John Wesley.
But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in himself not this or that side of the new movement, but the movement itself. Even at Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of Lincoln, he had been looked upon as head of the group of Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic mission to the Indians of Georgia he again took the lead of the little society, which had removed in the interval to London. In power as a preacher he stood next to Whitefield; as a hymn-writer he stood second to his brother Charles. But while combining in some degree the excellences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly deficient; an indefatigable industry, a cool judgement, a command over others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of men. He had besides a learning and skill in writing which no other of the Methodists possessed; he was older than any of his colleagues at the start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed almost covers the century. He was born in 1703 and lived on till 1791, and the Methodist body had passed through every phase of its history before he sank into the grave at the age of eighty-eight. It would have been impossible for Wesley to have wielded the power he did had he not shared the follies and extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples. Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At times he lived on bread only, and he often slept on the bare boards. He lived in a world of wonders and divine interpositions. It was a miracle if the rain stopped and allowed him to set forward on a journey. It was a judgement of heaven if a hailstorm burst over a town which had been deaf to his preaching. One day, he tells us, when he was tired and his horse fell lame, "I thought cannot God heal either man or beast by any means or without any?—immediately my headache ceased and my horse's lameness in the same instant." With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his conduct, whether in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life, by drawing lots or watching the particular texts at which his Bible opened.
His organization of Methodism.
But with all this extravagance and superstition Wesley's mind was essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at the head of a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary. In his earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitefield began his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could not at first reconcile himself to that strange way." He condemned and fought against the admission of laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of England, and looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society in full communion with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had been the earliest friends of the new movement, when they endangered its safe conduct by their contempt of religious forms. He broke with Whitefield when the great preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvinism. But the same practical temper of mind which led him to reject what was unmeasured, and to be the last to adopt what was new, enabled him at once to grasp and organize the novelties he adopted. He became himself the most unwearied of field preachers, and his journal for half-a-century is little more than a record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When once driven to employ lay helpers in his ministry he made their work a new and attractive feature in his system. His earlier asceticism only lingered in a dread of social enjoyments and an aversion from the gayer and sunnier side of life which links the Methodist movement with that of the Puritans. As the fervour of his superstition died down into the calm of age, his cool common sense discouraged in his followers the enthusiastic outbursts which marked the opening of the revival. His powers were bent to the building up of a great religious society which might give to the new enthusiasm a lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped into classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of unworthy members, and furnished with an alternation of settled ministers and wandering preachers; while the whole body was placed under the absolute government of a Conference of ministers. But so long as he lived, the direction of the new religious society remained with Wesley alone. "If by arbitrary power," he replied with charming simplicity to objectors, "you mean a power which I exercise simply without any colleagues therein, this is certainly true, but I see no hurt in it."
Results of the movement.
The great body which he thus founded numbered a hundred thousand members at his death, and now counts its members in England and America by millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church, as we shall see later, broke the lethargy of the clergy who, under the influence of the "Evangelical" movement, were called to a loftier conception of their duties; while a powerful moral enthusiasm appeared in the nation at large. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education.
Revival of France.
From the new England which was springing up about him, from that new stir of national life and emotion of which the Wesleyan revival was but a part, Walpole stood utterly aloof. National enthusiasm, national passion, found no echo in his cool and passionless good sense. The growing consciousness in the people at large of a new greatness, its instinctive prevision of the coming of a time when England was to play a foremost part in the history of the world, the upgrowth of a nobler and loftier temper which should correspond to such a destiny, all were alike unintelligible to him. In the talk of patriotism and public virtue he saw mere rant and extravagance. "Men would grow wiser," he said, "and come out of that." The revival of English religion he looked on with an indifference lightly dashed with dread as a reawakening of fanaticism which might throw new obstacles in the way of religious liberty. In the face of the growing excitement therefore he clung as doggedly as ever to his policy of quiet at home and peace abroad. But peace was now threatened by a foe far more formidable than Spain. What had hitherto enabled England to uphold the settlement of Europe as established at the Peace of Utrecht was above all the alliance and backing of France. But it was clear that such an alliance could hardly be a permanent one. The Treaty of Utrecht had been a humiliation for France even more than for Spain. It had marked the failure of those dreams of European supremacy which the House of Bourbon had nursed ever since the close of the sixteenth century, and which Lewis the Fourteenth had all but turned from dreams into realities. Beaten and impoverished, France had bowed to the need of peace; but her strange powers of recovery had shown themselves in the years of tranquillity that peace secured; and with reviving wealth and the upgrowth of a new generation which had known nothing of the woes that followed Blenheim and Ramillies the old ambition started again into life.
Its union with Spain.
It was fired to action by a new rivalry. The naval supremacy of Britain was growing into an empire of the sea; and not only was such an empire in itself a challenge to France, but it was fatal to the aspirations after a colonial dominion, after aggrandizement in America, and the upbuilding of a French power in the East, which were already vaguely stirring in the breasts of her statesmen. And to this new rivalry was added the temptation of a new chance of success. On the Continent the mightiest foe of France had ever been the House of Austria; but that House was now paralyzed by a question of succession. It was almost certain that the quarrels which must follow the death of the Emperor would break the strength of Germany, and it was probable that they might be so managed as to destroy for ever that of the House of Hapsburg. While the main obstacle to her ambition was thus weakened or removed, France won a new and invaluable aid to it in the friendship of Spain. Accident had hindered for a while the realization of the forebodings which led Marlborough and Somers so fiercely to oppose a recognition of the union of the two countries under the same royal house in the Peace of Utrecht. The age and death of Lewis the Fourteenth, the minority of his successor, the hostility between Philip of Spain and the Duke of Orleans, the personal quarrel between the two Crowns which broke out after the Duke's death, had long held the Bourbon powers apart. France had in fact been thrown on the alliance of England, and had been forced to play a chief part in opposing Spain and in maintaining the European settlement. But at the death of George the First this temporary severance was already passing away. The birth of children to Lewis the Fifteenth settled all questions of succession; and no obstacle remained to hinder their family sympathies from uniting the Bourbon Courts in a common action. The boast of Lewis the Fourteenth was at last fulfilled. In the mighty struggle for supremacy which France carried on from the fall of Walpole to the Peace of Paris her strength was doubled by the fact that there were "no Pyrenees."
