Reaching the Goal

Wesley returned from America a visibly defeated man. His ministry had failed; his character was damaged; his future was dark. He was not exactly a fugitive from the law, but his own flock had used the law to drive him from their shores. He would land in England hojjelessly discredited; and as he meditated during the long eventless days of the return voyage, Wesley saw all this in clearest vision. His career was marred, if not wrecked.

But Wesley was the last man in the world to dwell on any injury to his reputation, or to his pocket, or to his secular career. The tragedy of the situation, he felt, lay in the fact that he was a spiritual failure. His religion, with its passionate zeal, its heroic intensity, its unsparing self-sacrifice, yet gave neither peace to his own heart nor power to reach the hearts of others. This is the bitter analysis of his own spiritual state at this moment: —

“Tuesday, January 24, 1738. — I have a fair summer religion. I can talk well; nay, and believe myself, while no danger is near: but let death look me in the face, and my spirit is troubled. Nor can I say, ‘To die is gain!’

‘I have a sin of fear, that when I’ve spun
My last thread I shall perish on the shore!’

“I think, verily, if the Gospel be true, I am safe; for I not only have given, and do give, all my goods to feed the poor; I not only give my body to be burned, drowned, or whatever God shall appoint for me; but I follow after charity (though not as I ought, yet as I can), if haply I may attain it. I now believe the Gospel is true. ‘I show my faith by my works,’ by staking my all upon it. I would do so again and again a thousand times, if the choice were still to make. Whoever sees me, sees I would be a Christian. Therefore ‘are my ways not like other men’s ways.’ Therefore I have been, I am content to be, ‘a byword, a proverb of reproach.’ But in a storm I think, ‘What if the Gospel he not truer”

This is a bitter record; it makes plain the shadow under which Wesley was living. Wesley was a lonely man, too, on that sad voyage.

Delamotte was left behind in America; Charles Wesley and Ingham were already in England. Wesley had no comi)auionship but his own bitter thoughts, and his mood of depression is reflected in every line of his Journal. He describes himself as being “sorrowful and very heavy, though I could give no particular reason for it.” He notes in himself “a fearfulness and heaviness,” which almost continually weighed him down. There is a touch of keenest pathos in the sentences he writes in his Journal. “I went to America to convert the Indians, but, oh, who shall convert me?” He proceeds to deliberately assess himself, and it is with a severity of self-jlidgment little less than cruel. His words must be quoted in full, with the significant footnotes in brackets and in italics, which Wesley himself appended in later years, and which represent his own wiser judgment on himself: —

“It is now two years and almost four months since I left my native country, in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity; but what have I learned myself in the meantime? Why (what I the least of all suspected), that I who went to America to convert others was never myself converted to God. [7 am not sure of this.] ‘I am not mad,’ though I thus speak; but, ‘I speak the words of truth and soberness’; if haply some of those who still dream may awake, and see, that as I am, so are they.

“Are they read in philosophy? So was I. In ancient or modern tongues? So was I also. Are they versed in the science of divinity? I, too, have studied it many years. Can they talk fluently upon spiritual things? The very same could I do. Are they plenteous in alms? Behold, I gave all my goods to feed the poor. Do they give of their labour as well as of their substance? I have laboured more abundantly than they all. Are they willing to suffer for their brethren? I have thrown up my friends, reputation, ease, country; I have put my life in my hand, wandering into strange lands; I have given my body to be devoured by the deep, parched up with heat, consumed by toil and weariness, or whatsoever God should please to bring upon me. But does all this (be it more or less, it matters not) make me acceptable to God? Does all I ever did or can know, say, give, do, or suffer, justify me in His sight? Yea, or the constant use of all the means of grace (which, nevertheless, is meet, right, and our bounden duty)? Or that I know nothing of myself; that I am as touching outward moral righteousness, blameless? Or, to come closer yet, the having a rational conviction of all the truths of Christianity? Does all this give me a claim to the holy, heavenly, divine character of a Christian? By no means. If the oracles of God are true; if we are still to abide by ‘the law and the testimony,’ all these things, though, when ennobled by faith in Christ [J had even then the faith of a servant, though not that of a son], they are holy and just and good, yet without it are ‘dung and dross,’ meet only to be purged away by ‘the fire that never shall be quenched.’

“This, then, have I learned in the ends of the earth, that I ‘am fallen short of the glory of God’; that my whole heart is altogether corrupt and abominable’; and, consequently, my whole life; seeing it cannot be, that an ‘evil tree’ should ‘bring forth good fruit’: that ‘alienated’ as I am from the life of God, I am a ‘child of wrath’ [7 believe not], an heir of hell: that my own works, my own sufferings, my own righteousness, are so far from reconciling me to an offended God, so far from making any atonement for the least of those sins, which ‘are more in number than the hairs of my head,’ that the most specious of them need an atonement themselves, or they cannot abide His righteous judgment....

“If it be said that I have faith (for many such things have I heard, from many miserable comforters), I answer. So have the devils — a sort of faith; but still they are strangers to the covenant of promise. So the Apostles had even at Cana in Galilee, when Jesus first ‘manifested forth His glory’; even then they, in a sort, ‘believed on Him’; but they had not then ‘the faith that overcometh the world.’ The faith I want is [the faith of a son], ‘A sure trust and confidence in God, that, through the merits of Christ, my sins are forgiven, and I reconciled to the favour of God.’

That, even allowing for the qualifying footnotes of a later date, is a bit of very terrible self -description. Wesley, it is clear, was in no mood to write soft things about himself. Later, we may discuss whether the verdict Wesley passes on himself in this mood of depressed feeling was quite accurate; meanwhile, the mood itself is worth noting. His pride is gone. The sense of defeat and failure is complete. He knows there is something in Christianity not yet attained. His mood is one of utter self-abasement: —

“All my works, all my righteousness, my prayers, need an atonement for themselves; so that my mouth is stopped. I have nothing to plead. God is holy; I am unholy. God is a consuming fire; I am altogether a sinner, meet to be consumed.”

The Wesley who embarked for Georgia in 1735 and the Wesley who returned to England in 1738 are thus wholly different men. Wesley had put his theology once more, as at Wroot, to the test of actual life, and it had failed. He had not converted the Indians; he had only learne<l that he was not converted himself. There must be some fatal flaw in his creed or in his methods. The essential

‘Journal, February 1, 1738. secret of Christianity — its gift of peace to the conscience, and of power over men — evaded him. Why had he failed? What was it turned such high courage, such splendid devotion, such unsparing self-denials, to mere failure? Who reads the secret of Wesley’s failure has got to the very heart of Christianity,

This new mood had, of course, its gains. For one thing, Wesley’s theology, from this point, passes out of the pendulum condition. He had already, as we have seen, abandoned mysticism; he had seen its deadly nature. Ritualism, too, had failed. It only bred strife. His own austere legalism left the spirit unfed. This ascetic found that a harried body did not ensure a soul at peace. And from this point conscience and intellect in Wesley swung definitely to the evangelical reading of Christianity.

All this was, visibly, a stage in a great spiritual process. Wesley was being prepared for the touch of another teacher, and for the entrance into his life of a new experience.

As Wesley landed, the ship in which Whitefield was about to sail for America lay at anchor in the Downs. Wesley had looked forward to the inspiration of Whitefield’s comradeship; and he grudged sending so fine a spirit to the thankless work he himself had abandoned at Savannah. He promptly sent a note to Whitefield on board his ship. “When I saw God by the wind which was carrying you out brought me in,” he wrote, “I asked counsel of God. His answer you have enclosed.”

The enclosure was a slip of paper with the sentence on it, “Let him return to London.” Wesley had settled the question of whether Whitefield should go or stop by sortilege, with this result. But Whitefield had a sortilege of his own, and the sudden emergence in his memory of the story of the prophet that turned back at the bidding of another prophet, and was devoux’ed by a lion in consequence — as told in the Book of Kings — decided him to go on his voyage; and Wesley, at the most critical moment of his life, was thus left without his great comrade.

Whitefield was just then in the dawn of his amazing popularity in England. He was little more than a lad, yet crowds hung enchanted on the music of his lips. And the contrast betwixt Wesley creeping back to England a spirit-broken and defeated man, and Whitefield sailing out at the same moment with a nimbus of brilliant popularity about him, is little less than dramatic.

Wesley landed at Deal on the morning of February 1. and immediately proceeded to read prayers and preach in the house in which he lodged. Whatever was clouded in his spiritual sky, the point of duty always shone with luminous clearness. Whether his own spiritual condition was happy or unhappy, he must try to mend the spiritual condition of others. He lived in the spirit of the words which he afterwards made part of the Covenant service read every year in all the Churches he founded, “If I die, I will die at Thv door. If I sink, I will sink in Thv ship!”

He went .straight to London, where he had to give an account of himself to the trustees of the settlement in Georgia, and here he met his brother Charles, to whom his arrival was an astonishment. His acquaintance with the Moravians in Savannah naturally made him turn to Moi“avians in Loudon, and, on Tuesday, February 7 — “a day much to be remembered,” as he says in his Journal — he met at the house of a Dutch merchant Peter Bohler, a man destined to profoundly influence his life.

Bohler had been educated at Jena L^uiversity, and had joined the Moravians while jet a lad. He had been ordained as a Moravian missionary by Count Zinzendorf, and was on his way to Carolina when Wesley met him. He was just then delivering addresses, through an interpreter, to little audiences in London, and some strange spiritual influence accompanied his words.

Wesley and Bohler recognised each other, almost at the moment they met, as kindred spirits. The Moravian described Wesley to Count Zinzendorf as “a man of good principles, who knew he did not properly believe on the Saviour, and was willing to be taught.” Of Charles Wesley he says. “He is at present very much distressed in his mind, but does not know how he shall begin to be acquainted with the Saviour. Our mode of believing in the Saviour seems so easy to Englishmen, that they cannot reconcile themselves to it. If it were a little more diflScult, they would much sooner find their way into it. They take it for granted,” said this shrewd but simple-hearted Moravian, “that they believe already, and try to prove their faith by their works, and thus so torment themselves that they are at heart very miserable.”

Wesley went with Bohler to Oxford and listened eagerly to the teaching of his new friend. He guessed dimly that here, at last, lay the secret which had evaded him so long. And yet the simple speech of the Moravian sounded, in Wesley’s ears, like the accents of an unknown tongue. “I understood him not,” he said, “and least of all when he said, ‘Mi f rater, mi frater; excoquenda est ista tua philosophia.’” What had Wesley’s “philosophy” done that it was necessary to jettison it!

But Wesley was teachable, and on March 4 he records that he spent a day with Teter Bohler, “by whom, in the hands of the great God, I was, on Sunday, the 5th, clearly convinced of unbelief; of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved.” Later, Wesley says, “Bohler amazed me more and more by the account he gave of fruits of faith, the love, holiness, and happiness that he affirmed to attend it.” Wesley frankly accepted this teaching. True faith must produce these fruits. But Wesley was first and last a logician, and he asks himself, “How can I preach to others who have not faith myself?” Bohler’s advice was direct and practical, “Preach faith till you have it,” he said, “and then because you have it you will preach faith.”

Coleridge burlesques this by saying that it amounts to “Tell a lie long enough and often enough, and you’ll be sure to end by believing it.” But then Coleridge fails completely to understand the sense of Bohler’s advice! Wesley himself was in no mood to cavil. “On the very next day, Monday, 6th,” he records, “I began preaching this new doctrine, though my soul started back from the work. The first person to whom I offered salvation by faith alone was a prisoner under sentence of death,” and Wesley confesses that he found the task, in this particular shape, the more difficult, “as I had been many years a zealous asserter of the impossibility of a death-bed repentance.” The condemned man promptly confuted Wesley’s doubts by accepting the new doctrine, and, in the divine strength bred of it, showing “a composed cheerfulness” and “a serene peace,” while he stood on the very scaffold.

Wesley was convinced that Bohler’s teaching as to faith and its fruits was Scriptural; nay, it was the doctrine of the Church of England itself. But a doubt yet remained. How could the great spiritual process by which a man passed from death unto life be an instantaneous work? Yet, on examination, Wesley found that almost every conversion recorded in the New Testament was an instantaneous work. It might well be, however, that what was common in the first century had become impossible in the eighteenth century. But, “on Sunday the 22nd,” records Wesley, “I was beat out of this retreat, too, by the concurring evidence of several living witnesses, who testified God had thus wrought in themselves, giving them, in a moment, such a faith in the blood of His Son as translated them out of darkness into light, out of sin and fear into holiness and happiness. Here,” writes Wesley, “ended my disputing. I could now only cry out, ‘Lord, help Thou my unbelief!’”

During all these days of stress and search, of doubt and of yearning, Wesley’s zeal in practical work never relaxed. It grew even more urgent. Whatever his own spiritual fortunes, he must warn others of their perils and of their duties. To every one — man or woman, rich or poor, with whom he was for a moment in company — he would speak some word for his Master. The passing traveller on the road, the ostler who took the bridle of his horse, the servant of the house, the chance guest at the table — to each, in turn, Wesley uttered some brief, solemn, unpreluded word of counsel and always with strange effect.

At one inn, Wesley and his companion were served by a gay young woman, who at first listened to them with utter indifference. When they went away, however, “she fixed her eyes, and neither moved nor said one word, but appeared as much astonished as if she had seen one risen from the dead.” And there must have been something to compel astonishment, and even to startle, in these sudden and unconventional challenges of Wesley. His appearance — the thin, clear, intense face, the level, steady eyes, the dress of the clergyman, the brow of the scholar, the accent of the gentleman — all these gave startling power to the unprefaced and sudden appeal, that seemed to break out of eternity, and to have something of the awe of eternity about it.

Charles Wesley had already found the spiritual deliverance he sought. He was just recovering from pleurisy; and when the new-born joy broke into his soul, Wesley records, “his bodily strength returned, also, from that hour.” Colel’idge regards this as an inversion of cause and effect. All that had happened, he thinks, was that the pleurisy was gone; and Charles Wesley mistook the improvement of his health for a spiritual change. In the misinterpreted physical ferment of that vanished pleurisy, Charles Wesley, according to Coleridge, somehow lived to the end of his days! So simply can a great philosopher explain away spiritual phenomena!

The conversion of Charles Wesley was marked by a curious incident. He was lying ill, sad, and burdened; trembling at the point of a faith he was yet imable to exercise. A devout woman in the house, who assisted in nursing him, was seized with the conviction that she ought to speak some words of comfort to him. But he was a clergyman, and she onlj a servant. How could she venture on such an impertinence?

She took Mr, Bray, in whose house Charles Wesley was lying, aside, and with a burst of tears told him of the impulse which pressed with overpowering energy upon her, and asked how could she, a poor, weak, sinful creature, imdertake to guide a minister?

‘’Go, in the name of the Lord,” said Mr. Bray; “speak your words. Christ will work.”

The pair knelt down and prayed together; but after they had parted, the trembling woman knelt down by herself, and prayed afresh. Then, walking with timid feet to the door of the room where Charles Wesley was lying, she said, softly, but clearly, “lu the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise! Thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities!”

Wesley, according to his own version, was composing himself to sleep when these words, coming from unseen lips, fell on his ears. “They struck me,” he says, to the heart. I never heard words uttered with like solemnity. I sighed, and said within myself, ‘Oh that Christ would thus speak to me!’ I lay musing and trembling.”

He made inquiries, and presently the poor maid said, “It was I, a weak, sinful creature, that spoke. But the words were Christ’s. He commanded me to say them, and so constrained me that I could not forbear.” And those words, spoken by the lips of an ignorant woman, and under that mysterious impulse, brought spiritual deliverance to Charles Wesley!

Meanwhile Wesley was beginning to reflect how ill his teachers had served him. He had sat at the feet of k Kempis, of Jeremy Taylor, and of William Law. He had been the most docile of scholars; he had followed their counsels at all costs; and they had left him bankrupt! A Kempis and Taylor were beyond his reach, but William Law still lived. He was the teacher, indeed, of thousands; and Wesley turned upon him with a sort of fierce challenge, kindled by the sense of wasted years, and the memory of needless suflferings. For two years, he wrote to Law, he had lived by his theology; he had taught it to others. It had been to Wesley himself a hateful yoke, and to those to whom Wesley preached an idle sound. Wesley, by God’s mercy, had found, at last, a wiser teacher, who had taught him the true secret of Christianity, “Believe, and thou shalt be saved! Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all thy heart, and nothing shall be impossible to thee; strip thyself naked of thine own works and righteousness, and flee to Him.”

In that teaching Wesley saw the promise of the fulfilment of all his needs: —

“‘Now, sir,’ he cries to Law, ‘suffer me to ask. How will you answer it to our common Lord that you never gave me this advice? Why did I scarcely ever hear you name the name of Christ; never so as to ground anything upon faith in His blood? If you say you advised other things as preparatory to this, what is this but laying a foundation below the foundation? Is not Christ, then, the First as well as the Last? If you say you advised them because you knew that I had faith already, verily you knew nothing of me; you discerned not my spirit at all.’”

Wesley goes on to say, “I beseech you, sir, by the mercies of God, to consider deeply and impartially whether the true reason of your never pressing this upon me was not this, that you never had it yourself.”

Never, perhaps, was a great teacher so suddenly arraigned by his own pupil! Law, in reply, reminds Wesley, that he had other teachers, whom he might, on the same grounds, arraign. “Did you not above two years ago,” he says, “give a new translation of Thomas k Kempis? Will you call Thomas to account, and to answer it to God as you did me for not teaching you that doctrine?”

But Law goes on to say he did teach Wesley exactly what Bohler taught him. “You have had a great many conversations with me, and I dare say that you never was with me for half-an-hour without my being large upon that very doctrine, which you make me totally silent and ignorant of.” Law was a controversialist as formidable as Wesley himself, and he ended his letter by a very keen thrust: —

“If you had only this faith till some weeks ago, let me advise you not to be too hasty in believing, that because you have changed your language or expressions, you have changed your faith. The head can as easily amuse itself with a living and justifying faith in the blood of Jesus, as with any other notion; and the heart, which you suppose to be a place of security, as being the seat of self-love, is more deceitful than the head.”

It is easy to understand Wesley’s sudden fierceness with Law, and yet to sympathise with Law’s defence. Law had completely failed; his teaching cost Wesley years of wasted suffering; yet the fault did not lie wholly in the teacher. It is true that in Law’s books, and, no doubt, in his personal talks with Wesley, could be found frequent and full expositions of the evangelical way of salvation. But the emphasis lay elsewhere. There was no true perspective in Law’s theology. Nor was Wesley, in that softened mood, bred of the consciousness of utter failure, in which Bohler found him, and which explains why Bohler’s teaching proved so instantly effective. The secret of Law’s failure as a teacher, in a word, lies largely in the spiritual condition of his pupil.

But Wesley was standing on the verge of a new life. Wednesday, May 24, 1738, was for him the great day of deliverance, and he has described it in words that have become historic. For days he had been seeking peace, as Bohler had taught him, “(1) by absolutely renouncing all dependence, in whole or in part, upon my own works or righteousness, on which I had really grounded my hope of salvation, though I knew it not from my youth up: (2) by adding to the constant use of all the other means of grace continued prayer for this very thing — justifying, saving faith; a fuller reliance on the blood of Christ shed for me; a trust in Him as my sole justification, sanctification, and redemption.” There still, however, lay on him “a strange Indifference, dulness, and coldness, and a constant sense of failure.” But the dawn of a new and great experience was near.

All through the memorable day of his conversion it is curious to note how Wesley was eagerly listening as if for some voice calling to him out of the eternal world. He seemed to catch, everywhere, prophetic echoes of some coming message. The very air was full of whispers and omens. When he opened his New Testament at five o’clock in the morning, he tells how his eyes fell on the words, “There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises that we should be partakers of the divine nature.” Just before he left his room Wesley opened the book again, and, as with the force of a personal message, there gleamed on him from the open page the sentence, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.” These strange whispers met him and pursued him everywhere. In the anthem in St. Paul’s he heard translated into stormy music the cry of his own heart, “Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice; let Thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint.” Then, through the chant of the sweetvoiced choir, the thunder of the organ, ran, like a thread of still diviner music, a personal message, a voice whispering to him in reply: “O Israel, tnist in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption, and He shall redeem Israel from all his sins!” “In the evening,” he says, “I went very unwillingly to the society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans,” and across more than two centuries the great German spoke to the great Englishman.

What followed must be told in Wesley’s own words.

“About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart. But it was not long before the enemy suggested, ‘This cannot be faith; for where is thy joy?’ Then was I taught that peace and victory over sin are essential to faith in the Captain of our salvation; but that, as to the transports of joy that usually attend the beginning of it, especially in those who have mourned deeply, God sometimes giveth, sometimes withholdeth, them according to the counsels of His own will.’”

The fluctuations in Wesley’s gladness during those first moments of deliverance really prove Wesley’s kinship with all believing hearts in every age. Human nature is hardly capable of one sustained, unshadowed, perpetual joy. But Southey fastens on this very feature in Wesley’s experience and extracts from it an argument against its genuineness. “Here,” he says, “is a plain contradiction in terms; an assurance which did not assure him.” Coleridge, as happens with amusing frequency, disagrees with both Southey and Wesley.

“‘This assurance,’ he says, ‘amounted to little more than a strong pulse or throb of sensibility, accompanying the vehement volition of acquiescence, an ardent desire to find the position true and a concurring determination to receive it as truth. That the change took place in a society of persons all highly excited aids and confirms me in this explanation.’”

Coleridge, it will be seen, invents his facts. There was no “excitement” in the little company in which a single voice was audible, reading nothing more exciting than a bit of exposition translated from the German. But though Coleridge distrusts Wesley he contradicts Southey, “Surely,” he says, “it is rendering the word ‘assurance’ too absolutely to aflSrm its incompatibility with any intrusive suggestion of the memory or the fancy.” There is a flash of real insight in those words!

Charles Wesley was not present in that little room at Aldersgate at the supreme moment of his brother’s life. He was lying at home sick, and was engaged in prayer. The first impulse of John Wesley and those about him was to carry the news to the younger brother. “Towards ten,” writes Charles Wesley, “my brother was brought in triumph by a troop of our friends, and declared, *I believe.’ We sang a hymn with great joy and parted with prayer.” The hymn is supposed to be that beginning with the verse: —

‘Journal, May 24, 1738.

“Where shall my wondering soul begin:

How shall I all to heaven aspire?
A slave redeemed from death and sin,

A brand plucked from eternal fire.
How shall I equal triumphs raise.
Or sing my great Deliverer’s praise?”

Charles Wesley had just composed that fine hymn in the glow of his own conversion, and it was published a few months later. Its music runs through the whole history of Methodism; the experience it reflects is repeated wherever a human soul with intelligent faith receives Christ.

It is interesting to note the historic relations of Wesley’s conversion. The two Reformations — of Germany and of England — touch here. They touched, indeed, at an earlier stage. Who traces the great spiritual movement under Luther, which transfigured Germany and created Protestantism, must go back beyond Luther to another Lincolnshire parsonage — to Lutterworth, where John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, and was the centre of the spiritual movement which during the fourteenth century swept over England. The English reformer influenced Germany almost as much as he influenced his native land. John Huss himself made no secret of the debt he owed to Wyclift’e, and the Council of Constance, which burnt the body of John Huss, directed Wycliffe’s bones to be also burnt. Englishman and Bohemian, in its judgment, represented twin forces, and must be smitten with like penalties. The Moravian Brethren come, through the stormy generations which followed, by direct spiritual descent from Huss; Luther was his spiritual heir. And so, after more than three hundred years, Wycliffe’s teaching came back to England in Bohler; it spoke to Wesley from Luther’s lips in the little gathering in Aldersgate Street. Great debts are, in this way, sometimes greatly paid.