The Closing Day

Wesley had the gift — it might also be described as the art — of clean-blooded health in au unsurpassed degree. Probably nobody was ever better served by his own nerves and senses — by hand and foot, by eye and ear and voice — than he. His voice, it is true, had no organ-like notes, no volume of ear-shattering sound. It was a clear and flexible tenor of flute-like sweetness and carrying power, and with a curious suggestion of authority in it. Wesley tells how once he measured the range his voice could cover. It was clearly audible for a distance of 140 yards. And all Wesley’s physical faculties had the same characteristics of elasticity and strength. “A human gamecock,” Leslie Stephen calls him. He was short of stature, light of weight, erect and slender. He tells in his Journal how, in the year 1769, “I weighed 122 pounds, and in the year 1783 I weighed not a pound more or a pound less.’* A man who weighed not quite nine stone had certainly nothing of the impressiveness which belongs to mere bulk; but every fibre of Wesley’s slender, erect, little body had a toughness as of tempered steel. Work was for him a tonic. All his faculties grew tougher by dint of intense and ince.ssant use.

And time seemed to have lost its arresting oflBce for this unhasting, unresting ‘figure. His comrades died. One group of helpers after another passed away. A second generation of workers, the children of his original comrades, were about him. Still Wesley moved on his planetlike cour.se, preaching incessantly, writing, reading, administering, travelling through all weathers and on all roads, “Leisure and I,” he once said, at the beginning of his career, “have shaken hands.” And Time and Wesley had apparently shaken hands too! The flying years whitened his hair, and so gave him a yet more saintlike look; but they did not quench the sunshine in his eyes, or hush the music in his voice, or chill the fire of his zeal,

Wesley was accustomed, with almost amusing fidelity, to interrogate all his faculties and to record in his Journal — usually on his birthday — the condition in which he found his mind and body — almost as if they belonged to some one else. And so, through the last teu or fifteen years of his life, when he had passed the age at which most men fall into decay, we have successive records of his amazing vitality, and of the changes — or of the absence of change — to be noted in it.

Thus, in 1765, Wesley writes: “I breakfasted with Mr. Whitefield, who seemed to be an old, old man, being fairly worn out in his Master’s service, though he has hardly seen fifty years. Yet it pleases God that I, who am now in my sixty-third year, find no disorder, no weakness, no decay, no difference from what I was at flve-and-twenty, only that I have fewer teeth, and more grey hairs.” Two years afterwards he records how in a single day he travelled 110 miles, and on the road read the “History of Palmyra,” and Norden’s “Travels in Egypt and Abyssinia.”

On June 28, 1774, he inserts in his Journal a characteristic study of his own condition, and the causes which explain a state of health so remarkable: —

“This being my birthday, the first day of my seventy-second year, I was considering, How is this, that I find just the same strength as I did thirty years ago? That my sight is considerably better now, and my nerves firmer than they were then? That I have none of the infirmities of old age, and have lost several I had in my youth? The grand cause is, the good pleasure of God, Who doeth whatsoever pleases Him. The chief means are — 1. My constantly rising at four for about fifty years. 2. My generally preaching at five in the morning; one of the most healthy exercises in the world. 3. My never travelling less, by sea and land, than four thousand five hundred miles in a year.”

Two years later he writes: —

“I am seventy-three years old, and far abler to preach than I was at twenty-three. What natural means has God used to produce so wonderful an effect? First, continual exercise and change of air; second, rising at four every morning; third, the ability to sleep at will; fourth, the never losing a night’s sleep in my life; fifth, two violent fevers and two deep consumptions (these were rough medicines, but they caused my flesh to come again as the flesh of a little child); lastly, evenness of temper. I feel and grieve, but, by the grace of God, I fret at nothing.”

When he was seventy-five years of age, he records how he outwalked the stage coach for five miles on the deep Kentish roads. His record in 1781 is: —

“This day I enter into my seventy-ninth year, and by the grace of God feel no more of the infirmities of age than I did at twenty-nine. I have now preached thrice a day for seven days following, but it is just the same as if it had been but once.”

From what strange fountains of strength had this amazing old man drunk I

In 1784 Wesley was in Scotland, in wild weather, and beaten upon by the bitter moor winds. He records that he walked twelve miles without a sense of fatigue — and he was eighty-one years of age! In 1785 he writes: —

“It is now eleven years since I have felt any such thing as weariness. Many times I speak till my voice fails, and I can speak no longer. Frequently I walk till my strength fails, and I can walk no farther. Yet even then I feel no sensation of weariness, but am perfectly easy from head to foot.”

In June 1786, when he was eighty-three years old, Wesley travelled seventy-six miles in one day, and preached three times; and he declares that at the end of the day “I was no more tired than when I rose in the morning.”

These remarkable entries need perhaps to be slightly discounted. Wesley’s memory sometimes failed him. He describes, for example, as one of the causes of his marvellous health, “the never losing a night’s sleep in my life.’’ On July 5, 1773, he writes: “This is the first night I ever lay awake in my life, though I had ease in body and mind.” “In seventy years,” he says, “he had never lost one night’s sleep.” But his Journal contradicts these statements. Thus on September 10, 1759, he records: “Feverish at night, could not sleep a quarter of an hour, till between two and three in the morning.” On July 27, 1767, the entry is, “My cough is so violent at night I could not sleep a quarter of an hour together.”

Wesley wisely dwells on one feature of his life commonly overlooked, yet contributing greatly to his general health. There were wide spaces of solitude in all his days. No man ever spent more time amongst crowds than Wesley, yet few lives had wider intervals of healthful and meditative quiet. He writes to a friend: — “You do not understand my manner of life. ... It is true, I travel four or five thousand miles in a year. But I generally travel alone in my carriage, and consequently am as retired ten hours in a day as if I was in a wilderness. On other days I never spend less than three hours (frequently ten or twelve) in the day alone. So there are few persons in the kingdom who spend so many hours secluded from all company.”

When he was eighty-five Wesley first begins to note signs of decaying strength in himself. His step was not so light, his sight so keen, his memory so sure, as it had been. But, adds the indomitable old man, “I do not feel such a thing as weariness, either in travelling or preaching, and I am not conscious of any decay in writing sermons, which I do as readily and, I believe, as correctly as ever.”

But an old man is not always conscious of the changes in himself. Others are better able than he to realise the slower braiu, the less assured step, the failing voice. Wesley, as Hampson records, wherever he was, made it a point to preach if he could stand up on his legs; and this was true in his old age. The son of the poet Crabbe, in his father’s biography, describes one of Wesley’s sermons at this period of his life. He was, he said, “exceedingly old and infirm, and was attended, almost supported, in the pulpit by a young minister on each side. Wesley, in his sermon, drew on his classical recollections. He quoted some lines from Anacreon: —

“Oft am I by women told.
Poor Anacreon! thou grow’st old J
See, thine hairs are falling all,
Poor Anacreon! how they fall!
Whether I grow old or no.
By these signs I do not know;
By this I need not to be told,
‘Tis time to live, if I grow old.”

Young Crabbe relates that Wesley recited these lines with a mingled fire and pathos that produced the greatest effect.

In his eighty-sixth year (1789) Wesley makes at last, and records, the discovery of quick-coming age. ‘’I now find,” he says, “I grow old.” If he looked through the coming days of failing strength with forecasting eyes, he might, perhaps, be discouraged. The dulness of a peevish old age — did that await him? But he records, “Thou shalt answer for uie, O Lord my God.” Then he passes ou to his work. A Sunday, which caine shortly afterwards, he describes as “a day of rest,” because he had to preach only twice! Towards the end of the year he records, “My sight is so decayed that 1 cannot well read by candle light,” but he adds with unconquerable cheerfulness, “I can write as well as ever.”

On the first day of 1790, Wesley writes, “I am now an old man, decayed from head to foot. My eyes are dim, my right hand shakes much. I have a lingering fever almost every day; my motion is weak and slow;” but, with characteristic courage, he adds, “I can preach and write still.” And he goes on preaching and writing, if with slower step and hand, yet with a spirit as brave, and a face as bright, as in his prime. He wrote to Adam Clarke, who at that moment was ill, to follow his doctor’s instructions in everything else except the leaving off preaching. “I think,” he adds, “if I had taken this advice many years since, I should not now be a living man.”

Nothing is finer in Wesley than the cheerfulness of his spirit, while the tired body and brain were thus yielding to the arresting touch of time. The passage of years whitened his head and dimmed his sight; it made his feet stumble, his hand tremble, and his memory hesitate. But all that was noblest in Wesley — his calm faith, his serene courage, his flame-like zeal, his masterful will — were exactly as in the days of his prime. When he had to be helped by friendly hands along the street or into the pulpit he would repeat with a smile: —

“‘Tis time to live, if I grow old.”

While time was thus breaking down even Wesley’s long-enduring strength his younger brother, Charles, had died, on March 29, 1788. He was much the more emotional of the two great brothers, and death, as is not uncommon with persons of his temperament, was lit up by no fire of ecstatic gladness. As if by some subtle law of compensation, great joy in the dying hour is sometimes granted to those whose lives have been set in a sombre key, and denied to those who have known frequent ecstasies of joy in the days of healthy life. But Charles Wesley’s last moments, if they brought no raptures, were marked by a very sweet and quiet peace; and nothing could well be more perfect as an expression of Christian faith than the last lines the great singer of Methodism wrote: —

“In age and feebleness extreme,
Who shall a sinful worm redeem?
Jesus, my only hope Thou art,
Strength of my failing flesh and heart.
Oh, could I catch a smile from Thee,
And drop into eternity!”

A picture, half amusing and half pathetic, is given of Charles Wesley in his old age by his biographer, Jackson. A little figure with white hair and bent shoulders, clad against winter chills even in the heat of summer, and mounted on a little horse grey with age, taking his daily ride. As he ambled along he would suddenly pluck a card and a pencil from his pocket and begin to write in trembling shorthand the stanzas which were incessantly setting themselves to music in the chambers of his brain. “Not un frequently,” says Jackson, “he has come to the house in City Road, and, having left the i»ony in the garden in front, he would enter crying out. Ten and ink, pen and ink.’ These being supplied, he wrote the hymn he had been composing. When this was down he would look round on those present, saluting them with much kindness, give out a hymn, and put all in mind of eternity. He was fond of that stanza upon these occasions: —

“‘There all the ship’s company meet

Who sail with the Saviour beneath,
With shouting each other they greet.

And triumph o’er sorrow and death.
The voyage of life’s at an end.

The mortal afiBiction is past,
The age that in Heaven they spend,

For ever and ever shall last.’”

Charles Wesley is perhaps the greatest hymn-writer of the English-speaking race. A poet by force of natural genius, had he never come under the sway of the great forces of religion he would still have left his mark on English literature. Everything with him ran to the music of rhyme almost involuntarily; but his poetry became the servant and instrument of religion, and found its inspiration in the realm of spiritual emotions. And what other poet would not cheerfully sell his fame to make his verse the channel of such enduring power as vibrates in Charles Wesley’s hymns! No one who is ignorant of the inner life of Methodism can judge of the value of these hymns. They are the marching songs of a great spiritual host, the channel through which flows, Sunday after Sunday, the worship of ten thousand congregations. They are sung to dying ears and whispered by dying lips. But more than even this can be said of them. They are the creed of Methodism translated into terms of emotion, and set to music. So they help to explain that fine identity of doctrine which binds all the fragments of Methodism, under every sky, and in spite of all diversities of organisation, into spiritual unity.

Charles Wesley, in his hymns, thus rendered to Methodism a priceless service: he crystallised into music the creed for which it stands.

Some creeds, of course, could not be wedded to song or translated into “concord of sweet sounds.” Who can so much as imagine an Agnostic hymn-book! Thomson, in his “City of Dreadful Night,”’ has, it is true, set Atheism to music; but the music is a dirge. What Keble did for a single school in the Anglican Church Charles Wesley did for Methodism as a whole. Nay, he drew out into the music of worship and of aspiration the common spiritual consciousness.

Charles Wesley, like all the sous of Susannah Wesley, was a scholar. He had his mother’s gift of talking and writing in clearest and tersest English; and, if he had not his brother’s close-knitted intellect, he did a work nearly as lofty and quite as enduring. The epitaph on his grave, written by his own hand, happily expresses his character: —

“With poverty of spirit blest,
Rest, happy saint, in Jesus’ rest;
A sinner saved, through grace forgiven.
Redeemed from earth to reign in heaven!
Thy labours of unwearied love.
By thee forgot, are crown’d above;
Crown’d through the mercy of thy Lord
With a free, full, immense reward!”

After Mr, Gladstone’s death Lord Salisbury said of him, “He was a great Christian but in his use of that phrase he was only quoting unconsciously the words spoken of Charles Wesley by one who knew him best. “He was a great scholar, without ostentation; a great Christian without singularity, and a great divine without the least contempt for the meanest of his brethren.”