CHAPTER V

THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE.

Lord Macaulay’s verdict upon John Wesley, that he possessed a “genius for government not inferior to that of Richelieu,” received immediate demonstration when he came actively into the movement, and has been abundantly confirmed since his death, in the history of the society which he founded. It has been said that all institutions are the prolonged shadow of one mind, and that by the inclusiveness, or power of perpetuity in the institution, we may know the mind of the founder. Much of our last chapter was devoted to some attempt to realise the place and power of Whitefield;[7] what he was in relation to the Revival may be defined by the remark, often made, and by capable critics, that while there have been multitudes of better sermon-makers, it is uncertain whether the Church ever had so great a pulpit orator. In Wesley’s mind everything became structural and organic; he was a mighty master of administration; but he also followed Whitefield’s example, and took to the fields; and very great, indeed, amazing results, followed his ministry.

Footnote 7:

See Chapter XIV. for his place and power in America.

Many of the incidents which are impressive and amusing show the difference between the men. Whitefield overwhelmed the people: Wesley met insolence and antagonism by some sharp, concise, and cuttingly appropriate retort, which was remarkable, considering his stature. But both his presence and his words must have been unusually commanding: “Be silent, or begone,” he turned round sharply and said once to some violent disturbers, and they were obedient to the command.

Wesley’s rencontre with Beau Nash at Bath is a fair illustration of his quiet and almost obscurely sarcastic method of confounding a troublesome person. Preaching in the open air at Bath, the King of Bath, the Master of the Ceremonies, Nash, was so unwise as to attempt to put down the apostolic man. Nash’s character was bad; it was that of an idle, heartless, licentious dangler on the skirts of high society. He appeared in the crowd, and authoritatively asked Wesley by what right he dared to stand there. The congregation was not wholly of the poor; there were a number of fashionable and noble persons present, and among them many with whom this attack had been pre-arranged, and who expected to see the discomfiture of the Methodist by the courtly and fashionable old dandy. Wesley replied to the question simply and quietly that he stood there by the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to him “by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid hands on me and said, ‘Take thou authority to preach the Gospel!’” Nash began to bustle and to be turbulent, and he exclaimed, “This is contrary to Act of Parliament; this is a conventicle.” “Sir,” said Wesley, “the Act you refer to applies to seditious meetings: here is no sedition, no shadow of sedition; the meeting is not, therefore, contrary to the Act.” Nash stormed, “I say it is; besides, your preaching frightens people out of their wits.” “Sir,” said Wesley, “give me leave to ask, Did you ever hear me preach?” “No!” “How, then, can you judge of what you have never heard?” “Sir, by common report.” “Common report is not enough,” said Wesley; “again give me leave to ask is your name not Nash?” “My name is Nash.” And then the reader must imagine Wesley’s thin, clear, piercing voice, cutting through the crowd: “Sir, I dare not judge of _you_ by common report.” There does not seem much in it, but the effect was overwhelming. Nash tried to bully it out a little; but, to make his discomfiture complete, the people took up the case, and especially one old woman, whose daughter had come to grief through the fop, in her way so set forth his sins that he was glad to retreat in dismay. On another occasion, when attempts were made to assault Wesley, there was some uncertainty about his person, and the assailants were saying, “Which is he? which is he?” he stood still as he was walking down the crowded street, turned upon them, and said, “I am he;” and they instantly fell back, awed into involuntary silence and respect.

It is characteristic that while Whitefield simply took to the work of field-preaching, and preaching in the open air, and troubled himself very little about finding or giving reasons for the irregularity of the proceeding, Wesley defended the practice with formidable arguments. It is remarkable that the practice should have been deemed so irregular, or should need vindication, considering that our Lord had given to it the sanction of His example, and that it had been adopted by the apostles and fathers, the greatest of the Catholic preachers, and the reformers of every age. A history of field and street-preaching would form a large and interesting chapter of Church history. Southey quotes a very happy series of arguments from one of Wesley’s appeals: “What need is there,” he says, speaking for his antagonists, “of this preaching in the fields and streets? Are there not churches enough to preach in?” “No, my friend, there are not, not for us to preach in. You forget we are not suffered to preach there, else we should prefer them to any place whatever.” “Well, there are ministers enough without you.” “Ministers enough, and churches enough! For what? To reclaim all the sinners within the four seas? and one plain reason why these sinners are never reclaimed is this: they never come into a church. Will you say, as some tender-hearted Christians I have heard, ‘Then it is their own fault; let them die and be damned!’ I grant it may be their own fault, but the Saviour of souls came after us, and so we ought to seek to save that which is lost.” He went on to confess the irregularity, but he retorted that those persons who compelled him to be irregular had no right to censure him for irregularity. “Will they throw a man into the dirt,” said he, “and beat him because he is dirty? Of all men living those clergymen ought not to complain who believe I preach the Gospel; if they will not ask me to preach in their churches, they are accountable for my preaching in the fields.” This is a fair illustration of the neat shrewdness, the compact, incisive common sense of Wesley’s mind. Thus he argued himself into that sphere of labour which justified him in after years in saying, without any extravagance, “The world is my parish.”

We have said the Revival became conservative. It is true the Countess of Huntingdon did much to make it so; but it assumed a shape of vitality, and a force of coherent strength, chiefly from the touch of Wesley’s administrative mind. The present City Road Chapel, which was opened in 1776, opposite Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, is probably the first illustration of this fact; it stands where stood the Foundry—time-honoured spot in the history of Methodism. It stood in Moorfields; the City Road was a mere lane then. The building had been used by government for casting cannon; it was a rude ruin. Wesley purchased it and the site at the very commencement of his work, in 1739; he turned it into a temple. As the years passed on it became the cradle of London Methodism, accommodating fifteen hundred people. Until within twenty years of Wesley’s purchase this had been a kind of Woolwich Arsenal to the government; it became a temple of peace, and here came “band-rooms,” school-rooms, book-rooms—the first saplings of Methodist usefulness.

It has been truly said by a writer in the _British Quarterly_, that the most romantic lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar do not present a more startling succession of incidents than those which meet us in the life and labours of Wesley. Romish stories claim that Blessed Raymond, of Pegnafort, spread his cloak upon the sea to transport him across the water, sailing one hundred and sixty miles in six hours, and entering his convent through closed doors! The devout and zealous Francis Xavier spent three whole days in two different places at the same time, preaching all the while! Rome shines out in transactions like these: Wesley does not; but he seems to have been almost ubiquitous, and he moves with a rapidity reminding us of that flying angel who had the everlasting Gospel to preach, and he shines alike in his conflicts with nature and the still wilder tempests caused by the passions of men. We read of his travelling, through the long wintry hours, two hundred and eighty miles on horseback, in six days; it was a wonderful feat in those times. When Wesley first began his itinerancy there were no turnpikes in the country; but before he closed his career, he had probably paid more, says Dr. Southey, for turnpikes, than any other man in England, for no other man in England travelled so much. His were no pleasant journeys, as of summer days; he travelled through the fens of Lincolnshire when the waters were out; and over the fells of Northumberland when they were covered with snow. Speaking of one tremendous journey, through dreadful weather, he says, “Many a rough journey have I had before; but one like this I never had, between wind and hail, and rain, and ice, and snow, and driving sleet, and piercing cold; but it is past. Those days will return no more, and are therefore as though they had never been.

“‘And pain, like pleasure, is a dream!’”

How singular was his visit to Epworth, where he found the church of his childhood, his father’s church, the church of his own first ministrations, closed against him! The minister of the church was a drunkard; he had been under great obligations, both to Wesley himself and to the Wesley family, but he assailed him with the most offensive brutality; and when Wesley, denied the pulpit, signified his intention of simply partaking of the Lord’s Supper with the parishioners on the following Sunday, the coarse man sent word, “Tell Mr. Wesley I shall not give him the Sacrament, for he is not _fit_.” It seems to have cut Mr. Wesley very deeply. “It was fit,” he says, “that he who repelled me from the table where I had myself so often distributed the bread of life, should be one who owed his all in this world to the tender love my father had shown to his, as well as personally to himself.” He stayed there, however, eight days, and preached every evening in the churchyard, standing on his father’s tomb; truly a singular sight, the living son, the prophet of his age, surely little short of inspired, preaching from his dead father’s grave with such pathos and power as we may well conceive. “I am well assured,” he says, “I did far more good to my old Lincolnshire parishioners by preaching three days on my father’s tomb than I did by preaching three years in his pulpit!”

As he travelled to and fro, odd mistakes sometimes happened. Arrived at York, he went into the church in St. Saviour’s Gate; the rector, one Mr. Cordeau, had often warned his congregation against going to hear “that vagabond Wesley” preach. It was usual in that day for ministers of the Establishment to wear the cassock or gown, just as everywhere in France we see the French abbés. Wesley had on his gown, like a university man in a university town. Mr. Cordeau, not knowing who he was, offered him his pulpit; Wesley was quite willing, and always ready. Sermons leaped impromptu from his lips, and this sermon was an impressive one; at its close the clerk asked the rector if he knew who the preacher was. “No.” “Why, sir, it was that vagabond Wesley!” “Ah, indeed!” said the astonished clergyman; “well, never mind, we have had a good sermon.” The anecdotes of the incidents which waited upon the preacher in his travels are of every order of humorous, affecting, and romantic interest; they are spread over a large variety of volumes, and even still need to be gathered, framed, and hung in the light of some effective chronicle.

The brilliant passage in which Lord Macaulay portrays, as with the pencil of a Vandyke, the features of the great English Puritans, is worthy of attention. Perhaps, even had the great essayist attempted the task, he had scarcely the requisite sympathies to give an effective portrait or portraits of the early Methodists; indeed, their characters are different, as different as a portrait from the pencil of Denner to one from that of Vandyke, or of Velasquez; but as Denner is wonderful too, although so homely, so the Methodist is a study. The early Methodist was, perhaps, usually a very simple, what we should call an ignorant, man, but he had “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” He was not such an one as the early Puritan[8] or the ancient Huguenot, those children of the camp and of the sword, Nonconformist Templars and Crusaders, whose theology had trained them for the battle-field, teaching them to frown defiance on kings, and to treat with contempt the proudest nobles, if they were merely unsanctified men. The Methodist was not such an one as the stern Ironside of Cromwell; as he lived in a more cheerful age, so he was the subject of a more cheerful piety; he was as loyal as he was lowly. He had been forgotten or neglected by all the priests and Levites of the land; but a voice had reached him, and raised him to the rank of a living, conscious, immortal soul. He also was one for whom Christ died. A new life had created new interests in him; and Christianity, really believed, does ennoble a man—how can it do otherwise? It gives self-respect to a man, it shows to him a new purpose and business in life; moreover, it creates a spirit of holy cheerfulness and joy; and thus came about that state of mind which Wesley made subservient to organisation—the necessity for meetings and reciprocations. It has been said that every church must have some sign or counter-sign, some symbol to make it popularly successful. St. Dominic gave to his order the Rosary; John Wesley gave to his Society the Ticket. There were no chapels, or but few, and none to open their doors to these strange new pilgrims to the celestial city. We have seen that the churches were closed against them. Lord Macaulay says, had John Wesley risen in the Church of Rome, she would have thrown her arms round him, only regarding him as the founder of a new order, with certain peculiarities calculated to increase and to extend her empire, and in due time have given to him the honours of canonisation.

Footnote 8:

See Appendix A.

The English clergy as a body gathered up their garments and shrunk from all contact with the Methodists as from a pestilence. What could be done? Something must be done to prevent them from falling back into the world. Piety needs habit, and must become habitual to be safe, even as the fine-twined linen of the veil, and the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat, were shut in and all their glory defended by the rude coverings of badger-skins. John Wesley knew that the safety of the converted would be in frequent meetings for singing and prayer and conversation. Reciprocation is the soul of Methodism; so they assembled in each others’ houses, in rude and lonely but convenient rooms, by farm-house ingles, in lone hamlets. Thus was created a homely piety, often rugged enough, no doubt, but full of beautiful and pathetic instincts. So grew what came to be called band-meetings, class-meetings, love-feasts, and all the innumerable means by which the Methodist Society worked, until it became like a wheel within a wheel; simple enough, however, in the days to which we are referring. “Look to the Lord, and faithfully attend all the means of grace appointed in the Society.” Such was, practically, the whole of Methodism. So that famous old lady, whose bright example has so often been held up on Methodist platforms, when called upon to state the items of her creed, did so very sufficiently when she summed it up in the four particulars of “repentance towards God; faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; a penny a week; and a shilling a quarter.” Wesley seems to have summed the Methodist creed more simply still: “Belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and an earnest desire to flee from the wrath to come.” This was his condition of Church fellowship. When the faith became more consciously objective, it too was seized by the passionate instinct, the desire t o save souls. This drove the early Methodists out on great occasions to call vast multitudes together on heaths, on moors. Perhaps—but this was at a later time—some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the preachers; though the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks, and subsided into the organisation of the Countess of Huntingdon, which was, in fact, a kind of Free Church of England. The followers of Wesley sought the sequestration of nature, or in cities and towns they took to the streets or the broad ways and outlying fields. In some neighbourhoods a little room was built, containing the germ of what in a few years became a large Wesleyan Society. The burden of all these meetings, and all their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the sweetness and fulness of Jesus. They had intense faith in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; and their great interest was in souls on the brink of perdition. They knew little of spiritual difficulties or speculative despair; their conflict was with the world, the flesh, and the devil; and in this person, whose features have lately become somewhat dim, and who has wrapped himself in a new cloak of darkness, they did really believe. Wesley dealt with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; he and his band of preachers had little regard to proprieties, and it was not a polished time; so, ungraceful and undignified, the face weary, and the hand heavy with toil, they seemed out of breath pursuing souls. The strength of all these men was that they had a definite creed, and they sought to guard it by a definite Church life. The early Methodist had also cultivated the mighty instinct of prayer, about which he had no philosophy, but believing that God heard him, he quite simply indulged in it as a passion, and in this to him there was at once a meaning and a joy. We are not under the necessity of vindicating every phase of the great movement, we are simply writing down some particulars of its history, and how it was that it grew and prevailed. God’s ministry goes on by various means, ordinary and extraordinary; that is the difference between rivers and rains, between dews and lightnings.

A very interesting chapter, perhaps a volume, might be compiled from the old records of the mere anecdotes—the very humours—of the persecution attending on the Revival. Thus, in Cornwall, Edward Greenfield, a tanner, with a wife and seven children, was arrested under a warrant granted by Dr. Borlase, the eminent antiquary, who was, however, a bitter foe to Methodism. It was inquired what was the objection to Greenfield, a peaceable, inoffensive man; and the answer was, “The man is well enough, but the gentlemen round about can’t bear his impudence; why, he says he knows his sins are forgiven!” The story is well known how, in one place, a whole waggon-load of Methodists were taken before the magistrates; but when the question was asked in court what they had done, a profound silence fell over the assembly, for no one was prepared with a charge against them, till somebody exclaimed, “They pretended to be better than other people, and prayed from morning till night!” And another voice shouted out, “And they’ve _convarted_ my wife; till she went among they, she had a tongue of her own, and now she’s as quiet as a lamb!” “Take them all back, take them all back,” said the sensible magistrate, “and let them convert all the scolds in the town!”

There is a spot in Cornwall which may be said to be consecrated and set apart to the memory of Wesley; it is in the immediate neighbourhood of Redruth, a wild, bare, rugged-looking region now, very suggestive of its savage aspect upwards of a hundred years since. The spot to which we refer is the Gwennap Pit; it is a wild amphitheatre, cut out among the hills, capable of holding about thirty thousand persons. Its natural walls slant upwards, and the place has altogether wonderful properties for the carrying the human voice. Wesley began to preach in this spot in 1762. When he first visited Cornwall, the savage mobs of what used to be called “West Barbary,” howled and roared upon him like lions or wild beasts; in his later years of visitation, no emperor or sovereign prince could have been received with more reverence and affection. The streets were lined and the windows of the houses thronged with gazing crowds, to see him as he walked along; and no wonder, for Cornwall was one of the chief territories of that singular ecclesiastical kingdom of which he was the founder. When he first went into Cornwall, it was really a region of savage irreligion and heathenism. The reader of his life often finds, usually about once a year, the visit to Gwennap Pit recorded: he preached his first sermon there, as we have said, in 1762; at the age of eighty-six he preached his last in 1789. There, from time to time, they poured in from all the country round to see and to listen to the words of this truly reverend father.

The traditions of Methodism have few more imposing scenes. Gwennap Pit was, perhaps, Wesley’s most famous cathedral; a magnificent church, if we may apply that term to a building of nature, among the wild moors; it was thronged by hushed and devout worshippers. Until Wesley went among these people, the whole immense population might have said, “No man cared for our souls;” now they poured in to see him there: wild miners from the immediate neighbourhood, fishermen from the coast, men who until their conversion had pursued the wrecker’s remorseless and criminal career, smugglers, more quiet men and their families less savage, but not less ignorant, from their shieling, or lowly farmstead on the distant heath. A strange throng, if we think of it, men who had never used God’s name except in an oath, and who had never breathed a prayer except for the special providence of a shipwreck, and who with wicked barbarity had kindled their delusive lights along the coasts, to fascinate unfortunate ships to the cruel cliffs! But a Divine power had passed over them, and they were changed, with their families; and hither they came to gladden the heart of the old patriarch in the wild glen—a strange spot, and not unbeautiful, roofed over by the blue heavens. Amidst the broom, the twittering birds, the heath flower, and the scantling of trees, amidst the venerable rocks, it must have been wonderful to hear the thirty thousand voices welling up, and singing Wesley’s words:

“Suffice that for the season past, Hell’s horrid language filled our tongues; We all Thy words behind us cast, And loudly sang the drunkard’s songs. But, oh, the power of grace Divine! In hymns we now our voices raise, Loudly in strange hosannahs join, While blasphemies are turned to praise!”

Such was one of the triumphs of the Great Revival.