The Holy Club
THE HOLY CLUB little bit of romance left behind by Samuel Wesley Junior and his nut-brown maid, and is a flash of poetry from gray stone.
This young man had been boy and master at Westminster School, and he had a way of rising to the surface and putting an oar into the family waters at inappropriate moments.
He had upset Emily's love affair with Leyburne, his wife had quarrelled with Charles Wesley, and now John's turn had surely come.
He told the leader of the Holy Club roundly just what he should do—he must return to Epworth and there take up his father's work and fall heir to his priestly office when death should claim the Island Poet.
The prospect was uninviting, but, to Samuel Wesley Junior, it shone in light from his own imagination.
It was fitting and dutiful in a son, if that son happened to be some other one than Samuel Wesley Junior, for the truth was that it was this same eldest son that his father had first asked to join him at Epworth.
Age had shaken the Rector by the hand, and he had got into one of those panics of scholarship that foretold death ere the magnum opus could be completed.
With one hand paralyzed and greatly crippled in body he toiled on with Job. When he could not write with one hand he used the other or called aloud for the faithful Susanna, who in spite of all she had suffered could still write without pain. He longed to finish Job before he died, and he believed if Son Samuel joined him there might be hope. He loved this dutiful son, and the prospect was alluring.
He was much better suited to his taste than the
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upright and downright John, for as Samuel Junior himself confessed of his father: "I have lived longer with him than you and have been very intimate and yet have almost always pleased him, and am confident I shall do so to the end of my life."
It is as well he said 'almost always," for he must have remembered his mother's love of truth, and no one could really live "always" with the Rector of Epworth and give entire satisfaction.
There was a kind of devil of disquiet in the little man which wise Emily had called that "unaccountable love of discord."
It was to the eldest son that his old father described the idyllic scene at Epworth. The dovecote was new and shining in the sun.
It makes a delightful picture with the rebuilt parsonage barn.
Against two sides of the house are fruit trees with a harvest of plums and cherries, and even mulberries can grow at Epworth Rectory. What the old man particularly enthused over was "in the adjoining croft, walnuts," but what he really meant was—in the adjoining study, Job.
Son Samuel was not allured by any of the pictures conjured up in his father's letter, and wrote off to John Wesley to drive him to the rescue as a much more fitting sacrifice for Juggernaut wheels.
With naive blindness Samuel urges upon his brother the fact that his ordination vows involved a cure of souls and not the work of an academy.
John Wesley seems not to have retaliated with the obvious remark that physicians should cure themselves, for Samuel himself was in scholastic work, safe in the west of
THE HOLY CLUB England, and in a very good job in spite of ordination vows.
'There was a blind spot somewhere in most of the Wesleys, and John was too overwhelmed by the prospect of Epworth, viewed from the fastnesses of Oxford, to think of so logical a reply. He seems rather to have fallen back on something which savors of the prig rather than the logician: "The question is not whether I could do more good there or here, but whether I could do more good to myself, seeing wherever I can be most holy myself there I can promote holiness in others.
But I improve myself more at Oxford than at any other place."
Obviously both Job and the family fortunes could go hang if only John Wesley could preserve his precious holiness.
To a man, toiling in rowing on his voyage to heaven, the thought of Epworth floods, even interspersed with mulberries and walnuts, was an anticlimax.
John Wesley dare not relax his holy endeavors, for his soul stood in jeopardy every hour.
If he had to return to the old home he gave himself up for lost. Even his mother took but half-heartedly to his priestly arrogance, and he had never seen her angry in his life before that day when she had flushed up in a sort of smothered rage and told him plainly she would not be spoken to like that by a mere boy.
It was not likely that he could look forward to sweeping either father, mother or Sister Emily into the charmed circle of his disciples.
The thought of staging the Holy Club in Epworth Rectory was a thing not to be entertained for a moment.
He had not quite lost his sense of reality as to forget that his
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own family would inevitably and always get him beaten.
It might be good for his father's soul to confess his sins and wail for forgiveness, but it was not a likely thing to happen, and least of all in the presence of Son John.
But the seed had been dropped, and Wesley's mind began to take hold on and to play round the idea of a cure of souls.
In spite of a rigid holiness and a cruel bodily discipline, his mind retained its life-long character of susceptibility.
It might be the way of salvation after all—this cure of souls—for already the Holy Club was cracking under the terrible strain.
Like Arthur's Round Table it was to be betrayed in its own bosom, for the Holy Club of Oxford Methodists was to strike on that same rock as did those other knights of the Holy Grail, that same old submerged rock of human nature.
One of its members, named Hall, not only stooped to matrimony, but jilted one of Wesley's own sisters in order to marry another of them.
Kezia's blood always afterwards seemed to cry from the ground of the Holy Club, for, true to romantic tradition, she was destined to seek an early grave.
Martha Wesley got little by her conquest, as in addition to a large family of her own she was called upon to nurse the children of her husband's concubine.
Well for her that she was another of Susanna's children of the cloister period, for she seemed to exhibit among all horrors a preternatural calm.
The Wesley brothers were thunderstruck.
They flew to poetry, and nearly died with chagrin to find
THE HOLY CLUB that Hall had but used the methods of Divine guidance to determine which sister he should marry.
Had they not taught him so to do? He had received a revelation that it must be Martha, and who were they to fly in the face of Providence?
But the reasonable John was not so sure of that sort of guidance, and found out a very neat bit of work by Johnny Whitelamb which must have materially assisted Divine revelation.
This young cleric had felt called upon to tell Hall exactly what he thought of Kezia Wesley, because she had been so bitter an opponent of his own deplorable marriage.
Hiall's ardor for Kezia cooled, and Martha dawned on his enraptured sight.
John Wesley hastened to London to try and clear up the tangle of love and guidance, and walked straight into a messenger of God on Ludgate Hill, for there he met a man who asked him to go to Georgia to convert all the Indians of America.
It looked very much like Divine intervention, and certainly it was a way of escape from a difficult situation, for Georgia looked, in the distance, a paradise free from earthly entanglements.
Here in England the enemy would keep coming in as a flood in spite of rules and short sleep and scant food, or even in face of no food at all.
There in Georgia were the unspoiled children of nature and the Noble Savage of eighteenth-century tradition.
There John Wesley could hope to navigate all to heaven by his rules and his lovely Holy Club methods.
There could be no Delilahs and a bankrupt civilization, but hope and
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new life and a glorious family of tenderfeet in the ways of sin.
It was a proposal likely to appeal to Susanna Wesley herself, with her art of child instruction and her passionate admiration for the Danish Missionaries.
'To her son John the prospect was rosy indeed.
He was to discover in reality a world of rape and murder and sin only glimpsed at on this side of the water, but when he embarked for America his heart was light in his breast.
He had cut his losses, and set out on the voyage to Georgia as one who seeks a better country, that is, an heayenly. The good ship Simmonds was to John Wesley a dream ship of hope, but ere he entered into her he was suffered first to go and bury his father.