A History of the Four Georges, Volume II

by Justin McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1738—Religion out of fashion]

Nothing can better show than the rise and progress of the great Methodist movement how vast is the difference between a people and what is commonly called society. In society everywhere throughout England, in the great provincial cities as well as in the capital, religion seemed to have completely gone out of fashion. The Court cared nothing about it. The King had no real belief in his heart; he had as little faith in Divine guidance as he had in the honor of man or the chastity of woman. The Queen's devotional exercises were nothing but a mere performance carried on sometimes through a half-opened door, the attendant minister on one side of the door and the gossiping, chattering ladies on the other. The leading statesmen of the age were avowedly indifferent or professedly unbelieving. Bolingbroke was a preacher of unbelief. Walpole never seems to have cared to turn his thoughts for one moment to anything higher than his own political career, the upholding of his friends if they stood fast by him, and the downfall of his enemies. Chesterfield was not exactly the sort of man to be stirred into spiritual life. Morals were getting out of fashion as much as religion. Society had all the grossness without much of the wit which belonged to the days of the Restoration. Yet the mere fact that the Wesleyan movement made such sudden way among the poor and the lowly shows beyond question that the heart of the English people had not been corrupted. Conscience was asleep, but it was not dead. The first words of Wesley seemed to quicken it into a new life.

We have somewhat anticipated the actual course of events in order to show at once what the Wesleyan movement came to. During the lifetime of its founder it had grown into a great national and international institution. Since his time it has been spreading and growing all over the world where Christianity grows. It is the severest in {144} its discipline of all the Protestant churches, and yet it exercises a charm even over gentle and tender natures, and makes them its willing servants, while it teaches the wilder and fiercer spirits to bend their natures and tame their wild passions down. [Sidenote: 1738—The Wesleyan work] In the United States of America Wesleyanism is now one of the most popular and powerful of all the denominations of Christianity. It has since been divided up into many sections, both here and there, on questions of discipline, and even on questions of belief; but in its leading characteristics it has been faithful to the main purpose of its founder. Its success did not consist mainly in what it accomplished for its own people; it achieved a great work also by the impulse it gave to the Church of England. That Church for a while seemed to be filled with a reviving spiritual and ministerial activity. It appeared to take shame to itself that it had remained so long apathetic and perfunctory, and it flung itself into competition with the younger and more energetic mission. The English Church did not indeed retain this mood of ardor and of eagerness very long. After a time it relapsed into comparative inactivity; and a new and very different movement was needed at a period much nearer to our own to make it once again a ministering power to the people—to the poor. But for the time the revival of the Church was genuine and was beneficent. With the quickened religious vitality of the Wesleyan movement came also a quickened philanthropic spirit; a zeal for the instruction, the purification, and the better life of men and women. The common instinct of humanity always is to strive for higher and better ways of living, if only once the word of guidance is given and the soul of true manhood is roused to the work. Indeed, there is not much about this period of English history concerning which the modern Englishman can feel really proud except that great religious revival which began with the thoughts and the teachings of John Wesley. One turns in relief from the partisan struggles in Parliament and out of it, from the intrigues and counter-intrigues of selfish and perfidious statesmen, and {145} the alcove conspiracies of worthless women, to Wesley and his religious visions, to Whitefield and his colliers, to Charles Wesley and his sweet devotional hymns. Many of us are unable to have any manner of sympathy with the precise doctrines and the forms of faith which Wesley taught. But the man must have no sympathy with faith or religious feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's endurance. They brought tears to penitent eyes which had never been moistened before by any but the selfish sense of personal pain or grief. They pierced through the dull, vulgar, contaminated hideousness of low and vicious life, and sent streaming in upon it the light of a higher world and a better law. Every new Wesleyan became a missionary of Wesleyanism. The son converted the father, the daughter won over the heart of the mother. There was much that was hard, much that was fierce, in the doctrine and the discipline of Methodism, but that time was not one in which gentler teachings could much prevail. Men and women had to be startled into a sense of the need of their spiritual regeneration. Wesley and the comrades who worked with him in the beginning, and with some of whom, like Whitefield, he ceased after a while to work, were just the men needed to call aloud to the people and make sure that their voices must be heard. They had to talk in a shout if they were to talk to any purpose. There was much in their style of eloquence against which a pure and cultured criticism would naturally protest. But they did not speak for the pure and cultured criticism. They came to call ignorant sinners to repentance. They have the one great abiding {146} merit, they have the one enduring fame—that they saw their real business in life; that they kept to it through whatever disadvantage, pain, and danger; and that they accomplished what they had gone out to do. Their monument lives to-day in the living history of England and of America.

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CHAPTER XXXI.

ENGLAND'S HONOR AND JENKINS'S EAR.

[Sidenote: 1738—The passion of war]

"Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman among them." This was the proud boast which, as has been already mentioned, Walpole was able to make to Queen Caroline not very long before her death, when she was trying to stir him up to a more agressive policy in the affairs of the Continent. Walpole's words sound almost like an anticipation of Prince Bismarck's famous declaration that the Eastern Question was not worth to Germany the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier. But Prince Bismarck was more fortunate than Walpole in his policy of peace. He had secured a position of advantage for himself in maintaining that policy which Walpole never had. Prince Bismarck had twice over made it clear to all the world that he could conduct to the most complete success a policy of uncompromising war. Walpole had all the difficulty in keeping to his policy of peace which a statesman always has who is suspected, rightly or wrongly, of a willingness to purchase peace at almost any price. It is melancholy to have to make the statement, but the statement is nevertheless true, that in the England of Walpole's day, and in the England of our own day as well, the statesman who is known to love peace is sure to have it shrieked at him in some crisis that he does not love the honor of his country. A periodical outbreak of the craving or lust for war seems to be one of the passions and one of the afflictions of almost every great commonwealth in Europe. A wise and just policy may have secured a peace that has lasted for years; but the mere fact that peace has lasted for years {148} seems to many unthinking people reason enough why the country should be favored with a taste of war. We are constantly declaring that England is not a military nation, and yet no statesman is ever so popular for the hour in England as the statesman who fires the people with the passion of war. Many a minister, weak and unpopular in his domestic policy, has suddenly made himself the hero and the darling of the moment by declaring that some foreign state has insulted England, and that the time has come when the sword must be drawn to defend the nation's honor. Then "away to heaven, respective lenity" indeed! The appeal acts like a charm to call out the passion and to silence the reason of vast masses of the population in all ranks and conditions. Even among the working-classes and the poor—who, one might imagine, have all to lose and nothing to gain by war—it is by no means certain that the war fever will not flame for the hour. There are seasons when, as Burke has said, "even the humblest of us are degraded into the vices and follies of kings."

[Sidenote: 1738—The patriots' war-cry]

War had no fascination for Walpole. He saw it only in its desolation, its cruelty, its folly, and its cost. At the time which we have now reached he looked with clear gaze over the European continent, and he saw nothing in the action of foreign Powers which concerned the honor and the interest of England enough to make it necessary for her to draw the sword. But, unfortunately for his country and for his fame, Walpole was not a statesman of firm and lofty principle. He was always willing to come to terms. In the domestic affairs of England he allowed grievances to exist which he had again and again condemned and deplored, and which every one knew he was sincerely desirous to remove; he allowed them to exist because it might have been a source of annoyance to the King if the minister had troubled him about such a subject. He acted on this policy with regard to the grievances of which the Dissenters complained, and, as he always admitted, very justly complained. Much as he detested a policy of war, he was not the minister who would {149} stand by a policy of peace at the risk of losing his popularity and his power. Much as he loved peace, he loved his place as Prime Minister still more. It is probable that his enemies gave him credit for greater fixity of purpose in regard to his peace policy than he really possessed. They believed, perhaps, that they had only to get up a good, popular war-cry in England, and that Walpole would have to go out of office. They told themselves that he would not make war. On this faith they based their schemes and founded their hopes. It would have been well for Walpole and for England if their belief had been justified by events.