When Knights Were Bold
XXIV
WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD
Ir had been a strenuous campaign.
The good news of salvation had been carried far and wide.
The traveling preachers had been beaten, stoned, half drowned and put in prison.
It had been all so excitingly Scriptural, and Primitive Christianity had come back to earth again.
The early Methodists took no thought how they should answer their persecutors, but it was given them in that hour what they should speak.
They literally bore branded in their bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus.
John Nelson had almost perished outside the city wall at York and had ridden to warn Wesley of his danger with a shirt stained the color of raw beef.
Charles Wesley had had his own share of honorable wounds, and it had made more of a poet of him than ever.
The spice of excitement in hurtling brickbats and dead rats had made him chant the very Marseillaise of the Revival:
"Thy glory was our rear ward, Thy hand our lives did cover, And we, even we, have passed the sea, And marched triumphant over."
It was no wonder that, singing such words to
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popular tunes, the Methodists were in constant danger of being dubbed the followers of the young Pretender, who would most certainly have passed the sea and marched triumphantly through the country if only he had been able.
Had not the promise been, when he had fled over the sea to Skye, that "Charlie would come again"?
The sea had a fascination for the Methodist poet, and the brave people who had to bear the riots and the brickbats became the Ship's
Company and breasted the wave, fluting a wild carol ere their death.
Grace Murray loved those sea hymns . the best of all, and was to carry their refrain in her heart to the very end of her life.
Charles Wesley was also particularly happy with his songs and his work among condemned criminals.
In those days of mighty crowds and public executions the sight must have been well-nigh insupportable to see a man go singing to his death.
But the miracle happened over and over again, with the Methodists close at hand or mounted on the very cart of death.
The ladies of easy virtue in the Beggar's Opera might lament that they already beheld the gay Macheath properly in the cart, but what of real highwaymen who went to their doom as though all heaven were opened before their eyes?
The scaffold at Tyburn was just the very place where Charles Wesley's bustling mercurial disposition was an asset.
His heart rose on the tiptoe of excitement and the eye of the poet saw it all in a flash.
In that place of the gallows and the dangling rope he thought instinctively of those gibbets of the condemned malefactors outside
WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD the wall at Jerusalem.
He could introduce his poor victims, here struggling in their chains, to a fellowship of suffering and a hope of salvation sealed by the Son of God Himself.
Across the centuries Tyburn and Calvary were fast linked in the love of God.
The crowds looked up to see what should befall.
They saw stark gibbet and swaying, dangling rope.
They saw men about to'die.
But on their ears the strangest music broke, swaying over their heads and rising even to the very gates of heaven:
"Lamb of God, whose bleeding love We still recall to mind, Send the answer from above, And let us mercy find.
Think on us, who think on Thee, And every struggling soul release.
O remember Calvary, And let us go in peace."
Around the Marble Arch today men tub-thump and let loose upon the people a swarm of bees in bonnets.
Today they offer quack remedies for imaginary ills in that place where once Charles Wesley, at the old Tyburn, offered salvation to men on the brink of eternity.
He had passed whole days and nights in the condemned cell at Newgate, and had wrestled there for the souls of these men.
Now in the hour of death there was no fear, but only hearts melted down with the surpassing love of God.
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had been Christ's way on Calvary when He had promised life to the penitent thief, and now again to felons on Tyburn gallows Paradise was open to their eyes.
That the peace in their hearts was real was shown in their faces after death.
It is reported of one of them that "his face was not at all bloated or disfigured, no nor even changed from its natural color; but he lay with a calm, smiling countenance as one in a sweet sleep." The love of God had wiped away all marks of death by violence:
"CO remember Calvary, And let us go in peace."
The innate poetry in the heart of an English crowd and even in an execution crowd was seen by the fact that such a corpse was deemed sacred.
It was not fitting that such an one should be carted off to the surgeons for their profane knives and dissections, and a gang of sailors saw that quite plainly.
They were men living in the awful conditions of life on board ships like the Bounty in mutiny, but they had seamen's eyes, and they had watched Charles Wesley there under the gallows and felt something stirring from that strange spiritual Ship's Company even to their own.
They fought the friends of science for the possession of the body and stood victors on a stricken field.
Then the British Navy composed its features and its oaths, and reverently, to the stricken mother, delivered the body of her son.
England had certainly never before seen religion
WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD after this fashion.
To be of the Ship's Company itself was life to the full, pressed down and running over.
Here was a fellowship against which the gates of hell could not prevail.
All over the country these friends came through riots, side by side, and became accustomed to look death in the face. Once in 1748, at Roughlea in Lancashire, the little band of the leaders themselves came.near to losing their lives.
John Wesley and William Grimshaw of Haworth, with Grace Murray and a certain John Bennet, were cantering through the valley when the rabble broke upon them, led by the curate from Colne.
Down from the hills poured the shouting hordes upon that little handful of horsemen.
Wesley, Grimshaw and Bennet were beaten to the ground and smothered with filth.
The Methodists who had gathered for the service were routed, and one poor disciple was chased remorselessly until he jumped into the river from an overhanging rock.
Once there his plight was even more pitiable as each time he put his nose above water he was threatened with death.
Drums beat and horns sounded while sticks were brandished and used to some purpose on the heads of the devoted
Methodists.
History was indulging in one of her sly freaks of fortune, for here was Wesley, amid the ram's horns of the Establishment, for no other crime than that he was accused of apostasy from Mother Church.
That the son of old Sam Wesley of Epworth should be in such a predicament was grotesque, and of course he stoutly denied it, but it looked again very much
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as though the plain issue of that old contest of Church and Dissent was becoming confused in these peculiar Methodists. Now the little band was hours in conflict before they could make their escape at a swift trot out of the valley.
Would John Wesley promise never to come there again?
Would he promise to send none of his preachers there?
To all of which the little man replied: "I would rather cut off my right hand than make such a promise."
Grimshaw and Bennet must have watched him proudly, their hearts thumping in their breasts, and the priest of Haworth himself "ready to go to prison or death for Christ's sake."
It was just the scene to put iron into Bennet, for he could manage anything in this glorious company.
It was only when he was alone that he felt a little scared and not quite cut out for the martyr's crown: "I found myself weak and feeble and ready to wish myself away.
I was jealous over my heart lest it should betray me.
Therefore I desired the Lord to keep me from setting my hand to ye paper and from betraying the cause of Christ."
Such was that band of brothers, and nearly all in turn came to Grace Murray to be nursed.
The rigors of the campaign would bear on the strongest, and she was always ready to soothe the headache and to sit by the bedside and to comfort them in their sickness with her own strength and the comfort wherewith she was comforted of God.
It was in August, 1748, that Wesley himself was taken ill at the Orphan House in Newcastle.
It must have been like nursing a flash of lightning, as he
WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD would first sit up to ease his headache and then lie down and be promptly sick, so that he could not really decide whether it was better to sit up or to lie down.
In any case he had to preach at five in the morning, however ill he was, so that did not leave much margin for elaborate nursing.
The little man was too valuable to them all to leave things to chance, so Grace Murray sat up with him to get in all the hours possible to heal that fevered body. In the stillness of the sickroom at Newcastle he lay and watched her.
Did she remind him of his mother?
What thoughts were passing through his mind?
His brother Charles was thinking of getting married after a consultation with his brother and the submitting of three names as possible candidates.
What of Varanese, Aspasia, Miss Sophy? John Wesley had crossed them all off his list long ago.
He had no need any longer for such charmers and yet he was very low just now and his mother was dead, and it was good to feel Grace's cool hands on his burning forehead.
She was so quiet and so neat and knew all he wanted without his having to speak a word.
She was so brave and so true—he could feel his life safe in her hands. Now turning towards her, in that darkened room, and watching her quiet, orderly ways, he felt all at once that sudden sense of well-being, that swift realization of returning health.
Then, "sliding into it" he knew not how, he spoke to her half shyly and half gaily in that voice which could be so compelling, and these were the words he said: "If ever I marry
I think you will be the person."
XX V GRACE Joun Westey was preaching better than he had ever preached in his life before.
The crowds who came to hear him would stand motionless, and at the close none offered to go away.
The simple field preaching was assuming a dignity and a reverence not known in St. Paul's Cathedral, where men often talked and laughed during the service.
The people of England were hanging on the words of the field preacher, and a new reverence for his own little person was forming itself intangibly through England.
The people of Newcastle had only rough arguments for the royal Stuart, but for John Wesley they
"pulled off their hats" as he marched gaily through their streets.
There had been a hint of such a springtime in Georgia when those hymns had sounded side by side with Miss Sophy.
Things were vastly different now.
The very hymns were different after that heart-warming in Aldersgate Street, but there was still that intangible something of the Divine and the human love transfused, muted, blended.
When a woman like Grace Murray heard the Methodists sing, before her conversion and ere she knew their language, those songs alone were able to set all her passions roving.
There was terribly combustible matter in the Methodist revival of religion.
All
GRACE would be well if it could be held reasonable and harnessed in the strong hand of the son of Susanna Wesley, but it was ten years since Aldersgate Street, and Grace Murray was taking up more and more room in the emotional life of John Wesley. He was a man of forty-five years and had flamed over England with that virile manhood of his for ten years, and now his eyes seemed to have opened and he had seen a woman, by the light of a bedroom candle, bending over him like his mother.
Anything might happen with the passion wherewith Grace herself was capable of loving, and what a chorus of hymn singing that would make!
Grace had that peculiarly beautiful low voice that tunes men's hearts in their breasts. Her compass in singing was another miracle.
The scene had become idyllic.
There were summer evenings of compelling beauty. Gone were the nervous notes of those old fatal Aprils and Mays, but here. was something full-blooded and tremendous,. and the people held their breath while Wesley preached in the summer of °48: "It was a delightful evening and a delightful place under the shade of tall trees.
And every man hung upon the word; none stirred his head or hand or looked to the right or left, while I declared in strong terms, 'the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.' "
To Newcastle and to that other Grace John Wesley returned, and there, in his own house which he delighted in, he told her more about himself and his friendship and his dreams for the future. They stood at night in that little old-fashioned room with the paved courtyard outside and the window you could
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look through as you sat at the table and see the preachers hailing you from the gate as they rode in weary but rejoicing.
And Grace trembled.
She knew so much more about love than John Wesley did, and she must not think like that.
She knew she loved Wesley more than she had loved anyone ever before.
Did she not owe him her very soul?
But Wesley as the pilot of the ship's company was one thing, Wesley with the shadow of the old sea captain over his shoulder was another thing altogether.
It was not for nothing that Alexander Murray had complained that Mr. Wesley had robbed him of all his earthly happiness!
It was literally true, for his wife's love had been lost in the love of the Christ of Wesley's preaching, and at the feet of the preacher had been laid an. emotion of reverence, love and rapture which even made Wesley himself tremble.
And now when he spoke with her at Newcastle she broke down altogether and sobbed: "This is too great a blessing for me—I can't tell how to believe it. This is all I could have wished for under Heaven if I had dared to wish for it."
It had all come about so quickly and she had been taken off her guard, but here was the truth, and from that moment Wesley conversed with her as his own.
It was not quite like an ordinary courtship as the lover was John Wesley, but it was exciting enough.
A great part of their time alone together was spent in prayer, and the needs of the campaign were so exacting that there remained little leisure for earthly bliss. John Wesley had told his preachers that it was
GRACE inconceivable that they should preach one less sermon or ride one less mile because they were engaged or married, and he was true to his own exhortations.
There was no primrose path at Newcastle for the leader, for he had to be about the King's business, and so the time soon came to say goodbye and take horse in that little cobbled courtyard.
But the night before he left, Grace broke down again and begged they might not part so soon, for it was more than she could bear.
The little man was not really used to such response from his old-time friends, but he had said: "I am convinced God has called you to be my fellow laborer in the Gospel—now we must part for a time, but if we meet again I trust we shall part no more," and it had broken her all in pieces.
He did not really know the ground he stood on or the danger of speaking thus to a woman like Grace
Murray, and she herself knew she must not really believe it for it must be all a dream.
Yet the flesh was weak. The little man thought of a good plan on the spur of the moment—why should they part just then?
Grace should go with him through Yorkshire and Derbyshire on his way to London, and then John Bennet could see her back safely from Chinley when they must finally say goodbye.
This was a grand pilgrimage, and Grace was unspeakably useful with the women's bands and in all the societies.
They stayed at Haworth with William Grimshaw, for he always kept open house for the Methodist preachers there in the old parsonage with its pleasant garden and its roomy courtyard.
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The old wooden settle is still there built in near the great stone mantelpiece, although that strange company who met there and sat and sang their strange hymns are long since dust.
But the old house still holds its secret, and there in the porchway is the iron ring sunk deep in old masonry where John Wesley and Grace Murray tied up their horses.
It is the same nail-studded door that shut in the old ship's company in glorious fellowship at the end of the journey.
So through the August days they rode together and on into the long evenings and the long shadows, and at last they clattered down into the valley where Chinley stands and the green hills shut it in: "I left her in Cheshire with John Bennet and went on my way rejoicing."
John Wesley was happy.
God had been wonderfully good to him and had solved his problems in a remarkable manner.
In the old days the storms of love had separated him from God.
He had had to devise his ejaculatory prayer, his fastings and his resolutions to keep pace with it at all. They had been his climber's rope to prevent him from being swept from God's side by the avalanche. Now the loveliest thing of all was that when he thought of Grace he instinctively thought of God, and in no antagonistic way, but as though she led him so graciously into the very Presence.
He was deliciously safe in such a friendship.
Grace also was as good as Miss Sophy on pilgrimage.
She was as nicely modest and as uncomplaining as had Miss Sophy been in those Georgian camps of old.
But what a different woman was she
GRACE from the wax doll of Savannah!
She understood him as well as his mother.
But here was something a mother could never give in that heart of a woman for her mate and that sweet note of reverence which transformed all into a perfect idyll.
Of course he could not think of marriage just then, but there was no hurry.
She was safe as his housekeeper at Newcastle, and he would take her to Ireland with him in the spring if the road seemed long.
Then he must consult all his preachers and his brother Charles, but, mercifully, they had already convinced him at the London Conference that it was no sin to marry and that the bed was undefiled.
He had really never meant to get married, he told himself.
Ever since he was seven years old he had made people laugh by saying he would never marry:
"Because I should never find such a woman as my father had."
Also that blow with Varanese in the day of the cuckoo's song had been well-nigh mortal.
It had set up such a fear as to inhibit him from ever bringing off a real storming assault on any lady of his dreams ever again.
Even with Grace Murray he could only talk by hints and suggestions of marriage, "sliding into it I knew not how."
But that teasing ultimate fatal decision could be shelved conveniently with anyone so glorious as Grace, for he liked to think of her quite safely as "the daughter of my faith and prayer."
He went on his way rejoicing, but he was as blissfully ignorant as ever of a woman's heart. He was really too much of a mother's son ever to understand it. He was also so sure of God that he could
SON TOS USAN NSA see no rocks ahead, for now he lived at peace and took thought for one day at a time "safe in the hollow of Thy hand."
John Bennet would have given much for but half the assurance of his chief. When night fell that little house at Chinley might look very peaceful without, but within hearts were failing men for fear. Human heads were turning on restless pillows and trucklebeds were creaking under loads of anxious thought.
The Methodists had set their leader on his way to London with pious good wishes, but John Bennet had noted his unusually high spirits. He had also noticed a new turn of tenderness in his farewell to Grace
Murray.
It all came back to his mind as he lay awake with Grace so near him here in his own house where he was host. At last he fell into a troubled sleep, and the unmentionable fear rushed up to consciousness.
Fear clothed itself in marionette costume out of the mind's wardrobe, and there in poor John Bennet's brain was enacted a vivid little play.
He saw John Wesley bending over Grace Murray, and he heard him speak to her so tenderly.
He must be asking her to marry him.
Bennet saw with relief that she pushed her lover away, but oh! so gently.
He re- . mained doubtful of what the upshot should be, and feared greatly that scene the curtain would ring up next on the mind's stage.
Of course he awoke in fear and trembling, and with that haunting, waking consciousness of too vivid a dream, too lately experienced.
That dream haunted Bennet all next day.
Fear
GRACE had him by the throat.
He also had been ill at Newcastle, and there Grace Murray had nursed him through twenty-six blissful weeks, and she really had saved his life.
When the rest of the company had despaired for him Grace had been calm and strong and had prayed her unchanging God to give him help out of the sanctuary.
He had recovered in that very hour and had moreover risen from his bed to tell his wonderful nurse that God had given her to him as a wife in that prayer.
Had Grace forgotten all about it? What was Wesley doing dancing night and day before Bennet's eyes? He must have it out with Grace or go raving mad, for he could find no peace this way either day or night.
The time had come for Grace to return to Newcastle under John Bennet's escort, and so over the hills they went together, and as they rode they talked
"touching some things that had long lain on my mind."
They spoke freely together, and the fear took shape and clothed itself with words: "Is there anything between you and Mr. Wesley?" And Grace
Murray answered "No."
Never was a woman so cruelly placed.
She was terrified of betraying Wesley to any one of his followers.
She had no one she could consult as to her. future course of action.
She really did not believe that Wesley was in right down earnest, for he always had a way with him, and she could almost believe that Newcastle and her tears were all a dream.
She had been fond of Bennet, but of course he could not hold a candle to Wesley, but equally of course a bird in
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the hand was worth two in the bush.
She now labored under a racking anxiety, and with her face turned to Autumn and an empty home at Newcastle she felt the onslaught of a contest which was to last all the winter.
She received letters from both men, and her heart misgave her equally with both, nor could she find pleasure in either.
She was no fool and had always had a horror of doing the wrong thing.
She knew herself so dangerously placed that if she took but one false step the whole of the beloved Ship's Company might go to the bottom at a stroke.
She had not nursed Bennet as a sick man for twenty-six weeks without having formed a fair estimate of his character.
He had all the possibilities and all the attractiveness of a man endowed with the artistic temperament.
He was painfully conscious of himself and painfully conscious of his own deeds.
The diaries of the two men read so differently.
John Wesley's takes an even pace with God, while Bennet's is nervous and fretful and introspective.
He knows when the women come out to follow him with their eyes as he rides away on his travels.
He appreciates the little things that people do for him as though they thought much of him.
He is thrilled when people murmur in the crowd "there goes the preacher" and when at night some admirer serenades him below his window in the streets of Bolton.
He was ambitious and restless, with a good brain and an eye for possibilities.
He it was who enjoyed to the full those quarterly meetings on Todmorden Edge and showed the way to a democratic control of the Society which
GRACE was to stand when the hand of Wesley's benevolent despotism was cold in death.
He it was who took down the minutes of that first Conference in London which ever after should be the law and the testimony for all good Methodists.
It was John Bennet who knew that there must be recourse to law to obtain the same protection the Dissenters enjoyed in the midst of persecution.
His mind loved the prestige of the Church of England, but in his heart of hearts he was an incorrigible Dissenter.
He loved the friendship of the priest of Haworth and was a kindred soul to Charles Wesley in his criticism of the poor tools John Wesley had joined to them in the ranks of his traveling preachers.
He in fact carried on a sort of unofficial purge, and Charles Wesley and he deplored the stupidity of Brother John in their correspondence.
'A friend of ours," says Charles to Bennet, 'thas made a preacher of a tailor; I, with God's help, will make a tailor of him again."
George Whitefield, with his work among the aristocracy and his friendship with the Countess of Huntingdon, became another desirable acquaintance.
It was George Whitefield that Bennet consulted when he was playing with the idea of taking Holy Orders in the Church of England.
He maintained his restless, uneasy correspondence with both Charles Wesley and with George Whitefield, and there is always an air of criticism—a feeling that things should be put right in Wesley's Connection.
Bennet was not content to serve, and was jealous of the way his own societies had been swept in under Wesley's autocratic
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control.
Wesley had an uncomfortable way of talking of breaking his traveling preachers to the work which made a man like Bennet very uncomfortable.
Were he but in the Church of England he could hold his own with this man of iron even as Grimshaw of Haworth remained independent.
So the Dissenter in him revolted and drove him almost into the arms of Mother Church in order to obtain the freedom his soul loved.
'There was another matter that rankled with the man.
He would himself be a poet, and believed sometimes he was directly filled with the divine afflatus, but the Wesley regime went directly contrary to such forms of self-expression.
William Darney had got into trouble for singing his own hymns in what had been his own Yorkshire societies, and he had met Bennet and poured into his sympathetic ears all the pent-up pride and the frustration of the inhibited poet: "In the morning William
Darney came to meet me and we walked out into the fields.
He showed me a letter he had received from Mr. Wesley wherein he reproves him sharply of many things, particularly of singing his own hymns, which he tells him are nonsense."
Cruel words indeed, and John Bennet could sympathize, for he had also wooed the Muse.
He has left behind one lyric in his diary which he wrote when his mother died and which he attributes to the direct inspiration of God.
It must be confessed that it is a poor performance for the Almighty and that it is strangely reminiscent of more earthly composition in its refrain, which sounds so nearly like "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
GRACE There was a world of difference between John Wesley and John Bennet. When Wesley tells of the people waiting for the Word of Life it is of God he is conscious, but when Bennet sees a poor congregation his heart is as a stone.
He adds after one of his services that illuminating comment of all selfcentered preachers: "I trust many went home with different thoughts of me than they brought with them."
Bennet has all that nervous feeling for his congregation, all those ups and downs of an emotional nature, all the joy of treasured gossip after his great effort—''a man wept one told me."
He could do well and be brave with an audience, but when he stood alone his heart failed him for fear. He dreaded opposition.
Once when the women in the bands fell out, he got the stoutest of them to stand between himself and the fight. He was terribly afraid of real thunder, as such souls must ever be whose nerves are not well covered, and when the storm broke he had difficulty with his vain thoughts. He was like Charles
Wesley in his collapse before an unpleasant prospect.
He felt ill, and will stay in bed because he has to preach before Thomas Meyrick in the morning, and "1 did not speak such fine words as he." He lay in bed pensive and sad until William Shent electrified him by bawling through the door: "Brother Bennet, arise—it is time to be gone." He was of that sensitive, nervous temperament which suffers strangely in this rough-and-tumble world and often longs for escape.
If escape is not to be found, then it will certainly be devised either in fact or in an escape of
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the mind.
When Bennet gets wet through on the campaign he ruefully wrings out his sodden shirt and thinks he really cannot go through with it, for life like this is too hideously uncomfortable: "The enemy suggested into my mind hard thoughts of the ways of God.
There was no need of so much to do.
Others would certainly go to heaven easier, and then it was suggested I might do the same."
So he talked with himself as he struggled out of his wet clothes and feared lest he should get the ague and be ill again:
"The enemy tempted me, well, but since you are so weak in body God doesn't require it.
If He does of others He does not of you." Then he adds: "I so far seemingly consented in my mind that if I was bad the next day I would only give notice to preach at each place once a month."
Bennet was the sort of man o'er whom the unbeholden hangs in a night with which he could not cope.
That thought of the morrow was a burden in itself: "If I was bad the next day."
He was not the man to establish the Revival of Religion in England although he might be a successful wrecker of the whole campaign.
Wesley's Journal has a different ring about it although John Bennet had the advantage of ten years of youth against his chief: ""This day I was wet from morning to night with the continued rain, but I found no manner of inconvenience."
John Bennet's very weakness demanded the strength of Grace Murray, for with her it did not matter really if he were ill or well.
Her assurance had rallied his weakness at death's very door and her
GRACE voice had called him back to life in that illness of his at the Orphan House when all others despaired of his life. He was a very different lover from the man Alexander Murray, but his very weakness made sufficient appeal.
Grace knew that he needed her more than Wesley could even feel the need of anyone, for if he but remained sure of God he was abundantly able to look after himself.
The stage was set for a very pretty little play. Did Satan construct the plot in an amused moment when he felt he could count too surely on the weakness of human nature?
Or were the powers of darkness really tired of defiance from the lips of these incorrigible Methodists?
They certainly sang a great deal about the Captain of their salvation and His ability to break the power of canceled sin. They also proclaimed a gospel of life in death and of heaven in hell in a provokingly paradoxical way.
They had taken the leap of faith and had incomprehensively landed on their feet.
They wrestled not now, but trampled on sin.
Clearly the time had come to steer the precious Ship's Company . straight on to the rocks, and what more fitting than to strike the whole gallant revival upon its own so much vaunted, loadstone of love?