Few characters have stood the test of time and history so well. And no other man has so fully incarnated himself in literature. Therefore the tribute of James Russell Lowell: "We say of Shakespeare that he had the power of transforming himself into everything, but of Milton that he had the power of transforming everything into himself." Dante is individual, rather than self-conscious, and he, the cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine. But Milton never let himself go for a moment. As other poets are possessed by their theme, so is he self-possessed, his great theme being John Milton, and his great duty that of interpreter between him and the world. Puritanism has left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its true monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Milton. For the epitaph written by his friend was scrupulously accurate: "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are of good report, Milton thought upon these things."
VI
JOHN WESLEY
(1703–1791)
And the Moral Awakening of the Common
People
Now that long time has passed, the two bright names of the eighteenth century are seen to be the names of Washington and Wesley. The statement will come with a note of shock to many readers, but beyond most critical estimates, it is one that will stand examination. Time has a way of reversing judgments, and not the least of the changes in men's thought has been the gradual transformation in the attitude of the historian toward Wesley, carried to his grave by six poor men in 1791. Now that one hundred and twenty years have passed, Wesley has thirty millions of followers, who believe in his method and are carrying forward his work. The time has come when there is not a city in Great Britain, or on the North American continent, or in India—and few indeed, of any size in China or Japan—where there are not some disciples of this teacher, spreading his message, according to his plan. During these hundred and twenty years, dynasties have fallen, empires have perished, cities and states have changed, but the ideas and the influence of Wesley, stamped upon the memories of his followers, have spread like leaven, working often in silence and secrecy, but slowly transforming the world.
The praise of his critics is enough to lend John Wesley enduring fame. Leslie Stephen called him "the greatest captain of men of his century." Macaulay ridiculed the historians of his day who failed to see that "the greatest event of the era was the work of Wesley." To Macaulay's statement that Wesley had a genius for government, equal to that of Richelieu, Matthew Arnold added, "He had a genius for godliness." Buckle called him the first of ecclesiastical statesmen, while Lecky said, "Wesley's sermons were of greater historic importance to England than all the victories by land and sea under Pitt."
"No other man," writes Augustine Birrell, "did such a life-work for England. He helped to save England from the horrors of the French Revolution." This is not a careless pronouncement, nor an instance of biographical exaggeration. Born in 1703, belonging to the era just preceding the French Revolution, John Wesley, with his fifty years among the working people of Great Britain, changed the thinking of his time. The eighteenth century was a coarse age; Carlyle summarized it in a single biting phrase: "soul extinct; stomach well alive." The pictures of Hogarth, the journals of Wesley, and the History of Great Criminals prove that there was at least a basis for Carlyle's bitterness. Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, defines a pension as "pay given to a street hireling for treason to his country." Burke describes the British Secretary of State as "the greatest drunkard and most unlucky gambler of his age." Walpole portrays cabinet ministers and statesmen reeling into the ferry-boat of Charon at forty-five, worn out with drunkenness and gout. In his pictures of Beer Street and Gin Lane, Hogarth sketches the drunkenness and filth of the London that he calls "the city of gallows," with a street that was a lane of gibbets, where the corpses of felons hung. Hume and Walpole both prophesied an inevitable revolution, with corpses that would be piled up as barricades "in front of human beasts who fought with the ferocity of tigers." But at the very moment when France was seething with revolt, across in England, in Newcastle and Moorfields, thousands of grimy miners were assembled, now weeping in penitence, now singing hymns of praise to God. When the spirit of destruction swept over Europe, Wesley's revival had done its work, and its influence held the people of England back from the horrors of the guillotine in Paris. It is for this reason that historians rank John Wesley in terms of abiding influence, above Pitt, Wellington and Nelson.
In Adam Bede, George Eliot, the great novelist, describes with the minuteness of an eye-witness an open-air revival meeting among the early Methodists of England. Her heroine, Dinah Morris, relates the incident in the following words: "It was on just such a sort of evening as this, when I was a little girl, and my aunt took me to hear a good man preach out-of-doors, just as we are here. I remember his face well; he was a very old man, and had very long, white hair, his voice was very soft and beautiful, not like any voice I had ever heard before. I was a little girl, and scarcely knew anything, and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of man from anybody I had ever seen before, that I thought that he had perhaps come down from the skies to preach to us, and I said, 'Aunt, will he go back into the sky to-night, like the picture in the Bible?'" . . . That man of God was John Wesley, who had spent a lifetime going up and down the land, doing good. He had preached from fifteen to twenty times a week for fifty years—in all, over forty thousand times. In this, his sixty-second year, he was to preach eight hundred times. He had ridden nearly two hundred and fifty thousand miles; and in his long preaching tours through Ireland he had crossed the Channel forty times. The poor had lost their heart to him. The ignorant, the outcast, the collier and clerk alike, all pressed and thronged about this saintly figure, with his beautiful face, his clear eyes, his musical voice, who never tired of telling people, "God is love; Christ is love; and religion is life, as it is the happiest, so it is the cheerfullest thing in the world."
It is written of Moses that his hands were held up by two friends, Aaron and Hur. Not otherwise John Wesley was supported on either side by two great comrades,—Whitefield, the evangelist, and his own brother, Charles Wesley. If any man ever had the gift of eloquence and oratory, it was George Whitefield. At twenty-one years of age Whitefield received orders, and within a single year he was England's first preacher in point of hearers. His warmest friends may have overpraised this evangelist, but his harshest critics concede that he had the most musical, carrying voice that ever issued from a speaker's throat. During his career he wrote some sixty sermons, but he preached them over and over again, eighteen thousand times. Within a single week he spoke on an average of forty hours. There is nothing in his sermons, as they have come down to us, to explain their marvellous transforming influence, but Whitefield had the vision of the seer, saw heaven and hell as clearly as he saw the world around him, and could make men see and feel what he himself experienced. Benjamin Franklin heard Whitefield preach in Philadelphia, and was carried away by the personality of the preacher, whose luminous eyes, matchless voice, and transfigured face stirred the men of the Quaker City as if he were the angel Gabriel.