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My mother was
a Baptist, and my father, though not a Baptist, was a Calvinist
in belief. He frequently went on Sunday mornings, taking one or
two of his boys with him, to the Baptist chapel, about a mile off,
and to the Wesleyan chapel in the village on Sunday afternoons.
He was prone to criticise, in a hostile spirit, the sermons delivered
at the Wesleyan chapel. He abjured Wesley as much as he admired
Toplady, and balanced his depreciation of Arminianism by his appreciation
of Calvinism. Though I heard, when a boy, several hundred sermons,
I do not remember a single passage or anecdote given in any one
of them. I well remember, however, how sleepy I frequently got at
the afternoon services, and the scores of times I pinched myself
or pulled my hair to prevent nodding or falling from the form. We
all sat on forms without backs in Cornish village chapels in those
days. I also well remember how eagerly I anticipated the perorations
of a Wesleyan travelling minister (Christopher by name), when he
described in glowing language the joys of the redeemed and the tortures
of the damned. When he preached, and particularly at the end of
his sermons, I was wide awake. I then listened with rapt attention,
or as if I were witnessing the closing scene of a tragic performance
on the stage. His florid descriptions so arrested and swayed my
imagination that in my dreams I occasionally awoke in fright on
seeing the world on fire, accompanied by scenes that might have
given Dante excruciating suggestions for his Inferno. I mention
these things not to undervalue preaching to young people, but to
suggest that such preaching, to be beneficial, should be adapted
to the youthful mind.
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My mother rarely
went to chapel. Her household duties and anxieties were as numerous
and as necessary on Sundays as on other days. She put her religion
into her life. She said little and did much. She quietly and without
a murmur did the many things she had to do from day to day, and
from hour to hour. The cares and claims of home bounded her ambition
and fully occupied her thoughts and hands. She was essentially a
peacemaker. - never knew her to cause a family jar, or to say a
word against a neighbour, or to give offence to anyone. Blessed
be her name and memory!
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I sometimes
think that, could she, when absorbed in work and anxiety, have glanced
in fancy into the future, and seen how, fifty, sixty, or seventy
years after, she would be so loved and reverenced, an additional
smile might now and then have brightened her serious face. But perhaps
it is better as it was and is. She did her best from a sense of
duty and for the love of it, without a thought or expectation that
for so doing her memory would be embalmed in the memory of others.
She rests from her labours. She died in my brother Richard's house
at Bath in May, 1870, soon after she had entered on the eighty-sixth
year of her age. I have been privileged to dedicate to her memory
the Cornwall Convalescent Home at Perranporth, the Public Library
at Newton Abbot,2
where she was born, and one of the Homes at the Colony for the benefit
of Epileptics at Chalfont, Buckinghamshire.
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