Lady Huntingdon and Her Friends

Mrs Helen C. Knight

Always intent upon seizing opportunities for speaking to her dependents, she once addressed a laborer at work on the garden wall; pressing him with affectionate earnestness to consider eternal things. Some time after, speaking to another upon the same subject, she said, “Thomas, I fear you never pray, or look to Christ for salvation.

“Your ladyship is mistaken,” replied the man; “I heard what passed between you and James at the garden wall, and the word you meant for him took effect on me.”

“How did you hear it?” she asked.

“I heard it,” Thomas answered, “on the other side of the garden, through a hole in the wall, and I shall never forget the impression I received.”

In this one little incident we mark the germ of that which constituted the main, element of that spiritual awakening CONQUEST, and conquest in the true line of Christian aggression an unfledged hope, the quiet possession of spiritual immunities, a merely christened profession, did not satisfy her. She must not only be fed with the bread of life, but she must also feed others; she must not sit down herself at the Master’s table, but go out and compel others to come in at all times and everywhere, men were to be rescued from sin and its terrible penalties; in all the glare, the activity, the interlaced and interlacing interests of the present and outward life, only two things concerned her — redemption, and retribution; they stood out bald and significant, charged with immortal issues: and all her purposes, all her inducements were shaped and carried forward under the urgency of motives grand and solemn, as eternity itself. The folding of the hands, a sweet retirement into unworldly places, a graceful withdrawal from forbidden things, was not her testimony to the exceeding sinfulness of sin. She went from the altar and the mercy-seat warmed with holy zeal; her presence aroused the moral consciousness of the most dormant; her whole life was a constant exhortation, “Turn ye, turn ye; for why will ye die?”

In 1744, the earl’s family was afflicted by the less of two beautiful boys, George and Fernando, who died of small-pox, then prevailing at London.

With domestic sorrow then mingled public anxiety, the whole country being agitated by the last desperate effort of the exiled Stuarts to regain the throne of England. The nation was filled with alarms and rumors in many of the larger towns riots occurred, in which the Methodist preachers were sometimes rudely attacked and grossly insulted.

On one occasion Charles Wesley was summoned before the magistrates of Wakefield to answer for treasonable words let fall in prayer, wherein he besought the Lord to recall his “banished” ones, which was construed to mean the Pretender.

“I had no thought of the Pretender,” said the accused to the official,” but of those who confess themselves strangers and pilgrims on the earth, who seek a country, knowing this is not their home. The scripture speaks of us as captive exiles, who are not at home until we reach heaven.” the judges wisely accepted the spiritual interpretation, and let the prisoner go.

In the struggle which followed, Col. Gardiner lost his life. On parting with his wife and eldest daughter at Stirling castle, previous to the fatal engagement at Prestonpans, Lady Frances was more than ordinarily affected: instead of offering his accustomed consolations, and inspiring hope by his own cheerfulness, he only said, “We have an eternity to spend together.”

The fall of this excellent man not only bereaved a large and fond family, but spread sorrow over a wide circle of friends, and sadness through the nation. Heavy are the costs of war — “and heavy is this affliction to Lady Frances and the children,” exclaimed Lady Huntington; “but he has gone to the great Captain of his salvation, to sing the wonders of that love which hath redeemed him, and made him meet for the saints in light.” so does “hope in Christ” point heavenward. Doddridge preached an impressive sermon upon the occasion, which was afterwards published, and a hundred copies sent to Lady Huntington for circulation at a later date appeared his well-known memoir, which has been read and reread all over the world.

Within less than a year, Lady Frances Gardiner was called to reciprocate the sympathies of her friend. Earl Huntington died of apoplexy on the 13th of October, 1746, at his mansion in Downing-street, Westminster, aged fifty, leaving his wife at the ago of thirty-nine in the sole charge of his family and fortune. He was a man of unblemished character, and though not a believer in the distinctive theology of his wife, he courteously entertained her religious friends, and listened with admiration to the eloquent preachers of that day. “The morality of the Bible I admire,” he says, “but the doctrine of the atonement I cannot understand.”

His sisters were eminent for their piety, and Margaret became the wife of Rev. Benjamin Ingham, whose preaching first led her to the Saviour. After the earl’s death, the family retired to Donnington Park, where the countess spent in privacy the first six months of her widowhood. Some extracts from her letters to Doddridge admit us to the inner sanctuary of her heart.

“I hope you will never care about the ceremony of time in your letters to me, but just when attended with greatest ease to yourself, for we both agree that the one thing worth living for must be proclaiming the love of God to man in Christ Jesus as for me, I want no holiness he does not give me; I can wish for no liberty but what he likes for me, and I am satisfied with every misery he does not redeem me from, that in all things I may feel, ‘without him I can do nothing.’

“My family consists of two sons and as many daughters; for all of them I have nothing to do but to praise God. The children of so many prayers and tears, I doubt not shall one day be blest, your prayers for us all helping. The hint you gave me is great matter of joy to me; my soul longeth for grace.

“May the Lord give us all such love, to live and to die to him, and for him alone I am, with most kind respects for Mrs. Doddridge, your most sincere, but weak and unworthy friend,

“S. H.”

Again she writes, “Some important time is coming. Oh, might I hope it is that time when all things shall be swallowed up by the enlightening and comforting displays of our glorious Redeemer’s kingdom. My hopes are not only full of immortality, but of this. Your works are blessed, and God is making you a polished shaft in his quiver I want every body to pray with you and for you, that you may wax stronger and stronger I have had a letter from Lord Bolingbroke, who says, ‘I desire my complements and thanks to Dr. Doddridge, and I hope I shall continue to deserve his good opinion.’”

During the lifetime of the earl, Lady Huntington’s time was necessarily engrossed by many cares, which withheld her from the friends and the interests which lay nearest to her heart as mistress of his princely mansions, she had duties to general society which could not be slighted; respect and affection for him controlled her private preferences, and without making her disloyal to her religious convictions, blended her interests with his own. The tie is now broken: she meekly bears the chastisement; more than ever she feels herself a stranger and a pilgrim in the present and outward world; more than ever she feels herself a subject of that spiritual kingdom which Christ came to set up; and henceforth we find unfolding that lofty energy of character, which has identified her name with the revived Christianity of her day.

Returning again to society, Lady Huntington may be seen journeying through Wales. The party is large, composed of her two daughters, her sisters Anne and Frances Hastings, several clergymen, and other religious friends is it a jaunt of pleasure? a tour of aimless excitement? a seeing of new things for the sake of killing time?

Let us first pause and look around on the moral wastes of this English soil. “While there was little zeal in the great body of the clergy,” says Southey, “many causes combined which rendered this want of zeal more and more injurious. The population had doubled since the settlement of the church under Elizabeth, yet no provision had been made for increasing proportionally the means of moral and religious instruction, which in the beginning had been insufficient in reality, though the temporal advantages of Christianity extended to all classes, the great majority of the populace knew nothing more of religion than its forms. They had been Papists formerly, and now were Protestants, but they had never been Christians. The Reformation had taken away the ceremonies to which they were attached, and substituted nothing in their stead. There was the Bible indeed, but to the great body of the laboring people, the Bible was even in the letter a sealed book.”

There then was the rudeness of the peasantry, the brutality of the town populace, the prevalence of drunkenness, the growth of impiety, a general deadness to religion; and it was this brutish ignorance, this stiff-necked degradation, this famine of the word of God and all means of moral elevation, which at once demanded the labors of such men as Whitefield, Wesley, and their coadjutors, and inspired them with that resistless zeal which made their preaching like the fire and the hammer upon the flinty rock. Everywhere, on all sides, was spiritual want; it was not only seen among the abandoned, but felt in the general indifference to religion among the middling classes, in the skeptical spirit which pervaded the higher, and the almost total lack of earnestness in professed Christians, both among the clergy and laity.

What a demand for laborers on this harvest-field. The single and uppermost thought of those raised up of God and sent to these famishing multitudes was, “To the rescue.” Their simple and heartfelt message was, “Repent, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” This was not only the pervading element of the preachers, but also of private Christians as Christ came to seek and to save them which were lost, so must his disciples go forth bearing his invitations of mercy, leading men from sin and shame to those ways which are pleasantness, and to those paths which are peace.

Se felt Lady Huntington. The party set out from Bath, and in its journey through Wales travelled slowly, stopping at the, towns and villages on the route, in order to give the preachers an opportunity of addressing the people whenever a congregation could be gathered. Multitudes flocked to hear them.

Indeed, the preachers knew something of their hearers: one of them was GRIFFITH JONES of Abercowyn, author of a plan for instructing his countrymen, known as the “Welsh circulating schools.” the ignorance and Heathenism of the peasantry he had deeply deplored. On his first settlement in 1711, before he admitted communicants, he began by carefully examining them in Christian doctrine; but he soon found that those who most needed the instruction, men grown up in ignorance, were unwilling to attend, because unable to answer the questions put to them. He then fixed upon Saturday before the communion for distributing to the poor their supply of bread, bought with the money collected at the previous communion. These he gathered into a class, and by his great kindness of manner won their confidence and love, until he at last encouraged them to learn short lessons from the Bible. Thus it became a custom among his poor parishioners to repeat a verse of Scripture on receiving their monthly allowance of bread. By this direct and personal intercourse with the poor, he learned how vague and imperfect were their notions of Christianity, and how little the Sabbath service could effect, without the aid of other means of instruction. With this data he resolved to act and his first school was established in 1730 in one of his parishes, Llanddowror another soon followed; and these were attended with results so obviously good, that he soon received the cooperation of several efficient persons, and a generous donation of Bibles and other books from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

In ten years, one hundred and twenty-eight schools were in operation, with nearly eight thousand persons taught to read the Scriptures in the Welsh language, catechized, instructed in psalmody, and under the general supervision of Christian schoolmasters, trying in various ways to promote their best good. Griffith Jones was a popular as well as a faithful preacher; his greatest excellence was “gavaelgar ar y gydwybed,” or a grasp on the conscience; and accustomed as he had been to preaching-tours, and gray as he had grown in the service of his hardy countrymen, his very presence was like the ringing of the Sabbath bells for the people to come and hear.

Beside him is a younger brother, a Welsh Boanerges, HOWEL HARRIS; Greet him and cherish him, for he deserves well of those who love the Lord. Though destined for the church, he received no serious impressions until twenty-one, when this passage from a sermon, “If you are unfit to visit the table of the Lord, you are unfit to visit the church, you are unfit to live and unfit to die,” fastened powerfully upon his conscience. On his way from church, meeting a person whom he had wronged, he instantly confessed his fault and begged to be forgiven; and though fears and remorse for a long time darkened his soul, he stoutly determined to give himself to the service of God, and began to warn his neighbors to flee from the wrath to come in 1735 he returned to Oxford to complete his studies, but the immoralities of the university disgusted him, and he returned home. He betook himself henceforth to the poor of his native land in the cottage and the field he is preaching the doctrines of the cross. so many came to him for instruction, that at the close of the year he formed them into societies. “In the formation of these,” he tells us, “I followed the rules of Dr. Woodward, in a book written by him on the subject. Previously to this, no societies of the kind had been founded either in England or Wales. The English Methodists had not become famous as yet, although, as I afterwards learned, several of them in Oxford were at that time under strong religious influences.”

They were not organized either as Methodist or dissenting congregations nor indeed with any view of their ever separating from the church. The revival of religion in the church was his avowed purpose at first, and his proposed object through life.

In 1739 Whitefield and Harris met for the first time in the town-hall of Cardiff, where the former, fresh from the glowing scenes of Bristol, poured forth his impassioned eloquence to his Welsh auditory, among whom was Howel Harris. Of the mutual delight afforded by the interview, which immediately afterwards took place, Whitefield said characteristically, “I doubt not Satan envied our happiness; but I hope by the help of God we shall make his kingdom shake.’’

Such then were the men attached to Lady Huntington’s party. On arriving at Treveeca, Brecknockshire, the birthplace of Howel Harris, they remained several days, the preachers addressing, four or five times a day, immense crowds, who came from all the country round about. Twenty years afterwards, Trevecca was one of the principal centres of the countess’ influence.

“On a review of all that I have seen and heard,” exclaimed she, on their return home, “I am constrained to cry, ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name.’ the sermons contained the most solemn and awful truths, such as the utter ruin of man by the fall and his redemption by the Lord Jesus Christ, the energetic declaration of which produced quite a sensible effect on many, who, there is reason to believe, were brought from nature’s darkness to the marvellous light of the all-glorious gospel. My earnest prayer to God for them is, that they may continue in his grace and truth.”

Of a journey thus conducted, we cannot but regret that the only memorials are the brief sketches of a hastily penned journal by Lady Frances Hastings. Though undertaken for the countess’ health, it seems really to have been a home missionary tour; a rare union, we may venture to assert, in those days as well as our own, when travelling, even among professing Christians, is too often a time for “casting off fear and restraining prayer.”

Not long after the countess’ return, Doddridge paid a visit to London. During his stay he thus writes to his wife: “I can conclude by telling you that I am at the close of one of the most pleasant days I shall ever spend without you after an hour’s charming conversation with Lady Huntington and Mrs. Edwin, I preached in her family by express desire, and met Colonel Grumley, who is really a second Colonel Gardiner after dinner the ladies entertained us with their voices and harpsichord, with which I was highly delighted; and I have stolen a hymn which I believe to have been written by good Lady Huntington, and which I shall not fail to communicate to you. She is quite a mother to the poor; she visits them and prays with them in sickness, and they leave their children to her for a legacy when they die; and she takes care of them I was really astonished at the traces of religion which I discovered in her and Mrs. Edwin, and cannot but glorify God for them. More cheerfulness I never saw mingled with so much devotion. Lady Frances Gardiner sets out on Monday next I have taken my leave of her.”