Next morning, Wesley set off for Bristol; but the services were continued. In the afternoon, Shirley took his stand on the scaffold in the court, and addressed the multitude from the words, “Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.”
“From that time,” wrote Lady Huntingdon, “we had public preaching every day at four o’clock, whilst Mr. Shirley and Mr. Fletcher remained. Copious showers of Divine blessing have been felt on every side. Truly God is good to Israel. Continue Thy goodness, and in much greater abundance! O that I may be more and more useful to the souls of my fellow-creatures! I want to be, every moment, all life, all zeal, all activity for God, and ever on the stretch for closer communion with Him. My soul pants to live more to Him; and to be more holy in heart and life, that all my nature may show the glories of the Lamb.”[[184]]
Alas! that these glorious scenes among the Welsh mountains should so soon be followed by scenes of discord and of disputes. The great storm of the Calvinian controversy was already brewing.
Walter Sellon occupies a rather unique position in Methodistic annals. He died in 1792, at the age of seventy-seven; and yet of the first thirty, and the last twenty-two years of his life, hardly anything is known. Dr. Abel Stevens, in his “History of Methodism,” says Sellon was originally a baker; but I know of no authority for this, except Toplady’s, whose hatred and abuse of Sellon were such as to justify a hesitancy in believing a statement concerning his stout antagonist, which he intended to be injurious to his fame. Sellon was born in the year 1715; but up to the year 1745 he had not been introduced to Wesley. In a letter to Wesley, dated December 31, 1744, he states, that, until recently, he had condemned him as “an innovator,” and had “pitied those who followed” him. But, having heard Wesley preach, and having read his sermon on “Scriptural Christianity,” delivered before the Oxford University on August 24, 1744, his opinions concerning him and his followers were entirely changed; and he now requested Wesley, when he had an opportunity, to preach at Maidenhead, “where drunkenness, adultery, profaneness, gaming, and almost every abominable vice, were not only committed with greediness, but gloried in, and boasted of.”[[185]] Whether Wesley went to Maidenhead, which seems to have been Sellon’s place of residence, is not known; but, three years and a half afterwards, when he opened his famous Kingswood School, Walter Sellon was appointed the Headmaster “for the Classics.”[[186]] About the year 1754, Sellon received episcopal ordination, and became curate of the churches of Smisby, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and of Breedon, where vast multitudes flocked to hear him, “not only from adjacent towns and villages, but frequently from places ten, fifteen, and twenty miles distant.” “He was a real Methodist,” wrote Jonathan Edmondson, “and hundreds were turned to God through his instrumentality.”[[187]] Sellon enjoyed the confidential friendship of Wesley, and especially of Wesley’s brother Charles; and, about the time of his appointment to his curacies, stood faithfully by them in their contentions with the most able and prominent of their itinerant preachers, concerning the separation of the Methodists from the Established Church. All his publications were controversial; and all, except his first, were written specially in defence of the anti-Calvinian doctrines Wesley taught. This is not the place to review Walter Sellon as an author. Suffice it to say, that he was always powerful, rather than polite; and that, after his first publication, in 1765, which was levelled at Socinianism, he prepared a second in 1768, which was entitled, “Arguments against the Doctrine of General Redemption considered.” Without noticing, at present, the subsequent writings of Sellon, it is enough to add, that, about the year 1770, he was presented by the Earl of Huntingdon to the Vicarage of Ledsham, in Yorkshire, where he lived and laboured until his death, on June 13, 1792.[[188]] In an unpublished manuscript, John Pawson says:—
“I do not believe Mr. Sellon was made the instrument of awakening a single soul after he came to Ledsham. He was tutor to young Mr. Medhurst, of Kippax, who lately murdered his wife, and would have murdered his mother some years ago, if my brother Tarboton had not rescued her at the hazard of his own life. While in that family, Mr. Sellon seemed to lose all spirit and life, and, as far as I could learn, had very little savour of godliness about him. He took not the least notice of the Methodists, no more than if he had never known them.”
John Pawson was one of Wesley’s most honest and hardworking itinerants; but he sometimes was more severe in his strictures than was desirable. His remark, however, concerning Sellon’s abandonment of the Methodists was probably correct; for Wesley, in a letter dated June 10, 1784, wrote to him: “You used to meet me when I came near you; but you seem, of late, to have forgotten your old friend and brother.”[[189]]
To return to Fletcher. He and Sellon were well known to each other. Four years ago, they had exchanged pulpits for a season, Sellon preaching at Madeley, and Fletcher at Smisby and Breedon-on-the-Hill. Now Sellon was entering the arena of controversy. The expulsion of the Methodist students from Oxford University, in 1768, had been the means, incidentally, of bringing some of the chief doctrines of Calvinism into public notice. Sir Richard Hill, in defending the students, had warmly advocated Calvinistic predestination. Dr. Nowell, in answering Sir Richard, had clearly shown that this predestination was not the doctrine of the Church of England. Toplady had rushed to the rescue of his favourite dogma, and had published his translation of “Zauchius,” and also his “Letter to Dr. Nowell.” Sellon was the first of Wesley’s friends who entered the lists, by preparing and publishing his “Arguments against the Doctrine of General Redemption considered. London, 1769.” 12mo. 178 pp. Wesley encouraged him, and so did Fletcher. The former wrote as follows:—
“Wakefield, July 9, 1768.
“My Dear Brother,—I am glad you have undertaken the ‘Redemption Redeemed;’ but you must in no wise forget Dr. Owen’s answer to it: otherwise you will leave a loop-hole for all the Calvinists to creep out. The Doctor’s evasions you must needs cut in pieces, either interweaving your answers with the body of the work, under each head, or adding them in marginal notes.
“Your ever affectionate brother,