Ship'S Company
XII
SHIP'S COMPANY
Ir John Wesley felt that he had cut his losses and _ got rid of the Old Man of the Sea when he planted
Job at the feet of his sovereign, he was woefully ignorant of life and human nature. He was in reality shipping all the old difficulties upon the Simmonds when he piped Charles Wesley aboard.
The story of Samuel and Susanna Wesley was to be re-acted with new scenery and with a different curtain-raiser, but the bonds of the old couple were not to be severed in death.
John and Charles Wesley would fight their way through life very much in the characters of their respective parents.
There would follow startling results for the world, but there seemed little prospect of peace for the late President of the Holy
Club.
Charles Wesley was his father's understudy.
He flew into verse at the least provocation. He "'flounced and bounced" and knew so much better than anyone else what was good for them. He pursued the sinners on board the Simmonds with as little discretion as his father had denounced the Dissenters of his parish.
John, on the other hand, was more like his mother.
He had a way of putting her old childhood's teaching into practice.
Did these same sinners say handsomely that they had sinned, then he would welcome them
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to the family table of the Lord. The brothers argued all the way across the Atlantic.
John writes Charles down as "perverse."
Rarely can he report that they are "'at one."
So Susanna had always found it with her Rector when "it is an unhappiness peculiar to our family that your father and I never think alike on anything."
In that eighteenth-century frigate was staged all Sheridan's School for Scandal and all of What Happened in the Inn at Upton.
General Oglethorpe was the leader of this strange company of colonists to the brave new world of Georgia. He had to control disappointed failures from 'England, persecuted Germans, neurotic women and mothers of families along with a gaol delivery of discharged debtors.
It was an unlikely looking army with which to establish England's far-flung battle-line.
He little dreamed that the Wesley brothers were to constitute his main liability, as he had hoped for strength from that quarter.
The General knew Uncle Matthew Wesley, and though he was rather brutal in his honesty he knew he was the kind of dour individual to do his duty. He must have been taken aback at Matthew's estimate of his own nephews, for he seems to have received the General's overtures with unseemly mirth.
The High Church Wesleys stuck badly in the old Dissenter's throat.
Oglethorpe himself was so angry that he decided, out of hand, to take the brothers
Wesley to spite the old man, but he was in blissful ignorance that the solemn couple had packed up their precious Holy Club at Oxford but to embark it on
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the good ship Simmonds.
They were to find more lively material here for their pious raptures than ever they had found in their monastic cells. at Oxford.
Before, they had only known good women, now they were to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Welch and Mrs. Hawkins.
On that tedious sea voyage of weeks these women of the world found an exquisite escape from boredom in leading the brothers Wesley up the garden path, or what did duty for the garden path on board the good ship Simmonds.
'They were "open" to words of exhortation.
They were "convinced," or in the language of the Groups of a later day, they had "come through."
It got exciting when Mrs. Hawkins wept and said her mother had prophesied that she should never want a friend, and now
God had sent John Wesley to her. With a heart still tender with memories of Varanese and Aspasia, he melted at the very name of friendship.
He had "close conversation" with the lady, and read to her Sinner's Complaint to God.
He always read aloud to his sisters, and Varanese had spent many an hour with him in the old arbor reading.
They were fond of the Song of the Hebrew Children, and believed in Henry Wootton's advice of passing away time with a religious book or friend.
But here was a different proposition with close conversation in stuffy cabins, and floods of water sometimes necessitating a change of bunks for the ladies.
General Oglethorpe chivalrously carried them to his own cabin, and John Wesley cheerfully slept on the floor. Mrs. Welch was near her time and very ill, but nothing daunted the
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heroic John. Had he not befriended Varanese? Had she not told him her experience in that hour of mortal agony?
She had said that she felt like rushing into Stanton's quiet street to bid the first sinner she met fear that God 'who is able to inflict sharper pains than these."
It seems to have been much in the little man's mind with Mrs. Welch, and he would sit beside her as though she had been Varanese, and he would comfort her.
He read and talked, and when Mrs. Welch seemed "'at the point of death" he administered to her the Sacrament.
There must have been much of Uncle Matthew about him then, for she recovered from that hour.
In the same role he made gruel for the rest of the sick on board, and worked away for hours at this kindly toil.
It was a fast day of the Holy Club, and he had been up early, and noted almost at the beginning of the day that he was "very hungry."
But doctors of souls and bodies must live like that.
There must have been a pleasing sense of satisfaction in so real a mortifying of the flesh as the little priest delivered his steaming bowls of gruel with that persistent and pronounced aching void within his own body.
In his pocket, as some little recompense, lay 4 Kempis of the old pensive memories.
So would John Wesley follow the Pattern.
So would he tread in the steps of renunciation.
The most wonderful experience of the whole voyage was the storm that caught the ship on Sunday,
January 25, 1736.
The Wesley brothers were really frightened.
There seemed so little to separate them
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from the wrathful judgment of God in this cockleshell of a boat with its straining timbers.
The only thing they could do, with that fear at the heart, was to sit close in their little Holy Club between-decks.
But the most extraordinary thing was the behavior of the Moravians, those much persecuted Germans, on board.
They sang hymns to God amid the whistling of the wind and the snapping of spars, and even their women and children looked death in the face without fear.
'The members of the English Church did nothing but scream although they had the advantage of an irreproachable Apostolic Succession and moreover held correct views on Baptism.
It was a tremendous puzzle to the reasonable John.
He kept stealing off to the Moravians and asking them searching questions.
He learned German to talk the better with them, and was introduced to their hymnbook.
He marveled at their courage, and asked in awe, ""Were you not afraid to die?"
Their strange hymns assaulted his tender heart. They were so wistful, so human and so real. They were almost love songs.
John Wesley would translate them into English, and find them such heady stuff as to explode the rigid propriety of the religion of his Holy Club:
"Father, Thine everlasting grace Our scanty thought surpasses far; Thy heart still melts with tenderness, Thy arms of love still open are Returning sinners to receive That mercy they may taste and live.
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Though waves and storms go o'er my head, Though strength and health and friends be gone,
Though joys be withered all and dead, Though every comfort be withdrawn, On this my steadfast soul relies— Father, Thy mercy never dies!"
It was medicine for his own broken heart, and he was never to get away from that wistful tenderness of the Moravians whose very hymns were born in persecution and exile.
He marveled that men could do all the meanest duties on shipboard as though they did the Lord service, for with him religion was not a thing that carried the devotee, but was rather a terrible exaction of rule and a burden of rite which only the strongest could shoulder.
It creaked in its runing for all Susanna's training, and as she had created her discipline as a shield against the onslaughts of the body, so John conceived that religion had little to do with love.
It was the priest's shield and buckler against that very emotion.
These Moravian Christians were a strange contradiction to John Wesley of the High Church.
Their form of religion, in spite of himself, would keep appealing to that susceptible heart of his.
He felt himself back in a primitive Christianity which was warm and real and differed so painfully from the effort and the strain of his own Holy Club.
These Moravians could be little better than Dissenters, and surely no good thing could come out of Nazareth, and yet he was not so blinded by his own stiff opinions to miss a glimpse
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of beauty there.
He saw them consecrate one of their bishops whom, of course, he could not bring himself to believe was a bishop at all, and yet he felt he had joined hands across the centuries with the first
Apostles: "The great simplicity as well as solemnity of the whole almost made me forget the seventeen hundred years between and imagine myself in one of those assemblies where form and state were not, but Paul the tent-maker and Peter the fisherman presided yet with demonstration of the Spirit and of power."
It sunk deep with John Wesley, and he tucked it away somewhere about his little person for use in years to come when he would understand all better than now he did.
The time would come when he would rediscover tent-maker and fisherman and build them into the very fabric of the Church of Christ.
Meanwhile there was much work to be done.
The ship's company landed in America on Friday, the 6th of February, 1736, and General Oglethorpe and Wesley scrambled ashore and sought a place where the ground was a little ascending—to give thanks to Almighty God.
There were camps to make and axes to wield, and the General was constantly demanding
Wesley's services for the quality of their business-like and methodical attack and his disinterested care of a vital water supply.
Wesley seems to have admired that leader Oglethorpe and marked his power of conduct.
He thought him God-inspired when he sent down a midwife to Mrs. Welch and achieved the miraculous in that she was in time for her bringing to bed.
John Wesley himself sat close just outside
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the door of the hut, and awaited his turn for ghostly consolation.
His mind was strangely full of Varanese and her pious mortifications at such a time, but the jests of the unregenerate within the birth-chamber jarred upon his sensitive and highly strung mind.
He bemoans himself in the pages of his more responsive diary: "On this occasion I received a fresh proof how little extraordinary providences avail those who are not moved by the ordinary means.
Many burials and some deaths I have been present at, but I never yet knew a soul converted by the sight of either.
This is the second time I have been witness—there being only a door between us—of one of the deepest distresses which life affords.
The groans of the sick person had very short intermission.
And how were they filled up by the assistants?
With strong cries to God? With counselling her that was encompassed with sorrows of death to trust in Him?
With exhortations to each other to fear Him who is able to inflict sharper pains than these? No; but with laughing and jesting, at no time convenient, but at this least of all.
Verily, if they hear not Moses and the Prophets even the thunder of His power they will not understand."
Wesley felt a stranger in a strange land.
He had enjoyed that first thrill of landing with Oglethorpe and the startling look of the beautiful trees of the new land blooming as at summer-time.
But now he felt a very long way away from the learned seriousness of Epworth or the wholesome gentleness of Varanese.
Her words kept ringing in his head, II
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"Sharper pains than these," and they brought before him that peaceful English street at Stanton where
Varanese would fain have warned the sinner.
That she could have endured the agony of childbirth in the sustained atmosphere of the Holy Club must have appeared to him most commendable when compared with the ribaldry within.
Was he going to be able to rebuild on these hostile shores the perfection of his own Oxford religion?
He came just a little nearer doubting it, for it is an instinctive shielding of his own inadequacy that gesture of throwing the blame on the sinner: "If they hear not Moses and the Prophets."
He might have added, if they hear not the cries of a woman in childbirth they will very likely pay no heed to a young man named John
Wesley.
There is evidence that his self-confidence was shaken at the very beginning of his new life in America.
He sought out a friend among the Moravians to ask advice, and received in exchange a challenge.
Direct to the point went Spangenberg with his questions, to which Wesley then could find no answer: "Do you know yourself?"
"Do you know Jesus Christ?"
XIII
BEAREPUL SALN LS
THE exploits of the Rector of Epworth in his little corner of Lincolnshire pale altogether before those of his son Charles in America.
On landing, General Oglethorpe had taken Charles Wesley to Frederica and left John behind at Savannah.
To the General's confusion he was thus to make the discovery that one brother differed from another brother both in glory and common sense.
They were, in fact, as different from one another as that old couple on the Epworth flats—those original protagonists—Samuel and Susanna.
Charles Wesley had come to America in some bitterness of spirit, and had groaned under much of the discipline of his brother on the voyage.
Now he had escaped to Frederica and had left John behind at Savannah so that he could be his own man again.
If the parishioners of Epworth would gladly have done some mischief to the old Rector, the people of ©
Frederica would gladly have blown out the brains of his youngest son.
He seems to have hopped about like some perky sprite of mischief with a finger in everyone's business.
He insisted on public prayers and a strict observance of the Sabbath in a new colony fighting for its existence on none too friendly a soil.
There was great trouble with Dr. Hawkins, who
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was husband to the neurotic lady of the voyage.
This man had the temerity to fire off a gun in the middle of Charles Wesley's best sermon, and made the little priest so angry that he had the doctor shut up in prison for the rest of the day. Now if God worked according to the measure of Charles Wesley's mind no harm could have come from remembering the Sabbath Day to keep it holy, but unfortunately the Almighty did not observe His own day of rest, and it was on that very Sunday that a wretched woman miscarried.
The accident would not have happened could the doctor have been present, but he was in prison where Charles Wesley had thrust him.
It again appeared that only in quiet Stanton could babies be born according to the rules of the Holy Club.
Life and passion would keep breaking through. Mrs.
Hawkins was herself so infuriated as to snatch up a gun and discharge it so near the head of the priest of Frederica as to frighten him out of a week's growth.
Oglethorpe, in his turn, was furious when he heard of the prison episode.
He gave Charles Wesley such a piece of his mind as to set the little priest wondering what sins he could discover in his turn to discredit this his angry chief. He was secretary to Oglethorpe, but had no heart for the business, and after six days of writing letters and of routine grind he requested for himself that he might die. He could write strings of texts in his Journal and put down long conversations there if he chanced to be the star part, but he could get no sort of inspiration from the soldier