Alexander Murray
XXIII
ALEXANDER MURRAY
At the time of John Wesley's joyous friendship with Miss Sophy, this woman, Grace Murray, had been already married.
If ever there was a love match hers was one.
Her husband, Alexander Murray, was a fine, upstanding ship's captain when he took Grace to be his lawful wedded wife. He was troubled with no inhibitions nor hampered by ejaculatory prayer in his love-making.
It was a swift, passionate mating.
In four days he was at sea again, but the young couple had lived every moment of that brief union, and when Alexander sailed away he left a woman utterly hisown.
Grace Murray could think of nothing but her husband.
Before her eyes she saw his dear face and in her ears sounded all the wonderful words he had said to her.
She believed she must die for love and desire of him.
This cruel separation seemed to devastate both her body and mind and became so fierce an obsession with her that she grieved over his absence both by night and by day.
The little babe who should have been hers was swept away all prematurely, in this flood of inordinate grief, but left Grace unhampered to rush to London to meet her husband when his ship came again to port. There followed four months of bliss, with deeper satisfaction and less agony than in that whirling four days
ALEXANDER MURRAY
of honeymoon.
Life was now full and complete.
It was all Alexander Murray and there was no room or need for God.
Grace was left with child again, but her husband was home from the stormy seas ere she embarked on her own perilous adventure of childbirth.
In her pain that old fear took shape again.
What if she should die?
It was a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, and yet with that great ship's captain beside her it was not too difficult to believe in a God who could save as well as damn.
It was perhaps only half a thought among those birth pangs, yet she believed it a kind of trust in God.
She was no sooner on her feet than her husband had her heart again and "banish'd all other thoughts."
The next year took her to Portsmouth for the bliss of reunion and its packed pleasures.
She felt a little sobered again when she saw her landlady go so regularly to Church and a little fearful that, after all, her sins might find her out, but when she wanted to listen to a strange man preaching on Kennington Common her husband hurried her away.
Why listen to that crazy Whitefield when there remained but a month of leave and a desolation of loneliness afterwards that would stretch all round the globe and back again before the husband of her love came home?
He went, and her heart was broken, but this time she had the child of his love to cheer her days. And then a terrible thing happened.
The child born of that passionate love died, just as though it had been
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scorched in some flame prepared for it from the foundation of the world.
They laid the little scrap of humanity on the table, and Grace stood and looked at her handiwork and the vengeance of God. Of course she had forgotten the God of terrors, for she had been so safe in her husband's strong arms.
Now she was doubly alone, and the fear of death rose on her even as she gazed on that still baby face, and she was overwhelmed.
Somehow, for her sin that flower had been blasted.
For her hot bliss her child's soul was forfeit.
Down into hell it must go, tortured and twisting in agony, and for a mother's heart that was damnation.
Of course she had not cared about God, but He was real, after all, and had taken one step out from that tan-" gled unintelligible background of His forest home to strike Alexander's child out of her arms.
She had always known something would go wrong if she did the wrong thing, and it could not be right to live as she had lived when her husband came home from sea, for "the Lord thy God is a jealous God."
There was no end to this misery, and to a woman like Grace Murray there was no hope at all.
She paced that bedroom of burning memories in despair.
Tears were her portion night and day, and grief filled the room up of her absent child.
She would steal out to the churchyard and read through her tears those hopeless, glib epitaphs, and then turn to her baby's grave and weep again in abject sorrow.
It was not only just the death of the child, it was that awful
ALEXANDER MURRAY
load on her conscience, that terrible thought that the sin of the world lay at her own door.
Her sister could do nothing with her, but tried to distract her thoughts by taking her to a dance, which at one time was a form of entertainment in which she delighted.
The experiment was not a success, for the wretched woman's knees smote so together that there was no dance step possible, and she felt she loathed the whole petty round of pleasure. A woman's soul in agony had no use for the light fantastic toe.
Another friend had a bright idea, and told Grace of the preaching in Moorfields and commended this as a distraction.
Grace lay awake all night, and at four o'clock stumbled out into the September morning to find her way as best she could to Moorfields.
She joined a woman who was going there, and together they were lost in the stream of people hastening to the preaching.
Some sitting, some standing, some in little knots of fellowship, the people waited for the bread of life. Many had felt no need for the meat that perisheth, many had not slept for nights, many had specters of the mind which mocked the brightness of the morning and the sure sanity of the daily round.
Some, like John Nelson, had traveled all over England seeking peace and finding none, and were standing now longing for some job or some leadership which should spell salvation to their souls.
The crowds of eighteenth-century England seemed to suffer from a species of our ""Twentieth-century
Blues," but without the distraction of swift motor traffic to give them at least the illusion that they were
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traveling somewhere.
John Wesley had to deal, as the physician, with morbid souls, with terrified hearts scared out of all their wits by the Puritan legacy of hell fire, with people really driven desperate from sins committed and unpardonable, and also with the hopeless sufferers from sheer boredom; 'troubled with what they call lowness of spirits. They wanted something they knew not what; and were therefore heavy, uneasy and dissatisfied with everything."
Grace Murray's case was more desperate than these, for the thing was all over with her, and well she knew there could be no second chance.
The baby was dead and she was damned, and that was that.
And yet, in that early morning near the graves of the old Dissenters she heard a beautiful voice speaking wonderful words: "Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God." A little man had spoken it, standing there like a messenger of the Gods.
Alert, confident, challenging, he looked round on the great crowd and held all eyes.
Hearts beat like sledge-hammers, and through Grace darted pains such as she had only known before as pains of birth.
She cried aloud: "Alas!
What shall I do?
How shall I be born again?"
In her mind, obsessed with thoughts of birth and death, the words turned and twisted until down on the ground she sank in one tempest of weeping.
Swift as lightning came the challenge: "Has anyone here a desire to be saved?" And Grace answered in her heart that it was salvation for which she was dying.
But where could she find it?
To whom
ALEXANDER MURRAY
should she go? And again a hand of help was held out by that confident, glorious little man who was preaching.
He seemed to invite all trembling souls into a great partnership in his own strength and confidence: "My soul for yours if only you continue lying at the feet of Jesus."
Grace sobbed on in a tremendous outpouring of hope and fear and desire, and soon a woman in the crowd stepped close to her.
What ailed her?
Grace could not tell, whether life or death, but the Methodist knew those symptoms well and whispered low in her ear: "The hammer of God's love is breaking your heart."
Love then was the secret.
Grace was a connoisseur in love, but she had never dared to apply her knowledge to the God of Wrath and Judgment. Now the Almighty had slipped off His throne and had deigned to meet her on her own level of understanding.
Here were nail-pierced hands held out to take all the hideous sin of the world into their own safekeeping.
Grace was free to make a new start in love, and she knew such a God would never deal unmercifully with her little lost baby either.
This, then, was salvation, and when the Methodists sang with that queer light in their eyes and the quiet tears of joy running down their cheeks she knew what it all meant:
"Father, Thine everlasting grace Our scanty thought surpasses far; Thy heart still melts with tenderness, Thy arms of love still open are Returning sinners to receive, That mercy they may taste and live."
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It was just the language that a woman like Grace Murray could understand.
'Those singing crowds somehow picked up a tone of Georgian forest and arcadian bungalow, a sweet tenderness of earthly loss and yet heavenly gain, and withal they sang of a God out of the primeval forest with a burning heart of love. | That morning John Wesley stepped into Grace
Murray's life and laid the fate of his great Revival at her feet.
A cabin boy had saved it before, but now it was beset by more potent danger. How was a woman's heart to cope with such responsibility?
Alexander Murray returned from the seas to learn that his beautiful wife had joined the Methodists.
He smiled, for well he knew his Grace.
A great ship's captain of a man, he had handled worse things than that in his time.
Only let darkness fall and she would be his again as she had always been.
But the powers of darkness this time had gambled too confidently on poor weak human nature.
Alexander Murray was about to meet a rival who left him standing, for he had no sort of a chance against the Love of God.
He could ride out storms at sea and navigate gusts of passion, but the winds of God were beyond his manipulation.
So he stormed and threatened and said he would put her in a madhouse unless she left these pestilential Methodists, and there she calmly stood and faced it out although he had said:
"If you are resolved to go on thus I will leave you:
I will go as far as ships can sail."
Surely the memory of his former absence on salt estranging sea would
ALEXANDER MURRAY
be too much for a mere Methodist, but he could hardly believe his ears when she answered him: "I cannot help it.
I could lay down my life for you, but I cannot destroy my soul.
If you are resolved to go, you must go; I give you up to God."
There was nothing now left for Alexander Murray but to make shift to share his beautiful wife with this rival—God.
'The report went that he had come by a conversion, but well he knew the bitterness of his own heart.
It was certainly true that his life was changed, but also it was still more evident that there had passed away a glory from this earth.
The bosom of converting Grace was not quite all that the ship's captain could have desired. He loved her still fiercely all the time that he knew she was ruined.
He loved her so that he would not keep her on his boat at Deptford because she did not like the sailors swearing, and it had come to that between them, for in the old days, if she could only be in his arms, she had cared about nothing else. Now all was changed.
When they said goodbye he wept over her and could not part, following her and then turning back towards his boat.
But it was more than the parting with Grace that broke him down.
His were surely tears on the grave of a beautiful dream which had vanished forever.
Alexander Murray was lost overboard on his very next voyage, for why should he return?
It was only in dreams now that her husband troubled Grace Murray.
She was in the May morn of the life of Christ and walked on air.
She was the finest recruit that the Methodists had had for a long
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time, and was working for them night and day.
That night when her husband was drowned she had a strange dream.
A great weight was on her feet which might have been the cat, and she tried to thrust it away, but to her horror it unrolled itself until it lay by her side the whole length of a man.
Now she felt no fear, but an awe, because she dreamed she was praying all the time and knew herself "in ye hands of God."
Which was a parable and bespoke the doom of Alexander Murray almost as a wish fulfilment, for there really was no room for him since the Methodists had sung of those other Arms of love:
""When I waked I was convinced my husband was dead.
But I was so filled with God that at this time nothing could disturb or interrupt my happiness in Him."
Significantly she adds the glad realization of the nearness of God: "I felt ye everlasting Arms were round me."