From John Radford in Shepton Mallet to Mary Tooth. There has been a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit in this part of the country. It commenced about a month ago inspired by prayer meetings and two love feasts. Two parishes have now been affected but the place that has witnessed the greatest outpouring is a village called Leigh upon Mendip. The chapel in that village has been open every day for worship and during the greater part of the nights also. They have been employed in ‘fervent wrestling’ with Jehovah for heavily burdened sinners. At all the services the most profligate of people have been affected, made to cry out like on the day of Pentecost. Several sinners ‘groaning for deliverance have been brought to experience glorious liberty…’ – these every day scenes are most affecting.
All the Sunday school teachers in the village have been converted and many of the children likewise. They can barely enter a house in the village without witnessing similar scenes to those in the chapel ‘one or two are in deep anguish of soul on account of their sins, and others are heard triumphing in the redeemer’s grace or are pouring out their souls in prayer…’
The revival that is taking place affects people regardless of age or social class.
The Methodists in that village have been praying for such an event ‘and now the reaping time is indeed come.’ The preachers are often physically tired in their work but are ‘not tired of it.’
‘The affects of converting grace upon the minds of the people are the same as we have often known in relation to others. I will instance, or advert to a case or two. One man had contracted a debt, which was of long standing, but he no sooner experienced a divine change but he went to his creditor and discharged his debt. Another had some years ago taken a false oath against one of the members of our society and he no sooner obtained mercy from God, but he went to the individual and confessed his sins and asked forgiveness. A young man had adopted a stratagem to spoil the sport of some gentlemen who were engaged in fox-hunting…and being detected by the lovers of the chase, they took the law into their own hands and inflicted upon him many heavy stripes by which his body was discoloured etc. He [unreadable word] entered an action against them for an assault – during the pending of the suit he attended our chapel at Leigh and became deeply convinced of sin and truly converted to God. Last Monday he called upon an attorney to stop the proceedings, saying that as God had forgiven him he would forgive them, providing they paid all the expense.’
Last Sunday morning Radford went to sort the people into classes and to issue notes of admission into the society. The main part of the chapel was full and there were some in the gallery also. The range in age was from twenty to over seventy. People were neatly dressed and their expressions were happy. Radford stood in the pulpit and was calling names for more than three hours after which he admitted more than one hundred people on trial into the society ‘who with a very few exceptions, professed to enjoy a clear sense of God’s pardoning love.’ There remain about thirty or forty notes of admission still to issue.
At two in the afternoon, the congregation had to be divided, such was the eagerness to attend the preaching. A local preacher spoke to one half in the school-room and the same again in the evening – ‘many were wounded and others were healed.’ The work is spreading to other areas - at Mells in the Frome circuit nearly a hundred people in the last week or two have been ‘graciously wrought upon.’
In a postscript, Radford thanked Tooth for the kind invitation for Radford and his wife to visit Madeley. It is not possible at the moment to accept.