BOOKS.
THE LOVES OF JOHN WESLEY.*
THOSE who have read "John Wesley's Journal" are aware that his missionary work in Georgia was cut short by a series of petty annoy- ances in which a woman's name was curiously mixed up. In fact, the first two bills in which he was presented by the rand jury, charged him with having " broken the laws of the realm," first, " by speaking and writing to Mrs. Williamson against her husband's con- sent ;" and secondly, " by repelling her from the Holy Communion." The lady herself had already sworn to and signed an affidavit, " in- sinuating much more than it asserted" (we quote Wesley's own words), "but asserting that Mr. Wesley had many times proposed marriage to her, all which proposals she bad rejected." Wesley himself notices the matter with the reserve of a gentleman, and attempts no explanation; his silence is the best argument in his favour. But his Wesleyan biographers, writing when all the actors in the scene were dead, profess to explain it from authentic sources. Mrs. Williamson, it seems, was a Miss Causton, the niece of General Oglethorpe, who planted Georgia. Her uncle is said to have encou- raged her intimacy with Wesley, in the hope that a man whom he respected and admirecl,might be induced to settle in the colony, and give up his plans of evangelizing the Indians. For a time everything seemed to favour his plans. The young lady went to Wesley for assistance in French and spiritual counsel ; consulted his taste in her dress ; and, it is said, watched by him day and night during a fever. But an eminent minister—and Wesley was even then eminent—is the property of his party; his most sacred as well as his commonest actions are public ; and a heavy penalty awaits him if he makes love without leave from his congregation. Disturbed by a remonstrance fromaclerical colleague, who professed to think that the lady was too artful in her love, Wesley submitted his case to the Elders of the Moravian Church assembled in solemn conclave under Bishop Nitschnian. If a single touch of comedy were wanting to the whole transaction it may be found in the fact that they had already sat in judgment upon him, assisted by his officious friend, and at once advised him to proceed no further. He replied briefly, " The will of the Lord be done," and abruptly broke off his intimacy with Miss Causton. What con- cern it might give her seems not to have occurred to him as matter worthy consideration, but although there had been already some misunderstandings between them, we may perhaps infer from her affidavit afterwards, that she looked upon him as distinctly pledged to her. The phraseology of spiritual philandering is no doubt a little vague, and words which were only meant as a pastoral blessing may have sounded in the mouth of a young man more like a carnal de- claration of love. It is easy to conjecture the sequel. The lady ac- cepts a more business-like lover, retains a little pique against her first, and in the belief that he will not dare to push matters to extremity, perhaps in the wish to see if she retains any power, violates the new discipline he has introduced. Wesley seems to have warned her fairly before he enforced the rule of admitting no one to the Com- munion who had not given previous notice. Perhaps aman of more tact would have avoided such a rupture under such circumstances, but Wesley would never have done the work he did in life if he had been fastidiously delicate. Little faults of taste may fairly be for- given to a man whose one object on earth is to save souls.
It is clear that liking, appreciation, gratitude, perhaps vanity, but in no proper sense love, had determined Wesley's relations with Miss Causton. His first and only genuine passion belongs to a later part of his life; its history, written by himself in pages that were never meant for the world, was unknown to his biographers, and has only lately been retrieved. Mrs.Wesley, when she left her husband, carried
• Narrative of a Ilernarkable 7'ransaclion in the Early Life of John Wesley. From an Original Manuscript in his own hand-writing, never before published. London: John Russell Smith. it away amonr, other papers, no doubt partly in excuse of her miserable jealousy and misconduct. Apart from the fact that its incidents are confirmed by all the contemporary dates in the journal, that a part of the document is in Wesley's handwriting, and that such an antiquary as the late Mr. Hunter convinced himself of its authenticity, every page carries in it its own evidence. The deep passionate love, which almost confounds itself with the man's habitual religion, the strong sentiment of authority natural to the head of a sect, the vigorous common sense that justifies the feeling it cannot subdue, are all unmistakable signs of reality. It was not a wise love this attachment of Wesley's to his own servant, Grace Murray ; it was thwarted in its working out, and its issue was un- prosperous, and all the more does the man dilate and invest his vulgar surroundings with a tragic dignity. His whole narrative is like a chapter of Job, a reverent pleading with God, " What Thou. dost, I know not now, but I shall know hereafter." What had been unwise or harsh in his own conduct he had evidently not felt when he wrote ; perhaps he lacked moral insight ever to discover. It is clear that in all his dealings with women he treated them as he treated himself, as instruments for a great end without personality or feeling. Even when his own love was strongest, he seemingly demanded its return as a duty to the cause of religion, quite as much as he desired to be loved for himself. Bat he probably felt all the more that the devo- tion to a prophet's work, which ennobled him in his own eyes, ought to be his title of nobility with woman, his excuse for short-comings and weak sympathies where vulgar natures would have been profuse. That he, being what he was, should have loved at all, was a claim on gratitude. Above all, having trampled under foot other obstacles, being in sight of happiness, he had been betrayed by a brother, and his promised wife cheated into marriage with another. "If these things are so," he might well say, "hardly has such a case been from the beginning of the world."
Grace Murray does not seem quite worthy of her part in history. The daughter of a respectable tradesman, she had probably received a better education than the term " servant," which is commonly used of her, would imply in the last century; and Wesley tells us that she had good sense and some knowledge both of men and books. We may easily accept the praises he bestows on her "engaging be- haviour," and "mild, sprightly, cheerful, and yet serious temper," with no greater discount than the world commonly gives to lovers' praises. Probably, too, Wesley was a competent judge of her "ready utterance" and good acquaintance "with our method of winning souls," as well as of her "quick discernment of spirits, and no small insight into the devices of Satan." But her helpfulness and sympathies with himself, tested as they had been in journeys to- gether, and in the nursing him through a severe illness, naturally -weighed most with the teacher, whose very greatness shut him out from fellowship with ordinary associates. Unhappily, she seems to have been wanting in all strength of character and in real delicacy of feeling. When Wesley first spoke of marriage to her—apparently in his peculiar phraseology, as she professed afterwards not fully to have understood him—she begged permissioti to attend him on his next circuit. But being left in Cheshire, in the house of one John Bennet, one of Wesley's subordinates, she engaged herself not long after to him. Prom that time forward her life was distracted by the rival claims of her lovers. Bennet evidently believed to the last that he was the first contracted, and Wesley's brothers and the Society sided with him; the brothers disliking the .proposed sister-in-law, and the Methodist women, perhaps, a little jealous of Grace Murray's fortune. Wesley acted characteristically. He wrote to Bennet, upbraiding him severely for trying to rob a brother and a friend " of his faithful servant, of the fellow-labourer in the gospel whom he had been forming to his hand for ten years." The letter, through the carelessness or treachery of its bearer, was never de- livered. But not satisfied with his position, although the lady had lately given him "all the assurances which words could give of the most intense and inviolable affection," Wesley commenced talking "at large with all those who were disgusted with her." Of course he soon collected a curious mass of scandal. " Mr. Williams accused her ' of not lending his wife her saddle' (being just going to take horse herself). Mrs. Williams, of buying a Holland. shift (which was not true). Nancy and Peggy Watson, of buying a Joseph before she wanted it. Ann Matteson of being proud and insolent." The lover, thus in- formed, sat down and drew up a statement of the grounds on which he had proceeded, justifying every unwise step with rare method and good sense, and summing up, "The short is tlus : (1) I have scriptural reason to marry, (2) I know no person so proper as this." Thus for- tified, he set out on a new circuit, in a somewhat dangerous security, only questioning his own conscience for inordinate affection. Mrs. Murray as not a woman to be left alone. She seems, as far as we can judge, to have respected Wesley most, but to have liked Bennet ir i best. Throughout her intercourse with her old master the predomi- nant feeling seems to be compounded of ambition and fear, the natural wish to be Mrs. Wesley, and a not unnatural awe of the stern man who has condescended to her love. " When she received a letter from me," says Wesley, "she resolved to live and die with me, and wrote to me just what she felt. When she heard from him, her affection for him revived, and she wrote to him in the tenderest manner." Once she was confronted with both, and escaped giving a decisive answer by being "sorrowful almost to death." Mr. Bennet was disgusted by this indecision, and gave her up. Wesley, writing when he had lost her irrevocably, seems to treat it as a mysterious fate, perhaps a backsliding, but one in which the woman was without blame. He has no words, even in his grief, to condemn her. In fact, if her own story may be believed, she was betrayed into a decision which she could apparently never have made for herself. Charles Wesley suddenly came to Hineley Hill, near Newcastle, where she was staying, persuaded her, by means of a forged letter, that his brother had decided to give her up, and told her that her character was lost if she did not marry Mr. Bennet in- stantly. Mr. Bennet, who is not accused of any share in the fraud, was easily persuaded that "the fault lay all in" John Wesley, and within a week was married to the uncertain lady. It is just to add that this account rests upon Mrs. Bennet's unsupported evidence, and is more than a little suspicious against such a man as Charles Wesley, especially as we know that he assumed a high moral tone when he next met, his brother, and threatened to renounce all inter. course with him. John Wesley was for the time thoroughly broken. He had a last interview with Mrs. Bennet, in which she threw the blame of what had happened upon his brother, and declared with tears how great her love had been. Whether her protestations were true or false, it is scarcely wonderful that her husband soon separated from the Methodist connexion.
The verses in which John Wesley has described his feelings—reli- gions doggrel as they are, in a literary point of view—are among the most touching ever penned by man. It is evident that his very heart-strings were wrung. Ten years' habit and a contract of fifteen months were indeed ties which might have bound a harder man. Three years later, he made what may fairly be called a " manage de convenance" with a rich widow, Mrs. Vizelle. He had stipulated that he should never neglect work, but his wife seems to have been jealous of his absences, and more naturally jealous of his friendships with other women. It is curious to find her on one occasion surrep- titiously opening a letter of her husband's to one Sarah Ryan, a housekeeper, an intrigante, and with a certain littleness of under- standing—in fact, much such a woman as Grace Murray had been, and like her, on terms of spiritual intimacy with Mr. Wesley. Frenzied by discoveries of this sort, and little causeless suspicions, Mrs. Wesley at last left her husband's roof never to return. His famous entry in his diary, "I did not leave her, I did not send her away, and I will never meal her," was perhaps justified by her con- duct. Yet it is difficult not to feel that John Wesley, like Mr. Froude's Henry VIII., ought to have lived in a world where there were no women.
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