Life-Changers
XIX
LIFE-CHANGERS
SUSANNA WESLEY and her spouse had not agreed over many things in their lives, but Samuel had a way of coming round to her point of view later on and with assured dignity, as though, all the time, it had been his own opinion.
Their two sons were to play the same role over this all-important matter of conversion. In spite of Charles Wesley's horror at John for coquetting with such an idea among that first of Oxford
Group teams he was himself to be the first to experience Pentecost.
There was a great argument at the Delamottes' house at Blendon, and Charles Wesley had lost his temper badly and flounced out of the room.
The bone of contention was the suddenness or otherwise of conversion, and although it seems a strange thing to dispute over, the Wesleys could argue over anything and grow very warm in a spate of words. And it really was a matter of importance as the whole of the Holy Club religion of the two brothers had been built up on the opposite theory of conversion.
The inevitability of gradualness had been its gospel, and the safeguards had been forged of prayer, of fasting and good works to secure it.
In the Holy Club the pilgrims were roped together to cut each step of the ascending way and to save one another from falling
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by that rope of self-discipline.
It was an entirely reasonable theory and suitable to an eighteenth-century view of life which called a spade a spade and knew and condoned the primitive savage in man.
But the Moravians taught a religion of unreason.
Their pilgrims, in the slippery paths of youth, threw themselves on God, and in that leap of faith managed to land on their feet.
It was a fiercely personal religion, and it talked of the Lamb a great deal more than it spoke of the unknowable God-head.
Christ undertook the whole of the adventure of life for the pilgrim.
His love and His friendship were so real as to make sin distasteful to the devotee.
With Him religion meant a falling in love.
The world and sin had no more that they could do against one who had found the anchorage of the wounds of Christ. The Guide with the bleeding hands and feet would go on before and scale the mountain of life—there always with His followers.
This view-point was as different from Holy Club doctrine as it could well be, and it made Charles
Wesley very angry.
He must have distrusted those Moravian hymns which Brother John had translated in Georgia, for in them the heresy was complete:
"Now I have found the ground wherein Sure my soul's anchor may remain— The wounds of Jesus, for my sin Before the world's foundation slain; Whose mercy shall unshaken stay, When heaven and earth are fled away."
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Was it just a retreat from reality or a desperate effort to get the better of the sin of the world?
It had the advantage of working where the Holy Club safety apparatus broke down.
That was the point which John Wesley maintained.
Beaten out of all his retreats, he began to work his way obstinately through history and Bible literature to test this theme, "sudden conversion," by facts.
To his amazement he found there was no other sort of conversion as much as named save this dramatic falling-in-love event of the Moravian gospel.
So obstinately he argued with Brother Charles and quite scandalized Mrs. Delamotte and all pious eighteenthcentury opinion.
This would never do when England was looked on, even by France, as the most reasonable country in the world.
It savored of barbarism and of fanatical hotheads who had very rightly been burned at the stake for their very horrid enthusiasm.
Charles Wesley could hear the blaring ram's horn of Dissent in this latest madness of his brother, and feared he set at naught the Sacraments, and yet for all his anger he was the first to experience the reality of this very thing itself—this unreasonable, barbarian, sudden conversion!
Appropriately enough it happened in the month of May in 1738.
Charles Wesley was ill again and stranded in Little Britain near St. Pauls at the house of Mr. Bray, "a poor ignorant mechanic who knows nothing but Christ."
The house was a center for praying saints who, there, in those humble surroundings, were wrapt away from the material world in this strange new ec-
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stasy of the love of Christ. There visions and miracles were the realities of life. The language of heaven was their current coin. And the brethren and the sisters were all praying for the conversion of Charles Wesley. The air was electric and the atmosphere congenial, for he felt himself the center of excitement and the focal point of deep appreciation.
Peter Bohler had brow-beaten him on his sick-bed at Oxford and had produced no result at all, but this atmosphere of sympathetic urgency was much more
| stimulating to a poetic soul. Charles Wesley was not ignorant of that pleasant realization that these humble people considered him a key man in their campaign of salvation.
It was laid on the heart of one sister to speak words to Charles which she had received from God in a vision, but she dreaded the deed and went about sorrowfully clasping the secret to her breast.
It seemed too daring to speak to a priest of the Church of England about his soul.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bray had stabbed open a Bible and read the story of the Sick of the Palsy, and he exhorted
Charles Wesley to trust the faith of his friends if he had none himself, for Christ had healed that other sick man "when He saw their faith."
So lay the stricken Charles thinking and fevered and sore.
So lay Charles, hearing, as sick people will, every sound in the house.
Suddenly he heard a voice, speaking so strangely and pitched in so queer a key, that it sounded as though it might come from below or from above, for no man could say certainly from whence it came.
He asked his friends if Mrs. Mus-
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grave had returned, for likely enough it was she coming in to get the meals, for even saints must be fed. They told him that she was still abroad, and his heart took a wild leap of hope.
What if it were "Christ indeed"?
With hurried excitement Charles Wesley sawed on the bellrope at his bed head.
Surely his nonchalance could go no further than ringing to ascertain if the Lord had come.
It was time for Mrs. Turner, that sister with the hidden message, to declare herself.
It had been she speaking the words, but, so frightened was she, that her voice had quavered and rippled away beyond her control.
She had spoken in a voice, no longer her own, close to Charles Wesley's bedroom door, and this was the prophetic utterance: "In the name of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, arise and believe and thou shalt be healed of all thine infirmities."
Charles Wesley saw something very lovely in that God had thought of him, and sent his messenger to heal him.
It was the very cure he needed—to be loved again, to be appreciated again, to be cared about and watched over.
How he had hated Oglethorpe and his hard manliness! What terribly angular women those viragoes of Georgia had been! Now it was a May morning and the Day of Pentecost, and all was emphatically right with Charles Wesley's world.
He sprang from his sick-bed a changed man.
Feverishly he seized a Bible to confirm the message from Heaven, and the first words his eyes lighted upon were strangely prophetic and spoke language dear to the IQI
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heart of a poet: "He hath put a new song in thy mouth."
It was to be literally fulfilled, for Charles Wesley was to be the sweet singer of the Great Revival.
He would enlarge and electrify that slender little hymnbook which his brother had made by Miss Sophy's side in Georgia. His conversion gave him just enough uplift to float him on the poetic wave and just enough abandon to forget himself.
He had made verse before, as every son of old Sam Wesley must, but he had got little further than the point of being stuffed with other people's poetry and of bursting into quotation at all odd moments.
It is true that beautiful Anne Granville had praised his efforts in the old Stanton days and had pronounced his verses, in true eighteenth-century language, "quite charming." But here was something more than charm.
Here was something elemental that rushed up from the depths and got itself said in words of ecstasy.
He never waited for the emotion to be recollected in tranquillity, but pounded it all out then hot and strong from his heart and stuck the opening chord for the Revival of Religion in England with that rapturous question of his:
"Where shall my wondering soul begin?
How shall I all to heaven aspire?
A slave redeemed from death and sin, A brand plucked from eternal fire, How shall I equal triumphs raise Or sound my great Deliverer's praise?"
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He says that pride had him, almost at the start, grinning and preening himself there amidst his riotous lines of poetry, but for once he was strong enough to give it the knock-out blow and proceed with his ecstasies.
It must have been those words of the burning brand that jerked him back to earth, for it was assuredly not Charles Wesley who was the Brand plucked from the burning.
In his secret heart he must always have wished that he had been indeed that family brand plucked from the burning on that historic night of the Epworth fire. Then, ignominiously he had been carried to safety, in a nursemaid's arms, because he could not yet "go" on his tottering feet.
It had always given John a sort of unfair pre-eminence over his younger brother, so that now it was with a certain sense of satisfaction that Charles cut in before that strange elder brother of his, and in his new enthusiasm appropriated his very birth-right.
But in one moment the world and pre-eminence were well lost again for Charles Wesley in the rapture of the discovery of the love of Christ.
It was a thing to humble even a Wesley in the dust, and it had slung the arrogance of the Holy Club to the gutter:
"Outcasts of men, to you I call, Harlots, and publicans, and thieves!
He spreads His arms to embrace you all; Sinners alone His grace receives:
No need of him the righteous have; He came the lost to seek and save.
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Come, O my guilty brethren, come, Groaning beneath your load of sin!
His bleeding heart shall make you room, His open side shall take you in; He calls you now, invites you home:
Come, O my guilty brethren, come."
It was unreasonable, but it worked.
It worked marvelously above all one could ask or think.
Let a common harlot once believe that and she was safe where'er she walked.
Let the condemned prisoner know that gospel and he could face Tyburn with tears only of joy, for he knew he dropped but into the arms of Love.
Ejaculatory prayer every hour of the day and fasts all the year round could not achieve what the love of Christ wrought in a moment of time. Here at last was the gospel for which the outcasts of men were dying.
Here was color, emotion, life, and victory.
To souls bound fast in the dungeon of Giant Despair, with the shackles of John Calvin upon them, such a gospel of liberation broke all the prison bars.
Flames of hell, eternal damnation, the nightmare of the reprobate, all were conquered in that unconquerable Love of God.
At the heart of old Calvinistic England the warmth of spring thawed away fear. At the center of life and mystery a God smiled.
England turned from craven fear to that lighter burden of glorious love.
Death was swallowed up in victory.
Charles Wesley's hymns taught all fearful souls to go to meet God singing: ''O could I catch one smile from Thee and drop into Eternity."
The far-off
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terrible Jove of the thunderbolt and the fire became Jesus—"'Lover of my soul."
The hymns of Charles Wesley were sung all over.
England. Inevitably the Muse of poetry slipped away from Court and fashion and took up its piping in shepherd's cot and stone-mason's cottage.
That song swept the reason of the eighteenth century in ruin before it and in its place brought in the laughter and the tears of the age of Romanticism.
Old Sam Wesley's jingles could not do it, nor could Hetty's sorrowful strains accomplish that revolution.
But the peculiar quality of the passion of Charles Wesley's verse and the chorus of saved sinners who sang it, in rapture thawed out the very heart of England.
The land was tired of reason and sterility, and thousands of her sons were feeling like Charles Wesley, but his glory was that he could sing their inarticulate desire.
A thousand hearts were hungering for love, and here they found what they longed for in full measure, pressed down and running over.
"Suddenly everyone burst out singing."
It was a joy which broke the heart and sent tears coursing down the cheeks in a strange mingling of emotions.
Love of God— sin of man—but victory through the Blood of the Lamb—must one laugh or cry? The world looked on and wondered.
It saw tears washing the faces of the begrimed miners in the King's Wood, Bristol, and it noted the white channels of those tears and marveled.
Before, such men had been the terror of all sedate citizens and had marched into Bristol murdering and rioting and looting shops for food. Now like so many
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lambs they followed the sweet singer, Charles Wesley, to Holy Communion in Temple Church.
It was as true a miracle as ever Christ worked on the man amid the tombs of Gadara when, clothed and in his right mind, he sat down at Jesus' feet. Now these wild men of the woods were crooning songs of love, and behold and see gentleness as of the little child!
They wept as they sang and looked into the face of Christ on Calvary's Tree:
*© let me kiss Thy bleeding feet, And bathe and wash them with my tears, The story of Thy love repeat In every drooping sinner's ears, That all may hear the quickening sound, Since I, even I, have mercy found."
Charles Wesley insisted upon claiming his old friend William Law as the John the Baptist of the Methodist
Revival of Religion.
But it is safe to say that the author of "'the Serious Call," that voice crying in the wilderness of eighteenth-century England, could never have recognized himself as the forerunner of this more than Corybantic religion.
It partook rather of the color and imagery of those Moravian hymns of love which John Wesley had discovered and Charles
Wesley had appropriated.
But the distinctive quality of the songs of Methodism was due, in the first place, to all such combustible material being forced through the susceptible heart of the youngest son of old Samuel Wesley.