Proem: Wesley’s Place in History
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.
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. Montesquieu, who studied the England of that age through keen French 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 intellect, 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.” Betwixt Montesquieu and Butler, the great Frenchman and the still greater P^nglishman, what a procession of witnesses might be quoted in 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, in the eineKy 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 degro” Impossil;]’^ 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 wonderful 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 awakening, 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. Wycliffe’s 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 I 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 philanthropy! “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 thc steady attempt which has never ceased from that day to this to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the so< ial degradation of the profligate and the puor.... Tdo 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 in 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 institutions 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 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 of a nation, and so turn blackness into flame.
Wesley’s secret, in brief, does not lie in his statesmanship, 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 — Wyclilie, 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 education, 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!
There are men who live in history because they embodied the ruling ideas of their age and made them victorious. There are men of jet loftier force, who may be said, not to reliect, but lo create, the impulses which governed the world in which thpy 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. Ctesar 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 intei’preter of his age, the accidental 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 be 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, comjjared with other notable figures in history. But Wesley’s work was greater than Wesley himself; and it was greater because its secret lies in Ihe spiritual realm.
And it is exactly this that makes his story an inspiration for all time. The supreme gifts of the intellect are incommunicable. Shakespeare’s creative genius, Dante’s piercing imagination, Darwin’s gift for cuuibining 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 the si)irihinl 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 ex[)lauation 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 lace hid the most terrible lighting 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 Canning, 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 I*itt in statesmanship; Wilberforce in philanthropy. 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 Protestant, 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 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. WTio 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!