“Matthew Wesley.”[[331]]
This is an unjust, unfeeling, disreputable letter, and it is certainly surprising that Mehetabel Wesley, when her uncle died six years after, should have so eulogised his character as she did, in her elegy, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1737. He might be a man of much learning and information, a good judge and lover of poetry, and clever in his profession; but the above epistle makes one doubt that he was “a man of truly benevolent mind,” and prepares one to receive Patty Wesley’s statement respecting him, written a year before the time of his Epworth visit, viz., that he was not converted, nor what he ought to be.[[332]] He seems to have been highly esteemed for his professional ability and services; but a stranger to pure, earnest, heartfelt godliness. He treated John Wesley’s mission to Georgia with ridicule, and told Charles that, “if the French had any remarkably dull fellow among them, they sent him to convert the Indians.” Charles says he checked and silenced his uncle’s art and eloquence by repeating the lines of his brother:—
“To distant realms the apostle need not roam,
Darkness, alas! and heathens are at home.”[[333]]
A few months before his death, Samuel Wesley replied to his brother’s accusations, in a long letter, twenty lines of which were written by himself, about one-half of it by Mrs Wesley, and the remainder by his son John, who acted as his amanuenses. The letter, which is without date, is written in a serio-jocose style, and is headed “John o’ Styles’ Apology against the imputation of his ill husbandry.” A friend is represented as reading Matthew Wesley’s letter to his brother, John o’ Styles, and as reporting the brother’s answer to the charges brought against him. The pretended narrator says:—
“When I had read this to my friend John o’ Styles, I was a little surprised that he did not fall into flouncing and bouncing, as I have too often seen him do on far less provocation, which I ascribed to a fit of sickness he had lately had, and which I hope may have brought him to something of a better mind. He stood calm and composed for a minute or two, and then desired he might peruse the letter, adding, that if the matter of fact therein were true, and not aggravated or misrepresented, he was obliged in conscience to acknowledge it, and ask pardon at least of his family, if he could make them no other satisfaction. If it were not true, he owed that justice to himself and his family, to clear himself of so vile an imputation. After he had read it over he said he did not think it necessary to enter into a detail of the history of his whole life, from sixteen to upwards of seventy; but he would make some general observations on those general accusations which have been brought against him, and then would add some balance of his incomes and expenses ever since he entered on the stage of life.
“The sum of the libel may be reduced to the following assertions:—1. That John o’ Styles is worse than an infidel, and therefore can never go to heaven; which secondly, he aims at proving, because he provides not for his own house; as notorious instances of which, he adds, in the third place, that in the pursuits of his pleasures he had produced a numerous offspring, and has had a long time a plentiful estate, and great and generous benefactors, but yet has made no provision for those of his own house; which he thinks, in the last place, a black account, let the cause be folly, or vanity, or his own irregular passions.
“Answer.—If God has blessed him with a numerous offspring, he has no reason to be ashamed of them, nor they of him, unless perhaps one of them. Neither does his conscience accuse him that he has made no provision for those of his own house; which general accusation includes them all. But has he none, nay, not above one, two, or three, to whom he has given the best education which England could afford, by God’s blessing on which they live honourably and comfortably in the world? Some of them had already been a considerable help to the others, as well as to himself; and he has no reason to doubt the same of the rest, as soon as God shall enable them to do it. There are many gentlemen’s families in England who, by the same method, provide for their younger children; and he hardly thinks that there are many of greater estates but would be glad to change the best of theirs, or even all their stock, for almost the worst of his.
“Neither is he ashamed in claiming some merit in his having been so happy in breeding them up in his own principles and practices—not only the priests in his family, but all the rest—to a steady opposition and confederacy against all such as are avowed and declared enemies to God and his clergy, and who deny or disbelieve any articles of natural or revealed religion, as well as to such as are open or secret friends to the Great Rebellion, or to any such principles as do but squint towards the same practices; so that he hopes they are all staunch High-Church, and for inviolable passive obedience;[[334]] from which, if any of them should be so wicked as to degenerate, he cannot tell whether he could prevail with himself to give them his blessing; though, at the same time, he almost equally abhors all servile submission to the greatest and most overgrown tool of State, whose avowed design it is to aggrandise his prince at the expense of the liberties and properties of his freeborn subjects.[[335]]
“Thus much for John o’ Styles’ ecclesiastical and political creed; and, as he hopes, for those of his family. And as his adversary adds, that ‘at his exit they could have nothing in view but distress, and that it is a black account, let the cause be folly, or vanity, or ungovernable appetites;’ John o’ Styles answered: He has not the least doubt of God’s provision for his family after his decease, if they continue in the way of righteousness. As for his folly, he owns he can hardly demur to the charge; for he fairly acknowledges he never was, nor ever will be, like the children of this world, who are accounted wise in their generation, in doting upon this world, courting this world, and regarding nothing else: not but that he has all his life laboured truly both with his hands, head, and heart, to provide things honest in the sight of all men, to get his own living, and that of those who have been dependents on him.