The Field-Preaching
Now an attempt to put an ecclesiastical muzzle on Whitefield was i)recloome(l to failure. Whitefield, it is true, was only twenty-five years of age, a newly-ordained curate, without a charge and without influence. The chancellor of a diocese, with frowning official brows and the threat of excommunication on his lips, was a figure of sufficiently awe-inspiring quality. The ordinary curate would have been extinguished by the vision! But Whitefield was a curate of quite unconventional qualities. A spirit so daring as his was not to be chilled by the frown of even episcopal brows; a zeal so flame-like could not be restrained by even the menace of lawn sleeves! At that precise moment, too, Whitefield foimd himself in the presence of what seemed an urgent and overwhelming call to preach. Here were the Kingswood miners, a community ignorant, vicious, forgotten, who, beyond all others, needed the care and teaching of the Christian Church, and yet were left completely outside, not merely of its agencies, but even of its very remembrance. When Whitefield was setting out for America some wise and keen-sighted friend said to him, “If you have a mind to convert Indians, there are colliers enough in Kingswood.” How could one of Christ’s ministers — one, too, of Whitefield’s gifts and temperament, with the consciousness both of a divine message and of a divine power to utter that message — stand before such a crowd and consent to be dumb? The silent, sunless faces were a call too urgent to be denied.
The churches could find no room for Whitefield, and on Saturday afternoon, February 17, 1739, he took his stand on a little rising ground outside Bristol, called Rose-green, and preached his first open-air sermon. There .was a congregation of only some two hundred staring, listeners. Here was a strange spectacle, a clergyman in bands and gown, with a voice that had in it a note of thunder, preaching a sermon at the roadside. “I thought,” says Whitefield, in his magnificent way, “I might be doing the service of my Creator, who had a mountain .for His pulpit and the heavens for a sounding-board.”
It was just five months since John Wesley landed on his return from Germany. They had been months of waiting, of uncertainty, of discouragement, of apparently narrowing opportunities for work. The doors of all the churches were being shut one after another against Wesley and his comrades. It seemed as if England had no place for them, and could offer them no career. Those five months constitute a dramatic pause on the threshold of a great work. Then Whitefield, first of the three immortal comrades, broke through the imprisoning lines of conventional usage and of ecclesiastical law, and preached in the open air. With that act he stepped into a freer, larger world, and from that moment the new spiritual forces beginning to stir in England found — or rather made for themselves — a free channel.
The open-air services begun by Whitefield were attended, almost instantly, with startling results. His first audience numbered 200, the second rose to 3,000, the third to 5,000, and the crowds swiftly extended to vast gatherings of 20,000 people. Whitefield looked on the far-stretching mosaic of upturned countenances, black with the coal-dust of the pits, and tells in unforgettable words how, while he preached, he saw the white streaks made by the tears running down those grimy faces. “The open firmament above me,” he afterwards wrote, “the prospect of the adjacent fields, with the sight of thousands and thousands, some in coaches, some on horseback, and some in the trees, and at times all affected and drenched in tears together, to which sometimes was added the solemnity of the approaching evening, was almost too much for and quite overcame me.” “Blessed,” he adds, “are the eyes which see the things we see.”
The ecclesiastical authorities, of course, found fresh argument for a quarrel in these services. They were a new and yet more alarming expression of “enthusiasm.” The wrong thing was being done, in the wrong place, and in the wrong way. It is an amusing illustration of the frost-bitten formalism of that day to find so sensible a man as Samuel Wesley overcome with horror by the circumstance that Whitefield “never read the Liturgy to his tatterdemalions on the common!”
But if the services shocked the clerical conscience they stirred the heart of the common people. The affection Whitefield won from his hearers was childlike and touching. They hung on his words; they blessed him as he passed by them on the road; they gave him of their scanty earnings for that far-off orphan-house on American soil which already Whitefield was contemplating. They followed him with tears when he left them. These open-air services resembled the tapping of an artesian well. The dark, sunless, forgotten waters rushed up to the light.
But Whitefield had to sail for Georgia, and he summoned Wesley to leave London and come to Bristol to take up the strange work begun there. In the little society in Fetter Lane that call was heard with dread. Some dim sense of great issues hanging upon the answer to it disquieted the minds of the little company. The Bible was consulted by lot, and repeatedly, in search of a text which might be accepted as a decision. But only the most alarming passages emerged. “Get thee up into this mountain and die on the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered to thy people,” ran one. When one chance-selected text proved disquieting in this fashion the lot was cast again and yet again, but always with the same result. There was a quaint mixture of superstition and simplicity in the Bibliomancy of the early Methodists. If the text which presented itself did not please it was rejected, and the sacred pages were interrogated by chance afresh, in the hope of more welcome results.
Wesley at last decided to go, but even in his ears the call to Bristol seemed a summons to the grave. Yet his purpose was unshaken, and that step decided the whole character of his after work.
He reached Bristol and stood beside Whitefield while he preached in the open air. Wesley looked with amazed eyes and gravely pondering brow on the strange and vast congregation assembled. Then, on the morrow, in his own words, “I submitted to be more vile and, standing on a little grassy mound, preached to a great crowd from the words,^ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He htL-anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor.^”
Whitefield preached bis first open-air sermon on February 17, 1739; six weeks later, on April 2, John Wesley held his first open-air service, and Charles Wesley followed the example. of his comrades still later, on June 24. In his case, too, he was driven from the churches into the fields. The ecclesiastical authorities had grown sternly hostile. Charles Wesley was acting as curate, but without a licence, and preached repeatedly in Bexley Church; and the irregular vicar and still more irregular curate were summoned, on June 19, to appear before the Archbishop of Canterbury. Charles Wesley in his Journal says: —
“His Grace expressly forbade him to let any of us preach in his church, and charged us with breach of the canon. I mentioned the Bishop of London’s authorising my forcible exclusion. He would not hear me; said he did not dispute. He asked me what call I had. I answered, ‘A dispensation of the Gospel is committed to me.’
“‘That is, to St. Paul; but I do not dispute, and will not proceed to excommunication yet.’
“‘Your Grace has taught me, in your book on Church government, that a man unjustly excommunicated is not thereby cut off from communication with Christ’
“‘Of that,’ he replied ‘I am the judge.’
“I asked him if Mr. Whitefield’s success was not a spiritual sign, and sufficient proof of his call; and recommended Gamaliel’s advice. He dismissed us; Piers, with kind professions; me with all the marks of his displeasure.”
This was on the Thursday. Whitefield urged him to preach in the open air on the following Sunday. “If I do this,” writes Charles Wesley in perplexed meditation, “I shall break down the breach and become desperate.” He decided, however, at last, and he tells in his Journal the story of that fateful Sunday.
“Sunday, June 24, St. John Baptist’s Day. — The first Scripture I cast my eye upon was, ‘Then came the servant to Him and said, Master, what shall we do?’ I prayed with West and went forth in the name of Jesus Christ. I found near ten thousand helpless sinners waiting for the word in Moorfields. I invited them in my Master’s words, as well as name, *Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ The Lord was with me, even me. His meanest messenger, according to His promise. At St. Paul’s the psalms, lessons, &c., for the day put fresh life into me. So did the Sacrament. My load was* gone, and all my doubts and scruples. God shone upon my path, and I knew this was His will concerning me.”
Archbishop Potter threatened to excommunicate Charles “Wesley for preaching at Moorfields and Kennington Common, and the laity, too, shared the prejudices of the clergy. One surly landowner served Charles Wesley with a writ for walking over his field to address the crowd. Proceedings were settled by the payment of £10, and the bill still survives as an historical record. It runs: —
“Goter versus Westley. Damages, £10; costs taxed, £9, 16s. 8d. July 29, 1839, Received of Mr. Westley, by the hands of Mr. Joseph Varding, nineteen pounds sixteen shillings and sixpence, for damages and costs in their cause.
“William Gason, Attorney for the Plaintiff.”
At the bottom of this instrument Charles Wesley has written, “I paid them the things I never took,” and on the back the significant sentence, “To be rejudged on that day.”
It is almost amusing to notice the air — as of men stepping oS the solid earth into mere space, or of adventurers beginning a revolution — with which Whitefield and the Wesleys, in turn, began open-air preaching. What was there so alarming in preaching a sermon under the open sky, with the green turf for a floor, and the wide heavens for a sounding-board? As Wesley himself reflected, there are excellent precedents for open-air preaching in the New Testament. Yet he tells us, as he watched Whitefleld preaching to the Kingswood colliers, how deeply the sight shocked him. “All my life till very lately,” he says, “I have been so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.” Whitefield himself writes, on April 3: “Yesterday I began to play the madman in Gloucester by preaching on a table in Thornbury Street.” Yet both John and Charles Wesley preached often in the open air on the river bank, or under the shade of a great tree in Georgia, and this without a sense of doing anything of doubtful propriety. What was it made an open-air service in England so alarming?
They were unconsciously influenced by their environment. In convention-oppressed England, upon which mere decorous use and wont lay hard and deep as a frost, to preach outside a pulpit, or anywhere except under a church roof, was little less than impiety. It was charged with the most deadly risks. Religion had to be kept under a glass shade and packed in cotton-wool. To take it into the jostling street, to expose it to the rough winds that blew on the hill-side or across the open moor, was to imperil its very existence!
England, too, it must be remembered, was a mere network of ecclesiastical parishes, and each parish was a spiritual freehold, with jealously-guarded boundaries. These new preachers were mere trespassers! They were trespassers, too, of a very disquieting quality. To the drowsy divines of that period, the spectacle of clergymen betaking themselves to the market-place, or to the village green, in search of a congregation was nothing less than alarming. And the vastness of the congregations they drew, the depth of the feelings they aroused, made the spectacle only more alarming in clerical eyes. These men were kindling a conflagration!
To Wesley and his comrades themselves the business of field preaching was at first, as we have seen, utterly distasteful. John Wesley says he “consented to become more vile” when he preached on the hillside at Kingswood. All the sensibilities of the strait-laced, orderloving High Churchman were shocked, in a word, by the experience of having to stand on common earth, while the wind blew on his bare head, and preach to a passing crowd. But Wesley, after his logical fashion, made up his mind once for all on this subject, and his conscience obeyed his logic. He was but following a great and sacred i)recedeut in consenting in this fashion to become “a fool for Christ’s sake.” He puts the case with matchless force in a letter to a friend who warned him against these vagrant and unauthorised services: —
“On Scriptural principles, I do not think it tiard to justify what I do. God in Scripture commands me, according to my power, to instruct the ignorant, reform the wicked, confirm the virtuous. Man forbids me to do this in another’s parish, that is, in effect, to do it at all, seeing I have now no parish of my own, nor probably ever shall. Whom, then, shall I hear, God or man? ‘If it be just to obey man rather than God, judge you. A dispensation of the Gospel is committted to me, and woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.’ But where shall I preach it upon the principles you mention? Why not in Europe, Asia, Africa,
THE FIELD PREAOHTXa or America; not in any of these Christian parts, at least, of the habitable earth. For all these are, after a sort, divided into parishes. If it be said, ‘Go back, then, to the heathens from whence you came’ — nay, but neither could I now (on your principles) preach to them, for all the heathens in Georgia belong to the parish either of Savannah or Frederica.
‘“Suffer me now to tell you my principles in this matter. I look upon all the world as my parish, thus far, I mean, that in whatever part of it I am I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation. This is the work which I know God has called me to do; and sure I am that His blessing attends it.’”
Its early field-preaching best expresses the essential genius of Methodism. It makes audible what may be culled the imperial note in it; it makes visible, too, its ])assion of zeal to save lost men and women. There was in the Church life of that day little of the militant spirit. J^till less was there any representation of that divinest element of Christianity, the pity that seeks the lost, seeks them with passion and sorrow; seeks with scorn of suffering and difficulty and of mere convention. All the terms of Christ’s great parable were in those sad days — as too often in all days — inverted in Christ’s own Church. The ninety-nine sheep were lost in the wilderness, there was only one fat, well-wooled sheep in the fold. And beside that one comfortable sheep the equally fat and drowsy shepherd slumbered, and left the ninety-nine in the wilderness to seek him! The wandering sheep, that is, must pursue the shepherd, and not the shepherd the sheep! But when Whitefield and the Wesleys, with a thousand locked church doors behind them, stood before a crowd of unwashed miners at Kingswood, or a ragged multitude from the London slums at Moorfields, and proclaimed the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then faith came out from behind its defences. The drowsy, slippered, arm-chair religion of the day became aggressive. It attacked, instead of waiting to be attacked. Open-air preaching in these modern days has itself become almost a convention, hut in 1739 it was a revolution!
Journal, July 11, 1739.