The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  Perhaps because of his tension with the Dublin Guinnesses or perhaps because of a sense of calling from God, Henry determined to make his way north to the industrial regions around Ulster and Belfast. Conditions in those cities were often as bad as Dublin’s were becoming, and added to this was the turmoil of overheated political and religious tension. Henry Guinness was just the man to bring the message of Christ to souls in such a place. He had determined to rise above “party strife,” to issue a call to Christ that transcended politics and petty religious division. The result was astonishing. Hardened men wept as he preached; it was not uncommon for some to fall as though dead under the press of conviction or “the Spirit’s power.” Though the preacher was ever calm and reasoned, the invisible force that accompanied his words broke both hearts and barriers to unity. One reporter wrote that when clergy of every denomination sat on the stage behind Guinness as he preached, “It was the first time that all these ministers had met on a platform broader than their churches.”

  The aftermath of the meetings was nearly as dramatic as the meetings themselves. Churches exploded with searching souls and ministers followed Henry’s example in proclaiming a calm but unvarnished gospel of repentance and service to Christ. Between 1859 and 1862, Ulster’s Protestant churches alone increased by a hundred thousand. When American evangelist Dwight Moody and soloist Ira Sankey preached throughout Ireland in 1874—largely at the invitation of John Grattan Guinness—it was obvious that they were harvesting where another man and another great work of God had gone before.

  Henry was becoming one of the best-known preachers in the world. After his successes in the north of Ireland, he toured the United States. It was a pregnant moment for that troubled country, blessed as it was with a budding revival and cursed as it was by the specter of war over slavery and states’ rights. Henry preached for ten weeks in Philadelphia and for seven in New York before visiting other towns throughout Canada and the western American states. When the tour finished he was exhausted. He had been preaching up to nine sermons a week for months on end and he needed a rest. He returned to England and vacationed in Ilfracombe in Devonshire. It would prove to be one of the most defining decisions of his life.

  He was twenty-five at the time and had potential to become one of the most important Christian voices in his generation. But he was alone and increasingly felt the burden of it. At Ilfracombe, he met the woman who would bring this crisis to an end.

  Her name was Fanny Fitzgerald and though she would become a source of joy to her husband, her past had been filled with tragedy. Her father was Major Edward Marlborough Fitzgerald, a member of one of Ireland’s most celebrated aristocratic families. The major was the black sheep of that family, though, for he had decided to marry a Roman Catholic girl. It was a disastrous decision. His family abandoned him, his career was tarnished, and the marriage ended in divorce. Later, he married a fine woman named Mabel and that marriage was happy—but this is when the tragedies began.

  Mabel died of tuberculosis, leaving her husband and five children behind. Fanny was the second of these. The major, now retired from the army, made a life as a successful journalist but always there were the financial pressures and the burdens of caring for each child. Then came the smallpox epidemic. Fanny’s older brother, Gerald, succumbed to it and then Fanny fell ill as well. She would remember all her life how her father took her in his arms and told her that Gerald had died on the day the bells rang out for the wedding of Queen Victoria.

  It was all too much for the man. He boarded a steamship destined for France, spent hours in the ship’s saloon nursing a drink, wrote out a farewell letter, and then walked out onto the deck and jumped into the sea.

  Henry Grattan Guinness and Fanny (1861)

  Shortly afterward, a London actuary and leading Quaker named Arthur West was just reading the newspaper account of Fitzgerald’s death when his partner handed him a letter. West opened it and saw the signature of Edward Fitzgerald. In the letter, the obviously distraught man wrote of his concern for his four children, whose welfare he would “soon be unable to provide.” The note ended with the line, “Before this reaches you, I shall be out of reach of any answer.”

  Fitzgerald had guessed correctly about the character of Arthur West, though. That evening, West went home to discuss the unfortunate children with his wife. The couple decided to adopt Fanny and to make sure the other children were placed in good homes. And so Fanny Fitzgerald found a life among Quakers and spent the next twenty years living with them, learning their ways, and serving the hurting of society at their side.

  Her sufferings were not at an end, though. Her adoptive father had a reputation as a valiant soldier against slavery, but privately the strain was hard on his health; he suffered a stroke during Fanny’s teen years. Unable to live with the burden he had become to his wife and stepdaughter, he took his own life. As Michele Guinness has written,

  By the time she was twenty-nine hard work and slender means had taken their toll. Whatever brilliant mental powers Fanny possessed were hidden behind her wan, sober appearance. Necessity, which had robbed her of her youth, had made her capable and competent, but never cold or hard. There was too much of the Irish in her for training to curb her fire and zest completely. When she opened her mouth to speak there was a sudden warmth and vivacity about her which commanded attention. The little tea parties of the Quaker and Brethren circles in which she moved tended to be dull, but one of the old ladies was overheard to say, “My dear, I do assure thee when Fanny Fitzgerald comes into the room she breaks the ice in a moment. Thou knows the way she has with her! Sets everyone talking, and puts the stiffest people at ease.”

  It was as she was seeking a rest herself—plans for a trip to Paris having fallen through—that she ended up in Ilfracombe, where the famed Henry Grattan Guinness was recuperating from his American tour. She attended a service at which he preached, the two were introduced, and three months later they were married on October 2, 1860. Subsequently he would write, “I felt that I had found, for the first time in my life, a woman with a mind and soul that answer to my own. When with her I no longer felt alone.”

  It was good that Henry and Fanny shared an exceptional love, for the decades that followed their marriage were filled with turmoil and opposition. He would join the Plymouth Brethren and find that many of his former supporters felt this a step away from his nonpartisan approach to faith. He would also preach nonviolence just as the Civil War began in the United States, and this would make him a pariah, particularly among the British who were antislavery and who felt their cause was worth the fight. And he would champion an antialcohol conviction in an age when whiskey and beer flowed freely and when many in Ireland made their living producing one or the other.

  Still, the Guinnesses preached on, traveling the world and mentoring young leaders when they could. They would influence some of the most fruitful Christians of their age. Among these was Dr. Thomas Barnardo. The Guinnesses had first met Barnardo when he was a Sunday school teacher in their Plymouth Brethren Church at Merrion Hall in Dublin. He was short, thin, bespectacled, and “almost monkey-like” in appearance and character. But he also wanted to make a difference for God and this endeared him to Henry, who befriended the boy and mentored him in the foundations of the Christian life. Barnardo came to believe that he should go to the mission field in China, but the counsel of friends prevailed and he ended up studying medicine at London Hospital. It was one of the most fortuitous decisions in the history of Christian benevolence.

  While he tended his studies, he also involved himself in the evangelism and social outreach of a Plymouth Brethren church in London’s East End. It was through this work that he was exposed to the horrors of Victorian slums. As Derek Wilson has powerfully written,

  He had been quite unprepared for the degree of squalor and human degradation which now confronted him—men taking refuge from misery in drink; women forced into prostitution to provide food for their families; people dying on the
street of disease and starvation; children begging for coppers, their faces pinched with malnutrition, their health already broken by brutality or manual labor.

  The tenderhearted doctor later recalled “rough-headed urchins, running with their feet bare through the puddles, and bonnetless girls, huddled in shawls, lolling against the door-posts.” It was more than he could stand and though only a student at London Hospital he decided to lease an East End donkey stable and start a “ragged school” to get a few of these children off the street and to offer some minimal form of education. It was as he tended his waifs that he met Jim Jarvis.

  This small boy is famous in the Barnardo story since it was through him that the good doctor came to understand the extent of the plagues that beset impoverished children in the Victorian age. In his book, Night and Day, Barnardo described his first meeting with the boy who would become his guide to the unseen plight of London’s destitute children.

  One evening, the attendants at the Ragged School had met us as usual and at about half past nine o’clock were separating from their homes. A little lad, whome we had noticed listening very attentively during the evening, was amongst the last to leave, and his steps were slow and unwilling.

  “Come, my lad, had you better get home? It’s very late. Mother will be coming for you.”

  “Please sir, let me stop! Please let me stay. I won’t do no harm.”

  “Your mother will wonder what kept you so late.”

  “I ain’t got no mother.”

  “Haven’t got a mother, boy? Where do you live?”

  “Don’t live nowhere.”

  “Well, but where did you sleep last night?”

  “Down in Whitechapel, sir, along the Haymarket in one of them carts as is filled with hay; and I met a chap and he telled me to come here to school, as perhaps you’d let me lie near the fire all night.”

  Little Jim Jarvis went on to explain to the wide-eyed doctor that many children slept on the streets of the city and he offered to show Barnardo what he meant. For the next weeks, night after night, the boy took the doctor on a tour of the hovels where London’s orphaned children lived. They found children sleeping in barrels, on rooftops, under market stalls, and in any place that provided shelter from the wind and the rain and from the crooked adult who often kidnapped them for some evil purpose.

  In the filthy, agonized faces of London’s dispossessed children, Barnardo found his life’s work. He began answering this call by taking his cause to the upper classes and using his inspiring gift for oratory to move the elite to action. He won support from Lord Shaftesbury, an evangelical, and from the famed banker, Robert Barclay. With their backing and influence among the wealthy, Barnardo was able to open a home for boys in Stepney in 1870. He would build many others, often buying pubs and music halls to convert them into children’s homes. His work captured hearts throughout England, particularly after he began the practice of photographing each child when he first arrived, often gaunt and diseased, and then again months later when the child was happy and well. Barnardo sold postcards of these “before and after” photographs to raise money for his homes and to demonstrate the power of his work. The public responded with zeal and the work expanded dramatically in the following years.

  By 1878, Barnardo had established fifty homes in London alone. He had also begun a sort of town for homeless children which became a possibility when he and his wife, Syrie, were given a home in Barkingside, Essex, as a wedding gift. Barnardo turned this into a sixty-acre village for children, which remains the headquarters for the Barnardo foundation to this day. In 1906, the year after Barnardo died, there were thirteen hundred girls living there in sixty-six cottages.

  He had also devised a plan for sending the destitute children of Britain to loving homes in the United States and Canada. This met with unprecedented success. Between 1882 and 1901, Barnardo’s program sent 8,046 children to Canada, which meant that one-third of 1 percent of the entire Canadian population had come from Barnardo’s homes overseas. By the time that he died in 1905, there were more than 8,000 children in his 132 homes, more than 4,000 more had been placed with families, and some 18,000 had been sent to happy homes in Canada and Australia.

  That Thomas Barnardo accomplished such mighty works for God with the aid of Guinness mentoring, encouragement, and financial support is not well known. What is better known is the influence of the great China missionary, J. Hudson Taylor, upon their lives, for he would not only inflame their hearts for ministry in foreign lands but also become part of the Guinness story through marriage.

  Hudson Taylor was converted at the age of seventeen while looking for a book to read in his father’s library. He stumbled upon a tract titled “It Is Finished” and decided he had to know exactly what it was that was finished. By the time he had read the tract and searched out some of the answers for himself, he had, in his words, “made Christ his Savior.” Months later, on December 2, 1849, he was spending time alone in prayer when the matter of China came to his mind. He was reminded of the time when at the age of four he had told his parents, “When I am a man I mean to be a missionary and go to China.” This early episode and the sense he received in prayer as an adult together confirmed his call and he began to prepare to take the gospel to the Chinese people.

  He spared himself nothing in the process. He immediately began sleeping on bare wood and eating very little. He moved into a noisy, poverty-ridden suburb and began to minister there, learning how to trust God for the money he needed to carry on. His body toughened, his faith deepened, and his vision for China became more keen. He came into contact with the Chinese Evangelization Society (CES), which made arrangements for him to train as a doctor at London Hospital in the East End. The gospel was exploding in influence in China, though, and when reports of these successes reached London the leaders of the CES and Taylor himself agreed that he should leave his studies immediately and begin the voyage to China.

  His first years were troubled and without much success. He endured the ravages of a civil war, the opposition of anti-Western factions, the threat of cannibals and the callousness of other Western missionaries. Again, he learned the lessons of living by faith and of faithfully preaching when little seemed to come of it.

  Home on furlough in 1865, he walked the beach at Brighton on June 25 and determined that he could not leave his field, that China was his life. He formed the China Inland Mission and began asking God for twenty-four missionaries to return with him. He also asked for money so that the mission could do its work unfettered. In hope, he opened a bank account with a paltry few pounds in it. He waited and he prayed. Miraculously, the famed Victorian preacher Charles Spurgeon heard Taylor speak and began championing his cause. Before long, he had £13,000 and the twenty-four missionaries he needed.

  His years in China would be marked by the kind of opposition and despair most missionaries know. Children would die, assaults would wax and wane, and health would always be a challenge. Yet during fifty-one years in China, J. Hudson Taylor and his China Inland Mission would establish twenty mission stations, send nearly a thousand missionaries into the field, train some seven hundred Chinese workers, raise more than four million dollars, and leave behind a thriving Chinese church of 125,000. When modern readers watch the film Chariots of Fire and learn of Eric Liddell’s missionary zeal for China, they should remember the work of J. Hudson Taylor. When modern readers turn on the evening news and learn that the Chinese Christian church today is the most rapidly growing center of Christianity in the world, they should remember J. Hudson Taylor. And when American Christians learn that some Chinese pastors have come to the United States to preach in “un-Christian Western lands,” they should remember that it was J. Hudson Taylor who first embedded his own missionary zeal in the fledgling Chinese church.

  Hudson Taylor

  Henry Guinness first met Taylor at a conference in Liverpool and was so impressed with his humility and intensity that he asked the missionary to address a gathering in his
home. He must also have been struck by Taylor’s appearance, for the missionary had taken to dressing like a Chinese coolie in order to pull down cultural barriers to the gospel he preached. It was not uncommon, then, to see Taylor in pigtail and silk short pants and shirt. This won him many a Chinese convert but also drew the resentment of many of his fellow countrymen. Such extremes in the service of God only endeared him to Henry Guinness, though, and the two became close friends.

  Hudson Taylor and family

  In fact, internationally successful as Henry was, when he heard Taylor speak he immediately offered to join the work in China. This was at the same time that Thomas Barnardo was influenced by Taylor and yearned to give his life to Chinese missions. But Taylor was a wise man who knew every Christian had his own unique calling. He sensed that Barnardo was meant for other work and he told the Reverend Guinness that he could certainly do more good training young missionaries in England than going into the field himself.

  This was a turning point in Henry and Fanny Guinness’s lives. They already knew that most Christian denominations had schools for training ministers of their own but that no training was readily available for the kind of independent missionaries that Taylor and China Inland Mission needed. Still, they had not thought of themselves as meant to provide the answer to this challenge until Taylor changed their thinking. After much prayer and discussion, then, the Guinnesses moved into a house in London’s East End and began a one-house training school called Stepney Institute. It was located right in the heart of smoky factories and run-down tenements, in the kinds of neighborhoods where any serious missionary-in-training intent upon China must learn how to live. The students were required to preach in the open air and to give themselves to relief work as part of their training. It might not have seemed an inviting prospect for young men with other opportunities, but the school not only had a waiting list of students but eventually had to expand into new facilities. These facilities were at Harley House, Bow, and with the move the school then became known as the East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions.