Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

Preached at one p. m. to twenty thousand.

At five o'clock to another such congregation.

All at the utmost stretch of my voice.

But my strength was as my day.

Seven years later, August 23, 1773, his journal holds this record:

Preached at Gwennap Pit to above 32,000, perhaps the first time that a man of seventy had been heard by 30,000 persons.

Fitchett says that Wesley's voice must have far outranged Gladstone's. The people all stood closely packed together. At Bristol, after the audience had gone, one man measured the ground from Wesley's stand to the outskirts of the audience and found it to be 420 feet. For this reason his biographers say that Wesley preached more sermons, rode more miles, worked more hours, printed more books, and influenced more lives than any Englishman of his age, or any age. In 1773 he writes, "I am seventy-three years old, and far abler to preach than I was at twenty-three." Ten years later, the old man writes, "I have entered into the eighty-third year of my age. I am never tired, either with preaching, writing or travelling." And yet his emotions had tremendous intensity. He held thousands of miners in breathless silence for an hour and a half at a time. When he was ill, he exclaimed that if he could only go into the pulpit for two hours, and have a good sweat he thought he might recover. His secret of health was "a little more work." That was the tonic that cured worry and dissipated all clouds.

The moral courage of John Wesley is one of the wonderful spectacles of history. He lived in a brutal, cruel century. The crowds did not stop with jeers, oaths, vulgar epithets. It was a time when disputes were marked by all the savagery of a Spanish bull-fight. Wesley gives the details of these persecutions and without complaint. The period between June 1743, and February 1744, was particularly trying. An organized movement was carried on to intimidate the people from following Wesley. In several cities the Methodists were beaten and plundered by a rabble that broke into their houses, destroyed their victuals and goods, threatened their lives, and abused their women. During that winter Wesley received many blows, occasionally lost part of his clothing and was often covered with dirt. Meanwhile, enemies went on in advance to sow the towns with wild scandals, and stir up strife and storm, but Wesley went on building churches, developing schools, training lay preachers, organizing his people to take care of the class during his absence.

Wesley was a scholar, and prepared his sermons with the greatest care. He was also a flaming evangelist, and therefore was freed from what Robertson of Brighton describes as "the treadmill necessity of being always ready twice a week with earnest thoughts on solemn themes." Like Beecher, Wesley was not afraid of repeating his sermons. Like Wendell Phillips, he thought a lecturer was never in shape until he had one hundred nights of delivery back of him. Having heard a good man say, "Once in seven years I burn all my sermons," Wesley answered, "I cannot write a better sermon on the Good Steward than I did seven years ago; I cannot write a better on the Great Assize than I did twenty years ago; I cannot write a better on the use of money than I did thirty years ago."

As an orator, Wesley had many wonderful gifts. Not a large man, he was compact and strong, with nerves of silk and sinews of steel. In moments of impassioned speech he seemed to tower and take on the dimensions of a giant. His portraits show him to have been a man of fine figure, and beautiful face, with firm lips, mobile and sensitive, eyes bright and kindly. His complexion was very beautiful, fair, clear and somewhat ruddy. His forehead was broad, and beautifully curved. His voice was called the finest instrument of its kind in England, always saving that of Whitefield. During his college days he made a reputation as an accurate scholar, and a keen and skillful logician. All his life long he retained his analytic method, and was always working upon his sermons. He was a master of keen, arrowy sentences. His sermons abound in short paragraphs. His illustrations are simple, but so perfectly related to his thought, that they become a part of the argument itself. The chief characteristic of his style is its clearness. He excelled in the searching force of the application, and tested the result of each address by the number of hearers whom he had persuaded to change their lives at a given moment.