It would not be difficult to gather from the answers to the nine hundred biblical and theological questions in the Athenian Gazette, the principal points of Mr Wesley’s creed. The longest theological articles are those levelled against the Baptists and the Quakers. One piece alone, written against the former, fills nearly fifty pages of the Athenian Oracle; and against the latter there are several articles, showing that the Lincolnshire rector was no ardent admirer of the broad-brimmed followers of George Fox. They are charged with intolerance, enthusiasm, silliness, and with holding dangerous opinions and detestable doctrines. A Quaker, in fact, was a mischievous and troublesome compendium of all sorts of heresies. Samuel Wesley, as a rule, was generous and liberal in his sentiments respecting others; but some sects and parties, at the close of the seventeenth century, were so fanatical, bigoted, bitter, and offensive, that he found it difficult to regard them with the same fraternal feelings with which he regarded Christian brotherhoods in general.
With one or two exceptions, the theological and religious views of Samuel Wesley were as Scriptural and as sound as the standard of Methodist teaching contained in the well-known Sermons and Notes of his son John. There may be a difference of phraseology between the father and son, but their doctrines are substantially the same. Our space forbids lengthened quotations; but perhaps the following extracts from the Athenian Oracle will not be unacceptable, as containing statements of Scripture doctrines, and as tending to exhibit the opinions of Mr Wesley on some of the most important verities of the Christian religion, and on some of the most interesting points of ecclesiastical polity.
Samuel Wesley was a firm believer in the authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. He contends that the Bible now used “is the same that was written by the apostles and prophets,” and that, because they were “inspired by the Spirit of God,” the Bible “is the very Word of God.”[[45]]
He also had an unshaken faith in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He argues that it “is impossible for a man to invent fuller or clearer expressions for the proof of anything in question than the evangelist St John” employs in favour of the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. After adducing evidence of this, he concludes, with an air of conscious triumph, “When I see all this answered, without straining it into perfect incongruous nonsense, I promise to turn Socinian.”[[46]] “The Arians,” says he,[[47]] in another place, “in some of their confessions of faith, did grant that the Son was from all eternity, by such an emanation from the Father as that whereby the light proceeds from the sun; but yet contended for a moment’s difference between their existence—the Son receiving His, as they think, from the Father; whereby they unavoidably fell into the same absurdity which other pretenders to reason have since done—that, I mean, of a made God, or a subordinate Supreme.” Language like this is unmistakable. Samuel Wesley was no dubious hesitator between two opinions. While yet a youth in Mr Morton’s academy, he had been disgusted with the Socinian, Biddle; and, a few years later, he was the means of extricating one of the finest of intellects from Socinian meshes; for his own wife, Susanna Wesley, who, while a girl in her father’s house, had reasoned herself into the Socinian creed, acknowledges it as one of the great mercies of her life, that, she was “married to a religious orthodox man, and by him was first drawn off from the Socinian heresy.”
Samuel Wesley, like his son John, was a moderate Arminian. He fearlessly repudiates the doctrines of election and reprobation. “We cannot,” says he, “be satisfied by any of those scriptures which are brought for that purpose, that there is any such election of a determinate number as either puts a force on their natures, and irresistably saves them, or absolutely excludes all the rest of mankind from salvation. We think there is no one place in the Holy Scriptures which proves that so many men, and no more, were irresistably determined to everlasting salvation.”[[48]] He believed that “God predestinated those to salvation whom He foresaw would make a good use of His grace, resolving to damn only such as He foresaw would continue impenitent.”[[49]] He maintains that “God made man upright, and a free agent, and that God’s prescience presides over man’s free agency, but doth not overrule it, by saving man whether He will or no, or by damning him undeservedly.”[undeservedly.”][[50]] “God necessitates no evil action, yet He foresees all. If God tempts no man to evil, much less does He necessitate. Indeed, were He to do this, the nature of man would be destroyed, the proposal of rewards and punishments would be ironical, preaching would be vain, and faith also vain. If you ask us to reconcile all the differences arising[arising] out of the doctrines of God’s prescience and man’s free agency, we promise to do it when philosophers can solve the incommensurability of matter, and twenty other phenomena, and make them agree with demonstrations which appear diametrically opposite unto them. In the meantime, let us think soberly and modestly, as becomes us in these matters. Let every one enjoy his own sense, so he makes not God the author of sin, and let us all cry out, ‘How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out.’”[[51]]
Mr Wesley believed in the doctrine of universal redemption; in other words, that Jesus Christ “atoned so far for the sins of all mankind as to make them in a salvable condition, or to repair the ruins which were made by the first Adam, which is plain from Rom. v. 12, 18, &c.”[[52]] “God really wills the salvation of all men, as far as is consistent with the liberty of man and His own purity and justice;” and He “has also used all the necessary means for our salvation;” “He offers pardon of all sin, and right to life in Christ, to all men without exception, on condition of believing and acceptance.”[[53]]
He further believed that no man can do an “action properly and perfectly acceptable to God by his own natural abilities, abstracted from the assistance of God’s Spirit, but by His common assistance he may pray, abstain from sin, and practise duty; and, if he continues in these good actions, he will have still more aid, and go on to perfection.”[[54]]
Respecting the doctrines of justification and justifying faith, Mr Wesley writes: “Forgiveness of sins is, at least, included in justification, nay, is the main part, if not the whole thereof. It may, without violence, be reckoned a convertible term with it. Our sins being pardoned, our being esteemed righteous by God, our justification through our Saviour’s merits, we think are but the same thing in different expressions.”[[55]] “By God’s justifying a sinner, is meant His looking upon us and treating us as just and innocent persons, although before we stood guilty of heinous sins, and thereupon liable to grievous punishments.”[[56]] “We[“We] are saved by the merits of Christ Jesus; for His sake, not our own; and this we look upon to be the same, in other words, as Christ’s imputed righteousness.”[[57]] “We are justified, or accepted with God, as a means, by faith, or a true belief of what God reveals, and by trusting in His mercy, through His Son.”[[58]] “But then this very faith must be justified by works, as Abraham’s was, for it would have been in vain for him to have pretended he had believed God’s promise to him, had he not, in obedience to His command, also offered up his son Isaac.”[[59]] That faith, without which there is no salvation, “is a steady belief of all that God reveals, especially in the gospel, particularly that Jesus is the Messiah, or Saviour of the world, and that He will save me, if I depend on Him, and obey His commands.”[[60]] No follower of John Wesley holds the doctrine of justification by faith more clearly, or more firmly, than did John Wesley’s noble-minded father.
The new birth, writes the clear-headed and thoroughly orthodox young clergyman, “is that particular aid of God’s Holy Spirit, which works an entire change in the mind, and turns men from evil to good, being a new principle of action in them.”[[61]]
It is a remarkable fact, not generally known, that Samuel Wesley was a Millenarian. The Rev. William Lindsay Alexander, in an elaborate article in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” gives the following as the chief tenets of the Millenarian creed:—“That Jerusalem is to be rebuilt, the temple to be restored, and sacrifice again offered on the altar; that this city is to form the residence of Christ, who is to reign there in glory with all His saints for a thousand years; that, for this purpose, there shall be a resurrection of all the pious dead, that none of the Saviour’s followers may be absent during His triumph; that, at the close of the thousand years, they shall all return to heaven, and the world be left to Satan and his followers for a season; and that then the general resurrection and last judgment shall take place, and the history of the world be brought to a close.” In vol. iv. of the Athenian Gazette, the No. for October 17, 1691, is entirely occupied by a Millenarian article, which had been specially advertised on the Tuesday previous, and the following extract will show substantially the opinions held by Samuel Wesley:—“We believe, as all Christians of the purest ages did, that the saints shall reign with Christ on earth a thousand years; that this reign shall be immediately before the general resurrection, and after the calling of the Jews, the fulness of the Gentiles, and the destruction of Antichrist, whom our Saviour shall destroy by the brightness of His coming, and appearance in heaven; that at the beginning of this thousand years shall be the first resurrection, wherein martyrs and holy men shall rise and reign here in spiritual delights in the New Jerusalem, in a new heaven and new earth, foretold by the holy prophets.” After this statement of his belief follows an able article on the same subject, but it is scarce within the province which we have prescribed for ourselves, to attempt either to refute or to establish the truth of it.