The Controversy with Whitefield

Whitefield, as we have seen, was a convinced and exultant Calvinist. He believed in God’s love passionately, but he found it possible to believe that this love, high beyond all dreams, deep beyond all sounding, had yet a mysterious and tragical narrowness. It was certainly narrower than the human race, since it left whole sections of that race in the outer darkness of a reprobation lit with no gleams of mercy. The doctrine that God did not love, the race, and that Christ had not died for all men was, even in Whitefleld’s eyes, “the children’s bread,” something precious and nourishing. To cast it away, to leave it unproclaimed, was to rob Christ’s household.

To Wesley, on the other hand, that doctrine was a denial of the whole Gospel. It left him without a message. There was, at this point, betwixt the leaders of the great revival a breach of doctrinal belief deep and impassable. Wesley’s great rule in all theological differences, however, was to “Think and let think.” He had no doctrinal tests for his societies, and he certainly would not separate from a great and loyal comrade like Whitefield, who agreed with him in so many essential beliefs, because, at one point of metaphysical divinity, their theologies differed.

Yet the breach in doctrine betwixt the two men was something more than a question in metaphysics. It was fundamental. It pierced to the very heart of their creed. It carried with it far-reaching moral issues. It must, sooner or later, cause a division in their work. The mere impulse of the controversialist, the natural desire to win converts and to refute opponents, made either silence or peace as a permanent condition impossible.

The rupture came from Whitefleld’s side. He was no logician. His beliefs and his feelings were kept in separate compartments; his creed was a mosaic of unrelated fragments. Yet there are signs that in his conscience there was au unacknowledged disquiet with his own theology. He was conscious, too, of Wesley’s greater intellectual strength and wider range of scholarship; and the knowledge that the man who was his natural leader, at whose feet he had sat for years, differed so profoundly from him at a point so serious, was to Whitefield a guawing, if unconfessed, disquiet. He could not leave the subject betwixt them alone. He writes to Wesley begging him “for once to hearken to a child who is willing to wash your feet”: —

“The doctrine of election, and the final perseverance of those who are in Christ, 1 am ten thousand times more convinced of — if possible — than when I saw you last. You think otherwise. Why, then, should we dispute when there is no probability of convincing?”^

But Whitefield himself could not rest. He must try to convince Wesley. He writes to him from America: —

“The more I examine the writings of the most experienced men and the experiences of the most established Christians the more I differ from... your denying the doctrines of election and the final perseverance of the saints. I dread coming to England unless you are resolved to oppose these truths with less warmth than when I was there last I dread your coming over to America, because the work of God is carried on here and that in a most glorious manner by doctrines quite opposite to those you hold. God direct me what to do. Perhaps I may never see you again till we meet in judgment; then, if not before, you will know that sovereign, distinguishing, irresistible grace brought you to heaven.”

There is something almost amusing in the brief, compo.sed, matter-of-fact reply Wesley makes to Whitefield’s agitated appeals. He tries to cool his alarms with a fewdrops of patient ink: —

“The case is quite plain. There are bigots both for predestination and against it. God is sending a message to those on either side, but neither will receive it unless from one who is of their own opinion. Therefore for a time you are suffered to be of one opinion, and I of another. But when His time is come, God will do what men cannot — namely, make us both of one mind.”-

Wesley’s large-mindedness at this point was, on his part, both genuine and habitual. He acted upon it as a

‘Southey, vol. i. p. 226.
»7bta., p. 227.

steadfast policy. He was perfectly willing to give to his own followers the largest liberty of disagreeing with himself ou abstract points, so that in the realm of practical conduct they agreed.

Smaller controversialists meanwhile were busy, and their zeal was quite unflavoured by either prudence or charity. A leading member of the Society in London, named A court, insisted on turning the Society into a debating class on the subject of predestination, until Charles Wesley, in the interest of quiet, gave orders that he should no longer be admitted. John Wesley was present, as it happened, when this too zealous theologian next presented himself, and demanded whether he was to be expelled because he differed from them only in opinion. He was asked, “What opinion?” and replied, “That of election. I hold that a certain number are elected from eternity, and these must and shall be saved, and the rest of mankind must and shall be damned.” And he aflBrmed that many of the Society held the same; upon which Wesley observed that he never asked whether they did or not; “only let them not trouble others by disputing about it.” A court replied, “Nay, but I will dispute about it.” “Why, then,” said Wesley, “would you come among us, whom you know are of another mind? “Because you are all wrong and I am resolved to set you all right.” “I fear,” said Wesley, “your coming with this view would neither profit you nor us.” “Then,” rejoined A court, “I will go and tell all the world that you and your brother are false prophets.”

Whitefield, on his part, continued to exhort Wesley to a silence, in his public discourses, on the subject about which they disagreed, which he did not himself observe. “For Christ’s sake,” he writes, “if possible never speak against election in your sermons. No one can say that I ever mentioned it in public discourse, whatever my private sentiments may be.” And jet, at the same time, Whitefield records in his journal his resolve “to henceforth speak more boldly and explicitly as I ought to speak on these subjects.” His memory, it is clear, betrayed him when writing to Wesley!

Meanwhile the compulsion of events was too strong for both men. Wesley was sharply accused by a correspondent of “not preaching the Gospel” — the “Gospel” being,

THP] CONTROVERSY WITH WHITEFIELD 317

according to this particular theologian, the doctrine of election and nothing else. The latter somehow moved even Wesley’s composed mind; and, as was his custom in matters of difficulty, he “sought counsel of God by casting losts.” This yielded the message, “Preach and print.” He accordingly, in 1739, preached and printed the immortal sermon on “Free Grace,” the third discourse he ever published.

That sermon is, amongst other things, a revelation of Wesley’s real qualities as a preacher. His other printed sermons are, in the main, so many theological dry bones; dry bones upon which the prophet’s breath had ceased to blow. They are the petrified remains of sermons. They lack living tissue; there is in them no throb of passion, no breath of life. But in this sermon we have Wesley as a living preacher. His sentences burn with fire. There is a pulse of energy in the very syllables. Logic and rhetoric have opposite and, in many respects, incompatible qualities. Logic borrows from ice its crystalline clearness and its coldness. Rhetoric takes from fire its heat and glow. But in this sermon Wesley somehow gives his logic the rush and fire of eloquence, or rather he teaches the fiery haste of his rhetoric to steal from logic its ordered and close-linked strength. Lord Liverpool, on whose impassive figure Pitt and Fox, Burke and Sheridan, had expended all their matchless eloquence in vain, declared that parts of Wesley’s sermon on “Free Grace” were unsurpassed either in ancient or modern ora(o),>. Here is an example of its fire: —

“It [the doctrine of reprobation] represents the most holy God as worse than the devil, as both more false, more cruel and more unjust. More false because the devil, liar as he is, has never said ‘He willeth all men to be saved.’ More unjust because the devil, if he would, cannot be guilty of such injustice as you ascribe to God when you say that God condemned millions of souls to everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels, for continuing in win which for want of that grace which He will not give them they cannot avoid. And more cruel because that unhappy spirit seeketh rest and findeth none, so that his own restless misery is a kind of temptation to him to tempt others. But God resteth in His high and holy place, so that to suppose Him of His own mere motion, of His pure will and pleasure, happy as He is, to doom His creatures whether they will or no to endless misery, is to impute such cruelty to Him as we cannot impute even to the great enemy of God and man. It is to represent the most High God (he that hath ears to hear let him hear) as more cruel, false, and unjust than the devil. Here I fix my foot. You represent God as worse than the devil.

“But you say ‘you will prove it by Scripture.’ Hold! What! Will you prove by Scripture that God is worse than the devil? It cannot be. Whatever that Scripture proves, it can never prove this; whatever its true meaning be, this cannot be its true meaning. Do you ask, ‘What is its true meaning then?’ If I say I know not you have gained nothing; for there are many Scriptures the true sense whereof neither you nor I shall know till death is swallowed up in victory. But this I know, better it were to say it had no sense at all than to say that it had such a sense as this. It cannot mean, whatever it mean besides, that the God of truth is a liar. Let it mean what it will, it cannot mean that the Judge of all the earth is unjust.”

Whitefield, by this time, had grown more sharply admonitory. “Give me leave,” he says, “with all humility to exhort you not to be strenuous in opposing the doctrines of election and final perseverance, when by your own confession you have not the witness of the Spirit within yourself, and consequently are not a proper judge. I am assured God has now for some years given me this living witness in my soul.”^

Whitefield finds in the very fact that Wesley does not fill his letters with arguments about election, a darkly suspicious circumstance. “I wish,” he writes, “I knew your principles fully. Did you write oftener and more frankly, it might have a better effect than silence and reserve.”

A controversialist in distress for arguments is apt to take refuge in moral admonitions addressed to his opponent, as to the quality of his motives and conduct; and Whitefield about this time discovers that Wesley’s bad theology has a root in the mournfully defective moral condition of Wesley himself. “My dear brother,” he writes, “take heed. Beware of a false peace.... Kemember you are but a babe in Christ, if so much. Be humble. Talk little. Think and pray much. ... If you must dispute, stay till you are a master of the subject.”

“Meanwhile, you will not own election,” he complains again, “because you cannot own it without believing the doctrine of reprobation. What then,” he asks indignantly, “is there in reprobation so horrid?” Southey,

‘Southey, vol. i. p. 228.

who as a general rule sides with Whitefiekl against Wesley, here is compelled to answer Whitefield’s question: —” ‘The doctrine,’ he says, ‘implies that an Almighty and AUwise Creator has called into existence the greater part of the human race to the end that, after a short, sinful, and miserable life, they should pass into an eternity of inconceivable torments, it being the pleasure of their Creator that they should not be able to obey His commands, and yet incur the penalty of everlasting damnation for disobedience.’

Events were now moving fast. A discord in belief so acute was certain to register itself in outward form. Wesley strove manfully, first, to escape debate, or if this was not possible, to carry it on in a generous temper; but Whitefield, for a moment, at least, fell to lower levels. He printed and privately circulated a bitter letter against Wesley, in which he ridiculed Wesley’s habit of casting lots to settle difficult questions, and gave instances of a very private and confidential kind. The letter was printed by some of Whitefield’s adherents, and copies distributed at the door of the Foundry. A copy was handed to Wesley. It was obviously a private letter. Wesley held it up, saying, “I will do just what I believe Mr. Whitefield would were he here himself,” and he tore it to pieces; and every person in the congregation followed his example!

But Wesley and Whitefield, of course, had followers more vehement — more jealous for victory, and less careful for peace — than themselves. At Kingswood. John Cennick, one of Wesley’s earliest converts, was employed as a teacher, and was greatly trusted by him. He was a Calvinist of an almost more aggressive type than Whitefield himself, and the Arminianism of the two Wesley’s kindled in him a mood of brooding and angry mistrust. He wrote to Whitefield, then in America, calling upon him to hasten to England.

“‘I sit,’ he said, ‘solitary, like Eli, waiting what will become of the ark.... How gloriously the Gospel seemed once to flourish in Kingswood! I spake of the everlasting love of Christ with sweet power. Yet, now brother Charles is suffered to open his mouth against this truth, while the frightened sheep gaze in reply.... With universal redemption brother Charles pleases the world; brother John follows him in everything. I believe no atheist can more preach against predestination than they.... Fly, dear brother! I am in the midst of the plague. If God gives thee leave, make haste.’”

‘Southey, vol. i. p. 230.

WEBLEY AND HIS CENTURY

Humour has a wholesome office even in theology, and a lively sense of it would have saved the Church from many disputes and not a few heresies. An atheist preaching against predestination is a sufficiently non-humorous conception; and when John Cennick saw in “brother Charles” nothing but this dreadful apparition, it is a sign that he had temporarily lost all salt of humour.

The letter fell into Wesley’s hands. He had the instinct of a born leader of men for discipline. This was not a question of liberty, but of loyalty. Could he see his teaching attacked by one of his own teachers, and under the roof of his own school? Charles Wesley put the case with irresistible force to Cennick himself: —

“You came to Kingswood upon my brother’s sending for you. You served under him in the Gospel as a son. I need not to say how well he loved you. You used the authority he gave you to overthrow his doctrine. You everywhere contradicted it (whether true or false, is not the question). But you ought first to have fairly told him, ‘I preach contrary to you. Are you willing, notwithstanding, that I should continue in your house, gainsaying you? If you are not, I have no place in these regions. You have a right to this open dealing. I now give you fair warnine. Shall I stay here opposing you, or shall I depart?’ My brother, have you dealt thus honestly and openly with him? No. But you have stolen away the people’s heart from him. And when some of them basely treated their best friend, God only excepted, how patiently did you take it! When did you ever vindicate us as we have you! Why did you not plainly tell them, you are eternally indebted to these men?’”

Cennick had by this time formed a separate society; and Wesley, who always believed in straightforward measures, had a conference with the group of revolters. “Who told you,” he asked them, “that what we preach is false doctrine?”

“I did say this,” replied Cennick, “and I say it still. However, we are willing to join with you; but we will also meet apart from you.”

“You should have told me this before,” said Wesley, “and not have supplanted me in my own house ... by private accusations separating very friends.”

Cennick denied that he had privately accused Wesley. “Judge,” replied Wesley to the meeting; and he produced Cennick’s letter to Whitefield.

‘Southey, vol. i. p. 236.

The gathering separated to meet again in a week. But when they met, Wesley offered them not arguments — it was no time for debate — but authority. He quietly stood up and read a brief paper: —

“By many witnesses it appears that several members of tte Band Society in Kingswood have made it their common practice to scoff at the preaching of Mr. John and Charles Wesley; that they have censured and spoken evil of them behind their backs, at the very time they professed love and esteem to their faces; that they have studiously endeavoured to prejudice other members of that society against them, and in order, thereto, have belied and slandered them in divers instances; therefore,, not for their opinions, nor for any of them (whether they be right or wrong), but for the causes above mentioned, viz., for their scoffing at the word and ministers of God, for their tale-bearing, back->biting, and evil-speaking, for their dissembling, lying, and slandering, I, John Wesley, by the consent and approbation of the Band Society in Kingswood, do declare the persons above mentioned to be no longer members thereof. Neither will they be so accounted until they shall openly confess their fault, and thereby do what in them lies to remove the scandal they have given.”^

One of Cennick’s followers said: —

“‘It is our holding election which is the true cause of your separating from us.’ ‘You know in your own conscience it is not,’ replied Wesley. ‘There are several Predestinarians in our societies, both in London and Bristol, nor did I ever yet put one out of either because he held that opinion.’ ‘Well,’ said the objector, ‘we will break up our society, on condition you will receive and employ Mr. Cennick as you did before.’ ‘My brother has wronged me much,’ replied Wesley, ‘but he doth not say, ‘”I repent.” ’ ‘Unless in not speaking in your defence, I do not know that I wronged you at all,’ said Cennick. ‘Nothing then remains, it seems,’ said Wesley, ‘but for each to choose which society he pleases.’”

Whitefield landed from America shortly afterwards. He was burdened with financial difficulties created by his orphan house in Georgia, and he was suffering from a temporary loss of popularity. His mood was bitter. He told Wesley they preached two different Gospels; therefore he would not join. him, but would publicly preach against him, if ever he preached at all again. If he had ever promised not to do this, it was “due to human weakness,” and he was now of a more heroic temper.

Correspondence betwixt the two friends grew bitter,

‘Southey, vol. i. p. 237. and the dispute waudered into sad realms — the number of candles burned at Bristol, the quality of the furniture in Wesley’s bedroom. “And do you grudge me this?” asked Wesley — “a garret in which a bed is placed. Is this the voice of niy brother, my sou, Whitefield?”

Whitefield told Wesley in reproachful accents, “infidels of all kinds are on your side of the question. Deists, Arians, Socinians arraign God’s sovereignty and stand up for universal redemption.” It needs no particular degree of scholarship to know that “Deists, Arians, and Socinians” believe in no redemption at all; that all are philosojihical necessitarians. But scholarship was not Whitefield’s forte.

Perhaps neither party in this great debate looked at the strong point in his opponent’s position. Here is the fact which makes the tragedy of the universe, and seems to impeach either the goodness or the power of God: some of His creatures are in open quarrel with His laws. They love what He hates, and hate what He loves; and being in quarrel with His universe, they must perish. Now, any system of theology is bound to supply some explanation of this grim and dreadful fact.

Coleridge supplies a characteristically vague answer: an answer which is not an explanation of the diflSculty, but a flight from it: —

“In the question of Election relatively to the Divine Elector, we have only to challenge the judicial faculty as incompetent to try the cause; and this we prove at once, by showing the incapability of the human understanding to present the idea to Itself as it really is, and the consequent necessity it is under of substituting anthropomorphic conception, determined by accident of place and time (pre, post, futurum — before, after, to come) as feeble analogies and approximations. Having thus disqualified both the faculty that is to judge, and the premises that are to be judged of, the conclusion perishes per abortem.”^

This, of course, is not a solution of the problem, but an announcement that it is insoluble. Human reason, Coleridge says, in efifect, is incompetent to try this case. It has no oflSce in a realm so high! What is this but a proclamation of the bankruptcy of reason?

Whitefield’s Calvinism had, in one sense, a noble root. It sprang, in part, at least, from humility. He had so

Southey, vol. i. p. 227.

overwhelming a consciousness of personal ill-desert, that it seemed incredible that any act or condition of his own could be an element in his acceptance with God. But Whitefield was driven into naked Calvinism by one dreadful, and what seemed flawless, bit of logic. To say that God willed to save a man who, visibly, was not saved, meant that God had suffered moral defeat in His own world! It was to deny His omnipotence. “How could all be universally redeemed,” he asked, “if all are not universally saved?” Whitefield preferred to say God would not save, rather than that He could not. Calvin himself calls this doctrine “tremendum, horrendum, incomprehensihle: et verissimum. ...” And it was verissimum” because to deny it seemed the denial of God’s omnipotence.

But Wesley, with nobler logic, refused to save God’s omnipotence at the cost of His moral character. It were better to deny His omnipotence than His goodness! Whitefield’s doctrine could only be true on the theory that right and wrong are not changeless, universal, and eternal, running through all the ranks and orders of the universe up to God Himself, of whose character they are the transcript. But is it thinkable that a lie, if only God tells it, is as sacred as truth; that what would be hateful and cruel, if found in human conduct, becomes admirable and good if it is only God’s act! That is to unsettle all morality! As Miss Wedgwood puts it: —

“The human being who came nearest to the God of the Calvinists would be a father who chose out certain of his children to be sent away from his sight, at their birth, into some den of wickedness, to be brought up there; and who afterwards took an active share in bringing them to the gallows. And yet men who would have died any number of deaths themselves to save one soul from hell have regarded the decree by which the greater portion of the human race was devoted to hell before the world began not merely with reverent awe, but with delight.”^

But did Wesley’s theology save God’s character at the expense of His omnipotence? Assuredly not! The key to the problem lies in the very nature of moral goodness itself. Moral freedom is the essential condition of moral character. Goodness means the choice of obedience when disobedience is possible. And when God

•Wedgwood, p. 230.

created moral character He took the tremendous and inevitable risks of that great act. ln Mjo realm of moral charricter omuipotence has no office; and God has set us in that high kingdom. But this represents not the defeat of God’s omnipotence, but only it.s self imposed limitations.

“Thought, conscience, will — to make them all thine own
He rent a pillar from th’ eternal throne.
Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
The thorny crown of sovereignty to wear.
Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create.”

The denial of this truth robs all moral terms of their significance, and we must reconstruct human language. If the human soul is only a machine which must obey the impulse towards lust or purity, towards love or cruelty, which its Maker has given it, what use is there for the phraseology of either praise or blame? And how does it come to pass, it may be asked, that a machine has come to conceive a thought of goodness which is not that of a machine?

We do not save the moral character of God by denying the free will of man; we only transfer the shame and guilt of human sin to God Himself. He is its author! He planned it; He ordained it. He meant the harlot as well as the saint; the betrayer as well as the martyr; Judas as well as John, and Domitian as well as Paul. And He then pursues His own creatures with wrath through all the chambers of His universe, and all the ages of His eternity, for being what He made them. We may vary Calvin’s dreadful epithets. This doctrine is “tremendum, horrendum, incomprehensible, et fal-SISSIMUM.”

It is certain that in human society we must act on the theory that men are responsible for their acts, and be justly punished or rewarded for them. It is certain that God, too, acts on that theory; and if it is not true, then not only human society, but the whole moral universe itself, is built on a lie. If goodness is compelled and involuntary, it ceases to be goodness; and compelled and involuntary sin the human conscience, with its utmost authority, declares to be no sin. The theory that denies this is in conflict with the surest and deepest judgment of the human soul. No! God has set up in the human soul the august faculty of a free moral will; a will that has power to say “yes” or “no” to Himself. And the key to the glory as well as the tragedy of the universe lies there.

The general conscience of the race, we have said, has arrayed itself finally on the side of Wesley as against the Moravian reading of religion. And both the reason and the conscience of mankind have declared themselves on the side of Wesley as against Whitefield’s perverse and dreadful theology.