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John Wesley came of a notable stock. His ancestors for three generations were gentlefolk by birth, scholars by training, clergymen by choice, and martyrs, in a sense, by roughness of fortune. They belonged to a hard age; an age of ejectments and proscriptions, when intolerance was crystallised into Acts of Parliament, and even mistook itself for religion. Daniel Defoe sat thrice in the public stocks in the very year John Wesley was born — for no worse crime than having written that matchless bit of irony, “A Short and Easy Way with the Dissenters”!

A very bitter storm of legalised cruelty beat on the Wesleys of that time. Bartholomew Wesley, the great-grandfather of John, was thrust out from his snug Dorsetshire rectory, in advance of the general ejection under the Act of Uniformity, in 1662. His son, John, a more brilliant scholar than even his father, but of less toughness of fibre, was imprisoned in 1661, just before his father’s ejection, for not using the Book of Common Prayer. He was turned out of his living at Blandford in 1662, and lived a harried, distressful life under the cruel laws of the period afterwards. His natural home was Weymouth; but he was forbidden to settle there. A good woman, guilty of giving him lodgings, was fined £20 for the oflfence. “Often disturbed, several times apprehended, four times imprisoned,” runs his patient, melancholy record. Under the infamous Five Mile Act he was driven from one place after another, and he died, a comparatively young man, killed by the cruel temper of his times.

His son, Samuel Wesley, the father of John, had all the essential virtues of his stock — their passion for scholarship, their courage, their independent will; but he was of a hardier temper than his father. His independence of will took a somewhat surprising development. This son and grandson of ejected ministers decided that the Church which had ejected them was in the right, and he joined its ministry — thus turning his back on two generations of ill-used kinsfolk! He was, at the moment, at a Dissenting academy, a lad scarcely of age; but the form of diss6nt about him might well shock a youth of serious and generous temper. It was only a bitter variety of politics, absolutely exhausted of religious ideals and forces; and Samuel Wesley renounced it, trudged on foot to Oxford, with exactly forty-five shillings in his pocket, and entered himself at Exeter College as a “poor scholar.”

About that very time, in London, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a famous Dissenting clergyman was putting her learned father, and his theology, in the scales of her girlish judgment, and solemnly deciding against both it and him! This sturdy youth, trudging in the winter weather to Oxford, with such scanty coins in his pocket, but such high purpose in his heart, and this remarkable theologian in short dresses, had not yet met; but they were destined to be man and wife. There were, plainly, some very notable aflSnities of nature betwixt them. When they met and mated their offspring might well be expected to possess some unusual qualities.

The total amount of assistance Samuel Wesley received from his family during his university course consisted of five shillings; but he emerged, at the end, with a degree, and £10, 15s. in cash in his pocket! On the whole no student perhaps ever gave less to Oxford or got more out of it than did Samuel Wesley. In Scottish universities generations of hardy students have cultivated much literature on very little oatmeal; but all the universities north of the Tweed might be challenged to produce an example of scholarship nourished on scantier cash or a more Spartan diet than that of Samuel Wesley.

He held a London curacy for a year, was chaplain on board a king’s ship for another year, won the chaplainship of a regiment by a poem on the Battle of Blenheim, and lost it, according to one account, by publishing an attack on Dissenters. He was given the living at Epworth to which was afterwards added the neighbouring parish of Wroot.

John Wesley’s father, even at this distance of time, kindles a half-humorous, half-exasperated admiration.

He was a little, restless-eyed, irascible man; high-minded, quick-brained, of infinite hardihood and courage, but with an impracticable, not to say irresponsible, strain in his blood. He was determined — in spite of nature — to be a poet; and on his poetry, Pope, though his friend, finds time, in the “Dunciad,” to distil a drop of gall. His son John — who knew bad poetry when he saw it — says of his father’s “Life of Christ” in verse — filial piety contending in him with literary judgment — “the cuts are good; the notes pretty good; the verses so-and-so.” Praise of more frosty temperature it is diflBcult to imagine. Samuel Wesley’s great work was a commentary on the Book of Job, a performance which would have supplied a new exercise in patience to that much-afflicted patriarch, if he had been required to read it. “Poor Job!” says Bishop Warburton; “it was his eternal fate to be persecuted by his friends.”

Wesley’s clear-eyed wife, who loved her impracticable and hot-tempered spouse with an affection all husbands may well envT’, yet admits that amongst his rough parishioners at Epworth the talents of her husband were buried, and says, with wifely gentleness, he was “forced to a way of life for which he is not so well qualified as 1 could wish.” But this was only a wife’s soft periphrase. Her impracticable husband was busy hammering out laborious rhymes in his study, or was riding off to hold debate with his brother clergymen in Convocation, leaving his clearer-brained wife to manage the parish, cultivate the glebe, and govern her too-numerous brood of infants.

Susannah Wesley, his wife, would have been a remarkable woman in any age or country. She was the daughter of Dr. Annesley, himself an ejected divine, and a man of ripe learning and good family. The daughter of such a father had a natural bias for scholarship; she knew Greek, Latin, French, while yet in her teens, was saturated with theology, reasoned herself into Socinianism — and out of it — and, generally, had a taste for abstruse knowledge, which in these soft-fibred modern days is almost unintelligible.

She was reading the Early Fathers and wrestling with metaphysical subtleties when a girl of to-day would be playing tennis or practising sonatas. While yet only thirteen years of age, as we have seen, she solemnly reviewed “the whole issue in dispute betwixt Dissent and the Church,” and gravely decided that the views held by her father — and such a father! — were wrong. A feminine theologian of such tender years, who felt herself capable of deciding such an issue, and who actually decided it in such a way, and against such authorities, would be regarded in these days as a somewhat alarming portent. None but a blue-stocking, it might be confidently assumed — a dowdy in spectacles, with neglected dress and non-existent complexion, from whom suitors fled — would be capable of such a feat. As a matter of fact, Susannah Annesley was a beautiful, high-spirited girl — her sister was painted by Lely as one of the beauties of his time — keen-witted, but modest; with a genius for practical aflfairs. She was certainly neither dowdy nor blue-stocking; and was probably the most capable woman in all England in her day.

When only nineteen years old she married Samuel Wesley; and bore him nineteen children in twenty-one years. She was herself the twenty-fifth child of her father. It was an age of small incomes and large families!

She was an ideal wife, incomparably superior to her husband in practical genius, and yet herself lovingly blind to the fact. She might have talked philosophy with Hypatia or discussed Latin and Greek with Lady Jane Grey; and yet with her impetuous, unpractical husband she was as patient — if not quite as submissive — as Griselda. They were a strong-willed pair, accustomed to think for themselves; and she wrote to her son John afterwards, “It is a misfortune almost peculiar to our family that your father and I seldom think alike.” It may be taken for granted, however, that when they differed the wife was usually in the right. Yet she practised towards her husband the sweetest wifely obedience. That pugnacious little divine very properly expended many of his leaden stanzas on his wife: —

“She graced my humble roof and blessed my life;
Blessed me by a far greater name than wife.
Yet still I bore an undisputed sway;
Nor was’t her task, but pleasure, to obey.

Nor did I for her care ungrateful prove,

But only used my power to show my love;

Whate’er she asked I gave without reproach or grudge;

For still she reason asked, and I was judge.

All my commands requests at her fair hands,

And her requests to me were all commands.”

These are heavy-footed rhymes; and the actual prose of married life usually comes short of its poetry. The rector of Epworth discovered one fatal day that his wife, who had her own political views, did not join in the response when he offered prayer for the king.

“Sukie,” he said majestically, “if we are to have two kings, we must have two beds”; and the little, absolute, irresponsible, and exasperating man took horse and rode away, leaving his wife to care for his children and his parish. According to Southey — though the tale is doubtful — she did not hear of him again till twelve months afterwards, when William III. died, and the hot-headed rector of Epworth came back condescendingly to the bosom of his family!

The courageous pair began their wedded life on a curacy and an income of £30 a year; and children came fast — nineteen, as we have seen, in twenty-one years. So poverty — always darkened with the shadow of debt, and sometimes trembling on the edge of want — was a constant element of the family life. Years later, in a letter to his bishop, Mr. Wesley gives him the interesting information that he had but £50 a year for six or seven years together, and “one child at least per annum.” The little rector of Epworth, indeed, was fond of doing exercises in what may be called family arithmetic for the edification of his diocesan. In a letter to his Archbishop, aunouncing the birth of twins, he says: “Last night my wife brought me a few children. There are but two yet, a boy and a girl, and I think they are all at present. We have had four in two years and a day, three of which are living... Wednesday evening my wife and 1 joined stocks, which came to but six shillings, to send for coals.”

A father who, with only six shillings in his pocket, has to welcome the arrival of twins might be pardoned for feeling some anxiety. But the head of the Wesley household left that branch of family duty, as he did most others, to his wife. She carried the burden of household care; her husband could betake himself either to Convocation, or to a debtors’ prison, in a spirit of most cheerful philosophy. He wrote to the Archbishop of York, when the gates of Lincoln Castle had just been shut on him: “Now I am at rest; for I have come to the haven where I have long expected to be.” He adds incidentally: “When I came here my stock was but little above ten shillings, and my wife at home had scarce so much.” It does not seem to have occurred to this remarkable husband that a wife left with a brood of little children, and less than ten shillings in her possession, had almost sharper cause for anxiety than he had. She could hardly sit down and write philosophically: “Now I am at rest.” He adds: “She soon sent me her rings, because she had nothing else to relieve me with; but I returned them.”

Only once was there audible in his brave veife’s voice a repining note. While her husband was still lying in prison for debt, the Archbishop of York asked her:

“Tell me, Mrs. Wesley, whether you were ever really in want of bread?”

“My lord,” she answered, “strictly speaking, I never did want bread. But then I had so much care to get it before it was eaten, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me; and I think to have bread under such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all.”

In later years Mrs. Wesley writes of the “inconceivable distress” from which they not seldom sufei’ed in those sad days; one of the daughters, Emilia, speaks with sharper accents of the “intolerable want” of the family, and of the “scandalous want of necessaries” which not seldom afflicted them.

Samuel Wesley did, no doubt, manage his financial affairs very badly. He understood practically the whole sad philosophy of debt. “I am always called on for money before I make 11,” he wrote, “and must buy everything at the worst hand.” But he lacked common-sense in money matters. His household was divided by very thin partitions, indeed, from mere want; and yet this surprising husband and father could spend no less than £150 in thrice attending Convocation! He was very sensitive, however, to any impeachment of his thrift and care as the head of his family; and, to his brother-in-law, who attacked him bluntly on the subject, and quoted Scripture on the uncomfortable thesis that he who failed to provide for his own household was worse than an infidel, offered the following record of his business affairs. The figures have a delicious and characteristic confusion about them, and might well be the despair of an accountant; and yet they show that if the little impatient man had never learnt the art of living within his income, he contrived to exist on surprisingly small means. It is all written, it will be observed, in the third person: —

£ *. d.

Imprimis, when he first walked to Oxford, he had in

cash 2 5 0

He lived there till he took his Bachelor’s degree, without any preferment or assistance, except one crown 0 5 0

By God’s blessing on his own industry he brought to

London 10 15 0

When he came to London, he got deacon’s orders and

a cure, for which he had for one year 28 0 0

In which year, for his board, ordination, and habit he

was indebted £30, which he afterwards paid 30 0 0

Then he went to sea, where he had, for one year, £70,

not paid till two years after his return 70 0 0

He then got a curacy at £30 per annum, for two years, and by his own industry, in writing, &c., he made it £60 per annum 120 0 0

Was there ever a worse tangled bit of arithmetic! And yet behind the confused figures there shines a gallant spirit!

In a letter to his Archbishop, Samuel Wesley makes a frank but quite unnecessary confession of his want of business knowledge: “I doubt not but one reason of my being sunk so far is my not understanding worldly affairs, and my aversion to law, which my people have always known but too well. I had but fifty pounds per annum for six or seven years together, nothing to begin the world with, one child at least per annum, and my wife sick for half that time.”

To all his other ills must be added Samuel Wesley’s quarrels with his neighbours, bred, in the main, of political disputes, and amongst that rough peasantry taking a very rough shape. They maimed his cattle, destroyed his crops, assailed his character, tried to set fire to his

WESLEY AND HTS CENTURY

rectory. His tithes could be collected only in patches, and often by force. But the little plucky man had at least the virtue of courage. “They have only wounded me yet,” he said, “and, I believe, can’t kill me.” The whole relation betwixt priest and parishioners was of a very curious and troubled sort.

Susannah Wesley was a mother of a very notable type, and her management of her children may well be the despair of all mothers and the envy of all fathers to the end of time. This brave, wise, high-bred woman, with the brain of a theologian behind her gentle eyes, and the tastes of a scholar in her blood, had great ideals for her children. They should be gentlefolk, scholars. Christians. Her motherhood had an inexorable plan running through it; and never were the innumerable offices of a mother discharged with such insistent method and intelligent purpose. The whole household life moved as if to a time-table. The very sleep of the children was measured to them in doses. As each child reached a certain fixed date in its life it was required, within a certain specified time, to learn the alphabet. This wise mother understood that the will lies at the root of the character, and determines it. The Wesley household was richly endowed in the matter of will, so the first step in each child’s education was to bring that force under government. It was a standing and imperative rule that no child was to have anything it cried for, and the moral effect on the child’s mind of the discovery that the one infallible way of not getting a desirable thing was to cry for it must have been surprising.

The children were taught to be courteous in speech; to cry softly when it was necessary to cry at all — and sometimes this best of all mothers supplied her children with excellent reasons for crying.

Mrs. Wesley carried her principle of method and a time-table into the realm of religion. She began surprisingly early. “The children were early made to distinguish the Sabbath from other days, and were soon taught to be still at family prayers, and to ask a blessing immediately afterwards, which they used to do by signs, before they could kneel or speak!” The cells of each infantile brain were diligently stored with passages of Scripture, hymns, collects, &c. Prayer was woven into the fabric of every day’s life. The daily lesson of each child was set in a framework of hymns. Later, certain fixed hours were assigned to each member of the household, during which the mother talked with the particular child for whom that hour was set aside. It is probable that those rigours of introspection, that severity of self-anaylsis, which formed the habit of Wesley’s life in after years had their origin in those Thursday interviews which Mrs. Wesley had with “Jackie.”

Mr. Birrell accuses Mrs. Wesley of hardness. She was, he says, “a stern, forbidding, almost an unfeeling parent.” Mr. Lecky says the home at Epworth parsonage “was not a happy one.” But no criticism could well be more unjust. Life had not been vsoft to Mrs. Wesley; the age was not soft. A strain of the Spartan mother was in her blood, and not without need. A very narrow space divided that household of hungry mouths at Epworth from real want. When Susanuah Wesley awoke every morning, her first preoccupation must have been how to find bread for her hungry brood. These were conditions unfavourable to light-hearted ease. But no one can study the records of that home without seeing that its atmosphere was love. Love, it is true, of a strenuous temper, with no element in it of loitering tenderness, and no enervating strain of indulgence; but still love of deathless quality. John Wesley himself was the least sentimental of men; but his affection for his mother had something in it of a lover’s glow and tenderness. He writes to her hoping he may die first, and so not have the distress of outliving her!

It is possible to challenge some of Mrs. Wesley’s methods; and there is a tragical side to the family history. Out of her nineteen children nearly one-half died in infancy; and of her seven clever, quick-witted girls, five made very unhappy marriages. But great risks lie like a shadow on all human homes.

The only charge which can be fairly urged against Susannah Wesley is that she had no sense of humour. The very names of the children prove the complete absence of any sense of the ridiculous in either the rector of Epworth or his wife. One daughter was cruelly labelled Mehetabel; a second Jedidah! Mrs. Susannah Wesley’s theological performances while yet in short dresses prove her want of humour. A girl of thirteen, who took herself solemnly enough to undertake the settlement of “the whole question betwixt Dissent and the Church” must have been of an unsmiling and owl-like gravity. Now, humour has many wholesome offices. It acts like a salt to the intellect, and keeps it sweet. It enables its owner to see the relative sizes of things. It gives an exquisite tact, a dainty lightness of touch to the intellectual powers. And Mrs. Wesley visibly lacked any rich endowment of that fine grace.