Denouement
MXR!
DENOUEMENT
Ir had been a week of tremendous emotion. Now on Tuesday, October 3, Grace Murray stood before the altar in St. Andrew's Church, Newcastle, and plighted her troth with the black-coated John Bennet.
There were two more in the bridal train, and an oddly assorted pair they appeared.
Charles Wesley was there, all nerves, and hearing still those pursuing feet which had been so close behind him last Wednesday but had not yet succeeded in catching him up.
George Whitefield was there with his seraphic squint and a great feeling of discomfort.
Whatever he might think of Wesley's Arminian Theology he knew very well that this was serving the man a very shabby trick indeed.
And Grace saw them all, these leaders of the Great Revival of Religion, and what were her thoughts in that solemn old church at Newcastle that day? Here she had been a child, here had dawned all that awakening life for her with joy of song and dance and love.
Here she had lived under Wesley's roof after Alexander Murray had been swept from her side.
But there was now no traveler on the road nor on the sea.
After this fatal hour every man must hereafter hold his peace.
It was the whole of ten days since Charles Wesley had stormed at Whitehaven, and it looked very much as though Brother John was
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still in retreat there, for it was not until Wednesday, the 4th of October, that Wesley arrived at Leeds at nine o'clock at night.
Charles Wesley had still further plans, but Whitefield does not seem to have been willing to carry them out, feeling guilty himself and already glad to leave this impetuous groomsman.
The only thing that remained was to go and meet John Wesley and tell him the whole tale, but Charles Wesley rather shrank from a direct attack.
He was not at all sure of his reception, so he thought it would be better to meet in company with much vituperation and so escape that straightforward brother of his and his unanswerable logic.
Charles and his father had always believed in denouncing the enemy with swelling veins and much fury. They could brush aside pricklings of conscience better so.
Now Charles Wesley said they must all meet Brother John at Leeds, and there "he must acknowledge his sin before John Bennet and them all."
But Whitefield contrived to outwit this plan by going on ahead and meeting John alone, and moreover he offered him half his bed after his long journey from the north. So the two great leaders of the Evangelical
Revival divested themselves of their habits and disappeared behind the curtains of the same four-posted bed, while somewhere not far off Grace Murray and John Bennet lay together with the ghost of Alexander and the sting of memory.
It was Whitefield who broke the news to John Wesley that Grace was already married.
He told him, © with tears, that he much wanted them to wait until
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John himself should come, but that his "brother's impetuosity prevailed and bore down all before it."
John was dry eyed and sunk in a kind of hopeless distress as Whitefield nervously chattered on without saying very much to the purpose, although his intention of comfort was obvious.
He told John that in his opinion Grace was his wife and that he had said as much to John Bennet, but who could contend with Charles in eruption?
It was beyond the power of a mere preacher of the Gospel, and he supposed John realized that and would accept his futility as excuse enough.
This Whitefield had been a member of the Holy Club and had been summoned to Georgia by Wesley himself, and there had succeeded where his chief had failed.
It was he who had introduced Wesley to open-air preaching in Bristol at the dawn of the campaign. Now with the Countess of Huntingdon, a blue-stocking friend to Aspasia, he was the leader of the Evangelical Revival in the Church of England itself.
His theology was Calvinistic, and he claimed the merits of Christ only for believers—the select few of God's election.
John stood with the lost sheep of the House of Israel and offered salvation to all, and it was his message which swept the people of no Church at all into his societies up and down the length and breadth of England.
The heart and soul of his Gospel was that none could sin away the love of God, and everywhere he taught the Methodists to sing:
"For all my Lord was crucified, For all, for all, my Saviour died."
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But on that October night at Leeds there were no ghosts of Arminius or Calvin hovering around the four-post bed. John Wesley was in a fever and could not sleep, and Whitefield could only pray or gossip at intervals through the watches of the night.
Thoughts were crowding in on John Wesley and searing his mind as he lay with his brain boiling on the pillow.
Pictures came, and memories, a brother's disloyalty, a great campaign, and himself so weak now and so alone.
He was twice bereaved, for his mother was dead and Grace was married to another.
Where should he turn for help? He was not likely to find great consolation from his grotesque bedfellow with his prayers and lamentations and his obvious shutting of the door after the horse had gone.
And then all of a sudden, as so often with John Wesley: "God took that matter into His hand, giving me on a sudden a sound and quiet sleep."
Next morning at nine Wesley heard that his brother Charles had arrived, and, quite definitely, he felt he never wanted to see him again.
But Whitefield took upon himself the task of peacemaker and constrained John Wesley at least to meet his brother.
Charles, true to his nature, burst into the room with a spate of vituperation: "I renounce all intercourse with you but what I would have with an heathen man or a publican."
In the background poor George Whitefield and honest John Nelson wept on each other's necks.
It was the same old scene of discord.
Charles, angry beyond measure, stormed at John, who stood there just looking at him as though the whole torrent
DENOUEMENT
were only "adding a drop of water to a drowning man."
Nelson, that strapping stone-mason, begged and entreated for peace between the brothers, and Whitefield wept and prayed, and still the storm thundered.
In a general breakdown of nerve and a spate of emotion John Bennet entered the arena.
He had the grace to speak not one word, and Wesley kissed him in absolute silence save for those strangled sobs which had broken faithful Nelson's heart to hear proceeding from his chief. And then the brothers were left alone.
Charles, as quick as lightning, changed his tone, for he was no match really for this brother of his when the audience had gone. He now blamed Grace Murray as the jilt and the flirt, and rubbed in his advantage so well that John Wesley believed that he should see her face no more: "'Neither did I apprehend she desired my company any more."
That was exactly the conclusion that Charles Wesley wished him to come to and to maintain, and so the thunder died away.
But he reckoned without Gade Bennet.
It was one thing to make the supreme sacrifice of her life, it was quite another thing to have no opportunity for a final explanation and leave-taking.
A woman can never be left in that ruthless isolation of inconclusiveness.
She was already aware that she could manage Bennet, and so the message came: '"'Both John Bennet and his wife desired to see me."
Of course Wesley went as Grace well knew he would come, but the sight of him broke her in pieces. The three of them wept together and for a long time could say nothing at all, but Ben-
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net knelt at his feet and asked pardon for what he had said against him, and Grace knelt on his other side sobbing helplessly and repeating again and again that "she never had spoke or could speak against me."
Somehow the three of them contrived to eat their dinner, but at a look from Grace her husband withdrew, and Wesley and she were left alone.
It was a scene worthy of an artist's brush.
The littered table with its old-fashioned bowls and spoons, the October light of afternoon playing upon a strong man and a passionate woman with their faces strained with grief.
Behind them both were memories so tender that as their eyes met there could be no reproach, only a mystified question from Wesley: "What did you say to my brother to make him accost me thus?" He knew she could not have twisted those glories of the road into a heathen transaction, but he was puzzled and he went straight to the point. And so tenderly came the answer: "I would rather die than speak against one to whom I have so deep obligations." And willingly she would have died for Wesley.
She had indeed taken the harder course of living for him.
In subjection to John Bennet she would save the fair name of Wesley from the least breath of gossip and ill fame. With her cool hand on the arm of that restive man she would steer a course to leave the rest of the beloved Ship's Company free from danger.
She had only a few brief moments over a battered dinner-table, but she made the most of them, and convinced him once and for all that for ten years she had loved him. Quickly she ran through the whole story:
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"That at the time you first spoke to me at Newcastle I loved you above all persons living. That after my engagement to John Bennet my heart was divided until I went to Ireland. That then it was whole with you and from that time till John Bennet met us at Epworth.
'That after his speaking it was divided again till you talked with me on the road, from which hour I loved you more and more till we parted at Hindley Hill; when your brother took me thence I thought he was carrying me to you—that when I knew more of his design I told him: 'I will do nothing till I have seen Mr. Wesley,' but that when it was told me at Newcastle, among a thousand things, "Mr.
Wesley will have nothing to say to you,' then I said, 'Well, I will have Mr. Bennet if he will have me.' "
The artless tale was told.
Those two had been so free always with one another, and now Wesley must tell his side of the story.
He must have told her of that awful Sunday at Whitehaven and of his text of comfort, and then, as only he could talk, he told her all it meant.
The campaign must still go on.
What God had done for this man and this woman remained even if their hearts were broken—that really did not matter.
The love of God paid for all. They had always gone simply and naturally to prayer when alone together, and that must have been the only solution now: "After dinner I talked with her alone." And so they said goodbye.
Did she watch him as he took horse and rode slowly away from her to Newcastle?
None knows, none ever will know.
The, road was crammed with memories of her. Almost, they knew
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every stone of it from those frequent journeys to Leeds and Birstall, where John Nelson would entertain them in the glad old days in his house of the bow window which he had built with his own hands.
Now Wesley rode alone, with head sunk forward deep in meditation, and his horse finding his own way with nose towards Newcastle. A sure sign that things had gone deep with the horseman was that he had betaken himself to poetry and was composing jingles in his head as he journeyed. He had forsaken Susanna for the time being to show himself the son of his father, after all.
The poetry is not good and there are thirty-one verses, as the whole of the life of Grace Murray had to be made metrical; also he begins at the beginning with those old Varanese experiences.
It could only have been poetic licence which enabled him to write that he had ever "'danced along the flow'ry way."
| "Oft as thro' giddy youth I roved, And danced along the flow'ry way, By chance or thoughtless passion mov'd, An easy, unsuspicious prey I fell, while Love's envenomed dart Thrilled thro' my veins and tore my heart.
At length, by sad experience taught, Firm I shook off the abject yoke; Abhorr'd this sweetly poisonous draught,
Thro' all his wily fetters broke:
Fixt my desires on things above, And languisht for Celestial Love."
DENOUEMENT
So far to the Holy Club, but what was to be the remedy now for one at the height of his manhood?
As he thought of Grace and felt again her hand stealing into his, the old sweetness of the days when he had loved Aspasia well-nigh overwhelmed him.
A shy little phrase from the Beggar's Opera will not be denied place in his verses.
That haunting song of India's coasts in "Over the hills and far away" had been on everyone's lips when the world was young.
So demurely John Wesley gets it into his lament for Grace Murray, and betrays a dangerous reversion of mind to those sad old days of love and turmoil before the Hand of God was laid upon him in Aldersgate
Street.
Whither is he heading now in the terror of a broken heart?
The verses jingle on their way and the horse goes on with slack rein and stumbling feet, but Wesley travels safely, and is his own mother's
'son once more as he draws into the straight and narrow way again at the last verse:
"Teach me from every pleasing snare To keep the issues of my heart.
Be Thou my Love, my Joy, my Fear!
Thou my eternal Portion art.
Be Thou my never-failing Friend, And love, O love me to the end."
It was an echo of the distress which had wracked the man before, when he turned to God from Miss Sophy, and begged tenderness from the Almighty in a sort of desperation. Now he was riding out of Grace Mur-
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ray's life, and he was throwing himself again on the never-failing Friend.
There had been a terrible collapse after that early shattering of love's dream. The fate of the Revival of Religion might even now be in the balance.
He had left Grace Murray to the sharp-set intimacy of John Bennet's bed and board.
They had made the supreme sacrifice of private love to public duty—but would they be able to keep it up?
It is true that Wesley had left with Grace a cumbersome text which should prove some sort of anchorage.
She was never to forget it until her life's end. Dimly now over the circle of the years she chose it as the text for her funeral sermon, with that desperate energy of failing power which sees some distant goal and plants the flag there.
She had allowed John Wesley to go on his way immaculate in mind and body, for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.
Silently now she turned back and was subject to John Bennet.
She was to have five sons by him in eight years, but in her heart she carried a secret which he could not share and which he would never know.
She was to see all the Ship's Company leave her, but she kept her secret still.
More than fifty years later, at her funeral amid the Derbyshire Hills, the Rev. Jabez Bunting would have to make the best of her strangely chosen text.
It could not have been masculine enough for his six foot of strapping manhood, and it was so like a woman to faint.
But something must be made of it, for he was the rising man in Methodism and was presently to hammer his way into English literature through the quality of his pulpit eloquence as Jabez
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Branderham of Wuthering Heights. But what a text for the woman to choose!
His eyes were blind to the blood and tears of sacrifice, but that really did not matter so long as Grace Murray found her text again safely at the end of the journey: "I should utterly have fainted but that I believe verily to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."
XXXII MOLLY Tue faithful city of Oxford was wont to cherish John Wesley in the wilderness ways of life.
It was to her he returned when Varanese had swung, on the arm of Jack Chapon, out of his reach.
There he had dreamed of Aspasia by moonlight and there he had written down the story of Miss Sophy. Now he was back again after the glory of the love of God had flooded his heart and revived the thirsty land of England.
It was an ominous return.
The burden of that mighty Revival of Religion had all at once become intolerable.
The one who should have been his right hand, his own familiar friend, Brother Charles, had stabbed him in the back.
He had robbed him of Grace Murray and set such a cruel gossip on foot as to besmirch the glorious work of Christ and worry the leader with constant tittle-tattle.
It was Brother Charles who would keep pursuing him with names of his other friends linked with his own until he came to groan under whispers of Molly Francis and some lady of the name of Mrs. Lundy.
Charles seemed to have developed a complex on the question of his brother's marriage and would give him no peace with his prying ways and his wagging tongue.
Now amidst the dreaming spires of Oxford the hated gossip had died away.
John Wesley found himself respected by all,
MOLLY and discovered a wonderful change had come over the place since the days of stone-throwing and mockery.
He had come to record a vote for his father's old friend, Dr. Morley—why should he not remain and give up the struggle in the dust and heat of the great unregenerate world outside that glorious city?
His mind played round the thought.
He had an independent Fellowship which was ample for his own needs, and he would be done forever with Charles' ceaseless claims on his purse.
Should he not turn Jonah and let the Ship's Company founder?
Why not run away, for the world had served him cruelly?
What of the love of God and perishing souls?
The urgency of the quest did not seem so keen in this delightful city of the Muses, where men followed knowledge like a sinking star and found reality in old books.
Here, too, was the beauty of gardens, the light on grey stone and the peace of a slowly winding river. Who does not know the enchantment of the place? Who has not realized the way that those older universities hold their sons with chains which can be wrenched asunder only with blood-shedding?
And yet, in spite of all, something from that outside world of cruel gossip and ingratitude still held good— something still called Wesley with a stronger voice than academic peace.
It was the thought of his people—his Methodists—his Ship's Company—that would not let him rest.
They had given him their love in rich measure. How could he desert them now?
And then a friend appeared with an alternate solution and a suggestion of a plan to solve all problems.
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It seems that Wesley's old friend, Perronet, advised marriage, and also indicated the lady, who should be one of his own Huguenot friends and outside the circle of gossip of Methodism.
It was a stringent purgative for the poison of a lotus-eater, but it extracted Wesley from Oxford and saved God's Revival.
As he quaintly records his momentous decision, it runs, "I resolved to take up my Cross and marry."
But it is likely that even then he might have wriggled off the hook had not the lady taken things into her own hands and helped him out in the matter of. proposal and marriage.
She knew the ropes, for she was a widow and had grown-up children to complete her education.
Also Providence played right into her hands.
John Wesley twisted his ankle on London Bridge and went to Molly Vazeille to be nursed and refitted for the battle of life, and certain it is that the lady made hay while the sun shone.
She allowed him no time to write a treatise on inordinate affection, nor would she let him consult with all his preachers ere he took the plunge. Brother Charles more than they all was left in ignorance of the forthcoming marriage, and was dumbfounded when he heard the news. He confessed in impotent rage that he had no suspicion of such a bride, for he had been so busy bolting the stable door against Molly Francis and the rest of the sisters of Methodism that he had let the quarry escape, and almost wept for vexation.
His Journal shows a very good representation of a saint in a tantrum as he carried his own dear Sarah out of the commotion to mingle her tears with his at a distance.
It was only
MOLLY Mr. Blackwell, who was powerful with the moneybags, who prevailed on him to behave himself and to present himself before his sister-in-law with a kiss of reconciliation.
To this day the place of this strange marriage has never been discovered, and John Wesley does not give it so much as a mention in those meticulous Journals of his.
Perhaps a certain secrecy was necessary when a man was set up with a brother like
Charles Wesley who was bent on frustration and difficulty. The whole transaction was startlingly unreasonable for Brother John, and, although he brought it off in secret with Molly Vazeille, he felt uncomfortably certain that he owed the Methodists an apology.
So much can be gleaned from Charles Wesley's Journal, where he reveals the gossip he has been able to pick up from the Society.
He fortunately gives the outline of his brother's apology and flashes the Temptation at Oxford on to the screen: "Miss Hardy related my brother's apology: "That in Oxford he had an independent fellowship, was universally honored, but left all for the people's sake, returned to town, took up his cross and married; that at Oxford he had no more thought of a woman than for any other being; that he married to break down the prejudice about the world and him.' His easily won lady sat open-eyed."
On the other hand the Methodists are reported to have "hid their faces."
The lady is declared to have been easily won, but it is more than likely that it was she herself who did most of the winning, and it is true that she picked up
John Wesley under an entire misapprehension.
Fate
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so decreed that it should be she, Molly Vazeille, who caught him betwixt the saddle and the ground. Fate so fashioned the plot that it was just Molly Vazeille that Wesley met when the strains of the Pilgrims'
Chorus were muted and the Venusberg music was strident and jangling. They were both to reap a very whirlwind of sorrow and misunderstanding, but it was not Molly Vazeille's fault that such was the John Wesley she met at the opening of their married life.
She could understand a man like that, but the real Wesley, Wesley the son of Susanna, Wesley the servant of God, left her guessing.
From start to finish of that stormy voyage she was an alien, a stowaway on board with that precious Ship's Company.
She came to hate them all with their pious phrases, their divine love and their splitting of hairs.
Molly Vazeille was in the habit of calling a spade a spade. She had once reigned in Threadneedle Street as a banker's wife, and she was at home in that region of hard currency, of obvious cash and clear-cut values.
With the clearest of clear eyes she saw those early Methodists just as they were and not at all as they fondly hoped they were in the recesses of their own minds.
Charles Wesley called her his best friend because she told him his faults so honestly, for she had not traveled with that young man and his Sally without summing him up and the situation as well in bold clear-cut outline.
She saw how good it was to him to settle down in Bristol and come less and less to the help of his brother John.
It irked her that Charles should be kept in comfort and the odor of sanctity at
MOLLY Bristol while John Wesley paid him good money which he himself had earned in every part of the United Kingdom by sheer hard work.
This might be the way of the Methodists, but to Threadneedle Street it looked very like nonsense, and she never lost an opportunity of telling Charles so at the top of her voice. He called her "ta woman of a sorrowful spirit," and she called him a great many names, but all to do with his innate idleness.
He could be busy enough when it pleased him, as when he tramped about with his little infant prodigy to get the London musicians to take an interest in the lad and advance the family honor, or when he chased over England to meddle with John Wesley's affairs, but when it came to the burden and heat of the day he had a way of retiring to his dear Sally and his hymns and that growing grave of olive branches in the churchyard of St. James in the Horsefair at Bristol.
The austerity of John Wesley's New Room and the comfortable house in Charles Street, Bristol, where Charles Wesley lived are eloquent in contrast.
In that house hangs a portrait of Brother Charles which is also eloquent.
It shows the fat, rounded face of the complacent and the well-fed, and the modern devotee tries to excuse the apparition with explanation of some unfortunate twist of a neckcloth.
The Methodists must still see the haloes on their saints, but it is more than likely that that picture of Charles Wesley is as the clear eyes of Molly Vazeille saw him.
It was the same with John Bennet.
Mrs. Wesley saw the man just as the world would see him.
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note of the conquering hero is lacking from Bennet's diary after his famous marriage.
He is still jealous of Wesley, and Grace travels with him in low spirits over those hills of the north. There is an anxiety and a teasing unrest about it all. There is short sleep and rain on the windows and a restless pushing on to some purpose as yet unrevealed. The inevitable break came at Bolton.
With a great proportion of the trustees of the preaching-house he had walked out to form a society of his own on Congregational lines and with much talk of Calvin and of Wesley's popery. He had made a bid to wreck the Methodist societies of the north by going round in sound and fury declaring:
"Now you must take either me or Mr. Wesley."
But somehow it had all fallen rather flat, and it so obviously pained his wife that peace was found at Warburton where a meeting-house was built for him and where he could preach to his heart's content that he was no longer a servant but a son.
His endless theological arguments distressed and confused his wife, but Mrs. Vazeille was a match for him and applied that acid test, again at the top of her voice.
Bennet's diary gives the picture: ""While we were thus conversing Mrs. Wesley came into the room in a great rage saying there should be no private meetings nor underhand dealings.
She said I was in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity."
That accusation of jealousy was near the mark in Bennet's case, for he states so clearly what was rankling in his heart at Bolton: "How unjust it was as well as un-Christian, since I was the first person the Lord sent to preach
MOLLY among them and one of the chiefest instruments both for raising the society and building the house, for the trustees to give the house away without acquainting me. When the deed came to be signed my name was left out." Mrs. Wesley seems to have dealt faithfully with him by carrying the war into the enemy's country and by getting Bennet to confess that he never believed anything dishonorable of John Wesley either in his government of the societies or in his friendship with Grace Murray: "I thought it my duty to clear him of this accusation, his wife being present, lest some uneasiness should be created between them."
Uneasiness there certainly was, but not over Grace Bennet.
Mrs. Vazeille saw John Wesley as a man and a husband and not at all as God's messenger of salvation.
She treated him to the same eloquence as she had employed for Brother Charles and Brother Bennet.
Wesley called it "squabbling," but it was something nearer lunacy when she pulled the diminutive man round the room and finally stood victor with a tuft of those desirable curls in her hand. One of the preachers, entering at the moment, reported the scene and also his own rage at the woman: "I felt as though
I could have knocked the soul out of her."
It forms an interesting background to the Great Revival of Religion to realize that for thirty years John Wesley faced life with his very lively skeleton in his family cupboard. At the Methodist Mission House today there hangs a picture of the lady. She is discreetly disposed of behind a door in the room which gives the pre-eminence to large representations in color of John
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Wesley escaping from the fire and escaping to heaven from his death-bed.
Her station is not far removed from Threadneedle Street, which she might glimpse over the head of the modern Methodists as they administer Wesley's World Parish in that great Committee Room.
There is a certain dash about her car- | riage and a look in her eye as of Mona Lisa's enigmatic glance, but the prevailing impression is that the face is the face of a shrew.
That God chose such an instrument as Molly Vazeille to save the great Revival of Religion in England is but another confirmation of the fact that He moves in a mysterious way.
Wesley said he married ''to break down the prejudice about the world and him," but he accomplished more than that for his own peace of mind.
Once married, John Wesley had cleared away a dangerous preoccupation.
He had once for all solved the mystery of marriage, and like the charity-school boy with his mastery of the alphabet, Wesley discovered that he had also gone through very much to learn very little.
It is true that at the first he is man enough to marvel that a woman should give herself to him just like that, and as he rode away from her after that strangest of honeymoons he dashed off a letter to her to tell her so:
"My Dear Mo ty, Do I write too soon?
Have not you above all the people in the world a right to hear from me as soon as possibly I can?
You have surely a right to every proof of love I can give, and to all the little help
MOLLY which is in my power, for you have given me even your own self."
He was forty-two miles from London, and he addressed his letter to Mrs. Wesley in Threadneedle
Street, and added a postscript which he was to regret in the coming years: "If any letter comes to you directed to ye Rev. Mr. Wesley, open it: it is for yourself.
Dear love, adieu!"
But he was very soon to learn that the kind of love which Molly Vazeille could give him could really not hold a candle to the Love of God.
He was thus to become heart-whole for the campaign and to find no need any longer to explore an earthly union.
He was now wedded only to the Kingdom of God, and had cleared out all the old fears of fire and the mystery of women from his heart.
Grace Murray had been so torn with anxiety because she had foreseen just that difficulty in a man like
John Wesley.
It was so terribly possible that the divine fire might dissolve and pale before the fire of earthly passion.
Now between them all they had solved the difficulty and averted the danger.
It must always be God first with Wesley if England were to be saved.
"Be Thou my never-failing Friend, And love, O love me to the end."
Mrs. Vazeille demanded that Wesley should first of all be a husband and next the instrument of God's salvation.
Grace had considered him always only in
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the light of the Lord's anointed.
It was thus very salutary for the fortunes of the Ship's Company that he should take his wife over precisely the same ground which he had covered with Grace Murray.
It performed the psychological catharsis achieved by re-ascending in an aeroplane directly after a crash.
So to Ireland they journeyed and to those wistful mountains round about Keswick.
Mrs. John Wesley complained at every step, and she had a right to complain.
She called the weather vile when it was vile, for, to her, it was just weather and most horribly uncomfortable.
To John it was sent from his Father in Heaven, and so "rain's my choice." 'To him she seemed to be speaking blasphemy because she cursed the English climate up hill and down dale as they journeyed.
Grace had never complained.
Was she not one in the glory or agony of the same campaign?
Was she not there to hold up the prophet's hands? One of her fears had always been lest she should do anything to weaken him and hinder his message.
But to Mrs. Vazeille the case was vastly different.
What kind of marital love was this to have her bumped all over those horrid mountains at her age, and an uncertain age at that, and to ask her cheerfully to endure a campaign of discomfort which even rough slave-trading John
Newton, the terror of Cowper's life, had declined as too strenuous.
She must have lost her temper scores of times a day, and John Wesley must have shut his eyes and hoped for the best.
He writes to his friend Blackwell from that fatal Epworth a letter which shows how little he understood the woman
MOLLY -who now jogged at his side: "After taking a round of between three and four hundred miles we came hither yesterday in the afternoon. My wife is at least as well as when she left London. The more she travels the better she bears it. It gives us yet another proof that whatever Gods calls us to He will fit us for, so that we have no need to take thought for the morrow."
Molly Vazeille had her own ideas as to the propriety of what God called her to endure, and she spent much of her married life running away from this strange husband whom she had once picked up under an entire misapprehension.
Whether she lived with him or not she filled one useful purpose, for he now found he was able to consider all other women as his sisters only, which was really what he had always desired.
He loved to write to them as he had written to those girls at home who treasured his letters.
That was the only comfortable way to regard women, and so he found freedom to help many who were despairing and broken in the terrible chances and cruel- . ties of this vale of tears.
He had a charm that even Molly Vazeille could not gainsay, for her very love of him rendered her almost insanely jealous. He had a cure of souls which he must discharge freely. He had a correspondence which he must sustain with the weary and heavy-laden.
It was not Mrs. John Wesley's fault that she could not see it just like that.
It was not her fault that she possessed a Threadneedle Street mind which could only see material things of life even as our modern world sees them.
Molly Va-
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zeille saw Wesley's converts through Threadneedle Street eyes and hated the lot of them.
One poor woman, who had undergone the torture of a more than Enoch Arden return of one husband from the grave following a complication of two other aspirants, Wesley had won to the love of God and made
~ her housekeeper at the New Room at Bristol.
She sat at the head of his table and looked after a house full of preachers and sustained a spiritual correspondence with Wesley. But when Mrs. John visited Bristol she called the poor woman just what the world would call her, making no allowance for the contrite spirit:
"The whore now serving you has three husbands living."
It was baffling, it was preposterous, it was an insult to any wife to read letters written to such a woman from that incomprehensible husband of hers.
One day she found in his riding-coat such a letter, unsealed and unashamed, but surely those venerable locks suffered again for the writing of such words to a woman like Sarah Ryan: "The conversing with you either by speaking or writing is an unspeakable blessing tome.
I cannot think of you without thinking of God.
Others often lead me to Him, but it is, as it were, going round about; you bring me straight into His presence.
Therefore whoever warns me against trusting you I cannot refrain as I am clearly convinced He calls me to it.
I am, Your affectionate Brother."
Of course it was the kind of treatment to set a woman with a past like Sarah Ryan's completely on her feet, for after all it was Christ's own method, but Mrs. John Wesley could never have
Ain Wns 0 O Oat lal LEN iy NO it Sige nig EO ng Rep pla NO
MOLLY Pe tard that fine point.
She developed a kind of persecution mania, and searched every nook and cranny of Wesley's neat jackets and beloved desks to find incriminating evidence against him and his unfaithfulness to the wife of his bosom.
She must have found a strange collection of manuscript and some amazing letters written to this strange little man during almost half a century of life. There is no trace today of the Varanese correspondence, and it is thought that Mrs. John Wesley destroyed it all. How
Aspasia escaped is a mystery, but she survived in John Wesley's own manuscript.
The whole of the Miss Sophy episode was conned over by Mrs. John Wesley in the company of her son Noah Vazeille.
Together they decided that it would make fine printed matter for the papers, and looked for more incriminating manuscripts in the fastness of his private desk.
The bureau in Wesley's room was broken open and his papers stolen, and there, as one glorious find, the whole of that long treatise on Grace Murray came to light. Noah Vazeille took possession of it on the instant and carried it in triumph away from the Foundery.
Later he gave it to a friend, and later still it found its way into the safe keeping of the British
Museum.
It is from that old manuscript with its corrections in the well-known hand of Wesley that the evidence comes for the friendship of this man and this woman with the background of Alexander the sea captain and the wonders of the Grace of God.
In that unemotional museum collection of England's treasures this strange document holds its place.
It is
SON
TO SUSANNA
right that it should be there with Diana's Temple and the relics of primitive man, for it is eloquent of the ageless love of man and woman and of their unconquerable faith in the Love of God.
John Wesley did let Mrs. Vazeille have one model of his epistolary style all to herself, and obtained at first hand without the necessity of stealing it. In this letter he does not say that when he thinks of her he instinctively thinks of God, which was a phrase of which he was fond.
It is rather a letter written in his best reasoned vein and is a calm statement of their unhappy differences, and begins thus: 'Dear Molly,
I will tell you simply and plainly the things which I dislike.
If you remove them, well.
If not, I am but where I was. I dislike your showing any one of my letters and private papers without my leave.
This never did any good yet, either to you or me or anyone.
It only sharpens and embitters your own spirit.
And the same effect it naturally has upon others.
The same it would have upon me, but that by the Grace of God I do not think of it.'
Then follow nine separate things which the fond husband dislikes in his wife, and these are followed by ten good actions which she might do to set matters right between them. What he disliked most of all was the _ way she spoke to the servants.
There in his home at the Foundery, where Susanna had reigned with her "Pray do this" or "Pray do that," he heard the strident tones of his Molly blackguarding his servants like any fishwife.
He could not get away from that voice, and it lacerated his nerves to hear such language in
MOLLY his quiet house.
She also would dart out on him as he welcomed his friends to his study and kept a watch to see who went up and down the stairs.
As for his relations, she would have dealings with none of them.
John Wesley was not allowed to give them a dish of tea even in those pretty cups of his.
She doubtless thought they came for money, as they were mostly down on their luck, or possibly they might discuss the lady of the household in unbecoming terms.
Mrs. Vazeille was one of those annoying conversationalists who have but a nodding acquaintance with the truth.
This also irritated Wesley, with his sometimes almost stupid honesty.
The poor woman was only trying to go one better than those clever Wesleys when she declared, as for her first husband, why
"Mr. Vazeille learned Spanish in a fortnight." This fluency of lies was meeting the poor man at every turn, and he kept hearing echoes of the wild things his wife had said—how he beat her, how she might not sit in his presence without his leave, how he had ridden in Kingswood with Sarah Ryan and a host of other slanders which she well knew to be quite false.
It is a miracle how God's Grace sustained him through such a storm, but he did get as far as saying, when she left him, that he would not ask her to come back again.
The poor woman was to be pitied in that God had matched her with an hour of English
History that demanded more than ordinary common sense and courage.
She died in 1781 and was buried without Noah Vazeille informing Wesley of the event.
There is a suggestion of a blow given and received
SON
TO SUSANNA
even at the very last by that angular woman: "T came to London and was informed that my wife died on Monday.
This evening she was buried, though I was not informed of it till a day or two after." Well the plotters knew that the leader of the Methodists ought to have been at his wife's funeral, for was he not known as the apostle of all holiness?
John Wesley, through the years, managed to get his wife into right perspective as his mother, in the old days, had done with her explosive Rector. He looked upon her as a dispensation of Providence and so could not pray "Take Thy plague away from me," but rather 'Let me be purified, not consumed." He realized that it had all been for the good of the campaign, for he might have settled down, as Charles had done, had his lady sustained her initial blandishments "as she well knew how to do."
Instead he had been kept in one ceaseless fever of itinerancy in the interests of the Kingdom of God. The world was of the same opinion and enjoyed the joke: "No trap so mischievous to the field preacher as wedlock.
Matrimony has quite maimed poor Charles, and might have spoiled John and George if a wise Master had not graciously sent them a brace of ferrets," which is a remark
Mrs. Vazeille would really have liked to have made herself, at least, in so far as it applied to Mrs. George
Whitefield.
Her clear-cut mind and her spade philosophy would have appreciated the point of view that attributed the success of the Evangelical Revival of Religion to a couple of uncomfortable wives.