BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS.
The preceding chapters have shown that the Great Revival was creating
over the wild moral wastes of England a pure and spiritual atmosphere,
and its movements and organisations were taking root in every direction.
Voltaire, and that pedantic cluster of conceited infidels, the
Bolingbrokes, Middletons, and Mandevilles, Chubbs, Woolstons, and
Collinses, who prophesied that Christian faith was fast vanishing from
the earth, were slightly premature. It is, indeed, interesting to notice
the contrast in this period between England and the then most unhappy
sister-kingdom of France: there, indeed, Christian faith did seem to be
trodden underfoot of men. While a great silent, hallowed revolution was
going on in one, all things were preparing for a tremendous revolution
in the other. It was just about the time that the Revival was leavening
English society that Lord Chesterfield summed up what he had noticed in
France, in the following words: “In short, all the symptoms which I have
ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in
government, now exist and daily increase in France.” The words were
spoken several years before that terrible Revolution came, which
conducted the King, the Queen, and almost all the aristocracy,
respectability, and lingering piety of the nation to the scaffold. It
was a wonderful compensation. A few years before, a sovereign had cast
away from his nation, and from around his throne, all the social
elements which could guard and give dignity to it; how natural, then,
that the whole _canaille_ of the kingdom should rush upon the throne of
his successor, and cast it and its occupant into the bonfire of the
Reign of Terror!
In Britain, from some cause, all was different. This period of the
Revival has been truly called the starting-point of the modern religious
history of that land; and, somehow, all things were singularly combining
to give to the nation a new-born happiness, to create new facilities for
mental growth and culture, and to enlarge and to fill their cup of
national joy. It will be noticed that these things did not descend to
the nation generally from the highest places of the land. With the
exception of the sovereign, we cannot see many instances of a lively
interest in the moral well-being of the people. Other exceptions there
were, but they were very few. From the people themselves, and from the
causes we have described, originated and spread those means which,
amidst the wild agitations of revolution, as they came foaming over the
Channel, and which were rather aided than repressed by the unwisdom of
many of the governments and magistrates, calmed and enlightened the
public mind, and secured the order of society, and the stability of the
throne.
The historians of Wesleyanism—we will say it respectfully, but still
very firmly—have been too uniformly disposed to see in their own society
the centre and the spring of all those amazing means of social
regeneration to which the period of the Revival gave birth. Dr. Abel
Stevens specially seems to regard Methodism and Wesleyanism as
conterminous. It would seem from him that the work of the
printing-office, the book or the tract society, schools and missions,
and the various means of social amelioration or redemption, all have
their origin in Wesleyanism. We may give the largest honour to the
venerable name of Wesley, and accept this history by Dr. Stevens as the
best, yet as an American he did not fully know what had been done by
others not in the Connexion. There was an immense field of Methodism
which did not fall beneath the dominion of Wesley, and had no relation
to the Wesleyan Conference. The same spirit touched simultaneously many
minds, quite separated by ecclesiastical and social relations, but all
wrought up to the same end. These pages have been greatly devoted to
reminiscences of the great preachers, and illustrations of the preaching
power of the Revival, but our readers know that the Revival did not end
in preaching. These voices stirred the slumbering mind of the nation
like a thunder-peal, but they roused to work and practical effort. The
great characteristic of all that came out of the movement may be summed
up in the often-quoted expression, “A single eye to the glory of God.”
As one of the clergymen of Yorkshire, earnest and active in those times,
was wont to say, “I do love those one-eyed Christians.”
We shall have occasion to mention the name of Robert Raikes, and that
name reminds us not only of Gloucester, but of Gloucestershire; many
circumstances gave to that most charming county a conspicuous place.
Lying in the immediate neighbourhood of Bath, it attracted the attention
of the Countess of Huntingdon. “As sure as God is in Gloucestershire,”
was an old proverb, first used in monastic days, then applied to the
Reformation time, when Tyndale, the first translator of the English New
Testament, had his home in the lovely village of North Nibley; but it
became yet more true when Whitefield preached to the immense concourses
on Stinchcombe Hill; when Rodborough and Ebley, and the valley of the
Stroud Water were lit up with Revival beacons, and when Rowland Hill
established his vicarage at Wotton-under-Edge; then, in its immediate
neighbourhood, arose that beautiful Christian worker, the close friend
of George Whitefield, Cornelius Winter; and from his labours came forth
his most eminent pupil, and great preacher, William Jay.
And the Revival took effect on distinct circles which certainly seemed
outside of the Methodist movement, but which yet, assuredly, belonged to
it; the Clapham Sect, for instance. “The Clapham Sect” is a designation
originating in the facetious and satiric brain of Sydney Smith, than
whom the Revival never had a more unjust, ungenerous, or ungracious
critic; but the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_, in which the flippant
sting of speech first appeared, years afterwards consecrated the term
and made it historical in the elegant essay of Sir James Stephen. By his
pen the sect, with all its leaders, acts, and consequences, are
pleasantly described in the _Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography_; and
surely this was as much the result of the Great Revival as the
“evangelical succession” which calls forth the exercise in previous
pages of the same interesting pen; it was all a natural evangelical
succession, that of which we have spoken before, as enthusiasm for
humanity growing out of enthusiasm for Divine truth. Men who have become
fairly impressed by a sense of their own immortality and its redemption
in Christ, become interested in the temporal well-being and the eternal
welfare of others. It has always been so, and is so still, that men who
have not a sense of man’s immortal welfare have usually cared but little
about his temporal interests. Hospitals and churches, orphanages and
missionary societies, usually grow out of the same spiritual root.
We scarcely need ask our readers to accompany us to the pleasant little
village of Clapham, and its sweet sequestered Common, then so far
removed from the great metropolis; surrounded by the homes of wealthy
men, merchants, statesmen, eminent preachers, all of them infected with
the spirit of the Revival, and all of them noteworthy in the story of
those means which were to shiver the chains of the slave, to carry light
to dark heathen minds, and to hand out the Bible to English villages and
far-off nations. We have been desirous of conveying the impression that
those were times of a singular and almost simultaneous spiritual
upheaval; it was as if, in different regions of the great lake of
humanity, submerged islands suddenly appeared from beneath the waves;
and it is not too much to say that all those various means which have so
tended to beautify and bless the world, schemes of education, schemes
for the improvement of prison discipline, schemes of missionary
enterprise for the extension of Christian influence in the East Indies,
the destruction of slavery in the West Indies, and the abolition of the
slave trade throughout the British Empire; Bible societies and Tract
societies, and, in fact, the whole munificent machinery and organisation
of our day, sprang forth from that revival of the last century. It seems
now like a magnificent burst of enthusiasm; yet, ultimately it was based
upon only two or three great elements of faith: the spiritual world was
an intense reality; the soul of every man, woman, and child on the face
of the earth had an endowment of immortality; they were precious to the
Redeemer, they ought, therefore, to be precious to all the followers of
the Redeemer. Charged with these truths, their spirits inflamed to a
holy enthusiasm by them, from parlours and drawing-rooms, from the lowly
homes and cottages of England, all these new professors appeared to be
in search of occasions for doing good; the schemes worked themselves
through all the varieties of human temperament and imperfection; but,
looking back, it must surely be admitted that they achieved glorious
results.
[Illustration:
John Thornton.
]
If the reader, impressed by veneration, should make a pilgrimage to
Clapham Common, and inquire from some one of the oldest inhabitants
which was the house in which John Shore, the great Lord Teignmouth, the
first President of the Bible Society, lived, his soul within him might
be a little vexed to be informed that yonder large building at the
extreme corner of the common, the great Roman Catholic Redemptionist
College, is the house. There, were canvassed and brooded over a number
of the schemes to which we have referred. Thither from his own house,
close to the well-known “Plough”—its site now covered by suburban
shops—went the great Zachary Macaulay, sometimes accompanied by his son,
a bright, intelligent lad, afterwards known as Thomas Babington
Macaulay. John Shore had been Governor of India, at Calcutta. On the
common resided also, for some time, William Wilberforce. These were the
great statesmen who were desirous of organising great plans, from which
the consummating prayer of David in the 72nd Psalm should be realised.
Then there was another house on the common, the mansion of John
Thornton, which seemed to share with that of Lord Teignmouth the honours
of these Divine committees of ways and means. Before the establishment
of the Bible Society, Mr. Thornton had been in the habit of spending two
thousand pounds a year in the distribution of Bibles and Testaments—a
very Bible Society in himself. It is, perhaps, not too much to say,
there was scarcely a thought which had for its object the well-being of
the human family but it found its representation and discussion in those
palatial abodes on Clapham Common. There were Granville Sharp and Thomas
Clarkson; thither, how often went cheery old John Newton, to whom, first
of all, on arriving in London, went every holy wayfarer from the
provinces, wayfarers who soon found their entrance beneath his
protecting wing, and cheery introduction to these pleasant circles.
Beneath the incentives of his animating words, the fervid earnestness of
Claudius Buchanan found its pathway of power, and _The Star of the
East_—his great sermon on “Missions to India,”—was first seen shining
over Clapham Common; and it was the same genial tongue which encouraged
that fine, but almost forgotten man, John Campbell, in the enterprise of
his spirit, to pierce into the deserts of Africa. We may notice how
great ideas perpetuate themselves into generations, when we remember
that it was John Campbell who first took out Robert Moffat, and settled
him down in the field of his wonderful labours.
Sir James Stephen, in his admirable paper, is far from exhausting all
the memories of that Clapham Sect. There was another house, not in
Clapham, but not far removed—Hatcham House, as we remember it—a noble
mansion, standing in its park, opposite where the old lane turned off
from the main road to Peckham. There lived Joseph Hardcastle—certainly
one of the Clapham Sect—Wilberforce’s close and intimate friend, a
munificent merchant prince, in whose offices in the City were held for a
long time all the earliest committee meetings of the Bible Society, the
Religious Tract Society, and the London Missionary Society, and from
whom appear to have emanated the first suggestions for the limitation of
the powers of the East India Company in supporting and sanctioning, by
the English Government, Hindoo infanticide and idolatry. Among all the
glorious names of the Clapham Sect, not one shines out more beautifully
than that of this noble Christian gentleman.
Perhaps a natural delicacy withheld Sir James Stephen from chronicling
the story of his own father, Sir George Stephen; and there was Thomas
Gisborne, most charming of English preachers of the Church of England
evangelical school; and Sir Robert Grant, whose hymns are still among
the sweetest in our national psalmody. But we can do no more than thus
say that it was from hence that the spirit of the Revival rose in new
strength, and taking to itself the wings of the morning, spread to the
uttermost parts of the earth.
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