The Three Great Comrades

Here at the threshold of the revival, it is worth while to sketch the three great comrades who were the chief human forces in its development. At the outset it is not Wesley but Whitefield who is most conspicuous. He leads the way in the new path; he fills the largest space in the public eye. The Church doors are shutting relentlessly against Wesley. His field seems narrowing to the condemned cells where felons sat in the shadow of the gallows, and to the little societies which, on the inspiration of Peter Bohler, had been formed. But Whitefield is in the rich dawn of his fame as a preacher. Orthodox pulpits are still open to him. Charmed crowds hang on the magic of his eloquence. Whole cities stir at his coming. When he visited Bristol a second time crowds on foot, in coaches, or on horseback came out to meet him on the road. The people blessed him as he passed along the streets. In the church where he preached eager hearers clung to the rails of the organ loft, others climbed up on the leads of the very roof to catch the vibration of his matchless voice.

“In the early stages of any movement,” Miss Wedgwood says, with a touch of genuine insight, “it is impulse and not weight that has most efl’ect.” And Whitefield, by a rare combination of natural gifts and of spiritual fervour was exactly fitted to communicate impulse to the revival beginning to stir in English life.

Whitefield and Wesley, of course, represent very unlike types, and were products of unlike forces. Whitefield lacked Wesley’s sure logic, his faculty for government, his Ijassiou for order and method. Wesley had the graver, deeper, stronger nature. He was slower in attainment, but more resolute in grasp. Whitefield was swifter, more ardent and impulsive: but he possessed as profound a genius for religion as Wesley himself. He lived, moreover, in a realm of spiritual ardours unknown to Wesley.

It may be added that he had the supreme gift of the orator in a form to which Wesley could not pretend. And the union of two such men, with gifts so diverse, helps to explain the great religious movement of the eighteenth century.

The contrasts and the agreements of the two men are alike remarkable. Wesley was nurtured in the gravities of a parsonage and passed straight from the shelter of the rectory roof to a great public school, and then to an ancient University. Whitefield was the son of an innkeeper, and spent his early years in the atmosphere of an inn. In his own words, “he wore a blue apron, washed mops, cleaned rooms, and did the work of a tapster. His confessions of youthful vices are pitched in an almost hysterical key, and they reveal a curiously mixed character. He pilfered money from his mother’s pocket — but shared the ill-got coins with the poor. He stole books — but they were pious books intended to develop religious character. He was sent to the local grammar school, found study distasteful, and swung back again to the maternal inn, with its servile tasks and ignoble companionships. The boy, however, had gleams of genius, and by happy chance secured admission to Pembroke College, Oxford, as a servitor.

He did not excel as a student, but the religious influences of the Holy Club took hold of him. The Wesleys became his spiritual guides, though he lacked their balance and sobriety. He passed through religious experiences, indeed, which would seem in place in the biography of a mediaeval saint, or of an ascetic of the early Christian centuries. Vehement in everything else, he was vehement in his penitence, and in the austerities with which he afflicted his body. He clad himself in mean clothes, vexed his body by denying it sleep, ate the most distasteful food. “Whole days and weeks,” he says, in his exaggerated fa.shion. “have I spent in lying prostrate on the ground in silent and watchful prayer.” He chose the beautiful and famous AValk of Christ Church for the scene of some of his self-mortifications, and would kneel under the trees in the darkness, in the winter rain or amid the falling snow, until the sound of the great bell warned him that the college gates were about to close. Reviewing his youth, Whitefield passes a terrible sentenceon himself.

“From in J cradle to my manhood,” he cries, “I see nothing in me but a fitness to be damned.” There is a touch of the histrionic in Whitefield, even in the recital of his own spiritual biography!

Spiritual deliverance came to him at last, and came in a flood of rapture. “Oh,” he cried, as he tells the story, “Oh, with what joy, joy unspeakable, even joy full of glory, when the weight of sin went off and an abiding sense of the love of God broke in.... Go where I would I could not avoid singing psalms almost aloud.”

There was a radiant brightness in Whitefield’s very nature that won universal affection, and his new spiritual mood increased that radiance. His natural gift for oratory, too, had already made itself manifest. He was recognised as being of a saintly earnestness in religion, and the one inevitable career for him was the pulpit. His friends, indeed, urged him to precipitately in that direction. “My friends,” wrote Whitefield, “wanted me to knock my head against the pulpit, and how some young men stand up here and there and preach I do not know. ... I have prayed a thousand times till the sweat has dropped from my face like rain, that God of His infinite mercy would not let me enter the Church, till He called me and thrust me to the work.”

He was just twenty-one when he received deacon’s orders, and he at once leaped into fame as a preacher. “I intended to make 150 sermons,” he says, “and thought I would set up with a good stock-in-trade.” As a matter of fact, this greatest of English preachers only possessed a single sermon when he began his preaching career. lu his humility he put his first and solitary discourse into the hands of a friendly clergj-man, to show how unprepared for the work of the pulpit he was. The clergyman used one-half of the sermon at his morning service, and the other half at his evening service, and returned it to its astonished author with a guinea by way of payment. In his very first effort in the pulpit Whitefield discovered he had no need of a manuscript. So great indeed was the effect of that discourse that complaint was made to the bishop that he had driven no less than fifteen persons mad I

Whitefield was not a student, and not in any deep sense a thinker. He had few of the gifts of a leader of

THE THREE GREAT COMRADES im

men. But his religious sensibilities were singularly keen. He saw the great truths of Christianity, where other men only reasoned about them; and the facts of the spiritual world were as real to him, and in some senses as clear, as the facts of earth and sky with which his physical senses dealt. They overwhelmed him without crushing him. “Few men,” says Sir James Stephen, “ever moved amongst the infinitudes and eternities of invisible things with less embarrassment or less of silent awe than Whitefield.” “Silent awe,” indeed, was not possible to a man so loudly and musically vocal as Whitefield.

He was above middle height, with singularly fair complexion, regular features, and small deep-set, dark -blue eyes, which seemed to flash with brightness. One, as it happened, was set at a conflicting angle with the other, but the resultant squint — as in the case of another famous preacher, Edward Irving — only added expressiveness to his face. Whitefield had probably the most musical and “carrying” voice that ever issued from a human throat. Its sweetness hung in the charmed ears of the crowd; its cadences resembled the rise and fall of the notes of some great singer. Whitefield had, in addition, a body of iron and nerves of steel. Except Wesley himself, no other human being ever talked to such multitudes, or talked for so many hours a day, and for so many years in succession, as did Whitefield. His biographer says that “in the compass of a single week he spoke in general forty hours, very often sixty hours, and that to thousands of people.” And he did this for years, and “after his labours, instead of taking rest, he was engaged in offering up prayers and interce.ssions, or in singing hymns, as his manner was, in every house to which he was invited.” Whitefield, in a word, almost as much as Wesley, seems, in his well-nigh miraculous capacity for work, to belong to another race.

Whitefield achieved his greatest triumphs as an orator in the open air. Sir James Stephen gives this picture of one of his open-air sermons: —

“Taking his stand on some rising knoll, his tall and graceful figure dressed with elaborate propriety, and composed into an easy and commanding attitude, Whitefield’s clear blue eye’ ranged over thousands, drawn up in close files on the plain below, or clustering into masses on every adjacent eminence .... But the rich and varied tones of a voice of unequalled depth and compass quickly silenced every ruder sound — as in rapid succession its ever-changing melodies passed from the calm of simple narrative, and the measured distinctness of argument, to the vehemence of reproof, and the pathos of heavenly consolation. Sometimes the preacher wept exceedingly, stamped loudly and passionately, and was frequently so overcome that for a few seconds one would suspect he could never recover, and when he did, nature required some little time to compose herself. The agitated assembly caught the passions of the speaker, and exulted, wept, or trembled at his bidding.”

Whitefield preached under conditions and to audiences known to no other orators. Passing over Hampton Common he finds a crowd of 12,000 people collected to see a man hung in chains. Here is an audience, a pulpit, a text; and straightway he captures the crowd! He preaches to another vast multitude assembled to see a man hanged, and the hangman himself suspends his oflBce while Whitefield discourses. Some wandering players have set up their stage at a country fair; the crowd rushes together to grin and to jest. But Whitefield suddenly appears, turns the whole scene to religious uses, spoils the players’ harvest, and preaches a sermon of overwhelming power.

As an orator Whitefield had some strange characteristics. An ordinary preacher, if he has delivered one discourse a dozen times, feels that he has preached it to rags; the sound of it becomes hateful to his own ears. The discourse is exhausted of all vitality. But Whitefield never reached his highest point of effectiveness in a sermon until he had preached it forty times! Then it became on his lips a perfect instrument of persuasion.

It is computed that he preached over 18,000 sermons; sixty-three of these were published by himself during his lifetime, and the puzzled reader searches them in vain to discover the secret of their marvellous power. They seem commonplace, familiar, egotistical, and even tawdry. The secret of their power lay in the personality of the preacher — the expressive eyes, the matchless voice, the trembling lips, the face that seemed to shine as with a mystic light. And all these were but the instruments and servants of a passionate and spiritual earnestness, such as seldom burned in a human soul. Here was a man with a single purpose, who believed with absolute conviction every syllable of his message. His vision of heaven and of bell was as direct as that of the great Florentine. And what be saw he bad the orator’s power, the great actor’s power, of making others see. And through all Whitefield’s oratory glowed — sometimes flamed — a passion of love for his hearers. “You feel,” says Sir James Stei)hen, “that you have to do with a man who lived and spoke, and who gladly would have died, to turn his hearers from the path of destruction and to guide them to holiness and peace.”

All Whitefield’s sermons, it may be added, are but so many variations of two ideas: man is guilty, but may obtain forgiveness through Jesus Christ; man is deathless; he stands at a point betwixt the two mighty opposites of eternal suflfering and of eternal bliss. The great preacher’s oratory was thus a fiddle with only two strings. But what deep and moving harmonies they yielded I

Wesley and Whitefield differed at many points both of theology and of practical morality. Whitefield was an ardent Calvinist, Wesley a convinced Arminian. Wesley branded slavery as the sum of all villainies; Whitefield bought slaves in the interests of his orphan-house in Georgia, includes them as cattle in the list of his stock, and piously thanks God for their increase. But in spite of all their points of difference Wesley and Whitefield belong to the same spiritual type, lived under the empire of the same lofty motives, and had almost equal partnership in the greatest religious movement in English history. Southey, indeed, declares that “if the Wesleys had never existed Whitefield would have given birth to Methodism”; and there was perhaps never written a sentence of less insight. Whatever Whitefield might have done, he himself, the most erratic and planless of men, could never have built the enduring and stately fabric of Methodism. Whitefield’s influence resembles the gale sweeping over the surface of the sea. The effect is instant, and visible to every sense. But of Wesley’s work the true symbol is the coral reef, built up slowly, and cell by cell, in the sea depths, over which the soil forms, and on which great cities will rise and unborn nations live. The one stirred the surface; the other built up from the depths, built deeply, and built for all time.

Whitefield’s ideal was to fly from one crowd of waiting hearers to another. Wesley had the social instinct. He knew the forces born of companionship, the shelter created by compajiionship. So from the very beginning of his work he was busy organising little societies where spiritual life could be sheltered and nourished; societies which supplied an external retlex for the inner spiritual experience of those who belonged to them. While Whitefield was moving the crowds, Wesley was organising these tiny centres of living structure; and the societies Wesley gathered were the cells in the coral reef!

Wesley, of course, did not invent the societies into which he gathered his converts. Such societies sprang into existence by way of protest against the black night of immorality which settled down over England after the Restoration and before Wesley himself was born. Bcihler revived these societies, and gave them a more spiritual tone. Miss Wedgwood, in view of this, says that “England gave the form of the societies, and Germany the spirit.” This is one of those plausible generalities whidi delight the ear but do not endure the test of facts. All that need be noted just now, however, is that when Wesley returned from Germauy and began the real work of his life, by some wise, unconscious instinct he busied himself in nourishing and multiplying the societies which, in concert with Peter Bohler, he had already begun to form. This work was less dramatic and immediately visible than that of Whitefield’s, but it was more eudui’ing.

It is the fashion to say of Whitefleld and John and Charles Wesley that the fiirst was the orator, the second the statesman, the third the singer, of the great religious movement of the eighteenth century. But the three actors in that great drama are hardly to be packed into separate compartments, and labelled, in this fashion. John Wesley had more than a touch of the poet, as well as the genius of a statesman; and if oratory is the art of using human speech as an instrument of overwhelming persuasion, then Charles Wesley was an orator as truly as his elder brother, or as Whitetield himself, though of a quite different type.

Charles Wesley, tried by the test of the work he accomplished, was one of the greatest masters of persuasive speech. For fifteen years he moved through the towns and villages of England and Ireland, preaching in crowded churches or to vast multitudes under the open skies, and always with strange power. There is something almost awe-inspiring in the sight of a multitude of 15,000 or 20,000 people standing silent, hushed, and expectant, waiting for the sound of a single human voice. Whitefield himself, the greatest of field-preachers, has told how the sight impressed him. “All was hushed when I began,” he says, “and the people, standing round the hill in the profoundest silence, filled me with admiration. To behold such crowds standing together in such a silence, or to hear the echo of their singing running from one end of them to the other, was very solemn.”

To draw such a crowd, to hold it spell-bound, to sway it with religious emotion, to melt it into penitence, to kindle it to joy, is one of the greatest tasks for which human speech has ever been used. To do it day after day, sometimes two or three times in a single day; to do it for fifteen years as the ordinary business of life.; to do it intermittently till old age, is a task the mere vision of which might have stricken Demosthenes with despair. And Charles Wesley performed this strange feat! He had not the organ-like voice and the dramatic genius of Whitefield, nor yet his brother’s strange secret of calm and overwhelming solemnity of address. The secret of Charles Wesley’s power in preaching lay in the realm of the emotions. The tears ran down his cheeks; his voice took cadences of infinite tenderness. It shook with a trembling pathos of emotion; and the contagion of his feeling melted whole crowds.

In old age Charles Wesley’s preaching took a curious character. He preached with his eyes closed, making long pauses, with bent and listening head, as though waiting for some message from unseen realms. He fumbled with his hands about his breast, or leaned upon the pulpit Bible with his elbows. He sometimes paused and asked the congregation to sing a hymn until his message came to him. But in the prime of his life he was a preacher of almost unsurpassed power, talking in sentences which had the rush and impact of bullets, but which vibrated with electric thrills of emotion.

Charles Wesley’s development of extraordinary power in preaching was both sudden and unexpected. He notes with characteristic accuracy the exact date when he first attempted to preach without notes. “At St. Antholin’s Church, on Friday, October 20,” he says, “seeing so few present, I thought of preaching extempore. I was afraid; yet I ventured on the promise, *Lo, I am with you always.’” Only a few months afterwards he could stand up before a crowd of 15,000 people and speak without fear, or pause, or failure of power, for two unbroken hours.

Charles Wesley had his limitations. He never could succeed, for example, in getting his natural feelings and his formal ecclesiastical beliefs to agree together. His best biographer, Thomas Jackson, says that through many years he entertained on various subjects two conflicting sets of principles, and acted on them alternately with equal sincerity, and without even suspecting their inconsistency! But this is hardly just to Charles Wesley. The fact is he felt truth rather than reasoned about it, and his feelings were wiser than his reasoned beliefs. But it is quite true that he remained delightfully and permanently unconscious of the discord betwixt his theories and his feelings.

He was in theory a High Churchman of the narrowest order. He declared that if he left the Church of England he would be afraid to meet the disembodied spirit of his father in Paradise. That most irascible of High Churchmen, in such a cause, would quarrel with him even in those celestial realms! Charles Wesley’s inconsistencies, bred of the unconscious conflict betwixt his generous impulses and his ecclesiastical prejudices, are amusing. He was the first to administer the Sacrament to the new converts in an unconsecrated building, yet he was filled with pious horror when the Methodists asked to receive the Sacrament at the hands of their own preachers. He spent his earlier years in open-air preaching, and the years of his old age in preaching in City Road Chapel; yet he made it his dying charge that his bones should not lie in the grounds of that chajel, because they were unconsecrated. “It is a pity,” wrote his wiser brother John, afterwards, “that my brother’s bones were not deposited where my bones will lie. Certainly that ground is as holy as any in England; it contains many bonny dead.” It is an example of the irony of things that Charles Wesley’s sacerdotal honor at the thought of his bones resting in the grounds of City Road Chapel has had the effect of dismissing them to soil still less sacred. The particular part of the churchyard where they sleep was, it seems, never consecrated!

Charles Wesley said, “My brother is all hope, I am all fear;” but that is not quite accurate. Charles was in temperament as sanguine as his brother John, but one side of his nature made him fear the results of the very things which the other and nobler side of his nature made him do.

He was a little, short-sighted man, of hurrying speech, odd in manner, desultory in mental habit, hot in his resentments, most loyal in his friendships, and with a simplicity of mind which niade him eminently lovable. He lacked the strength, the fixity of purpose, the keen logic, the ordered and .systematic intellect of his greater brother. But he outran him in some things, and was, perhaps, the more lovable of the two for the very reason that he was less faultlessly perfect. For love is sometimes nourished by the things it has to forgive.