John Wesley did not blame anybody for anything. Once when he saw a drunken man reeling through the street, he turned to a friend and said, "But for the grace of God, there goes John Wesley!" All his biographies agree that after his fiftieth year his power as a preacher increased constantly until he was seventy-five. He grew more gentle, more tender, and there was about him an aura of love and veneration, so that even his enemies removed their hats and stood silent in his presence. And we might here paraphrase his own words and truly say of him, as he said of Josiah Wedgwood, "He loved flowers and horses and children—and his soul was near to God!"
The actual reason for breaking away or "coming out" is a personal antipathy for the leader. Like children playing a game, theologians reach a point where they say, "I'll not play in your back yard." And not liking a man, we dislike his music, his art, his creed. So they divide on free grace, foreordination, baptism, regeneration, freedom of the will, endless punishment, endless consequences, conversion, transubstantiation, sanctification, infant baptism, or any one of a dozen reasons which do not represent truth, but are all merely a point of view, and can honestly be believed before breakfast and rejected afterward.
However, the protest of Wesley had a basic reason, for at his time the State Religion was a galvanized and gilded thing, possessing everything but the breath of life.
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And so John Wesley went riding the circuit from Land's End to John O'Groat's, from Cork to Londonderry, eight thousand miles, and eight hundred sermons every year. In London he spoke to the limit of his voice—ten thousand people. Yet when chance sent him but fifty auditors he spoke with just as much feeling. His sermons were full of wit, often homely but never coarse. He knew how to interest tired men; how to keep the children awake. He interspersed anecdote with injunction, and precept with homely happenings. He yearned to better this life, and to evolve souls that were worth saving.
Wesley grew with the years, and fully realized that preaching is for the preacher. "Always in my saddlebags beside my Bible and hymnal I carried one good book." He knew history, science as far as it had been carried, and all philosophy was to him familiar. The itineracy he believed was a necessity for the preacher as well as for the people. A preacher should not remain so long in a place as to become cheap or commonplace. New faces keep one alive and alert. And the circuit-rider can give the same address over and over and perfect it by repetition until it is most effective.
The circuit-rider, the local preacher or class-leader, the classes, the "love-feast," or general meeting—these were quite enough in the way of religious machinery.
Finally, however, Wesley became convinced that in large cities an indoor meeting-place was necessary in order to keep the people banded together. Often the weather was bad, and then it was too much to expect women and children to stand in the rain and cold to hear the circuit-rider.
So London supplied an abandoned warehouse called "The Foundry," and here the Wesleys met in a vast body for a service of song and praise. Methodism is largely a matter of temperament—it fits the needs of a certain type. The growing mind is not content to have everything done for it. The Catholics and Episcopalians were doing too much for their people, and not letting the people do enough for themselves. The Methodist class-meeting allowed the lowliest member to lift up his voice and make his own appeal to the Throne of Grace. Prayer is for the person who prays, and only very dull people doubt its efficacy. The God in your own heart always harkens to your prayer, and if it is reasonable and right, always answers it.
"Methodism raised the standard of intellect in England to a degree no man can compute," says Lecky the freethinking historian. Drunkenness, gambling, dog-fighting, bear-baiting in whole communities were replaced by the singing of hymns, prayers and "testimonies," in which every one had a part. Wesley loved flowers and often carried garden- seeds to give away, and then on his next trip would remember to ask about results. He encouraged his people to be tidy in their dress and housekeeping, and gentle in their manners.