“The (Popish) Priest at Madeley is going to open his Mass-house, and I have declared war on that account last Sunday, and propose to strip the Whore of Babylon, and expose her nakedness to-morrow. All the Papists are in a great ferment, and they have held meetings to consult on the occasion.”
An odour now hangs and will hang about the name of Fletcher, and turning to his example for encouragement, amid the more sterile tracts of labour, the weary and desponding will get refreshed. As mountains pierce the clouds and bring down rains upon the parched and shrivelled plains, so men now and then tower high above their fellows, and privileged with a greater significance, sunned and bathed in a purer light, they become a medium of it to others. It was so with Fletcher. In his presence men of coarser mould and ruder habits, as well as those distinguished for their attainments, felt the force and purity of his life. It has taken the Church of which he was so distinguished a member nearly a whole century to come up to plans by which he extended the sphere of his usefulness: we mean those outdoor meetings, cottage-lectures, Scripture readings, catechisings, and similar means whereby in every corner of the parish he contrived to stir men up and to create among them a concern for their higher interests. These are his words:—
“Soon after coming to Madeley, I have frequently had a desire to exhort in Madeley Wood and Coalbrookdale, two villages of my parish, but I have not dared to run before I saw an open door. It now, I think, begins to open, as two small societies of twenty persons have formed themselves in those places.”
But for a large soul like Mr. Fletcher’s the parish even is too limited, and we find accordingly that he gathered a small society sixteen miles off, riding that distance in order to preach at five o’clock in the morning two or three times a-week. Of course a man could not do this without treading on someone’s toes. It was the way to get opposition, and he got it. The churchwardens, clergy, archdeacon, bishop, and magistrates were dead against him. Magistrates threatened him and the whole of his flock with imprisonment; and the bishop preached against him before his brethren at the general visitation. He writes to Charles Wesley—“A young clergyman who lives at Madeley Wood, where he has great influence, has openly declared war against me by pasting on the church-door a paper, in which he charges me with rebellion, schism, and being a disturber of the public peace. He puts himself at the head of the gentlemen of the parish (as they term themselves), and supported by the recorder of Wenlock he is determined to put in force the Conventicle Act against me. A few weeks ago the widow who lives in the Rock Church and a young man who read and prayed in my absence were taken up.” He tells us he appeared at Wenlock and bearded the justices, who denounced him as a Jesuit!
Times have changed, and what was deemed in Mr Fletcher an indiscretion and even a crime, is now universally applauded. If persecution to Mr. Fletcher arose from those who by influence and position should have seconded his plans, we need scarcely feel surprised to find that, setting himself against the commoner and coarser vices of the times, he was opposed by those who thrived thereby. In a letter to Mr. Charles Wesley he says—“You cannot well imagine how much the animosity of my parishioners is heightened, and with what boldness it discovers itself against me, because I preach against drunkenness, shows, and bull-baiting. The publicans and the maltmen will not forgive me: they think that to preach against drunkenness and to cut their purse is the same thing.”
It is difficult to imagine a man of education, taste, and refined feeling in the midst of elements more discordant, or so totally out of character with what he had been used to. Unvisited by those influences that from a thousand sources now combine to smooth the path of the country clergy, mining districts, like others where the physical energies of the body are developed to the utmost stretch by the nature of the employment, presented the greatest obstacles to progress; the most dogged indifference to efforts made for their advancement; and, where attempts were made to put a check upon the brutal amusements of the population, they offered the most determined resistance. At out-door or in-door services, in such semi-civilized portions of the parish, the sound of prayer, both on Sundays and week-evenings, would ascend mingled with the yells and cries and curses of drunken colliers, the barking of dogs, the roar of a bull, or some indulgence of the kind with which publicans seasoned their attractions. The Green, at Madeley Wood, was a favourite spot for such games, and narrowly upon one occasion did this zealous and pious man escape being pulled from his horse and made the victim of a party of infuriated colliers, who made the bargain to “bait the parson.”
Mr. Fletcher, with a view of further promoting his mission of usefulness in 1767 visited Yorkshire, Bristol, Bath, and Wales, and subsequently his native country, Rome, &c. He returned to England in 1770; and some time after undertook the charge of a college founded by the Countess of Huntingdon, at Trevecca, in South Wales, but resigned the appointment, in consequence of his repugnance to Calvinistic views. This brought out Mr. Fletcher as a controversialist, with Toplady and others. At the breaking out of the American War Mr. Fletcher took up his pen in defence of the Government, and the right divine of kings, contending that “if once legislation was affirmed to belong to the people, as such, all government would be overturned,” and that such a scheme ought to be totally extirpated; doctrines which so pleased the King that the Lord Chancellor was commissioned to offer him preferment, which he declined.
Poor human nature at best goes on crutches; and one infirmity he had to struggle with when young, Mr. Benson tells us, “was temper. He was a man of strong passions, and prone to anger in particular, insomuch that he has frequently thrown himself on the floor, and laid there most of the night, bathed in tears, imploring victory over his spirit.” He obtained it, and by the means employed—by earnest wrestling, by prayer articulate at times—voiceless, waiting prayer at others. Holiness to be realised in man—holiness incarnate on earth, eternal in the heavens—and the annihilation of all that would bar it out from the soul was his motto. But the man that would tremble before the suspicion of a fault, on the other hand, could beard a gamester armed, and pour an avalanche of indignation upon his head—aye, while the infuriated duellist held a pistol to his breast. There was a combination of earnestness, sincerity, and, withal, humiliation, about the man that won its way and fused all before it. There was a primitive simplicity and singleness of purpose, an enthusiasm unmixed with bitterness, and that heavenly temper about Mr. Fletcher which reminds one of the sublimated virtues and graces of the early Christians. Like the old fathers, he accommodated himself to his hearers, suiting his exhortations to their modes of thought, and seizing opportunities for imparting instruction and advice, so as to secure for both the most favourable reception. His parishioners soon began not only to perceive but to appreciate these excellent features of his character. Unmoved by storm and tumult, actuated by the purest motives, with a grace and sweetness that shone through every look and gave value to every action, his visits, wherever he went, brought with them influences like the reviving breath of spring. If he overtook on the road a poor woman, wearied with a load, he assisted her to carry it, meanwhile taking care to exhort her to relieve herself of that more intolerable one of sin. If he saw a man fetch down a bird with his gun, he complimented him upon his aim and called his attention to the mark for the prize of his high calling—thus tempering and interweaving with things and pursuits of this life those relating to that which is to come. A very atmosphere of good surrounded him, from whence distilled heavenly and refreshing dew. To meet the objections of his parishioners to early Sunday morning meetings, on the ground of their being unable to rise so early, he was accustomed to go round the village himself, tinkling a bell; “thus, though free from all men,” as the Apostle said to the Corinthians, he made himself the servant of all, giving himself up to the work as practically and devotedly as though each particular department had been his special duty. If a poor man was ill and lacked attendance he sat by the sickbed and tended him; if he needed clothes to keep him warm he stripped himself; if he needed money he gave it; and even the furniture in his house was at the service of the poorest. He was not only a servant, but a “servant of servants,” therefore, unto his brethren; and upon the well-recognised principle of true greatness laid down by his divine Master—“Whomsoever would be chief amongst you, let him be your servant”—he obtained that reverence and regard with which, even now, his name is spoken of both in the cottages of the poor and houses of the rich.
There was in Mr. Fletcher a combination of distinguished virtues seldom found in one man, and those so marked and developed that each by itself would have been sufficient to confer distinction upon any individual possessing it in an equal degree. Of his ministrations in the pulpit of the old church none now left can speak. By the children, however, of those who have listened to him we have often heard it said—“Never were hearers more riveted and enrapt by lips of a fellow-mortal.” Every topic received at his hand a fresh bloom—a brilliancy, a fascination, a fragrance that entranced. Christ the Saviour, Christ in the garden, and upon the cross; now at the right hand of the Father, and again coming in great glory to judge the world; man regenerated; the benediction and the curse; the two hemispheres of the one truth needful for man to know, were themes upon which he began, continued, and ended.
The “Rock Church,” previously spoken of, at Madeley Wood, was a cottage built on a spur of one of the sandstones of the lower coal measures, and it still stands, overlooking the valley of the Severn. Mr. Fletcher exerted himself, however, to erect a place of better accommodation in 1776, and succeeded in building what now forms part of the old Wesleyan chapel, a short distance from the Rock Church; and we find him devoting £25, being a balance of £105 received as the annual income from his estate in Switzerland, to its completion: the remainder previously appears to have been devoted to other charitable purposes. He was unable then, however, to clear off the whole, for in the following year he wrote to Thomas York and Daniel Edmunds, who assisted him in the secular concerns of the vicarage, saying:—