In the same year, 1757, Wesley began a remarkable correspondence with Sarah Ryan, the wisdom of which may be fairly doubted.
Sarah Ryan, the offspring of poor parents, was born in 1724. From childhood she was, according to her own confession, excessively vain, and fond of praise. “As she grew in years, her ill tempers gathered strength; and she became artful, subtle, cunning; often loved and made lies; and had little regard either to justice, mercy, or truth.” To obtain food and clothing, she went into domestic service. At the age of nineteen, she was married to a corkcutter, who pretended he had £150 a year; but who turned out to be a profligate, impoverished scamp. He was already married to another woman; he proposed to Sarah Ryan to stoop to infamy to obtain him money; he ran away; and the bailiff sold his goods to pay his debts. About a year subsequent to this, Sarah Ryan engaged herself to Solomon Benreken, an Italian; but, before she married him, Ryan, an Irish sailor, feigned illness, got her to sit up with him, and actually married her. Ryan’s life was most profligate; and his treatment of his young wife abominably cruel. He went to sea; during his absence, Benreken, the Italian, renewed his proposals; and, for the third time, this worthless woman went to the hymeneal altar, and was actually married to a third husband, though the other two, to whom she had been already married, were still alive. The Italian seemed to be the best of the trio. For two months, he treated her with great kindness; but, belonging to the navy, he was then obliged to leave her. After his departure, Ryan returned, and claimed her; and, though he treated her with great barbarity, she considered herself his lawful spouse, lived with him, and maintained herself by washing. Ryan again left her, and set sail for America. Once more, she became a domestic servant. While in service, the Italian, having returned to England, wished her to live with him; but to this she objected. She had now arrived at the age of thirty; she was seized with illness in the family where she was a servant; and was sent to the hospital. On her dismissal, she found herself in the greatest straits; and had, by her own labour, to maintain both herself and her mother. This was in 1754. She went to Spitalfields church, and professed to find peace with God, while Wesley was administering the sacrament. Ryan wrote to her, wishing her to join him in America; but, though she had three husbands living, she now preferred not to live with any of them. Her early religious experience, as published by Wesley in the Magazine for 1779, is wild and whimsical, rather than intelligent and devout.
Sarah Ryan was now resident with Mary Clarke, in a small house, in Christopher Alley, Moorfields. Here a select few of the more lively London Methodists held their meetings. Among others, Miss Bosanquet, afterwards Mrs. Fletcher, now a young girl of about sixteen years of age, was accustomed to make this her home. Here she met with Sarah Ryan and Sarah Crosby, both of them boarders with Mary Clarke. Such a conclave of Methodist females attracted Wesley’s notice; and, about two years after her conversion, that is in 1757, he made Sarah Ryan, the wife of three living husbands, at the age of thirty-three, his Bristol and Kingswood housekeeper.
With the utmost respect for Wesley, we cannot but consider this an exceedingly hasty and imprudent act. Perhaps Sarah Ryan was converted; but naturally, she was vain, flippant, giddy, and far from being what a Methodist housekeeper ought to be. In addition to this, though her sin of marrying three men in succession, without any of them dying, might be pardoned by the God whose commands she had so grossly broken, yet, all will admit, that a foolish young servant woman, who had so flagrantly transgressed the laws of her country, and, for her crimes, could, at any moment, be sent to prison, was not exactly the woman to be the matron of Kingswood school, and the favourite correspondent of Wesley in the years 1757 and 1758. No wonder that Wesley’s naturally jealous wife was fired with indignation; and that, at one of the Bristol conferences, when Sarah Ryan was sitting at the head of a table, where sixty or seventy of the preachers were dining, Wesley’s irritated spouse rushed into the room, and pointing to the presiding matron, shrieked,
“The —— now serving you has three husbands living.” For about four years, Sarah Ryan held her situation; and met a hundred persons every week in class or band, and also made excursions to the country societies around Bristol. In 1762, she returned to London, and became the guest of Miss Bosanquet, at Leytonstone, having told the young lady, that she needed a friend like herself. Here they held meetings, read and expounded the Scriptures, formed a society, and made their home into an orphanage. In June, 1768, they removed their family of orphans to Yorkshire; and, on the 17th of August following, Sarah Ryan died, in the forty-fourth year of her age, and was buried in Leeds old churchyard; where to her name and age were added only these words;—“who lived and died a Christian.”[313] Some of her last utterances were: “I am dying. Glory be to God! Cut, cut, cut the thread, sweet Jesus! cut the thread!”
Part of this account is taken from an unpublished manuscript memoir, in the handwriting of Mrs. Fletcher, who regarded Sarah Ryan as one of the holiest of saints, and as her nearest and dearest friend. Judging from her own private diaries and letters, the present writer cannot dispute her piety; but, at the same time, he thinks that the eulogies by Wesley and by Mrs. Fletcher are excessive. Her career was a strangely chequered one, but her end was peace. We rejoice over her as a converted magdalen; but we cannot commend her being appointed as Wesley’s housekeeper, and her being made Wesley’s confidant concerning his wife’s jealousy and unkind behaviour.
In the Arminian Magazine, for 1782, Wesley published eleven of her letters addressed to himself, and eight of his own addressed to her, written at different dates, extending from August 10, 1757, to March 20, 1758. Wesley tells her he had been censured for making her his housekeeper; but he could not repent of it. He gives her the rules of the family, which he wishes to be strictly kept; namely—“1. The family rises, part at four, part at half an hour after. 2. They breakfast at seven, dine at twelve, and sup at six. 3. They spend the hour from five to six in the evening, after a little joint prayer, in private. 4. They pray together at nine, and then retire to their chambers; so that all are in bed before ten. 5. They observe all Fridays in the year as days of fasting, or abstinence.” He adds:—
“You, in particular, I advise,—Suffer no impertinent visitant, no unprofitable conversation in the house. It is a city set upon a hill; and all that is in it should be ‘holiness to the Lord.’ On what a pinnacle do you stand! You are placed in the eye of all the world, friends and enemies. You have no experience of these things; no knowledge of the people; no advantages of education; not large natural abilities; and are but a novice, as it were, in the ways of God! It requires all the omnipotent love of God to preserve you in your present station; but, if you continue teachable and advisable, I know nothing that shall be able to hurt you.”[314]
At the end of 1757, Wesley, and it would seem his wife, went to Bristol. While there, conjugal unpleasantness occurred, of which Mrs. Wesley’s jealousy of Sarah Ryan appears to have been the cause. The housekeeper says, she “dealt faithfully with both of them,” and adds, “I will not despair of Mrs. W——.”[315] Within a month, Wesley’s wife left him, vowing she would not return. Wesley informed Sarah Ryan of this distressing fact. She advised him, “not to depend too much upon any creature; and to use much private prayer;” and assured him, that “much good would come out of this.”
Perhaps the reader will complain of so much being said concerning Ryan. The writer’s apology is this,—though Sarah Ryan was unquestionably a converted woman, and though the correspondence between her and Wesley was, in the highest degree, pure and pious, there can be little doubt, it was the appointment of this converted magdalen to be his housekeeper, that led Wesley’s jealous wife to the first conjugal separation which has been recorded in Wesley’s history. Sarah Ryan went to Bristol in October, 1757; and, within three months afterwards, Wesley’s wife, though she had often played the termagant, for the first time left him. Wesley’s intention, in making the appointment, was benevolent; but, considering the antecedents of the woman, considering the importance of the office, considering the duty of consulting the feelings and prejudices of the parents and children committed to the housekeeper’s care, and considering the morbid jealousy of his own uneducated and common minded wife, we are persuaded the appointment was a great mistake. From her conversion in 1754 to her death in 1768, Sarah Ryan conducted herself as a Christian; but no one will say that, because of this, she was a fit and proper person to be the manager of Wesley’s house at Bristol. Her letters, wrote Wesley in 1782, “breathe deep, strong sense and piety. I know few like them in the English tongue.”[316] Quite correct. And yet, was it not because her husband had chosen for his housekeeper a woman who had been so thoughtless, that Mrs. Wesley’s unfounded, jealous bitterness, which had long been smouldering, now, not unnaturally, burst into a furious flame?