Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America онлайн

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It seems a very sudden leap from the saloons of the West End to a Lincolnshire kitchen; but in the kitchen of that most romantic old vicarage of Epworth, it has been truly said, the most vigorous form of Methodism had its origin. There, at the close of the seventeenth century, and the commencement of the eighteenth, lived and laboured old Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles Wesley. Samuel was in every sense a wonderful man, more wonderful than most people know, though Mr. Tyerman has done his best to set him forth in a very clear and pleasant light, in his very entertaining biography. Scholar, preacher, pastor, and poet was Samuel Wesley; he led a life full of romantic incident, and full of troubles, of which the two most notable are debts and ghosts: debts, we must say, in passing, which had more to do with unavoidable calamity than with any personal imprudence. The good man would have been shocked, and have counted it one of his sorest troubles, could he, in some real horoscope, have forecast what “Jackey,” his son John, was to be. But it was his wife, Susannah Wesley, patient housewife, much-enduring, much-suffering woman, Mary and Martha in one, saint as sacredly sweet as any who have seemed worthy of a place in any calendar of saints, Catholic or Protestant, mother of children, all of whom were remarkable—two of them wonderful, and a third highly eminent—it was Susannah Wesley, whose instinct for souls led her to look abroad over all the parish in which she lived, with a tender, spiritual affection; in her husband’s absence, turning the large kitchen into a church, inviting her poor neighbours into it, and, somewhat at first to the distress of her husband, preaching to and praying with them there. This brief reference can only memorialise her name; read John Kirk’s little volume, and learn to love and revere “the mother of the Wesleys!” The freedom and elevation of her religious life, and her practical sagacity, it is not difficult to see, must have given hints and ideas which took shape and body in the large movement of which her son John came to be regarded, and is still regarded, as the patriarch. Thus Isaac Taylor says, “The Wesleys’ mother was the mother of Methodism in a religious and moral sense, for her courage, her submissiveness to authority, the high tone of her mind, its independence, and its self-control, the warmth of her devotional feelings, and the practical direction given to them, came up, and were visibly repeated in the character and conduct of her sons.” Later on in life she became one of the wisest advisers of her son, in his employment of the auxiliaries to his own usefulness. Perhaps, if we could see spirits as they are, we might see in this woman a higher and loftier type of life than in either of those who first received life from her bosom; some of her quiet words have all the passion and sweetness of Charles’s hymns. Our space will not permit many quotations, but take the following words, and the sweet meditation in prose of the much-enduring, and often patiently suffering lady in the old world country vicarage, which read like many of her son’s notes in verse: “If to esteem and have the highest reverence for Thee; if constantly and sincerely to acknowledge Thee the supreme, and only desirable good, be to love Thee, I do love Thee! If to rejoice in Thy essential majesty and glory; if to feel a vital joy overspread and cheer the heart at each perception of Thy blessedness, at every thought that Thou art God, and that all things are in Thy power; that there is none superior or equal to Thee, be to love Thee, I do love Thee! If comparatively to despise and undervalue all the world contains, which is esteemed great, fair, or good; if earnestly and constantly to desire Thee, Thy favour, Thy acceptance, Thyself, rather than any, or all things Thou hast created, be to love Thee, I do love Thee!” At length she died as she had lived, her last words to her sons breathing the spirit of her singular life: “Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God!”