THE QUEEN'S DEATH-BED.
[Sidenote: 1737--Caroline's death-stroke]
The Queen had long been dying; dying by inches. In one of her
confinements she had been stricken with an ailment from which she
suffered severely. She refused to let any one, even the King, know
what was the matter with her. She had the strongest objection to being
regarded as an invalid; and she feared, too, that if anything serious
were known to be the matter with her she might lose her hold over her
selfish husband, who only cared for people as long as they were active
in serving and pleasing him. An invalid was to George merely a
nuisance. Let us do Caroline justice. She was no doubt actuated by
the most sincere desire to be of service to the King, and she feared
that if she were to make it known how ill she was, the King might
insist on her giving up active life altogether. Not only did she take
no pains to get better, but in order to prove that she was perfectly
well, she used to exert herself in a manner which might have been
injurious to the health of a very strong woman. When at Richmond she
used to walk several miles every morning with the King; and more than
once, Walpole says, when she had the gout in her foot, she dipped her
whole leg in cold water to be ready to attend him. "The pain," says
Walpole, "the bulk, and the exercise threw her into such fits of
perspiration as routed the gout; but those exertions hastened the
crisis of her distemper." History preserves some curious pictures of
the manner in which the morning prayers were commonly said to Queen
Caroline. The Queen was being dressed by her ladies in her bedroom;
the door of the bedroom was left partly open, the {115} chaplain read
the prayers in the outer room, and had to kneel, as he read them,
beneath a great painting of a naked Venus; and just within the
half-open bedroom door her Majesty, according to Horace Walpole, "would
frequently stand some minutes in her shift, talking to her ladies."
Robert Walpole was the first to discover the real and the very serious
nature of the Queen's malady. He was often alone with her for the
purpose of arranging as to the course of action which they were to
prevail upon the King to believe to be of his own inspiration, and
accordingly to adopt. Shortly after the death of Walpole's wife he was
closeted with the Queen. Her Majesty questioned him closely about the
cause of his wife's death. She was evidently under the impression that
Lady Walpole had died from the effects of a peculiar kind of rupture,
and she put to Walpole a variety of very intimate questions as to the
symptoms and progress of the disease. Walpole had long suspected, as
many others had, that there was something seriously wrong with the
Queen. He allowed her to go on with her questions, and he became
satisfied in his own mind that the Queen herself was suffering from the
disorder about which she was so anxious to be told.
On August 26, 1737, it was reported over London that the Queen was
dead. The report was unfounded, or at least premature. Caroline had
had a violent attack, but she rallied and was able to go about again at
Hampton Court with the King. On Wednesday, November 9, 1737, she was
suddenly stricken down, and this was her death-stroke. She did not die
at once, but lingered and lingered.
There are few chapters of history more full of strange, sardonic
contrast, and grim, ghastly humor, than those which describe these
death-bed scenes. The Queen, undergoing a succession of painful
operations; now groaning and fainting, now telling the doctors not to
mind her foolish cries; now indulging in some chaff with them--"Is not
Ranby [the surgeon] sorry it isn't his own cross old wife he is cutting
up?"--the King sometimes blubbering, and sometimes telling his dying
wife that her staring eyes {116} looked like those of a calf whose
throat had been cut; the King, who, in his sudden tenderness and grief,
would persist in lying outside the bed, and thereby giving the poor,
perishing sufferer hardly room to move; the messages of affected
condolence arriving from the Prince of Wales, with requests to be
allowed to see his mother, which requests the mother rejects with
bitterness and contempt--all this sets before us a picture such as
seldom, happily for the human race, illustrates a death-bed in palace,
garret, or prison cell. The King was undoubtedly sincere in his grief,
at least for the time. He did love the Queen in a sort of way; and she
had worked upon all his weaknesses and vices and made herself necessary
to him. He did not see how life was to go on for him without her; and
as he thought of this he cried like a child whose mother is about to
leave him. Over and over again has the story been told of the dying
Queen's appeal to her husband to take a new wife after her death, and
the King's earnest disclaimer of any such purpose; the assurance that
he would have mistresses, and then the Queen's cry of cruel conviction
from hard experience, "Oh, mon Dieu, cela n'empêche pas!" "I know,"
says Lord Hervey, who tells the story, "that this episode will hardly
be credited, but it is literally true." One does not see why the
episode should hardly be credited, why it should not be taken at once
as historical and true. It is not out of keeping with all other
passages of the story, it is in the closest harmony and symmetry with
them. The King always made his wife the confidante of his amours and
intrigues. He had written to her once, asking her to bring to Court
the wife of some nobleman or gentleman, and he told her frankly that he
admired this lady and wanted to have her near him in order that he
might have an intrigue with her, and he knew that she, his wife, would
always be glad to do him a pleasure. Thackeray, in his lecture, often
speaks of the King as "Sultan George." George had, in the matter of
love-making, no other notions than those of a sultan. [Sidenote:
1737--George's settled belief] He had no more idea of his wife
objecting to his mistresses than {117} a sultan would have about the
chief sultana's taking offence at the presence of his concubines. The
fact that the Queen lay dying did not put any restraint on any of
George's ways. He could not be kept from talking loudly all the time;
he could not be kept from bawling out observations about his wife's
condition which, if they were made only in whispers, must have tended
to alarm and distress an invalid. It is not the frank brutality of
George's words which surprises us; it is rather the sort of cross-light
they throw on what was after all a tender part of his coarse and
selfish nature. Every reader of the history and the memoirs of that
reign must be prepared to understand and to appreciate the absolute
sincerity of the King's words; the settled belief that the Queen could
not possibly have any objection to his taking to himself as many
mistresses as he pleased. One is a little surprised at the uncouth
sentimentality of the thought that nevertheless it might be a
disrespect to her memory if he were to take another wife. What a light
all this lets in upon the man, and the Court, and the time! As regards
indiscriminate amours and connections, poor, stupid, besotted George
was simply on a level with the lower animals. Charles the Second,
Louis the Fourteenth, Louis the Fifteenth even--these at their worst of
times were gentlemen. It was only at the Hanoverian Court of England
that such an interchange of appeal and reassurance could take place as
that which was murmured and blubbered over the death-bed of Queen
Caroline. "Horror," says one of the great Elizabethan poets, "waits on
the death-beds of princes." Horror in the truest sense waited on the
death-bed of that poor, patient, faithful, unscrupulous, unselfish
Queen.
The Queen kept rallying and sinking, and rallying again; and the King's
moods went up and down with each passing change in his wife's
condition. Now she sank, and he buried his face in the bedclothes and
cried; now she recovered a little, and he rated at her and made rough
jokes at her. At one moment he appeared to be all {118} tenderness to
her, at another moment he went on as if the whole illness were a mere
sham to worry him, and she might get up and be well if she would only
act like a sensible woman. The Prince of Wales made an attempt to see
the Queen. The King spoke of him as a puppy and a scoundrel; jeered at
his impudent, affected airs of duty and affection, declared that
neither he nor the Queen was in a condition to see him act his false,
whining, cringing tricks now, and sent him orders to get out of the
place at once. His Majesty continued all through the dying scenes to
rave against the Prince of Wales, and call him rascal, knave, puppy,
and scoundrel. The Queen herself, although she did not use language
quite as strong, yet expressed just as resolute a dislike or
detestation of her son, and an utter disbelief in his sincerity. She
declared that she knew he only wanted to see her in order that he
should have the joy of knowing she was dead five minutes sooner than if
he had to wait in Pall Mall to hear the glad tidings. She told the
listeners that if ever she should consent to see the prince they might
be sure she had lost her senses. Princess Caroline was in constant
attendance on the Queen. So was Lord Hervey. The princess, however,
became unwell herself and the Princess Emily sat up with the Queen.
But Caroline would not consent to be removed from her mother. A couch
was fitted up for her in a room adjoining the Queen's; and Lord Hervey
lay on a mattress on the floor at the foot of the princess's bed. The
King occasionally went to his own rooms, and there was peace for the
time in the dying woman's chamber. Probably the only two that truly
and unselfishly loved the Queen were occupying the couch and the
mattress in that outer room.
The Queen talked often to Princess Caroline, and commended to her the
care of her two younger sisters. She talked to her son William, Duke
of Cumberland, then little more than sixteen years old, admonished him
to be a support to his father, and to "try to make up for the
disappointment and vexation he must receive from your {119} profligate
and worthless brother." But she also admonished him to attempt nothing
against his brother, and only to mortify him by showing superior merit.
She asked for her keys, and gave them to the King. She took off her
finger a ruby ring which he had given her at her coronation, and put it
on his finger, and said to him, almost as patient Grizzel does, "Naked
I came to you, and naked I go from you." All who were present at this
episode in the dying were in tears, except the Queen herself. She
seemed absolutely composed; indeed she was anxious that the end should
come. She had no belief in the possibility of her recovery, and she
only wanted to be released now from "the fever called living." Except
for the bitter outbursts of anger and hatred against the Prince of
Wales, the poor Queen seems to have borne herself like a true-hearted,
resigned, tender wife, kind mother, and Christian woman.
[Sidenote: 1737--A fatal mistake]
An operation was tried, with the consent of the King. Thereupon arises
a controversy not unlike that which followed an imperial death in very
modern European history. Lord Hervey insists that the surgeons showed
utter incapacity, made a shocking and fatal mistake; cut away as
mortified flesh that in which there was no mortification whatever.
Then Sir Robert Walpole, who had been sent for, comes on the scene.
The King ordered him to be brought in from the outer room, and Walpole
came in and tried to drop on his knees to kiss the King's hand. It was
not easy to do, Sir Robert was so bulky and unwieldy. He found it hard
to get down, and harder still to get up again. However, the solemn
duty was accomplished somehow, and then Sir Robert was conducted to the
Queen's bedside. He dropped some tears, which we may be sure were
sincere, even if by no means unselfish. He was in utter dread of
losing all his power over the King if the Queen were to die. The Queen
recommended the King, her children, and the kingdom to his care, and
Sir Robert seems to have been much pleased with the implied compliment
of the recommendation.
{120}
The moment Walpole got to private speech with Lord Hervey, he at once
exhibited the nature of his grief and alarm. "My lord," he exclaimed,
"if this woman should die, what a scene of confusion will there be!
Who can tell into whose hands the King will fall, or who will have the
management of him?" Lord Hervey tried to reassure him, and told him
that his influence over the King would be stronger than ever. Walpole
could not see it, and they argued the matter over for a long time. The
talk lasted two or three hours, much to Lord Hervey's dissatisfaction,
for it kept him out of bed, and this happened to be the first night
since the Queen had fallen ill when he had any chance of a good night's
rest; and now behold, with the Prime-minister's unseasonable anxiety
about the affairs of State, Lord Hervey's chance is considerably
diminished. Even this little episode has its fit and significant place
in the death-bed story. The Prime-minister will insist on talking over
the prospects--his own prospects or those of the nation--with the
lord-in-waiting; and the lord-in-waiting is very sleepy, and, having
had a hope of a night's rest, is only alarmed lest the hope should be
disappointed. No one appears to have said a word as to what would be
better or worse for the Queen.
The Queen was strongly under the belief that she would die on a
Wednesday. She was born on a Wednesday, married on a Wednesday,
crowned on a Wednesday, gave birth to her first child on a Wednesday;
almost all the important events of her life had befallen her on
Wednesday, and it seemed in the fitness of things that Wednesday should
bring with it the close of that life. Wednesday came; and, as Lord
Hervey puts it, "some wise, some pious, and a great many busy,
meddling, impertinent people about the Court" began asking each other,
and everybody else they met, whether the Queen had any clergyman to
pray for her and minister to her. Hervey thought all this very
offensive and absurd, and was of opinion that if the Queen cared about
praying, and that sort of thing, she could pray for herself as well as
any one else could do it. {121} Hervey, however, kept this free and
easy view of things discreetly to himself. He was shocked at the rough
cynicism of Sir Robert Walpole, who cared as little about prayer as
Hervey or any other man living, but was perfectly willing that all the
world should know his views on the subject. The talk of the people
about the Court reached Walpole's ears, and he recommended the Princess
Emily to propose to the King and Queen that the Archbishop of
Canterbury should be sent for. The princess seemed to be a little
afraid to make so audacious a proposal to the King, Defender of the
Faith, as the suggestion that a minister of the Church should be
allowed to pray by the bedside of the dying Queen. Sir Robert
encouraged her in his characteristic way. In the presence of a dozen
people, Hervey tells, Sir Robert said to the princess: "Pray, madam,
let this farce be played; the archbishop will act it very well. You
may bid him be as short as you will. It will do the Queen no hurt, no
more than any good; and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools who
will call us atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools as they
are."
[Sidenote: 1737--Praying with the Queen]
The advice of the statesman was taken. The wise and good fools were
allowed to have it their own way. The archbishop was sent for, and he
came and prayed with the Queen every morning and evening; the King
always graciously bolting out of the room the moment the prelate came
in. But the wise and good fools were not satisfied with the concession
which enlightenment had condescended to make. Up to this time they
kept asking, "Has the Queen no one to pray with her?" Now the
whispered question was, "Has the Queen taken--will the Queen take--the
sacrament?" Some people hinted that she could not receive the
sacrament because she could not make up her mind to be reconciled to
her son; others doubted whether she had religious feeling enough to
consent to ask for the sacrament or to receive it. All this time the
King chattered perpetually to Lord Hervey, to the physicians and
surgeons, and to his children, about the virtues {122} and gifts of the
Queen. He deplored in advance the lonely, dull life he would have to
lead when she was taken from him. He was in frequent bursts of tears.
He declared that he had never been tired one moment in her company;
that he could never have been happy with any other woman in the world;
and he paid her the graceful and delicate compliment of saying that if
she had not been his wife he would rather have her for a mistress than
any other woman with whom he had ever held such relationship. Yet he
hardly ever went into her room, after one of these outpourings of
tender affection, without being rough to her and shouting at her and
bullying her. When her pains and her wounds made her move uneasily in
her bed, he asked her how the devil she could sleep when she would
never lie still a moment. He walked heavily about the room as if it
were a chamber in a barrack; he talked incessantly; gave all manner of
directions; made the unfortunate Queen swallow all manner of foods and
drinks because he took it into his head that they would do her good;
and she submitted, poor, patient, pitiable creature, and swallowed and
vomited, swallowed again and vomited again, and uttered no complaint.
[Sidenote: 1737--Would not play second fiddle]
Even in his outbursts of grief the King's absurd personal vanity
constantly came out; for he was always telling his listeners that the
Queen was devoted to him because she was wildly enamoured of his person
as well as his genius. Then he told long stories about his own
indomitable courage, and went over and over again an account of the
heroism he had displayed during a storm at sea. One night the King was
in the outer room with the Princess Emily and Lord Hervey. The puffy
little King wore his nightgown and nightcap, and was sitting in a great
chair with his thick legs on a stool; a heroic figure, decidedly. The
princess was lying on a couch. Lord Hervey sat by the fire. The King
started the old story of the storm and his own bravery, and gave it to
his companions in all its familiar details. The princess at last
closed her eyes, and seemed to be fast asleep. The King presently went
into {123} the Queen's room, and then the princess started up and
asked, "Is he gone?" and added, fervently, "How tiresome he is!" Lord
Hervey asked if she had not been asleep; she said no; she had only
closed her eyes in order to escape taking part in the conversation, and
that she very much wished she could close her ears as well. "I am sick
to death," the dutiful princess said, "of hearing of his great courage
every day of my life. One thinks now of mamma, and not of him. Who
cares for his old storm? I believe, too, it is a great lie, and that
he was as much afraid as I should have been, for all what he says now,"
and she added a good many more comments to the same effect. Then the
King came back into the room, and his daughter ceased her comment on
his bravery and his truthfulness.
"One thinks of mamma, and not of him." That was exactly what George
would not have. He did dearly love the Queen after his own fashion; he
was deeply grieved at the thought of losing her; but he did not choose
to play second fiddle even to the dying. So in all his praises of her
and his laments for her he never failed to endeavor to impress on his
hearers the idea of his own immense superiority to her and to everybody
else. There is hardly anything in fiction so touching, so pitiful, so
painful, as this exposition of a naked, brutal, yet not quite selfish,
not wholly unloving, egotism. The Queen did not die on the Wednesday.
Thursday and Friday passed over in just the same way, with just the
same incidents--with the King alternately blubbering and bullying, with
the panegyrics of the dying woman, and the twenty times told tale of
"his old storm." The Queen was growing weaker and weaker. Those who
watched around her bed wondered how she was able to live so long in
such a condition of utter weakness. On the evening of Sunday, November
20th, she asked Dr. Tesier quietly how long it was possible that her
struggle could last. He told her that he was "of opinion that your
Majesty will be soon relieved." She thanked him for telling her, and
said in French, "So much the better." About {124} ten o'clock that
same night the crisis came. The King was asleep in a bed laid on the
floor at the foot of the Queen's bed. The Princess Emily was lying on
a couch in a corner of the room. The Queen began to rattle in her
throat. The nurse gave the alarm, and said the Queen was dying. The
Princess Caroline was sent for, and Lord Hervey. The princess came in
time; Lord Hervey was a moment too late. The Queen asked in a low,
faint voice that the window might be opened, saying she felt an asthma.
Then she spoke the one word, "Pray." The Princess Emily began to read
some prayers, but had only got out a few words before the Queen
shuddered and died. The Princess Caroline held a looking-glass to the
Queen's lips, and, finding the surface undimmed, quietly said, "'Tis
over"; and, according to Lord Hervey, "said not one word more, nor as
yet shed one tear, on the arrival of a misfortune the dread of which
had cost her so many."
"Pray!" That was the last word the Queen ever spoke, All the wisdom of
the Court statesmen, all the proud, intellectual unbelief, all the
cynical contempt for the weaknesses of intellect which allow ignorant
people to believe their destiny linked with that of some other and
higher life--all that Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, Walpole, would have
taught and sworn oaths for--all was mocked by that one little word,
"pray," which came last from the lips of Queen Caroline. Bring saucy
Scepticism there; make her laugh at that!
The story would be incomplete if it were not added that while the
Queen's body was yet unburied the King came to Hervey and told him,
laughing and crying alternately, that he had just seen Horace Walpole,
the brother of Robert, and that Walpole was weeping for the Queen with
so bad a grace "that in the middle of my tears he forced me to burst
into laughter." Amid this explosion of tears and laughter the story of
the Queen's life comes fittingly to an end.
[Sidenote: 1737--Walpole strengthens his position]
The moment the breath was out of the Queen's body, {125} Walpole set
about a course of action which should strengthen his position as
Prime-minister of the King. At first his strong fear was that with the
life of the Queen had passed away his own principal hold upon the
confidence of George. He told Hervey that no one could know how often
he had failed utterly by argument and effort of his own to bring the
King to agree to some action which he considered absolutely necessary
for the good of the State, and how after he had given up the attempt in
mere despair the Queen had taken the matter in hand, and so managed the
King that his Majesty at last became persuaded that the whole idea was
his own original conception, and he bade her send for Walpole and
explain it to him, and get Walpole to carry it into execution. Hervey
endeavored to reassure him by many arguments, and among the rest by one
which showed how well Hervey understood King George's weaknesses.
Hervey said the one thing which was in Walpole's way while the Queen
lived was the fear George had of people saying Walpole was the Queen's
minister, not the King's, and suggesting that the King's policy was
ruled by his wife. Now that the Queen was gone, George would be glad
to prove to the world that Walpole had always been his minister, and
that he retained Walpole's services because he himself valued them, and
not because they had been pressed upon him by a woman. Hervey proved
to be right.
Walpole, however, was for strengthening himself after the old fashion.
He was determined to put the King into the hands of some woman who
would play into the hands of the minister. The Duke of Grafton and the
Duke of Newcastle tried to persuade Walpole to make use of the
influence of the Princess Emily. They insisted that she was sure to
succeed to the management of the King, but that if Walpole approached
her at once he might easily make her believe that she owed it all to
him, and that she might thus be induced to stand by him and to assist
him. Walpole would have nothing of the kind. He only believed in the
ruling power of a mistress now that the {126} Queen was gone. He gave
his opinions in his blunt, characteristic way. He meant, he said, to
bring over Madame de Walmoden, and would have nothing to do with "the
girls." "I was for the wife against the mistress, but I will be for
the mistress against the daughters." Accordingly he earnestly advised
the King not to fret any longer with a vain sorrow, but to try to
distract himself from grief, and urged him, for this purpose, to send
over at once to Hanover for Madame Walmoden. Walpole's way of talking
to the young princesses would seem absolutely beyond belief if we did
not know that the reports of it are true. He told the princesses that
they must try to divert their father's melancholy by bringing women
round him; he talked of Madame Walmoden, and repeated to them what he
had said to Lord Hervey, that, though he had been for the Queen against
Lady Suffolk and every other woman, yet now he would be for Madame
Walmoden, and advised them in the mean time to bring Lady Deloraine, a
former mistress, to her father, adding with brutal indecency that
"people must wear old gloves until they get new ones." He offended and
disgusted the Princesses Caroline and Emily, and they hated him forever
after. Walpole did not much care. He was not thinking much about "the
girls," as he called them. He believed he saw his way.
{127} CHAPTER XXX.
THE WESLEYAN MOVEMENT.
[Sidenote: 1738--John Wesley]
In 1738 John Wesley returned to London from Georgia, in British North
America. He had been absent more than two years. He had gone to
Georgia to propagate the faith to which he was devoted; to convert the
native Indians and to regenerate the British colonists. He did not
accomplish much in either way. The colonists preferred to live their
careless, joyous, often dissolute lives, and the stern spirit of Wesley
had no charm for them. The Indians refused to be Christianized; one
chief giving as his reason for the refusal a melancholy fact which has
kept others as well as him from conversion to the true faith. He said
he did not want to become a Christian because the Christians in
Savannah got drunk, told lies, and beat men and women. Wesley had,
before leaving England, founded a small religious brotherhood, and on
his return he at once set to work to strengthen and enlarge it.
John Wesley was in every sense a remarkable man. If any one in the
modern world can be said to have had a distinct religious mission,
Wesley certainly can be thus described. He was born in 1703 at
Epworth, in Lincolnshire. John Wesley came of a family distinguished
for its Churchmen and ministers. His father was a clergyman of the
Church of England, and rector of the parish of Epworth; his grandfather
was also a clergyman, but became a Non-conformist minister, and seems
to have been a good deal persecuted for his opinions on religious
discipline. John Wesley's father was a sincere and devout man, with a
certain literary repute and well read in {128} theology, but of narrow
mind and dogmatic, unyielding temper. The right of King William to the
Throne was an article of faith with him, and it came on him one day
with the shock of a terrible surprise that his wife did not altogether
share his conviction. He vowed that he would never live with her again
unless or until she became of his way of thinking; and he straightway
left the house, nor did he return to his home and his wife until after
the death of the King, when the controversy might be considered as
having closed. The King died so soon, however, that the pair were only
separated for about a year; but it may fairly be assumed that, had the
King lived twenty years, Wesley would not have returned to his wife
unless she had signified to him that she had renounced her pestilent
scepticism.
The same stern strength of resolve which Wesley, the father, showed in
this extraordinary course was shown by the son at many a grave public
crisis in his career. The birth of John Wesley was the result of the
reconciliation between the elder Wesley and his wife. There were other
children, elder and younger; one of whom, Charles, became in after-life
the faithful companion and colleague of his brother. John and Charles
Wesley were educated at Oxford, and were distinguished there by the
fervor of their religious zeal and the austerity of their lives. There
were other young men there at the time who grew into close affinity
with the Wesleys. There was George Whitefield, the son of a Gloucester
innkeeper, who at one time was employed as a drawer in his mother's
tap-room; and there was James Hervey, afterwards author of the flowery
and sentimental "Meditations," that became for a while so famous--a
book which Southey describes "as laudable in purpose and vicious in
style." These young men, with others, formed a sort of little
religious association or companionship of their own. They used to hold
meetings for their mutual instruction and improvement in religious
faith and life. They shunned all amusement and all ordinary social
intercourse. They were ridiculed {129} and laughed at, and various
nicknames were bestowed on them. One of these nicknames they accepted
and adopted; as the Flemish _Gueux_ had done, and many another
religious sect and political party as well. Those who chose to laugh
at them saw especial absurdity in their formal and methodical way of
managing their spiritual exercises and their daily lives. The jesters
dubbed them Methodists; Wesley and his friends welcomed the title; and
the fame of the Methodists now folds in the orb of the earth.
[Sidenote: 1738--Torpor of the English Church]
Wesley and his friends had in the beginning, and for long years after,
no idea whatever of leaving the fold of the English Church. They had
as little thought of that kind as in a later generation had the men who
made the Free Church of Scotland. Probably their ideas were very vague
in their earlier years. They were young men tremendously in earnest;
they were aflame in spirit and conscience with religious zeal; and they
saw that the Church of England was not doing the work that might have
been and ought to have been expected of her. She had ceased utterly to
be a missionary Church. She troubled herself in nowise about spreading
the glad tidings of salvation among the heathen. At home she was
absolutely out of touch with the great bulk of the people. The poor
and the ignorant were left quietly to their own resources. The
clergymen of the Church of England were not indeed by any means a body
of men wanting in personal morality, or even in religious feeling, but
they had as little or no religious activity because they had little or
no religious zeal. They performed perfunctorily their perfunctory
duties; and that, as a rule, was all they did.
Atterbury, Burnet, Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves
ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the
torpid condition into which the Church had fallen. Decorum seemed to
be the highest reach of the spiritual lives of most of the clergy. One
finds curious confirmation of the statements {130} made publicly by men
like Atterbury and Burnet in some of the appeals privately made by
Swift to his powerful friends for the promotion of poor and deserving
clergymen whose poverty and merit had been brought under his notice.
The recommendation generally begins and ends in the fact that each
particular man had led a decent, respectable life; that he was striving
to bring up honestly a large family; and that his living or curacy was
not enough to maintain him in comfort. We hardly ever hear of the work
which the good man had been doing among the poor, the ignorant, and the
sinful. Swift has said many hard and even terrible things about
bishops and deans, and vicars and curates. But these stern accusations
do not form anything like as formidable a testimony against the
condition into which the Church had fallen as will be found in the
exceptional praise which he gives to those whom he specially desires to
recommend for promotion; and in the fact that the highest reach of that
praise comes to nothing more than the assurance that the man had led a
decent life, had a large family, and was very poor. Such a
recommendation as that would not have counted for much with John
Wesley. He would have wanted to know what work the clergyman had done
outside his own domestic life; what ignorance had he enlightened, what
sinners had he brought to repentance.
[Sidenote: 1738--An "archbishop of the slums"]
Things were still worse in the Established Church of Ireland. Hardly a
pastor of that Church could speak three words of the language of the
Irish people. Lord Stanhope, in his "History of England from the Peace
of Utrecht," writes as if the Irish clergymen--the clergymen, that is,
of the Established Church of Ireland--might have accomplished wonders
in the way of converting the Irish peasantry to Protestantism if they
only could have preached and controverted in the Irish language. We
are convinced that they could have done nothing of the kind. The Irish
Celtic population is in its very nature a Catholic population. Not all
the preaching since Adam {131} could have made them other than that.
Still it struck John Wesley very painfully later on that the effort was
never made, and that the men who could not talk to the Irish people in
their own tongue, and who did not take the trouble to learn the
language, were not in a promising condition for the conversion of
souls. The desire of Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the
rest, seems only at first to have been an awakening of the Church in
these islands to a sense of her duty. They do not appear to have had
any very far-reaching hopes or plans. They saw that the work was left
undone, and they labored to bring about a spirit which should lead men
to the doing of it. At first they only held their little meetings on
each succeeding Sunday; but they found themselves warming to the task,
and they began to meet and confer very often. Their one thought was
how to get at the people; how to get at the lowly, the ignorant, and
the poor. Soon they began to see that the lowly, the ignorant, and the
poor would not come to the Church, and that, therefore, the Church must
go out to them. In a day much nearer to our own a prelate of the
Established Church indulged in a very unlucky and unworthy sneer at the
expense of the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. He
called him an "Archbishop of the slums." The retort was easy and
conclusive. It was an admission. "Exactly; that is just what I am. I
am an archbishop of the slums; that is my business; that is what I
desire to be. My ministry is among the hovels and the garrets and the
slums; yours, I admit, is something very different."
This illustrates to the life the central idea which was forming itself
gradually and slowly into shape in the mind of John Wesley and in the
minds of his associates. They saw that archbishops of the slums were
the very prelates whom England needed. Their souls revolted against
the apparently accepted idea that the duties of a priest of the Church
of England were fulfilled by the preaching of a chill, formal, written
sermon once a week, and the attendance {132} on Court ceremonials, and
the dining at the houses of those who would then have been called "the
great." An institution which could do no more and strove to do no more
than the Church of England was then doing did not seem to them to
deserve the name of a Church. It was simply a branch of the Civil
Service of the State. But Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and
the rest, fully believed at first that they could do something to
quicken the Church into a real, a beneficent, and a religions activity.
Most of them had for a long time a positive horror of open-air
preaching and of the co-operation of lay preachers. Most of them for a
long time clung to all the traditional forms and even formulas amid
which they had grown up. What Wesley and the others did not see at
first, or for long after, was that the Church of England was not then
equal to the work which ought to have been hers. A great change was
coming over the communities and the population of England. Small
hamlets were turning into large towns. Great new manufacturing
industries were creating new classes of working-men. Coal-mines were
gathering together vast encampments of people where a little time
before there had been idle heath or lonely hill-side. The Church of
England, with her then hide-bound constitution and her traditional
ways, was not equal to the new burdens which she was supposed to
undertake. She suffered also from that lack of competition which is
hurtful to so many institutions. The Church of Rome had been
suppressed for the time in this country, and the most urgent means had
been employed to keep the Dissenters down; therefore the Church of
England had grown contented, sleek, inert, and was no longer equal to
its work. This fact began after a while to impress itself more and
more on the minds of the little band who worked with John Wesley. They
resisted the idea to the very last; they hoped and believed and dreamed
that they might still be part of the Church of England. They found
themselves drawn outside the Church, and they found, too, that when
once they had gone even a very little way out of the {133} fold, the
gates were rudely closed against them, and they might not return. It
was not that Wesley and his associates left the Church of England. The
Church would not have them because they would persist in doing the work
to which she would not even attempt to put a hand.
[Sidenote: 1738--John Wesley's Charity]
John Wesley had been profoundly impressed by William Law's pious and
mystical book, "A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life," which was
published in 1729. Law lived in London, and Wesley, who desired to be
in frequent intercourse with him, used to walk to and from the
metropolis for the purpose. The money he thus saved he gave to the
poor. He wore his hair at one time very long in order to save the
expense of cutting and dressing it, and thus have more money to give
away in charity. He and his little band of associates, whose numbers
swelled at one time up to twenty-five, but afterwards dropped down to
five, imposed on themselves rules of discipline almost as harsh as
those of a monastery of the Trappist order. They fasted every
Wednesday and Friday, and they made it a duty to visit the prisons and
hospitals. Wesley's father, who was growing old, was very anxious that
his son should succeed him in the rectory of Epworth. John would not
hear of it. In vain his father pressed and prayed; the son could not
see his way in that direction. John Wesley has been blamed by some of
his biographers for not accepting the task which his father desired and
thought right to impose on him. But no one on earth could understand
John Wesley's mission but John Wesley himself. When it was pressed
upon him that in the living of Epworth he would have the charge of two
thousand souls he said, "I see not how any man can take care of a
hundred." It was pointed out to him that his little band of companions
had been growing smaller and smaller; he only answered that he was
purifying a fountain and not a stream. The illustration was effective
and happy.
The truth is that the tremendous energies of John {134} Wesley could
not possibly find employment within the narrow field of work adopted by
the Established Church of his day. Wesley was a fighter; he had to go
out into the broad living world and do battle there. He had
originality as well as energy; he must do his work his own way; he
could not be a minister of routine. He soon found it borne in upon him
that he must speak to his fellow-man wherever he could find him. For a
long time he held back from the thought of open-air preaching, but now
he saw that it must be done. There was a period of his life, he says,
when he would have thought the saving of a soul "a sin almost if it had
not been done in a church." But from the first moment when he began to
preach to crowds in the open air he must have felt that he had found
his work at last. His friend and colleague Whitefield, who had more of
the genius of an orator than Wesley, had preceded him in this path.
One is a little surprised that such men as Wesley and Whitefield should
ever have found any difficulty about preaching to a crowd in the open
air. The Hill of Mars at Athens listened to an open-air sermon from an
apostle, and Whitefield himself observed at a later date that the
"Sermon on the Mount is a pretty remarkable precedent of field
preaching."
[Sidenote: 1738--Wesley's superstition]
Meanwhile, however, Wesley's father died, and Wesley received an
invitation to go out to Georgia with General Oglethorpe, the governor
of that settlement, to preach to the Indians and the colonists. He
sailed for the new colony on October 14, 1735. He was accompanied by
his brother Charles and two other missionaries, and on board the vessel
was a small band of men from "the meek Moravian Missions." The
Moravian sect was then in its earliest working order. It had been
founded--or perhaps it would be more fitting to say restored--not many
years before, by the enthusiastic and devoted Count Von Zinzendorf.
Wesley was greatly attracted by the ways and the spiritual life of the
Moravians. It is worthy of note that when Count Zinzendorf began the
formation or {135} restoration of Moravianism he had as little idea of
departing from the fold of the Confession of Augsburg as Wesley had of
leaving the Church of England. John Wesley did not, as we have said,
accomplish much among the colonists and the Indians. Perhaps his ways
were too dogmatic and dictatorial for the colonists. He departed
altogether from the Church discipline in some of his religious
exercises, while he clung to it pertinaciously in others. He offended
local magnates by preaching at them from the pulpit, giving them pretty
freely a piece of his mind as to their conduct and ways of life, and,
indeed, turning them to public ridicule with rough and rasping
sarcasms. With the Indians he could not do much, if only for the fact
that he had to speak to them through an interpreter. The tongue, says
Jean Paul Richter, is eloquent only in its own language, and the heart
in its own religion. It certainly was not from lack of zeal and energy
that Wesley failed to accomplish much among the Indians. He flung
himself into the work with all his indomitable spirit and disregard for
trouble and pain. One of his biographers tells us that "he exposed
himself with the utmost indifference to every change of season and
inclemency of weather; snow and hail, storm and tempest, had no effect
on his iron body. He frequently lay down on the ground and slept all
night with his hair frozen to the earth; he would swim over rivers with
his clothes on and travel till they were dry, and all this without any
apparent injury to his health." It is no wonder that Wesley soon began
to regard himself as a man specially protected by divine power. He was
deeply, romantically superstitious. He commonly guided his course by
opening a page of the Bible and reading the first passage that met his
eye. He saw visions; he believed in omens. He tells us himself of the
instantaneous way in which some of his prayers for rescue from danger
were answered from above. Those who believe that the work Wesley had
to do was really great and beneficent work will hardly feel any regret
that such a man should have allowed himself to be governed {136} by
such ideas. It was necessary to the tasks he had to execute that he
should believe himself to bear a charmed life.
Wesley was very near getting married in Georgia. A clever and pretty
young woman in Savannah set herself at him. She consulted him about
her spiritual salvation, she dressed always in white because she
understood that he liked such simplicity of color, she nursed him when
he was ill. The governor of the colony favored the young lady's
intentions, which were indeed strictly honorable, being most distinctly
matrimonial. At one time it seemed very likely that the marriage would
take place, but Wesley's heart was evidently not in the affair. Some
of his colleagues told him plainly enough that they believed the young
lady to be merely playing a game, that she put on affection and
devotion only that she might put on a wedding-dress. Wesley consulted
some of the elders of the Moravian Church, and promised to abide by
their decision. Their advice was that he should go no further with the
young woman, and Wesley kept his word and refused to see her any more.
She married, soon after, the chief magistrate of the colony, and before
long we find Wesley publicly reprehending her for "something in her
behavior of which he disapproved," and threatening even to exclude her
from the communion of the Church until she should have signified her
sincere repentance. Her family took legal proceedings against him.
Wesley did not care; he was about to return to England, and he was
called on to give bail for his reappearance in the colony. He
contemptuously refused to do anything of the kind, and promptly sailed
from Savannah.
This little episode of the Georgian girl is characteristic of the man.
He did not care about marrying her, but it did not seem to him a matter
of much importance either way, and he doubtless would have married her
but that he thought it well to seek the advice of his Moravian friends,
and bound himself to abide by their decision. That decision once
given, he had no further wavering or {137} doubt, but the course he had
taken and the manner in which he had completely thrown over the woman
did not prevent him in the least from visiting her with a public rebuke
when he saw something in her conduct of which he disapproved. He saw
no reason why, because he refused to be her lover, he should fail in
his duty as her minister.
[Sidenote: 1738--Wesley's unhappy marriage]
We may anticipate a little as to Wesley's personal history. Later in
his life he married. He was not happy in his marriage. He took for
his wife a widow who plagued him by her narrow-mindedness, her
bitterness, and her jealousy. Wesley's care and kindness of the women
who came under his ministrations set his wife wild with suspicion and
anger. She could not believe that a man could be kind to a woman, even
as a pastor, without having evil purpose in his heart. She had the
temper of a virago; she stormed against her husband, she threatened
him, she sometimes rushed at him and tore his hair; she repeatedly left
his house, but was prevailed upon by him to return. At last after a
fierce quarrel she flung out of the house, vowing that she would never
come back. Wesley's comment, which he expressed in Latin, was stern
and characteristic: "I have not left her, I have not put her away, I
will never recall her." He kept his word.
Wesley started on his mission to preach to the people and to pray with
them. Whitefield and Charles Wesley did the same. Charles Wesley was
the hymn writer, the sweet singer, of the movement. The meetings began
to grow larger, more enthusiastic, more impassioned, every day. John
Wesley brought to his work "a frame of adamant" as well as "a soul of
fire." No danger frighted him, and no labor tired. Rain, hail, snow,
storm, were matters of indifference to him when he had any work to do.
One reads the account of the toil he could cheerfully bear, the
privations he could recklessly undergo, the physical obstacles he could
surmount, with what would be a feeling of incredulity were it possible
to doubt the unquestionable evidence of a whole cloud of {138}
heterogeneous witnesses. Not Mark Antony, not Charles the Twelfth, not
Napoleon, ever went through such physical suffering for the love of
war, or for the conqueror's ambition, as Wesley was accustomed to
undergo for the sake of preaching at the right time and in the right
place to some crowd of ignorant and obscure men, the conversion of whom
could bring him neither fame nor fortune.
All the phenomena with which we have been familiar in modern times of
what are called "revivalist" meetings were common among the
congregations to whom Wesley preached. Women especially were affected
in this way. They raved, shrieked, struggled, flung themselves on the
ground, fainted, cried out that they were possessed by evil spirits.
Wesley rather encouraged these manifestations, and indeed quite
believed in their genuineness. No doubt for the most part they were
genuine: that is, they were the birth of hysterical, highly strung
natures, stimulated into something like epilepsy or temporary insanity
by the unbearable oppression of a wholly novel excitement. No such
evidences of emotion were ever given in the parish church where the
worthy clergyman read his duly prepared or perhaps thoughtfully
purchased sermon. Sometimes a new form of hysteria possessed some of
Wesley's congregations, and irrepressible peals of laughter broke from
some of the brethren and sisters, who declared that they were forced to
it by Satan. Wesley quite accepted this explanation, and so did most
of his companions. Two ladies, however, refused to believe, and
insisted that "any one might help laughing if she would." But very
soon after these two sceptics were seized with the very same sort of
irrepressible laughter. They continued for two days laughing almost
without cessation, "a spectacle to all," as Wesley tells, "and were
then upon prayer made for them delivered in a moment." It is almost
needless now to say that bursts of irrepressible laughter are among the
commonest forms of hysterical excitement.
[Sidenote: 1738--Whitefield's oratory]
The cooler common-sense of Charles Wesley, however, {139} saw these
manifestations with different eyes. He felt sure that there was
sometimes a good deal of affectation in them, and he publicly
remonstrated with some women who, as it appeared to him, were
needlessly making themselves ridiculous. He was probably right in
these instances: the instinct of imitation is so strong among men and
women that every genuine outburst of maniacal excitement is sure to be
followed by some purely mimetic efforts of a similar demonstration.
The novelty of the whole movement was enough to account for the genuine
and the sham hysterics. It was an entirely new experience then for
English men and women of the humblest class, and of that generation, to
be addressed in great open-air masses by renowned and powerful
preachers. Whitefield's first great effort at field-preaching was made
for the benefit of the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol. Before
many weeks had gone by, he could gather round him some twenty thousand
of these men. Whitefield had a marvellous fervor and force of oratory.
His voice, his gestures, his sudden and startling appeals, his solemn
pauses, the dramatic and even theatric energy which he threw into his
attitudes and his action, his flights of lofty and sustained
declamation, contrasting with sentences of homely colloquialism, were
overwhelming in their effect on such an audience. "The first
discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the
white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their
cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only
miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor
and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole,
and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall
under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne
willing testimony to the irresistible power of a sermon from Whitefield.
Wesley and Whitefield did not remain long in spiritual companionship.
They could not agree as to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination.
Wesley was opposed to {140} the doctrine; Whitefield willing to accept
it. They discussed and discussed the question, but without drawing any
nearer together. Indeed, as might naturally have been expected, they
only fell more widely asunder, and after a while the difference of
opinion grew to something like a personal estrangement. Wesley had
already broken away from spiritual communion with some of his old
friends, the Moravians. Probably he felt all the stronger for his own
work now that he stood as a leader all but alone. He walked his own
wild road; Whitefield took a path for himself. Wesley soon found that
he was gaining more followers than he had lost. He had to adopt the
practice of employing lay preachers; it was a matter of necessity to
his task. He could not induce many clergymen to work under his
guidance and after his fashion. The movement was spreading all over
the country. Wesley became the centre and light of his wing of the
campaign. The machinery of his organization was simple and strong. A
conference was called together every year, which was composed of
preachers selected by Wesley. These formed his cabinet or central
board, and lent their authority to his decisions.
This was the germ of the great Wesleyan organization, which has since
become so powerful, and has spread itself so widely over Great Britain
and the American States. The preachers were sent by Wesley from one
part of the country to another, just as he thought best; and it never
occurred to any missionary to refuse, remonstrate, or even delay. The
system was admirable; the discipline was perfect. Wesley was as
completely in command of his body of missionaries as the general of the
order of Jesuits is of those over whom he is called to exercise
control. The humblest of the Wesleyan preachers caught something,
caught indeed very much, of the energy, the courage, the devotion, the
self-sacrifice, of their great leader. No doubt there were many errors
and offences here and there. Good taste, sobriety of judgment,
prudence, common-sense, were now and then offended. Most of the
preachers were {141} ignorant men, who had nothing but an untaught
enthusiasm and a rude, uncouth eloquence to carry them on. They had to
preach to multitudes very often more ignorant and uncouth than
themselves. It would be absolutely impossible under such conditions
that there should not sometimes be offence, and, as Hamlet says, "much
offence too." But there was no greater departure from the lines of
propriety and good taste than any one who took a reasonable view of the
whole work and its workers must have expected to find.
[Sidenote: 1738--Opposition to Wesleyanism]
Of course a strong opposition to the movement showed itself in many
parts of the country. The Wesleyans were denounced; they were
ridiculed; they were caricatured; they were threatened; they were set
upon by ruffians; they were stoned by mobs. In some places it was said
that the local magistrates actually connived with the attempt to drive
them out by force. Projects are actually declared to have been formed
for their complete extermination. Such projects, however, do not
succeed. No amount of violence has ever yet exterminated religious
zeal and impassioned, even let it be fanatical, enthusiasm. John
Wesley went his way undismayed. He even appears to have positively
enjoyed the excitement and the danger. The persecution began after a
while to languish in its efforts, and the Wesleyans kept growing more
and more numerous and strong. But the movement in growing grew away
from the Church of England. Wesley had been drawn out of his original
intent step after step. He could not help himself, once his movement
had been started. He had had to take to field preaching, for the good
reason that he could not otherwise reach the people whom it was his
heart's warmest longing to reach. He had to take to employing lay
preachers, because without them he could not have got his preaching
done. At last he began to ordain ministers, and even, it is said,
bishops, for the missions in America. He had, in fact, broken away
altogether from the discipline of the Church of England, although he
persisted to his dying day that he never had any design of {142}
separating from the Church, "and had no such design now." Near to the
close of his long life he declared, "I live and die a member of the
Church of England, and none who regard my judgment or advice will ever
separate from it." No one can doubt that Wesley spoke in full
sincerity. When he stepped outside the pale of Church practice it was
only to do what he believed ought to have been the work of the Church
itself, but which the Church did not then care to attempt, and which,
as he felt convinced, could not afford to wait for the indefinite time
when the Church might have the spirit, the energy, and the resources
needed for such an undertaking.
Wesley was a thorough despot; as much of a despot as Peter the Great or
Napoleon. He took no trouble to disguise his despotic purpose. He did
not shelter himself, as Napoleon once wished to do, under the draperies
of a constitutional king. Wesley was satisfied in his own mind that he
knew better than any other man how to guide his movements and govern
his followers, and he told people that he knew it, and acted
accordingly. The members of his conference, or what we have called his
cabinet, were only like Clive's council of war; Wesley listened to
their advice and their arguments, but acted according to his own
judgment all the same. Late in his career it was charged against him
that he was trying to turn himself into a sort of Methodist pope. He
asked for some explanation of this, and was told that he had invested
himself with arbitrary power. His answer was simple and
straightforward. "If by arbitrary power you mean a power which I
exercise singly, without any colleagues therein, this is certainly
true; but I see no hurt in it." All the actions of his life show this
complete faith in himself where the business of his mission was
concerned. He was dogmatic, masterful, overbearing, very often far
from amiable, sometimes all but unendurable, to those around him. But
if he had not had these peculiar qualities or defects he would not have
been the man that he was; he would not have been able to bear the
charge of such a task at such a {143} time. It is probable that
Hannibal did not cut through the Alps with vinegar; it is certain that
he could not have pierced his way with honey.
[Sidenote: 1738--Religion out of fashion]
Nothing can better show than the rise and progress of the great
Methodist movement how vast is the difference between a people and what
is commonly called society. In society everywhere throughout England,
in the great provincial cities as well as in the capital, religion
seemed to have completely gone out of fashion. The Court cared nothing
about it. The King had no real belief in his heart; he had as little
faith in Divine guidance as he had in the honor of man or the chastity
of woman. The Queen's devotional exercises were nothing but a mere
performance carried on sometimes through a half-opened door, the
attendant minister on one side of the door and the gossiping,
chattering ladies on the other. The leading statesmen of the age were
avowedly indifferent or professedly unbelieving. Bolingbroke was a
preacher of unbelief. Walpole never seems to have cared to turn his
thoughts for one moment to anything higher than his own political
career, the upholding of his friends if they stood fast by him, and the
downfall of his enemies. Chesterfield was not exactly the sort of man
to be stirred into spiritual life. Morals were getting out of fashion
as much as religion. Society had all the grossness without much of the
wit which belonged to the days of the Restoration. Yet the mere fact
that the Wesleyan movement made such sudden way among the poor and the
lowly shows beyond question that the heart of the English people had
not been corrupted. Conscience was asleep, but it was not dead. The
first words of Wesley seemed to quicken it into a new life.
We have somewhat anticipated the actual course of events in order to
show at once what the Wesleyan movement came to. During the lifetime
of its founder it had grown into a great national and international
institution. Since his time it has been spreading and growing all over
the world where Christianity grows. It is the severest in {144} its
discipline of all the Protestant churches, and yet it exercises a charm
even over gentle and tender natures, and makes them its willing
servants, while it teaches the wilder and fiercer spirits to bend their
natures and tame their wild passions down. [Sidenote: 1738--The
Wesleyan work] In the United States of America Wesleyanism is now one
of the most popular and powerful of all the denominations of
Christianity. It has since been divided up into many sections, both
here and there, on questions of discipline, and even on questions of
belief; but in its leading characteristics it has been faithful to the
main purpose of its founder. Its success did not consist mainly in
what it accomplished for its own people; it achieved a great work also
by the impulse it gave to the Church of England. That Church for a
while seemed to be filled with a reviving spiritual and ministerial
activity. It appeared to take shame to itself that it had remained so
long apathetic and perfunctory, and it flung itself into competition
with the younger and more energetic mission. The English Church did
not indeed retain this mood of ardor and of eagerness very long. After
a time it relapsed into comparative inactivity; and a new and very
different movement was needed at a period much nearer to our own to
make it once again a ministering power to the people--to the poor. But
for the time the revival of the Church was genuine and was beneficent.
With the quickened religious vitality of the Wesleyan movement came
also a quickened philanthropic spirit; a zeal for the instruction, the
purification, and the better life of men and women. The common
instinct of humanity always is to strive for higher and better ways of
living, if only once the word of guidance is given and the soul of true
manhood is roused to the work. Indeed, there is not much about this
period of English history concerning which the modern Englishman can
feel really proud except that great religious revival which began with
the thoughts and the teachings of John Wesley. One turns in relief
from the partisan struggles in Parliament and out of it, from the
intrigues and counter-intrigues of selfish and perfidious statesmen,
and {145} the alcove conspiracies of worthless women, to Wesley and his
religious visions, to Whitefield and his colliers, to Charles Wesley
and his sweet devotional hymns. Many of us are unable to have any
manner of sympathy with the precise doctrines and the forms of faith
which Wesley taught. But the man must have no sympathy with faith or
religious feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable
value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to
the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in
common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of
the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the
opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment
before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with
all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's endurance. They brought
tears to penitent eyes which had never been moistened before by any but
the selfish sense of personal pain or grief. They pierced through the
dull, vulgar, contaminated hideousness of low and vicious life, and
sent streaming in upon it the light of a higher world and a better law.
Every new Wesleyan became a missionary of Wesleyanism. The son
converted the father, the daughter won over the heart of the mother.
There was much that was hard, much that was fierce, in the doctrine and
the discipline of Methodism, but that time was not one in which gentler
teachings could much prevail. Men and women had to be startled into a
sense of the need of their spiritual regeneration. Wesley and the
comrades who worked with him in the beginning, and with some of whom,
like Whitefield, he ceased after a while to work, were just the men
needed to call aloud to the people and make sure that their voices must
be heard. They had to talk in a shout if they were to talk to any
purpose. There was much in their style of eloquence against which a
pure and cultured criticism would naturally protest. But they did not
speak for the pure and cultured criticism. They came to call ignorant
sinners to repentance. They have the one great abiding {146} merit,
they have the one enduring fame--that they saw their real business in
life; that they kept to it through whatever disadvantage, pain, and
danger; and that they accomplished what they had gone out to do. Their
monument lives to-day in the living history of England and of America.
{147}