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Chapter 3. The Hour a Week. Susanna Wesley and
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the Parsonage That Would Not Burn Down Twice.
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1 Epworth, a quarter past 11, 9 February 1709.
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The first scream came from an 11 -year -old girl
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upstairs. Hedy Wesley had fallen asleep in the
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high back bedroom of the rectory and been waked,
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a little after 11, by a sensation she could not
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at first place, a warmth against her cheek, a
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softness like new bread rising. and then the
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unmistakable red flicker of something burning
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above her head. She sat up. A fragment of flaming
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thatch dropped onto her coverlet. She screamed.
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Her father, Samuel Wesley, rector of St. Andrew's,
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forty -six years old, deep in debt, already half
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asleep in his study downstairs, rose at the sound
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with the slow bewilderment of a man whose first
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thought always is that the household's troubles
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are none of his making. He pulled open the study
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door. and found the front hall already orange
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with firelight. He shouted for the children.
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He ran for the stairs. Susanna Wesley, his wife,
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was lying in from the recent birth of what would
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be their eighteenth or nineteenth child, no one
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now is entirely certain which. She heard the
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shouting and rose from her bed. She could not
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run, her body would not yet let her. She pulled
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a shawl around her shoulders and made for the
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stairs, and when the stairs were already too
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hot to pass, she turned and walked. Walked, Samuel
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would later write, with the inexplicable calm
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of a woman who had decided that panic was a luxury
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this household could not afford, threw a wall
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of flame and out into the February cold of the
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garden, where the neighbors were already gathering
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in their nightclothes with buckets and wet blankets
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and the useless tools of an English village against
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a fire that had already won. She counted the
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children by lantern light. She counted again.
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She counted a third time. And on the third count
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she understood, with the peculiar arithmetic
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of a mother, that the number was wrong. Jackie
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was missing. John Benjamin Wesley, five years
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old, her fifteenth child, the one she had always
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said was marked somehow for a special providence,
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was still in the burning house. The rest of that
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night would pass into Methodist legend. A neighbor,
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hoisted on another's shoulders at the second
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-story window, would pull the boy out of the
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flaming nursery moments before the roof collapsed.
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Samuel Wesley would fall to his knees in the
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frozen garden and cry, Come, neighbors, let us
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kneel down and give thanks to God. He has given
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me all my eight children. Let the house go. I
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am rich enough. Susanna would wrap the boy in
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her shawl and press her face into his hair and
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say nothing at all. She would remember this night.
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In the decades that followed, as the night Providence
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had set a private seal upon the child, she already
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suspected was not entirely hers. She would call
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him, for the rest of his life, her brand plucked
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from the burning. 2. The daughter who argued
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with her father. To understand how a country
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parson's wife, in a Lincolnshire fen came to
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produce, at one confinement, and then another,
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and then another, the architects of the evangelical
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awakening of two continents, one must reach back
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to a London vicarage in the year 1682. and a
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13 -year -old girl quietly announcing to her
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astonished Puritan father that she had changed
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her mind. Susanna Annisley was born on January
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20, 1669, the 25th and youngest child of Dr.
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Samuel Annisley, one of the most eminent dissenting
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ministers of the age. Her father's house in Spitalfields
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was a staging ground for the great nonconformist
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lights of Restoration London. Richard Baxter
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came, John Owen came, The young Daniel Defoe,
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who would later court her sister, came, and
Load full transcript
the
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arguments around the Annisley dinner table were
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the arguments of men who had been ejected from
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their pulpits in 1662 and had made out of loss
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an intellectual civilization. Susanna, the baby
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of the family, sat in the corner of that dining
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room and listened. She listened by her own account
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for ten years. And at thirteen -thirteen, she
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stood up and told her father she could not accept
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his conclusions. She had read in secret and thoroughly
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the arguments on both sides of the conformity
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question. She had concluded, with the precision
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of a girl who had grown up hearing theology the
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way other children hear nursery rhymes, that
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the Church of England was the true Church and
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that dissent however noble was not the ground
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on which she could build her own soul. She told
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her father so. She told him, in a written document
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she had prepared in advance, the reasons. Dr.
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Annesley, to his lasting credit and the enduring
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benefit of the English -speaking world, did not
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thrash her. He did not lock her in her room.
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He read the document. He disagreed with every
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line of it. And then, with the grace of a man
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who had lost too many friends to coercion to
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inflict it on his own daughter, he let her go.
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She walked at thirteen into the Anglican parish
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church down the road and took her first communion
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at its altar. It was the first of many occasions
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in her life on which she would, with perfect
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courtesy and perfect immovability, refuse to
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do what she was told. She was nineteen when she
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married Samuel Wesley, another young nonconformist
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turned Anglican, a man whose intellectual trajectory
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mirrored her own but whose temperament did not.
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Samuel was brilliant, industrious, and permanently
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embarrassed by money. He took holy orders. He
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accepted the parish at South Ormsby in Lincolnshire,
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then the larger and more miserable one at Epworth
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in 1697, and began the forty -year career of
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a country rector who was somehow always one step
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ahead of his creditors and two steps behind his
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own best intentions. Into that parsonage, over
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the next twenty -one years, Susanna would bear
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nineteen children. Nine of them would die in
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infancy. Ten of them would live. 3. The Method
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By 1705, Susanna Wesley had developed, of sheer
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maternal necessity, the household regime that
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would make her famous. Ten surviving children,
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aged from the toddler in her arms to the fifteen
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-year -old Sammy, already away at Westminster
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School, in a rectory with four working rooms
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and a husband frequently in London on church
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business, something had to govern the day or
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the day would govern her. She chose routine.
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She chose it with the intensity of a woman who
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had lived through the plague year as a child
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in London and understood in her marrow that chaos
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is the ordinary condition of human life and that
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only discipline beats it back. The children rose
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at six. They were dressed, fed, catechized, and
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at their lessons by nine. They studied from nine
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to twelve and from two to five. They sat in silence
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at meals. They were never given anything for
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which they cried, but only for which they asked
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politely. They were never permitted to play with
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the village children, whose manners Susanna considered
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irredeemable, and when a fire forced her to board
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them out for two years and they returned speaking,
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she said with a clownish accent and rude habits,
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she grieved the damage as though the children
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had been physically wounded and set to work restoring
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them. She taught each of them to read from the
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first chapter of Genesis, beginning on the day
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after their fifth birthday, not before, because
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she believed a child's mind must be mature enough
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to retain what it received. and not after because
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she believed delay bred inattention. Each child
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spent one full day, a single intense Monday morning
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in a room with the door shut, learning the alphabet.
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All ten, with the exception of the daughter Molly,
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who was ill, learned it in that single day. On
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the second day they began to read scripture.
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By the end of the first quarter they could read
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well. She kept in her own hand a separate record
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of each child's progress, their tempers, their
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particular faults, the scripture verses she had
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used to shape them. This would have been enough,
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in any other century, to make her remarkable.
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It was not in hers what made her famous. What
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made her famous was the hour. She gave each of
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her ten surviving children, in a rigidly observed
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weekly rotation, one hour of her undivided attention.
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Monday evening was Molly. Tuesday was Hetty.
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Wednesday Nancy. Thursday Jackie John. Friday
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was Patty. Saturday was Charles. Sunday was Emily
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and Suki. In that hour she did not correct their
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grammar or drill them on catechism. She sat with
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them, one soul at a time, and spoke with them
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about the state of their own soul. She asked
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what they feared. She asked what they loved.
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She asked whether they understood why God had
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made them. and whether they had begun, in their
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small way, to love him back. She kept the rotation
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for twenty years. She kept it through four pregnancies,
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two fires, Samuel's eight -month imprisonment
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for debt, and the long seasons when she herself
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was sick and the household ran on nothing but
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her will. She kept it even when her husband was
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away in London for months at a stretch. She kept
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it when the crops failed. She kept it when the
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parishioners of Epworth, a surly half -literate
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fen people who resented their learned rector,
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stoned the windows of the rectory and killed
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the family cow in the lane. Years later, when
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her son John had become the most famous preacher
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in England, he would write and beg her with the
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half -embarrassed reverence of a middle -aged
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man who has finally understood his own formation,
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to describe the method to him in writing so that
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he might use it with the children of his converts.
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She wrote the letter on July 24, 1732. She was
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63 years old. It is the single most influential
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parenting document in Protestant history. In
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it she told him what she had told him, differently,
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a thousand times before, that to teach a child
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to love God, you must first conquer the child's
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will, not crush it, but conquer it, so that the
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child learns early that there is something worth
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obeying besides itself. Then she wrote, the child
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may be taught anything. Without that, she wrote,
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you may teach the child everything, and it will
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amount to nothing. John would build Methodism
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on the sentence. 4. The Kitchen Congregation
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In the winter of 1711 to 1712, Samuel Wesley
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was in London for the Convocation of the Church
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of England, and the curate he had left behind
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at Epworth, a dull, inoffensive man named Inman,
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was preaching sermons so tedious that the parish
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began by mutual silent consent to stay home.
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Susanna noticed. She noticed because the villagers
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who skipped Inman's sermons would drift on Sunday
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afternoons past the rectory, and some of them,
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drawn by curiosity or by the old affection they
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had not quite surrendered, would knock at her
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door. At first she received them in ones and
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twos and read to them from a printed sermon of
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her husband's, or from a missionary account out
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of the society for promoting Christian knowledge.
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It was a small thing, a kitchen thing. Within
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a month her kitchen could not hold them. Within
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two months, two hundred people were crowding
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into and around the rectory kitchen on Sunday
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afternoons, more than attended Inman's morning
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service at the church, and Susanna,
seated on
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a wooden chair with a child on her lap, was reading
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aloud, praying with the congregation and answering
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questions afterward. She had begun, without intending
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to, the first Methodist class meeting in history.
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It would happen again in almost identical form,
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fifty years later under the direction of her
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son. Inman, enraged, wrote to Samuel in London.
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Samuel, alarmed by the scandal of a wife conducting
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what looked dangerously like a conventicle, wrote
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to Susanna, ordering her to stop. Her reply,
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on February 6th, 1712, is perhaps the greatest
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surviving letter of an early 18th century Englishwoman
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to her husband. She declined. She declined courteously,
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at length. and with an argument so precisely
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reasoned that Samuel, when he read it, wrote
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back more tentatively. She observed, with the
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careful Anglican scholarship she had been building
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since the age of twelve, that she was not preaching,
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she was reading. She was not conducting a service,
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she was holding a gathering in her own home as
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was permitted any Christian. She was not teaching
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strangers, she was teaching her neighbors. She
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was not defying her husband, she was doing what
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he himself would do were he present. And she
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closed with a sentence Samuel could not answer.
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If you do, after all, think fit to dissolve this
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assembly, do not tell me that you desire me to
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do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience.
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But send me your positive command, in such full
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and express terms as may absolve me from all
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guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity
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of doing good when you and I shall appear before
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the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus
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Christ. Samuel did not send the command. The
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kitchen meetings continued. until he returned
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to Epworth in the summer. John Wesley was eight
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years old that winter. He sat on the bench beside
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his mother, every Sunday afternoon. He watched
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the villagers fill the kitchen. He watched his
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mother read and pray and answer. He was watching,
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though no one knew it, Methodism being born.
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5. A Second Fire She had already lost one rectory.
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In the summer of 1702, a half dozen years before
00:13:25.340 --> 00:13:28.159
the fire that would nearly take John. An earlier
00:13:28.159 --> 00:13:30.620
blaze, started by some quarrel in the village,
00:13:30.919 --> 00:13:33.360
had consumed most of the first house and all
00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:35.740
of Susanna's papers, including the spiritual
00:13:35.740 --> 00:13:38.080
journals she had begun keeping as a young wife
00:13:38.080 --> 00:13:40.360
and the theological manual she had been writing
00:13:40.360 --> 00:13:43.220
for her children. She had rebuilt the house.
00:13:43.919 --> 00:13:48.120
She had begun the journals again. Then came 1709.
00:13:48.759 --> 00:13:52.899
The flames. The child at the window. The husband's
00:13:52.899 --> 00:13:55.840
knee in the frozen garden. Samuel's recorded
00:13:55.840 --> 00:13:59.279
cry, let the house go. I am rich enough, has
00:13:59.279 --> 00:14:02.240
been quoted in a thousand sermons. What is less
00:14:02.240 --> 00:14:04.759
often quoted is what Susanna said afterward.
00:14:05.519 --> 00:14:08.120
She said nothing aloud, but she wrote in a letter
00:14:08.120 --> 00:14:10.980
a few days later that she had determined to redouble
00:14:10.980 --> 00:14:13.769
her care for the education of the children. because
00:14:13.769 --> 00:14:16.750
I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under
00:14:16.750 --> 00:14:19.649
my care as a talent committed to me under a trust
00:14:19.649 --> 00:14:22.370
by the great Lord of all the families both in
00:14:22.370 --> 00:14:25.250
heaven and in earth." She did not grieve the
00:14:25.250 --> 00:14:28.230
burnt manuscripts. She grieved, she wrote, her
00:14:28.230 --> 00:14:31.370
own previous carelessness. She would not be careless
00:14:31.370 --> 00:14:35.029
again. She began, within weeks of the fire, a
00:14:35.029 --> 00:14:38.190
new manual of devotion for her children. She
00:14:38.190 --> 00:14:40.750
began it in a borrowed room in a neighbor's cottage,
00:14:41.070 --> 00:14:43.340
with her youngest on her hip. and the ashes of
00:14:43.340 --> 00:14:45.759
her house still blowing across the Epworth Fen.
00:14:46.539 --> 00:14:49.720
She called it, with her usual plainness, a religious
00:14:49.720 --> 00:14:53.019
conference between mother and Amelia. It is a
00:14:53.019 --> 00:14:55.820
strange and moving document, a Socratic dialogue
00:14:55.820 --> 00:14:58.259
in which she plays both parts, the mother patient
00:14:58.259 --> 00:15:00.759
and the daughter sharp, working through the attributes
00:15:00.759 --> 00:15:03.139
of God one by one as though teaching a small
00:15:03.139 --> 00:15:06.500
person to walk. It was not published in her lifetime.
00:15:07.139 --> 00:15:09.580
It was not published for two hundred years after
00:15:09.580 --> 00:15:13.340
her lifetime. It was read aloud in the reconstructed
00:15:13.340 --> 00:15:15.960
rectory at Epworth to ten children once a week
00:15:15.960 --> 00:15:19.539
by Lanternlight for a decade. That was the publication
00:15:19.539 --> 00:15:25.179
she had intended. 6. The Sons The two boys are
00:15:25.179 --> 00:15:27.860
best known to history as a pair, and so it is
00:15:27.860 --> 00:15:30.320
easy to forget that Susanna raised them as she
00:15:30.320 --> 00:15:33.379
raised all of them one at a time. John Jackie
00:15:33.379 --> 00:15:36.230
was her brand from the burning. She never quite
00:15:36.230 --> 00:15:39.289
treated him as an ordinary child again after
00:15:39.289 --> 00:15:43.210
the 1709 fire. She dedicated him privately to
00:15:43.210 --> 00:15:46.370
God. She kept among her papers a written covenant
00:15:46.370 --> 00:15:50.029
made on May 17, 1711, in which she pledged to
00:15:50.029 --> 00:15:53.169
take more particular care of his soul. He repaid
00:15:53.169 --> 00:15:55.850
her attention with the grave, slightly austere
00:15:55.850 --> 00:15:58.169
intelligence of a child who knows he is being
00:15:58.169 --> 00:16:01.210
watched by heaven. At five he could read the
00:16:01.210 --> 00:16:04.210
Bible. At ten, he was at Charterhouse School
00:16:04.210 --> 00:16:08.590
in London. At seventeen, Oxford. At twenty -five,
00:16:08.830 --> 00:16:12.090
ordained. At thirty -five, failing miserably
00:16:12.090 --> 00:16:14.669
as a missionary to Georgia and writing his mother
00:16:14.669 --> 00:16:17.389
long letters of confused anguish to which she
00:16:17.389 --> 00:16:19.669
responded with the same steady, unflattering
00:16:19.669 --> 00:16:22.830
love she had given him in his hour. Charles,
00:16:22.950 --> 00:16:25.049
her eighteenth child, was the quicker, softer,
00:16:25.210 --> 00:16:28.139
more lyrical temperament. He had been born two
00:16:28.139 --> 00:16:31.379
months premature in December 1707 and was not
00:16:31.379 --> 00:16:34.419
expected to live. Susanna had swaddled him and
00:16:34.419 --> 00:16:36.679
kept him in a warm cradle beside the kitchen
00:16:36.679 --> 00:16:39.100
hearth for weeks, tending him in the intervals
00:16:39.100 --> 00:16:41.159
between her lessons with his older siblings.
00:16:41.960 --> 00:16:44.480
He would grow up to write over six thousand hymns,
00:16:44.700 --> 00:16:47.320
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and Can It Be Love
00:16:47.320 --> 00:16:49.740
Divine All Loves Excelling, hymns that still
00:16:49.740 --> 00:16:51.960
rise in three centuries of languages from the
00:16:51.960 --> 00:16:53.980
pews of churches whose founders never heard of
00:16:53.980 --> 00:16:57.039
Epworth. Both boys left home for school, both
00:16:57.039 --> 00:16:59.620
returned for the long vacations. Both came in
00:16:59.620 --> 00:17:01.960
their Oxford years under the influence of the
00:17:01.960 --> 00:17:04.140
disciplined piety Susanna had drilled into them
00:17:04.140 --> 00:17:06.259
and began with their friend George Whitefield,
00:17:06.500 --> 00:17:08.819
the circle of rigorous young believers the scoffers
00:17:08.819 --> 00:17:11.720
of Christchurch called the Holy Club. Their mother
00:17:11.720 --> 00:17:14.000
heard about the Holy Club in letters and wrote
00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:16.400
back, practically, that they must not become
00:17:16.400 --> 00:17:19.000
morbid and must not mistake disciplined habit
00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:22.079
for converted heart. She wrote to John on June
00:17:22.079 --> 00:17:26.319
8, 1725, when he was 22, one of the most remarkable
00:17:26.319 --> 00:17:29.059
sentences in her long correspondence. I would
00:17:29.059 --> 00:17:31.400
advise you as much as possible, in your present
00:17:31.400 --> 00:17:33.900
circumstances, to throw your business into a
00:17:33.900 --> 00:17:36.839
certain method. Take heed of that soul -destroying,
00:17:36.980 --> 00:17:39.799
time -wasting, vain habit of reading unprofitable
00:17:39.799 --> 00:17:43.160
books. The son who would later preach 40 ,000
00:17:43.160 --> 00:17:46.799
sermons and ride 250 ,000 miles on horseback,
00:17:46.910 --> 00:17:49.410
had his habits of discipline laid in him before
00:17:49.410 --> 00:17:52.529
he could multiply. She did not live to see his
00:17:52.529 --> 00:17:58.690
conversion. She came close. 7. The Foundry In
00:17:58.690 --> 00:18:02.190
1739, nine years after Samuel's death and thirty
00:18:02.190 --> 00:18:05.549
years after the fire, Susanna, now 70, frail,
00:18:05.769 --> 00:18:07.970
dependent on her adult children, was living in
00:18:07.970 --> 00:18:10.250
the house of her son -in -law Wesley Hall, whose
00:18:10.250 --> 00:18:13.190
character she had slowly come to distrust. Her
00:18:13.190 --> 00:18:15.549
children arranged, with some relief, to bring
00:18:15.549 --> 00:18:18.319
her to London. where John had just taken possession
00:18:18.319 --> 00:18:21.180
of an old cannon foundry on Windmill Street and
00:18:21.180 --> 00:18:23.400
was converting it into the first Methodist meeting
00:18:23.400 --> 00:18:26.500
-house in the city. She moved into the adjoining
00:18:26.500 --> 00:18:30.519
rooms. She was small and thin and bent. She wore
00:18:30.519 --> 00:18:33.680
a white cap. She sat in the corner of her son's
00:18:33.680 --> 00:18:35.960
services and watched him preach to cockney laborers
00:18:35.960 --> 00:18:38.859
and cast -offs and redeemed drunkards and listened
00:18:38.859 --> 00:18:41.059
as the old hymns she had taught her son to sing
00:18:41.059 --> 00:18:44.319
rose from five hundred throats. She would occasionally
00:18:44.319 --> 00:18:47.279
lean over to a younger woman nearby and murmur,
00:18:47.400 --> 00:18:50.339
not critically, but wonderingly, This is my son.
00:18:50.960 --> 00:18:54.319
This is Jackie. It was at the foundry that she
00:18:54.319 --> 00:18:59.180
died. On the evening of July 23, 1742, she called
00:18:59.180 --> 00:19:01.940
her children around her bed. She blessed them
00:19:01.940 --> 00:19:05.099
by name, Amelia, Suki, Molly, Hetty, Nancy, Patty,
00:19:05.299 --> 00:19:08.059
Kezzie, Sammy, Charles, Jackie. She asked them
00:19:08.059 --> 00:19:10.119
to sing a psalm of praise when she was gone.
00:19:10.819 --> 00:19:13.950
She closed her eyes. John Wesley, who had the
00:19:13.950 --> 00:19:16.549
preacher's gift and the mother's gift both, recorded
00:19:16.549 --> 00:19:18.890
the scene in his journal with an unadorned line
00:19:18.890 --> 00:19:21.230
that has kept her alive for three hundred years.
00:19:21.549 --> 00:19:23.869
About three in the afternoon, I went to my mother
00:19:23.869 --> 00:19:26.910
and found her change was near. I sat down on
00:19:26.910 --> 00:19:30.230
the bedside. She was in her last conflict, unable
00:19:30.230 --> 00:19:33.549
to speak, but I believe quite sensible. Her look
00:19:33.549 --> 00:19:36.109
was calm and serene and her eyes fixed upward
00:19:36.109 --> 00:19:39.079
while we commended her soul to God. From three
00:19:39.079 --> 00:19:41.519
to four, the silver cord was loosing and the
00:19:41.519 --> 00:19:44.079
wheel breaking at the cistern. Then, without
00:19:44.079 --> 00:19:46.859
any struggle or sigh or groan, the soul was set
00:19:46.859 --> 00:19:49.559
at liberty. We stood round the bed and fulfilled
00:19:49.559 --> 00:19:52.460
her last request. Children, as soon as I am released,
00:19:52.599 --> 00:19:55.559
sing a psalm of praise to God. She was seventy
00:19:55.559 --> 00:19:58.759
-three. She had borne nineteen children and buried
00:19:58.759 --> 00:20:01.640
nine. She had lived through two rectory fires,
00:20:01.779 --> 00:20:04.160
four monarchs, one eight -month imprisonment,
00:20:04.500 --> 00:20:07.200
a decade of clergy salary and arrears. and the
00:20:07.200 --> 00:20:09.900
long proud obedient labor of a wife who had never
00:20:09.900 --> 00:20:12.559
once let the household fall. She had written
00:20:12.559 --> 00:20:15.980
no book. She had preached no public sermon, unless
00:20:15.980 --> 00:20:18.859
a kitchen counts. She had published nothing.
00:20:19.559 --> 00:20:22.559
She had raised John and Charles Wesley. She was
00:20:22.559 --> 00:20:25.319
buried in Bunhill Fields, the dissenter's cemetery
00:20:25.319 --> 00:20:28.000
across the road from the foundry, because the
00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:30.460
Anglican parish of her adulthood would not receive
00:20:30.460 --> 00:20:33.140
her and because, in the strange final irony of
00:20:33.140 --> 00:20:36.019
her life, She came to rest among the nonconformists
00:20:36.019 --> 00:20:38.799
she had left at thirteen. Her grave is there
00:20:38.799 --> 00:20:42.440
still. The inscription is plain. It does not
00:20:42.440 --> 00:20:47.279
list the children. It
does not need to. 8. The
00:20:47.279 --> 00:20:51.440
Echo. John Wesley lived fifty more years. He
00:20:51.440 --> 00:20:53.859
would ride, by the end of his life, a quarter
00:20:53.859 --> 00:20:56.500
of a million miles on horseback, preach more
00:20:56.500 --> 00:20:59.559
than forty thousand sermons. organized the societies
00:20:59.559 --> 00:21:02.319
that would grow into the largest Protestant denomination
00:21:02.319 --> 00:21:05.940
in the English -speaking world, and die in 1791,
00:21:06.140 --> 00:21:08.900
leaving behind him an army of Methodist preachers
00:21:08.900 --> 00:21:11.480
who would, within fifty years of his death, carry
00:21:11.480 --> 00:21:13.960
his mother's hour -a -week method into the mining
00:21:13.960 --> 00:21:16.299
camps of Cornwall, the slave quarters of the
00:21:16.299 --> 00:21:18.619
American South, the villages of Yorkshire, the
00:21:18.619 --> 00:21:20.940
tents of the Second Great Awakening, and at length
00:21:20.940 --> 00:21:23.559
the lanes of Pensacola, the college campuses
00:21:23.559 --> 00:21:26.279
of Auburn, the storefront Pentecostal churches
00:21:26.279 --> 00:21:29.589
of Los Angeles. Charles Wesley died three years
00:21:29.589 --> 00:21:32.130
before his brother, having set the theology of
00:21:32.130 --> 00:21:34.349
his mother's kitchen to tunes that would outlast
00:21:34.349 --> 00:21:37.750
empires. The line, Bold I approach the eternal
00:21:37.750 --> 00:21:40.329
throne, and claim the crown, through Christ my
00:21:40.329 --> 00:21:43.049
own, from and can it be, is a sentence Susanna
00:21:43.049 --> 00:21:45.710
had spoken to him in her peculiar northern Lincolnshire
00:21:45.710 --> 00:21:48.410
accent across many Saturday evening conversations
00:21:48.410 --> 00:21:51.750
by Lanternlight. He did not quite remember learning
00:21:51.750 --> 00:21:54.910
it. Neither do we with most of the words we live
00:21:54.910 --> 00:21:58.359
by. What passes from a mother into her son does
00:21:58.359 --> 00:22:01.779
not pass, usually, as doctrine. It passes as
00:22:01.779 --> 00:22:03.960
cadence, posture, the catch in the breath before
00:22:03.960 --> 00:22:07.339
prayer. It passes as the small physical memory
00:22:07.339 --> 00:22:10.119
of having been, once, listened to with the full
00:22:10.119 --> 00:22:12.619
attention of a serious adult who believed the
00:22:12.619 --> 00:22:15.960
child's soul was worth an hour. Methodism, at
00:22:15.960 --> 00:22:18.960
its best, has always been the institutional echo
00:22:18.960 --> 00:22:21.819
of that attention. Its class meetings are the
00:22:21.819 --> 00:22:25.220
kitchen at Epworth, multiplied. Its hymnody is
00:22:25.220 --> 00:22:28.839
Charles' grief and Charles' joy in meter. Its
00:22:28.839 --> 00:22:30.960
field preaching is John's mother at the rectory
00:22:30.960 --> 00:22:34.240
door turned outward. She would not have recognized
00:22:34.240 --> 00:22:37.740
any of it as a monument to herself. She would
00:22:37.740 --> 00:22:40.539
have turned with her usual impatience to whatever
00:22:40.539 --> 00:22:43.579
child most urgently needed correcting. There
00:22:43.579 --> 00:22:46.200
is a last picture of her in the domestic record,
00:22:46.480 --> 00:22:49.579
dated about 1740, two years before her death.
00:22:49.930 --> 00:22:52.950
She is sitting in a low chair in her son's foundry
00:22:52.950 --> 00:22:55.690
rooms, a cap on her head, a book open in her
00:22:55.690 --> 00:22:59.589
lap. A small candle burns beside her. Outside,
00:22:59.730 --> 00:23:01.690
the London night is thick with coal smoke and
00:23:01.690 --> 00:23:05.569
carriage bells. She is alone in the room. She
00:23:05.569 --> 00:23:08.450
is not, strictly speaking, praying. She is, as
00:23:08.450 --> 00:23:11.349
far as anyone can tell, simply listening. It
00:23:11.349 --> 00:23:14.650
is what she had done, all along. The alphabet
00:23:14.650 --> 00:23:17.750
on the first day. The scripture on the second.
00:23:18.160 --> 00:23:21.220
The hour on Thursdays for Jackie and on Saturdays
00:23:21.220 --> 00:23:24.420
for Charles. The letter to her husband, refusing
00:23:24.420 --> 00:23:27.460
to close the kitchen. The covenant for the brand
00:23:27.460 --> 00:23:30.059
plucked from the burning. Nineteen children,
00:23:30.240 --> 00:23:32.279
nine graves, ten lives, one house that burned
00:23:32.279 --> 00:23:35.119
twice and a soul that would not. She listened.
00:23:35.980 --> 00:23:38.339
And heaven, through her, began to speak English.
00:23:39.359 --> 00:23:40.559
End of chapter 3