Long Shadows
XXXITII
LONG SHADOWS
Stnce the Lord had removed his plague, seven years more had passed over John Wesley's devoted head.
The years now seemed to go very fast, and so differently from the leaden feet of those seven years that he had once contemplated serving for his dear Varanese.
His mother had told him he would see things quite differently when he stood on the borders of eternity, and now, as always, he found her right:
'Ah, my dear son, did you, with me, stand on the verge of life and see before your eyes a vast expanse, an unlimited duration of being you might shortly enter upon, you can't conceive—how different the sentiments of sensitive pleasures, the desire of sexes, and pernicious friendships of the world would be then from what they are now while health is entire."
So had his mother always tended to show up the trivialities of this life against the background of a vast eternity. To the young Wesley it was perhaps hardly fair, for spring in the Cotswolds and College quads in moonlight can be very beautiful in themselves.
But now that he stood where his mother had stood, on the verge of life, it was all just the way he felt himself.
They said he seemed to have the look of a man "sunk in God."
'Those old moving memories had been left a very long way behind him. And yet
SON
TO SUSANNA
before he joined his mother in that unlimited duration of being there was just time for his past life to step out from the shadows.
It happened one day to Wesley as to his father, but here was no posturing on the hearthrug as John o' Styles.
Matters had gone too deep for that, and now John Wesley answered simply not a word.
The campaign had prospered gloriously, and thousands had flocked to his standard.
All over England and Ireland, in the West Indies and throughout America the Ship's Company had propagated itself, until its success caught Wesley's breath with wonder and an instant bowing of the head in great humility: "What hath God wrought!"
In the lane leading to the city he had built him a new chapel, with old ship's masts for pillars and a little garden at the back to fulfil those old cravings for just one bit of home.
The Foundery had been sold, and now Wesley lived in his own house, whose front windows commanded
Bunhill Fields and his mother's grave.
The house was well provided with cupboards such as her careful soul must have loved, and the walls were paneled in plain wood.
The fireplaces were comfortable and most inviting for a family conclave.
But Wesley was ending where he began, for in his bachelor home he thought he was really no better, after all, than just a lonely Fellow of his College.
He had a close friend, Henry Moore, who was to live in the house after Wesley's death and whom he had chosen to look after all his papers.
He was to have those precious manuscripts at his disposal among which
LONG SHADOWS
he had so hated Mrs. Vazeille to rummage, and to Henry Moore also he had given his little copy of Thomas 4 Kempis in its neat little leather case.
So one day, to the two friends, the bustling Thomas Oliver ran in. He was Wesley's Book Steward, and a very poor one at that, but he had written one amazing hymn in his:
"The God of Abraham praise, Who reigns enthroned above, Ancient of everlasting days, And God of Love."
He had, moreover, chosen his wife exactly according to Wesley's rules of reason, and had achieved success where his master had singularly failed.
Thomas Oliver set out to select a wife with grace, common sense and a small competency, and all were gloriously found dwelling in Miss Green from the north of England.
But as he had chosen the best horse in . Methodism with no reason at all save that the beast fell in love with him at first sight, it is highly probable that his success in matrimony was due to the poet and musician in him rather than to the man of reason.
He was a fit messenger to bring to Wesley a request from a very old friend.
He had been walking in Moorfields and had met one Mrs. John Bennet, who desired that she might speak with Mr.
John Wesley. Where was she? At the house of her son, who was the Dissenting Minister of the chapel on the pavement in Moorfields.
She was really only
SON
TO SUSANNA
just round the corner, and after all these years!
Wesley was obviously overcome at the suddenness of it all. Should he go or should he stay? Then turning to Henry Moore he proposed that they should go together, and so set out for that house in the fields where once he had preached of new birth and Grace
Murray had found life from the dead.
Now she had been John Bennet's widow for thirty years.
She had brought up a large family of small children on Susanna Wesley's own rules and had done all for them herself.
They were only babies when their father died, but she had never wasted a minute, and had managed a little English literature into the bargain.
She had looked with love into the childish faces and had been helped on her way.
Now she was an old woman of seventy-five, and God was going gently about His work of taking down her old clay cottage, as she quaintly called her body.
Wesley himself was ten years older, and felt strangely unequal to this meeting of ghosts from the past.
Even blunt Henry Moore records that the scene was deeply affecting.
He was also able to state that the woman was worthy of his leader's devotion: "It was easy to see that notwithstanding the many years which had intervened, that both in sweetness of spirit and in person and manners she was a fit subject for the tender regrets expressed in those verses which I have presented to the reader." Now there was no more poetry.
Wesley was strangely silent as the two men walked back to their bachelor's house in the City Road.
It was his custom to make caustic com-
LONG SHADOWS
ments when his friends married, as that it had not improved them or that they were fallen from a high estate, or as in the case of Aspasia, that he despaired of finding grace among gentlewomen.
But now he has the grace to say nothing at all. He paid his lost love the tribute of silence, and Henry Moore never heard him name her name after that one last supreme meeting.
The years had: done their worst and had drawn deep lines on that sweet face. The pain of it all came in on Wesley like a flood.
It was the wreck of old beauty and the death of old passion, and men must needs be silent when even the shade of that which once was great has passed away.
In that same year of 1788 Charles Wesley died.
Susanna had always found him a difficult baby to rear, but it was just like him to achieve the unexpected and live to be eighty years old.
With his habitual impetuosity he had rushed into this world quite two months before he was expected, and had to be wrapped in wool on arrival as are all precious things.
But his nervous little body carried its early history to the grave.
He was always just that sort of person.
He would always find it difficult to walk and not faint.
He will return to London after just setting out, appalled at what lies before him.
He will rush to horse and fall off just as readily.
He was an incredibly bad rider and altogether too nervous for the highly strung creature between his knees not to realize that the best place for him was in the ditch.
Charles Wesley was really not to be depended on, and he was a thorn in Brother John's side to the end
SON
TO SUSANNA
of the chapter.
He coquetted with Whitefield and Lady Huntingdon, not realizing that the whole of the fortunes of the precious Ship's Company must stand or fall by Arminius and not by Calvin and his horrible decrees.
So John's letters cry out against him: "I give you a dilemma.
Take one side or the other.
Either act really in connection with me, or never pretend to it. Rather disclaim it and openly avow you do and will not.
But acting in connection with me, I mean take counsel with me once or twice a year, as to the places where you will labor.
Hear my advice before you fix, whether you take it or no.
At present you are so far from this that I do not even know when and where you intend to go.
So far are you from following any advice of mine, nay, even from asking it. And yet I may say without vanity that I am a better judge of this matter than either Lady Huntingdon, Sally Jones, or any other— nay, than your own heart."
Charles Wesley was prone to seek "guidance" not to go to places where he really did not wish to go: "Either you move by those impressions which you account Divine, or, which is worse, sit pro ratione voluntas.'?
Charles knew very well he was never going to put himself really under John's laborious yoke, and his brother stormed to deaf ears: "What I have desired, any time these ten years, is either that you would really act in connection or that you would never say you do; either leave off professing or begin performing.
O brother, pretend no longer to the thing that is not; you do not, will not act in concert with me.
Not
LONG SHADOWS
since I was married only (the putting it on that is a - mere finesse) , but for ten years last past and upwards you have no more acted in connection with me than
Mr. Whitefield has done.
I would to God you would begin now or else talk no more as if you did."
The grand bone of contention between the brothers was that old question which haunted the mind of their father and poisoned his spirit.
Was it to be now with the Methodists a case of Church or of Dissent?
Charles Wesley was vehement for the Church and gloried in the rout of all Dissenters.
Gleefully he says of Whitefield that he mowed down the Dissenters.
He himself would not admit one traveling preacher to the ranks of Methodism unless they would give a pledge that they would live and die in the Church of England.
He stormed about over England weeding out undesirables with a too heavy hand until John Wesley begged him "not to check the young ones without strong necessity.
If we lay some aside we must have a supply, and of the two I prefer grace before gifts. We must have forty itinerant preachers or drop some of our societies.
You cannot so well judge of this without seeing the letters I receive from all parts."
Force of circumstances was driving John Wesley into this position *to Dissent or be silent," and silent he could never be, for the Love of Christ constrained him. A great part of his societies were made up of Dissenters who had found new life with the Methodists, so that he was driven more and more to the position of despera-
SON
TO SUSANNA
tion which he thus describes: 'Church or no Church, we must save souls."
Charles Wesley had come to the conclusion that only Church of England souls were worth saving, and so he preached a famous sermon about a remnant being left from the fire, and he preached it everywhere he went. Two parts of the Methodist societies could perish so that the third was drawn from the fire, and this third part were the children of Mother
Church.
So had the glory of the sacred flame come to mean just that sort of fire to Charles Wesley, and the Ship's Company to him was nothing more than the few who could scramble up over the side of "the old ship—The Church." But the heart of his brother
John was very tender for the lost sheep of the House of Israel.
His was the world parish, and when all America was added on he had to do something about it. The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed, so he ordained his own ministers in order that they might administer the Sacraments of Holy Church.
The Rector of Epworth must have turned in his grave, but John had not yet done with his sins. He justified the horrid deed by those wretched reasons of his, and what was worse by arguments from the Presbyterian Kirk.
Charles Wesley must have felt that both he and his father had lived in vain when he received this letter from his unrepentant brother:
"If you will go hand in hand with me, do. But do not hinder me if you will not help. Perhaps if you had kept close to me I might have done better. However, with or without help I creep on!"
LONG SHADOWS
Now Charles Wesley was dead and John was preaching still. He was, in fact, just then crying his heart out because his brother had gone on before him and first obtained the prize of entry into the Many
Mansions.
He had mastered his emotion until he had given out his brother's hymn of "Wrestling
Jacob," and now the words rang through the little chapel:
"My company before is gone, And I am left alone with Thee."
The old man could get no further, and there he sat and wept with the long shadows creeping up around him and the long thoughts of home, of sorrow and the Love of God.
Like Susanna and her Rector, John could forgive his brother Charles everything for having written that one hymn of the Traveler:
* Tis Love! 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart; The morning breaks, the shadows flee, Pure, universal Love Thou art; To me, to all, Thy mercies move:
Thy nature and Thy name is Love."
It was the sum and solution of the whole mystery of life.
That inexorable 'Traveler Unknown" had met Jacob at the Brook Jabbok, had kept company with men of broken heart on an Emmaus road, and was even now present with a very old man crying his
SON
TO SUSANNA
heart out in a stuffy Methodist Chapel.
Up and down the scale the Ship's Company sang their craziest of crazy tunes and with so great an output of emotion as to leave them quite breathless.
They knew all the words by heart, and in any case they could not have seen them in those hymn books of Charles
Wesley's for their eyes were full of tears.
On they sang, with a shout of triumph which would fairly land them all in Heaven.
But they could not overtake that nervous, artistic, little figure which even then had outstripped them and cut in to the Mansions of Light:
"Lame as I am, I take the prey, Hell, earth, and sin with ease o'ercome; I leap for joy, pursue my way, And as a bounding hart fly home, Through all eternity to prove Thy nature and Thy name is Love."