“Your friend and well wisher,
“John Wesley.”
This was galling; the bishop felt it so; and, as we shall see hereafter, allowed his indignation to boil over. Southey says, that Wesley did not treat Bishop Lavington with the urbanity which he usually displayed towards his opponents. This is scarcely true; but if it were, his grace of Exeter deserved all he got. We regret, that we shall be obliged to renew acquaintance with him. Meanwhile, let us briefly say, that this buffooning bishop was born at Mildenhall in 1683. On leaving the school at Winchester, he was removed to New College, Oxford, where he graduated for the civil law, and obtained a fellowship. At the age of thirty-four, he was made rector of Hayford Warren; then prebendary of Worcester; then canon of St. Paul’s; and then bishop of Exeter. He died on the 13th of September, 1762; exactly fifteen days after the following entry in Wesley’s journal:—
“Sunday, August 29, 1762.—I preached, at eight, on Southernhay Green” [Exeter] “to an extremely quiet congregation. At the cathedral, we had an useful sermon, and the whole service was performed with great seriousness and decency. Such an organ I never saw or heard before, so large, beautiful, and so finely toned; and the music of ‘Glory be to God in the highest,’ I think, exceeded the ‘Messiah’ itself. I was well pleased to partake of the Lord’s supper with my old opponent, Bishop Lavington. O may we sit down together in the kingdom of our Father!”
1751.
1751
Age 48
THE year upon which we are now entering was one of vast anxiety and trouble, and, of course, like previous years, was characterized by unceasing activity on the part of the great chiefs of the Methodist movement. Charles Wesley was from four to five months in London, about the same in Bristol, and spent the rest in an important visit to the numerous societies in the midland counties and the north of England. Whitefield gave the first two months of the year to the metropolis, the next three to the west of England and to Wales, more than two to Ireland and Scotland, and then, in August, set sail for America. Wesley himself spent eight months in itinerancy, and the rest in London.
Moravianism was more than ever a vexata quæstio. Whitefield, in a letter dated March 30, 1751, remarks:—“I doubt not but there are many holy souls among the Moravians; but their not preaching the law, either as a schoolmaster to show us our need of Christ, or as a rule of life, after we have closed with Him, is what I can in nowise concur with. These their two grand mistakes, together with their unscriptural expressions in their hymns, and several superstitious fopperies lately intruded among them, make me think they are sadly departed from the simplicity of the gospel.”[108]
A friend, writing to Wesley, at the commencement of the year, observes:—
“No doubt God had wise ends in permitting the Unitas Fratrum to appear, just as the people of God began to unite together; but we cannot fathom His designs. Very probably we should have been now a very different people from what we are, had we had only our own countrymen to cope with. We should then have set the plain gospel of Christ against what is palpably another gospel. But this subtle poison has more or less infected almost all among us. We would put gospel heads on bodies ready to indulge unholy tempers. Although as a society we stand as clear of joining with the Beast as any other, yet we have not purged out all his leaven; the antinomian leaven is not yet cast out. All our preaching at first was pointed at the heart; and in almost all our private conversation, ‘Do you feel the love of God in your heart? Does His Spirit reign there? Do you walk in the Spirit? Is that mind in you which was in Christ?’ were frequent questions among us. But while these preachers to the heart were going on gloriously in the work of Christ, the false apostles stepped in, laughed at all heart work, and laughed many of us out of our spiritual senses; for, according to them, we were neither to see, hear, feel, nor taste the powers of the world to come, but to rest contented with what was done for us seventeen hundred years ago. ‘The dear Lamb,’ said they, ‘has done all for us; we have nothing to do, but to believe.’ Here was a stroke at the whole work of God in the heart! And ever since, this German spirit has wrought among us, and caused many to rest in a barren, notional faith, void of that inward power of God unto salvation.”