EPWORTH CHURCH.
The brilliant passage in which Lord Macaulay portrays, as with the pencil of a Vandyke, the features of the great English Puritans, is worthy of attention. Perhaps, even had the great essayist attempted the task, he had scarcely the requisite sympathies to give an effective portrait or portraits of the early Methodists; indeed, their characters are different, as different as a portrait from the pencil of Denner to one from that of Vandyke, or of Velasquez; but as Denner is wonderful too, although so homely, so the Methodist is a study. The early Methodist was, perhaps, usually a very simple, what we should call an ignorant, man, but he had “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” He was not such an one as the early Puritan[[8]] or the ancient Huguenot, those children of the camp and of the sword, Nonconformist Templars and Crusaders, whose theology had trained them for the battle-field, teaching them to frown defiance on kings, and to treat with contempt the proudest nobles, if they were merely unsanctified men. The Methodist was not such an one as the stern Ironside of Cromwell; as he lived in a more cheerful age, so he was the subject of a more cheerful piety; he was as loyal as he was lowly. He had been forgotten or neglected by all the priests and Levites of the land; but a voice had reached him, and raised him to the rank of a living, conscious, immortal soul. He also was one for whom Christ died. A new life had created new interests in him; and Christianity, really believed, does ennoble a man—how can it do otherwise? It gives self-respect to a man, it shows to him a new purpose and business in life; moreover, it creates a spirit of holy cheerfulness and joy; and thus came about that state of mind which Wesley made subservient to organisation—the necessity for meetings and reciprocations. It has been said that every church must have some sign or counter-sign, some symbol to make it popularly successful. St. Dominic gave to his order the Rosary; John Wesley gave to his Society the Ticket. There were no chapels, or but few, and none to open their doors to these strange new pilgrims to the celestial city. We have seen that the churches were closed against them. Lord Macaulay says, had John Wesley risen in the Church of Rome, she would have thrown her arms round him, only regarding him as the founder of a new order, with certain peculiarities calculated to increase and to extend her empire, and in due time have given to him the honours of canonisation.
The English clergy as a body gathered up their garments and shrunk from all contact with the Methodists as from a pestilence. What could be done? Something must be done to prevent them from falling back into the world. Piety needs habit, and must become habitual to be safe, even as the fine-twined linen of the veil, and the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat, were shut in and all their glory defended by the rude coverings of badger-skins. John Wesley knew that the safety of the converted would be in frequent meetings for singing and prayer and conversation. Reciprocation is the soul of Methodism; so they assembled in each others’ houses, in rude and lonely but convenient rooms, by farm-house ingles, in lone hamlets. Thus was created a homely piety, often rugged enough, no doubt, but full of beautiful and pathetic instincts. So grew what came to be called band-meetings, class-meetings, love-feasts, and all the innumerable means by which the Methodist Society worked, until it became like a wheel within a wheel; simple enough, however, in the days to which we are referring. “Look to the Lord, and faithfully attend all the means of grace appointed in the Society.” Such was, practically, the whole of Methodism. So that famous old lady, whose bright example has so often been held up on Methodist platforms, when called upon to state the items of her creed, did so very sufficiently when she summed it up in the four particulars of “repentance towards God; faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; a penny a week; and a shilling a quarter.” Wesley seems to have summed the Methodist creed more simply still: “Belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and an earnest desire to flee from the wrath to come.” This was his condition of Church fellowship. When the faith became more consciously objective, it too was seized by the passionate instinct, the desire t o save souls. This drove the early Methodists out on great occasions to call vast multitudes together on heaths, on moors. Perhaps—but this was at a later time—some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the preachers; though the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks, and subsided into the organisation of the Countess of Huntingdon, which was, in fact, a kind of Free Church of England. The followers of Wesley sought the sequestration of nature, or in cities and towns they took to the streets or the broad ways and outlying fields. 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 these meetings, and all their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the sweetness and fulness of Jesus. They had intense faith in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; and their great interest was in souls on the brink of perdition. They knew little of spiritual difficulties or speculative despair; their conflict was with the world, the flesh, and the devil; and in this person, whose features have lately become somewhat dim, and who has wrapped himself in a new cloak of darkness, they did really believe. Wesley dealt with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; he and his band of preachers had little regard to proprieties, and it was not a polished time; so, ungraceful and undignified, the face weary, and the hand heavy with toil, they seemed out of breath pursuing souls. The strength of all these men was that they had a definite creed, and they sought to guard it by a definite Church life. The early Methodist had also cultivated the mighty instinct of prayer, about which he had no philosophy, but believing that God heard him, he quite simply indulged in it as a passion, and in this to him there was at once a meaning and a joy. We are not under the necessity of vindicating every phase of the great movement, we are simply writing down some particulars of its history, and how it was that it grew and prevailed. God’s ministry goes on by various means, ordinary and extraordinary; that is the difference between rivers and rains, between dews and lightnings.
A very interesting chapter, perhaps a volume, might be compiled from the old records of the mere anecdotes—the very humours—of the persecution attending on the Revival. Thus, in Cornwall, Edward Greenfield, a tanner, with a wife and seven children, was arrested under a warrant granted by Dr. Borlase, the eminent antiquary, who was, however, a bitter foe to Methodism. It was inquired what was the objection to Greenfield, a peaceable, inoffensive man; and the answer was, “The man is well enough, but the gentlemen round about can’t bear his impudence; why, he says he knows his sins are forgiven!” The story is well known how, in one place, a whole waggon-load of Methodists were taken before the magistrates; but when the question was asked in court what they had done, a profound silence fell over the assembly, for no one was prepared with a charge against them, till somebody exclaimed, “They pretended to be better than other people, and prayed from morning till night!” And another voice shouted out, “And they’ve convarted my wife; till she went among they, she had a tongue of her own, and now she’s as quiet as a lamb!” “Take them all back, take them all back,” said the sensible magistrate, “and let them convert all the scolds in the town!”
There is a spot in Cornwall which may be said to be consecrated and set apart to the memory of Wesley; it is in the immediate neighbourhood of Redruth, a wild, bare, rugged-looking region now, very suggestive of its savage aspect upwards of a hundred years since. The spot to which we refer is the Gwennap Pit; it is a wild amphitheatre, cut out among the hills, capable of holding about thirty thousand persons. Its natural walls slant upwards, and the place has altogether wonderful properties for the carrying the human voice. Wesley began to preach in this spot in 1762. When he first visited Cornwall, the savage mobs of what used to be called “West Barbary,” howled and roared upon him like lions or wild beasts; in his later years of visitation, no emperor or sovereign prince could have been received with more reverence and affection. The streets were lined and the windows of the houses thronged with gazing crowds, to see him as he walked along; and no wonder, for Cornwall was one of the chief territories of that singular ecclesiastical kingdom of which he was the founder. When he first went into Cornwall, it was really a region of savage irreligion and heathenism. The reader of his life often finds, usually about once a year, the visit to Gwennap Pit recorded: he preached his first sermon there, as we have said, in 1762; at the age of eighty-six he preached his last in 1789. There, from time to time, they poured in from all the country round to see and to listen to the words of this truly reverend father.
The Great Revival.
Wesley Preaching in Gwennap Pit.
The traditions of Methodism have few more imposing scenes. Gwennap Pit was, perhaps, Wesley’s most famous cathedral; a magnificent church, if we may apply that term to a building of nature, among the wild moors; it was thronged by hushed and devout worshippers. Until Wesley went among these people, the whole immense population might have said, “No man cared for our souls;” now they poured in to see him there: wild miners from the immediate neighbourhood, fishermen from the coast, men who until their conversion had pursued the wrecker’s remorseless and criminal career, smugglers, more quiet men and their families less savage, but not less ignorant, from their shieling, or lowly farmstead on the distant heath. A strange throng, if we think of it, men who had never used God’s name except in an oath, and who had never breathed a prayer except for the special providence of a shipwreck, and who with wicked barbarity had kindled their delusive lights along the coasts, to fascinate unfortunate ships to the cruel cliffs! But a Divine power had passed over them, and they were changed, with their families; and hither they came to gladden the heart of the old patriarch in the wild glen—a strange spot, and not unbeautiful, roofed over by the blue heavens. Amidst the broom, the twittering birds, the heath flower, and the scantling of trees, amidst the venerable rocks, it must have been wonderful to hear the thirty thousand voices welling up, and singing Wesley’s words:
“Suffice that for the season past,