One is thankful to find no traces of undue deference on the part of those parochial clergymen who were made her chaplains, and who at irregular intervals, when they could be spared from their own parishes, supplied her chapels. But though these good men did not flatter her, they felt and expressed the greatest respect for her character and exertions, as did also the Methodists generally. Fletcher described an interview with her in terms which sound rather overstrained, not to say irreverent, to English ears; but allowance should be made for the 'effusion' in which foreigners are wont to indulge. 'Our conversation,' he writes to Charles Wesley, 'was deep and full of the energy of faith. As to me, I sat like Paul at the feet of Gamaliel; I passed three hours with a modern prodigy—a pious and humble countess. I went with trembling and in obedience to your orders; but I soon perceived a little of what the disciples felt when Christ said to them, It is I—be not afraid.' John Wesley, in spite of his differences with her, owned that 'she was much devoted to God and had a thousand valuable and amiable qualities.' Rowland Hill, when a young man, wrote in still stronger terms: 'I am glad to hear the Head is better. What zeal for God perpetually attends her! Had I twenty bodies, I could like nineteen of them to run about for her.'[772]
The good countess was not unworthy of all this esteem. In spite of her little foibles, she was a thoroughly earnest Christian woman. Her munificence was unbounded. 'She would give,' said Grimshaw, 'to the last gown on her back.' She is said to have spent during her life more than 100,000l. in the service of religion.
Lady Huntingdon's Connexion, like John Wesley's societies, drifted away rather than separated from the National Church. In consequence of some litigation in the Consistorial Court of London about the Spa Fields Chapel, it became necessary to define more precisely the 'status' of Lady Huntingdon's places of worship. If they were still to be considered as belonging to the Church of England, they were, of course, bound to submit to the laws of the Church. In order to find shelter under the Toleration Act, it was necessary to register them as Dissenting places of worship. Thus Lady Huntingdon, much against her will, found herself a Dissenter. She expressed her regret in that extraordinary English which she was wont to write. 'All the other connexions seem to be at peace, and I have ever found to belong to me while we were at ease in Zion. I am to be cast out of the Church now, only for what I have been doing these forty years—speaking and living for Jesus Christ; and if the days of my captivity are now to be accomplished, those that turn me out and so set me at liberty, may soon feel what it is, by sore distress themselves for those hard services they have caused me.'[773] Still she could not make up her mind to call herself and those in connexion with her, Dissenters. She tried to find some middle term; it was not a separation from the Church, but a 'secession;' which looks very like a distinction without a difference. 'Our ministers must come,' writes her ladyship in 1781, 'recommended by that neutrality between Church and Dissent—secession;' and to the same effect in 1782: 'Mr. Wills's secession from the Church (for which he is the most highly favoured of all from the noble and disinterested motives that engaged his honest and faithful conscience for the Lord's unlimited service) brings about an ordination of such students as are alike disposed to labour in the place and appointed for those congregations. The method of these appears the best calculated for the comfort of the students and to serve the congregations most usefully, and is contrived to prevent any bondage to the people or minister. The objections to the Dissenters' plan are many, and to the Church more; that secession means the neutrality between both, and so materially offensive to neither.'[774]
One result of this 'secession' was the withdrawal from the Connexion of those parochial clergymen who had given their gratuitous services to Lady Huntingdon—Romaine, Venn, Townsend, and others; but they still maintained the most cordial intimacy with the countess, and continued occasionally to supply her chapels.
It must be admitted, in justice to the Church rulers of the day, that the difficulties in the way of co-operation with Lady Huntingdon were by no means slight. Her Churchmanship, like that of her friend Whitefield, was not of the same marked type as that of John Wesley. It will be remembered that John Wesley, in his sermon at the foundation of the City Road Chapel in 1777—four years, be it observed, before Lady Huntingdon's secession—described, in his own vigorous language, the difference between the attitude of his followers towards the Church, and that of the followers of Lady Huntingdon and Mr. Whitefield. So far as the two latter were concerned, he did not overstate the case. The college at Trevecca could hardly be regarded in any other light than that of a Dissenting Academy. Berridge saw this, and wrote to Lady Huntingdon: 'However rusty or rickety the Dissenters may appear to you, God hath His remnant among them; therefore lift not up your hand against them for the Lord's sake nor yet for consistency's sake, because your students are as real Dissenting preachers as any in the land, unless a gown and band can make a clergyman. The bishops look on your students as the worst kind of Dissenters; and manifest this by refusing that ordination to your preachers which would be readily granted to other teachers among the Dissenters.'[775] Berridge also thought that the Wesleyans would not retain their position as Churchmen. In the very same year (1777) in which Wesley gloried in the adhesion of his societies to the Church, Berridge wrote to Lady Huntingdon: 'What will become of your students at your decease? They are virtual Dissenters now, and will be settled Dissenters then. And the same will happen to many, perhaps most, of Mr. Wesley's preachers at his death. He rules like a real Alexander, and is now stepping forth with a flaming torch; but we do not read in history of two Alexanders succeeding each other.'[776]
But to return to Trevecca. The rules of the college specified that the students after three years' residence might, if they desired, enter the ministry either of the Church or any other Protestant denomination. Now, as Trevecca was essentially a theological college, it is hardly possible to conceive that the theology taught there could have been so colourless as not to bias the students in favour either of the Church or of Dissent; and as the Church, in spite of her laxity, still retained her liturgy, creeds, and other forms, which were more dogmatic and precise than those of any Dissenting body, such a training as that of Trevecca would naturally result, as the Vicar of Everton predicted, in making the students, to all intents and purposes, Dissenters. The only wonder is that Lady Huntingdon's Connexion should have retained so strong an attachment to the Church as they undoubtedly did, and that, not only during her own lifetime, but after her death. 'You ask,' wrote Dr. Haweis to one who desired information on this point,[777] 'of what Church we profess ourselves? We desire to be esteemed as members of Christ's Catholic and Apostolic Church, and essentially one with the Church of England, of which we regard ourselves as living members.... The doctrines we subscribe (for we require subscription, and, what is better, they are always truly preached by us) are those of the Church of England in the literal and grammatical sense. Nor is the liturgy of the Church of England performed more devoutly in any Church,' &c.
The five worthy Christians whose characters and careers have been briefly sketched were the chief promoters of what may be termed the Methodist, as distinguished from the Evangelical, movement, in the technical sense of that epithet. There were many others who would be worthy of a place in a larger history. Thomas Walsh, Wesley's most honoured friend; Dr. Coke ('a second Walsh,' Wesley called him), who sacrificed a good position and a considerable fortune entirely to the Methodist cause; Mr. Perronet, the excellent Vicar of Shoreham, to whom both the brothers Wesley had recourse in every important crisis, and who was called by Charles Wesley 'the Archbishop of Methodism;' Sir John Thorold, a pious Lincolnshire baronet; John Nelson, the worthy stonemason of Birstal, who was pressed as a soldier simply because he was a Methodist, and whose death John Wesley thus records in his Journal: 'This day died John Nelson, and left a wig and half-a-crown—as much as any unmarried minister ought to leave;' Sampson Stainforth, Mark Bond, and John Haine, the Methodist soldiers who infused a spirit of Methodism in the British Army; Howell Harris, the life and soul of Welsh Methodism; Thomas Olivers, the converted reprobate, who rode one hundred thousand miles on one horse in the cause of Methodism, and who was considered by John Wesley as a strong enough man to be pitted against the ablest champions of Calvinism; John Pawson, Alexander Mather and other worthy men—of humble birth, it may be, and scanty acquirements, but earnest, devoted Christians—would all deserve to be noticed in a professed history of Methodism. In a brief sketch, like the present, all that can be said of them is, 'Cum tales essent, utinam nostri fuissent.'
(2) THE CALVINISTIC CONTROVERSY.
The Methodists met with a vast amount of opposition; but, after all, there was a more formidable enemy to the progress of the Evangelical revival than any from without. The good men who made so bold and effectual a stand against vice and irreligion in the last century might have been still more successful had they presented a united front to the common foe; but, unfortunately, a spirit of discord within their ranks wasted their strength and diverted them from work for which they were admirably adapted to work for which they were by no means fitted. Hitherto our attention has been mainly directed to the strength of the movement. The pure lives and disinterested motives of the founders of Methodism, their ceaseless energy, their fervent piety—in a word, their love of God and their love of their neighbour for God's sake—these are the points on which one loves to dwell; these are traits in their characters which posterity has gratefully recognised, though scant justice was done them by the men of their own generation. In their quarrel with sin and Satan all good men will sympathise with them. It is painful to turn from this to their quarrels among themselves; but these latter occupy too large a space in their history to be lightly passed over.
It has frequently been remarked in these pages that the eighteenth century, or at least the first half of it, was essentially an age of controversy; but of all the controversies which distracted the Church and nation that one which now comes under our consideration was the most unprofitable and unsatisfactory in every way. The subject of it was that old, old difficulty which has agitated men's minds from the beginning, and will probably remain unsettled until the end of time—a difficulty which is not confined to Christianity, nor even to Deism, but which meets us quite apart from theology altogether. It is that which, in theological language, is involved in the contest between Calvinism and Arminianism; in philosophical, between free-will and necessity. 'The reconciling,' wrote Lord Lyttelton, 'the prescience of God with the free-will of man, Mr. Locke, after much thought on the subject, freely confessed that he could not do, though he acknowledged both. And what Mr. Locke could not do, in reasoning upon subjects of a metaphysical nature, I am apt to think few men, if any, can hope to perform.'[778] It would have been well if the Methodists had acted according to the spirit of these wise words; but, unfortunately, they considered it necessary not only to discuss the question, but to insist upon their own solution of it in the most positive and dogmatic terms.