Holy Dying
CHAPTER EIGHT
Holy Dying Christian, make it the study and business of thy life to learn to do thy last work well.
Richard Baxter When we see the day approaching, we must address ourselves to our dying work with all seriousness, renewing our repentance for sin, our consent to the covenant, our farewells to the world; and our souls must be carried out towards God in suitable breathings.
Matthew Henry 3 es E Puritan would have been appalled at the modern tendency to surround a dying man with a conspiracy of silence, until, drugged and insensible, he is able to shuffle off this mortal coil without ever really facing death. If for the Puritan life was real, life was earnest, then so was death.
As he addressed himself to his 'dying work', he maintained his attitude of high seriousness to the end. His response to dying, as to everything else in life, was active and positive.
For him, it was the final deed to be done, the ultimate battle to be fought, and in this strenuous spirit he squared up to the last enemy.
Death was for the Puritan, however, more than a personal
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test, the final conflict of the life of faith. It was also an opportunity to give glory to God and to build up others in the faith.
The enormous literature of Puritan funeral sermons makes clear the edification to be drawn from a believer's death-bed, either by those who witnessed his end, or by those who heard or read of it later. No doubt some of these sermons tend to idealize, to soften the harsh reality of a painful illness or a dying agony. Yet in some of the greatest descriptions of Puritan death-bed scenes, it is the verisimilitude that commands respect. Baxter could expatiate on 'the great difference between the death of a heavenly believer and of an earthly sensualist', and extol the former as 'a comfortable death'. But by 'comfortable' he did not mean a death void of physical pain, as the context of the phrase and the manner of his own dying both make plain. 'It wonderfully prepareth for a comfortable death', he writes, 'to live in the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ ;'' and the day before he died he said to his friends, with the honesty that was ingrained in him, 'I have pain, there is no arguing against sense, but I have peace, I have peace.'?
It was in this great Puritan tradition of holy dying that Susanna was found as she took her leave of the world. It was a tradition which her own father had adorned with his last words of triumphant faith : 'I'll die praising thee, and rejoice that there's others can praise thee better. I shall be satisfied with thy likeness ; satisfied, satisfied! Oh my dearest Jesus I come.'* The same longing to give glory to God in articulo mortis breaks out again in John Wesley's dying words, 'I'll praise, I'll praise .
. .. With unconscious aptness, Wesley's lips take up the words of one of the greatest hymns of the Puritan tradition, Isaac Watts's 'I'll praise my Maker'. No words could better express the strength and confidence of the * Baxter, Practical Works, ed. Orme XVIII, 7-8.
* Baxter, Autobiography, ed. Lloyd Thomas, p. 266.
* Williams, The Excellency of a Publick Spirit, p. 146.
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Godward reference of Puritan faith than these; the resolve that, to the very last breath, life is to be expended ad maiorem
Dei gloriam:
Pll praise my Maker, while I've breath ; And when my voice is lost in death, Praise shall employ my nobler powers ; My days of praise shall ne'er be past, While life, and thought, and being last,
Or immortality endures.
So at the very end Wesley joins himself to the Puritan succession of faith, and echoes, in a strangely moving way, his grandfather's words of nearly a century before, 'I'll die praising thee.'
Fifteen years before Susanna died, she and John had discussed in their letters the time when death must part them.
John expressed a wish to die before his mother—scarcely a natural desire in a young man of twenty-four, but one which suggests the powerful ties which bound Wesley to his mother.
She replied with her usual sobriety and common sense:
You did well to correct that fond desire of dying before me, since you do not know what work God may have for you to do ere you leave the world. And besides, I ought surely to have the pre-eminence in point of time, and go to rest before you. Whether you could see me die without any emotions of grief, I know not ; perhaps you could; it is what I have often desired of the children, that they would not weep at our parting, and so make death more uncomfortable than it would otherwise be to me. If you, or any other of my children, were like to reap any spiritual advantage by being with me at my exit, I should be glad to have you with me. But as I have been an unprofitable servant, during the course of a long life, I have no reason to hope for so great an honour, so high a favour, as to be employed in doing our Lord any service in the article of death. It were well if you spake prophetically, and that joy and hope might have the ascendant over the other passions of my soul in that important hour. Yet I dare not presume, nor do I despair, but rather leave it to our
Almighty Saviour, to do with me both in life and death just what he pleases, for I have no choice.
Clarke, Wesley Family, 11, 26-7. Letter dated 26 July 1727.
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The fact that Susanna had often spoken to her children about her death suggests a certain degree of preparedness for it, however diffident she might feel about her own adequacy for 'that important hour'. Her hope that her children might be edified by her departing, her desire to serve Christ even in the act of dying, and her utter resignation to the divine will,
—these show the lasting influence upon her soul of the Puritan piety in which she had been formed. There are, nevertheless, hints in the letter of a certain uneasiness in face of death, which she expects to be harrowing experience even if her children's grief does not make it more so. This suggestion of unreadiness, of shrinking back from the moment of death, is touched on in a letter to John written eight years later. She acknowledges, with typical candour, that, though she has long since chosen God as her 'only God' and her
'All', yet 'one thing often troubles me, that, notwithstanding I know that while we are present with the body we are absent from the Lord ; notwithstanding I have no taste, no relish left for anything the world calls pleasure, yet I do not long to go home as in reason I ought to do. This often shocks me: and as I constantly pray (almost without ceasing) for thee, my son; so I beg you likewise to pray for me, that God would make me better, and take me at the best."!
For all her forebodings, however, the experience of death, when it came to her in the summer of 1742, found Susanna calm and well-prepared. At the end of July, John Wesley rode from Bristol to London, and recorded in his Journal,
'I found my mother on the borders of eternity. But she had no doubt or fear; nor any desire but (as soon as God should call) "to depart, and to be with Christ'"'.' The calm and peace of her passing are described more fully in John's entry for goth July, the day on which Susanna died.? 'About three in the afternoon,' he records:
1 Clarke, Wesley Family, I1, 31-2.
* The Journal (III, 29) has 23 July, but Wesley's letters make plain that the date was in fact 31 July 1742.
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I went to my mother, and found her change was near. I sat down on the bed-side. She was in her last conflict; unable to speak, but, I believe, quite sensible. Her look was calm and serene, and her eyes fixed upward, while we commended her soul to God. From three to four the silver cord was loosing and the wheel breaking at the cistern; and then, without any struggle, or sigh, or groan, the soul was set at liberty. We stood round her bed, and fulfilled her last request, uttered a little before she lost her speech: 'Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God.'?
Her daughter Anne's account in a letter to Charles is similar and equally circumstantial :
A few days before my mother died, she desired me, if I had strength to bear it, that I would not leave her till death, which God enabled me to do. She laboured under great trials both of soul and body, some days after you left her; but God perfected
His work in her about twelve hours before He took her to Himself. She waked out of a slumber; and we, hearing her rejoicing, attended to the words she spoke, which were these: 'My dear
Saviour! are you come to help me in my extremity at last?'
From that time she was sweetly resigned indeed ; the enemy had 'no more power to hurt her. The remainder of her time was spent in praise. * If ever a mother deserved to die with her children round her, it was Susanna. They were not all there, of course, for Samuel was dead before her, and Charles out of London; but John was present, together with 'three or four of our sisters', as he wrote to his brother. She was still their teacher and instructress in the faith, as she pledged them to 'sing a psalm of praise to God', as they had done at her instance innumerable times in their Epworth days. She proved their exemplar in dying, as she had been in living, and John's observation on the members of his societies, "Our people die well,' proves his mother, once more, a true Methodist.
Yet though a Methodist now, Susanna remained an Anglican too, and the Prayer Book found its fitting place in 1 Wesley, Journal, III, 29~30.
2 Stevenson, Ademorials of the W'esley Family, pp. 225-6.
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* her dying moments. In his letter to Charles, John included a detail which is absent from the account in his Journal : 'After using the Commendatory prayer, I sat down on her bedside, and, with three or four of our sisters, sang a requiem to her departing soul.'! John here presumably refers to the familiar prayer in the 'Order for the Visitation of the Sick', which the 1662 Prayer Book entitled 'A commendatory
Prayer for a sick person at the point of departure'. It commended Susanna, as she had often commended herself, 'into the hands of a faithful Creator, and most merciful Saviour'.
It besought that her soul might be purged from 'whatsoever defilements it may have contracted in the midst of this miserable and naughty world',—and both adjectives should be given due weight, to do justice to Susanna's experience of the human condition. It closed with the petition, 'And teach us who survive, in this and other like daily spectacles of mortality, to see how frail and uncertain our own ¢ondition is: and so to number our days, that we may seriously apply our hearts to that holy and heavenly wisdom, whilst we live here, which may in the end bring us to life everlasting, through the merits of Jesus Christ thine only Son our
Lord.' For those who survived this death-bed scene, there could be, in the deepest sense, no 'other like daily spectacles of mortality', for to them her death was sui generis, like no other. And they did not need to be present at her dying to learn the lesson that they should apply their hearts to 'that holy and heavenly wisdom', for her whole life had bidden them do nothing else.
The wheel had come full circle for Susanna. She died in London, where she was born and lived all her early life.
She was buried—and none more fittingly—in what John Kirk is pleased to call 'that great Puritan Necropolis',
Bunhill Fields. Her body lies among the Puritan saints, with John Bunyan, John Owen, Isaac Watts, and her own sister,
*See Wesley, Journal, III, gon.
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Elizabeth Dunton. John buried her there, on Sunday afternoon, 1st August, and preached to a great crowd at her graveside : 'Almost an innumerable company of people being gathered together, about five in the afternoon I committed to the earth the body of my mother, to sleep with her fathers.'
He preached from The Revelation, of the great white throne and the judgement of the dead, in the hearing of 'one of the most solemn assemblies I ever saw, or expect to see on this side eternity'.! The plain headstone which her family placed above her grave bore some trite and undistinguished verses by Charles, but in his closing couplets he spoke no more than the truth:
Meet for the fellowship above, She heard the call, 'Arise, My love!'
'I come!' her dying look replied, And lamb-like as her Lord, she died.
For all the constriction of her earthly circumstances, there -is a universal quality about Susanna Wesley's life and faith.
She was indeed the daughter of Puritanism, and in a real sense the mother of Methodism. She stands as a living embodiment of that continuity between these two movements which has perhaps never been adequately recognized.
Yet above and beyond her place in a particular stream of the Protestant tradition, she stands forth as one of the saints of the Holy Catholic Church, with the authentic marks of spiritual greatness upon her.
1 Wesley, Journal, III, 30-1.