The Breach with the Moravians
The first equipment of a Church is its theology. It stands for some one special reading of Christianity, and its theology, by its accent and i)erspective, expresses that reading. And it may be said, generally, that the difference betwixt the theologies of the various Christian Churches is mainly one of accent, and of angle of vision. Now the theology of the Methodist Church was decisively shaped by three great controversies which belong to its early years. Who studies the history of Wesley’s work will see that on its very threshold lay the certainty of these controversies.
Wesley was a devoted son of the Anglican Church, ordained to its ministry, a convinced believer of its doctrines, a passionate lover of its ritual. But he owed his spiritual life to the Moravians. Whitefield was his closest comrade, and in some fields of work his leader. And in each of these relationships was hidden a latent and profound discord sure to register itself in open controversy.
By the necessity of its genius, and by the stamp of Wesley’s strong character put upon it, Methodism, it was certain, must be English, and not German, in type. It could not be a Church of mystics and dreamers. The pulse of an energetic and practical morality beat in its very blood. Sooner or later, therefore, it must break with Moravianism, with its dreamy quietism, its mysticism, shading off into the deadliest form of Antinomianism.
Whitefield, again, was a satisfield and even an exultant Calvinist. The doctrine that Christ did not die for all men was, in his own words, “the children’s bread”; he would not give it to the dogs. But Wesley was a reasoned and convinced Arminian. His theology at this point had been settled by his mother’s homely sense and spiritual insight. That all men were included in the great sweep of God’s fatherly love and of Christ’s redeeming purpose was for hini the first of certainties. He had no gospel for himself, or for anybody else, if this was not true. Was Methodism to be Calvinistic or Arminian in its theology? This great issue had to be determined, and the discord betwixt the two great comrades on this point made a far-reaching controversy inevitable.
Then the Anglican Church of that day had forgotten the spiritual elements of Christianity. It put form before fact. It resolved religion into a scheme of human ethics that had no divine force behind it, or in it. It was content to be the Church of a comfortable and tiny minority. Its clergy cared much for the few sheep within the episcopal fold, and much, too, for the wool on their backs; but they had ceased to even remember the sheep in the wilderness. All the divinest elements of Christianity — its. passion of i)ity for the lost, and its exultant faith in the supernatural — had perished. How were such great opposites to be reconciled? How could the new and strong wine of Methodism be retained in a wineskin so dry and ragged?
Was Methodism, in a word, to be German or English in type; Ai-minian or Calvinistic in theology; a mere scheme of decorous moralities or a living religion, with the pulse of a supernatural life beating passionately in it? Controversy was inevitable at each of these points. The dispute with the Moravians was the struggle between a religion that exi)ressed itself in an energetic morality and a religion drowsed with more, and worse, than the fumes of poppie«. The long debate with Whitefield was a conflict between two irreconcilable readings of Christ’s Gospel. The controversy with the Anglican Church was the quarrel of fire with ice. It meant the affirmation that spiritual fact is more than ecclesiastical form, that religion is not a mere form of social police, a system of what may be called C’hinese moralities. It was a battle for the spiritual reading of Christianity.
Now Wesley himself took short views. He was content to do each day’s work within the day, and never troubled himself with the problems of to-morrow. He perhaps had no clear vision of the fundamental discords which lay hidden in his relations with those about him, nor of the theology waiting to be shaped by controversy. So he stood, all uncouscious, on the verge of iuevitable disputes; disputes with the Church of his infancy, with the guides who had led him to Christ, with his own closest comrade in the work lie was doing. These controversies, it will be seen, determined for Methodism the temper of its morality, the colour of its theology, the form of its Church order.
In October, 1739, Philip Henry Molther, a Moravian minister, came to London on his way to Pennsylvania. He was a man of many gifts and of intense — if narrow — piety; and the Society in Fetter Lane — the common centre of the new spiritual movement — at once fell under his influence. He remained in London till the following September, and during these few brief months Methodism and Moravianism were rent asunder for ever.
There was a deep mystic strain in Molther’s genius. His vision of evangelical truth was intense but narrow, and even distorted. Truth is often of a scale too large for the tiny curve of human vision; and in partial truth there is deadly peril. Heresy Itself is often truth only half seen, or seen in distorted perspective. Molther’s errors represent only a want of equipoise in his theology; but their practical results were gross, and even deadly. Christ, he taught, was for a believer everything; “all beside was nothing.” And in the catalogue of things dismissed as “nothing” — as irrelevant, or even evil — were the ordinary duties of Christian morality and the simplest acts of Christian worship. Molther taught that there were no degrees in faith. Who had not perfect faith had none at all. The single duty of a man wanting faith was “to be still,” and do nothing. The very means of grace to him were hindrances — not to say .sins. “An unbeliever, or one who has not a clean heart, ought not to use them at all; ought not to pray, or search the Scriptures, or communicate, but to ‘be still’; and then he will surely receive faith, which, till he is still, he cannot have.”^
In the “stillness” in which an unbeliever was to wait the entrance of Christ into his soul he was not to go to church, not to read the Scriptures, not to use private prayer, not to do temporal good, not to attempt to do
‘Journal, June 22, 1740. spiritual good. The soul, in a word, was to dwell in a spiritual and self-manufactured vacuum till Christ came to it.
All Christian ordinances, on this theory, lost their obligation and even their utility. Those who were without faith must not use them; those who had faith need not. To those outside the spiritual household they were hindrances, to those inside they were impertinences.
This is plainly a doctrine in quarrel alike with common-sense and with the elementary laws of morality. As held by Molther himself, and the group of fellow-mystics at that moment about him, it might not produce any failure in practical morality; but when filtered through minds of coarser fibre — and bodies of stronger appetites — the moral risks of such teaching were inevitable and tremendous. As a matter of fact, Molther’s teaching produced instant and visible mischief. It disturbed the peace of the Societies. Charles Wesley describes the effect on those who accepted the new theology: “Lazy and proud in themselves, bitter and censorious towards others, they trample on the ordinances and despise the commands of Christ.”
Wesley hastened back from Bristol to check the course of this evil. He found the Society full of strife and confusion — its perplexed members driven, many of them, to their wits’ end. “I was,” he says, “utterly at a loss what course to take, finding no rest for the sole of my foot. These vain janglings pursued me wherever I went, and were always sounding in my ears.” He describes in his Journal the evil change Molther and his teachings had already wrought on the meetings at Fetter Lane. “Our Society,” he says, “met at seven in the morning and continued silent till eight.” “At eight,” he records on another occasion, “our Society met at Fetter Lane. We sat an hour without speaking, the rest of the time was spent in dispute.” He writes again: “In the evening our Society met, but cold, weary, heartless, dead. I found nothing of brotherly love amongst them now, but a harsh, dry, heavy, stupid spirit. For two hours they looked at one another when they looked up at all, as if one-half of them were afraid of the other.”
It is almost amusing to notice how Wesley resented being called down from the high levels of spiritual service in which he was walking, to this sad controversy. And the Moravian heresy shocked his common-sense by its pretence of snperfine spirituality. It soared in realms too high for him. He writes in his Journal: —
“My soul is sick of this sublime divinity. Let me think and speak as a little child! Let my religion be plain, artless, simple! Meekness, Temperance, patience, faith, and love, be these my highest gifts; and let the highest words wherein I teach them be those I learn from the Book of God!”
With characteristic frankness Wesley proceeded to discuss Molther’s teaching with Molther himself. He translated his vague and misty ideas into plain English, with the hope of shocking both Molther and his followers by their nature, but in vain. Wesley’s account of the interview is amusing. “I weighed all his words,” he says, “with the utmost care, desiring him to explain what I did not understand. I asked him again and again, ‘Do I not mistake what you say? Is this your meaning or is it not?’ So that I think if God has given me any measure of understanding I could not mistake him much.” At the close of the interview Wesley wrote down what had passed in the plainest words, but the whole process was like trying to persuade a ghost to become solid flesh and blood.
Wesley i)reached to the members every night for a week, but his hearers were in a mood in which reason has no office and controversy only hardens. He was told bluntly that he was “preaching up the works of the law, which, as believers, they were no more bound to obey than the subjects of England were bound to obey the laws of France. One of them said, when publicly expounding Scripture, that as many went to hell by praying as by thieving. Another said, ‘You have lost your “first joy; therefore you pray; that is the Devil. You read the Bible; that is the Devil. Y’’ou communicate; that is the Devil.’”
Finally, Wesley brought the matter to an issue. The spurious treatise of Dionysius the Areopagite was a favourite book amongst the Moravians. It is full — as Wesley himself says — of “super-essential darkness,” a mere weltering chaos of mystic nonsense. Wesley took it to the Society on the night of July 16, 1740, and read some deadly extracts from it. Here is the passage from it on which he challenged the little gathering: —
The Scriptures are good; prayer is good; communicating Is good; relieving our neighbours is good; but to one who is not born of God, none of these is good, but all very evil. For him to read the Scriptures, or to pray, or to communicate, or to do any outward work, is deadly poison. First let him be born of God. Till then let him not do any of these things. For if he does, he destroys himself.
After reading this twice or thrice over, as distinctly as I could,’ he says, ‘I asked, “My brethren, is this right, or is it wrong?” Mr. Bell answered immediately:
‘It is right; it is all right. It is the truth. To this we must all come, or we never can come to Christ.’
‘Mr. Bray said, “I believe our brother Bell did not hear what you read, or did not rightly understand.”
‘But Mr. Bell replied short, “Yes, I heard every word, and I understand it well. I say, it is the truth; it is the very truth; it is the inward truth.” ’
Matters, upon this, came quickly to a crisis, for this was a doctrine which both shocked Wesley’s conscience and affronted his common-sense. Wesley himself was no longer allowed to preach in Fetter Lane. “This place,” he was told, “is taken for the Germans.” He had already obtained possession of the Foundry — a large, disused workshop in Moorfields — and had begun to hold services there. If driven from Fetter Lane, he had thus a new centre. On Sunday night, July 20, Wesley went to the Love-feast in Fetter Lane, and read a short paper in which he recited the reasons and the history of the dispute. The paper ended: —
“You have often affirmed that to search the Scriptures, to pray, or to communicate, before we have this faith, is to seek salvation by works; and that till these works are laid aside, no man can receive faith.
“I believe these assertions to be flatly contrary to the Word of God. I have warned you hereof again and again, and besought you to turn back to the “law and the testimony.’ I have borne with you long, hoping you would turn. But as I find you more and more confirmed in the error of your ways, nothing now remains — but that I should give you up to God. You that are of the same judgment, follow me.’”
“I then,” says Wesley, “without saying anything more, withdrew, as did eighteen or nineteen of the society.” According to the Moravians themselves, the dramatic ‘Jouraal, June 20, 1740.
THE BREAOH WITH THE MORAVIANS ?.09
effect of Wesley’s departure from the building was spoilt by a petty but iugenious trick. As the persons present came into the room they placed their hats all together on the ground in one corner; but Wesley’s hat had been — by design — carried off. When he had finished his paper and called upon all who agreed with hlni to follow him, he walked across the room, but could not discover his hat! The pause, the search which followed, quite effaced the impress! veness of his departure, and, as Sou they puts it, “the wily Molther and his followers had time to arrest many who would have been carried away in his wake.”
Zinzendorf sent another and wiser representative, Spangenberg, to confer “with Wesley, and act as mediator between the divided parties. Spangenberg decided that Molther and his followers were wrong, and had treated Wesley ill; but this did not end the controversy. Peter Bohler, in turn, was sent to Loudon to put matters right. He was a man to be trusted, and Wesley’s personal debt to him, it was calculated, would outweigh all other considerations. And much of the charm of Bohler and of his influence over Wesley still survived. After an interview with him Wesley wrote, “I marvel how I refrain from joining these men. I scarce ever see any of them blit my heart burns within me. I long to be with them, and yet I am kept from them.”
But where practical morality was, no matter how remotely, concerned Wesley was inexorable, and at bottom Moravian doctrine, as Molther had poisoned it, and as it was now fermenting amongst Wesley’s societies, was a quarrel with morality. Wesley wrote to his brother Samuel, whose obstinate good sense, in spite of wide theological differences, weighed heavily with his younger brother: —
“As yet I dare in no wise join with the Moravians; because their general scheme is mystical, not Scriptural, refined in every point above what is written, immeasurably beyond the plain Gospel; because there is darkness and closeness in all their behaviour, and guile in almost all their words; because they not only do not practise, but utterly despise and decry self-denial and the daily cross. For these reasons chiefly I will rather, God being my Helper, stand quite alone than join with them.”
Finally Zinzendorf himself came to England. The question whether Moravianisra was to take root on English soil was at issue, and Zinaeudorf was anxious. Wesley and he held a memorable conversation — not under any roof, but in Gray’s Inn Walk — at that time a little patch of faded verdure set amid the dust and roar of London streets.
They walked to and fro — a strange pair, the stately German noble and the prim little Anglican divine. The conversation wag in Latin, and is recorded in Latin in Wesley’s Journal. “Why,” began Zinzendorf, “have you changed your religion?” Wesley, of course, denied the charge. The conversation wandered through the whole realm of theology; but the difference betwixt the two men was fundamental: —
“‘You have afiQrmed,’ said Zinzendorf, ‘in your epistle, that they who are true Christians are not miserable sinners; and this is most false: for the best of men are most miserable sinners, even till death. They who teach otherwise are either absolute impostors, or they are under a diabolical delusion.’ ‘What Is Christian perfection?’ he demanded again. ‘It is imputed — not inherent. We are never perfect in ourselves.’ Then he went on: ‘We reject all self-denial; we trample on it. In faith we do whatever we desire, and nothing more. We laugh at all mortification; no purification precedes perfect love.“”
These were, in Wesley’s ears, words ra.sh, extravagant, perilous! The conversation left the breach as wide as ever, and later Wesley in a powerful letter formulates and jrats on record the fundamental differences which parted Methodism and Moravianism, and must always keej) them asunder. Zinzendorf responded by publishing an advertisement in the newsjiapers declaring that he and his people had no connection with Joha and Charles Wesley. Thus came to an end a goodlier fellowship than that of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Many curious and even absurd explanations of this breach are offered by the historians and critics of Methodism. Southey blames Wesley’s ambition for the controversy. “John Wesley,” he says, “could never have been more than a member of the Moravian Church; the first place was occupied, and he was not born to hold a secondary place.” Coleridge says the true reason of the dispute is to be found in the diversity of the German and English genius. Elsewhere he says that Zinzendorf
•Southey, vol. i. p. 220.
was a metaphysician without logic, and Wesley a logician without metaphysics: hence their hopeless quarrel. Later still — and with true Coleridgean inconsistency — he finds the blackest wicliedness in Wesley’s spirit throughout the whole transaction, and falls foul of his friend Southey for dealing with Wesley too lightly: —
“Robert Southey (he says) is an historian worth his weight in diamonds, and were he (which heaven forfend) as fat as myself, and the diamonds all as big as bird’s eggs, I should still repeat the appraisal.... But here, I am vexed with him for not employing stronger and more impassioned words of reprobation, and moral recoil in this black blotch of Wesley’s heart and character.”
But the cause of the dispute lies deeper than any mere difference between English and German genius, or in the mental characteristics of Zinzendorf and of Wesley. Molther’s teaching, in fact, was an aberration from Moravian doctrine; it declared, in the last analysis, that religion had nothing to do with morality. Surely a strange and dreadful doctrine!
Half-triiths are often whole heresies; and Molther was led astray because he saw truth only in fragments, or in false perspective. Christianity, in a sense, changes the ethical order. It gives to obedience a new place, and equips it with new motives. A forgiven soul obeys because it is forgiven, and under the motives which forgiveness creates. But Molther was so eager to affirm that we do not purchase our forgiveness by our obedience, that he forgot to assert that we obey, and must obey, under the inspiration of forgiveness.
The mischief of Molther’s doctrine was immediate and long-enduring. It poisoned the teaching of not a few of Wesley’s own helpers. It taught them what Wesley calls “a luscious style of preaching.” “They feed their people,” he says, “with sweetmeats.” They talked much of the promises and little of the commands. “What are vulgarly called ‘Gospel sermons,’” he says again, “has now become a mere cant word; I wish none of our society would use it. Let but a pert, self-sufficient animal, that has neither sense or grace,” he cries with angry energy, “bawl out something about Christ or His blood, or justification by faith, and his hearers cry out, ‘What a fine Gospel sermon.’ Surely the Methodists have not so learned Christ.”
The taint of Antinomianism in such teaching produced — as was inevitable — some dreadful forms of immorality, of which the notorious case of Wheatley, one of Wesley’s helpers, who corrupted a whole town, is an example. We have only to i-emember the story of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit in the fourteenth century, of the Munster Anabaptists in the sixteenth century, and of the New Lights in England in Cromwell’s later days, to understand the peril which overhung Wesley’s work at this stage.
Wesley’s Journal gives many examples of the deadly mischief wrought amongst his converts. Thus, in March, 1746, at Birmingham, he tells how one “came to me, and looking over his shoulder, said, ‘Don’t think I want to be in your Society; but if you are free to speak to me, you may.’” After some conversation Weslej’ asked: “Do you believe you have nothing to do with the law of God!”
“‘I have not,’ was the answer. ‘I am not under the law; I live by faith.’ ‘Have you, as living by faith, a right to everything in the world?’ ‘I have: all is mine, since Christ is mine.’ ‘May you, then, take anything you will, anywhere, suppose, out of a shop, without the consent or knowledge of the owner?’ ‘I may, if I want it; for it is mine; only I will not give offence.’ ‘Have you also a right to all the women in the world?’ ‘Yes, if they consent’ ‘And is that not a sin?’ ‘Yes, to him that thinks it is a sin; but not to those whose hearts are free.’ ‘The same thing,’ comments Wesley, ‘that wretch, Roger Ball, affirmed in Dublin. Surely these are first-born ••hildren of Satan.’”
Seven years later Wesley records a conversation he had, again at Birmingham, with a woman who had fallen under Moravian influence: —
“‘I never pray,’ she said, ‘for what can I pray for? I have all.’ I asked, ‘Do you not pray for sinners?’ She said, ‘No; I know no sinners but one. I know but two in the world: God is one and the devil is the other.’ I asked, ‘Did not Adam sin of old; and do not adulterers and murderers sin now?’ She replied, ‘No, Adam never sinned; and no man sins now; it is only the devil.’ ‘And will no man ever be damned?’ ‘No man ever will.’ ‘Nor the devil?’ ‘I am not so sure; but I believe not.’ ‘Do you receive the Sacrament?’ ‘No, I do not want it’ ‘Is the word of God your rule?’ ‘Yes; the word made flesh, but not the letter. I am in the spirit’”
“Upon inquiry,” adds Wesley, “1 found these wild enthusiasts were six in all — four men and two women.
They had first run into the height of Antinomianism, and then were given up to the spirit of pride and blasphemy.”
Two years later still — so long-enduring are the forces of evil — in 1755 — Wesley records in his Journal: —
“On Friday, April 4, to Birmingham, a barren, dry, uncomfortable place. Most of the seed which had been sown for so many years the ‘wild boars’ have rooted up; the fierce, unclean, brutish, blasphemous Antinomians have utterly destroyed it. And the mystic foxes have taken true pains to spoil what remained with their new Gospel.”
All this shows not only how deadly, but how obstinate, was the mischief wrought by the Moravian lapse into Antinomianism.
Fletcher wrote his famous “Checks” to arrest the poisonous taint which was creeping into the very blood of the societies. These “Checks” are matchless in force of logic and in grace of literary style; but who now reads them? They are forgotten! But this is only because the evil which made them necessary has practically ceased to exist. The blood of Christendom has been purged of the Antinomian strain, and the universal Christian conscience has arrayed itself on Wesley’s side. Wesley, indeed, did more than save his own movement from ruin and defeat by the resolute stand he took at this stage of his work. He helped, for all the Churches, and for all time, to avert a peril which threatened Christian morality itself. And how different might have been the religious history of England if the great revival of the eighteenth century had been captured by the my.stics; if Zinzendorf and not Wesley had determined its theology and stamped himself upon its character!