[58] 'Mark Boyd's Reminiscences of Fifty Years.'
[59] Disraeli.
[60] Mathias.
[61] Rogers.
[62] Tytler's 'England under Edward VI. and Mary,' 1839, vol. i., p.
48.
ART. VI.--_Wesley and Wesleyanism_.
(1.) _The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of the
Methodists_. By the Rev. L. TYERMAN. 3 vols. Hodder and Stoughton.
(2.) _The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, M.A., Rector of
Epworth, and Father of the Rev. John and Charles Wesley_. By the Rev.
L. TYERMAN. Simpkin and Marshall.
(3.) _John Wesley and the Evangelical Reaction of the Eighteenth
Century_. By JULIA WEDGEWOOD. Macmillan and Co.
(4.) _The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley_. Vols. I.--XI.
Methodist Book Room.
(5.) _John Wesley's Place in Church History_. Bell and Daldy.
(6.) _Wesley and Methodism_. By ISAAC TAYLOR. Bell and Daldy.
(7.) _John Wesley: His Life and His Work_. By the Rev. M. LELIÈVRE.
Translated from the French by the Rev. A. J. FRENCH, B.A. Wesleyan
Conference Office.
(8.) _John Wesley; or, the Theology of Conscience_, By the author of
the 'Philosophy of Evangelicism.' Bell and Daldy.
Protestantism has never shown any especial pride in its hagiology, it
does not treasure very highly the lives of its saints; yet it has an
illustrious succession of eminent and noble men--great by endurance
and self-denial, by the majesty and multiplicity of their labours, by
the fervent enthusiasm of their character, and by their exalted
intercourse with divine truths and things. Among the most eminent of
these lives, great by its endowments and virtues, transcendent by
incessant and immeasurable activity, extraordinary by its protracted
period of service, stands that of John Wesley, mild and modest, but
conspicuous and renowned, alike in the Old World and the New. Shall we
be doing a needless thing if we devote some pages to an attempt at an
estimate of the man, his ideas, his work, and his influence? First,
the man. Pleasant, it has been said, is the task to trace up to their
mountain source the streams which, broadening into great rivers,
descend to run among the hills and water the valleys; to drink at the
fountain-head, where perhaps all seems bleak and drear, compared with
the fertility through which the river wanders below; thus, also, it is
pleasant to trace some great benevolent flood of influence and thought
back to its obscure fountain, its unlikely, perhaps unsuspected,
spring. Thus also it is that in the kitchen of a poorly furnished
Lincolnshire parsonage, in its atmosphere of poverty and piety,
Methodism really had its origin; the early life of its founder was
lightened by its special providences, his sense of wonder was excited
by its supernatural voices, his frame was nourished by its hard
discipline. Such was the cradle and the early aliment of John Wesley;
and the first element in Methodism is the quality and character of the
man.
Even at this day, Epworth is a quiet old village town, lying on the
windy side of a Lincolnshire upland; no railway has, we believe,
disturbed its solitary stillness, and the rest of its inhabitants is
unbroken by the shrill whistle of the locomotive. We may figure to
ourselves its loneliness a hundred and seventy years since, when in
its old parsonage John Wesley's eyes first opened to the light. Samuel
Wesley, his father, was the rector of the little village; quite a
notable man to us, and by no means an obscure man in his day. Epworth,
considering those times, was not a poor living, it was worth £200 a
year; it is now worth nearly £1,000; but excellent and admirable man
as he appears to have been, the old rector was usually in debts and
difficulties. Perhaps even Goldsmith's typical clergyman would not
have 'passed rich with £40 a year,' if, in addition to that wealth, he
had found his quiver filled by nineteen children; although we know
wonderful Robert Walker became a rich man, kept out of debt and
danger, and accumulated a fortune in his incumbency of Seathwait on an
annual income of £10! Few well-authenticated stories are more romantic
than that of Epworth parsonage; among old houses it has a
distinguished pre-eminence. Both the pastor and his wife were
extraordinary people: on both sides their ancestors were remarkable,
and they in turn became parents of an offspring, marvellous not merely
in number, but in the singular versatility of their genius. The old
rector was one of the stupendous scholars, of whom there were so many
in the lone and obscure retreats of village life in that age; one of
those men who, patiently trimming the midnight lamp, or kindling it
before the earliest glow of the summer's sunbeam, thought or wrote
with equal facility in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, and published their
works in huge quartos or folios. Of him probably we should now know
nothing, but for the work of his remarkable children. Yet he was
himself a huge folio of a man, a poet, too, in virtue of a
considerable power of conception, fertility of illustration, and
melody of expression; those queer old volumes, the 'Athenian Oracle,'
which are a choice amusement and recreation for the bookworm, received
large contributions, and on the most curious subjects, from his pen:
he possessed a nimble wit, and his posthumous work on Job is said to
contain--for it has never fallen in our way--a vast wealth of
scholarship. Susannah Wesley, his wife, was at once a saint and a
scholar, far more equal to the discussion of many knotty matters in
divinity than some of the bishops of that day; and she also had an
intense concern for the souls of the parishioners round about her. The
household of that parsonage vividly reflects that old twilight time.
Twice the rectory was consumed by fire: it was supposed to be the work
of incendiaries, for the rector was very unpopular, and the story has
often been told in prose and in painting, how, on one of these
occasions, the infant John nearly perished in the flames, how he was
rescued, and how the brave rector knelt with his children on the
village green, exclaiming, 'Come, neighbours, let us kneel down, let
us give thanks to God, He has given me all my eight children--I am
rich enough.' But in the fire he lost not only his house, but his
furniture and his precious library, all his manuscripts, and his
sermons, and moreover a work on Hebrew poetry, which, from what we
know of his pen, must have been very valuable. Grim shadows often fell
over the rectory. One circumstance gives it a most singular notoriety,
and was probably not without influence on the mind of John. We allude
to its celebrated ghost. Among ghost stories, this of the apparition
or _polter-geisterie_ of Epworth--for the hauntings were noisy
racketings rather than appearances--has always been held to be one of
the most inexplicable. Dr. Southey quite inclines to a belief in the
genuineness of the ghostly visitations, and Mr. Tyerman expresses
himself as reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the noises and
other circumstances were occasioned by the direct and immediate agency
of some unseen spirit; Isaac Taylor also seems forced to a similar
admission. Thus it was a singular old house and household; much there
was calculated in every way to stir the souls of such children and
youths as John and Charles Wesley, not to mention the less famous, but
scarcely less ingenious, Samuel and Mehetabel, Amelia and Keziah; it
is interesting to think of that family in those old Epworth fields and
lanes and hedgerows, and to follow them in all their strange, varied,
and parti-coloured existence.
In due time, John left home for college; he studied at Christ-church,
Oxford, after he had fulfilled his earlier course at the Charter
House. It was long before he found his way into the work which has
made his name so eminent; nor can it be said that in earlier life he
gave much promise of that especial excellence to which he attained. He
was a hard and industrious student, an exemplary and pious youth and
young man. It is not uninteresting to notice that at this time he had
rather a close and not unaffectionate correspondence with Mary
Granville, then a young widow, which suggests suspicious
possibilities. Talented, beautiful, and accomplished, we know her
principally as the old lady, Mrs. Delany, the cherished friend of
George III., to whom he paid such courtly and beautiful deference in
her old age at Windsor. Mr. Tyerman seems to think, and we think too,
that Wesley had a 'fair escape;' that he was not at all uninteresting
to the fair widow is certain. What would have become of Methodism had
the intimacy been closer? He was elected a fellow of Lincoln College,
Oxford; but his ideas of Christian truth appear to have been very
crude and confused. In his twenty-fifth year he was ordained a priest
of the Church of England, and ministered for some time at a wretched
little Lincolnshire village called Wroote; the population was under
three hundred, 'and the people,' says Mehetabel Wesley, 'were as dull
as asses and impervious as stone.' It is true there was at this time a
small cluster of Oxford students who had received the denomination of
'Methodists,' and Wesley was one of them; he was called even the
'Curator of the Holy Club,' and a 'crack-brained enthusiast.' His
brother Charles regarded him with reverence, and all looked up to him
as the worthy leader of the little band. He appears to have led the
life of an ascetic, and his charity to the poor was limited only by
his very scanty means. An instance shows us something of the character
of the man. On one cold winter day, a young girl, whom these earlier
Methodists kept at school, called upon him in a state nearly frozen.
The young man said to her, 'You seem half-starved; have you nothing to
wear but that linen gown?' She said, 'Sir, it is all I have!' Wesley
felt in his pocket, but it was almost empty; the walls of his chamber,
however, were hung with pictures, and these now seemed to him to
become his accusers. 'It struck me,' says he, 'will thy Master say to
thee, "Well done, good and faithful steward, thou hast adorned thy
walls with the money which might have screened this poor creature from
the cold." O justice! O mercy! are not these pictures the blood of
this poor maid?' When he had reached the age of seventy-three, the
Commissioners of Excise--in all generations a race of monetary
ferrets--addressed to him a circular, expressing that beyond a doubt
he had neglected to make a proper entry and return of his silver
plate. The letter was very curt and peremptory. Wesley evidently
thought the application to him was ridiculous, and he replied in a
note still more curt. 'Sir, I have two silver spoons at London and two
at Bristol; this is all the plate that I have at present, and I shall
not buy any more while so many round me want bread. I am, Sir, your
most humble servant, John Wesley.' Thus the reflection of the young
student realized itself in the active life of the old man.
For some time, however, John Wesley appears before us as a kind of
eighteenth century Puseyite, or rather such an one as Hurrell Froude;
his notions were cast in a mould of High Church idealism, not unmixed
with a certain morbid pietism; and Oxford Methodism almost anticipates
that other mighty reaction, the great religious movement of our age;
but the Methodism of Oxford, indeed, although it numbered among its
adherents such men as the Wesleys, and Whitefield, and Hervey, and
Ingram, soon came to an end, and, but for Wesley's after career, would
have been buried in oblivion, for Mr. Tyerman truly characterizes it
as 'misty, austere, gloomy, and forbidding, while yet intensely
earnest, sincere, and self-denying.'
The friends were soon widely scattered to their different vicarages
and curacies, and John Wesley himself--now in his thirty-second
year--accepted a mission to the little American State of Georgia. We
need not describe his experience in America further than to remark
how, on his way thither, he fell in with Moravians, who imparted to
him some new light in theology on its experimental side. The vigorous
hymns of the Moravians and their vivid representations of Christian
life, put before him a new set of ideas, which, when he separated
himself entirely from the organization of that sect and returned to
England, bore abundant fruit. His life in Georgia was of short
continuance, but characterized by singular circumstances; first and
foremost, he took into his ministry a very strange, morose, and
cheerless type of Christianity; also in connection with this, we have
to notice a very important item in his history--he fell in love. It is
quite remarkable that all Wesley's transactions with womankind--on
his own account--were unfortunate, even exceedingly unhappy. The lady
who first drew forth his affections appears to have accepted his
proposal of marriage; but by a rapid transition we find her a week or
two after, married to a Mr. Williamson; this overwhelmed the poor
priest, and introduced him to other troubles. He refused to admit her
to the Lord's table; then we find him arrested and brought before the
recorder for defaming the lady; then followed a stream of indictments
against him, and, in brief, sick and sore, and as a prisoner at large,
we find him hurrying away from the colony.
For a life which became so remarkable for the prescience and rigidity
of its principles, such a commencement was very singular. A strange
undeterminateness appears to rule, or rather to leave him unruled and
ungoverned, until his thirty-seventh year. It is singular, for
instance, to find an undoubtedly pious, earnest, holy, and
self-denying man, such as Wesley was, declaring that until he returned
from Georgia he was an unconverted man. He was no doubt in search of
that deep faith which is eternal life. It appears that a real change
came over him when he heard the preaching of Peter Bohler, the
Moravian; in all these earlier years of Wesley's activity he seems to
have been greatly indebted to the Moravians. The issue of the
influence of Bohler upon his mind, was his confession that before this
period he was a servant of God, accepted and safe, but now he knew it,
and was happy as well as safe, and in after years and until our own
time, the conscious happiness of believers has been a considerable
point in Methodist teaching. There is no doubt that Wesley himself
attained a cheerful, quiet, restful consciousness he had never known
before, and his life hereafter, while constant in its course of
self-denial, was lifted above the morose asceticism of his earlier
years. But as to the principle itself, it is surely as dangerous as a
rule of Christian experience, as it is doubtful in all human
philosophy. For some time he was materially influenced by Moravian
principles and practices, and, indeed, it is easy to see that God who
destined for his distinguished servant a very long life, was teaching
him in various schools those principles, which upon an eminently large
scale he was to apply. He went to Germany to visit the Moravian
settlement of Hernhutt, he came to know that eminent and extraordinary
man, Christian David, he heard him preach and received from his own
lips his singular story. He professed himself to have received
remarkable spiritual intelligence from Moravian teachings; and some of
the finest hymns in the Wesleyan Hymn Book are translations made at
this time by John Wesley from those of Count Zinzendorf. But it is
very remarkable that he signalized the period of his conversion by a
quarrel with William Law; he charged him most ungraciously with having
deceived him in having given to him a mystical, notional, and
intellectual faith; and Law replied to him in language, which
assuredly in every way leaves that devout and eminent Christian
philosopher in possession of the field. It is, however, the last
ground of serious exception we can take to the life of Wesley. At this
point, his life seems to collect itself into eminent purpose and
consistency. He was soon compelled to disentangle himself from the
Moravians, whose notions at that time were beset by the most mystical
and mischievous fancies, and ridiculous and even indecent allusions.
He was forbidden their pulpit on account of his clearly expressed
dissent from their doctrines, and almost immediately, and apparently
without any distinctly marked design on his own part, he commenced
that course which made him so pre-eminent a father and apostle in the
modern church. John Wesley's course is very singular. It has this
strong mark of eminent honesty: that the whole of the immense system
of usefulness he inaugurated, appears to have been without especial
intention or plan. From year to year the institution grew; piece by
piece, the mighty structure took proportion and shape. Commencing in a
simple design to be useful, to awaken men to a knowledge of sin, and
to the determination of salvation from sin, Wesley became an
evangelist. He had no idea of separating himself from the Established
Church; he always regarded himself as one of its ministers, and was
sufficiently filled, even to the close of his life, with all the ideas
implied in being an ordained priest in its communion. It is impossible
to regard him in relation to England at that time, without feeling
that he, in an eminent degree, was raised up and set apart for the
salvation of his country.
The social condition of England, when Wesley appeared presents no
attractive picture to the student; in some measure it relieves and
lightens our despondency concerning England at present, to remember
what the country was then. It is true the population was small, almost
insignificant, as compared with our present overcrowded masses--it was
not more than about six millions--but with abundant wealth and means
of happiness, the people fell far short of what we should now consider
comfort. This was, however, a slight shade in the picture; there were
cruelty and injustice in the administration of English law, life and
liberty were held very cheap, deism or atheism in religion and a wild
licentiousness and rude brutality of manners, pervaded all classes,
from the court to the meanest hamlet of the land. For the most part
the Church of England had shamefully forgotten and neglected her duty,
while the Nonconformists had sunk generally into so cold an
indifferentism in devotion, and so hard and sceptical a frame of
thought in theology, that almost every interest of the land was given
over to profligacy or recklessness, and in thoughtful minds to
despair. Those who called themselves Christians were for the most part
spiritually dead. The literature of England suffered a temporary
eclipse, and such as it was, it was shamefully perverted from all high
purposes, and was very generally adverse to all purity and moral
dignity. The gaols, indeed, were crammed with culprits, but that did
not prevent the heaths from swarming with highwaymen, and the cities
with burglars; in the remote regions of England, such as Cornwall in
the West, and Yorkshire and Northumberland in the North, and
especially Midland Staffordshire, the manners were wild and savage
beyond all description or conception. The reader must conceive a state
of society divested of all the educational, philanthropic and
benevolent activities of modern times. There were no Sunday-schools
and few day-schools; here and there a solitary chapel sequestered in
some lane, either in the metropolis or the country town, or more
probably far away from a town, stood in some confluence of roads a
monument of old intolerance; but religion was, as we have said, in
fact dead or lying in a trance. To few men has it been given,
commencing a career at the age of thirty-seven, to have reserved for
them yet, upwards of half-a-century of health, strength, and mental
vigour, to carry out and give effect to all their plans. Wesley rose
to break up this monotony, and to alarm this depravity of social life;
his strong, clear voice sounded over the land; the amount of hatred,
hostility and persecution which he roused, evidently showed the living
feeling he had created; it is a more favourable circumstance that a
man should hate religion than be wholly indifferent to it; on the
other hand, the love was more fervid and intense than the hate, hate
roared and hissed, and threw about its mischievous display of foolish
fireworks in the shape of pamphlets and satires; but there would
appear to have been such a degree of genuine sympathy, that men and
women, united by certain principles of faith, statedly met together,
regardless of peril or cost, and thus there gradually extended over
the whole of England a circle of religious societies bearing Wesley's
name.
The Church of England very soon set itself against the new movement;
Whitefield, much younger than Wesley, an ardent, flaming, seraphic
man, had been compelled to betake himself to the fields. Like Wesley
he was an ordained minister of the Church, but he had been threatened
with suspension and expulsion, and he was the first who could collect
thousands--sometimes not less than twenty thousand--to hear the
gospel. It was with great fear and trembling that Wesley imitated him,
and he says, referring to his first preaching in the open air near
Bristol, 'I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange
way of preaching in the fields; having been all my life, till very
lately, so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order,
that I would have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had
not been done in church.' 'Such,' says Mr. Tyerman, 'were the
prejudices and feelings of the man who for between fifty or sixty
years proved himself the greatest outdoor preacher that ever lived.'
It does not seem very easy to settle the precise etymology of the term
Methodist, whether derived, as some have said, from an allusion in
Juvenal to a celebrated quack physician, or whether, as Mr. Tyerman
seems to think, first used in a pamphlet attacking Whitefield in the
earlier years of his ministry, in which the author fetches up an old
sentence from the pages of Chrysostom, who says, 'To be a Methodist is
to be beguiled.' We ourselves happened once, in a parish church in
Huntingdonshire, to be listening to a clergyman notorious alike by his
private character and vehement intolerance, who was entertaining his
audience on a week evening by a discourse from the text in Ephesians
iv. 14. 'Whereby they lie in wait to deceive.' He said to his people,
'Now you do not know Greek; I know Greek, and I am going to tell you
what this text really says; it says, "they lie in wait to make you
Methodists;" the word used here is _methodeian_, that is really the
word that is used, and that is really what Paul said, "they lie in
wait to make you Methodists." A Methodist means a deceiver, one who
deludes, cheats and beguiles.' The Grecian scholar was a little at
fault in his next allusion, for he proceeded to quote that other
passage of the apostle, 'We are not ignorant of his devices,' and
seemed to be under the impression that 'device' was the same word as
that on which he had expended his criticism. 'Now,' said he, 'you may
be ignorant because you do not know Greek, but "_we_ are not ignorant
of his devices," that is, of his _methods_, his deceivers, that is his
Methodists.' It was a piece of the richest criticism we ever remember
to have heard in any pulpit. In such empty wit and ignorant punning,
it is very likely, however, that the term had its origin; be that as
it may, 'Methodist' soon became the designation of a really large body
of social and spiritual reformers, and assuredly no term has obtained
greater renown and importance since 'the disciples were first called
Christians at Antioch;' but in fact the word is to be found in several
places in our obsolete English. Wesley was not the greatest outdoor
preacher that ever lived, but we can forgive Mr. Tyerman for thinking
so in his high feeling of admiration for his illustrious hero. He
became a power in the country. Earl Stanhope in his very interesting
'History of England from 1713-1783,' devotes a lengthy chapter to
Wesley and the rise of Methodism, and says, 'with less immediate
importance than war or political changes, it endures long after, not
only the result, but the memory of these has passed away, and
thousands who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole continue to hold the
precepts and venerate the name of John Wesley.' Thus this venerable
name is a distinguished landmark or milestone in the history of the
mind of England. By his labours he gave the noblest freedom to
thousands of enslaved minds, and marshalled their wild natures under
the principles of order and obedience. Wesley achieved his greatest
victories in the open air; he probably inherited from his father a
tolerably sharp power of satiric reproof, which often served him well
in such encounters as he would be sure to have in the broad streets or
the fields, and was well illustrated in his victory over Beau Nash.
The accomplished rake and dandy king of Bath, master of the ceremonies
in that then famous watering-place, appeared swaggering in his
enormous white hat, and asked, 'By what authority he dared to do what
he was doing now?' 'By the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to me
by him who is now Archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid his hands
upon me and said, "Take thou authority to preach the Gospel."' Cried
the man of Bath, 'Your preaching frightens people out of their wits.'
'Sir,' said Wesley 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'No!' 'How then can
you judge of what you have never heard?' 'I judge, he answered, 'from
common report.' 'Common report,' replied Wesley, 'is not enough; give
me leave to ask, Sir, is not your name Nash?' 'It is,' he said. 'Sir,'
replied Wesley, 'I dare not judge _of you_ by common report.' Even the
unblushing master of ceremonies was abashed and worsted; he was
slinking away, when, to complete his discomfiture, an old woman lifted
up her voice, and begged Wesley to allow her to question and to answer
him; this made the scene ludicrous, and in the midst of such a
singular and disgraceful defeat, the mighty dandy left the preacher to
continue and to close his sermon.
The most romantic lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar
do not present a more startling succession of incidents than those
which meet us in the life and labours of Wesley and his Prætorian
band, and these are all the more marvellous and romantic because they
lay no tax upon credulity and never appeal to miracle as their
foundation. Wesley never, like blessed St. Raymond of Pennafort,
spread his cloak upon the sea to transport him across the water,
sailing one hundred and sixty miles in six hours, and entering his
convent through closed doors; nor do we ever find him, like the dear
and judicious Xavier, spending three whole days in two different
places at the same time, preaching all the while. We fear it is true
that Wesley does not shine in feats like these, but he seems almost
ubiquitous, and moves with a rapidity which reminds us of that flying
angel who had 'the everlasting gospel to preach;' while his conflicts
with the tempests of nature, and those wilder tempests caused by the
passions of men, crowd his life with incident. We read of adventurous
journeys through regions in the North of England when snowstorms
drifted and baulked the way, and made travelling almost impossible, or
over roads made like glass by the hard frost, and through pathless
wastes of white. Thus we read of his travelling through the long
wintry hours, two hundred and eighty miles, on horseback in six days,
a wonderful feat, and Wesley himself writes,--'Many a rough journey
have I had before, but one like this I never had, between wind and
hail and rain and snow and ice, and driving sleet and piercing cold;
but it has passed, and those days will return no more, and are
therefore as though they had never been. So "the love of Christ
constrained him."' Vast concourses met him in singular places: on
Blackheath fourteen thousand people, in Kingswood more, in Moorfields
and on Kennington Common twenty thousand people. Singular was his
visit to Epworth, where he found the church of his childhood, his
father's church, and the church of his own first ministrations, closed
against him, but for eight days he stayed, and preached every night
standing on his father's tomb; truly a singular sight, the living son,
the prophet of his age, surely little short of inspired, preaching on
the dead father's grave, with such pathos and power as we may well
conceive. 'I am well assured,' he says, 'that I did far more good to
my Lincolnshire parishioners by preaching three days on my father's
tomb, than I did by preaching three years in his pulpit.' Visiting
York, he went to the service of St. Saviour's Gate church; the rector,
the Rev. Mr. Cordeux, had warned his congregation against hearing that
'vagabond Wesley' preach. Wesley went into the church in his
canonicals, it was not unusual for ministers then to wear the cassocks
or the gown like the university man in a university town: the rector
of course saw he was a clergyman, but not knowing who he was, offered
him his pulpit to preach, and Wesley was thoroughly willing and ready.
He took for his text a part of the gospel of the day--sermons leaped
impromptu from his lips and heart; this sermon was an impressive one,
and after the service the rector asked the clerk if he knew who the
strange clergyman was. 'Sir,' said the clerk, 'it was the "vagabond
Wesley" against whom you warned us.' 'Ay, indeed!' said the
astonished rector, 'we have been trapped, but never mind, we have had
a good sermon.' The Dean of York heard of the affair, and threatened
to lay the matter before the archbishop; but the rector outstripped
the dean, and went himself and told the story to the archbishop. 'You
did quite right,' he said, and so the matter ended; only when the
'vagabond Wesley' came to York again, the rector offered his church
the second time to him, and a second time be preached in St.
Saviour's.
A succession of persecutions attended him and his followers on their
way, and yet very little could be alleged to their discredit. In
Cornwall, Edward Greenfield, a tanner, with a wife and seven children,
was arrested under a warrant signed by Dr. Borlase, the eminent
antiquarian, who was a bitter foe to Methodism. Wesley appeared to
vindicate his friend, and he first inquired what objection there was
to the peaceable, inoffensive man. The answer was, 'The man is well
enough in other things, but the gentlemen cannot bear his impudence;
why, Sir, he says that he knows his sins are forgiven!' When
Bernardine of Sienna preached at Bologna, the people brought out their
dice-tables and burnt them in the streets; when Antony of Padua
preached at Pavia, he saw impure books and pictures committed to
immense flames; and even more remarkable, when Savonarola preached in
Florence, the woman left off painting their faces, and decorating
their hair. The results of Wesley's preaching were scarcely less
remarkable. The story is well known how in one place a whole
waggon-load of Methodists had been taken before a magistrate, but when
he asked what they had done, a deep silence fell over the court, for
no one was very well prepared with any charge against them; at length
some one exclaimed that 'they pretended to be better than other
people, and prayed from morning till night;' and another said, 'They
have _convarted_ my wife; till she went among them she had such a
tongue, but now she's as quiet as a lamb.' 'Take them back, take them
back,' said the sensible magistrate, 'and let them convert all the
scolds in the town.' We are amazed when we attempt to realize all the
causeless conflicts through which many of these holy enthusiasts
passed, certainly the world in all its force was against them; no wild
anti-popery riots were more unreasonable and brutal than the turbulent
mobs which tore down houses and insolently assaulted women and men for
their attachment to the new movement. Attempts were often made on
Wesley's life in Cornwall; wild cries rose around him, 'Away with
him!' 'Kill him at once!' 'Crucify the dog!' Stones and bricks were
frequently hurled at him; often he might have said, 'My soul is among
lions.' Staffordshire was scarcely behind Cornwall in the rough
assaults. Quiet men were pressed for soldiers, and sent as prisoners
to jail, simply because they were Methodists; hot-headed Hanoverians
did their best to make the whole Methodist body disloyal, and both
John and Charles Wesley were arrested or taken before the magistrates
upon suspicion of being favourable to the Pretender. Thus Charles was
brought before the magistrates at Wakefield, and five witnesses were
ready to swear that he had either prayed or preached about the return
of the 'Banished One,' the well-known and tender words of the wise
woman of Tekoa, being supposed to convey some sinister allusion to the
exiled Stuarts. It was the age of mobs and riots; for a long time the
preaching of Wesley appears to have been greeted by turbulencies as
wild and vehement as those which give a disgraceful notoriety to the
name of John Wilkes or Lord George Gordon.
So astonishing were the results of these very simple and Christ-like
ministrations, that there was surely something of the supernatural in
the man Wesley. It is part of the very nature of Christianity to
believe that from time to time the Church is invigorated by
extraordinary impulses of divine life find grace, and singular
effusions of the Holy Spirit: and to those who are able to reach at
all the idea of supernatural causes in the Christian life, it is not
difficult to apprehend the reality of such impulses. There was surely
much that was remarkable in Wesley; it is unquestionable that strange
influences seemed to attend him. His words, it has been remarked,
seemed to possess a mesmeric power; his proximity to the supernatural
has often been made the subject of criticism. Extraordinary
circumstances which Southey, Richard Watson, Isaac Taylor, and other
eminent writers have found to be perfectly inexplicable upon
principles of natural reasoning marked his ministry; we read of
innumerable instances of individual convulsions, and of multitudes
falling prostrate to the ground before his words; cold and
imperturbable natures were suddenly overwhelmed. Wesley was quite a
believer in the visible and oral manifestation of the 'powers of the
world to come;' such instances were especially prominent in the
earlier part of his singular course. We have no remarks to make upon
these phenomena, nor shall we inquire whether they may or may not be
accounted for on merely natural principles; the facts remain
unquestioned. One thing is certain, as when Peter preached, so at the
preaching of Wesley, innumerable thousands were 'pricked to the heart,
and exclaimed, "What shall we do?"'
The power of Wesley's teaching may probably be traced to the fact that
it dealt with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; but then the whole
doctrine was suffused in the fulness, the sufficiency, and the
sweetness of Jesus, and it was a mighty reaction against the
indifference and injustice of the age. The party formed against Wesley
represented the higher classes, bishops and men whose minds and hearts
it would seem were incapable of sympathy for the suffering and the
poor, and for those who were out of the way; coarse ribalds like
Lavington, the Bishop of Exeter, or dilettanti gentlemen like Horace
Walpole, buffoons and time servers like Foote, or even hard
theologians like Toplady, their doctrines tinctured with the harsh and
morbid severity of the times, when, as we have seen, reckless
disregard for life, a claim over it for the most insignificant
offences, must have tended to give a rigour and narrowness to many
religious ideas. Wesley's audiences were chiefly composed of the poor.
The early Methodist was a very simple, perhaps usually an ignorant,
man, but he had that light which 'lighteth every man that cometh into
the world.' The Methodist was not such an one as the Puritan of other
days, who was a sort of Knight of the Iron Hand, a Nonconformist
crusader, whose theology had trained him to the battle-field, nerved
him to frown defiance upon kings, and to treat as worthy only of
contempt the unsanctified nobles of the earth. The Methodist was not
such an one; he was as loyal as he was lowly, he had been forgotten or
passed by, by priests and Levites, but suddenly he found himself
raised to the rank of a living soul--a voice had reached him assuring
him that he, too, was in possession of a soul. Over the country the
ground, on the whole, was easy to Wesley to win; there was no
education, there were no conflicts of opinion, there were no popular
books, the people had no objects to claim their attention, the towns
were far apart, and connected only by the mail or stagecoach, or that
heavy and much more romantic-looking than agreeable conveyance, the
market-cart; there was little popular excitement, there were only
coarse amusements. It is unquestionable that the people had far fewer
religious interests than in the old days of popery, the entire
services of the Church were bald and uninteresting, there was no
music, unless of such a description as to move the passions by
shattering the nerves,--there was no popular psalmody worthy of the
name; thus the religious nature was entranced or buried. But the
Methodist was one who had heard the call of God, conscience had been
stirred within him, and a new life had created new interests; for
Christianity really ennobles a man, gives him self-respect, shows to
him a new purpose and business in life, and stirs the spirit,
moreover, with a pulse of joy and cheerfulness; hence Methodism
created the necessity for meetings and for frequent reciprocations.
There were no chapels, or but few, and none to open their doors to
these strange new pilgrims to the celestial city. The churches, of
course, were closed against them;--what could be done, for they must
speak together. Reciprocation was the soul of Methodism; almost all
the great religious movements have been instituted and marked by some
sign--Dominic invented the rosary, Loyola the spiritual contemplations
and the retreat, Wesleyanism created Class-meetings; this constituted
its essential symbolism. A church can scarcely long maintain a
standing without a symbol. This is the countersign of parties and
sects. So these people assembled in each other's houses, in rude and
homely rooms, by farm ingles, in lone hamlets; thus was created a
homely piety, rugged enough, but full of beautiful and pathetic
instincts. When the faith became more consciously objective, it was
possessed by that singular belief ruling the Church in all such
movements--the belief in the power, conjoined to the desire to save
souls. This drove them out on great occasions to call the vast
multitudes together on heaths and moors. Occasionally, but this was at
a later period, some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the
preachers; but the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement
fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks; these
last sought the sequestered places of nature, or in cities and towns
they took to the streets, outlying fields or broadways; in some
neighbourhoods a little room was built containing the germ of what in
a few years became a large Wesleyan society. The burden of all their
meetings and their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the
sweetness and fullness of Jesus; they had an intense faith in the love
of God shed abroad in the heart; their great solicitude was that souls
were on the brink of perdition. This was to them more than spiritual
difficulties, mere interior trials, or speculative despair; these were
mostly a _terra incognita_ to them. Wesley dealt, as it has been
expressed, with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; he had little
regard to mere proprieties. Wesley and his preachers, 'out of breath
pursuing souls,' seemed to many ungraceful, undignified, their faces
weary, their hands heavy with toil. Yet these men had found, such as
it was, a definite creed, and, as in the case of their great leader,
all the inexhaustible variety and world-wide energy of other minds
were in them concentrated into a burning instinct; the word of 'the
Lord was like fire, or like a hammer.' The early Methodists had also
the mighty instincts of prayer--to them there was a meaning in it and
a joy. So these men pursued their way. God's ministry goes on by
various means, ordinary and extraordinary; it is the difference
between rivers and rains, between the dews and the lightnings, the
rivers are exhaled by the sun and return to the earth in rains, the
Severn and the Wye roll their beautiful forces through the meadow and
along the hill-side, but if they did not give their waters to the sun
and the cloud, and fall back upon the earth as dew and showers, they
would cease from their channels among the hills. So Methodism availed
itself of the ordinary and extraordinary.
All truly holy souls, even those the most opposed in their pews or
their studies, meet and melt and mingle in song; holy song is the
solvent of the most divergent creeds. Perhaps the greater number of
the early Methodists were not pressed by physical want; concern for
the soul was the grand business, in many instances possibly it was a
wild and even diseased feeling. There was no art, no splendid form of
worship or ritual; early Methodism was as free from all this as
Clairvaux, in the valley of Wormwood, when Bernard ministered there
with all his monks around him, or as Cluny, when Bernard de Morlaix
chanted his 'Jerusalem the Golden.' Methodism, like all the great
religious movements which have shaken men's souls, was purely
spiritual, or, if it had a sensuous expression, it was not artificial;
loud 'Amens!' resounded as Wesley preached, spoke, or prayed, and then
the hearty gushes of, perhaps, not melodious song united all hearts in
some Wesleyan Litany or Te Deum. It was so throughout the whole land;
such cyclones of spiritual power mysteriously visit our world from age
to age, but this surely was one in which there was infinitely more to
bless and benefit, and far less to which good taste or good sense
could take any exception, than in perhaps any of the great preceding
waves of spiritual power which had rolled over Europe. It was the
ascetic type set forth by Wesley in an age of animal and sensual
indulgence. It was principally by fighting with the sins of the age,
at the same time by laying hold upon its characteristics, and
especially by remembering that man is more than a machine to fill rich
men's pockets, or to digest victuals--a soul, in fact, for whom Christ
died--that Methodism 'grew mightily, and prevailed.'
The strength of a great and popular leader is especially shown in his
power to infuse his own spirit into the minds of other men, thus
constituting an organized band of kindred helpers; never surely was
there a man who more remarkably abides this test than Wesley, and he
became the general of a remarkable order. Protestantism may well, with
Wesley to adduce, challenge Rome to produce any superior illustration
of spiritual power. Archbishop Manning has spoken of St. Benedict, St.
Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Ignatius, chiefs of the orders they
created, as the four rivers of the water of life; it is a singular
illustration and not creditable to the archbishop's piety or good
taste; but if Wesley be compared with these great fathers of the
Romish Church, he shines brilliantly in the comparison. Mr. Tyerman
enthusiastically inquires, 'Is it not true that Methodism is the
greatest fact in the history of the Church of Christ?' We may reply we
do not think so, and may yet be prepared to render almost equal homage
with Mr. Tyerman to this stupendous spiritual organization. John
Wesley very soon poured his animating spirit into other men, and the
history of Jesuitism--that marvellous story of the conquest of the
human mind--does not exhibit anything like so striking an array of
heroic and glorious achievements. Rome would make much of such a
history, had she to recite it of herself. The names of those who
surround Wesley as his fellow-labourers and helpers are, indeed, all
of them humble men; no courtly or episcopal favour smiled upon him or
them as they passed along. He had absolutely nothing but the pure
Gospel, by the proclamation of which he sought to awaken human
interest and to command attention; but soon there came a host, of whom
it might be said, 'There went with him a band of men whose hearts God
had touched.' The mind of England seemed to be waiting for that which
Wesley brought to it. Spiritually dead as the Church of England was,
many clergymen, responsive to his call, shook off their lethargy, and
several, like William Grimshaw, of Haworth, laboured heartily with the
apostle of Methodism. The right material was constantly at hand so
soon as it was needed, in men who have almost passed away from memory,
but whose 'record is on high.' We have no space for the review of that
long gallery of interesting portraits of marked and remarkable men;
only we notice there seemed to be a hand for every kind of work that
had to be accomplished; one to lead on the polemic work of the
disputant, and another, or others, to pour forth hymns; some to sway,
by rugged but splendid powers of persuasion, immense masses of people;
others to minister in localities and gather up the lost sheep into
folds; and others to visit in prison, or in those scenes where the
tender voice and the ministering hand were needed, while all bowed
before the omnific mind of Wesley. Few lives are more startling than
that of John Nelson; few types of saintly holiness are higher than
Thomas Walsh; Thomas Maxfield has generally been supposed to be the
first of the long line of lay preachers to whose exertions Methodism
owes so much; while John and Thomas Oliver, John Haine, George Story,
and Sampson Staniforth, and a number of other goodly names, represent
lives of such intense earnestness, holiness, and activity, as would
certainly win them a place in a Catholic calendar of saints, and are
so full of glowing adventure, that the story of many of them would
keep a boy's eyes from winking even late in the night.
Simultaneously with Wesley came the singular apparition of Whitefield,
who fell into no groove of Church routine or life, although
undoubtedly standing on the Calvinistic side of Methodist opinion. It
is interesting to compare these two men together. Whitefield sprang
upon the world ready armed as a youth of twenty, and finished his
career in the prime of life; he seems almost to realize, if it can be
realized, the idea of an abstract soul. We read his words, and they
are nothing; but those words uttered by him broke down, overwhelmed,
and dissolved all prejudices. What must he have been to whom such
strong men, such courtly, artificial, yet highly cultured men, such
sceptical and inaccessible men as Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield, and
David Hume, and Garrick, and Benjamin Franklin, 'were as tow,' while
he was as 'a spark' to kindle all into consuming flame. Not
immediately connected with Wesley's organization, this mysterious and
marvellous man, an entire soul of all-embracing love and compassion,
greatly aided the movement;--equally at home in preaching in the
select saloons of the Countess of Huntingdon, to Dukes and Duchesses
and arrays of Peers, or in the wildest and most furious and murderous
mobs. Whitefield is a mystery to us; he only seems to burn with an
incandescent heat, so that words shrivel, and evaporate in the flame
of that pure, ingenuous, generous, and wholly consecrated soul; and
this, notwithstanding the melody of that full, clear, all-encompassing
voice, varying to every passionate accent, sinking to the most
penetrating entreaty, swelling to the most rousing apostrophe. In the
full careering heat of his speech, Whitefield became, unconsciously to
himself, poet, philosopher, psychologist, thus enabling us to
understand something of his stupendous power, even while we are still
perplexed as to its cause. No melody or poetry shines through the
words of his published discourses; but no pictures we have ever met
with of inspired, rapt oratory, are more surprising than those which
are presented to us by his contemporaries of Whitefield's preaching,
on the slope of some mountain or hill, the trees and hedges full of
people hushed to profound silence, the open firmament above him, the
green fields around him, the sight of thousands on thousands of
people, some in coaches, some on horseback, gathered around him and
all affected--melted to tears. When the evening approached, he once
said, 'Beneath the twilight it was too much, and quite overcame me!'
One night he describes a time never to be forgotten: it lightened
exceedingly; he preached the warnings and the consolations of the
coming of the Son of Man; the thunder broke over his head, the
lightning gleamed upon his path; it ran along the ground, and shone
from one part of the heavens to the other. His spirit rose above the
storm; he longed for the time when Christ should be revealed in
flaming fire. 'Oh,' exclaims he, 'that my soul may live in a like
flame, when He shall actually come to call me!'
But Wesley's success! Wesley, as an orator, seems still more
inconceivable. By all accounts Whitefield was seraphic. Wesley seldom
rose beyond penetrating good sense, and nothing appears to have
transported him out of his invariable calm. Yet the effects of his
oratory were even still more wonderful; there was something of
magnetism in it. Henry Moore, his great friend, says, 'At this moment,
I well remember my first thought after hearing him preach nearly fifty
years ago; _spiritual_ things are natural things to that man;' In
innumerable instances we find audiences shaken as by a mighty wind,
hurled down, agonizing, screaming aloud; there was much more of all
this in Wesley's preaching than in Whitefield's, yet in Whitefield's
we should expect it more. Wesley, in the style of his oratory, seems
to have been judicial, and our readers are not unaware of the
remarkable power that quiet statement is able to exercise. Who so
passionless apparently as Jonathan Edwards, a man who would have
disdained every approach to sensationalism, whose entire mode of
pulpit delivery was obnoxious to all ideas of pulpit oratory, and
whose whole scheme of thought and expression were as calm and clear as
logical metaphysics could make them? yet what scenes he witnessed when
he preached? Thus it was eminently with Wesley; crowds thronged around
him intent to listen wherever he appeared; if the face was beautiful,
the height of the body was so far beneath the average standard that it
seems almost contemptible for the holding of such powers as he
wielded; and then the voice, not less than the manner, appears to have
been unfitted to carry tempests of passion--nor did he desire that it
should; we suppose that it must have been singularly clear and
penetrating, and that every sentence was sharply cut and elaborated,
not by preparation and the pen, but by convictions deep and indelible.
Such sentences carried upon a clear penetrating voice--and in oratory
the voice is all but everything--will achieve more than more plausible
means. It is fervour which fires, but fervour often burns more
effectually in the still, white, soundless heat, than in what seems to
be the most raging flame. There must have been considerable natural
dignity in the man. 'Be silent, or begone,' he said on one occasion to
some who were molesting him in preaching, and the intruders were
silenced. The traditions of Methodism are rich in the recollection of
such scenes;--the scenes of Gwennap Pit for instance. This is a
natural excavation, three miles from Redruth, an amphitheatre, formed
by nature, whose walls are from seven to eight hundred feet in height,
and which is capable of holding from twenty-five to thirty thousand
persons. This was one of Wesley's most famous churches. Year after
year this most spacious and magnificent cathedral amongst the wild
moors of Cornwall was crowded by vast and hushed assemblies. Until
Wesley's day, all that immense population might have said, 'No man
cared for our souls.' Wild, rugged miners and fishermen of whom it was
true that they never breathed a prayer except for the special
providence of a shipwreck--men whose wicked barbarity in kindling
delusive lights along the coast to allure unfortunate ships to the
cruel cliffs of those dangerous shores, had won for their region the
name of 'West Barbary.' Now, as if some power had passed over them,
clothed anew and in their right minds, they assembled to greet and
gladden their venerable father in that wild glen, creating a strange
and not unbeautiful life in the stillness of that desolate and
romantic spot, and worshipping with the birds overhead and the broom
and the wild flowers under foot, under the overhanging shadow of the
venerable rocks. Truly it must have been a sublime thing to have heard
that great multitude peal out in Wesley's own words:--
'Suffice that for the season past,
Hell's horrid language filled our tongues,
We all thy words behind us cast,
And loudly sang the drunkard's songs.
But, oh! the power of grace divine,
In hymns we now our voices raise,
Loudly in strange hosannas join,
And blasphemies are turned to praise.'
Twenty-five thousand persons! and it is said he was able to make
everyone hear his words; wonderful, whether we think of the acoustical
properties of the church itself, the attentiveness the preacher could
command, or the marvellous strength, the clearness and fulness of his
voice.
Of all the helpers from whom Wesley derived assistance essential to
the carrying on his work, his brother Charles was the most
providential. He was a narrow ecclesiastic, and often troublesome, but
he did good service. Much as Wesley loved the service of the Church of
England, it was utterly impossible to employ it in the work he set
himself to perform; but it has been felt again and again, whether it
has been expressed or not, that a religious service without liturgies
is impossible. People may disclaim and disown the word liturgy, and
substitute for it psalms and hymns, the fact remains the same; psalms
and hymns are liturgies in rhyme--liturgies sung instead of said.
Congregations need to be held together; the voice of a solitary soul
is not enough for religious purposes, and especially for the pressure
of overwrought emotions; multitudes require something more than a mere
monologue. Wesley arose at a time when that popular and united form of
worship, the hymn, had but just ceased to be regarded as an
innovation. There were Churches in London--Maze Pond, for
instance--which had divided upon the question of singing, and the
unmusical members went off, and formed a community of their own,
undistracted by notes of song. Watts had only just published some of
his psalms and hymns, when Wesley came down among the people and began
to move to and fro amongst his congregations. The want of simple forms
of prayer and praise was soon felt. No doubt his recent acquaintance
with the Moravians had given him invaluable suggestions, of which he
was prepared to avail himself. Amidst much which was worse than
foolish, the Moravians had, as he knew, many inspiring psalms, and a
far greater variety of metre than English devotional verse had
heretofore employed. Some of the most magnificent hymns in the
Wesleyan collection are Wesley's translations from Zinzendorf and
other German psalmists; but the fulness and splendour of Wesleyan
psalmody was developed by Charles Wesley. His hymns have been the
liturgies of Methodism, the creeds of that Church have been embodied
in them, they have formed its collects, and enshrined its loftiest
bursts of devotional ardour. What sentiment of Christian experience is
there which does not find an utterance in them? What phase of
Methodist faith is there which is not translated into some of these
verses? In preparing the hymn-book, indeed, a great number of Watts's
hymns were included, and included not only without any acknowledgment,
but the preface, from the pen of John, claims for the Wesleys all the
hymns in the volume. In this condition the hymn-book remains to this
day, and we have often conversed with Methodists who have stoutly
maintained that certain hymns in the volume legitimately belong to it,
although published by Watts years before its compilation. This,
however, in no way interferes with the estimate we have to form of
these sacred lyrics; of course, the Methodist estimate of them is that
they are the highest achievements of sacred song. That which we are
constantly using, and which touches our affections becomes supremely
precious and dear to us. They are all eminently experimental; they
seem to have been constructed for the class-meeting and band-meeting;
they are especially conjubilant, hymns well calculated to excite and
stir, and carry aloft the feelings of the people; and they have
become--they very soon became--the voices of the Church.
Wesley, in his reformation, soon commenced the work of reforming the
singing. Throughout his life and labours he often remarks upon the
questionable psalmody by which he was greeted; thus at Warrington, he
says:--
'I put a stop to a bad custom which was creeping in here; a
few men, who had fine voices, sang a psalm which no one
knew, in a tune fit for an opera, wherein three, four, or
five persons sung different words at the same time; what an
insult to common sense! what a burlesque upon public
worship! no custom can excuse such a mixture of profanity
and absurdity.'