Uncle Matthew
UNCLE MATTHEW
THERE was time before the death of the Rector of Epworth for the ghost of his old life to pay him one last visit.
One day it took flesh upon itself and walked straight into his shabby home.
Samuel Wesley received a visit from his brother Matthew and lived to read the letter which Matthew wrote to him after that memorable reunion.
That there was truth in the epistle could not be gainsaid, and the effect that it had upon the Rector was to make him stand quite still in the fastness of his study—thinking.
He confesses himself that he restrained himself from his usual trick of '"flouncing and bouncing," and in truth his vanity had received a knockdown blow.
The mischief of it was that the man was such an incorrigible Dissenter, and to think that he could teach the Rector of Epworth anything was going really a little too far.
It took time that day to recover one's self-esteem, but gradually the pleasing and well-known sensation returned to warm his heart.
After all, he was a great poet, and if only he could introduce Job to royal favor he would show them, as he had always done before, just how wonderful Samuel Wesley really was.
Had he not had sons at Westminster, Charterhouse and Oxford?
Was he not the God-given thorn in the flesh of
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Dissent wherever and whenever he met it?
He would return the Parthian shot, but, in doing so, he betrayed himself by the very title he adopted as his nom de plume—he would be "John o' Styles" to plain Matthew Wesley, apothecary.
Of course he had always been just that, with a flourish into the bargain, but the reply weakens and quavers away before the rugged Puritanism of his brother's accusation.
Matthew had said some very terrible things and had not tried to spare his brother's poetic and susceptible soul.
He had cut right across those dispensations of Providence, beloved of the Rector's heart, and had roundly told him that "in pursuit of his pleasure he had produced a numerous offspring," and moreover to the famous champion of orthodoxy he had dared to say that he found him worse than any infidel.
To the unregenerate comes a sense of joy that ever Matthew Wesley could say just those things to the Rector of Epworth, for only so rarely does a prophet arise to speak the things burning in the heart of the people.
It was a glorious summing up against the Champion of Orthodoxy, and it read like this: "You have a numerous offspring; you have had a long time a plentiful estate, great and generous benefactions, and have made no provision for those of your own house who can have nothing in view at your exit but distress.
This I think a black account, let the case be folly or vanity or ungovernable appetites.
I hope Providence has restored you again to give you time to settle this balance, which shocks me to think of.
UNCLE MATTHEW
To this end I must advise you to be frequent in your perusal of Father Beveridge on Repentance and Dr.
Tillotson on Restitution; for it is not saying 'Lord!
Lord!' will bring us to the Kingdom of Heaven, but doing justice to all our fellow creatures, and not a Poetical imagination that we do so."
It is clear that Matthew Wesley knew very well what he was talking about and that well he knew this brother of his. He was not at all impressed with his borrowed feathers from the breast of Mother Church, but confronted him with a rugged and unashamed Puritan honesty unadorned with frills or feathers.
The doctor Matthew had come to Epworth after presiding at Hetty's bed of affliction.
He was shocked with what he had left and what he had found at the end of his journey.
Hetty Wesley had been his pride when as a beautiful girl she had lived with him in London.
He had had her poems printed for her in the Gentleman's Magazine and had gloried in her wonderful promise. Now he had had to deliver her in anguish time and time again because Sam Wesley had forced upon her that hideous union with a drunken plumber.
It was not for nothing that when Matthew Wesley came to die it was his doctor's hand that Hetty best remembered.
He died on her bosom, and she was melted into poetry and wept tears again at his loss.
The adjective which slips into her memorial verses is a strange one and only understood against that background of the brutal paws of that drunken husband of her bosom, William Wright.
It is the
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"lenient hand" of this dear doctor that Hetty would sing in her sad lines.
If Matthew Wesley was shocked at that one transaction of Hetty's marriage he was staggered by the poverty he found at Epworth. What thoughts must have raced through his stern old Puritan mind as he ducked his head to say grace for that stricken female household!
With chivalrous reticence he refrained from questioning the mother of the Wesleys, but the girls told him all, and more.
He was the uncle of romance to them, and treated them to glorious meals at a hearty eighteenth-century hostelry and finally carried off Patty to the comfort of his own London home.
He asked this favor of his sister-in-law one morning ere old Sam Wesley was out of bed, for he seems not to have trusted himself to speak of the children before their father.
Mrs. Wesley noted his conduct with mild interest, not seeming to grasp that burning indignation of the doctor and the uncle of Hetty Wright.
In her letter to her son, John Wesley, in 1731, Susanna says: ""He was strangely scandalized at the poverty of our furniture and much more at the meanness of the children's habit.
He always talked more freely with your sisters of our circumstances than to me; and told them he wondered what his brother had done with his income, for 'twas visible he had not spent it in furnishing his house or clothing his family.
He was very shy of speaking anything relating to the children before your father, or indeed of any other matter.
He always behaved himself
UNCLE MATTHEW
very decently at family prayers, and in your father's absence said grace for us before and after meat."
This letter must have given John pause among his apostolic ardors at Oxford.
He was no lover of Dissent himself and would rather have liked to have converted Uncle Matthew to his dear Holy Club had it not seemed so hard a proposition.
Sister Martha thought he might attempt it, and yet almost the last thing the old man did on this side the grave was to chuckle at Nephew John's ecclesiastical pretensions.
But if the future could then have been foretold, this doctor uncle was to carry more weight with John
Wesley than ever John o' Styles could have done, for somewhere bound up in his little person was a great deal of his Uncle Matthew.
The years were to come when Wesley would show a strange mingling of the doctor and the priest.
It would fall to his lot to travel miles every year to snatch those on the verge of hell to safety with his lenient hand, and with that doctor's hand he would pour them the wine of life as they knelt at his feet round the broken body of his
Saviour.
With deep mastery he would minister to minds diseased and bring health and life again from the grave.
But the time was not yet.
He was still stiff and puctilious in his priestly duties, and had not learned his cure of souls so well as Uncle Matthew had learned his healing ministry.
It was on the 25th of April, 1735, that Samuel Wesley died.
John Wesley was thankful to have such a satisfactory occupation, in his father's deathchamber, as the reading of the Commendatory Prayer.
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Through that bedroom of Samuel and Susanna Wesley the voice of the young priest echoed as he read out the words which would sound so differently to old and to young ears: "O Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons; we humbly commend the soul of this Thy servant our dear father into Thy hands, as into the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Saviour; most humbly beseeching Thee that it may be precious in Thy sight.
Wash it, we pray Thee, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb that was slain to take away the sins of the world, that whatsoever defilements it may have contracted in the midst of this miserable and naughty world through the lusts of the flesh, or the wiles of Satan, being purged and done away it may be presented pure and without spot before Thee."
Miserable and naughty enough!
But death closes all. There must have been a certain satisfaction for the President of the Holy Club thus to administer the last rites of the Church to old Sam Wesley. After the Reformation this prayer had taken the place of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, and the one-time
Dissenter must have been thankful to make his exit in so laudable and so Churchlike a manner.
Did he really enjoy that prayer, or was it his last stab at Son John when he remarked after his best priestly effort,
"Now you have done all."
He had found his son's ecclesiastical pretensions irksome, and the Dissenter in him had rebelled at the young man's assurance
UNCLE MATTHEW
about the mysteries of God.
He had once turned John Wesley out of the house for less than this.
But now on his death-bed he must suffer whatever was said or done, and it only remained to gather up his feet and die when John Wesley read that prayer for the second time.
The sun was setting in the Isle of Axholme as the Rector of Epworth slipped away to his great reward.
In heaven he was confident he would be at least appreciated.
He had said he would appear in glory with all the children God had given him, but now they were gathered round him in that shabby bedroom watching his last agony.
He had given Emily a word, for her Puritan ruggedness had irked him as much as John's High Church Doctrine.
To that clear-sighted girl who had criticized the poor poet so ruthlessly he said: "Do not be concerned at my death; God will then begin to manifest Himself to my family."
But unto Charles he saith: "Be steady.
The Christian faith will surely revive in this kingdom.
You shall see it though I shall not," and then he laid his hand in love upon the young man's head.
Of course Charles Wesley was thrilled.
He felt he must shoulder a plank in the wreck of the family fortunes, and although he was ignorant what he could do, he struck an attitude and was sure that he must do something.
In reality he presently sailed away to Georgia, and it was Sister Emily who shouldered the responsibility of the Mother of the Wesleys.
Son Samuel was far away at Tiverton, but Charles sent him word of that memorable death-bed and spoke of
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his father's gameness to the very end of his life: "The fear of death he had entirely conquered, and at last gave up his latest human desires of finishing Job, paying his debts and seeing you."
Susanna was calm when the end came.
She had fought too long a rear-guard action to be anything else.
She looked beyond the pitiful old corpse to those bright days when the world was young and love of Christ had been born in love of Samuel Wesley.
In those far-off days the connection had not seemed incongruous.
The Divine Master and the earthly one had claimed her allegiance at one and the same time, and somehow were mutually responsible the one for the other.
It had fallen to her lot to have to try to square the real and the ideal, and in that terrible contest she was not defeated.
She could never have gone through all that she had done had she not believed it was God's way for her.
She had told them that she would always stick to their father whatever befell.
Life with Samuel Wesley might mean crucifixion, but there remained the inner life with the Saviour of mankind.
She had plumbed the depths of "dying and behold we live," and life and death no longer held any terror for her.
She was only thankful that the old man had had so easy a death, for she could never bear to see him really suffer. So calmly now she bade farewell to the boys about to set out on their great missionary venture to America.
Without a penny in the world and with the creditors already distraining on her poor hens and chickens, she stood up like any Spartan
UNCLE MATTHEW
mother and set her two sons forward on their great crusade.
With a superb courage and a fine idealism she rallied the faint-hearted with her ringing challenge: "Had I twenty sons I should rejoice if they were all so employed."
It only remained to get Job planted at the feet of the third sovereign whom Samuel Wesley had wooed for preferment.
In that direction it could now do the Rector of Epworth little good as he was even now rustling round heavenly mansions in ghostly cassock.
He had received his ultimate preferment and had been wont, while on earth, to glimpse Samuel
Wesley in these highest altitudes.
He would shine with his children in a constellation of stars or cut in before the saints in light to welcome an old friend into these everlasting habitations.
He could see himself making a special commotion over the entrance of his friend the Archbishop of York.
He rejoiced to direct him to an ethereal seat in the orchestra stalls.
In heaven he would be relieved from the necessity of begging from him and could now turn the tables of benevolence.
There was an end of debtor's prisons, and the wicked world would forever cease from troubling.
But Job tarried still in this vale of tears, and the stricken family at Epworth looked upon it as a pious duty to get the patriarch at least introduced to royal favor.
It had been such an incubus on the whole family, and had grown to an enormous volume which seemed to have consumed their fortune and battened on their penury.
It was in keeping with
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the irony of life that John Wesley himself should have to stagger to London with the volume and seek out the Queen to lay the treasure at her feet.
Between its covers were shut ten years of his father's boisterous life. What storms, what curses and what vituperation had gone to the making of its many pages!
Mary had died that her husband might illustrate its pages, Son Samuel had wearied his friends with importunity for their subscriptions, and even
Pope and Swift had been pressed into that same service. John Wesley had wept at Wroote over the patriarch and his own slackness in filial devotion, and Susanna must have well-nigh fainted at the very name of Job. But now it was all over and the great work was to be launched on an enraptured world.
Even John Wesley, who was not easily surprised, was rather taken aback at the nonchalance of the Queen when she received the treasure.
She was playing with her maids of honor when the little man and his huge burden were shown into her presence.
She gave him naught but smiles, and then dealt the son of Epworth the unkindest cut of all in her arch remark "that it was prettily bound."
In one moment she returned to her play, and John Wesley had to contrive to walk backwards out of her presence with thoughts of life and death racing through his mind.
He must have been glad to turn to his great American crusade and to his preparations for departure from so sophisticated an England.
There was more appreciation and a feeling of importance among his friends in Little College Street,
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UNCLE MATTHEW
Westminster, where the brothers Wesley made their final preparations for their new venture in life. The dream of Oxford was over.
Life was now to begin in real earnest.
Something of glamor and something of heroism wrapped about the little house near the Abbey and clothed the old stone steps at Westminster as the brothers took boat to fall down river.
It was a sailing to the unknown, a leap in the dark, a glorious flinging away of life.
So rings John Wesley's challenge as he rallied his companions for the great adventure: 'Fast and pray; and then send me word whether you dare go with me to the Indians."
In the safe days of Walpole's rule, with his sleeping dogs and peace at any price, it partook rather of the spirit of Captain Scott and his glorious company in our own safe days before the Great War.
And so young Charles Delamotte found it, who must surely rank as the first to discover the hero in John Wesley.
He would follow him to the ends of the earth, and his mother might plead with him in vain.
He was deaf and blind to anyone save to that little handsome missionary with the beautiful clear-cut face and the light of high adventure in his eye.
Mrs. Delamotte was furious with John Wesley for taking her son away from her, but what could she do with a man who, somewhere tucked away mysteriously about him, carried that indefinable thing called charm?
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