Samuel Wesley
SAMUEL WESLEY
THE Rector of Epworth loved to call himself the Poet of the Isle of Axholme, but he was really not any better a poet than Axholme bid fair to be an island. That bit of land in Lincolnshire was an island only by virtue of surrounding rivers, but they served
—Samuel Wesley could whisper to himself the soothing title of 'The island poet."
His daughter Emily, being brought up in the hard school of his parentage, cut across his cadences with her brutal summing up of his character.
To her the poet stands condemned for his 'unaccountable love of discord."
It was too true.
The poet of the isle was a man not quite at peace with himself, and he was possessed of a temper which matched that deeply hidden discord. He could: never quite forgive himself for the things which had been done when he quitted the beleaguered camp of Dissent for the safety and preferment of the Church of England.
He told himself that he got nothing out of it, and as for flying from persecution, why, that was the one thing that would have kept him in the old army, but he protests too much to be quite honest.
Perhaps it is not pleasant to acknowledge the innate snob, nor is it in keeping with the halo of the poet.
His brother-in-law, Dunton, the bookseller, had no illusions about Sam Wesley's apostasy.
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TO SUSANNA
He writes him down as determined on preferment and knows that he will turn his back on any old friend to secure a higher position for himself.
It was known that Samuel Wesley was the man to kick a ladder away after he had used it to scale the heights.
He meant to go higher.
He was even fool enough to talk about his prospects, for Dunton is obviously delighted that he cannot yet be called "Your Grace."
His habit of dedicating his second-rate verse to Royalty is also assessed at its proper value in the plan
-of advancement.
Dunton rolls that "Rector of Epworth" under his tongue and despises him in his heart.
It galled the bookseller to think that he had printed much of the Rector's verse and provided him with a Dissenting income when he was all the time scaling the heights of Establishment.
It made him furious to remember that Samuel Wesley really owed all he was or could be to those old despised Dissenters and that his father had once languished in Blandford gaol for conscience' sake.
What would old John Wesley, appointed to his living by the Lord and Cromwell's Triers, have said to the priest of Epworth parish and the poet of the Isle of Axholme?
It was in the Dissenting Academies that Samuel Wesley had come by all his learning and all his poetry.
He had had the advantage of a real scholar in Veale of Stepney to direct his studies in youth.
But he was not above washing all the dirty linen of the Academies in public and he shouted their sins from the housetops.
The Dissenters had really paid his footing first on the primrose -path to preferment,
SAMUEL WESLEY but he liked to forget all that and remember only that he was a son of Oxford by his own charges and Rector of Epworth by his own merit.
And so he protested and so he attacked the Dissenters and found no peace for his soul by day or by night.
Behind the Rector of Epworth always stalked the ghost of his past life.
It moved with him along his road to perferment and was packed up amongst the books and tables on the wagons moving along that road.
He was always in the position of a man fighting his own shadow to restore his confidence.
He spent a great deal too much time in fighting the Dissenters of his parish and in publishing literature against them.
It poisoned his brain with venom and muddied the limpid stream of his inspiration.
The Dissenters became his obsession, for he could never really cut loose from his own shadow.
A great part of the distress in Epworth Rectory was due to this perpetual controversy, for the Dissenters of the parish hated the Rector for his home thrusts and never lost an opportunity of jeering at his children or making his farming efforts as difficult as possible.
They threatened to "squeeze out his guts" in Parliamentary Elections and clapped him in prison until he should pay the uttermost farthing of his debts to them.
At the Election of 1705 they serenaded his Rectory windows with diabolical rams' horns and yokel hilarity. And though of course it was all very funny from the Dissenters' point of view it caused the death of his latest infant and imperilled the life of the so lately delivered but yet undaunted Susanna Wesley.
There Oo
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TO SUSANNA
was such a tumult in the street then that the Wesley nurse could not sleep, but when she finally managed to drop off she promptly overlaid the youngest Wesley and later delivered the baby's body, cold and stiff, to its mother.
Susanna must have had need of all her philosophy that night. What thoughts were hers as, sore and dejected, she lay on the Rector's bed and heard the ribald jests bawled from the throats of his persecutors?
There are some alive in England still who have heard the serenade of the Skimity Ride, and they confess that the hollow sound of the ram's horn is absolutely bloodcurdling.
It is reputed to have brought down the walls of Jericho, and its assault on the frail tenement of clay is devastating.
Susanna was thankful that her husband was lying low at Gainsborough, but it could not have escaped her notice that she was carrying the heavy end of the stick of his folly.
Yet she knew that somehow still he twisted her heart in pity for him.
She could not really bear him to be ill treated.
She hated this roaring mob outside her sick-room, and remembered her husband kindly as the champion of orthodoxy. These
Dissenters were really very ill-bred, and the ram's horn was a diabolical instrument of music.
Under all the pain and the distress there remained hidden a discomfort of mind, a stress and a puzzle of old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago.
For Susanna herself had quitted that old camp of Dissent along with the lover of her youth, and yet she could never forget her own great father and his unwaver-
SAMUEL WESLEY ing loyalty to these uncomfortable heretics.
Life was such a bundle of contradictions, such a tangle of conflicting loyalties, such a questioning of what should be done and what would have been better left undone.
Yet beaten in body and mind something still held fast.
Above the blare of the ram's horn and the Dissenters' tumultuous devotion to Jehovah, the whisper of the husband of her youth and the champion of orthodoxy could still warm her heart:
"that Jesus Christ is God incarnate and the only Saviour of mankind."
Was it not worth the wringing of the heart by old memories to have kept that Lordship of Christ safe in a world which had denied
Him? The fierce Calvinism of Dissent had no loophole in it to let in the world to a chance of salvation.
It was to be the Church of Susanna's adoption which was to keep the door on the latch for all returning sinners. Hope was bound up in the sacrifice on Calvary. Let the rams' horns bellow there outside the gates of Epworth Rectory, for Susanna knew all the time that she was on the winning side.
It was in this same year of 1705 that the Elect Dissenters finally clapped Samuel Wesley into Lincoln
Gaol.
It meant almost literal starvation for his family, but Susanna was ready for the emergency and firm on the side of orthodoxy.
She managed to get enough bread to feed the little scholars in her nursery, and sent her husband all her rings to buy him comfort in his confinement.
Of course he sent them back, untouched and unpawned, like David and the water of Bethlehem's Well.
Always Samuel Wesley 4I
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TO SUSANNA
knew how to do the fine thing, for it seemed that his poetry rather helped him there.
Also, as he languished in his debtors' prison, he had a hidden source of satisfaction besides the comfort of his muse.
He had just had time to get Susanna churched before he was locked up, and at Epworth that event had become one of the fixed feasts in the Calendar of the Christian year.
In glorious contradistinction to those ribald Dissenters it behoved a priest of the Church of England to fulfil all righteousness.
John Wesley was two years old when that furious battle between Establishment and Dissent was waged in Epworth streets.
Did he wake up that night and cry quietly because he was afraid and the bawling yokels sounded so near and menacing?
It is true that it was all to go into the pattern of his mind and that he was destined never to get out of earshot of the rams" horns of Dissent.
It must have formed a background to nursery life of a peculiarly uncomfortable kind, and his father's unfortunate entanglements were assuredly due to this very bogy of Dissent.
It was a specter of the mind to more than the Rector of Epworth, for his enemies would fling such curses over his garden walls that the children would rush into the house in a panic. The one who was to revive all religion in England and to re-spiritualize both
Establishment and Dissent had to come just this way of fear in childhood.
'Then, he had to suffer that horrible turmoil as best he could, but the years would come when he would stake out a city of refuge for his followers which was neither Establishment nor
SAMUEL WESLEY
Dissent and yet was fearlessly compounded of both.
The Methodists of a later day were to be of Presbyterian Kirk organization and yet to retain the use of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.
What concord hath light with darkness or Christ with Belial?
The answer seems to depend on the fine confused background of John Wesley and upon the conflicting strains in his inheritance.
The time was to come when, in his small person, Roundhead and Cavalier should become reconciled and Stuart King and Commonwealth nation should blend in his own polity.
It was to be a compromise essentially Methodistic and essentially English also, for it sustained the poise of conservatism by means of the passion of revolution.