Desperate Remedies
XIV
DESPERATE REMEDIES
Ir General Oglethorpe had forgiven Charles Wesley there was no reason why he should add mortification to his magnanimity by retaining the thorn in the flesh.
He made up an excuse to save the priest's precious dignity, and promptly returned him to England.
Before the soldier parted from his little tormenter he gave him one piece of sound advice.
It had a sting in the tail, perhaps, for Oglethorpe had suffered much while Charles Wesley worked out his own salvation.
This was his parting word to the High Church priest: "On many accounts I should recommend to you marriage rather than celibacy.
You are of a social temper and would find in a married state the difficulties of working out your salvation exceedingly lessened and your helps as much increased."
It was a soldier's remedy, and would later be recommended to Brother John also for a safe prescription for keeping him out of mischief.
For all his trouble the storm which Charles Wesley had raised broke on his brother's head, and Oglethorpe found his help and advice once more needed to extricate this second Wesley from serious complications.
On one unlucky day John Wesley called upon Dr.
Hawkins to collect a preparation of the bark for loss of voice.
The nervous exaction of rescuing Charles
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Wesley from the toils had taken its toll of his brother, but worse was yet in store.
Mrs. Hawkins rose in her wrath against her one-time friend.
She threatened him that day with a pistol and a pair of scissors, and made a fierce attempt to cut off his adorable curls.
She towered above him and held the poor little priest down on her bed and tore his cassock with her teeth.
The Holy Club was no match for that tempest of feminine jealousy and hatred.
The neighbors and a sergeant who ran in to the rescue must have wondered to find Wesley in so compromising a situation, but they could do little to extricate him from that bed of fury.
They held the woman's arms, with their grasped wealth of pistol and scissors, but even so she managed to meet her teeth in Wesley's arm.
In fact, he was only saved by the finesse of Dr. Hawkins, who finally dashed in on a stricken field and whisked his wife off her feet with an admirable low tackle.
Oglethorpe again had to hear the whole story and summon all to his tent of justice and deal out a severe reprimand.
How was he ever to establish England's Colony safely here on the quicksands of neurotic women and prying priests?
The whole plan would be wrecked by these Wesleys and their incomprehensible mischief-making.
John Wesley himself was in danger of inheriting all the odium which had attached to his brother
Charles in Georgia.
He prayed that his eyes might be opened, but went on blindly none the less on his thorny path of soul saving.
People began to hate
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him and believe that he let out the secrets which he had gleaned from his High Church Confessional methods.
One honest soul told him roundly that he had no right to pry into other people's business nag order to set them together by the ears." John Wesley was astonished.
Was he not trying to save the people?
What motive could he have but that?
To which his candid friend replied: "A pure delight in doing mischief.
I believe in the morning when you say your prayers you resolve against it, but by the time you have been abroad two hours all your resolutions are vanished and you can't be easy until you're at is again."
It was a severe indictment of the methods of the Holy Club. The most rigorous observance of Prime, Matins, Lauds, Sext and Evensong seemed to accomplish nothing in a distracted world.
Now John Wesley had both charm and a doctor's mastery of a situation; he was also an indefatigable worker, and yet he was not succeeding at all. It was true that Brother Charles had fouled the running for him with these fearful saints of Frederica, but with all his desires to straighten out tangles he had himself failed most lamentably.
The truth was that he had nothing really to offer to sinners in an earthly paradise.
'The Gospel tarried while John Wesley worked himself into a fever with rules and rites and confessions and sacraments.
Brother Charles was prepared to despair of God rather than confess that he himself could be wrong, but John Wesley was miserable and did not dare to think that the "Christian Sacrifice" could have failed.
He would go on baptizing babies
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by triune immersion as though his life hung on it.
He would go on dispensing the mysteries of God to his parishioners with an equally iron hand.
Susanna's son never gave up anything easily.
Now he had come to Georgia to save his own soul and incidentally the souls of the colonists, and saved they should all be even if he were to die in the attempt.
General Oglethorpe considered that John Wesley with all his whimsies driven from his brain might be more useful to him in life than in death.
His plan was a simple one and consisted in throwing a beautiful young girl right at Wesley's head.
She was the niece of Causton,. the magistrate at Savannah, and was living with her uncle and aunt.
The plan was simple, as became a soldier, but Oglethorpe and Miss Sophy's relatives believed it to be fool-proof.
The only thing they had not taken into account was the training of Susanna Wesley. Far across the seas from Epworth's apron-strings the controls still held good.
Miss Sophy Hopkey would make John Wesley suffer and teach him much, but she would find it very difficult to marry him.
Susanna had seen to that with her talk of fire and burning brands, and her - warnings against the Delilahs of life. But her initiation into a hell of suffering was also to fall into its place in the plan of salvation.
Of all the strange servants of God and the instruments of the revival of His worship, surely none was ever more strange than Miss Sophy Hopkey of Georgia.
She was a different proposition from any that had posed John Wesley before.
He had loved
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the vital Sally Kirkham, with her quick wit and her mature advice, and he still sat at her feet in a staid friendship.
He had lost his heart to Aspasia, that experienced widow, but here was virginal beauty all ready for the asking.
That he was impressed with her almost at their first meeting is evident.
The Sunday when he gave her the Holy Communion is marked in the diary with a pensive "which of them shall endure to the end?" and a world of sad memories. He wrote to both Varanese and Aspasia on that very day. There was a flying to 4 Kempis again and a sojourn in his garden in pensive thought.
Miss Sophy was only eighteen years old.
She might be suspected of not having great intelligence, but she had other graces to commend her to John Wesley.
She seems to have spent much of her time in just looking at him.
She was very quiet and very obedient and she had a soft yieldingness which was quite devastating.
She was a good pupil, or rather a good listener, for there remain no examination results to show how much Miss Sophy really absorbed of all that Wesley taught her.
She had a happy knack of being interested in all that he was interested in, be it singing or gardens or the French language. He could superimpose upon her the atmosphere of the Cotswold Hills in his little bungalow in Savannah and find his empty heart beating again to the old well-known throb of friendship.
So far from any obstacle being Ehensan in his way, he was to receive all the help, and more, that he needed from the Causton relatives.
No designing
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Mamma of Jane Austen's circle could have done more, and yet, time after time, a strange inhibition seemed to descend upon Wesley when just on the point of declaring his love.
The plotters arranged the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity, and yet Susanna's training held fast.
He was gloriously dense when Causton actually threw Miss Sophy at his very feet with his explosive: "The girl will never be easy till she is married.
I give her up to you.
Do what you will with her.
Take her into your own hands.
Promise her what you will.
I will make it good."
All John Wesley did was to take her into his school, which he ran strictly on his mother's lines, and after four months of daily converse he once touched her hand.
General Oglethorpe fared no better with his impersonation of Providence and the designing parent.
He commanded Wesley to take Miss Sophy in his own boat all the way from Frederica to Savannah, and must have congratulated himself upon _ his worldly wisdom.
It would be one glorious hike by sea and island streams in an earthly paradise of indescribable beauty. Who was proof against such blandishments?
John Wesley did feel then that he stood in jeopardy, but he hoped that his desire to live single might be a sufficient protection.
But for all that he found himself saying things that he would not have done if he had not been so carried away with the beauty of it all. The boats went lazily forward or tied up to fascinating little islands.
The company walked and bathed and camped out by day and night.
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One lovely day John Wesley talked of holiness with Miss Sophy by a little stream of clear water in a grove of overarching trees.
One never-to-be-forgotten night they lay awake by their camp fire and talked of life. The flames danced and their eyes met across the blaze as they lay under their scout tent in a privacy of surrounding darkness.
It was on that night that words sprang to Wesley's lips unrehearsed by reason.
They were words which later demanded prayers every hour to reduce the possibility of such a thing happening again, for he notes in his diary that he now began to be very much afraid of this woman.
That beautiful voice which was presently to woo souls from the prisonhouse must have sounded strangely compelling that night by the camp fire, for the words in the darkness were these: 'Miss Sophy, I should think myself happy if I was to spend my life with you." Was this then to be the end of Susanna
Wesley's travail?
Was this to be the destiny of the Brand plucked from the burning?
To live all his strenuous, serious, palpitating life by the side of this chit of a child in the backwoods of America?
The girl burst into tears and Wesley felt his way to safer ground, to end this unpremeditated declaration, innocuously enough, in a Psalm.
Perhaps, after all, it was the very camp fire that saved Wesley that night. Before his eyes were spluttering logs.
Leaping flames were being tossed into the night by burning brands.
Like Isaac, it had been Miss Sophy herself who had helped him to collect the wood for her own sacrifice.
Something arrested the
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young man, and it is true to say that when Wesley thought over this very incident long afterwards, the words which sprang instinctively to his mind were those of the Brand plucked from the burning. For all Miss Sophy's cool self-possession and quiet, meek demeanor, she made Wesley think of fire and caused him a devastating fear round his heart.
That sliding into a Psalm, too, was altogether typical of his mother and her methods of defense.
So had she gloried in them.
So had she taught these very songs to her little scholars in Epworth nursery.
So had the persecuted Puritans sung them amid the flames.
There was nothing better calculated to pluck Wesley to safety than that mingling in song of the woman's voice with his own manly tones.
He reached out a hand to mother and sisters in the darkness and the danger was fled away.
General Oglethorpe knew what he was about when he so tempted John Wesley.
A home was particularly dear to the little man, and there was nothing better calculated to collapse the Holy Club than matrimony.
Wesley knew himself that the two were incompatible, and so was never tired of declaring his design "'to live single." He had come to America to save his soul, and who was Miss Sophy to wreck such an undertaking?
But it had been a very near thing that night and he was really frightened.
It was the world of the eighteenth century and the world of primeval beauty in Georgia, but Susanna Wesley had once reigned on the mud-flats of Axholme and her spirit walked abroad that night for her son's protec-
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tion.
General Oglethorpe, for all his dashing manhood and his training in the arts of eighteenthcentury intrigue, was no match for that much-tried woman.
He had been completely outmaneuvered and his desperate remedy for Susanna's son had failed.
He was to find that hundreds of miles of estranging sea were impotent to quench the roaring flames of Epworth Rectory when ingeniously fanned by the hands of Susanna Wesley.