Rebecca Lamar Harmon
ISBN 0-687-40767-2, paperback, 1968
Read: 2004 November 3 - December 12
Reviewed: 2004 December 13
I don't know where I saw a review of this book, but when I did I started looking for a copy to give to my mother, a "lady of the parsonage" as the dedication puts it. Finally, I found one at a used bookshop through amazon.com. Since it was used already anyway, I read it myself before shipping it off to Hillsboro for Christmas.
While scores of books have been written about John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, fewer have dealt with other members of the Wesley family. In this case we are considering the woman who bore and raised these and several other children and, thereby, her own contribution to 18th century England.
There are some interesting artifacts to the book. Being written by a woman in the 1960s the author often cautions the reader not to apply the "standards of today" to the situation of this woman and her daughters, or the politics of the 20th century. Written in 2004, these warnings would hardly have been necessary. There are few "standards of the day" now, except to avoid being headline news, and most readers are very accustomed to realizing that everyone's time and place is unique.
Susannah Annesley was the daughter of a minister, himself the son of a pastor. Her other grandfather was a lawyer. She married Samuel Wesley, another preacher from a line of preachers and he soon graduated from Oxford and was assigned a parish in London. Both sides of the family had roots back deep into English history. After four or five children, they moved to Epworth where most of the action in Susannah's life happens.
Epworth was a cut in pay and a stark separation from the cultured society for which they were both raised and trained.
Both families, and the household of Samuel and Susannah were in constant religious turmoil, on a doctrinal plane. Some were dissenters, others adherents to the high church practices of the Church of England of the time. The times were quite dark. Communications by letter seems the only positive constant. Transportation by road was abysmal, often impossible, books were in short supply, health and economy were both poor, even the illumination was poor as the weather was gray and damp.
The couple had nineteen children of whom nine survived to adulthood. Two were named John the first of whom died as an infant. Various tragedies befell the family, the most serious of which was that the rectory burned down when John (the second) was a baby. He was barely saved. Everything they owned, including considerable books and papers, was lost, and the family was split for about a year while rebuilding was undertaken. In addition, the pastor had to raise the funds for the rebuilding himself. Samuel Wesley was a strict pastor. There is speculation that parishioners set the fire.
Through considerable personal and family discipline, including a strict hour of quiet and prayer per day, Susannah ran the household between illnesses of herself, her husband, and other family members. In addition to the doctrinal differences throughout the family, there were political ones as well, one of which, having to do with whoever was the appropriate divine right monarch at the time nearly, led to a separation. Only a conveniently placed conference in London and the timely death of whoever the usurper was led to reconciliation, soon after which John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was conceived.
An example of the strict social structure of the time is the manner in which this conflict started. At prayers over the evening meal, Mrs. Wesley did not say "Amen" to one of her husband's (and master's) entreaties for whomever he thought was the rightful ruler, the one who she did not (I forget the rest of the details). Husband took wife to task about this, the argument ensued, and he ended up saying he wouldn't share a bed with a person of such apostate beliefs.
In another instance when Samuel was out of town, Sunday services were reduced from two to one but Susannah, missing the routine, held private devotions for her family in the kitchen on Sunday evening in which she would read and speak briefly on scripture. Soon the servants were attending, then friends and neighbors and before you know it, attendance in the rectory kitchen was greater than it usually had been at normal evening services in the church. This displeased the rector and he wished Susannah to stop having the meetings, but she countered that she would not quit without his explicit order since, when they stood together at the judgment, she wanted the whole blame for the cessation to rest clearly on his authority. He gave no such order and the devotions continued until he returned.
The book documents many illnesses of various family members, the ghosts who lived in the house, the deaths of several of the children, and the fact that their income always insufficient. They were always in debt and being bailed out by the benevolence of extended family members, church leaders and others. Some of the children blamed the mis-management of their father, but there is only so much that anyone could have done.
Samuel spent much of his spare time working on a book, Dissertations on the book of Job that, after being lost in the fire was never completed.
Later, some chapters are spent on the histories of the children who survived to adulthood. In brief, John and Charles went off and founded Methodism, John being the organized leader and fiery, convicting preacher who took his "warmed heart" feeling and made reasoned theology of it, and Charles who was much less organized but a gifted and prolific hymn writer. Samuel was a rector in the established high church and never recognized or gave any credence to Methodism, a street movement driven on emotion.
The daughters suffered from poor to bad marriages, especially Hetty who was duped into an elopement, became pregnant, was abandoned, and married a plumber on the rebound. Her parents, who felt she was never sufficiently repentant, never forgave her. Her father in particular was bothered with the needs of the girls but they were no better off when they went off to be maids or run schools or marry badly than they had been with him. This was particularly sad. Hetty was bright and scholarly and had helped her father with DissertationsÉ while growing up. Never forgiven, she died at age 38. The last child, Kezziah, was not whole physically and died after a short marriage at age 32. Most of the rest of the children lived to around 80. Much of the third quarter of the book goes by without much mention of Susannah.
The brothers Samuel, John, and Charles, in addition to their busy work of ministry (itinerant ministry for John) and families, did all they could to take care of their extended family, as we do now. They took in or supported their mother and sisters and their families in times of need, which were more common than not and did other notable, sacrificial acts, like supporting each other through college. Susannah lived at the heart of the birthing Methodism at the end, after the death of her husband in Epworth, and was a direct, intelligent, reconciling force in the family.
My favorite quote in the book is in a letter from father Samuel to son John. It speaks to me directly, as it should to my daughter Katherine. "Child, you think to carry everything by dint of argument. But you will find by and by, how little is ever done in the world by clear wisdom."
Susannah also had some good quotes, reproduced at the end. My favorites are:
ÓI am induced to believe that it is much easier to be contended without riches than with them."
"I am content to fill a little space if God be glorified."
Having been raised in poverty myself, I had some interest in this book in that it portrays another parsonage family dealing with the burdens and deprivations of ministry. Nothing in my background is anything near this, however. We were always rich by comparison.
The incident with Hetty troubles me most, and the author picks up on the same discrepancy that I do, namely that here we have a family devoted to expounding and living out the word of Christ in this world, yet the forms and conventions of present pre-Dickensonian society take precedence in this episode. Hetty made a mistake, no question. She had been warned, no dispute. The consequences were dire and self-evident. Christ does not condemn and mercilessly and eternally browbeat a person in this predicament (remember the woman at the well who had had five husbands and the man she was with now was not her husband?) but her father Samuel did, much to the consternation of her siblings, particularly John the leader, and possibly her mother. Perhaps she was headstrong and would have been more contrite in the presence of Jesus himself than in the presence of her father, who knows? But isn't that what we preach, the very presence of Christ with and within us?
I observed this in my own heritage. Forgiveness was preached from the pulpit on Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. then at 8:00 we'd be at home watching Bonanza, cheering on the tough guys blowing the evil cow rustlers to oblivion. Kind of like the current situation where it is somehow necessary to grind Saddam Hussein into dust in the name of God, faith, and goodness. Apparently this schizophrenia extends all the way back to before the founding of Methodism. I feel strangely comforted.
Susannah Wesley was a woman of unusual mental strength in the face of everything that befell her. "Whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin in you (however innocent it may be in itself)." Holding firm principle in a dark time, weakened by relentless childbearing, childrearing, and service to her husband, church and country, she lived this principle out in her time.