CHAPTER VII

LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS.

There came with the work of the Revival a practice, without which it is more than questionable if it would have obtained such a rapid and abiding hold upon the various populations and districts of the country; this was lay preaching. The designation must have a more inclusive interpretation than we generally apply to it; we must understand by it rather the work of those men who, in contradistinction to the great leaders of the Revival—men of scholarship, of universities, and of education—possessed none of these qualifications, or but in a more slight and undisciplined degree. They were converted men, modified by various temperaments; they one and all possessed an ardent zeal; but, in many instances, we shall find that they were as much devoted to the work of the ministry as those who had received a regular ordination. It is singular that prejudices so strong should exist against lay preaching and preachers, for the practice has surely received the sanction of the most ancient usages of the Church, as even Dr. Southey admits, in his notes to the _Life of Wesley_. Thus, in the history of the Church, this phenomenon could scarcely be regarded as new. Orders of preaching friars; “hedge-preachers,” “black, white, and grey,” with all their company; disciples of Francis, Dominic, or Ignatius, had spread over Europe during the dark and mediæval ages. Although this rousing element of Church life had not found much expression in the churches of the Reformation, yet with the impulse of the new Revival, up started these men by multitudes. The reason of this was very simple. There is a well-known little anecdote of some town missionary standing up in a broad highway preaching to a multitude. He was arrested by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked him from the edge of the crowd by what authority he dared to stand there? and who had given him the right to preach? The man had his New Testament in his hand; he rapidly turned to the last chapter of it, and said, “I find it written here, ‘Let him that heareth say, Come!’ I have heard, and I would say Come!” The anecdote represents sufficiently the rise and progress of lay preaching in the Revival. There first appeared, naturally, a simple set of men, who, in their different spheres, would, perhaps, lead and direct a prayer-meeting, and round it with some pious and gentle exhortation. We have already pointed out the necessity soon felt for frequent and reciprocative services; these were not the lay preachers to whom we refer; but in this fraternal form of Church fellowship, the lay preacher had his origin.

Wesley imposed restrictions upon his helpers which he soon found himself compelled to renounce. John Wesley was a strong adherent to the idea of Church order. The first lay preacher in his communion who leapt over the traces was Thomas Maxfield. It was at the Foundry in Moor Fields. Wesley was in Bristol, and the intelligence was conveyed to him. He appears to have regarded it as a serious and dangerous innovation. The good Susannah Wesley, his mother—now past threescore years and ten—infirm and feeble, was yet living in the Chapel House of the Foundry. To her John hurried on his arrival in London; and after his affectionate salutations and inquiries, he expressed such a manifest dissatisfaction and anxiety that she inquired the cause. With some indignation and unusual abruptness, he said, “Thomas Maxfield has turned preacher, I find;” and then the wise and saintly woman gave him her advice. She reminded him that, from her prejudices against lay preaching he could not suspect her of favouring anything of the kind; “but take care,” she said, “what you do respecting that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are.” She advised her son to hear Maxfield for himself. He did so, and at once buried all his prejudices. He exclaimed after the sermon, “It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good!” and Thomas Maxfield became the first of a host who spread all over the country.

It may be supposed that the Countess of Huntingdon very naturally shared all Wesley’s prejudices against lay preaching; but she heard Maxfield preach, and she wrote of him, “God has raised one from the stones to sit among the princes of the people. He is my astonishment; how is God’s power shown in weakness!” and she soon set herself to the work of supplying an order of men, of whom Maxfield was the first to lead the way. By-and-by came another innovation: the lay evangelists at first never went into the pulpit, but spoke from among the people, or from the desk. The first who broke through this usage was Thomas Walsh; we will say more of him presently. He was a man of deep humility, and his life reveals entire and extraordinary consecration; but he believed himself to be an ambassador for Christ, and he walked directly up into the pulpit, never questioning, but quite disregarding the usual custom. The majesty of his manner, his solemn, impressive, and commanding eloquence, forbade all remark; and henceforth all the lay preachers followed his example. There arose a band of extraordinary men. Let the reader refer to the chronicles of their lives, and the effects of their labours, and he will not suppose that he has seen anything in our day at all approaching to what they were.

Local preachers have now long been part of the great organisation of Methodism. But in the period to which we refer, it must be remembered that the pen had not commenced the exercise of its more popular influence. There were few authors, few journalists, very few really popular books; these men, then, with their various gifts of elevated holiness, broad and rugged humour, or glowing imagination, went to and fro among the people, rousing and instructing the dormant mind of the country. Then it was Wesley’s great aim to sustain interest by variety. Wesley himself said that he believed he should preach himself and his congregation asleep if he were to confine his ministrations to one pulpit for twelve months. We would take the liberty to say in reference to this, that it would depend upon whether he kept his own mind fresh and wakeful during the time. He writes, however: “We have found by long and constant experience, that a frequent change of teachers is best; this preacher has one talent, that another. No one whom I ever knew has all the talents which are needful for beginning, continuing, and perfecting the work in a whole congregation; neither,” he adds, “can he find matter for preaching morning and evening, nor will the people come to hear him; hence he grows cold, and so do the people; whereas if he never stays more than a fortnight together in one place, he may find matter enough, and the people will gladly hear him.”

This certainly gives an idea but of a plain order of services; and, no doubt, some of Wesley’s preachers were of the plainest. There was Michael Fenwick, of whom Wesley says, “he was just made to travel with me—an excellent groom, _valet de chambre_, nurse, and, upon occasion, a tolerable preacher.” This good man was one day vain enough to complain to Wesley, that although he was constantly travelling with him, his name was never inserted in Wesley’s published _Journals_. In the next number he found himself immortalised with his master there. “I left Epworth,” writes Wesley, “with great satisfaction, and about one, preached at Clayworth. I think none were unmoved but Michael Fenwick, who fell fast asleep under an adjoining hayrick.”

A higher type of man, but still of the very plain order of preachers, was Joseph Bradford. He also was Wesley’s frequent travelling companion, and he judged no service too servile by which he could show his reverence for his master. But on one occasion Wesley directed him to carry a packet of letters to the post. The occasion was very extraordinary, and Bradford wished to hear Wesley’s sermon first. Wesley was urgent and insisted that the letters must go. Bradford refused; he would hear the sermon. “Then,” said Wesley, “you and I must part!” “Very good, sir,” said Bradford. The service was over. They slept in the same room. On rising in the morning, Wesley accosted his old friend and companion, and asked if he had considered what had been said, that they must part. “Yes, sir,” replied Bradford. “And must we part?” inquired Wesley. “Please yourself, sir,” was the reply. “Will you ask my pardon?” rejoined Wesley. “No, sir.” “You wont?” “No, sir.” “Then I will ask yours,” replied the great man. It is said that Bradford melted under the words, and wept like a child. But we must not convey the idea that the early preachers were generally of this order. “In a great house there are vessels to honour and vessels to dishonour.” “Vessels of dishonour” assuredly were none of these men: but there were some who attained to a greatness almost as remarkable as the greatness of the three, Whitefield and the Wesleys.

What a man was John Nelson! His was a life full of singular incidents. It was truly apostolic, whether we consider its holy magnanimity, the violence and vehemence of the cruel persecutions he encountered, or his singular power over excited mobs; reminding us sometimes of Paul fighting as with wild beasts at Ephesus, or standing with cunning tact, and disarming at once captain and crowd on the steps of the Castle at Jerusalem. Then, although he was but a poor working stonemason, he had a high gentlemanly bearing, before which those who considered themselves gentlemen, magistrates and others, fell back abashed and ashamed. He was one of the prophets of Yorkshire; and many of the large Societies at this day in Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford owe their foundation to him. It seems wonderful to us now, that merely preaching the word of truth, and especially as John Nelson preached it, with such a cheerful, radiant, and even heavenly manner, should bring out mighty mobs to assault him. The stories of his itinerancy are innumerable, and his life is really one of the most romantic in these preaching annals. At Nottingham, while he was preaching, the crowds threw squibs at him and round him; but, as he was still pursuing his path of speech, a sergeant in the army pressed up to him, with tears, saying, “In the presence of God and all this company, I beg your pardon. I came here on purpose to mob you, but I have been compelled to hear you; and I here declare I believe you to be a servant of the living God!” He threw his arms round Nelson’s neck, kissed him, and went away weeping; and we see him no more. Perhaps more remarkable still was his reception at Grimsby. There the clergyman of the parish hired a drummer to gather a great mob, as he said, “to defend the rights of the Church.” The storm which raged round Nelson was wild and ferocious; but it illustrates the power of this extraordinary man over his rudest hearers, that after beating his drum for a long time, the poor drummer threw it away, and stood listening, the tears running down his cheeks.

Nelson was a man of immense physical strength; his own trade had fostered this, and before his conversion he had, no doubt, been feared as a man who could hit out and hit hard. As the most effectual means of silencing him, he was pressed for a soldier; but John was not only a Methodist, he had adopted the Quaker notion that a Christian dare not fight; and he seems to have been a real torment to the officers and men of the regiment, who indeed marched him about different parts of the country, but could not get him either to accept the king’s money or to submit to drill. An officer put him in prison for rebuking his profanity, and threatened to chastise him. Nelson says, “It caused a sore temptation to arise in me; to think that a wicked, ignorant man should thus torment me, and I able to tie his head and heels together. I found an old man’s bone in me; but the Lord lifted up the standard within, else should I have wrung his neck and set my foot upon him.”

At length, after three months, the Countess of Huntingdon procured his discharge. The regiment was in Newcastle. He preached there on the evening of the day on which he was liberated, and it is testified that a number of the soldiers from his regiment came to hear him, and parted from him with tears. He was arrested as a vagrant, without any visible means of living. A gentleman instantly stepped forward and offered five hundred pounds bail; but the bail was refused. He was able to prove that he was a high-charactered, industrious workman; but it availed nothing. Crowds wept and prayed for him as he was borne through the streets. “Fear not!” he cried, “oh, friends; God hath His way in the whirlwind, and in the storm. Only pray that my faith fail not!” It was at Bradford. They thrust him into a most filthy dungeon. The authorities would give him no food. The people thrust in food, water, and candles. He shared these with some wretched prisoners in the same cage, and he sang hymns, and talked to them all night. He was marched off to York; but there the excitement was so great when it was known that John Nelson was coming a prisoner that armed troops were ordered out to guard him. He says, “Hell from beneath was moved to meet me at my coming!” All the windows were crowded with people—some in sympathy, but most cheering and huzzaing as if some great political traitor had been arrested; but he says, “The Lord made my brow like brass, so that I could look upon all the people as grasshoppers, and pass through the city as if there had been none in it but God and me.”

Such was John Nelson. These anecdotes are sufficient to show the manner of man he was. He has been truly called “the proto-martyr of Methodism.” But it is not in a hint or two that all can be said which ought to be said of this noble and extraordinary man. His conversion, perhaps, sank down to deeper roots than in many instances. The thoughts of Methodism found him perplexed with those agonizing questions which have tormented men in all ages, until they have realized the truth as it is in Jesus. His life was guilty of no immoralities; he had a happy, humble home, was industrious, and receiving good wages; but as he walked to and fro among the fields he was distressed, “for,” he said, “surely God never made man to be such a riddle to himself, and to leave him so.” He heard Wesley preach. “Then,” he says, “my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock, and I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me;” and so, in short, he became a Methodist, and a Methodist preacher; and among the noble names in the history of the Church of Christ, in his own line and order, it may be doubted whether a nobler name can be mentioned than that of John Nelson.

Quite another order of man, less human, but equally divine, was Thomas Walsh. His parents were Romanists, and he was intended by them for the Romish priesthood; and he appears to have been an intense Romanist ascetic until about eighteen years of age. He had a thoughtful and exceedingly intense nature, and his faith was no rest to him. In his dilemma he heard a Methodist preacher speak one day from the text, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” It appears to have been the turning-point of a remarkable life.

“The life of Thomas Walsh,” says Dr. Southey, “might almost convince a Catholic that saints were to be found in other communions as well as in the Church of Rome.” Walsh became a great biblical scholar; he was an Irishman, he mastered the native Irish, that he might preach in it; but Latin, Greek, and Hebrew became familiar to him; and of the Hebrew, especially, it is said that he studied so deeply, that his memory was an entire concordance of the whole Bible. His soul was as a flame of fire, but it burnt out the body quickly. John Wesley says of him, “I do not remember ever to have known a man who, in so few years as he remained upon earth, was the instrument of converting so many sinners.” He became mighty in his influence over the Roman Catholics. The priests said that “Walsh had died some years ago, and that he who went about preaching, on mountains and highways, in meadows, private houses, prisons, and ships, was a devil who had assumed his shape.” This was the only way in which they could account for the extraordinary influence he possessed. His labours were greatly divided between Ireland and London, but everywhere he bore down all before him by a kind of absorbed ecstasy of ardent faith; but he died at the age of twenty-seven. While lying on his death-bed he was oppressed with a sense of despair, even of his salvation. The sufferings of his mind on this account were protracted and intense; at last he broke out in an exclamation, “He is come! He is come! My Beloved is mine, and I am His for ever!” and so he fell back and died. Thomas Walsh is a great name still in the records of the lay preachers of early Methodism.

All orders of men rose: different from any we have mentioned was George Story, whose quiet, but earnest and reasonable nature, seems to have commanded the especial love of Southey. He appears never to have become what some call an enthusiast; but he interestingly illustrates, that it was not merely over the rugged and uninformed minds that the power of the Revival exercised its influence. Very curiously, he appears to have been converted by thinking about Eugene Aram, the well-known scholar, whose name has become so celebrated in fiction and in poetry, and who had a short time before been executed for murder at York. Story was impressed by the importance of the acquisition of knowledge, and Aram’s extraordinary attainments kindled in his mind a sense of admiration and emulation; but, as he thought upon his life, he reasoned, “What did this man’s learning profit him? It did not save him from becoming a thief and a murderer, or even from attempting his own life.” It was an immense suggestion to him; it led him upon another track of thinking. The Methodists came through his village; he yielded himself to the influence, and Dr. Southey thinks “there is not in the whole biography of Methodism a more interesting or remarkable case than his.” He became a great preacher, but disarmed and convinced men rather by his calm, dispassionate elevation of manner, than by such weapons as the cheerful _bonhomie_ of Nelson, or the fervid fire of Walsh.

But we are, perhaps, conveying the idea that it was only beneath the administration of John Wesley that these great lay preachers were to be found. It was not so; but no doubt beneath that administration their itinerancy became more systematic and organised. Whitefield does not appear to have at all shared Wesley’s prejudices on this means of usefulness; but those men who fell beneath the influence of Whitefield, or the Countess, seem soon to meet us as settled ministers, in many, if not in all instances. Among them there are few greater names in the whole Revival than those of Captain Jonathan Scott and the renowned Captain Toriel Joss. Captain Scott was a captain of dragoons, and one of the heroes of Minden; he was converted by the instrumentality of William Romaine, who, in spite of his prejudices against lay preaching, encouraged him in his excursions, in which he spoke to immense crowds with great effect. Fletcher, of Madeley, said, “his coat shames many a black one.” He was a gentleman of an ancient and opulent family, and the Countess, who, naturally, was delighted to see people of her own order by her side, felt herself greatly strengthened by him. It was said, when he preached at Leeds, the whole town turned out to hear him; and he was one of the great preachers of the Tabernacle in Moorfields, during more than twenty years. But yet a far more famous man was Toriel Joss. He was a captain of the seas, and had led a life which somewhat reminds us of Newton’s. He was a good and even great sailor, but he became a greater preacher. Whitefield said of these two men, that “God, who sitteth upon the flood, can bring a shark from the ocean, and a lion from the forest, to show forth his praise.” Joss was a man of property, with a fair prospect of considerable wealth, when he renounced the seas and became one of the great lay preachers. Whitefield insisted that he should abandon the chart, the compass, and the deck, and take to the pulpit. He did so. In London his fame was second only to that of Whitefield himself. He became Whitefield’s coadjutor at the Tabernacle, where, first as associate pastor, and afterwards as pastor, he continued for thirty years. The chapel at Tottenham Court Road was his chief field, and John Berridge called him “Whitefield’s Archdeacon of Tottenham.”

We cannot particularise others: there were Sampson Staniforth, the soldier, Alexander Mather, Christopher Hopper, John Haime, John Parson—and these are only representative names. There were crowds of them; they travelled to and fro, with hard fare, throughout the land. Their excursions were not recreations or amusements. Attempt to think what England was at that time. It is a fact that they often had to swim through streams and wade through snows to keep their appointments; often to sleep in summer in the open air, beneath the trees of a forest. Sometimes a preacher was seen with a spade strapped to his back, to cut a way for man and horse through the heavy snow-drifts. Highwaymen were abroad, and there are many odd stories about their encounters with these men; but, then, usually, they had nothing to lose. Rogers, in his _Lives of the Early Preachers_, tells a characteristic story. One of these lay preachers, as usual on horseback, was waylaid by three robbers; one of them seized the bridle of his horse, the second put a pistol to his head, the third began to pull him from the saddle—all, of course, declaring that they would have his money or his life. The preacher looked solemnly at them, and asked them “if they had prayed that morning.” This confounded them a little, still they continued their work of plunder. One pulled out a knife to rip the saddle-bag open; the preacher said, “There are only some books and tracts there; as to money, I have only twopence halfpenny in my pocket;” he took it out and gave it them. “All that I have of value about me,” he said, “is my coat. I am a servant of God; I am going on His errand to preach; but let me kneel down and pray with you; that will do you more good than anything I can give you.” One of them said, “I will have nothing to do with anything we can get from this man!” They had taken his watch; they restored this, and took up the bags and fastened them again on the horse. The preacher thanked them for their great civility to him; “But now,” said he, “I will pray!” and he fell upon his knees, and prayed with great power. Two of the rascals, utterly frightened at this treatment, started off as fast as their legs could carry them; the third—he who had first refused to have anything to do with the job—continued on his knees with the preacher; and when they parted company he promised that he would try to lead a new life, and hoped to become a new man.

Should the reader search the old magazines and documents in which are enshrined the records of the early days of the Revival, he will find many incidents showing what a romantic story is this of the self-denials, the difficulties, and enthusiasm of these men, whose best record is on high—most of them faithful men, like Alexander Coates, who, after a life of singular length and usefulness in the work, went to his rest. His talents were said to be extraordinary, both in preaching and in conversation. Just as he was dying, one of his brethren called upon him and said, “You don’t think you have followed a cunningly-devised fable now?” “No, no, no!” said the dying man. “And what do you see?” “Land ahead!” said the old man. They were his last words. Such were the men of this Great Revival; so they lived their lives of faithful usefulness, and so they passed away.