John Mason: Water-Stratford Unveiling

Modest revelation of a stone today in Water-Stratford — a plaque to John Mason, Vicar from 1674-94, hymn writer and prophet of apocalypse now in his back garden. Many thanks to Mike Edwards, churchwarden, and Sarah Willis who hosted the do in Mason’s old Rectory, Tony How, whose vision this was, Liz Simpson, present Incumbent and many others for a grand day out.
The tale of the thousands who camped out for years in a field they called Sion and the man with the wooden leg that would grow back when Jesus appeared, is an fascinating Bejemanesque nugget of puritan history in this puritan county — a part of our story that’s desperately unfashionable these days, but worth telling. What does it mean in context?

1. We like to think we live in an age of social and political upheaval, but the late seventeenth century saw everything turned upside down and inside out, civil wars, and the King executed. This age of Diggers, Ranters, Shakers, Muggletonians and Quakers was electric with a sense that the old religious institutions had failed to deliver anything except strife and war. Significant proportions of the population swirled into what we would regard as marginal movements, seeking enlightenment and a spiritual home. In this first age of great diarists Religion became a much more internal personal matter.
2. Following the Reformation, public visual art had been pretty much verboten in England, and had been confined to court circles and a domestic siding. Artistic endeavour poured into Literature and poetry well after the age of Shakespeare. You couldn’t be a puritan and a visual artist, but you could be a John Milton or Andrew Marvell.
   
3. As cultural life picked up after the restoration the first public art form to flourish in England was Music — John Blow, Henry Purcell, Jeremiah Clarke. Mason was pretty much the first English popular original vernacular hymn writer.
   

John Mason’s Remains are simple sayings to carry around with you — spiritual wisdom for all. Some of them have become quite famous:

Honesty is the best policy and innocence the best wisdom

What can we learn from John Mason?

Firstly, His is a deeply personal faith. Christianity is not a religion of forms and dogma, institutions and cultic participation, but a way of life which recommends itself by how it is lived. Mason walked the walk as well as talked the talk — “a light in the pulpit and a pattern out of it,” they said. Saint Paul said this about his congregation in Corinth:

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God.

So it’s the attitude to living and people, God and faith, that counts, rather than being a member of a particular sect or following a particular doctrine. Just like today?

Secondly, this is Christianity for the streets — faith sans frontières. Here is Mason’s friend Isaac Watts, writing in 1744:

I have often thought that this short collection of short sentences, under various heads, are very proper to attend christians of the middle-rank of life, either in the parlour or the kitchen, in the shop or the work-house; and for that end I have been a frequent purchaser of them, to distribute in families, among private christians.

This is a Lay Spirituality — no dependence upon parsons. Everyone is called to be holy, and can serve God as faithfully and effectively by working as an apprentice, tradesman or housemaid as they could by being a clergyman. All are called to ministry — just like today?

Thirdly, as well as keeping it personal, keeping it real, Mason plays skilfully with language like a metaphysical poet, turning words upside down and back to front playfully, but always in simple language anyone could understand:

Man is not made for the world, but the world for man.
We hated God without a cause, and he loved us without a cause.
As every shred of gold is precious, so is every minute of time

Here’s one for next time your children tell you they are bored:

A Christian should never say he hath nothing to do. It was not for nothing that we were called out of nothing.

Fourthly (best Puritan sermons went on to twenty-seventhly — not this one!) He protests the emptiness and materialism of his age and ours.

We put a price on our riches, but riches cannot put a price on us.
Riches are indifferent things; good or bad, as they are used; be then as indifferent to them as they are to you.The world promises comforts and pays sorrows
Riches and prosperity will either kill with care, or surfeit with delight
Be not proud of riches but afraid of them, lest they be silver bars to cross the way to heaven.

John Mason’s religion is personal, opposed to materialism, full of surprise and delight. It is down to earth, beautifully simple, and, compared to other preachings of his age, straightforward and memorable. He being dead yet speaketh, to quote the letter to the Hebrews, to a world of indifference, show, celebrity as an end in itself, selfishness, materialism and sickness of heart.

Confronted by our own upheavals, uncertainty, emptiness, and materialism, we cold do worse than learn from John Mason. Our society, like his is profoundly weary and suspicious of institutions. The future of the Christian church lies not in institutional triumph, but in simple straightforward lay discipleship. At the heart of John Mason’s teaching lies a simple picture of what a lay Christian is, apart of all the technicalities and circumstantial upheavals of his age

They that believe have Christ in their hearts, heaven in their eye, and the world under their feet. God’s spirit is their guide, God’s fear is their guard, God’s people are their companions, God’s promises are their cordials, holiness is their way, and heaven is their home.

Does he mean us? He surely does!

Not Quite the End of the World

400 years ago, Bucks was a Puritan county. Yesterday I went to Water Stratford to help arrange a service on 7 June to celebrate a wonderfully eccentric piece of our puritan heritage. The glory of St Giles’ Church is its Norman architecture, on a par with Stewkley — Amazing 11th Century doorways North & South:
John Mason was Rector from 1674-94, a godly puritan pastor, pious and eloquent — “a light in the pulpit and a pattern out of it.” He wrote hymns much admired by Isaac Watts and Richard Baxter. One of his hymns (“Mercy, good Lord, mercy I ask”) was said by Joseph Belcher, Nonconformist Divine, to be ideal for public executions and “equally appropriate for sinners of every class.” Hymn writing ability is plainly inherited — John Mason Neale, his descendant, was named after him.


Here by the Great Ouse River, near where this Wheely-bin stood yesterday, sprang up in 1694 an extrordainary millenarian movement — thousands, some say tens of thousands, camping out for years awaiting the End together. Only Lucinda Lambton or John Betjeman could do it justice, but let the parish website take up the tale:

Towards the end of his life John Mason suffered from nightmares, delusions and hyper-sensitivity to sound; his condition worsened after the death of his beloved wife Mary, and he came to believe he was appointed to proclaim the imminent Second Coming of Christ, which would take place at Water Stratford. His passionate preaching was so convincing that many people sold their property and came here, taking up residence in houses and barns or in tents, thinking that only here would they be preserved – everywhere else was about to be destroyed. Water Stratford was known to these followers as “Sion”, and for a time there was dancing and hymn-singing day and night. Contemporary accounts tell of the vast quantities of provisions that were held in common; of the shrieking of, “Appear, appear!” during the wild dancing; of the man with a wooden leg who made a great noise with this during the dancing, and believed his original leg was soon to be restored at the Second Coming.

John Mason became increasingly ill and when he died his followers expected that he would rise from his grave after three days, as he had prophesied; when this did not happen they assumed they had misunderstood and settled down to wait for this to happen. The new Rector had the grave exhumed in order to show that the prophecies had been false; nevertheless, some of the followers stayed here for about fifteen years, “until they were dispersed by the Military.”

Very few of Mason’s hymns made it beyond the 19th century, but they are visionary and striking in their context. Best known is this “General Song of Praise to Almighty God.” The verses in Red are not usually sung these days and you can see why, but it’s fun to imagine the man with the wooden leg belting them out lustily as he awaited the miraculous re-growth of his stump, with ten thousand friends gathered on the water meadow by the Great Ouse in 1694!

How shall I sing that Majesty
Which angels do admire?
Let dust in dust and silence lie;
Sing, sing, ye heavenly choir.
Thousands of thousands stand around
Thy throne, O God most high;
Ten thousand times ten thousand sound
Thy praise; but who am I?

Thy brightness unto them appears,
Whilst I Thy footsteps trace;
A sound of God comes to my ears,
But they behold Thy face.
They sing because Thou art their Sun;
Lord, send a beam on me;
For where heaven is but once begun
There alleluias be.

Enlighten with faith’s light my heart,
Inflame it with love’s fire;
Then shall I sing and bear a part
With that celestial choir.
I shall, I fear, be dark and cold,
With all my fire and light;
Yet when Thou dost accept their gold,
Lord, treasure up my mite.

How great a being, Lord, is Thine,
Which doth all beings keep!
Thy knowledge is the only line
To sound so vast a deep.
Thou art a sea without a shore,
A sun without a sphere;
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere

How good art thou, whose Goodness is
Our parent, nurse and guide;
Whose Streams do water Paradise
And all the Earth beside!
Thine Upper and thy Nether Springs
Make both thy Worlds to thrive:
Under thy warm and sheltering Wings
Thou keep’st two Broods alive.

Thy Arm of Might, most mighty King,
Both Rocks and Hearts doth break:
My God, thou canst do every thing
But what would shew thee Weak.
Thou canst not cross thy self, or be
Less than thy self, or poor;
But whatsoever pleaseth Thee,
That canst thou do, and more.

Who would not fear thy Searching Eye,
Witness to all that’s true?
Dark Hell and deep Hypocrisy
Lie plain before its view.
Motions and Thoughts before they grow,
Thy Knowledge doth espy;
What unborn Ages are to do,
Is done before thine Eye.

Thy Wisdom, which both makes and mends,
We ever much admire:
Creation all our Wit transcends;
Redemption rises higher.
Thy Wisdom guides stray’d sinners home,
’Twill make the dead World rise,
And bring those Prisoners to their Doom,
Its Paths are Mysteries.

Great is thy Truth, and shall prevail
To Unbelievers shame:
Thy Truth and Years do never fail;
Thou ever art the same.
Unbelief is a raging wave,
Dashing against a Rock:
If God doth not his Israel Save,
Then led Egyptians mock.

Most Pure and Holy are thine Eyes,
Most Holy is thy Name;
Thy Saints, Thy Laws, and Penalties,
Thy Holiness proclaim.
This is the Devil’s Scourge and Sting,
This is the Angels’ Song,
Who Holy, Holy, Holy Sing,
In Heavenly Canaan’s Tongue.

Mercy, that shining Attribute,
The Sinner’s Hope and Plea!
Huge Hosts of Sins in their Pursuit,
Are drown’d in thy Red Sea:
Mercy is God’s memorial,
And in all Ages prais’d;
My God, thine only Son did fall,
That Mercy might be rais’d.

Thy Bright Back-parts, O God of Grace,
I humbly here Adore;
Shew me thy Glory and Thy Face,
That I may praise Thee more.
Since none can see thy Face and live,
For me to die is best;
Thro’ Jordan’s Streams who would not dive,
To Land at Canaan’s rest?