Fletcher of Madeley

by Frederic W. Macdonald

"But is it consistent with the doctrines of our Church to condemn and set aside all feelings in religion, and rank them with unaccountable impulses? Give me leave, sir, to tell you that either you or the compilers of our Liturgy, Articles, and Homilies must be mistaken, if I did not mistake you.... They bid us pray (office for the sick) that every sick person may know and feel that there is no saving name or power but that of Jesus Christ. In the seventeenth of our Articles they speak of godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the workings of God's Spirit. And in the third part of the homily for rogation week, they declare that when after contrition we feel our consciences at peace with God through the remission of our sin, it is God that worketh this miracle in us. (Compare this with Rom. v. 1.) They are so far therefore from attributing such feelings to the weakness of good people's nerves, or to a spirit of pride and delusion, that they affirm it is God that worketh them in their hearts....

"You seemed, sir, to discountenance feelings as not agreeable to sober, rational worship; but, if I am not mistaken, reason by no means clashes with feelings of various sorts in religion. I am willing to let any man of reason judge whether feeling sorrow for sin, hunger and thirst after righteousness, peace of conscience, serenity of mind, consolation in prayer, thankfulness at the Lord's table, hatred of sin, zeal for God, love to Jesus and all men, compassion for the distressed, etc., or feeling nothing at all of this, is matter of mere indifference: yea, sir, take for a judge a heathen poet, if you please, and you will hear him say of a young man who, by his blushes, betrayed the shame he felt for having told an untruth,—Erubuit, salva res est....

"If a man may feel sorrow when he sees himself stript of all, and left naked upon a desert coast, why should not a penitent sinner, whom God has delivered from blindness of heart, be allowed to feel sorrow upon seeing himself robbed of his title to heaven, and left in the wilderness of this world destitute of original righteousness? Again, if it is not absurd to say that a rebel, condemned to death, feels joy upon his being reprieved and received into his prince's favour, why should it be thought absurd to affirm that a Christian, who, being justified by faith, has peace with God, and rejoices in hope of the glory to come, feels joy and happiness in his inmost soul on that account? On the contrary, sir, to affirm that such a one feels nothing (if I am not mistaken) is no less repugnant to reason than to religion....

"But if, because your text was taken out of St. Paul's epistle, you choose, sir, to let him decide whether feelings ought to have place in sound religion, or not, I am willing to stand at the bar before so great a judge, and promise to find no fault with his sentence.... Where does he exclaim against feeling the power of God, or the powerful operations of His Spirit on the heart? Is it where he says that the kingdom of God is 'not in word, but in power'; that this kingdom within us (if we are believers), this true, inward religion consists in peace, righteousness, and joy in the Holy Ghost; that Christians rejoice in tribulation, because the love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto them? Is it where he says, he is 'not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, because it is the power of God to the salvation of every one that believeth'; that he desired to 'know nothing but Jesus and the power of His resurrection'? (2 Cor. ii. 24.) Or is it when he calls the exerting of this power in him his life; saying, 'I live not, but Christ lives in me; and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me'?

"Can we suppose that he discountenances feelings in religion, when he prays that 'the God of hope' would fill the Romans (xv. 13) 'with all joy and peace in believing, that they might abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost'; when he says that 'they had not received again the spirit of bondage to fear, but the spirit of adoption, crying, Abba, Father, and witnessing to their spirits that they were the children of God,' agreeable to that of St. John, 'He that believeth hath the witness in himself'?

"One more argument on this subject, and I shall conclude the whole. If good nature, affability, and morality, with a round of outward duties, will fit a man for heaven, without any feeling of the workings of the Spirit of God in the heart, or without peace, righteousness, and joy in the Holy Ghost; if such a professor of godliness is really in that narrow way to the kingdom which few people find, why did our Lord puzzle honest Nicodemus with the strange doctrine of a new birth?... why did He trouble the religious centurion with sending for Peter, that the Holy Ghost might fall upon him and all that heard the word, while the apostle preached to them remission of sins, through faith in Jesus?

"But, above all, if inward feelings are nothing in sound religion, if they rather border upon enthusiasm, why did not our Lord caution the woman who came behind him in Simon's house, who wept at his feet, and kissed and wiped them with her hair? Why did He not take this opportunity to preach her and us a lecture on enthusiasm? Why did He not advise her to take something to help the weakness of her nerves, and prevent the ferment of her spirits? Why did He not tell her she went too far, she would run mad in the end? Why did He not bid her (as people do in our days) go into company a little, and divert her melancholy? Nay, more; why did He prefer her with all her behaviour to good-natured, virtuous, religious, undisturbed Simon?

"... However, do not mistake me, sir; I am far from supposing that the sincerity of people's devotion must be judged of by the emotion they feel in their bodies.... But as I read that God will have the heart or nothing, so I know that when He has the heart, He has the affections, of course. Fear and hope, sorrow and joy, desire and love act upon their proper objects, God's attributes. They often launch out, and, as it were, lose themselves in His immensity, and, at times, several of these passions acting together in the soul, the noble disorder they cause cannot but affect the animal spirits, and communicate itself more or less to the body. Hence came the floods of tears shed by David, Jeremiah, Mary, Peter, Paul, etc.; hence came the sighs, tears, strong cries, and groans unutterable of our Saviour Himself."

The "Defence," from which these extracts are made, fairly exhibits the mind of early Methodism, and of the Evangelical Revival generally, upon the questions discussed. The discrimination between religious feeling arising from the quickened apprehension of Divine truth, and that which is little more than natural emotion unnaturally stimulated, is not peculiar to Fletcher. He did but share it with the other leaders of the new reformation. The teaching of Wesley, the master mind of the whole movement, is, as regards this matter, as much marked by strong sense as by Evangelical fervour.

The comment, perhaps, of most readers of this "Defence of Experimental Religion" will be that the points contended for are obvious and indisputable, that they would be so readily admitted as to render much of the argument superfluous. That this should appear so is one of the many illustrations of the extent to which the results of the great Revival have passed into the religious life of the nation, and become a common heritage.