A New Order of Helpers

Wesley, even after his couversiou, had all, or nearly all, the stubborn prejudices of a High Churchman; and amongst the most obstinate of these was the prejudice against a layman preaching. To touch that point, as he himself said, was to touch the apple of his ej’e. Only a duly ordained divine, linked by a chain of many-centuried ordinations to the Apostles themselves, had the right to stand in the pulpit and preach to his fellow-men. That a mere layman, ordained by nobody, should mount to that sacred eminence, and dare with secular lips to interpret Scripture to his fellow-men, seemed to Wesley nothing short of sacrilege. He felt, as he contemplated that spectacle, as a Jewish priest would have felt had he seen some one who did not belong to the tribe of Levi ministering at that altar. And yet — such is the satire of history — Wesley was destined to found a Church which employs more lay preachers, and employs them with greater effect and honour, than any other Church known to history!

It was the resistless compulsion of facts — always for him the highest form of logic — which vanquished Wesley’s prejudices. His work took a range and scale which outran his powers. The fast-multiplying numbers of the converts made provision for their oversight imperative. He must have helpers and associates. At first a few clergymen of spiritual temper stood by him; but they I were only few. The public opinion of their order, too, was against them. They were anchored to their parishes. They could not keep pace with the rush of Wesley’s work and the tidal sweep of the great movement hp represented. They grew, in fact, afraid of the movement and of the strange forces stirring in it. Those who hated the work drew comfort from the reflection that it hung — or seemed to hang — on the slender thread of a solitary human life. Only a single pair of lips had to be silenced by weariness, or sickness, or death, and all the tumult of the revival would be hushed. When Wesley died, they believed, his work would disappear. He had no allies, and could have no successors. But Wesley wrote afterwards: —

“When they imagined they had effectually shut the door, and locked up every passage whereby any help could come to two or three preachers, weak in body as well as soul, who they might reasonably believe would, humanly speaking, wear themselves out in a short time; when they had gained their point, by securing (as they supposed) all the men of learning in the nation. He that sitteth in Heaven laughed them to scorn, and came upon them by a way they thought not of. Out of the stones He raised up those who should beget children to Abraham. We had no more foresight of this than you. Nay, we had the deepest prejudices against it, until we could not but own that God gave wisdom from above to these unlearned and ignorant men, so that the work of the Lord prospered in their hands, and sinners were daily converted to God.”’

It was, in advance, one of the certainties of the revival that Wesley would draw about himself a body of helpers from amongst his own converts; yet it is almost amusing to note how grudgingly, and with what reluctant, not to say resisting, steps, he moved in this direction. But he was borne away by forces too strong to be resisted. The new and glad spiritual energies awakening in multitudes broke inevitably into speech. The attempt to keep them decorously inarticulate was vain.

After Whitefield had preached one afternoon at Islington Churchyard a layman named Bowers, in all the joy of his new-found spiritual life, stood up on the table when Whitefield had finished and began to address the crowd. All ecclesiastical sensibilities were fluttered by the spectacle. Charles Wesley, who was present, tried in vain to stop Bowers, and at last withdrew indignantly, by way of protest. The zeal of this too daring layman was inextinguishable. He attempted to preach afterwards in the streets of Oxford, was arrested by the beadles, and scourged with stern rebuke for his obstinately vocal tongue by Charles Wesley.

This volunteer orator, it may be conceded, needed to be suppressed; but Wesley was compelled to choose amongst his comrades men whom his shrewd eyes — and he had f the eye of a great captain for fit instruments — saw to be

•Southey, vol. i. p. 307. prudent and trustworthj-, as well as zealous and gifted, to watch over the converts in one place while he moved on to preach elsewhere. His helpers were in all cases volunteers. Thus, at the latter end of 1739 Wesley records: “A young man named Thomas Maxfield came and desired to help me as a son of the Gospel. Soon after came another, Thomas Richards, then a third, Thomas Westall. These, severally, desired to serve me as sons, as helpers, when and where I should direct.” The names of these men deserve to live in history. They were the advance guard of a great and noble host.

But if Wesley took their help, he did it in very grudging measure, with plentiful doubts, and only on the avowed grounds of necessity. He could not forbid, he would not expressly sanction, and at first he satisfied himself with merely “permitting” lay preaching. But he did this with doubts, and doubts that looked both ways; doubts whether he ought to do so much, and also whether he ought not to do more.

“It is not clear to us (he says) that presbyters, so circumstanced as we are, may appoint or ordain others; but it is that we may direct, as well as suffer them to do, what we conceive they are moved to by the Holy Ghost. We think that they who are only called of God and not of man, have more right to preach than they who are only called of man and not of God. Now, that many of the clergy, though called of man, are not called of God to preach His Gospel is undeniable. First, because they themselves utterly disclaim, nay, ridicule the inward call; secondly, because they do not know what the Gospel is; of consequence they do not, and cannot preach it. That I have not gone too far yet, I know; but whether I have gone far enough, I am extremely doubtful. Soul-damning clergymen lay me under more diflSculties than soul-saving laymen.”

Wesley at first allowed his helpers to exhort, but rigorously forbade them to preach. They might expound the Scriptures; but they must not venture on the solemn business of delivering a “sermon.” This, however, was obviously an arrangement which could not last. Who can decide the exact point at which an exhortation attains the awful dignity of a sermon? And why should an address which was legitimate, and even praiseworthy, as an exhortation, suddenly become a mere impiety, when identified as a sermon? Wesley was at Bristol when ‘Southey, vol. i. p. 307.

the tidings reached him that Maxfield, his earliest helper, whom he had left in London, was preaching. All the sacerdotalist in him — and there was much of sacerdotalism behind his long nose and beneath his flowing wig — took fire. He hastened to London, brooding as he went in angry alarm over this scandal. “John,” said his wise mother when they met, “take care what you do with respect to that young man, for he is as surely called by God to preach as you are. Examine what have been the fruits of his preaching and hear him for yourself.”

His mother’s words touched a very sensitive chord in Wesley’s intellect and conscience. The “fruits of his preaching”! These were final! The sermon that converts men has written upon it the signature of God’s approval. Wesley’s prejudices were stubborn, but they always yielded to facts. He listened, watched, meditated, decided. “It is the Lord,” he said, “let Him do what seemeth Him good.”

Wesley quickly found another instance more striking and decisive than even that of Maxfield, where upon a layman’s preaching was written, in characters visible to all men, the signature of God’s approval and use. John Nelson, whose spiritual history is one of the romances of early Methodism, had been for some time exhorting his neighbours at Birstal. He says of himself at that time that “he would rather be hanged on a tree than go to preach.” But the crowds that gathered about him and hung upon his words, and found in them a converting energy, drew him on; and Nelson, to his own alarm, found himself at last guilty of delivering a sermon. He wrote to Wesley begging for advice “how to carry on the work which God had begun by such an unpolished tool as myself.” Wesley accordingly went down to Birstal. “He sat down by my fireside,” records Nelson, “in the very posture T dreamed about four months before, and spoke the same words I dreamed he spoke.” Wesley found both preacher and congregation in Birstal raised up without his act or knowledge, and as he looked and listened he realised that the question of lay preaching was settled for all time. He recognised, indeed, in this new order of Christian workers springing up under his eyes the solution of a great problem.

What sort of men were these helpers who thus gathered round Wesley and gave range, continuity, and permanence to his work? Their story lies written in fadded and welluigh forgotten biographies. And from these ancient volumes their faces look out upon us with a curious effect. The art of the eighteenth century was very cruel to its subjects; and the portraits of Wesley’s helpers, it must be confessed, are not seldom of an alarming quality. They are not often the faces of scholars. Sainthood has not yet had time to refine the coarse, strong features of the ploughman, or the stonemason, or the private soldier. Southey describing the portrait of John Haime, gives a cruel category of his features: “Small, inexpressive eyes, scanty eyebrows, and a short, broad, vulgar nose, in a face of ordinary proportions, seem to mark out a subject who would have been content to travel a jog-trot along the high-road of mortality, and have looked for no greater delight than that of smoking and boozing in the chimneycorner. And yet John Haime passed his whole life in a continued spiritual ague.”

But John Haime’s “spiritual ague,” with its alternations of fire and ice, of anxious dreads and exultant raptures, was, after all, infinitely nobler than the animal-like content in which the majority of his fellow-countrymen at that moment lived.

These men, for all their limitations, deserve to be counted among God’s heroes. They had a touch of the divine patience, the courage which no terrors could shake, of the early Christian martyrs. They were saints like Francis of Assisi, dreamers like Bunyan. They had a perpetual vision of the spiritual world. To Bunyan “above Elstow Green was heaven, beneath was hell.” And Wesley’s first preachers saw all men set betwixt such dread opposites. They had all the zeal of the preaching Friars of the Middle Ages, with a better theology than they and an infinitely nobler morality. Their speech was the channel of a j)ower which lay beyond alike the comprehension or the analysis of reason. The more, indeed, their sneering critics emphasise the lowly birth, the scanty training, the untaught simplicity of these early Methodist preachers, the more wonderful becomes their work. What strange force was it that seized these untaught men, transfigured them, lifted them up to the height of great and sacred emotions, made them not merely orators who

WESLEY AND HIS CENTUEY

could sway crowds, but apostles who could save souls? For the great, perpetual miracle of Christianity, the miracle of making drunkards sober, thieves honest, and harlots chaste, was, somehow, wrought by the preaching of Wesley’s helpers. It was wrought, indeed, on a scale which left the decorous and orderly ministry of the Church of that day utterly bankrupt!

The lives of the early Methodist preachers belong, alas! to the realm of forgotten literature; yet he who explores these dead biographies will find some strange and rich booty in them. They are written for the most part in homely English, the English of Bunyan or of Cobbett. They are rich in strange incidents, and in amazingly vivid portraits of strange characters. The story of John Nelson, for example, might be described as Bunyan’s “Grace Abounding” translated into human terms once more.

Nehson was a typical Yorkshireman, strong-bodied, stubborn, rich in quaint humour and in homely common-sense, and rich, too, in the capacity for profound religious feeling. He had, as even Southey says, “as high a spirit and as brave a heart as ever Euglivshraan was blessed with.” The religious struggles through which he passed desei’ve to be classed with those of Bunyan or of Francis de Sales, and they are described with equal vividness. He had a stormy youth, and at thirty years of age records that, “rather than live another thirty years like those already passed, he would choose to be strangled.” “Surely,” said he, “God never made man to be such a riddle to himself, and to leave him so! There must be something in religion that I am unacquainted with, to satisfy the empty mind of man, or he is in a worse state than the beasts that perish.” He heard Whitefield, but that most mellifluous of all preachers did not suit the brooding nature of this stubborn I’^orkshireman. Later he heard Wesley. “Oh,” he says, “that was a blessed morning for my soul.” His description of Wesley as a preacher is classic and has already been quoted.

In how heroic a temper Nelson took his religion can be imagined. He knew no half-measures. He carried his fearless spirit into his piety and rebuked sin in high or low. He was a stonemason, and was working at the time at the Exchequer, a royal building. He was required by his foreman to work ou the Sabbath day, on the ground that it was the king’s business, and even the Ten Commandments must yield to royalty. The honest Yorkshireman declared he would not work on the Sabbath for any man in England. “Religion,” said the foreman, “has made you a rebel against the king.” “No, sir,” he replied, “it has made me a better subject than ever I was. The greatest enemies the king has are Sabbath-breakers, swearers, drunkards, and whoremongers, for these pull down God’s judgments both upon king and country.” He was told that he must lose his employment if he would not obey his orders; his answer was, “he would rather want bread than wilfully offend God.” The foreman swore that he would be as mad as Whitefield if he went on.

“‘What hast thou done,’ said he, ‘that thou needst make so much ado about salvation? I always took thee to be as honest a man as any I have in the work, and could have trusted thee with five hundred pounds.’ ‘So you might,’ answered Nelson, ‘and not have lost one penny by me.’ ‘I have a worse opinion of thee now,’ said the foreman. ‘Master,’ he replied, ‘I have the odds of you; for I have a much worse opinion of myself than you can have.’”

Nelson’s zeal was of so ardent a type that out of his scanty earnings he actually hired one of his fellow-workmen to go to hear Wesley preach, and so give his soul a chance. Religion shot through with gleams of poetry the untaught imagination of this Yorkshire mason; and describing his own feelings he says, “My soul seemed to breathe its life in God as naturally as my body breathed life in the common air.” The vicar of Birstal, where Nelson lived, by way of suppressing this inconveniently earnest Christian, had him pressed for a soldier, in defiance of the law, and the story of what he suffered sheds a curious light on the social condition of England in that day.

As a pressed man, Nelson was marched through Y’ork, where his reputation as one of these new, fanatical, and much-hated Methodists was well known. It was, says Nelson, “as if hell were removed from beneath to meet me at my coming. The streets and windows were filled with people, who shouted and huzzaed as if I had been one that had laid waste the nation. But the Lord made my brow like brass, so that I could look on them as grasshoppers, and pass through the city as if there had been none in it but God and myself.” Nelson, though forced into the ranks, still held that a red coat did not discharge him from his obligations as a preacher, and he rebuked his astonished officers to their face for their oaths. An uncomfortable soldier this! One youthful ensign set himself to suppress this strange recruit, and showed much ingenuity in inventing insults and crudities to be expended upon him. At this stage of his story the mere unregenerate Yorkshireman emerges for a moment in honest John’s autobiography.

“‘It caused a sore temptation to arise in me,’ he says, ‘to think that an ignorant, wicked man should thus torment me — and I able to tie his head and heels together! I found an old man’s bone in me!’”

Nelson obtained his discharge at last through the influence of Lady Huntingdon, but his story is as moving a bit of English as there is to be found in the literature of the eighteenth century. And the lives of many of these preachers are rich in such stories, heroic, pathetic, sometimes absurd, but with a gleam of nobility running through their simplest performances.

Alexander Mather, for example, had by virtue of his Scottish blood a toughness of body and a certain fierce energy of industry that to an ordinary man might well seem incredible. He was a baker, working hours which the modern temper would find intolerable, yet he found time to be one of Wesley’s most effective helpers: —

“I had no time for preaching but what I took from my sleep, so that I frequently had not eight hours’ sleep in a week. This, with hard labour, constant abstemiousness, and frequent fasting, brought me so low that my master was often afraid I should kill myself, and perhaps his fear was not groundless. I frequently put off my shirts as wet with sweat as if they had been dipped in water. After hastening to finish my business abroad, I have come home all in a sweat in the evening, changed my clothes, and ran to preach at one or another chapel, then walked or ran back, changed my clothes, and gone to work at ten, wrought hard all night, and preached at five the next morning. I ran back to draw the bread at a quarter or half-an-hour past six, wrought hard in the bake-house till eight, then hurried about with bread, till the afternoon, and perhaps at night set off again.”;

Another of Wesley’s hely)ers, Thomas Olivers, was a Welshman, with all the qualities of the Welsh tempera-] ment, its fervour, its simplicity, its gleam of poetry, its capacity for sudden anger. Describing his own spiritual condition after conversion, he says — “I truly lived by faith. I saw God in everything — the heavens, the earth and all therein showed nie something of Him — yea, even from a drop of water, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand I often received instruction.”

Of Olivers’s emotional susceptibilities many striking amusing illustrations are given. While he was dining one day about noon a thought came over him that he was not called to preach. The food which then lay before him did not belong to him, and he was a thief and a robber in eating it. He burst into tears and could eat no more; and, having to oflSciate at one o’clock, went to the preaching-house, weeping all the way. He went weeping into the pulpit, and wept sorely while he gave out the hymn, while he prayed, and while he preached. A sympathetic emotion naturally spread through the congregation; many of them “cried aloud for the disquietness of their souls.”

Wesley proved an ideal captain for these ecclesiastical irregulars. They were his spiritual children, as well as his helpers. His government over them had in it a fatherly strain; and yet he enforced upon them a discipline of an almost heroic pitch. They were soldiers on a campaign, and there is more than a touch of military severity in the rules enforced upon them. These rules descend to the homeliest details of food, dress, manners, hours of sleep, methods of work, and general conduct. Never did a body of men work more diligently, fare harder, and receive smaller pay in earthly coin than did this first generation of Methodist preachers. “Never be unemployed, never be trifiingly employed,” was Wesley’s rule for them — a rule which was but the reflex of his own practice.

Wesley’s care for his preachers was not unqualified by an ample knowledge of the weakness of human nature. Here are some of his regulations: —

“Be serious; let your motto be, Holiness to the Lord. Avoid all lightness as you would avoid hell-fire, and trifling as you would cursing and swearing. Touch no woman; be as loving as you will, but the custom of the country is nothing to us. Take money of no one; if they give you food when you are hungry, and clothes when you want them, it is enough; but no silver or gold; let there be no pretence for any one to say we grow rich by the Gospel.”

The thoroughness with which Wesley investigated and regulated the domestic habits of his preachers, finds many entertaining illustrations.

“‘Do you,’ said he, ‘deny yourselves every useless pleasure of sense, imagination, honour? Are you temperate in all things? To take one instance — in food, do you use only that kind, and that degree, which is best both for the body and soul? Do you see the necessity of this? Do you eat no flesh suppers? No late suppers? These naturally tend to destroy bodily health. Do you eat only three times a day? If four, are you not an excellent pattern to the flock! Do you take no more food than is necessary at each meal? You may know, if you do, by a load at your stomach; by drowsiness or heaviness; and, in a while, by weak or bad nerves. Do you see only that kind, and that degree, of drink which is best both for your body and soul? Do you drink water? “Why not? Did you ever? Why did you leave it off, if not for health? When will you begin again? To-day? How often do you drink wine or ale? Every day? Do you want or waste it?’”

He declared his own purpose, of eating only vegetables on Fridays, and taking only toast and water in the morning; and he expected the preachers to observe the same kind of fast.

Wesley was so much in advance of his age as to understand the educational power of the Press, and he used his preachers, systematically, as its vehicle. No preacher was to make any personal excursion into authorship without Wesley’s consent; but a parcel of the books Wesley himself published was part of the travelling equipment of every itinerant. “Carry them with you,” said Wesley, “through every town. Exert yourselves in this. Be not ashamed; be not weary; leave no stone unturned.”

The itinerancy of Wesley’s helpers was, at first, of a very active sort. A preacher, he thought, would exhaust his message to any one community in seven or eight weeks. After that period, Wesley argued, “neither can he find matter for preaching every morning and evening, nor will people come to hear him; hence, he grows cold by lying in bed, and so do the people. Whereas, if he never stays more than a fortnight in one place, he will find matter enough, and the people will gladly hear him.” “I know,”. says Wesley frankly, “were I to preach one whole year in one place, I should preach both myself and niy cougregatiou to sleep.”

Wesley, with a wise beuevoleuce for both preachers and congregations, insisted that his helpers should preach short sermons. One of his regulations, indeed, might with great advantage be painted in golden characters on every church in the world to-day. His preachers were enjoined “to begin and end always precisely at the time appointed, and always to conclude the service in about an hour; to suit their subject to the audience; to choose the plainest text, and keep close to the text; neither rambling from it, nor allegorising, nor spiritualising too much.” They were not to be vociferous.

“‘Scream no more,’ Wesley wrote to one of his helpers, ‘at the peril of your soul. God now warns you, by me, whom He has set over you, speak with all your heart, but with moderate voice. I often speak loud, often vehemently, but I never scream; I

I never strain myself. I dare not. I know it to be a sin against

I God and my own soul.’”

There is assuredly the salt of common-sense in all this. When before in history, indeed, was there such a combination of zeal, which, by its mere temperature, suggests fanaticism, linked to so much of cool-eyed sanity, and of practical sense!

Southey says, scornfully, of these early preachers, that “they possessed no other qualification as teachers than a good stock of animal spirits and a ready flow of words, a talent which, of all others, is least connected with sound intellect.” But this is one of the many passages in his “Life of Wesley” in which Southey’s prejudices blind him to facts. These men were, no doubt, as one of them describes himself, “brown-bread preachers.” But at least they knew, and knew well, and by that surest form of knowledge — the knowledge born of verified experience — all they taught. Wesley says, energetically, of them: “In the one thing, which they profess to know, they are not ignorant men. I trust there is not one of them who is not able to go through such an examination in substantial, practical, experimental divinity as few of our candidates for holy orders, even in the University (I speak it with sorrow and shame, and in tender love ), are able to do.”^

‘Southey, vol. i. p. 310.

Wesley himself, however, had a scholar’.s hate of ignorance, and he toiled with almost amusing diligence to educate his helpers. He insisted that they should be readers, and scourged them with a very sharp whip if he found them neglecting their books. Thus he writes to one: —

“Your talent in preaching does not increase. It is Just the same as it was seven years ago. It is lively, but not deep. There is little variety; there is no compass of thought. Reading only can supply this, with daily meditation and daily prayer. You wrong yourself greatly by omitting this. You can never be a deep preacher without it, any more than a thorough Christian. Oh, begin! Fix some part of every day for private exercises. You may acquire the taste which you have not. What is tedious at first will afterwards be pleasant. Whether you like it or not, read and pray daily. It is for your life! There is no other way; else you will be a trifler all your days, and a pretty, superficial preacher. Do justice to your own soul; give it time and means to grow; do not starve yourself any longer.”

Wesley was wisely anxious as to the pulpit style of his helpers, and the chief of all pulpit virtues, of the literary sort, he held to be clearness.

“‘Clearness,’ he writes to one of his lay-assistants, ‘is necessary for you and me, because we are to instruct people of the lowest understanding. Therefore we, above all, if we think with the wise, must yet speak with the vulgar. We should constantly use the most common, little, easy words (so they are pure and proper) which our language affords. When first I talked at Oxford to plain people, in the castle of the town, I observed they gaped and stared. This quickly obliged me to alter my style, and adopt the language of those I spoke to; and yet there is a dignity in their simplicity which Is not disagreeable to those of the highest rank.’”

These early Methodist preachers, if they did not know much of “high thinking,” at least had an abundant experience of plain living. Wesley proposed that Mather should go with him on a preaching tour in Ireland, and he was asked how much he thought would be suflScient for the support of his wife during his absence. Mather fixed the sum at the modest rate of 4s. a week, and this was counted excessive! The wife of a Methodist helper in those heroic days must have been of an even more frugal mind than John Gilpin’s wife, sung by Cowper. The helper, when on a preaching tour, was expected to find his food amongst those who heard him. When he was at home, his wife was allowed Is. 6d. a day for his board, with the understanding that whenever her husband was invited out for a meal the price of that meal was to be deducted from the Is. 6d. The wife’s allowance was 4s. a week, with the further allowance of £1 a quarter for each child.

At the ninth Conference, held in October, 1752, at Bristol, it was agreed that the preachers should receive a stipend of £12 per annum, in order to provide themselves with necessaries. Their list of “necessaries” must have been of Spartan brevity. But more than twelve years afterwards, at the Conference of 1765, a deputation from the York circuit was admitted and allowed to plead against the ‘^arge sum of £12 a year”! Before 1752, each circuit made its own financial arrangements with the preachers, and sometimes they were of a quaint order. As late as 1764, the practice in the Norwich circuit, for example, was to divide the love-feast money among the preachers, and “this,” says Myles, with a certain accent of melancholy, “was very little indeed.”

When before in history was there such an inexpensive order of preachers as these early helpers of Wesley? They laid up much treasure in heaven, but had very empty pockets on earth. One of them, John Jane, died at Epworth. His entire wardrobe was insuflBcient to pay his funeral expenses, which amounted to £1, 17s. 3d. All the money he possessed was Is. 4d., “enough,” records Wesley briefly, “for any unmarried preacher of the Gospel to leave to his executors.”

Many of these early preachers, it is true, sooner or later failed Wesley. They settled down to the charge of dissenting congregations, or they accepted orders in the Anglican Church. Some were swept away by one theological craze or another. Many excuses are to be made for them. Their position was undefined; their place in the great movement unsettled. They did the work of ministers without having as yet any claim to the ministerial office. But the part they played in Wesley’s movement can hardly be exaggerated. The Methodist ministry of to-day comes by direct descent from them. Out of them, too, has grown the great order of lay preachers, without which Methodism itself could not exist.

For every Methodist minister in the world to-day there are, roughly speaking, ten lay preachers; and out of every seven sermons preached in Methodist pulpits every Sunday, six are preached by the lips of laymen. Every minister who stands in a Methodist pulpit has passed through this order. The ‘great sign and pledge of the non-sacerdotal character of Methodism is found in two facts. Its ministers share their preaching office with the lay preachers, and their pastoral office with the leaders.