Though
I transcribe letters mostly a couple of hundred years old I rarely feel I am
engaging with people who are very different to me. So I can be shocked, made to
laugh, feel sympathy, and so on. But the letter transcribed below seemed to
come from another world; the writer shadowed by a close-at-hand deity,
as if hearing a voice. Perhaps I was being unfair; perhaps I was only dealing
with typical rhetorical tropes common among evangelical clergy of the
period. But then I did my research and
discovered a daughter better known than her father. Emily Katharine Bates
(1846-1922) has a Wikipedia page from which I discover she was a prolific
author and leading spiritualist who most definitely heard voices and wrote
about it. “She joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891” says
Wikipedia. Enough said? I will just add
this from her Seen and Unseen published in 1908 in which she returns to
the year 1856:
“When
only nine years old I lost my father—the Rev. John Ellison Bates of Christ
Church, Dover—and my earliest childish experience of anything supernormal was
connected with him. He had been an invalid all my short life, and I was quite
accustomed to spending days at a time without seeing him. His last illness,
which lasted about a fortnight, had therefore no special significance for me,
and my nurse, elder brother, and godmother, who were the only three people in
the house at the time, gave strict orders that none of the servants should give
me a hint of his being dangerously ill. These instructions were carefully
carried out, and yet I dreamed three nights running—the three nights preceding
his decease—that he was dead. I was entirely devoted to my father, who had been
father and mother to me in one, and these dreams no doubt broke the terrible
shock of his death to me”.
The
author of the 1838 letter below is this Reverend John Ellison Bates (1809-1856),
currently curate of St. Brides in Liverpool and married to an Irishwoman,
Ellen-Susan Carleton. He had studied at Christ Church, Oxford and in 1829
staked his main claim to fame by rowing in the first 1829 Oxford-Cambridge boat
race. Later, he became perpetual curate of a newly-built Christ Church in Dover,
consecrated in 1844.
Bates
is writing to an older man, William Henry Hardy (1789-1880), a prolific
theological author who was attracted to both Roman Catholicism and the
stringency of the Plymouth Brethren, often at the same time though it is as a
contributor to Brethren thinking that he is most remembered. In 1838 he is sending
his writings to Bates who now replies.
Transcription
Addressed
to: W H Darby Esqr Fern Bank Malvern Hills Worcester
Datelined:
1 Falkner Terrace Liverpool Feb 26 1838
My
dear Sir
I
was absent from home when your last parcel arrived having been engaged in a
very interesting work similar to the home mission in Ireland. The only
difference is that we confine ourselves to those parishes where the Incumbents
are willing to receive us, a rule which cannot be violated without a pernicious
breach of Church discipline. I mention the cause of my absence only for this
reason, it has tended to confirm an opinion to which I have been gradually led
& to which perhaps you will not be prepared to hear me so decidedly avow,
that it is a sin to separate from the Church of England with all
her blots & blemishes she is a branch of the Church of Christ. God owns her
& God is honouring her and to separate from her I believe to be contrary to
the mind & will of God. To this opinion I have been led after candid &
impartial inquiry, as far as I can know my own wicked heart I believe I can say that the Lord has given a
real will to walk in this [His?] way whatever be the consequences. I have not
shrunk from the subject when the Providence of God has brought me in the way of
those persons or writings which have questioned & controverted my opinions
on this point and I have waited on the Lord for direction. The result is that I
now tell you and I am thus candid i stating it that you may weight with
yourself the responsibility of the course you have adopted in seceding yourself
& exerting your influence to lead off others. My dear Sir, I say it in the
purest Xtian [?] love, I shall be happy to correspond with you still, and if
you feel yourself constrained to dwell upon the same points I shall as far as
time and opportunities permit give my attention to the subject. But I plainly
declare that I think it would be more profitable to make Christ our all in all
than to be constantly controverting points of difference. If you think you have
a duty towards me in setting before me what you conceive to be the error od my
way, you have discharged it. I know what your sentiments concerning my
adherence to the Ch of England are. I have weighed them in the closet: and the
result is I am fully persuaded that I am i the very place where the hand of the
Lord has set me. And it is on this account that I do not shirk from those who
would draw me aside because I only wish to be where the Lord places me, and
while I wait on him. I now and am assured he will fulfil that promise which the
Holy Spirit has put it into my heart to please long before I became a minister
in the Church, “I will cause them to walk kn a straight way wherein they shall
not stumble”. What a true blessedness it is to have that word of Scripture “My
work is with the Lord & my judgement is with my God”. Daily experience
convinces me that it is Walking with God that is the great object we are to aim
at and to prevent this Satan uses all his artifice and leads men to affix a
value to that which is comparatively of no value. He seduces them to follow
some favourite theorem or darling plan of their own and transforming himself to
an angel of light persuades them it is God. “Cease ye from man whose breath is
in his nostrils” is as much needed for the warning of those who separate from
the Church as for those who are connected with it. You have freely commented on
my position in the Church of England, let me make one remark on the position of
yourself and others who have separated from it, “what would have been the
present state of the Church had pious men instead of leaving her prayed for
her. Behold & visit this vine – alas as it was in the apostle so it is now,
ye are carnal and walk as men. What an inconsistency it is for the authors of
those tracts to contend for the unity of the Church in word and yet in practice
to destroy its unity by increasing the schisms which have already rent it. But
so it will be we know until the Lord comes. There must be heretics in this
present dispensation, not that we are the less culpable for them, but we need
not be stumbled by them when he that shall come does come then & not till
then will be gathered together all things in Christ. May he hasten the day. The
Lord direct you & pour down His spirit on you. You kindly will excuse this
hasty scrawl. I have written just as I feel on the subject. Be assured that I
am with many thanks for the interest you have shown in me,
Yours
in the Lords service John Ellison Bates
If
I understand you right you consider the great congregation means the body of
the faithful. I must still beg to differ from you and to hold that unbelievers
are intended by that designation and I refer you to the 58th Psalm
where you will find “congregation” synonymous with “sons of men” afterwards
described as “wicked &c[?] what is the difference between congregation and
eccelsia – the inference is obvious that in the congregation or Ecclesia or
Church we may expect to meet with wicked which will not listen to the voice of
Charmers &c
[Psalm
58 uses “charmers” as a positive word: “The wicked are estranged, even
from the womb; those who speak falsehood go astray from their
birth. They are as venomous as a serpent; they are like the deaf
adder which stops its ears, which does not heed the voice of the charmers, and
is deaf to the skilful weaver of spells. Break, O God, their teeth in
their mouths; smash the fangs of these lions”.]
References
Wikipedia:
Emily Katharine Bates
Information
about William Henry Darby is scattered across Plymouth Brethren websites; searches
for John Ellison Bates turn up his daughter.
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