WILLIAM E.H. LECKY
Next to the founders of the world's great religions, the principal figures in religious history are the leaders of its new movements, the founders of sects or denominations. In this subordinate class few names outrank that of John Wesley, while those of his brother, Charles, and George Whitefield, their eloquent colleague, are inseparably associated with that of the great founder of Methodism, one of the most striking of the epochal religious movements of modern times.
Although not intending to break with the Anglican Church, Wesley and his followers were carried out upon independent lines which led to the upbuilding of a distinct type of religious faith and organization, whose power has been especially marked in Great Britain and America, and has been increasingly spread throughout the world.
Between Whitefield and John Wesley, in 1741, a separation occurred on points of doctrine, Whitefield adhering to a rigid Calvinism, while Wesley inclined to Arminianism, and thenceforth they followed their several paths. Although Whitefield founded no sect, he exerted a widespread influence by his presence and voice. Before their separation both preachers had been in America, and the personality and eloquence of Whitefield not only wrought a spell upon the multitude, but even exercised a degree of fascination over such a philosophical spirit as Franklin. Wesley's work in America was deeper and more enduring, and is still a growing feature of the country's religious development.
Nothing could be happier for the present purpose than the treatment of this great religious movement, in its beginnings, as it is here dealt with by the dispassionate historian of England during the century in which the movement arose.
The Methodist movement was a purely religious one. All explanations which ascribe it to the ambition of its leaders, or to merely intellectual causes, are at variance with the facts of the case. The term Methodist was a college nickname bestowed upon a small society of students at Oxford who met together, between 1729 and 1735, for the purpose of mutual improvement. They were accustomed to communicate every week, to fast regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays and on most days during Lent; to read and discuss the Bible in common, to abstain from most forms of amusement and luxury, and to visit sick persons, and prisoners in the jail.
John Wesley, the master spirit of this society, and the future leader of the religious revival of the eighteenth century, was born in 1703, and was the second surviving son of Samuel Wesley, the rector of Epworth, in Lincolnshire. His father, who had early abandoned Nonconformity, and acquired some reputation by many works both in prose and verse, had obtained his living from the government of William, and had led for many years a useful and studious life, maintaining a far higher standard of clerical duty than was common in his time. His mother was the daughter of an eminent Nonconformist minister, who had been ejected in 1662, and was a woman of rare mental endowments, of intense piety, and of a strong, original, and somewhat stern character.
Their home was not a happy one. Discordant dispositions and many troubles darkened it. The family was very large. Many children died early. The father sank slowly into debt. His parishioners were fierce, profligate, and recalcitrant. When John Wesley was only six years old the rectory was burned to the ground, and the child was forgotten among the flames, and only saved at the last moment by what he afterward deemed an extraordinary providence.
All these circumstances doubtless deepened the natural and inherited piety for which he was so remarkable; and some strange and unexplained noises which during a long period were heard in the rectory, and which its inmates concluded to be supernatural, contributed to that vein of credulity which ran through his character. He was sent to the Charterhouse, and from thence to Oxford, where at the age of twenty-three he was elected fellow of Lincoln. He had some years before acquired from his brother a certain knowledge of Hebrew, and he was speedily distinguished by his extraordinary logical powers, by the untiring industry with which he threw himself into the studies of the place, and above all by the force and energy of his character.
His religious impressions, which had been for a time somewhat obscured, revived in their full intensity while he was preparing for ordination in 1725. He was troubled with difficulties, which his father and mother gradually removed, about the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed, and about the compatibility of the articles with his decidedly Arminian views concerning election; and he was deeply influenced by the Imitation of St. Thomas à Kempis, by the Holy Living and Dying of Jeremy Taylor, and by Law's Serious Call. His life at Oxford became very strict. He rose every morning at four, a practice which he continued till extreme old age. He made pilgrimages on foot to William Law to ask for spiritual advice. He abstained from the usual fashion of having his hair dressed, in order that he might give the money so saved to the poor. He refused to return the visits of those who called on him, that he might avoid all idle conversation. His fasts were so severe that they seriously impaired his health, and extreme abstinence and gloomy views about religion are said to have contributed largely to hurry one of the closest of his college companions to an early and a clouded death.
The society hardly numbered more than fifteen members, and was the object of much ridicule at the university; but it included some men who afterward played considerable parts in the world. Among them was Charles, the younger brother of John Wesley, whose hymns became the favorite poetry of the sect, and whose gentler, more submissive, and more amiable character, though less fitted than that of his brother for the great conflicts of public life, was very useful in moderating the movement and in drawing converts to it by personal influence. Charles Wesley appears to have been the first to originate the society at Oxford; he brought Whitefield into its pale, and, besides being the most popular poet, he was one of the most persuasive preachers of the movement.
There, too, was James Hervey, who became one of the earliest links connecting Methodism with general literature. During most of his short life he was a confirmed invalid. His affected language, his feeble, tremulous, and lymphatic nature formed a curious contrast to the robust energy of Wesley and Whitefield; but he was a great master of a kind of tumid and over-ornamented rhetoric which has an extraordinary attraction to half-educated minds. His Meditations was one of the most popular books of the eighteenth century. His Theron and Aspasio, which was hardly less successful, was an elaborate defence of evangelical opinions; and though at this time the pupil and one of the warmest admirers of Wesley, he afterward became conspicuous in the Calvinistic section of the party, and wrote with much acerbity against his old master.
There, too, above all, was George Whitefield, in after-years the greatest pulpit orator of England. He was born in 1714, in Gloucester, in the Bell Inn, of which his mother was proprietor, and where upon the decline of her fortunes he was for some time employed in servile functions. He had been a wild, impulsive boy, alternately remarkable for many mischievous pranks and for strange outbursts of religious zeal. He stole money from his mother, and he gave part of it to the poor. He early declared his intention one day to preach the Gospel, but he was the terror of the Dissenting minister of his neighborhood, whose religious services he was accustomed to ridicule and interrupt. He bought devotional books, read the Bible assiduously, and on one occasion, when exasperated by some teasing, he relieved his feelings, as he tells us, by pouring out in his solitude the menaces of Psalm cxviii; but he was also passionately fond of card-playing, novel-reading, and the theatre; he was two or three times intoxicated, and he confesses with much penitence to "a sensual passion" for fruits and cakes. His strongest natural bias was toward the stage. He indulged it on every possible occasion, and at school he wrote plays and acted in a female part.
Owing to the great poverty of his mother, he could only go to Oxford as a servitor, and his career there was a very painful one. St. Thomas à Kempis, Drelincourt's Defence against Death, and Law's devotional works had all their part in kindling his piety into a flame. He was haunted with gloomy and superstitious fancies, and his religion assumed the darkest and most ascetic character. He always chose the worst food, fasted twice a week, wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes, and was subject to paroxysms of a morbid devotion. He remained for hours prostrate on the ground in Christ Church Walk in the midst of the night, and continued his devotions till his hands grew black with cold. One Lent he carried his fasting to such a point that when Passion Week arrived he had hardly sufficient strength to creep upstairs, and his memory was seriously impaired. In 1733 he came in contact with Charles Wesley, who brought him into the society. To a work called The Life of God in the Soul of Man, which Charles Wesley put into his hands, he ascribed his first conviction of that doctrine of free salvation which he afterward made it the great object of his life to teach.
With the exception of a short period in which he was assisting his father at Epworth, John Wesley continued at Oxford till the death of his father, in 1735, when the society was dispersed, and the two Wesleys soon after accepted the invitation of General Oglethorpe to accompany him to the new colony of Georgia. It was on his voyage to that colony that the founder of Methodism first came in contact with the Moravians, who so deeply influenced his future life. He was surprised and somewhat humiliated at finding that they treated him as a mere novice in religion; their perfect composure during a dangerous storm made a profound impression on his mind, and he employed himself while on board ship in learning German, in order that he might converse with them. On his arrival in the colony he abandoned, after a very slight attempt, his first project of converting the Indians, and devoted himself wholly to the colonists at Savannah. They were of many different nationalities, and it is a remarkable proof of the energy and accomplishments of Wesley that, in addition to his English services, he officiated regularly in German, French, and Italian, and was at the same time engaged in learning Spanish, in order to converse with some Jewish parishioners.
His character and opinions at this time may be briefly described. He was a man who had made religion the single aim and object of his life, who was prepared to encounter for it every form of danger, discomfort, and obloquy; who devoted exclusively to it an energy of will and power of intellect that in worldly professions might have raised him to the highest positions of honor and wealth. Of his sincerity, of his self-renunciation, of his deep and fervent piety, of his almost boundless activity, there can be no question. Yet with all these qualities he was not an amiable man. He was hard, punctilious, domineering, and in a certain sense even selfish. A short time before he left England, his father, who was then an old and dying man, and who dreaded above all things that the religious fervor which he had spent the greater part of his life in kindling in his parish should dwindle after his death, entreated his son in the most pathetic terms to remove to Epworth, in which case he would probably succeed to the living, and be able to maintain his mother in her old home.
Wesley peremptorily refused to leave Oxford, and the reason he assigned was very characteristic. "The question," he said, "is not whether I could do more good to others there than here; but whether I could do more good to myself, seeing wherever I can be most holy myself there I can most promote holiness in others." "My chief motive," he wrote when starting for Georgia, "is the hope of saving my own soul. I hope to learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen." He was at this time a High-Churchman of a very narrow type, full of exaggerated notions about church discipline, extremely anxious to revive obsolete rubrics, and determined to force the strictest ritualistic observances upon rude colonists, for whom of all men they were least adapted. He insisted upon adopting baptism by immersion, and refused to baptize a child whose parents objected to that form. He would not permit any non-communicant to be a sponsor, repelled one of the holiest men in the colony from the communion-table because he was a Dissenter; refused for the same reason to read the burial-service over another; made it a special object of his teaching to prevent ladies of his congregation from wearing any gold ornament or any rich dress, and succeeded in inducing Oglethorpe to issue an order forbidding any colonist from throwing a line or firing a gun on Sunday. His sermons, it was complained, were all satires on particular persons. He insisted upon weekly communions, desired to rebaptize Dissenters who abandoned their Nonconformity, and exercised his pastoral duties in such a manner that he was accused of meddling in every quarrel and prying into every family.
A more unpropitious commencement for a great career could hardly be conceived. Wesley returned to England in bad health and low spirits. He redoubled his austerities and his zeal in teaching, and he was tortured by doubts about the reality of his faith. It was at this time and in this state of mind that he came in contact with Peter Boehler, a Moravian teacher, whose calm and concentrated enthusiasm, united with unusual mental powers, gained a complete ascendency over his mind. From him Wesley for the first time learned that form of the doctrine of justification by faith which he afterward regarded as the fundamental tenet of Christianity. He had long held that in order to be a real Christian it was necessary to live a life wholly differing from that of the world around him, and that such a renewal of life could only be effected by the operation of the divine Spirit; and he does not appear to have had serious difficulties about the doctrine of imputed righteousness, although the ordinary evangelical doctrine on this matter was emphatically repudiated and denounced by Law.
From Boehler he first learned to believe that every man, no matter how moral, how pious, or how orthodox he may be, is in a state of damnation, until, by a supernatural and instantaneous process wholly unlike that of human reasoning, the conviction flashes upon his mind that the sacrifice of Christ has been applied to and has expiated his sins; that this supernatural and personal conviction or illumination is what is meant by saving faith, and that it is inseparably accompanied by an absolute assurance of salvation and by a complete dominion over sin. It cannot exist where there is not a sense of the pardon of all past and of freedom from all present sins. It is impossible that he who has experienced it should be in serious and lasting doubt as to the fact; for its fruits are constant peace—not one uneasy thought; "freedom from sin—not one unholy desire." Repentance and fruits meet for repentance, such as the forgiveness of those who have offended us, ceasing from evil and doing good, may precede this faith, but good works in the theological sense of the term spring from, and therefore can only follow, faith.
Such, as clearly as I can state it, was the fundamental doctrine which Wesley adopted from the Moravians. His mind was now thrown, through causes very susceptible of a natural explanation, into an exceedingly excited and abnormal condition, and he has himself chronicled with great minuteness in his journal the incidents that follow. On Sunday, March 5, 1738, he tells us that Boehler first fully convinced him of the want of that supernatural faith which alone could save. The shock was very great, and the first impulse of Wesley was to abstain from preaching, but his new master dissuaded him, saying: "Preach faith till you have it; and then because you have faith you will preach faith." He followed the advice, and several weeks passed in a state of extreme religious excitement, broken, however, by strange fits of "indifference, dulness, and coldness." While still believing himself to be in a state of damnation, he preached the new doctrine with such passionate fervor that he was excluded from pulpit after pulpit. He preached to the criminals in the jails. He visited, under the superintendence of Boehler, some persons who professed to have undergone the instantaneous and supernatural illumination. He addressed the passengers whom he met on the roads or at the public tables in the inns. On one occasion, at Birmingham, he abstained from doing so, and he relates, with his usual imperturbable confidence, that a heavy hailstorm which he afterward encountered was a divine judgment sent to punish him for his neglect.
This condition could not last long. At length, on May 24th, a day which he ever after looked back upon as the most momentous in his life—the cloud was dispelled. Early in the morning, according to his usual custom, he opened the Bible at random, seeking for a divine guidance, and his eye lighted on the words, "There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that we would be partakers of the divine nature." Before he left the house he again consulted the oracle, and the first words he read were, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." In the afternoon he attended service in St. Paul's Cathedral, and the anthem, to his highly wrought imagination, seemed a repetition of the same hope. The sequel may be told in his own words: "In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed; I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all what I now first felt in my heart."
Pictures of this kind are not uncommon in the lives of religious enthusiasts, but they usually have a very limited interest and importance. It is, however, scarcely an exaggeration to say that the scene which took place at that humble meeting in Aldersgate Street forms an epoch in English history. The conviction which then flashed upon one of the most powerful and most active intellects in England is the true source of English Methodism. Shortly before this, Charles Wesley, who had also fallen completely under the influence of Boehler, had passed through a similar change; and Whitefield, without ever adopting the dangerous doctrine of perfection which was so prominent in the Methodist teaching, was at a still earlier period an ardent preacher of justification by faith of the new birth. It was characteristic of John Wesley that ten days before his conversion he wrote a long, petulant, and dictatorial letter to his old master, William Law, reproaching him with having kept back from him the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, and intimating in strong and discourteous language his own conviction, and that of Boehler, that the spiritual condition of Law was a very dangerous one.
It was no less characteristic of the indefatigable energy which formed another and a better side of his nature, that immediately after this change he started on a pilgrimage to Herrnhut, the head-quarters of Moravianism, in order that he might study to the best advantage what he now regarded as the purest type of a Christian church. He returned objecting to many things, but more than ever convinced of his new doctrine, and more than ever resolved to spend his life in diffusing it. In the course of 1738 the chief elements of the movement were already formed. Whitefield had returned from Georgia. Charles Wesley had begun to preach the doctrine with extraordinary effect to the criminals in Newgate and from every pulpit into which he was admitted. Methodist societies had already sprung up under Moravian influence. The design of each was to be a church within a church, a seed-plot of a more fervent piety, the centre of a stricter discipline and a more energetic propagandism, than existed in religious communities at large.
In these societies the old Christian custom of love-feasts was revived. The members sometimes passed almost the whole night in the most passionate devotions, and voluntarily submitted to a spiritual tyranny that could hardly be surpassed in a Catholic monastery. They were to meet every week, to make an open and particular confession of every frailty, to submit to be cross-examined on all their thoughts, words, and deeds. The following, among others, were the questions asked at every meeting: "What known sin have you committed since our last meeting? What temptations have you met with? How were you delivered? What have you thought, said, or done of which you doubt whether it be sin or not? Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?"
Such rules could only have been accepted under the influence of an overpowering religious enthusiasm, and there was much truth in the judgment which the elder brother of John Wesley passed upon them in 1739. "Their societies," he wrote to their mother, "are sufficient to dissolve all other societies but their own. Will any man of common-sense or spirit suffer any domestic to be in a band engaged to relate to five or ten people anything without reserve that concerns the person's conscience, how much soever it may concern the family? Ought any married person to be there unless husband and wife be there together?"
From this time the leaders of the movement became the most active of missionaries. Without any fixed parishes they wandered from place to place, proclaiming their new doctrine in every pulpit to which they were admitted, and they speedily awoke a passionate enthusiasm and a bitter hostility in the Church. Nothing, indeed, could appear more irregular to the ordinary parochial clergyman than those itinerant ministers who broke away violently from the settled habits of their profession, who belonged to and worshipped in small religious societies that bore a suspicious resemblance to conventicles, and whose whole tone and manner of preaching were utterly unlike anything to which he was accustomed. They taught in language of the most vehement emphasis, as the cardinal tenet of Christianity, the doctrine of a new birth in a form which was altogether novel to their hearers. They were never weary of urging that all men are in a condition of damnation who have not experienced a sudden, violent, and supernatural change, or of inveighing against the clergy for their ignorance of the very essence of Christianity. "Tillotson," in the words of Whitefield, "knew no more about true Christianity than Mahomet." The Whole Duty of Man, which was the most approved devotional manual of the time, was pronounced by the same preacher, on account of the stress it laid upon good works, to have "sent thousands to hell."
The Methodist preacher came to an Anglican parish in the spirit and with the language of a missionary going to the most ignorant heathens; and he asked the clergyman of the parish to lend him his pulpit, in order that he might instruct the parishioners—perhaps for the first time—in the true Gospel of Christ. It is not surprising that the clergy should have resented such a movement; and the manner of the missionary was as startling as his matter. The sermons of the time were almost always written, and the prevailing taste was cold, polished, and fastidious. The new preachers preached extempore, with the most intense fervor of language and gesture, and usually with a complete disregard of the conventionalities of their profession. Wesley frequently mounted the pulpit without even knowing from what text he would preach, believing that when he opened his Bible at random the divine Spirit would guide him infallibly in his choice. The oratory of Whitefield was so impassioned that the preacher was sometimes scarcely able to proceed for his tears, while half the audience were convulsed with sobs. The love of order, routine, and decorum, which was the strongest feeling in the clerical mind, was violently shocked. The regular congregation was displaced by an agitated throng who had never before been seen within the precincts of the church. The usual quiet worship was disturbed by violent enthusiasm or violent opposition, by hysterical paroxysms of devotion or remorse, and when the preacher had left the parish he seldom failed to leave behind him the elements of agitation and division.
We may blame, but we can hardly, I think, wonder at the hostility all this aroused among the clergy. It is, indeed, certain that Wesley and Whitefield were at this time doing more than any other contemporary clergymen to kindle a living piety among the people. It is equally certain that they held the doctrines of the Articles and the Homilies with an earnestness very rare among their brother-clergymen, that none of their peculiar doctrines were in conflict with those doctrines, and that Wesley at least was attached with an even superstitious reverence to ecclesiastical forms. Yet before the end of 1738 the Methodist leaders were excluded from most of the pulpits of the Church, and were thus compelled, unless they consented to relinquish what they considered a divine mission, to take steps in the direction of separation.
Two important measures of this nature were taken in 1739. One of them was the creation of Methodist chapels, which were intended, not to oppose or replace, but to be supplemental and ancillary to, the churches, and to secure that the doctrine of the new birth should be faithfully taught to the people. The other, and still more important event, was the institution by Whitefield of field-preaching. The idea had occurred to him in London, where he found congregations too numerous for the church in which he preached, but the first actual step was taken in the neighborhood of Bristol. At a time when he was thus deprived of the chief normal means of exercising his talents his attention was called to the condition of the colliers of Kingswood. He was filled with horror and compassion at finding in the heart of a Christian country, and in the immediate neighborhood of a great city, a population of many thousands sunk in the most brutal ignorance and vice, and entirely excluded from the ordinances of religion. Moved by such feelings, he resolved to address the colliers in their own haunts. The resolution was a bold one, for field-preaching was then utterly unknown in England, and it needed no common courage to brave all the obloquy and derision it must provoke, and to commence the experiment in the centre of a half-savage population.
Whitefield, however, had a just confidence in his cause and in his powers. Standing himself upon a hillside, he took for his text the first words of the Sermon which was spoken from the Mount, and he addressed with his accustomed fire an astonished audience of some two hundred men. The fame of his eloquence spread far and wide. On successive occasions five, ten, fifteen, even twenty thousand were present. It was February, but the winter sun shone clear and bright. The lanes were filled with the carriages of the more wealthy citizens, whom curiosity had drawn from Bristol. The trees and hedges were crowded with humbler listeners, and the fields were darkened by a compact mass. The face of the preacher paled with a thrilling power to the very outskirts of that mighty throng. The picturesque novelty of the occasion and of the scene, the contagious emotion of so great a multitude, a deep sense of the condition of his hearers and of the momentous importance of the step he was taking, gave an additional solemnity. His rude auditors were electrified. They stood for a time in rapt and motionless attention. Soon tears might be seen forming white gutters down cheeks blackened from the coal-mine. Then sobs and groans told how hard hearts were melting at his words. A fire was kindled among the outcasts of Kingswood, which burned long and fiercely, and was destined in a few years to overspread the land.
It was only with great difficulty that Whitefield could persuade the Wesleys to join him in this new phase of missionary labor. John Wesley has left on record, in his journal, his first repugnance to it, "having," as he says, "been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church." Charles Wesley, on this as on most other occasions, was even more strongly conservative. The two brothers adopted their usual superstitious practice of opening their Bibles at random, under the belief that the texts on which their eyes first fell would guide them in their decision. The texts were ambiguous and somewhat ominous, relating for the most part to violent deaths; but on drawing lots the lot determined them to go. It was on this slender ground that they resolved to give the weight of their example to this most important development of the movement. They went to Bristol, from which Whitefield was speedily called, and continued the work among the Kingswood colliers and among the people of the city; while Whitefield, after a preaching tour of some weeks in the country, reproduced on a still larger scale the triumphs of Kingswood by preaching with marvellous effect to immense throngs of the London rabble at Moorfields and on Kennington Common. From this time field-preaching became one of the most conspicuous features of the revival.
The character and genius of the preacher to whom this most important development of Methodism was due demand a more extended notice than I have yet given them. Unlike Wesley, whose strongest enthusiasm was always curbed by a powerful will, and who manifested at all times and on all subjects an even exaggerated passion for reasoning, Whitefield was chiefly a creature of impulse and emotion. He had very little logical skill, no depth or range of knowledge, not much self-restraint, nothing of the commanding and organizing talent, and, it must be added, nothing of the arrogant and imperious spirit so conspicuous in his colleague. At the same time a more zealous, a more single-minded, a more truly amiable, a more purely unselfish man it would be difficult to conceive. He lived perpetually in the sight of eternity, and a desire to save souls was the single passion of his life. Of his labors it is sufficient to say that it has been estimated that in the thirty-four years of his active career he preached eighteen thousand times, or on an average ten times a week; that these sermons were delivered with the utmost vehemence of voice and gesture, often in the open air, and to congregations of many thousands; and that he continued his exertions to the last, when his constitution was hopelessly shattered by disease. During long periods he preached forty hours, and sometimes as much as sixty hours, a week. In the prosecution of his missionary labors he visited almost every important district in England and Wales. At least twelve times he traversed Scotland, three times he preached in Ireland, thirteen times he crossed the Atlantic.
Very few men placed by circumstances at the head of a great religious movement have been so absolutely free from the spirit of sect. Very few men have passed through so much obloquy with a heart so entirely unsoured, and have retained amid so much adulation so large a measure of deep and genuine humility. There was indeed not a trace of jealousy, ambition, or rancor in his nature. There is something singularly touching in the zeal with which he endeavored to compose the differences between himself and Wesley, when so many of the followers of each leader were endeavoring to envenom them; in the profound respect he continually expressed for his colleague at the time of their separation; in the exuberant gratitude he always showed for the smallest act of kindness to himself; in the tenderness with which he guarded the interests of the inmates of that orphanage at Georgia around which his strongest earthly affections were entwined; in the almost childish simplicity with which he was always ready to make a public confession of his faults.