Cornelius Smith the converted
Gypsy.
'I do
believe, I will believe, that Jesus died for me
I was born on the 31st of March, 1860, in a gipsy
tent, the son of gipsies, Cornelius Smith and his wife Mary Welch.
The gipsies are very musical, and my father was a
good illustration of this statement. He was a very good fiddler - by ear, of
course. He tells a story of the days when he was learning to play in his
mother's tent. Dear old lady, she got tired of the noise the boy was making,
and she told him to stop. As he did not stop, she said, "If you don't I
will blow out the candle." This she did. That of course made no difference
to the young musician; he went on playing, and grannie said, "I never saw
such a boy; he can play in the dark!" For years my father had greatly
added to his ordinary earnings by fiddling to the dancers in the public-houses
at Baldock, Cambridge, Ashwell, Royston, Bury St. Edmunds and elsewhere. Even
after my mother's death, though his fiddling led him into great temptations, my
father continued this practice, and he sometimes took me with him. When he
fiddled I danced. I was a very good dancer, and at a certain point in the
evening's proceedings my father would say, "Now, Rodney, make the collection,"
and I went round with the hat. That is where I graduated for the ministry. If
ever my father took more drink than was good for him, with the result that he
did not know whether he was drawing the bow across the first string or the
second, I went round again with my cap. What I collected that time I regarded
as my share of the profits, for I was a member of the firm of Smith and Son,
and not a sleeping partner either. How delighted I was if I got a few coppers
to show to my sisters! These visits with my father to the beer-shop were very
frequent, and as I think of those days, when I was forced to listen to the vile
jokes and vulgar expressions of the common labourers, I marvel at the grace
which shielded me and prevented me from understanding what was being said.
All this time, while my father was living this life of fiddling and drinking
and sinning, he was under the deepest conviction. He always said his prayers
night and morning and asked God to give him power over drink, but every time
temptation came in his way he fell before it. He was like the chaff driven
before the wind. He hated himself afterwards because he had been so easily
overcome. He was so concerned about his soul that he could rest nowhere. If he
had been able to read the Word of God, I feel sure, and he, looking back on
those days, feels sure, that he would have found the way of life. His sister
and her husband, who had no children, came to travel with us. She could
struggle her way through a little of the New Testament, and used to read to my
father about the sufferings of Christ and His death upon the tree for sinful
men. She told my father it was the sins of the people which nailed Him there,
and he often felt in his heart that he was one of them. She was deeply moved
when he wept and said, "Oh, how cruel to serve Him so!" I have seen
father when we children were in bed at night, and supposed to be asleep,
sitting over the fire, the flame from which was the only light. As it leapt up
into the darkness it showed us a sad picture. There was father, with tears
falling like bubbles on mountain streams as he talked to himself about mother
and his promise to her to be good. He would say to himself aloud, "I do
not know how to be good," and laying his hand upon his heart he would say,
"I wonder when I shall get this want satisfied, this burden removed?"
When father was in this condition there was no sleep for us children. We lay
awake listening, not daring to speak, and shedding bitter tears. Many a time I
have said the next morning to my sisters and my brother, "We have no
mother and we shall soon have no father." We thought he was going out of
his mind. We did not understand the want or the burden. It was all quite
foreign to us. My father remained in this sleepless, convicted condition for a long
time, but the hour of his deliverance was at hand.
"Long in darkness we had waited
For the shining of the light:
Long have felt the things we hated
Sink us into deeper night."
One morning we had left Luton
behind us. My eldest sister was in the town selling her goods, and my father
had arranged to wait for her on the roadside with our waggon. When our waggon
stopped my father sat on the steps, wistfully looking towards the town against
the time of his daughter's return, and thinking, no doubt, as he always was, of
my mother and his unrest. Presently he saw two gipsy waggons coming towards him
and when they got near he discovered to his great delight that they belonged to
his brothers Woodlock and Bartholomew. Well do I remember that meeting. My father
was the oldest of the three, and although he was such a big man he was the
least in stature. The brothers were as surprised and delighted to meet my
father as he was to meet them. They fell on each other's necks and wept. My
father told them of his great loss, and they tried to sympathise with him, and
the wives of the two brothers did their best to comfort us motherless children.
The two waggons of my uncles faced my father's, but on the opposite side of the
road. The three men sat on thc bank holding sweet fellowship together, and the
two wives and the children of the three families gathered around them. Soon my
father was talking about the condition of his soul. Said he to Woodlock and
Bartholomew, "Brothers, I have a great burden that I must get removed. A
hunger is gnawing at my heart. I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep. If I do not
get this want satisfied I shall die!" And then the brothers said,
"Cornelius, we feel just the same. We have talked about this to each other
for weeks."
Though these three men had been far apart, God had been dealing with them at
the same time and in the same way. Among the marvellous dispensations of
Providence which have come within my own knowledge this is one of the most
wonderful. These men were all hungry for the truth. They could not read and so
knew nothing of the Bible. They had never been taught, and they knew very
little of Jesus Christ. The light that had crept into their souls was "the
true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." "He,
the Spirit, will reprove the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment."
As the brothers talked they felt how sweet it would be to go to God's house and
learn of Him, for they had all got tired of their roaming life. My father was
on the way to London, and fully resolved to go to a church and find out what it
was his soul needed. The three brothers agreed to go together, and arranged to
take in Cambridge by the way. They drove their waggon to the Barnwell end of
the town, where there was a beer-shop. The three great big simple men went in
and told the landlady how they felt. It is not often, I feel sure, that part of
a work of grace is carried on in a beer-shop, and with the landlady thereof as
an instrument in this Divine work. But God had been dealing with the landlady
of this beer-house. When the brothers spoke to her she began to weep, and said,
"I am somewhat in your case, and I have a book upstairs that will just
suit you, for it makes me cry every time I read it." She brought the book
down and lent it to the brothers to read. They went into the road to look after
their horses. A young man who came out of the public-house offered to read from
the book to them. It was "The Pilgrim's Progress." When he got to the
point where Pilgrim's burden drops off as he looks at the cross, Bartholomew
rose from his seat by the wayside and excitedly walking up and down, cried,
"That is what I want, my burden removed. If God does not save me I shall
die!" All the brothers at that moment felt the smart of sin, and wept like
little children.
On the Sunday the three brothers went to the Primitive Methodist Chapel,
Fitzroy Street, Cambridge, three times. In the evening the Rev. Henry Gunns
preached. Speaking of that service, my father says: "His points were very
cutting to my soul. He seemed to aim directly at me. I tried to hide myself
behind a pillar in the chapel, but he, looking and pointing in that direction,
said, "He died for thee!" The anxious ones were asked to come
forward, and in the prayer-meeting the preacher came to where I was sitting and
asked me if I was saved. I cried out, "No; that is what I want." He
tried to show me that Christ had paid my debt, but the enemy of souls had
blinded my eyes and made me believe that I must feel it and then believe it, instead
of receiving Christ by faith first. I went from that house of prayer still a
convicted sinner, but not a converted one."
We now resumed our way to London, and had reached Epping Forest when darkness
came on. My father put his horse in somebody's field, intending, of course, to
avoid detection of this wrongdoing by coming for it early in the morning. That
night he dreamed a dream. In the dream he was travelling through a rugged
country over rocks and boulders, thorns and briars. His hands were bleeding and
his feet torn. Utterly exhausted and worn out, he fell to the ground. A person
in white raiment appeared to him, and as this person lifted up his hands my
father saw the mark of the nails, and then he knew it was the Lord. The figure
in white said to my father, showing him His hands, "I suffered this for
you, and when you give up all and trust Me I will save you." Then my
father awoke. This dream shows how much the reading of "The Pilgrim's
Progress" had impressed him. He narrated the dream at the breakfast table
on the following morning. When he went to fetch his horses his tender
conscience told him very clearly and very pointedly that he had done wrong. As
he removed the horses from the field and closed the gate he placed his hand on
it and, summoning up all his resolution, said, "That shall be the last
known sin I will ever wilfully commit."
My father was now terribly in earnest. There were a great many gipsies encamped
in the forest at the time, including his father and mother, brothers and
sisters. My father told them that he had done with the roaming and wrong-doing,
and that he meant to turn to God. They looked at him and wept. Then my father
and his brothers moved their vans to Shepherd's Bush, and placed them on a
piece of building land close to Mr. Henry Varley's Chapel. My father sold his
horse, being determined not to move from that place until he had found the way
to God. Says my father "I meant to find Christ if He was to be found. I
could think of nothing else but Him. I believed His blood was shed for
me." Then my father prayed that God would direct him to some place where
he might learn the way to heaven, and his prayer was answered. One morning he
went out searching as usual for the way to God. He met a man mending the road,
and began to talk with him - about the weather, the neighbourhood, and
such-like things. The man was kindly and sympathetic, and my father became more
communicative. The man, as the good providence of God would have it, was a
Christian, and said to my father, "I know what you want; you want to be
converted." "I do not know anything about that," said my father,
"but I want Christ, and I am resolved to find Him." "Well,"
said the working-man "there is a meeting tonight in a mission hall in
Latimer Road, and I shall come for you and take you there." In the evening
the road-mender came and carried off my father and his brother Bartholomew to
the mission hall. Before leaving, my father said to us, "Children, I shall
not come home again until I am converted," and I shouted to him, "Daddy,
who is he?" I did not know who this Converted was. I thought my father was
going off his head, and resolved to follow him. The Mission Hall was crowded.
My father marched right up to the front. I never knew him look so determined.
The people were singing the well-known hymn –
"There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's veins,
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."
The refrain was, " I do
believe, I will believe, that Jesus died for me." As they were singing, my
father's mind seemed to be taken away from everybody and everything. "It
seemed," he said, "as if I was bound in a chain and they were drawing
me up to the ceiling." In the agony of his soul he fell on the floor
unconscious, and lay there wallowing and foaming for half an hour. I was in
great distress, and thought my father was dead, and shouted out, "Oh dear,
our father is dead!" But presently he came to himself, stood up and,
leaping joyfully, exclaimed, "I am converted!" He has often spoken of
that great change since. He walked about the hall looking at his flesh. It did
not seem to be all quite the same colour to him. His burden was gone, and he
told the people that he felt so light that if the room had been full of eggs he
could have walked through and not have broken one of them.
I did not stay to witness the rest of the proceedings. As soon as I heard my
father say, "I am converted," I muttered to myself, "Father is
converted; I am off home." I was still in utter ignorance of what the great
transaction might mean.
When my father got home to the waggon that night he gathered us all around him.
I saw at once that the old haggard look that his face had worn for years was
now gone, and, indeed, it was gone for ever. His noble countenance was lit up
with something of that light that breaks over the cliff-tops of eternity. I
said to myself in wonderment, "What marvellous words these are – 'I do
believe, I will believe, that Jesus died for me.'" My father's brother
Bartholomew was also converted that evening, and the two stopped long enough to
learn the chorus, and they sang it all the way home through the streets. Father
sat down in the waggon, as tender and gentle as a little child. He called his
motherless children to him one by one, beginning with the youngest, my sister
Tilly. "Do not be afraid of me, my dears. God has sent home your father a
new creature and a new man." He put his arms as far round the five of us
as they would go, kissing us all, and before we could understand what had happened
he fell on his knees and began to pray. Never will my brother, sisters, and I
forget that first prayer. I still feel its sacred influence on my heart and
soul; in storm and sunshine, life and death, I expect to feel the benediction
of that first prayer. There was no sleep for any of us that night. Father was
singing, "I do believe, I will believe, that Jesus died for me," and
we soon learnt it too. Morning, when it dawned, found my father full of this
new life and this new joy. He again prayed with his children, asking God to
save them, and while he was praying God told him he must go to the other
gipsies that were encamped on the same piece of land, in all about twenty
families. Forthwith he began to sing in the midst of them, and told them what
God had done for him. Many of them wept. Turning towards his brother
Bartholomew's van he saw him and his wife on their knees. The wife was praying
to God for mercy, and God saved her then and there. The two brothers,
Bartholomew and my father, then commenced a prayer meeting in one of the tents,
and my brother and eldest sister were brought to God. In all thirteen gipsies
professed to find Christ that morning.