Lying Prophets | Page 9

She
visited the larder, drank a cup of milk, and then, fetching an iron hoop
and buckets, went to a sunken barrel outside the cottage door, into
which, from a pipe through the road-bank, tumbled a silver thread of

spring water.
Of the Tregenza household a word must needs be spoken. Joan's own
mother had died twelve years ago, and the anxious-natured woman who
took her place proved herself a good step-parent enough. Despite a
disposition prone to worry and to dwell upon the small tribulations of
life, Thomasin Tregenza was not unhappy, for her husband enjoyed
prosperity and a reputation for godliness unequaled in Newlyn. A great,
weather-worn, gray, hairy man was he, with a big head and a furrowed
cliff of a forehead that looked as though it had been carved by its
Creator from Cornish granite. Tregenza indeed might have stood for a
typical Cornish fisher--or a Breton. Like enough, indeed, he had old
Armorican blood in his veins, for many hundreds of Britons betook
themselves to ancient Brittany when the Saxon invasion swept the West,
and many afterward returned, with foreign wives, to the homes of their
fathers. Michael Tregenza had found religion, of a sort fiery and
unlovely enough, but his convictions were definite, with iron-hard
limitations, and he looked coldly and without pity on a damned world,
himself saved. Gray Michael had no sympathy with sin and less with
sinners. He found the devil in most unexpected quarters and was
always dragging him out of surprising hiding-places and exhibiting him
triumphantly, as a boy might show a bird's egg or butterfly. His devil
dwelt at penny readings, at fairs and festivals, in the brushes of the
artists, in a walk on a Sunday afternoon undertaken without a definite
object, sometimes in a primrose given by a boy to a girl. Of all these
bitter, self-righteous, censorious little sects which raise each its own
ladder to the Throne of Grace at Newlyn, the Luke Gospelers was the
most bitter, most self-righteous, most censorious. And of all those
burning lights which reflected the primitive savagery of the Pentateuch
from that fold, Gray Michael's beacon flamed the fiercest and most
bloody red. There was not a Gospeler, including the pastor of the flock,
but feared the austere fisherman while admiring him.
Concerning his creed, at the risk of wearying you, it must be permitted
to speak here; for only by grasping its leading features and its vast
unlikeness to the parent tree can a just estimate of Michael Tregenza be
arrived at. Luke Gospeldom had mighty little to do with the Gospel of

Luke. The sect numbered one hundred and thirty-four just persons, at
war with principalities and powers. They were saturated with the spirit
of Israel in the Wilderness, of Esau, when every man's hand was
against him. At their chapel one heard much of Jehovah, the jealous
God, of the burning lakes and the damnation reserved for mankind, as a
whole. Every Luke Gospeler was a Jehovah in his own right. They
walked hand in hand with God; they realized the dismay and
indignation Newlyn must occasion in His breast; they sympathized
heartily with the Everlasting and would have called down fire from
Heaven themselves if they could. Many openly wondered that He
delayed so long, for, from a Luke Gospeler's point of view, the place
with its dozen other chapels--each held in error by the rest, and all at
deadly war among themselves--its most vile ritualistic church of St.
Peter, its public-houses, scandals, and strifes, was riper for destruction
than Sodom. However, the hundred and thirty-four served to stave off
celestial brimstone, as it seemed.
It is pitiable, in the face of the majestic work of John Wesley in
Cornwall, to see the shattered ruins of it which remain. When the
Wesleys achieved their notable revival and swept off the dust of a dead
Anglicanism which covered religious Cornwall like a pall in the days
of the Georges, the old Celtic spirit, though these heroes found it hard
enough to rekindle, burst from its banked-up furnaces at last and blazed
abroad once more. That spirit had been bred by the saint bishops of
Brito-Celtic days, and Wesley's ultimate success was a grand repetition
of history, as extant records of the ancient use of the Church in
Cornwall prove. Its principle was that he who filled a bishop's office
should, before all things, conduct and develop missionary enterprise;
and the moral and physical courage of the Brito-Celtic bishops, having
long slumbered, awoke again in John Wesley. He built on the old
foundations, he gave to the laymen a power at that time blindly denied
them by the Church--the power which Irish and Welsh and Breton
missionary saints of old had vested in them. Wesley--himself a
giant--made wise