Wild Grows the Heather in Devon Read online

  © 1998 by Michael R. Phillips

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-2956-4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover illustration © Erin Dertner / Exclusively represented by Applejack Licensing

  To Gregory, Heidi, and Penny,

  and those dear and loyal friends

  who have loved and supported us

  in this difficult time.

  Thank you all!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Stormy Tryst

  Mysterious Alliance

  Root of Strife

  Part I: A Happy Family

  1. A Mother’s Dream

  2. A Father’s Vision

  3. Of Tomatoes and the Future

  4. Reflections and Dreams

  5. A Kitchen Mêlée

  6. Lofty Objectives

  7. Shadowy Schemes

  8. Difference of Outlook

  9. A Ride

  10. Encounter With a Woodcutter

  11. A Family Discussion About Changing Times

  12. Something Strange in the Garret

  Part II: First Glances Inward

  13. We Can Change the World!

  14. Center of Civilization

  15. Clandestine Arrangements

  16. Last-Minute Reflections

  17. Annoying Disturbance

  18. Sir Charles Rutherford

  19. Which Direction the Future?

  20. A Changing World

  21. Breaking of the Cocoon

  22. The Beast Hand

  23. Unexpected Claim of Conscience

  Part III: Unexpected Change

  24. A Morning Walk

  25. Jermyn Street Again

  26. New Hope Chapel

  27. Unusual Errand

  28. Where Does Conscience Come From?

  29. The Proof . . . Is Within You!

  30. Storm and Rainbow

  31. What Am I to Do?

  32. Probing Words Out of the Past

  33. Old Friendship Renewed

  34. A Newly Changed World

  35. Purple Messenger

  36. Private Sanctuary and Decision

  37. God Can’t Love Me

  38. Individual Marks of a Father’s Love

  Part IV: All Things New

  39. Silent Witness to High Things

  40. A Lunch at the Cottage

  41. A Conversation in the Barn

  42. Paris in Spring

  43. The London Rutherfords

  44. Amanda and Cousin Geoffrey

  45. Difference of Opinion

  46. Invitation to the Country

  47. The Other Side of the Door

  48. The Mystery of Our Hope

  49. The Keys

  50. New Values, Hard Questions

  51. A Prayer Garden

  52. Why Must God Be Good?

  53. Life—A Good Thing

  54. Adventure in the Loft

  55. Unsought Advice

  56. A Puzzling Scripture

  57. God’s Daughters

  58. What Would Happen If We Trusted Men?

  59. Husband and Wife

  60. Wintry Surprise

  61. The Sleigh Ride

  Part V: Challenge and Decision

  62. New Challenges, New Opportunities

  63. The Boy With the Withered Leg

  64. Opportunity and Adventure

  65. The Place of Heather

  66. Different Human Plants

  67. Happy Evening

  68. The Mystery of the Heather Garden

  69. Exploration

  70. Pinnacle of Success

  71. Surprise Discovery

  72. In the Stables

  73. Unfamiliar Ground

  74. Far-Reaching Questions

  75. The Future of Liberal Leadership

  76. In What Arena Change?

  77. The Decision

  78. What Came of It

  79. Thoughts of Far Away

  80. Overheard Prayers

  Part VI: Crisis

  81. A New Century Accelerates Progress

  82. Fateful Encounter

  83. Birthday Reflections

  84. Surprise Caller

  85. Bold Proclamation

  86. Mothers and Daughters

  87. Parental Concern

  88. An Unwelcome Letter

  89. Explosive Talk

  90. Another Letter and Its Result

  Part VII: Heartbreak and Hope

  91. Dawn Through the Clouds

  92. Deeper and Stronger

  93. Brother and Sister

  94. Unknown Connections

  95. Privilege of the Prodigal’s Parent

  96. Father and Son

  97. Prayers for a Prodigal Daughter

  98. Thank You!

  Epilogue

  The Rutherford Family Lineage

  About the Author

  Fiction by Michael Phillips

  Introduction

  Ideas and Change

  My objective as a writer is more than to just tell stories. Though I certainly want my books to be enjoyable, it is important to me that they contain more than entertainment value.

  I approach every new project, therefore, by asking myself what unique elements I might bring to a book or series to make it a distinctive literary experience for those who eventually read it.

  “What human struggles, historical issues, and spiritual concepts can I explore,” I ask myself, “that haven’t come up in quite the same way in previous books? How might I develop a new range of characters whose lives will be fresh and interesting? What thought-provoking challenges can I cause these characters to face that will enable them to grow? How will the individuals in the story interact emotionally with those around them and within their specific historical and cultural milieu? Most important, how will they respond to God when he makes his presence felt in their hearts?”

  All this no doubt stems from what I as a reader look for in a novel. When I read, I want to grow and be changed from the experience. I enjoy finding myself intellectually and spiritually challenged. I want to think and learn. I want to feel that I’ve met real people whose experiences will stay with me. I want to know that I’ve genuinely experienced some place on the globe or some period in history about which I was unfamiliar before. When I finish a book, I hope I will be a little different than when I began. I want to feel that I’ve enjoyed a full-course literary meal rather than just a snack. When I took to writing myself, therefore, it was with the hope of producing the sorts of books that I personally like to read, with the kinds of characters and issues that I myself find intriguing. After
all, if I’m not fascinated by the lives of my characters, how can I expect readers to be?

  It is the qualities I have described above that make the Scottish novelist George MacDonald my favorite author. Some complain that these complexities cause my books, like MacDonald’s, to be too long and involved, that every title is really two books in one. I take such comments as great compliments, signs that readers are getting their money’s worth. For I happen to enjoy best those books that take weeks to read, that are journeys rather than two-hour television programs. One of my favorite MacDonalds is 786 pages! That book is not just a story. It is an experience!

  The era in which I chose to set THE SECRETS OF HEATHERSLEIGH HALL is a historical period I find especially fascinating from several different perspectives. I would sum it up by calling it an era of ideas and of change. Both play significant roles in this first book of the series.

  In most historical novels, a strong sense of historical events (war, revolution, social change, and so on) is intrinsic to the story. The particular setting of this book, however, is one of relative tranquility. The late Victorian period in England was an era characterized by a free flow of new ideas rather than by events. Some of these ideas would later be proved to be fallacious (communism). Some would stand the test of time (universal suffrage). About others (evolution, universal reconciliation), debate rages on a hundred years later.

  At the outset of this project, I found myself intrigued by the question of what stresses would come to a thoroughly “modern” family in this pivotal age, one with little prior spiritual inclination or background, if suddenly confronted by the Gospel in a new and personal way. What would be the ideas they would wrestle through? What changes would result? What would be the impact on each family member, on the relationships of husband and wife, on the family as a whole, on their views, on their world outlook?

  This was something I had not done in a book before. The more I considered it, the more fascinated I became. Especially, I became curious to consider how a man and woman confronting God personally for the first time might wrestle through issues of spirituality as the intellectualism of the times worked in combination with the deep emotional tugging of the Holy Spirit on their hearts. I am extremely intrigued by this interplay between the rational and the emotional. It is a component of the spiritual life often overlooked in today’s occasionally pietistic spiritual climate.

  Furthermore, I found myself wondering what tension such a fundamental change as conversion might bring to a family in that age. What if the husband and wife were not in agreement in all things? How would the children in such a family react? What if the change were not welcomed by some family members? (These questions, of course, could apply just as easily to our own time.)

  The thought of such potential familial stresses led to another question I thought it important to explore—that is, why do people without religious background become Christians, and what happens to them afterward?

  I think too often we base evangelism on what God can do for us—Accept the Lord and he will give you a happy life. That’s backward to my way of thinking. If salvation is not based on the truth of God’s character, on his inherent goodness and love for us, and on our obedience as we respond to give back that love, then I think its foundation will always be faulty. Happy lives, sunny skies, abundance, blessing, and ideal circumstances do not necessarily follow giving one’s heart to the Lord. We live as God’s children because he is our Father, not because he lavishes us with blessings. Some lives are hard. Some questions are not answered in this life. But that does not change who God is and how we are called to respond to him.

  For all these reasons, I felt it important that everything not necessarily go smoothly and rosily because the characters in this story encounter God. Real life doesn’t usually work that way. Neither do the lives of the family Rutherford, whom you are about to meet.

  With these comments about my objectives as foundational, I would also like to tell you a little more about the time in which the Rutherfords lived and why I find it such an intriguing period of English history. As I said, it was a time of ideas and change—and that’s putting it mildly. Late nineteenth-century Great Britain was a positive intellectual greenhouse for new concepts. In every field, from politics to science to theology, thinkers and policy makers were pushing past boundaries in ways that would have been inconceivable a hundred years before. Societal concerns gave rise to socialism. On its heels, communism was born in England during the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Scientific advances were changing the way people viewed the natural world. Darwin had already proposed an evolutionary foundation for the animal kingdom. Within the first decade of the twentieth century, Einstein would propose his theory of special relativity.

  This surge of new ideas brought with it rapid and enormous societal change. Industrialism had already revolutionized both commerce and daily life. Electricity was changing the way people lived. Telephones were revolutionizing communication. Motorized engines were moving people faster and more conveniently than ever before. Cities were doubling in size every few years as life became increasingly urban.

  The changes in British politics were just as rapid and as powerful. The British monarchy was losing power and influence while Parliament, once a bastion of conservatism and the aristocracy, was witnessing the birth of the Labour party. The middle class was rising in influence. All men, not just nobles, could now vote. That right would soon come to women as well.

  Clearly, some of this change was for the better, some was not. Few will quarrel with the wisdom behind giving working men and women the vote and protecting children from grueling factory labor. The wisdom behind evolutionary and communist theory, however, might be more open to question. (It could be conjectured that most of the social change proved generally beneficial to people and culture, while many of the new philosophical ideas of the times produced a deviation from traditional and biblical truth.)

  Absolutely central to this historical milieu was a climate of vigorous rationalism, which was applied not only to scientific matters, but to religious ones as well. Generalizations are always dangerous, of course, for they are never entirely true. But it seems nevertheless to be a valid observation that churchgoers of a century ago, in Great Britain especially, were more comfortable with intellectual dialogue as an integral component of spiritual life than are many of our own time.

  People a century ago discussed and analyzed and thought issues out for themselves—far more, I believe, than many in Christian circles today. People attended public lectures as a pastime. Intellectual debate was a standard drawing-room activity. Such discussions often formed the evening’s entertainment. There was no radio or television. Instead, people sat in parlors and drawing rooms and discussed the current ideas being circulated in church and society and in the day’s magazines and newspapers.

  This climate of discussion and debate shows itself quite clearly in this series. Not only are the ideas you will encounter here historical in themselves, so too are the dialogues in which these ideas are prominent. Readers accustomed to today’s “quick read” fiction may find this surprising and even, at times, a bit uncomfortable. Yet this style of writing and interaction is deliberate and, I hope, ultimately rewarding. My goal is to help you not just read about these times, but fully to experience them. Thus I hope you will be drawn into these discussions with the characters and feel a little what it was like to be a Christian in turn-of-the-century England.

  So for those readers who occasionally desire more “action,” I would simply offer a reminder that 1890s England was not, in general, a fast-moving time. It was, however, a fascinating time, and one that was critical in shaping the world we live in today. If you can allow yourself to settle into the pace of the book and “live” it as intended, I believe you will find it fascinating as well.

  The specific topics that people were debating at the turn of the century will be familiar to you, for many of today’s hot issues were born at approximately
that time. Traditional norms in every discipline and walk of life—science, society, business, politics, industry, art, music, and religion—were being questioned. The debate between God and science, evolution and creation, was at the forefront of everyone’s thinking. Everything from women’s rights to Darwin’s ideas about natural selection was vigorously and heatedly debated—as they are in the book you are about to read.

  Three topics in particular which come in for their share of discussion in this volume may perhaps raise red flags in your thinking. To this day Christians feel heated about all three—evolution, the roles of men and women, and universalism.

  In those days, the idea of evolution was seen as one of the most serious threats to Christianity itself. If evolution was true, many people assumed, then God simply could not exist. For a thinking person of the times, therefore, the idea of evolution was one of the serious stumbling blocks to faith and belief. This issue arises in the book as rationalist Charles Rutherford wrestles through the foundational truths of the Christian faith and attempts to reconcile them with his evolutionist assumptions.

  Later in the story, a lengthy discussion arises concerning the roles of women and men and the seeming disparity between what modern society was saying about equality and what the Bible appeared to indicate. When working on this book, I found myself intrigued by the situation that might develop if a relatively “liberated” and modern woman—and these were the days when the seeds of today’s feminism were being planted—encountered a more traditional, conservative viewpoint concerning the wife’s role in marriage and a woman’s place in society. I therefore attempted to frame the sort of dialogue that might well have taken place in England at the time.

  It might help as you read to know that my wife helped me write this particular section! We attempted together to envision the kind of discussion two women of the time might actually have had in sorting through such a complex issue. Judy’s help was invaluable toward this end because she has approached these issues from both vantage points represented.

  Whereas the debate over evolution was for the most part between the conservative church and the scientific community, and the issue of the roles of women was largely between the conservative church and a societal movement, another equally heated controversy existed within the church itself. No more divisive point of contention existed in the church of those days than the theological controversy over “universalism,” or, more properly, universal reconciliation. It was a conflict that furiously raged in all denominations and seminaries, split churches, spawned countless books and pamphlets, and sparked thousands of parlor debates throughout England and Scotland. As today, a belief in universal reconciliation was considered heresy in some circles, enlightened thinking in others.