Chariots Of Fire
XXXIV
CHARIOTS OF FIRE
THERE remained but three years more for John Wesley to creep on his lonely way.
In 1790 he gave up keeping his accounts.
Taking a long and reasonable view he justified this startling decision by saying:
"For upwards of eighty-six years I have kept my accounts exactly.
I will not attempt it any longer, being satisfied with the continual conviction that I save all I can, and give all I can, this is all I have."
Now John Wesley in 1790 was aged eighty-seven years, so that Susanna must have set the children early to their keeping of infant pence.
But in spite of that pardonable exaggeration he was his mother's true son in saying that he had kept accounts long enough to arrive at a general conclusion about money.
He was not going to make his mind up in a hurry about so important a matter at that.
In 1791 he preached his last sermon at Leatherhead in Surrey and returned to his house in the City Road to die. The friends who welcomed him in the courtyard near the chapel were struck by the way he got out of the coach for the last time.
He who was always so active on the King's business could now but creep upon his way.
With difficulty he climbed the narrow stairs of his own house and sank down on a chair, quite spent.
The man was dying, but it took
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some little time for him to make up his mind even about that. He thought at first if everyone left him quite alone he might feel better, but death was forcing his hand. At last he confessed to his anxious friends,
"T must lie down," and in another moment they had summoned the doctor.
But Wesley was still unconvinced, and tried to smile away the anxiety of the Ship's Company with 'Doctor, they are more afraid than hurt."
But it was his last joke, for quickly he was plunged in the stupor of death. Around his bed were gathered the sons and daughters which God had given him in the bands of the Gospel. They watched every movement and garnered every word.
His mind was turning, turning, in that strange strait between life and death, and ever and anon it brought to the surface flotsam and jetsam of his long life.
He made one heroic attempt to sing a psalm of Watts', and queerly enough it was all tangled up in his clothes, and he discovered it as he tried to get out of bed and to dress.
It was one of the springtime ones from that first hymn book of his, and often he must have tried it over in that bungalow in Arcady rising early in the morning when Miss Sophy came to breakfast.
"Tl praise my Maker whilst I've breath; And when my voice is lost in death, Praise shall employ my nobler powers.
My days of praise shall ne'er be past, _ Whilst life, and thought, and being last,
Or immortality endures."
CHARIOTS OF FIRE He was soon obliged to return to his bed, and once there he conducted phantom services and preached ghostly sermons in a dream kingdom all his own.
Sometimes he took his friends by surprise by darting at them a quick intelligible question: What was the text he preached from at Hampstead?
To which the answer came like some chorus rehearsing fate:
"Ye know the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be made rich."
It was the right answer, and it brought peace to the dying man as he muttered: "That is the foundation, the only foundation; there is no other."
It had been a long and reasonable view of things that had brought him there, but his mind was satisfied with the conclusion.
Here was a rule of poverty, of chastity and obedience, which far transcended the rules of the Holy Club, for it was informed with the charm of Christ—'tye know the grace."
It was the evangelical rule lighted by the enthusiasm of St. Paul.
It was the gospel of Wesley himself, who had thought the world well lost for the Grace of God. And now he could preach it no more.
His mouth was dry and his wits wandering—what should he do?
All at once a reasonable avenue of hope appeared and he commanded them with great eagerness: "Give my sermon on the love of God to everyone."
He had once had a sermon on Christian charity which he had preached for Sister Hetty to show the mercy due from us to evil men.
But he had come to stand in that bad company himself and had discovered that
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he was even in need of just that mercy.
He had learned that only the mercy of God was sufficient to cover all his sin.
Love of God, Grace of God—it was all one, and it had taken him all his life to learn.
It was the only love of which he was not afraid, and it was the complete answer to the sin of the world:
"Give my sermon on the love of God to everybody."
The widow of Charles Wesley had come to say goodbye, and he greeted her affectionately and held her hand.
Gently she bent over him and moistened his lips with a drop of water.
He was sinking into his last sleep, but the reaction to that last ministry was instantaneous.
His mother had always insisted on a grace being said for food or drink, and even death must tarry while Susanna's son obeyed her ruling. So came the old home grace at the very end of the journey: '""We thank Thee, O Lord, for these and all Thy mercies; bless the Church and King: grant us truth and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord for ever and ever."
It must have sounded an incongruous declaration for a dying saint as his disciples stood round him grasping after any word of comfort.
They could not see, with eyes blinded by tears, the tremendous importance of that scene.
They could not know that John Wesley was ending just where he began.
In that borderland country between life and death only his mother was any more real to him.
He had come so into this world and so he would return.
"Bless the King."
Now which King did Susanna mean by that?
It had been after a controversy on
CHARIOTS OF FIRE sovereignty that John Wesley had been born and now it was all cropping up again from hidden depths of the unconscious.
It was clear that neither Grace Murray nor anyone else ever really had a fair chance with John Wesley.
Susanna had seen to all that under the old thatched roof of Epworth Rectory before ever the brand was plucked from the burning:
"TI do intend to be more particularly careful of the soul of this child."
He could call a dear friend "eyes of the blind," and he had spoken of Grace Murray as "his right hand," but he was not going to give to them anything more of his immaculate little person than that.
His heart was his mother's and belonged to her God, for so she had forged his chains in that remorseless discipline of the nursery when she had essayed, singlehanded, the salvation of the souls of her children.
Was it Mrs. Charles Wesley or was it really his mother there, hiding behind the curtains of his bed?
His eyes were growing dim, and he was greatly in need of love and protection, and he was moreover lost in the dark.
But all at once almost in ecstasy came the glad words: "The best of all is, God is with us."
It was a great consolation to the Methodists.
They were a company of shipwrecked mariners and they felt themselves embarked on a sea of troubles.
The chief of their credentials was an inordinate affection for their dying pilot and for the rest of the Ship's
Company, but what had they beyond that?
Their hands were strong to save a castaway because their hearts were tender with the love of God, but the
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Church of England had cast them adrift and they could find no desired haven among the Dissenters.
They had a firm conviction that they would all meet again in heaven, for they were accustomed to sing a sort of rollicking sea-shanty at their funeral services:
**There all the ship's company meet Who sailed with the Saviour beneath; Rejoicing, each other they greet, And triumph o'er sorrow and death."
But what were they to do here and now?
They were a huge flock of sheep gathered from every fold and carrying every brand upon their bodies.
They used the Prayer Book of the Church of England, but all their polity was of Presbyterian construction, and who ever heard of such a union as that? They were the heirs of Samuel and Susanna Wesley in this strange composing of that old quarrel of English
Church and Dissenting Puritan, but it was a peculiarly difficult legacy for those who should come after.
Now their leader had declared with conviction and yet in sober reason: ""The best of all is, God is with us." Taking a long view of things, he had said that they bore the authentic sign and seal of a divine society.
No Church could bear more unmistakably than they the marks of the Lord Jesus.
It was no idle tale that desire of theirs to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.
It gave their queerly assorted ranks a certain family likeness.
They tried to take life as Christ had taken it and they lived by
CHARIOTS OF FIRE His inexorable example.
But theirs was no mechanized imitation of the life divine.
Rules they might have, but the whole was transmuted into friendship and a love that warmed the heart.
They swung through life to Christ's own rhythm. He was as real to them as though He had overtaken them upon the Emmaus road.
Simply they had gone back to live in Nazareth, to weep at Calvary and to rejoice in a garden at Jerusalem.
Theirs was an older orthodoxy than old Sam Wesley's, an older orthodoxy even than the Church of Thomas 4 Kempis, for it was the orthodoxy of One in Galilee who was Himself a heretic: "Fear not, little flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom."
The little old man gathering up his feet in that old-fashioned bedstead was the same who had raised all England for Christ.
To him had been given the heathen for his inheritance.
He had been sent out into the world under the strain and stress of being ~ son to Samuel and Susanna Wesley, and he had been well-nigh deafened by rams' horns of Dissent and trumpets of orthodoxy.
Calvin and Arminius had contended for his 'soul, and he had trembled under threats of what went forward in the Mind of God.
But in a life packed with emotional crises he had come to believe that nothing profane lurked at the heart of the universe.
Burning and shining there at the center, the essence of God partook of the warmth and the salvation of human love.
So he was ending his long life very simply, and as a child comes home from school: 'The best of all is, God is with us."
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As John Wesley was whirled away into that world of light it was appropriate that the friends at his bedside should hear the rush of a chariot of fire.
Instantly they dropped onto their knees and prayed passionately that the mantle of their Elijah might flutter down to them. Then they went out and told of his death and sent his message all round England in a glorious challenge of hope: ""The best of all is,
God is with us." They buried him in his own back garden, which was also just as it should be for this man of the many gardens. Only Charles Wesley and his father were fit to lie in consecrated ground. They buried John Wesley secretly, for fear of the great crowd of mourners, and that is perhaps why, to this day, some of his disciples refuse to believe that he ever died. Their number dwindles, but to some, still, he walks the City Road or darts in and out of Bristol's
New Room.
Sometimes they have watched him among the packing-cases in an old yard in Aldersgate
Street, sometimes under Paul's dome.
Sometimes they have seen a little figure sprinting round the playground at the Charter House or have watched a young man at work in his rooms at Lincoln College.
Perhaps it is to Oxford that he will return, like that other Scholar Gipsy who waited for the spark from heaven to fall, for, after all his wanderings, it was only Oxford he wished to have written on his coffin.
But for John Wesley there remained no need to tarry longer, for he had learned the secret which that other sought.
In the midst of his own wild brotherhood he had brought down fire from heaven, even to a
CHARIOTS OF FIRE world of half-believers in but casual creeds.
So if his ghost still walks the warm, green, muffled Cumnor hills or stays to watch the line of festal light in Christ
Church Hall, it is in no spirit of quest, but rather in the ecstasy of love's satisfaction.
"But what—I dream. Two hundred years are flown Since first Thy story ran through Oxford halls."