The friends were soon widely scattered to their different vicarages and curacies, and John Wesley himself—now in his thirty-second year—accepted a mission to the little American State of Georgia. We need not describe his experience in America further than to remark how, on his way thither, he fell in with Moravians, who imparted to him some new light in theology on its experimental side. The vigorous hymns of the Moravians and their vivid representations of Christian life, put before him a new set of ideas, which, when he separated himself entirely from the organization of that sect and returned to England, bore abundant fruit. His life in Georgia was of short continuance, but characterized by singular circumstances; first and foremost, he took into his ministry a very strange, morose, and cheerless type of Christianity; also in connection with this, we have to notice a very important item in his history—he fell in love. It is quite remarkable that all Wesley's transactions with womankind—on his own account—were unfortunate, even exceedingly unhappy. The lady who first drew forth his affections appears to have accepted his proposal of marriage; but by a rapid transition we find her a week or two after, married to a Mr. Williamson; this overwhelmed the poor priest, and introduced him to other troubles. He refused to admit her to the Lord's table; then we find him arrested and brought before the recorder for defaming the lady; then followed a stream of indictments against him, and, in brief, sick and sore, and as a prisoner at large, we find him hurrying away from the colony.
For a life which became so remarkable for the prescience and rigidity of its principles, such a commencement was very singular. A strange undeterminateness appears to rule, or rather to leave him unruled and ungoverned, until his thirty-seventh year. It is singular, for instance, to find an undoubtedly pious, earnest, holy, and self-denying man, such as Wesley was, declaring that until he returned from Georgia he was an unconverted man. He was no doubt in search of that deep faith which is eternal life. It appears that a real change came over him when he heard the preaching of Peter Bohler, the Moravian; in all these earlier years of Wesley's activity he seems to have been greatly indebted to the Moravians. The issue of the influence of Bohler upon his mind, was his confession that before this period he was a servant of God, accepted and safe, but now he knew it, and was happy as well as safe, and in after years and until our own time, the conscious happiness of believers has been a considerable point in Methodist teaching. There is no doubt that Wesley himself attained a cheerful, quiet, restful consciousness he had never known before, and his life hereafter, while constant in its course of self-denial, was lifted above the morose asceticism of his earlier years. But as to the principle itself, it is surely as dangerous as a rule of Christian experience, as it is doubtful in all human philosophy. For some time he was materially influenced by Moravian principles and practices, and, indeed, it is easy to see that God who destined for his distinguished servant a very long life, was teaching him in various schools those principles, which upon an eminently large scale he was to apply. He went to Germany to visit the Moravian settlement of Hernhutt, he came to know that eminent and extraordinary man, Christian David, he heard him preach and received from his own lips his singular story. He professed himself to have received remarkable spiritual intelligence from Moravian teachings; and some of the finest hymns in the Wesleyan Hymn Book are translations made at this time by John Wesley from those of Count Zinzendorf. But it is very remarkable that he signalized the period of his conversion by a quarrel with William Law; he charged him most ungraciously with having deceived him in having given to him a mystical, notional, and intellectual faith; and Law replied to him in language, which assuredly in every way leaves that devout and eminent Christian philosopher in possession of the field. It is, however, the last ground of serious exception we can take to the life of Wesley. At this point, his life seems to collect itself into eminent purpose and consistency. He was soon compelled to disentangle himself from the Moravians, whose notions at that time were beset by the most mystical and mischievous fancies, and ridiculous and even indecent allusions. He was forbidden their pulpit on account of his clearly expressed dissent from their doctrines, and almost immediately, and apparently without any distinctly marked design on his own part, he commenced that course which made him so pre-eminent a father and apostle in the modern church. John Wesley's course is very singular. It has this strong mark of eminent honesty: that the whole of the immense system of usefulness he inaugurated, appears to have been without especial intention or plan. From year to year the institution grew; piece by piece, the mighty structure took proportion and shape. Commencing in a simple design to be useful, to awaken men to a knowledge of sin, and to the determination of salvation from sin, Wesley became an evangelist. He had no idea of separating himself from the Established Church; he always regarded himself as one of its ministers, and was sufficiently filled, even to the close of his life, with all the ideas implied in being an ordained priest in its communion. It is impossible to regard him in relation to England at that time, without feeling that he, in an eminent degree, was raised up and set apart for the salvation of his country.
The social condition of England, when Wesley appeared presents no attractive picture to the student; in some measure it relieves and lightens our despondency concerning England at present, to remember what the country was then. It is true the population was small, almost insignificant, as compared with our present overcrowded masses—it was not more than about six millions—but with abundant wealth and means of happiness, the people fell far short of what we should now consider comfort. This was, however, a slight shade in the picture; there were cruelty and injustice in the administration of English law, life and liberty were held very cheap, deism or atheism in religion and a wild licentiousness and rude brutality of manners, pervaded all classes, from the court to the meanest hamlet of the land. For the most part the Church of England had shamefully forgotten and neglected her duty, while the Nonconformists had sunk generally into so cold an indifferentism in devotion, and so hard and sceptical a frame of thought in theology, that almost every interest of the land was given over to profligacy or recklessness, and in thoughtful minds to despair. Those who called themselves Christians were for the most part spiritually dead. The literature of England suffered a temporary eclipse, and such as it was, it was shamefully perverted from all high purposes, and was very generally adverse to all purity and moral dignity. The gaols, indeed, were crammed with culprits, but that did not prevent the heaths from swarming with highwaymen, and the cities with burglars; in the remote regions of England, such as Cornwall in the West, and Yorkshire and Northumberland in the North, and especially Midland Staffordshire, the manners were wild and savage beyond all description or conception. The reader must conceive a state of society divested of all the educational, philanthropic and benevolent activities of modern times. There were no Sunday-schools and few day-schools; here and there a solitary chapel sequestered in some lane, either in the metropolis or the country town, or more probably far away from a town, stood in some confluence of roads a monument of old intolerance; but religion was, as we have said, in fact dead or lying in a trance. To few men has it been given, commencing a career at the age of thirty-seven, to have reserved for them yet, upwards of half-a-century of health, strength, and mental vigour, to carry out and give effect to all their plans. Wesley rose to break up this monotony, and to alarm this depravity of social life; his strong, clear voice sounded over the land; the amount of hatred, hostility and persecution which he roused, evidently showed the living feeling he had created; it is a more favourable circumstance that a man should hate religion than be wholly indifferent to it; on the other hand, the love was more fervid and intense than the hate, hate roared and hissed, and threw about its mischievous display of foolish fireworks in the shape of pamphlets and satires; but there would appear to have been such a degree of genuine sympathy, that men and women, united by certain principles of faith, statedly met together, regardless of peril or cost, and thus there gradually extended over the whole of England a circle of religious societies bearing Wesley's name.
The Church of England very soon set itself against the new movement; Whitefield, much younger than Wesley, an ardent, flaming, seraphic man, had been compelled to betake himself to the fields. Like Wesley he was an ordained minister of the Church, but he had been threatened with suspension and expulsion, and he was the first who could collect thousands—sometimes not less than twenty thousand—to hear the gospel. It was with great fear and trembling that Wesley imitated him, and he says, referring to his first preaching in the open air near Bristol, 'I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields; having been all my life, till very lately, so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I would have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in church.' 'Such,' says Mr. Tyerman, 'were the prejudices and feelings of the man who for between fifty or sixty years proved himself the greatest outdoor preacher that ever lived.'
It does not seem very easy to settle the precise etymology of the term Methodist, whether derived, as some have said, from an allusion in Juvenal to a celebrated quack physician, or whether, as Mr. Tyerman seems to think, first used in a pamphlet attacking Whitefield in the earlier years of his ministry, in which the author fetches up an old sentence from the pages of Chrysostom, who says, 'To be a Methodist is to be beguiled.' We ourselves happened once, in a parish church in Huntingdonshire, to be listening to a clergyman notorious alike by his private character and vehement intolerance, who was entertaining his audience on a week evening by a discourse from the text in Ephesians iv. 14. 'Whereby they lie in wait to deceive.' He said to his people, 'Now you do not know Greek; I know Greek, and I am going to tell you what this text really says; it says, "they lie in wait to make you Methodists;" the word used here is methodeian, that is really the word that is used, and that is really what Paul said, "they lie in wait to make you Methodists." A Methodist means a deceiver, one who deludes, cheats and beguiles.' The Grecian scholar was a little at fault in his next allusion, for he proceeded to quote that other passage of the apostle, 'We are not ignorant of his devices,' and seemed to be under the impression that 'device' was the same word as that on which he had expended his criticism. 'Now,' said he, 'you may be ignorant because you do not know Greek, but "we are not ignorant of his devices," that is, of his methods, his deceivers, that is his Methodists.' It was a piece of the richest criticism we ever remember to have heard in any pulpit. In such empty wit and ignorant punning, it is very likely, however, that the term had its origin; be that as it may, 'Methodist' soon became the designation of a really large body of social and spiritual reformers, and assuredly no term has obtained greater renown and importance since 'the disciples were first called Christians at Antioch;' but in fact the word is to be found in several places in our obsolete English. Wesley was not the greatest outdoor preacher that ever lived, but we can forgive Mr. Tyerman for thinking so in his high feeling of admiration for his illustrious hero. He became a power in the country. Earl Stanhope in his very interesting 'History of England from 1713–1783,' devotes a lengthy chapter to Wesley and the rise of Methodism, and says, 'with less immediate importance than war or political changes, it endures long after, not only the result, but the memory of these has passed away, and thousands who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole continue to hold the precepts and venerate the name of John Wesley.' Thus this venerable name is a distinguished landmark or milestone in the history of the mind of England. By his labours he gave the noblest freedom to thousands of enslaved minds, and marshalled their wild natures under the principles of order and obedience. Wesley achieved his greatest victories in the open air; he probably inherited from his father a tolerably sharp power of satiric reproof, which often served him well in such encounters as he would be sure to have in the broad streets or the fields, and was well illustrated in his victory over Beau Nash. The accomplished rake and dandy king of Bath, master of the ceremonies in that then famous watering-place, appeared swaggering in his enormous white hat, and asked, 'By what authority he dared to do what he was doing now?' 'By the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to me by him who is now Archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid his hands upon me and said, "Take thou authority to preach the Gospel."' Cried the man of Bath, 'Your preaching frightens people out of their wits.' 'Sir,' said Wesley 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'No!' 'How then can you judge of what you have never heard?' 'I judge, he answered, 'from common report.' 'Common report,' replied Wesley, 'is not enough; give me leave to ask, Sir, is not your name Nash?' 'It is,' he said. 'Sir,' replied Wesley, 'I dare not judge of you by common report.' Even the unblushing master of ceremonies was abashed and worsted; he was slinking away, when, to complete his discomfiture, an old woman lifted up her voice, and begged Wesley to allow her to question and to answer him; this made the scene ludicrous, and in the midst of such a singular and disgraceful defeat, the mighty dandy left the preacher to continue and to close his sermon.
The most romantic lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar do not present a more startling succession of incidents than those which meet us in the life and labours of Wesley and his Prætorian band, and these are all the more marvellous and romantic because they lay no tax upon credulity and never appeal to miracle as their foundation. Wesley never, like blessed St. Raymond of Pennafort, spread his cloak upon the sea to transport him across the water, sailing one hundred and sixty miles in six hours, and entering his convent through closed doors; nor do we ever find him, like the dear and judicious Xavier, spending three whole days in two different places at the same time, preaching all the while. We fear it is true that Wesley does not shine in feats like these, but he seems almost ubiquitous, and moves with a rapidity which reminds us of that flying angel who had 'the everlasting gospel to preach;' while his conflicts with the tempests of nature, and those wilder tempests caused by the passions of men, crowd his life with incident. We read of adventurous journeys through regions in the North of England when snowstorms drifted and baulked the way, and made travelling almost impossible, or over roads made like glass by the hard frost, and through pathless wastes of white. Thus we read of his travelling through the long wintry hours, two hundred and eighty miles, on horseback in six days, a wonderful feat, and Wesley himself writes,—'Many a rough journey have I had before, but one like this I never had, between wind and hail and rain and snow and ice, and driving sleet and piercing cold; but it has passed, and those days will return no more, and are therefore as though they had never been. So "the love of Christ constrained him."' Vast concourses met him in singular places: on Blackheath fourteen thousand people, in Kingswood more, in Moorfields and on Kennington Common twenty thousand people. Singular was his visit to Epworth, where he found the church of his childhood, his father's church, and the church of his own first ministrations, closed against him, but for eight days he stayed, and preached every night standing on his father's tomb; truly a singular sight, the living son, the prophet of his age, surely little short of inspired, preaching on the dead father's grave, with such pathos and power as we may well conceive. 'I am well assured,' he says, 'that I did far more good to my Lincolnshire parishioners by preaching three days on my father's tomb, than I did by preaching three years in his pulpit.' Visiting York, he went to the service of St. Saviour's Gate church; the rector, the Rev. Mr. Cordeux, had warned his congregation against hearing that 'vagabond Wesley' preach. Wesley went into the church in his canonicals, it was not unusual for ministers then to wear the cassocks or the gown like the university man in a university town: the rector of course saw he was a clergyman, but not knowing who he was, offered him his pulpit to preach, and Wesley was thoroughly willing and ready. He took for his text a part of the gospel of the day—sermons leaped impromptu from his lips and heart; this sermon was an impressive one, and after the service the rector asked the clerk if he knew who the strange clergyman was. 'Sir,' said the clerk, 'it was the "vagabond Wesley" against whom you warned us.' 'Ay, indeed!' said the astonished rector, 'we have been trapped, but never mind, we have had a good sermon.' The Dean of York heard of the affair, and threatened to lay the matter before the archbishop; but the rector outstripped the dean, and went himself and told the story to the archbishop. 'You did quite right,' he said, and so the matter ended; only when the 'vagabond Wesley' came to York again, the rector offered his church the second time to him, and a second time be preached in St. Saviour's.
A succession of persecutions attended him and his followers on their way, and yet very little could be alleged to their discredit. In Cornwall, Edward Greenfield, a tanner, with a wife and seven children, was arrested under a warrant signed by Dr. Borlase, the eminent antiquarian, who was a bitter foe to Methodism. Wesley appeared to vindicate his friend, and he first inquired what objection there was to the peaceable, inoffensive man. The answer was, 'The man is well enough in other things, but the gentlemen cannot bear his impudence; why, Sir, he says that he knows his sins are forgiven!' When Bernardine of Sienna preached at Bologna, the people brought out their dice-tables and burnt them in the streets; when Antony of Padua preached at Pavia, he saw impure books and pictures committed to immense flames; and even more remarkable, when Savonarola preached in Florence, the woman left off painting their faces, and decorating their hair. The results of Wesley's preaching were scarcely less remarkable. The story is well known how in one place a whole waggon-load of Methodists had been taken before a magistrate, but when he asked what they had done, a deep silence fell over the court, for no one was very well prepared with any charge against them; at length some one exclaimed that 'they pretended to be better than other people, and prayed from morning till night;' and another said, 'They have convarted my wife; till she went among them she had such a tongue, but now she's as quiet as a lamb.' 'Take them back, take them back,' said the sensible magistrate, 'and let them convert all the scolds in the town.' We are amazed when we attempt to realize all the causeless conflicts through which many of these holy enthusiasts passed, certainly the world in all its force was against them; no wild anti-popery riots were more unreasonable and brutal than the turbulent mobs which tore down houses and insolently assaulted women and men for their attachment to the new movement. Attempts were often made on Wesley's life in Cornwall; wild cries rose around him, 'Away with him!' 'Kill him at once!' 'Crucify the dog!' Stones and bricks were frequently hurled at him; often he might have said, 'My soul is among lions.' Staffordshire was scarcely behind Cornwall in the rough assaults. Quiet men were pressed for soldiers, and sent as prisoners to jail, simply because they were Methodists; hot-headed Hanoverians did their best to make the whole Methodist body disloyal, and both John and Charles Wesley were arrested or taken before the magistrates upon suspicion of being favourable to the Pretender. Thus Charles was brought before the magistrates at Wakefield, and five witnesses were ready to swear that he had either prayed or preached about the return of the 'Banished One,' the well-known and tender words of the wise woman of Tekoa, being supposed to convey some sinister allusion to the exiled Stuarts. It was the age of mobs and riots; for a long time the preaching of Wesley appears to have been greeted by turbulencies as wild and vehement as those which give a disgraceful notoriety to the name of John Wilkes or Lord George Gordon.
So astonishing were the results of these very simple and Christ-like ministrations, that there was surely something of the supernatural in the man Wesley. It is part of the very nature of Christianity to believe that from time to time the Church is invigorated by extraordinary impulses of divine life find grace, and singular effusions of the Holy Spirit: and to those who are able to reach at all the idea of supernatural causes in the Christian life, it is not difficult to apprehend the reality of such impulses. There was surely much that was remarkable in Wesley; it is unquestionable that strange influences seemed to attend him. His words, it has been remarked, seemed to possess a mesmeric power; his proximity to the supernatural has often been made the subject of criticism. Extraordinary circumstances which Southey, Richard Watson, Isaac Taylor, and other eminent writers have found to be perfectly inexplicable upon principles of natural reasoning marked his ministry; we read of innumerable instances of individual convulsions, and of multitudes falling prostrate to the ground before his words; cold and imperturbable natures were suddenly overwhelmed. Wesley was quite a believer in the visible and oral manifestation of the 'powers of the world to come;' such instances were especially prominent in the earlier part of his singular course. We have no remarks to make upon these phenomena, nor shall we inquire whether they may or may not be accounted for on merely natural principles; the facts remain unquestioned. One thing is certain, as when Peter preached, so at the preaching of Wesley, innumerable thousands were 'pricked to the heart, and exclaimed, "What shall we do?"'
The power of Wesley's teaching may probably be traced to the fact that it dealt with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; but then the whole doctrine was suffused in the fulness, the sufficiency, and the sweetness of Jesus, and it was a mighty reaction against the indifference and injustice of the age. The party formed against Wesley represented the higher classes, bishops and men whose minds and hearts it would seem were incapable of sympathy for the suffering and the poor, and for those who were out of the way; coarse ribalds like Lavington, the Bishop of Exeter, or dilettanti gentlemen like Horace Walpole, buffoons and time servers like Foote, or even hard theologians like Toplady, their doctrines tinctured with the harsh and morbid severity of the times, when, as we have seen, reckless disregard for life, a claim over it for the most insignificant offences, must have tended to give a rigour and narrowness to many religious ideas. Wesley's audiences were chiefly composed of the poor. The early Methodist was a very simple, perhaps usually an ignorant, man, but he had that light which 'lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' The Methodist was not such an one as the Puritan of other days, who was a sort of Knight of the Iron Hand, a Nonconformist crusader, whose theology had trained him to the battle-field, nerved him to frown defiance upon kings, and to treat as worthy only of contempt the unsanctified nobles of the earth. The Methodist was not such an one; he was as loyal as he was lowly, he had been forgotten or passed by, by priests and Levites, but suddenly he found himself raised to the rank of a living soul—a voice had reached him assuring him that he, too, was in possession of a soul. Over the country the ground, on the whole, was easy to Wesley to win; there was no education, there were no conflicts of opinion, there were no popular books, the people had no objects to claim their attention, the towns were far apart, and connected only by the mail or stagecoach, or that heavy and much more romantic-looking than agreeable conveyance, the market-cart; there was little popular excitement, there were only coarse amusements. It is unquestionable that the people had far fewer religious interests than in the old days of popery, the entire services of the Church were bald and uninteresting, there was no music, unless of such a description as to move the passions by shattering the nerves,—there was no popular psalmody worthy of the name; thus the religious nature was entranced or buried. But the Methodist was one who had heard the call of God, conscience had been stirred within him, and a new life had created new interests; for Christianity really ennobles a man, gives him self-respect, shows to him a new purpose and business in life, and stirs the spirit, moreover, with a pulse of joy and cheerfulness; hence Methodism created the necessity for meetings and for frequent reciprocations. There were no chapels, or but few, and none to open their doors to these strange new pilgrims to the celestial city. The churches, of course, were closed against them;—what could be done, for they must speak together. Reciprocation was the soul of Methodism; almost all the great religious movements have been instituted and marked by some sign—Dominic invented the rosary, Loyola the spiritual contemplations and the retreat, Wesleyanism created Class-meetings; this constituted its essential symbolism. A church can scarcely long maintain a standing without a symbol. This is the countersign of parties and sects. So these people assembled in each other's houses, in rude and homely rooms, by farm ingles, in lone hamlets; thus was created a homely piety, rugged enough, but full of beautiful and pathetic instincts. When the faith became more consciously objective, it was possessed by that singular belief ruling the Church in all such movements—the belief in the power, conjoined to the desire to save souls. This drove them out on great occasions to call the vast multitudes together on heaths and moors. Occasionally, but this was at a later period, some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the preachers; but the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks; these last sought the sequestered places of nature, or in cities and towns they took to the streets, outlying fields or broadways; in some neighbourhoods a little room was built containing the germ of what in a few years became a large Wesleyan society. The burden of all their meetings and their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the sweetness and fullness of Jesus; they had an intense faith in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; their great solicitude was that souls were on the brink of perdition. This was to them more than spiritual difficulties, mere interior trials, or speculative despair; these were mostly a terra incognita to them. Wesley dealt, as it has been expressed, with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; he had little regard to mere proprieties. Wesley and his preachers, 'out of breath pursuing souls,' seemed to many ungraceful, undignified, their faces weary, their hands heavy with toil. Yet these men had found, such as it was, a definite creed, and, as in the case of their great leader, all the inexhaustible variety and world-wide energy of other minds were in them concentrated into a burning instinct; the word of 'the Lord was like fire, or like a hammer.' The early Methodists had also the mighty instincts of prayer—to them there was a meaning in it and a joy. So these men pursued their way. God's ministry goes on by various means, ordinary and extraordinary; it is the difference between rivers and rains, between the dews and the lightnings, the rivers are exhaled by the sun and return to the earth in rains, the Severn and the Wye roll their beautiful forces through the meadow and along the hill-side, but if they did not give their waters to the sun and the cloud, and fall back upon the earth as dew and showers, they would cease from their channels among the hills. So Methodism availed itself of the ordinary and extraordinary.
All truly holy souls, even those the most opposed in their pews or their studies, meet and melt and mingle in song; holy song is the solvent of the most divergent creeds. Perhaps the greater number of the early Methodists were not pressed by physical want; concern for the soul was the grand business, in many instances possibly it was a wild and even diseased feeling. There was no art, no splendid form of worship or ritual; early Methodism was as free from all this as Clairvaux, in the valley of Wormwood, when Bernard ministered there with all his monks around him, or as Cluny, when Bernard de Morlaix chanted his 'Jerusalem the Golden.' Methodism, like all the great religious movements which have shaken men's souls, was purely spiritual, or, if it had a sensuous expression, it was not artificial; loud 'Amens!' resounded as Wesley preached, spoke, or prayed, and then the hearty gushes of, perhaps, not melodious song united all hearts in some Wesleyan Litany or Te Deum. It was so throughout the whole land; such cyclones of spiritual power mysteriously visit our world from age to age, but this surely was one in which there was infinitely more to bless and benefit, and far less to which good taste or good sense could take any exception, than in perhaps any of the great preceding waves of spiritual power which had rolled over Europe. It was the ascetic type set forth by Wesley in an age of animal and sensual indulgence. It was principally by fighting with the sins of the age, at the same time by laying hold upon its characteristics, and especially by remembering that man is more than a machine to fill rich men's pockets, or to digest victuals—a soul, in fact, for whom Christ died—that Methodism 'grew mightily, and prevailed.'