Newcastle
XXII
NEWCASTLE
THE House of Stuart had a way of influencing the House of Wesley at unexpected moments.
With its loyalties had been bound up that drama in Epworth Rectory before the birth of John Wesley. The friends of Wesley at Stanton had been followers of the Stuart, and the fall of that Royal House had sent the father of Aspasia into banishment in the delectable Cotswold country.
It is also true that Grace Murray's husband had lost his estates in Scotland from his own
. father's loyalty to the Old Pretender. Now the Young Pretender was marching from Scotland at the head of his loyal men and all unwittingly upset the plans of the Rev. John Wesley, who was engaged in a preaching tour near Epworth.
England was longing for a leader.
She had lavished her store of love on these Stuarts, who time and time again had played her false.
It was all this combustible stuff of love and loyalty that John Wesley's campaign had tapped and liberated in the service of the King of kings.
His brother's hymns were a glorious' safety-valve for this pent-up longing for a leader, and through them all echoed so often the name of Captain.
It was no wonder that the early Methodists were forever in the toils as suspect supporters of these tiresome Stuarts.
The years after 1745 show
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a great outbreak of mob violence against Wesley's followers and their leader himself was always being dubbed a Papist. The priests of the English Church who led the mobs against the Methodists were but taking up the cudgels against interference from abroad which would threaten both Church and State if unchecked. They were the true protestant patriots, and they would save true religion into the bargain if the Methodist with his enthusiasms was pitched into the nearest horse-pond.
So it came about that the Church of old Samuel Wesley drubbed her truest sons ever towards that opposite and hated Camp of Dissent.
Almost every church building was closed against them until John Wesley himself was shut out even from the old Epworth sanctuary, and so came to preach from his father's tombstone in the churchyard there. There is a certain fascination in that scene of John Wesley perched above that little irascible father of his, now held down and rendered speechless by reason of death and the covering gravestone.
It must have been the first time that Son John had succeeded in getting the last word.
Below his feet were Susanna's words of the Trinity in Unity and "the only Saviour of Men" which in her day had been a brave flourish against the Unitarianism of Dissent.
Now here stood her son, driven from the true Church, and yet offering such a general salvation to men through that only Saviour that the old issues were sadly confused.
John Wesley's mind must have been busy with old memories as he rode hot haste for the north. He had a conviction that his king and country needed him,
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but he also had a nearer concern for his own property.
In his great campaign for the salvation of England he had seized on three strategic positions, and there built his fortresses against the enemies of the Lord.
'The buildings were really centers of peace with just a hint of the bungalow in Arcadia and the garden at Stanton.
The Foundery in Moorfields held London for Christ.
The New Room in the Horsefair at Bristol kept the loyalty of the west, and at Newcastle upon Tyne the Orphan House held the north.
It surely is not for nothing that the great little Duke of Wellington sprang from the House of Wesley. The gardens soon became graveyards, but they were always dear to John Wesley.
He could pause in the heat of his great campaign to give directions for the re-hanging of a garden gate.
In addition each house was set up with a cobbled yard and a stable for the horses of the traveling preachers.
There was a good living-room complete with table and benches, and the private rooms opened off this large commonroom and gave hostelry for his rough riders in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven.
'The lavish supply of cupboards always speaks of Susanna Wesley, for she had reigned over his first fortress in London at the Foundery.
Now at Newcastle reigned Grace Murray.
There she nursed the preachers' bodies and broke their hearts.
There she looked after the women of the camp and drove them mad with jealousy.
They complained that she spent too much on her aprons, which was a sure sign that she looked better than any of them in
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whatever she put on. To John Wesley she was like a mother.
She would advise and warn and encourage him in the great campaign.
She would do a good deal of his own work in settling the women's bands and class meetings, and to crown all she was a superb housekeeper.
She gathered up in herself all the qualities he had always loved in women.
She had the ever sought-after neatness of person and the vigor for work which even that lady of leisure Aspasia had evinced when she set a dainty stitch between each elegant sip of tea.
But whereas Aspasia was far removed from her impoverished admirer, Grace Murray was entirely at his service.
She knew how to supply every one of those wants of toilet and home comfort that a mother's heart knows so well by instinct. She could also listen to his sermons and think along with him and know what he was going to say even before it was said.
She was the perfect comrade.
She would lay down her life for John Wesley.
In the riots she would stand by him and quickly see the raised stone or the hated filth which was coming from the angry crowd against her, hero.
He had always loathed getting his clothes dirty since those infant days when Susanna had presided over his regular change of linen.
Bravely the woman would defend him if need be with her own body.
Fearlessly would Grace Murray ride on his poor stumbling horses anyhow and anywhere in the interests of the Kingdom of God which now belonged so peculiarly both to him and to her. For she was among the initiate, made one in the glorious fellowship of salvation.
She took the
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road of life with a clear eye and a ready hand in the most glorious band of pilgrims who ever traversed the moors and fells of England.
That early dawn of Methodism was just as though heaven had come down to earth.
The first ten years of the revival were the golden age, when the whole thing was growing under Wesley's hand and the people were singing those glorious hymns with tears of joy. It was a time of deliverance for the captive who before had lived his life subject to bondage in that awful election fear of Calvin and the flames of Hell.
It was a time of love in an age of barren reason—a love that simply would not be reasoned with, as all true love must ever be.
It was a glorious time of work with fields white unto harvest.
The souls who pressed on John Wesley were fevered and overladen.
They came to him as the physician, and found health in contact with that upright little person with his beautiful hands and that light in his eye. When he preached to them he had a way of stroking back his curls and looking round on them all with so searching a look that time and time again he set their hearts beating like a sledge-hammer in their breasts. He was so sure of it all, and so very sure of his Master, and he was braced with such energy and confidence that they gave him their willing allegiance.
The little man had thrown his halting reasoning overboard, and there were no more resolutions or ejaculatory prayers in the diaries in his saddle-bags as he sallied forth to contest the kingdoms of this world for Christ. And with him went Grace Murray in a
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glorious friendship in which there were no inhibitions.
The early Methodists were free with the freedom with which Christ set them free. Gone were the heartache and the hesitations of the earlier Mays and Aprils of John Wesley's life.
Now in the golden September of 1745 he rode into Newcastle and received a welcome which he records in his Journal with satisfaction: "We came to Newcastle at an acceptable time."
He had arrived at the age of man's chief vigor.
He knew himself to be raising the whole country as Bonny Prince Charlie could never raise it, and everywhere he went people followed him with looks of love and veneration which made him just a little uneasy as not due to him or to any save to God alone.
It is impossible to overestimate the hero worship which attended John Wesley in those glorious days. He had stolen the fire of all the knock-kneed Stuarts, and Grace Murray worshiped with the rest.
In Ireland Aspasia had "new arranged" her shells and then set her mosses in order and later played on the harpsichord because she was so disappointed she could not go to England by reason of these horrid rebels from Scotland.
She also had altered her mind about the noble House of Stuart.
The promotion of her husband to the Deanery of Down had been at other hands, and life was too comfortable to ransack old loyalties.
She was leading an amiable existence with an admiring husband who praised all her hobbies and helped to advance her friends in the Church, and it is clear she would have done the same for the Wesleys had they not been so utterly foolish as to get so
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horribly enthusiastic and to compass sea and land to make proselytes.
She was still collecting sermons, and had just read one on these same Stuart rebels which she pronounced "charming."
Now the lady was somewhat detached from reality, if not from reason, if she could so describe as charming those rabble hordes from Scotland.
Nor was the English army of press gang men of distinct charm which was to rout the hosts of Bonny Prince Charlie.
There was really little charm about that place of slaughter when the stars looked down on Scottish faces "dead on Culloden's field."
Meanwhile her old friend John Wesley, with a greater sense of reality, was dashing out to see if the guns on Newcastle wall missed his orphan house. He had a sort of infectiously gay courage, and was longing to get into the camp to preach to the soldiers of the Captain of their Salvation.
No more languishing in the moonlit quads of Oxford for Aspasia's quondam admirer—this was life, full-blooded and magnificent.
And Grace Murray was a kindred spirit in her superhuman labors in his orphan house.
She had nursed his sick preachers back to life like any Florence Nightingale.
She had stayed up for three weeks at a stretch to get his helpers on the road again—she had fainted and gone on as usual, although he begged her not to "for one night more."
In addition she had run the house for all his ablebodied veterans and had settled the bands and prayed with the sisters and had worked like a Trojan for God and Wesley.
She was so busy she never noticed the
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sisters' gossip or their black looks, but she would have things done and all in order for the great campaign, and if all women should hate her she really did not care.
Varanese was busy advancing her children and her husband, who was constantly in debt, by the kind offices of Aspasia.
Miss Sophy was well married, and in truth had been little better than a flirt.
In Grace Murray John Wesley had met some compounding of English soil which he had never met before in his women friends.
An intense emotional nature was subdued by the background of the north-country discipline of proud poverty.
She was a woman who was not afraid of work.
Her love and her loyalty were queer elemental things and not the elegant and talked-of darlings of Court drawing-room or arbor.
Stalking behind her ever was the grim reality of life —the right and the wrong and the inescapable judgment.
In her strong body there was still a place for fear, but it was not of the physical kind at all, rather a hidden primeval fear of the Gods of the Forests with their totems and their taboos.
She had an almost morbid terror of doing the wrong thing—a haunting fear that forever and forever such wrong action would go on until all those she loved best were brought down in ruin by her hand.
Wedded to the primitive fears were primitive loves so powerful as to rend the veil of the Temple of Clay.
She shared with John Nelson that power of knowing when the Wesleys were near from a strange psychic disturbance within.
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Such was Grace Murray and such the early Methodists who flocked to Wesley's standard and found salvation.
The quality of the religion which he offered them was this emotional, disciplined thing which they could understand.
It was all a matter of passionate love and loyalty, and was the only thing which could really rout that old primeval fear from their hearts.
Hundreds-of them came to Wesley for help, and he read the symptoms of their distress as Uncle Matthew might have done, but the cure he knew lay only with God "who made them for Himself and would not suffer them to rest till they rested in Him."
| The Reformation might have made the world safe for democracy, but it had rendered the ultimate estate of man more precarious.
It had called in question the efficacy of an ordered priesthood to pilot the individual soul to heaven and had taken up the position of Emily Wesley's indignant protest: 'Nor shall I put my conscience under the direction of mortal man as frail as myself." But the shock to the collective mind of this devastating upheaval of viewpoint has never been fully explored.
The fall of the Medieval Church left embedded in the mind of man a mass trauma.
In a once safe world all had now become conjectural.
Who should now select the candidates for entrance to the everlasting habitations?
Who should now know if his sins were forgiven him or no? To camouflage that breach, made by the discrediting of the priest, the presbyter hastened to put the responsibility on God alone:
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"© Thou, who in the heavens dost dwell, Who, as it pleaseth best Thysel', Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell, A' for Thy glory, And no for onie guid or ill They've done afore Thee!"
The crowds which flocked to hear Wesley were weary and heavy-laden with seeking some sane way through the inexorable labyrinth of the Mind of God.
<A jaded, beaten humanity went out after a man so sure and so strong in every inch of his virile person.
He took away that terrible feeling of inferiority, for he lifted the responsibility from the shoulders of God and gave it back fearlessly to the human heart.
With a glad sense of surprise and thanksgiving Englishmen received back again the gift of their own free will.
He told them plainly that now, in this acceptable hour, they were free to choose whether they would have life or death. They needed no priest nor cast-iron election, but only the freewill offering of a loving heart.
So came the Methodist doctrine of assurance from the conviction that those sins that were many were all forgiven in a mutual covenant of love.
It was a gospel to bind the pilgrim so fast to his Guide that he could never be swept to perdition unless he himself cut the rope.
The ghosts of Presbyter and Old Priest grew wan and presently faded away amid the tears, the laughter and the song of a Wesley field-day:
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_ "O how shall I the goodness tell, Father, that Thou to me hast showed?
That I, a child of wrath and hell, I should be called a child of God, Should know, should feel my sins forgiven,
Blest with this antepast of heaven!"