Trials And Triumphs

In January, 1741, at the town of Bala, Harris was savagely assaulted. The local clergyman, in what he called an effort 'to defend the Church', opened a barrel of beer on the main street and used it to entice a mob to attack the evangelist. 

The fury of the persecutors was such that one of them fell into a fit from the transport of his passion. Another was loud for hurling Harris from the top of a rock into the lake hard by. The women also were as fiendish as the men, for they besmeared him with mire, while their companions... belabored him with their fists and clubs... inflicting such wounds that his path could be marked in the street by the crimson stains of his blood.

The enemy continued to persecute him... striking him with sticks and staves, until overcome with exhaustion he fell to the ground... They still abused him, though prostrate; until one of his persecutors... perhaps apprehensive of a prosecution for murder if the abuse were pro longed, became his rescuer and... delivered him out of his enemies' hands.

 "Though oft threatened [before],' wrote Harris, 'this was the first blood I had shed for Christ!" *

***

Had bullets been shot at me, I felt I should not move. Mob raged, Voice lifted up, and though by the power going with the words my head almost went to pieces, such was my zeal that I cried, "I'll preach of Christ till to pieces I fall!" **

Perhaps such courage was to be expected in the powerfully masculine Harris, but it was equally evident in the meek and gentle Cennick. Cennick recorded an instance in which as he and Harris were preaching in the Wiltshire town of Swindon:

the mob fired guns over our heads, holding the muzzles so near to our faces that Howell Harris and myself were both made as black as tinkers with the powder. We were not affrighted, but opened our breasts, telling them we were ready to lay down our lives .. 

Then they got dust out of the highway and covered us all over; and then they played an engine upon us, which they filled out of the stinking ditches. While they played on brother Harris I preached; and when they turned the engine upon me, he preached. This they continued till they spoiled the engine; and they threw whole buckets of water and mud over us. 

After we left the town, they dressed up two images, called one Cennick and the other Harris, and then burnt them. The next day they gathered about the home of Mr. Lawrence, who had received us, and broke all of his windows with stones, cut and wounded four of his family, and knocked down one of his daughters.'***

A few months later the same mob, learning that Cennick was at the near-by village of Stratton, came upon him and his people, 'armed with swords, staves and poles'.  'Without respect to age or sex' he writes, 'they knocked down all who stood in their way, so that some had blood streaming down their faces, and others were... beaten and almost trampled to death. ...I got many severe blows myself.'

* Life of Howell Harris: Hugh J. Hughes, London, 1892, pp 142-3
** Howell Harris, Reformer and Soldier, op cit, p 35.
*** Cennick's Manuscript (unpublished)