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not fully recover for a century after his reign. There was sensual dissipation of every sort. Drunkenness was the arch sin of the land; mistresses abounded, and the women were so immoral that there was a saying that a man was almost afraid to select a wife. Court ladies had beautiful clothes and elegant manners, but they knew how to curse and even to spit, and it was a common custom at Court for gentlemen to sit on the ladies' beds while they sipped their morning chocolate.
London, for all its fine houses, was filthy and ill-lighted.
After dark, buckets of refuse were emptied from garret windows with no regard for those passing below. Thievery abounded.
Though there was great respect for learning in that day, poor transportation made it almost impossible for scholars like the Reverend Samuel Wesley to procure books. Rigid censor ship was abolished just before the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the number of printing presses was very limited; nothing was published outside London and the universities.
Many of the lords could barely sign their names, and the common people had practically no education. News circulated mostly in newsletters written by hand in London and sent out to towns and villages to be passed around. It is easy to see, therefore, why the Sunday sermon was so important: there was a dearth of books and news.
In the cities this situation was somewhat remedied by the advent of the Coffee Houses which, from the reign of Charles
II to, the time of the early Georges, were centers of social life in London and in other cities. The East India Company had by this time brought in tea and coffee, and nothing stronger was served in these gathering places. Furthermore, the Coffee
Houses were much less expensive than modern clubs and quite democratic in their clientele. Since there were few means of disseminating news, the Coffee Houses filled that function.
Most Londoners had their favorite house and could be found there at certain hours. There was a Coffee House frequented
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by the Whigs, another by the dandies of the day; still another by the clergy, another by men of letters, etc. Lloyd's Coffee
House became the center for businessmen interested in news of shipping. The first Mr. Lloyd was a Coffee House keeper during the reign of Queen Anne. So began Lloyd's of London, one of the most famous insurance companies of the world.
Samuel Wesley in his younger days met with the other editors of the Athenian Gazette at Smith's Coffee House,
George Yard. On one such occasion, a boisterous fellow kept swearing in loud tones audible to the whole room. In true
Wesley fashion Samuel called for a waiter and instructed him to carry to the man a glass of water to wash out his mouth. The man became enraged and would have done bodily harm to Mr.
Wesley but was restrained. Years later in St. James's Park, a stranger approached Samuel Wesley and introduced himself as the man he had reproved long ago in the Coffee House.
"Since that time, sir," said he, "I thank God, I have feared an oath, and everything that is offensive to the Divine Majesty; and as I have a perfect recollection of you, I rejoice at seeing you, and could not refrain from expressing my gratitude to God and you." ^ At the time of Susanna Wesley, the idea of a balanced diet was unknown; the majority of the nation is said to have lived almost entirely on oats, rye, and barley. Lack of proper rnedical care and unsanitary methods accounted for an enormous death rate, exceeding the birthrate. Smallpox carried off one thir teenth of the population until Jenner discovered vaccination, though it should be mentioned that in early 1722, Lady Mary
Montagu brought to England from Turkey a form of inocula tion against that dread disease.
Actually, the peasantry had seen little change in their way of living in a hundred years. Theirs was a life of drudgery, with wakes and fairs almost their sole diversion. Little children were put to work beside their mothers when they were as young as four or five years old, especially in the new and growing spin-
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ning industry. The Government did nothing for the education of the poor, so most of the villagers were illiterate. Even if they had known how to read and write, newspapers or maga zines were too scarce to inform them about national affairs.
Each village was a separate entity, and its inhabitants were satisfied to build their lives entirely around it, and their mental and spiritual horizons were correspondingly narrow.
In trying to form a picture of a woman's life in the time of Susanna Wesley, any twentieth-century woman would be curious to know what sort of help this mother of the eighteenth century had in giving birth to nineteen children in twenty-one years. But alas! such a subject in that day was highly indeli cate. Indeed, in Mrs. Wesley's time the mere idea of putting into print instructions for midwives was considered immodest.
If only Susanna Wesley had been as chatty in her letters as Pepys was in his Diary, we would know much more about life in an English rectory generally and at the Epworth parsonage in particular. But family doings were evidently deemed by Mrs. Wesley too trivial to write about, with the result that much that might have been most interesting Wesleyana never was set down at all.
Susanna Wesley was delivered of all her babies by a mid wife. We know that Samuel, Jr.'s birth was a difficult one and that Charles came prematurely, but other than that we know nothing of Susanna's many accouchements. Her husband
Samuel, in a letter to the archbishop, lists among his misfor tunes "one child at least per annum and my wife sick for half that time." We must remember in this connection that at that time asepsis and anesthesia were unknown.
As early as 1567, midwives were required to be licensed by the bishop, but no examination determined their qualifica tions. These licenses simply authorized the midwife to baptize infants in an emergency since so many babies died at birth and bad roads often made impossible the services of a minister.
"At the beginning of the eighteenth century," says Harvey
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Graham, "an increasing number of people began to take the view that midwives should have rather more instruction than was implied by the usual Bishop's license. At that time any woman could practice midwifery if recommended by a few matrons, took a formal oath and paid a fee of 18s 4d. There was no more attempt at examination than there had been in the seyenteenth century but the oath was more elaborate. The would-be midwife had to forswear child substitution, abortion, sorcery and overcharging, all of which practices were common.
The Bishop's license was no guarantee of skill, and women tended to take up midwifery because they needed money and had no experience of anything else. Women who were wi dowed or very old became midwives 'as if a woman were more expert in that art for her dotage.' '' ^
As time went on, more and more male "midwives'' or, we would say, doctors, were called in to assist in difficult cases and often seemed to get better results than the women. In London, the Chamberlens, four generations of them, were distinguished practitioners of obstetrics. Peter Chamberlen the Elder was physician to King James I and his Queen Anne in 1612. There was great mystery about what was called the Chamberlen
"secret.'' When the great doctor arrived for a delivery he always brought with him a large wooden box decorated with gilded carvings. This was taken with him to the patient's room, and no one but a Chamberlen was admitted. Years later one of the Chamberlen wives found the famous box hidden in the attic under a trap door. When she opened the box the "secret" was revealed: a pair of forceps! Hugh
Chamberlen of the fourth generation of these doctors delivered Princess Anne (later Queen Anne) of a baby who soon died, as did the rest of her seventeen children. Since Hugh had no heir, the story of the "secret" leaked out, and by 1708, forceps were in general use.
The medical profession of Susanna's day was far from competent. There were then four categories of doctors; the
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physician, the surgeon, the apothecary, and the unlicensed practitioner. The training of all of them was inadequate.
Matthew Wesley, the brother of Samuel, practiced in London as "a civilian, doctor of physic and a chirugeon," but he seems to have had little formal preparation for his chosen profession beyond visits to various spas in Europe. John Wesley himself later wrote a book on "Primitive Physic"—a medical curiosity to this day.
The religious life of England was at a low ebb in these times.
True, there were godly ministers in that day and parsonages that belonged in the same category with that of the Wesleys.
Bishops Butler and Berkeley were spoken of as almost saintly, but "taken as a class, the clergy of the eighteenth century were gross and unspiritual because they represented a faith exhausted of all spiritual force." ® The historian Green quotes
Bishop Burnet as branding the English clergy of his day as "the most lifeless in Europe." * Speaking of the beginning of the 1700's, William Fitchett says: "A new century was dawning but it seemed as if in the spiritual sky of England the very light of Christianity was being turned by some strange and evil force into darkness." ®
And if the true test of any age and the most optimistic is the picture of its religion, then England's portrait at that time was a dour and sinister one.
Gone were the days of the heroism of such men as the parents and grandparents of Susanna and Samuel Wesley.
Then English clergymen were persecuted for their stand on religious freedom and were not afraid to lose all for conscience' sake. Now it had come about that for the most part even the leaders of the Anglican Church fawned upon their lordly patrons and winked at the excesses of the Court, Or else, they lived it out in their influential parishes, going through the stodgy performance of their duties with none of the urgency that belongs to those with a divine calling.
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As for the ordinary rural clergy, Lord Macaulay gives us this unhappy picture of them:
The coarse and ignorant squire, who thought that it belonged to his dignity to have grace said every day at his table by an ecclesiastic in full canonicals, found means to reconcile dignity with economy. A young Levite—such was the phrase then in use—might be had for his board, a small garrett, and ten pounds a year, and might not only perform his own professional functions, might not only be the most patient of butts and of listeners, might not only be always ready in fine weather for bowls, and in rainy weather for shovel-board, but might also save the expense of a gardener or of a groom. Sometimes the reverend man nailed up the apricots, and sometimes he curried the coach-horses. He cast up the farrier's bills. He walked ten miles with a message or a parcel. If he was permitted to dine with the family, he was expected to content himself with the plciinest fare. He might fill himself with the corned beef and the carrots; but, as soon as the tarts and cheese-cakes made their appearance, he quitted his seat, and stood aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great part of which he had been excluded.
Perhaps after some years of service he was presented to a living sufficient to support him; but he often found it necessary to purchase his preferment by a species of simony, which furnished an inexhaustible subject of pleasantry to three or four generations of scoffers. ... A waiting-woman was generally considered as the most suitable helpmate for a parson. ...
In general, the divine who quitted his chaplainship for a benefice and a wife found that he had only exchanged one class of vexations for another. Not one living in fifty enabled the incumbent to bring up a family comfortably. As children multiplied and grew, the household of the priest became more and more beggarly. Holes appeared more and more plainly in the thatch of his parsonage and in his single cassock. Often it was only by toiling on his glebe, by feeding swine, and by loading dungcarts, that he could obtain daily bread; nor did his utmost exertions always prevent the bailiffs from taking his concordance and his ink-stand in execu tion. It was a white day on which he was admitted into the
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kitchen of a great house, and regaled by the servants with cold meat and ale. His children were brought up like the children of the neighboring peasantry. His boys followed the plow, and his girls went out to service. Study he found impossible, for the advowson of his living would hardly have sold for a sum sufficient to purchase a good theological library; and he might be considered as unusually lucky if he had ten or twelve dog-eared volumes among the pots and pans on his shelves.® Again quoting Green: "Of the prominent statesmen of the time the greater part were unbelievers in any form of Chris tianity and distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives. . . . The rural peasantry . . . were left without much moral or religious training of any sort. 'We saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar,' said Hannah More at a far later time, 'and that was used to prop a flower pot.' '' ''
The truth is, the dissolute reign of Charles II had left a dark mark upon English life which was not quickly erased, and even the Church was affected by it. Religion had been wrung dry of the compelling power that should have been its life blood. Deism had come to full flower during this period.
God was not denied, but he had created the universe, given it its laws, and then gone off to some far distant spot where he had no touch with mortals. Religion was governed by reason and cold logic, and anything bordering on enthusiasm was anathema. Worship was observing the stated forms tradi tionally laid down; most sermons were dry homilies that fur nished no spiritual manna for the living of one's days. Many
Englishmen felt a postive scorn of religion. Others filled the family pew because it was traditional to do so, but their rou tine worship was troubled by no pangs of conscience regard ing their less privileged countrymen.
It was for such a time as this that John Wesley, reared in a dismal swamp in Lincolnshire by parents of pious heritage and strong religious faith, was called to arouse all England from its spiritual lethargy.
The Epworth Rectory rebuilt after the
FIRE . . . THIS TIME WITH SUBSTANTIAL BRICK.
LIFE at EPWORTH By the time Susanna was ensconced in the Epworth parsonage she had been married about eight years. Samuel received his
Bachelor of Arts degree at Oxford in June, 1688, was ordained deacon in the Church of England seven weeks later, and was given a London curacy which paid him twenty-eight pounds a year. It was several years later that he received his Master of Arts degree from Cambridge. In February, 1689, he was ordained priest and given an appointment as chaplain on a man-