Oxford Loses Its Spell
An expressive proof of the cloistered and self-centred character of Wesley’s piety at this stage may be found in his refusal to take his father’s i)lace at Epworth. His father was now old, and was visibly breaking down in health. He might die at any moment. Who should be his successor? On that point hung practically the future of the Epworth household. The living was of value; the rector had spent a considerable part of his income in improving the parsonage. If John could secure the next presentation this would ensure a home for his mother and sisters as long as they needed it. The living was in the gift of the Crown, and John Wesley was strongly urged to take steps at once to secure the appointment.
He hesitated, doubted, debated, and at last definitely refused; and he justifies himself in a letter of stupendous length to his father, a letter which in bulk would almost make a pamphlet. A decision which required an apology on such a scale must have been doubtful!
Wesley’s reasons for refusing, when analysed, are all of a personal, not to say selfish, sort. His first consideration he declares is “which way of life will conduce most to my own improvement?” He needs daily converse with his friends, and he knows “no other place under heaven, save Oxford, where I can have always at hand half-a-dozen persons of my own judgment and engaged in the same studies. ... To have such a number of such friends constantly watching over my soul” is a blessing which, in a woid, Wesley cannot bring himself to give up. At Oxford, too, he enjoys retirement. “I have not only as much, but as little, company as I please.” He is free from care; he enjoys all sorts of spiritual opportunities — public prayer twice a day, the weekly sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, &c. Whatever others may do, says Wesley, “I could not stand my ground, no, not for one month, against intemperance in sleeping, eating and drinking, against irregularity in study, against softness and self-indulgeuce, unless” in brief, lie had such
aids to Christian living as Oxford alone afforded. “Half Christians,” he declares, would kill him. “They undermine insensibly all my resolutions and quite steal from me the little fervour I have. I never come from among these ‘saints of the world’ but faint, dissipated, and shorn of all my strength.” Except he can crouch beneath the shelter of a stronger faith than his own, John Wesley protests he must die; so he will not venture from Oxford!
The question of doing good to others has, of course, to be considered; but Wesley tells his father bluntly “the question is not whether I could do more good to others there or here, but whether I could do more to myself. Seeing wherever I can be most holy myself, there I can most promote holiness in others.” But this is at Oxford and only at Oxford. It has been urged that at Oxford many persons “despised him,” and he would at least, by going to Epworth, step into an atmosphere of respect. But Wesley is in that unhealthy spiritual mood in which persecution is a sort of luxury. A Christian, he replies, will be despised anywhere; “nay, until he be thus contemned no man is in a state of salvation.”
All this shows that Wesley’s piety was of the cloistered type. It dreads the fresh air. Unless wrapped in cotton wool, and fed with a spoon, and allowed to breathe a medicated atmosphere, it will die!
His father was too sick to wrestle with a filial logician at once so ingenious and so diffuse. He tells his son Samuel he “had done what he could with such a shattered head and body, to satisfy the scruples which your brother has raised against my proposal from conscience and duty,” and he appeals to Samuel to help him.
Samuel now takes up the correspondence, and asks his brother, with refreshing bluntness, if all his labours came to this: that more was absolutely necessary to the very being of his Christian life than for the salvation of all the parish priests of England! He tried to engage John Wesley’s conscience on the side of going to Epworth. “Are you not ordained?” he asked. “Did you not deliberately and openly promise to instruct, to teach, to admonish, to exhort those committed to your charge? Did joli equivocate then with so vile a reservation as to purpose in your heart that you would never have a charge? It is not a college, it is not a University, it is the order of the Church according to which you were called.” He had taken orders, in a word, not that he might be a tutor in a college, but have a cure of souls. “The order of the Church,” cries Samuel, “stakes you down, and the more you struggle you will be held the faster. If there be such a thing as truth I insist upon it you must, when opportunity offers, either perform that promise or repent of it.”
But John was too alert a logician to be caught by his brother’s argument. A priest who refused all cure of souls would, no doubt, be faithless; but was it perjury to reject the first parochial charge ofi’ered to him? His conscience, however, was troubled. “I own,” he says, “1 am not the proper judge of the oath I took at ordination. Accordingly, the post after 1 received yours I referred it to the ‘high priest of God’ before whom I contracted that engagement, proposing this single question to him: whether I had at my ordination engaged myself to undertake the cure of a parish or no.” The appeal to the bishop in such terms shows the legal conscience in Wesley. He would keep the letter of the bond; but he must have it interpreted in the letter, and by official authority!
His bishop replied: “No; provided you can as a clergyman better serve God and His Church in your present or some other station.”
Wesley thus escaped the net of his brother’s logic; yet, ten months afterwards, with strange inconsistency, he left Oxford tor Georgia, doing the very thing which he declared an anxious regard for his own spiritual health made it impossible for him to do, even though sacred interests — the comfort of an aged father, the future of his mother and his sisters — hung upon it. His brother’s logic, in the long run, proved too much for John Wesley’s conscience. There is some evidence, indeed, that after his father’s death Wesley did actually apply for the living, but Sir Robert Walpole was unfriendly and the application failed.
No one can read the letters which passed at this time betwixt John Wesley and his old and dying father — his plain-spoken brother Samuel acting as a sort of chorus — without seeing how thoroughly self-centred, and how wanting in robust fibre is the younger Wesley’s piety at that time. He is so occupied in thinking about his own soul that he can spare no thought for any one else. And of his own soul he thinks in a fashion at once so morbid and so timorous that it is clear he has scarcely mastered yet the first letters in the great spiritual alphabet of Christianity.
Wesley’s father died on April 25, 1735, and nothing in the whole story of his life is so beautiful as the manner of his leaving it. Years had mellowed him. Time had cooled the restlessness of his blood. Sickness had given a new perspective to his theologj’, a new tenderness to his spirit. As he drew near the mysterious borderland of eternity his piety deepened; it was baptized with new influences.
Both John and Charles Wesley were with him at the last, and. in a letter dated April 30, 1735, Charles describes to his brother Samuel the manner of their father’s death. Something of that strange vision which comes to dying eyes was granted the old man. “He often,” writes Charles Wesley, ‘’laid his hand upon my head and said, *Be steady! The Christian faith will surely revive in this kingdom. You shall see it, though I shall not.’ “To John he said: “The inward witness, son; the inward witness I That is the strongest proof of Christianity.”
That “inward witness” had come late to the old man, but it had come. To his son it was then an unknown experience. The very words were cryptic; they belonged to an unknown language. “I did not,” says John, when telling the story afterwards, “I did not, at that time, understand them.” Yet what thrilled in the soul of the dying father was the very force which was later to transfigure his son’s life and, through him, to change the whole religious history of England.
Just as the end came John stooped over his father and asked him whether he was not near heaven? “He answered,” writes Charles, “distinctly and with the utmost of hope and triumph that could be expressed in sounds: ‘Yes, I am.’ Just after my brother had used the commendatory prayer he spoke again: ‘Now you have done all.’ These were his last words.”
Mr. Wesley left his household but ill provided for. He rented a few fields, and the live stock upon them was seized on the very day of his funeral, by a hard landlord, for the unpaid rent. Charles had not yet taken his degree; John’s fellowship scarcely did more than provide for his own wants, and the burden of the support of Mrs. Wesley and her unmarried daughters fell on Samuel. The father had finished, before his death, his magnum opus — a commentary on the Book of Job — and Wesley went to London to present a copy to the Queen.
While in London Dr. Burton, of Corpus Christi College, who was one of the trustees of the new colony of Georgia, introduced him to General Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony. The trustees were at that moment in search of a clergyman who could preach to the settlers and to the Indians in their neighbourhood, and Wesley seemed to them to be exactly the man for the post. He was a scholar, a clergyman of known and intense zeal, with a passion for religious work which, to cooler temperaments, seemed fanaticism. It might have been supposed that the logic which forbade John Wesley leaving Oxford to go to Epworth, on account of the risks involved in a change of spiritual climate, would apply yet more forcibly to the new scheme. But Wesley had unconsciously shifted his ground. His conscience had arrayed itself on the side of his brother’s arguments.
Moreover, University groups are in their very nature temporary. Mere time dissolves them. The members must scatter to their separate careers; and this was happening at Oxford. Morgan was dead; Gambold and Ingham were about to accept cures. Whitefield, not yet ordained, was starting for evangelistic work in Gloucestershire. Broughton was chaplain at the Tower. The goodly fellowship of the Holy Club at Oxford, like the knighthood of King Arthur’s Round Table, was dissolving. And Wesley, with other ties one by one snapping, listened with not unwilling ears to this new call.
It is clear, in addition, that Wesley himself, if he had not grown tired of the Holy Club and its methods, had visibly lost faith in it and them. Its round of mechanical prayers, its pious services, its physical austerities, were but a spiritual treadmill, and yielded no more progress than a treadmill. It led no whither. Wesley had been on it six years, and knetv. At the end of those weary, high-strung, earnest years he felt there was in religion
OXFORD LOSES ITS SrELL a secret that evaded his search, a strength unpossessed, a joy nntasted. How could spiritual life be translated into mechanical terms and not perish in the process?
At first Wesley refused the offer of the mission to Georgia, but it was with an accent which invited its renewal. He declared he could not leave his mother, for whose support and comfort he was indispensable. Would he go, he was asked, if his mother consented? Wesley thought this impossible, but agreed that she should be consulted. If he expected her to refuse he strangely misread the lofty and courageous temper of his mother’s mind. “Had I twenty sons,” the brave woman answered, “I should rejoice that they were all so employed, though I should never see them more.”
Wesley, however, did not take even his mother’s consent as final. He consulted many other advisers, from William Law, and his brother Samuel, to John Byrom the poet. All agreed that he should go. Samuel, no doubt, -hoped that the fresh airs of the new world, and the rough schooling of a new life, would chase out of his brother’s character some morbid elements.
On September 18, 1735, Wesley agreed to go. He was thirty -two years of age; he possessed the best scholarship of his time; he had practised at Oxford the austerities of an ascetic, and had shown he possessed a natural genius for leadership. The Georgia trustees counted themselves lucky in securing such a man. Many of Wesley’s friends, however, were sorely disappointed. The Georgia appointment seemed a mere black eclipse falling on a brilliant career. Wesley, to justify himself, explained his motives in a remarkable letter, dated October 10, which is worth quoting at length: —
“My chief motive is the hope of saving my own soul. I hope to learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen. They have no comments to construe away the text; no vain philosophy to corrupt it; no luxurious, sensual, covetous, ambitious expounders to soften its unpleasing truths. They have no party, no interest to serve, and are therefore fit to receive the Gospel in its simplicity. They are as little children — humble, willing to learn, and eager to do the will of God.
“A right faith, will, I trust, by the mercy of God open the way for a right practice; especially when most of the temptations are removed which here so easily beset me. It will be no small thing to be able, without fear of giving offence, to live on water and the fruits of the earth. An Indian hut affords no food for curiosity.
WESLF.Y AND HIS CENTURY
no gratiflcation of the desire of Rrand or new or pretty things. The pomp and show of the world have no place in the wilds of America.
“... I have been a grievous sinner from my youth up, and am yet laden with foolish and hurtful desires; but I am assured, if I be once converted myself, God will then employ me both to strengthen my brethren and to preach His Name to the Gentiles.
“I cannot hope to attain to the same degree of holiness here which I may there. I shall lose nothing I desire to keep. I shall still have food to eat and raiment to put on; and if any man have a desire of other things, let him know that the greatest blessing that can possibly befall him is to be cut off from all occasions of gratifying those desires which, unless speedily rooted out, will drown his soul in everlasting perdition.’”
This letter explains exactly what aspect the Georgia mission wore to Weslej’ himself, and with what motive he undertook it. Why did he go to preach the Gospel to American Indians? “My chief motive,” he says, “is the hope of saving my own soul.” His own soul is still his chief preoccupation. It bulks, to his own distressed gaze, so large that it shuts out of sight all the human race beside! He is conscious that he has not yet learnt the true secret of the Gospel of Christ, and in that he was perfectly correct. He hopes to discover it for himself, however, by the process of teaching it to a heathen community on the other side of the world!
Here is a missionary, in a word, who does not possess a creed, but who is starting on a cruise in search of one! He hopes not so much to impart it to the dark-skinned savages whom he is to teach, but to extract it from them! The note of weariness with Oxford, and with the spiritual processes of the Holy Club, is audible throughout this letter. His peaceful room in the quadrangle of Lincoln College, under the shadow of the famous Lincoln vine, with a little circle of pale and studious faces bending over their Greek Testaments round his table — he is eager to exchange all this for a wind-blown American prairie, and a company of half -clad Indians! The College chapel with its pealing organ, its murmur of incessant prayers, its decorous and learned audience, oppresses him. What he had not found in the atmosphere of an ancient university he hopes to discover amongst the rough settlers of the new land, or — with still greater hope — from the untutored savages wandering through its forests.
Wealey’e Works, vol. vii. p. 36.
He drew a picture of these delightful savages so glowing that one astonished correspondent — a lady — exclaimed, with feminine directness of logic, “Why, Mr. Wesley, if they are all this already, what more can Christianity do for them?”
But perhaps the flower of a true Christian faith, which refused to grow amid the heavy airs of Oxford, might blossom on the rough soil of Georgia. Wesley would revise his creed by the unspoiled consciences of his Indian hearers. “I cannot hope,” he says, “to attain the same degree of holiness here which I may there.” Only ten months before he had declared the only place on earth where he could hope to keep the faintest pulse of religious life beating in his blood was Oxford. The change to the spiritual climate of Epworth would simply kill it. Now he flees from Oxford as the best means of saving his soul!
Methodism has sent out, since then, a thousand missionaries to heathen lands, but never one with so strange an equipment of motives as that under which its own founder sailed as a missionary to Georgia. But if any proof is needed of the failure of the religious creed on which Wesley had hitherto lived — a High Church theology, a plodding, heavy-footed ritualism — it may be found in the explanation of his own motives which Wesley gives.