Awakening Read Online Free Page B

of Bedwellty, accompanied by the fruit of his loins, has taken ship for America. Not in search of lucre but in order to invite Mr Henry Ward Beecher to return to England. Beecher the anti-slavery preacher, charismatic, brilliant, stands at the centre of the tempest at present shaking that unhappy nation. America is moving inexorably, it seems, towards civil war. Baptists have a long and honourable record in the anti-slavery movement. Anna remembers Mr Knibb, their father’s friend, describing the hell of slavery in Jamaica so that they all wept and, more to the point, opened their purses.
    Mr Elias explains that a fortnight ago Idris Jones visited Aberystwyth, where a great Awakening has spread from America. There he dreamed of its advance into England. A Revival. The name of Mr Beecher occurred to him. Accordingly Mr Jones left for Boston on The Petrel.
    â€˜Shushie shushie, darling heart,’ whispers Loveday to Jack, leaning across Anna and putting a finger to her lips. He takes no notice. Beatrice, red in the face, grips the squirmer’s wrist and gives it a spiteful tug. Mouth squared up to bellow, Jack Elias takes her measure through his tears.
    â€˜You little monster ,’ Anna hears her sister whisper to the lad. ‘Sit still.’
    Jack’s resistance collapses. He slumps into a doleful heap of boyhood; his nose runs green mucus; one tear trickles down his cheek. Tom hugs him up against his side and tickles his armpit with the free hand.
    â€˜Has he got earache, do you think?’ Loveday whispers helplessly. ‘He’s usually such a cherub.’
    Beatrice’s face says: I consider you a true friend, Loveday Elias, but you’re half an idiot when it comes to your children.
    Loveday’s face replies: I like you, Beatrice Pentecost; you are an excellent woman with sundry gifts, but maybe it will be wise for you and kinder to children not to marry.
    Mr Clifford is on his feet. It’s no secret, he tells them, the northern accent thick on his tongue, that from the age of eleven he was a factory worker in Beeston, a jacker-off in a lace factory earning half a crown a week. And there he learned much; it was a college education to him. Splicing the cotton off the bobbins to ensure an even thread, he worked sixteen hours a day, slave of the machines. His father was a Chartist and he too has been a Chartist.
    And John Clifford would say that he worked there with Christ. Yes. Jesus Christ in person. ‘You will perhaps wonder what I mean by that.’
    He means his workfellows, the lace-makers, the suffering men, women and children of the northern factories, the so-called ‘hands’: and inasmuch as suffering was inflicted on these our Saviour’s children, it was inflicted on our Saviour.
    As the workmen came out on strike, so too did Jesus. What was Jesus but a workman with lathe and saw? A radical workman who wants for his workfellows homes, food and hospitals, decent working conditions and a fair wage: aye, and a vote for every man in this land. John Clifford has since studied law and moral philosophy, geology and palaeontology and oh so many ologies. At base he remains not just the jacker-off of lace but his mother’s child. ‘John,’ Mrs Clifford said when he left for the Academy in Leicester to be trained for the ministry. ‘Find out the teaching of Jesus, make yourself sure of that, then stick to it no matter what may come.’
    â€˜How simple,’ Mr Clifford says. ‘And how profound. Her voice still rings in my ears. The mother is the first educator of and minister to the child. In her gentleness, her humility, her grasp of the great simple Truth.’
    Simple Truth in the person of Jack Emanuel Elias is chiefly under the pew, entangling himself with the Pentecost sisters’ skirts as he tunnels through to the aisle. His plump, bonny face pops up open-mouthed, bobs down again; he rams his way past his dreamy mother and is gone.
    Mr