It was a great happiness to be born in a village. Our village was rather a pretty one. Afar off we heard the murmurs and smelt the salt air of the distant sea, and that was something. There were no beerhouses then, and, alas! few attractions to keep raw village lads under good influence. My father, as I have said, was a Dissenting minister, painful, godly and laborious, ever seeking the spiritual welfare of his people, and relieving as far as possible their temporal wants. I had to accompany him in his pastoral visits, sometimes an irksome task, as the poor were numerous and garrulous, and made the most on such occasions of the infirmities of their lot. Some of the old ones were so worn and withered that their weird faces often haunted me by night and terrified me in my dreams.
Another thing that gave me trouble was the fact of being a Dissenter. It seemed to me a badge of inferiority, as the ignorant farmers and tradesmen around made Nonconformity the subject of deprecating remarks. “Dissenters were sly,” said the son of the village shopkeeper, the only boy of my age in the village, whose father was the most servile of men himself to the parochial dignitaries, and I felt that, as a Dissenter, I was under a cloud. It was the fashion to call us “Pograms,” and the word – no one knew what it meant – had rather an unpleasant sound to my youthful ears. This I knew, that most of the leading men of the place went to church when they went anywhere, and not to our meeting-house, where, however, we had good congregations. Many of our people were farmers who came from a distance for the afternoon service, and at whose homes when the time came I had many a happy day going out ferreting in the winter and in the autumn riding on the fore-horse. As the harvest was being gathered in, how proud was I to ride that fore-horse, though I lost a good deal of leather in consequence, and how welcome the night’s rest after tumbling about in the waggon in the harvest field. Happily did the morning of my life pass away amidst rural scenes and sights. It is a great privilege to be born in the country. Childhood in the city loses much of its zest. Yet I had my dark moments. I had often to walk through a small wood, where, according to the village boys, flying serpents were to be seen, and in the dark nights I often listened with fear and trembling to the talk of the villagers of wretched miscreants who were to be met with at such times with pitch-plaster, by means of which they took away many a boy’s life for the sake of selling his dead body to the doctor for the purposes of dissection. But the winter night had its consolations nevertheless. We had the stories of English history by Maria Hack and other light literature to read. We had dissecting maps to put together, and thus acquire a knowledge of geography. And there was a wonderful game invented by a French abbé, which was played in connection with a teetotum and a map of England and Wales, the benefits of which even at this distance of time I gratefully record. It is true cards were looked upon as sinful, but we had chess and draughts. Later on we had The Penny Magazine, and Chambers’s Journal, and The Edinburgh Review, which had to me all the fascination of a novel. We had also The Evangelical Magazine and The Youth’s Companion, a magazine which, I believe, has long ceased to exist, and the volumes with illustrations of the Society for Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, and we had the book club meetings, when it was the fashion for the members to take tea at each other’s homes, and propose books, and once a year meet to sell the old ones by auction. My father shone on such occasions. He was a good talker, as times went – conversation not being much of a gift among the members of the club, save when the ladies cheered us with their presence. As a Scotchman he had a good share of the dry humour of his nation. But chiefly did he shine when the brethren met. Foremost of the party were Sloper of Beccles, who had talked on things spiritual with Mrs. Siddons, Crisp of Lowestoft, Blaikie of Bungay, Longley of Southwold, and others, who discussed theology and metaphysics all the evening, till their heads were as cloudy as the tobacco-impregnated room in which they sat. At all these gatherings Alexander Creak of Yarmouth was a principal figure; a fine, tall, stately man, minister of a congregation supposed to be of a very superior class. One of his sons, I believe, still lives in Norfolk. As to the rest they have left only their memories, and those are growing dimmer and fainter every year.
At that time amongst the brethren who occasionally dawned upon our benighted village were Mayhew of Walpole, good old Mr. Dennant of Halesworth (of whom I chiefly remember that he was a bit of a poet, and that he was the author of a couplet which delighted me as a boy – and delights me still – “Awhile ago when I was nought, and neither body, soul nor thought”), and Mr. Ward of Stowmarket, who was supposed to be a very learned man indeed, and Mr. Hickman of Denton, whose library bespoke an erudition rare in those times. Most of them had sons. Few of them, however, became distinguished in after life; few of them, indeed, followed their fathers’ steps as ministers. One of the Creaks did, and became a tutor, I think, at Spring Hill College, Birmingham; but the fact is few of them were trained for contest and success in the world. As regards myself, I own I was led to think a great deal more of the next world than of this. We had too much religion. God made man to rule the world and conquer it, to fight a temporal as well as spiritual battle, to be diligent in business, whilst at the same time fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. What I chiefly remember was that I was to try and be good, though at the same time it was awfully impressed upon me that of myself I could think no good thought nor do one good thing; that I was born utterly depraved, and that if I were ever saved – a fact I rather doubted – it was because my salvation had been decreed in the councils of heaven before the world was. Naturally my religion was of fear rather than of love. It seems to me that lads thus trained, as far as my experience goes, never did turn out well, unless they were namby-pamby creatures, milksops, in fact, rather than men. I have lived to see a great change for the better in this respect, and a corresponding improvement of the young man of the day. It may be that he is less sentimental; but his religion, when he has any, is of a manlier type. I never saw a copy of Shakespeare till I was a young man. As a child, my memory had been exercised in learning passages from Milton, the hardest chapters in the Old or New Testament, and the Assembly Catechism. If that Assembly Catechism had never been written I should have been happier as a child, and wiser and more useful as a man. I have led an erratic life; I have wandered far from the fold. At one time I looked on myself as an outcast. With the Old Psalmist – with brave Oliver Cromwell – with generations of tried souls, I had to sing, as Scotch Presbyterians, I believe, in Northern kirks still sing: —
Woe’s me that I in Meshec am
A sojourner so long,
Or that I in the tents do dwell
To Kedar that belong.
Yet nothing was simpler or more beautiful than the lives of those old Noncons.; I may say so from a wide experience. They were godly men, a striking contrast to the hunting, drinking, swearing parsons of the surrounding district. Hence their power in the pulpit, their success in the ministry. But they failed to understand childhood and youth; childhood, with its delight in things that are seen and temporal, and youth with its passionate longing to burst its conventional barriers, and to revel in the world which looks so fair, and of which it has heard such evil. Ah, these children of many prayers; how few of them came to be pious; how many of them fell, some, alas, to rise no more. One reason was that if you did not see your way to become a church member and a professor of religion you were cut off, or felt inwardly that you were cut off, which is much the same thing, and had to associate with men of loose lives and looser thoughts. There was no via media; you were either a saint or a sinner, of the church or the world. It is not so now, when even every Young Men’s Christian Association has its gymnasium, and the young man’s passions are soothed by temperance and exercise and not inflated by drink. There may not be so much of early piety as there was – though of that I am not sure. There is a great deal more of religion than there was, not so much of sensational enjoyment or of doctrinal discussion perhaps, but more practical religion in all the various walks of life.
We had to teach in the Sunday-school. My services were early utilised in that direction, for the village was badly supplied with the stuff of which teachers were made, and as the parson’s son I was supposed to have an ex-officio qualification for the task. I fear I was but a poor hand in the work of teaching the young idea how to shoot, especially when that idea was developed in the bodies of great hulking fellows, my seniors in years and superiors in size. However, one of them did turn out well. Many years after