Beginning the Work
Wesley’s conversion perplexed some of his friends and alarmed others. “If you were not a Christian ever since I knew you,” said Mrs. Button, the mother of his friend, you were a great hypocrite, for you made us all believe you were one.” Samuel Wesley received the news with a sort of bewildered anger which is almost amusing. His brother, he held, was suffering from an attack of “enthusiasm” — a disease much more deadly than any known to medical science. “Falling into enthusiasm,” he writes, “is being lost with a witness. I pleased myself with the* expectation of seeing Jack, but now that is over, and I am afraid of it. I heartily pray God to stop the progress of this lunacy.... What Jack means by his not being a Christian till last mouth I understand not,” cries this bewildered High Churchman. “Is baptism nothing?... He must be either unbaptized or an apostate to make his words true.”
But then John Wesley had already moved to another spiritual climate. In his spiritual chronologj’ the birthday of a Christian was now shifted from his baptism to his conversion; and “in that change,” as Miss Wedgwood says, with a flash of profound insight, “the partition line of two great systems is crossed.”
Wesley, however, was the last man to be moved by the alarms and perplexities of his friends. Already, on June 13 — only three weeks after his conversion — he was on his way to Germany to visit the Moravian settlements. He loved to study religion in the concrete, to try it by the supreme test of life. The actual experience of the human soul was for him the final logic. In the Moravian settlements at Herrnhut he would find a whole community living by the great truths he had just learned, and he hastened to cross-examine the experiences of these simple-minded Moravians; to study the social order they had evolved and the manner of life they lived.
He spent three months in this business, returning to England on September 16, and his Journal gives a picture, half amusing and half pathetic, of Wesley’s conversations with group after group of these goldly peasants, and the anxious yet simple-minded questions by which he interrogated their beliefs and emotions. In the rough guttural of peasant’s German, or filtered through a Latin transla- ’ tion, the experiences of one devout Moravian after another reached Wesley, and he listened with musing brow and patient eyes. Here was the work of the Holy Spirit translated into terms of human life and spread out before his eyes. Here was Christ’s Gospel verified! Wesley wrote to his brother Samuel, “I am with a Church whose conversation is in heaven, in whom is the mind that was in Christ, and who walk as He walked. Oh, how high and holy a thing Christianity is, and how widely distinct from that — I know not what — which is so called, though it I neither purifies the heart nor renews the life.” I Wesley met Count Zinzendorf, the head of the Moravian i community, a man with a genius for religion and in a hundred ways remarkable; but it is curious to note that Zinzendorf, who in social standing and in education was so much nearer Wesley than Bohler, impressed Wesley much less than did that lowly-minded missionary. There was a narrower spiritual interval betwixt Bohler and Wesley than betwixt Zinzendorf and Wesley; and Wesley was in that mood when social distance does not count.
Wesley took part in the religious services of the Moravians with keenest sympathy, and sat, with the simplicity 1 of a child, at the feet of peasant-elder or carpenter-I preacher in turn. But he could not part with his ob-I stinate English common-sense, and he studied the whole I system and the type of piety it produced with shrewd eyes. On his return to England he wrote to Count Zinzendorf a grateful letter, full of the praise of what he had seen; but, he added, he hoped later to give his Moravian friends “the fruit of my love by speaking freely on a few things which I did not approve, perhaps because I did not understand them.”
What those “few things” were of which Wesley’s keen common-sense disapproved is described later, and at length. But on the whole Wesley came back from his Moravian tour with faith reinforced. His new spiritual experiences were really not new. They belonged to a line of human experience which ran back through all the saints to the days of the Apostles. He had seen them shared by hundreds of living men and women, in whom they bore all their ancient fruits of saintship. Wesley brought back from Herrnhut the exultant sense that he stood in a goodly companionship.
From this moment the character of Wesley’s work changes. He is living in a new spiritual climate. Religion is for him uo longer an experiment. It is an attainment! It belongs to the realm of certainties. He has an exultant confidence in proclaiming it, and his work gains instantly a new and strangely concentrated energy.
The story of his first week’s work in a striking expression of zeal. He reached London on Saturday night, September 16, preached four times on Sunday, met the little Moravian society, which now numbered thirty-two persons, on Monday; on Tuesday he visited the condemned felons at Newgate and preached in the evening at Aldersgate Street. All the days of the week were, in fact, filled up with preaching and private visitations. And at last Wesley has somehow found the key to the human heart. His speech had always possessed strange power to disquiet the conscience, but now there is a new quality in his message. It brings peace to those consciences it formerly could only disquiet.
His Journal is rich with brief and sometimes apparently unconscious records of success, both in preaching to great congregations and in dealing with individuals. “One who had long scoffed at spiritual religion” sent an urgent message to Wesley to visit him. “He had all the signs,” says Wesley, “of settled despair, both in his countenance and behaviour. He said he had been enslaved to sin many years, especially to drunkenness.... I desired that we might join in prayer. After a short space he rose, and his countenance was no longer sad; he said, ‘Now I know God loveth me, and hath forgiven my sins, and sin shall not have dominion over me, for Christ hath set me free.” “And,” says Wesley, “according to his faith it was unto him.”
He records again: “At St. Thomas’s, a young woman raving mad, screaming and tormenting herself continually; I had a strong desire to speak to her. The moment
I began she was still. The tears ran down her cheeks all the time I was telling her ‘Jesus of Nazareth is able and willing to deliver you.’ ... I expounded at Mr. Fox’s, as usual, the great power of God with us, and one who had been in despair several years received the witness that she was a child of God.” Such records as these begin to shine like stars in the hitherto clouded and troubled firmament of Wesley’s Journal.
Wesley, it is clear, now stands fitly equipped on the threshold of the true work of his life — the religious awakening of his countrymen. His spiritual training, in a sense, is complete. He has a real Gospel to preach; the good tidings of religion as a deliverance, not as a new and intolerable bondage. And he can proclaim this ‘Gospel with a new accent of certainty. It is verified in his own experience, and confirmed by the witness of multitudes. He has all his old thoroughness, his utter sincerity, his scorn of compromise, his unsparing self-sacrifice; but through these fine qualities there now runs something new — a note of victory, a fire of gladness.
Here, surely, is a fit instrument in God’s hands for a great task. It is not merely that Wesley’s spirit is now a transparent medium through which truth shines clear to other spirits. It is a channel through which great forces — the living energies of the Holy Spirit — stream into other lives. Wesley, under these new conditions, resembles an electric wire thrilling with subtle and strange energy. Hejias power! Power other than that of the eloquent tongue or the logical brain; power that riin^J)axkJ;o e±e that belongs to the spiritual order, and gives him a strange mastery over the souls of those who listen to him.
But Wesley’s preaching, if it produced more direct and visible results than before, now provoked, curiously enough, almost more of active opposition than ever. His disquieting earnestness, the steel-like edge and hardness of his speech, had always been too severe a trial for the drowsy congregations of that day. For them religion had only the offices of an opiate; it was a process as entirely mechanical as the revolutions of a Thibetan prayer-wheel. But now the disturbing energy of Wesley’s speech for hearers who asked only to be let alone was somehow enormously multiplied; and the Churches, one after another, shut promptly and almost automatically against him, after he had once preached in them. Before the end of 1738 he was little better than an ecclesiastical outcast.
His Journal at this period is full of such records as these: “Preached twice at St. John’s, Clerkenwell, so that I fear they will bear me there no longer.... Preached in the evening to such congregations as I never saw before at St. Clement’s, in the Strand; as this is the first time of my preaching here, I suppose it will be the last. ... I preached at St. Giles’s.... How was the power of God present with us! I am content to preach here no more.”
We do not stop just now to analyse the secret of the opposition Wesley aroused at this stage amongst the clergy and the average churchgoers. It is suflQcient to note the fact that at this precise moment, when he really had a message he could proclaim with exultant confidence — a message through whose syllables some strange spiritual iorce ran like a flame — well-nigh all the church-doors in London were shut with a loud and energetic bang against him!
As the Churches refused to hear him, Wesley betook himself to the gaols, and he found his most eager hearers, and his best results, amongst the felons in the condemned cells. Felons waiting to be hanged, it must be remembered, sat in crowds — a witness to the cruelty of the law in those harsh days — in every English gaol. Charles Wesley records preaching to one sad company of the condemned, fifty-two in number, and amongst them a child of ten. Rogers, the poet, as late as 1780, relates seeing a cart full of young girls, in dresses of various colours — the feminine instinct for adornment surviving to the last — on their way to Tyburn to be executed, after the Gordon Riots. Wesley’s work amongst these hurrying candidates for the gallows fills a large space in his Journal. Here is a typical story — one of many: —
“On Wednesday my brother and I went, at their desire, to do the last good office to the condemned malefactors. ... It was the most glorious instance I ever saw of faith triumphing over sin and death. On observing the tears run fast down the cheeks of one of them, I asked him, *How do you feel your heart now?’ He calmly replied, ‘I feel a peace which I could not have believed to be possible, and I know it Is the peace of God which pasaeth all understanding.’”
In his Journal it is almost amusing to note the rigour with which Wesley still continues to test himself, and the care, not to say the eagerness, with which he collects and records all varieties of spiritual experience which he sees. He writes to many persons who have come under his influence, asking them to describe the effects religion produces in them; and Wesley, himself the frankest of men. had some secret charm which awakened frankness in others. As a result, his Journal is packed with human documents which, when read even a hundred and lifty years afterwards, affect the reader with a curious sense of reality and honesty.
It was no vulgar and peeping curiosity which made Wesley seek and write down these stories. The truth is that no one ever looked at religion in a more scientific way or tried it more absolutely by scientific methods, than did Wesley. For him it was not a theology to be recited, a history to be learned, a philosophy to be interpreted, or even a code of external ethics to be obeyed; it was a divine force entering human life, and undertaking to produce certain results in human character and exijerience. And Wesley was always testing it. in himself or in others, by the question, “Does it, as a matter of fact, produce the results it claims to yield?”
“Experience first, inference second. This,” says Huxley, “is the order of science.” And Wesley’s attitude towards his own work is, in Huxley’s sense, completely scientific. He resembles a chemi.st who is trying some new combination. He must watch, note, verify the results, in terms of human experience, which this combination produces.
Meanwhile, the three men who were to be henceforth linked in a memorable partnership of Christian service found themselves together in Loudon. Wesley landed from Germany on September 16, 1738; WTiitefield returned from a brief visit to America in December; Charles Wesley was acting as curate at Islington. Thus, at the beginning of 1739, the three comrades, for the first time since the Holy Club at Oxford broke up, found themselves side by side again. They were young men with no ecclesiastical position, and no sense as yet of the greater career they were to pursue in common. But all tiree had, somehow, relearned the last secret of Christianity. Something of its early power had fallen upon them. A gleam of the fiery tongues of Pentecost was in their speech; a breath of its mighty, rushing wind was in their lives.
The evidence of that strange power is found abundantly in each of the three. Charles Wesley, during his brother’s absence in Germany, did amazing work in the condemned cells of the prisons, and amongst the social wrecks of the workhouses of London. Crowds gathered round Whitefield whenever he stepped into a pulpit. In the little societies already in existence the presence of the three was a sort of embodied flame, and remarkable meetings were held. Sometimes whole nights were spent in prayer.
“On the first night of 1739,” says Wesley himself, “Mr. Hall, Kinchin, Ingham, Whitefield, Hutchins, and my brother Charles, were present at our love-feast, with about sixty of our brethren. About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily amongst us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of His majesty, we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!’”
Such meetings, of course, shocked the drowsy sense of propriety in the average clergyman. The preaching of the three comrades might incidentally yield results of a praiseworthy sort. It had to be confessed that they made thieves honest, drunkards sober, wife-beaters gentle. They lit human faces with the glow of a strange -joy, and sent even condemned men to the gallows with hymns on their lips. But their work had one fatal vice, the worst that age knew — it was irregular! It was tainted with that dreaded, hated, and most dangerous thing, enthusiasm! Even Southey, telling the story a hundred years afterwards, cannot quite forgive the Wesleys for saving men and women in an unconventional fashion; and Coleridge breaks upon his text with one of his amusing footnotes: —
“O dear and honoured Southey! this is the favourite of my library among many favourites; this is the book which I can read for the twentieth time with delight, when I can read nothing else at all.... This darling book is nevertheless an unsafe book for all of unsettled minds. The same facts and incidents as those recorded in Scripture, and told in the same words — and the workers, alas! in the next page — these are ‘enthusiasts,’ ‘fanatics.’”
The incidents of the first chapters in the Acts of the Apostles re-emerging in actual life after eighteen centuries — this was, indeed, for many good people an alarming, not to say a shocking, spectacle. How many there are still who can tolerate spiritual phenomena only as long as they are safely locked tip between the covers of the Bible, and at a distance of centuries!
The two Wesleys, who had no disquieting dream of separation from the Church, and were anxious for nothing more than the approval of their spiritual superiors, waited on the Bishop of London to explain and justify their methods. Gibson was a diplomatist, an antiquarian, a man of affairs; but anything more remote than his temper from the fiery zeal of the reformer, the consuming ardour of the evangelist, can hardly be imagined. He looked with perplexed eyes at the two brothers. The brown of American suns was as yet upon their faces; but they were scholars, gentlemen, university men. The pity was that some strange fire of zeal burned fiercely in them. There was no touch of the dissenter about them. They had no quarrel with the Articles or the ritual of the Church. The disquieting thing was that they took these too literally.
They discussed with their Bishop, for example, the propriety, nay, the necessity, of re-baptizing Dissenters. “Sure and unsure,” Charles Wesley argued, “were not the same”; and where the fate of eternal souls was at stake no risks ought to be taken. But Bishop Gibson was anxious only to leave the Dissenters alone, no matter how inconsistent with the High Church theory that policy might be. Charles Wesley waited upon Gibson later to notify that he intended to perform such a baptism.
‘”It is irregular,’ said the Bishop; ‘I never receive any such information but from the minister.’
“‘My lord, the Rubric does not so much as require the minister to give you notice, but “any discreet person.” I have the minister’s leave.’
“‘Who gave you authority to baptize?’
“‘Your lordship,’ replied Charles (for he had been ordained priest by him), ‘and I shall exercise it in any part of the known world.’” ‘Are you a licensed curate?’ said the Bishop. ‘Do you not know that no man can exercise parochial duty in London without my leave? It is only sub silentio.’
““But you know many do take that permission for authority, and you yourself allow it.’
“‘It is one thing to connive,’ said the Bishop, ‘and another to approve. I have power to inhibit you.’
“‘Does your lordship exert that power?’ asked Charles, all the Wesley in him hardening into stubborness at a threat. ‘Do you now inhibit me?’
“‘Oh, why will you push matters to an extreme?’ cried the perplexed Bishop.”
Plainly troublesome young men these, who refused to dilute religion into platitudes, or button it up in polite conventions!
Of the three comrades, the Wesleys — perhaps because they were older and better known — were regarded with more suspicion. All official brows frowned upon them. Their opportunities of preaching steadily narrowed. The Church at best was a hard stepmother to the brothers. John Wesley was his father’s curate for three years, the sole ecclesiastical charge, in England, he ever held. Charles held, without a title, a curacy at Islington for about as many mouths, and was driven from it practically by violence. This was the only preferment the Anglican Church had to otter two of its sons who represented the greatest religious force that has stirred in Protestant England.
It is usual to say that the startling physical manifestations which attended the early preaching of the Wesleys explain, and justify, the general shutting of all pulpits against them; but the mere dates in the almanac wreck that theory. In the spring of 1739 only one instance of the physical manifestations, afterwards so remarkable a result of Wesley’s preaching, had occurred, and already the Church had closed her doors upon her enthusiastic son for ever. Southej’ finds justification for the exclusion of the Wesleys in the love-feasts and watch-night services held by the little Moravian societies, in which the Wesleys joined. We have described one such meeting which lasted till three o’clock in the morning, and was swept by a wave of remarkable spiritual influence. “Such a meeting,” said Southey, “set prudence at defiance. It was an example of that excessive devotion which gave just offence to the better part of the clergj-. Such excessive devotion,” he adds, “if it find a mind sane, is not likely to leave it so.” Coleridge, with a flash of keener insight, traces the opposition of the clergy to the new movement to what he calls “the subtle poison of the easy-chair.”
To such a spiritual mood “prudence” seems the first of virtues, and zeal the last and worst of offences. The Wesley’s disquieted the conscience of the clergy of their day by their uncomfortable earnestness. They were “enthusiasts.” This was but a polite way of saying they were dangerous lunatics. So in mere self-defence there was an unconscious conspiracy to suppress them. But it remains, after all explanations, the scandal of the Church of that day, the final and overwhelming proof of its blindness, that it shut its doors against the Wesleys.
But Whitefield was the youngest of the group; he had as yet provoked less criticism than his comrades. His matchless preaching powers gave him a strange popularity; and so, in the order of God’s providence, it fell to him to break through the narrow limits of mechanical Church order and make a way for the new forces beginning to stir in the religious life of England.
There is something almost amusing in the slowly awakening suspicion of the London clergy towards Whitefield. Here was a strange clerical i)henomenon, a preacher who used words of fire in the pulpit; who wept over his hearers in a passion of pity, and somehow set their tears running too. It was jdain that no starched conventionalities would long restrain a divine at once so youthful and so ardent. No one knew quite what he would do next. He was preaching in Bermondsey Church to a great crowd, while a still vaster crowd filled the churchyard outside, unable to find admittance. Why, asked Whitefield, should he not go out, turn a tombstone into a pulpit and preach to that great multitude eagerly waiting to listen? These spectacle of that dumb waiting crowd in Bermondsey churchyard, he said afterwards, “put me first upon thinking of preaching without doors. I mentioned it to some friends, who looked upon it as a mad notion. However, we knelt down and prayed that nothing may be done rashly.”
At St. Margaret’s, Westminster, one Sunday morning Whitefield was practically pushed into the pulpit, and preached against the protest of the oflBcials, and to the scandal of all ecclesiastical sensibilities. A few days later he went to Bristol, but by this time the clergy generally had taken alarm. The chancellor of the diocese sent for him, and asked him by what authority he preached in the diocese of Bristol without a licence, and read to him those canons which forbade any minister from preaching in a private house. “V^Tiitefield contended these did not apply to ministers of the Church of England. When he was informed of his mistake, he said: —
“There is also a canon, sir, forbidding all clergymen to frequent taverns and play at cards; why is not that put in execution?” Then he added what, to the shuddering chancellor, seemed the worst of blasphemies. There were things — the souls of men, for example — which this highly irregular young curate counted of more value than even the most venerable canons. At all risks he must preach to lost men wherever he found them. “Notwithstanding the canons,” he said, “he could not but speak the things which he knew.”
The answer was solemnly written down, and the chancellor then said grimly: “I am resolved, sir, if you preach or expound anywhere in this diocese, I will first suspend, and then excommunicate, you.” They parted at this point; and Whitefield goes on to tell how “after I had joined in prayer for the chancellor,” he conducted a service in St. Nicholas Street with signal power. “It is remarkable,” he adds, “that we have not had such a continued presence of God amongst us as since I was threatened to be excommunicated.”