It was about this time that Charles Wesley met Whitefield moodily walking through the college corridors. The misery of his appearance struck him, and he invited him to his rooms to breakfast. The memory of the meeting never passed away; Charles Wesley refers to it in his elegy on Whitefield. In a short time he leaped forth into spiritual freedom, and almost immediately became, youth as he was, preacher, and we may almost say, apostle. The change in his mind seems to have been as instantaneous and as luminous as Luther’s at Erfurt. Whitefield was at work, commencing upon his own great scale, long before the Wesleys. John had to go to America, and to be entangled there by his High Church notions; and then there were his Moravian proclivities, so that, altogether, years passed by before he found his way out into a light so clear as to be able to reflect it on the minds of others.
To some of the members of this “Holy Club,” we shall not be able to refer again; we must, therefore, mention them now. Especially is some reference due to James Hervey; his name is now rather a legend and tradition than an active influence in our religious literature; but how popular once, do not the oldest memories amongst us well know? On some important points of doctrine he parted company from his friends and fellow-students, the Wesleys. John Wesley used to declare that he himself was not converted till his thirty-seventh year, so that we must modify any impressions we may have from similar declarations made by the amiable Vicar of Weston Favel: the term conversion, used in such a sense, in all probability means simply a change in the point of view, an alteration of opinion, giving a more clear apprehension of truth. Hervey was always infirm in health, tall, spectral; and, while possessing a mind teeming with pleasing and poetic fancies, and a power of perceiving happy analogies, we should regard him as singularly wanting in that fine solvent of all true genius, geniality. Hence, all his letters read like sermons; but his poor, infirm frame was the tabernacle of an intensely fervent soul. Shortly after his settlement in his village in Northamptonshire he was recommended by his physician to follow the plough, that he might receive the scent of the fresh earth; a curious recommendation, but it led to a conversation with the ploughman, which completely overturned the young scholar’s scheme of theology. The ploughman was a member of the Church of Dr. Doddridge, afterwards one of Hervey’s most intimate friends. As they walked together, the young minister asked the old ploughman what he thought was the hardest thing in religion? The ploughman very respectfully returned the question. Hervey replied, “I think the hardest thing in religion is to deny sinful self,” and he proceeded, at some length, of course, to dilate upon and expound the difficulty, from which our readers will see that, at this time, his mind must have been under the same influences as those we meet in The Imitation of Thomas à-Kempis. “No, sir,” said the old ploughman, “the hardest thing in religion is to deny righteous self,” and he proceeded to unfold the principles of his faith. At the time, Hervey thought the ploughman a fool, but the conversation was not forgotten, and he declares that it was this view of things which created for him a new creed. Our readers, perhaps, know his Theron and Aspasia: we owe that book to the conversation with the ploughman; all its pages, alive with descriptions of natural scenery, historical and classical allusion, and glittering with chromatic fancy through the three thick volumes, are written for the purpose of unfolding and enforcing—to put it in old theological phraseology—the imputed and imparted righteousness of Christ, the great point of divergence in teaching between Hervey and John Wesley.
Thus the term Methodism cannot, any more than Christianity, be contented with, or contained in one particular line of opinion. Thus, for instance, among the members of the “Holy Club” we find the two Wesleys and others distinctly Arminian—the apostles of that form of thought which especially teaches us that we must attain to the grace of God; while Whitefield first, and Hervey afterwards, became the teachers of that doctrine which announces the irresistible grace of God as that which is outside of us, and comes down upon us. No doubt the doctrines were too sharply separated by their respective leaders. In the ultimate issue, both believed alike that all was of grace, and all of God; but experience makes every man’s point of view; as he feels, so he sees. The grand thought about all these men in this Great Revival was that they believed in, and untiringly and with immense confidence announced, that which smote upon the minds of their hearers almost like a new revelation; in an age of indifference and Deism they declared that “the grace of God hath appeared unto all men.”
There is a very interesting anecdote showing how, about this time, even the massive and sardonic intellect of Lord Bolingbroke almost gave way. He was called upon once by a High Church dignitary, his intimate friend, Dr. Church, Vicar of Battersea, and Prebendary of St. Paul’s, to whom we have already referred as from the first opposed to the Revival, and, to the doctor’s amazement, he found Bolingbroke reading Calvin’s Institutes. The peer asked the preacher, the infidel the professed Christian, what he thought of it. “Oh,” said the doctor, “we think nothing of such antiquated stuff; we think it enough to preach the importance of morality and virtue, and have long given up all that talk about Divine grace.” Bolingbroke’s face and eyes were a study at all times, but we could wish to have seen him turn in his chair, and fix his eyes on the vicar as he said: “Look you, doctor. You know I don’t believe the Bible to be a Divine revelation, but those who do can never defend it but upon the principle of the doctrine of Divine grace. To say the truth, there have been times when I have been almost persuaded to believe it upon this view of things; and there is one argument I have felt which has gone very far with me on behalf of its authenticity, which is, that the belief in it exists upon earth even when committed to the care of such as you, who pretend to believe in it, and yet deny the only principle upon which it is defensible.” The worn-out statesman and hard-headed old peer hit the question of his own day, and forecast all the sceptical strife of ours; for all such questions are summed in one, Is there supernatural grace, and has that grace appeared unto men? This was the one faith of all these revivalists. The world was eager to hear it, for the aching heart of the world longs to believe that it is true. The conversation we have recited shows that even Bolingbroke wished that it might be true.
WESTON FAVEL CHURCH,
(Where James Hervey Preached.)
The new creed of Hervey changed the whole character of his preaching. The little church of Weston Favel, a short distance from the town of Northampton, became quite a shrine for pilgrimages; he was often compelled to preach in the churchyard. He was assuredly an intense lover of natural scenery, a student of natural theology of the old school. His writing is now said to be meretricious and gaudy. One critic says that children will always prefer a red to a white sugar-plum, and that the tea is nicer to them when they drink it from a cup painted with coloured flowers; and this, perhaps, not unfairly, describes the style of Hervey; we have prettiness rather than power, elegant disquisition rather than nervous expression, which is all the more wonderful, as he must have been an accomplished Latin scholar. But he had a mind of gorgeous fullness, and his splendid conceptions bore him into a train of what now seem almost glittering extravagances. Hervey was in the manner of his life a sickly recluse, and we easily call up the figure of the old bachelor—for he never married—alternately watching his saucepan of gruel on the fire, and his favourite microscope on the study table. He was greatly beloved by the Countess of Huntingdon, perhaps yet more by Lady Fanny Shirley—the subject of Walpole’s sneer. He was, no doubt, the writer of the movement, and its thoughts in his books must have seemed like “butter in a lordly dish.” But his course was comparatively brief; his work was accomplished at the age of forty-five. He died in his chair, his last words, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy most comfortable salvation;” shortly after, “The conflict is over; all is done;” the last words of all, “Precious salvation.” And so passed away one of the most amiable and accomplished of all the revivalists.
John Gambold, although ever an excellent and admirable man, lived the life rather of a secluded mystic, than that of an active reformer. He became a minister of the Church of England, but afterwards left that communion, not from any dissensions either from the doctrines or the discipline of the Church, but simply because he found his spiritual relationships more in harmony with those of the Moravians, of whose Church he died a bishop. We presume few readers are acquainted with his poetical works; nor are there many words among them of remarkable strength. The Mystery of Life is certainly pleasingly impressive; and his epitaph on himself deserves quotation:
“Ask not, ‘Who ended here his span?’
His name, reproach, and praise, was Man.