CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE FIELDS.
It was field-preaching, preaching in the open air, which first gave
national distinctiveness to the Revival, and constituted it a movement.
Assuredly any occasions of excitement we have known, give no idea
whatever of the immense agitations which speedily rolled over the
country, from one end to the other, when these great revivalists began
their work in the fields. And the excitement continued, rolling on
through London, and through the counties of England, from the west to
the north, not for days, weeks, or months merely, but through long
years, until the religious life of the land was entirely rekindled, and
its morals and manners re-moulded; and all this, especially in its
origination, without money, no large sums being subscribed or guaranteed
to sustain the work. The work was done, not only without might or power,
but assuredly in the very teeth of the malevolence of might and of
power; nor is it too much to say that it probably would not have been
done, could not have been done, had the churches, chapels, and great
cathedrals been thrown open to the preachers.
It seems a singular thing to say, but we should speak of Whitefield as
the Luther of this Great Revival, and of Wesley as its Calvin. Both in
the quality of their work and in their relation in point of time, this
analogy is not so unnatural as it perhaps seems at first. The
impetuosity and passion, the vehemence and sleepless vigilance of
Whitefield first broke open the way; the calm, cautious, frequently even
nervously timid intelligence of Wesley organised the work.
How could a writer, in a recent number of the _Edinburgh Review_, say:
“It is a great mistake to complain, as so many do, that the Church cast
out the Wesleys. We have seen at the beginning how kindly, and even
cordially, they were treated by the leading members of the episcopate.”
Surely any history of Methodism contradicts this statement. Bishop
Benson, indeed, ordained Whitefield, but he bitterly lamented to the
Countess of Huntingdon that he had done so, attributing to him what
seemed to the Bishop the mischief of the evangelical movement. “My
lord,” said the Countess, “mark my words: when you are on your dying
bed, that will be one of the few ordinations you will reflect upon with
complaisance.”
The words were, in a remarkable degree, prophetic; when the Bishop was
on his death-bed he sent ten guineas to Mr. Whitefield as a token of his
“regard, veneration, and affection,” and begged the great field-preacher
to remember him in prayer. If the bishops were kind and cordial to the
first Methodists, they certainly took a singular way of dissembling
their love. For instance, Bishop Lavington, of Exeter, whose well-known
two volumes on Methodism are really a curiosity of episcopal scurrility,
was in a passion with everything that looked like Whitefieldism in his
diocese. Mr. Thomson, the Vicar of St. Gennys, was a dissipated
clergyman, a character of known immorality; he was a rich man, and not
dependent upon his vicarage. In the midst of his sinful life conscience
was arrested; he became converted; he countenanced and threw open his
pulpit to Mr. Whitefield; he became now as remarkable for his devout
life and fervent gospel preaching as he had been before for his
ungodliness. What made it all the worse was, that he was a man of real
genius. Now all his brethren in the ministry disowned him, and closed
their pulpits against him; and presently Bishop Lavington summoned him
to appear before him to answer the charges made against him by his
brethren for his Methodistical practices. “Sir,” said the Bishop, in the
course of conversation, “if you pursue these practices, and countenance
Whitefield, I will strip your gown from off you.” Mr. Thomson had on his
gown at the time—more frequently worn by ministers of the Church then
than now. To the amazement of the Bishop, Mr. Thomson exclaimed, “I will
save your lordship the trouble!” He took off his gown, dropped it at the
Bishop’s feet, saying, “My lord, I can preach without a gown!” and
before the Bishop could recover from his astonishment he was gone. This
was an instance, however, in which the Bishop was so decidedly in the
wrong that he sent for the vicar again, apologised to him; and the
circumstance, indeed, led to the entertainment by the Bishop of views
which were somewhat milder with reference to Methodism than those which
still give notoriety to his name.
[Illustration:
GEORGE WHITEFIELD.
]
Southey[5], in his certainly not impartial volumes, admits that, for the
most part, the condition of the clergy was dreadful; it is not wonderful
that they closed their churches against the innovators. There was, for
instance, the Vicar of Colne, the Rev. George White; when the preachers
came into his neighbourhood, it was his usual practice to call his
parishioners together by the beat of a drum, to issue a proclamation at
the market-cross, and enlist a mob for the defence of the Church against
the Methodists. Here is a copy of the proclamation, a curiosity in its
way: “Notice is hereby given that if any man be mindful to enlist in His
Majesty’s service, under the command of the Rev. Mr. George White,
Commander-in-Chief, and John Bannister, Lieutenant-General of His
Majesty’s forces for the defence of the Church of England, and the
support of the manufactory in and about Colne, both which are now in
danger, let him repair to the drumhead at the Cross, where each man
shall receive a pint of ale in advance, and all other proper
encouragements.” Such are some of the instances, which might be
multiplied to any extent, showing the reception given to the revivalists
by the clergy of the time. But let no reader suppose that, in reciting
these things, we are willingly dwelling upon facts not creditable to the
Church, or that we forget how many of her most admirable members have
made an abundant _amende honorable_ by their eulogies since; nor are we
forgetting that Nonconformist chapels, whose cold respectability of
service and theology were sadly outraged by the new teachers, were not
more readily opened than the churches were to men with whom the Word of
the Lord was as a fire, or as a hammer to break the rock in pieces.[6]
Whitefield soon felt his power. Immediately after his ordination, he in
some way became for a time an occasional supply at the chapel in the
Tower; he found a straggling congregation of twenty or thirty hearers;
after a service or two the place was overflowing, and remained so.
During his short residence in that neighbourhood the youth continued
throughout the whole week preaching to the soldiers, preaching to
prisoners, holding services on Sunday mornings for young men before the
ordinary service. He was still ostensibly at Oxford; a profitable living
was offered to him in London, and instantly declined. He went to
Gloucester, to Bristol, to Kingswood. Of course it is impossible to
follow Whitefield step by step through his career; we can only rapidly
bring out a crayon sketch of the chief features of his work. He made
voyages to Georgia; voyaging was no pastime in those days, and he spent
a great amount of time in transit to and fro on the seas; our business
with him is chiefly as the first field-preacher; and Kingswood, near
Bristol, appears to have been the first place where this great work was
to be tried. It was then, what it is still, a region of rough
collieries, the Black Country of the West; the people themselves were of
the roughest order. Whitefield spoke at Bristol, to some friends, of his
probable speedy embarkation to preach the Gospel among the Indians of
America; and they said to him, “What need of going abroad to do this?
Have we not Indians enough at home? If you have a mind to convert
Indians, there are colliers enough in Kingswood!” A savage race! As to
taking to the fields in this instance, it was simply a necessity; there
were no churches from whence the preacher could be ejected. Try to
realize it: the heathen society, indoctrinated only in brutal sports;
the rough, black labour only typical of the rough, black minds, the
rough, black souls. Surely he must have been a very brave man; nor was
he one at all of that order of apostles whose native roughness is well
fitted, it seems, to challenge roughness to civility.
Footnote 5:
Appendix E.
Footnote 6:
Appendix F.
Whitefield was a perfect gentleman, of manners most affectionate and
amiable; altogether the most unlikely creature, it seems, to rise
triumphant over the execrations of a mighty mob. The oratory of
Whitefield seems to us almost the greatest mystery in the history of
eloquence: his voice must have been wonderful; its strength was
overwhelming, but it was not a roar; its modulations and inflections
were equal to its strength, so that it had the all-commanding tones of a
bell in its clearness, and all the modulations of an organ in its
variety and sweetness. Kingswood only stands as a representative of
crowds of other such places, where savages fell before the enchantment
of his sweet music. Read any accounts of him, and it will be seen that
we do not exaggerate in speaking of him as the very Orpheus of the
pulpit. Assuredly, as it has been said Orpheus, by the power of his
music, drew trees, stones, the frozen mountain-tops, and the floods to
bow to his melody, so men, “stockish, hard, and full of rage,” felt a
change pass over their nature, as they came under the spell of
Whitefield. Yet, perhaps, he would not have gone to Kingswood had he not
been inhibited from preaching in the Bristol churches. He had preached
in St. Mary Redcliff, and the following day had preached opening sermons
in the parish church of SS. Philip and Jacob, and then he was called
before the Chancellor of the diocese, who asked him for his licence by
which he was permitted to preach in that diocese. Whitefield said he was
an ordained minister of the Church of England, and as to the special
licence, it was obsolete. “Why did you not ask,” he said, “for the
licence of the clergyman who preached for you last Thursday?” The
Chancellor replied, “That is no business of yours.” Whitefield said,
“There is a canon forbidding clergymen to frequent taverns and play at
cards, why is that not enforced?” The Chancellor evaded this, but
charged Whitefield with preaching false doctrine; Whitefield replied
that he preached what he knew to be the truth, and he would continue to
preach. “Then,” said the Chancellor, “I will excommunicate you!” The end
of it was that all the city churches were shut against him. “But,” he
says, “if they were all open, they would not contain half the people who
come to hear. So at three in the afternoon I went to Kingswood among the
colliers.” Whitefield laid his case in a very respectful letter, before
the Bishop, but on he went. As to Kingswood, tears poured down the black
faces of the colliers; the great audiences are described as being
drenched in tears. Whitefield himself was in a passion of tears. “How
can I help weeping,” he said to them, “when you have not wept for
yourselves?” And they began to weep. Thus in 1739 began the mighty work
at Kingswood, which has been a great Methodist colony from that day to
this. That was a good morning’s work for the cause of Christ when the
Chancellor shut the doors of the churches of Bristol against the brave
and beautiful preacher, and threatened to excommunicate him. Was it not
said of old, “Thou makest the wrath of man to praise Thee”?
Now, then, see him girt and road-ready; we might be sure that the
example of the Chancellor of Bristol would be pretty generally followed.
The old ecclesiastical corporations set themselves in array against him;
but how futile the endeavour! Their canons and rubrics were like the
building of hedges to confine an eagle, and they only left him without a
choice—without any choice but to fulfil his instinct for souls, and to
soar. Other “little brief authorities,” mayors, aldermen, and such like,
issued their fulminations. Coming to Basingstoke, the mayor, one John
Abbott, inhibited him. John Abbott seems to have been a burly butcher.
The intercourse and correspondence between the two is very humorously
characteristic; but, although it gives an insight as to the antagonism
which frequently awaited Whitefield, it is too long to quote in this
brief sketch. The butcher-mayor was coarse and insolent; Whitefield
never lost his sweet graciousness; writing to abusive butchers or
abusive bishops, as in his reply to Lavington, he never lost his temper,
never indulged in satire, never exhibits any great marks of genius,
writes straight to the point, simply vindicates himself and his course,
never retracts, never apologises, goes straight on.
There is no other instance of a preacher who was so equally at home and
equally impressive and commanding in the most various and dissimilar
circles and scenes; it is significant of the notice he excited that his
name occurs so frequently in the correspondence of that cold and
heartless man and flippant sneerer, Horace Walpole, whose allusions to
him are usually disgraceful; but so it was, he was equally commanding in
the polished and select circles of the drawing-room, surrounded by dukes
and duchesses, great statesmen and philosophers, or in the large old
tabernacle or parish church, surrounded by more orderly and saintly
worshippers, or in nature’s vast and grand cathedrals, with twenty or
thirty thousand people around him.
From the day when he went to Kingswood, we may run a rapid eye along the
perspective of his career—in fields, on heaths, and on commons, it was
the same everywhere; from his intense life we might find many scenes for
description: take one or two. On the breast of the mountain, the trees
and hedges full of people, hushed to profound silence, the open
firmament above him, the prospect of adjacent fields—the sight of
thousands on thousands of people; some in coaches, some on horseback,
and all affected, or drenched in tears. Sometimes evening approaches,
and then he says, “Beneath the twilight it was too much for me, and
quite overcame me.” There was one night never to be forgotten. While he
was preaching it lightened exceedingly; his spirit rose on the tempest;
his voice tolled out the doom and decay hanging over all nature; he
preached the warnings and the consolations of the coming of the Son of
man. The thunder broke over his head, the lightning shone along the
preacher’s path, it ran along the ground in wild glares from one part of
heaven to the other; the whole audience shook like the leaves of a
forest in the wind, whilst high amidst the thunders and the lightnings,
the preacher’s voice rose, exclaiming, “Oh; my friends, the wrath of
God! the wrath of God!” Then his spirit seemed to pass serenely right
through the tempest, and he talked of Christ, who swept the wrath away;
and then he told how he longed for the time when Christ should be
revealed, amidst the flaming fire, consuming all natural things. “Oh,”
exclaimed he, “that my soul may be in a like flame when He shall come to
call me!” Can we realize what his soul must have been who could burn
with such seraphic ardours in the midst of such scenes?
[Illustration:
WHITEFIELD PREACHING IN LONDON.
]
So he opened the way everywhere, by his field-preaching, for John
Wesley. Truly it has been said, “Whitefield, and not Wesley, is the
prominent figure in the opening of the Methodist movement;” and the time
we must assign to this first popular agitation is the winter of 1738-39.
The two men were immensely different. To Whitefield the preaching was no
light work; it was not talking. After one of his sermons, drenched
through, he would lie down, spent, sobbing, exhausted, death-like: John
Wesley, after one of his most effective sermons, in which he also had
shaken men’s souls, would just quietly mount his little pony, and ride
off to the next village or town, reading his book as he went, or
stopping by the way to pluck curious flowers or simples from the hedges;
the poise of their spirits was so different. All great movements need
two men, Moses and Aaron; the prophet Elijah must go before, “to restore
all things.” Whitefield lived in the immediate neighbourhood and
breathed the air of essential truth; Wesley looked at men, and saw how
all remained undone until the work took coherency and shape. As he says,
“I was convinced that preaching like an apostle, without joining
together those that are awakened, and training them up in the ways of
God, is only begetting children for the murderer.” Whitefield preached
like an apostle; the scenes we have described appear charming rural
scenes, in which men’s hearts were bowed and hushed before him; but
there were widely different scenes when he defied the devil, and sought
to win his victims away, even in fairs and wakes—the most wild and
dissolute periodical pests and nuisances of the age. Rough human nature
went down before him, as in the instance of the man who came with heavy
stones to pelt him, and suddenly found his hands as it were tied, and
himself in tears, and, at the close, went up to the preacher, and said,
“I came here only to break your head, and you have broken my heart!”
But the roughs of London seem to have been worse than the roughs of
Kingswood; and we cannot wonder that men like Walpole, and even polite
and refined religious men, thought that a man who could go right into
St. Bartholomew’s Fair, in Moorfields, and Finsbury, take his station
among drummers, trumpeters, merry-andrews, harlequins, and all kinds of
wild beasts, must be “mad”; it must have seemed the height of
fanaticism, like preaching to a real Gadarene swinery. All the
historians of the movement—Sir James Stephen, Dr. Abel Stevens, Dr.
Southey, Isaac Taylor, and others, recite with admiration the story of
the way in which he wrestled successfully with the merry-andrews. He
began to preach at six o’clock in the morning; stones, dirt, rotten eggs
were hurled at him. “My soul was among lions,” he says; but the
marvellous voice overcame, and he went on speaking, and we know how
tenderly he would speak to them, of their own miseries, and the dangers
of their own sins; the great multitude—it was between twenty and thirty
thousand—“became like lambs;” he finished, went away, and, in the wilder
time—in the afternoon—he came again. In the meantime there had been
organisations to put him down: here was a man with a long heavy whip to
strike the preacher; there was a recruiting sergeant who had been
engaged with drum and fife to interrupt him. As he appeared on the
outskirts of the crowd, Whitefield, who well knew how to catch the
humour of the people too, exclaimed, “Make way for the king’s officer!”
and the mob divided, while, to his surprise, the recruiting officer,
with his drum, found himself immediately beneath Whitefield; it was easy
to manage him now. The crowd around roared like wild beasts; it must
have been a tremendous scene. Will it be believed—it seems
incredible—that he continued there, preaching, praying, singing, until
the night fell? He won a decided victory, and the next day received no
fewer than a thousand notes from persons, “brands plucked from the
burning,” who spoke of the convictions through which they had passed,
and implored the preacher to remember them in his prayers.
This was in Moorfields, in which neighbourhood since, the followers both
of Wesley and of Whitefield have found their tabernacles and most
eminent fields of usefulness. Many have attempted fair-preaching since
Whitefield’s day, but not, we believe, with much success; it needs a
remarkable combination of powers to make such efforts successful.
Whitefield was able to attempt to outbid the showmen, merry-andrews, and
harlequins, and he succeeded. No wonder they called him a fanatic; he
might have said, “If we be beside ourselves, it is for God, that by all
means we may save some!”
But what we have been especially desirous that our readers should note
is, that these more vehement manifestations of Methodism were not the
result of any methodised plan, but were a simple yielding to, and taking
possession of circumstances; it was as if “the Spirit of the Lord” came
down upon the leaders, and “carried them whither they knew not.”
* * * * *
[For an account of Whitefield’s labours in America, and the spread of
the Great Revival there, the reader is referred to the supplemental
chapter at the end of this volume.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------