WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY London. Smith.Eldurfc Co IS.Waterloo Pla WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY A STUDY IN SPIRITUAL FORCES BY THE REV. W. H. FITCHETT, B.A., LL.D. PRINCIPAL OF THE METHODIST LADIES' COLLEGE, HAWTHORN, MELBOURNE ; PRESIDENT OF THE METHODIST CHURCH OF AUSTRALASIA AUTHOR OF "HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE," ETC. ETC. WITH A PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILES SECOND IMPRESSION NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 1907 Printed by BALLANTYNB, HANSON &> Co. Edinburgh CONTENTS PAGE PROEM WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY i BOOK I. THE MAKING OF A MAN CHAP. I. HOME FORCES 13 II. THE WESLEY HOUSEHOLD 23 III. HOUSEHOLD STORIES 32 IV. PERSONAL EQUIPMENT 42 BOOK II. THE TRAINING OF A SAINT I. CHILD PIETY 53 II. IN SEARCH OF A THEOLOGY 61 III. A DEEPER NOTE 70 IV. A KELIGION THAT FAILED 81 V. OXFORD LOSES ITS SPELL 88 VI. A STRANGE MISSIONARY 96 VII. BEACHING THE GOAL 112 VIII. WHAT HAD HAPPENED 126 BOOK III. THE QUICKENING OF A NATION I. ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . .139 II. BEGINNING THE WORK -149 III. THE FIELD- PREACHING 161 IV. THK THREE GREAT COMRADES 169 V. WESLEY AS A PREACHER 179 VI. THE GREAT ITINERANT 190 VII. A NEW ORDER OF HELPERS 204. VIII. How THE NEW CONVERTS WERE SHELTERED . .218 IX. SOLDIER-METHODISTS .225 VI CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE X. How THE WORK SPREAD : SCOTLAND .... 240 XI. How THE WORK SPREAD: IRELAND .... 248 XII. ACROSS THE ATLANTIC 260 XIII. THE SECRET OF THK GREAT REVIVAL .... 274 XIV. How WESLEY AFFECTED ENGLAND 283 BOOK IV. THE EVOLUTION OF A CHURCH I. WESLEY AS A CHURCH-BUILDER 299 II. THE BREACH WITH THE MORAVIANS . . . .310 III. THE CONTROVERSY WITH WHITEFIELD .... 322 IV. THE ONFALL OF THE BISHOPS 335 V. THE CONFERENCE 347 VI. A YEAR OF CRISIS 357 VII. THE DEVELOPING CHURCH 366 VIII. A THREATENED SCHISM 376 IX. THE DEED OF DECLARATION 388 X. WESLEY'S THEORY OF THE CHURCH .... 400 XI. THE FINAL STEPS 410 XII. THE EFFECTIVE DOCTRINES OF METHODISM . . . 423 XIII. METHODISM AS A POLITY 435 BOOK V. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS I. WESLEY'S PERSONALITY 445 II. WESLEY'S LOVE AFFAIRS 456 III. WESLEY IN LITERATURE 473 IV. WESLEY'S ODD OPINIONS 484 V. THE CLOSING DAY 497 VI. WESLEY'S DEATH 55 VII. WESLEY'S CRITICS 5*4 EPILOGUE THE CONTINUITY OF SPIRITUAL IMPULSE . . 525 INDEX . 53 1 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PORTRAIT OF JOHN WESLKY Frontispiece Reproduced from the painting by GEORGE ROMNEY, by the kind permission of WALTER R. CASSELS, Esq. FACSIMILES PAGE FROM JOHN WESLEY'S JOURNAL IN GEORGIA re Miss HOPKEY To face page 108 LETTER FROM JOHN WESLEY TO Miss BOLTON OF WITNEY, MAY 13, 1774 445 Reproduced by the kind permission of Miss M. G. COLLINS of Warwick PAGE FROM JOHN WESLEY'S JOURNAL IN GEORGIA ,, ,, 478 LETTER FROM JOHN WESLEY TO Miss BOLTON OF WITNEY, YES. 26, 1780 ., ,, 484 Reproduced by the kind permission of Miss M. G. COLLINS of Warwick WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY PEOEM WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY IF John Wesley himself, the little, long-nosed, long- chinned, peremptory man who, on March 9, 1791, was carried to his grave by six poor men, "leaving behind him nothing but a good library of books, a well-worn clergyman's gown, a much-abused reputation, and the Methodist Church," could return to this world just now, when so much admiring ink is being poured upon his head, he would probably be the most astonished man on the planet. For if Wesley has achieved fame, he never intended it. Seeley says that England conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. And if Wesley built up one of the greatest of modern Churches, and supplied a new starting-point to modern religious history, it was with an entire absence of conscious in- tention. For more than a generation after he died historians ignored Wesley, or they sniffed at him. He was accepted as a fanatic, visible to mankind for a moment on the crest of a wave of fanaticism, and then to be swallowed up, without either regret or recollection, of mere night. Literature refused to take him seriously. He was denied any claim to stand amongst the famous men of all time. But Wesley has at last come into the kingdom of his fame. The most splendid compliments paid to him to-day come not from those inside the Church he founded, but from those outside it. Leslie Stephen describes Wesley as the greatest captain of men of his century. Macaulay ridicules those writers of " books called histories of England" who failed to see that amongst A 2 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY the events which have determined that history is the rise of Methodism. Wesley, he says, had "a genius for government not inferior to that of Richelieu " ; Matthew Arnold gives nobler praise when he says he had " a genius for godliness." Soutney, who wrote Wesley's Life without in the least understanding Wesley's secret, asserts him to be " the most influential mind of the last century ; the man who will have produced the greatest effects, centuries or perhaps millenniums hence, if the present race of men should continue so long." Buckle calls him " the first of ecclesiastical statesmen." Lecky says that the humble meeting in Aldersgate Street where John Wesley was converted " forms an epoch in English history " ; and he adds that the religious revolution begun in England by the preaching of the Wesleys is " of greater historic im- portance than all the splendid victories by land and sea won under Pitt." Wesley, he holds, was one of the chief forces that saved England from a revolution such as France knew. "No other man," says Augustine Birrell, " did such a life's work for England ; you cannot cut him out of our national life." England, in a word, is as truly interested in Wesley as in Shakespeare. And, since the forces which stream from religion are mightier than anything literature knows, it is a reasonable theory that, in determining the history of the English-speaking race, Wesley counts for more than Shakespeare. What was there, then, in Wesley himself, or what is there in his work, to justify compliments so splendid, and from authorities so diverse ? Wesley's least monument, hi a sense, is the Church he built; and yet the scale and stateliness of that Church are not easily realised, nor the rich energy of growth which beats in its life. When Wesley died in 1791 his "societies" in Great Britain numbered 76,000 members, with 300 preachers. To-day, Methodism taking its four great divisions in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and Australasia has 49,000 ministers in its pulpits, and some 30,000,000 hearers in its pews. It has built 88,000 separate churches ; it teaches in its schools every Sunday more than 8,000,000 children. The branches of Meth- odism, in some respects, are more vigorous than even the WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY 3 parent stock. In Canada, out of a population of less than 6,000,000, nearly 1,000,000 are Methodists. Every ninth person in Australasia belongs to Wesley's Church. It is, in some respects at least, the most vigorous form of Pro- testantism in the world. The Methodist Church of the United States raised ^4,000,000 as a centenary effort the largest sum raised by a single Church in a single effort in Christian history. Time is a rough critic ; it dissolves like some powerful acid all shams. But the Church that Wesley founded does more than barely survive this test. A century after Wesley died, it is well-nigh a hundred-fold greater than when ne left it. And yet Wesley's true monument, we repeat, is not the Church that bears his name. It is the England of the twentieth century ! Nay, it is the whole changed temper of the modern world: the new ideals in its politics, the new spirit in its religion, the new standard in its phil- anthropy. Who wants to understand Wesley's work must contrast the moral temper of the eighteenth cen- tury with that of the twentieth century ; for one of the greatest personal factors in producing the wonderful change discoverable is Wesley himself. In some respects the eighteenth century is the most ill-used period in English history. It is the Cinderella of the centuries. Nobody has a good word to say about it. Carlyle sums it up in a bitter phrase : " Soul extinct ; stomach well alive." Yet a century cannot be condensed into an epigram, least of all into one written in gall. The eighteenth century suffers because we set it in a false perspective. We compare it with the centuries which come after it, not with those which went before it. Its records, no doubt, look drab-coloured when set between the English revolution of the seventeenth century, which destroyed the Stuarts, and the French revolution of the nineteenth century, which cast out the Bourbons. But we may not be unjust, even to a century ! The eighteenth century is, for England, a chain of great names and of great events. It found England, Scotland, and Ireland separate kingdoms ; it left them united. If it took from us the United_ States, it gave us Canada, India, and Australia. 4 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY years during its course, William Pitt ruled it for twenty years of splendour. If it saw a British Admiral shot on his own quarter-deck for cowardice, and a British fleet in open mutiny at the Nore, it also saw the great sea victories of Rodney at the Battle of the Saints, of Lord Howe on the first of June, and of Nelson at the Nile. Blenheim was fought the year after Wesley was born, and the Nile the year he died. The century between such events cannot have been inglorious. It was certainly a century of social and political growth. The England of George III. and of Pitt is a vast advance on the England of Queen Anne and of Walpole. The real scandal of England in the eighteenth century, the leprosy that poisoned its blood, the black spot on the shining disc of its history, is the general decay of religion which marked its first fifty years. At the point of its faith England was dying. Its spiritual skies were black as with the gloom of an Arctic midnight, and chilly as with Arctic frosts. Only by an effort of the historic imagination can we realise the condition of England in 1703. When Wesley was born, men still lived who had seen Judge Jeffreys on the bench, Titus Gates in the witness-box, and the Seven Bishops in the dock. Jdonteso^uieu, who studied the England of that age through keen Trench eyes, says bluntly : "There is no such thing as religion in England." That, of course, was not true ; Epworth parsonage itself disproves it, and there must have been many English homes like that of which Susannah Wesley was the mother. But that saying of the keen-sighted Frenchman had a dreadful measure of truth in it. Christianity under English skies was never, before or since, so near the death point. Who does not remember the sentences which Bishop Butler, that gloomy, 'subtle, powerful in- tellect, prefixed to his " Analogy " ? " It has somehow come to be taken for granted," he wrote, " that Christianity is not so much a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. . . . Men treat it as if in the present age this were an agreed point amongst all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject to mirth and ridicule." Be- twixt Montesquieu and Butler, the great Frenchman and WESLEY S PLACE IN HISTORY 5 the still greater Englishman, what a procession of witnesses might be quoted hi proof of the decay of faith in Great Britain at the beginning of the eighteenth century ! And when faith dies, what else can live ? Who wants to see the morality of that period will find it reflected in the art of Hogarth, the politics of Walpole, the writings of Mrs. Aphra Behn, or of Smollett, and the pleasures of the Medmenham Club. It is registered in the foulness of the literature of the day, hi the cruelty of its laws, in the despair of its religion. Christianity cannot perish; but it came near its death- swoon in that sad age. " There was," says Green, the historian, " open revolt against religion and against Churches in both extremes of English society. The poor were ignorant and brutal to a degree impossible now to realise ; the rich, to an almost utter disbelief of religion, linked a foulness of life now happily almost inconceivable." Then there came the Great Revival ! The most wonder- ful movement in the history of the eighteenth century ; its greatest gift to the English-speaking race, is nothing in the realm of politics, or of literature, or of science; it is not the rise of the middle classes, which shifted the centre of political power ; or the great industrial awaken- ing, which multiplied the wealth of the nation tenfold. It is the re-birth of its religion ! And it is this of which Wesley is at once the symbol and the cause. That revival was the translation into English life, and into happier terms, of Luther's Reformation in Germany. WycliftVs reforms had no root; the Reformation in the days of Henry VIII. had almost worse than no root. It was political and non-moral. The true awakening of the religious life of the English-speaking race dates from Wesley. To say that he re-shaped the conscience of England is true, but is only half the truth. He re-created it ! It was dead twice dead ; and through his lips God breathed into it the breath of life again. The pulse of John Wesley is felt to-day in every form of English religion. His fire burns in all our philan- thropy! "The Methodists themselves," to quote Green once more, " were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action on the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy ; its noblest result is the steady attempt wnich has never 6 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY ceased from that day to this to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of the profligate and the poor. . . . The great revival reformed our prisons, abolished the slave trade, taught clemency to our penal laws, gave the first impulse to popular education." But what was Wesley's secret ? By what strange magic did he work a miracle so great ? It is a great deed to create a new Church, and perhaps a harder thing still to reform a Church both old and dead. How did Wesley accomplish both feats? The answer to this question is found in the history told in these pages. But let it be said at once that it is idle to seek the reason merely hi some endowment of personal genius. The compliments paid to Wesley are often mere blunders. He was not, as Buckle calls him, " the first of ecclesiastical statesmen " a Leo X. in a Geneva gown. He did not possess " the strongest mind of his century," as Southey thought. Coleridge's oft-urged criticism is at least partly true ; he had the logical, but not the philosophical mind. He had nothing of Bunyan's dreamy genius; he could not compare in sweep and range of thought with the author of the " Analogy " ; and, to come to later names and times, he had not Newman's subtle and profound intellect. The secret of his work is not to be found in the close- wrought and magnificent ecclesiastical machinery with which he endowed his Church. The characteristic in- stitutions of Methodism were not the causes of the great revival; they are its results. And Wesley invented no new doctrine. He added to Christian knowledge no new truth. " I simply teach," he himself said, " the plain old religion of the Church of England " ; truths, as he again put it, "which were merely the common, fundamental teaching of Christianity." And that is perfectly true. Wesley did not re-discover Christianity. He did not disturb it with a new heresy, or adorn it with a new doctrine. He did not even set the old doctrines in a new perspective. The fatal thing in the religion of that age was that it had ceased to be a life, or to touch life. It was exhausted of its dynamic elements the vision of a Redeeming Christ ; the message of a present and personal WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY 7 forgiveness. It was frozen into a theology; it was spun out into ecclesiastical forms; it was crystallised into a system of external ethics ; it had become a mere adjunct to politics. No one imagined it, or thought of it, or tried to realise it, as a spiritual deliverance ; a deliverance at the very touch of the fingers; a deliverance to be realised in the personal consciousness. Religion translated into terms of living human experience, and dwelling as a divine energy in the soul, was a forgotten thing. An electric lamp without the electric current is a mere loop of calcined fibres black and dead. And Christianity itself, in England, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was exactly such a circle of dead fibres. What Wesley did was to pour the mystic current of a divine life through the calcined soul ot a nation, and so turn blackness into flame. Wesley's secret, in brief, does not lie in his statesman- ship, in his genius for organisation, or in his intellectual power. First and last it belongs to the spiritual realm. The energy that thrilled in his look, that breathed from his presence, that made his life a flame and his voice a spell, stands, in the last analysis, in the category of spiritual forces. But all this only shows how lofty was the plane on which Wesley worked, and how great were the forces he represented. George Dawson, in his " Biographical Lectures," says: "I never can think of Wesley without associating him with the four glorious Johns of whom England ought to be proud Wycliffe, the Reformer before the Reformation ; Milton, the greatest soul England ever knew ; Bunyan, the writer of the most blessed book next to the Bible that the world ever delighted in ; Locke, who turned a clear understanding, an admirable educa- tion, and a pure conscience to putting that which was before a matter of feeling on the grounds of philosophy. Then comes Wesley, and, I believe, taking him altogether, Wesley was worthy to walk in the company of these four." But Dawson did not see that while Wesley had not the genius of Milton, or the luminous imagination of Bunyan, or the analytical intellect of Locke, he has yet left a deeper mark on English history than the other three Johns put together ! 8 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY There are men who live in history because they em- bodied the ruling ideas of their age and made them victorious. There are men of yet loftier force, who may be said, not to reflect, but to create, the impulses which governed the world in which they lived. They shaped their epoch ; they were not shaped by it. Napoleon was of the first type. He did not create the Revolution. He became its political heir and embodiment. Cassar was of the other and greater order. He did not merely find a new channel for the currents of Roman history ; he changed the very direction of their flow. By force of genius he gave to the history and political order of Rome a new physiognomy. Wesley, too if he is to be judged by the scale and permanence of his work belongs to this greater type. He was not merely the interpreter of his age, the acci- dental figurehead of a spiritual revolution which was set in movement independently of him, the human centre round which crystallised impulses vaguely stirring in a thousand lives. He did not reflect his century ; he wrought it to a new pattern. He set its pulses moving to the rhythm of a new life. He was, as a matter of fact, in quarrel with the essential temper of his age. But he bent that temper to his own. He set in motion forces which changed the religious history of England. Wesley, to sum up, was great ; great in mere scale and range of intellect ; greater than his generation knew, or than even his own Church yet realises. No one can study Wesley's life and work without an ever-deepening sense of the scale of the man, compared with other notable figures in history. But Wesley's work was greater than Wesley himself ; and it was greater because its secret lies in the spiritual realm. And it is exactly this that makes his story an inspira- tion for all time. The supreme gifts of the intellect are incommunicable. Shakespeare's creative genius, Dante's piercing imagination, Darwin's gift for combining a thousand apparently unrelated facts into one triumphant generalisation, Wellington's faculty for guessing "what there was on the other side of the hill " all these came by original endowment of nature. They were gifts, not acquirements. But the great forces and endowments of WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY 9 the spiritual realm do not depend on the gifts or denials of nature. Their secret is not hidden in the convolutions of the grey matter of the brain. They depend on spiritual conditions ; so they lie within the reach of common men. And Wesley's secret, we repeat, lies at this point. Great as was his work, yet the explanation of it all is both near and simple. And to realise this at the outset is the one condition that makes the story of Wesley's life worth reading and worth writing. Yes ! across even what it is the fashion to call the leanness of the eighteenth century runs a golden chain of mighty names. Marlborough he won Blenheim the year after Wesley was born stands at its beginning ; the man who behind the mask of his serene face hid the most terrible fighting gifts English history, at least, has known ; Nelson and Wellington stand at its close. Among the figures still visible to history in the century are the two Pitts haughty father and still haughtier son ; Wolfe with his sky-tilted nose, who gave us America; Clive, with his sullen brows, who won for us India; and Can- ning, who called the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old. Its record in literature is splendid ; it ranges from Swift and Addison, Johnson and Goldsmith, Pope and Gibbon, to Byron and Burns, to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Isaac Newton is its representative in science ; Burke and Pitt in statesmanship ; Wilberforce in philan- thropy. Yet, in that crowd of great faces, the one which represents the force which has most profoundly affected English history is the long-nosed, clear-complexioned face of John Wesley, with its eager eyes, and masterful chin, and flowing locks. It is sometimes claimed that Newman, who was born ten years after Wesley died, has influenced the religious life of his country as deeply as he. A convinced Protes- tant, of course, must be forgiven for holding that Newman's influence, on the whole, was evil, and not good. But, apart from this, it must be remembered that, of his ninety years, Newman threw the first forty-five into the scales of the Anglican Church, and the last forty-five into the scales of the Roman Catholic Church. Neither can claim him as a whole. He spent the first half of his life in 10 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY protesting against one Church, and the second half of his life in protesting against the other. George Washington is the only name in the record of the eighteenth century which rivals that of Wesley in its influence on our race, and Wesley represents the more enduring energy. All this may be claimed for Wesley, not because he outshone the men of his century in genius, but because he dealt with loftier forces than they. Who awakens the great energies of religion, touches the elemental force in human life; a force deeper than politics, loftier than literature, and wider than science. Wesley worked in a realm through which blew airs from eternity . BOOK I THE MAKING OF A MAN CHAPTER I HOME FORCES JOHN WESLEY came of a notable stock. His ancestors for three generations were gentlefolk by birth, scholars by training, clergymen by choice, and martyrs, in a sense, by roughness of fortune. They belonged to a hard age; an age of ejectments and proscriptions, when in- tolerance was crystallised into Acts of Parliament, and even mistook itself for religion. Daniel Defoe sat thrice in the public stocks in the very year John Wesley was born for no worse crime than having written that matchless bit of irony, " A Short and Easy Way with the Dissenters " ! A very bitter storm of legalised cruelty beat on the Wesleys of that time. Bartholomew Wesley, the great- grandfather of John, was thrust out from his snug Dorsetshire rectory, in advance of the general ejection under the Act of Uniformity, in 1662. His son, John, a more brilliant scholar than even his father, but of less toughness of fibre, was imprisoned in 1661, just before his father's ejection, for not using the Book of Common Prayer. He was turned out of his living at Blandford in 1662, and lived a harried, distressful life under the cruel laws of the period afterwards. His natural home was Weymouth; but he was forbidden to settle there. A good woman, guilty of giving him lodgings, was fined 20 for the offence. " Often disturbed, several times apprehended, four times imprisoned," runs his patient, melancholy record. Under the infamous Five Mile Act he was driven from one place after another, and he died, a comparatively young man, killed by the cruel temper of his times. His son, Samuel Wesley, the father of John, had all the essential virtues of his stock their passion for scholarship, their courage, their independent will; but 14 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY he was of a hardier temper than his father. His inde- pendence of will took a somewhat surprising develop- ment. This son and grandson of ejected ministers decided that the Church which had ejected them was in the right, and he joined its ministry thus turning his back on two generations of ill-used kinsfolk ! He was, at the moment, at a Dissenting academy, a lad scarcely of age ; but the form of dissent about him might well shock a youth of serious and generous temper. It was only a bitter variety of politics, absolutely exhausted of religious ideals and forces; and Samuel Wesley renounced it, trudged on foot to Oxford, with exactly forty-five shillings in his pocket, and entered himself at Exeter College as a "poor scholar." About that very time, in London, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a famous Dissenting clergyman was putting her learned father, and his theology, in the scales of her girlish judgment, and solemnly deciding against both it and him ! This sturdy youth, trudging in the winter weather to Oxford, with such scanty coins in his pocket, but such high purpose in his heart, and this remarkable theologian in short dresses, had not yet met; but they were destined to be man and wife. There were, plainly, some very notable affinities of nature betwixt them. When they met and mated their offspring might well be expected to possess some unusual qualities. The total amount of assistance Samuel Wesley received from his family during his university course consisted of five shillings ; but he emerged, at the end, with a degree, and 10, 155. in cash in his pocket! On the whole no student perhaps ever gave less to Oxford or got more out of it than did Samuel Wesley. In Scottish universities generations of hardy students have culti- vated much literature on very little oatmeal ; but all the universities north of the Tweed might be challenged to produce an example of scholarship nourished on scantier cash or a more Spartan diet than that of Samuel Wesley. He held a London curacy for a year, was chaplain on board a king's ship for another year, won the cnaplain- ship of a regiment by a poem on the Battle of Blenheim, and lost it, according to one account, by publishing an HOME FORCES 15 attack on Dissenters. He was given the living at Epworth to which was afterwards added the neighbouring parish of Wroote. John Wesley's father, even at this distance of time, kindles a half - humorous, half -exasperated admiration. He was a little, restless-eyed, irascible man ; high-minded, quick-brained, of infinite hardihood and courage, but with an impracticable, not to say irresponsible, strain in his blood. He was determined in spite of nature to be a poet ; and on his poetry, Pope, though his friend, finds time, in the "Dunciad," to distil a drop of gall. His son John who knew bad poetry when ne saw it says of his father's " Life of Christ " in verse filial piety con- tending in him with literary judgment "the cuts are good ; the notes pretty good ; the verses so - and - so." Praise of more frosty temperature it is difficult to imagine. Samuel Wesley's great work was a commentary on the Book of Job, a performance which would have supplied a new exercise in patience to that much-afflicted patri- arch, if he had been required to read it. " Poor Job ! " says Bishop Warburton; "it was his eternal fate to be persecuted by his friends." Wesley's clear-eyed wife, who loved her impracticable and hot-tempered spouse with an affection all husbands may well envy, yet admits that amongst his rough parishioners at Epworth the talents of her husband were buried, and says, with wifely gentleness, he was "forced to a way of life for which he is not so well qualified as I could wish." But this was only a wife's soft periphrase. Her impracticable husband was busy hammering out laborious rhymes in his study, or was riding off to hold debate \vith his brother clergymen in Convocation, leaving his clearer-brained wife to manage the parish, cultivate the glebe, and govern her too-numerous brood of infants. Susannah Wesley, his wife, would have been a remark- able woman in any age or country. She was the daughter of Dr. Annesley, himself an ejected divine, and a man of ripe learning and good family. The daughter of such a father had a natural bias for scholarship; she knew Greek, Lathi, French, while yet in her teens, was satu- rated with theology, reasoned herself into Socinianism 16 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY and out of it and, generally, had a taste for abstruse knowledge, which in these soft-fibred modern days is almost unintelligible. She was reading the Early Fathers and wrestling with metaphysical subtleties when a girl of to-day would be playing tennis or practising sonatas. While yet only thirteen years of age, as we have seen, she solemnly re- viewed " the whole issue in dispute betwixt Dissent and the Church," and gravely decided that the views held by her father and such a father ! were wrong. A feminine theologian of such tender years, who felt herself capable of deciding such an issue, and who actually decided it in such a way, and against such authorities, would be regarded in these days as a somewhat alarming portent. None but a blue-stocking, it might be confidently assumed a dowdy in spectacles, with neglected dress and non- existent complexion, from whom suitors fled would be capable of such a feat. As a matter of fact, Susannah Annesley was a beautiful, high-spirited girl her sister was painted by Lely as one of the beauties of his time keen-witted, but modest ; with a genius for practical affairs. She was certainly neither dowdy nor blue- stocking; and was probably the most capable woman in all England in her day. When only nineteen years old she married Samuel Wesley; and bore him nineteen children in twenty- one years. She was herself the twenty-fifth child of her father. It was an age of small incomes and large families ! She was an ideal wife, incomparably superior to her husband in practical genius, and yet herself lovingly blind to the fact. She might have talked philosophy with Hypatia or discussed Latin and Greek with Lady Jane Grey ; and yet with her impetuous, unpractical husband she was as patient if not quite as submissive as Griselda. They were a strong-willed pair, accustomed to think for themselves ; and she wrote to her son John afterwards, "It is a misfortune almost peculiar to our family that your father and I seldom think alike." It may be taken for granted, however, that when they differed the wife was usually in the right. Yet she prac- tised towards her husband the sweetest wifely obedience. HOME FORCES 17 That pugnacious little divine very properly expended j*r-ij t f~ rfj many of his leaden stanzas on his wife : " She graced my humble roof and blessed my life ; Blessed me by a far greater name than wife. Yet still I bore an undisputed sway ; Nor was't her task, but pleasure, to obey. Nor did I for her care ungrateful prove, But only used my power to show my love ; Whate'er she asked I gave without reproach or grudge ; For still she reason asked, and I was judge. All my commands requests at her fair hands, And her requests to me were all commands." These are heavy-footed rhymes ; and the actual prose of married life usually comes short of its poetry. The rector of Epworth discovered one fatal day that his wife, who had her own political views, did not join in the re- sponse when he offered prayer for the king. "Sukie," he said majestically, "if we are to have two kings, we must have two beds " ; and the little, absolute, irresponsible, and exasperating man took horse and rode away, leaving his wife to care for his children and his parish. According to Southey though the tale is doubt- ful she did not hear of him again till twelve months afterwards, when William III. died, and the hot-headed rector of Epworth came back condescendingly to the bosom of his family ! The courageous pair began their wedded life on a curacy and an income of 30 a year ; and children came fast nineteen, as we have seen, in twenty-one years. So poverty always darkened with the shadow of debt, and sometimes trembling on the edge of want was a constant element of the family life. Years later, in a letter to his bishop, Mr. Wesley gives him the interesting information that he had but 50 a year for six or seven years to- gether, and " one child at least per annum." The little rector of Epworth, indeed, was fond of doing exercises in what may be called family arithmetic for the edification of his diocesan. In a letter to his Archbishop, announcing the birth of twins, he says : " Last night my wife brought B 18 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY me a few children. There are but two yet, a boy and a girl, and I think they are all at present. We have had four in two years and a day, three of which are living . . . Wednesday evening my wife and I joined stocks, which came to but six shillings, to send for coals." A father who, with only six shillings in his pocket, has to welcome the arrival of twins might be pardoned for feeling some anxiety. But the head of the Wesley house- hold left that branch of family duty, as he did most others, to his wife. She carried the burden of household care ; her husband could betake himself either to Convo- cation, or to a debtors' prison, in a spirit of most cheerful philosophy. He wrote to the Archbishop of York, when the gates of Lincoln Castle had just been shut on him: " Now I am at rest ; for I have come to the haven where I have long expected to be." He adds incidentally : "When I came here my stock was but little above ten shillings, and my wife at home had scarce so much." It does not seem to have occurred to this remarkable husband that a wife left with a brood of little children, and less than ten shillings in her possession, had almost sharper cause for anxiety than he had. She could hardly sit down and write philosophically: "Now I am at rest." He adds : " She soon sent me her rings, because she had nothing else to relieve me with ; but I returned them." Only once was there audible in his brave wife's voice a repining note. While her husband was still lying in prison for debt, the Archbishop of York asked her : "Tell me, Mrs. Wesley, whether you were ever really in want of bread?" " My lord," she answered, " strictly speaking, I never did want bread. But then I had so much care to get it before it was eaten, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me; and I think to have bread under such terms is the next degree of wretched- ness to having none at all." In later years Mrs. Wesley writes of the " inconceivable distress" from which they not seldom suffered in those sad days; one of the daughters, Emilia, speaks with sharper accents of the " intolerable want " of the family, HOME FORCES 19 and of the "scandalous want of necessaries" which not seldom afflicted them. Samuel Wesley did, no doubt, manage his financial affairs very badly. He understood practically the whole sad philosophy of debt. " I am always called on for money before I make it," he wrote, " and must buy every- thing at the worst hand." But he lacked common-sense in money matters. His household was divided by very thin partitions, indeed, from mere want ; and yet this surprising husband and father could spend no less than 150 in thrice attending Convocation! He was very sensitive, however, to any impeachment of his thrift and care as the head of his family; and, to his brother-in- law, who attacked him bluntly on the subject, and quoted Scripture on the uncomfortable thesis that he who failed to provide for his own household was worse than an infidel, offered the following record of his business affairs. The figures have a delicious and characteristic confusion about them, and might well be the despair of an ac- countant ; and yet they show that if the little impatient man had never learnt the art of living within his income, he contrived to exist on surprisingly small means. It is all written, it will be observed, in the third person : *. <* Imprimis, when he first walked to Oxford, he had in cash . . . . . . . . 250 He lived there till he took his Bachelor's degree, with- out any preferment or assistance, except one crown 050 By God's blessing on his own industry he brought to London . . . . . . . .10150 When he came to London, he got deacon's orders and a cure, for which he had for one year . . 28 o o In which year, for his board, ordination, and habit he was indebted ^30, which he afterwards paid . 30 o o Then he went to sea, where he had, for one year, ^70, not paid till two years after his return . . 7000 He then got a curacy at ^30 per annum, for two years, and by his own industry, in writing, J 736, a fact which shows how leisurely was the navigation of those days. With the voyage begins Wes- ley's immortal Journal, a bit of literature once strangely neglected, and now almost over-praised. For naturalness, incident, variety, and imperishable interest it undoubtedly deserves to be classed with " Boswell." Over Boswell's "Johnson," indeed, the Journal has the advantage that it deals with a greater figure than even the famous lexi- cographer, and the hero of it is also the writer. The Journal, again, is not a book of gossip ; it is an autobio- graphy. It gives us Wesley, not as seen from the outside, but as Wesley saw himself. It enables us, in a word, to look at men, books, and events through John Wesley's eyes, and to see Wesley himself as interpreted and sometimes as misinterpreted by his own conscience. If the voyage was leisurely, Wesley and his companions spent it in no leisurely mood. They began by drawing up and signing a solemn bond betwixt themselves. It bears date November 3, and runs: " In the name of God, Amen ! We, whose names are under- written, being fully convinced that it is impossible either to pro- mote the work of God among the heathen without an entire union G 98 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY among ourselves, or that such a union should subsist unless each one will give up his single judgment to that of the majority, do agree, by the help of God : First, that none of us will undertake anything of importance without first proposing it to the other three ; secondly, that whenever our judgments differ, any one shall give up his single judgment or inclination to the others ; thirdly, that in case of an equality, after begging God's direction, the matter shall be decided by lot. JOHN WESLEY. CHARLES WESLEY. BENJAMIN INGHAM. CHARLES DELAMOTTE." Here we have Wesley's instinct for order and fellow- ship registering itself. The missionaries were not to be separate units, but a disciplined company. In the last words of that bond, too, we have the practice of sortilege which runs intermittently through all Wesley's after years erected into a law and made the ultimate standard of decision in all doubtful matters. The voyage was regarded by the little group as an opportunity for trying all sorts of heroic experiments with themselves. It gave them a welcome chance of shedding old habits. They reduced the number of their meals, and limited their diet to rice and biscuits. Wes- ley, owing to an accident, had to sleep on the floor one night without a bed, and so made the delightful dis- covery that a bed was a superfluity. It could in future be dispensed with. The ascetic, not to say the monk, was emerging once more in Wesley's life ! He acted on the theory that his soul was a besieged fortress, and each physical sense was an avenue standing wide open to his foes. An appetite starved into submission, or other- wise suppressed, was a traitor hanged! In other ways the ship that carried these strange missionaries was turned into a floating monastery. Each hour of the day was assigned to a specific task. They rose at four o'clock in the morning, and went through a succession of ordered tasks meditations and spiritual exercises that left not one moment of perilous space for leisure, till ten o'clock at night when sleep came. One incident of the voyage served as a sharp test to Wesley of his own spiritual condition. Amongst the A STRANGE MISSIONARY passengers he found a little group of Moravian exiles, who, by the simplicity and seriousness of their piety, strangely interested him. A storm broke over the ship one evening just as these simple-minded Germans had begun a religious service; Wesley describes what follows : " In the midst of the Psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began amongst the English. The Germans calmly sang on. I asked one of them afterwards, ' Was you not afraid ? ' He answered, ' I thank God, no.' I asked, ' But were not your women and children afraid ? ' He replied mildly, ' No ; our women and children are not afraid to die.' From them I went to their crying, trembling neighbours, and pointed out to them the difference in the hour of trial be- tween him that feareth God and him that feareth Him not." Now, Wesley knew that he had not mastered the secret of that strange contempt of death. " I have a sin of fear," he said then, and for many a day afterwards. And he knew that the touch of death has for religion the office of an acid on gold. It is a test the most searching of tests. And under the touch of that dreadful acid of fear, Wesley's religion at this stage failed him. It was not that he recoiled from the mere icy breath of death ; else would he have had less courage than the recruiting sergeant can buy in every market for a few pence a day. But there are mysterious elements in death, which make it the symbol of sin's triumph, the crowning act of sin's dark reign. The human soul is dimly conscious that in moral evil there are dark and strange forces depths unsounded, relations with God and His universe unrealised and death brings the soul face to face with these last and uttermost elements of wrong-doing. So it is that sin and death, while strangely akin, are strangely abhorrent to each other. And as Wesley's religion at this stage failed to deliver him from the fear of death, he judged, rightly enough, that he had not yet found in it any complete deliverance from sin, death's sad ancestress. Directly he landed, too, Wesley found himself face to 100 WESLEY AND HIS CENTUKY face with the challenge of what was to him a quite new type of piety. He eagerly sought out the head of the little Moravian community, August Spangenberg, and, with that fine humility which was characteristic of one side of his nature, asked his advice as Wesley himself puts it " with regard to my own conduct." The simple- minded Moravian pastor proceeded to put Wesley to the question : " He said, ' My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions. Have you the witness within yourself ? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God ? ' '"I was surprised,' records Wesley, ' and knew not what to answer. He observed it, and asked, " Do you know Jesus Christ ? " I paused and said, "I know He is the Saviour of the world." " ' True,' he replied ; ' but do you know He has saved you? ' "'I answered, "I hope He has died to save me." He only added, "Do you know yourself?" I said, "I do." But I fear they were vain words.' " Wesley was the last man in the world to resent questioning so frank and courageous ; but it is clear that the challenge of the plain-spoken Moravian disquieted him. He does not seem to have been struck by the circumstance that an echo of his father's dying words " The inward witness, son, the inward witness " from the lips of a man of another race and another theological school, thus met him as he put his foot on the soil of the new world. Wesley, however, was strangely drawn to the Moravians. He lived with them for a while, and saw their piety in what might be called its household dress. It was the most beautiful form of piety he had yet witnessed the ordered devoutness and diligence of the Epworth Rectory repeated, with a strain of gladness running through it the Epworth household hardly knew. Wesley was present, again, at a Moravian service held for the election and ordination of a bishop, and he records how the grave simplicity of the proceedings made him forget the seventeen centuries that had fled, and imagine himself in one of those assemblies where form and state were not, but Paul the tentmaker, or Peter the fisherman, presided. A STRANGE MISSIONARY 101 It is curious to note, however, that though the sim- plicity of Moravian piety moved Wesley's admiration, and the certainty of Moravian faith awakened his envy, yet all this did not in the least abate the fury of his own sacerdotal zeal. The very centre of his religion was, no doubt, unconsciously shifting; but the outer crust of the High Churchman the external habit of his life was almost more rigid and austere than ever. It was a strange human field on which Wesley was now at work. The colony of Georgia represents, perhaps, the most generous experiment in settlement known to history. Its founder was General Oglethorpe scholar, soldier, politician, knight - errant, philanthropist, and through it all for he was the son of an Irish mother a generous, hot-blooded, irresponsible Irishman. He had been a student at Oxford, a soldier in the British Army ; he had fought on the Continent under Prince Eugene, and in the British Parliament had anticipated Howard as a philanthropist. The condition of debtors in English prisons moved his warm-hearted pity. He secured the appointment of a Parliamentary Committee to report on the condition of the great English prisons, the Fleet and the Marshalsea; and as an mcidental result, the plan for forming a settlement in South Carolina emerged. The settlement was vested in trustees; Oglethorpe was appointed governor; large sums of money were raised to start the colony ; and a code of regulations was drawn up, which, if not in every detail of perfect wisdom, at least represented very noble ideals. One clause prohibited slavery, as contrary not only to the Gospel, but to the fundamental laws of England. It would have been well for the Southern States of America, and for the whole history of the English- speaking race, if Oglethorpe's regulations for his settle- ment at this point had been universally adopted. Their absence was, later, to cost the United States the most dreadful civil war known to history. The most difficult social and political problem the great transatlantic Republic has to solve would never have existed if the Georgian precedent had been followed. But the new colony not only represented a great social experiment ; it offered a refuge for social failures of every 102 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY kind English debtors, Highland Jacobites, Moravian refugees, the wrecks of commerce and of politics, the victims of religious persecution. The settlement was thus a cluster of unrelated human atoms, representing social, political, and racial types of very diverse kinds. It was, moreover, planted on the soil, and breathed the airs of a new world, with ancient conventions forgotten, and a new liberty fermenting in its very blood. It con- stituted an ideal field for social and religious experiments. And, as his contribution to the peace of the new settle- ment, Wesley was bent on enforcing, by priestly discipline, the strictest reading of the rubric ! He would stamp the usages or what he imagined to be the usages of the first Christian century on a community living in the eighteenth ! This proves how completely the ecclesiastic and the sacerdotalist were dominant in Wesley. He worked solely on what may be called the ecclesiastical plane. Thus he instituted both early and forenoon services for every day. He divided the morning service, taking the Litany apart. He celebrated the Lord's Supper every week, but refused it to all who had not been episcopally baptized. He revived what he believed to be the Apostolic practice of baptism by immersion. He re- baptized the children of dissenters, and refused admission to the Lord's Supper to the pastor of the Salzburgers because though he had been baptized it was not done in severely correct canonical fashion. Nearly twenty years afterwards, recalling this incident, he wrote, " Can High Church bigotry go farther than this ? And how well since I have been beaten with mine own staff." The indictment against Wesley, drawn up by the grand jury of Savannah in 1737, consists of ten articles, and to one of these Wesley with every sign of penitence pleaded guilty. His crime consisted of having baptized an Indian trader's child with only two sponsors ! " This," cries the conscience-stricken ritualist, " I own, was wrong ; I ought at all hazards to have refused baptizing it till he had procured a third." There spoke the true High Churchman, who not only believes that spiritual and eternal issues hang on mechanical forms, but will sacrifice them for the sake A STRANGE MISSIONARY 103 of the forms! On Wesley's theory the eternal destiny of the child turned on its being baptized. Yet, even at that dreadful hazard, Wesley believed he ought to have refused to baptize it in the absence of a third sponsor ! But if Wesley's standard was severe for others, it was nothing less than heroic for himself. Zeal for high ideals of conduct and service burnt in him like a flame. There were no austerities of self-denial from which he shrank. He visited his parishioners from house to house in order, taking for that business the hours betwixt twelve and three, when all work was suspended on account of the heat. He lived with the plainness and simplicity of an anchorite. In one of the schools which he and Delamotte taught, some of the poorer scholars went barefoot, and the more comfortably dressed children looked down with contempt on their unshod companions. To cure that pride Wesley himself, for a while, went with naked feet. He lived practically on dry bread, and interspersed even that rudimentary diet with incessant fasts. The social impulse in Wesley reappears hi Georgia. A wise and sure instinct warned him that a solitary religion would perish, and, as at Oxford, he organised his flock into little societies which met once a week, or oftener, in order to improve, instruct, and exhort one another. But Wesley's ministry at Savannah failed, exactly as it did at Wroote, and with even more dramatic com- pleteness. It was empty of true spiritual force. It failed to make men better. It bred strife. " How is it," asked Oglethorpe, bewildered by the ecclesiastical quarrels that filled the air on every side "how is it that there is no love, no meekness, no true religion amongst the people; but instead of this, mere formal prayers ? " Wesley, in Southey's words, instead of feeding his flock with milk, was " drenching them with the physic of an intolerant discipline " ; and human nature rebelled against the bitter dose. One angry parishioner as Wesley faithfully records in his Journal told him, " I like nothing you do. All your sermons are satires upon particular persons ; there- fore I will never hear you more, and all the people are of my mind." His puzzled hearers, this plain-spoken 104 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY critic went on to say, were unable to decide whether Wesley was a Protestant or a Roman Catholic. "They never heard of such a religion before. They do not know what to make of it. And then your private behaviour. All the quarrels that have been here since you came have been along of you. . . . And so you may preach long enough, but nobody will come to hear you." If at Savannah his parishioners were quarrelling with John Wesley, at Frederica both the governor and the people were in angry feud with Charles Wesley. Charles was as austere as his brother John, and had, perhaps, even less tact. Within a month his parishioners were in open rebellion against him, and tried to ruin him with the governor by accusing him of a design to destroy the colony. The unfortunate governor found that his chap- lains were mere human storm-centres. "What would an unbeliever say to your raising these disorders ? " he demanded of Charles Wesley in bitter tones. Oglethorpe was a man of impetuous temper and un- restrained speech; his underlings naturally exaggerated these qualities, and outvied him in the steps they took against the unfortunate chaplain. Charles Wesley was practically denied the ordinary necessaries of existence. A bed was provided out of the public stores to every one else in the settlement, but denied to the too zealous divine, who, while suffering from a low fever, had yet to sleep on the ground. "Thank God," said poor Charles Wesley, "it is not yet made capital to give me a morsel of bread ! " But his life, he seriously believed, was more than once attempted. Oglethorpe a little later was starting out to meet a descent by the Spaniards upon the new settlement. The odds against him were desperate ; he believed he would never return, and he took leave of his secretary and chaplain in very high-strung fashion. "'I am now going 'to death,' he said. 'You will see me no more.' " ' If I am speaking to you for the last time,' replied his secretary, ' hear what you will quickly know to be the truth as soon as you are entered upon a separate state. ... I have renounced the world. Life is a bitterness to me. I came hither to lay it down. A STRANGE MISSIONARY 105 You have been deceived. I protest my innocence of the crimes I am charged with, and think myself now at liberty to tell you what I thought never to have uttered. ' " An explanation followed; Oglethorpe, the most generous, if the most impulsive of men, fell on his chaplain's neck and kissed him, and so they parted. " God is with you," cried Charles Wesley as the boats moved off. " Go forth, Christo duce et auspice Christo" When Oglethorpe returned safe from his expedition, Charles told him ne had longed to see him once more to give further explanations ; " but then," he added, " I con- sidered that if you died you would know them all in a moment." " I know not," said Oglethorpe, " whether separate spirits regard our little concerns. If they do, it is as men regard the follies of their childhood, or I my late passion- ateness." Oglethorpe could quarrel with his chaplains furiously, but he loved them ; and, many years afterwards, when he himself was a white-haired and venerable figure the finest figure, as Hannah More declares, she ever knew, and one which " perfectly realised her ideal of Nestor " it is on record that, meeting John Wesley unexpectedly, he ran to him and kissed him with the simplicity and affection of a child. Charles Wesley, with his comrade, Ingham, returned to England in July 1736, but John Wesley clung resolutely to his post. The puzzle is that his High Church temper was so little influenced by the admiration he felt for Moravian teaching, and the type of piety it produced. The Moravians of Savannah taught mm exactly what Peter Bohler taught him afterwards in London, but the teaching at the moment left his life unaffected. Wesley's own explanation is, "I understood it not: I was too learned and too wise, so that it seemed foolishness unto me; and I continued preaching, and following after, and trusting in that righteousness whereby no flesh can be justified." The truth is that Peter Bohler himself, had he met Wesley in Savannah, would have taught him in vain. The stubborn Sacramentarian and High Churchman had 106 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY to be scourged, by the sharp discipline of failure, out of that subtlest and deadliest form of pride, the pride that imagines that the secret of salvation lies, or can lie, within the circle of purely human effort. Wesley later describes Peter Bohler as "one whom God prepared for me." But God, in the toilsome and humiliating experi- ences of Georgia, was preparing Wesley for Peter Bohler. A love episode, as ill-managed and as barren as were all Wesley's excursions into the realm of sentiment, brought his stay in Georgia to a hasty and inglorious end. Wesley, from his youth, both by temperament and by the manner of his training, was peculiarly susceptible though in no ignoble fashion to feminine influence. In the Epworth Rectory feminine influences from the wise, serene, strong-brained mother, to the circle of bright- witted sisters were supreme ; and Wesley, at every stage of his life, sought what had been the joy of his early years the companionship of intelligent women. But where the sex was concerned, he suffered a curious par- alysis of his native shrewdness, and he managed his love affairs worse than perhaps any other great man known to history. The chief magistrate of Savannah, Mr. Causton, was a man of doubtful antecedents and violent temper. His niece, Miss Hopkey, a clever and attractive girl, fell in love with Wesley or at least was anxious that the little, handsome, and clever Fellow of Lincoln College should fall in love with her, and she plainly endeavoured, by all the innocent arts known to the sex, to hasten that desirable consummation. She became pensively religious to suit Wesley's mood ; attended his services with pious diligence; dressed to suit his austere taste; nursed him through a sickness; took his advice on the interesting question of what she should eat for supper, and how soon she should go to bed. Wesley accepted all this with exquisite simplicity, as signs of an angelic character. He was visibly and frankly if somewhat pedantically in love with her. In the beginning of December he records in his Journal, "I advised Miss Sophie to sup earlier and not immediately before going to bed. She did so, and on this little cir- cumstance depend what an inconceivable train of conse- A STRANGE MISSIONARY 107 quences ! Not only all the colour of remaining life for her, but perhaps my happiness too." His companion, belamotte, who contemplated Miss Hopkey through no nimbus of sentiment, and who had not been at Oxford for nothing, bluntly warned Wesley, and asked him if it was his intention to marry her. Wesley at this stage of his life a chill-blooded ecclesi- astic, even when in love found he could not answer that inconveniently direct query. He determined to submit the question of whether he ought to marry Miss Hopkey to the Moravian Bishop a step which, to the feminine mind at least, will prove decisively that he was not in love with that young lady at all. The matter was finally referred, for decision, to the elders of the Moravian Church strange assessors in the court of the affections! They solemnly considered the case. Wesley was called in to learn his fate. " Will you abide by our decision ? " Nitschman asked him. After some hesitation, Wesley replied, " I will." " Then," said the Moravian, " we advise you to proceed no further in the matter." "The will of the Lord be done," answered Wesley. It is a matter debated still with great keenness, whether or not Wesley had actually offered himself in marriage to Miss Hopkey. Moore, his biographer, says that Wesley told him expressly, " he never actually proposed marriage." On the other hand, the young lady herself, in the pro- ceedings against Wesley at the close of his stay in Savannah, deposed under oath that "Mr. Wesley had many times proposed marriage to her, all of which pro- posals she had rejected." But no one who reads the whole story can doubt that Wesley's real offence was that he failed to propose to Miss Hopkey, or, at least, to do it with sufficient definiteness. That quick-witted young lady learned that her lover was submitting the direction of his affections to a court of venerable Moravian elders ; she guessed the decision would be against her and promptly betook herself to another lover. On March 4 the Moravian elders gave their decision ; on March 8, Wesley ruefully records in his Journal, " Miss Sophie engaged herself to Mr. Williamson, 108 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY a person not remarkable for handsomeness, neither for greatness, neither for wit, nor knowledge, nor sense, and least of all for religion. And on Saturday, March 12, four days after, they were married. An expeditious young lady, this ! Wesley found in the lesson of the day for the succeed- ing Sunday the words, " Son of man, behold, I take from thee the desire of thine eyes at a stroke " ; 'and, he adds, " I was pierced through as with a sword." Fifteen years afterwards he was to write that same verse once more in his Journal, as the record of a yet more bitter defeat of his affections. 1 1 Wesley, at this period even more than in later years, had the habit of recording with an almost incredible diligence, and for the purpose of self- scrutiny, every act of his life, and every play of his feelings. His Georgian journals, which still exist, are examples of the tireless industry with which he translated himself into written terms. In the Journal there is not only a page for every day, but a separate space for every hour of the day. He computed and registered the use of his time with the fidelity with which a careful business man writes down the investments of his capital. And an incident, such as the affair with Miss Hopkey, which moved him so deeply, would naturally be recorded with special care. This makes credible the somewhat doubtful authenticity of another version of this incident, apparently in Wesley's own handwriting, known to exist. Miss Hopkey, according to this story, was only eighteen years of age ; her affections had become entangled with some unworthy object, and her guardians had broken off all intercourse between the two. The girl was in much grief, and Wesley, as a clergyman, was asked to pay special attention to her. This drew the two into close relationship, and Wesley presently discovered that he had not only a high esteem for Miss Hopkey, but a tender affection for her, an affection which he persuaded himself was that for a sister. He, on his part, was convinced that a celibate life was better for all men, and for himself was almost imperative ; while she, with the facile resolve of a grieved maiden, had also vowed to live for ever single. Intercourse betwixt the two was at its most perilous stage, when they took a trip by boat from Frederica to Savannah. Wesley's tenderness at this period is con- fessed, but still, after his pedantic fashion, he tests his emotions by ex- tracts from the Greek Fathers. Did he actually propose to Miss Hopkey is a question the narrative after all leaves unsettled. He tells how he sat by the camp fire and asked her whether she was engaged to the person for whom she was supposed to be mourning. She replied, " I am promised to that young man or none," and straightway took refuge in tears. " Miss Susan," said Wesley, " I should count myself happy if I could spend my life with you." These sudden words, he adds, " weie not spoken of design " ; the young lady replied with more tears, but the simple-minded Fellow of Lincoln College was persuaded that if even he broke through his resolve for a single life, Miss Hopkey would be heroically firm to her pledge of celibacy. This belief kept Wesley silent ; yet, looking back on this incident, he calls it " a very narrow escape." " I wonder to this hour," he says, " I did not say, ' Miss Susan, will you marry me ? ' " Plainly he believed that in express terms he never did speak the decisive words. J& /f / X, X/ A page from John Wesley's Journal in Georgia, re 3ftss Hopkey. PCBI/IiJHET) VT SMITH, ELDBB, it Co., 15 WATEIO.OO PLACE, S.W. A STRANGE MISSIONARY 109 Wesley naturally contemplated Miss Hopkey, when she became Mrs. Williamson, with new and changed eyes, and that ingenious young lady probably felt no longer under any obligations to consult in dress or conduct the tastes of her former, and quite too leisurely, lover. This was to Wesley only another painful surprise. " God," he gravely records in his Journal, " has shown me yet more of the greatness of my deliverance by opening to me a new and unexpected scene of Miss Sophie's dissimulation." Later, Wesley felt called upon to mention to her " some things in her con- duct which he thought reprehensible," and was much astonished simple man ! at finding " Miss Sophie " re- senting with shrill vehemence his rebukes. Her husband was kindled by his wife's anger, and forbade her to speak to Wesley, or to attend his services ; but his self-willed bride seems to have disobeyed him. Wesley now con- templated debarring Mrs. Williamson from the Lord's Supper, and he asked Mr. Causton, the magistrate, " Sir, what if I should think it the duty of my office to repel one of your family from the Holy Communion ? " " If you repel me or my wife," answered Mr. Causton, " I shall require a legal reason ; but I shall trouble myself about none else." In those days, when the Lord's Supper was, in Cowper's phrase, a "pick-lock of office" for men, and a sign of social respectability for women, to be debarred from the table of the Lord was a serious injury. On August 7 five months after her marriage Wesley refused to allow Mrs. Williamson to join the Lord's Supper. On the very next day a warrant was issued for the apprehension of " John Wesley, clerk, to answer the complaint of William Williamson for defaming his wife, and refusing to ad- minister to her the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in a public congregation without cause." The enraged husband assessed his damages at .1000. Wesley was arrested, but discharged on pledge to appear at the next session of the court. He was asked to put in writing his reasons for refusing to admit Mrs. Williamson to the Lord's Supper ; he wrote to the lady : "If you offer yourself to the Lord's table on Sunday, I will advertise you, as I have done more than once wherein you have done wrong, and when you have openly 110 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY declared that you have truly repented, I will administer to you the mysteries of God." But Mrs. Williamson would not formally " notify the curate of her intention to present herself at the communion"; till she did so Wesley would not " advertise her wherein she had done wrong " ; and so the sad nature of Mrs. Williamson's offence remains to this day unknown. Meanwhile, a grand jury of forty-four persons about one-fifth of the adult male population of the town con- sidered the case. There were twelve charges against Wesley, ranging from one of "inverting the order and method of the liturgy," to " searching into and meddling with affairs of private families." A majority of the grand jury found ten of these charges proved ; a minority of twelve acquitted Wesley, and declared that the charges were "an artifice of Mr. Causton's, designed to blacken Mr. Wesley's character." Wesley, when called upon to plead, took the ground that nine of the ten charges were of an ecclesiastical nature, as to which the court had no jurisdiction. The tenth, that of speaking and writing to Mrs. Williamson, was of a secular character, and he demanded to be heard upon it at once. His enemies, however, were in no haste to bring the issue to a trial. They wished to use the charges as a device for driving Wesley from the colony. The military chaplain at Frederica was appointed to conduct religious services hi Savannah, and Wesley's office was thus practically taken from him. The weeks crept on ; Wesley found that he could neither secure a trial nor do his work as chaplain, and he deter- mined to sail for England. He posted up a paper in the great square, with the announcement, "Wnereas John Wesley designs shortly to set out for England," &c. He was notified that he must not leave the settlement till he had answered the charges against him. Wesley answered that he had already attended seven sessions of the court for that purpose, and had been refused the opportunity of pleading. He refused to sign any bond pledging himself to appear before the court, and an order was published requiring all loyal persons to prevent him leaving the settlement. He was, in substance, a prisoner at large. Wesley's enemies, it is clear, wished not only to drive A STRANGE MISSIONARY 111 him from the settlement, but to make his departure wear the look of a flight from justice. Wesley conducted evening prayers that day ; and then, he says, " about 8 o'clock, the tide then serving, I shook off the dust from my feet and left Georgia, after having preached the Gospel there not as I ought, but as I was able, one year and nearly nine months." A troublesome journey, parti v by boat, and partly on foot, brought Wesley and his three companions to Charlestown, and ten days later, on December 22, he set sail for England. A strangely troubled chapter in his life was closed. CHAPTER VII REACHING THE GOAL WESLEY returned from America a visibly defeated man. His ministry had failed ; his character was damaged ; his future was dark. He was not exactly a fugitive from the law, but his own flock had used the law to drive him from their shores. He would land in England hopelessly dis- credited ; and as he meditated during the long eventless days of the return voyage, Wesley saw all this in clearest vision. His career was marred, if not wrecked. But Wesley was the last man in the world to dwell on any injury to his reputation, or to his pocket, or to his secular career. The tragedy of the situation, he felt, lay in the fact that he was a spiritual failure. His religion, with its passionate zeal, its heroic intensity, its unsparing self-sacrifice, yet gave neither peace to his own heart nor power to reach the hearts of others. This is the bitter analysis of his own spiritual state at this moment : "Tuesday, January 24, 1738. I have a fair summer religion. I can talk well ; nay, and believe myself, while no danger is near : but let death look me in the face, and my spirit is troubled. Nor can I say, ' To die is gain ! ' ' I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun My last thread I shall perish on the shore ! ' "I think, verily, if the Gospel be true, I am safe; for I not only have given, and do give, all my goods to feed the poor ; I not only give my body to be burned, drowned, or whatever God shall appoint for me ; but I follow after charity (though not as I ought, yet as I can), if haply I may attain it. I now believe the Gospel is true. ' I show my faith by my works,' by staking my all upon it. I would do so again and again a thousand times, if the choice were still to make. Whoever sees me, sees I would be a Christian. Therefore ' are my ways not like other men's ways.' 112 REACHING THE GOAL 113 Therefore I have been, I am content to be, 'a byword, a proverb of reproach.' But in a storm I think, ' What if the Gospel be not true?'" This is a bitter record ; it makes plain the shadow under which Wesley was living. Wesley was a lonely man, too, on that sad voyage. Delamotte was left behind in America; Charles Wesley and Ingham were already in England. Wesley had no companionship but his own bitter thoughts, and his mood of depression is reflected in every line of his Journal. He describes himself as being "sorrowful and very heavy, though I could give no particular reason for it." He notes in himself "a fearlulness and heaviness," which almost continually weighed him down. There is a touch of keenest pathos in the sentences he writes in his Journal. " I went to America to convert the Indians, but, oh, who shall convert me?" He proceeds to deliberately assess himself, and it is with a severity of self-judgment little less than cruel. His words must be quoted in full, with the significant footnotes in brackets and in italics, which Wesley himself appended in later years, and which represent his own wiser judgment on himself: " It is now two years and almost four months since I left my native country, in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity ; but what have I learned myself in the meantime ? Why (what I the least of all suspected), that I who went to America to convert others was never myself converted to God. [/ am not sure of this.] ' I am not mad,' though I thus speak ; but, ' I speak the words of truth and soberness ' ; if haply some of those who still dream may awake, and see, that as I am, so are they. "Are they read in philosophy 1 ? So was I. In ancient or modern tongues 1 So was I also. Are they versed in the science of divinity? I, too, have studied it many years. Can they talk fluently upon spiritual things? The very same could I do. Are they plenteous in alms? Behold, I gave all my goods to feed the poor. Do they give of their labour as well as of their substance ? I have laboured more abundantly than they all. Are they willing to suffer for their brethren? I have thrown up my friends, reputation, ease, country ; I have put my life in my hand, wander- ing into strange lands ; I have given my body to be devoured by the deep, parched up with heat, consumed by toil and weariness, or whatsoever God should please to bring upon me. But does all H 114 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY this (be it more or less, it matters not) make me acceptable to God ? Does all I ever did or can know, say, give, do, or suffer, justify me in His sight ? Yea, or the constant use of all the means of grace (which, nevertheless, is meet, right, and our bounden duty) ? Or that I know nothing of myself ; that I am as touching outward moral righteousness, blameless ? Or, to come closer yet, the having a rational conviction of all the truths of Christianity ? Does all this give me a claim to the holy, heavenly, divine character of a Christian ? By no means. If the oracles of God are true ; if we are still to abide by 'the law and the testimony,' all these things, though, when ennobled by faith in Christ [/ had even then the faith of a servant, though not that of a scm], they are holy and just and good, yet without it are ' dung and dross,' meet only to be purged away by ' the fire that never shall be quenched.' "This, then, have I learned in the ends of the earth, that I ' am fallen short of the glory of God ' ; that my whole heart is ' altogether corrupt and abominable ' ; and, consequently, my whole life ; seeing it cannot be, that an ' evil tree ' should ' bring forth good fruit ' : that ' alienated ' as I am from the life of God, I am a ' child of wrath ' [/ believe not\, an heir of hell : that my own works, my own sufferings, my own righteousness, are so far from reconciling me to an offended God, so far from making any atonement for the least of those sins, which ' are more in number than the hairs of my head,' that the most specious of them need an atonement themselves, or they cannot abide His righteous judgment. . . . "If it be said that I have faith (for many such things have I heard, from many miserable comforters), I answer, So have the devils a sort of faith ; but still they are strangers to the covenant of promise. So the Apostles had even at Cana in Galilee, when Jesus first ' manifested forth His glory ' ; even then they, in a sort, ' believed on Him ' ; but they had not then ' the faith that over- cometh the world.' The faith I want is [the faith of a son], ' A sure trust and confidence in God, that, through the merits of Christ, my sins are forgiven, and I reconciled to the favour of God.' "* That, even allowing for the qualifying footnotes of a later date, is a bit of very terrible self-description. Wesley, it is clear, was in no mood to write soft things about himself. Later, we may discuss whether the verdict Wesley passes on himself in this rnood of depressed feeling was quite accurate; meanwhile, the mood itself is worth noting. His pride is gone. The sense of defeat and failure is complete. He knows there is something in Christianity 1 Journal, February 29, 1736. REACHING THE GOAL 115 not yet attained. His mood is one of utter self-abase- ment : "All my works, all my righteousness, my prayers, need an atonement for themselves ; so that my mouth is stopped. I have nothing to plead. God is holy; I am unholy. God is a con- suming fire ; I am altogether a sinner, meet to be consumed." The Wesley who embarked for Georgia in 1735 and the Wesley who returned to England in 1738 are thus wholly different men. Wesley had put his theology once more, as at Wroote, to the test of actual life, and it had failed. He had not converted the Indians ; he had only learned that he was not converted himself. There must be some fatal flaw in his creed or in his methods. The essential secret of Christianity its gift of peace to the conscience, and of power over men evaded him. Why had he failed ? What was it turned such high courage, such splendid devotion, such unsparing self-denials, to mere failure? Who reads the secret of Wesley's failure has got to the very heart of Christianity. This new mood had, of course, its gains. For one thing, Wesley's theology, from this point, passes out of the pendulum condition. He had already, as we have seen, abandoned mysticism ; he had seen its deadly nature. Ritualism, too, had failed. It only bred strife. His own austere legalism left the spirit unfed. This ascetic found that a harried body did not ensure a soul at peace. And from this point conscience and intellect in Wesley swung definitely to the evangelical reading of Christianity. All this was, visibly, a stage in a great spiritual process. Wesley was being prepared for the touch of another teacher, and for the entrance into his life of a new experience. As Wesley landed, the ship in which Whitefield was about to sail for America lay at anchor in the Downs. Wesley had looked forward to the inspiration of Whitefield's com- radeship ; and he grudged sending so fine a spirit to the thankless work he himself had abandoned at Savannah. He promptly sent a note to Whitefield on board his ship. " When I saw God by the wind which was carrying you out brought me in," he wrote, " I asked counsel ol God. His answer you have enclosed." 116 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY The enclosure was a slip of paper with the sentence on it, " Let him return to London." Wesley had settled the question of whether Whitefield should go or stop by sortilege, with this result. But Whitefield had a sortilege of his own, and the sudden emergence in his memory of the story of the prophet that turned back at the bidding of another prophet, and was devoured by a lion in con- sequence as told in the Book of Kings decided him to go on his voyage; and Wesley, at the most critical moment of his life, was thus left without his great comrade. Whitefield was just then in the dawn of his amazing popularity in England. He was little more than a lad, yet crowds hung enchanted on the music of his lips. And the contrast betwixt Wesley creeping back to England a spirit-broken and defeated man, and Whitefield sailing out at the same moment with a nimbus of brilliant popu- larity about him, is little less than dramatic. Wesley landed at Deal on the morning of February i, and immediately proceeded to read prayers and preach in the house in which he lodged. Whatever was clouded in his spiritual sky, the point of duty always shone with lumi- nous clearness. Whether his own spiritual condition was happy or unhappy, he must try to mend the spiritual condition of others. He lived in the spirit of the words which he afterwards made part of the Covenant service read every year in all the Churches he founded, "If I die, I will die at Thy door. If I sink, I will sink in Thy ship!" He went straight to London, where he had to give an account of himself to the trustees of the settlement in Georgia, and here he met his brother Charles, to whom his arrival was an astonishment. His acquaintance with the Moravians in Savannah naturally made him turn to Moravians in London, and, on Tuesday, February 7 "a day much to be remembered," as he says in his Journal he met at the house of a Dutch merchant Peter Bohler, a man destined to profoundly influence his life. Bohler had been educated at Jena University, and had joined the Moravians while yet a lad. He had been ordained as a Moravian missionary by Count Zinzendorf, and was on his way to Carolina when Wesley met him .; REACHING THE GOAL 117 He was just then delivering addresses, through an inter- preter, to little audiences in London, and some strange spiritual influence accompanied his words. Wesley and Bohler recognised each other, almost at the moment they met, as kindred spirits. The Moravian described Wesley to Count Zinzendorf as "a man of good principles, who knew he did not properly believe on the Saviour, and was willing to be taught." Of Charles Wesley he says, " He is at present very much distressed in his mind, but does not know how he shall begin to be acquainted with the Saviour. Our mode of believing in the Saviour seems so easy to Englishmen, that they cannot reconcile themselves to it. If it were a little more difficult, they would much sooner find their way into it. They take it for granted," said this shrewd but simple- hearted Moravian, " that they believe already, and try to prove their faith by their works, and thus so torment themselves that they are at heart very miserable.'" Wesley went with Bohler to Oxford, and listened eagerly to the teaching of his new friend. He guessed dimly that here, at last, lay the secret which had evaded him so long. And yet the simple speech of the Moravian sounded, in Wesley's ears, like the accents of an unknown tongue. "I understood him not," he said, "and least of all when he said, 'Mi frater, mi frater; excoquenda est ista tua philosophia.' " What had Wesley's " philosophy " done that it was necessary to jettison it ! But Wesley was teachable, and on March 4 he records that he spent a day with Peter Bohler, " by whom, in the hands of the great God, I was, on Sunday, the 5th, clearly convinced of unbelief ; of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved." Later, Wesley says, " Bohler amazed me more and more by the account he gave of fruits of faith, the love, holiness, and happiness that he affirmed to attend it." Wesley frankly accepted this teaching. True faith must produce these fruits. But Wesley was first and last a logician, and he asks himself, " How can I preach to others wno have not faith myself ? " Bohler's advice was direct and practical, " Preach faith till you have it," he said, " and then because you have it you will preach faith." Coleridge burlesques this by saying tnat it amounts to " Tell a lie long enough and often enough, and you'll be 118 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY sure to end by believing it." But then Coleridge fails completely to understand the sense of Bohler's advice! Wesley himself was in no mood to cavil. ' : On the very next day, Monday, 6th," he records, " I began preaching this new doctrine, though my soul started back from the work. The first person to whom I offered salvation by faith alone was a prisoner under sentence of death," and Wesley confesses that he found the task, in this particu- lar shape, the more difficult, " as I had been many years a zealous asserter of the impossibility of a death-bed repentance." The condemned man promptly confuted Wesley's doubts by accepting the new doctrine, and, in the divine strength bred of it, showing "a composed cheer- fulness" and "a serene peace," while he stood on the very scaffold. Wesley was convinced that Bohler's teaching as to faith and its fruits was Scriptural ; nay, it was the doctrine of the Church of England itself. But a doubt yet re- mained. How could the great spiritual process by which a man passed from death unto life be an instantaneous work? Yet, on examination, Wesley found that almost every conversion recorded in the New Testament was an instantaneous work. It might well be, however, that what was common in the first century had become im- possible in the eighteenth century. But, "on Sunday the 22nd," records Wesley, " I was beat out of this retreat, too, by the concurring evidence of several living witnesses, who testified God had thus wrought in themselves, giving them, in a moment, such a faith in the blood of His Son as translated them out of darkness into light, out of sin and fear into holiness and happiness. Here," writes Wesley, " ended my disputing. I could now only cry out, ' Lord, help Thou my unbelief ! ' " During all these days of stress and search, of doubt and of yearning, Wesley's zeal in practical work never relaxed. It grew even more urgent. Whatever his own spiritual fortunes, he must warn others of their perils and of their duties. To every one man or woman, rich or poor, with whom he was for a moment in company he would speak some word for his Master. The passing traveller on the road, the ostler who took the bridle of his horse, the servant of the house, the chance guest at the table REACHING THE GOAL 119 to each, in turn, Wesley uttered some brief, solemn, unpreluded word of counsel and always with strange effect. At one inn, Wesley and his companion were served by a gay young woman, who at first listened to them with utter indifference. When they went away, however, " she fixed her eyes, and neither moved nor said one word, but appeared as much astonished as if she had seen one risen from the dead." And there must have been something to compel astonishment, and even to startle, in these sudden and unconventional challenges of Wesley. His appearance the thin, clear, intense face, the level, steady eyes, the dress of the clergyman, the brow of the scholar, the accent of the gentleman all these gave startling power to the unprefaced and sudden appeal, that seemed to break out of eternity, and to have something of the awe of eternity about it. Charles Wesley had already found the spiritual de- liverance he sought. He was just recovering from pleurisy ; and when the new-born joy broke into his soul, Wesley records, " his bodily strength returned, also, from that hour." Coleridge regards this as an inversion of cause and effect. All that had happened, he thinks, was that the pleurisy was gone ; and Charles Wesley mistook the improvement of his health for a spiritual change. In the misinterpreted physical ferment of that vanished pleurisy, Charles Wesley, according to Coleridge, somehow lived to the end of his days ! So simply can a great philosopher explain away spiritual phenomena! The conversion of Charles Wesley was marked by a curious incident. He was lying ill, sad, and burdened; trembling at the point of a faith he was yet unable to exercise. A devout woman in the house, who assisted in nursing him, was seized with the conviction that she ought to speak some words of comfort to him. But he was a clergyman, and she only a servant. How could she venture on such an impertinence ? She took Mr. Bray, in whose house Charles Wesley was lying, aside, and with a burst of tears told him of the impulse which pressed with overpowering energy upon her, and asked how could she, a poor, weak, sintul creature, undertake to guide a minister ? 120 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY "Go, in the name of the Lord," said Mr. Bray; '-speak your words. Christ will work" The pair knelt down and prayed together ; but after they had parted, the trembling woman knelt down by herself, and prayed afresh. Then, walking with timid feet to the door of the room where Charles Wesley was lying, she said, softly, but clearly, " In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise ! Thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities ! " Wesley, according to his own version, was compos- ing himself to sleep when these words, coming from unseen lips, fell on his ears. " They struck me," he says, "to the heart. I never heard words uttered with like solemnity. I sighed, and said within myself, ' Oh that Christ would thus speak to me ! ' I lay musing and trembling." He made inquiries, and presently the poor maid said, "It was I, a weak, sinful creature, that spoke. But the words were Christ's. He commanded me to say them, and so constrained me that I could not forbear." And those words, spoken by the lips of an ignorant woman, and under that mysterious impulse, brought spiritual deliverance to Charles Wesley ! Meanwhile Wesley was beginning to reflect how ill his teachers had served him. He had sat at the feet of a Kempis, of Jeremy Taylor, and of William Law. He had been the most docile of scholars; he had followed their counsels at all costs; and they had left him bank- rupt ! A Kempis and Taylor were beyond his reach, but William Law still lived. He was the teacher, indeed, of thousands; and Wesley turned upon him with a sort of fierce challenge, kindled by the sense of wasted years, and the memory of needless sufferings. For two years, he wrote to Law, he had lived by his theology; he had taught it to others. It had been to Wesley himself a hateful yoke, and to those to whom Wesley preached an idle sound. Wesley, by God's mercy, had found, at last, a wiser teacher, who .had taught him the true secret of Christianity, " Believe, and thou shalt be saved ! Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all thy heart, and nothing shall be impossible to thee; strip thyself naked of thine own works and righteousness, and flee to Him." REACHING THE GOAL 121 In that teaching Wesley saw the promise of the fulfil- ment of all his needs : " ' Now, sir,' he cries to Law, ' suffer me to ask, How will you answer it to our common Lord that you never gave me this advice 1 Why did I scarcely ever hear you name the name of Christ ; never so as to ground anything upon faith in His blood ? If you say you advised other things as preparatory to this, what is this but laying a foundation below the foundation ? Is not Christ, then, the First as well as the Last 1 If you say you advised them be- cause you knew that I had faith already, verily you knew nothing of me ; you discerned not my spirit at all.' " Wesley goes on to say, " I beseech you, sir, by the mercies of God, to consider deeply and impartially whether the true reason of your never pressing this upon me was not this, that you never had it yourself." Never, perhaps, was a great teacher so suddenly ar- raigned by his own pupil ! Law, in reply, reminds Wesley, that he had other teachers, whom he might, on the same grounds, arraign. " Did you not above two years ago," he says, " give a new translation of Thomas a Kempis ? Will you call Thomas to account, and to answer it to God as you did me for not teaching you that doctrine ? " But Law goes on to say he did teach Wesley exactly what Bohler taught him. " You have had a great many conversations with me, and I dare say that you never was with me for half-an-hour without my being large upon that very doctrine, which you make me totally silent and ignorant of." Law was a controversialist as formidable as Wesley himself, and he ended his letter by a very keen thrust : " If you had only this faith till some weeks ago, let me advise you not to be too hasty in believing, that because you have changed your language or expressions, you have changed your faith. The head can as easily amuse itself with a living and justifying faith in the blood of Jesus, as with any other notion ; and the heart, which you suppose to be a place of security, as being the seat of self-love, is more deceitful than the head." It is easy to understand Wesley's sudden fierceness with Law, and yet to sympathise with Law's defence. Law had completely failed ; his teaching cost Wesley years of 122 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY wasted suffering ; yet the fault did not lie wholly in the teacher. It is true that in Law's books, and, no doubt, in his personal talks with Wesley, could be found frequent and full expositions of the evangelical way of salvation. But the emphasis lay elsewhere. There was no true per- spective in Law's theology. Nor was Wesley, in that softened mood, bred of the consciousness of utter failure, in which Bohler found him, and which explains why Bohler's teaching proved so instantly effective. The secret of Law's failure as a teacher, in a word, lies largely in the spiritual condition of his pupil. But Wesley was standing on the verge of a new life. Wednesday, May 24, 1738, was for him the great day of deliverance, and he has described it in words that have become historic. For days he had been seeking peace, as Bohler had taught him, "(i) by absolutely renouncing all dependence, in whole or in part, upon my own works or righteousness, on which I had really grounded my hope of salvation, though I knew it not from my youth up : (2) by adding to the constant use of all the other means of grace continued prayer for this very thing justifying, saving faith ; a fuller reliance on the blood of Christ shed for me ; a trust in Him as my sole justi- fication, sanctification, and redemption." There still, how- ever, lay on him " a strange indifference, dulness, and coldness, and a constant sense of failure." But the dawn of a new and great experience was near All through the memorable day of his conversion it is curious to note how Wesley was eagerly listening as if for some voice calling to him out of the eternal world. He seemed to catch, everywhere, prophetic echoes of some coming message. The very air was full of whispers and omens. When he opened his New Testament at five o'clock in the morning, he tells how his eyes fell on the words, "There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises that we should be partakers of the divine nature." Just before he left his room Wesley opened the book again, and, as with the force of a personal message, there gleamed on him from the open page the sentence, " Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." These strange whispers met him and pursued him every- where. In the anthem in St. Paul's he heard trans- REACHING THE GOAL 123 lated into stormy music the cry of his own heart, " Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, Lord. Lord, hear my voice ; let Thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint." Then, through the chant of the sweet- voiced choir, the thunder of the organ, ran, like a thread of still diviner music, a personal message, a voice whisper- ing to him in reply : " O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous re- demption, and He shall redeem Israel from all his sins ! " " In the evening," he says, " I went very unwillingly to the society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans," and across more than two centuries the great German spoke to the great Englishman. What followed must be told in Wesley's own words. "About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation ; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart. But it was not long before the enemy suggested, ' This cannot be faith ; for where is thy joy ? ' Then was I taught that peace and victory over sin are essential to faith in the Captain of our salvation ; but that, as to the transports of joy that usually attend the beginning of it, especially in those who have mourned deeply, God sometimes giveth, sometimes withholdeth, them ac- cording to the counsels of His own* will." l The fluctuations in Wesley's gladness during those first moments of deliverance really prove Wesley's kinship with all believing hearts in every age. Human nature is hardly capable of one sustained, unshadowed, perpetual joy. But bouthey fastens on this very feature in Wesley's experience and extracts from it an argument against its genuineness. " Here," he says, " is a plain contradiction in terms; an assurance which did not assure him." Cole- ridge, as happens with amusing frequency, disagrees with both Southey and Wesley. 1 Journal, Mav 24, 1738. 124 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY " ' This assurance,' he says, ' amounted to little more than a strong pulse or throb of sensibility, accompanying the vehement volition of acquiescence, an ardent desire to find the position true and a concurring determination to receive it as truth. That the change took place in a society of persons all highly excited aids and confirms me in this explanation.' " Coleridge, it will be seen, invents his facts. There was no " excitement " in the little company in which a single voice was audible, reading nothing more exciting than a bit of exposition translated from the German. But though Coleridge distrusts Wesley he contradicts Southey. " Surely," he says, " it is rendering the word ' assurance ' too absolutely to affirm its incompatibility with any in- trusive suggestion of the memory or the fancy." There is a flash of real insight in those words ! Charles Wesley- was not present in that little room at Al^ersgate at the supreme moment of his brother's life. He was lying at home sick, and was engaged in prayer. The first impulse of John Wesley and those about him was to carry the news to the younger brother. " Towards ten," writes Charles Wesley, " my brother was brought in triumph by a troop of our friends, and declared, ' I believe.' We sang a hymn with great joy and parted with prayer." The hymn is supposed to be that beginning with the verse : ./- s " Where shall my wondering soul begin : How shall I all to heaven aspire ? A slave redeemed from death and sin, A brand plucked from eternal fire. How shall I equal triumphs raise, Or sing my great Deliverer's praise ? " Charles Wesley had just composed that fine hymn in the glow of his own conversion, and it was published a few months later. Its music runs through the whole history of Methodism; the experience it reflects is repeated wherever a human soul with intelligent faith receives Christ. It is interesting to note the historic relations of Wesley's conversion. The two Reformations of Germany and of England touch here. They touched, indeed, at an earlier stage. Who traces the great spiritual movement REACHmG THE GOAL 125 under Luther, which transfigured Germany and created Protestantism, must go back beyond Luther to another Lincolnshire parsonage to Lutterworth, where John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, and was the centre of the spiritual movement which during the fourteenth century swept over England. The English reformer influenced Germany almost as much as he in- fluenced his native land. John Huss himself made no secret of the debt he owed to Wyclifie, and the Council of Constance, which burnt the body of John Huss, directed Wycliife's bones to be also burnt. Englishman and Bohemian, in its judgment, represented twin forces, and must be smitten with like penalties. The Moravian Brethren come, through the stormy generations which followed, by direct spiritual descent from Huss; Luther was his spiritual heir. And so, after more than three hundred years, Wycliff'e's teaching came back to England in Bohler ; it spoke to Wesley from Luther's lips in the little gathering in Aldersgate Street. Great debts are, in this way, sometimes greatly paid. CHAPTER VIII WHAT HAD HAPPENED THE question may now be asked, What was it really happened in that little room in Aldersgate Street on the night of May 24, 1738? Something did happen: some- thing memorable, something enduring. It changed Wesley's life. It lifted him, at a breath, out of doubt into certainty. It transfigured weakness into power. Nay, it did something more; it changed the course of history ! A purely secular witness like Lecky declares the movement which had its starting-point in that little room on that night is historically of greater importance than all the splendid victories by land or sea won under Pitt. But for it there would be no Meihodist Church under any sky, and English-speaking Protestantism itself, if it still survived or if it had not found another Wesley would be bankrupt of spiritual force. Now, science requires for such an effect an adequate cause; and some of the causes assigned, though they bear the authority of famous names, are of quite humorous inadequacy. Coleridge, as we have seen, discovers in Charles Wesley's conversion nothing more than a re- covery from pleurisy. It represented a fall of tem- perature in his blood, not the entrance of new spiritual forces into his character. Southey is disposed in the same way to resolve Wesley's spiritual experiences into physical terms. He traces the emotions of that great hour on the night of May 24 to the state of his pulse or of his stomach. But to make John Wesley's stomach, and not his soul, the scene of such wonderful phenomena, the source whence radiate such far-reaching forces, can only be regarded as one of the most surprising feats of unconscious humour on record. The " explanations " of Coleridge and Southey explain nothing ; they simply reflect that obstinate reluctance to admit the existence 126 WHAT HAD HAPPENED 127 and validity of spiritual forces which is the last disguise of unbelief. Wesley's own explanation is that in that little meeting, and at that hour so precisely fixed, he was " converted." And he probably understood what happened a little better than his as yet unborn critics. But to this view many persons object that Wesley was really converted long before that night. If John Wesley was not a Christian when toiling on his spiritual treadmill at Oxford and in Georgia, then, cries Canon Overton, " God help all those who profess and call themselves Christians ! " And multitudes, no doubt, will join in emphatic and, indeed, in somewhat alarmed agreement with Canon Overton. Let that great experience be recalled which came to Wesley after reading Bishop Taylor's " Holy Living." " Instantly," he says, " I resolved to dedicate all my life to God, all my thoughts and words and actions, being thoroughly convinced that there was no medium, but that every part of my life, not some part only, must either be a sacrifice to God or myself, that is the devil." Was not that the true turning-point of Wesley's life ? Jeremy Taylor's teaching certainly acted as a pre- cipitating shock to all the longings and convictions of Wesley's spiritual nature. They crystallised at its touch into an unshakable purpose. He did at that moment surrender to the great forces and accept the great duties of religion. And he did this with a decision and com- pleteness rare in human experience. "Instantly," he says, " I resolved ! " To Wesley, no half measures, no easy compromises, were at any time possible. Even though his reading of truth was sadly mistaken, his loyalty to it was of heroic fibre. Religion for him was no pleasant anodyne, a premium paid to secure eternal safety, a decorous fringe to the outer garment of his life. It was the chief business of existence. There was in Wesley's religion, too, at every stage, the essential note of passion. He would follow the truth as he saw it at all risks and through all worlds. Was this not a conversion ? Did it not bring him into the household of God's children ? Here was certainly that root of all religion, the submitted will. Why, following this rhythm betwixt the human soul and God, did there 128 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY not come, in Wesley's case, that eternal music of peace, hushing all discords, which is its product ? If he had died then, would he not have been saved ? As to this Wesley himself doubted. He offers con- flicting judgments. " I, who went to America to convert others," he says, "was never myself converted to God." But, later, with a wise doubt, he writes : " I am not sure of this." Later still, and with clearer insight, he wrote of himself as having at that time " the faith of a servant, not of a son." The truth is, Wesley simply did not understand at that stage the Christianity in which he had been nurtured and of which he was a teacher. He had sat at the feet of many instructors and had read many books. He had been a sacerdotalist, an ascetic, a mystic, a legalist, all in turns nay, all together ! And yet, through all these stages, he had persistently misread the true order of the spiritual world. He believed that a changed life was not the fruit of forgiveness, but its cause. Good works, he held, came before forgiveness and constituted the title to it ; they did not come after it and represent its effects. He had, in every mood of his soul, that is, missed the great secret of Christianity, lying so near, and level to the intelligence of a child ; the secret of a personal salvation, the free gift of God's infinite love through Christ ; a salvation received through Christ and by faith ; a salvation attested by the Spirit of God and verified in the consciousness. Wesley himself supplies the evidence that up to this time he had missed this conception of religion. We have his spiritual chronology drawn out by his own hand, in a series of self-judgments, all dated and catalogued, and making a complete map of his religious experience. 1 He gives this by way of preface to his own account of what took place at the room in Aldersgate Street, and he explains what, at each successive stage, had been the foundation of his religion. We may quote these, prefixing to each mood the stage in Wesley's life to which it belonged : THE CHILD. " I was carefully taught that I could only be saved by universal obedience; by keeping all the commandments of God ; in the meaning of which I was diligently instructed. And 1 Journal, May 24, 1738. WHAT HAD HAPPENED 129 those instructions, so far as they respected outward duties and sins, I gladly received and often thought of. But all that was said to me of inward obedience, or holiness, I neither understood nor remembered. So that I was indeed as ignorant of the true meaning of the law as I was of the Gospel of Christ. THE SCHOOLBOY. " The next six or seven years were spent at school ; where, outward restraints being removed, I was much more negligent than before. . . . However, I still read the Scriptures, and said my prayers morning and evening. And what I now hoped to be saved by was : ( I ) Not being so bad as other people; (2) having still a kindness for religion; (3) reading the Bible, going to church, and saying my prayers. THE UNIVERSITY STUDENT. " Being removed to the university for five years, I still said my prayers both in public and private. ... I cannot well tell what I hoped to be saved by now, when I was continually sinning against that little light I had, unless by those transient fits of what many divines taught me to call repentance. HOLY ORDERS. " I began to alter the whole form of my conversa- tion. . . . I set apart an hour or two a day for religious retirement. I communicated every week. I watched against all sin, whether in word or deed. I began to aim at and pray for inward holiness. So that now doing so much, and living so good a life, I doubted not but I was a good Christian. THE DISCIPLINE OF WILLIAM LAW. "Meeting now with Mr. Law's ' Christian Perfection ' and ' Serious Call,' although I was much offended at many parts of both, yet they convinced me more than ever of the exceeding height, breadth, and depth of the law of God. ... I cried to God for help and resolved not to prolong the time of obeying Him as I had never done before. And by my continued endeavour to keep His whole law, inward and outward, to the utmost of my power, I was persuaded that I should be accepted of Him, and thought I was even then in a state of salvation. THE "HoLY CLUB." "In 1730 I began visiting the prisons, assisting the poor and sick and doing what other good I could by my presence or my little fortune to the bodies and souls of all men. To this end I deprived myself of all superfluities and many that are called the necessaries of life. ... I carefully used, both in public and private, all the means of grace at all oppor- tunities. I omitted no occasion for doing good. I for that reason suffered evil. And all this I knew to be nothing unless as it was directed towards inward holiness. Accordingly this, the image of God, was what I aimed at in all, by doing His will and not my own. Yet when, after continuing for some years in this course, I apprehended myself to be near death, I could not find that all this T 130 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY gave me any assurance of acceptance with God. At this I was not a little surprised, not imagining I had been all this time building on the sand nor considering that ' other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid ' by God, ' even Christ Jesus.' THE MYSTIC. " Soon after a contemplative man convinced me yet more than I was before convinced that outward works are nothing, being alone ; and in several conversations instructed how to pursue inward holiness or a union of the soul with God. But even of his instructions (though I then received them as the words of God) I cannot but now observe : (1) That he spoke so in- cautiously against trusting in outward works that he discouraged me from doing them at all; (2) that he recommended mental prayer and the like exercises as the most effectual means of purifying the soul and uniting it with God. Now these were, in truth, as much my own works as visiting the sick or clothing the naked ; and the union with God, thus pursued, was as really my own righteousness as any I had before pursued under another name. THE MISSIONARY. " In this refined way of trusting to my own works and my own righteousness I dragged on heavily, finding no comfort or help therein till the time of my leaving England. . . . All the time I was at Savannah I was thus beating the air. Being ignorant of the righteousness of Christ, which, by a living faith in Him, bringeth salvation to ' every one that believeth,' I sought to establish my own righteousness, and so laboured in the fire all my days. . . . Before I had willingly served sin ; now it was unwillingly, but still I served it. I fell and rose and fell again. . . . During this whole struggle between nature and grace, which had now continued above ten years, I had many remarkable returns to prayer, especially when I was in trouble. I had many sensible comforts. . . . But I was still ' under the law,' not ' under grace.' THE RETURN TO ENGLAND. " On my return to England, Jan- uary 1738, being in imminent danger of death and very uneasy on that account, I was strongly convinced that the cause of that un- easiness was unbelief, and that the gaining of a true, living faith was the ' one thing needful ' for me. But still I fixed not this faith on its right object ; I meant only faith in God, not faith in or through Christ. I knew not that I was wholly void of this faith, but only thought I had enough of it." That long self-analysis is clear, sustained, and final. As a matter of intellectual knowledge, Wesley, it is need- less to say, was familiar with the true sense of Christianity. His Moravian teacher's theology was, and is, in the WHAT HAD HAPPENED 131 Thirty-nine Articles. But for Wesley, as for his genera- tion, these had become a set of pale and colourless syllables out of which all reality had drained. And his experience proves afresh that a creed may survive as a bit of literature ; it may be chanted in hymns, and woven into prayers and solemnly taught as a theology, and yet be exhausted of all life. The great phrases may be depolarised, not to say dead. And this is a warning for all time. Wesley's Church holds to-day, and holds tenaciously, the doctrines which, up to this stage, Wesley himself had missed. These, indeed, are for us weighted by the history they have shaped. They are authenticated by the literature and the hymnology they have inspired. They have so completely passed out of controversy that they have become plati- tudes. The peril is they may become unverified formulae again. Wesley declares that he owed his conversion to the teaching of Peter Bohler. What, then, exactly was that teaching? Bohler did unconsciously the supreme work of his life during those few days in London and at Oxford when he was conversing with Wesley. The humble- minded Moravian, wise only in spiritual science, touches Wesley and then vanishes! But he helped to change the religious history of England, little as he himself dreamed of it. And what he taught Wesley is sufficiently clear. In substance, it was three things, things which lie in the very alphabet of Christianity, but which, somehow, the teachings of a godly home, of a great University, of an ancient Church, and of famous books had not taught Wesley. These are that salvation is through Christ's atonement alone and not through our own works ; that its sole condition is faith ; and that it is attested to the spiritual consciousness by the Holy Spirit. These truths to-day are platitudes ; to Wesley they were, at this stage of his life, discoveries. Wesley's mistake was, of course, fatal. It is perfectly clear that through all the stages of his experience up to this point self, in many disguises, had taken the place of Christ. Wesley always puts the emphasis on himself, on his own motives, acts, self-denials, prayers, aspirations 132 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY and not on his Saviour. And woe to the soul that shifts the centre of its faith in this fashion and finds that centre, not in the redeeming offices the great and radiant figure of the living Christ, but in the imperfect and broken fragments of its own acts and merits ! Not even what the Holy Ghost does in us can at any stage take, as the reason of our confidence before God, the place of what Christ has done for us. But now, as a result of Bohler's teaching, there broke on Wesley's eyes a true vision of the redeeming work and offices of Jesus Christ. Up to this point he had taken part of those offices on himself a mistake common in all ages, repeated in myriads of lives, and always most deadly. In the after years of his life his favourite text was that great passage which declares that Christ is " made of God unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and re- demption." But in the sad years which went before that memorable hour in Aldersgate Street Wesley never had conceived that Christ is made, in some deep and mysteri- ous sense, righteousness to the believing soul. As he himself puts it: "I had faith, but I fixed not this faith on its right object. I meant only faith in God, not faith in and through Christ." Now not even God's mercy if that mercy could come to us in some other shape than that presented in the mystery of Christ and His redemption would satisfy the human conscience. Wesley had, as few men ever had, the sense of sin and its hatefulness : a vision of the divine law holy, stainless, august dishonoured by sin. And the sense of the profound and eternal discord betwixt his sinful consciousness and the stainless righteousness of God forbade all peace. To be barely forgiven, spared by divine mercy, was for Wesley not enough, as it cannot be enough for any human soul. There must be some abiding and fundamental reconciliation with righteousness. Here were two eternal contradictories, mercy and justice. And would it be enough to walk through all the paths of eternity spared of God's mercy, but still condemned by His justice ? What the human soul needs is some meeting-point in its own consciousness betwixt those two mighty opposites. And Wesley learned from Bohler the great secret of WHAT HAD HAPPENED 133 Christianity that in Christ is found that sublime meeting-point. God's gift to the believing soul is not merely pardon, but justification. Christ becomes for that soul " the Lord our righteousness." So the vision which transfigured Wesley's life was that of the complete and all-sufficient offices of Christ in redemption offices of a grace high beyond our very hopes, and deep beyond our comprehension. But Bohler taught him, too, the secret of personal and saving faith. Had not Wesley faith before May 24, 1738 ? Yes, and he himself has told us what kind of a faith it was. It was, he says, "a speculative, notional, airy shadow which lives in the head and not in the heart." The homilies of his own Church, it is true, might have taught Wesley a better definition of faith than this ! It is " a sure trust and confidence which a man hath in God that by the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven and he is reconciled to the favour of God." Wesley held this definition of faith with perfect intellectual clearness ; but it was a mere unrealised abstraction. Dr. Dale points out that this definition is itself a para- dox. " If faith is the condition precedent to salvation, how can it be a belief that we are saved already ? " He tries to solve the paradox by asking, " Is it not true that God has already given us believers and unbelievers alike eternal redemption hi Christ ? " Faith does not create a new fact, but only accepts, and brings into the realms of consciousness, a fact which exists already and inde- pendently of it. But that is teaching which easily runs into perilous realms ! It may be added that the paradox of faith lies elsewhere. If it is " the gift of God," how can it be itself the condition of other gifts ? If faith is the gift of God, the responsibility of its non-existence lies on God ! How can it be held for guilt hi a man that he does not pos- sess what can only come to him by the gift of God ? The truth, as far as it can be expressed in the terms of human thought, is that faith represents the concurrence of two wills, the Divine and the human. It is impossible without the grace of God; so that grace is an essential, but ever-present, condition of its exercise. But even the grace of God does not produce faith without the consent 134 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY of the human will. Wesley learned, but learned late and slowly, that faith is not merely the struggle of the un- aided soul to reach some act and mood of confidence. It is the surrender of the soul to the helping grace of God ; and only when that surrender is made is the soul up- lifted by a divine impulse to the great heights of rejoicing trust. Wesley learned from Bohler, too, that the pardon re- ceived from Christ is attested to the pardoned soul by the direct witness of the Holy Spirit ; so it brings, as an immediate fruit, a divine peace. This doctrine, of course, was already embedded in Wesley's creed, and he held it with perfect intellectual clearness. "If we dwell in Christ and Christ in us," he had written to his mother many years before, "certainly we must be conscious of it. If we can never have any certainty that we are in a state of salvation, good reason it is that every moment should be spent, not in joy, but in fear and trembling. Then, undoubtedly, in this life we are of all men most miserable." And yet, unconsciously, Wesley had hitherto acted on the theory that the only confidence as to his own spiritual state a man can have, is that which he derives from the contemplation of his own good works, or which he ex- tracts, by a strictly logical process, from such good works. He practically held his mother's belief, that any divinely given consciousness of acceptance with God was a rare experience and one confined to great saints. He tells with much simplicity how Peter Bohler " now amazed me more and more by the account he gave of the fruits of faith, of the holiness and happiness that he affirmed to attend it." Yet, if any doctrine has on it writ large the authority of Scripture and the assent of reason, it is the doctrine of what is technically called " assurance." To deny it is to say that our spiritual consciousness has no office, or that it lies. As a result of forgiveness the most stupendous change has passed over the soul. Its relation to God and to His universe is transfigured. The forgiven sinner is no longer an outcast, but a child. Can we persuade ourselves that this amazing change does not, somehow, report itself to the consciousness? Can it be God's WHAT HAD HAPPENED 135 purpose that the child He has received into His family again should continue to believe, what is now a lie, that he is still an outcast? Though God smiles upon him must he still think that He frowns? After sin's dark substance is gone, can it be God's will that its shadow should remain; that the pardoned soul should carry the burden of sin no longer reckoned against it, and feel the imaginary stains of a guilt that has been washed away ? Is it credible that the only soul to whom God's face wears a mask is the soul He has forgiven ? And He wears a mask to hide His forgiveness ! Surely this is a paradox of incredible quality ! " I be- lieve in the forgiveness of sins." That is a triumphant credo. But who will rejoice in a forgiveness so furtive that not even the soul to which it is granted knows whether or not it has happened ? The denial of the witness of the Spirit involves the most amazing contradiction. The soul before pardon believes, what is true, that it is condemned ; but after the great act of pardon it believes, what is a lie, that it is still condemned. And God keeps silence ! He sends no sign or whisper of comfort. It is pleasing to Him the God of truth ! that His restored and forgiven child should still live in the atmosphere of a falsehood ! This is an incredibility of transcendent scale ! It is in direct contradiction to God's Word : " The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God." This divine witness does not belong to the realm of miracle. It is not independent, as Wesley's experience shows, of human conditions. It varies with the mood of the human heart itself ; it wanes with waning faith or grows clearer with deepening earnestness. It is striking to notice the variations in Wesley's own inood even after this great experience caine to him. On the very night of May 24, after he had left the little room in Aldersgate Street, he says, " I was much buffeted with temptations, but cried out and they fled away." They returned again and again. Two days later he describes himself as " in heaviness because of manifold tempta- tions." Still later he finds " a want of joy," and traces its cause to "want of timely prayer." In Wesley's ex- perience, in brief, as in the experience of all Christians, 136 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY there are fluctuations of spiritual mood. But his experi- ence now had one new feature. He had still to maintain a daily fight with the forces of evil ; but he says, " herein I found the difference between this and my former state. Then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered. Now I was always conqueror!" Here was struggle; but here, too, was victory ! BOOK III THE QUICKENING OF A NATION CHAPTER I ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY " Our light looks like the evening of the world : " in those pathetic and expressive words a " Proposal for a National Reformation of Manners," published in 1694, described the moral condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A new century was dawning, but it seemed as if in the spiritual sky of England the very light of Christianity itself was being turned, by some strange and evil force, into darkness. And it was upon a moral landscape of this sort, dark with the shadows as of some dreadful and swift-coming spiritual eclipse, that Wesley was about to begin his work. It is impos- sible to understand the scale and power of that work without some preliminary attempt to realise the field upon which it was done. It would be easy to multiply testimonies showing how exhausted of living religion, how black with every kind of wickedness, was the England of that day. Its ideals were gross; its sports were brutal; its public life was corrupt; its vice was unashamed. Walpole, indeed, did not invent political corruption, but he systematise*! it; he erected it into a policy ; ne made it shameless ! Cruelty fermented in the pleasures of the crowd, foulness stained the general speech. Judges swore on the bench ; the chaplain cursed the sailors to make them attentive to his sermons ; the king swore incessantly, and at the top of his voice. The Duchess of Marlborough, a story runs, called on a lawyer without leaving her name. " I could not make out who she was," said the clerk afterwards, " but she swore so dreadfully she must be a lady of quality." Ferocious laws still lingered on the Statute-Book. Justice itself was cruel. As late as 1735 men were pressed to death who refused to plead on a capital charge. The law under which women were liable to be 139 140 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY publicly flogged, or to be burned at the stake, was not repealed till 1794. Temple Bar was adorned with a perpetually renewed fresco of human heads. It was the age of the pillory and of the whipping-post ; of gin-hells, and of debtors' prisons, hideous enough to have darkened Dante's Inferno with a new gloom. Drunkenness was the familiar and unrebuked habit even of Ministers of the State. Adultery was a sport, and the shame lay not on the false wife or on the smiling gallant, but on the be- trayed husband. But it is unfair to judge any age by its vices. Human wickedness blackens, more or less, every century. Who wants to know how low England had sunk in the eigh- teenth century must judge of it, not by its worst, but by its best elements by its religion, or what in it was mistaken for religion ; and by the teachers of that religion. For there is no surer test of a religion than the sort of teachers it produces. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to go to a satirist in search of a portrait; and Thackeray's portraits of eighteenth- century divines are, no doubt, etched hi acid. But they are not untrue to life ; their power, indeed, lies in their truth. Of George II., the little, hot-tempered, pugnacious monarch, with the morals and manners of a Jonathan Wild in purple, Thackeray writes in sword-edged phrases. And George II. had divines who matched his morals ; who even consented to treat his amazing morals as virtues ! The King was dead; and "it was a parson," says Thackeray, "who came and wept over this grave, with Walmoden (one of the dead King's many mistresses) sitting on it, and claimed heaven for the poor old man slumbering below. Here was one who had neither dignity, learning, morals, nor wit who tainted a great society by a bad example; who in youth, manhood, old age, was gross, low, and sensual ; and Mr. Porteus, afterwards my Lord Bishop Porteus, says the earth was not good enough for him, and that his only place was heaven ! Bravo, Mr. Porteus! The divine who wept these tears over George the Second's memory wore George the Third's lawn." Thackeray draws a life-like picture of another divine of that day the type of a class Selwyn's chaplain and ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 141 parasite, who has written down his own character in his own letters. And Thackeray sets the dreadful portrait in the perspective of history, when "all the foul pleasures and gambols in which he revelled were played out ; all the rouged faces into which he leered were worms and skulls; all the fine gentlemen whose shoebuckles he kissed lay in their coffins. This worthy clergyman takes care to tell us that he does not believe in his religion, though, thank heaven, he is not so great a rogue as a lawyer. He goes on Mr. Selwyn's errands, any errands, and is proud, he says, to be that gentleman's proveditor. He waits upon the Duke of Queensberry ' old Q ' and exchanges pretty stories with that aristocrat. He comes home ' sifter a hard day's christening,' as he says, and writes to his patron before sitting down to whist and partridges for supper. He revels in the thoughts of oxcheek and burgundy he is a boisterous, uproarious parasite, licks his master's shoes with ex- plosions of laughter, and cunning smack and gusto, and likes the taste of that blacking as much as the best claret in old Q.'s cellar. He has ' Rabelais ' and ' Horace ' at his greasy fingers' ends. He is inexpressibly mean curiously jolly ; kindly and good-natured in secret a tender-hearted knave, not a venomous lickspittle. Jesse says that at his chapel in Long Acre, ' he attained a con- siderable popularity by the pleasing, manly, and eloquent style of his delivery.' " " Was infidelity endemic, and corruption in the air ? " asks Thackeray as he contemplates such amazing divines. The bad morals of George II., he goes on to say, bore their fruit in the early years of George III., and the result was a court and a society as dissolute as England ever knew. Thackeray was a satirist, but these pictures owe nothing to the gall in his inkpot. The satire, we repeat, lies in their truth. Now, a religion has always the sort of clergy it de- serves ; and, taken as a class, the clergy of the eighteenth century were gross and unspiritual because they repre- sented a faith exhausted of all spiritual force. If, in the England of that day, we look behind all mere failures in external morality to the spiritual causes which account for them, these are clear. It was the age of a shallow and confident Deism ; a Deism exultant and militant, served by wit and humour as well as defended by logic. It had capturec 1 literature ; it coloured the general imagi- 142 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY nation ; it stained the common speech ; it sat enthroned in the place of Christian faith. Now Deism of any type is morally impotent; and Deism of the eighteenth-century type is nothing but a little patch of uncertain quicksand set in a black sea of atheism. It does not deny God's existence, but it cancels Him out as a force in human life. It breaks the golden ladder of revelation betwixt heaven and earth. It leaves the Bible discredited, duty a guess, heaven a freak of the uncharted imagination, and God a vague and far- off shadow. Men were left by it to climb into a shadowy heaven on some frail ladder of human logic. And while in those sad days there was this obscuring mist of Deism outside the Churches, inside them there was a mist almost: as evil and dense. Open and confessed Arianism had captured almost completely the dissenting Churches ; and an unconscious and practical Arianism reigned, in spite of its Articles, in the Anglican Church. The sense of sin was faint ; and with it had grown faint, too, the doctrine of a divine and redeeming Christ. The religious literature of that age shows how curiously pale and ineffective the notion of God had become for even those who professed to be His ministers. In the theology of the time "God," says Sir Leslie Stephen, " was an idol compounded of fragments of tradition and of frozen metaphysics." 1 There was a God ; and He had once touched human life. But it was a long time ago, and in a far-off land. He had now emigrated from His own world. The grotesque Deity of Bishop Warburton was, to quote Leslie Stephen again, " a supernatural chief- justice whose sentences were carried out in a non-natural world; a constitutional monarch who had signed a con- stitutionali compact and retired from the active govern- ment of affairs." Of God as the Father of our spirits, as actually living in His own universe and ruling men's lives ; God of whom it might be said in Tennyson's words : " Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands or feet," no trace is to be found in the theology of the eighteenth century. Superstition, according to its theologians, con- 1 " History of English Thought," &c., vol. ii. p. 338. ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 143 sisted in the belief that God ever revealed Himself in the affairs of the modern world. Fanaticism was the imagi- nation that He revealed Himself by any touch, or breath, or thrill of influence to the personal soul. Deism, we repeat, thick with Arctic fogs and frozen with Arctic chills, constitutes the working theology of that unhappy age. In that theology Christ is attenuated to a shadow. He serves as a label for a creed, but He has only the offices of a label. His Gospel did not consist of " good news," but only of good advice. It was not a deliverance, but a philosophy. A decent Chinaman who took Confucius seriously might almost have preached nine-tenths of the sermons of that period. If he had concealed his pig-tail, altered his complexion, disguised himself in cassock and bands, learned a few technical phrases, and spoken of the Gospels as true but very re- mote histories, he might have passed for a sound divine, with a very orthodox appetite for a fat benefice. Lecky says, with cruel accuracy, " Beyond a belief in the doctrine of the Trinity and a general acknowledgment of ,the veracity of the Gospel narratives, the divines of that day taught little which might not have been taught by the disciples of Socrates or the followers of Confucius." Now Christianity does not consist in a code of ethics. It is not a chapter of remote history. It is a group of great and majestic truths ; truths which transcend the understanding, and are robed in mystery ; but which must shape our lives. First and last it is a message of redeem- ing love. The mystery of a divine propitiation through the blood of Christ, of access to God through the priestly offices of Christ, is of its very essence. Its supreme gift is the life of God restored in the soul by the mighty grace of the Holy Spirit. But all these great doctrines, which do not so much belong to Christianity as constitute it, had somehow slipped, not merely from human faith, but almost from human recollection at this stage of English - speaking Christianity. The message of " entrance into the Holiest by the blood of Jesus " had no meaning for men who believed they could saunter into God's presence with a few polite compliments at any time. In the religion of that day there were no tears of repentance. The note 144 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY of passion is silent; the hush of reverence is missing. And all this because the vision of God had grown faint : the sense of sin of what sin means, and of God's remedy for it had perished. Now a religion exhausted of its supernatural contents in this fashion has no power over the human conscience. It transfigures no lives. It inspires no martyrs. It creates no saints. It sends out no missionaries. It generates a morality of ignoble temper. It resembles nothing so much as an atmosphere exhausted of oxygen. And the religion of the eighteenth century was treated as it deserved to be treated. Its very sacraments, " the symbols of atoning grace," became, in Cowper's phrase, "An office key, a pick-lock to a place." Swift, in one of his letters to Stella, writes: "I was early in to see the Secretary, Bolingbroke, but he was gone to his devotions and to receive the Sacrament ; several rakes did the same. It was not for piety, but for employment, according to Act of Parliament." Such a religion could not inspire a saintly or an heroic ministry; and certainly there was not much that was saintly, and still less that was heroic, in the temper of the Anglican clergy in the days of the early Georges. The first great duty of religion was to be tepid. There must be no enthusiasm, no heroics. Extremes were to be shunned. " We should take care never to overshoot ourselves, even in the pursuits of virtues," was the counsel of one of the preachers of that age. " Whether zeal or moderation be the point we aim at, let us keep fire out of one and frost out of the other." " Those words," says Miss Wedgwood, " are the motto of the Church of the eighteenth century." Its divines were much more afraid of being suspected of believing too much, than of doubting everything. Christianity was diligently watered down, by its own teachers, into insipid platitudes. The sin against the Holy Spirit is by Bishop Clarke diluted into " a per- verse refusal to be convinced by the highest evidence of the truth of Christianity." The motive by which religion was urged on the conscience was at bottom an ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 145 appeal to cowardice. Bishop Sherlock, indeed, resolves religion into a judicious balance of odds. " It is ten to one," he says, in substance, "that religion is true. If it turns out to be false the Christian has only lost one- tenth of the amount he staked. If it turns out to be true, the sinner has made a very bad bargain indeed." Logic is the one instrument of a tepid religion. So all the teaching and preaching of the eighteenth-century divines is hi the terms of logic, and has the chill of logic. The religious teachers of that day, in a word, had but half-beliefs, and out of half-beliefs no heroic morality can be extracted. Leslie Stephen says of the most famous preacher of that day, Blair, that "he was a mere washed-out dealer of second-hand commonplaces, who gives the impression that the real man has vanished and left nothing but a wig and gown." Bishop Warburton's conception of the Christian Church may be gathered from a sentence in one of his letters. " The Church," he says, " like the ark of Noah, is worth saving, not for the sake of the unclean beasts that almost fill it and make most noise and clamour in it ; but for the little corner of rationality that is much more depressed by the stink within than by the tempest without." Middleton, another Church digni- tary of that day, wrote a letter to Lord Hervey ridiculing the Articles which he was about to sign in order to take possession of a living. " Though there are many things in the Church (he says) that I wholly dislike, yet while I am content to acquiesce in the ill I shall be glad to taste a little of the good, and so have some amends for that ugly assent and consent which no man of sense will approve of. We read of some of the earliest disciples of Christ who followed Him, not for His works, but for His loaves. To us who had not the happiness to see the one it may be allowed to have some inclination to the other. Your lordship knows a certain person who, with a very low notion of the Church's sacred bread, has a very high relish for a very large share of the temporal. My appetite for each is equally moderate. I have no pretensions to riot in the feast of the elect, but with the sinner in the Gospel to gather up the crumbs that fall from the table." Now a religion of this type, and served by such ministers, inevitably bred ignoble lives. Piety was but K 146 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY a skin of external habits, a form of prudence extended into the spiritual world. If the dusty sermons of that age are put into the retort and their essence distilled, it will be seen to consist of exhortations like these : " Don't be drunk, or you will ruin your health ; nor commit murder, or you shall be hanged. Every man should be happy, and the way to be happy is to be thoroughly respectable." The opinion that Christianity was untrue, but useful to society, representsl the working creed of the educated classes. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reports a plan on foot for taking the " not " out of the Commandments and putting it in the Creed. That is a flash of feminine satire ; but it represents the theory on which whole mul- titudes lived. Bishop Butler has painted the spirit of his time in dark and imperishable colours. " The deplorable distinction of our age," he says, " is an avowed scorn of religion, and a growing disregard of it." But Butler himself, with all his high gifts, supplies, in his own person, an expressive proof of the spiritual blindness and death which lay on the Churches of that day. He forbade Whitefield and the Wesleys to preach in his diocese, though all around his cathedral city lay the most degraded and hopeless class in England the coal-miners of Kingswood, as untouched by any of the forces of Christianity as if they had been savages in Central Africa. That the best, the wisest, the most powerful, the most earnestly convinced of the bishops of that day should take this attitude towards Wesley and his work shows what was the general temper of the clergy of that time. Butler's conscience was not disquieted by the lapse into mere heathenism of a whole class within sound of the bells of his cathedral ; but he grows piously indignant at the spectacle of an ecclesiastical irregularity ! Enthusiasm in good men was, in his eyes, a more alarm- ing spectacle than vice in bad men. What more signifi- cant inversion of spiritual values can be imagined ! No feature of the eighteenth century, indeed, is more curious, or more deeply characteristic, than its dread of "enthusiasm." It was the accursed thing! A sound divine was much more anxious to purge himself of the suspicion of enthusiasm, than of the scandal of heresy. ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 147 It was an age of compromise ; of compromises in politics, in philosophy, in theology ; and compromises are fatal to enthusiasm. They must kill it, or be killed by it. Let it be remembered that two great waves of passion had recently swept over England the Puritan wave that culminated and broke hi the Civil War; and the recoil from Puritanism which found its triumph in the Restora- tion. Great debates, fought with sword and musket, with the prison and the pillory, with Acts of Parliament and sentences of the courts, had left England exhausted. The Whig spirit of compromise which explains the Revolution of 1688 had captured the realm of religion. Men were still sore with the wounds of the strife. The public mind was hi a mood of reflux. It dreaded passion. It hated fanatics. Enthusiasm was a word suspect. Moderation was the chief thing. Now enthusiasm has, or ought to have, its last strong- hold in religion, and in the men who are the teachers of religion. But in the eighteenth century the clergy were the one class in the whole nation in which the fires of enthusiasm were most completely extinct; and this as a result of then* own acts. Within a single generation they had, first, taught the divine right of Kings, and fiercely persecuted all who doubted that doctrine. Then, after 1688, they swallowed their principles, took the oath of allegiance to William, and proceeded to hunt out of rectory and parsonage the stubborn remnant of their own brethren who declined to turn their back on their prin- ciples with the same cheerful facility! Principle of the high and austere sort was, for the moment, discredited in this dreadful fashion by the example set by the clergy themselves. There were some bright spots, it is true, even in this dark landscape. Amongst the fat, well-beneficed, un- spiritual bishops of that day stand the almost saintly figures of Butler and of Berkeley. The century which counted William Law amongst its theologians, and Watts and Doddridge amongst its singers, still had some of the divine glow of religion hi its veins. And there must have been many an English rectory, beside Epworth Parsonage in which burned the clear flame of household piety. And yet the spiritual life of England at tnis moment 148 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY was beyond all doubt swiftly draining away. Its public life corrupt ; its clergy discredited ; its Church frozen ; its theology exhausted of Christian elements. This was the England of the eighteenth century ! It needed a spiritual revolution to save such a people. The airs of Pentecost must blow afresh over the dying land ; the fires of a new Pentecost must fall to kindle the flame of faith in men's souls once more. And Wesley was called, and trained by God, for that great task. CHAPTER II BEGINNING THE WORK WESLEY'S conversion perplexed some of his friends and alarmed others. " If you were not a Christian ever since I knew you," said Mrs. Hutton, the mother of his friend, " you were a great hypocrite, for you made us all believe you were one." Samuel Wesley received the news with a sort of bewildered anger which is almost amusing. His brother, he held, was suffering from an attack of "enthu- siasm " a disease much more deadly than any known to medical science. " Falling into enthusiasm," he writes, " is being lost with a witness. I pleased mvself with the expectation of seeing Jack, but now that is over, and I am afraid of it. I heartily pray God to stop the progress of this lunacy. . . . What Jack means by his not being a Christian till last month I understand not," cries this bewildered High Churchman. " Is baptism nothing ? . . . He must be either unbaptized or an apostate to make his words true." But then John Wesley had already moved to another spiritual climate. In his spiritual chronology the birth- day of a Christian "was now shifted from his baptism to his conversion ; and " in that change," as Miss Wedgwood says, with a flash of profound insight, " the partition line of two great systems is crossed." Wesley, however, was the last man to be moved by the alarms and perplexities of his friends. Already, on June 13 only three weeks after his conversion he was on his way to Germany to visit the Moravian settlements. He loved to study religion in the concrete, to try it by the supreme test of life. The actual experience of the human soul was for him the final lo