Word of God to those who were hungering for it, and to help each in his measure to let the light, now shrouded beneath a mass of observances which had lost their original meaning to the unlettered people, shine out in its primitive brilliance and purity; but Dalaber had only partially understood the significance of all this.
Clarke was the man of thought and devotion. His words uplifted the hearts of his hearers into heavenly places, and seemed to create a new and quickened spirituality within them. Garret was the man of action. He was the true son of Luther. He loved to attack, to upheave, to overthrow. Where Clarke spoke gently and lovingly of the church, as their holy mother, whom they must love and cherish, and seek to plead with as sons, that she might cleanse herself from the defilement into which she had fallen, Garret attacked her as the harlot, the false bride, the scarlet woman seated upon the scarlet beast, and called down upon her and it alike the vials of the wrath of Almighty God.
And the soul of Dalaber was stirred within him as he listened to story after story, all illustrative of the corruption which had crept within the fold of the church, and which was making even holy things abhorrent to the hearts of men. He listened, and his heart was hot as he heard; he caught the fire of Garret's enthusiasm, and would then and there have cast adrift from his former life, thrown over Oxford and his studies there-and flung himself heart and soul into the movement now at work in the great, throbbing city, where, for the first time, he found himself.
But when he spoke words such as these Garret smiled and shook his head, though his eyes lighted with pleasure.
"Nay, my son; be not so hot and hasty. Seest thou not that in this place our work for the time being is well-nigh stopped?
"Not for long," he added quickly, whilst the spark flew from his eyes-"not for long, mind you, ye proud prelates and cardinal. The fire you have lighted shall blaze in a fashion ye think not of. The Word of God is a consuming fire. The sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, pierces the heart and reins of man; and that sword hath been wrested from the scabbard in which it has rusted so long, and the shining of its fiery blade shall soon he seen of all men.
"No," added the priest,