Traveling Mercies
XXVI
TRAVELING MERCIES
Tue bombshell had exploded.
It might look a wholly innocent one in Wesley's neat handwriting, but it threw Grace Murray into a nice perturbation.
She was summoned from Newcastle to accompany the leader to Ireland.
In a last despairing effort to straighten out the tangle she put pen to paper to John Bennet, saying "that if he loved her he should meet her at Sheffield: for she was sent for to Ireland, and if he did not come now she could not answer for what might follow."
It is difficult to see what John Bennet could have done if he had appeared, but he took the line of least resistance and neither wrote nor came.
The path which should cross that of John Wesley was too thorny for the feet of a John Bennet.
He assured Grace later that he was just taking horse when his plans were upset by the death of a relative, but it is likely that he looked upon that demise as a providential intervention in matters which had become too hard for him.
Grace Murray took the road and passed by Sheffield, but she looked in vain for John Bennet there.
The die was cast.
She had done her best to transfer the responsibility from her own shoulders to the inadequate ones of temperamental Bennet, and now she felt free to shake rein and make for Bristol without
TRAVELING
MERCIES a wrinkle in her conscience and a certain satisfaction . in her heart.
She meant to throw in her lot wholeheartedly with Wesley and assay that glorious trip to Ireland and leave the rest to God.
She was always fearful of taking the wrong turning, but she almost could believe just then that she might be able to combine the ship's captain and the Captain of her
Salvation without disaster.
And what a welcome awaited her at Bristol from that other lover—alert, - joyful, girt for travel!
So different a man from John Bennet, he seemed, without a doubt or complex in all his virile frame.
April was upon him again and May would follow in lovely Ireland with this glorious woman of his choice.
Spirits at Bristol and on the whole campaign ran very high, and the voyage, for all its storms, was such as they both rejoiced in with those red sails in the sunset and the joy of the ship's company shut in with one another and with God.
But first they must get Charles Wesley safely married at Garth on the Wye, and must travel through Wales to take ship for Ireland at Holyhead.
It all reads like a glorious saga of sea and mountain, Wesley preached everywhere he went, and the people heard him gladly. Everywhere he brought new hope.
Everywhere he dealt tenderly with lost souls. Everywhere Grace went with him and looked after his temporal needs as well as being the companion of his heart.
All their interests were the same, and they stood the hard traveling like twin souls for courage.
There were terrible Welsh mountains to scale, and such rain and wind as to rob Wesley of his voice, but
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always Grace was near with her good old-fashioned remedies and her motherly advice.
Wesley cannot have known that the woman had a care in the world beyond the care of his own precious person and the interests of the Kingdom of God.
This strange couple rode in to Charles Wesley's marriage at Garth House in Wales, and the bridegroom verily believed that John was the gayest soul present on that solemn occasion.
It is true that this must have been a relief to Brother Charles, for the money had taken some beating up, and now the whole situation with his wife's people, the Gwynnes, hung on John Wesley as guarantor of £100 a year with his friend Blackwell in the background as a man of substance in the London business world.
Charles Wesley, like his father, seems not to have had a penny in the world.
He was prone to live from hand to mouth, and even his brother had to send a line to John Bennet to send the book money direct to himself and not entrust it to Brother Charles when he came into the north.
It was no wonder that his prospective mother-in-law, Mrs. Gwynne, had rather doubted the wisdom of entrusting her dear Sarah to the keeping of this restless poet.
It was she who had insisted on the money, and had almost broken the match because the security seemed so poor until John
Wesley had come to the rescue.
It reads, in Charles Wesley's Journal, much like the old Epworth days and the Island Poet, for Mrs. Gwynne had been asked to swallow as large a dose of faith about the value of Charles Wesley's literary compositions as
TRAVELING
MERCIES ever his father had demanded from the world at large.
Charles had recourse to Vincent Perronet of Shoreham, and his letter finally convinced the skeptical mother-in-law at Garth: "Alas, Madam!
What is all this world and the glories of it? How little does the world appear to that mind whose affections are set on things above!
This state is-what I trust you are seriously seeking after—however, I have been hitherto speaking as if Mr. Wesley's circumstances really wanted an apology: but this is not the case.
The very writings of these two gentlemen are even at this time a very valuable estate; and when it shall please God to open the minds of people more, and prejudice is worn off, it will be still much more valuable.
I have seen what an able bookseller has valued a great part of their works at, which is £2,500: but I will venture to say that this is not half their value.
They are works which will last and sell while any sense of true religion and learning shall remain among us.
However, as they are not of the same nature with an estate in land they cannot be either sold or pledged without the most manifest loss in convenience."
It will be seen how precarious was Charles Wesley's marriage dowry, and the whole thing was only made at all reasonable by his brother's name to give some sort of validity to sanguine dreams.
Also Charles had a mind to go round the societies, cap in hand, had not Mr. Blackwell come to the rescue in that subscription of £100 and eased matters considerably, for "T thought it better to be obliged for a maintenance
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to ten or a dozen friends than to five hundred or five thousand of the people."
Charles Wesley had married into an important family, and John Wesley was to know the drag of providing money for his penurious brother all the rest of his days. The responsibility of these commitments was destined not to be shelved for the best part of eighty years, for the Methodist Book Room was still paying out the money to Charles Wesley's widow long after both the Wesley brothers were dust.
The young girl of twenty-three years who had married the penniless poet of forty contrived to live more than seventy years after that day in Wales when
John Wesley and Grace Murray had rejoiced at her wedding.
It is likely that John Wesley was in good spirits then because he had similar dreams himself, now made the more reasonable in the fact that his brother had actually taken the plunge.
In an unaccountable way marriage seems to have scared this strange couple of Susanna Wesley's children almost out of their wits. Wesley actually got very little out
~ of his dreams or his bargain, as Charles Wesley's marriage was the signal for him to travel less and less in the interests of the gospel, and yet his demands became greater and his interference more dangerous the less he shouldered of the real fortunes of the campaign.
But now it was hid from their sight, and Charles discovered a grand new era of hymn making and drew his portrait of love with a surer hand.
In his new house in Charles Street, Bristol, he was to
TRAVELING
MERCIES write many of the best known of the songs of the Revival, and perhaps among the rest this little gem:
"O disclose Thy lovely face!
Quicken all my drooping powers; Gasps my fainting soul for grace, As a thirsty land for showers; Haste, my Lord, no more delay, Come, my Saviour, come away!
Well Thou knowest I cannot rest Till I fully rest in Thee, Till I am of Thee possessed, Till, from every sin set free, All the life of faith I prove, All the joy and heaven of love."
It was in this atmosphere of love and to the tune of marriage bells that John Wesley and Grace Murray set out for Ireland.
It was again a glorious pilgrimage, and Wesley had a good text for the beginning of the campaign at Dublin: "Beloved, if God so loved us we ought also to love one another."
There was a mellowing about the man and a more tender touch throughout this Irish journey so that miracles of grace were wrought wherever he went, and men wept for | joy as they thought of the love of God.
He found alittle garden after his own heart, and calls it "our garden" now where before it had been his alone in Savannah or had belonged to Varanese in the Cotswold Hills.
Here he preached with joy and some emotion on: "Let us come boldly unto the Throne
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of Grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need!"
His mind is busy with old memories and the burden of an old tenderness, for he remembers 2 Kempis again and deals very gently with the sorrowing people of Ireland: "This day and the next I endeavored to see all who were weary and faint in their minds.
Most of them I found had not been used with sufficient tenderness."
The campaign goes on rising in a crescendo of love until men kneel breathless and spellbound and heaven came down to earth: "When I had at length pronounced the blessing no man stirred, but each stayed in his place till
I walked through them."
Such seasons of refreshing had never been before, but Wesley had discovered the prime secret: "God begins His work at the heart."
So in a glory of spring days the work went on, and Grace Murray forgot about John Bennet and never wrote to him at all.
She treated Wesley with "a tenderness not to be exprest," and made him love her more the more they traveled and conversed together.
Night after night and day after day they sang sweet hymns together, and together supported that great wave of religious emotion which was setting through the British Isles like a flood: "and in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in the desert."
The only mischief was that life could not go on like this forever.
In July the travelers must return to England and Grace Murray must face the complications which had been so conveniently left behind on the other side of the Irish Sea.
If she had been
TRAVELING
MERCIES quite honest with herself she would have confessed that she really was not quite sure that Wesley himself had moved a step nearer marriage for all the Irish raptures.
At the bottom of her heart there lurked a secret misgiving, for when a woman gives her heart away she gives it unconditionally, but Wesley seemed to preserve his regularly beating heart in a fine state of preservation and to know none of Grace's fears in a campaign of salvation which took full toll of his powers.
Human hearts were not just then the question in point.
Rather there filled the scene a great urgency of endeavor.
As Wesley once said, the meaning of life was really just this: "Let you and I go on to build up the City of God." Of course he was not so dense, in his blundering masculinity, as not to sense some new sadness about his once gay companion.
Now with a rough sea passage before them he tried to re-establish her confidence, and bethought him of one of the easeful form of words and little ceremonies with which his tidy mind was wont to clear up difficulties.
In the presence of some witness he and she swore an oath of allegiance to one another, so he fondly believed they would still be man and wife even if shipwrecked in mid-ocean or cast away on the Shutter Rock of Lundy Island, or lost on the stormy coast of Wales.
He called it a solemn contract de praesenti, but it was doubtless but cold comfort to a woman of Grace's nature who had once espoused that proper ship's captain, Alexander
Murray, in right good earnest.
So later they went on board together at ten o'clock at night and Wesley
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slept soundly in perfect peace.
Grace must have found jt more difficult to find rest in her stuffy cabin in that little sloop bound for Bristol and the old snags and problems.
The night was a night of storm, and the boat was blown hither and thither in distress.
How those hymns of love and of the sea must have drummed in her head, linking up with those scenes she had witnessed in Ireland and those hundred other little incidents of life with Wesley.
She was to remember hymns and the sea and Wesley to her dying day.
They had come aboard on Thursday night, and on Sunday were off Minehead, but Monday saw them safely landed on Bristol Quay.
It was all over, that dream of spring in Ireland.
Grace was back in that other home of Wesley's in Bristol and her heart was jealous with the thought of sharing Wesley with his other disciples.
Well she knew that the Orphan House at Newcastle was not the Leader's only home of love.
The New Room at Bristol had been first with him after the Foundery had been established, and now there was added the new school at Kingswood, and housekeepers in them all.
Professional pride was tender just now, for Grace must submit to be a guest in Wesley's other homes, for there was no head of the table there for her as at Newcastle, where she was accustomed to reign in her own right.
The sisters of the Society were not above hinting to Wesley himself something of their resentment against this too capable companion with their "You know Sister Murray must have the pre-eminence."
'To add to her feelings of
TRAVELING
MERCIES discomfort and regret at the passing of that wonderful Irish tour she heard much gossip among the womenfolk of the Bristol New Room.
It stands today with its bare table and wooden benches just as Grace saw it in that sad July of 1749.
The little rooms for the preachers open off the larger commonroom above the chapel and, without, is the cobbled courtyard and the inevitable stable. Today the manger holds its place just as in Wesley's day, and on the pillars of the New Room the candlesticks still hold high their undiminished heads.
If there is one place in which to recapture the beauty and the simplicity of the revival of love it is here in Broadmead, Bristol.
The atmosphere is even now, to the initiate, that intangible thing which can bring tears to the eyes and reverence to stubborn knees.
It was here that Grace Murray's heart failed her for fear.
It was here that she heard an "'idle tale" of Wesley's friendship with Molly Francis and believed that that same heart must break.
In those rooms she had talked with Wesley before they went to Ireland and told him something of John
Bennet, and in a very moving scene Wesley had pressed her for her love as already promised to himself. Now that lovely thing between them seemed in ruins, besmirched by idle talk of Molly Francis, and in a vehement fit of jealousy Grace Murray wrote a letter to John Bennet.
It was to be the undoing of them all, for to the man who had been left behind it was as a lifebelt thrown out to a castaway.
All his love of life returned, all his pent-up passion, all
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his thwarted love.
He was ten years younger than Wesley, and surely he could be a match for him after all.
In this new mood of reassurance all things were possible to John Bennet.
He sent Grace word: "He would meet her when she came into the North."
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