What Had Happened
The question may now be asked, What was it really happened in that little room in Aldersgate Street on the night of May 24, 1738? Something did happen: something memorable, something enduring. It changed Wesley’s life. It lifted him, at a breath, out of doubt into certainty. It transfigured weakness into power. Nay, it did something more; it changed the course of history! A purely secular witness like Lecky declares the movement which had its starting-point in that little room on that night is historically of greater importance than all the splendid victories by land or sea won under Pitt. But for it there would be no Methodist Church under any sky, and English-speaking Protestantism itself, if it still survived — or if it had not found another Wesley — would be bankrupt of spiritual force.
Now, science requires for such an effect an adequate cause; and some of the causes assigned, though they bear the authority of famous names, are of quite humorous inadequacy. Coleridge, as we have seen, discovers in Charles Wesley’s conversion nothing more than a recovery from pleurisy. It represented a fall of temperature in his blood, not the entrance of new spiritual forces into his character. Southey is disposed in the same way to resolve Wesley’s spiritual experiences into physical terms. He traces the emotions of that great hour on the night of May 24 to the state of his pulse or of his stomach. But to make John Wesley’s stomach, and not his soul, the scene of such wonderful phenomena, the source whence radiate such far-reaching forces, can only be regarded as one of the most surprising feats of unconscious humour on record. The “explanations” of Coleridge and Southey explain nothing; they simply reflect that obstinate reluctant to admit the existence and validity of spiritual forces which is the last disguise of unbelief.
Wesley’s own explanation is that in that little meeting, and at that hour so precisely fixed, he was “converted.” And he probably understood what happened a little better than his as yet unborn critics.
But to this view many persons object that Wesley was really converted long before that night. If John Wesley was not a Christian when toiling on his spiritual treadmill at Oxford and in Georgia, then, cries Canon Overton, “God help all those who profess and call themselves Christians!” And multitudes, no doubt, will join in emphatic — and, indeed, in somewhat alarmed — agreement with Canon Overton. Let that great expei’ience be recalled which came to Wesley after reading Bishop Taylor’s “Holy Living.” “Instantly,” he says, “I resolved to dedicate all my life to God, all my thoughts and words and actions, being thoroughly convinced that there was no medium, but that every part of my life, not some part only, must either be a sacrifice to God or myself, that is the devil.” Was not that the true turning-point of Wesley’s life?
Jeremy Taylor’s teaching certainly acted as a precipitating shock to all the longings and convictions of Wesley’s spiritual nature. They crystallised at its touch into an unshakable purpose. He did at that moment surrender to the great forces and accept the great duties of religion. And he did this with a decision and completeness rare in human experience. “Instantly,” he says, “I resolved!” To Wesley, no half measures, no easy compromises, were at any time possible. Even though his reading of truth was sadly mistaken, his loyalty to it was of heroic fibre. Religion for him was no pleasant anodyne, a premium paid to secure eternal safety, a decorous fringe to the outer garment of his life. It was the chief business of existence. There was in Wesley’s religion, too, at every stage, the essential note of passion. He would follow the truth as he saw it at all risks and through all worlds.
Was this not a conversion? Did it not bring him into the household of God’s children? Here was certainly that root of all religion, the submitted will. Why, following this rhythm betwixt the human soul and God, did there not come, in Wesley’s case, that eternal music of peace, hushing all discords, which is its product? If he had died then, would he not have been saved?
As to this Wesley himself doubted. He offers conflicting judgments. “I, who went to America to convert others,” he says, “was never myself converted to God.” But, later, with a wise doubt, he writes: “1 am not sure of this.” Later still, and with clearer insight, he wrote of himself as having at that time “the faith of a servant, not of a son.”
The truth is, Wesley simply did not understand at that stage the Christianity in which he had been nurtured and of which he was a teacher. He had sat at the feet of many instructors and had read many books. He had been a sacerdotalist, an ascetic, a mystic, a legalist, all in turns — nay, all together! And yet, through all these stages, he had persistently misread the true order of the spiritual world. He believed that a changed life was not the fruit of forgiveness, but its cause. Good works, he held, came before forgiveness and constituted the title to it; they did not come after it and represent its effects. He had, in every mood of his soul, that is, missed the great secret of Christianity, lying so near, and level to the intelligence of a child; the secret of a personal salvation, the free gift of God’s infinite love through Christ; a salvation received through Christ and by faith; a salvation attested by the Spirit of God and verified in the consciousness.
Wesley himself supplies the evidence that up to this time he had missed this conception of religion. We have his spiritual chronology drawn out of by his own hand, in a series of self-judgments, all dated and catalogued, and making a complete map of his religious experience.^ He gives this by way of preface to his own account of what took place at the room in Aldersgate Street, and he explains what, at each successive stage, had been the foundation of his religion. We may quote these, prefixing to each mood the stage in Wesley’s life to which it belonged: —
The Child. — “I was carefully taught that I could only be saved by universal obedience; by keeping all the commandments of God; in the meaning of which I was diligently instructed. And those instructions, so far as they respect outward duties and sins, I gladly received and often thought of. But all that was said to me of inward obedience, or holiness, I neither understood nor
‘Journal, May 24, 1738. remembered. So that I was indeed as ignorant of the true meaning of the law as I was of the Gospel of Christ.
The Schoolboy. — “The next six or seven years were spent at school; where, outward restraints being removed, I was much more negligent than before.... However, I still read the Scriptures, and said my prayers morning and evening. And what I now hoped to be saved by vjas: (1) Not being so bad as other people; (2) having still a kindness for religion; (3) reading the Bible, going to church, and saying my prayers.
The University Student. — “Being removed to the university for five years, I still said my prayers both in public and private. ... I cannot well tell what I hoped to be saved by now, when I was continually sinning against that little light I had, unless by those transient fits of what many divines taught me to call repentance.
Holy Ordeus. — “I began to alter the whole form of my conversation. ... I set apart an hour or two a day for religious retirement. I communicated every week. I watched against all sin, whether in word or deed. I began to aim at and pray for inward holiness. So that now doing so much, and living so good a life, I doubted not but I uas a good Christian.
The DiscrPLixE of William Law. — “Meeting now with Mr. Law’s ‘Christian Perfection’ and ‘Serious Call,’ although I was much offended at many parts of both, yet they convinced me more than ever of the exceeding height, breadth, and depth of the law of God. ... I cried to God for help and resolved not to prolong the time of obeying Him as I had never done before. And by my continued endeavour to keep His whole law, inicard and outward, to the utmost of my poxcer, I was persuaded that I should be accepted of Him, and thought I cas even then in a state of salvation.
The “Holy Cllb.” — “In 1730 I began visiting the prisons, assisting the poor and sick and doing what other good I could by my presence or my little fortune to the bodies and souls of all men. To this end I deprived myself of all superfluities and many that are called the necessaries of life. ... I carefully used, both in public and private, all the means of grace at all opportunities. I omitted no occasion for doing good. I for that reason suffered evil. And all this I knew to be nothing unless as it was directed towards inward holiness. Accordingly this, the image of God, was what I aimed at in all, by doing His will and not my own. Yet when, after continuing for some years in this course, I apprehended myself to be near death, I could not find that all this gave me any assurance of acceptance with God. At this I was not a little surprised, not imagining I had been all this time building on the sand nor considering that ‘other foundation can no man lay than that which, is laid’ by Ood, ‘even Christ Jesus.’
The Mystic. — “Soon after a contemplative man convinced me yet more than I was before convinced that outward works are nothing, being alone; and in several conversations instructed how to pursue inward holiness or a union of the soul with God. But even of his instructions (though I then received them as the words of God) I cannot but now observe: (1) That he spoke so incautiously against trusting in outward works that he discouraged me from doing them at all; (2) that he recommended mental prayer and the like exercises as the most effectual means of purifying the soul and uniting it with God. Now these were, in truth, as much my own works as visiting the sick or clothing the naked; and the union with Ood, thus pursued, was as really my otvn righteousress as any I had before pursued under another name.
The Missionary. — “In this refined way of trusting to my own works and my own righteousness I dragged on heavily, finding no comfort or help therein till the time of my leaving England.... All the time I was at Savannah I was thus beating the air. Being ignorant of the righteousness of Christ, which, by a living faith in Him, bringeth salvation to ‘every one that believeth,’ I sought to establish my own righteousness, and so laboured in the fire all my days.... Before I had willingly served sin; now it was unwillingly, but still I served it. I fell and rose and fell again.... During this whole struggle between nature and grace, which had now continued above ten years, I had many remarkable returns to prayer, especially when I was in trouble. I had many sensible comforts.... But I was still ‘under the law,’ not ‘under grace.’
The Return to England. — “On my return to England, January 1738, being in imminent danger of death and very uneasy on that account, I was strongly convinced that the cause of that uneasiness was unbelief, and that the gaining of a true, living faith was the ‘one thing needful’ for me. But still I fixed not this faith on its right object; I meant only faith in Ood, not faith in ot through Christ. I knew not that I was wholly void of this faith, but only thought I had enough of it.”
That long self-analysis is clear, sustained, and final. As a matter of intellectual knowledge, Wesley, it is needless to say, was familiar with the true sense of Christianity. His Moravian teacher’s theology was, and is, in the Thirty-nine Articles. But for Wesley, as for his generation, these had become a set of pale and colourless syllables out of which all reality had drained. And his experience proves afresh that a creed may survive as a bit of literature; it may be chanted in hymns, and woven into prayers and solemnly taught as a theology, and yet be exhausted of all life. The great phrases may be depolarised, not to say dead.
And this is a warning for all time. Wesley’s Church holds to-day, and holds tenaciously, the doctrines which, up to this stage, Wesley himself had missed. These, indeed, are for us weighted by the history they have shaped. They are authenticated by the literature and the hymnology they have inspired. They have so completely passed out of controversy that they have become platitudes. The peril is they may become unverified formulae again.
Wesley declares that he owed his conversion to the teaching of Peter Bohler. What, then, exactly was that teaching? Bohler did unconsciously the supreme work of his life during those few days in London and at Oxford when he was conversing with Wesley. The humble-minded Moravian, wise only in spiritual science, touches Wesley — and then vanishes! But he helped to change the religious history of England, little as he himself dreamed of it.
And what he taught Wesley is suflSciently clear. In substance, it was three things, things which lie in the very alphabet of Christianity, but which, somehow, the teachings of a godly home, of a great University, of an ancient Church, and of famous books had not taught Wesley. These are that salvation is through Christ’s atonement alone and not through our own works; that its sole condition is faith; and that it is attested to the spiritual consciousness by the Holy Spirit. These truths to-day are platitudes; to Wesley they were, at this stage of his life, discoveries.
Wesley’s mistake was, of course, fatal. It is perfectly clear that through all the stages of his experience up to this point self, in many disguises, had taken the place of Christ. Wesley always puts the emphasis on himself, on his own motives, acts, self-denials, prayers, aspirations, and not on his Saviour. And woe to the soul that shifts the centre of its faith in this fashion and finds that centre, not in the redemming offices, the great and radiant figure of the living Christ, but in the imperfect and broken fragment of its own acts and merits! Not even what the Holy Ghost does in us can at any stage take, as the reason of our confidence before God, the place of what Christ has done for us.
But now, as a result of Bohler’s teaching, there broke on Wesley’s eyes a true vision of the redeeming work and offices of Jesus Christ. Up to this point he had taken part of those offices on himself — a mistake common in all ages, repeated in myriads of lives, and always mo.st deadly. In the after years of his life his favourite text was that great passage which declares that Christ is “made of God unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.” But in the sad years which went before that memorable hour in Aldersgate Street Wesley never had conceived that Christ is made, in some deep and mysterious sense, righteousness to the believing soul. As he himself puts it: “I had faith, but 1 fixed not this faith on its right object. I meant only faith in God, not faith in and through Christ.”
Now not even God’s mercy — if that mercy could come to us in some other shape than that presented in the mystery of Christ and His redemption — would satisfy llie human conscience. Wesley had, as few men ever had, the sense of sin and its hatefulness: a vision of the divine law — holy, stainless, august — dishonoured by sin. And the sense of the profound and eternal discord betwixt his sinful consciousness and the stainless righteousness of God forbade all peace. To be barely forgiven, spared by divine mercy, was for Wesley not enough, as it cannot be enough for any human soul. There must be some abiding and fundamental reconciliation with righteousness. Here were two eternal contradictories, mercy and justice. And would it be enough to walk through all the paths of eternity spared of God’s mercy, but still condemned by His justice?
What the human soul needs is some meeting-point in its own consciousness betwixt those two mighty opposites. And Wesley learned from Bohler the great secret of Christianity — that in Christ is found that sublime meeting-point. God’s gift to the believing soul is not merely pardon, but justification. Christ becomes for that soul “the Lord our righteousness.” So the vision which transfigured Wesley’s life was that of the complete and allsuflBcient ofBces of Christ in redemption — offices of a grace high beyond our very hopes, and deep beyond our comprehension.
But Bohler taught him, too, the secret of personal and saving faith. Had not Wesley faith before May 24, 1738? Yes, and he himself has told us what kind of a faith it was. It was, he says, “a speculative, notional, airy shadow which lives in the head and not in the heart.” The homilies of his own Church, it is true, might have taught Wesley a better definition of faith than this! It is “a sure trust and confidence which a man hath in God that by the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven and he re reconciled to the favour of God.” Wesley held this defiuitiou of faith with perfect intellectual clearness; but it was a mere unrealised abstraction.
Dr. Dale points out that this definition is itself a paradox. “If faith is the condition precedent to salvation, how can it be a belief that we are saved already?” He tries to solve the paradox by asking, “Is it not true that God has already given us — believers and unbelievers alike — eternal redemption in Christ?” Faith does not create a new fact, but only accepts, and brings into the realms of consciousness, a fact which exists already and independently of it.
But that is teaching which easily runs into perilous realms! It may be added that the paradox of faith lies elsewhere. If it is “the gift of God,” how can it be itself the condition of other gifts? If faith is the gift of God, the responsibility of its non-existence lies on God! How can it be held for guilt in a man that he does not possess what can only come to him by the gift of God?
The truth, as far as it can be expressed in the terms of human thought, is that faith represents the concurrence of two wills, the Divine and the human. It is impossible without the grace of God; so that grace is an essential, but ever-present, condition of its exercise. But even the grace of God does not produce faith without the consent of the human will. Wesley learned, but learned late and slowly, that faith is not merely the struggle of the unaided soul to reach some act and mood of confidence. It is the surrender of the soul to the helping grace of God; and only when that surrender is made is the soul uplifted by a divine impulse to the great heights of rejoicing trust.
Wesley learned from Bohler, too, that the pardon received from Christ is attested to the pardoned soul by the direct witness of the Holy Spirit; so it brings, as an immediate fruit, a divine peace. This doctrine, of course, was already embedded in Wesley’s creed, and he held it with perfect intellectual clearness. “If we dwell in Christ and Christ in us,” he had written to his mother many years before, “certainly we must be conscious of it. If we can never have any certainty that we are in a state of salvation, good reason it is that every moment should be spent, not in joy, but in fear and trembling.
Then, undoubtedly, in this life we are of all men most miserable.”
And yet, unconsciously, Wesley had hitherto acted on the theory that the only confidence as to his own spiritual state a man can have, is that which he derives from the contemplation of his own good works, or which he extracts, by a strictly logical process, from such good works. He practically held his mother’s belief, that any divinely given consciousness of acceptance with God was a rare experience and one confined to great saints. He tells with much simplicity how Peter Bohler “now amazed me more and more by the account he gave of the fruits of faith, of the holiness and happiness that he affirmed to attend it.”
Yet, if any doctrine has on it writ large the authority of Scripture and the assent of reason, it is the doctrine of what is technically called “assurance.” To deny it is to say that our spiritual consciousness has no office, or that it lies. As a result of forgiveness the most stupendous change has passed over the soul. Its relation to God and to His universe is transfigured. The forgiven sinner is no longer an outcast, but a child. Can we persuade ourselves that this amazing change does not, somehow, report itself to the consciousness? Can it be God’s purpose that the child He has received into His family again should continue to believe, what is now a lie, that he is still an outcast? Though God smiles upon him must he still think that He frowns? After sin’s dark substance is gone, can it be God’s will that its shadow should remain; that the pardoned soul should carry the burden of sin no longer reckoned against it, and feel the imaginary stains of a guilt that has been washed away? Is it credible that the only soul to whom God’s face wear.s a mask is the soul He has forgiven? And He wears a mask to hide His forgiveness!
Surely this is a paradox of incredible quality! “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” That is a triumphant credo. But who will rejoice in a forgiveness so furtive that not even the soul to which it is granted knows whether or not it has happened?
The denial of the witness of the Spirit involves the most amazing contradiction. The soul before pardon believes, what is true, that it is condemned; but after the great act of pardon it believes, what is a lie, that it is still condemned. And God keeps silence! He sends no sign or whisper of comfort. It is pleasing to Him — the God of truth! — that His restored and forgiven child should still live in the atmosphere of a falsehood! This is an incredibility of transcendent scale! It is in direct contradiction to God’s Word: ^’The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.”
This divine witness does not belong to the realm of miracle. It is not independent, as Wesley’s experience shows, of human conditions. It varies with the mood of the human heart itself; it wanes with waning faith or grows clearer with deepening earnestness.
It is striking to notice the variations in Wesley’s own mood even after this great experience came to him. On the very night of May 24, after he had left the little room in Aldersgate Street, he says, “I was much buffeted with temptations, but cried out and they fled away.” They returned again and again. Two days later he describes himself as “in heaviness because of manifold temptations.” Still later he finds “a want of joy,” and traces its cause to “want of timely prayer.” In Wesley’s experience, in brief, as in the experience of all Christians, there are fluctuations of spiritual mood. But his experience now had one new feature. He had still to maintain a daily flght with the forces of evil; but he says, “herein I found the difference between this and my former state. Then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered. Now I was always conqueror!” Here was struggle; but here, too, was victory!