AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
71
`MANGLING DONE HERE'
Whatever else may be said against me, no one can accuse me of trying to run before I could walk!
Later I learned to quote in the open air, Gospel texts in Yiddish, and being unconsciously something of a mimic,
I was hooted down and called a `m'shomed' or a renegade Jew, and once was effectually silenced by having a cod's
head, out of the gutter pressed down on my head.
On one occasion a Jew challenged my quotation from the Scriptures, saying `that is in your Protestant Bible'. I
explained to the crowd that while I based all my teaching on the original Scriptures, I, being an Englishman,
naturally spoke English. I asked my questioner whether he had a Hebrew Bible, he said he had at home and the
crowd agreed to wait for him to fetch it. When he returned I asked him to find Daniel 9:26 and to read it from
the Hebrew. What he read sounded something like `YICHORETH MESSIACH V'AIN LO' `Messiah shall be cut
off and have nothing'. He closed the book and said `I have never read that before'. You see the Rabbi discourages
`All computation of the days of the Messiah', and so such passages, like Isaiah 53, are never read. For a moment
that crowd stood silent.
Soon after the close of 1906 a change came over the nature and objects of the work.
While the B.T.C. continued as originally planned, my heart was in the work, and I valued the training that I also
received while helping others. I was responsible for the Elementary Greek class, and hoped that I would not prove
to be such a good teacher, that my pupils would catch up with myself, who was at the same time a member of the
Advanced Greek class. It was a joy to see about 70 students devoting two hours on three evenings a week for most
of the year, in concentrated studies of the Scriptures. The attitude of those responsible was Calvinistic, and at the
beginning had much in common with those called Strict Baptists. One of the side issues of the training led us into
the open-air, and commenced a gruelling witness among the Jews.
There were many things that puzzled and distressed me however which, owing to my lack of knowledge I
accepted at their face value, but I could not shake off the feeling that there was an artificial `holiness' whipped up by
continual urgings to self-mortification, so that later one member ransacked London to buy a shawl for the expected
baby, that was drab in colour, `white' was forbidden being heavenly. In spite of the grounding which this movement
gave me in the Fundamentals, I feel it would not be far from fact to quote of myself, that `after the most straitest sect
of our religion I lived a Pharisee'. To take a holiday was tantamount to backsliding from grace, and I had to endure
a lecture for not wearing a black hat while spending a few days among gorse and heather. It was all good discipline
I expect, like nasty medicine can be, but it ultimately led to the rupture that opened the way for a fuller
understanding of the teaching of the Word. I took the attitude, that while I was officially associated with this work, I
would stand loyally by Mr. Heward in public but state my reasons for regretting many things to him in private. On
one occasion I was shocked by the subtlety of his reasoning. In the neighbourhood of the meeting place in Forest
Gate a man was dying of cancer, and Mr. Heward was asked to visit him with the Gospel. His immediate reaction
was to send for me, and say (for the first and only time) that I was a kind of Pastor; he was
but superintending from a distance, so it would be my privilege and responsibility etc. etc. `Water falling drop by
drop, hollows out a stone', and eventually an incident occurred that led to a crisis. A lady of the meeting had passed
on to one or two fellow members a few copies of Things to Come, edited by Dr. Bullinger. She was summoned to
appear before Mr. Heward, and as a punishment for her action, was excommunicated and not allowed to participate
in the Lord's Supper. Mr. F.P. Brininger appealed against this drastic action towards his sister-in-law, and he too
was excommunicated! I felt that being an official of the movement, I could not endorse this action, especially as it
was at the end of a long list of similar impositions. I make no claim to superior spirituality for what I did, any more
than Paul justified his calling the high priest `A whited wall' (Acts 23:3). Neither would he have justified the
`contention' that divided Barnabas and himself (Acts 15:39), but it was overruled, it brought into prominence Silas,
a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37) and Timothy (Acts 16:1), for all unbeknown to either himself or Barnabas, a door was
about to open in Europe and the break had to come.
So, all unknown to myself, a door of utterance was about to open, freed from the fetters that had bound me for
several years, and liberty without license was about to be entered.