How Wesley Affected England

It seems a daring and extravagant thing to measure the work of a single life by the changes that life has wrought in the character of a nation. The most commanding human figure, when set against the background of a kingdom, may well seem dwarfed into microscopic dimensions. In some rare cases, as with Peter the Great in Russia, Cavour in Italy, or Bismarck in Germany, a test so high may be applied without any startling sense of disproportion. But in English history, such a test, when applied even to Pitt or to Gladstone, seems too cruel.

In the case of Wesley, many of the ordinary elements of power were visibly lacking. He was to the day of his death a poor man, if only because he gave away everything he possessed. He was, at the moment when his career takes the scale of history, a clergyman without a charge, a leader without a party, a preacher with every pulpit in the three kingdoms shut against him. Yet when all this has been said, it remains true that Wesley may challenge the judgment of mankind by the test of the mark his work has left on the history of the English-speaking race.

And his contribution to that history may be compressed into a single sentence. He restored Christianity to its place as a living force in the personal creed of men and In the life of the nation. A change profound and wonderful, carrying in itself the pledge and the secret of a thousand other changes! For more than fifty years — from the moment he broke through all ecclesiastical conventions and preached on the open moors at Kingswood to the rough miners, down to the moment speech failed on his lips in the death chamber in City Road — Wesley was the greatest personal force in England. And he was a force for all that Christianity means.

He had a spiritual vision as keen as that of Thomas k Kempis; a sense of eternity as profound as that of William Law; spiritual convictions as overmastering as those of John Henry Newman, and in infinitely closer harmony with the essential genius of Christianity. And he was not, like the author of the Imitatio, imprisoned in a cell. He was not, like Law, wrapped in cotton wool by a cluster of rich feminine admirers. He was not, like Newman, buried in semi-monastic seclusion at Littlemore. He lived in the open air. He turned the hill-side and the city street into a pulpit. He preached to vast crowds daily; he touched thousands of lives by his personal influence; and he did this for more than fifty years! He gathered round himself a great order of preachers of a quite new type. He built up a far-stretching spiritual organisation embodying his own ideals, and on fire with his own spirit. As a result he quickened the conscience, not merely of his own followers, but of the Church which had cast him out, and of the whole nation to which he belonged. Christianity, not merely as a creed, but as a conscience, was in this way re-born under British skies.

The range and character of Wesley’s work may be judged by the tests of history. And when those high tests are applied it can be soberly claimed for Wesley that he did not so much revive the evangelical tradition of Christianity; he created it! He made it a permanent element in the religious life of England. All great evangelistic movements, from his time down to the present day, have had in them a breath of Wesley’s spirit. And the evangelical tradition which dates from Wesley, it may be added, is of the sanest and most practical type.

There is a current platitude just now that the next revival must be ethical. If so, it will be a return to Wesley; for the revival which bears his name was ethical in the most intense and practical fashion. Religion, as AVesley defined it, and enforced it, consisted of godly tempers and godly conduct. Even Leslie Stephen, who, in the matter of theological belief, is parted by whole horizons from Wesley, and who tries Wesley’s work by purely literary tests, bears emphatic testimony to the practical qualities of that work. Wesley’s aim, he says, was “to stamp out vice, to suppress drinking and debauchery, to show men the plain path to heaven.” It was, in other words, to set up in human life that Civitas Dei of which all the saints have dreamed, a true and imperishable Kingdom of God, a kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.

Lecky, in a score of passages, notes, with a certain accent of admiring astonishment, the influence of the Methodist revival outside Methodism. It was one of the forces which produced Sunday-schools. It affected the army, the Universities, literature, and this in spite of the fact that the chief literary men of the day had nothing for it but sneers. It is not easy to recite the countless practical forms which Wesley’s work took. He set up a dispensary with free supply of medicine to the poor; he fought against political corruption; he established relief employment for the destitute. Says Lecky, “It is no exaggeration to say that Wesley had a wider constructive influence in the sphere of practical religion than any other man who has appeared since the sixteenth century.”

All the great and characteristic contributions to Christian life in modern days come, in brief, by direct descent from Wesley. And the indirect influence of his work — its reflex on other bodies than his own — is, perhaps, greater and more wonderful than even its direct fruits. The Anglican Church, for example, cast Wesley out. It rejected his work. Yet the Anglican Church of to-day is profoundly influenced by Wesley. He created a new conscience in that Church. He awakened a spirit which killed silently and absolutely, as a breath of pure oxygen kills some microbes, the idle and unspiritual clergy of his day, who had attenuated Christianity into a sort of Chinese morality — mere Confucianism with a Christian label — and who were more alarmed at the suspicion of believing too much than of believing nothing at all. Wesley, preaching on his father’s tombstone outside Epworth Church, made impossible the drunken vicar inside. The spectacle of the vast open-air crowds that hung on Wesley’s lips made the empty church for ever intolerable.

Wesley’s influence outside his own Church runs sometimes in strange and unrecognised channels. It called into existence, no doubt, the great evangelical school in the Anglican Church. But it also helped to create the opposite school. The Oxford Movement, if only because it was served by more splendid literary talents, outbulks in scale and importance for a considerable section of mankind Wesley’s revival. No one as yet has adequately traced the connection betwixt the two movements; and yet the connection is undeniable, and constitutes a striking, if almost unrecognised, example of the reflex influence of the great revival. Wesley, in a sense, explains Newman and made him possible.

There are the oddest resemblances and contrasts betwixt the two men. Newman was born ten years after Wesley died, and so drew his earliest breath in the new religious atmosphere Wesley created. Newman, indeed, frankly acknowledges his debt to the revival. “The writer,” he says, “who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom, humanly speaking, I almost owe my soul, is Thomas Scott.” But Scott was the disciple of Newton, and Newton was converted under Whitefield, and the line of spiritual connection betwixt Newman and the revival at this point is clear. Unlike Wesley, Newman was an evangelical first, and a sacerdotalist afterwards. He came under Law’s influence as a mere boy; he was “converted” in an evangelical sense at fifteen, and of that inward conversion he says in his Apologia, nearly sixty years afterwards: “I am still more certain than that I have hands and feet.”

But though the order of events is inverted in the lives of the two men, the correspondences are wonderful. Newman, it is true, was an evangelical, not of Wesley’s, but of Whitefield’s school. He was a Calvinistic evangelical, that is; and when, like Wesley, he made the discovery, in his own words, that “Calvinism is not a key to the phenomena of human nature as they occur in the world.” he gave up, not merely Calvinism, but the whole evangelical theory as well. Newman was, perhaps, more credulous than even Wesley. Wesley believed in “Old Jeffrey”; but Newman, as a youth, thought he himself was an angel and the solid earth about him a dream. “I thought,” he records in his Apologia, “life might be a dream or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.” Nature was a parable for him, Scripture an allegory.

The two men both held Fellowships at Oxford; both were familiar figures in this historic pulpit of St. Mary’s, and both went, though in an inverted order, through the same theological stages. Both men were, in turn mystics, ascetics, sacerdotalists.

But where Wesley met Peter Bohler and stepped through the shiuing gate of faith into the land of spiritual freedom, Newman met Pusey and went through the narrow doors of sacerdotalism into the shadow-haunted realm of a false theology. Wesley was thirty-two years old when he sailed for America, and before Moravian influences had touched him. Newman was thirty-two years old when he parted from Froude at Rome on his way to Sicily, and when on the narrow Sicilian waters he wrote his hymn — “Lead, Kindly Light.” If the two men had met, how exactly they would have understood each other! And with what equal eyes of approval Archbishop Laud would have looked on them both I They were both his ecclesiastical offspring.

Wesley would have fought for the apostolic succession and for the integrity of the Prayer-book as fiercely as Keble or Newman. He would have thrust all dissenters out of both the realm of his own charity and the Kingdom of God with a scorn as complete as theirs. With his Oxford companions he might have set up, instead of the Holy Club, a semi-monastic house at Littlemore, exactly as Newman did a century later. Sacerdotalist, mystic, and ascetic, we repeat, can be found in each of them.

But Newman is an arrested Wesley. Could Wesley, like Newman, have forsaken Anglicanism for the Church of Rome? His habit of unsparing logic, his courage in hanging life, death, and eternity on a syllogism, makes that possible. The sacerdotalist, indeed, who does not end by becoming a Roman Catholic is an example of arrested logic, a mere incomplete syllogism in flesh and blood. Newman’s argument is flawless: “To believe in the Church” — in the sacerdotal sense — “is to believe in the Pope.” Wesley, in 1745, would, no doubt, have found it harder to join the Church of Rome than Newman did in 1845. Romanism in the middle of the eighteenth century was, for an Englishman, linked to a hated system of politics. It stood for Charles I. against Hampden; for the Stuarts against the House of Hanover; for the Star Chamber against the Bill of Rights; for James II. against William of Orange. And these things counted even for a sacerdotalist. Had Newman himself lived a hundred years nearer the trial of the Seven Bishops it would have made his surrender to the Papacy more diflBcult.

The differeute in their religion finds its expression in the different atmosphere of the two men. Wesley’s atmosphere is radiant with snnshine; Newman’s is a sort of sunless mist. Let any one compare the over-subtle logic, the indefinable note of weariness which runs through Newman’s ‘’Grammar of Assent,” and the exultant energy, the gladness, the accent of triumphant certainty in, say, Wesley’s “Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,” and he will find expressed in literary terms the spiritual interval betwixt the two men. Newman never escaped from that sacerdotal treadmill in which Wesley toiled for thirteen years. He only changed its direction. Religion, Newman says in his “Grammar of Assent,” is “a system; it is a rite, a creed, a philosophy, a rule of duty.” But he did not add with Wesley, it is a life; nay it is a partnership in the highest form and energy of Life, the life of God Himself! Religion for Newman, whether at Christ-churcli or at Littlemore, was a matter of “prescribed rites embodied in institutions.” For Wesley, it was the inrush of supernatural forces out of the spiritual realm, flooding every channel of human nature.

But it is curious to note how profoundly Newman and Wesley agreed as to the validity of the spiritual consciousness. Wesley, from first to last, tested religion in the forum of his consciousness. Newman, following Kant, rested his belief in God on the witness of his own consciousness. We have, he asserted, “a direct and conscious knowledge of our Maker.” He found in the indestructible facts of consciousness the one force capable of resisting the all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in the realm of religion. “Personality,” in Newman’s philosophy, was “the key to truth.” Dr. Barry, his best biographer, says: “Metaphysicians commonly started from the universal to arrive at the particular; but he who is not of their sect reverses the process. ‘Let the concrete come first,’ Newman arglies, ‘and the so-called universals second.’ He went back to the days of his childhood when he was alone with the Alone, and on this adamantine basis of reality he set up his religion.”

In principle, it will be seen — in the value assigned to personality — Newman and Wesley are alike; but Wesley did not “go back to his childhood” in search of God. He found a constant witness to the existence of God living within him. His doctrine of the witness of the Spirit is but a form of this great philosophy.

Wesley was saved from sacerdotalism by the touch of his mother’s hands; by the influence of Moravian teaching; and beyond even these forces by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Yet he, had a narrow escape. He might have been an eighteenth-century Newman! And though it sounds a paradox, it is sober truth that Wesley at Oxford, in 1730, made Newman at Oxford, in 1830, possible. Wesley left the sacerdotal camp, but the breath of his zeal made even those dry bones live. He created a new conscience in sacerdotalism, and from that new conscience, stirring like some strange wine in old bottles, came the whole Tractarian movement of the Thirties.

High Church Anglicanism stands to-day on that via media to which Newman led it, and at which point he abandoned it. It would probably scorn the suggestion that it owes any debt to Wesley. It certainly displays no sense of obligation to the Church which Wesley founded. And the Roman Catholic Church, too, would smile at the notion that it owes Wesley anything for the gift of Newman. And yet, if the indirect influences of Wesley’s work are followed, it will be seen that the debt is undeniable. If Wesley called into existence a new Church, he stirred into life the conscience of the Church he left.

If we come down to later times, no one will deny that the touch of Wesley’s hand, the breath of his spirit, is in the modern Church. The Salvation Army is one aspect of Wesley’s work — his work amongst the fallen and the outcast — revived under modern conditions and in a picturesque shape. The Christian Endeavour Societies are Wesley’s great institution of the class-meeting translated into modern terms and made to serve new uses. All the great city missions springing up under every sky have in them the very spirit of Wesley. If modern religion is learning to take social forms, if it is expressing itself in terms of practical, beneficence, this, too, is part of the tradition caught from Wesley. For he first, amongst the religious teachers of England, charged religion with social oflBces. There is hardly a form of practical beneficence the world knows to-day that Wesley did not set into operation. It is a secular historian like Lecky who says: “Not only the germs of almost all the existing zeal in England on behalf of Christian truth and life are due to Methodism, but the activity stirred up in other portions of Protestant Europe we must trace, indirectly at least, to Wesley.”^ And it is a writer of Newman’s school, Palmer, who declares that “the bold, aggressive movement, of which Wesley was the symbol, once more made Christianity the teacher of the world.”

But we are discussing now the effect produced upon national life and character by Wesley’s work, rather than any ecclesiastical change it wrought; and it is difficult to write on this without seeming to exaggerate. What was it that saved England from “the red fool-fury of the Seine,” and kept her undestroyed while the wild forces of the Revolution were shaking throne and Church in France into ruin? Maurice tells how his father was accustomed to say that “England escaped a political revolution because she had undergone a spiritual revolution” — that brought about by Wesley and Whitefield; and Lecky’s testimony to the same fact is emphatic. “Many causes,” he says, “conspired to save England from the contagion of the revolutionary spirit in France, but among them a prominent place must be given to the new and vehement enthusiasm which was at that very time passing through the middle and lower classes of the people.”^

It is historically certain that English Deism helped to produce the French Revolution. The English Deists supplied Voltaire and his school with arguments, and in France these arguments found a soil in which they struck deep root; or, to vary the figure, they acted as sparks cast into some inflammable vapour. But why did the very teaching which, although a foreign importation, produced such effects in France, fail completely in England, its native soil? The answer is to be found in Wesley and the revival linked to his name. If Wesley had been an English Voltaire, corroding all belief with the acid of his wit, and distilling the gall of his bitter spirit into the blood of the nation, there might have been a Reign of Terror in London as well as in Paris!

Let it be remembered that at this time a new social movement — the rise of the great manufacturing industries

‘Lecky, vol. ii. p. 521. V6td., p. 686. of Great Britain — was shifting the whole centre of national life. It was a movement which has yielded splendid results, but its birth was attended with the gravest social perils. It was a movement of disintegration, disordering the social relations of whole classes. It altered the very type of national life. It increased the sum total of wealth, but totally changed its distribution; it made for a time at least, the rich richer, the poor poorer. It kindled a war which has not since found a truce betwixt Labour and Capital. It drew together all the inflammable elements of the nation. It tended to weaken if not arrest moral forces, and to substitute for them forces non-moral and anti social — greed of money, class jealousy, selfishness. Lecky describes it as “peculiarly fortunate” that the emergence of this great social phenomenon in England should have been preceded by “a religious revival which opened a new spring of moral and religious energy among the poor, and at the same time gave a powerful impulse to the philanthropy of the rich.” But was it merely a stroke of “peculiar good fortune” which explains the api)earance, at this supreme and critical moment in national history, of the great Methodist revival? It was the providence of God, the working of that divine Will which shapes human history to the patern of the divine counsels.

Sometimes in nations, as in individuals, the creed has no relation to the conscience. But the great revival made Christianity authoritative on the moral sense of the nation, and in that august change lay the secret of a thousand other changes. Who watches the emergence of that new force in English history, and traces its workings in the national life, has the key to nearly everything noble in modern British legislation.

There were of course many forces which, for the moment, postponed, or obscured — though they did not destroy — the growth of those seeds of justice and goodness which the revival planted on the soil of English character. The Great War with France, for example, had been in progress for ten years when Wesley died, and it lasted ten years after his death. How profoundly that war, both during its course and after it had closed, deflected the national life is not easly realised. As one result Parliament remained unreformed, and utterly failed to reflect the natioual conscience. It is difficult to-day to realise the evils of the old electoral system. Two-thirds of the House of Commons were simply appointed by rich men. The Duke of Norfolk owned eleven members, Lord Lonsdale owned nine. Old Sarum had two members, but not a single inhabitant. Seventy members were returned by thirty-five electorates which, all put together, counted hardly as many voters. Three hundred members, it was estimated, were returned by 160 persons, while great cities had not a single member.

Under such conditions, the better ideals which Wesley’s work had created could not find expression in public law. Legislation was partial, justice was still brutal. There were still 25.*^ capital offences on the Statute-Book. If a man injured Westminster Bridge he was hanged; if he cut down a young tree, if he shot a rabbit, if he stole property valued at five shillings, he was hanged. So late as 1816 there were at one time in Newgate fifty-eight persons under .sentence of death, one of them a child of ten years old. Romney tells the story of two men, partners in the same offence, who were tried for robbery. One man moved the pity of the jury. They found him guilty of robbery to the extent of 4s. lOd.; the other was found guilty of theft to the extent of 5s., and that extra twopence was for one man fatal. It measured the difference betwixt life and death! Cruelty, in brief, ran through the whole gamut of .social life. Women worked in coal-pits, crawling like animals on hands and feet in the darkness of the mine. Children of six were habitually employed. Down to 1804 the rights of working men to combine were regulated by a law passed at the date of the battle of Bannockburn. More than one-half of the entire children of England grew up without education.

Taxes were inevitable; but the system of taxation was cruel, and stupid to a degree almost incredible. Salt was taxed to the extent of forty times its cost, and on the coast the poor used sea-water to take its place in cooking. Paper was taxed threepence per pound, newspapers fourpence per copy, advertisements three shillings and sixpence for each issue. The law, that is. was used to kill the very opportunities of knowledge. England, too, was cursed in the latter years of the eighteenth century by a lunatic king and a distracted regency; and later by a monarch, George IV., who would have been less of a scandal to the nation if he had been a lunatic.

And all this was after Weslej’ had quickened the conscience of the nation, and poured the wine of a new humanity into its veins! Why was that new conscience so late in making itself effective? For an answer, let the disturbing forces we have recited be considered; the distractions of the Great War, the mischiefs of a vicious system of politics, the influence of a corrupt court, the persistence of ancient and cruel forms of legislation; and it will be understood how even the new conscience which Wesley had created in the nation found late and imperfect expressions in public affairs.

Wesley’s convinced and passionate opposition to slavery is historic, and it is the more remarkable because it was so much in advance of the sentiments of his age. The British Parliament during the eighteenth century, it must be remembered, passed no less than twenty-three Acts of Parliament benevolently “regulating” the slave traflQc. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1718) Great Britain undertook to furnish annually to South America 4,800 negroes, and to do this for thirty years; and the contract was renewed in 1748. Great Britain, that is, ignobly turned, on this gigantic scale, slave-provider for the Spaniard! And it was not the political conscience merely that was utterly without sensitiveness to what Wesley described “that sum of all villainy,” the slave trade; the clerical conscience was equally torpid. A great ecclesiastical dignitary, the Bishop of London, in a pastoral issued in 1727, declared that “Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel does not make the least alteration in civil property,” even though that “property” consisted of human flesh and blood!

When at last a reform of the franchise made Parliament a true expression of the national conscience then came the great procession of humanitarian Acts. The revolt against the slave trade, and Howard’s reform of the prisons, were the earliest and happiest expressions of the new conscience thus created. The new sense of justice, of human equality, of the dignity and worth of human nature, which went with the Great Revival found expression in the reform of the courts, the purification of the criminal code, the great Reform Bill of 1836, and the humane legislation linked to the name of Shaftesbury. Wesley and the Evangelicals generally were against Catholic relief, and against the repeal of the Test Act — a fact which proves that they were imperfectly emancipated from the evil conditions of their own times, and that intelligence in them did not keep pace with conscience. But the principles they taught, and the new spirit they introduced into national affairs, were powerful dissolvents, in which the cruel legislation of earlier years — legislation which undertook to make injustice the guard, and cruelty the servant, of religion — disappeared.

A century, it may be added, is but a hand-breadth in the life of a nation. Let the vision take a wider range, and it will be seen that betwixt the England of 1703 and the England of 1903 there is the most amazing difference. The little cluster of islands, with its scanty fringe of quarrelling colonies, has become an empire whose flag floats over one-fifth of the surface of the planet, and almost one-fourth of the human race. But the difference in scale and power which marks the empire is even less impre.ssive than the advance in its ideals and temper. A new conscience has been created; a new humanity breathes throughout society; new ideals of legislation register themselves on the Statute-Book. Great Britain has many problems still unsolved, many characteristic evils yet unvanquished. But let it be set in the perspective of history; let it be measured against the great empires of other days. And with all its imperfections it is certain that it more nearly approaches the ideals of Christianity than any other community in which men have ever dwelt together.

To the creation of this freer and nobler England a thousand forces have co-operated. But if that tangled web of contributing forces be disentangled, the richest and strongest are those which belong to religion. And who will deny that, of these, the most influential and effective are those which gather round Wesley and the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century! And the secret lies not so much in the man, as in the message; not in the teacher, but in the thing taught; not in the human agent, but in the spiritual forces of which he was the channel.