How the New Converts Were Sheltered
Converts were now multiplying fast; they had grown to the scale of an army, and a new and most perplexing problem was born of Wesley’s very success. How was he to watch over his converts? They had the untaught simplicity of children; they were scattered over a vast area; the spiritual atmosphere about them was ungenial. The clergy, their natural shepherds, had towards them too often the temper of wolves. They treated them as outcasts and drove them from the sacramental table. The converts looked to Wesley as their spiritual leader; yet how could he, an evangelist hurrying perpetually on to preach to new crowds, keep in personal touch with the converts behind him? The most difficult problem of the whole revival had to be solved, and on its solution depended the permanency of Wesley’s work.
It is, therefore, with something of the joy of discovery, the accent of a spiritual Archimedes crying “Eureka,” that, amid the hurry of his work and the fast-multiplying crowds of his converts, Wesley catches his first vision of the class-meeting, and sees of what uses it is capable. “This,” he cries, “is the thing; the very thing that we have wanted so long.”
Yet Wesley’s note of surprised gladness is not a little puzzling. A religious society of some sort is a constant and familiar feature of his whole history up to this date. While he was yet a student at Oxford, he records in his Journal how some “serious man,” otherwise nameless, said to him, “You must find companions or make them; the Bible knows nothing of a solitary religion.” And certainly Wesley, with some wise, dumb instinct, always gave to his religion a social form. He founded one society at Oxford; established another on board the ship that took him to America; organised a third as soon as he got to Savannah, and betook himself to the Moravian society in London directly he landed in England. He dates his religious almanac, indeed, by the various societies that came into existence; the society at Oxford in 1729, in Savannah in 1736, in London in 1739, &c. It was in the little society in Aldersgate Street that Wesley himself was converted. And Wesley not only organised new societies, but gladly availed himself of those which existed.
Societies within the Church came into existence long before Methodism. They make their appearance in the dissolute times that followed the Restoration, and represent an attempt on the part of the Christian conscience of that day to organise itself, if only in self-defence, against the shameless vice by which all decency was affronted, and the jesting unbelief which threatened to destroy religion. In Woodward’s account of these societies we have, says Miss Wedgwood, “an exact description of a Methodist class-meeting, written four years before Wesley was born.” But that is a somewhat wild over-statement. These early societies lacked the essentially spiritual elements of the class-meeting.
The Moravians, too, planted their little societies here and there on English soil, or captured those which already existed. So it is true, though it is only half the truth, that We.sley did not invent religious societies in England. But he gave those which existed a new form; he charged them with a new office. The religious societies Woodward describes were tiny nurseries of morals. The Moravian societies were, or became, mere centres of quietism. The Methodist society, in its final form — the class-meeting — is something profoundly different.
Wesley, of course, found the great principle of religious fellowship in active operation in the Apostolic Church. In his class-meetings he merely organised that principle afresh, translated it into new terms, and made it a permanent element and condition of church life. And in doing this he was faithful to the highest ideals of church order.
There are two possible theories of church relationship. One is what may be called the tram-car theory. Here is an accidental group of people who sit side by side for a few moments, who are going in the same direction, are impelled by the same forces, and cared for by the same agencies. But they are strangers to each other. They have no common language. No articulate or conscious kinship links them together. “Society,” except in the mechanical — or, say, the geographical — sense, does not exist betwixt them.
Then there is what may be called the family theory of the Church. Here is a circle of human beings knitted together by conscious and acknowledged kinship. They talk a common language. They have common joys and sorrows and perils. They have offices of help and protection towards each other; what touches one is felt by all. Which of these two conceptions of church membership — that of the tram-car, or that of the fireside — comes nearest to God’s ideal it is needless to say.
No such household fellowship existed in the Church of that day, and this was one of the secrets of its decay. Southey, describing a stage in John Nelson’s history, says that “a judicious minister who should have known the man could have given him the teaching he needed. But,” he adds, with unconscious severity, “the sort of intercourse between a pastor and his people which this would imply hardly exists anywhere, and cannot possibly exist in the metropolis.” Coleridge, on this, breaks out in a pregnant footnote. “Is this true?” he asks; “and can a Church of which it is true be a Church of Christ?” Wesley, who knew the Church of his day well, says of it: “Look east, west, north, or south, name what parish you please, is Christian fellowship there? Rather, are not the bulk of the parishioners a mere rope of sand? What Christian connection is there between them? What intercourse in spiritual things? What watching over each other’s souls?”
But if in the Church of that day there was little direct fellowship betwixt the minister and his hearers, still less was there betwixt the hearers themselves. The Church had lost — perhaps it never possessed — one of its noblest functions, the unifying office betwixt men and women of all ranks. And Wesley was supplying what is one of the primitive and imperishable necessities of Christian life in every age, and under all conditions, when, in the shape of his societies — and later of the class-meeting — he erected fellowship into a permanent feature of Church life.
It is curious to note how, by what might almost be called accident — by the mere compulsion of events, and not by conscious plan — the Methodist societies came into existence. Wesley founded the society which afterwards met in Fetter Lane on Bohler’s advice. But, in 1738, after the separation from the Moravians, the Foundry became the centre of his work. “At the latter end of 1739,” he records, “from eight to ten persons came to me in London who appeared to be deeply convinced of sin. They desired that I would spend some time with them in prayer, and advise them how to flee from the wrath to come.” Wesley fixed Thursday evening for this purpose. The numbers grew fast. “The first evening about twelve persons came, the next week thirty or forty. These grew to a hundred; and then,” says Wesley, “I took down their names and places of abode, intending to call upon them in their homes. Thus,” he adds, “without any previous plan, began the Methodist society in England — a company of people associated together to help each other, to work out their own salvation.” A similar society was formed at Bristol, and later at other places.
Here, then, was the Methodist society, but not yet the Methodist class-meeting. This did not emerge till 1742, three years later; and it was an effort to clear off the first of Methodist Church debts which yielded the class-meeting.
On the meeting-house at Bristol was a considerable debt, and the members of the society were consulting how it should be paid. One, Captain Foy, whose name deserves to live, stood up and said, “Let every member of the society give a penny a week, till the debt is paid.” Another answered, “Many of them are poor, and cannot afford to do it.” “Then,” said the first speaker, “put eleven of the poorest with me; and if they can give anything, well; I will call on them weekly; and if they can give nothing, I will give for them as well as myself. And each of you call on eleven of your neighbours weekly; receive what they give, and make up what is wanting.’* It was done; and the plan was quickly discovered to yield more than pence. “In a while,” writes Wesley, “some of these informed me, they found such and such an one did not live as he ought. It struck me immediately, ‘This is the thing, the very thing, we have wanted so long.’” Here was the suggestion of an oversight far-stretching and yet minute; the most effective pastorate the wit of man has yet devised or the grace of God used.
Wesley’s iustinct of thoroughness, his habit of following out a hint till it became an institution, came at once into play. The class-meeting was system ati sed; it was made co-extensive with the revival. His trained and scholarly mind ran through all history in search of precedents and details, and these he found in abundance. So dispassionate a witness as Paley found in the mode of life, its form and habit, of the early Christian Church, “a close resemblance to the Unitas Fratrum and to the modern Methodists.” The tesserae, the symbols of membership in the Apostolic Church, were reproduced in the familiar “ticiiet,” the sign of membership in the Methodist Church.
The value of the societies — especially in their later form of the class-meeting — was simply measureless. They gave the revival coherence; they nourished its vitality. Each new convert brought into the class-meeting found himself one of a group bound by great emotions held in common — sorrow for sin, joy in jjardon, the consciousness of a new life, a common passion for the salvation of others, a common aspiration after higher attainments in Christian experience. He caught from the society the inspiration, and he found in it the safeguards, of companionship. The sheltering office of these societies was thus of inexpressible value. The mere chill of the secular world would have killed the new-born spiritual life of multitudes. The spell of ancient companionships would have asserted itself. But in the new companionships into which the converts were brought was found a counteracting energy.
Wesley quickly recognised in the class-meeting the most effective instrument of discipline a founder or the head of a Church could desire.
“‘It can scarcely be conceived,’ he says, ‘what advantages have been reaped from this little prudential regulation. Many now happily experienced that Christian fellowship of which they had not so much as an idea before. They began to bear one another’s burdens and naturally to care for each other. Evil men were detected and reproved. They were borne with for a season; if they forsook their sins we received them gladly; if they obstinately persisted therein it was openly declared that they were not of us.’”
Each class had a leader, and the leaders’ meeting became the disciplinary court in the Church. The ticket which was the symbol of membership was renewed every three months during a personal visitation of each class by Wesley himself or by one of his helpers. The simple withholding of the ticket broke the tie of membership and excluded the unworthy; and Wesley, who with a wise instinct put efficiency before bulk, purged his classes in this way year by year with unshrinking thoroughness.
What Methodism has gained in every land and throughout its whole history from the class-meeting can hardly be expressed in words. The device gives range, continuity, and permanence to the pastoral work of the Church. And for a Church with an itinerant ministry such an organisation is imperative. Without it no effective pastorate can exist. This great institution not only influenced Wesley’s work profoundly while he lived, it has left a deep and permanent mark on Methodism itself. The class-meeting gives religion speech; it slays that dumb and obstinate shyness about spiritual things which lies like some chilling frost on so many good people. If Methodism has developed in its laity gifts of speech, of prayer, and of service beyond most Churches, it is due to the class-meeting. And the stamp of the class-meeting is on the Methodist ministry itself. In the class-meeting each minister learns, so to speak, the grammar of his spiritual language. He brings from it a glow, a certainty, a strength which no other institution yields.
The class-meeting has its characteristic risks. It is not seldom discredited by want of elasticity and freshness in its conduct. But for Methodism itself it is a sj)i ritual nerve-centre whence radiate a thousand spiritual forces. And it may be predicted with great, if melancholy, confidence that when the class-meeting dies Methodism itself, if it survives, will undergo some silent but profound and disastrous change. It will begin to ossify. Forms will once again seem more than fact. The familiar and mournful cycle of change by which a great Church I)etrifies, and fits itself for being thrust aside by some new and more intensely spiritual agency, will have begun.
Just now, however, we are only concerned to note the contribution which his societies made to the success of Wesley’s work during his lifetime, and the degree in which they as a consequence influenced England. The societies undoubtedly met and satisfied what was at the uiomeut the special need of religion in England. Says Miss Wedgwood: —
“The yearning for some common standing-ground broader than that of mere Icinship, stronger than that of mere nationality, must be strong at every time; perhaps it was especially strong during the eighteenth century. A reaction from the work of the Reformation swept many at that time into Romanism, and collected many more into little societies cemented by a common interest in the things of eternity. But nowhere did this instinct meet with such absolute satisfaction as in the ranks of Methodism.”
In Wesley’s societies, to sum up, a new and far-stretching brotherhood came into existence. It spread like a living net over England. It linked men and women, parted from each other by the widest differences of education and social position, of wealth and poverty, into a common household. It bred a thousand kindly oflBces betwixt them. And as a contribution to the social life of England in that day these societies had a value never yet sufficiently recognised. It was not merely that they had the office of a salt in the blood of the body social; and that each little class-meeting was a centre of religious energies affecting everything within its reach. The classes were a brotherhood; a brotherhood woven of spiritual ties, and so made indestructible. And this brotherhood overleaped social barriers; it bridged separating gulfs betwixt classes. It made society not only purer, but closer and stronger. The social offices of religion are seldom adequately realised; and these offices never found a happier or more effective expression than in Wesley’s societies.