And 'tis a shameful sight,
When children of one family
Fall out, and chide, and fight.'
'You must be reconciled,' said he; 'go and shake hands with each other,' and they did so. He continued, 'Put your arms around each other's neck, and kiss each other;' and this was also done. 'Now,' he said, 'come to me,' and taking two pieces of bread and butter he folded them together, and desired each to take a part. 'Now,' he said, 'you have broken bread together.' Then he put his hands upon their heads and blessed them. The two tigers were turned into loving lambs. They never forgot the old man's blessing, and one of them, who became a magistrate in Berkshire, related the beautiful incident in long afterdays. We love to note those pleasant little incidents in the man's life, and there are many such. A thousand anecdotes are told of his benevolence and goodness, and if his life should ever be adequately written, they will form a more entertaining regalia of majesty, than we know in the life of any one of the fathers of the Church.
We are not writing a life of Wesley; we leave unnoticed, therefore, his more secret and sacred history. We have no space to devote to the romance of Grace Murray. She was the light of the prophet's eyes; he proposed to her in marriage, and was gratefully accepted. We read the story from a very different point of view to Mr. Tyerman, and have little doubt that Grace sacrificed her own feelings to the vehement anger and interference of Charles Wesley, to the welfare of her lover, and to the interests of the society. Wesley beautifully, affectionately, and ingenuously said, 'the origin of the object of his affections was no objection to him; he regarded not her birth, but her qualifications. She was remarkably neat, frugal, and not sordid; had a large amount of common sense, was indefatigably patient, and inexpressibly tender; quick, cleanly, and skilful; of an engaging behaviour, and of a mild, sprightly, and yet serious temper; and that her gifts for usefulness were such as he had never seen equalled.' He concluded, 'I have Scriptural reasons to marry, I know no person so proper as this.' But the union was not to be. If we followed implicitly the authority of Mr. Tyerman, we should express an opinion adverse to Grace; but we prefer to ask whether such a woman as she seems to have been was not moved to the step she took by the highest considerations, moved by persuasions, by the tempest she was raising in the societies, and by the not very saintly conduct of Charles Wesley, who is described in this matter—very well it seems to us—by Mr. Tyerman, 'as a sincere, but irritated, impetuous, and officious friend.' Be this as it may, Wesley met her to say farewell. He kissed her and said, 'Grace Murray, you have broken my heart.' A week or two after she was married. The two never met again for thirty-nine years. She long out-lived her husband; and when in London she came to hear her son preach in Moorfields, she met her venerable lover—lover still apparently, for the interview is described as very affecting. Henceforth they saw each other no more, and Wesley never again mentioned her name. In the whole transaction, so far from any shade falling on the memory of Wesley, his admirers will, perhaps, be pleased to find him so related to intense human feelings. No doubt the marriage would have been an unfortunate one for the society, and the possession of such a wife as Grace Murray would most likely have been fatal to, or at least would have greatly interfered with, that stupendous scheme of apostolic usefulness which he was destined to create. Seductions of domestic life sadly derange a prophet's work. Through long years Grace continued a course of Christian usefulness, and lived and died eminently respected. She lies in Chinly churchyard, in Derbyshire.
The lady who became the wife of Wesley was the roughest of termagants, the plague and pest of her husband's existence; and she takes her place in the foremost rank of the bad wives of eminent men, worthy to be classed with the wedded companions of Socrates, of Albert Durer, of George Herbert, or Richard Hooker; she was the most vicious vixen of them all. It may be imagined, without doing any injustice to him, that when his letters were stolen, interpolated, and forged by his wife, for the purpose of injuring his character, the grieving spirit of the old prophet may sometimes have said, 'Grace Murray would not have done this.'
Wesley's mind was eminently administrative. It has often been said that he had in him much that combined the genius of Richelieu and Loyola—the calm, iron will and the acute eye of the one, the inventive genius and habitual devotion of the other. He would compare better with Washington, or the illustrious member of the Wesley family of our own age, Wellington. His mind was eminently healthy, and may be said to have been always awake, ceaseless in activity, sleepless in vigilance. He intermeddled with all knowledge in many languages, and he compiled and published libraries. He appears to have been almost wholly indifferent to food; in sleep he was sparing; his frame was very small, and if this appeared to be a reason against his popular impressiveness as a preacher, it was a means of his amazing agility. Look at the remarkable likeness of the man prefixed to the work of Isaac Taylor; it has been likened to a shrivelled monk of the order of La Trappe, a face in which sharpness and serenity strive for the dominion of the features, the dark hawk-eyed intelligence with the bland smile. The principles which illustrate Wesley's character, and testify, not merely his greatness, but how it happened that he achieved so much, may be well presented in some of those brief axioms which do in fact, as we read the multitudinous events of his long career, exhibit the pivots upon which his life turned. 'I dare no more fret than curse or swear.' 'I reverence the young because they may be useful when I am dead.' 'You have no need to be in a hurry,' said a friend. 'Hurry?' he replied; 'I have no time to be in a hurry.' 'The soul and the body,' he writes, in a characteristic letter insisting on the observance of discipline in his society—'The soul and the body make a man; the spirit and the discipline make a Christian.' 'Let us work now, we shall rest by and by.' Such sentences exhibit the secret of his ubiquitous activity and his power; and such characters are usually cheerful. A glow of quiet, kindly humour often lightened his speech, sometimes sharpening into quiet satire. Many anecdotes illustrate both these attributes. At eighty he appeared to have the sprightliness of youth, and moved about like a flying evangelist. Although so clear-sighted a man, he was too great by far for the epithet 'shrewd.' If people who make mistakes in judging of character because of their own want of judgment become suspicious, the fault is chiefly theirs. Wesley was seldom mistaken in his judgment of particular persons; Charles was often mistaken. Wesley himself says, 'My brother suspects everybody, and he is continually imposed upon; but I suspect nobody, and I am never imposed upon.' Again and again we are reminded how much he lived in an atmosphere of continual quiet. 'I do not remember,' said the happy old man, when at the age of seventy-seven, 'I do not remember to have felt lowness of spirits for one quarter of an hour since I was born.' Of course it is to be presumed he means that causeless depression which is usually the result of indolence. At the age of eighty-six he writes, 'Saturday, March 21st, I had a day of rest, only preaching morning and evening.' We have seen that in his first days he was not a radiant and cheerful man; but through his long sunset we know not where to find such another instance of active spiritual brightness. He was a serenely happy old man. Sometimes he seems to us as if incapable of the feeling either of blame or praise, contempt or homage. There was great strength, as there ever is, in his clearness and stillness of spirit. Genius is so vague an epithet and quality that we know not how either to apply it to him or to deny it; but so far as it represents soul and imagination, great breadth and depth and height of soul or feeling, it was certainly denied him. On the other hand, he had a judgment most clear, an apprehension most quick and vivid, and an enthusiasm as little tainted by fanaticism as any great Christian leader since the days of the apostle Paul. Reformer as he was, he was essentially conservative.
As is usual in most religious orders, Popish or Protestant, his spirit has survived in his society, and the shadow of Wesley falls wide and far. He lived through amazing changes of opinion with reference to himself, and before he died, from being one of the most abused and execrated of men, he certainly was one of the most revered. No foe had been more rancorous and unjust than Lavington, Bishop of Exeter; Wesley lived to unite with him in the ordinance of the Lord's Supper in his own cathedral. He writes, with no bitterness of the man who had with such bitter ribaldry abused him, 'I was well pleased to partake of the Lord's Supper, with my old opponent, Bishop Lavington. Oh! may we sit together in the kingdom of our Father.' At Lewisham he dined with the eminent Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London. On proceeding to dinner the Bishop refused to sit above Wesley at the table, saying, 'Mr. Wesley, may I be found at your feet in another world.' Wesley objected to take the seat of precedence; but the learned prelate obviated the difficulty by requesting as a favour that Wesley would sit above him because his hearing was defective, and he desired not to lose a sentence of Wesley's conversation. It is known that the king had a great respect for him; and it is to this most probably Wesley refers, when writing to one of his preachers, advising him to stand his ground against the vehement opposition of the Bishop of the Isle of Man, he says, 'I know pretty well the mind of Lord Mansfield, and of one that is greater than he.' In his latter days his movements to and fro in the country became ovations; not merely did thousands gather to hear him preach, the streets of towns were lined to look upon him, and the windows were thronged as he passed along. While in Yorkshire, we read of cavalcades of horses and carriages formed to receive and escort him on the way. At Redruth, as he preached in the market place, the congregation not only filled the windows, but sat on the tops of the houses. Assuredly, as often as he had been 'persecuted, he was not forsaken;' he did not die of Crucifixion, but he felt no elation of spirit, and we see him still the same man that he had been in the widely different circumstances of cruel and unjust misrepresentation.
It is wonderful to think that at nearly ninety years of age he could continue to make any effort to preach, but he did so, and he continued as a tower of strength to the companies he had formed and called together. But he outlived most of his early contemporaries, friends and foes. He stood in the pulpit of St. Giles's, in London; he had preached there fifty years before, prior to his departure for America. 'Are they not passed as a watch in the night?' he writes. Old families that used to entertain him had passed away. 'Their houses,' says he, 'know neither me nor them any more.' His later letters show that fervid sentiment for woman known only to loftiest minds and hearts; this again is entwined with beautiful simple regards for children. When he ascended the pulpit of Raithby Church, where he was often allowed to preach, a child sat in his way on the stairs, he took it in his arms and kissed it, and placed it tenderly on the same spot. Crabb Robinson heard him at Colchester, he was then eighty-seven, on each side of him stood a minister supporting him; his feeble voice was barely audible. Robinson, then a boy, destined to enter into his ninety-second year, says, 'It formed a picture never to be forgotten.' He goes on to say, 'It went to the heart, and I never saw anything like it in after life.' Three days after he preached at Lowestoft, and there he had another distinguished hearer, the poet Crabbe. Here, also, he was supported into the pulpit by a minister on either side; but what really touched the poet naturally and deeply, was Wesley's adaptation and appropriation of some lines of Anacreon. The poet speaks of his reverent appearance, his cheerful air, and the beautiful cadence with which he repeated the lines:—
'Oft am I by women told,