The Great Itinerant
Weslet quickly came to his natural place as the leader and representative of the new movement. He was not merely its theologian and statesman, its scholar, its chief controversialist; he was its foremost and most diligent, if not the greatest, preacher. His career as an evangelist, now in full progress, deserves some study, for there is no other, for range, continuity, and permanent results, to approach it in modern history.
Wesley preached his first open-air sermon on April 2, 1739, and his last at Winchelsea on October 7, 1790. Betwixt those two dates lie fifty-one years, filled with a strain of toil almost without parallel in human experience. At the beginning of this period his two comrades, Whitefleld and his brother Charles, were in gifts and zeal his peers. Charles Wesley married in 1749, and his work as an itinerant shrank at once to very narrow limits, Whitefield died in America on September 30, 1770. Wesley thus, in what may be called the full stain of aggressive work, exceeded his brother by more than forty years, and Whitefield by more than twenty. His work, it may be added, was of a more concentrated type than that of either of his two comrades. In mere scale of labour Wesley far outran Whitefield. Whitefield preached, it is computed, 18,000 sermons, more than ten a week for thirty-four years of evangelistic life. Wesley preached 42,400 sermons after his return from Georgia, an average of more than fifteen a week; and he travelled, it is computed, in his itinerant work, more than 250,000 miles. Wesley, in a word, was a man who, if he had the brain of a statesman, the culture of a scholar, the message of an apostle, had also the glowing and tireless zeal of a preaching friar of the Middle Ages.
His work throughout these fifty-one years was of an unvarying type. It was the proclamation to the crowd, wherever he could gather one — on hill-side or river-bank. in the village luarket-place or under a church roof — of the unchanged and unchanging message of Christ’s Gospel. Wesley never wearied, never faltered, never doubted, never turned aside. His comrades lagged behind him; his friends forsook him; a world of angry controversy eddied about his name and character. None of these things affected Wesley. The clear flame of his zeal burned long, burned undimmed, burned still, when even the fire of life turned to ashes.
Who plots on a map of England Wesley’s preaching tours becomes sensible of certain constant features in the lines along which these tours moved. They did not cover the whole of England. They ran in certain well-marked geographical curves. In his evangelistic campaigns Wesley — to borrow the terminology of the soldier — had three bases — London, Bristol, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. They formed, roughly, an isosceles triangle; and Wesley’s tours — allowing for a certain percentage of oscillation — ran to and fro betwixt these three points. He must have known the road westward from London to Bristol, and northward from London to Newcastle-on-Tyne, as a city postman knows his round. Why did Wesley keep so obstinately to these particular lines? Why did he leave such wide spaces of England practically unvisited?
A little consideration supplies the explanation. The chief feature of English history from the middle of the eighteenth century is the rise of the great manufacturing towns. In the last fifty years of the eighteenth century the population of England increased fifty per cent. This was the result of the industrial revival, which changed the whole life of England and gave to her the leadership of commercial Europe. Now, Wesley’s preaching tours followed roughly the lines of England’s industrial development. He travelled where population was thickest. He left almost unvisited the wide green fields of rural districts, with their slow-moving, scanty population. But where the stream of life was deepest; where tiny villages were growing into busy cities; where tall chimneys filled the skies with their blackness, there Wesley preached and toiled. His mission began with the miners of Kingswood. It ran, almost throughout his whole career, amongst the crowds of the manufacturing cities. Wesley thus — with perhaps uncouscious wisdom — was baptizing with divine forces the new fermenting life of his day.
His tours, it may be added, were planned out in advance with great minuteness — the places he was to visit, the hours at which he would arrive, the services to be held. There were no wasted moments, no omitted opportunities, no intervals of rest. And Wesley carried out his “appointments” with iron resolution. Nor storm, nor distance, nor weariness availed to intercept his planetlike course. His custom was to preach in the morning at five o’clock, or even earlier. He then mounted his horse, or entered his chaise, and rode or drove to the next place he had appointed, where another great crowd waited for him. So throughout all the hours of the day, and all the days of the week, and all the weeks of the year, for a long half-century. He lived like a soldier on a campaign — lightly equipped, and ready at a moment to march. But for him it was a campaign of fifty years I
And yet he was a man of exquisite neatness and order, with the delight of a scholar in having everything perfect about him. “In his chamber and study, during his winter months of residence in London, not a book was misplaced or even a scrap of paper left unheeded. He could enjoy every convenience of life; and yet he acted in the smallest things like a man who was not to continue an hour in one place. He appeared at home in every place — settled, satisfied, and happy; and yet was ready any hour to take a journey of a thousand miles.”
The mere physical strain of such a career can hardly be estimated. The incessant travelling under the wet and changeful English skies, and on the rough English roads of that day, was a stupendous toil. Wesley travelled usually 4,500 miles a year, mostly on horseback, and this down to nearly his seventieth year. And while travelling at this rate he generally preached two, three — sometimes even four — sermons a day. He lived in crowds. His life, for so many hours each day, was full of noise, hurry, and agitation. And yet in all this incessant travelling and preaching he carried with him the studious and meditative habits of the philosopher!
His light, compact figure had the consistency and toughness of so much india-rubber. Nothing tired him; few things disturbed him. He was as insensible to vicissitudes of weather as a North Sea pilot. There was not a soft fibre, not an unhealthy nerve or a relaxed muscle, not an ounce of unnecessary flesh, in his wonderful little body. Every waking moment had its task, and no one ever gave fewer hours to sleep than did John Wesley.
He records that he rode in one day a distance of more than ninety miles between Bawtry and Epworth; and, at the end, “was little more tired than when he rose in the morning.” In Scotland, he reached Cupar, “after travelling near ninety miles,” and “was not in the least tired.” “Many a rough journey,” says Wesley, “have I had before, but one like this I never had, between wind and rain, and ice and snow, and driving sleet and piercing cold.” Under such harsh conditions he had ridden 280 miles in six days.
There is something almost amusing in the brevity, and more than philosophic coolness, with which Wesley records his experiences as a traveller, in the wild weather, and on the rough roads of that time. He gives us little vignettes of the scenery and weather — snow landscapes, pictures of dripping skies, of bitter, blowing winds — in spite of which he is seen struggling on indomitably to his appointments. He is too busy, perhaps, to attend to the weather very much, or to describe his own feelings about it. He tells the simple, matter-of-fact story in the most matter-of-fact way. Here is one of his little weather vignettes: —
“The hills were covered with snow, as in the depth of winter. About two we came to Trewint, wet and weary enough, having been battered by the rain and hail for some hours. I preached in the evening to many more than the house would contain, on the happiness of him whose sins are forgiven.”
A companion picture, which may well make the soft-fibred and comfort-loving modern reader shiver, comes a little later: —
“There was so much snow about Boroughbridge that we could SO on but very slowly, insomuch that the night overtook us when we wanted six or seven miles to the place where we designed to lodge. But we pushed on, at a venture, across the moor, and, about eight, came safe to Sandhutton.... We found the roads abundantly worse than they had been the day before; not only because the snows were deeper, which made the causeways in many places unpassable — and turnpike-roads were not known in these parts of England till years after — but likewise because the hard frost, succeeding the thaw, had made all the ground like glass. We were often obliged to walk, it being impossible to ride and our horses several times fell down while we were leading them, but not once while we were riding them, during the whole journey. It was past eight before we got to Gateshead Fell, which appeared a pathless waste of white. The snow filling up and covering all the roads, we were at a loss how to proceed, when an honest man of Newcastle overtook and guided us safe into the town.
“Many a rough journey have I had before, but one like this I never had; between wind, and hail, and rain, and ice, and snow, and driving sleet, and piercing cold. But it is past; those days will return no more, and are therefore as though they had never been.”
It is to be noted that Wesley had not always the exhilaration of admiring crowds to inspire him. Some of his open-air services were begun under circumstances which might well have taxed the courage of an apostle — if only because the human conditions were so chilling. Thus he describes an open-air meeting in Scotland: —
“At eleven I went into the main street, and began speaking to a congregation of two men and two women. These were soon joined by above twenty children. ... At six William Coward and I went to the Market-house. We stayed some time, and neither man, woman, nor child came near us. At length I began singing a Scotch psalm, and fifteen or twenty people came within hearing, but with great circumspection, keeping their distance, as thought they knew not what might follow.”
This, it may be added, was on his third visit to Scotland, when he was a man of fame.
An example of how Wesley attacked a great town is found in the story of how he conducted his first service in Newcastle: —
“At seven I walked down to Sandgate, the poorest and most contemptible part of the town and, standing at the end of the street with John Taylor, began to sing the Hundredth Psalm. Three or four people came out to see what was the matter; who soon increased to four or five hundred. I suppose there might be twelve or fifteen hundred before I had done preaching; to whom I applied those solemn words: *He was wounded for our transgressions.’ Observing the people, when I had done, to stand gaping and staring upon me, with the most profound astonishment, I told them: ‘If you desire to know who I am, my name is John Wesley. At five in the evening, with God’s help, I design to preach here again.’ At five, the hill on which I designed to preach was covered from the top to the bottom. I never saw so large a number of people gathered together, either in Moorfields or at Kennington Common. I knew it was not possible for the one-half to hear, although my voice was then strong and clear; and I stood so as to have them all in view, as they were ranged on the side of the hill. The Word of God which I set before them was: ‘I will heal their backsliding; I will love them freely.’ After preaching, the poor people were ready to tread me under foot, out of pure love and kindness. It was some time before I could possibly get out of the press. I then went back another way than I came; but several people were got to our inn before me; by whom I was vehemently importuned to stay with them, at least, a few days; or, at least, one day more. But I could not consent, having given my word to be at Birstal, with God’s help, on Ttiesday night.”
Wesley, however, had to face not merely stormy skies and weary, interminable journeys. He had to endure an amazing amount of obloquy and public abuse, hardening not seldom into gusts of stern and cruel persecution. The England of the latter half of the eighteenth century was brutal and untaught. Its temper was cruel; its very sports were marked by an almost incredible savagery. And the crowds of that day found as much pleasure in harrying an tinfortunate Methodist preacher as in watching a prize fight or in baiting a bear. Wesley tells the story of these persecutions in his own brief, composed fashion, without comment or complaint; but behind his calm syllables are records of human brutality — and of human courage — not easily paralleled.
At Wednesbury, for example, there was a whole cycle of persecution, which stretched from June, 1743 to February, 1744. For these eight months the town was practically — so far as Methodists were concerned — under i mob-rule. The magistrates and clergy conspired with the I rabble against Wesley’s followers. They suffered almost as many wrongs as did the Jews at Kischineff, under Russian rule. They were plundered, beaten, hunted through the cities, and outraged almost at the pleasure of the mob. Wesley sums up the story: —
“Ever since June 20 last, the mob of Walsal, Darlaston, and Wednesbury, hired for that purpose by their betters, have broken open their poor neighbours’ houses at their pleasure, by night and by day; extorted money from the few that had it; took away or destroyed their victuals and goods; beat and wounded their bodies, threatened their lives; abused their women (some in a manner too horrible to name), and openly declared they would destroy every Methodist in the country; the Christian country where his Majesty’s innocent and loyal subjects have been so treated for eight months, and are now, by their wanton persecutors, publicly branded for rioters and incendiaries.”
A favourite and very deadly trick was to seize and impress for the Army or Navy the more active of Wesley’s followers and preachers. The story of Thomas Beard deserves to be told as it stands in Wesley’s Journal: —
“I left Newcastle, and in the afternoon met John Nelson, at Durham, with Thomas Beard; another quiet and peaceable man, who had lately been torn from his trade, and wife, and children, and sent away as a soldier; that is, banished from all that was near and dear to him, and constrained to dwell among lions, for no other crime, either committed or pretended, than that of calling sinners to repentance. But his soul was in nothing terrified by his adversaries. Yet the body, after a while, sunk under its burden. He was then lodged in the hospital, at Newcastle, where he still praised God continually. His fever increasing, he was let blood. His arm festered, mortified, and was cut off; two or three days after which God signed his discharge, and called him up to his eternal home.”
Of Wesley’s personal experiences some examples deserve to be given: —
“I made haste to Goston’s-green, near Birmingham, where I had appointed to preach at six. But it was dangerous for any who stood to hear, for the stones and dirt were flying from every side, almost without intermission, for near an hour. However, very few persons went away. I afterwards met the Society and exhorted them, in spite of men and devils, to continue in the grace of God.”
A still more exciting experience awaited him a little after at Falmouth: —
“I rode to Falmouth. Almost as soon as I was set down the house was beset on all sides by an innumerable multitude of people. A louder or more confused noise could hardly be at the taking of a city. The rabble roared with all their throats, ‘Bring out the Canorum. Where is the Canorum?’ (an unmeaning word which the Cornish generally use instead of ‘Methodist’). No answer being given, they quickly forced open the outer door and filled the passage. Only a wainscot partition was between us, which was not likely to stand long. I immediately took down a large looking-glass which hung against it, supposing the whole side would fall in at once. When they began their work, with abundance of bitter imprecations, poor Kitty was utterly astonished and cried out ‘0, sir, what must we do?’ I said, ‘We must pray.’ Indeed at that time, to all appearances, our lives were not worth an hour’s purchase. She asked, ‘But, sir, is it not better for you to hide yourself, to get into the closet?’ I answered, ‘No; it is best for me to stand just where I am.’ Among those without were the crews of some privateers which were lately come into the harbour. Some of these, being angry at the slowness of the rest, thrust them away, and coming up all together set their shoulders to the inner door, and cried out, ‘Wast, lads, avast.’ Away went all the hinges at once and the door fell back into the room. I stepped forward at once into the midst of them and said, ‘Here I am. Which of you has anything to say to me? To which of you have I done any wrong? To you? or you? or you?’ I continued speaking till I came, bareheaded as I was (for I purposely left my hat that they might all see my face), into the middle of the street, and then, raising my voice, said, ‘Neighbours, countrymen, do you desire to hear me speak?’ They cried vehemently, ‘Yes, yes. He shall speak. He shall. Nobody shall hinder him.’
“I never saw before — no, not at Walsal itself — the hand of God so plainly shown as here. There I had many companions who were willing to die with me, here not a friend but one simple girl, who, likewise, was hurried away from me in an instant, as soon
as ever she came out of Mrs. B ’s door. There I received
some blows, lost part of my clothes, and was covered over with dirt. Here, although the hands of perhaps some hundreds of people were lifted up to strike or throw, yet they were one and all stopped in the midway, so that not a man touched me with one of his fingers, neither was anything thrown, from first to last, so that I had not even a speck of drit on my clothes. Who can deny that God heareth the prayer, or that He hath all power in heaven and earth?”
Under such couditious as these Wesley still pressed on, with unresting swiftness, in his great work. The area of his labours widened. He went north to Scotland, making no less than twenty-one tours through Scottish towns and villages. He crossed St. George’s Channel forty-two times, and put the impress of his strong personality and ardent zeal on Ireland. He drew comrades to his side, found helpers and jjreachers amongst his converts, and became not a solitary combatant, but the general of an army. And the business of preaching — constant in strain, vast in scale, and intense in ardour as this was — formed only part of Wesley’s work. Side by side with these preaching tours is an unbroken chain of other forms of work. Great controversies, to be described hereafter, rose, ran their course, and died; persecutions were endured and forgotten; churches were built. A thousand wild scandals broke on Wesley himself. His friends fell from him, his comrades often proved faithless. He was pelted by the crowds, sneered at by the educated, frowned on by the clergy, and not seldom the very men who were plucked from sin and death turned against him. His brother Charles married a well-to-do wife, and gathered about himself the comforts of a settled home. Whitefield was absorbed in his orphanage scheme in America.
The one steadfast, unshakable soul who never doubted, never faltered, never grew discouraged, was Wesley! He was an Itinerant Apostle almost to the hour of his death. And he stamped the characteristics of his own life for all time on the Church he founded. It is the Church of an itinerant ministry.
Later, Wesley’s work took a new shape — a shape more wearisome than even his interminable journeys — and infinitely more distressing. False doctrines crept in among his followers; strange forms of immorality manifested themselves; spiritual life grew faint. During the latter years of his apostolate Wesley was incessantly “purging” his Societies, casting out unworthy members and enforcing wholesome discipline. He was, in a word, building a Church without knowing it or intending it. And, through all the dust and tumult of his preaching tours, who watches can see the lines of a great Church emerging, as will be described later. It is a Church not shaped in the calm of a philosopher’s study, but in the fires of conflict and controversy. Each new feature of the great structure is wrought at the bidding of necessity, and to meet some visible and urgent need. It is tested by the stern and hard logic of facts.
And when the tale of Wesley’s work as an itinerant preacher has been told, great spaces in his life are still left untouched and undescribed. He was a student, an administrator, the general of a great campaign, as well as a preacher; and if he had been none of these, his mere correspondence, his reading, his literary productions, were sufficient to fill to the brim any ordinary human life. But when all these separate forms of industry — as preacher, student, traveller, administrator, controversialist, writer — are crowded into the tiny curve of one little human life the sum-total of energy they represent is nothing less than amazing.
How did he do it? He wrote, he read, he corresponded, he preached; he was the unordained bishop of a great spiritual flock. He was always in the saddle or in the pulpit — and he was never in a hurry! What was his secret?
The truth is his toils as a preacher were interspaced with frequent islets of leisure. This man, who seemed to live in crowds, had yet in his life wide spaces of solitude. He preached to his flve-o’clock-in-the-morning congregation, then mounted his horse, or stepped into his chaise, and rode or drove olf to the next gathering. Betwixt the two crowds he had hours of solitude — to think, to read, to plan. He was the master, it may be added, of the perilous art of reading on horseback. His work itself was a physical tonic. Preaching at five o’clock in the morning may, perhaps, seem an heroic form of diligence; as a matter of fact “Wesley proved it to be the most healthy variety of physical exercise! Preaching in the open air, with the free winds of heaven about him, was — looked at from the physical side — a very wholesome form of gymnastics.
These open-air preachings find their best record in Wesley’s Journal. The famous Journal consists in the main of brief notes of sermons and texts, with tiny, swift vignettes of the crowds that listened to them — their size, their behaviour, the manner in which the discourse affected them, &c. These accounts are curiously condensed and vivid. They are written, so to speak, in mental as well as literal shorthand. Wesley sees his crowd for a moment, compresses the story of the sermon and its results into a sentence, adds a pious wish for a blessing, and then hurries on to the next crowd with abrupt haste. And that note of hurrying speed, that breathless economy of description, is characteristic of the whole Journal. Then come, thrust in betwixt these notes of sermons and texts and crowds, stories of strange conversions, of puzzling spiritual experiences, of odd characters met and of odd talks with them, with notes on books, scenery, events.
One does not easily realise, as the eye runs over these compressed and breathless sentences, what intense toil lies behind them. To talk to a crowd of 5,000 people — few living speakers know what that means: the expenditure of nervous force, the strain on throat and brain, on body and soul. But Wesley did this, not only every day, but often twice and three times in a day. He did it for fifty years, and the strain did not kill him!
Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign in 1879 is famous in history; but it was confined to a little patch of Scotland; it lasted fifteen days, and represented perhaps twenty speeches. But Wesley carried on his campaign on a scale which leaves Mr. Gladstone’s performances dwarfed into insignificance. He did it on the great stage of the three kingdoms, and he maintained it without a break for more than fifty years!
Mr. Gladstone, at Gravesend, in 1871, spoke for two hours to an audience of 20,000, and Mr. John Morley, his astonished biograjjher, declares the speech to be, both physically and intellectually, the greatest achievement of Mr. Gladstone’s career. But for Wesley to address audiences as vast, and in circumstances as trying, was an ordinary experience, and one which was repeated incessantly to extreme old age. Gladstone was sixty-two years old when he delivered his Gravesend speech. When Wesley was of the same age his Journal is packed with records like this: — “Sunday, August 10, 1766. After prayers had been read in the church, preached in the churchyard to a large congregation; at 1 p. m. to 20,000; and between five and six to another such congregation. This was the hardest day’s work I have had since I left London, being obliged to speak at each place from the beginning to the end at the utmost stretch of my voice. But my strength was as my day.”
Seven years later (August 23, 1773) he records: — “Preached at Gwenuap pit to above 32,000, the largest assembly I ever preached to, perhaps the first time that a man of seventy had been heard by 30,000 persons at once.” Wesley’s voice, it may be added, must have far outranged Gladstone’s. He writes in his Journal, under date April 5, 1752: — “About one I preached at Bristol. Observing that several sat on the opposite side of the hill, I afterwards asked one to measure the ground, and we found that it was seven score yards from where I stood, yet the people heard perfectly. I did not think .any human voice could have reached so far.”
It is no exaggeration to say that Wesley preached more jsermons, rode more miles, worked more hours, printed imore books, and influenced more lives than any other jEnglishman of his age, or perhaps of any age. And the t[>erformance did not even tire him! In 1776 he writes: “I am seventy-three years old. and far abler to preach than I was at twenty-three.” Ten years later this amazing old man writes, “I have entered into the eighty -third year of my age. I am a wonder to myself. I am never tired, either with preaching, writing, or travelling.”
In his address to crowds, it must be remembered, Wesley was dealing with the most awful themes; he roused the deepest emotions of his hearers. And when he had lifted one vast multitude of men and women up to some high and intense mood of religious feeling he passed from it to hurry to some other crowd and worked the same miracle there. He himself maintained a strange calm — a calm which represented the equipoise of great emotions, not their absence — through all these services. But the emotions which his words kindled in the listening multitudes were often of tremendous intensity. He was somehow the instrument and channel of strange forces. He would hold a vast multitude of Ttlnglish peasants and artisans in fixed, unbreathing, and almost awful stillness. Suddenly a wave of overpowering feeling would sweep over his hearers, and men would fall as if suddenly struck by a thunderbolt under his words. Often he records that while preaching he had to stop to sing or pray, to allow the emotions of his hearers to express themselves. He gives many instances of the effect — instant, visible, and dramatic — of his sermons.
For the gathering of these crowds Wesley employed none of the familiar modern devices. There were no advertisements, no local committees, no friendly newspapers, no attractions of great choirs. It is a puzzle still to know how the crowds were induced to assemble, for Wesley gives no hints of any organisation employed. His hearers seemed to wait for him, to spring up before him as if at the signal of some mysterious whisper coming out of space. Wesley’s familiar habit was to preach every morning at five o’clock, and he was often awakened long before that hour by the voices, sometimes by the hymns, of the multitude already gathered. How did he succeed in gathering in the grey dawn, and often while the stars yet hung pale in the sky, such crowds to listen to him?
Who reads Wesley’s Journals and Letters during this period finds in them one most significant change. Something has dropped suddenly out of Wesley’s life. The old, ever-gnawing, self-discontent — the weariness, the bitter self-judgments, the sigh of defeated longings — all are gone! These for fourteen years had made up his “religion.” Now everything is changed. Here is a man who has attained certainty. Religion for him is not an aspiration. It is an attainment. He is a man of lowlier spirit than ever; and yet linked to the humility of a child is the exultant confidence of a great saint — the serene calm of a soul that has passed beyond conflict and attained victory. His serenity of temper, which no care could darken and no anxiety disturb, is nothing less than wonderful. If it seems to fail for a moment, it is only for a moment, and to Wesley’s own surprise. Thus he says: —
“I had often wondered at myself (and sometimes mentioned it to others) that ten thousand cares of various kinds were no more weight or burden to my mind than ten thousand hairs were to my head. Perhaps I began to ascribe something of this to my own strength. And thence it might be that on Sunday 13 strength was withheld and I felt what it was to be troubled about many things. One and another hurrying me continually, it seized upon my spirit more and more, till I found it absolutely necessary to fly for my life, and that without delay. So the next day, Monday 14, I took horse and rode away for Bristol. As soon as we came to the house at Bristol my soul was lightened of that insufferable weight which had lain upon my mind, more or less, for several days.”
“A little more work,” to this life so packed and crowded with work, was, as Wesley says in another passage in his Journal, a tonic that killed care!
What force was it which knitted a life divided amongst so many interests into unity; which gave to a single human will a resisting power as of hardened steel; and which made a fallible man a force so tremendous, and kept him at a level so high? The explanation lies in the spiritual realm. Wesley had mastered the central secret of Christianity. He lived, he thought, he preached, he wrote, he toiled, under the undivided empire of the august motives, the divine forces of religion.