Wesley as a Church-Builder

In a life such as Wesley’s a point is at last reached at which its relation to history has to be determined. The story ceases to be biography, and becomes, in some large and permanent sense, history. Let Wesley be pictured in mid-career as he stands, say, preaching to a crowd of 10,000 people at Moorfields, or to one of 20,000 at Gwennap Pit, and let him be looked at, say, through John Nelson’s eyes. The honest Yorkshireman had no gift of imagination and no trick of literary picturesqueness. He can only describe what he sees, but he sees with curiously direct and uncoloured vision. We have already quoted his vivid account of the first time he heard Wesley preach; how “as soon as he got upon the stand he stroked back his hair and turned his face towards where I stood, and I thought he fixed his eyes on me. His countenance struck such an awful dread upon me before I heard him speak that it made my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock, and when he did speak I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me. When he had done I said, ‘This man can tell the secrets of my heart.’”

This, says Southey, was Wesley’s secret of power as a speaker. He never generalised. He spoke not to the crowd, but to the individual.

“The preacher’s words were like the eyes of a portrait which seemed to look at every beholder.

“‘Who,’ said the preacher, ‘Who art thou, that now seest and feelest both thine inward and outward ungodliness? Thou art the man! I want thee for my Lord! I challenge thee for a child of God by faith. The Lord hath need of thee. Thou who feelest thou art just fit for hell, art just fit to advance His glory — the glory of His free grace, justifying the ungodly and him that worketh not. O come quickly! Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou, even thou, art reconciled to God.’”

Multiply a scene like this, and utterances like these, through half a century, and over the whole area of the United Kingdom! Here is visibly a man who is moving a nation. He is a man, too, who can translate his message into terms of literature, and write it in imperishable words. Here is a passage, for example, from his “Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion” which may be taken as an example of the character and force of his teaching: —

“Faith ... is with regard to the spiritual world what sense is with regard to the natural world. It is the... feeling of the soul whereby a believer perceives the presence of Him in whom he lives, moves, and has his being, and indeed the whole invisible world, the entire system of things eternal. By this faith we are saved from all uneasiness of mind, from the anguish of a wounded spirit, from discontent, from fear, and sorrow of heart, from that inexpressible listlessness and weariness both of the world and ourselves which we had so helplessly laboured under for so many years — especially when we were out of the hurry ot the world, and sunk in calm reflection. This we know and feel, and cannot but declare, saves every one that partakes of it both from sin and misery, from every unhappy and every unholy temper —

‘Soft peace she brings; wherever she arrives
She builds our quiet, as she forms our lives;
Lays the rough paths of peevish nature even,
And opens in each heart a little heaven.’”

But is all this mere air-drawn rhetoric? Is it that suspected, dread, hated thing, “enthusiasm”? No! Wesley claims it is the highest form of reason. It belongs to the realm of certainties: —

“We Join with you [i. e. the men of reason] in desiring a religion founded on reason, and every way agreeable thereto. But one question remains: What do you mean by reason? I suppose you mean the eternal reason, the nature of things, the nature of God, and the nature of man, with the relations necessarily existing between them. Why, this is the religion we preach — a religion evidently founded on, and every way agreeable to, natural reason, to the essential nature of things: to the nature of God, for it begins in knowing Him, it ends in doing His will: to the nature of man, for it begins In a man’s knowing himself to be what he truly Is, foolfsh, vicious, miserable. It goes on to point the true remedy for this, to make him truly wise, virtuous, and happy, as every thinking mind (perhaps with some implicit remembrance of what it originally was) longs to be. It finishes all by restoring to due relations between God and man; by uniting for ever the tender Father and the grateful, obedient son, the great Lord of all, and the faithful servant, doing not his own will but the will of Him that sent him.”

Such a man, we repeat — with such a message, and such energy to deliver it — is from any point of view a great figure. He must profoundly affect his generation.

But there is nothing necessarily permanent in his work. The orator’s voice is hushed; the crowds are gone, the emotions the ringing words awakened are dead. Who to-day reads the “Appeal,” even though it stands unmatched for force in the religious literature of its century? Had Wesley done nothing more than preach or write, his memory might have faded. But at this stage Wesley links himself by one great achievement, not merely to English history, but to the history of religion. He creates a Church! He did not do this consciously, or of deliberate purpose. He strove, indeed, not to do it; he protested he would never do it. But as history shows, he actually did it! And since history is not so much philosophy teaching by examples as God interpreting Himself by events, we are entitled to say that Wesley, in laying the foundations of a new Church, did something that, no doubt, outran his own human vision, but which fulfilled a divine purpose.

To destroy a Church is easy. But to build one is a task requiring not only the highest gifts of intellect and the richest endowments of spiritual energy, but a combination of external circumstances and forces such as does not often occur in human history. To set up a sect is not diflScult. Small men can do it; small passions make it possible. A quarrelsome temper, a loud voice, and a suflScient absence of humour to enable the performer to take himself seriously — to announce at the top of his voice, for example, that he is the reincarnation of Elijah or of John the Baptist — these are qualities and performances that, for a time, will generate a sect. But a Church, a true province of the spiritual kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, within whose bounds millions of devout souls may dwell; a Church which creates and trains a ministry, sends out missions, builds great institutions, and lives with a life that grows ever richer while generations pass — this is one of the great things of history. Its origin does not, indeed, belong to the category of human forces. Its secret and explanation lie in the divine realm. And that Wesley, without deliberately intending it, built an indestructible Church is the fact that gives to his career the scale of history.

Each Church is an attempt to translate Christianity into a working formula; and Wesley added one more such formula to the spiritual history of the race. And it is a formula which endures! No one can write a history of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and leave out Methodism.

Whitefleld stopped short of this great achievement. He was a greater preacher than Wesley; but he was only a preacher, and so his biography never takes the imperishable scale and range of history. Charles Wesley lives by his hymns. He found a vehicle for the religious emotions which Churches of every name and type accept and use, and will continue to use till the sound of the last earthly hymn melts into the eternal harmonies of heaven. But this, in the case of Charles Wesley, was but an accident of spiritual genius. What place in history, again, would Ignatius Loyola have apart from the great religious Order he created? Wesley’s fame is imperishable because, somehow, he created an imperishable institution.

And in the story of Wesley’s work nothing is more remarkable than the narrow limits of time within which the movement he inspired crystallised into definite form, a form which, as thouglf shaped by unseen hands to unseen ends, had the prophecy and the assurance of enduring existence. Wesley, as we have seen, spent thirteen sad, slow, blundering years in solving the problem of religion for himself. But having solved it, the whole of his life instantly gained a certain swiftness of movement and certainty of goal it would be difficult to match in religious history. And in five brief, hurrying years — years full of controversies and distractions — he practically shaped, and shaped for all time, the Church which bears his name. Two wonders, indeed, are visible in this aspect of Wesley’s work; the absence of any clear intention to create a Church, and yet the swiftness, the sagacity, the certainty of aim and stroke, with which that work was actually done.

A cluster of dates in the almanac — dates covering only five years — will serve to show with how little of delay, of uncertain experiments, of wasted efforts, a great Church was evolved: —

“1739 — April 2. — Wesley preaches his first open-air sermon at Kingswood. May 12. — Foundation of first Methodist preaching place laid at Bristol. June. — Foundation of school laid at Kingswood. October 15 — Wesley sets out for Wales, beginning his itinerancy. November. — First Methodist preaching house, the Fonudry, opened in London; first Methodist stewards appointed; first hymn-book published; first Methodist Society formed; first lay preacher, Maxfield, employed.

“1740. — Wesley separates from the Moravians; controversy on Predestination with Whitefield begun; the theology of Methodism shaped.

“1742 — February 15. — Societies divided into classes; first mention of class-leaders. April. — First watch-night in London; quarterly visitation of classes by preachers established; tickets of membership used.

‘•n43.~May 1. — Rules of the Society published.

“1744 — June 25. — First Conference met In London.”

Here, compressed into a dozen lines, and into five brief years, is Methodism in all its essential features, in clearest outline. During the 160 years which have passed since, Methodism has witnessed many changes in form, but absolutely no change in principle. These great formative years determined what is characteristic and vital in it. The first Methodist Conference in history assembled on June 25, 1744. It consi.sted of only ten men. Its record includes a description of “The Society and its Officers,” which might stand to-day, with some changes in names, for contemporary Methodism.

The secret of the swift, definite, and symmetrical evolution of Methodism in a period of time so brief is found, in the main, in Wesley himself; and it is curious to note how much of the fitness which lies in unconscious natural genius, as well as of the fitness which comes of equally unconscious education and training for the work of a Church-builder, Wesley had. These five great shaping years found Wesley, for one thing, at the high-watermark of energy and power. They cover the best years of his life, say from thirty-six to forty-one. All the apparently wasted experiences of his career now found their office and use. His equipment of knowledge was singularly wide. To the discipline of a godly home, of a great public school, and of an ancient University had been added the experiences of a new settlement in America, and the teaching of the Moravian settlements in Germany.

Wesley, as we have seen, had personally gone through the whole gamut of possible religious experience. He was familiar with all schools of religious thought. He knew Protestantism in its two great forms — Anglican and German. He was familiar, indeed, with every school of theology and every variety of ecclesiastical use. He knew men, cities, books, churches, history. No development of human nature and no turn of ecclesiastical polity found him unprepared.

Wesley’s temperament helped him, as well as his training. He was not of the French but of the English type. He cared little for theories and much for facts. He was always willing to be wiser to-day than he was yesterday. He dealt with diflSculties as they arose, and not till they arose. He had many prejudices, and they were of a robust sort; but he only kept a prejudice so long as it agTeed with facts. This side of his character finds an almost amusing illustration in the way in which he dealt with what was, to him, the alarming phenomenon of a layman preaching. He heard at Bristol that his helper, Maxfield, had crossed the mystic border line which separates an exhortation from a sermon, and the story has already been told of how Wesley rode post haste to London to trample out the first sparks of what might prove to be a conflagration. His mother’s calm eyes and quiet speech arrested him. She made the one appeal which, to Wesley’s reason and conscience alike, was irresistible. This new and alarming phenomenon must, after all, be judged by the question: “Does God use it?”

Wesley looks clear-eyed at the facts. They are in conflict with the mental habits of a lifetime, and with that most obstinate of all forms of human prejudice, the bias of an ecclesiastic. But the facts are plain. God visibly blesses the preaching of this layman, and Wesley instantly surrenders his opposition. “It is the Lord,” he says; “let Him do what seemeth Him good.” And so he gave to Methodism one of the supreme secrets of its strength, the partnership of laymen with ministers in the great business of preaching.

There was in Wesley, with all his daring and enthusiasm, no touch of the fanatic’s scorn of prudence. Few men ever lived who excelled him in the wise adaptation of means to ends. At the first Methodist Conference in 1744, what may be called the whole strategy of the revival was discussed. The question was proposed, “What is the best way of spreading the Gospel?” The answer is, “To go a little and a little farther from London, Bristol, St. Ives, Newcastle, or any other Society, so a little leaven would spread with more effect and less noise, and help would always be at hand.” There speaks the practical genins of a true leader of men I Wesley, it is clear, would have made a great soldier. In military terms, he kept touch with his base. He did not merely overrun a district; he took possession of it and entrenched himself in it.

And not only by training, and by the practical bent of his genius, but by the nature of his beliefs, Wesley at this stage was admirably fitted for giving shape to a new Church. Most Christians have an easy, careless belief that the Holy Spirit once dwelt in the Church and shaped its history; but the unspoken addition to that belief is that He dwells in it no more. His gracious offices are nineteen hundred years distant! Now Wesley believed with enthusiastic certainty that the Holy Ghost was in the world on whose soil he trod, and was inspiring the life and shai)ing the development of the Church about him. That the offices of the Holy Ghost belong not merely to history, but to biology, is a great and fruitful belief carrying with it strange consequences; and it is much rarer than we quite realise.

“Antiquity” is a word of irresistible authority to many good people, but they discover antiquity at the wrong point. In the true sense, “antiquity” lies about us! The Church of 1744, when Wesley i)ut his impress on religious history, was nearly eighteen centuries older than the Church of apostolic days; and unless God’s education of His Church had utterly failed, it ought to have been illuminated with richer light and nearer the divine ideal. Certainly the oflQces of the Holy Spirit in the Church of to-day may be expected to be, not scantier, but ampler, than in the first century. And Wesley learned to see the movements of that divine Spirit in the events about him, in the experiences of his converts, in the strange forces which drew such vast crowds to his preaching, and in the waves of emotion which swept over them. He recognised the guidance of the Holy Spirit, too, in the dim, half-seen outlines of the great institution — Society or Church, Wesley himself hardly knew which — taking shape about him.

If the movement, again, be looked at as a bit of human history, it is clear that many of the features of Wesley’s work were determined by forces outside himself, and represent not his choice, but the imperative compulsion of events. He was an outdoor preacher, for example, by mere necessity. The churches were shut against him; he could find no pulpit but the open moor, the street corner, his father’s gravestone.

How much open-air preaching shocked Wesley’s prejudices as a divine and his fastidiousness as a scholar is proved over and over again. He demands of his brother clergymen what would induce them to face the discomforts and dangers of this strange service: —

“‘Who is there among you,’ he says, ‘that is willing (examine your own hearts) even to save souls from death at this price? Would not you let a thousand souls perish rather than you would be the instrument of rescuing them thus? Can you bear the summer sun to beat upon your naked head? Can you suffer the wintry rain or wind, from whatever quarter it blows? Are you able to stand in the open-air, without any covering or defence, when God casteth abroad His snow like wool, or scattereth His hoar-frost like ashes? And yet these are some of the smallest inconveniences which accompany field-preaching. For beyond all these are the contradiction of sinners, the scoffs both of the great, vulgar, and small; contempt and reproach of every kind — often more than verbal affronts — stupid, brutal, violence, sometimes to the hazard of health, or limbs, or life. Brethren, do you envy us this honour? What, I pray you, would buy you to be a field-preacher? Or what, think you, could induce any man of common-sense to continue therein one year, unless he had a full conviction in himself that it was the will of God concerning him. Upon this conviction it is that we now do for the good of souls what you cannot, will not, dare not do.’

In the same way, by the mere compulsion of events, Wesley became an itinerant preacher, though most of his habits, all his prejudices, and some of the deepest instincts of his nature were opposed to it. There was in Wesley’s very blood a semi-monkish love of solitude; and had he been by accident of birth and training a Roman Catholic, he certainly, at one stage of his career at all events, would have found his retreat in a cell. When the brothers returned from America, his brother writes, they “were resolved to retire out of the world at once, being sated with noise, hurry, and fatigue.” All he asked on this side

‘Southey, vol. i. p. 292. of eternity was solitude. “We want nothing, we look for nothing more in this world.” Whitefield strongly ui’ged Charles Wesley to accept a college living. To become a pair of ecclesiastical vagrants, hastening from village to village, and preaching to an unending succession of accidental crowds, was the last thing of which the brothers dreamed. “We were dragged out again and again,” says Wesley, “to preach at one place and another, and so carried on we knew not how, without any design but the general one of saving souls, into a situation which, had it been named to us at first, would have appeared far worse than death.”

Wesley, in brief, was an itinerant malgre lui. There were, of course, great historic precedents for an itinerant ministry, ranging from the early Saxon bishops down to the mendicant Orders of the Roman Church and the chaplains of Edward VI. — of whom John Knox was one. In Cromwell’s time the proposal to turn all the parish ministers of England into itinerants was only lost in what is known as the “little” Parliament by two votes. Wesley, however, was moved to undertake au itinerant ministry, not out of any regard to ancient precedent, but by the actual necessities of the work he had undertaken.

But these two features of that work — open-air preaching and the itinerant nature of his ministry — determined many other things. They determined, for example, the general question of Wesley’s relation to ecclesiastical order. For that order he had been, and still was, a zealot; but he was slowly learning that there were things more precious, as well as more urgent, than mere ecclesiastical use and wont. England was mapped out, for example, into parishes; and were these faint lines of ecclesiastical boundaries, drawn by human hands and guarding fancied human rights, to arrest such a work as Wesley was beginning? They were like films of cobweb drawn across a track of an earthquake! And many an ecclesiastical cobweb of the same kind had to be brushed aside to make room for the new religious life beginning to stir in Great Britain.

Wesley was curiously quick to seize each suggestion that events offered him. He never ran before Providence, and never lingered behind it. And his nimble intellect, while he worked, glanced through all history, his wide knowledge discovering everywhere helps, analogies, guides. When, for example, the most characteristic of all Methodist institutions, the class-meeting, suddenly emerged, as if by happy accident, Wesley recognised its values and possibilities; but he recognised, too, the historical analogies of the institution. It was not merely, in Wesley’s words, “the very thing” the Church at that moment wanted; it was the re-emergence in modern form of the fellowship the apostolic Church once possessed.

Who studies, in a word, Wesley’s genius, training, and beliefs will cease to wonder that, in a period so brief, and apparently with no sense of the greatness of the work he was doing, he determined, and determined for all time, the essential characteristics of the great Church that bears his name.

For the equipment of a Church, to sum up briefly, great forces must be enlisted, great plans formed. Methodism looked at as a Church in process of evolution needed a theology, a philosophy, a discipline; and Wesley, without formally proposing these special tasks for himself, had undertaken them. He found his theology in the Bible, his philosophy in the correspondence of its truths to human character, and his discipline in the application of common-sense to the actual facts of the moment. Herbert Spencer has defined science as “organised knowledge”; and a Church, as Wesley saw it and planned it, might be defined as organised religion.