Page:The English Peasant.djvu/353

 Withal he had been tempted, and had fallen into exactly the sins of his people. Confusion of ideas concerning courtship and matrimony, with the burden and sorrow accruing therefrom; want of confidence in other men's good intentions; and suspicion leading to deceit,—such, we have seen, had been his temptations, and these too were the temptations of the peasant of the Weald.

An earnest-hearted, long-suffering people, capable of becoming very dark, ignorant, besotted, and depraved, or of rising to a grandeur and nobility of faith, such as all the crackling fires of Smithfield could never burn out,—these people now began to find in their fellow-peasant one who expressed their deepest thoughts.

His first hearers were the man and his wife who had welcomed him so kindly to Ewell. They invited him to come into their cottage and talk to them. Others came, but he was not satisfied to go on before he had taken the advice of the minister of a Methodist meeting he now attended at Kingston. His teacher thought it right to deter him by drawing a picture of the responsibility of any one who attempted the work of preaching. This greatly distressed and alarmed him. Moreover, he fancied the people at the chapel looked coldly upon him. They could not understand him, and were afraid of him.

No human being, in fact, could be blamed for not seeing in this rough, unmannerly gardener, with his strange thoughts only half expressed, a great and powerful preacher.

But what could so wonderful an experience mean if he had not passed through it for others? Why, indeed, should he have been singled out for special teaching if he was not to teach his brethren? He had learned something which he believed was of infinite importance for them to know. That knowledge had come to him not from books, or even sermons, but, as he believed, by a heavenly vision and by the action of a heavenly Teacher. What more real call could any preacher have than this?

And if he wanted a human amen to the Divine message, he soon had it. His neighbours crowded into the little thatched cottage, and their testimony was expressed by one of their number, a poor unhappy woman, who was induced by her husband to come