This clerical railer tells the archbishop that, by means of Methodism, there was, in this remote part of the country, “a schismatical rebellion against the best of churches; a defiance of all laws, civil and ecclesiastical; a professed disrespect to learning and education; a visible ruin of trade and manufacture; a shameful progress of enthusiasm; and a confusion not to be paralleled in any other Christian dominion.” He adds, that he has taken pains to “inquire into the characters of these new sectaries, and has found their teachers shamefully ignorant, and criminally arrogant, while many of them have been prevented arriving at the order of priesthood by early immoralities.”
The text he professes to expound is 1 Corinthians xiv. 33, and the following are a specimen of his spicy sentences concerning the Methodists and their system:—“A weak illiterate crowd,”—“a labyrinth of wild enthusiasm,”—preachers are “bold, visionary rustics, setting up to be guides in matters of the highest importance, without any other plea but uncontrollable ignorance,”—these officious haranguers cozen a handsome subsistence out of their irregular expeditions. Mr. Wesley has in reality a better income than most of our bishops. The under lay praters, by means of a certain allowance from their schismatic general, a contribution from their very wise hearers, and the constant maintenance of themselves and horses, are in a better way of living than the generality of our vicars and curates; and doubtless find it much more agreeable to their constitution, to travel abroad at the expense of a sanctified face and a good assurance, than to sweat ignominiously at the loom, anvil, and various other mechanic employments, which nature had so manifestly designed them for.”
But enough of the oracular utterances of Mr. White. Who was he? First of all, he was educated at Douay, for orders in the Church of Rome. Renouncing popery, he was noticed by Archbishop Potter, and made a priest of the Church of England. An itch for scribbling made him the author of about half-a-dozen worthless ungrammatical publications, including “a burlesque poem on a miraculous sheep’s eye at Paris.” A devoted son of “the best of churches,” he frequently abandoned his church for weeks together; and, on one occasion, read the funeral service more than twenty times in a single night over the dead bodies which had been interred, without ceremony, during his absence from home. He married an Italian governess in 1745; was imprisoned for debt in Chester castle; and there died on April 29, 1751.[28]
If White’s sermon had not given birth to the murderous outrage at Roughlee and Barrowford, it would have been too worthless to be noticed. As it was, a brainless and ungrammatical production became of such importance, that Grimshaw thought it his duty, in 1749, to publish an answer to it. Grimshaw was not the man to be mealy mouthed. On his title page he put the following: “Why boastest thou thyself in mischief, O mighty man? The goodness of God endureth continually. Thy tongue deviseth mischief; like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. Thou lovest evil more than good; and lying words rather than to speak righteousness. Thou lovest all devouring words, O thou deceitful tongue; God shall likewise destroy thee for ever. He shall take thee away, and pluck thee out of thy dwelling place, and root thee out of the land of the living. The righteous also shall see and fear, and laugh at him.” (Psalm lii. 1-6.) This was strong language for the incumbent of Haworth to use respecting the perpetual curate of Colne. Grimshaw tells him, that his sermon is “full of palpable contradictions, absurdities, falsities, groundless suggestions, and malicious surmises, and, in some sort, vindicates the people it was intended to asperse.” Grimshaw’s “Answer” extends to eighty-six pages, 12mo, closely printed, and is an able and well written defence of the poor, persecuted Methodists. White was no match for Grimshaw, at least, in literary conflict. The one was a braggadocio, the other was a giant; and, with a giant’s knotted club, he belabours the pompous priest with anything but the gentleness of a carpet knight. White, however, deserved all he got. The man was a popish cheat. Besides his disgraceful imprisonment in Chester castle, he had, as Grimshaw reminds him, been acting the rake, in London and elsewhere, for the last three years; and now forsooth! all at once, the cheat and rake becomes the virtuous and indignant champion of mother church. No wonder that Grimshaw wrote: “Bombalio! Clangor! Stridor! Taratantara! Murmur!” The terrible text on Grimshaw’s title page was a graphic description of the miserable priest who raised the Roughlee mob, and its prophetic utterances were soon fearfully fulfilled. Within three years White was dead. “For some years,” says Wesley, “he was a popish priest. Then he called himself a protestant. He drank himself first into a jail, and then into his grave.”[29]
Leaving Barrowford, Wesley and his friends went to Heptonstall, where he preached, with unexampled power, in an oval surrounded with spreading trees, and scooped out of a hill, which rose round him and his congregation like a rural theatre. He then made his way, through Todmorden and Rossendale, to Bolton, where with the cross for his pulpit, and a vast number of “utterly wild” people for his audience, he began to preach. Once or twice they thrust him down from the steps on which he was standing, but he still continued his discourse. Then stones were thrown, which seem to have done more injury to the mob themselves than they did to Wesley. One man was bawling in his ear, when his bawling was silenced by a missile striking him on the cheek. A second was forcing his way to the preacher, when another stone hit him on his forehead, and disfigured him with blood. A third stretched out his hand to lay hold on Wesley, when a sharp flint struck him on the knuckles, and made him quiet till Wesley concluded his discourse and went away. It was either on this, or some subsequent occasion, that six papists, from Standish, near Wigan, rode right through the midst of Wesley’s congregation; and tradition states, that two of the horsemen, brothers of the name of Lyon, were afterwards hanged for burglary.[30]
Wesley and his friends proceeded from Bolton to Shackerley, six miles farther, where he preached to a large congregation, including not a few Unitarians, the disciples of Dr. Taylor, the divinity tutor of the Unitarian academy founded at Warrington. Wesley, always hopeful, remarks: “O what a providence is it, which has brought us here also, among these silver tongued antichrists!” Wesley visited Shackerley three times after this, and wrote, in 1751: “Being now in the very midst of Mr. Taylor’s disciples, I enlarged much more than I am accustomed to do, on the doctrine of original sin; and determined, if God should give me a few years’ life, publicly to answer his new gospel.” This was done six years afterwards; and Shackerley must always have a place in Methodistic annals, inasmuch as to Wesley’s visits here Methodism is indebted for the most elaborated work he ever wrote.
In his onward progress, Wesley came to Astbury, where a lawless mob, headed by “Drummer Jack,” surrounded the preaching house, and endeavoured, by discordant noises, to drown his voice. Some years after, the same Drummer Jack was escorting a wedding party to Astbury church, and, on reaching the spot where he had attempted to disturb Wesley’s congregation, suddenly expired.[31]
Thus preaching on his way, Wesley, on September 4, got back to London.
Meanwhile, on July 5, Whitefield, after nearly a four years’ absence, returned to England from America. On the day he landed, he wrote to his friends, the two Wesleys; but an immediate interview was impracticable, for Wesley himself was on his northern journey, and his brother Charles, besides attending to his ministerial duties, was paying loving attentions to Sarah Gwynne. Three days before Wesley got back to London, Whitefield wrote to him as follows:—
“London, September 1, 1748.