“I cannot conduct another service, Brother Prince! You must do it for me at Evensong,” groaned Starky as they returned to the rectory, arm-in-arm with Henry on one side and his wife on the other.
“You can. You will. I know you will.”
“Hear hear, well said Brother Henry! We all know you will,” said his sister stoutly.
“You’ll feel better after lunch, dear,” said his wife.
The Evensong congregation was like the morning’s at first, apart from Starky’s conduct of the service being more lost and halting than ever. At sermon time he ascended the pulpit and stared out for almost half a minute, open-mouthed, wide-eyed and visibly sweating, then said with difficulty, “Belovéd. . dearly belovéd brothers. . and sisters. . I will read the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. If the Lord is pleased to speak by me. . then He will. If He will not I must hold my tongue because I will not, I cannot speak for myself.”
He then read out quietly but clearly, “Awake, thou that sleepest; and arize from the dead; and Christ shall give thee light,” and with no change of voice said, “Wise men tell us that this world of ours is a great globe hurtling round the Sun, spinning like a huge cannonball as it goes yet holding on its surface oceans, mountains, cities, you, me, all of us. What a terrible thought!”
After a brief pause he added urgently, “Why are we all not sick with dizziness? What stops the bodies of you, me, everybody on this planet being flung out by this whirling wheel of a world into boundless space? Scientific men say our bodies are held here by a force called gravity, a force pulling everything down toward the Earth’s centre, a centre where many imagine Hell to be. But Hell cannot be inside the Earth because the Earth is a mortal body that will die and pass away! When it does only Hell will remain here and it will be eternal. These bodies of ours also must and will die — as we all know — but they contain immortal souls that will not and cannot die, as most of you forget. O you poor, poor souls, think how frantically you will beg for death when death is no longer possible! When the last trump sounds, the sky rolls up like a scroll, the stars fall like ripe figs, the world vanishes yet ye are resurrected! Where will you stand when there is no ground to stand upon? I tell you, you will not stand, it will be impossible! Some of us, thank God, will be drawn up easily and gladly into the eternally happy companionship of Jesus Christ our Lord, in the Kingdom of Heaven for which he created you all, and into which he invites you all, and where all who gladly accept His loving invitation will certainly go. But the vast majority of you who are refusing that loving invitation will exist with no ground beneath your feet — exist in eternal torturing darkness, without light, without hope of light. . without hope of anything, ever!
“Not many of you have been in one of Her Majesty’s new improved prisons where the inmates break stones with heavy hammers, trudge for hours on end over treadmills, stagger with big iron cannonballs round a yard from one heap to another whenever a warder blows a whistle. In return they are allowed just enough food and sleep to keep them alive for the duration of their sentence. How like most people’s life on Earth that is! Has anyone here never been sickened by toil? And come to the end of the day’s drudgery feeling exactly where they were at the start? And wakened next morning to a life they must lift and go on carrying like an almost unbearable burden? Such are the lives in Queen Victoria’s new improved prisons, but he who protests against this punishing labour must endure worse. That man is taken down a dark tunnel through several thicknesses of wall and locked in a tiny cell without windows or light. Bread and water is passed to him through a tiny opening by someone he never sees. The silence here is so complete that only by muttering or yelling or scraping his heels on the floor may a man know he is not struck deaf, and he has no way of knowing he has not been struck blind. Five days of this punishment turns the strongest criminal into a gibbering lunatic, yet he has merely disobeyed a human, prison governor. How much more dreadful must be the imprisonment of we who disobey the governor of the universe! Awake, thou that sleepest; and arise from the dead; and Christ will give thee light! Do you not fear to disobey that call? Why will you not leave this earthly prison house by taking steps toward joining Christ in his Holy Kingdom? The punishment I described never lasts as long as a week! God’s spell of solitary confinement will never end. The punishment I described is mental, but on the last day to your souls all-horrible alone-ness will be added a resurrected, undying body of flesh whose every inch, inside and out, will be gripped and crushed by a scorching mass of unendurable — but eternally to be endured — agony.”
This start of Starky’s sermon blended ideas he had heard from Henry with ideas from the notes he no longer used, but all were strongly combined and fluently uttered. The Spirit possessing him did not rave or shout, it spoke of Heaven solemnly yet joyfully, and spoke of Hell with such pity and distress that men hearing him dropped their heads upon their chests or gaped, amazed, at sobbing wives. Most women wept and one or two shrieked. Children clung to each other. Starky’s wife and sister and all who attended the evening prayer groups looked up to their rector with tears of joy while Henry, at the pulpit foot, smiled with calm satisfaction. A deep silence following the sermon was broken by a choirboy in the gallery suddenly guffawing until the bassoonist clouted his ear. Starky ended the service with a calm, firm authority he had never before shown.
Rector and curate retired to the vestry and gazed at each other for a moment before disrobing.
“You are now a mouthpiece of Almighty God, Brother Starky. Your trumpet blast is the opening of a new spiritual era.”
“You were right, master! You were right! The Spirit at last descended,” said Starky happily.
“You must not call me master, Brother Starky — only Christ is our master.”
“Yes but — please forgive me! — brother places us on an equal footing. I am not, I cannot be on an equal footing with you. It would be falsehood for me to pretend to it my dear, dear master.”
Henry brooded a little then smiled and said, “Call me Belovéd.” “O I will,” whispered Starky, “ I will.”
A very happy group returned to the rectory through a crowd of awe-struck gazers.
“Yes, we will all call you Belovéd, Brother Henry,” said Julia, “Won’t we dear?”
Mrs Starky could only nod, being too happy to speak.
From now on Starky conducted Sunday services without faltering. Those who had come from other parishes to mock him no longer came, some who had come out of mere curiosity remained to pray. His sermons never again caused such wild reactions as that first and most inspired one, but his congregation remained large, and interested with many who responded fervently to the services. On the following Sunday he announced that our Belovéd Brother Henry Prince had been directed by the Lord to say, that if any persons would send their children to the schoolroom later that evening, he would lecture to them. About fifty came. In a pamphlet published in 1842 — The CHARLINCH REVIVAL or, an Account of the Remarkable Work of Grace which has lately taken place in Somersetshire — Henry described what happened in the schoolroom: