a man who had made religion the single aim and object of his life, who
was prepared to encounter for it every form of danger, discomfort, and
obloquy; who devoted exclusively to it an energy of will and power of
intellect that in worldly professions might have raised him to the
highest positions of honor and wealth. Of his sincerity, of his
self-renunciation, of his deep and fervent piety, of his almost
boundless activity, there can be no question. Yet with all these
qualities he was not an amiable man. He was hard, punctilious,
domineering, and in a certain sense even selfish. A short time before
he left England, his father, who was then an old and dying man, and who
dreaded above all things that the religious fervor which he had spent
the greater part of his life in kindling in his parish should dwindle
after his death, entreated his son in the most pathetic terms to remove
to Epworth, in which case he would probably succeed to the living, and
be able to maintain his mother in her old home.
Wesley peremptorily refused to leave Oxford, and the reason he assigned
was very characteristic. "The question," he said, "is not whether I
could do more good to others there than here; but whether I could do
more good to myself, seeing wherever I can be most holy myself there I
can most promote holiness in others." "My chief motive," he wrote when
starting for Georgia, "is the hope of saving my own soul. I hope to
learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the
heathen." He was at this time a High-Churchman of a very narrow type,
full of exaggerated notions about church discipline, extremely anxious
to revive obsolete rubrics, and determined to force the strictest
ritualistic observances upon rude colonists, for whom of all men they
were least adapted. He insisted upon adopting baptism by immersion, and
refused to baptize a child whose parents objected to that form. He would
not permit any non-communicant to be a sponsor, repelled one of the
holiest men in the colony from the communion-table because he was a
Dissenter; refused for the same reason to read the burial-service over
another; made it a special object of his teaching to prevent ladies of
his congregation from wearing any gold ornament or any rich dress, and
succeeded in inducing Oglethorpe to issue an order forbidding any
colonist from throwing a line or firing a gun on Sunday. His sermons, it
was complained, were all satires on particular persons. He insisted upon
weekly communions, desired to rebaptize Dissenters who abandoned their
Nonconformity, and exercised his pastoral duties in such a manner that
he was accused of meddling in every quarrel and prying into every
family.
A more unpropitious commencement for a great career could hardly be
conceived. Wesley returned to England in bad health and low spirits. He
redoubled his austerities and his zeal in teaching, and he was tortured
by doubts about the reality of his faith. It was at this time and in
this state of mind that he came in contact with Peter Boehler, a
Moravian teacher, whose calm and concentrated enthusiasm, united with
unusual mental powers, gained a complete ascendency over his mind. From
him Wesley for the first time learned that form of the doctrine of
justification by faith which he afterward regarded as the fundamental
tenet of Christianity. He had long held that in order to be a real
Christian it was necessary to live a life wholly differing from that of
the world around him, and that such a renewal of life could only be
effected by the operation of the divine Spirit; and he does not appear
to have had serious difficulties about the doctrine of imputed
righteousness, although the ordinary evangelical doctrine on this matter
was emphatically repudiated and denounced by Law.
From Boehler he first learned to believe that every man, no matter how
moral, how pious, or how orthodox he may be, is in a state of damnation,
until, by a supernatural and instantaneous process wholly unlike that of
human reasoning, the conviction flashes upon his mind that the sacrifice
of Christ has been applied to and has expiated his sins; that this
supernatural and personal conviction or illumination is what is meant by
saving faith, and that it is inseparably accompanied by an absolute
assurance of salvation and by a complete dominion over sin. It cannot
exist where there is not a sense of the pardon of all past and of
freedom from all present sins. It is impossible that he who has
experienced it should be in serious and lasting doubt as to the fact;
for its fruits are constant peace--not one uneasy thought; "freedom from
sin--not one unholy desire." Repentance and fruits meet for repentance,
such as the forgiveness of those who have offended us, ceasing from evil
and doing good, may precede this faith, but good works in the
theological sense of the term spring from, and therefore can only
follow, faith.
Such, as clearly as I can state it, was the fundamental doctrine which
Wesley adopted from the Moravians. His mind was now thrown, through
causes very susceptible of a natural explanation, into an exceedingly
excited and abnormal condition, and he has himself chronicled with great
minuteness in his journal the incidents that follow. On Sunday, March
5, 1738, he tells us that Boehler first fully convinced him of the want
of that supernatural faith which alone could save. The shock was very
great, and the first impulse of Wesley was to abstain from preaching,
but his new master dissuaded him, saying: "Preach faith till you have
it; and then because you have faith you will preach faith." He followed
the advice, and several weeks passed in a state of extreme religious
excitement, broken, however, by strange fits of "indifference, dulness,
and coldness." While still believing himself to be in a state of
damnation, he preached the new doctrine with such passionate fervor that
he was excluded from pulpit after pulpit. He preached to the criminals
in the jails. He visited, under the superintendence of Boehler, some
persons who professed to have undergone the instantaneous and
supernatural illumination. He addressed the passengers whom he met on
the roads or at the public tables in the inns. On one occasion, at
Birmingham, he abstained from doing so, and he relates, with his usual
imperturbable confidence, that a heavy hailstorm which he afterward
encountered was a divine judgment sent to punish him for his neglect.
This condition could not last long. At length, on May 24th, a day which
he ever after looked back upon as the most momentous in his life--the
cloud was dispelled. Early in the morning, according to his usual
custom, he opened the Bible at random, seeking for a divine guidance,
and his eye lighted on the words, "There are given unto us exceeding
great and precious promises, even that we would be partakers of the
divine nature." Before he left the house he again consulted the oracle,
and the first words he read were, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of
God." In the afternoon he attended service in St. Paul's Cathedral, and
the anthem, to his highly wrought imagination, seemed a repetition of
the same hope. The sequel may be told in his own words: "In the evening
I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was
reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter
before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the
heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed; I felt
I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was
given me that he had taken away _my_ sins, even mine, and saved me from
the law of sin and death. I began to pray with all my might for those
who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted
me. I then testified openly to all what I now first felt in my heart."
Pictures of this kind are not uncommon in the lives of religious
enthusiasts, but they usually have a very limited interest and
importance. It is, however, scarcely an exaggeration to say that the
scene which took place at that humble meeting in Aldersgate Street forms
an epoch in English history. The conviction which then flashed upon one
of the most powerful and most active intellects in England is the true
source of English Methodism. Shortly before this, Charles Wesley, who
had also fallen completely under the influence of Boehler, had passed
through a similar change; and Whitefield, without ever adopting the
dangerous doctrine of perfection which was so prominent in the Methodist
teaching, was at a still earlier period an ardent preacher of
justification by faith of the new birth. It was characteristic of John
Wesley that ten days before his conversion he wrote a long, petulant,
and dictatorial letter to his old master, William Law, reproaching him
with having kept back from him the fundamental doctrine of Christianity,
and intimating in strong and discourteous language his own conviction,
and that of Boehler, that the spiritual condition of Law was a very
dangerous one.
It was no less characteristic of the indefatigable energy which formed
another and a better side of his nature, that immediately after this
change he started on a pilgrimage to Herrnhut, the head-quarters of
Moravianism, in order that he might study to the best advantage what he
now regarded as the purest type of a Christian church. He returned
objecting to many things, but more than ever convinced of his new
doctrine, and more than ever resolved to spend his life in diffusing it.
In the course of 1738 the chief elements of the movement were already
formed. Whitefield had returned from Georgia. Charles Wesley had begun
to preach the doctrine with extraordinary effect to the criminals in
Newgate and from every pulpit into which he was admitted. Methodist
societies had already sprung up under Moravian influence. The design of
each was to be a church within a church, a seed-plot of a more fervent
piety, the centre of a stricter discipline and a more energetic
propagandism, than existed in religious communities at large.
In these societies the old Christian custom of love-feasts was revived.
The members sometimes passed almost the whole night in the most
passionate devotions, and voluntarily submitted to a spiritual tyranny
that could hardly be surpassed in a Catholic monastery. They were to
meet every week, to make an open and particular confession of every
frailty, to submit to be cross-examined on all their thoughts, words,
and deeds. The following, among others, were the questions asked at
every meeting: "What known sin have you committed since our last
meeting? What temptations have you met with? How were you delivered?
What have you thought, said, or done of which you doubt whether it be
sin or not? Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?"
Such rules could only have been accepted under the influence of an
overpowering religious enthusiasm, and there was much truth in the
judgment which the elder brother of John Wesley passed upon them in
1739. "Their societies," he wrote to their mother, "are sufficient to
dissolve all other societies but their own. Will any man of common-sense
or spirit suffer any domestic to be in a band engaged to relate to five
or ten people anything without reserve that concerns the person's
conscience, how much soever it may concern the family? Ought any married
person to be there unless husband and wife be there together?"
From this time the leaders of the movement became the most active of
missionaries. Without any fixed parishes they wandered from place to
place, proclaiming their new doctrine in every pulpit to which they were
admitted, and they speedily awoke a passionate enthusiasm and a bitter
hostility in the Church. Nothing, indeed, could appear more irregular to
the ordinary parochial clergyman than those itinerant ministers who
broke away violently from the settled habits of their profession, who
belonged to and worshipped in small religious societies that bore a
suspicious resemblance to conventicles, and whose whole tone and manner
of preaching were utterly unlike anything to which he was accustomed.
They taught in language of the most vehement emphasis, as the cardinal
tenet of Christianity, the doctrine of a new birth in a form which was
altogether novel to their hearers. They were never weary of urging that
all men are in a condition of damnation who have not experienced a
sudden, violent, and supernatural change, or of inveighing against the
clergy for their ignorance of the very essence of Christianity.
"Tillotson," in the words of Whitefield, "knew no more about true
Christianity than Mahomet." _The Whole Duty of Man_, which was the most
approved devotional manual of the time, was pronounced by the same
preacher, on account of the stress it laid upon good works, to have
"sent thousands to hell."
The Methodist preacher came to an Anglican parish in the spirit and with
the language of a missionary going to the most ignorant heathens; and he
asked the clergyman of the parish to lend him his pulpit, in order that
he might instruct the parishioners--perhaps for the first time--in the
true Gospel of Christ. It is not surprising that the clergy should have
resented such a movement; and the manner of the missionary was as
startling as his matter. The sermons of the time were almost always
written, and the prevailing taste was cold, polished, and fastidious.
The new preachers preached extempore, with the most intense fervor of
language and gesture, and usually with a complete disregard of the
conventionalities of their profession. Wesley frequently mounted the
pulpit without even knowing from what text he would preach, believing
that when he opened his Bible at random the divine Spirit would guide
him infallibly in his choice. The oratory of Whitefield was so
impassioned that the preacher was sometimes scarcely able to proceed for
his tears, while half the audience were convulsed with sobs. The love of
order, routine, and decorum, which was the strongest feeling in the
clerical mind, was violently shocked. The regular congregation was
displaced by an agitated throng who had never before been seen within
the precincts of the church. The usual quiet worship was disturbed by
violent enthusiasm or violent opposition, by hysterical paroxysms of
devotion or remorse, and when the preacher had left the parish he seldom
failed to leave behind him the elements of agitation and division.
We may blame, but we can hardly, I think, wonder at the hostility all
this aroused among the clergy. It is, indeed, certain that Wesley and
Whitefield were at this time doing more than any other contemporary
clergymen to kindle a living piety among the people. It is equally
certain that they held the doctrines of the Articles and the Homilies
with an earnestness very rare among their brother-clergymen, that none
of their peculiar doctrines were in conflict with those doctrines, and
that Wesley at least was attached with an even superstitious reverence
to ecclesiastical forms. Yet before the end of 1738 the Methodist
leaders were excluded from most of the pulpits of the Church, and were
thus compelled, unless they consented to relinquish what they considered
a divine mission, to take steps in the direction of separation.
Two important measures of this nature were taken in 1739. One of them
was the creation of Methodist chapels, which were intended, not to
oppose or replace, but to be supplemental and ancillary to, the
churches, and to secure that the doctrine of the new birth should be
faithfully taught to the people. The other, and still more important
event, was the institution by Whitefield of field-preaching. The idea
had occurred to him in London, where he found congregations too numerous
for the church in which he preached, but the first actual step was taken
in the neighborhood of Bristol. At a time when he was thus deprived of
the chief normal means of exercising his talents his attention was
called to the condition of the colliers of Kingswood. He was filled with
horror and compassion at finding in the heart of a Christian country,
and in the immediate neighborhood of a great city, a population of many
thousands sunk in the most brutal ignorance and vice, and entirely
excluded from the ordinances of religion. Moved by such feelings, he
resolved to address the colliers in their own haunts. The resolution was
a bold one, for field-preaching was then utterly unknown in England, and
it needed no common courage to brave all the obloquy and derision it
must provoke, and to commence the experiment in the centre of a
half-savage population.
Whitefield, however, had a just confidence in his cause and in his
powers. Standing himself upon a hillside, he took for his text the first
words of the Sermon which was spoken from the Mount, and he addressed
with his accustomed fire an astonished audience of some two hundred men.
The fame of his eloquence spread far and wide. On successive occasions
five, ten, fifteen, even twenty thousand were present. It was February,
but the winter sun shone clear and bright. The lanes were filled with
the carriages of the more wealthy citizens, whom curiosity had drawn
from Bristol. The trees and hedges were crowded with humbler listeners,
and the fields were darkened by a compact mass. The face of the preacher
paled with a thrilling power to the very outskirts of that mighty
throng. The picturesque novelty of the occasion and of the scene, the
contagious emotion of so great a multitude, a deep sense of the
condition of his hearers and of the momentous importance of the step he
was taking, gave an additional solemnity. His rude auditors were
electrified. They stood for a time in rapt and motionless attention.
Soon tears might be seen forming white gutters down cheeks blackened
from the coal-mine. Then sobs and groans told how hard hearts were
melting at his words. A fire was kindled among the outcasts of
Kingswood, which burned long and fiercely, and was destined in a few
years to overspread the land.
It was only with great difficulty that Whitefield could persuade the
Wesleys to join him in this new phase of missionary labor. John Wesley
has left on record, in his journal, his first repugnance to it,
"having," as he says, "been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious
of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought
the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church."
Charles Wesley, on this as on most other occasions, was even more
strongly conservative. The two brothers adopted their usual
superstitious practice of opening their Bibles at random, under the
belief that the texts on which their eyes first fell would guide them in
their decision. The texts were ambiguous and somewhat ominous, relating
for the most part to violent deaths; but on drawing lots the lot
determined them to go. It was on this slender ground that they resolved
to give the weight of their example to this most important development
of the movement. They went to Bristol, from which Whitefield was
speedily called, and continued the work among the Kingswood colliers and
among the people of the city; while Whitefield, after a preaching tour
of some weeks in the country, reproduced on a still larger scale the
triumphs of Kingswood by preaching with marvellous effect to immense
throngs of the London rabble at Moorfields and on Kennington Common.
From this time field-preaching became one of the most conspicuous
features of the revival.
The character and genius of the preacher to whom this most important
development of Methodism was due demand a more extended notice than I
have yet given them. Unlike Wesley, whose strongest enthusiasm was
always curbed by a powerful will, and who manifested at all times and on
all subjects an even exaggerated passion for reasoning, Whitefield was
chiefly a creature of impulse and emotion. He had very little logical
skill, no depth or range of knowledge, not much self-restraint, nothing
of the commanding and organizing talent, and, it must be added, nothing
of the arrogant and imperious spirit so conspicuous in his colleague. At
the same time a more zealous, a more single-minded, a more truly
amiable, a more purely unselfish man it would be difficult to conceive.
He lived perpetually in the sight of eternity, and a desire to save
souls was the single passion of his life. Of his labors it is sufficient
to say that it has been estimated that in the thirty-four years of his
active career he preached eighteen thousand times, or on an average ten
times a week; that these sermons were delivered with the utmost
vehemence of voice and gesture, often in the open air, and to
congregations of many thousands; and that he continued his exertions to
the last, when his constitution was hopelessly shattered by disease.
During long periods he preached forty hours, and sometimes as much as
sixty hours, a week. In the prosecution of his missionary labors he
visited almost every important district in England and Wales. At least
twelve times he traversed Scotland, three times he preached in Ireland,
thirteen times he crossed the Atlantic.
Very few men placed by circumstances at the head of a great religious
movement have been so absolutely free from the spirit of sect. Very few
men have passed through so much obloquy with a heart so entirely
unsoured, and have retained amid so much adulation so large a measure of
deep and genuine humility. There was indeed not a trace of jealousy,
ambition, or rancor in his nature. There is something singularly
touching in the zeal with which he endeavored to compose the differences
between himself and Wesley, when so many of the followers of each leader
were endeavoring to envenom them; in the profound respect he continually
expressed for his colleague at the time of their separation; in the
exuberant gratitude he always showed for the smallest act of kindness to
himself; in the tenderness with which he guarded the interests of the
inmates of that orphanage at Georgia around which his strongest earthly
affections were entwined; in the almost childish simplicity with which
he was always ready to make a public confession of his faults.
CONQUESTS OF NADIR SHAH
CAPTURE OF DELHI
A.D. 1739
SIR JOHN MALCOLM
It was the fortune of Persia to be delivered from the Afghan yoke at
a time when, under a feeble and corrupt ruler, the national life had
been almost crushed out by foreign tyranny. This deliverance was
wrought by a man who raised himself from the lowest condition to the
head of the kingdom which he restored. Besides this achievement for
Persia, Nadir Shah performed deeds of conquest which placed his name
among those who have won lasting celebrity by the subjugation of
empires.
The Afghans had in 1722 captured Ispahan, the Persian capital, then
an important metropolis with six hundred thousand inhabitants. They
sacked the city and killed all of the royal family except Hasan, the
weak ruler, his son Tamasp, and two grandchildren. From this blow
the once magnificent capital of Persia has never recovered. Tamasp
became shah in 1727.
How the brief rule of the conquering Afghans was terminated by Nadir
Shah, and how he pursued his own bloody path of conquest, Sir John
Malcolm, the historian of Persia, relates in a most graphic and
comprehensive manner.
Nadir Shah was born in the province of Khorasan. Persian historians pass
over the early occurrences of his life, and the first event that these
notice is the birth of his eldest son, Reza Kuli, which occurred when he
was thirty-one years of age. He had before that experienced great
vicissitudes of fortune, and had given proofs both of valor and talent.
When only seventeen he was taken prisoner by the Usbegs, who made annual
incursions into Khorasan; but he effected his escape after a captivity
of four years. His occupation from that period till he entered into the
service of Shah Tamasp can only merit notice as it is calculated to show
that the character of this extraordinary man was always the same. He was
at one time in the service of a petty chief of his native province, whom
he murdered, and whose daughter he carried off and married. After this,
he obtained a precarious subsistence by heading a band of robbers; from
which occupation he passed, by an easy transition in such troubled
times, into the employment of the Afghan Governor of Khorasan, by whom
he was at first raised to rank and command, as a reward for his valor in
actions with the Usbegs, and afterward degraded and punished with the
bastinado on account of his insolent and turbulent conduct.