_Late Fellow and Sub-Rector of Exeter College, Principal of the
Litchfield Theological College, and Prebendary of Litchfield Cathedral._
I fear it is impossible to deny, that in the early part of the
eighteenth century--amid the general coldness, languor, and want of
enthusiasm which characterized that effete epoch--"the Church of
England, as well as all the dissenting bodies, slumbered and slept." At
this epoch, the Puritans were buried, and the Methodists were not born.
The Bishop of Litchfield, in a sermon delivered in 1724, said, "The
Lord's Day is now the Devil's market day." In Litchfield Cathedral
Library is a copy of Dr. Balguy's Sermons, delivered in 1748, containing
on the fly-leaf an autograph remark by Bishop Bloomfield. It is in these
words, "No Christianity here." It is said of that period of time, by a
noted minister of the Church of England, that a dry rationalism had
taken possession of the church, and that all the powers of her best
intellects were engaged in hot contests with Deists and Unitarians;
that an equally dry morality and stoical praise of "Virtue" formed the
chief part of the exhortations from the pulpit. It was just in these
times that the causes of the reformation of John Wesley sprang into
being. Seven biographies of John Wesley have already been written, and
the subject seems far from being exhausted even yet. As usual in such
cases it is the earlier publications which take the more sober view of
his character and history; while those of a later date surround their
hero with a halo of extravagant admiration. Alexander Knox, a personal
friend of Wesley's, thus writes of him: "How was he competent to form a
religious polity so compact, effective and permanent? I can only express
my firm conviction that he was totally incapable of preconceiving such a
scheme. * * * * That he had uncommon acuteness in fitting expedients to
conjunctures is most certain; this, _in fact_, was his great talent."
(_Letter appended_ to Southey's Third Edition, 2, p. 428.) Methodism, at
the first, sprang up simply as a revival.
Half a century ago a distinguished Wesleyan wrote as follows: "Though
Methodism stands now in a different relation to the establishment than
in the days of Mr. Wesley, _dissent_ has never been professed by the
body--and for obvious reasons: (1) A separation of a part of the society
from the church has not arisen from the principles assumed by the
professed Dissenters, and usually made so prominent in their discussions
on the subject of establishments. (2) A considerable number of our
members are actually in the communion of the Church of England to this
day. (3) To leave that communion is not, in any sense, a condition of
membership with us." (R. Watson's Observations, p. 156.)
"What may we reasonably believe to be God's design in raising up the
preachers called Methodists? Not to form any new sect, but to reform the
nation, particularly the church; and to spread scriptural holiness over
the land." (Large Minutes of Conference, 1744-89, Qu. 3.) In the same,
Qu. 45, we have this answer: "We are not seceders, nor do we bear any
resemblance to them. We set out upon quite opposite principles."
Southey says: "Wesley had now proposed to himself a clear and
determinate object. He hoped to give a new impulse to the Church of
England, to awaken its dormant zeal, infuse life into a body where
nothing but life was wanting, and lead the way to the performance of
duties which the church had scandalously neglected." (Southey's Life, p.
193, ed. Bohn.)
Mr Curties says: "A disastrous period of Wesleyanism opened with John
Wesley's voyage to America, in 1735. It was a mission nobly undertaken,
at the instance of Dr. Burton, of Corpus College, and of the celebrated
mystic, William Law; and its purpose was twofold; first, that of
ministering to the settlers in Georgia, and then of evangelizing the
neighboring tribes of red Indians. (Southey's Life, p. 47). But its
results were far different from those which either Wesley, or those who
wished him well, could have anticipated. For not only were his services
for the settlers rejected, and his mission to the Indians a failure. (R.
Watson's Life, p. 38.) On his voyage out he had fallen in with
twenty-six Moravian fellow-passengers, on their way from Germany to
settle in Georgia; and they spoilt all. On his as yet unsettled,
enthusiastic, self-dissatisfied frame of mind, the spectacle of their
confident, tranquil, yet fervid piety, fell like a spark on tinder. He
writes, in his journal, now first begun, 'From friends in England I am
awhile secluded; but God hath opened me a door into the whole Moravian
Church.' Here, Wesley learned, and took in, the doctrines of Peter
Bohler, the Moravian, who taught thus: First, when a man has a living
faith in Christ, then he is justified. Second, this living faith is
_always given in a moment_. Third, in that moment he has peace with God.
Fourth, which he can not have without knowing he has it. Fifth, and
being born of God he sinneth not. Sixth, and he can not have this
deliverance from sin, without knowing that he has it." (Southey's Life,
p. 113.)
Such is the origin of the Methodist tenet "that there is a swift and
royal road, not only for some men, but for all men, by which the highest
spiritual things may be reached at a bound." Under such an impression
John Wesley set about realizing an instantaneous and sensible
conversion. If a man under high mental excitement is looking for such a
thing to occur, something will take place sooner or later that will
answer the expectation. So, on Wednesday, May 24, 1738, about nine
o'clock in the evening, at a society's meeting in Aldersgate street,
Wesley persuaded himself that he had felt the desired transition and had
passed--from what, to what? In the answer to that question lies the
whole doctrinal difference between modern Methodism and the Church of
England. Stevens, in his history of Methodism 1, 108, says, Methodism
owes to Moravianism special obligations: (1) It introduced Wesley into
that regenerated spiritual life, the supremacy of which over all
ecclesiasticism and dogmatism it was the appointed mission of Methodism
to reassert. But a still stranger event occurred in John Wesley's life,
which contributed still farther to darken and confuse his teaching at
this critical period of his career. He had been carried away by his love
of the Moravians so far as to take a long journey, and to visit the
headquarters of their communion at Hernhutt, in Saxony. There he had
been an honored guest at the retreat which the enthusiast Count
Zinzendorf had carved out of his estate for these hunted Bohemian
followers of Huss and Wickliff. But he had returned home, after a brief
residence among them, as Luther returned from Rome, not a little shaken
in his allegiance to their system. Indeed, shortly afterwards he broke
from them entirely; set up a sort of English Moravianism of his own, and
organized it with "bands" and "class-meetings" on the Moravian model.
But his feelings as a churchman revolted against their
ultra-spiritualism; repudiated their doctrine that sacraments and
outward means were nothing, and protested that a man must do something
more than wait, in quietude, until the influx of God's spirit came upon
him, and filled, like a rising tide, all the sluices and channels of his
soul. But no sooner had this unquiet soul emancipated itself from one
foreign influence than it was warped out of its true course by another.
_German mysticism_ had done its work on him, and its doctrine of
regeneration into God's kingdom by an interior convulsion of the mind
had left its mark upon Wesleyanism for all future time. But just as this
extravagance seemed likely to subside, and to be absorbed amid the
healthier atmosphere of an English churchman's common sense, most
unhappily a strong breath of _French fanaticism_ suddenly set across his
path, from quite another quarter. And the singular phenomenon now
presented itself of an epidemic religious-hysteria commingling with, and
emphasizing into lamentable extravagance, all the most dangerous
features of the Methodist-Moravian doctrine about the new birth. So
wonderfully is all the world connected together! * * * * *
These French "convulsionists," who had, just before this time, brought
their curious mental malady with them into England, were refugees from
the atrocious _dragonnades_ of Louis the XIV. Maddened by his abominable
and relentless persecutions, deprived by his autocratic edicts of all
that life held dear, robbed of their children at the sweet age of seven
years old, broken on the wheel, hunted among the mountains of the
Cevennes, beggared, insulted, tortured, massacred--what wonder that
these poor Protestants lost the balance of their mental powers and
engendered a hysterical disease? The disease is (I believe), under its
strangely mutable forms, well known to medical science, though science
has never yet been able to probe all its mysterious depths. Its seat is,
apparently, the great nervous ganglia of nutrition, which lie in the
center of the body, and whose strange sympathetic action with and upon
the brain has led to all the popular notions about the heart and
neighboring organs being the seat of various impassioned feelings.
Suffice it, however, at present, to observe that the phenomena which
this extraordinary and infectious disease presented had sufficed to
cheer the faith and animate the ardor of the Calvinists in the Cevennes
against Rome.
The Cevennes is a range of mountains in the south of France, divided
into N. and S. * * a wild rugged country, and the abode of many
Protestants, who here maintained themselves against the persecutions of
their enemies. (See _Cavalier Jean_). Such, in fact, were the causes of
the extasies or irregular inspirations; the want of spiritual guides and
schools, spoliation, suffering, liability to torture, and constant
apprehension of the galley or the gibbet, the minds of these unfortunate
creatures became excited. * * *
This religious enthusiasm began in Vivarais, an old territory of France,
in Languedoc, on the Rhone, with the dragonnades and the revocation,
repeal of an edict, about the year 1686.
A practical proof of the morbific power of the emotions and passions is
found in the frequent occurrence of _psychopathitis_ in times when all
the elements of social life are in a state of fermentation. In and after
revolutions sudden changes of fortune produce a thousand cases of mental
disorder.
The very same disease broke out among the Romanists themselves, at Port
Royal, in 1729. In the previous century it had thrown whole nunneries
near Bordeaux into wild confusion. In the sixteenth century it was known
in Italy as the "Dancing Mania," or Tarantism. At the close of the
fifteenth century _Tarantism_ had spread beyond the borders of Apulia. *
* * The number of those affected by it increased beyond all belief.
Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught the disease from the
mental poison which they eagerly received _through the eye_. * * *
Foreigners of every color and race were, in like manner, affected by it.
Neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even old men of
ninety threw aside their crutches, and joined the most extravagant
dancers. * * * Subordinate nervous attacks were much more frequent
during the seventeenth century, than at any former period. (Hecker,
Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 107-115, Engl. Trans.)
During the Middle Ages it appeared in Germany. It was a convulsion,
which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame; * * *
and was propogated by the _sight_ of the sufferers. They continued
dancing, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they
fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of
extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death. * * *
They were haunted by visions, and some of them afterwards asserted that
they had felt as if immersed in a _stream of blood_, which obliged them
to leap so high. George Fox, Journal 1, p. 100: "The word of the Lord
came to me again. * * * So I went up and down the streets crying, Woe to
the bloody city, Lichfield! And there seemed to me to be a channel of
blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a
pool of blood." In Germany it was called St. John's or St. Vitus's
dance. And long before its first appearance in that precise form, in
1374, it had, no doubt, been the real secret of the bacchanalian orgies
among the Greeks, and of the frantic, dervish-like gestures and cuttings
with knives and lancets which we read of among Asiatic races. In our own
day and country (thank God) these extraordinary and degrading spectacles
are scarcely to be seen.
But the disease still lurks among the superstitious Christians of Tigre
in Abyssinia; in Siberia; among the revivalists of Ireland and America;
and (in a very mild form), among the ignorant Welsh Methodists,--who are
on this account popularly called "Jumpers." Now it so happened that
these poor hysterical French refugees had arrived in great numbers in
London, and had also visited Bristol, shortly before the critical year
1739,--when the excitable George Whitfield landed from America, and John
Wesley returned home from Germany. Men's thoughts were then full of the
(so called) "French prophets." A new religious enthusiasm was floating
in the atmosphere, and it only needed the impulse of some exciting
preaching, and the mental tension which is always produced among
expectant and heated crowds, to generate infallibly an outbreak of this
unaccountable and infectious malady. Such an occasion soon presented
itself. In February, 1739, Whitfield, for the first time, preached in
the open air, at Kingswood, near his native place, Bristol, to the wild
and lawless colliers of the then _Black Country_ of England. In the May
following he persuaded John Wesley to join him there, and to imitate his
example. And then, for the first time, _religious hysteria_ began to
manifest itself in England. Men and women of all ages fell down in
convulsions, and cried aloud for mercy. And honest John Wesley said, "I
am persuaded that it is the devil tearing them as they are coming to
Christ."--_Wesley's Journals._