Introduction II
INTRODUCTION
pla E dictum which urges that 'Mothers are the makers of spirit', can cite an impressive range of evidence in its favour. Certainly the most superficial knowledge of the character and career of John Wesley can hardly overlook the enormous influence of his mother on his whole personal development. Mrs Elsie Harrison's study of Wesley deliberately allows the accent to fall on the crucial human relation- . ship of his life, when it styles him Son to Susanna.1 It is indeed arguable that this relationship is the vital clue, not merely to his private life, as Mrs Harrison's title suggests, but to much of his public life—they were never far apart in Wesley—and to his whole personal make-up too.
If Susanna's influence was so vital for her son's development, then it becomes imperative to try to understand her own character and beliefs, and the environment, both personal and intellectual, which helped to shape them. When we turn to the sources available for such study, we are confronted by the surprising fact that there has been no attempt at a full-scale biographical study of Susanna. Certainly there is no life of her extant which is at all commensurate with the central importance she holds both in the life of John Wesley and in the development of Methodism. The present study is not a full-length portrait of Susanna, but attempts to set her
1G. Elsie Harrison, Son to Susanna : the private life of Fohn Wesley (1937). a * II
INTRODUCTION
life and thought within the context of the Puritan tradition in which she was bred, and to assess the importance of her
Puritanism for the upbringing of her family and for the development of Methodism.
For such a study of Susanna there is no lack of materials.
Adam Clarke's Memoirs of the Wesley Family! contains a valuable selection of Susanna's letters, prayers, and theological writings. More of her letters are printed in G, J.
Stevenson's Memorials of the Wesley Family.2, Many of her meditations and prayers have survived, partly in her own manuscript notebooks at Wesley College, Bristol, and partly in printed sources.* A brief selection of this devotional material has been edited by the Rev. W. L. Doughty in The Prayers of Susanna Wesley (1956). In addition, one of the most important of Susanna's theological treatises, setting out a reasoned basis for the Christian Faith, was published by the Rev. G. Stringer Rowe in 1898, under the title, Mrs
Wesley's Conference with her Daughter.* .
Yet although materials for Susanna's life were to hand, it was not until 1864 that the first published life appeared.5
It was the work of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Rev.
John Kirk, who lamented in his Preface that though there had been numerous brief sketches of Susanna's character, yet 'up to this hour, no volume worthy to be called a memorial of her has issued from the press'. He hoped 'to supply, in some small degree, this remarkable deficiency'.
Despite the rapid sale of his first edition, it can only be said that Kirk's turgid and pietistic account fully justified the modest claims he made for it. There followed, in 1876, a volume in the Eminent Women Series, entitled Susanna Wesley,
1 First edition, 1823 ; for the purposes of this study, the second edition, revised and enlarged to two volumes (1836), has been used.
* Published London, no date, but with Preface dated 1876.
* Notably in Adam Clarke, op. cit.; J. Whitehead, Life of Wesley (1793); H. Moore, Life of John Wesley (1824); and The Wesley Banner for 1852.
* Publications of the Wesley Historical Society, No. 3.
5 J. Kirk, The Mother of the Wesleys (1864).
INTRODUCTION
and written by one of her distant relatives, Eliza Clarke.
This life is clear and readable, and shows real shrewdness of judgement in assessing character. It is vitiated, however, by a pronounced tendency to undervalue the religious basis of Susanna's life and thought. In her preface, Eliza Clarke admits that Susanna was 'nothing if not religious', but at the same time appears to count it a virtue in her own biography that it 'differs from previous ones in not being written from a sectarian nor even from an eminently religious point of view'. What this approach means in practice may be seen in her omission of a long and interesting section of a letter from Susanna to her son Samuel, then at Westminster School, with the complacent remark, 'Much of this letter has been omitted on account of its being exclusively a theological dissertation."! It is symptomatic of Eliza
Clarke's approach that, while she devotes a whole chapter to "The Supernatural Noises'
(the Epworth 'ghost' or poltergeist), she refers hardly at all to Susanna's theological writings, her prayers or meditations. When Susanna's letters take on a theological tone, as they often do, Eliza Clarke's tendency is to excise the offending paragraphs and subsume them under a row of asterisks. She gives herself away in her
Preface, where she clearly implies that the religious element in Susanna's life is of only secondary interest: "More of general interest about Mrs Wesley ought to have been preserved ; but, unfortunately, she and her family have been. regarded solely in connection with Methodism. She was nothing if not religious; but [sic/] she was a lady of ancient lineage, a woman of intellect, a keen politician, and, had her ordinary correspondence been preserved, it would have given us an insight into the life of the period which would have been full of deep and world-wide interest.'? By 'ordinary
1 Eliza Clarke, Susanna Wesley, p. 98. For the full text of Susanna's letter, see Clarke, Wesley Family, 11, 146-50.
— * Eliza Clarke, Susanna Wesley, p. vi. yd
INTRODUCTION
correspondence' is apparently meant 'non-religious' or 'nontheological'. The possibility that the letters which have come down to us from Susanna's pen, full as they frequently are of theological meat, might represent her 'ordinary correspondence', or an important part of it, never seems to have entered Eliza Clarke's mind. She would clearly prefer an expurgated edition of Susanna's writings, 'without theology', and does her best to provide it for her Victorian public. But Susanna without theology is rather like The Fathers without Theology, to quote an egregious modern title,—or like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. If Kirk errs on the side of religiosity in his presentation, Eliza Clarke distorts the picture of Susanna by trying to water down the strain of religion which is central to her whole life and character.
The third and most recent life of Susanna is Miss Mabel R.
Brailsford's Susanna Wesley, the Mother of Methodism, published by the Epworth Press in 1938. In many ways, despite its brevity, Miss Brailsford's is quite the best life of the three.
Herself a Quaker, but the daughter of a Methodist minister, Edward John Brailsford (1841-1921), she has an understanding sympathy for the religious dynamic of Susanna's personality.
She writes lucidly and with a discerning humanity. She is not content, for instance, to dismiss Susanna's method of educating her children as harsh and inhuman, as a superficial reading of it might suggest. 'Her views on the training of children,' she writes, 'may sound somewhat arid and harsh, for the atmosphere of mother-love cannot be captured and held in a syllabus. Here again her system can be judged only by its results, and there was not one of the young Wesleys but left her schoolroom endued with the twin passions for learning and for righteousness."!
All three of the extant lives of Susanna deal quite cursorily with her early years in the London home of her father,
Dr Samuel Annesley, one of the most distinguished of 1M. R. Brailsford, Susanna Wesley, p. 63.
INTRODUCTION
Puritan ministers. Yet her Puritan home and her close relationship with her father were of decisive importance for Susanna. None of the previous lives really brings out the key significance of her ancestral Puritanism for her whole later development. It is hinted at and touched upon, but never documented or explored in depth. This omission may be seen as typical of a more general neglect of the Puritan strand in the Methodist tradition. One may fully concede the many-sided nature of the Methodist movement, and the diversity of influences—Catholic, Anglican, Pietist and Moravian—which helped to shape it. Yet, as I have written elsewhere, 'there is another strand in Methodism which, while not ignored, has often been underestimated or minimized—the English Puritan tradition in which Wesley's parents were reared. It is true that both Samuel and Susanna
Wesley left the Dissent of their birth, but one cannot jump out of one's skin by a change of denomination, and the evidence suggests that Susanna at least never lost her Puritanism even after she became a loyal Anglican.'! These words might serve as a text for the present study, for Susanna
Wesley incarnated many of the values of Puritanism, bred them in her children, and so transmitted them to Methodism, where they formed part of the rich amalgam which was the result of John Wesley's creative work for English Christianity.
It is not suggested, of course, that one can understand any complex event merely by reference to its antecedents ; nor is it denied that tracing everything back to Adam can be a tedious and unprofitable procedure. Yet if it is agreed that Susanna Wesley exercised a decisive influence on her son
John, by character, relationship, and teaching, then it surely becomes essential to investigate the influences, personal and 1J. A. Newton, Methodism and the Puritans, (Friends of Dr Williams's Library,
1964), p. 2. In this study I have tried briefly to indicate the debt of Methodism to the Puritans, under the heads of doctrine, liturgy, pastoralia, and ethics. a
INTRODUCTION
intellectual, which formed her spirit. Chapters One and Two describe Susanna's Puritan home and background, and draw
— freely on the writings of her father and his fellow-muinisters.
Chapter Three examines the marital relationship of Susanna and Samuel Wesley, and utilizes new material which has come to light as recently as 1953. Chapter Four is devoted to Susanna's training of her children,—practical, moral, and religious,—and to the theological treatises she wrote for their instruction. Chapter Five leans heavily on her own writings, especially her prayers and meditations, and tries to assess how decisively Puritanism shapedher devotion and theology. Chapter Six looks at Susanna's reactions to the Methodist Revival, and her influence upon its course.
Chapter Seven seeks to assess how far Susanna's Puritanism affected the doctrine and ethos of Wesley's Methodism.
Chapter Eight describes her death, and forms a brief epilogue to the whole study.
Despite some obvious differences, there are clear resemblances between the Puritanism of the seventeenth century and the Methodism of the eighteenth. Both stand in a dialectical relation to the Church of England, originating within it, and yet standing over against it. Both make their fundamental appeal to Scripture, and look to reason and experience to corroborate its deliverances. Both embody a conception of the Christian life in terms of disciplined living ('method' is a keyword for each of them), moral rigorism, and Christianity in earnest. Both stand for warm popular piety and lay religion, genuinely of and for the people. Both are intensely concerned for evangelical mission and pastoral care, and are ready to adapt and supplement the system of the Church in obedience to these primary needs. Both, finally and supremely, are concerned with the sovereignty of grace, and are eager to translate into human terms an understanding of the Christian life as 'faith working by love'. Can we, however, posit more than a family likeness
INTRODUCTION
between these two traditions? Can we discern continuity within a given stream of Christian life? It is the argument of this study that we can, and that the central figure in the transmission of the Puritan tradition to the life of Methodism is she who found it no inconsistency to be a Puritan, an Anglican, and a Methodist, and who embodies all three types of churchmanship: Susanna Wesley.