Samuel wrote a strong letter to his wife in which he pointed out that it was not normal to hold such meetings, especially in a church rectory and guided by a woman. He suggested that Susanna ask a man to read the book aloud. His suggestion did not sit well with Susanna, and as her husband’s intellectual and spiritual equal, she refused to back down. In response she wrote,
As to it looking particular [peculiar], I grant it does. And so does everything that is serious or that may [in] any way advance the glory of God or the salvation of souls if it be performed out of a pulpit, or in the way of common conversation, because in our corrupt age, the utmost care and diligence have to be used to banish all discourse of God or spiritual concerns out of our society.…
As I am a woman, so I am also the mistress of a large family. And though the superior charge of the souls contained in it lies upon you, as head of the family, and as their minister; yet in your absence I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under my care as a talent committed to me.
The mail was delivered once a week to Epworth, and Susanna used the opportunity to debate with her husband by letter. Samuel suggested that the meetings stop, while Susanna argued that the meetings were doing so much good in the community.
Our meeting has wonderfully conciliated the minds of this people toward us, so that we now live in the greatest amity imaginable.… Some families who seldom went to church, now go constantly; and one person, who had not been there for seven years, is now prevailed upon to go with the rest.
She finished her letter with these words:
If you do, after all, think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me any more that you desire me to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send me your positive command, in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment, for neglecting this opportunity of doing good to souls, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Samuel did not forbid his wife to continue, though the meetings were curtailed when smallpox struck the village of Epworth. John and four of his sisters were stricken with the disease, but under Susanna’s regimented care, they all made full recoveries.
When Samuel returned from London, the meetings were disbanded in favor of church services, but the benefits remained. Church attendance continued to rise, and the Wesleys lived at peace with their neighbors. John, who was one of his mother’s staunchest supporters, took note of the positive effects of the “society” that had blossomed in the rectory kitchen, and there is no doubt that the experience played a part in directing his future.
In 1714, the time came for eleven-year-old John Wesley to follow in his brother Samuel’s footsteps and go away to school. On one of his trips to London, the Reverend Wesley had arranged for the Duke of Buckingham to sponsor John at the Charterhouse School in the capital city.
John’s sisters, though, had not been sent off to school, because there were very few private boarding schools for girls. This meant that the two oldest girls, Emilia and Susanna, who were now twenty-two and nineteen, respectively, had no prospects other than marriage or being governesses. At the same time that eleven-year-old John was being outfitted with a black broadcloth robe, knee pants, and new boots, Susanna Wesley was doing all she could to find a way to furnish her two oldest daughters with enough suitable clothes to leave the rectory in search of governess positions. John was oblivious to the envy his sisters felt at the opportunities awaiting him. He had never before traveled more than five miles away from Epworth, and the idea of going alone to London both fascinated and terrified him.
Chapter 4
A Diligent Student
John arrived at the Charterhouse School in London with little idea of what lay ahead. He soon discovered that an established pecking order existed among the students, with the smallest of the new students being on the very bottom rung. This meant that John had to spend many hours running errands for the older boys, cleaning their shoes, and allowing them to take food off his plate in the dining room. John soon realized that this was the way things were done at English boarding schools, and he knew that if he endured, he would move up the pecking order the next year and be able to require the same of a new batch of freshmen.
At first John struggled with homesickness, longing for the strict life he had left behind in Epworth. His entire life had been spent under the direct spiritual guidance of his mother and, to a lesser extent, his father, and now he missed that guidance. For the first time since the fire that burned down the rectory, John was free to think what he liked and do things without anyone inquiring about his motives. As a result he soon felt himself slipping from the high ideals he had set for himself. John decided to write a list of things he felt he had to do to be in right standing with God. These were (1) “not being so bad as other people,” (2) “having still a kindness for religion,” and (3) “reading the Bible, going to church, and saying my prayers.” These rules, which John did his best to keep, may have seemed very pious to most of his fellow students, but for a Wesley they represented the bare minimum of acceptable behavior.
John enjoyed his first year at Charterhouse School. The lessons were not particularly challenging to him, despite the fact that he had to speak Latin all day and learn Greek and Hebrew. Since it was too expensive for him to return to Epworth on a regular basis, John often spent holidays and weekends with his brother Samuel and his new wife, Ursula, or with his Wesley and Annesley relatives in London.
In 1715 John’s younger brother Charles joined John in London. He attended Westminster School, where their father had arranged a scholarship for him. On special occasions all three Wesley brothers got together, something John always looked forward to.
Meanwhile, back in Epworth the residents of the rectory experienced mysterious events just before Christmas 1716. The parlor maid swore that she heard strange knocking sounds coming from inside the rectory walls. The woman became so frightened by the sounds that Susanna consulted a neighbor as to what the noise might be.
“Ah, it must be rats,” the neighbor told her. “I had rats in the walls of my house that made a sound like that. But I fixed the trouble. I blew my trumpet in the house as loud as I could, and they all scurried away, never to return.”
Susanna borrowed the neighbor’s trumpet and blew the instrument as loud as she could throughout the house. Satisfied she had rid the rectory of rats, she returned the trumpet. Despite her effort, however, the parlor maid continued to complain of hearing noises in the walls.
Then Emilia reported hearing unexplained groaning sounds in the rectory, followed by the sound of breaking glass in the kitchen. Terrified, she ran to her mother, who went to investigate. In the kitchen Susanna found nothing broken or out of place. But that was not the end of it. Soon afterward the butler insisted that in the middle of the night he heard dragging sounds on the stairs and a loud tapping noise coming from inside the walls and the ceilings and under the floorboards. There seemed to be no logical explanation for the noises people in the house were hearing, and everyone reached the conclusion that the rectory was haunted. Even Susanna Wesley was finally won over to this conclusion, and they all took to calling the ghost Old Jeffrey, after a man in the village who had taken his own life.
While everyone else in the rectory believed that the place was haunted, Samuel Wesley refused to accept such a conclusion. He argued that there had to be some logical explanation that they had not yet found. But even Samuel changed his mind when he too began hearing strange noises emanating from the rectory walls.
John heard of the strange happenings at the rectory in a letter he received from his sister Anne. At first he was amused by what he read, but as letters continued to arrive from Epworth giving more details of the strange haunting, he grew more fascinated with what was happening. He wrote home pressing for more details. His mother wrote in response, “I cannot imagine how you should be so curious about our unwelcome guest. For my part, I am quite tired with hearing or speaking about it: but if you come among us, you will find enough to satisfy all your scruples, and perhaps may hear or see it yourself.”
When the Wesley brothers next got together, they spent many hours discussing the haunting of the rectory at Epworth they had been reading about in their letters from home. At first John found it hard to accept that his family had taken to believing in ghosts, especially since he knew that his mother and father would normally have called such a belief the invention of an idle and undisciplined mind. But since their parents both believed that the haunting was real, the three brothers concluded that indeed it must be true.
Three months after the first mention of Old Jeffrey, news came that the strange events had stopped and the rectory had returned to normal. This information came as a relief to John. Now he could once again concentrate fully on his studies, but he never forgot the incident that led him to believe that supernatural powers were at work in the world.
Nothing as remotely interesting as a haunted rectory happened during the remainder of John’s time attending Charterhouse School. At the end of his term at the school, John had done so well with his studies that the Charterhouse School offered him a scholarship of twenty pounds toward his college education. John applied to Christ Church at Oxford. The college accepted his application and matched the amount of the scholarship from the Charterhouse School, allowing him to continue his studies.
On June 14, 1720, John entered Christ Church, the most prestigious college at Oxford, following in the footsteps of his older brother. Three days later he turned seventeen. John found the course work in logic, rhetoric, politics, and morals interesting and easy to pass. He was also in full charge of his leisure activities and was soon filling his days with boating, chess, card games, dancing, theater, tennis, and billiards. As he pursued these activities, his ideas of faith and serving God slipped further away from his everyday experience. The simple standards he had established for himself at the Charterhouse School seemed harder than ever to keep in light of these new pursuits. John rarely thought about his spiritual condition apart from the twice-yearly Communion service where he was obliged to examine his sinful state.
John watched over his money as closely as he could, but sometimes he found himself in the embarrassing situation of needing to ask his friends or tutors for loans. Like his father before him, John saw his debts beginning to grow.
Meanwhile, things were not going well back at the rectory at Epworth, specifically for John’s older sisters. They were all well educated and spoke Latin and Greek, but the family lived in one of the most backward areas of England. And because their father was such a poor financial manager, the Wesley sisters did not have enough fine clothes or life experiences to present themselves as eligible brides in the level of society for which they had been groomed. Emilia was able to find a job working as a teacher in a boarding school in Lincoln, but the next sister, Susanna, chose a more difficult solution. While staying with her uncle in London, she met and then married a farmer named Richard Ellison without her parents’ permission. When Samuel and Susanna Wesley met Richard Ellison, they were appalled at his coarse behavior, and they were horrified when they learned that he was an abusive husband. John’s mother described him as “a little inferior to the apostate angels of wickedness.” News of his sister’s marriage to such a man as Richard Ellison saddened John as he continued his studies at Oxford.
