Wesley and His Century: A Study in Spiritual Forces

If John Wesley himself, belittled, long-nosed, longchinned, peremptory man who, on March 9, 1791, was carried to his grave by six poor men, “leaving behind him nothing but a good libraiy 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 intention.

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 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.” Southey, who wrote Wesley’s Life without 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 importance 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 thar 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, in 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 Methodism, in some respects, are more vigorous than even the 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 Protestantism 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 he 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 philanthropy. WTio wants to understand Wesley’s work must contrast the moral temper of the eighteenth century with that of the twentieth century; for one of the greatest jjersonal 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, If Lord North ruled England for twelve sad 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 seven years after his death. 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 hi-<tory, is the general dfcay 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.

Keep reading