III

Etienne (Stephen) Grellet

All this reminds me of that restless and adventurous Quaker, Stephen Grellet. In some ways his record is without parallel. In days when travelling was by no means easy, he passed from country to country with as little concern as some men feel in passing from village to village. He learned language after language in order that he might preach the Word in every hole and corner of the earth. He stood before Emperors and Kings speaking to crowned heads with naturalness and ease with which he addressed the children at home. He found his way into prisons and workhouses; into slave camps and thieves’ kitchens; he lost no opportunity of making of making an opportunity of preaching to all kinds and conditions of men the words of the everlasting life. His one of the most remarkable evangelistic careers on record. But let him tell his own story. ‘One evening’, he says, ‘I was walking in the fields alone, my mind being under no kind of religious concern, nor in the least excited by any thing I had heard or thought of.’ Suddenly, explain it how you may, the solitudes of that vast American forest declined any longer to be dumb. They became vocal with wondrous speech. The wayward winds and the rustling leaves were all whispering and carolling and shouting and echoing the same wonderful word: Eternity! Eternity! ‘It reached my very soul  – my whole man shook – it brought me, like Saul, to the ground. The great depravity and sinfulness of my heart were set open before me.’ In desperation he turned to his Bible. ‘How can I set forth the fullness of heavenly joy that filled me? I saw that there was One that was able to save me. I beheld the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. I put my trust in the atoning blood. Floods of joyous tears gave vent to the gratitude in my heart!’ And all through one word – a word that ‘reached my very soul, shook my whole man, and brought me to the ground.’ – that word ‘Eternity!‘

  Eternity! The word falls upon the ear like the booming of the ocean on the crags along the coast. It rings and echoes and reverberates and resounds through all the intricate avenues and tortuous corridors of the soul. The whole being trembles at its utterance as the abbey shudders to the organ’s diapason. Every faculty is awed into stillness; the soul is hushed into worship. The word has all the music of the spheres within it; and , if it does not hurry us, as it hurried Stephen Grellet, to the Cross, nothing will.