England. He helped to save England from the horrors of the French
Revolution." This is not a careless pronouncement, nor an instance of
biographical exaggeration. Born in 1703, belonging to the era just
preceding the French Revolution, John Wesley, with his fifty years among
the working people of Great Britain, changed the thinking of his time.
The eighteenth century was a coarse age; Carlyle summarized it in a
single biting phrase: "soul extinct; stomach well alive." The pictures
of Hogarth, the journals of Wesley, and the _History of Great Criminals_
prove that there was at least a basis for Carlyle's bitterness. Dr.
Johnson, in his _Dictionary_, defines a pension as "pay given to a
street hireling for treason to his country." Burke describes the British
Secretary of State as "the greatest drunkard and most unlucky gambler of
his age." Walpole portrays cabinet ministers and statesmen reeling into
the ferry-boat of Charon at forty-five, worn out with drunkenness and
gout. In his pictures of Beer Street and Gin Lane, Hogarth sketches the
drunkenness and filth of the London that he calls "the city of gallows,"
with a street that was a lane of gibbets, where the corpses of felons
hung. Hume and Walpole both prophesied an inevitable revolution, with
corpses that would be piled up as barricades "in front of human beasts
who fought with the ferocity of tigers." But at the very moment when
France was seething with revolt, across in England, in Newcastle and
Moorfields, thousands of grimy miners were assembled, now weeping in
penitence, now singing hymns of praise to God. When the spirit of
destruction swept over Europe, Wesley's revival had done its work, and
its influence held the people of England back from the horrors of the
guillotine in Paris. It is for this reason that historians rank John
Wesley in terms of abiding influence, above Pitt, Wellington and Nelson.
In _Adam Bede_, George Eliot, the great novelist, describes with the
minuteness of an eye-witness an open-air revival meeting among the early
Methodists of England. Her heroine, Dinah Morris, relates the incident
in the following words: "It was on just such a sort of evening as this,
when I was a little girl, and my aunt took me to hear a good man preach
out-of-doors, just as we are here. I remember his face well; he was a
very old man, and had very long, white hair, his voice was very soft and
beautiful, not like any voice I had ever heard before. I was a little
girl, and scarcely knew anything, and this old man seemed to me such a
different sort of man from anybody I had ever seen before, that I
thought that he had perhaps come down from the skies to preach to us,
and I said, 'Aunt, will he go back into the sky to-night, like the
picture in the Bible?'" . . . That man of God was John Wesley, who had
spent a lifetime going up and down the land, doing good. He had preached
from fifteen to twenty times a week for fifty years--in all, over forty
thousand times. In this, his sixty-second year, he was to preach eight
hundred times. He had ridden nearly two hundred and fifty thousand
miles; and in his long preaching tours through Ireland he had crossed
the Channel forty times. The poor had lost their heart to him. The
ignorant, the outcast, the collier and clerk alike, all pressed and
thronged about this saintly figure, with his beautiful face, his clear
eyes, his musical voice, who never tired of telling people, "God is
love; Christ is love; and religion is life, as it is the happiest, so it
is the cheerfullest thing in the world."
It is written of Moses that his hands were held up by two friends, Aaron
and Hur. Not otherwise John Wesley was supported on either side by two
great comrades,--Whitefield, the evangelist, and his own brother,
Charles Wesley. If any man ever had the gift of eloquence and oratory,
it was George Whitefield. At twenty-one years of age Whitefield received
orders, and within a single year he was England's first preacher in
point of hearers. His warmest friends may have overpraised this
evangelist, but his harshest critics concede that he had the most
musical, carrying voice that ever issued from a speaker's throat. During
his career he wrote some sixty sermons, but he preached them over and
over again, eighteen thousand times. Within a single week he spoke on an
average of forty hours. There is nothing in his sermons, as they have
come down to us, to explain their marvellous transforming influence, but
Whitefield had the vision of the seer, saw heaven and hell as clearly as
he saw the world around him, and could make men see and feel what he
himself experienced. Benjamin Franklin heard Whitefield preach in
Philadelphia, and was carried away by the personality of the preacher,
whose luminous eyes, matchless voice, and transfigured face stirred the
men of the Quaker City as if he were the angel Gabriel.
Charles Wesley, like George Whitefield, was an evangelist who preached
constantly in the open air, to multitudes of fifteen to twenty
thousand people. He was without the iron strength of Whitefield, but
for fifteen years he did preach once a day, and sometimes two and
three times. He lacked Whitefield's organ voice, and the strange
mystic, magical charm of his brother John, but his sentences were
short, with the swiftness of bullets, and he was a most persuasive
orator. The fact was, Charles Wesley's emotions were often beyond his
powers of control. He pled with men with tears running down his
cheeks; his voice shook and quavered; he melted men until their hearts
were like water. Often, in the midst of his sermon, he broke into
song. In theory he was a high-churchman, but in practice he was a
nonconformist, who ordained laymen to the ministry. He was a little
man, short-sighted, quick to resent a wrong, loyal in friendship, most
lovable, full of faults, and full of sorrow by reason of his faults,
an inspired singer of hymns; but he lacked the order, the organizing
gift, the iron purpose and the unyielding will of his brother John.
Far greater than either Whitefield or Charles Wesley was the brother,
preacher, statesman, theologian, scholar, and evangelist. John Wesley
outlived Whitefield by thirty, and his brother Charles, by four years.
If Whitefield preached eighteen thousand times, this amazing man
preached forty-two thousand, four hundred times and within fifty-one
years. His comrades broke down, his friends passed away, bitter
opposition developed, the doors of the churches were closed against
him but Wesley's zeal "burned long, burned undimmed, burned when even
the fire of life turned to ashes." For fifty years he not only
preached, but published seven volumes a year. He did an enormous work
as author and publisher. In the interests of the poor he was the first
man to publish cheap literature, and he brought many wise books within
the reach of colliers and peasants. He wrote a volume on household
medicine; simple books on grammar, style, good health and history. He
translated the writings of other authors, and abridged works that were
beyond the poor man's purse. The germ of the modern lecture system,
social settlement work, night-schools, and the shelter-houses of
General Booth, are all in Wesley's work. He accomplished an incredible
amount as author, publisher, educator, and organizer of social and
political reforms. His _Journal_, covering a period of fifty-four
years, and existing to-day in the shape of twenty-one beautifully
written volumes, has been called "the most amazing record of human
exertion ever penned."
This personal _Journal_ of John Wesley deserves a place among the few
great journals of the world. There are only two other eighteen century
volumes worthy to be spoken of in the same breath:--Walpole's _Letters_
and Boswell's _Johnson_. Horace Walpole was the rich idler, the male
butterfly, who lived for pleasure and position, and in his gossiping
letters embalmed for later generations "all the lords and ladies, the
rakes and flirts, the fools and spendthrifts, the gossip and scandal of
a rich man's career." Dr. Johnson stands for manliness, independence,
courage, robust common sense. His chief interests in life were
literature and politics, and Boswell says that he divided society into
two classes, Whigs who were to be cudgelled and scourged, and Tories who
were to be admired and praised. But Wesley's _Journal_ is upon a far
higher level. His spirit is not that of curiosity, as was Walpole's, nor
of vehement resentment and personal preferences, as was Johnson's. It is
that of a passionate and divine pity. He possessed an overpowering sense
of the value of men apart from their position, their politics, their
knowledge or ignorance, their poverty or wealth; he saw them as God sees
them. And the result is a work far sweeter and finer than either of the
two famous volumes just considered.
Wonderful the picture of serenity and strength given us in these
intimate, vivid pages. The story of a single day is the story of the
whole fifty years. Wesley rose at four o'clock, read his devotional
books until five, preached in the open air to the colliers who had to go
to their tasks at half-past six. After breakfast at seven, he mounted
his horse; drew rein for a few minutes from time to time to read a page
in some book that he was analyzing; after twenty or thirty miles' ride,
preached in a public square or some churchyard at noon; dismissed his
hearers at one o'clock that they might return to their work; rode
rapidly, often twenty miles, to his next appointment, where he preached
at five; after supper, when the evening twilight fell, preached again,
holding a service that often lasted until nine or even ten o'clock.
During the half century, Wesley worked along the lines of a triangle,
westward from London to Bristol, north by Liverpool and Carlisle to
Newcastle; then back to London through the towns of the east coast of
England. His preaching tours followed the lines of England's
industrial centers. He worked where the population was thickest. He
loved the mining districts, where two or three thousand men would
assemble for him at almost any hour of the day. The falling rain
never disturbed him, the rough roads seemed to bring no tire. He loved
crowds, and noise and excitement did not seem to wear upon his
strength. Apparently there was not a tired or sore nerve in his
wonderful little body. An entry in his journal speaks of having
travelled that day ninety miles, and not being in the least tired,
although he seems to have preached three times. "Many a rough journey
have I had before," says the _Journal_, "but one like this I never
had, between wind and rain, ice and snow, and driving sleet and
piercing cold. But it is past; those days will return no more, and are
therefore as though they had never been." His appointments were often
made a fortnight in advance. His journals are filled with pictures of
deep snow, dripping skies, bitter northwest winds.
What is the secret of Wesley's greatness, and how did he ever endure
such labour? The hidings of his power are in his wonderful ancestry.
Long after Samuel Wesley's death, the son found in the garret of the
old rectory a manuscript of his father's, with a scheme of world-wide
evangelization which became a chart for the son, who said, "the world
is my parish." The mother, Susannah, was possessed of so many gifts
that her son felt that to have fallen heir to her mental and moral
treasures was, in itself, a gift of God. Gibbon described his tutor in
Oxford as a "man who remembered that he had a salary to receive and
forgot that he had a duty to perform."
John Wesley had the opposite theory of life. At seventeen, going to
Oxford he won distinction as a scholar of the finest classical taste,
of the most liberal and manly sentiments, and one of the finest men of
his time. Elected a Fellow of Lincoln College when thirty-two years of
age, appointed lecturer in Greek, carrying on his own studies in
Arabic and Hebrew, in poetry and oratory, young Wesley wrote in his
_Journal_ a sentence that describes the next sixty years of his life:
"Leisure and I have taken leave of each other." It was true of him in
middle life, and it was to be true of him to the day of his death.
During the critical years when Wesley was educating himself, his
favourite books were the _Imitation of Christ_, by Thomas à Kempis,
Jeremy Taylor's _Purity of Intention_, and William Law's masterpiece,
_Serious Call_. It was while he was in Oxford that he formed the habit
of reading for one hour before he outlined the duties of the day. Then
came the two years' visit to the United States, his brief ministry in
Georgia, his friendship with the Moravians, and that golden hour on
May 24, 1738, when he went with Peter Böehler and passed through an
experience like that of Paul on the road to Damascus, that has been
described by the critical historian Lecky,--"It is scarcely an
exaggeration to say that the scene which took place at that humble
meeting in Aldersgate Street forms an epoch in English history." But
it is a striking fact that Wesley's real work did not begin until he
had reached full middle life. It was under the influence of George
Whitefield, the greatest pulpit orator England has produced, that
Wesley went to Bristol and under pressure by Whitefield, consented to
speak in the open air to some three thousand people, gathered about a
little eminence. Few careers offer greater encouragement and
inspiration to the man who at middle-age has yet to find himself.
And what was the secret of his incredible strength? The secret is very
simple. During each day he kept two or three little islands of silence
and solitude for himself, betwixt the sermons and crowds. He learned
how to read books on horseback. He never hurried, and never worried.
He preached with physical restraint, so that public speech became a
form of physical exercise, a life-giving kind of gymnastics. He
learned how to breathe, so that speaking three, or four and five hours
a day did not injure his vocal cords. Morley, in his _Life of
Gladstone_, says that at Gravesend, Gladstone spoke for two hours to
an audience of twenty thousand, and his biographer declares that
physically and intellectually, that speech was the greatest of Mr.
Gladstone's career. Gladstone was sixty-two years old when he
performed that feat, which is unique in his career. Wesley's journal
is filled with records like this:--
Sunday, August 10, 1786. Preached in the churchyard to large
congregations.
Preached at one P. M. to twenty thousand.
At five o'clock to another such congregation.
All at the utmost stretch of my voice.
But my strength was as my day.
Seven years later, August 23, 1773, his journal holds this record:
Preached at Gwennap Pit to above 32,000, perhaps the first time that a
man of seventy had been heard by 30,000 persons.
Fitchett says that Wesley's voice must have far outranged Gladstone's.
The people all stood closely packed together. At Bristol, after the
audience had gone, one man measured the ground from Wesley's stand to
the outskirts of the audience and found it to be 420 feet. For this
reason his biographers say that Wesley preached more sermons, rode
more miles, worked more hours, printed more books, and influenced more
lives than any Englishman of his age, or _any_ age. In 1773 he writes,
"I am seventy-three years old, and far abler to preach than I was at
twenty-three." Ten years later, the old man writes, "I have entered
into the eighty-third year of my age. I am never tired, either with
preaching, writing or travelling." And yet his emotions had tremendous
intensity. He held thousands of miners in breathless silence for an
hour and a half at a time. When he was ill, he exclaimed that if he
could only go into the pulpit for two hours, and have a good sweat he
thought he might recover. His secret of health was "a little more
work." That was the tonic that cured worry and dissipated all clouds.
The moral courage of John Wesley is one of the wonderful spectacles of
history. He lived in a brutal, cruel century. The crowds did not stop
with jeers, oaths, vulgar epithets. It was a time when disputes were
marked by all the savagery of a Spanish bull-fight. Wesley gives the
details of these persecutions and without complaint. The period
between June 1743, and February 1744, was particularly trying. An
organized movement was carried on to intimidate the people from
following Wesley. In several cities the Methodists were beaten and
plundered by a rabble that broke into their houses, destroyed their
victuals and goods, threatened their lives, and abused their women.
During that winter Wesley received many blows, occasionally lost part
of his clothing and was often covered with dirt. Meanwhile, enemies
went on in advance to sow the towns with wild scandals, and stir up
strife and storm, but Wesley went on building churches, developing
schools, training lay preachers, organizing his people to take care of
the class during his absence.
Wesley was a scholar, and prepared his sermons with the greatest care.
He was also a flaming evangelist, and therefore was freed from what
Robertson of Brighton describes as "the treadmill necessity of being
always ready twice a week with earnest thoughts on solemn themes."
Like Beecher, Wesley was not afraid of repeating his sermons. Like
Wendell Phillips, he thought a lecturer was never in shape until he
had one hundred nights of delivery back of him. Having heard a good
man say, "Once in seven years I burn all my sermons," Wesley answered,
"I cannot write a better sermon on the Good Steward than I did seven
years ago; I cannot write a better on the Great Assize than I did
twenty years ago; I cannot write a better on the use of money than I
did thirty years ago."
As an orator, Wesley had many wonderful gifts. Not a large man, he was
compact and strong, with nerves of silk and sinews of steel. In
moments of impassioned speech he seemed to tower and take on the
dimensions of a giant. His portraits show him to have been a man of
fine figure, and beautiful face, with firm lips, mobile and sensitive,
eyes bright and kindly. His complexion was very beautiful, fair, clear
and somewhat ruddy. His forehead was broad, and beautifully curved.
His voice was called the finest instrument of its kind in England,
always saving that of Whitefield. During his college days he made a
reputation as an accurate scholar, and a keen and skillful logician.
All his life long he retained his analytic method, and was always
working upon his sermons. He was a master of keen, arrowy sentences.
His sermons abound in short paragraphs. His illustrations are simple,
but so perfectly related to his thought, that they become a part of
the argument itself. The chief characteristic of his style is its
clearness. He excelled in the searching force of the application, and
tested the result of each address by the number of hearers whom he had
persuaded to change their lives at a given moment.
Little by little he developed a kingly authority. He carried the
atmosphere of gentle supremacy. "How did you know that Theseus was a
god?" The answer was: "I recognized Apollo by his speech; Mars by his
thunderbolts; Minerva by her wisdom, but I knew that Theseus was a
god, because whatsoever he did, whether he sat, or whether he walked
or whatsoever he did, he conquered." John Wesley was a natural king,
ruling men by the divine right of moral supremacy. One day a mob
threatened to tear him in pieces. "I called," Wesley writes, "for a
chair. Suddenly the winds were hushed, and all was calm and still; my
heart was filled with love; my eyes with tears; my mouth with
arguments. The leaders were amazed; they were ashamed; they were
melted down; they devoured every word." At the end of the sermon the
leader, who held a stone in his hand, with which to strike Wesley,
seemed transformed. He turned to his followers and shouted, "If any
man dares to lift a hand against Mr. Wesley he will have to reckon
with me first!" Those who came to curse remained to pray.
Wesley has had scores of biographers, and every one of them seems to
have emphasized the happiness and the serene cheerfulness of his daily
life. If there ever lived a man who dwelt in constant sunshine, and
maintained unbroken tranquillity and peace amidst endless storm and
tumult, that man was John Wesley. He cared nothing about a great
house, servants, equipage, money. It is said that the profits of his
various publications were about $150,000, but he gave this money away
as fast as it came in. He discovered the simple life long before
Pastor Wagner. He ate sparingly, cared nothing for rich foods or
costly raiment. He loved the temperate zone, far removed alike from
luxury and poverty. He never wrote a creed. In welcoming a member into
his company he asked two questions, "Is thine heart right? If it be,
give me thine hand. Dost thou love and serve God? It is enough. I give
thee the right hand of fellowship." In that spirit, when members of
other churches came to him he bade them keep their own creed if only
"they did love and serve God, and desired to save souls."
And so his work spread into every land. Asbury, the great pioneer, rode
his horse to and fro over the Alleghany Mountains, preaching in hundreds
of settlements between the Atlantic Coast and the Mississippi River.
Simpson, with his unrivalled eloquence, travelled from state to state
for forty years, founding churches, charging class leaders, consecrating
lay preachers, placing the torch in the hand of some gifted youth, and
sending him out to light a thousand other tapers. Taylor made his way
across India with its three hundred millions, and in every cannibal
island in the South Seas and along the path through the jungles of
Africa, went the followers of Wesley. It is a wonderful story. For the
man who counted himself the friend of all the churches and the enemy of
none "has liberalized, broadened and sweetened every Christian faith."
The year 1741 brought the beginning of Wesley's plan of world
evangelization. He saw that the millions of the human race would never
be reached by a handful of preachers. He tells us that it was as if a
veil had fallen from his eyes, after which he saw clearly that Jesus
used lay disciples, both men and women, for the spread of His life and
teaching. Holding a candle in his hand, Wesley lighted another
candle, and watched the flame leap from taper to taper. He organized
each group of one hundred converts into a class and pledged them to
come together in a meeting, when each disciple was to tell the story
of what the living Christ had done for him. He saw that merchants
advertised their cotton and their woollen goods; that manufacturers
went everywhither telling other men the advantages of the new loom, or
locomotive; and instead of having one minister to confess Christ
before five hundred dumb hearers, Wesley conceived the idea of
dedicating each of the five hundred hearers, not to dumbness but to
full speech, and to send them forth, from house to house, and mine to
mine, and school to school.
Scientists tell us that the Gulf Stream, made up of individual drops
of water, each of which has been warmed by the tropic sun, bathes
England and turns a land that is as far north as Labrador into a land
of fruit and flowers. And from that hour, if other churches had one
minister, to five hundred disciples, Wesley dedicated laymen and
laywomen to the task of going forth into all the world to tell the
story of the love of God to sinful men.
The movement he started is still advancing in the world. It was Wesley
who gave the impulse to Wilberforce, the emancipator, to Howard, the
prison reformer, to Livingstone, the missionary, to the Booths with
their work for the submerged classes. Above any other man in modern
times he made it plain to the miner, the peasant, and the criminal, that
they must achieve eminence through penitence and obedience, love and
self-sacrificing service. Having turned multitudes to righteousness, his
name now shines like the brightness of the firmament, and will continue
to shine like the stars for ever and ever.
John Wesley mastered another secret--he knew how to die gloriously. In
his last hours, Moody, the evangelist, turned with smiles to a friend,
and whispered, "They were all wrong. There is no valley, and no
shadow." Wesley died with that memorable word upon his lips, "The best
of all is, God is with us." He preached his last sermon on February
23, 1791. His last letter was addressed to Wilberforce, and was a
protest against the horrors of slavery. A few weeks before, he had
given the first five days of the new year to the task of walking
through the streets of London, soliciting alms for the relief of the
poor. In those days his appearance in the street was the signal for
all passers-by to uncover. Men revered him as a noble saint. He died
singing, in the spirit of serene happiness and outbreaking joy:
"_I'll praise my Maker while I've breath_
_And when my voice is lost in death,_
_Praise shall employ my nobler powers._"
Great was the power of the soldier, Napoleon; wonderful the genius of
his opponent Wellington, the victor; marvellous the influence of Pitt,
with his vision of the expansion of England as a world power; but more
wonderful, a thousand times, the influence of John Wesley, carried to
his grave by six very poor men, but whose work is memorable, whose
influence is immortal, and whose spirit is inshrined in the hearts of
millions of his grateful followers.
VII
GARIBALDI
(1807-1882)
_The Idol of the New Italy_