Across the Atlantic

Who wants to see in what strange, unguessed ways — in advance of all human plans, or independently of them — a great religious movement such as that of the eighteenth century spreads, may well study the story of how Wesley’s work spread to America. The forces of the great movement flew across the wide Atlantic like burning sparks blown with the wind — the wind that bloweth whithersoever it listeth.

No human field could well be less promising — as far as spiritual conditions are concerned — than that offered by the United States of that day. It had the roughness of a new settlement, with the forces and institutions of civilised life only half developed. A scanty population was scattered over an immense geographical area, and what to-day are counted amongst the greatest cities of the world were then little more than villages. Philadelphia in 1739, for example, when Whitefleld arrived there, consisted of only 2,076 houses, representing a population of ten or eleven thousand persons. Whitefleld, with his farcarrying voice, could have made himself audible to the entire population at once. Social life was in its crudest form; industrial life was only beginning to stir; the very institutions of religion, over large areas, had yet to be created. Franklin tells an odd story belonging to an older period, according to which some one was pleading with the Attorney-General of the day for a charter and funds to establish a college in “Virginia, and he begged Mr. Attorney to consider that “the people of Virginia had souls to be saved as well as the people of England.” “Souls,” cried this great legal authority, “damn your souls! Make tobacco.” And over wide tracts of primitive settlements that brusque and pagan counsel had been acted upon. People counted the business of “growing tobacco” — or its equivalents — much more urgent and important than that of “saving their souls,” if, indeed, they had any souls to be saved. Already, too, the political skies above the United States were black with the menace of the coming war with the parent State, a war which was to rend the Anglo-Saxon race in twain for unknown years.

The story of the first planting of Methodism on American soil is very curious. In 1752 Wesley visited an odd patch of German settlement from the I’alatinate on the Rhine, in Ireland — a cluster of little villages, Ballingarrene, Killeheeu and Courtmatrix. His visit resulted in many conversions and the creation of some Methodist Societies. Wesley records the visit without comment in his Journal; it was part of the day’s work. And yet in that little community of German-Irish he had, all unknowing, planted seed out of which was to spring under other skies the great Methodist Church of the United States.

One of his converts was Philip Embury, who became a lay preacher; a man without any special endowment of intellect, yet his name — almost by chance — has become historic. Embury was one of a group of Irish-German emigrants to the United States in 1760. He settled in New York, but lacked courage to begin religious work there, and by a natural and inevitable reaction his own religious life began to die. Another party of these German-Irish emigrants, from the same neighbourhood, landed in New York the next year. Amongst them was Barbara Heck, a peasant woman of courageous character and an earnest Methodist. Her zeal kindled in womanly vehemence when she found the first party of emigrants had practically forgotten their Methodism. A familiar but doubtful story relates how she went into a room one day where Embury and his companions were playing cards. She seized the pack, threw it into the fire, and cried to Embury: “You must preach to us or we shall all go to hell together; and God will require our blood at your hands.” “I cannot preach,” stammered the rebuked man, “for I have neither chapel nor congregation.” “Preach in your own house,” answered Barbara Heck, “and to our own company.” And so the first Methodist sermon in America was preached under a private roof and to a congregation of five persons.

It is sometimes said, in reference to this incident, by way of sneer, that Anierican Methodism was “born at the car(J-table”; but there is evidence that Endiui-y himself had not lost his Methodist habits and become a card-player.

The work begun in this fashion spread; a congregation was formed, a Society organised. To this congregation there came one Sunday a British officer in full uniform; he fell on his knees with the other worshippers, and joined in their singing when they rose. It was Captain Webb, of the 42nd, a gallant soldier who had been converted while listening to a sermon by Wesley at Bristol.

Webb was a soldier of distinction, and in many ways a remarkable man. He fought at the siege of Louisburg and was desperately wounded. A bullet struck him on the right temple, glanced down through the eye-ball and fell into his mouth, and in the shock of the wound Webb swallowed the bullet. “He is dead enough,” was the comment of a comrade, as he stooped over him. But Webb, most indomitable of men, whispered back, “No, I am not dead.” He lived to take a great part in a nobler warfare. He was with the tiny and heroic column that, at midnight on September 12, 1759, climbed the crevice in the cliffs which led to the Heights of Abraham, and in the fierce fighting next morning he saw Wolfe die and the strength of France in Canada shattered.

He was stout-bodied and broad-faced, and the green shade that hung over his eyeless socket gave to his broad features a peculiar look. He was in the habit of taking his sword into the pulpit with him and, before he preached, laying it on the table or desk. It was a bit of gallant steel, and with the battle-scarred face of the preacher above it never failed to impress an audience. John Adams, the second I’resident of the United States, no mean judge of oratory, described Webb as “the old soldier, one of the most eloquent men I ever heard.” Webb carried into his religion all the fine qualities of a soldier — courage, loyalty, enterprise. He became a local preacher, and was accustomed to go into the pulpit in full uniform. He was quartered with a detachment of his regiment at Albany, and hearing of the little society at New York, came down the river, made himself known, and at once put the impulse of a new energy into Methodist affairs.

A woman leads the procession of converts to Christianity in Europe, the purple seller of Philippi; and a woman’s figure, that of Barbara Heck, stands at the head of American Methodism. And beside her are the figures of two laymen — Embury the carpenter, and Webb the soldier.

The first Methodist chapel in America was built, Embury making the pulpit with his own hands, and preaching the first sermon in it, on October 30, 1768. It was a low building of stone, GO feet by 42 feet, and was adorned with a fireplace and a chimney. This was done to evade the law which forbade the erection of other than Anglican places of worship. The work spread fast, and a letter was written to Wesley urging him to send them a leader, and adding that if the English Conference could not afford to pay the preacher’s passage the members of the little Society in New York would sell their coats and shirts to provide the funds.

Wesley, it will be remembered, had a very definite and prudent strategy in his operations. He took short steps, and never went far from his base. He did not cross St. George’s Channel till 1747, nor the Scotch border till 1751. To reach across the Atlantic to America seemed, to his prudent eyes, a policy, if not too daring, yet too hurried. When Wesley was urged, a little later, to visit America himself he replied: “The way is not plain; I have no business there so long as they can do without me. At present I am a debtor to the people of England and Ireland.”

But the cry from America was very urgent. One pertinacious Methodist wrote: —

“Mr. Wesley says, the first message cf the preachers Is to the lost sheep of England. And are there none in America? They have strayed from England into the wild woods here, and they are running wild after this world. They are drinking their wine in bowls, and are jumping and dancing, and serving the devil in the groves and under the green trees. And are not these lost sheep? And will none of the preachers come here? Where Is Mr. Brownfleld? Where is John Pawson? Where is Nicholas Manners? Are they living, and will they not come?’”

‘Southey, vol. ii. p. 202.

It was impossible to refuse that appeal, and the Conference of 1769 called for volunteers for America. Two helpers, Richard Boardmau and Joseph Pilmoor, offered themselves. They were not sent across the Atlantic with empty hands. The members of the Conference, the hardest worked and worst paid company of men probably at that moment in Great Britain, put their scanty coins together. It took £20 to pay the passages of the volunteers across the Atlantic, and they carried in addition the sum of £50 as a token of brotherly love from British to American Methodism. These two Methodist helpers thus set out with £50 to Christianise a continent!

The Conference of 1771 made a still more splendid contribution to the religious life of the United States. It sent Francis Asbury and Richard Wright to America; and Francis Asbury was certainly the noblest gift England ever bestowed on her children beyond the Atlantic. He has never yet come to his just fame, even in his own Church. It was in the year after Whitefield died that Asbury landed on American soil, and while this, as yet unknown, Staffordshire peasant had none of Whitefield’s magnificent powers of oratory, he was destined to make a deeper and more enduring mark on the religious life of America than even the great preacher did.

This son of a peasant-household began to preach when a lad of eighteen. He went to America when he had been a travelling preacher for five years. He started on that historic pilgrimage, which was to lead him to goals unimagined, without a penny in his pocket. On the rough, vast floor of America he played the part of an apostle, without putting on the airs of one; without, indeed, in the least suspecting himself to be one. His travels rival, if they do not outrun, those of John Wesley himself, and they were maintained under far harsher conditions. He found his lodgings in the rough cabins of the pioneers; his track ran through shadowy and almost untrodden forests, over wide prairies, across unbridged rivers. His salary for the greater part of his life was under £20 a year. Tall and thin, his gaunt body had the toughness of steel, while his temper had the gentleness of a woman.

He was a Fletcher without that awful look of other worlds which lay like a continual presence on Fletcher’s brow; a Wesley without the masterful will and the obstinate High Church bias of his great leader. But Wesley himself could not have outridden, or outpreached, or out-toiled him; Fletcher’s saintly life had hardly more of the atmosphere of prayer about it than that of Asbury. Prayer was woven into the very fibres of his life. He touched with its magic every person with whom he came in contact, if only for a moment. If he stayed a few days in some settler’s cabin he had household prayer with every household meal. No visitor crossed the cabin threshold without being welcomed, or dismissed, with prayer. Asbury had not Wesley’s genius for command, but he suited the American character and the conditions of American life better than even his great leader. He had no class prepossessions. He belonged to no political school. He had no stubborn High Church bias. And he held together, as perhaps not even Wesley could have done, the Methodist Societies in America during the bloody civil war, and he held them by force of the wise gentleness that love teaches.

For his only genius was that which love gives. In this respect he resembled Fletcher rather than Wesley. He was, in fact, an English and peasant version of that halfangelic Swiss. Asbury was half seraph and half peasant — a seraph with a touch of the peasant’s homeliness added, and hardly less seraphic on that account.

Wesley, brief as was his personal intercourse with Asbury, had put upon him his characteristic stamp. It is still visible in his pithy, short-sentenced English. It was writ large before the eyes of his contemporaries in his neatness of dress, his methodical industry, his hunger for knowledge, and his student-like habits. This Staffordshire peasant, travelling five thousand miles a year, preaching incessantly, spending three hours a day in prayer, and without a settled home, yet had it as a fixed rule to read a hundred pages daily. He made himself a scholar, and mastered Latin. Greek, and Hebrew.

To what mysterious order did such men belong? They seem to have possessed faculties which lie undeveloped in ordinary men, and to draw their life from richer fountains. What to other men are rare and momentary experiences — high moods of emotion and of vision, which come and vanish at a breath — were to such men as Wesley and Fletcher and Asbury the permanent and ordinary conditions of life. They are revelations, indeed, of the unused and unsuspected forces which slumber in religion.

It is needless to assess Asbury’s intellect. Love taught him wisdom, love gave him power. He reached by its charm heights of influence impossible to mere intellectual energy. He healed the schism of 1779-80 betwixt the Northern and Southern branches of the infant Methodist Church in America, not by his arguments, not by mere tact or authority, but by his tears and prayers, and by that love which shone in his tears and breathed in his prayers. A wifeless, solitary man; a rustic by birth, who owed nothing to the schools and little to natural endowment; who had no powers of debate, and seemed to have no gifts of leadership; yet, in the history of His Church, as God sees it, and writes it, and will ci’own it, not many figures stand higher than that of the peasant bishop of Methodism in the United States — Francis Asbury.

Wesley, shrewd judge of men as he was, scarcely realised at first Asbury’s pre-eminent gifts. He had recognised, it is true, the gentleness which was the characteristic note of Asbury’s character, but had hardly discovered the strength and sagacity which underlay Asbury’s gentleness. And Wesley had a general’s instinct. He believed that in the shaping of a new Church on the rough soil of America a strong hand was needed; and in 1773 he despatched Thomas Ranliin and George Shadford as reinforcements to America. His letter of commission to Shadford is characteristic: “I let you loose, George, on the great continent of America. Publish your message in the open face of the sun, and do all the good you can.”

Rankin, who figures familiarly as “dear Tommy” in Wesley’s letters, was a Scotchman by birth, a soldier by training — a soldier of John Haime’s school — and Wesley made him general assistant of the Societies in America for the express purpose of drawing more tightly the reins of discipline there. Rankin certainly brought to his religion something of the temper, and very much of the discipline, of a soldier. Even the gentle Asbury, where principle was concerned, was known to have a hand of iron; but Rankin’s touch was of wrought steel! His sense of order was so profoundly shocked by the physical manifestations which attended some revivals that he was tempted to quarrel with the revivals themselves. He carried the peremptory acceuts of a trooper into the Society gatherings, and for a time it seemed as if the gentler-natured Asbury, with the finer and wiser influences he represented, would be driven from the field, ^sop’s fable of the’ contest betwixt the sun and the wind was illustrated afresh, in a word, by the contrast betwixt the methods of the two men; and, as in the historic fable, the gentle sunshine of Asbury’s genius proved more effective than the hard and blustering wind which Rankin’s administration suggested.

Methodism, from the first, grew with almost tropical rapidity on American soil. It suited the genius of the people. It exactly fitted their circumstances. An itinerant ministry, as mobile and as enterprising as the light cavalry of an invading army, spread over the whole vast continent. The first preachers brought the methods of Wesley, and the traditions of the earliest heroic group of his helpers, to America. They outmarched the immigrants; they out-toiled the settlers; they carried the message and the spirit of religion everywhere. And year by year the tale of new Societies, of multiplying chapels, and of an ever-expanding army of helpers, was reported to the British Conference.

Asbury greatly contributed to this by the skill of his administration. He had many of the gifts of a great commander. He knew how to choose men; he could look over a whole continent and see its strategic points, and place everywhere exactly the man that suited the post. He knew, too, how to suit the temper and genius of a preacher to the exact spiritual stages of each Society; and with all his gentleness Asbury had enough resolution to act on his own reading of the situation. He distributed his helpers over the continent on the method, and with much of the skill, by which a great general distributes his troops.

And yet Methodism in America was at first sadly handicapped. Civil war was on the point of breaking out. The first Conference in America met on July 14, 1773, but the historic meeting of Coke and Asbury in America, on November 14, 1784, marks the starting point of the great Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States.

But only four months before, the Declaration of Independence had been signed, and the bond which united the colonies to England was severed. To found a new Church on a soil shaken with a political earthquake of this scale was a task which might well seem too great for the wit of man to accomplish. But something wiser than human wit, and mightier than human strength, went to the task.

The helpers Wesley had sent across the Atlantic were, of course, English or Scotch by birth; their sympathies were with their native land; they shared Wesley’s obstinate loyalty; and they were, not unnaturally, suspected of being “unpatriotic,” not to say anti-American, by their own flocks. Wesley, on the other side of the Atlantic, was declaring at that very moment that he would as soon associate with a drunkard or a whoremonger as with rebels. With what eyes could Rankin, the excavalryman, with more than a soldier’s instinct for discipline and a soldier’s hate of disloyalty, look on rebels? One by one Wesley’s early helpers were driven out of America. The preachers were, later, required by Congress to take the oath of allegiance to the new Government, and even the all-patient Asbury refused to do this. He was fined £5 for preaching without taking the oath, and was practically silenced for two years, and in hiding for part of the time. The unhappy effects of the civil war are reflected in the Minutes of the English Conference. For ten years — ten sad, troubled years — 1773-1783 — there is no record of the American work in them. It had disappeared! The red furnace of war seemed to have destroyed it. For eleven years — 1773-1784 — no published Minutes of the American Conference made their appearance.

Wesley, it may be added, greatly increased the diflSculties of his helpers in America by his political utterances in England. In 1775 he issued a little pamphlet of four pages, entitled “A Calm Address to our American Colonies.” Never before or since, perhaps, did so small a bit of printed paper produce such a sensation. Over 40,000 copies were sold in a few weeks. The pamphlet moved the almost tearful gratitude of the members of the British Cabinet, astonished to find a man of Wesley’s knowledge of the common people, and influence with them, on their side; but it deeply offended all who were opposed to the war, and brought ou Wesley himself a tempest of abuse. His friends in America tried to suppress the pamphlet there, and burned all the copies that reached American soil. Wesley bluntly declared in his pamphlet that the Americans had no grievances, and had been robbed of no ’ rights. The British I’arliament, he argued, had power to tax the American settlements, and the revolt was at bottom not a struggle for freedom, but an attempt to overthrow the monarchy.

Now the “Calm Address” was, in fact, simply Johnson’s well-known pamphlet “Taxation no Tyranny” abridged, and adorned with Wesley’s name and a few sentences of Wesley’s nervous p]nglish. Its publication, in this form, laid Wesley, not unreasonably, open to the charge of plagiarism. The pamphlet, too, was in sharp contrast with some of Wesley’s earlier utterances. He had, for example, on June 15, 1755, addressed a very noble letter to Lord North, j)rotesting against the treatment to which the Americans were subjected. He wrote: —

“AH my prejudices are against the Americans; for I am a High Churchman, the son of a High Churchman, bred up, from my childhood, in the highest notions of passive obedience and non-resistance; and yet, in spite of all my long-rooted prejudices, I cannot avoid thinking, if I think at all, that an oppressed people asked for nothing more than their legal rights, and that in the most modest and inoffensive manner that the nature of the thing would allow. But waiving all considerations of right and wrong, I ask, is it common-sense to use force towards the Americans? These men will not be frightened; and, it seems, they will not be conquered so easily as was at first imagined. They will probably dispute every inch of ground; and, if they die, die sword in hand.”’

These are admirable sentiments; but while Wesley wrote in this fashion in private, how did he come to write so differently in public? The truth is that in politics Wesley was apt to speak on half knowledge, since he was too busily occupied in a greater realm to be able to master all the facts belonging to a world so different. In political matters, too, his natural bias, both of training and character, made him what was called in those days a Tory. Only when his conscience became peremptory did his political views correct themselves.

‘Tyerman, vol. i. p. 198.

It can be easily understood how Wesley’s utterances in England increased the diflSculties of his preachers in America. But Wesley, it must be said, was far wiser for his preachers than for himself. Thus he wrote to them:

“It is your part to be peacemakers; to be loving and tender to all, but to addict yourselves to no party. In spite of all solicitations, of rough or smooth words, say not one word against one or the other side; keep yourselves pure; do all you can to help and soften all; but ‘beware how you adopt another’s jar.’” In the same spirit Charles Wesley wrote to them, saying, “As to the public affairs, I wish you to be like-minded with me. I am of neither side, and yet of both: on the one side of New England, and of Old.”’

The ecclesiastical situation in America quickly came to a crisis — a crisis which hastened the solution of the same difficulty in England itself. Wesley required his helpers in America, as in England, not only to keep on terms of friendship with the Church of P^ngland, but to regard themselves as her humble and unrecognised servants. They were not to administer the sacraments, to hold services in church hours, or to label themselves Dissenters. But the number of clergymen in the United States was few; their parishes were vast, and they were too often men without either zeal or piety. It was absurd to expect the energetic and fast-multiplying Societies of Methodism to depend on the charity — too often the grudging and ungenerous charity — of a few Anglican clergy for the administration of the sacraments.

The civil war, as a matter of fact, wrecked Wesley’s whole policy in this matter. Most of the Anglican clergj — men abandoned their parishes and fled from the revolting colonies. The administration of the sacraments, as far as Wesley’s Societies were concerned, threatened to become — over wide spaces it did actually become — a lost and almost forgotten thing.

The question of the sacraments thus became, in America, urgent and peremptory. Wesley appealed to the English bishops to ordain some of his helpers to meet the crisis, and was refused. English bishops had no overtender anxiety to supply the ordinances of religion to rebels at war with their mother country and their legitimate sovereign. Wesley wrote to the Bishop of London:

‘Southey, vol. ii. p. 210.

“I mourn for poor America, for the sheep scattered up and down therein; part of them have no shepherds at all, particularly in the northern colonies; and the case of the rest is little better, for their own shepherds pity them not.”

Wesley, with characteristic patience, waited for four years before he acted. He wrote twice to Lowth, the Bishop of London, a man of liberal mind and generous sympathies, begging ordination for a single preacher who might travel amongst the American Societies and administer the sacraments. But Lowth refused. “There are three ministers in that country already,” he said. “And what are these,” was Wesley’s natural reply, “to watch over a continent?” Not only were they too few in number; they were visibly unfit in character for the work they had to do. Wesley wrote to Lowth: —

“Your lordship did not see good to ordain him [Wesley’s helper], but your lordship did see good to ordain and send into America other persons who knew something of Greek and Latin, but who knew no more of saving souls than of catching whales.”

Facts with Wesley had always a final logic. He, by this time, had begun to look at the whole situation with eyes purged of High Church prepossessions. It was as well, perhaps, he reflected that the bishops had not ordained his helpers.

“If they would ordain them now (he wrote) they would expect to govern them; and how grievously would this entangle us! As our American brethren are now totally disentangled, both from the State and the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the primitive Church; and we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty wherewith God has so strangely made them free.’”

He determined to solve the diflSculty by ordaining a superintendent or bishop for America. Wesley acted deliberately, and i)uts with great force the reasons that weighed with him. Why did he do for America what he refused to do for England? He replies: —

“Here there are bishops who have a legal jurisdiction. In America there are none, either any parish ministers; so that, for some hundreds of miles together, there is none either to baptize

‘Southey, vol. ii. p. 213. or to administer the Lord’s Supper. Here, therefore, my scruples are at an end; and I conceive myself at full liberty, as I violate no order, and invade no man’s right, by appointing and sending labourers into the harvest.’”

Accordingly Wesley, with Creighton, a clergyman who was also one of his devoted helpers, ordained Coke as superintendent, Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey as presbyters for America. Coke in turn was to ordain Asbury. Wesley, after his practical fashion, would go as far as he must, but no further. His principles, it is true, ran far ahead of his acts; but he was the unimaginative Englishman who kept his feet on the solid earth and cared much for the concrete and nothing for the abstract; much for practical eflSciency and little for logic. Alike in England and America, he strained to the breaking-point the loyalty of his people in his desire to keep on terms with the Anglican Church. In America, for example, in 1779, the Methodist Churches in the Southern States deliberately broke loose, and resolved to begin existence as an independent Church, since in no other way could they secure the administration of the sacraments amongst themselves. The schism was only healed by Asbury’s prayers and tears and matchless tact.

Wesley’s characteristic tenderness for the High Church theory his intelligence had long ago renounced, and which he was in the very act of publicly repudiating, is amusingly shown in the very ordination of Coke. He will not name him ‘’bishop,” though he is making him one, but labels him “superintendent.” It was American directness and common-sense which later thrust aside the clumsy word “superintendent,” and made the name and the fact to agree by the use of the term bishop. Wesley, too, at another point was illogical. Lord King, he declared, had satisfied him that presbyters and bishops were the same order. Why, then, did he think it necessary to ordain Coke as bishop under the alias of “superintendent”? Southey’s criticism at this point is perfectly sound. Ou Wesley’s principles the consecration was useless, for Dr. Coke, having been regularly ordained, was already as good a bishop as Wesley himself.

Coke was almost as splendid a gift to America as Asbury. His tact, his zeal, his overpowering personality, at once made him a power; and it may be added that a gentleman by birth and position, and a scholar by training, he had a social position to which Wesley’s other helpers could not pretend. Asbury was on a country tour at the moment of Coke’s arrival; but just as Coke had finished preaching at a chapel in Delaware “a plain, robust man came up to him in the pulpit and kissed him, pronouncing at the same time a primitive salutation.” This was Asbury; and the two men who were to impress so profoundly the religious life of the United States at once became the closest friends.

It does not fall within the scope of this book to further describe the progress of the work in America. Methodism there was but an ofifshoot of the English revival, planted on strange soil, under strange skies, and under harsh conditions. Yet it has grown to be the greatest and most vigorous branch of English-speaking Protestantism history knows! Its geographical and political conditions gave it the form of an independent Church earlier than even the parent movement in England; and it is to-day the most powerful religious body in a nation of eighty millions. If Wesley’s work had to be judged by this, in a sense, one of its secondary results, how great is its scale!