Walking to Glory

Walking to Glory

20 Il WALKING TO GLORY

Then the rector rushed upstairs to the nursery. The maid seized baby Charles and ordered the others to follow, but no one noticed that Jacky lay fast asleep through the uproar. When the rector realized the child was missing, he tried to get up the stairs again, but they were on fire and would not bear his weight. In agony of mind he knelt in the hall and commended John Wesley's soul to God.

But here was Jacky safe and sound, "a brand plucked out of the burning." The Reverend Samuel Wesley, his house in ashes, his books and writings gone, cried out in joy: "Come, neighbors! Let us kneel down! Let us give thanks to God! He has given me all eight children. Let the house go. I am rich enough!"

The family found shelter in the homes of neighbors or relatives except for the eldest child, Samuel, who was away at Westminster School. Soon the rectory was being rebuilt in red brick with a tiled roof, and long before it was finished the children were together again, and their mother, who was exceptionally well-read for a woman of the reign of Queen Anne, had resumed their lessons.

Jacky Wesley' grew up in an extraordinary household.

Both parents had distant connections with the peerage and with landed gentry. Each came from Dissenting families but had rejoined the Church of England. Wesley's grandfather and great-grandfather, both as diminutive as his father, had been rectors of parishes in Dorset until ejected for refusing to accept the new Book of Common

Prayer in 1662. His grandfather, John Wesley, an ardent young puritan preacher, had suffered imprisonment after the Restoration Settlement, like John Bunyan, and had died when Wesley's father, Samuel, was four.

Samuel went to a Dissenting academy, then he conformed—an act of conscience which opened the way to Oxford University. Having no money, he walked there and entered Exeter College as a servitor, the lowest rank of undergraduate, and survived much poverty to take his

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degree and to be ordained. He then eked out his small stipend as a curate in London by writing witty essays and poor verse for a magazine and married his editor's sisterin-law.

Samuel's bride, Susanna ("Sukey"), was the youngest of numerous children born to the respected and scholarly leader of London's Dissenters, Dr. Samuel Annesley. She was beautiful, scholarly, and serious. Like her husband, she had read herself out of her father's nonconformity into an adherence to the high church party in the Church of England.

Samuel secured a small country living at South Ormsby in Lincolnshire through the influence of John Sheffield,

Earl of Mulgrave, but in 1696 he offended a local nobleman by refusing to receive his mistress. Anxious to move, he obtained the parish of Epworth, which was in the gift of the Crown, and settled in that small struggling town in a remote part of north Lincolnshire. He believed that he had received it at the dying wish of Queen Mary

II, to whom he had dedicated a "Life of Christ' in heroic verse and who had refused him an Irish bishopric. Since she had died two years before he obtained the living, he is more likely to have owed the preferment to the influence of his patron John Sheffield, now Marquess of Normanby, the principal landowner of the district.

At Epworth, Susanna continued to bear a child a year, five of whom died. By early 1702 the Wesleys had one surviving son, Samuel, and five daughters, including the latest baby, Anne. She might have been the last—for the | rector left his wife.

Both Samuel and Susanna were strong willed with vio-. lent loyalties. They were Tories, but he supported William III while she sympathized with the non-jurors, those bishops and clergy who had refused the oath of allegiance to William and had lost their dioceses and livings.

Her heart was with the exiled James II. Each day at evening household prayers the rector prayed for "our sovereign Lord, King William." His wife said "Amen" but seems to have silently switched the petition to "the King over the water.'' When the news trickled down to Epworth that James II had died in exile, she stopped saying '""Amen," "upon which," she wrote to Lady Yar-

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borough, a kindly neighbor fourteen miles away, "he retired to his study, and calling me to him asked me the reason of my not saying 'Amen' to the prayer.

"I was a little surprised at the question and don't well remember what I answered, but too well I remember what followed. He immediately kneeled down and imprecated the divine Vengeance upon himself and all his posterity if ever he touched me more or came into a bed with me before I had begged God's pardon and his, for not saying 'Amen' to the prayer for the King."

Samuel moved to another room. Susanna refused to recant, despite '"'my extreme affliction" that 'he will not live with me." After Easter he went to London for convocation, muttering that he would never return; he would go to sea again as a naval chaplain, such as he had been briefly before they were married.

King William had died in March. Queen Anne, an undoubted Stuart, had ascended the throne. Yet the rector would not forgive his wife, and though he returned from London, he kept away from her body. Then, in July, their thatched rectory caught fire and was three-quarters burned. This first fire brought him to his senses.

In August 1702 the Wesleys slept together again, and on June 17, 1703 John Wesley was born.

In a sense he owed his existence to Queen Anne's accession and to a fire. Five years and eight months later, in February 1709, his life was saved by that stalwart neighbor in that second fire.

In later years John Wesley would often apply to his life the Old Testament text '""A brand plucked out of the burning," yet he did not think of himself as a child of destiny nor did his parents. Though Susanna pledged herself to take particular care of Jacky's soul, they loved all their children. Jacky was their fifteenth, including the two sets of twins whose tiny graves were their only memorial. He was the seventh to survive, to be followed by Martha, Charles, and finally Kezia (Kezzy) born soon after the second fire.

In the years of Jacky's early childhood, his father was in his late forties, and his mother, though eight years younger, seemed already middle-aged through much childbearing and ill health. Samuel Wesley was a hard-

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working, rather disorganized clergyman. When he was not out among his parishioners as they weaved their flax or worked their hemp or cut the peat which lay all around, he would be scribbling his heroic verse or compiling a parallel Bible in Hebrew, Greek, and ''Chaldee"

(Aramaic) or preparing his monumental commentary (in Latin) on the Book of Job. A stout upholder of the orthodox doctrines of the Church of England, he was also one of the small band of church people, scattered across the land, who wanted to spread Christianity throughout the world. Were it not for his large family, he would willingly have sailed to distant parts.

As a rector, he held glebe lands which he tried to farm.

His soil was fertile, since the Isle of Axenholme, on which Epworth stood, had once been mainly a marsh, drained in the previous century. But his efforts had little success and only increased his debts, especially when his barn fell down and his flax caught fire.

Nor was he popular with the morose and inbred inhabitants of Axenholme, then one of the most isolated parts of eastern England, so low-lying that in winter or spring the flooding of three rivers would frequently cut off

Epworth from the Lincolnshire wolds except by boat.

Even the roads, passable in dry weather, were merely cart tracks across the fields.

Despite his wit and his laugh, Samuel Wesley's high moral teaching annoyed many of his people. Once he had to stand up to a mob, and when his Tory convictions and loyalty to the Church, which the Whigs seemed to threaten, thrust him into the thick of a general election, his enemies turned on him. In London they cancelled his military chaplaincy, and at Epworth they maimed his cows, which ran dry, so that his debts increased yet more.

One Friday morning, when he came out of church after a baptism, he was confronted by a bailiff who demanded immediate repayment of a debt. Samuel Wesley asked for a few hours' grace. This was refused. He was arrested in his own churchyard and carted off to the debtors prison in Lincoln Castle, where he promptly began services, distributed books, and quipped that he was 'getting ac quainted with my brother jailbirds as fast as I can."

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Susanna was left to find bread for the children and the servants until wealthy friends could send donations which cleared the debt and allowed the rector to return home. John Wesley once commented that his mother

"did not feel for others near so much as my father did; but she did ten times more than he did," both among the poor and needy and in her own home. Susanna always managed the household. She regarded her husband as her master, though she argued with him frequently. But he left the details of kitchen, nursery, and schoolroom to her.

She had strong views on the upbringing of their children: "The first thing to be done is to break their wills and bring them to an obedient temper."" She taught them to fear the rod—the universal sanction of the day for children of both sexes—and never to cry when beaten but to "murmur softly." She held that to spoil a child was a worse cruelty than the rod, yet she never stinted praise and encouragement. She also laid down a law that if a child confessed a naughtiness, he or she would not be beaten; but to her disgust, the children could often get round their father and be let off without acknowledging a wrong, even when caught red-handed.

She was a brilliant teacher. Jacky, like the others before him, was not allowed to read until he was five, with the result that he developed a good memory by ear, especially for the stories in the Bible. On the day after his fifth birthday he was taught the letters of the alphabet and told to read the first verses of Genesis. Since he almost knew the creation of the world by heart, he learned quickly, and like his elder brother and sisters, he could read within two days.

The children sat together in class, each doing a lesson appropriate to age. Since Samuel had gone to Westminster School and then to Oxford, and Charles was too young, Jacky was virtually being educated in a girls' school. Discipline was strict during the daily six hours of lessons—no running into the garden or playing around until school was out. Each weekday evening Susanna taught one child individually; Jacky's turn came on Thursdays.

He was also taught from infancy to say the Lord's

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Prayer, night and morning, and other prayers and Bible passages as he grew older. Whatever his little mischiefs, he regarded piety as a part of life. Epworth might have its tumults and his parents their eccentricities and arguments, but they gave Jacky sound learning, a sensitive conscience, and good manners. They grounded him in classics and divinity and never discouraged his inquisitive mind.

He was happy and no rebel, though perhaps, surrounded by sisters, he was a little fastidious. Looking back on his childhood, John Wesley considered that by the age of ten he had not lost his innocence, "having been strictly educated, and carefully taught that I could only be saved 'by universal obedience, by keeping all the commandments of God,' in the meaning of which I was diligently instructed." He gladly received and often thought about the duties he must perform and the sins he must shun.

But it was all on the surface of his soul.

Chapter Two Slippery Paths of Youth Lord Normanby, Samuel Wesley's patron, had received yet another step in the peerage and was now

Duke of Buckingham. He had married King James II's illegitimate daughter immediately upon the death of her estranged husband, Lord Anglesey (an Annesley relative of Susanna) and had built Buckingham House in St.

James' Park, the future royal palace, to keep her in style.

The duchess was regarded as the haughtiest woman in England, but she showed kindness to the Wesleys. The Buckinghams became aware that Jack's parents had no money for the next stage of his education.

The duke, Lord President of the Council, second only in the Cabinet to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, had been for many years a governor of Sutton's Hospital in Charterhouse, founded in 1611 by a soldier who had made a great fortune in coal. Thomas Sutton had provided free education for eighty pensioner brothers, such as former sea captains, military officers who had been captives of the infidels, or merchants who had fallen on evil times; and for forty boys of similar class, to be called

"gownboys," from the scholar's gown which they wore in class and chapel. He had bought the Charterhouse, the former Carthusian monastery which had been made into a great Tudor mansion after the Dissolution. It lay just beyond the walls of the city of London to the northwest, a few hundred yards from Smithfield, the open space where Protestant martyrs had been burned at the stake and which now was used as a market for the herds of cattle which came on the hoof from the provinces.

When a gownboy left school, each governor of Charterhouse had the right in rotation to nominate a replacement. The Duke of Buckingham nominated John

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Wesley, aged ten, "in the place of Thomas Tipping."

In January 1714, therefore, eight months before the death of Queen Anne, Jack made the long winter journey on rough roads from northern Lincolnshire to London, probably in the care of his elder brother since Samuel was now an usher at Westminster School. Despite the twelveyear gap in age, they were close friends. Jack's respect for \

Samuel never wavered, even when theology divided them.

On January 28, dressed as a gownboy in black breeches and jerkin (short coat) with white collar under a long black coat, John Wesley entered the Charterhouse with its wide courts and stone buildings. Only one other new boy had come that quarter, and Wesley was the youngest} gownboy, by nearly a year, until one William Camell arrived six months later, only to die of smallpox within weeks.

The whole school numbered about 100 Carthusians.

Detailed evidence for the early eighteenth-century Charterhouse is scarce, but apparently it now included fee-paying Oppidans. They were day boys or lodgers in nearby private houses, while the lives of the gownboys centered on the Duke of Norfolk's former indoor tennis court (for the "royal" or ''real'' game) which had been redesigned internally with two floors. Upstairs were the bitterly cold dormitories where gownboys slept two to a bed—no hardship for a Wesley from Epworth rectory.

Downstairs, the Writing School ran the former tennis court's full seventy feet. The splendidly paneled ceiling, one of the finest in Europe, was decorated with the armorial bearings of the first governors, which were blackened by a hundred years of London fogs and the smoke of sea coals burning in the great fireplace. Under this ceiling, between the square-cut oak columns, the classes sat all in one room. Wesley learned more Greek and Latin classics than his parents could teach, and presumably he felt the usher's cane or the schoolmaster's birch rod for wrong translations or petty misdeeds.

The schoolmaster was the elderly Dr. Thomas Walker.

His chief assistant, the usher, who later succeeded him, was the learned Andrew Tooke, professor of geometry and author of a celebrated schoolbook on Greek mytholo-

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gy—Wesley would have had to learn it by heart. He also learned much of the Greek Anthology. Two centuries later, when the school had moved to Surrey, a headmaster, whose hobby was to rummage among uncataloged books in the small hours of the night, discovered a copy of the Anthology in which Tooke (or perhaps an assistant usher) had listed the boys in his class. Among them came the name: Wesley. It was later found in other textbooks of the period.

Few of Wesley's contemporaries were outstanding.

James Hotchkis, son of a canon of St. Paul's, and Eberhard Crusius, son of another London clergyman, grew up to follow one another as schoolmasters of Charterhouse, Crusius having acquired some celebrity for his Lives of Roman Poets. Another boy, William Yorke, became chief justice of Ireland and was buried at Charterhouse. One of his class, the son of a Baltic baron, wrote a biography of Charles II's doctor. Eleven of the boys who sat with Wesley became clergymen.

The young scholars did not spend all day long in the Writing School. Games were not yet organized, but Charterhouse had converted the Great Cloister into a field called Green, where in summer they probably played a primitive form of cricket. The Carthusian version of football, in which a ball was dribbled up and down the cloisters by the feet of competing hordes of boys, was one of the ancestors of soccer, but Wesley made no mention of it. Nor does he mention the wild and dangerous primitive ball game played traditionally on Good Friday on Green, as in many parts of Europe, in which a boy as small as Wesley would have emerged bruised and muddy. His father had told him to run around Green three times every day before breakfast, and this he did, claiming that he owed his good health to the exercise.

It would have made him hungry. The main meal of the day was at noon. Wesley afterward claimed that the older boys ("the upper boys seemed to me to be very big and tall') bullied the younger by seizing their meat, so that for the most of his time he existed on bread, the explanation of his small stature. This explanation seems unlikely because all the Wesleys were small.

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If Wesley got plenty of knocks, this was normal. The school was well-disciplined for the times, but Carthusians were lively. Nine boys immediately junior to Wesley were involved (soon after he had left) in such 'great misdemeanors and disorders' that they were degraded from their rank as monitors and reported to the governors, who ordered them to be punished "with due correction of the school," which was never administered publicly.

Every day the boys attended chapel. The gownboys sat. on the north side in front of the fine tomb of the founder, with its recumbent effigy and coats of arms. The monitors sat at right angles to the boys, and they were also under the eyes of the schoolmaster and the usher in their stalls on either side of the communion rail on the opposite sides of the chapel. Thus, while Dr. King, the preacher, droned the liturgy or Dr. Burnet, the ancient master, delivered long sermons, the boys could not doze, nudge each other, or make faces at the elderly brothers in their black and gold gowns.

Young Wesley reckoned that this regular chapel-going would help earn his eternal salvation. He continued to say his prayers morning and evening, and to read the Bible. But he was no longer subject to his mother's strict spiritual discipline: "Outward restraints being removed, I was much more negligent than before, even of outward duties, and almost continually guilty of outward sins, which I knew to be such, though they were not scandalous in the eyes of the world." If there was sexual impurity in the dormitories, he had no part in it, but the sensitive conscience which Epworth had bred would nag him whenever he was angry or greedy, when he swore, laughed at smut, or thought or did whatever might have distressed his parents.

The Victorian biographer who asserted that "John Wesley entered Charterhouse a saint, and left it a sinner'' was wrong in his facts and hazy in theology. The truth lies closer to the couplet of a celebrated Old Carthusian of the day, Joseph Addison:

When in the slippery paths of Youth With heedless steps I ran,

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Thine arm, unseen, conveyed me safe And led me up to man.

At Charterhouse, Wesley was a trifle smug. He was not "so bad as other people," he reckoned, and would get through at the Day of Judgment.

One day the elderly schoolmaster was crossing Green out of school hours when he noticed that the smaller boys, including Wesley, were not playing their various games. Dr. Walker could hear no sound from the cloisters and therefore assumed they were up to mischief. He turned back and entered the gownboys' writing room.

He found Crusius, Yorke, Widdowson, and all the junior gownboys gathered around. As the story was told many years later by Charles Wesley's daughter, they were "assembled in the schoolroom round my uncle, who was amusing them with instructive tales, to which they attentively listened rather than follow their accustomed sports." Walker expressed approval and told Wesley that 'he wished him to repeat this entertainment as often as he could obtain auditors, and so well employ his time."

The incident was later garbled by a hostile writer. He portrayed Wesley as a monitor who harangued younger students and when rebuked by the master, exclaimed,

"Better rule in hell than serve in heaven."' But Sally Wesley confuted this and said that her version '"'was thus related to me by my father," who may have heard John

Wesley tell it among his anecdotes.

Old Dr. Walker encouraged Wesley in many other ways as he rose in the school, finding him a hard worker, proficient in Greek and Latin verse. Walker did not need to provide hospitality during the shorter holidays, despite the distance to Epworth, because Wesley had an uncle nearby, his father's elder brother Matthew, a wealthy physician of somewhat crabbed character, whose only son became a rake and a drunkard. Uncle Matthew

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disapproved of his brother's bad management but was generous to nephews and nieces.

In 1716, when John Wesley was in his second year at Charterhouse, his older brother, Samuel, married, and his younger brother Charles, aged nine, entered Westminster School at Samuel's expense until Charles was elected King's Scholar. Samuel's wife Ursula ('Nutty') was somewhat shrewish and not always kind to Charles, but Jack told their mother, "She has always been particularly civil to me." He often walked the mere two and a half miles from the Charterhouse, past Newgate Prison, down Fleet Street, the Strand, and Whitehall, to the home of Samuel and Nutty in Westminster. He was there when Samuel read aloud a letter from Epworth describing the extraordinary disruption caused at the rectory by a ghost. Years later John Wesley made a thorough enquiry into "Old Jeffrey," as the family called the ghost, but the matter remains unresolved.

Brother Samuel (they had all been taught to address each other as 'Brother' or "Sister,'' not by Christian name alone) was already a poet. He lacked genius but moved among poets and essayists: Jack and Charles would have seen Pope, Swift, and Prior at the Westminster home. Samuel was counted a Jacobite (but he denied it) and was devoted to Bishop Atterbury, the dean of Westminster and bishop of Rochester who later was exiled for sedition.

Jack, though following the statesmen who put Church and Crown before Parliament (now called Tories), supported the new dynasty. Yet this loyalty could open no doors to the future. His own patron, the Tory Duke of Buckingham, had fallen from power, and so had Brother

Samuel's patron, the Earl of Oxford. Both remained governors of the Charterhouse and no doubt tipped Wesley handsomely when the gownboys formed a guard of honor at the arrival of the great ones, in their full-bottomed wigs, before the Governors' Assemblies.

Though Buckingham could not help, the late founder of Charterhouse had made provision for every gownboy's next step if funds were otherwise unprovided. The slower students were apprenticed to trades, like Wesley's classmate John Spencer, who was bound to a periwig

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maker. The brighter students received grants to Oxford or Cambridge, especially to Christ Church, Oxford. The schoolmaster had no hesitation in nominating John Wesley for a grant, and he was entered at Christ Church as a Commoner on June 24, 1720, a week after his seventeenth birthday; the first time his name appears in the battel book, charging him for provisions on July 13, 1720, it was written John Westley.

The rector of Epworth was delighted at his son's success. Thinking to forward Jack's career, he had told him before he left Charterhouse to call on Dr. Henry

Sacheverell. The celebrated Tory cleric lived a short walk away at St. Andrew's, Holborn, the rich rectory which Queen Anne had given him after his inflammatory sermons and notorious trial for sedition had led to the fall of the Whig government, which she hated. Samuel Wesley had helped Sacheverell by writing his defense to read at the trial and now felt entitled to expect a return.

Sacheverell had been an Oxford don, though his scholarship was not highly regarded, and his letters of introduction could open many doors.

Jack duly presented himself. 'I was a very little fellow when I was introduced to him," Wesley would afterward recall with amusement. "I found him alone, as tall as a Maypole and as fine as an Archbishop. After I had made known to him the object of my visit, he said: "You are too young to go to the University. You cannot know Greek and Latin yet. Go back to school.' '' This was cool treatment for a boy whose father had befriended the pompous doctor in his hour of need. Little Wesley was outraged. Well-bred in the classics at Charterhouse, even learning Hebrew with Sam at Westminster, he felt himself a giant of knowledge beside such a Maypole. "I looked at him as Goliath looked at David, and despised him in my heart. I thought, if I do not know Greek and Latin better than you I ought to go back to school indeed. 1 left him, and neither entreaties nor commands could have brought me back to him."

Chapter Three The Red Notebook Early in September 1723 John Wesley, twenty years of age and in his third year at Christ Church, was walking one evening a mile or two from Oxford.

Smallpox raged among town and gown, but he had survived a mild attack in childhood and therefore was immune; neither had he caught the prevalent fever which had carried off "a very ingenious young gentleman of our college."" Wesley wrote home that he was "seldom troubled with anything but bleeding at the nose, which I have frequently''—a condition which would not necessarily imply a serious physical defect or high blood pressure.

As he walked through water meadows, his nose began to bleed again. He tried to stop it. Every method proved useless. Then "I stripped myself and leapt into the river, which happened luckily not to be far off." The shock contracted the muscles and stopped the flow of blood.

Wesley loved bathing and exercise. He swam and boated; he played ''real'' tennis; he rode and occasionally went hunting. Sometimes he was given a gun at a shoot.

But all his activities were hemmed in by lack of money and drove him into debt from time to time.

As a commoner, he had to pay all his board, room rent, and college expenses out of the Charterhouse grant and what his family could scrape together, whereas Sam, the riper scholar, had been a student on the Foundation, living free. Sam retained his studentship until 1723, passing the compensation to Jack as a loan.

John Wesley worked hard at the classics and at logic.

He fulfilled his tutor's requirements with ease despite a tendency to spend hours in wide reading, which did little except feed his intellectual curiosity, though he would generally make a synopsis ("collecting," he called it) of

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each book. He was sociable, though neither his parentage nor his pocket took him into the company of the aristocrats of The House, as Christ Church was always known at Oxford. To save money he wore his own hair instead of a fashionable wig.

Still small in physique, he was neat in dress and appearance. According to a tradition passed down in his brother Samuel's family, he had a gaiety and sprightliness about him in his early twenties 'with a turn for wit and humor, a young fellow of the finest classical taste, of the most liberal and manly sentiments." He also had a relish for ghost stories and enjoyed card playing.

None of this would ensure him a livelihood. The Duke of Buckingham was dead, and Wesley lacked a patron to open the way to the law, politics, or literary pursuits. The sword had no attraction, even if he had possessed the means to purchase a commission. He had already begun a lifelong interest in medical matters but showed no desire to follow Uncle Matthew.

The obvious career, especially for a Wesley, was that of clergyman. Many of his Oxford contemporaries would slip casually into Holy Orders to be tutors or schoolmasters or country curates; some had family livings waiting.

Susanna Wesley hoped that Jack would help his father, who had lately accepted the additional parish of Wroot, a gloomy village seven miles from Epworth with a less expensive rectory where they now lived. "I heartily wish you were in Orders,'"" she wrote to Jack in September

1724, shortly after he had taken his degree as Bachelor of Arts.

But her own teaching and example had made his conscience too sensitive to allow him to seek Holy Orders without a true inward calling. He seemed a clean-living young man to his friends, and if rather fond of the ladies, his behavior toward them was correct. He did not forget to say his prayers, 'both in public and in private.'" He read several commentaries on the New Testament as well as his Bible regularly, yet he reckoned afterward that he was "'continually sinning against that little light I had

[despite] transient fits of what many divines taught me to call repentance."

He hesitated when old Mr. Wesley began to press him

THE RED NOTEBOOK Ill 35

to prepare properly and be ordained: 'You don't admire a callow clergyman any more than I do." Jack would prefer to be an Oxford don, though it would oblige him to be in Orders. He loved Oxford, and his father had already mentioned him for a fellowship to Dr. Morley, a Lincolnshire man who was rector of Lincoln, the small college across the High.

At last, soon after Christmas 1724, Wesley wrote to both his parents that he had decided to seek Holy.

Orders, partly to ensure himself a livelihood and partly to help toward a stricter life.

The letters arrived at Wroot and started an argument.

His father was against ''your going over hastily into Orders." He suggested, alarmingly, that Jack spend a year collating the Hebrew, Greek, Syrian, and Latin texts of Old Testament books to assist the polyglot Bible, which the rector had been preparing, and added: "You ask me which is the best commentary on the Bible. I answer, the Bible."

Susanna disliked delay. After more discussion, she retired to bed, 'very ill and confined to my chamber." In February she complained to Jack that " 'tis an unhappiness almost peculiar to our family, that your father and I seldom think alike. I approve the disposition of your mind ...and I think the sooner you are a deacon the better." She particularly liked the idea because it would set him to study practical divinity.

Three weeks later on March 17, the rector wrote again:

"I've changed my mind since my last, and now incline to your going this summer into Orders." He promised to scrape together the money for the fees.

This letter must have reached Oxford at the beginning of Holy Week 1725. Wesley began to prepare. A remark in his mother's recent letter had struck him forcibly: she had urged him to "enter now upon a serious examination of yourself, that you may know whether you have a reasonable hope of salvation by Jesus Christ, that is, whether you are in a state of faith and repentance or not." To stay always in this state of mind and soul, she urged, was the essential condition of salvation.

An old red notebook which had belonged to his grandfather, the Puritan preacher, lay ready to hand. Wesley

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knew a shorthand code which would enable him to write fast and protect his more intimate jottings from prying eyes. He adapted and developed the code so cleverly that it was not fully and accurately deciphered until 1972, nearly 250 years later.

Early in the morning of Good Friday, he went to the college service in the Latin chapel of Christ Church Cathedral. The prayers were in Latin, which was familiar enough to John Wesley, but they were generally read in a perfunctory manner by a bored canon in the cold, half-lit cathedral. Wesley's attention wandered, and he found 'a great many unclean thoughts arising in chapel."

Back in his rooms he opened the red notebook. "Friday, March 26," he wrote in longhand at the top of the first right hand page. Examining himself as his mother had suggested, he put down in shorthand code a list of his temptations: a. Too much addicting myself to light behavior at all times; b. Listening too much to idle talk, and reading vain plays and books; c. Idleness; and lastly d. Want of due consideration in whose presence I am.

From which I perceive it is necessary a. To labor for a grave and modest carriage; b. To avoid vain and light company; and c. To entertain awful apprehensions of the presence of God; d. To avoid idleness, freedom with women, and high-seasoned meats [possibly because he believed they stimulated his virility]

He determined "to resist the very beginnings of lust, not by arguing with, but by thinking no more of it or by immediately going into company." He had plenty of friends in different colleges.

For ten days he wrote no more in the red notebook.

His good resolutions hardly affected his usual manner or activities. Then he began a daily diary to check how he

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spent his time, writing a single line for each morning and afternoon for a fortnight until he 'went out of town." A friend who was a little younger than Wesley, Robin Griffiths of Merton, had invited him home.

They rode through the springtime Cotswold hills to Broadway, the lovely village of sandstone houses where the Cotswolds meet the vale of Evesham, some forty miles from Oxford. Griffiths' father had the parish and thus the Elizabethan rectory. Wesley found himself accepted into a circle of intellectual, charming, and devout people of about his age. Robin often took him to Stanton rectory, a mile or two away on the hillside, where the Reverend Lionel Kirkham and his wife lived with a son and three daughters, Sally, Betty, and Damaris.

Wesley fell a little in love with Sally, but he hoped to be a college fellow, who must be unmarried. And only that month his eldest sister, Emily, miserable from an unhappy love affair, had warned him to avoid 'engaging his affections" before he could marry speedily.

The next village to Stanton was Buckland. Here lived the Tookers in the fifteenth-century rectory with its moot hall. Behind the church at ''the Farm' were the romantic

Granvilles, political exiles from London, whose aristocratic connections did not make them proud. Mrs. Granville's late husband, a descendant of the famous Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge, had been implicated in the recent Jacobite rising, and his brother, Lord Lansdowne, had been exiled to France, where the old Pretender gave him the empty title of duke. Lansdowne later made his peace with the Hanoverians.

Only one of Mrs. Granville's daughters, Ann, was at home. Wesley had not yet met her brilliant sister Mary,

Mrs. Alexander Pendarves, recently widowed of an elderly husband whom she had been forced to marry. It may have been Mary who later suggested the use of literary codenames. As "Varanese,'"' the unmarried Sally

Kirkham might correspond in the third person with the bachelor John Wesley as 'Cyrus'; Mary Pendarves began to write to him too, taking the name ''Aspasia."

While Wesley was in the Cotswolds this spring of 1725, two months short of his twenty-second birthday, one of the group of friends urged him to read a book "which I

38 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

had frequently seen but never much looked into before."

The Christian's Pattern was a paraphrase by George Stanhope, the incumbent dean of Canterbury, of the medieval classic The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis.

Some of The Imitation's strictness made Wesley angry:

"T can't think that when God sent us into the world," he complained to his mother, "he had irreversibly decreed that we should be perpetually miserable in it .

. that all mirth is vain and useless, if not sinful. But why then does the Psalmist so often exhort us to rejoice in the Lord?"

The more that he read 4 Kempis, however, the more "'I began to see that true religion was seated in the heart, and that God's law extended to all our thoughts as well as words and actions." Reading 4 Kempis was comforting, especially in the flowing English of the dean of Canterbury: "So all-sufficient, so delightful, so heavenly sweet is the Friendship and Company of Jesus." But a Kempis could give him no assurance that Jesus was always present in his heart. Wesley determined to make himself worthy of so great a Guest, then to watch and work carefully lest Jesus depart again. As a Kempis taught: 'While Jesus is present by his Grace and Comfort, nothing is too hard to do, nothing grievous to suffer; but Happiness and perfect Peace dwell and reign in my breast. But the moment he withdraws his cheering face, all my Supports are lost and gone."

Back in Oxford, Wesley took a step which was unusual and frowned upon. He began to attend Holy Communion in the cathedral every Sunday. Students and Commoners were required to communicate once a quarter, but to go more frequently was considered indecent, possibly Popish. The congregations at the weekly celebrations were tiny. It was not easy to be outwardly religious at Christ Church. As Charles Wesley was to describe it four years later, 'Christ Church is certainly the worst place in the world to begin a reformation; a man stands a very fair chance of being laughed out of his religion at his first setting out, in a place where 'tis scandalous to have any at all.' "

Susanna urged "Dear Jacky" not to mind. In the course of a long and theological letter, discussing the subject

THE RED NOTEBOOK

lil 39 with zeal, she stiffened his resolution: 'If it be a weak virtue that can't bear being laughed at, I am very sure 'tis a strong and well confirmed virtue that can stand the test of a brisk buffonery."'

Wesley did not mind buffoonery, but he longed for a companion. One evening in July 1725, he and Robin Griffiths were at a party but were due later at the funeral of a tradesman's daughter who had died of consumption (tuberculosis) at the age of fifteen. They slipped out of the party and walked the short distance to St. Mary's, the university church. They were early and took a turn up and down the aisle, lit by the evening sun through the stained glass.

Wesley asked Robin: 'Do you really think yourself my friend? If so, why will you not do me all the good you can?"

Robin began to protest. Wesley cut him short. 'Please oblige me in something which you can't deny is in your power. Let me have the pleasure of making you a whole

Christian! I know you are at least half persuaded already.'' Robin, Wesley went on, could do him no greater kindness, and both of them would need to be whole

Christians when it was their turn 'to follow that young woman."

Robin turned 'exceedingly serious."" Wesley may not have realized that Griffiths was already a consumptive.

They became fellow pilgrims: Wesley pressing ahead, Robin following the more lamely. Into the first page of his diary Wesley inserted a list of rules ''collected" from the devotional book Rules for Holy Living by Bishop

Jeremy Taylor. Sally Kirkham (Varanese) had called some of Taylor's rules 'altogether impracticable,' and Wesley soon found that she was right.

Early in September he received the bishop of Lincoln's Letters Dimissory, giving authority for his ordination on the title of a curacy to his father at Epworth and Wroot, and presented them to the bishop of Oxford's registrar.

Wesley hardly thought himself worthy to be made deacon. On the night before the service, he confessed in cipher in his diary: "Boasting, greedy of praise, intemperate sleep, detraction, lying—Lord have mercy—heat in arguing."

40 II| WALKING TO GLORY

Thus abashed and anxious, he was ordained in Christ Church Cathedral on the morning of Sunday, September

19, 1725 by Bishop of Oxford John Potter, a future archbishop of Canterbury.

The new Reverend John Wesley could not leave Oxford while working for a fellowship; therefore, he rode out to little country churches in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire where he donned his canonicals and preached his carefully written sermons. Back in his rooms he labored at Homer or Horace or divinity, composed verses, and wrote letters. He went for walks, played tennis (two hours on the second day after his ordination), and sat at the coffee house.

One evening he 'disputed warmly on a trifle.'' When he opened his diary, he repented. His friends might regard him as an upright and delightful man when not in an argument; but if he draws a true self-portrait in his secret diary, rather than over-etching the warts, it would

that he was proud, both of his intellectual powers 'and of his holiness, and inclined to be peevish. He admits to being idle—by which he probably meant that he read light books and plays such as The Ambitious Stepmother, The Fair Penitent, and other tragedies by the late

Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe, of which he was especially fond. Wesley confessed to himself that he broke his word, dissembled, and was quick to condemn or censure, especially the canons of Christ Church.

Meanwhile, in Lincoln College and far away in Lincolnshire, intense lobbying was propelling him toward the vacant fellowship, which would provide a home and income until death or marriage. In March he sat in the lodge of the rector of Lincoln to write a theme, then a few days later was examined in Homer and Horace. The rector and fellows judged that he was not a scholar of the first water, but they liked him and approved of him as a High Churchman and a Tory.

On March 17, 1726 the twelve fellows elected John Wesley unanimously. When the news reached Epworth and Wroot, his father rejoiced. Debts and an uncertain future meant nothing: ''Wherever I am, my Jacky is Fellow of Lincoln!"

Chapter Four "You Cannot Serve Him Alone''

The new Fellow of Lincoln spent the summer of 1726 helping his father. Visiting the cottagers at Wroot or Epworth, or wandering through the market, Wesley kept an ear for the dialect and the curious Lincolnshire phrases: "You muck spout'; 'You clarhkettle,

I'll tan your bonecart!" "As rough as a hackle." Many of the words were unknown beyond the county.

Wesley had an insatiable curiosity; he even attended an archaelogical dig. Meanwhile, he tried to keep his rules and to regulate his days and was leaning toward selfdenial. One July day he discussed this with his mother.

She offered the opinion that 'one act of self-denial is more grateful to your Master than the performance of many duties, as it is an undeniable instance of the love we bear him."

But all was not well at home. During the previous year Jack's beautiful and clever sister Hetty had eloped with a lawyer. The rector thought the man a scoundrel and opposed their match. His instinct was sure: Hetty returned home after one night. Her father refused to forgive her.

To efface the scandal, she married the first man to ask the rector for her hand: a rough, lazy, poorly educated glazier and plumber called Wright from the nearby town of Louth. Wright's love soon cooled. He took to drink and made Hetty's life miserable.

Jack found his father ''inconceivably exasperated against her.'" He had disowned her and 'never spoke of her in my hearing but with the utmost detestation.'"' Jack visited her in Louth and was sure she had repented of her misdeeds and craved her parents' love, yet their mother took the rector's part as did several of the sisters and nineteen-year-old Charles, who had left Westminster

42 |Ill WALKING TO GLORY

and was about to go up to Christ Church. Only crippled Molly supported Jack in his concern for Hetty.

One evening at dinner in Wroot rectory, Jack deliberately launched a disputation on the theology of forgiveness, affecting not to notice his father's irritation. Jack, who had long considered preparing a sermon on universal charity, or so he said, now retired to write it. When he showed his mother the script, she saw through him at once: 'You wrote this sermon for Hetty. The rest was brought in for the sake of the last paragraph." But she asked for only one change.

He preached it on the last Sunday in August in Wroot parish church. His father said nothing afterward. Next day Jack rode to Epworth, returning later that week.

While he was away, the rector and Charles visited sister Suky and her worthless husband, Richard Ellison, a farmer who had come down in the world. As they returned, the rector exploded against Jack.

When they were all back at Wroot, young Charles asked Jack to take a walk in the garden after supper and informed him, "My father last night was telling me of your disrespect to him. He said you had him at open defiance."

Jack was genuinely surprised. Not for the last time he had failed to see that he might give offense by his stand on a principle. He asked how or when.

"Every day,"" replied Charles and repeated their father's words:

"' "You hear how he contradicts me, and takes your sister's part before my face. Nay, he disputes with me, preach—' and then he stopped short," said

Charles, "'as if he wanted to recall his word, and talked of other things."

Jack ran into the house. He found the rector by himself in the hall and burst into tears, saying he had learned from his brother that he had offended by often contradicting him and not offering to write for him, "but now I promise to do whatever you please."

His father kissed him and cried a little too. "I always believed you were good at bottom," he said, "and I will employ you next day."

John Wesley therefore spent hours, when he would rather have studied Xenophon and Horace or relaxed

"YOU CANNOT SERVE HIM ALONE" III 43

with Half Pay Officers or another play, writing sermons for his father and transcribing long Latin quotations for the magnum opus on Job until the time came to ride off to Oxford.

"I never knew a college besides ours whereof the members were so perfectly satisfied with one another''— so Wesley described Lincoln's six or eight fellows in residence. He found them 'well-natured and well-bred," and peaceable and neighborly among themselves and toward their acquaintances outside. The fellows liked their new colleague too.

He worshiped with them in the chapel, which seemed small after Christ Cathedral and was lit at the east end by unusual seventeenth-century stained glass, from Lincolnshire, which told the story of the Faith. He dined at high table and played cards or conversed in the intimate common room with its oak paneling. And every Saturday night, after he had mounted the steep staircase in Chapel

Quad to his rather cramped set of rooms overlooking the Turl, he would open his diary and examine himself. He seldom liked what he saw as he searched his soul and would jot down in code his frequent failures to keep resolutions.

Wesley's college duties were light. He loved, therefore, to walk out on the Woodstock road, hire a horse from a hostler at Yarnton, and ride into the Cotswolds.

Sally Kirkham had married the local schoolmaster, John Chapone, in December 1725, to Wesley's sorrow, if one of his sisters is to be believed. He was present at the wedding, and "Cyrus" Wesley and ''Varanese"" Chapone remained devoted friends. They corresponded, and this alarmed Susanna Wesley: 'The more I think of it, the less

I approve it." They kept the friendship on a strictly moral and pious level, however much their hearts might flutter, and as Sally said as she sat with Wesley and her sister, "I can't think it expedient, nor indeed lawful, to break off that acquaintance which is one of the strongest incentives

44 |Il WALKING TO GLORY

I have to virtue." One Sunday after Wesley had read the prayers and preached at Stanton, he walked up Horrell

Hill with the sisters. Sally said she loved him 'more than all mankind except her father and her husband." Betty felt the same, 'though a maid must not say much."" Wesley asked for 'just the same freedom with her as with my sisters," and when she went off to bed that night, Betty said, "'"Good night, brother."

He returned to Stanton for a Christmas visit, getting up late despite his rule for early rising. Sometimes they talked or danced or had company; one evening he read aloud from Dean Swift's new satire, Gulliver's Travels, which had taken England by storm that year. He also read to them Congreve's play The Way of the World and Shakespeare, or they might bring out the cards and the circular revolving tray, extract the eight of diamonds, and play ''Pope Joan," a popular card game of the day.

Wesley's blend of social ability and seriousness made him, at twenty-three, an interesting mixture. His open face, with full lips, a nose which was a little too long, and rather large eyes, was framed by luxuriant silky hair which fell to his shoulders in defiance of current fashion; it had an unusual color, a dark brown which looked auburn in certain lights. His clerical dress was always spotless, in contrast to the rough coat of the Buckland parson,

Trewythn Tooker, who generally appeared more like a grazier than a clergyman.

The Kirkham family's fondness for their young don was well put a year later by Bob, the lazy and amusing young brother of Sally and Betty, then in his first year at Oxford. He wrote in a jocular letter to Wesley from Stanton that they had spent pleasant hours reminiscing about "your most deserving, queer character—your worthy personal accomplishments—your noble endowments of mind—your little and handsome person—and your obliging and desirable conversation." The Tookers, the Granvilles, and the Griffiths would have said the same that Christmas and new year of 1726-1727.

Then came tragedy. Robin Griffiths' consumption had steadily gained on him. When Wesley had stayed at Broadway rectory, he and Robin shared much religious talk, but they would also spend a morning foxhunting

"YOU CANNOT SERVE HIM ALONE?" |Ii 45

with the local squire's hounds (his son was another Oxford contemporary). Robin was now weaker but looked forward to marrying one of the Tooker girls from Buckland Rectory. Early in January 1727 Wesley walked over to see him. Three days later a message came that Robin Griffiths was dead.

Wesley preached the funeral sermon in the twelfthcentury church dedicated to the royal princess of Wessex,

Saint Eadburgha, and rode sadly back to Oxford.

That March he submitted to the university his Latin theme on Reason in Brutes and How Flies and Fishes Respire.

The examiners awarded him the degree of Master of Arts:

Oxford and Cambridge had not yet turned the award of M.A. into a formality to be claimed by any B.A. of two years' standing who kept his name on the books.

Wesley marked the occasion by starting in his diary at hourly introspection of his behavior. This he kept up for four days, then abandoned the first notebook with twen- | ty pages to fill. He began another, reverting to twicedaily reports and a Saturday night appraisal. When he described his system to his mother, she commented:

"There's nothing like a clear method to save both time and labor in anything."

He continued his wide reading in history, divinity, literature, and plays, for the Bodleian Library was only a few steps from Lincoln; but as no tutorship fell vacant, he had only one pupil and sorely felt the loss of Robin, his fellow pilgrim on the steep ascent to heaven. Brother

Charles had come up, as a student on the foundation of Christ Church, but brotherly affection brought little affinity. Charles was high-spirited and clever and already a skilled versifier, but he envied the Christ Church noblemen who had money to spend and costly clothes. In chapel, he was "utterly inattentive" by his own later admission. John Wesley saw much good in him, noting that he "'merits emulation—in meekness, tenderness and learning." But "if I spoke to him about religion he would warmly answer, 'What, would you have me be a saint all at once?' and would hear no more."

In August 1727, when the summer floods had subsided between Wroot and Epworth, Wesley went back to serve as his father's curate. The college renewed his leave of

46 |ll WALKING TO GLORY

absence every six months. His father was aging, and his mother had nearly died in June. The rector had written in July: "Though she has now and then some very sick fits, yet I hope the sight of you will revive her." It did, for she lived to be seventy-three.

For the next two years John Wesley was a country curate. He studied in the mornings, visited cottages in the afternoon, and kept his health by exercise—swimming in the river in summer, shooting with his dog, Tony, in autumn, and playing tennis when opportunity offered.

(Shooting and tennis were his favorite sports.) In the evenings he would often dance a little with his sisters and their friend Kitty Hargreaves, who much attracted him.

Dancing was the only exercise permitted a woman except for walking or riding, and Wesley had bought a flute to play as they danced.

Sometimes he left Epworth for a round of visits to married sisters and to the unmarried Kezzy, the youngest, who was a teacher in Lincoln. Once he visited Wentworth Woodhouse, the great house in south Yorkshire belonging to the descendants of Strafford, Charles I's executed statesman, and was allowed to spend days in their library. In September 1728 he went up to London with Charles to stay with Brother Sam at Westminster and attend a play. Charles was somewhat smitten with an actress, whereas Jack felt less sure that he should continue to enjoy the stage or the reading of plays.

The two brothers rode on to Oxford, and Bishop Potter ordained John into priest's orders. Some words given to the candidates by the bishop's examining chaplain sank into his mind. "Do you know what you are about?" asked Dr. Hayward. "You are bidding defiance to all mankind. He that would live a Christian priest ought to know that, whether his hand be against every man or not, he must expect every man's hand should be against him."" Wesley was ready for the world's contempt, which would help work out his own salvation.

He was increasingly serious in his manner, seeking to refine and renew his nature by keeping to his method yet longing for assurances that he pleased God. He was still

"constrained to travel alone, having no man to guide or help.'"" He knew the need for a companion, for an elderly

"YOU CANNOT SERVE HIM ALONE" |II 47

Lincolnshire clergyman, Joseph Hoole of Haxey, had impressed upon him some words which Wesley quoted so often in later life that he was generally credited as their source: "The Bible knows nothing of a solitary religion.'

"Sir," Hoole had said, ''you wish to serve God and go to | heaven. Remember, you cannot serve Him alone. You. must therefore find companions or make them."

In effect, he did both. During their journey to London and on to Oxford, Wesley had argued long and hard with his brother. By January he knew that Charles had re-) nounced his frivolity, perhaps scared by his flirtation with the actress, ''though I can't tell myself,'"" he wrote to John, "how or when I first awoke out of my lethargy— only that 'twas not long after you went away." He was sure he would be established in faith by John's help and their mother's prayers and would never quarrel with her again "'till I do [quarrel] with my religion." He relied on his brother's prayers that such a quarrel would never occur.

Brother Sam noticed the difference at Christmas vacation. He told John—and thereby gave a profile of Wesley | in late 1728—that Charles was 'so entirely infected with your gravity that every motion and look made me almost suspect it was you; nay, I begin now to think he will hardly ever lay aside the present solemnity of his person and behavior."

Charles had wasted his time on "diversions." Now he set out to redeem it. In the early weeks of 1729 he started reading seriously and began to keep a diary on John's system, leaning heavily on his advice. Wesley gladly paid the postal fees for the long and vivid letters which arrived from Oxford at Gainsborough post office, to be collected when one of the family took the boat up the Trent.

Charles had persuaded Bob Kirkham, amusing and still rather idle, to join him in keeping the rules which John had formulated. Charles had rescued William Morgan, a "modest, humble, well-disposed youth" in the next set of rooms, from 'vile hands." Morgan wanted to be guided in things temporal and eternal though he dared not "'receive the sacrament but at the usual times for fear of being laughed at." Charles managed to persuade Bob "'to neglect censure on a religious account and thereby en-

48 |ll WALKING TO GLORY

couraged myself to do so." Soon Charles, Morgan, and 'Bob were all defying ridicule by going to the Eucharist

-once a week.

Charles was about to ride into the Cotswolds, though he feared that without his brother the delights of Stanton might trip him. He told gaily how the Kirkhams "have had the good fortune there to have a couple of aunts die and leave the three girls £200 a piece. There's news for you, you rogue!"

Wesley also heard from Charles that the vice-chancellor was taking measures to stem the tide of Deism in Oxford, for if few men openly rejected the Divinity of Christ, a growing crowd of dons and undergraduates were indifferent to Christian doctrine and practice. Charles, in contrast, having looked at the University Statues, which were grounded firmly in Christianity, was trying to observe the methods of study and worship laid down for Oxford many centuries before.

Fifty-six years later in 1785, Charles Wesley claimed that it was for this reason, and in that year of 1729, that an undergraduate of Christ Church first mocked him,

Kirkham, and Morgan with the "harmless name of 'Methodist.' "" The term had been used occasionally in the previous century to describe medical men of a certain sort, and occasionally in religion.

Charles' memory, however, was at fault, perhaps misled by an unconscious desire to strengthen his authority in the Methodist movement. His claim to be 'the first

Methodist' was accepted, for no one was alive to contradict him except his brother John, who did not choose to do so. It became part of Methodist tradition. But it cannot be sustained against contemporary documentary evidence. The nickname Methodist was not used at Oxford for another three years; it first appears in letters, diaries and publications, all within a few weeks, in late summer of 1732. Charles had not organized his two friends into any religious club; Bob Kirkham was still more interested in the company of his drinking friends, although he did brave mockery to attend the Eucharist weekly with Morgan and Charles.

Christ Church men, this spring of 1729, joked about "the whimsical Mr. Wesley, his preciseness, and pious

"YOU CANNOT SERVE HIM ALONE" Ill 49

extravagancies."" Charles was now convinced that eternal) salvation depended on what they could do to prepare) themselves for heaven, and he needed John. 'I earnestly long for and desire," he wrote, 'the blessing God is about to send me in you. I am sensible this is my day of grace." He also assumed that his destination in eternity would largely depend on how well he employed his | time. John came from Epworth in the summer. He encouraged Charles and Morgan, then returned by way of Westminster, where he, Charles, and Sam visited the playhouse.

Back in Lincolnshire, relations with his father were becoming tense. Wesley longed to be back in Oxford for good. The opportunity came when the new rector of Lincoln, Dr. Euseby Isham, wrote that the college required his presence to take up a tutorship.

Wesley made a leisurely journey, visiting relations and friends in the cities of Lincoln, London, and Westminster. On the evening of November 22, 1729, when the towers and spires of Oxford were silhouetted in the early winter sunset, he rode down Headington Hill and over Magdalen Bridge. He went straight to visit Charles at Christ Church—the beginning of eight formative years | which would end very differently from what John Wesley , expected.

Chapter Five "Our Little Society"

One summer evening in August 1730, William Morgan, whom Charles had befriended, knocked on the door of John Wesley's rooms in Chapel Quad, Lincoln, with exciting news.

He had regularly been visiting a man who lay shackled in Oxford Castle under sentence of death for murdering his wife. Among the other prisoners were several debtors. These were free to walk about the prison. Morgan had talked with one of them that afternoon and was convinced, he told Wesley, that "it would do much good if anyone would be at the pains of now and then speaking with them."

Wesley replied cautiously that dons and undergraduates did not visit prisons. Morgan raised the subject again at their regular readings, which Wesley had organized for Charles, Bob Kirkham, and Morgan. Four evenings a _week they would meet in each others' rooms in rotation.

Wesley read prayers; they had supper; then he read to es them from the classics on weekdays and a book of divinity on Sundays. They would tell each other how they had spent the day and examine their spiritual progress.

At each session that week, Morgan urged upon them the good they might do the prisoners and their own souls. He brought along another undergraduate, John

Boyce, who, as the son of a former mayor of Oxford, was sure that the civic authorities would not object.

On August 24 the two Wesleys walked down with Morgan to the Castle at the edge of the city and were "so well satisfied with our conversation there that we agreed to go thither once or twice a week." Morgan next took

Wesley to a cottage in the town where a woman in extreme poverty, Mrs. Vesey, lay sick.

"OUR LITTLE SOCIETY" Iii 51

Morgan's suggestion that the four friends—and Boyce—help the prisoners and the poor seemed a true imitation of Christ, and when Wesley wrote to Epworth, his father sent back strong encouragement. He was pleased that Morgan was "'breaking the ice for you" and revealed that he too, in his Oxford days, had visited prisoners. But Jack must seek the approval of the local clergyman and of the bishop.

Bishop Potter promptly sent a message that he "was greatly pleased with the undertaking."

Wesley therefore preached once a month at the Castle and at Bocardo, the prison where most of the debtors lay

(and where Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer had lain before '& they were burned at the stake.) Wesley and the laymen)

took turns visiting the prisons daily; twice a week the read prayers. They raised a little fund to buy medicine and books and sometimes to help a debtor gain discharge. They also adopted three or four poor families in the town, visiting them regularly and reading to the sick and aged.

In the spring of 1731 Wesley started a small school for poor children, paying a woman to teach. The friends took turns to hear the children read or say their prayers, and to inspect their knitting and weaving. When necessary,

Wesley would buy a child clothes.

The numbers of "our little society" grew slightly. John Gambold of Christ Church who joined them wrote shortly afterward that "Mr. John Wesley was always the chief manager, for which he was very fit. For he had not only more learning and experience than the rest, but he was blest with such activity as to be always gaining ground, and such steadiness that he lost none.'" His proposals

"were sure to charm them," wrote Gambold, because Wesley was in earnest and was "always the same. To this

I may add that he had, I think, something of authority in his countenance; though.

. he could soften his manner and point it as occasion required."

Wesley strongly urged "method and order" on all his disciples so that every hour of the day had its proper use, whether study, devotion, exercise, or charity. He urged them to "keep in their minds an awful sense of God's presence." He put together and published A Collection of

52 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

Forms of Prayer, ''which, lying by them as they stood at their studies, they at intervals snatched a short petition out of it." Wesley liked to shoot up a prayer on the first second of every hour. He "thought prayer to be more his business than anything else," wrote Gambold, "and I have seen him come out of his closet with a serenity of countenancy that was next to shining."

When John Wesley told his father about the charitable work they had begun, the old rector declared that 'none but such as are out of their senses would be prejudiced against your acting in this manner." He was wrong. Soon after they began to visit the prisons, Bob Kirkham reported that he had been ridiculed at Merton for being a member of ''the Holy Club." He had never heard of such a club nor known the strange customs assigned to it by rumor, yet he learned that it had "become a common topic of mirth." And his college thought that nothing was so ridiculous as visiting prisoners and the poor: Oxford

. had forgotten her great medieval and Tudor traditions of charity.

As the rumors spread, most undergraduates and many dons looked on the Wesleys with a mixture of amusement and anger. To receive the Sacrament weekly was bad enough and smacked of Popish or of Jacobite sympathies (the professor of New Testament Greek, a canon of Christ Church, threatened to turn his nephew out of doors for joining the Wesleys in this), "yet nothing," as Gambold recalled a few years later, "was so much disliked as these charitable employments.'' Wesley heard that several seniors of Christ Church had consulted on "the speediest way to stop the progress of enthusiasm" in the college and that the university censors ''were going to blow up the Godly Club (this was now our common title, though we were sometimes dignified with that of the Enthusiasts, or the Reforming Club)."

Wesley prepared a careful paper to place before serious | critics, but he taught his disciples to ignore the jeering or

"OUR LITTLE SOCIETY" II 53

to glory in it as helping to make them more worthy of.

God's favor, more certain that He would accept them when they died, and more like Christ while they lived. |

Wesley worked hard to imitate Christ. Since the return to | Oxford, he had resolved to "make the Scripture my study." The Bible now shaped his wide and unremitting reading in divinity as he struggled to understand it.

To give himself more time and inclination he shook off! his "trifling acquaintances" and kept a sharp eye on the | use he made of each hour. He offered prayers at intervals | 3 throughout the day, including prayer when the college clock struck the hour, and he trained himself to rise at 5. o'clock or even at 4. Early rising became a hallmark of the'

Methodists; across Oxford the handful of disciples struggled and groaned to obey Wesley's insistence on this selfdenial, and nothing seemed more absurd to the university.

To save on coals or logs and sometimes to inflict a\ penance on himself, Wesley sat in a fireless room unless. he had company. To deepen humility and to save the hire of horses, the Wesley brothers took to walking all the way on their visits to Epworth, some 150 miles. This fad worried their father. 'I should be so pleased to see ye here this spring," he wrote in 1731, "if it was not upon the hard conditions of your walking hither, but that always terrifies me, and I am commonly so uneasy for fear ye should kill yourselves with coming so far on foot that it destroys much of the pleasure I should otherwise have in conversing with you." ww (Lan After that visit, walking each way, they assured him when they were safe back in Oxford that twenty-five miles a day for six days improved their health. They had walked through the Lincolnshire wolds and through the shires, under the shadow of Warwick Castle, and down by Stratford-on-Avon so that they could visit their Cotswolds friends. Farmers on their hacks or ponies trotting io market or drovers behind their herds would have thought nothing of young men on foot. To walk or ride could be more comfortable and sometimes faster than riding in a wagon or coach. But these two, a parson and a layman, looked odd, for as they walked they read, despite the fact that even main roads were rough and bro-

54 || WALKING TO GLORY

ken and often hilly; they were deep in learned books, redeeming the time. Wesley reported that reading for ten of twenty-five daily miles had brought no harm.

In 1732 they learned a new way of self-denial. The celebrated London bookseller Rivington had told Wesley about a young Oxford man named John Clayton. The two soon met in an Oxford street and became friends.

Clayton, the son of a Manchester bookseller, was a tutor of Brasenose College, intending to take Holy Orders. He was a high churchman of the kind going out of fashion as the Hanoverian age wore on, and an ardent Jacobite. He approved the Wesleys' religious method, but he urged them to keep the fasts of the primitive church, which were enjoined in the Book of Common Prayer yet had lapsed from general use. ur The Wesleys accepted Clayton's advice and brought him into their "little society." They began to fast every

Wednesday and Friday. On the next visit to Epworth they refused even to breakfast with their parents on a Wednesday or a Friday to the rector's indignation, and on the way home they refrained from eating until evening. Their mother wrote in disgust: 'I must tell ye, Mr.

John Wesley, Fellow of Lincoln, and Mr. Charles Wesley, Student of Christ Church, that ye are two scrubby travelers, and sink your characters strangely by eating nothing on the road... .* to save charges. I wonder ye are not ashamed of yourselves."" She was sure that a little thought would return them to a better mind.

John Clayton was two years younger than Charles and would be close to the brothers for only six months before he was ordained and left Oxford, yet he had great influence. He tightened their system. The Godly Club never met all together, as was supposed by an imaginative painting of the next century, but in small groups in different colleges. Some of them hardly knew each other, but Clayton urged them to fill every hour with prayer or action to promote God's glory and their soul's health. He reorganized the visiting of the back streets and secured permission for regular readings in the bleak Workhouse, where broken old men and women were kept at labor for much of the day.

He also introduced Wesley to the writings of the Early

"OUR LITTLE SOCIETY" |I| 55

Fathers. Wesley would walk round to the Bodelian Library and spend hours discovering new strands of Christian thought. In beautifully printed Tudor and Stuart editions of Greek and Latin texts, he studied afresh the great

Christian doctrines. He bought two huge volumes of texts culled from the Fathers by William Beveridge, a learned bishop who had died some twenty years before.

Wesley learned about the asceticism of the Desert Fathers and began to glimpse ideas of Christian perfection. His conviction was strengthened: that true Christianity could not be fully experienced by simple souls though all must start on the path.

Wesley had maintained his Cotswold connections. His chief correspondents now were Mrs. Mary Pendarves

(''Aspasia"') in London and her sister Ann ('Selima''), who had moved with their mother, Mrs. Granville, from Stanton to Gloucester. Wesley and the ladies wrote elaborate letters to each other. Romance was excluded. Wesley's heart dwelt tenderly on the affection of these cultured women. Once the two brothers rode to Gloucester and came back in a coach with the sisters, on their way to London, and were charmed by their pious conversation.

Mrs. Pendarves teased Wesley a little by calling him "Primitive Christianity."

It was Mrs. Pendarves (as the evidence tentatively suggests) who showed him a new book which became a powerful influence, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law.

Law was a non-juring, celibate clergyman in his forties who was living near London as tutor to young Edward

Gibbon, future father of the great historian. Law had already written Christian Perfection, which Wesley does not seem to have noticed. A Serious Call, published in 1729, went into numerous editions and became famous in upper class circles and clerical households for its gentle wit and wise advice conveyed by a cast of curious characters whose behavior displayed Law's lofty view of a truly devout and holy life.

Wesley disliked parts of the book, but A Serious Call, together with Christian Perfection, which he then read,

"convinced me more than ever of the exceeding height and breadth and depth of the law of God. The light

56 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

flowed in so mightily upon my soul, that everything appeared in a new view. I cried to God for help, and resolved not to prolong the time of obeying him as I had never done before. And by my continued endeavor to keep his whole law, inward and outward, to the utmost

my power, I was persuaded that I should be accepted of him, and that I was even then in a state of salvation."

To reach Christian perfection became the driving force of his life; nearly six years with many adventures would pass before he realized that he was driving in the wrong direction.

Chapter Six Sons of Sorrow On the night of July 25, 1732 Wesley took two hours' sleep, then set off from Oxford after 11 o'clock to walk to London.

Unless he boarded a coach or a swift boat on the Thames for part of the fifty-four mile journey, he must have walked hard all night and day, for by the evening of July 26 he was at Rivington's shop in the city. The next morning he met a wealthy patron of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), who gave him a substantial donation for use among the prisoners and poor children of Oxford.

Brother Sam had obtained an invitation for Jack to preach at St. Margaret's, Westminster, the parish church in the shadow of the Abbey. After the service Sam introduced him—without either realizing what would eventually flow from the introduction—to young Colonel Oglethorpe, who had received a royal charter to found the colony of Georgia as a buffer between Spanish Florida and the British provinces in America. Georgia was intended to be a haven for English debtors, persecuted

Continental Christians, and others in distress. Oglethorpe was about to sail with the first colonists.

Meanwhile, Sam was somewhat worried by Jack, who seemed to be weaving himself into a cocoon of stiff regulations and becoming even more grave; the Wesley sense of humor was being buried. Sam suspected that Jack now thought all laughter to be wrong, but Jack assured him it | was permissible at the right times.

Wesley visited other relations and inspected Guy's Hospital, the new charitable foundation on the south bank of the Thames, to gather ideas for his own more humble philanthropies. He also walked out to Putney to o7

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sit at the feet of William Law; they discussed the attainment of a devout and holy life, not dreaming that in a few years they would reject each other's views. Wesley returned to Westminster by river, reading Law's gift of a German mystic text.

While in London, Wesley received a letter written on August 6, 1732 from Clayton in Oxford which mentioned a new nickname. A Christ Church man named Bingham had derided Wesley as a "Methodist." Possibly Bingham had been reading about a small group of divines in the last ten years of the seventeenth century who had been known as 'New Methodists." John Wesley's sermons and Charles Wesley's precise and particular practices had smacked of this approach to religion. The name caught on more widely than "Holy Club" and "Godly Club" and was soon used in letters and diaries, but when Wesley left London that August, he was still hardly aware of it.

On the walk back he talked with other wayfarers as they trudged the highway or sat outside taverns. He inquired how they worked out their salvation, and he urged them to seek God. Their confused replies emphasized his own uncertainties, although he was sure that his earnestness must please God; and in Oxford, where few scholars and dons remained in high summer and the grass grew in the High, he continued his reading and his good works, aiming always to improve his soul.

Then early in September 1732 he received bad news:

William Morgan had died in Ireland and had died insane.

"Morgan had been a youth of "sweetness and simplicity," whose greatest love was to encourage others to live a good life; but an unspecified (and possibly undiagnosed) disease had caused him to retire to a country village in Wiltshire where he spent much of his time teaching cottage children. His illness had slowly disordered his mind as Wesley noticed when they met. Wesley did not therefore enjoin him to keep the church fasts like the others: Morgan had once been severely abstemious but had reverted to a normal diet.

Morgan returned to Ireland. On a journey to the South, he became raging mad. The family servant brought him home to Dublin, where he died in delirium, calling out the names of the Wesleys.

SONS OF SORROW Ill 59

Morgan's father, who had fumed to his son about ''the ridiculous society you are engaged in," was won over by the manner of his death and showed gratitude to the Wesleys for their kindness to William. Oxford gossip,\ however, accused them of killing the youth by insisting | that he fast. When the university filled up again for the new term, they found themselves the objects of hatred./

Worse than gossip followed at the end of term. On jy December 11 Wesley entered the common room at Lincoln to find the dons talking about him and "'this sect called Methodists'—a quotation from the latest edition of Fog's Weekly Journal, freshly arrived from London. In the Journal was a long anonymous letter to the editor complaining that 'the university at present is not a little pestered with those sons of sorrow, whose number daily receives addition" and who designed to ""make the whole place nothing but a monastery."

The letter writer complained of their "absurd and perpetual melancholy," of their early rising, and of their time spent in prayer. He attacked them for believing that every conceivable action, however trivial, was of religious importance and for shedding social entertainments and diversions. The anonymous author's criticisms fell thick:

"Gloomy and disconsolate way of life. ... Weighed down by a habitual sorrow. ... Some suppose them to use religion only as a veil to vice. . .

. Enthusiastic madness and superstitious scruples. ...'' The writer ended with a suggestion on how to clear their heads and expel

"this gloomy stupidity."

Wesley made no answer, for he was due to preach before the university—his second university sermon— three weeks later on Monday, January 1. It would be the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ and the traditional

New Year's Day, though not the legal start of the year, which still fell on March 25.

He was already preparing his sermon. He worked on it for a total of twenty-seven hours, writing and revising.

Then he read all forty minutes of it aloud to different friends and discussed their suggestions. On the final Saturday he did not play cards in the common room, for his mind was on the sermon.

At 10 o'clock on Monday morning, January 1, 1733, the

60 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

vice-chancellor of Oxford and the heads of houses and the customary officials processed to St. Mary's church, which had a larger congregation than usual for a weekday sermon since so many wished to hear the controversial Mr. Wesley. The feast being that of the Circumcision of Christ, Wesley chose as his text Romans 2:29, the words of St. Paul: 'Circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter" and explained this circumcision of the heart as being "that habitual disposition of soul which in the sacred writings is termed 'holiNessenIn a long, closely reasoned argument which he read carefully, he preached that Christians were to be so endued with the virtues of Christ, so ''renewed in the image of our mind" as to be (in Christ's words) " 'perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.' '' He spoke of the Christian's love of God and neighbor which arose from faith in Christ. He concluded with a reasoned plea that "in every motion of our heart, every word of our tongue, in every work of our minds... whatever we do, we do all to the glory of God."

His sermon won approval from the vice-chancellor and the rector of Lincoln and increased Wesley's standing as a theologian. It left him elated.

He was further vindicated by an anonymous pamphlet with the title 'The Oxford Methodists," replying to the attack in Fog's Weekly. He never discovered the author, but it helped to stem 'the torrent rolling down from all sides upon me." Nevertheless, several undergraduates and young dons were "frightened away from a falling house.'' One day in March he was even confronted by a hostile mob at the gate of Lincoln College.

John Wesley faced "the ill consequences of my singularity": loss of earnings as pupils deserted him, loss of friends, and loss of reputation. He concluded that nothing mattered but "a clean heart, a single eye, a soul full of God! A fair exchange, if by loss of reputation we can purchase the lowest degree of purity of heart!'

Chapter Seven Oxford Deserted By the winter of 1734-1735, when Wesley had been a tutor of Lincoln for five years, some three dozen Oxford men had been with the Holy or Godly Club. Most had gone down; Wesley now counted only four or five in his

"little society." The Holy Club had never had formal structure, membership, or leader: Wesley's authority derived from his prestige and experience.

His zeal in inducing undergraduates "to mix more devotion into their study," especially the many who were reading for Holy Orders, met varying success. The Yorkshireman Benjamin Ingham, the gentle studious

James Hervey, and a servitor of Pembroke called George Whitefield, with deep blue eyes and a squint, were ardent among the later disciples. But Richard Morgan, the late William Morgan's younger brother, was not. His father had placed him at Lincoln under Wesley as a mark of trust. Richard arrived in Oxford with a greyhound, against university regulations. After two months of Wesley's tutorship, he scrawled a long letter to his father, which caught Wesley's eye when he happened to enter

Richard's room while he was out. Wesley ("contrary to my custom") read a line or two. He was so astonished that he read the rest—a mixture of fact and hearsay about "a society of gentlemen... whom the world calls Methodists, of which my tutor is president. They imagine they cannot be saved if they do not spend every hour, nay every minute of their lives in the service of God."

Bemoaning Wesley's strictness, Richard went on to write his father: 'By being his pupil I am stigmatized with the name of Methodist, the misfortune of which I cannot describe. For what they reckon the greatest happiness, namely of being laughed at, is to me the greatest

62 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

misery.

. If 1am continued under Mr. Wesley I shall be ruined."

Wesley hurriedly wrote a rebuttal to old Mr. Morgan, who replied tactfully that he had never received the letter of complaint. He then wrote to his son, praising Wesley and ordering Richard to banish the greyhound, not to squander the mornings "in tea and chat,'' and to be careful of criticizing others. But Mr. Morgan did not want

Richard to be drawn into "that society,'' nor did Wesley, though Richard became a disciple later.

Wesley continued his ministry, by evil report and good report, like the Apostle Paul. The future looked settled: employment as a controversial tutor with unusual influence on a restricted circle in each Oxford generation, earning perhaps a brief footnote to English church history.

In 1735, however, his world was turned upside down by two unrelated events: the death of his father and the conversion of George Whitefield.' Whitefield had come up from his native Gloucester with religion and good works. He had admired the Wesleys from afar before he came to know Charles, who brought him into their activities. Among the books which Charles lent him was a late seventeenth-century work of devotion, Scougal's The Life of God in the Soul of Man.

George eventually discovered in Scougal a phrase which set him afire: "True religion is a union of the soul with God...or, in the Apostle's phrase, it is Christ formed within us."" He saw in a flash that he must be born again. He began to wrestle spiritually and believed he needed to strive to renounce evil and cultivate virtue, to subordinate all his moments to make himself good enough for Christ to enter his soul. The Wesleys believed that they had been born again at baptism and needed a lifetime to reach Christian perfection. George Whitefield saw instinctively that their attitude lacked logic. If union with Christ was essential for salvation, it must be acquired by the earliest possible day, whatever the cost.

Whitefield was too much in awe of John Wesley to argue, and neither of them realized that winter of 1734-35 that Scenes would soon discover the key to evangelical revival.

OXFORD DESERTED Ili 63

In October 1734 Wesley hurried home. His father's health had worsened. Samuel rallied, but he was now seventy-two, and he urged his son to succeed him as rector. Brother Sam was now headmaster of Blundell's

School at Tiverton in Devon and had already refused to consider the parish of Epworth, but the Crown might be influenced to offer it to John. Father and son had discussed it as far back as 1732, but in October 1734, as Wesley walked to Epworth, he was undecided. On his return to Oxford, however, he reached an "unalterable resolution" not to accept. His reason was bleak: "The question is not whether I could do more good to others there or here, but whether I could do more good to myself." He believed he could best promote holiness in others in a place where he himself could be most holy, and Oxford was the place.

When the rector protested, Wesley spent days preparing a letter of 5,000 words, which he dated December 10,

1734 and finished finally eight days later, to explain in great detail why, as a tutor in Oxford, he "could be holier myself here than anywhere else."

Thus he would do good to others, not least because "being despised is absolutely necessary to our doing good in the world." A parish would only "crush my own soul, and so make me useless to others."

Brother Sam shot down the arguments even before he had seen a full copy of Jack's letter. 'I judge every proposition flatly false.

. I see your love to yourself, but your love to your neighbor I do not see.'" He contended that Jack's Holy Orders as a priest had solemnly engaged him to take a parish.

This argument alarmed Wesley and "almost convinced me," until the bishop of Oxford agreed that ordination did not engage him to a parish if he could serve God better in "your present or some other station."

Family discussion continued into March 1735 when a letter reached Oxford from Sister Emily, saying that the brothers must come at once if they wished to see their father alive. On Palm Sunday, after taking the Sacra-

64 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

ment, they set out through the mud on foot. They took with them Westley Hall, one of Wesley's pupils at Lincoln, an Oxford Methodist who had not yet showed that he was a ruffian, though he could not decide whether to marry Patty or Kezzy and had virtually pledged his troth to both. Hall was sick and therefore rode while they walked, but he could hardly keep his balance on the horse. They reached Epworth on Good Friday, April 4.

The dying rector laid his hands on Charles' head: 'Be steady,"" he murmured. 'The Christian faith will surely revive in this kingdom. You shall see it, though I shall not."

John Wesley took charge of the family, the parish, and the final arrangements for completing the printing of the magnum opus on the Book of Job. To help their father

"end his days in peace," he abandoned his unalterable resolution and wrote to intermediaries in London who could influence Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, to present him to Epworth. The reply was discouraging, and the old rector died on April 25, 1735 without know ing who would succeed him.

Charles told Sam. that his brother had "laid aside all hopes (or fears, for I cannot certainly say which) of succeeding." The living went to the Reverend Samuel Hirst.

As rector of Epworth, Wesley might have been lost to history. Perhaps he would have married Betty or Damaris

Kirkham or Kitty Hargreaves, for "Aspasia'' Pendarves had cooled toward him.

While the Wesleys were at Epworth attending to their dying father, George Whitefield lay sick and gloomy in Pembroke College. His excesses, such as praying for hours in the rain in Christ Church meadows, had alarmed the Wesleys. Before they left Oxford, Charles had brought John to advise George spiritually and medically (for as Gambold said, ''His knowledge of the world and his insight into physic were often of use to us"), but Whitefield had worsened.

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He wrote frequently. Wesley sent ministrations by return post. Unknown to him, at about the time the rector died, Whitefield was transformed.

One day in his misery, he picked up a book which someone had lent him, Contemplations ou_the New Testament by Joseph Hall, a seventeenth-century bishop. Writing on the Crucifixion, Hall suddenly made Whitefield aware that the new birth was not a reward but a gift.

Because Christ had paid the price of sin, no method of prayers and good works or self-denial could earn forgiveness. Whitefield threw himself on his bed and prayed a prayer of utter helplessness. whl god Joy flooded his soul. He had discovered that grace was | free, received by faith alone.

Whitefield wrote another long letter to Wesley on May 5. Awe of his spiritual master prevented him saying openly what had happened. One phrase, however, might have saved John Wesley nearly three more years of struggle: 'Into his all gracious arms," wrote Whitefield,

"I blindly throw myself "

Wesley stayed at Epworth as acting rector for two months. Then he went up to London in late June to see

Dissertationes in Librum Jobi through the press and to attempt to resolve the triangular love affair of Westley Hall,

Patty, and Kezzy.

Epworth rectory ceased to be the Wesley home. Their mother would go to Tiverton to live with Sam and Ursula. The unmarried and married sisters were scattered in Lincolnshire and London. John Wesley expected to return to Oxford. During the last months of his father's life, however, there had been much talk of Georgia, for Oglethorpe was home and seeking clergy. The old rector had exclaimed that he would have gone himself were he younger.

In November, when the crippled Molly died giving birth to a child, he recommended to the Georgia trustees his bereaved son-in-law, Johnny Whitelamb, now vicar

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of Wroot. Whitelamb was a local boy from a poor home who had assisted the old rector with his papers, then had been helped through Lincoln College by the Wesleys, though they kept him short of money. Molly had fallen in love with him while he worked at the rectory. She had married him despite his involvement with a prostitute near Oxford, and they became a devoted couple, the only love match of all the sisters.

The trustees rejected Whitelamb, who remained at Wroot, a disconsolate, gloomy man who in later years seemed to become a deist.

At this time John Wesley had no close interest in Georgia. Nine months earlier, when he had been at a meeting of the SPCK in Barlett's Buildings, Holborn, as a corresponding member, some Protestant Salzburgers had arrived at Gravesend, and he helped to plan their departure to Georgia on the Prince of Wales. But it had not crossed his mind to serve there. On August 28, 1735, however, he was walking down Ludgate Street near St.

Paul's when he met, by accident, a theologian and a Georgia trustee named John Burton, a fellow of Eton.

Burton urged upon Wesley the opportunity which Georgia presented to himself, Charles, and the other Oxford

Methodists to fulfill their exalted religious aims. Wesley was attracted. To go among the Indians would help him to be more ascetic, to withdraw more from the world in his pursuit of Christian perfection. And he would be less tempted by women, he thought, if they were "of a different species from me."

He talked with Colonel Oglethorpe. He consulted William Law. He went north to Manchester to consult John

Clayton, then back by Epworth, which his mother had not yet left. She declared that had she twenty sons, she would rejoice if all went as missionaries to Georgia.

Charles agreed to come as Oglethorpe's secretary for Indian affairs. The bishop of London hastily made him a deacon; a week later the bishop of Oxford ordained him a priest. The brothers persuaded Benjamin Ingham to accompany them to Georgia. Meantime, Westley Hall, having given a ring to Kezzy in the country, married Patty in London "'in spite of her poor astonished parent, of her brothers, of all your vows and promises." He left Kezzy a

OXFORD DESERTED Il 67

brokenhearted old maid for life. Hall offered to go to Georgia, and the trustees accepted him and Patty.

At John's insistence the two Wesleys would be volunteer missionaries; only their passage and book supplies would be paid for by the SPCK, which announced that Messrs. John Wesley and Ingham designed "after a short stay at Savannah, to go among the Indian nations bordering upon that Settlement, in order to bring them to the knowledge of Christianity."

Westley Hall withdrew at the last moment; therefore, Patty could not come.

One last duty remained. Queen Caroline, George II's consort, had accepted the dedication of Job. On Sunday morning, October 12, 1735, Wesley went to Kensington

Palace with Colonel Oglethorpe and a Christ Church friend, a bishop's son who was angling (successfully) for a good living. Sir Robert Walpole introduced them to the royal presence. Wesley reported to Sam that the Queen gave him "many good words and smiles." Later in his life she became one of his anecdotes: The Queen was romping with her ladies when he made his bow, he would say. She received him graciously. He presented his father's book on bended knee. She said: "It is prettily bound," and laid it unopened on a window ledge though she could read Latin easily. After kind words to Wesley and the two other gentlemen introduced by Walpole, she smiled a dismissal and returned to her romp.'

Two days later, barely six weeks after Georgia was first suggested to him, Wesley embarked at Gravesend with Brother Charles, Benjamin Ingham, and Charles

Delamotte, a twenty-year-old Londoner of the Wesleys' acquaintance.

John Wesley had no doubt why he wanted to be a missionary. 'My chief motive, to which all the rest are subordinate, is the hope of saving my own soul. I hope to learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathens."

Chapter Eight Sophy of Savannah On the evening of Saturday, January 17, 1736, John and Charles Wesley were sitting with Colonel Oglethorpe and others in the state cabin of the Simmonds far out in the Atlantic. The sea had been rough, and the clouds had been thickening all day. Now the pitching of the ship became more alarming every minute.

Suddenly a huge wave "burst into the cabin.

. witha noise and shock almost like that of a cannon."" A bureau had sheltered Wesley, but he was shocked to discover himself "afraid to die." At midnight he added a note to his diary: ''Stormy still and afraid!"

The Wesleys and their fellow passengers had been three months on board already, for the Simmonds, held off the Isle of Wight by contrary winds, had only cleared the English Channel in the second week of December.

Wesley, as chaplain, had been much impressed by a group of twenty-six German emigrants. They were members of the Church of the United Brethren, colloquially known as the Moravian Church, which descended directly from the pre-Reformation martyr John Hus, but had been revived from a moribund state by young Count Zinzendorf, who was only three years older than Wesley.

An English locksmith named Ambrose Tackner knew German and was willing to teach Wesley, who soon conversed with Moravian Bishop David Nitschman and his flock. The Wesleys would not invite them to Holy Communion but admired their serenity and unselfishness.

The Germans were always cheerful. They undertook servile tasks which the English emigrants were too proud or lazy to consider, and when crewmen or passengers abused, vilified, or even knocked them down, they turned the other cheek. At their services they sang

SOPHY OF SAVANNAH Il 69

hymns of great beauty. The Church of England's metrical psalms sounded tawdry and stilted in contrast.

The Wesleys, Benjamin Ingham, and young Charles Delamotte had signed an agreement to consult each other on every move, abiding by the majority decision. If they divided equally, they would draw lots. They had pledged thernselves to continue their introspective diaries and the rigorous Oxford Methodist system of prayers, readings, fasts, and good works.

The Moravians were not impressed, for they detected that Wesley's tight routine was chiefly intended to acquire merit. They offered him, in contrast, the great Reformation doctrine of Justification by Faith. As Wesley wrote some two years later, they "endeavored to show me 'a more excellent way.' But I understood it not at first.

I was too learned and too wise. So that it seemed foolishness to me. And I continued preaching, and following after, and trusting in that righteousness whereby no flesh can be justified."

During the days of storm, Wesley tried to keep to his rigorous program but could not throw off his fear as the ship rocked and jarred ''with the utmost violence." The gale died down but another struck a few days later.

Again, a great wave knocked him over! He found he was unhurt yet ''could but say to myself, 'How is it that thou hast no faith?' being still unwilling to die."

On the Sunday evening, with the ship so rolling that he could hardly walk the companion ways, he went to| join the twenty-six Moravians. He found them joyfully singing one of their magnificent hymns. As they sang, a great wave struck the ship, split the mainsail, and poured in between the decks. "A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans looked up and without intermission calmly sang on. I asked one of them afterwards, 'Was you not afraid?' He answered, 'I thank God, no.' I asked, 'But were not your women and children afraid?' He replied mildly, 'No; our women and children are not afraid to die.' "

When the storm blew itself out at last, Wesley resumed his personal discipline and his pastoral work as ship's chaplain. He was particularly pleased that a Mrs. Hawkins, the young wife of a surgeon sailing to a post in

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Georgia, was hanging on his exhortations and renouncing her frivolous ways. Charles, however, believed she was a hypocrite. The brothers argued. "Charles perverse,'" noted Wesley several times in his diary.

On February 4 they saw land. When the Simmonds anchored in the Savannah River, Wesley was entranced by "the exceeding beautiful prospect''—the rows of pines, palms, and cedars along the shore beneath a cloudless sky. Early next morning he set foot in Georgia. Oglethorpe led them across the foreshore of an island to rising ground, where they knelt down in thanksgiving. Oglethorpe then took boat for Savannah while Wesley held a service under the myrtles and cedars, sheltered from sun and wind.

When the colonel returned after a day and night ashore, he brought with him the energetic and learned leader of the original Moravian settlers, a man about the same age as Wesley called August Spangenberg. His cheerful demeanor and year of experience in America encouraged Wesley to ask him for advice on how to proceed, but to Wesley's surprise, Spangenberg declined to give it. He said he must first ask Wesley some questions.

"Do you know yourself?" Spangenberg asked. ''Have you the witness in yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?"

While Wesley recognized the text in St. John's first Epistle from which the questions derived, he hesitated to answer. Spangenberg then put a direct question, though kindly: "Do you know Jesus Christ?"

Wesley paused in some confusion, then replied lamely:

"I know He is the Saviour of the world."

"True," said the German. 'But do you know He has saved you?"

Wesley replied uncomfortably, "I hope He has died to save me."

Spangenberg did not pursue his catechism. He merely repeated the question: '"'Do you know yourself?"

Wesley replied, "I do." (Later he wrote, "but I fear they were vain words.'') Spangenberg then offered various practical suggestions about Georgia.

His strange questions were soon forgotten by Wesley in the rush of his secretarial work for Oglethorpe and in

SOPHY OF SAVANNAH Ili 71

preparing the flock for their settlement on land. Wesley had come to convert the Indians, but the Georgia trustees, while he had lain becalmed in English waters, had sent to appoint him rector of Savannah in succession to Mr. Quincy, who wanted to return north to Boston.

Wesley was encouraged, however, when an ancient Indian chief, who believed himself to be nearly 100, came on board. Dressed in English clothes such as he had worn when Oglethorpe presented him to King George II in London, Chief Tomo-chachi was accompanied by some younger relations, also in English dress, and by the king of the Savannah nation, who wore a large blanket, beads in his hair, and a scarlet feather behind one ear.

Chief Tomo-chachi made a grave speech, interpreted by an Indian woman who had married an English trader, which led Wesley to believe that the Indian nations would welcome Christianity. He was disappointed when he returned the chief's visit; the wigwams were empty.

Later, Wesley often met the few braves and squaws who lived near Savannah, but Oglethorpe scotched Wesley's plans to follow distant forest tracks or the waterways in search of tribes to convert; he might be captured by the French or the Spanish and embroil the colony in war.

About a month after Wesley's arrival, the colonists crowded into the courthouse, which served as their church on Sundays, for their new parson's first service. The second Scripture lesson at the Morning Prayer that Sunday put him in mind of the motto of St. Francis of Assisi:

"Naked to follow the naked Christ,'"" which he feared was scarcely appropriate to himself because Georgia seemed a most pleasant place to live. He preached from St. Paul's chapter on Christian love. The people listened "with deep affection" without hint of future hate.

Wesley lodged with the Moravians until his predecessor left, then he moved to the parsonage, unpacked his books, and threw himself into the work of pastor to Savannah and to the scattered settlements of ex-debtors,

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Scottish highlanders (who had their own minister), and Young Adventurers—the title given to young men who had come out at their own expense. Oglethorpe warned him to beware of "log house converts," but Wesley was taken in by the pretended ''zeal for holiness' of a Dutch youth who was afterward revealed to be a thief and a liar and had hoped to manipulate Wesley for his own ends.

The weeks in Savannah passed in devotional exercises, pastoral duties, secretarial work for the colony—particularly burdensome on the days when Wesley fasted—and travel. He walked the forest paths in Indian shoes or traveled the waterways by canoe or skiff, sleeping nights wrapped in an Indian blanket. He was especially pleased at opportunities to be with the Moravians or to visit the Protestant refugees from Salzburg who called their place

Ebenezer ("Hitherto hath the Lord helped us'). Though he could not approve their lack of a rigid framework of fasts, prayers, and liturgical services, he envied these

Continental Christians their joy, their humble assurance, and their purity of heart. He began to translate the German hymns, which he loved to sing.

The colonists were somewhat amazed by their new little parson. They approved his zeal for visiting the sick, bereaved, and the few prisoners and for catechizing the children. They admired his energy and his willingness to cut down trees and help build houses. They were amused at his habit of bursting into song and puzzled at his hourly stops to say a prayer. They were not so pleased when he divided the services in the Book of Common Prayer to conform, he said, with the First Prayer Book of Edward VI, which he thought more in tune with the custom of the primitive church. Parents were worried at baptisms because he insisted on following the long forgotten rubric which enjoins the minister to dip the baby

"discreetly and warily' into the water, not to sprinkle.

And because John Wesley fasted, some thought him a papist in disguise.

He expected his people to fast too. He taught that the road to God was steep, that they must carry out frequent religious duties and exercises if they would be true Christians. Many rejected these extra burdens on their hard, pioneering lives.

SOPHY OF SAVANNAH III 73

John Wesley was happy. Charles, however, was not.

While still on board the Simmonds, he had complained in a letter to the ladies at Stanton of spiritual unworthiness and misery. He had now gone south with Oglethorpe to set up a new settlement on the coast at Fort Frederica, where most of the passengers from the Simmonds had been allotted land. Charles had hoped that pastoral work would alter his soul for the better, but he contracted dysentery after sleeping on the ground because boards were too expensive. He disliked his work as Oglethorpe's secretary of Indian affairs, and instead of preaching to Indians, he was failing to cure settlers of bad habits.

He sent word to his brother that Mrs. Hawkins, Wesley's pious "'convert,'" had come to him with a confession of adultery with Oglethorpe. She had then told Oglethorpe that the tale was slanderous gossip put about by the Wesley brothers.

Wesley promptly sailed to Frederica as soon as the winds allowed, and interrogated Mrs. Hawkins. After a week, not totally convinced of Oglethorpe's innocence or of Mrs. Hawkins' hypocrisy, he returned to Savannah.

And it was there that another woman became the cause of a train of events which, in little more than eighteen months, would lead him to flee the colony.

Sophia Christiana Hopkey, a pretty and kindhearted girl of seventeen, was the niece of Mrs. Thomas Causton, whose husband was chief magistrate of Savannah and the colony's storekeeper. Rumor persisted that he had come to Georgia because of a disreputable past. John

Wesley first met Sophy at church with her relations a few days after his arrival. When he took the unusual step of instituting public prayers in the early morning and a communion service on every Sunday and saint's day, she was always present.

He thought it his duty to speak privately with every communicant every week. Being determined "to have no intimacy with any woman in America," he was careful at

74 \ll WALKING TO GLORY

first to choose times when Sophy and he were in the open air and never alone. In June, however, her aunt roundly hinted to Wesley that Sophy would make a good housewife. Through study of the Mystics and a misreading of the Early Fathers, Wesley was temporarily ''persuaded that 'It was unlawful for a priest to marry,' '"' so in July he began to invite Sophy and another girl to the parsonage for devotional instruction after the early public prayers, rather to the disgust of young Philip Thicknesse, a boy boarding with the Caustons, who wondered why he was not asked: "Surely," he said, "my soul is as of much importance as theirs."

Wesley would come briskly to the temporary church after a dawn bath in the Savannah River with Charles, back from Frederica, and Delamotte. They chose the hour not only for coolness but 'because the alligators were not stirring so soon. We heard them, indeed, snoring all around us."

Some day in July, apparently alone with Sophy in the parsonage, Wesley talked with her and then "I took her by the hand, and before we parted I kissed her. And from this time, I fear there was a mixture in my intention, though I was not soon sensible of it." Shortly afterward, by prior arrangement, she left Savannah to stay at Frederica with a family named Hurd.

Wesley was able to put her to the back of his mind, for on July 20 five Chickasaw Indian braves from up country, two of them being chiefs, were brought to him by an elderly clergyman, a Mr. Andrews. He knew their language, had been educated at Wesley's own Oxford college, and had once been a missionary among the Mohawks in New York Province. While Charles noted the conference in shorthand, Wesley eagerly asked about their beliefs.

"Do you believe there is One above who is over all things?" he asked.

One of the chiefs answered, 'We believe there are four beloved things above: the clouds, the sun, the clear sky, and He that lives in the clear sky." et you believe there is but One who lives in the clear sky?"

"We believe there are Two with Him, Three in all."

SOPHY OF SAVANNAH Ill 75

The conference took several sessions. Wesley convinced himself from their strange mixture of religious ideas that the red men were ripe for conversion, though most of the colonists said they were treacherous, cruel, and inclined to murder children.

Wesley wrote out an account of the conference and addressed it to the Gentleman's Magazine in London.

Charles would take it, for he was going home. His health had broken; he was bickering with Oglethorpe and felt disappointed at failure to help the Indians. Since the brothers were anxious to summon recruits to their mission, they had decided, with Oglethorpe's consent, that Charles should return to England briefly and bring back more missionaries. Shortly after the conference the brothers left by sea for the long-established port of Charleston in South Carolina, whiling away the hours by reading devotional books, singing the hymns they had learned from the Germans, and visiting settlers on the islands.

In South Carolina, for the first time, Wesley saw black slaves in the fields, a fact which would come vividly to mind many years later. Georgia had expressly forbidden slavery, although some of the settlers used blacks, asserting that they were baptized and free.

Within a fortnight Wesley was back in Savannah and at once sailed to Frederica to rejoin Oglethorpe, who "gave me a large account of Miss Sophy and desired me to be with her as much as I could 'because she was in deep distress.' '' She had been bothered by the attentions of a young man named Mellichamp. Her relations were urging her to accept him since he was well connected at home, but Wesley knew him to be a scamp, and Sophy did not want him. Wesley calmed her by reading pious books.

This August visit to Frederica proved to be a foretaste of troubles to come.

Mrs. Hawkins and her husband stirred up strife, claiming that Wesley had slandered her. She enticed him to her home, where she threatened to shoot him, then set upon him with a pair of scissors. She pushed him onto her bed and cut off one side of his long hair. She swore at him, tearing his cassock. Servants, husband, neighbors, and finally the constable rushed into the room and re-

76 \Il WALKING TO GLORY

strained her; and soon the story of the little parson's adventure was all over the colony. When Wesley returned to Savannah, young Thicknesse was much amused to watch Wesley preach "with his hair so long on one side, so short on the other''—those 'fine long Adonis locks of auburn hair—hair which he took infinite pains to have in the most exact order which, with his benign and humble countenance, gave him a very pleasing aspect."

Wesley still had no suspicion that he would not stay permanently in Georgia. He wrote to George Whitefield in England, urging him to come out and join him.

Ingham had gone to live among the Indians on Pipe Makers Creek, four miles northwest of Savannah, so that "only Delamotte with me, till God shall stir up the hearts of some of his servants, who, putting their lives in their hands, shall come over and help us, where the harvest is great and the laborers few. What if thou art the man, Mr.

Whitefield?" In a second letter he sketched the unlimited opportunities which he and Whitefield could seize: ''Here are adults from the farthest parts of Europe and Asia, and the inmost Kingdoms of Africa. Add to these the known and unknown natives of this vast continent, and you will indeed have a great multitude."

Yet Wesley was no nearer the Indians. Oglethorpe refused to let him leave the colonists without a pastor, and the Indians themselves, at the end of his conference with them, had said they could not listen while surrounded by tribal enemies.

Darkness falls swiftly in Georgia; a small skiff must not be caught out at sea. Wesley, sailing from Frederica to Savannah in October 1736 with no other passenger except Sophy, landed on an uninhabited island.

He scented moral danger. Wesley and Sophy were alone, a bachelor with a young spinster, except for a white boy, Jemmy, who was his volunteer servant, and the boat's crew, respectfully keeping their distance. Wes-

SOPHY OF SAVANNAH

Ili 77 ley took refuge in the thought that he had not sought this temptation; Oglethorpe had ordered him to take Sophy in his boat. And if his resolution to stay single should waver, he had convinced himself that Sophy was now determined never to marry.

He had returned to Frederica to baptize, marry, bury, and to discipline an erring flock, who always failed to live according to the high standards of William Law's Serious

Call unless their parson was among them. He had found Sophy unhappy yet dreading a return to Savannah where she must live with her uncle and aunt. Her violent suitor,

Tom Mellichamp, had been put in prison for fraud, and Causton had virtually given her to Wesley if he would have her. At Frederica, Wesley had visited her frequently as her pastor and was careful to keep conversation on an exalted plane. Nevertheless, he could not disguise from himself that she tugged at his heart and would be a most suitable wife.

Once ashore on the uninhabited island, they made a fire and had supper. Wesley read prayers, and the crew rigged up the sail on four stakes to keep out the bitter northeast wind and the night dews. The sailors lay on one side; Sophy, Wesley, and Jemmy on the other.

The next morning they set sail in a rough sea but made small progress and were obliged to land on the south end of St. Katherine's Island. The wind held them there for three days. One afternoon Wesley took Sophy for a walk, and they sat in a little thicket by a spring, and Wesley talked learnedly about holiness. He was charmed by her puzzled attempt to understand. Next day they sailed on only to be turned back by the wind. That night as they lay awake by the fire, Wesley asked: "Miss Sophy, how far are you engaged to Mr. Mellichamp?"

"T have promised him either to marry him or to marry no one at all."

Wesley's feelings overcame his resolution. "Miss Sophy, I should think myself happy if I was to spend the rest of my life with you!"

Chapter Nine "Lost, Sunk'

Sophy burst into tears. 'I am very unhappy," she said between sobs. "I won't have Tommy, for he is a bad man. And I can have none else." She begged Wesley to say no more about marriage while half admitting that she loved him. She added, ''We may converse on other subjects as freely as ever."" Recovering himself, Wesley ""ended our conversation with a psalm."

Sophy insisted that she could not live with her uncle and aunt. Back at Savannah on the day before her eighteenth birthday on November 1, 1736, Wesley secured an arrangement from the Caustons whereby Sophy should sleep at their house but breakfast at his, along with Delamotte, and spend the mornings and evenings in his care. She joined the devotions and sang the hymns. Between pastoral duties Wesley taught her French and read theology to her, being particularly taken with Ephraem

Syrus, a fourth-century Syrian whose involved and repetitious writing had recently been republished in Greek.

(Wesley presumably translated into English as he read.) The arrangement continued all winter. Wesley disregarded gossip about his relations with Sophy, but, as he admitted eventually, 'I find I cannot take fire into my bosom and not be burnt." He intended to stay celibate yet had fallen in love. As a celibate, he could ignore

Sophy's feelings and continue to polish her soul, occasionally allowing himself a kiss. If and when he abandoned celibacy, he could still have her, for she would not marry except to him, having thrown off Mellichamp.

Early in 1737 he revisited Frederica and returned, having "beaten the air in this unhappy place." The colonists rejected the religious yoke he had placed on their shoulders. ''[My] utter despair of doing good there .

. made

"LOST, SUNK" Ill 79 me content with the thought of seeing it no more."

Wesley was now in a dilemina. He still expected to be a celibate and itinerant missionary among the tribes. If he married Sophy, he would become a man of property (for a wife's estate belonged to the husband) and be tempted to settle in Savannah. Yet he was wavering. On February

3, impulsively, he dropped a broad hint about marriage.

Had Sophy responded, he "would have made but a faint resistance," but she said it was best for both of them never tO marry.

On reflection, Wesley 'thought this a very narrow escape.'' He consulted the Moravian pastor, John Toeltschig, older than himself. Toeltschig urged him to marry. Ingham and Delamotte, however, argued strongly against the German's advice; they thought that Sophy was not holy enough for Wesley.

Wesley went away into the country to pray over his position and almost reached despair. When a pastoral duty forced him to walk back to Savannah, for an hour,

"my heart was with Sophy all the time." Back in the countryside, however, he reached a new determination not to marry, and when he returned to his own house on February 14, he took Sophy into the garden. He said: "I am resolved, Miss Sophy, if I marry at all, not to do it till

I have been among the Indians." He still believed that she had no other suitor; she could be kept for his convenience.

Sophy very properly stopped coming to the parsonage, though they continued to meet in company. Twelve days later, calling at the Caustons, he found her alone. ''Her words, her eyes, her air, her every motion and gesture, were full of such a softness and sweetness!'' Had he touched her hand, he would have proposed and been accepted.

The next day Delamotte happened to leave them alone "and my resolution failed." Wesley took her by the hand, and once again he nearly proposed, restraining himself only because he believed she would never marry.

Young Delamotte was upset. The more he saw of Wesley's infatuation, the more he was disturbed. He knew that Wesley was in love; he doubted Sophy's sincerity, though unaware that she was seeing another man.

80 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

Delamotte urged caution. When Wesley retorted that he had no intention of marrying, Delamotte replied: "You do not know your own heart."

On March 4 Wesley and Delamotte decided to settle the matter by lot. They wrote out three cards: ''Marry."

"Think not of it this year.'"" 'Think of it no more.'"" They shuffled the cards and prayed. Delamotte drew a card.

He turned it over. The lot was: 'Think of it no more."

Wesley's first reaction was relief and submission, but within three days, while "drinking a dish of tea" at the Caustons, he realized that Sophy still held his heart. He had now heard a rumor that a young adventurer, William

Williamson, of whom he disapproved, was courting her.

She denied it and assured him she would take no step without his advice.

Wesley was "in the toils," as he recorded it in his diary. The more he saw Sophy, the more he loved her; he had begun to believe that his resolution to stay single would soon be overcome. On March 8, 1737 Sophy came to breakfast and stayed for prayers. That evening at the Caustons, he found Sophy and her aunt quarrelling over a letter from the rejected suitor, Tom Mellichamp.

"Get out of my house!'"" Mrs. Causton shouted at her niece. '"Mr. Wesley," she cried, "I wish you would take her. Take her away with ye!'' Sophy wept. Wesley withdrew to his house in heaviness of spirit for Sophy's suffering.

But the next day when he walked through the rain and called on Mrs. Causton, he was astounded to be asked to publish the banns of marriage between Sophy and William Williamson. Wesley could hardly believe what he heard, for Sophy had directly denied the rumors of courtship. Mrs. Causton suggested he talk with Sophy. He returned home "amazed, in pain, prayed, meditated," as he wrote in his diary for the hour between 11 a.m. and noon. He half wondered whether Sophy's aim was to provoke him into proposing, but she was too sincere a girl for such artifice.

At noon they met. Wesley was in 'a complication of passions and tumult," miserable at his loss and certain that Williamson would "make her very unhappy." Their conversation, then and in the afternoon, left him sure

"LOST, SUNK" lil 81 that she was marrying Williamson on an impulse to escape her uncle and aunt.

He walked up and down in his garden in shock. 'Tried to pray, lost, sunk."

Sophy married Williamson four days later, without banns, at Purrysburg across the river in South Carolina.

They were married by a priest who sat lightly to church law, but the irregular marriage was never challenged.

Despite his sore heart, Wesley stayed friendly with the Williamsons, although grieving that Sophy came less regularly to Holy Communion. He continued his parish ministry, hoping that time would heal the wound. In April, however, he discovered that Sophy had been dallying with Williamson for at least two weeks before their sudden engagement. Her assurances that she would remain single and her denials of the rumors which linked her with Williamson had been deceit. Wesley realized, with thanksgiving, that he had narrowly escaped marriage with an unsuitable girl.

His spirit was wounded. He was lonely: Ingham had) returned to England, and Delamotte was little more than | a youth. The Moravians always welcomed him, but their _ quiet faith and stirring hymns highlighted his sense of failure.

In June he wrote to his sister Kezia, suggesting that she come to Georgia to keep house. As soon as the letter had gone, he doubted the wisdom of his suggestion, even though he had no intention of leaving the colony nor of abandoning his hope of a mission to the Indians.

A Mrs. Brownfield now disclosed to him ''a new and unexpected scene" of Sophy's dissimulation: Sophy had been in love with Tom Mellichamp while pretending that she wished to shake him off. Her tears on the uninhabited island had been another deceit. Wesley was hurt and angry. He wanted to refuse to admit her to Holy Communion. Delamotte dissuaded him, but a leading settler urged him to do so, and one month later after an unsatis-

82 Il WALKING TO GLORY

factory talk with Sophy, who was pregnant, he wrote her a letter describing ''what I dislike about your past or present behavior." He thought he had written in the most mild and friendly manner, but to Sophy it seemed abrupt and offensive. She miscarried, and her aunt blamed Wesley.

The next time Sophy came to church, he publicly repelled her from the Sacrament. Since he could not assert that she was 'an open and notorious evil liver," he relied on a long-disused rubric that an intending communicant should give prior notice to the minister. Wesley himself had neglected another rubric that the minister should give private warning that he would withhold the Sacrament, so that the offender might stay away and avoid public rebuff.

Whether Sophy deserved to be excluded or not, Wesley had highlighted his misunderstanding of the Christian Gospel. On that August Sunday in Savannah, he publicly, if unconsciously, demonstrated his current belief that Christ's consolations were only for the righteous; the sinner must strive to deserve them.

Sophy's humiliation infuriated her husband. Williamson secured a warrant for Wesley's arrest, claiming

£1,000 damages for defamation, an immense sum in 1737.

Wesley was arraigned before the bailiff and the recorder and was summoned to appear at the next court. Williamson demanded that bail should be set. The baliff refused:

"Mr. Wesley's word is sufficient."

Causton, as chief magistrate, now set about packing a grand jury who could be relied upon, after hearing the presentments, to find a true bill against Wesley, who would then go to trial. Forty-three men, a fifth of the adult males in Savannah, including a Frenchman who knew no English, sat for two days. By the beginning of September, the grand jury had found a true bill of indictment under ten heads. However, twelve of the grand jurors brought to Wesley a minority report which rejected most of the charges against him. They planned to send it to the trustees in London.

In Oglethorpe's absence to England, Causton had civil power. But most of the charges were ecclesiastical, for which he had no jurisdiction. Wesley, though sure of

"LOST, SUNK" Ill 83 this, was willing to stand his trial, yet whenever he tried ie present his case, the court adjourned without hearing im.

The colony was split. One faction abused Wesley; the other abused Causton and the Williamsons. By early November when Colonel William Stephens, a future governor, arrived in Georgia, he found that ''the discord between Mr. Causton and the Parson.

. was carried now to that height as to engage a great part of the town, which was so divided that Mr. Causton and Mr. Wesley drew their great attention and the partisans on both sides did not stick to throw plenty of scandal against their adversaries."

At church Stephens sorrowed "to see so thin an audi-j ence, which proceeded from a grown aversion to he preacher since this public strife sprung up." Wesley preached very acceptably on mutual forgiveness. Stephens heard both sides of the story and brought the protagonists together. He noted their mutual resentment:

Causton was the more vehement, Wesley temperate but "of opinion that no reconciliation was possible."

Wesley's work was in ruins. He decided to lay his case before the trustees in England. On November 22 he pinned up a notice that he would leave the colony on|

December 2. Williamson pinned up another to remind the public of his pending claim for £1,000 damages. He threatened to prosecute "with utmost rigor' any who helped Wesley to escape before trial.

When December 2 came, Wesley sent to ask the court if they designed to stop him. In answer, the recorder, Mr.

Christie, arrived with a "kind of bond," engaging Wesley "under penalty of fifty pounds" to appear when summoned. Wesley retorted that he had sought trial seven or eight times. He refused to give a bond.

The magistrates publicly ordered all constables and sentinels to prevent John Wesley from leaving the colony. He decided to escape. 'Being now only a prisoner at large" in a place where every day would bring fresh accusations of "words I never said and actions I never did, I saw clearly that the hour was come for me to fly for my life."

After evening prayers he slipped out through the night

84 Ill WALKING TO GLORY

on a favorable tide and crossed into South Carolina with a constable, a tithing man, and a barber who also wished to leave the colony. All three, according to Stephens, were of ill repute.

Landing, they made for Port Royal on foot. Their journey that followed seemed a parable of Wesley's life. Hot and thirsty by day, cold and hungry at night, losing the way in swamp and forest, they struggled along a forest path marked by blazes chipped in the bark of the trees.

They came to a fork and "followed through an almost impossible thicket, the briers of which dealt but roughly both with our clothes and skin."

The blazes stopped. They were lost. 'We prayed to God to direct us, and forced our way through the thicket once more, searched out the other blaze, and traced that, till it came to an end too."

a Pi-Tex c oO pee ras Aas

Chapter Ten Strangely Warmed On January 24, 1738 aboard the Samuel, John Wesley was relieved to learn that he was now only 160 leagues from Lands End.

He had sailed from Charleston on Christmas Eve. He was a deserter, for he had left Georgia without permission of the trustees, though he had convinced himself that he was justified in returning to report to them the sad state of the colony. He had jumped his bail, but he reckoned that it should never have been set and that he must reach London before his accusers.

He had failed as a missionary. His future was uncertain. His carefully constructed method of living had collapsed, and when great seas during a "thorough storm" broke over the ship with a sound like the thunder in Georgia, he had found that he could not face death without fear. ae erat His mind was "full of thought." In an attempt to clear it, he began to write: 'I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who will convert me? Who, what is it that will deliver me from this evil heart of unbelief? I have a fair summer religion. I can talk well; nay, and believe myself, while no danger is near. But let death look me in the face, and my spirit is troubled....' On page after page he continued to examine his spiritual poverty in Georgia, " ..

. continually doubting whether I was right or wrong, and never out of perplexities and entanglements."

On Sunday, January 29, they "saw English land once more."" The Samuel ran by the Lizard with a fair wind which veered the next day and held her back. Then it changed again and took her through the Straits of Dover and into the North Sea and a calm, until a strong north

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