Susanna Wesley
SUSANNA WESLEY But there was an uphill road to be negotiated ere the Rector was laid in that narrow and peaceful bed.
Susanna Wesley was to have nineteen children in twenty years of married life and to undertake the charges of battle always with an empty war chest.
Her husband was never out of debt and the family often lacked the bare necessities of life.
In this bleak contest the mother must yet keep an eye on the souls as well as the bodies of her numerous offspring.
She was not satisfied with the mere formation of flesh and bone and sinew, but she travailed again in birth for the souls of her children.
It was before the advent of John Wesley that she realized that unless she made such an effort she must be overwhelmed.
If she were to keep any of that treasure which had come to her concealed in the Lordship of Christ she must bid farewell to the world.
She seems to have made that discovery, as she frankly tells son John, "hen I was with child of you."
It was then that she realized that in this devastating spate of children she must yet achieve the whole armor of the ascetic.
She had certainly nothing of help to expect from her poetical husband, for a man no longer was as an hiding-place from the tempest.
The Rock of Ages alone remained beautiful in its very austerity, and she confessed quite simply, "I have long since chosen
Him as my only good."
It had not been so desperate at the beginning.
The life at South Ormsby with the little church on the hill and the humble parsonage had had elements of idealism.
Samuel Wesley could still write poetry
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to his wife then and the family was still manageable.
But in the background already loomed the shadow of debt, for, while Samuel Wesley hugged the precious thought to himself that he was a second
Milton, the demand notes flowed unchecked.
The anxiety was beginning to tell when Mary was born in a poor crippled body, but at the lowest there was always hope alike for Mr. Micawber and for the Rector of South Ormsby.
He had been lost to the world in his poem of the Life of Christ, but had so far emerged as to have the good sense to dedicate his work to Queen Mary of Orange.
In consequence the living of Epworth was bestowed upon the poor man in recognition of his hardihood in scaling Parnassus with such a theme.
So came Hetty Wesley into the world on the crest of poetry and success and on the heels of poor sister Mary. Now Epworth was a good living and the fortune of the Wesley family seemed established until the awful truth dawned that it was poorer than it had ever been before. A whole series of misfortunes dogged the steps of the poetical Rector of Epworth, for his barns fell, his harvests failed and his cows were slashed by night by some hidden hand.
But the losses the Rector felt most keenly were those consequent on "child bearing."
He always spoke in a bewildered way about these frequent events, and he considered them as acts of God along with the falling of his barns.
There was really no stemming the tide with this drain on his resources of "'one child at least per annum."
So he tells the Archbishop of York in a series of letters
SUSANNA WESLEY which, for all their flourishes, have the well-known technique of the beggar.
The strain of the thing was wearing the poor man out, and he was a perfect hero to be able to flourish at all with this: "I have had but three children born since I came hither about three years since but another coming."
Susanna appears in the picture as simply going out into the highways and hedges and compelling them to come in.
The much tried Rector of Epworth could not be expected to cope with such conduct: "Last night my wife brought me a few children.
There are but two yet, a boy and a girl, and I think they are all at present: we have had four in two years and a day."
The day before these twins were born there was about six shillings in the house.
Susanna had taken her suffering spouse aside and made him club his resources with her own to buy coals.
It is surely Susanna's careful reckoning of that two years and a day, for time and sense were clearly all no more to her husband.
The year of the arrival of these second twins was not out before Susanna was with child again, and the time for open rebellion had clearly come.
The revolt was signalled in the Epworth parlor, and the moment chosen was the time of meeting at the family altar.
Susanna quite definitely refused to say ""Amen" to her husband's pious prayer for King William IJ.
It is probable that any monarch which Samuel Wesley chose would have been unpopular with Mrs. Samuel just then, but the Stuarts were her choice and she would stand or fall by them.
Never had the battered banner of that
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forlorn clan from Scotland a stranger camp follower than the mother of all the Wesleys.
The Rector waited for the dutiful response, but there was none that answered.
He got up from his knees and lost his temper.
He was just over five feet in height and his anger nearly burst his little body, but he swore he would have no rival in his house, and he thundered his ultimatum of "Two kings—two beds."
But Susanna waited, strangely unmoved.
Her husband turned on his heel, and throwing some few belongings into his saddle-bags took horse for London.
He was perhaps glad to get away from those steady eyes of Susanna, and in any case he knew he was born for higher things than "Epworth steeple." Was he not the friend of Pope and Swift?
Had he not written a poem to Dryden to say he would not like to be in that poet's shoes at the Judgment Day?
Were not Dukes and Achbishops proud to have Sam Wesley for their protégé, and was he not equally known and respected by Royalty itself?
And yet he could not quite keep up the pose of outraged lord and master.
Perhaps he could not leave Susanna alone for her dark hour, for he returned to Epworth for her bringing to bed with Anne.
In the strange ramifications of history the accession of Stuart Anne to the throne very neatly saved the situation not only for England but for the exiled Rector of Epworth.
The bells of the Coronation of 1702 rang Samuel Wesley back to his duties and to his wife's long-suffering and forgiving bosom, and the child of the reconciliation was a little boy called'
SUSANNA WESLEY John Benjamin—the Brand plucked from the burning.
His mother made her resolutions and forsook the world.
The glorious method and routine of the cloister should yet save her soul and the souls of her children. Waves and storms might go over her head, but she had found the way of peace, for from henceforth she was resolved to be in the world but not of it.
'The quiver was not yet full in spite of that tactful hint to the Almighty in the second name of the babe of reconciliation.
After all it was not a wholehearted effort of faith as Benjamin was only tacked on, as a gesture of pious hope, to this baby alone, for all the other Wesley children had but one honest name apiece.
And in any case the world could not be saved without Charles Wesley, who was not to make his appearance until the eighteenth on the list, and so vindicate the Lord's partiality for large families.
But Mrs. Wesley had now got the Rev. Samuel at last into proper perspective.
His five feet of manhood no longer filled her horizon, but he became no more to her than the hair shirt of her cloister.
She passed through all subsequent happenings not much above a wet-shod.
If she could not control this devastating urge of life she could at least reign as queen in her own kingdom.
So, almost gaily, she betook herself to her nursery of scholars, for here she could reign, absolutely, in her own right.
III METHOD Tue little Wesleys might be as poor as tinkers but they were never vulgar.
From their earliest days their mother taught them to cry quietly and never to grasp after their food.
Before they could well speak or go they were taught to ask God's blessing by signs upon the mean repasts served to them in Epworth Rectory.
They changed their linen regularly and went into their queer coffined cradle at stated times to remain there until the inevitable hour of resurrection.
As Jehovah was to the Children of Israel so was Susanna to the little Wesleys.
But she, unlike the great I Am, would not have borne with their manners in the wilderness for five minutes let alone forty years.
The little Wesleys were obliged to eat everything put before them, and their mother believed that they would have taken poison without question should she have demanded that Socratic sacrifice of them.
If they ate between meals they were "most certainly beat."
They were never allowed to run into the kitchen to procure unlawful provender, and were not allowed to ask a servant to do them any service without prefixing to the lisped request the sentence, "Pray John or Mary will you do such a thing."
Even among themselves the curt Christian
METHOD name must not be used.
Brother John must always ask Sister Hetty for what he wanted and, thus impeded, carry on heated nursery discussion. There was to be no loophole for the unbalanced uprush of passion or desire, for the first and most important matter in the curriculum of Susanna Wesley was to break the child's will: "I insist upon conquering the will of children betimes because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education without which both precept and example will be ineffectual.
But when this is thoroughly done then a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of its parents, till its own understanding comes to maturity, and the principles of religion have taken root in the mind."
It is abundantly clear that each little Wesley was a potential Methodist when at the age of five their real education began.
What of the joys of being five years old?
Susanna Wesley was stranger to the modern lyric of When We Were Very Young or even Now We Are Six.
In Epworth Rectory life was real, life was earnest.
As the birthday morning dawned Susanna put herself in fighting trim and she really did enjoy that day.
The decks were cleared for action, and the little scholar and his mother were shut in together in a room no one might enter until the child had his letters by heart.
Susanna did not mind repeating a thing twenty times over if, after that, the infant retained the information.
She also said that it was surprising how much a child could learn under these conditions
'given ordinary health.
But then there was no dis-
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charge in the war, and to run into the garden was a thing not even named amongst Christians. There was much Bible and Prayer Book instruction, which was carried out by each child taking a younger one aside for a quiet time each day and so foreshadowing the system of the pupil-teacher.
In addition Susanna interviewed them all on different evenings of the week for intensive spiritual culture.
Jacky never forgot his own Thursday evening.
In years to come he found it the most appropriate night in which to write letters to his women friends.
Under the protecting memory of his mother it felt a more reasonable and safe proceeding than on any other night of the week. He would never wholeheartedly play with fire because Susanna had seen to all that in her methodical training of the sons of Samuel Wesley.
When the time came for the boys to leave the shelter of home Susanna Wesley pursued them with her earnest letters.
To Samuel Junior there are wise words on lifting the elbow, and to John, in a brave new world of Beggar's Opera and glorious women, a timely admonition: "Your arguments against horseraces do certainly conclude against masquerades, balls, plays, operas and all such light and vain diversions, which, whether the gay people of the world will own it or no, do strongly confirm and strengthen the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life; all which we must renounce or renounce our God and hope of eternal salvation."
He had brought the rebuke about his ears because he wanted to know what his mother thought of a poser about Sunday
METHOD concerts which one of his lady friends had put to him from the gay Court life of eighteenth-century
London, but his mother improved the shining hour also with a shrewd stroke about these very sirens:
"I am verily persuaded that the reason why so many seek to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven but are not able is there is some Delilah, some one beloved vice, they will not part with; hoping that by a strict observance of their duty in other things that particular fault will be dispensed with. But alas! They miserably deceive themselves.
The way which leads to heaven is so narrow, the gate we must enter in so strait that it will not permit a man to pass with one known unmortified sin about him."
It was a tough proposition with which to brighten a student's breakfast table.
It was difficult to forget that Brand plucked from the burning with a post-bag full of such uncompromising morality.
When the assaults of the world came upon John Wesley he instinctively thought of his mother and of fire and was afraid:
"The gate we must enter is so strait that it will not permit a man to pass with one known unmortified sin about him."
Susanna Wesley had dedicated her first-born to the work of the ministry, but the education which she gave to all her children was so contrived as to turn both boys and girls into priests of the Church of England. They imbibed theology with their mother's milk.
Theirs was the priest's sound classical education allied to the presbyter's grasp of God's Law.
The little Wesleys would have made respectable bish-
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ops in eighteenth-century England. They could beat many a one in high places by being able to read aloud very beautifully.
John Wesley never heard anyone read better than his eldest sister Emily, and he loved to hear her give to Paradise Lost all the swing of her own passion and the intelligent assistance of her Puritan background.
He would never meet bettereducated women than his own sisters and yet he would never meet more tragic ones.
With minds stored with the music of Homer and hands working to the pageantry of Milton's verse, they were condemned to be hen-girls and swine-herds on the filth of the water-logged flats of Lincolnshire.
Their brothers all passed into their appointed place in the bosom of Mother Church, but Emily, Sukey, Molly,
Hetty, Patty, and Kezia all knew the reality of Piers Plowman's lament for "The woe of these women that waneth in cots."
In this miracle effort of salvation for her children Susanna Wesley could look for little help from her good husband.
On the contrary he had an unfortunate habit of putting sand in the workings of her dear, delightful method.
He stalks between the lines of her letters as the agent of Bolshevism.
Now Susanna had her fixed rules for the children's conduct, but her impetuous spouse would lose his temper and frighten her little Methodists quite out of their wits.
She says, '""A law was made that whoever was charged with a fault of which they were guilty, if they would ingenuously confess it and promise to amend, should not be beat. This rule prevented a good deal of lying
METHOD and would have done more if one in the family would have observed it. But he could not be prevailed on, and therefore was often imposed upon by false colors and equivocations which none would have used, but one, had they been kindly dealt with; and some, in spite of all, would always speak truth plainly."
Life was clearly difficult for' the devotee, and the star pupil, John Wesley himself, had an uncomfortable time with his father, for he got both beaten and laughed at for observing the rules too well.
His mother had taught him to reason out everything, with the result that he debated every step of the way forward and made a man like his father very angry.
A poet cannot be expected to tolerate too much reason.
He would thunder at the child, "You think to carry everything by dint of argument," and turning to his mother he followed up his advantage in that trying strain of crude banter: "I protest, sweetheart.
I think our Jack would not attend to the most pressing necessities of nature unless he could give a reason for it.'
But Susanna struggled on and in her heart delighted in her apt pupil and grappled him to herself with hoops of steel.
So would she get him through every difficulty and every decision of his life.
So in the slippery paths of youth she would hope for the best when "'some Delilah" might arise to tempt him from the straight and narrow way.
She liked to see him meditating as she handed him that pear from the Rectory garden, and when asked if he would have it she liked to hear his baby solemnity pronounce that portentous answer: "I will think of it." His father
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might storm and crack his unseemly jokes, but Susanna Wesley knew very well that she was about.
She had not lived with this same father for so many boisterous years without making a gallant effort to steady his sons before they took the way of life alone.
There was lively domestic conflict and a hundred alarms of war packed into that little philosopher of Epworth Rectory who was presently to turn the world upside down.
It takes all sorts of background to accomplish a revival of religion.
Susanna Wesley might break all the rules of the modern psychologist for the training of children, and her husband might add all the disadvantages of discord for the tender minds of children, but between them, in some unaccountable way, they manufactured the instrument of God's salvation.