How the Work Spread: Ireland

Ireland was for Wesley a new field, strange, wild, unhappy — the very paradox of civilisation; a field in which, not by any unkindness of nature or any ordinance of God. but only by the follies and hates of mankind, good things became evil. Law inspired crime. Religion bred hate. Freedom became the author of tyrannj’. The Ireland of the early Georges and of the penal laws I Was there auy other patch of soil in the civilised world where the defeat of the religion of Jesus Christ was so nearly absolute, and the task of religion more hopeless?

Lord Hutchinson, it will be remembered, condensed the Ireland of that day into one terrible sentence: “A corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted Government, a divided people.” Society was one tangled web of dreadful hates. The Protestant hated and oppressed the Catholic; the Anglican hated and oppressed the Nonconformist; the Romanist hated and, where he had the chance, slew both. Green says: “After the surrender of Limerick every Catholic Irishman, and there were five Irish Catholics to every Irish Protestant, was treated as a stranger and a foreigner in his own country.” The Government was in the hands of one-twelfth of the population, and was used by them to fill their pockets at the expense of the other eleven-twelfths. Class fueds were nouriished by law. The Irish Catholic was practically an outlaw under his own native skies; the Irish Presbyterian lived under the harrow of the Test Act; and even the Irish Anglican had to stand hat in hand before an Anglican who had the merit of being English.

But it is the dreadful paradox of Irish affairs in the eighteenth century which most impresses the student in the twentieth century. It represents an inversion, almost without parallel in history, of all natural order. Englishmen had won freedom in England only to deny it to

‘“Short History,” p. 811.

Irishmen in Ireland. The two noblest forces in human society are the authority of law and the authority of religion. They are, or should be, allies. But in the Ireland of that day they were sworn and deadly foes. The main object of the law in Ireland was the extirpation of what four out of every five of its inhabitants held as their religion. Nowhere was Protestantism — or rather what mistook itself for Protestantism — so strong, and nowhere had it failed so absolutely. Nowhere else was Romanism so harried and handicapped; and nowhere else was it so nearly triumphant! It was persecuted; and persecution hardened its priests into fanatics, it ennobled them into martyrs.

The Protestantism which Ireland in those sad days knew had borrowed the persecuting policy of Rome: and persecution in its case was twin-sister to greed. It was as eager to pick the pockets of its victim, or to confiscate his farm, as to punish his deplorably corrupt theology. The Irish peasant, in his turn, was wedded to his religion not simply by spiritual forces — often not in the least by spiritual forces — but by a cluster of forces which were titie contradiction of everything spiritual: by class hate; by the memory of inexpiable wrongs, wrongs sometimes endured, sometimes committed; by loyalty to his class; by his ignorance, in a word, and by his hates. And never was ignorance so complete or hate so bitter! They were ancestral hates, that had their roots in history, and were kept living and deep by oppression.

And never did Protestandsra sin so fatally against its own genius as in the Ireland of that day. The Protestant vicar took every tenth potato from the Romish peasant for his own support; but he made no attempt to convert him, to understand him, to talk his language, or to enlighten his ignorance. Lecky’s picture of the Irish Church of that day has in it a touch of the iron severity of Tacitus : —

“The Irish Establishment was the Church of the poor in the sense that they paid for it, but in no other. Its adherents were certainly less than one-seventh of the population, and they belonged exclusively to the wealthiest class. And this astonishing Establishment was mainly supported by tithes. The mass of the Irish Catholics were cottiers living in an abject, hopeless poverty hardly paralleled in Europe, and deriving a bare subsistence for themselves and their families from little plots of

HOW THl-: WORK SPREAD: IRELAND 245

potato ground, often of not more than ten or fifteen perches. The tenth part of the produce of these plots was rigidly exacted from the wretched tenant for the benefit of a clergyman who was in violent hostility to his religion, whom in many cases he never saw, and from whose ministrations he derived no benefit whatever.’”

“‘A system of half persecution was pursued,’ says Southey, ‘at once odious for its injustice and contemptible for its inefflcacy. Good principles and generous feelings were thereby provoked into an alliance with superstition and priestcraft; and the priests, whom the law recognised only for the purpose of punishing them if they discharged the forms of their office, established a more absolute dominion over the minds of the Irish people than was possessed by the clergy in any other part of the world. It would be difficult, in the whole compass of history, to find another instance in which such various and such powerful agencies concurred to degrade the character and to blast the prosperity of a nation.’

What type of character did these evil conditions create? The Irish are peculiarly susceptible to the influences which stream upon them from history, from legislation, and from the Church, “No people,” says Lecky, “brooded more upon old wrongs, clung more closely to old habits, were more governed by imagination, association and custom.” And history, the law, the Church, alike combined to corrupt them. To quote Lecky again: —

“They were half-naked, half-starved, utterly destitute of all providence, and of all education, liable at any time to be turned adrift from their holdings, ground to the dust by three great burdens — rack rents, paid not to the landlord but to the middleman; tithes, aid to the clergy — often the absentee clergy — of the Church of their oppressors; and dues, paid to their own priests.’”

And it was upon a field so hopeless as this, and sown so thickly with evil tares, that Wesley was about to step. Southey says that “all the circumstances were as favourable for the progress of Methodism in Ireland as they were adverse to it in Scotland,” and he proceeds to cite these: the failure of the Established Church, &c. But this is an absurd inversion of fact. In Scotland Wesley was at least a Protestant speaking to Protestants. He did not represent a foreign and hated race. But in Ireland the hate of a Romanist for a Protestant, the mistrust

‘Lecky, vol. ii. p. 197.
‘Southey, vol. ii. p. 107.
•Lecky, vol. i. p. 341.

of an Irishman for everything English, and the bitterness bred of political wrongs and ancestral hates, whose origin ran back into far-off centuries, were all against him.

And yet, great are the forces of simple and genuine religion! By the magic of truth, truth with love as its vehicle and minister, Wesley won in Ireland a success certainly greater than that he won in Scotland, and second only to that he won in England. What Methodism did in Ireland is not to be measured by the chapels built, the circuits formed, the societies gathered. Methodism was the earliest and noblest of those healing forces which touched Irish history, and have done so much to transfigure it. Here was a form of religion which did not carry a pike in one hand, and a writ of proscription in the other. Here were messengers of Christ’s Gospel whose chief characteristic was not a ruthless hunger for tithes from the pockets of those who hated both them and their creed. Methodism saved Protestantism as a spiritual force in Ireland. It did something to arrest that dreadful divorce betwixt classes which threatened to destroy society itself. When it stepped on to Irish soil there became visible a form of Protestantism which suffered persecution instead of inflicting it. It talked the language of the first Christian century, and had something at least of the spirit of that far-off century — its heroic zeal, its exultant faith, its eager and tender sympathy.

Wesley himself brought no political cure to Ireland, and he stood as resolutely aloof from Irish party disputes as he did from Scottish theological quarrels. But he looked, with at least a flash of the clear vision of a Christian statesman, into the black mist of Irish politics. He was a “King and Church” man, with a strain of Oxford Toryism in his very blood. And yet, as far as Ireland was concerned, he was, in judgment and sympathy, a Pittite before Pitt! This is how he explains the Romanism of Ireland: —

“At least ninety-nine in a hundred of the native Irish remain in the religion of their forefathers. Nor is it any wonder that those who are born Papists generally live and die such, when the Protestants can find no better ways to convert them than penal laws and Acts of Parliament.”

He relates how, with the book before him on the saddle, and riding along Irish roads, he read that not very accurate work, Sir John Davies’s “Historic Relation Concerning Ireland,” and in his Journal he comments: —

“None who reads these can wonder that, fruitful as it is, it was always so thinly inhabited; for he makes it plain — (1) That murder was never capital among the native Irish; the murderer only paid a small fine to the chief of his sept. (2) When the English settled here, still the Irish had no benefit of the English laws. They could not so much as sue an Englishman. So the English beat, plundered, yea, murdered them at pleasure. Hence (3) arose continual wars between them, for three hundred and fifty years together, and hereby both the English and Irish natives were kept few as well as poor.”

Wesley adds that in the general massacre of 1641, and the war that followed, “not so few as a million men, women, and children were destroyed in four years’ time”; a bit of widly imaginative arithmetic which proves afresh how diflScult it is for those who live near great historical events to see their true size.

Wesley’s mission to Ireland, however, was first and last spiritual, alike in its methods and its ends. He arrived in Dublin on August 9, 1747. It was Sunday, the church bells were ringing, and he went, after his manner, straight to the service in St. Mary’s, and preached in the same church in the evening. Methodism had already found a place in Dublin. A lay helper from England, Thomas Williams, had gathered a society there, and had hired an old Lutheran chapel as a preaching place. Here Wesley preached to crowds that filled the chapel yard as well as the chapel.

He spent a fortnight in Dublin, and studied with keen eyes the character of his Irish hearers. There was no touch in them of Scottish gravity, with its unresponsiveness as of Scotch granite; and none of the boorishness of the English rustic. These new hearers were quick-witted, courteous, impressionable; and, as Wesley records, “an immeasurably loving people.” Later, Wesley found that an Irish convert, with his Celtic quickness and generosity, his susceptibility to emotion, had the defects of his qualities. “The waters,” he said, grimly, after telling the story of a congregation that was dissolved in tears at his sermon, “spread too wide to be deep.” He notes, too, how little relation the Irish peasant’s religion often has to his understanding. Ignorance in his case does not hinder or limit devotion. “The more I converse with this people,” he says, “the more I am amazed. That God hath wrought a great work among them, is manifest; and yet the main of them, believers and unbelievers, are not able to give a rational account of the plainest principles of religion. It is plain, God begins His work at the heart; then ‘the inspiration of the Highest giveth understanding.’”

After only a fortnight’s work in Dublin, Wesley writes: “If my brother or I could have been here a few months I question if there might not have been a larger society in Dublin than even London itself.”

But two weeks after he had left, his brother Charles, accompanied by Charles Perronet, arrived, and took up his work; and even in that brief interval betwixt the departure of one brother and the arrival of another, the changeful quality of Irish temper and the uneasy jealousy of Romish priests found illustration. The priests had taken alarm. Here was a new kind of Protestantism that had for their flocks a strange magic. It must be arrested! And an Irish priest would make his appearance on the edge of a crowd listening to a Methodist helper, and drive off his own people with gestures and curses, like a watch-dog harrying a flock of sheep that had wandered into forbidden pastures. A Popish mob broke into the Dublin chapel, made a bonfire of the seats and the pulpit, and threatened to murder any one assembled there. The blasts of mob violence in Ireland usually had the support of the local authorities, who in all cases were Protestants; and who not seldom hated Methodists even more than they disliked Papists. Charles Wesley himself was stoned through the Dublin streets. A woman was beaten to death in an assault of the mob on one of the Methodist gatherings. One of Wesley’s helpers, John Beard, died as the result of the ill-usage he received, and was the first — but not the last — Methodist martyr in Ireland.

Wesley’s second visit to Ireland (in 1748) lasted three mouths, and was marked by intense toil, by some triumphant results, and by much persecution. He found that his Irish hearers took their religion lightly. He missed the deep convictions, the overwhelming sense of sin, which marked his English and Scotch converts; and so, as he records he “preached on the terrors of the law in the strongest manner of which he was capable.” Yet “still,”

he says, “those who were ready to eat up every word do not appear to digest any part of it.” But Wesley, somehow — this prim, intense, methodical, and unemotional Englishman — had the secret of winning the love of his Irish hearers.

Thus at Athloue he preached to a vast crowd in the market-jjlace, and found it difficult to escape from the loving throng that pressed on him. He broke away at last; but a mile out of the town, on a hill-top which the road crossed, he found another crowd waiting to intercept him. They opened the way for him till he reached their midst, then closed round him and would not let him go. The crowd sang hymn after hymn together, and when at last Wesley got free “men, women, and children lifted up their voices and with a sound,” Wesley declares, “he had never heard before.” “Yet in a little while,” he adds, with one quick, forerunning vision into the happier world, “and we shall meet to part no more, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away for ever.”

The fiercest outbreak of popular violence was at Cork. Here the crowd practically took possession of the city under the leadership of an itinerant ballad-singer, half fool and half rogue, named Butler, who was accustomed to parade the streets in a burlesque of clerical attire, with a Bible in one hand and a bundle of ballads in the other. The magistrates sympathised with the crowd, and the Methodists were hunted through the streets like vermin. An appeal to the Mayor only produced the answer that Popish priests were protected, but Methodists were not. Many Methodists, both men and women, were beaten with clubs or wounded with swords; their houses were plundered and half destroyed. An information was laid against Charles Wesley as “a person of ill-fame, a vagabond, and a common disturber of his Majesty’s peace,” with a prayer that he might be transported. A similar information was lodged against all the Methodist helpers at that moment in Ireland.

When the case came before the court the judge inquired, “Where were the persons presented?” He glanced at Charles Wesley, with the company of his preachers about him, as they came forward, and seemed for some time visibly agitated, and unable to proceed. Here was a group of strange criminals! The first witness for the prosecution was Butler, who being asked his occupation answered that he was a ballad-singer. “Here,” cried the judge, lifting up his hands in wonder, “here are six gentlemen indicted as vagabonds; and the first accuser is a vagabond by profession.”

Persecution, however, never slew even a bad creed. It was not in the least likely to hinder Methodism. In Ireland the Methodist preachers had many strange experiences; much hardship; many odd conversions; many queer followers; but their success was great. Wesley himself, summing up the fruits of his work in Dublin, says: —

“In some respects the work of God in Dublin was more remarkable than even in London. (1) It is far greater, in proportion to the time and to the number of people. (2) The work was more pure. In all this time, while they were mildly and tenderly treated, there were none of them headstrong or unadvisable; none that were wiser than their teachers; none who dreamed of being immortal or infallible, or incapable of temptation; in short, no whimsical or enthusiastic persons; all were calm and sober-minded.’”

Wesley, it may be added, adapted his methods to the conditions of Irish society. He had to brace the morality of his converts in some respects by the sharpest discipline. He relentlessly expelled from his societies those who assisted to plunder the cargo of a wrecked ship until they made restitution. One who quoted the famous saying that “cleanliness is next to godliness” naturally looked with unrelenting eyes on the easy-going, unwashed habits of many of his converts. He required his preachers, in dress and habit, to be a rebuke to all slovenliness. Thus to one of his Irish preachers he writes, instructing him, with plain-spoken directness, “to avoid all laziness, sloth, indolence”; all “nastiness, dirt, slovenliness,” &c. “Whatever clothes you wear,” wrote Wesley, “let them be whole: no rents, no tatters, no rags.” He even thought necessary to add, “Clean yourself of lice,” “Cure yourselves and your family of the itch.”

Many converts were won amongst the Irish Roman (Catholics, and amongst them one — Thomas Walsh — who would have been a remarkable man in any age and under any form of society.

Southey dwells at length on Walsh’s case, drawn visibly

•Journal, July 26, 1762.

into a mood of admiring sympathy by the scholarship this strange convert achieved. Here was an Irish peasant, the son of a carpenter, the child of fanatical Romanists, who had renounced Romanism as the result of mere intellectual recoil from its errors. He had been brought into clear and happy spiritual life while hearing a Methodist preacher at a street corner in Limerick expounding Christ’s words, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour,” &c. This man made himself, in Wesley’s words, “the best Biblical scholar I have ever known.” He knew Hebrew and Greek as perfectly as he knew his native Erse. If questioned concerning any Hebrew or Greek word in the Bible he would tell after a pause how often and where it occurred, and what it meant in every place.

But Walsh was something more than an amazing scholar in certain lines. He had a genius for religion; and his life, to quote Southey, “might well convince even a Catholic that saints are to be found in other communions as well as in the Church of Rome.” Walsh himself describes what may be called the mountain heights to which he was lifted as the result of his conversion: —

“‘Now,’ says he, ‘I felt of a truth that faith is the substance or subsistence of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. God and the things of the invisible world, of which I had only heard before by the hearing of the ear, appeared now in their true light as substantial realities. Faith gave me to see a reconciled God and an all-suflScient Saviour. The Kingdom of God was within me. I drew water out of the wells of salvation. I walked and talked with God all the day long: whatsoever I believed to be His will I did with my whole heart. I could unfeignedly love them that hated me and pray for them that despitefully used and persecuted me. The commandments of God were my delight.’”

Walsh carried his piety into his studies, and here is the prayer with which he was accustomed to preface each new hour of study: —

“Lord Jesus, I lay my soul at Thy feet to be taught and governed by Thee. Take the veil from the mystery and show me the truth as it is in Thyself. Be Thou my sun and star by day and by night!”

His religion had in it a touch of something unearthly. He seemed to breathe strange airs. His feet trod the

•Southey, vol. ii. p. 119.

earth, but his spirit was in the celestial realm. Sonthey says: —

“His friends described him as appearing like one who had returned from the other world, and perhaps it was this unearthly manner which induced a Romish priest to assure his flock that the Walsh who had turned heretic and went about preaching was dead long since; and that he who preached under that name was the devil in his shape. It is said that he walked through the streets of London with as little attention to all things around him as if he had been in a wilderness, unobservant of whatever would have attracted the sight of others, and as indifferent to all sounds of excitement, uproar, and exultation as to the passing wind. He showed the same Insensibility to the influence of fine scenery and sunshine; the only natural object of which he spoke with feeling was the starry firmament — for there he beheld infinity....

“Sometimes he was lost, they say, in glorious absence, on his knees with his face heavenwards and arms clasped round his breast, in such composure that scarcely could he be perceived to breathe. His soul seemed absorbed in God; and from the serenity, and ‘something resembling splendour which appeared on his countenance and in all his gestures afterwards it might easily be discovered what he had been about.’ Even in sleep the devotional habit still predominated, and ‘his soul went out in groans and sighs and tears to Grod.’ They bear witness to his rapts and ecstasies, and record circumstances which they themselves believed to be proofs of his communion with the invisible world.’”

If Walsh’s religion had in it an ardour which rose to the level of passion, it was yet marked by a fine charity and sanity. This is how he discussed the Romish Church he had left: —

“I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, though not according unto knowledge. Many of them love justice, mercy, and truth; and may, notwithstanding many errors in sentiment, and therefore in practice (since as is God’s majesty so is His mercy), be dealt with accordingly. But I freely profess that now, since God hath enlightened my mind and given me to see the truth as it is in Jesus, if I had still continued a member of the Church of Rome I could not have been saved. With regard to others I say nothing; I know that every man must bear his own burden and give an account of himself to God. To our own Master both they or I must stand or fall for ever. But love, however, and tender compassion for their souls constrained me to pour out a prayer to God in their behalf. All souls are Thine, 0 Lord God; and Thou wiliest all to come to the knowledge of the truth, and be saved. ... I beseech Thee, O eternal God, show Thy tender mercies upon those poor souls who have been

‘Southey, vol. ii. p. 122.

long deluded by the god of this world, the Pope and his clergy. Jesus, Thou lover of souls and Friend of sinners, send to them Thy light and Thy truth that they may lead them.”’

It is almost amlising to put side by side, as types of the wide range of character from which Wesley drew his helpers, John Nelson, the Yorkshire stonemason, and Thomas Walsh, the Irish carpenter’s son. The one was a typical Saxon: square-headed, strong-bodied, with little imagination but with much humour; rich in the salt of common-sense, and with a command of homely Saxon speech which suggests John Bunyan or William Cobbett. Walsh represents the Celtic type, with its gift of imagination, its visions, its ardours, its touch of melancholy, its kinship to the spiritual world. Walsh had neither the strength of body, the sanity of intellect, nor the plodding common-sense of John Nelson. And Nelson could never have been the scholar, the dreamer, the mystic, such as Walsh was. He never rose to his fervours, nor was touched by his melancholy. But both men were alike in the courage, the fire, the zeal with which they served Methodism, and proclaimed its message with their dying breath to crowds. And a religious movement which created, and used spiritual types so diverse, was surely very remarkable.

Wesley visited Ireland first in 1747, and betwixt that period and his death he crossed the Irish Sea no less than forty-two times. So successful was his work on Irish soil that in 1752 he held the first Irish Conference. It met at Limerick, lasted two days, the members consisting of John Wesley himself and nine of his helpers. The first Irish Conference, like the early English Conferences, spent much time in a vigorous examination into the theology of the helpers and their teaching; and the notes of the “conversations” are sometimes almost humorous in their directness and pungency. “How far do any of us believe the doctrine of Predestination?” runs one question. The answer to it is, “None of us believe it at all!” Some of the questions and answers have a local flavour. Irish congregations were apt to be talkative; so comes the question, “How shall we all set an example to the people of decency in public worship?” Answer:

‘Ibid., p. 116.

“First, let us constantly kneel at prayer, and stand during singing and while the text is repeated. Second, let us be serious and silent both while the service lasts, and while we are coming in and going out.”

There is a local flavour, again, in another question and answer. “Should we not preach more expressly and more strongly on self-denial than we have hitherto done?” Answer: “By all means, in this kingdom more especially, where it is scarce ever mentioned or thought of.” “What should we avoid next to luxury?” Answer: “Idleness, or it will destroy the whole work of God in the soul; and in order to this let us not pass one day without spending at least one hour in private prayer.”

This was exactly the teaching, pungent, strong-fibred, practical, which Wesley’s emotional converts in the south of Ireland, at least, needed. And such teaching, linked to evangelical doctrine of the most fervent type, and preached in the most fervent way, yielded in Ireland very remarkable fruits.