But still the sinner love.[135]
These verses might be headed ‘A Prayer before Controversy,’ but it is a shock to the reader on turning the page to find that the next verse shows how soon he descended from this high level.
The controversy was renewed thirty years later with vastly greater bitterness, and with much more personal feeling.
John Fletcher parted in 1771 from his Trevecca students like the saint he was, for he could no longer hold his place when other Arminians were discharged. ‘I cannot give up the possibility of the salvation of all any more than I can give up the truth and love of God.... I left them all in peace, the servant, but no more the president of the college.’[136]
The love of Whitefield and the Wesleys was of the kind which many waters cannot quench; but when Madan, Romaine, Hervey, and Rowland Hill heaped upon John Wesley’s venerable head torrents of vulgar abuse—abuse absolutely impossible, inconceivable in our milder mannered age[137]—Charles felt that there was a point beyond which even Christian charity could not decently go. His refusal to write Hervey’s epitaph is worthy of a Christian gentleman:
Let Madan or Romaine record his praise,
Enough that Wesley’s brother can forgive.
The flowing tide, however, was with the Methodists, and though the fight was long, and the victory was not wholly won in their day, these hymns rendered an inestimable service to the cause of religious freedom. It may be true that they represented Calvin’s teaching one-sidedly, and at times misrepresented it, but it cannot be denied that they pictured current Calvinistic teaching accurately enough. The Wesleys saw clearly that, should belief in a limited redemption spread in their Society, they would but labour in vain and spend their strength for nought. They might have gathered little coteries of devout folk, strongly tinctured with what we now call Plymouth Brethrenism, but they could never have founded a great Church, whose chiefest glory should be its missionary enterprise both at home and in the ends of the earth. The mission of Thomas Coke more than a hundred years ago, the great city missions of our own time, the work of William Booth, of Hugh Price Hughes, and Samuel F. Collier, would have been impossible had they not been able to say anywhere and to all—
Sent by my Lord, on you I call;
The invitation is to all: