Grace Finds Peace
XX XV
GRACE FINDS PEACE
Ir was the last day of the old year, and up in Derbyshire an old friend had come to see the dying of the year in Grace Bennet's cottage.
The two friends talked so much that they forgot to pray at parting, and Grace was worried afterwards at that omission.
But it was the last day of the year 1791, and as they reviewed that past twelve months there was one event that eclipsed all others and drew their eyes and loosed their tongues.
It was the year of Wesley's death, and the new year would open on an England bereft of his venerable little person.
What was said of him in the Derbyshire cottage?
Grace called it 'tchitchat," and fell to writing a journal next day as a sort of penance, which seems to point to the fact that she was one of those people for whom John Wesley could never die.
Indeed, now, she confidently looked forward to meeting him again, and had her eye strained forward for sight of him beyond the veil: 'The result of that affair I leave till that great decisive day when the secrets of all hearts will be opened.
I love and honor him as a father and shall do while I have a being. I doubt not we shall spend a happy eternity together."
So said Mrs. John Bennet, but she was speaking then, not of her husband, but of John
Wesley.
She had been a widow for forty years, but
GRACE FINDS PEACE the lovely thing about Heaven was that there they neither married nor were given in marriage, and that there even Charles Wesley could not clatter in upon that lover's meeting.
Now, in old age, Grace longed to be gone and felt as though God held her off from harbor when she would fain have scudded before the wind for home.
So she wrote in her journal, and so she remembered the old days at sea: "I was countermanded when I thought myself in sight of my port, with my sails spread, and filled with the gales of the Divine Spirit.
How have I seen when I have been upon the ocean a ship with all her sails unfurled and right before the wind, the mariners rejoicing and myself with them, thinking we were so near our desired haven, when suddenly a crosswind has sprung up and blown us quite away. Soam J. Lord help me to improve the time because the days are evil."
She had moved from her Chinley home to Chapelen-le-Frith, and there she had rejoined the Methodists.
She delighted in the Class Meeting and the services, and could still acknowledge, after being in the school of Christ for sixty years, that '"'His banner over me was love."
But sometimes she was troubled by bad dreams, and sometimes those dreadful arguments of her husband, about free Grace and imputed righteousness, frightened her.
She told her son how she hated these religious bickerings, and even could not refrain from asking John Bennet on his deathbed if he was really sure of all those notions of his.
She had not forgotten how near she was to heartbreak
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when Bennet and Wesley had parted company for the sake of those notions and because Bennet's name was left out of the list of the Bolton trustees.
It had cost her another of those children of hers, for in the storm of her distress the little life also had been overwhelmed.
'The spate of theological jargon, under which she had suffered, left her a prey to the terrible temptation of thinking that all she had known and experienced of the love of God was really just a trick of her imagination.
Did she and Wesley just think God was with them and that His Presence restrained them when all the time it was without foundation in fact?
Looking at life like that, in terms only of body and mind, she might have married Wesley and bid defiance to God and the still small voice. Human love seemed bound up with muscle, gland and sinew, so was it possible that the love of God could be a lie when she killed it in the labyrinthine ways of her own mind?
Night after night she would dream and agonize and lie alone with her sorrow.
Day after day she would see Satan in every corner of her house.
But her own loyalty was of such a quality that not for very long together could she doubt the loyalty of the love of God.
Joy would keep breaking through, or as she says: "I had fainted had not the Lord Jesus appeared and commanded the dogs of hell to depart—I believe that God loveth with an everlasting love."
In the last resort she turned back to a morning in Moorfields when a clear voice had sounded out its challenge: "My soul for yours if you continue lying at the feet of Christ."
But sometimes
GRACE FINDS PEACE now she maintained the challenge only in desperate confidence: "If I perish I perish at the feet of Christ."
Grace Murray had made her supreme sacrifice because she had feared to tarnish the love of God with implications of carnal affection. Now in old age she had to fight the battle all over again and face alone the specter of the mind's omnipotence.
Passionately, she sought for something still beyond the body, something coming from above.
Desperately, she demanded a constancy of love with its foundation eternal in the heavens: ""When I meditate on the sufferings of my Redeemer all the cares and sorrows of life dwindle into nothing.
I feel exalted above the world and above myself.
Give me my God and let the world forsake me."
But the friends of her old age could never guess the terrors of her heart.
She was one who was known to be able to keep a secret, and, as she says herself, God was her only confidant.
She left behind for her son what she calls "Some _ broken hints of my life" in the journal written in old age and in Wesley's verses written between Leeds and Newcastle.
She much wanted to get the story of her life which Mr. Wesley had written down from her mouth, but Noah Vazeille had been at his thieving work and that old manuscript found its way into the British Museum instead.
There remain but hints, for as she says: "I would rather say less than more, having always been afraid of saying or doing wrong."
But from another source comes a very beautiful hint of the life of Grace Bennet in her old age.
She would often receive visits from her god-daughter, Sarah
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Goodman, who stepped across to her cottage from Eccles House.
The girl loved the old lady for her charm and her strength and her wise counsel.
Together they would talk of the things of God, and when Grace removed to Chapel-en-le-Frith the child was disconsolate.
She would look across at the little empty house with all a girl's pensive hero worship, and she would write down all she could remember of the sayings of her friend.
One secret she had learned was a great consolation for absent friends, for Grace had introduced her to a very beautiful rite over the old-fashioned teacups: "One thing I beg of you, and that is that you will retire to prayer at five o'clock in the evening, which is the time I do, when we shall be offering our prayers for each other at the same time there are hundreds putting their petitions to the Almighty."
It was the usual tea-time hour, and it was also Wesley's own hour for prayer, and the hour in which to remember the rest of the Ship's Company.
It was a particularly Methodist Communion of Saints, for it was wedded to the teapot and the intimate circle of home.
So it reads over and over again in Wesley's own diaries: "5.
Tea, conversed, prayed."
It was in keeping with that Primitive Christianity, so dear to his heart, that a common meal should thus be raised into something sacramental in that warm circle of love and memory.
It was a League of Prayer in the eighteenth century which served to unite the scattered members of Wesley's large company into one glorious fellowship.
It is from Grace Bennet that the secret comes, for well she knew her Wesley,
GRACE FINDS PEACE and so she kept company with him in a mystic communion over battered teacups.
But she only wished now to be gone, and she turned her face to the new century unwillingly, her eyes a mist of tears: "I have lived to enter upon another century and am now nearly eighty-five years of age—for me to live is
Christ, but to die is gain. Sometimes I have pleasing thoughts that some of my old companions will come to meet me and welcome me home—but my eyes forbid me at present saying more."
| Grace Bennet died in 1803.
As her friends stood round her in her last hours they saw her constantly praying and talking with someone within the veil. She had always expected God to send her old friends to lead "their sister spirit home." She was eager to join them, but must still fulfil the will of God even in death: "The Lord's time is best," she kept assuring them. Her mind was exercised with the old problem, and even now she set a seal on her lips being fearful of saying too much rather than too little.
The faithfulness of God was still the burden of her sinking life, and even on her deathbed the theme of loyalty was her care: "Some people I have heard speak much of our being faithful to the grace of God, as if they rested much on their own faithfulness.
I never could bear this; it is God's Faithfulness to His own word of promise that is my only security for salvation."
As Grace Bennet slipped away into the shadows the old memories made free with her.
Odd scraps of those old hymns, old remembered conversations, came sweeping up to the level of consciousness.
She
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was back in Newcastle, where one had said, ""We shall meet to part no more."
She was back in the glorious days of Bonny Prince Charlie and the hymns of exile which England had found suspect.
Now it was Grace who was the exile and was languishing there in that old bed in Derbyshire, longing for release and whispering through those old cracked lips: "When will His chariot wheels advance to call his exiled home?"
She was very weak and in great pain and distress, but in that last hour only the things of the spirit mattered.
After a long and sadly heroic life she now could take her discharge in deep thankfulness from the hands of the Only Faithful One:
"About midnight she fell asleep in Jesus with these words, which were the last that could be understood:
'Glory be to Thee, My God, Peace Thou givest me.' "
They buried Grace Bennet amid the hills of Derbyshire. They buried her in her husband's grave among the Dissenters of Chapel Milton, and perhaps the rams' horns looked as though they had won the day.
But a strapping young Methodist, Jabez Bunting, preached her funeral sermon, and his theme was a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer, once seen through a mist of tears at Whitehaven long ago.
Here was a strange linking up of memories and a strange peace after the storm of faction, for the words of the funeral text were Wesley's own words of comfort: "I should utterly have fainted but that I believe verily to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." 'They were the words that Grace had appropriated over a table littered with the rem-
GRACE FINDS PEACE nants of a sorry meal and seen by the light of an October afternoon in Leeds, now long ago. For fifty years she had cherished that text and bound it about her heart, and after such loyalty it was no wonder that she so passionately demanded faithfulness in God
Himself.
And God had been as good as His word.
He had shown signs and wonders in England's green and pleasant land.
Paradoxically, it had been that. passionate disciplined thing called Methodism which had kept England safe in an age of revolution.
Grace Bennet's faith had become her country's fruition.
Her sacrifice had wrought a transcript of her own experience in an England tortured with the horrors of an industrial and political cataclysm.
The love of God held good through all, and men sang their way through hell itself with a faith which all the horrors of French and Industrial Revolutions could not conquer:
"In want my plentiful supply, In weakness my almighty power, In bonds my perfect liberty, My light in Satan's darkest hour, In grief my joy unspeakable, My life in death, my heaven in hell."
It was unreasonable, but men looked at one another and wondered.
Was it possible that it might be, after all, the highest reason and the deepest wisdom?
A doctor of medicine had preached Wesley's funeral
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sermon, and the whole discourse had been designed to show how reasonable a thing is religion.
In any case it had been proved a power which could keep a man and a woman from fainting in the cruel wilderness ways of life.
It was a power able to free the slave and rescue little chimney sweeps from torture.
It was a power capable of raising the ranks of labor to sit in the Council Chambers of Empire.
It was a spirit to breathe passion into the English novel and set the chariots of fire soaring through literature.
It became so steadying a stream of deep morality that even today, in a time of national crisis, the power of that old Revival of Religion shows itself not quite spent.
Even today little bald-headed, bespectacled business men track the way of Christ on Brighton road and the hills of the north.
Theirs is the honesty, the constancy and the chivalry which is the very lifeblood of England.
No flames of hell can frighten them into religion, for they have sealed up the Bottomless Pit long ago.
Like any schoolboy they will take what is coming to them and will even pay for what they have had.
But if they catch sight of His hands and His feet .
. The Love of Christ constrains men still.