Death Of Susanna
X XI
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THE mother of the Wesleys had lived to see the beginning of the great revival of religion at the hands of her sons.
She had stood on Kennington Common and listened to John as he preached to the laden souls who pressed upon him for salvation.
She had attended the means of grace at his new meeting-house in The Moorfields, and there at the Foundery she had taken up her abode.
It was to be the last caravanseria before she traveled on into the world of light. She had helped to keep the two boys sane in a rush of emotion and Moravian vision-seeking which was calculated to unbalance any Wesley.
She had poured a certain amount of cold water on ecstasies, and had insisted on the solidity and the poise of the ordered means of grace.
In so far she had been loyal to Mother Church and to her husband, but she had nullified all Samuel
Wesley's diatribes against Dissent by one significant piece of advice which she had given her son John.
The shades of all the Annesleys died hard with Susanna Wesley, and to her credit it remains that ever the laypreacher came up to the help of the Lord in the wilderness ways of eighteenth-century England.
She had dealt with John over that matter as she would have handled him in childhood's days at Epworth.
His face was dark and angry as he came posting in to
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the Foundery from an excursion to the west.
He looked on mischief bent because Thomas Maxfield had dared to preach to the people, and who was
Thomas Maxfield but a layman who had been the first-fruits of John's new open-air ministry in Bristol?
Susanna could see in her son's face that it was going to be hard going for the said Thomas Maxfield.
She was accustomed to read her children like open books, so she stood quietly in her son's way and asked him the question of all the mothers of the world:
"What is the matter?"
He answered her roughly:
"Thomas Maxfield has turned preacher, I find." It cannot have been the first time that her sweet reasonableness brought that son of hers back to his senses as she stood and looked at him.
The whole fate of the Evangelical Revival hung on the issue of that encounter in that place where today the unheeding manufacture cigarettes. Quietly the words came, smoothing the anger from the face of the outraged priest of the Church: 'John, you know what my sentiments have been. You cannot suspect me of favoring readily anything of this kind. But take care what you do with respect to that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as ever you are.
Examine what have been the fruits of his preaching and hear him also yourself."
On those uncomfortable benches in the Foundery sat John Wesley, later, listening to his first lay-preacher and hearing again his mother's devastating reasoning: "As much called of God as you." And it was true.
The man had power, such power as to hold
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more than John Wesley spellbound.
The Countess of Huntingdon was amazed that even she could listen to such a one as though she had been turned to stone in the immobility of her astonishment.
Susanna Wesley had been right again, and her son bowed his head to his God and to his mother's sagacity, and answered from his heart, all passion spent:
"It is the Lord!
Let Him do what seemeth Him good!"
All the spirits of Susanna's dissenting ansectors, safely buried just over the way in Bunhill
Fields, must have shouted for joy.
They all had known always that they were as much called of God as the veriest Archbishop of Canterbury for all his noble army of bishops, priests, and deacons.
The victory was again with St. Paul and the Reformation, and Samuel Wesley with all his fine works and his preferment lay beaten and moldering in the grave.
His wife had torpedoed his orthodox indignation at one stroke.
It was almost her last good deed in his vale of tears.
Now John Wesley, like any Peer Gynt, was sitting on her bedside charioting her to heaven.
As always, when most moved, he sang.
He called it a requiem to her parting soul, and his sisters, gathered in that little room, joined in.
It was to be the last time that Susanna's scholars would sing round her as in her
Epworth school.
They would always be children to her, but in reality they were a group of stricken women as they stood singing round the gasping Susanna.
She had said: "As soon as I am released, children, sing a psalm of praise to God."
That was just what life
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had come to mean for the wife of Samuel Wesley, "as soon as I am released." Now she lay looking upwards on her widow's bed with prayer on her lips and thoughts of ultimate release, as often she had lain in those far-off difficult days of child-bearing at Epworth.
But it was not of the husband of her bosom she was dreaming.
That little figure did not rustle up, complete in cassock, to welcome Susanna into the everlasting habitations.
Rather she was thinking of the Man of Sorrows, and her last words were for Him only and spoken in a tone of glad surprise: "My dear Saviour!
Are you come to help me in my extremity at last?"
John Wesley felt her pulse and knew the brave heart had at last done with the struggle.
He looked at her hands, those hands of a mother always remembered, and saw them already dead.
He sat and watched, and through his brain the old words of her great book came echoing: "From three to four the silver cord was loosing and the wheel breaking at the cistern."
Behind him stood that group of sorrow— Emily, Sukey, Hetty, Anne, and Martha.
Life had dealt hardly with the womenfolk of the Rector of Epworth.
Hetty was there broken in body and with a mind now occupied in the poetry of the grave.
She had written her own epitaph with its last fierce expostulation with life: "A broken heart can bleed no more." Emily was there who had summed up her father so aptly with his fine sanguine dreams and his hopeless performance.
She was as stern and unrelenting as any old Puritan, and had put John Wes-
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ley right time and again for all the love she bore him.
She had even ventilated the little room in Aldersgate Street with a cold douche of realism: 'For God's sake tell me how a distressed woman who expects daily to have the very bed taken from under her for rent can consider the state of the Churches in Germany."
She also could look forward to nothing but a grave, and a pauper's grave at that, for after all her sufferings it had been her hard hap to marry "a tradesman without a trade." Here was Anne, too, the baby who had arrived when the bells were ringing for the accession of Queen Anne.
It was forty years ago since the Rector had returned and made up his quarrels with the wife of his bosom and found the new olive branch and christened her Anne. Now she was almost an old woman herself and knew all life could do to a woman married to a drunken husband.
Sukey had feared still worse in her choice of partner, and was married to "'a man, he may be called, that is little inferior to the apostate angels in wickedness, that is not only her plague, but a constant affliction to the family."
And there was Martha, so like John Wesley to look at, and born as he was in that cloister period of Susanna's life. She had that preternatural calm that life's little ironies could never ruffle.
Her spouse adored was half mystic and half libertine.
But like John Wesley she could pass through all unscathed and "breathe in tainted air." Westly Hall was enough to break anyone's heart, but Martha went calmly on her way and saw her whole family safely into the grave ere she laid down her bones in the fields close here to the
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Foundery where now she stood watching her mother's dying struggle.
It must have been she, true to her name, who was making that dish of tea for poor wornout John when the watchers summoned them back to the bedside for the final goodbye.
Life had done its worst for Susanna Wesley, but she could still open her eyes wide in the astonishment of prayer at the very moment of dissolution.
The love of God still held good in face of all the horror of life.
They buried her on Sunday, the Ist of August, 1742, in the Dissenters' graveyard across the lane which led to the City. On her plain tombstone she was allowed to be the daughter of that old Puritan,
Dr. Samuel Annesley, but there was no word to say - she was the relict of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth.
It was not quite the thing to bury his 'wife in unconsecrated ground, but Charles Wesley did his best to make her respectable with his epitaph of the efficacious sacrament:
"The Father then revealed His Son, Him in the broken bread made known."
It is safe to say that Charles Wesley dare not have written that glib poem had his mother been alive.
With superb arrogance he made her mourn a legal night of seventy years in darkness before the light of his own particular brand of religion was vouchsafed to her.
In the sacrament, administered by that philanderer Hall, Susanna Wesley was supposed to have been converted: "She knew and felt her sins for-
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given." Of course it was outrageous, for he was not fit to hold a candle to Susanna, but it was very like
Charles Wesley.
He should have seen that every sin had long since been purged away in the fiery furnace of life with old Samuel Wesley.
Not for Susanna was instant salvation, but rather a whole life of selfabnegation and crucifixion and a growing in grace.
It is true that Charles was not there when his mother died and that after he had taken a leaf out of John's book he did much better with that sacramental hymn of his which begins:
""What are these arrayed in white, Brighter than the noonday sun?
Foremost of the sons of light, Nearest the eternal throne?
These are they that bore the cross, Nobly for their Master stood; Sufferers in His righteous cause, Followers of the dying God."
But first his brother had conducted that last service for her in great anguish of spirit, when a hush fell on the crowd in Bunhill Fields as John Wesley read of the Great White Throne and that awful Judgment when the dead must answer for the deeds done in the body.
Standing by that open grave in the rank grass, Son John surely knew that Susanna had passed the test with flying colors.
Where he was standing, amidst that forest of tombstones of the Puritan saints, he could see the grave of the Pilgrim who had fled from
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the City of Destruction and had staked his soul on the sacrifice of that Man of Sorrows whom he had seen when he came, in his pilgrimage, to the place that was a little ascending.
It is likely that John Bunyan and Susanna Wesley, in the last analysis, had no sacrament to trust in save the eternal Cross which is planted for ever in the very heart of humanity.
But Charles Wesley had always heard the rustle of his own cassock, as his father had done before him, so he really could not help it, and it was left for a more clear-sighted posterity to remove his objectionable epitaph from Bunhill Fields.
It was natural for him to think of himself and his precious views first.
It was typical of the two that when they came back from Georgia Charles should race upstairs to see his mother and even as he ran should think how glad his mother would be to see him, and how the sight of him would do her good: "I went to comfort my mother indisposed in her chamber."
But for John the meeting was enough: "I saw my mother once more."
She had been everything to this son of hers, and now she was dead, and ever afterwards he would have no one to turn to for help and counsel in this rough world.
John Wesley was bereft indeed, for he had consulted her always.
It was she who had to scrutinize the Varanese raptures over Thomas 4 Kempis and sift that lady's views on humility.
It was she who had to give advice on the bringing up of children to the young mother at Stanton and her interested women friends, so that long afterwards the elegant Aspasia
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could almost quote Susanna's very words to her sister when Anne Granville became a mother in her turn:
"IT don't fear your prudence in the management of your children.
Love coupled with fear are the bands which must confine them to what is right. A wrong and over-indulgent conduct of parents to children is the greatest cruelty to them," or as Susanna had said,
"They pass for kind and indulgent whom I call cruel parents."
It was for Susanna that the whole sad tale of Miss Sophy had been so plainly written, and it was his mother who had concluded against a return to Georgia.
When the next blow fell what should he do?
Already on the books at the Foundery a name had been written down.
It was there unnoticed and unobtrusive to the eye when Susanna lay above stairs in her last agony.
It was as little as a man's hand, but it was destined to eclipse all other. stars in the firmament, for the name was the name of Grace Murray.