Down And Out
XVIII
DOWN AND OUT
THE forests of Georgia had nearly strangled the life out of Delamotte's hero. The thorns had torn living flesh and he had fought like a madman to escape, beating up and down in that tangled wilderness with no man to show the way. Now he was on board ship, but no less in a spiritual wilderness and without one glimpse of Sinai.
Wesley lay still in his bunk and cared for nothing more on earth.
He might just as _ well have been in a floating coffin, for he had lost interest in everything, and the very last thing he wanted to see was a human being to whom he must preach.
He did not believe he could ever "speak close" to any of his flock again.
William Law had considered this trip to America as the wildness of some scatterbrain, and he had told
Wesley roundly: "Sir, I perceive you would convert the world.
You must wait God's own good time."
But Susanna's son was not accustomed to sit with folded hands awaiting some far-off Divine event.
His mother's plan had always been to keep the children busy, and her remedy for a broken heart had been "a regular and exact performance of present duty."
She had had literally to work out her own salvation, and had taken the Kingdom of Heaven by force. The Scriptures might say that flesh and blood
DOWN AND OUT could not inherit that Kingdom, but both Susanna Wesley and her son would make a tremendous effort of human virility to climb those heights.
Now all that effort of muscle and sinew had failed, all the love of a human heart had been betrayed, and all the ceaseless pounding of grey matter in the spiral ascent of the Holy Club had but plunged John Wesley farther into the abyss. To add to all his misery he was most lamentably sea-sick.
Now the whole business of life and religion seemed to him stale, flat 'and unprofitable as he lay on board the Samuel and heaved but with the heaving deep.
Never in his ordered little life had he felt anything like this before. That driving, steady mind of his was spinning round in circles. The Methodist was the Methodist no longer, for he had lost his sense of direction.
Every prop had been knocked from under him, and he had now neither pride, rule, nor friendship to gird up the loins of his mind. Three times a mere woman had turned him down, and Brother Samuel had told him he doubted he would make nothing of that province of life being disappointed in one match.
All his assurance was gone.
He was apprehensively nervous of life after all his mother's drillings and wisdom, for he had been running on accumulated capital, and now, left to himself, he was bankrupt.
He must have known when he conducted his last punctilious prayers that night in Savannah, with his eye on the tide and the way into the forest, that he had failed.
The staff of his religion had broken in his hand. The Holy Club was vanquished.
In spite of a soul-shat-
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tering effort it had failed in the rough and tumble of life.
The colonists of Georgia had said it was not suited to the needs of a new colony, and they but spoke the truth, for it was too academic for brute man and brute nature.
After all was said and done it had come out of a college quad and out of a scholar's monkish cell.
Wesley, in his heart of hearts, knew that he too was a failure, and added to that uncomfortable realization was the knowledge that he had been blundering and cruel.
That scene in the church at Savannah ' must have been imprinted on his memory in sinister outline.
There must have stood the beautiful young wife put to shame before a whole congregation and put to shame by himself—to save his own horrid pride.
The thought was unpleasing and it hurt his mind.
It even made him know what sin could be, real sin, not the fancy kind of breaking Church rules and non-observance of the Sabbath Day.
This sin painted hideous pictures of unkindness in the brain and made terrible cleavage with love.
The flames of hell were roaring again in Wesley's ears, for the protection of the Holy Club and the innate goodness of his own heart had entirely broken down.
At the back of all the Wesleys stalked that hard old Calvinism of the Dissenters.
The God of Cromwell would have them in the end.
There was a way to Hell from the very gates of Heaven, and there was no guarantee of safety for an inch of the journey of life.
After all, the humanism of old Sam Wesley was but an acquired taste.
Let the rain descend and
DOWN AND OUT the floods come, and, rushing up from that old Dissenting past, would intrude that fear at the heart with its strangle-hold of death.
All across the Atlantic and up to the Lizard and under Beachy Head a phrase of a poem kept drumming in Wesley's head.
It spoke such haunting words and they kept on having their say and seemed the warp and woof of the stuff of his mind:
"JT have a sin of fear that when I've spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore."
Roaring winds and leaping waves and passengers and ship's company were not real at all compared with that unmasked reality of hell. The words of all the service books seemed jargon only.
Wesley supposed he never again could feel that confidence of the priest with power to administer the mysteries of God. He felt now nothing better than a cunningly devised fable himself, and began to believe that he had given up friends and comfort and prosperity all for the shadow of a shade.
Besides this cheerless philosophy there was the consciousness that he must meet the all too real trustees of Georgia and explain why he had run away as Jonah from Nineveh.
It would take some explaining, and it was bad to think of for one so weak as he was now.
To look back to America broke his heart, but to look forward to England sent that shattered heart down into his boots with fear.
Those roaring flames of hell would preclude the hope of any escape by bare bodkin methods
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or the easier possibility of the castaway in mid-ocean, but it is clear that this voyage of Wesley in the Samuel was the time of his darkest hour.
On that stricken ship, so divertingly named, help came from the most unexpected quarter, but it came along the lines of Susanna Wesley's own salvation in a cheerless world.
That miserable unchin of the seas, the cabin boy, put in an appearance.
He was young, and his miserable little person called aloud for instruction. He was a potential pupil for any school, and he acted on John Wesley like a tonic.
Arising from that melancholy horizontal position he seized on the lad and began to teach him, as though his life hung on it as surely his sanity did. There in the midst of the ocean of doubt, lost in mazes of High Church, Presbyterian, Moravian, and Mystic theology, a lost scrap of humanity was Wesley's salvation.
There in the dusky face before him Wesley read that great patience of the lost children of Ham.
Wesley, with all his pride in ruins, dare speak to such a one for he would listen.
Those old Bible tales could not be bettered for such a scholar, and so over-board went the intricacies of Holy Club and 4 Kempis, and the Word of God was the only possibility in such a situation.
The Bible alone was simple enough for the two strange wayfarers whom fortune had served so ill and thrown together so strangely on the high seas.
So the Dissenting past had its own way with John Wesley and held him like a sheet anchor in storms which were rolling round his soul.
The dusky children of sorrow had helped him before in his flight to
DOWN AND OUT Charleston, for they had let him roast potatoes in their bonfire when he was starving.
'They were to reap a great reward in the breaking of the dawn, for their emancipation was to be at the hands of that little hunted priest who had eaten their humble fare and taught one of the least of their brethren stories of Jesus in a stuffy cabin on the high seas.
A shred of John Wesley's old confidence returned when the cabin boy brought another Negro to hear the Bible tales all of his own accord.
These two Africans were the forerunners of the thousands of Wesley's world parish which would later press upon him for the Word of Life, but this congregation was worth its weight in gold for the sake of the preacher himself.
These two dusky children of sorrow lent him their patience and their love until he could stand on his feet again and face the rest of the ship's company.
The Great Revival of Religion was saved there in the hull of the sailing-ship Samuel as she butted her way across the Atlantic in January days.
Susanna Wesley's favorite verse from George Herbert looked as though it was to be fulfilled literally in those children of a savage slavery who stood by her son in his dark hour:
"Only since God doth often make Of lowly matter for high uses meet, I throw me at His feet; There will I lie until my Maker seek For some mean stuff whereon to show his skill; then is my time."
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But what a contrast it all was to that voyage outward on the Simmonds.
Then the Wesley brothers were strong and determined, then they would convert the world, then they would pursue the sinner to within an inch of his life. Then their quarry was Dr. and Mrs. Hawkins and General Oglethorpe and Mrs.
Welch, but now the constellation of the great twin brethren had set beyond the distant rim of the farthest horizon.
Now even Brother Charles was at a loose end.
On his first return to England, he enjoyed himself in all the glory of the pioneer missionary and had been feted and had hob-nobbed with the aristocracy in quite his father's vein.
Archbishops, bishops, Lord and Lady Oxford, Lady Cox and Count Zinzendorf had all been interested to hear of Georgia and of real Red Indians, and Charles Wesley had been able to shine in their reflected glory and forget Dr. Hawkins and the tempest of the wrath of Oglethorpe.
He had even had the privilege of interviewing the King himself at Hampton Court.
Aspasia and Varanese had both received him kindly for old time's sake, and he had seen his mother and had one dispute at least with his sister-in-law at Tiverton.
He had lost his temper again, it is true, when his brother's honest Journal from Georgia arrived, and he had denounced Brother John as a simpleton for falling into the difficulties which he had himself created by his own folly in the affair of Oglethorpe and that group of viragoes.
He stood fuming inwardly outside the door while the Committee read the words of truthful John, and when he was bade
DOWN AND OUT to speak later he could scarcely summon up voice enough to make the gentlemen hear what he was saying. He tried to regain something of his old confidence by raking together the burnt-out ashes of the fires of the Holy Club, and kept advising everyone to read William Law in season and out of season.
He got some sort of excitement out of preaching on "there be few that be saved" and he made a little girl cry and a young man run mad with his exhortations.
Mrs. Delamotte, thoroughly angry with him and his brother for taking her Charles to Georgia, withstood him to the face, and even William Law himself could not bear with him for a moment.
He might almost have been Oglethorpe and not William Law, the Master of the Oxford Methodists, with the abrupt termination which he put to the interview.
Charles Wesley found himself the wrong side of the door with this remark rapped out in sheer desperation after his plea "that he might at least write to the prophet": "Nothing I can either speak or write will do you any good."
Charles Wesley was in the condition of restlessness and irritability which Susanna had long come to recognize in her husband.
It sprang from the same source of that inner discontent with self and a haunting memory of a past one could not lay by the heels.
People would keep on asking Charles if he was going back to Georgia, and of course he professed vehemently that he was, while all the time his heart misgave him.
At last he took refuge in the inevitable collapse after dashing about the country falling off
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his horse and getting lost and being robbed by a highwayman.
The shadow of Georgia through all these adventures could not be shaken off, and at last the authorities talked as though it were only three weeks away and a shadow no longer.
The return of Brother John with his sober estimate of the difficulties of the situation further stole what little thunder remained to his younger brother and made it abundantly clear that it was time to take to one's bed.
It was at Oxford that Charles Wesley collapsed with the most appalling toothache.
He was even driven to the noxious weed, tobacco, to relieve his misery.
'The consequences were, of course, inevitable that he should experience sorrow upon sorrow, for it made him lamentably sick. A pain in his side made him convinced he must die, and yet he lingered to the morning.
He was able to draw enough attention to himself in the way his father had enjoyed, for John was summoned to his bedside and Sister
Kezzy had to do a hand's turn in the sick-room.
John had had only one day with his mother, but he went most dutifully to attend his dying brother and shoulder once again the difficulties which this mercurial brother of his was always creating.
But there was someone else at that bedside who was not half so sympathetic.
His name was Peter Béhler and he came from Moravia.
It seemed that John Wesley was not even now to be allowed to lick his wounds in secret away from those old burning memories.
The fatal months of March and April were drawing on and here he was back at Oxford again, and at his
DOWN AND OUT old barren game of resolution-making all by himself.
He had sacrificed everything for his religion and now was left without so much as a flutter of consolation.
His religion itself had died on him.
That man of God, Peter Bohler, told him plainly that he was no better than an unbeliever after all his desperate endeavors after righteousness.
If he had thought to save himself from the Puritan's Hell by his good works he might know himself tragically mistaken. Nothing in the world but faith could possibly do him any good—why, his very good deeds needed an atonement in themselves!
So, from the tossing of the main, John Wesley had returned to walk again the streets of Oxford with a mind in tempest and the veriest Prospero in the shape of the Moravian Bohler close at his elbow.
It began to look as though, after all his pious endeavors, he was little better than a lost soul if Prospero were true.
He had the spirit to retort on this Moravian avenger: "If what stands in the Bible is true then am I saved."
But relentlessly Béhler kept him to the point of that command which once horrified Nicodemus in the depths of the night in Palestine—'"Ye must be born again."
The Moravian theme now was the incomprehensible, insane one of instantaneous conversion. Wesley did not believe such things possible or desirable— how can these things be? And yet as he searched his
Bible again he found every conversion there recorded was an instantaneous one.
Beaten out of that retreat, he asked Béhler for tangible evidence of such a miracle in present-day life and was told that the
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Moravian could bring down a whole team of changed lives to convince him. But it was all too unreasonable for honest John, and he betook himself to his own rooms and sat him down to write out the whole history of Miss Sophy and his own heart, for that, at least, was real.
He wrote it all so carefully so that he that runs could read, and his mother especially should not stumble over any detail of her son's history.
He would always go to her in trouble and she would tell him the reasonable solution, even though
Charles had called him away before he could get the story told.
His mother should read the whole tale and judge for herself.
So the manuscript remains transcribed in Oxford on that fatal day of March 12, 1738, which was the first anniversary day of the wedding of Miss Sophy.
In that city he had often communed with his own heart.
In that College of Lincoln he had waited for Aspasia's letters and dreamed in the moonlight.
In Oxford he had drawn that line of finality in his diary after the wedding of Varanese and had asked, "Have I loved women or company more than God?" Now he writes across the page of his story of Miss Sophy the legend, "A brand snatched out of the fire."
It may have been to reassure his mother, it may have been in the nature of a pious hope, but whatever it was the words were eloquent of a fear which had been buried in his mind when the crackling flames of Epworth Rectory had roared about him in childhood's days. In his heart of hearts he was afraid of fire.
It had been drilled into him all his life that he had just escaped from some dreadful
DOWN AND OUT material conflagration which in some inexplicable way was linked with his eternal salvation.
These women and the feelings they aroused in him had the quality of fire and inhibited him from ever being at ease with them.
'They seemed to fight with God for the possession of his soul, and, should he once yield to them, down into hell he must surely go.
So with a heart that loved them and a soul that shunned, John Wesley showed all the marks of his mother's perfect scholar.
It looked as though he would never find peace within himself in the wilderness of this world, although he sought it painfully with tears.
His heart was breaking with those memories which he had remorselessly stirred up in order to write them all down in his account of Miss Sophy, for he had spared himself nothing in the telling. He was always accustomed to see the faces of his friends as he wrote to them, and so must her ghost have haunted his rooms at Lincoln College, so must she have stepped lightly with him across that Lincoln quad and climbed the stairs again to his old refuge of an empty room and a barren note-book.
Could he drive her face away from before his eyes with that flourish of a bitter pen—''a brand snatched out of the fire'?
But for what had he been saved?
This Peter Bohler was telling him that after all the sacrifice and the fear he really was not saved at all. So witnessed the team from London who stood there in Oxford, the first of Oxford groups, to tell John Wesley just how, when and where they had been changed in a twinkling of an eye.
Confuted by these witnesses and driven out
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of all faith in good works, the Brand plucked from the burning was a pitiable case.
He closed their painful confessions in a characteristic way, for he was very lonely and here in this first Oxford group was at least the nucleus of a German choir—would they please sing him one of their own hymns before they left him to Sophy and his bachelor rooms?
That strange little band of Moravians struck up the song of the lover's dead heart and John Wesley was seen to dash the tears from his eyes.
It was now April 23 and the cuckoo's song was already sounding from the Cotswold Hills, but the glory had all departed. John
Wesley sobbed his way through the hymn which he had himself translated and re-fashioned by Miss Sophy's side:
"My soul before Thee prostrate lies, To Thee, her source, my spirit flies; My wants I mourn, my chains I see:
O let Thy presence set me free!
Jesu, vouchsafe my heart and will With Thy meek lowliness to fill; No more her power let Nature boast, But in Thy will may mine be lost.
When my warm'd thoughts I fix on Thee And plunge me in Thy mercy's sea, Then even on me Thy face shall shine, And quicken this dead heart of mine."