The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century / With a supplemental chapter on the revival in America

by Edwin Paxton Hood

John Nelson at Nottingham.

Nelson was a man of immense physical strength; his own trade had fostered this, and before his conversion he had, no doubt, been feared as a man who could hit out and hit hard. As the most effectual means of silencing him, he was pressed for a soldier; but John was not only a Methodist, he had adopted the Quaker notion that a Christian dare not fight; and he seems to have been a real torment to the officers and men of the regiment, who indeed marched him about different parts of the country, but could not get him either to accept the king’s money or to submit to drill. An officer put him in prison for rebuking his profanity, and threatened to chastise him. Nelson says, “It caused a sore temptation to arise in me; to think that a wicked, ignorant man should thus torment me, and I able to tie his head and heels together. I found an old man’s bone in me; but the Lord lifted up the standard within, else should I have wrung his neck and set my foot upon him.”

At length, after three months, the Countess of Huntingdon procured his discharge. The regiment was in Newcastle. He preached there on the evening of the day on which he was liberated, and it is testified that a number of the soldiers from his regiment came to hear him, and parted from him with tears. He was arrested as a vagrant, without any visible means of living. A gentleman instantly stepped forward and offered five hundred pounds bail; but the bail was refused. He was able to prove that he was a high-charactered, industrious workman; but it availed nothing. Crowds wept and prayed for him as he was borne through the streets. “Fear not!” he cried, “oh, friends; God hath His way in the whirlwind, and in the storm. Only pray that my faith fail not!” It was at Bradford. They thrust him into a most filthy dungeon. The authorities would give him no food. The people thrust in food, water, and candles. He shared these with some wretched prisoners in the same cage, and he sang hymns, and talked to them all night. He was marched off to York; but there the excitement was so great when it was known that John Nelson was coming a prisoner that armed troops were ordered out to guard him. He says, “Hell from beneath was moved to meet me at my coming!” All the windows were crowded with people—some in sympathy, but most cheering and huzzaing as if some great political traitor had been arrested; but he says, “The Lord made my brow like brass, so that I could look upon all the people as grasshoppers, and pass through the city as if there had been none in it but God and me.”

Such was John Nelson. These anecdotes are sufficient to show the manner of man he was. He has been truly called “the proto-martyr of Methodism.” But it is not in a hint or two that all can be said which ought to be said of this noble and extraordinary man. His conversion, perhaps, sank down to deeper roots than in many instances. The thoughts of Methodism found him perplexed with those agonizing questions which have tormented men in all ages, until they have realized the truth as it is in Jesus. His life was guilty of no immoralities; he had a happy, humble home, was industrious, and receiving good wages; but as he walked to and fro among the fields he was distressed, “for,” he said, “surely God never made man to be such a riddle to himself, and to leave him so.” He heard Wesley preach. “Then,” he says, “my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock, and I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me;” and so, in short, he became a Methodist, and a Methodist preacher; and among the noble names in the history of the Church of Christ, in his own line and order, it may be doubted whether a nobler name can be mentioned than that of John Nelson.

Quite another order of man, less human, but equally divine, was Thomas Walsh. His parents were Romanists, and he was intended by them for the Romish priesthood; and he appears to have been an intense Romanist ascetic until about eighteen years of age. He had a thoughtful and exceedingly intense nature, and his faith was no rest to him. In his dilemma he heard a Methodist preacher speak one day from the text, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” It appears to have been the turning-point of a remarkable life.

“The life of Thomas Walsh,” says Dr. Southey, “might almost convince a Catholic that saints were to be found in other communions as well as in the Church of Rome.” Walsh became a great biblical scholar; he was an Irishman, he mastered the native Irish, that he might preach in it; but Latin, Greek, and Hebrew became familiar to him; and of the Hebrew, especially, it is said that he studied so deeply, that his memory was an entire concordance of the whole Bible. His soul was as a flame of fire, but it burnt out the body quickly. John Wesley says of him, “I do not remember ever to have known a man who, in so few years as he remained upon earth, was the instrument of converting so many sinners.” He became mighty in his influence over the Roman Catholics. The priests said that “Walsh had died some years ago, and that he who went about preaching, on mountains and highways, in meadows, private houses, prisons, and ships, was a devil who had assumed his shape.” This was the only way in which they could account for the extraordinary influence he possessed. His labours were greatly divided between Ireland and London, but everywhere he bore down all before him by a kind of absorbed ecstasy of ardent faith; but he died at the age of twenty-seven. While lying on his death-bed he was oppressed with a sense of despair, even of his salvation. The sufferings of his mind on this account were protracted and intense; at last he broke out in an exclamation, “He is come! He is come! My Beloved is mine, and I am His for ever!” and so he fell back and died. Thomas Walsh is a great name still in the records of the lay preachers of early Methodism.

All orders of men rose: different from any we have mentioned was George Story, whose quiet, but earnest and reasonable nature, seems to have commanded the especial love of Southey. He appears never to have become what some call an enthusiast; but he interestingly illustrates, that it was not merely over the rugged and uninformed minds that the power of the Revival exercised its influence. Very curiously, he appears to have been converted by thinking about Eugene Aram, the well-known scholar, whose name has become so celebrated in fiction and in poetry, and who had a short time before been executed for murder at York. Story was impressed by the importance of the acquisition of knowledge, and Aram’s extraordinary attainments kindled in his mind a sense of admiration and emulation; but, as he thought upon his life, he reasoned, “What did this man’s learning profit him? It did not save him from becoming a thief and a murderer, or even from attempting his own life.” It was an immense suggestion to him; it led him upon another track of thinking. The Methodists came through his village; he yielded himself to the influence, and Dr. Southey thinks “there is not in the whole biography of Methodism a more interesting or remarkable case than his.” He became a great preacher, but disarmed and convinced men rather by his calm, dispassionate elevation of manner, than by such weapons as the cheerful bonhomie of Nelson, or the fervid fire of Walsh.

But we are, perhaps, conveying the idea that it was only beneath the administration of John Wesley that these great lay preachers were to be found. It was not so; but no doubt beneath that administration their itinerancy became more systematic and organised. Whitefield does not appear to have at all shared Wesley’s prejudices on this means of usefulness; but those men who fell beneath the influence of Whitefield, or the Countess, seem soon to meet us as settled ministers, in many, if not in all instances. Among them there are few greater names in the whole Revival than those of Captain Jonathan Scott and the renowned Captain Toriel Joss. Captain Scott was a captain of dragoons, and one of the heroes of Minden; he was converted by the instrumentality of William Romaine, who, in spite of his prejudices against lay preaching, encouraged him in his excursions, in which he spoke to immense crowds with great effect. Fletcher, of Madeley, said, “his coat shames many a black one.” He was a gentleman of an ancient and opulent family, and the Countess, who, naturally, was delighted to see people of her own order by her side, felt herself greatly strengthened by him. It was said, when he preached at Leeds, the whole town turned out to hear him; and he was one of the great preachers of the Tabernacle in Moorfields, during more than twenty years. But yet a far more famous man was Toriel Joss. He was a captain of the seas, and had led a life which somewhat reminds us of Newton’s. He was a good and even great sailor, but he became a greater preacher. Whitefield said of these two men, that “God, who sitteth upon the flood, can bring a shark from the ocean, and a lion from the forest, to show forth his praise.” Joss was a man of property, with a fair prospect of considerable wealth, when he renounced the seas and became one of the great lay preachers. Whitefield insisted that he should abandon the chart, the compass, and the deck, and take to the pulpit. He did so. In London his fame was second only to that of Whitefield himself. He became Whitefield’s coadjutor at the Tabernacle, where, first as associate pastor, and afterwards as pastor, he continued for thirty years. The chapel at Tottenham Court Road was his chief field, and John Berridge called him “Whitefield’s Archdeacon of Tottenham.”

TABERNACLE, MOORFIELDS.