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FLETCHER OF MADELEY.
MEN WORTH REMEMBERING:
_Price Half-a-Crown each._
1. Henry Martyn.
By the Rev. Canon C. D. BELL, D.D.
2. William Wilberforce.
By the Rev. JOHN STOUGHTON, D.D.
3. Philip Doddridge.
By the Rev. CHARLES STANFORD, D.D.
4. Stephen Grellet.
By the Rev. WILLIAM GUEST, F.G.S.
5. Robert Hall.
By the Rev. E. PAXTON HOOD.
6. Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D.
By the Rev. DONALD FRASER, D.D.
7. William Carey.
By the Rev. JAMES CULROSS, D.D.
8. Andrew Fuller.
By his Son, A. G. FULLER.
9. Alexander Duff, D.D., LL.D.
By THOMAS SMITH, D.D.
10. Richard Baxter.
By the Very Rev. G. D. BOYLE, M.A., Dean of Salisbury.
11. Samuel Rutherford.
By the Rev. ANDREW THOMSON, D.D.
12. John Knox.
By WM. M. TAYLOR, LL.D.
13. Fletcher of Madeley.
By the Rev. F. W. MACDONALD.
LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, Paternoster Row.
FLETCHER OF MADELEY.
BY THE REV.
FREDERIC W. MACDONALD,
_Theological Tutor, Handsworth College,
Birmingham._
London:
HODDER AND STOUGHTON,
27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
MDCCCLXXXV.
Butler & Tanner,
The Selwood Printing Works,
Frome, and London.
PREFACE.
I have to express my obligations to the Rev. L. Tyerman for the help I
have received in writing this little book from his life of Fletcher,
published two years ago under the title of "Wesley's Designated
Successor." Mr. Tyerman's labours in the sphere of Methodist history
and biography are too well known to require any word of commendation
from me. It may be enough to say that he has made it impossible for any
one to study the history of the great movement with which the names of
Wesley, Whitefield, and Fletcher are associated, without having
recourse to his volumes. There may be differences of opinion respecting
Mr. Tyerman's judgments upon men and things; there can be none whatever
as to his patient, laborious research, and perfect honesty in the use
of his ample materials.
I am also much indebted to my friends the Rev. George Mather, now of
Falmouth, and Mr. George Stampe, of Great Grimsby, for the opportunity
of examining a considerable number of Fletcher's manuscripts, hitherto
unpublished. It was not to be expected that fresh light could be thrown
on Fletcher's character, but these papers have enabled me to supply
some links, and add a few details to the story of his life.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY 1
CHAPTER II.
EARLY LIFE 10
CHAPTER III.
SETTLES IN ENGLAND.--HIS CONNEXION
WITH WESLEY AND THE METHODISTS 19
CHAPTER IV.
SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 34
CHAPTER V.
ENTERS THE MINISTRY 44
CHAPTER VI.
FIRST YEARS AT MADELEY.--DIFFICULTIES
AND DISCOURAGEMENTS 56
CHAPTER VII.
CONTROVERSY AND CORRESPONDENCE 73
CHAPTER VIII.
TREVECCA COLLEGE.--THE CALVINIST CONTROVERSY 95
CHAPTER IX.
WESLEY'S PROPOSAL.--FAILING HEALTH 119
CHAPTER X.
RESIDENCE IN SWITZERLAND 131
CHAPTER XI.
RETURN TO ENGLAND.--MARRIAGE 154
CHAPTER XII.
LAST YEARS 168
APPENDIX 193
CHAPTER I.
_INTRODUCTORY._
There is reason to think that the interest felt in the Evangelical
Revival of the last century, after declining for awhile, is again
steadily increasing. It may be said that this quickened interest is but
part of a larger intellectual movement, of a reaction, in which we have
passed from undue disparagement of the eighteenth century to an
exaggerated estimate of its importance and value. Nor is it likely,
when eighteenth century forms of literature, philosophy, and social
life are being studied with so much sympathy, that the most prominent
event in its religious history would escape attention.
There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole account of the
matter. The fact is, and we are continually being reminded of it, the
consequences of the Revival are by no means exhausted. We are not yet
at the end of its manifestations; and though some of its later forms
have new and striking features of their own, their relation to the
original movement is attested both by historic descent and by inward
resemblances and affinities. So long as this is the case, and the
Revival, or Reformation, of a century and a half ago is still amongst
the living forces that influence society, the interest with which its
rise and progress are regarded will continue. Active Christian spirits
will seek to understand and respond to its newer developments; and
others, whether in sympathy with those developments or not, will be
obliged to take account of them, and assign them, as far as possible,
to their true succession and order.
In addition to its direct, historical consequences, moreover, time is
continually discovering or suggesting remoter and more complicated
results of the Evangelical Revival, thus rendering the study of the
whole question at once more difficult and more attractive. What were
its real relations, if any, to the teaching of Coleridge, the points of
agreement and divergence, of attraction and repulsion between it and
that original and influential mind, to which so many, who in their turn
have influenced the course of religious thought in England, have
confessed themselves supremely indebted? What is the connexion,
revealed both by resemblances and by contrasts, between the Evangelical
Revival of the eighteenth century and the Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic
movement of the nineteenth, between the Oxford of John and Charles
Wesley and the Oxford of Keble and Pusey and Newman? What has the
Revival contributed to the gradual but unmistakable change that has
come over the theology of the Calvinistic Churches; and, again, to the
progress of democracy in Church and State? As regards some at least of
these questions, it is too soon to look for precise and final answers;
but their relevance will be admitted, and the evidence by which they
must be determined accumulates from year to year.
While the interest in the Evangelical movement is thus reinforced from
various quarters, time, in the exercise of its kindliest office, has
removed a principal hindrance to a fair appreciation of it. Justice is
now generally done to the character of its leaders, and the existing
differences of opinion as to the value of their work are, for the most
part, differences of which there is no need to be ashamed. It is no
longer necessary to vindicate their memory from ignoble charges of
fanaticism, hypocrisy, or ambition. To slander Wesley, or to ridicule
Whitefield, has ceased to bring profit or to give pleasure to any one.
Hardly a month passes but a monument is erected, a eulogy pronounced, a
tribute paid to one or other of the men who, a hundred and fifty years
ago, brought new life to the English Church and nation. Their
reputation is not now a charge upon the loyalty of particular bodies of
Christians, at once doing battle for themselves and for the character
of their fathers and founders; they belong to the Churches, which are
many, to the Church, which is One, and their names are in the keeping
of the general company of Christians far and near.
And this change from the strife and bitterness of former days has come
about, as such changes are wont to come, not so much by valiant
advocacy or successful disputation, as by the sure working of God upon
the hearts of men, enabling them to "discern between the righteous and
the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him
not." Sooner or later this discernment comes, stealing through a
thousand channels of conviction into the heart and conscience of a
people, no one knows precisely when or how; and far more weighty than
any formal acts of canonization are the verdicts by which the
conscience of after ages names its benefactors and heroes, often to the
reversal of the passionate judgments of earlier times. The monument of
the Wesleys is in Westminster Abbey; Whitefield's grave is in America;
Fletcher's ashes lie in Madeley churchyard. Each has his record in a
fitting inscription; but their common epitaph, as men once persecuted
for righteousness' sake, but now to be had in everlasting remembrance,
was written long before: "This was he whom we had sometimes in
derision, and a proverb of reproach; we fools accounted his life
madness, and his end to be without honour: how is he to be numbered
among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!... The
righteous live for evermore; their reward also is with the Lord, and
the care of them is with the Most High."
* * * * *
In the minutes of the Methodist Conference which met at Bristol, in
July, 1786, the following entry occurs:
"_Q._ Who has died this year?
"_A._ John Fletcher, a pattern of all holiness, scarce to be paralleled
in a century."
Such is the brief record that marks the passing away of a man whose
place in the love and veneration of Wesley and of the Methodists was
unique. Second only to the great leader himself in his influence, and
in the special character of that influence leaving even Wesley behind,
Fletcher's loss was the greatest sustained by the Revival from the
death of Whitefield, in 1770, to that of Wesley, in 1791. One word in
the short obituary notice reveals the secret of his power; it was
_holiness_.
The term saint, in the New Testament extended to all the members of
Christ, is often used colloquially to describe any one who, in
comparison with worldly men or mere formal Christians, is conspicuous
for reality and earnestness of spiritual life; but it may be applied to
Fletcher in that last and highest sense, which makes it so rare a
designation even of the best men. He possessed in an exceptional degree
the qualities that constitute saintliness: deep humility and
transparent purity, absolute unworldliness, with love unfailing, and
patience that had its perfect work. The impression that he made upon
those with whom he came in contact has been renewed upon biographers
and historians.
"Fletcher was a saint," is the testimony of earlier and later
witnesses. To none of his associates in the great Revival, the
goodliest company of Christian men the age possessed, is this testimony
borne in the same sense and with the same entire agreement. He was
excelled by them in one respect and another; he could not, for example,
sustain comparison for a moment with Wesley in the commanding powers,
intellectual and moral, that have placed him among the greatest
leaders of the Church Catholic; but for seraphic piety, for sanctity
that had no perceptible spot or flaw, Fletcher of Madeley stood alone.
This is the deliberate judgment of those who knew him best. Of these
Wesley was the chief. In the funeral sermon which he preached soon
after Fletcher's death he said: "I was intimately acquainted with him
for above thirty years. I conversed with him morning, noon, and night,
without the least reserve, during a journey of many hundred miles. And
in all that time I never heard him speak an improper word, or saw him
do an improper action. To conclude: Many exemplary men have I known,
holy in heart and life, within fourscore years; but one equal to him I
have not known, one so inwardly and outwardly devoted to God. So
unblamable a character in every respect I have not found either in
Europe or America, and I scarce expect to find another such on this
side eternity."
Benson, for many years the intimate friend of Fletcher, wrote to Wesley
as follows: "I have often thought the testimony that Bishop Burnet
bears of Archbishop Leighton might be borne of him with equal
propriety: 'After an intimate acquaintance of many years, and after
being with him by night and by day, at home and abroad, in public and
in private, ... I must say, I never heard an idle word drop from his
lips, or any conversation which was not to the use of edifying. I never
saw him in any temper in which I myself would not have wished to be
found at death.' Any one who has been intimately acquainted with Mr.
Fletcher will say the same of him, and they who knew him best will say
it with the most assurance."
All other contemporary notices of Fletcher are in the same strain. So
with the historians and biographers of subsequent times. "Fletcher in
any communion would have been a saint," says Southey. "He was a saint,"
wrote Isaac Taylor, "as unearthly a being as could tread the earth at
all." "Fletcher," says Robert Hall, "is a seraph who burns with the
ardour of Divine love. Spurning the fetters of mortality, he almost
habitually seems to have anticipated the rapture of the beatific
vision."
These testimonies may be closed, though they are not exhausted, by a
passage from one of the most recent and valuable works on the religious
life of the last century:[1] "If John Wesley was the great leader and
organiser, Charles Wesley the great poet, and George Whitefield the
great preacher of Methodism, the highest type of saintliness which it
produced was unquestionably John Fletcher. Never perhaps since the rise
of Christianity has the mind which was in Christ Jesus been more
faithfully copied than it was in the Vicar of Madeley. To say that he
was a good Christian is saying too little. He was more than Christian,
he was Christlike."
* * * * *
Fletcher's first biographer was John Wesley. In the preface to the
funeral sermon preached in London on November 6th, 1785, he says: "I
hastily put together some memorials of this great man, intending, if
God permit, when I have more leisure and more materials, to write a
fuller account of his life." Twelve months later, being then in the
eighty-fourth year of his age, the following entry appears in his
"Journal": "_Oct. 25th_, 1786. I now applied myself in earnest to the
writing of Mr. Fletcher's life, having procured the best materials I
could. To this I dedicated all the time I could spare till November,
from five in the morning till eight at night. These are my studying
hours; I cannot write longer in a day without hurting my eyes." The
labour of love was soon completed, and Wesley published "A Short
Account of the Life and Death of the Rev. John Fletcher," with the
motto, "Sequor, non passibus aequis." That was no conventional
eulogy--Wesley did not deal in them,--but, as we have seen, his heart's
tribute to the holiest man he had ever known. And if the venerable
Wesley counted himself but as one who followed, and that at a distance,
the saintly Vicar of Madeley, he would be a hardy writer who could set
himself to portray such a life and character unvisited by misgivings
and unchastened by the responsibility that comes from the study of high
examples of Christian holiness. But for the reader also, if his heart
is as the writer's, there will be a share alike in the humiliation and
in the hopes which the study of a holy life may well afford. This brief
memoir of Fletcher of Madeley is attempted because no lapse of time or
change of circumstances can make it unseasonable to contemplate a
character like his. Such men do not die:
"----a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives."