I take it for granted, Reverend Sir, that you need not be apprized that I am one of these Methodists; and blessed be God I have had the honour of being one of them for about thirty-five years. If this is to be vile, may I be more vile! If this be my shame, upon the most mature and serious reflection I really glory in it. But then, lest any more innocent youths should hereafter suffer barely for the imputation of a nick-name, give me leave simply and honestly to inform you, Reverend Sir, and through you the whole university, what not barely a reputed, but a real Methodist is: “He is one of those whom God hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour; wherefore they, who be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, are called according to God’s purpose by his spirit working in due season: they, through grace, obey the calling; they be justified freely; and made the sons of God by adoption: they are conformed to the image of his only begotten Son Jesus Christ; they walk religiously in good works; and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain everlasting felicity.” This is the true portrait of a Methodist, drawn at full length, drawn to the very life, and that too not by an ignorant modern dauber, but by those good old skilful scriptural limners, Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, in the xviith article of our church; an article that deserves to be written in letters of gold; and yet, for holding of this very article in its literal grammatical sense, agreeable to his subscription at the time of matriculation, one of these young students, as we have been informed, was expelled. If our information be wrong in this or any other respect, the nation may soon be set right by an authentic publication of the whole judicial proceedings.
If you should desire, Reverend Sir, a definition of Methodism itself, as well as of a Methodist, you may easily be gratified. It is no more nor less than “faith working by love. A holy method of living and dying, to the glory of God.” It is an universal morality, founded upon the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost: or, to keep to the exact terms made use of in the last collect of our excellent liturgy, it is “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost;” which we cannot go to church or chapel on Sundays, holidays, or other common days, without praying, not that it may be driven from, but be with us all evermore.
If this be enthusiasm, the true Methodists confess themselves to be enthusiasts. But then, they humbly apprehend, that they cannot with any just propriety of speech be termed modern enthusiasts; for it is an enthusiasm which our blessed Lord earnestly insists upon, in that prayer which he put up when he was about to take his farewel of his disciples, and which is a pattern of that all-prevailing intercession which He is now making at the right hand of God, and demands that all his disciples may be possessed of; “Father, I will that those whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am; that they may be one with me, even as thou, O Father, and I are one: I in them, and they in me, that they all may be made perfect in one.” An enthusiasm, with which Peter and John were fired, when Annas the high-priest, and Caiaphas, and John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high-priest, seeing their boldness, and perceiving that they were unlearned and ignorant men, marvelled, and took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus. An enthusiasm, with which the proto-martyr Stephen was filled, when he cried, “Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost.” An enthusiasm, which Ignatius supposed by some to be one of those little children which the Lord Jesus took up in his arms, was absorbed in, when he stiles himself a bearer of God; and for witnessing of which good confession, in order to cure him of this enthusiasm, he was ordered by Trajan, the Roman emperor, to be thrown to the lions. An enthusiasm, for which Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, those glorious lights of the reformation, those excellent compilers of our liturgy, articles, and homilies, were burnt alive near Baliol college. And, to mention but one more, too too recent an example, an enthusiasm, for being only a little tinctured with which, six students, on March 11th, in the year of our Lord 1768, were publicly expelled in Edmund-Hall chapel.
But think you, Reverend Sir, that this is the way to stop the progress of this enthusiasm? Or rather, may we not imagine that this very act of expulsion will be a means of furthering and promoting its progress far and near? To speak my own thoughts, I am fully persuaded, that if such unscriptural methods of stopping this enthusiasm be pursued further, it will be only like cutting off the Lyrnean head; instead of one, an hundred will spring up.
Indeed, if the picture of modern enthusiasts, drawn up and presented to the public by your Right Reverend Diocesan, be a just and proper one, supposing at the same time the Methodists are thereby referred to, no matter how soon they are banished out of the university, and out of the church also: for his Lordship is pleased to tell us “that they act in direct opposition to the perverse pharisees of old; these ascribed the works of the Holy Ghost to Beelzebub; and it is no uncommon thing for these modern enthusiasts, adds his Lordship, to ascribe the works of Beelzebub to the Holy Spirit.” Surely his Lordship, by these modern enthusiasts, cannot mean those who apply for holy orders, and profess before men and angels, that “they are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost, to take upon them the office and administration of the church;” when the searcher of hearts knows that they are moved only by secular views and worldly hopes of preferment. This is ascribing the works of Beelzebub to the Spirit of God with a witness: or, to use the words of a no less learned, though less censorious prelate; I mean the moderate Bishop Burnet, “it is a committing the horrid crime of Ananias and Sapphira over again; it is lying, not only unto man, but unto God.”
This is a modern kind of enthusiasm, Reverend Sir, which the true old Methodists always did, and I trust always will abjure, detest and abhor. If worldly church preferments had been their aim, some of them at least might have had worldly ladders enough let down to them to climb up by: but having received a kind of apostolical commission at their ordination, when those who profess themselves lineal successors of the Apostles, said unto them, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost now committed unto you by the imposition of our hands:” they would fain keep up and maintain something of the dignity of an apostolic character; and therefore, without ever so much as designing to enter into any political cabals, or civil or church factions whatsoever, without turning to the right hand or the left, or troubling the world with so much as one single sermon or pamphlet, on the bare externals of religion; they have endeavoured to have but one thing in view, namely, to determine to think of nothing, to know nothing, and to preach of nothing but Jesus Christ, and him crucified; to spend and be spent for the good of souls, and to glory in nothing save in the cross of Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto them and they unto the world.
It is true, by thinking and acting thus, the Methodists have been, and it is presumed always will be, charged and condemned by men of corrupt minds, as thinking and acting irregularly and disorderly: but as such a charge, in the very nature of the thing, supposes a deviation from some settled standing rule, they would humbly ask, wherein the irregularity and disorderliness of this way of acting and thinking doth specifically consist? Is it irregular and disorderly to be “instant in season and out of season?” Is it irregular and disorderly to do what every Bishop at the very time of our being ordained priests positively tells us pertaineth to their office, “to seek after the children of God, scattered abroad in this naughty world?” Is it irregular and disorderly after we have established the truth of what we deliver in our sermons by scripture proofs, further to confirm and illustrate them by repeated and particular quotations, taken from the liturgy, articles, and homilies of our established church? Is it irregular and disorderly to fill her pews, to croud her communion tables, and to recommend a frequent and constant devout attendance upon her public offices and services? Or, supposing they should, merely by caprice or prejudice, be denied the privilege of preaching within the church, can it be justly termed irregular or disorderly, at least can it possibly be looked upon as criminal, to preach the same truths, to make use of the same kind of illustrations, to repeat the self-same recommendations without the church walls, in the fields, or any other place whatsoever?
The late candid Bishop of Lincoln, I am positive, did not think such a way of acting altogether so very criminal: for in a charge given to his clergy some years before his translation to the see of Salisbury, he told them to this effect, “that they were not to look upon themselves as ministers of a Plato, a Pythagoras, or any other heathen philosopher, consequently they were not to entertain their auditories with mere moral harangues; but that they were to consider themselves as ministers of Jesus Christ; and therefore if they would not preach the gospel in the church, they could not be justly angry if the poor people went out to hear it in a field.” A charge this, truly worthy of a sober-minded, moderate, wise Bishop of the Church of England. For even in acting thus seemingly irregular and disorderly, these modern enthusiasts only copy after the greatest and brightest examples the world ever saw, and whose examples it is more than criminal not to follow or copy after. Our blessed Lord, when denied the use of the synagogues, on seeing the multitude, went up and chose a mountain for his pulpit, and the heavens for his sounding board. At other times he sat by the sea-side, nay, went into a ship and preached, whilst the whole multitude stood on the shore. When Peter and John, that this kind of enthusiasm might spread no further among the people, were straitly threatened and commanded that they should thenceforth speak at all to no man in Christ’s name, they calmly yet boldly replied unto their threatners and commanders, “Whether it be right in the sight of God, to hearken unto you, more than unto God, judge ye: for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” A certain woman, named Lydia, a seller of purple, had her heart opened when the great apostle of the Gentiles was preaching and praying by a river-side; and Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others, believed, and clave unto the same Apostle, from the time they heard him preach in the midst of Areopagus, or Mars-hill. And we may suppose he was not less successful when he was obliged by the angry Jews to preach in the school of one Tyrannus.
I believe you will agree, Reverend Sir, that the venerable Fox and Bradford did not appear less venerable for preaching at Pauls-cross; neither did I ever hear that Bishop Latimer was looked upon as degrading his episcopal character, when he used to preach in Cotton-Garden Westminster, and King Edward the sixth, that Josiah of his age, with some of his court, looked out at the palace window to hear him. And I hereby appeal to the whole university, whether the Reverend Doctors of divinity, heads of houses, graduates or under-graduates, ever looked upon it as criminal, or beneath the dignity of their place and station, to sit out in the open air on St. John Baptist’s day, to hear a master of arts preach from the stone pulpit in Maudling-College yard; though, for fear it may be they should give further sanction to field-preaching, they have lately thought proper to adjourn into the chapel?
You know, Reverend Sir, who it was, that when those who were bidden in a regular way refused to come to the wedding-supper, without asking any one’s leave for so doing, sent forth some irregulars into the lanes and streets of the city, into the highways and hedges, with that glorious encouraging commission, not by fines and imprisonments, not by threats and expulsions, not by killing the body for the good of the soul, but by filling their mouths with gospel arguments, backed with the all-powerful energy of the Holy Ghost, to compel poor, wandering, weary, heavy laden sinners to come in. Armed with this panoply divine, and, as they think, authorised by the same Lord, some few of us continue to this day, amongst small and great, high and low, rich and poor, in church or chapel, in commons, streets, fields, whensoever or wheresoever divine providence opens a door, “to testify repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ;” and this not from contempt of, or in opposition to the godly admonitions of our ecclesiastical superiors, but because “the love of Christ constraineth us;” and we think that a wo, a dreadful wo, awaits us if we preach not the gospel. Not that we are enemies to a decent or even episcopal consecration, or setting apart churches and chapels for divine and holy worship: but we are more indifferent about the reputed outward sanctity of places, because our Lord, with great solemnity, said unto the woman of Samaria, “Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father: but the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.” Hence we infer, that every place is then, and only then properly called holy, when like the ground around the burning bush, it is made holy by the divine presence of Him who spake to Moses out of the bush; or like mount Tabor, which by the Apostle Peter is called, by way of emphasis, the holy mount, because himself and James and John, not only had upon that mount a visible outward manifestation, but also a blessed inward heart-felt sense of the Redeemer’s excellent glory. It was undoubtedly this which made Peter to break out into that exclamation: “Master, it is good for us to be here.” And it was this that warmed, and not only warmed, but constrained the enraptured Patriarch Jacob, when he had only the ground for his bed, the stones for his pillow, and the open firmament for his curtains and furniture, to break forth into that extatic language, “How dreadful is this place! this is no other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.”