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[Illustration: John Wesley]
THE
Young People's Wesley
BY W. McDONALD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY BISHOP W. F. MALLALIEU, D.D.
"The best of all is, God is with us."--_Wesley_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & PYE
1901
Copyright by
EATON & MAINS,
1901.
AFFECTIONATELY
Dedicated
TO
ALL THE MEMBERS OF JOHN WESLEY'S
WIDELY EXTENDED
AND CONSTANTLY INCREASING
PARISH.
PREFACE.
MY sole object in the preparation of this little volume has been to meet
what I regard as a real want--a Life of John Wesley which shall include
all the essential facts in his remarkable career, presented in such a
comprehensive form as to be quickly read and easily remembered by all;
not so expensive as to be beyond the reach of those of the most limited
means, and not so large as to require much time, even of the most busy
worker, to master its contents. I have sought to give my readers a
faithful view of the man--his origin, early life, conversion, marvelous
ministry, what he did, how he did it, the doctrines he preached, the
persecutions he encountered, and his triumphant end.
This revised and enlarged edition will be found to contain many
interesting features not found in the first edition. I have added, also,
a brief account of the introduction of Methodism into America, as well
as John Wesley's influence at the opening of the twentieth century. For
this interesting chapter I am indebted to Rev. W. H. Meredith, of the
New England Conference, who kindly consented to assist me, in view of
the pressure to get the manuscript ready on time.
It will appear, from all that has been said, that Mr. Wesley was the
most remarkable character of the last century; and the influence of his
life is more potent for good to-day than ever before, and must continue
to augment--if his followers are true to their trust--till the end of
time.
WILLIAM MCDONALD.
CONTENTS.
Page.
PREFACE, 5
INTRODUCTION, 9
CHAPTER.
I. BORN IN TROUBLOUS TIMES, 13
II. THE WESLEY FAMILY, 20
III. WESLEY'S EARLY LIFE, 32
IV. EPWORTH RAPPINGS, 41
V. ORIGIN OF THE HOLY CLUB, 49
VI. WESLEY IN AMERICA, 58
VII. WESLEY'S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 71
VIII. WESLEY'S MULTIPLIED LABORS, 83
IX. WESLEY'S DOMESTIC RELATIONS, 93
X. WESLEY'S PERSECUTIONS, 101
XI. WESLEY AND HIS THEOLOGY, 115
XII. WESLEY AS A MAN, 132
XIII. WESLEY AS A PREACHER, 136
XIV. WESLEY AS A REFORMER, 144
XV. WESLEY AND AMERICAN METHODISM PRIOR TO 1766, 153
XVI. WESLEY AND AMERICAN METHODISM, 161
XVII. WESLEY APPROACHING THE CLOSE OF LIFE, 173
XVIII. WESLEY AND HIS TRIUMPHANT DEATH, 179
XIX. WESLEY'S CHARACTER AS ESTIMATED BY UNBIASED JUDGES, 185
XX. THE GREATER WESLEY OF THE OPENING CENTURY, 193
CONCLUSION, 203
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PORTRAIT OF JOHN WESLEY, Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
AN UNUSUAL VIEW OF THE EPWORTH RECTORY, 16
THE WESLEYAN MEMORIAL CHURCH, EPWORTH, ENGLAND, 32
JEFFREY'S ATTIC ROOM, WHENCE THE MYSTERIOUS NOISES CAME, 48
WESLEY'S ARMCHAIR, 64
WESLEY'S CLOCK, 96
SAMUEL WESLEY'S GRAVE, UPON WHICH JOHN PREACHED HIS FAMOUS
SERMON, 112
WESLEY'S TEAPOT. WESLEY'S BIBLE AND CASE, 144
ST. ANDREW'S CHURCH AT EPWORTH. EPWORTH MEMORIAL CHURCH
AT CLEVELAND, O., 160
THE ROOM IN WHICH WESLEY DIED, 176
JOHN WESLEY'S GRAVE, 192
INTRODUCTION.
WHAT, another Life of John Wesley! Why not? This time a "Young People's
Wesley." If ever the common people had an interest in any man, living or
dead, that man is John Wesley. It is true that we already have many
"Lives" of this remarkable man. They range from the massive volumes of
Tyerman down to the booklet of a few pages. The truth abides that of
making many books there is no end, and so more Lives of Wesley will be
written from time to time as the years and centuries come and go. The
reason of this is that John Wesley is one of the greatest men of all the
Christian centuries. When we undertake to enumerate the five greatest
men that the English race has ever produced we must of necessity include
the name of John Wesley. As the distance increases between the present
time and the days of his protracted activity the grander does he appear.
The majority of the men of his day and generation did not comprehend
him. They could not, for the plan of his aspirations and achievements
was far above their thinking or living. They did not realize his
greatness; they did not foresee the influence he was destined to exert
on all future generations. He has been dead more than a hundred years,
and yet to-day he is larger, vaster, and more powerful in the wide realm
of intellectual and spiritual activities than he was at any time during
his long and vigorous life. So far as we can judge, this development of
the stature of this wonderful man will continue for ages.
Remember that John Wesley was well bred. On both his father's and
mother's side he inherited the qualities of the best blood of England.
So far as we know, his ancestry was purely Saxon, and of the best type
of English-Saxon lineage. On sea or land, in military affairs, as a
diplomat or statesman, he would have been eminent. He was one of the
most thorough and comprehensive scholars of his century. He was fully
abreast of his times in all matters of natural science; he was a
linguist of rare excellency; he was a metaphysician; he was at home in
philosophy. He had the rare ability of using all he knew for the best
and highest purposes. He was a real genius, not a crank. A genius
utilizes environment; a genius dominates circumstances; a genius makes
old things new; a genius pioneers mankind in its career of progress.
Because of these qualities and characteristics, men will never tire of
reading the life, and men will never stop writing the life, of this
man. Born in the humble rectory of Epworth, in the midst of the fens of
Lincolnshire, his name and fame reach to the ends of the earth. Men know
him not for what he might have been, but for what he was--a friend of
all, and a prophet of God.
Just now when the common people are more and more educated, and nearly
all of them are readers of books, and many of them interested in good
books, it is important that we have a Life of Wesley that is perfectly
adapted to those who are not critical historical students, but rather to
those who want the gist of things, who want the substantial and
essential facts in compressed shape.
It is believed that this volume will meet all these requirements, and
that a careful perusal of its pages will put any person of ordinary
intelligence in very close touch with one of the greatest religious and
social reformers the world has ever known. This volume is one that might
be read with great profit by every member of our Church, and by all
Methodists everywhere. Especially would its reading help all our young
people, and particularly the members of our Epworth League. It is
certain that its reading would give them clear, definite, and correct
views of the life and work of the founder of Methodism; and such views
would be sure to lead to a more healthful and vigorous personal
religious experience, and would encourage all heroic aspirations for
the highest attainments in holy living, and excite the most ardent and
persistent efforts for the salvation of all men. John Wesley knew that
humanity had been redeemed by the sufferings and death of the Lord Jesus
Christ. He knew that every redeemed soul might be saved. He knew that it
was his business to bring redeemed humanity to the feet of its Redeemer.
Would that all his followers might share in this threefold knowledge;
and that by the reading of this volume all might be led to consecrate
themselves to the accomplishment of the supremely glorious task at which
John Wesley wrought until he ceased at once to work and live. O, that
all Methodists might follow John Wesley even as he followed Christ!
W. F. MALLALIEU.
Auburndale, Mass., April 8, 1901.
The Young People's Wesley.
CHAPTER I.
BORN IN TROUBLOUS TIMES.
DURING the latter part of the seventeenth and the first part of the
eighteenth century England was the theater of stirring events. War was
sounding its clarion notes through the land. Marlborough had achieved a
series of brilliant victories on the Continent, which had filled and
fired the national heart with the spirit of military glory.
The English, at that time, had an instinctive horror of popery and
power. James II, cruel, arbitrary, and oppressive, had been hurled from
the throne as a plotting papal tyrant, and his grandson, Charles Edward,
known as the Pretender, was making every possible effort to regain the
throne and to subject the people to absolute despotism. To add to their
dismay, the fleets of France and Spain were hovering along the English
coast, ready, at any favorable moment, to pounce upon her. The means of
public communication by railroad and telegraph were unknown. There were
few mails, and reliable information could not be readily or safely
obtained. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that strange
and exaggerated reports should have kept the public mind in a state of
great excitement and general consternation.
It was also, pre-eminently, an infidel age. Disrespect for the Bible and
the Christian religion prevailed among all classes. Hobbes, with his
scorpion tongue; Toland, with his papal-poisoned heart; Tindal, with his
infidel dagger concealed under a cloak of mingled popery and
Protestantism; Collins, with a heart full of deadly hate for
Christianity; Chubb, with his deistical insidiousness; and Shaftesbury,
with his platonic skepticism, hurled by wit and sarcasm--these, with
their corrupt associates, made that the infidel age of the world.
Christianity was everywhere held up to public reprobation and scorn.
It is true that Steele, Addison, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke, and Johnson
exposed the follies and sins of the times, but the character of these
efforts was generally more humorous and sarcastic than serious.
Occasionally they gave a sober rebuke of the religion of the day.
Berkeley attacked, with his keen logic and finished style, the skeptical
opinions which prevailed. Most of his articles were on the subject of
"Free Thinking." Johnson, the great moralist, stood up, it is said, "a
great giant to battle, with both hands against all error in religion,
whether in high places or low."
These men, and Young, with his vast religious pretentiousness, are said
to have walked in the garments of literary and social chastity; but
Swift, greater intellectually than any of them, and a high church
dignitary to boot, would have disgraced the license of the "Merry
Monarch's" court and outdone it in profanity. Even Dryden made the
literature of Charles II's age infamous for all time.
"Licentiousness was the open and shameless profession of the higher
classes in the days of Charles, and in the time of Anne it still
festered under the surface. Gambling was an almost universal practice
among men and women alike. Lords and ladies were skilled in knavery;
disgrace was not in cheating, but in being cheated. Both sexes were
given to profanity and drunkenness. Sarah Jennings, Duchess of
Marlborough, could swear more bravely than her husband could fight. The
wages of the poor were spent in guzzling beer, in wakes and fairs,
badger-baiting and cockfighting."[A] And yet the reign of Anne claims to
have been the golden age of English literature. It did show a polish on
the surface, but within it was "full of corruption and dead men's
bones."
[Illustration: AN UNUSUAL VIEW OF THE EPWORTH RECTORY.]
Added to this, the Church, which should have been the light of the
world, was in a most deplorable state. Irreligion and spiritual
indifference had taken possession of priest and people, and ministers
were sleeping over the threatened ruins of the Church, and, in too many
instances, were hastening, by their open infidelity, the day of its
ruin. The Established Church overtopped everything. She possessed great
power and little piety. Her sacerdotal robes had been substituted for
the garments of holiness; her Prayer Book had extinguished those
earnest, spontaneous soul-breathings which bring the burdened heart into
sympathetic union with the sympathizing Saviour. Spirituality had
well-nigh found a grave, from which it was feared there would be no
resurrection. Isaac Taylor says: "The Church had become an
ecclesiastical system, under which the people of England had lapsed into
heathenism;" and "Nonconformity had lapsed into indifference, and was
rapidly in a course to be found nowhere but in books." In France
hot-headed, rationalistic infidelity was invading the strongholds of the
Reformation, and French philosophers were spreading moral contagion
through Europe, which resulted in the French Revolution. The only thing
which saved England from the same catastrophe was the sudden rise of
Methodism, which, as one writer says, "laid hold of the lower classes
and converted them before they were ripe for explosion." When
preachers of the Gospel celebrated holy communion and preached to a
handful of hearers on Sabbath morning, and devoted the afternoon to
card-playing, and the rest of the week to hunting foxes, what else could
have been expected? It is doubtful if in any period of the history of
the Church the outlook had been darker.
The _North British Review_ says: "Never has a century risen on Christian
England so void of soul and faith; it rose a sunless dawn following a
dewless night. The Puritans were buried, and the Methodists were not
born." The Bishop of Lichfield said, in a sermon: "The Lord's day now is
the devil's market day. More lewdness, more drunkenness, more quarrels
and murders, more sin is conceived and committed, than on all the other
days of the week. Strong drink has become the epidemic distemper of the
city of London. Sin in general has become so hardened and rampant that
immoralities are defended, yea, justified, on principle. Every kind of
sin has found a writer to teach and vindicate it."
"The philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke; the moralist was Addison;
the minstrel was Pope; and the preacher was Atterbury. The world had an
idle, discontented look of a morning after some mad holiday."
Over this state of moral and religious apostasy a few were found who
made sad and bitter lamentations. Bishop Burnet was "filled with sad
thoughts." "The clergy," he said, "were under more contempt than those
of any other Church in Europe; for they were much more remiss in their
labors and least severe in their lives. I cannot look on," he says,
"without the deepest concern, when I see imminent ruin hanging over the
Church, and, by consequence, over the Reformation. The outward state of
things is black enough, God knows, but that which heightens my fears
arises chiefly from the inward state into which we are fallen."
Bishop Gibson gives a heart-saddening view of the matter: "Profaneness
and iniquity are grown bold and open." Bishop Butler declared the Church
to be "only a subject of mirth and ridicule." Guyes, a Nonconformist
divine, says that "preacher and people were content to lay Christ
aside." Hurrian, another Dissenter, sees "faith, joy, and Christian zeal
under a thick cloud." Bishop Taylor declares that "the spirit was
grieved and offended by the abominable corruption that abounded;" while
good Dr. Watts sings sadly of the "poor dying rate" at which the friends
of Jesus lived, saying: "I am well satisfied that the great and general
reason of this is the decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of
men, and the little success that the administration of the Gospel has
made of late in the conversion of sinners to holiness."
This was the state of the English Church, and of Dissenters as well, at
the opening of the eighteenth century. And well it might be when, as has
been said, the philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke, the moralist was
Addison, the minstrel was Pope, and the preacher was Atterbury. But when
darkness seems most dense the day-star of hope is near to rising.
On the 17th of June, 1703, was born in the obscure parish at Epworth, of
Samuel and Susannah Wesley, John Wesley, the subject of this sketch. He
was one of nineteen children. The names of fifteen have been recorded;
the others, no doubt, died in infancy. Of these fifteen, John was the
twelfth. He was born in the third year of the eighteenth century. His
long life of eighty-eight years covered eleven of the twelve years of
Queen Anne's reign, thirteen of that of George I, thirty-three of George
II, and more than thirty of George III. This remarkable child was to
more than revive the dead embers of the Reformation; he was chosen of
God to inaugurate a spiritual movement which was to fill the world with
the spirit of holy being and doing, and bring to the people ransomed by
Jesus, in every clime and of every race, "freedom to worship God."