Household Stories

Some of the incidents of Wesley’s childhood must have deeply coloured his religion. One is the historic fire which consumed the rectory in 1709, when Wesley was not yet six years old. The building was old and dry, constructed of lath and plaster and ancient timber. On the midnight of February 9, 1709, it was discovered to be in flames. The fire raced along the woodwork of the ancient rectory as though it had been so much tinder. The rest of the household made a hurried and scorched escape, but John, in the alarm and hurry, was forgotten.

The little fellow awoke to find the room so full of light that he though it was day; he lifted his head and looked through the curtains. A red scribble of fire was racing across the ceiling. He sprang from the bed and ran to the door, but it was already a dreadful tapestry of dancing flames. He climbed on a chest which stood beneath the window and looked out. The night was black, but the light of the burning house fell on the upturned faces of a swaying crowd of agitated people. The strong north-east wind, blowing through the open door, had turned the staircase into a tunnel of flame; the father found it would be death to climb it. He fell on his knees in the hall, and cried aloud to God for the child that seemed shut up in a pi’ison of flame.

Mrs. Wesley herself, who was ill, had — to use her own phrase — “waded through the fire,” and reached the street, with scorched hands and face; as she turned to look back at the house the face of her little son could be seen at the window. He was still in the burning house!

There was no ladder; his escape seemed impossible. The boy himself heard behind him the crackling flames, and saw before him the staring, white-faced crowd, framed against the background of the black night.

One man, with more resource than the rest of the crowd, ran in beneath the window, and bade another climb upon his shoulders. The boy was reached and, just as he was drawn through the window, he heard the crash of the falling roof behind him. “Come, neighbours,” cried the father, when his child was brought to him, “let us kneel down! Let us give thanks to God! He has given me all my eight children. Let the house go. I am rich enough.”

No child of six could ever forget an incident like that. It burned itself in upon the boy’s imagination. In later years it became for him luminous with new and strange meanings. It was a parable of his own spiritual history. He had been delivered from fiercer fires than those which consumed Epworth Eectory. Was he not “a brand plucked from the burning”; and plucked for some special purpose? Nay, the incident became a mystic picture of the condition of the whole world, and of the part he was to play in it.

His theology translated itself into the terms of that night scene. The burning house was the symbol of a perishing world. Each human soul, in Wesley’s thought, was represented by that fire-girt child, with the flames of sin, and of that divine and eternal anger which unrepenting sin kindles, closing round it. He who had been plucked from the burning house at midnight must pluck men from the flames of a more dreadful fire. That remembered peril coloured Wesley’s imagination to his dying day.

The story of the fire is told by the rector himself, by Mrs. Wesley, and by John, from his boyish recollection. Of these three accounts, the most graphic and vivid is that by Samuel Wesley himself, though, curiously enough, it is the account generally overlooked. As it is read, something of the confusion, the heat, the terror of the fire can be realised across nearly two centuries: —

“A little after eleven (he writes) I heard ‘Fire!’ cried in the street next to which I lay. If I had been in my own chamber, as usual, we had all been lost. I threw myself out of bed, got on my waistcoat and nightgown and looked out of the window; saw the reflection of the flame, but knew not where it was; ran to my wife’s chamber with one stocking on, and my breeches in my hand; would have broken open the door, which was bolted within, but could not. My two eldest children were with her. They rose, and ran towards the staircase, to raise the rest of the house. Here I saw it was my own house, all in a light blaze, and nothing but a door between the flame and the staircase.

“I ran back to my wife, who by this time had got out of bed. and opened the door. I bade her fly for her life. We had a little silver and some gold, about £20. She would have stayed for it, but I pushed her out. I ran upstairs and found them, came down, and opened the street door. The thatch was fallen in all on fire. The north-east wind drove all the sheets of flame in my face, as if reverberated in a lamp. I got twice on the steps, and was drove down again. I ran to the garden-door and opened it. The fire was there more moderate. I bade them all follow, but found only two with me, and the maid with another (Charles) in her arms that cannot go; but all naked. I ran with him to my house of office in the garden, out of the reach of the flames; put the least in the other’s lap; and not finding my wife follow me, ran back into the house to see her, but could not find her.

“I ran down, and went to my children in the garden, to help them over the wall. WTien I was without, I heard one of my poor lambs, left still above-stairs, about six years old, cry out, dismally, ‘Help me.’ I ran in again, to go upstairs, but the staircase was now all aflre. I tried to force my way up through it a second time, holding my breeches over my head, but the stream of fire beat me down. I thought I had done my duty; went out of the house to that part of my family I had saved, in the garden, with the killing cry of my child in my ears. I made them all kneel down, and we prayed to God to receive his soul.

“I ran about inquiring for my wife and other children; met the chief man and the chief constable of the town going from my house, not towards it, to help me. I took him by the hand and said, ‘God’s will be done!’ His answer was: ‘Will you never have done your tricks? You fired your house once before; did you not get enough by it then, that you have done it again?’ This was cold comfort I said, ‘God forgive you!’ But I had a little better soon after, hearing that my wife was saved, and then I fell on mother earth and blessed God.

“I went to her. She was alive, and could just speak. She thought I had perished, and so did all the rest, not having seen me nor any share of eight children for a quarter of an hour; and by this time all the chambers and everything was consumed to ashes, for the fire was stronger than a furnace, the violent wind beating it Aovn on the house. She told me afterwards how she escaped. When I first went to open the back-door, she endeavoured to force through the fire at the fore-door, but was struck back twice to the ground. She thought to have died there, but prayed to Christ to help her. She found new strength, got up alone, and waded through two or three yards of flame, the fire on the ground being up to her knees. She had nothing on but her shoes and a wrapping-gown, and one coat on her arm. This she wrapped about her breast, and go safe through into the yard, but no soul yet to help her. She never looked up or spake till I came; only when they brought her last child to her, bade them lay it on the bed. This was the lad whom I heard cry in the house, but God saved him by almost a miracle. He only was forgot by the servants, in the hurry. He ran to the window towards the yard, stood upon a chair, and cried for help. There were now a few people gathered, one of whom, who loved me, helped up another to the window. The child, seeing a man come into the window, was frightened, and ran away to get to his mother’s chamber. He could not open the door, so ran back again. The man was fallen down from the window, and all the bed and hangings in the room where he was were blazing. They helped up the man a second time, and poor Jacky leaped into his arms and was saved. I could not believe it till I had kissed him two or three time a”

The next day, as he was walking in the garden, and surveying the ruins of the house, he picked up part of a leaf of his Polyglot Bible, on which these words were still legible: “Vade; vende omnia quae habes; et attoUe crucem, et sequere me” — “Go; sell all that thou hast; and take up thy cross, and follow Me.”

Is it any wonder that such an experience registered itself ineffaceably on John Wesley’s imagination? Wesley, as a child, must have watched with grave, wondering eyes another incident in the Epworth household. The father was absent at Convocation; and Mrs. Wesley began to hold religious meetings in the rectory kitchen. She held these little services first for her own servants and children; then the neighbours begged permission to come, till thirty of forty were gathered on Sunday evening. That fiery little High Churchman, her husband, heard the news. A “conventicle” was held under the roof of his own rectory, with a woman publicly praying, and even, perhaps, exhorting; and that woman his own wife! Here was matter to set the sacerdotal conscience on fire with austere anger! Mrs. AVesley’s letters, in reply to her imperious husband, are models of sense and goodness, and her logic is quite too much for that irascible little man.

It “looked particular,” her husband argued, if she held a service. “I grant it does,” his wife replies, “and so does almost anything that is serious, or that may in any way advance the glory of God or the salvation of souls, if it be performed out of a pulpit.” Then, too, her sex made it unsuitable, her husband contended, that she should conduct such a meeting. “As I am a woman,” Mrs. Wesley replies, “so I am also mistress of a large family; and though the superior charge of the souls contained in it lies upon you, as head of the family, and as their minister, yet in your absence I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under my care as a talent committed to me under a trust by the great Lord of fill the families of heaven and earth. And if I am unfaithful to Him, or to you, how shall I answer when He shall command me to render an account of my stewardship?”

“Why did she not ask some one else to read a sermon?” Mr. Wesley demanded. “Alas!” she replies, “you do not consider what a people these are. 1 do not think one man among them could read a sermon without spelling a good part of it; and how would that edify the rest?” As for its being a conventicle, a rival of the church, “these little gatherings,” Mrs. Wesley tells her husband, “have brought more people to church than ever anything else did in so short a time. We used not to have above twenty or twenty-five at evening service, whereas now we have between 200 and 300.”

Mrs. Wesley’s modesty is charming. “I never durst positively to presume to hope that God would make use of me as an instrument in doing good. The furthest T ever durst go was: It may be! Who can tell? With God all things are possible. I will resign myself to Him; or, as Herbert better expresses it: —

‘Only since God doth often make
Of lowly matter for high uses meet

I throw me at His feet.
There will I lie until my Master seek
For some mean stuff whereon to show His skill;

Then is my time.’”

Mrs. Wesley closes with a note of fine dignity. “If you do, after all, think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me that you desire me to do this; for that will not satisfy my conscience. But send me your positive command, in such full and express terms as may absolve me from guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity for doing good when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

That terrible sentence was too much for the little rector, and the meetings were continued until he returned from London.

But the whole incident, it can well be imagined, must have deeply impressed John Wesley, who then was only nine years old. The figure of his mother standing before that crowd of peasant listeners, the grave, sweet, high-bred face, in such vivid contrast with every other face

WESLEY AND HTS CENTURY

in the room; the example of serious but intense zeal; the controversy with the father; the questions — the very questions he had himself to settle later, and on a larger field — which was of greater importance, decorous form or spiritual fact? whether it was wrong to do good if the method of doing it was irregular; did human souls exist for the sake of ecclesiastical forms, or ecclesiastical forms for the salve of human souls? The whole incident, we repeat, with the controversy it kindled, must have profoundly impressed Wesley. And his mother’s fine persistency and courageous zeal must have helped to determine the whole policy of his own life in after years.

Meanwhile, on the lively household at Epworth there broke one of the oddest experiences that ever visited a bewildered rector’s family circle — the performances of that poltergeist — noisy ghost, or imp — familiarly named by the girls of the household “Old Jeffrey.” Who does not know the story of “Old Jeffrey” has missed one of the best attested and most curious ghost stories in literature.

For nearly six months — from December 1716 to April 1717 — the rectory was made hideously vocal with mysterious noises, raps on doors and walls, thumps beneath the floor, the smash of broken crockery, the rattle of iron chains, the jingle of falling coins, the tread of mysterious feet. The noises baffled all more prosaic explanations and were at last assigned by common consent to some restless spirit; they became a sound so familiar that they ceased to be annoying, and the lively girls of the parsonage labelled the unseen, but too audible, sprite “Old Jeffrey.”

The story is told in letters, in amplest detail, and by every member of the family in turn, and all the tales were collected by John Wesley himself — who was at the Charterhouse when “Old Jeffrey” was active — and published in the Arminian Magazine. There is an element of humour in the varying tones in which the marvellous tale is recited. The rector tells it with masculine directness, and a belief in the ghost which plainly breeds, not fear, but only anger, and a desire to come to close quarters with it, and even to thump it. Mrs. Wesley tells the story, after her practical fashion, with Defoe-like simplicity; the quick-witted girls tell the tale with touches of girlish imagination and humour; a neighbouring clergyman, who was called in to assist in suppressing the ghost, adds his heavy voice to the chorus. The evidence, if it were given in a court of law, and in a trial for murder, would suffice to hang any man.

Some of the performances of the ghost were of a thrilling character. Mrs. Wesley, walking hand in hand with her husband, at midnight, downstairs to the room whence the noises came, records that “a large pot of money seemed to be poured out at my waist, and to run jingling down my nightgown to my feet.” More than once the indignant rector felt himself actually pushed by some invisible force. When the sounds were first heard it was noticed that the slumbering children, who were unconscious of the sound, were trembling with agitation and terror in their very sleep; and Mr. Wesley, with fatherly indignation, demanded why the ghost disturbed innocent children, and challenged it to meet him in his study if it had anything to say to him. He walked off majestically to his study to meet the ghost, and found the door held against him.

The girls discovered, by-and-by, that they could make “Old Jeffrey” angry by making personal remarks about it, ascribing its j)erformauces to rats, &c.; whereupon it would thump the floor and walls with huge indignation. “Old Jeffrey” was a ghost with pronounced ijolitical views, and would kick the floor or walls with noisy energy when Mr. Wesley prayed for the king. But the rector’s loyal sentiments were not to be repressed by a mere Jacobite ghost, and he would repeat the prayer for King George I. in yet more defiant tones. Samuel Wesley offered on this the sensible reflection, “Were I the king myself, I should rather Old Nick should be my enemy than my friend.” Mr. Wesley pursued the noise into almost every room in the house, chased it into the garden; tried to open a conversation with the ghost, engaged the services of a mastiff to put it down, but when the ghost began to discourse the dog tried ignobly to get under the bed in sheer terror. Once he made elaborate preparations for shooting it, but was prevented by a fellow divine, who was watching with him, reminding him that lead could not hurt a spirit. It was a punctual ghost, and generally began its performances a little before ten o’clock; and the girls came at last to accept it as an intimation that it was “time to go to sleep.” “A gentle tapping at their bedhead,” John Wesley records, “usually began between nine and ten at night: they then commonly said to each other, ‘Jeffrey is coming; it is time to go to sleep.’”

“Old Jeffrey,” it may be added, was the most polite and considerate of poltergeists known to literature. When it was “on duty,” it would lift the latches of the doors as the girls approached them to pass through. Mrs. Wesley, in her literal fashion, appealed to the invisible imp not to disturb her from five to six, as that was her quiet hour, and to suspend all noise while she was at her devotions; and “Old Jeffrey,” the most gentlemanly of ghosts, respected her wishes, and suspended his noisy operations during these periods.

The knocking in one particular chamber was especially violent one night; Mr. Wesley went into the room and adjured the spirit in vain to speak. He then said, “These spirits love darkness. Put out the candle, and perhaps it will speak.” His daughter Nancy did so, and the rector repeated his adjuration through the darkness; but there was only knocking in reply. Upon this he said, “Nancy, two Christians are an overmatch for the devil; go you down stairs. It may be when I am alone he will have courage to speak.” When the girl was gone he said, “If thou art the spirit of my son Samuel I pray thee knock three knocks and no more.” Immediately all was silence and there was no more knocking that night.

The performances of this queer poltergeist in Epworth Parsonage have, of course, their parallel in many similar stories; and what explanation of them is possible? Mrs. Wesley, after her direct and practical fashion, tried “Old Jeffrey” by the test of his utility, and pronounced against him. “If these apparitions,” she said, “would instruct us how to avoid danger, or put us in the way of being wiser and better, there would be sense in it. But to appear for no end that we know of, unless to frighten people almost out of their wits, seems altogether unreasonable.” A very foolish ghost is “Old Jeffrey,” according to Mrs. Wesley!

Coleridge discovers in the Wesley family “an angry and damnatory predetermination” to believe in the ghost, a view which is in hopeless quarrel with the facts, “The noises,” he says, “were purely subjective, and partook of the nature of a contagious nervous disease” — an explanation which respect for a great name need not prevent any one from calling childish. ‘’Old Jeffrey,” it is clear, was too much for the philosophy of S. T. C. There are many explanations of “Old Jeffrey.” Dr. Salmon accuses Hetty Wesley of playing tricks on her family and producing all the noises; but Mr. Andrew Lang, an authority on ghosts and their performances, writes a long article in the Contemporary, in defence of Hetty, and decides that she “did not, in top boots, invade the room of her father’s serving man and frighten his mastiff into howls.” Priestly offers the theory of imposture by servants and neighbours; Isaac Taylor resolves “Old Jeffrey” into a monkey-like “buffooning droll” of a spirit. Mr. Wesley had preached for several Sundays against the “cunning men” of the neighbourhood, whom the ignorant peasants used to consult as a kind of wizards; and Mr. Andrew Lang thinks the performances of “Old Jeffrey” were the revenge taken by these “cunning men.”

Samuel Wesley, the eldest son of the household, offers the best judgment on the story, and he puts it in the form of an unconscious, but very respectable, epigram. “Wit, I fancy,” he says, “might find many interpretations, but wisdom none.” The modern reader, we suspect, will take the side of “wisdom.”

“Old Jeffrey” belongs to the class of queer phenomena that baflSe explanation, but the story undobutedly coloured John Wesley’s imagination. It, to use Mr. Andrew Lang’s phrase, “made a thoroughfare for the supernatural through his brain.” It predisposed him not, it is true, to believe in all ghost stories, but to expect them; to listen to them with alert attention; to record them; to treat them respectfully. He tells a hundred ghost stories in his “Journal,” and always has towards them the same mental attitude of keenest interest, a respect for the witnesses, and an open mind as to any explanation.

According to one tradition, it may be added, “Old Jeffrey” revisited his familiar haunts nearly a century later; and an incumbent of less hardy courage than that possessed by the Wesley household was actually driven from the Epworth Rectory by strange, persistent, and utterly unaccountable noises.