Personal Equipment
In the sober and ordered household life of the Epworth Rectory John Wesley grew up a grave, silent, patient boy, with meditative brow and reflective ways, and an invincible habit of requiring a reason for everything he was told to do. “I profess, sweetheart,” said the hot-tempered little rector to his wife, “I think our Jack would not eat his dinner unless he could give a reason for it.” The boy had a strain of social silence and endurance in him even at that tender age. In 1712 he, with four of the other children, had the smallpox, the common and dreaded plague of that time. His mother writes: “Jack has borne his disease bravely like a man, indeed, like a Christian, though he seemed angry at the piistules when they were sore, as we guessed by his looking sourly at them, for he never said anything.”
The boy’s gravity of temper, and what may be called his religious docility, were so marked that when he was not yet eight years of age has father — always disposed to do things in a hurry — admitted him to the Lord’s Supper. His mother, with the finer prescience that love gives to a mother, saw in her second son the hint of some great, unguessed future, and she writes in her diary under the head of “Evening, May 17, 1717, Son John”: —
“What shall I render to the Lord for all His mercies? I would offer myself and all that Thou hast given me; and I would resolve — O give me grace to do it! — that the residue of my life shall be all devoted to Thy service. And I do intend to he more particularly careful with the soul of this child, that Thou hast so mercifully provided for, than ever I have been; that I may instil into his mind the principles of true religion and virtue. Lord give me grace to do It sincerely and prudently.”
In 1714 his father succeeded in procuring for him, from the Duke of Buckingham, a nomination to the Charterhouse; and thus, when not yet eleven years old, from the shelter of home — and such a home! — and from an atmosphere charged with prayer as with the fragrance of ever-burning incense, John Wesley stepped into the competitions and tumult of a great i)ublic school. The change of atmosphere and environment was great. The Charterhouse of that day was a school with great traditions and a decent standard of scholarship; but it was rough, not to say lawless, to a degree that can now hardly be realised. The hateful “fag” system prevailed in a very unsoftened form. The school, indeed, was a little patch of human society, exhausted, in some respects, of all civilised elements and governed by the ethics of the savage. The stronger and older boys systematically robbed the younger ones of their meat, and during the greater part of the six years Wesley spent in that school he suffered that daily and ignoble theft, and practically lived on bread.
A boy trained in the severities of Epworth Parsonage, however, could easily survive even the raided meals of the Charterhouse School. His father advised his son to run three times round the Charterhouse garden every morning; and the son obeyed that injunction with the literal fidelity characteristic of him. Every morning a little, lean, boyish figure might have been seen flying with nimble legs thrice round the Charterhouse garden. Wesley’s hair when a boy was of an auburn tint, though it grew darker in later years; and the rich-tinted hair crowning the thin face, with its serious yet keen eyes, must have made a very interesting countenance. Spare diet and constant exercise in the keen morning air helped to endow Wesley with that amazing physical toughness which enabled him, when eighty-five years old, to walk six miles to a preaching appointment, and declare that the only sign of old age he felt was that “he could not walk nor run quite so fast as he once did.”
That he was an ideal student — quick, tireless, methodical, friigal of time and sober of spirit — goes without saying. The son of Susannah Wesley, fresh from the touch of her diligent life, and with the breath of her grave spirit still upon him, could hardly be anything else. And six years of strenuous, if somewhat rough and harsh, life at the famous school gave Wesley an ample foundation for his after studies. Life at a great public school, however, is something more than an education in books.
WESLEY AND HTS CENTURY
No enervating softness is in its atmosphere. It develops courage, hardihood, self-reliance. It hardens all the fibres of the character. It is one long and bracing tonic. Wesley brought f roip the Charterhouse a tough body; but he brought from it, too, a certain toughness of character, an admirable possession for a youth of seventeen who is entering a great University, and such a University as Oxford was in the early years of the eighteenth century.
The oldest brother Samuel was at this period a teacher in Westminster School, where the youngest of the three, Charles, was a scholar; and John Wesley studied Hebrew under his elder brother; for the Wesleys had in an admirable degree the habit of helping each other. “Jack is with me,” writes Samuel to his father, “and is a brave boy, learning Hebrew as fast as he can.”
At this stage a piece of what seemed surprisingly good fortune visited the Epworth household. Charles Wesley was at Westminster, a lively schoolboy, with more than a schoolboy’s gift for fighting, when an Irish gentleman, Garrett Wesley, rich and childless, wrote to the Epworth Rectory asking if there was a son of the house named Charles; if so, he desired to adopt him as his heir. There was some kinship of blood betwixt the two families, but its exact degree is not clear. Garrett Wesley seems to have actually contributed to the cost of his intended heir’s education for some time, and finally wished to carry him off to Ireland and take the place of a father to him. Mr. Wesley left the decision of the matter to the boy himself, who declined the proposal; and Garrett Wesley chose as his heir another kinsman, Richard Colley, who assumed the name of Wesley, was raised to the peerage as Baron Mornington, and became the grandfather of the Duke of Wellington. Up to 1800 the most famous of British soldiers appears in the Army-list as “Arthur Wesley”; after that year the name is changed to Wellesley.
This seems to show that the saint and reformer who changed the course of the religious history of England by spiritual forces, and the great soldier who contributed such splendid victories to its secular history, sprang ‘from the same family stock. And betwixt Wesley and Wellington are, no doubt, curious points of agreement. Both were little men, of the toughest physique, with an almost miraculous capacity for hard work, and with courage which, if it had the coolness of ice, had also the hardness of steel. Wellington’s “Despatches” and Wesley’s “Journal” have many characteristics in common — a certain stern directness, a scorn of ornament, a love for short words and clear thinking. If the portraits of the two men are studied there are odd points of resemblance. Each has the long, obstinate nose, the resolute chin, the steady, piercing eves of a leader of men. But the countenance of the great preacher is refined and made gentle by the gospel of love he preached so long. The character of the famous soldier was moulded and tempered in the red furnace of Badajos and San Sebastian, of Busaco and of Waterloo. And the scars of the flames are on his face even in old age I
In 1720 John Wesley began his life at Oxford, entering Christ Church as a commoner on a Charterhouse scholarship of £40 a year. The Oxford of 1720 might have been pronounced, in advance, to be a singularly ungenial field for a clever lad of seventeen who took life very seriously, and who — though he was quite unconscious of it — was to be the agent under God of the greatest movement in the religious history of England. The Oxford of that day was suflSciently remote from the Oxford Matthew Arnold has painted in memorable words: “steeped in sentiment, spreading her gardens to the moonlight,” and “whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.” There was no romance about the Oxford on which John Wesley looked with perplexed youthful eyes, and no atmosphere of “sentiment.” In an age which counted “enthusia.sm” the most deadly of sins the Universities were certain to sufi’er most: just as in a body in which the circulation of the blood is defective the extremities are the parts most affected. And Oxford at the beginning of the eighteenth century was perhaps the mo.st prosaic patch in the whole drab-coloured English landscape.
It had no “enthusiasms,” not even for athletics! It was the home of insincerity and idleness and of the vices bred of such qualities. Its insincerity, too, was of a specially evil type. It was organised, endowed, made venerable, clothed with authority, and even mistook itself for virtue! All the formulae of a great Christian seat of Christian learning existed; but the facts were in quarrel with the formulJE. Gibbon has cruelly embalmed, like a dead fly in the imperishable amber of his rhetoric, his own tutor who, “remembered that he had a salary to receive and forgot that he had a duty to perform”; but this man was a type of the University itself. The professors drew salaries for lectures they never gave; the students bought dispensations for absence from lectures which were never delivered, and took oaths to obey laws which they never so much as read. Oxford, when Wesley trod its streets, was, for the average student, an education v in the bad art of subscribing to articles he ridiculed, swearing to keep laws he ignored, and pretending to attend lectures which had no existence. Whoever wants to understand to what a depth it had sunk must read that terrible sermon which Wesley himself delivered in St. Mary’s pulpit on St. Bartholomew’s Day of 1744. That discourse is, in fact, a flaming indictment of the University, preached with infinite courage in the University pulpit itself, and to an audience of professors, fellows, heads of colleges, and students. It can hardly be wondered at that this sermon was the last Wesley was allowed to deliver in the historic pulpit of St. Mary’s!
A whole University is not, of course, to be packed into a single generalisation. There was some good scholarship and a surviving element of wholesome life in even the Oxford of 1720-44; but no one can understand the evolution of Methodism in its primitive form at Oxford who does not realise the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the great University.
Wesley had a studious and successful, if not brilliant, career at Oxford. The atmosphere of the University did not enervate him; perhaps by some subtle law of reaction it even made his industry more intense. He took his Bachelor’s Degree in 1724 and was elected Fellow of Lincoln in 1725. A year later he was appointed lecturer in Greek and Moderator of the Classes. He took his Master’s Degree in 1727.
Thus at twenty-two Wesley was a Fellow of the most scholarly, if almost the smallest, college in Oxford. His brother Samuel had a good position jn Westminster School and was making powerful friends. Charles, his younger brother, only seventeen years old, had a scholarship at Christ Church. The sons of the Epworth Parsonage jdainly promised to do better in the world than their hot-tempered, impracticable father.
And Oxford put upon John Wesley its ineffaceable mark. He was a University man, with the merits and the faults of the type, to the day of his death. He had mental faculties that worked with the exactitude of a machine. He excelled in logic, and was apt to resolve everything — even his own religions experience — into the terms of logic. He had a certain confident primness of manner, shone in argument and found delight in it. His literary style showed already the characteristics which brought him fame in later years. It was clear, terse, direct, and marked by a stern scorn of ornament and of mere verbal pyrotechnics. Wesley delighted in short words set in short sentences. His very brevity, indeed — his habit of taking the most direct road to his meaning, and of clothing his thoughts in the fewest possible syllables — had many of the effects of wit. He talked in epigrams without intending it, or even being conscious of it.
The youthful Fellow of Lincoln planned great things for his own future. That somewhat pompous announcement, “Leisure and I have taken leave of each other,” belongs to this period of his life. It was translated into sober and humble fact later; but even at this stage he treated his degree not as the end, but as the starting-point of his life as a student. He distributed his hours on plan with characteristic thoroughness, so many being given to classics, so many to logic and ethics, so many to Hebrew and Arabic. Saturday was devoted to oratory and poetry, for already Wesley was making more or less successful excursions into the fairyland of verse. “Make poetry your diversion,” wrote his serious-minded mother, “but not your business.”
A letter from a University chum, Robert Kirkham, gives a sort of keyhole glimpse of the secular Wesley, the young, precise, self-confident, argumentative Fellow of Lincoln. Kirkham addresses his friend as “Dear Jack,” describes with tindergraduate gusto a dinner of “calves’ head and bacon, with some of the best green cabbages in the town.” The dinner party “tapped a barrel of admirable cider”; and by way of relish to the calves’ head and bacon, Wesley was informed, they discussed “your most deserving queer character, your little and handsome person, and your obliging and desirable conversation. You have often,” Kirkham writes, “been in the thoughts of M. B., which I have curiously observed, when with her alone, by inward smiles and sighs, and abrupt expressions concerning you.” “M. B.” was Miss Betty Kirkham, the writer’s sister, and the letter shows that the “little and handsome person” of the youthful Fellow of Lincoln already drew the regards of feminine eyes.
Wesley himself at this stage took an affectionate interest in his own personal appearance. He discusses with his brother Samuel, and with great seriousness, the question of whether he should wear his hair long or short. “As to my looks,” he writes, “it would doubtless mend my complexion to have it [his hair] off, by letting me get a little more colour; and perhaps it might contribute to my making a more genteel appearance.” But John Wesley, like John Gilpin’s wife, was of a frugal mind, and he decided that the improvement in his looks did not supply suflScient grounds for expending two or three pounds a year in payments to a barber.
The fact is that debt pursued Wesley up to the very threshold of his Fellowship. His father writes to “Dear Mr. Fellow-elect of Lincoln,” sending him £12 and saying, “I have done more than I could for you. I have not £5,” he says, “to keep the family till after harvest. What will be my own fate, God only knows.” The little man plainly had before his eyes the prospect of paying another visit to Lincoln Castle in the capacity of a prisoner for debt. He writes, however, “Sed passi graviora.” “Wherever I am, my Jack is Fellow of Lincoln!”
But a wave of deeper feeling was beginning to sweep through the channels of Wesley’s life, and “M. B.” with her sighs, and the hairdresser with his scissors, were soon submerged and lost for ever to human vision.