Fearful Saints
FEARFUL SAINTS Oglethorpe. Where John felt that generous reaction of the Englishman who must needs love all captains of ships and all leaders of forlorn hopes, Charles must indulge in jealousy and the spite of hurt pride. He meant to shine yet, and soon fate would play into his hands.
Upon Oglethorpe rested the whole success of this Georgian venture of colonization.
He had shouldered the white man's burden and the responsibility of Empire and had been prepared to face it with this ill-assorted crowd of refugees and home failures. The Spaniards were a real danger, and were only just across the river from the land claimed by England.
Oglethorpe passed each day fearing a sudden attack from them and the instant wiping out of his little flock by the enemy.
Every sound and every bonfire set his nerves on edge and made him fear that the end had come.
Now to be set up with Charles Wesley as his secretary was a refinement of cruelty, for the man had no aptitude for the rough and tumble of life in a new colony.
His irresponsibility and rashness might explode a mine at any moment under Oglethorpe's feet.
He did in fact nearly cause a mutiny by his habit of collecting all the dangerous gossip of the new colony.
His one constructive idea was to hold constant services and to call his sweating parishioners together by beat of drum.
He was jealous of the manly activity of the camp which went on apart from himself, and loved those moments when the spotlight was turned on him and when he could roll the drum and make even Oglethorpe obey
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him.
'To the plain soldier it seemed like fiddling when Rome was burning.
He called it all so much vain repetition, and thus describes the prayers which Charles Wesley thought so lovely: "No love, no meekness, no true religion among the people, but instead of that formal prayers."
One evening the soldier and the priest stood side by side watching the parishioners creep like snails unwillingly to obey the drummer's call. With innate perkiness Charles Wesley turned to his commanding officer with the remark: "You see, sir, they do not lay too great a stress on forms."
To which, quick as lightning, came the retort: "The reason of that is because others idolize them."
After a grunt from the soldier prayers began and the priest got even with him in the lesson, in which he delighted to answer
Oglethorpe back from the protection of his cassock by rolling this sweet morsel under his tongue: "Be instant in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine."
It looked very much as though General Oglethorpe would endure neither sound doctrine nor any other sort of Charles Wesley's doctrine very much longer. The priest seemed to get on the nerves of the soldier in an incomprehensible way, and there was no peace possible between them.
One night Oglethorpe had to leave the settlement to investigate the Spanish menace to the safety of his infant colony.
He literally took his life in his hand.
He was strangely strung up in his preparations, and when
FEARFUL SAINTS they brought him the wrong sword he was very angry, for he took it as an omen of disaster.
He wanted to sling him with his father's sword as a protection and as an emblem of success, but the mistake was twice repeated.
Nervy and jumpy, he waited for the right sword, and then, buckling it on, he turned to Charles Wesley with this word of explanation: "With this sword I was never yet unsuccessful."
The ubiquitous little priest had been watching the whole scene with quotations bursting his heart, and answered like a shot from a gun: "I hope, sir, that you carry with you a better, even the sword of the Lord and of Gideon."
'To which it is almost incredible to report that the soldier's only reply was "I hope so, too."
Charles Wesley got so excited that he ran off into the woods and then suddenly popped out on the bank of the river to see the last of Oglethorpe's boat and to get some more perilous stuff off his poetical bosom.
The soldiers and sailors, thinking he ran with some important message, stopped the boat, so could hear quite nicely the Sprite's parting shot shouted to them in mid-stream: "Christo duce, et auspice Christo!"'
It really was not to be wondered at that when Charles Wesley wanted to borrow a teakettle from Oglethorpe he got the answer that there was no issue to be made to him.
And again, when he bobbed up among the soldiers on guard "in expectation of an enemy," the wrath of Oglethorpe blew him through the West Indies and back by Panama.
In his Journal he says, "I stayed as long as I could, however unsafe within the wind of such
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commotion, but at last the hurricane of his passion drove me away."
Charles Wesley turned to the women.
There was nothing else to be done, for he seemed always to get left behind with the weaklings of the camp.
The women might appreciate him and at least could compass a cup of tea.
They achieved even more than that. They fooled him to the top of his bent.
No Malvolio could have fallen more neatly into Maria's plot than did Charles Wesley into the snares of Mrs.
Hawkins and Mrs. Welch.
They seemed to conspire together to compass his downfall.
If he wanted converts he should have them with the modern Group's love of confession thrown in. The little priest's eyes must have goggled in horror when they told him that they had both committed adultery with no less a man than Oglethorpe himself.
He was blissfully ignorant that the plotters had told very much the same tale to Oglethorpe, but with varying dramatic personae.
They had told the soldier to keep an eye on the priest because of his adultery with Mrs. Welch.
So were the threads tangled and confused, and the wicked lies let loose to do their worst in that distracted young outpost of Empire.
All Charles Wesley's righteous indignation and hurt pride rose against Oglethorpe.
He had never liked the way that soldier had carried Mrs. Welch into his own bunk when the sea had washed her out of her cabin on the Simmonds.
This, then, was the meaning of all those quarrels which Brother John was always trying to compose between these women.
He pitied his poor brother's simplicity.
FEARFUL SAINTS Let him come and reclaim his converts and reestablish his Holy Club.
Let him come to Frederica and try his hand at life-changing.
And so John Wesley came, and his Journal reads like some distracted Oxford group:
Monday, April 12th, 1736 Mrs. Welch open!
Resolved to change.
Oglethorpe friendly, soft.
Oglethorpe came out of the house very angry with her.
Tuesday, April 13th Mrs. Hawkins civil.
Mr. Welch open and affected.
Mrs. Welch soft, open and affected.
Oglethorpe at Prayers.
Mrs. Hawkins at Prayers—she open, mild.
Oglethorpe soft, open.
O God in Thy Light let us see light.
Wednesday, 14th April Mrs. Hawkins came to me at Mrs. Welch's.
God will reveal all.
Friday, 16th April News of the Spaniards coming.
Mrs. Welch and Mrs. Hawkins came to me in the field.
Oglethorpe seemed quite open and in an excitable temper.
Mrs. Hawkins and Oglethorpe seem innocent!
Amen!
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Mrs. Welch in a swoon.
Open my eyes.
In spite of this prayer for guidance things continued pretty lively until Oglethorpe thought it expedient to take a hand himself.
He opened the attack on Charles Wesley without any of the paraphernalia of ''a quiet time."
One night in his own tent he bade Charles sit down, and so addressed him:
"Pray, sir, sit down, I have something to say to you.
I hear that you have spread reports about me and Mrs.
Hawkins.
In this you are the author of them. There is a great difference in telling such things to another and to me.
In you who told it your brother 'tis scandal, in him who repeated it to me it is friendship.
My religion does not, like the Pharisees, consist in long prayers, but in forgiving injuries as | do this of yours."
There is something finely magnanimous about this upright and downright soldier.
He towers above poor white-faced Charles Wesley and looks right through him.
The only significance the little priest can claim is against this background of the large tolerance of this man of the world.
To him Charles Wesley was a fool, and up to that time he had believed him to be a vicious fool, but John's visit had convinced him of Charles Wesley's innocence.
John Wesley had gone straight to Oglethorpe and had told him the whole ugly story which he had heard from Brother Charles, and so put the key of the mystery into the hands of the soldier.
To honest John he
FEARFUL SAINTS pronounced "the thing in itself a trifle.
"Tis not such things as these that hurt my character—they would pass for gallantries and rather recommend me to the world."
But because John Wesley had believed the story, Oglethorpe took the trouble to convince him of its falsehood and to explain the danger of the Spaniards and the precarious position of the new colony. He had a regard for John Wesley, but none at all for poor frightened Charles, who could not come himself to ask the truth of the rumors, but must pile mischief upon mischief until Oglethorpe himself believed Charles Wesley to be a consummate knave.
He had indeed decided to expose the little priest before the whole colony, but the coming of John Wesley had saved the situation.
He had meant to have him tried and imprisoned for his relationship with Mrs. Welch, and had had him shadowed to that end, and believed he had all the evidence he required.
He had found that Charles Wesley was in the habit of visiting that virago Welch and of sometimes staying until midnight. Oglethorpe believed that Charles
was spreading rumors about his character in order to hide his own sin with this woman.
So any man of the world might have reasoned, but there were yet some things that a man of the world could not see— things that passed for everyday conversation under Epworth roof—things of rules and saints and guidance.
The soldier, uninitiated in Holy Club language, must have blinked to hear Charles Wesley's explanation.
He was, he said, but following the advice of the saints in never conversing with a woman in the
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face of the sun.
It was not the woman's body with which the priest was concerned.
The urgency until midnight was for her soul.
Oglethorpe had believed Charles Wesley to be a hypocrite of the worst type, but something, even before John's visit, had stayed his hand from condign punishment.
Paradoxically, it was the soldier who had felt himself the champion of religion.
He had determined that he would not expose Charles Wesley lest religion should be hurt in the colony through him.
He knew what a score it would be for the scoffers, and what a tale it would have provided in ribald mirth for eighteenth-century playgoers.
It was the kind of stuff over which the blades of fashion would have made very merry as was their custom.
Oglethorpe was not going to let them have the chance, for, as he says: 'I considered the effect it would have upon religion. That that should be wounded through your side I could not bear.
Your history would be made a play or novel of." What a fate for the son of Susanna Wesley!
But there was something more that had stayed the hand of Oglethorpe when he would have crushed that son between its finger and thumb. A little old man in London had laughed so much at the soldier for taking his precious nephews to convert the Indians, by Holy Club methods, that he had ended by insulting Oglethorpe himself.
It was the shade of Matthew Wesley that had saved his nephew Charles from prison and perhaps death in Georgia.
This was the soldier's summing up: "Above all your uncle!
HEAREULE SAINTS His triumph over you and religion turned the scale, and I verily believe God sent me that night to be insulted by him to save you."
There was something also in the very large-heartedness of this soldier that had saved the mischievous priest from destruction. It was his pitiable little white face and the prostration of fear in the once perky
Charles Wesley.
As Oglethorpe looked at him he mused on the mind of a man and the inscrutable chances of life. He knew what it was to expect death himself, and believed that then the far view of things was the only justice. On the night of his dangerous expedition to the Spaniards he had so debated with himself over that shrinking, white-faced priest: 'This man must either be innocent or deeply penitent; whichever 'tis 'tis the same to me.
I am going to cast myself on death and the mercy of God, and shall I refuse forgiveness to my fellow creature?
No, I will not only forgive him, but so forgive him as I would God should forgive me."
Surely such magnanimity from a man of the world was enough to stagger the mechanized piety of the Holy Club and the holy Wesleys.