The Onfall of the Bishops
In a famous passage Macaulay discusses the use the Roman Catholic Church would have made of Wesley. Rome certainly knows the value of enthusiasm, and has the art of using enthusiasts. What is the secret of the strange arrest which fell upon the Reformation of the sixteenth century, so that while Northern Europe became Protestant, Southern Europe remained, and remains, Roman Catholic? The explanation, of course, is found chiefly in the emergence of the great Order of the Society of Jesus. Ignatius Loyola is the champion Rome evolved against Luther. He was an enthusiast of the most fanatical type, and the Roman Church, instead of quarrelling with him, found a use for him; permitted him to create an Order, and turned him, and it, into the most formidable of weapons against its enemies. “At Rome,” says Macaulay, “the Countess of Huntingdon would have been given a place in the calendar as St. Selina; Joanna Southcott would have founded an order of barefooted Carmelites; Mrs. Fry would have been the first superior of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the Gaols. Ignatius Loyola at Oxford would have headed a secession; John Wesley at Rome would have become the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.”
This is one of those easy and picturesque generalisations which are the charm — and the peril — of Macaulay’s historical writings. Loyola was a Spaniard, a fanatic; a soldier with an intellect as narrow and as hard as his own sword. Wesley was an Englishman, a scholar, a logician, a saint. The two men under no conditions could have exchanged parts. The Church of Rome, moreover, is a spiritual despotism. In the Order of Jesus, its highest expression, slavery is crystallised into a system. The Church and the Order correspond to each other; for despotism and slavery are eternal correlatives. But the Anglican Church, with all its faults, represents spiritual freedom. It failed to find a place for Wesley, and that failure is the scandal and tragedy of its history. It justifies the description of Anglicanism as “the Church of missed opportunities.” But under no conditions could it have produced an Ignatius Loyola, or found a use for one.
But how did it happen that the Anglican Church could not find a use for Wesley and his great comrades? These men were more than its children; they were God’s great and special gifts to it. They had an unquestioning faith in its doctrines, and were fanatically zealous for its ritual and its services. Whitefleld, if his sermons are judged by their immediate effects, was perhaps the greatest preacher the English race has ever produced. John Wesley had imsurpassed gifts of leadership. Charles Wesley is one of the immortal hymn-writers of the Christian religion. What Church might not have welcomed such men as divine gifts! These men, too, brought to the religion of the eighteenth century exactly what it wanted; the note of passion, the contagious energy of intense enthusiasm. And they were specially fitted to render the one service the social and religious life of that day needed — the service of bridging the fast widening chasm betwixt the (vhurch and the common people. On one side they were scholars and gentlemen; on the other they were themselves trained in poverty, and could talk the language of the common people. Wesley could preach from the pulpit of St. Mary’s, at Oxford to the Heads of colleges, to Fellows and under graduates and proctors, and hold them breathless. But he could preach, too, in Gwennap Pit,, or on the hill-.side of Kingswood, to 10,000 rough miners and watch the tears running down well-nigh as many faces.
Why did the Anglican Church of that day shut its doors against men like these, and turn them, in spite of themselves, into “schismatics”? They were its own children, baptized at its font, fed at its table, taught in its universities. It evolved these men, educated them, ordained them, and then — cast them out!
Newman’s pathetic cry when he finally broke with the Anglican Church is still remembered. “Oh my Mother! whence is this unto thee, that thou hast good things poured upon thee and canst not keep thera, and bearest children yet darest not own them?... How is it that whatever is generous in purpose, and tender or deep in devotion, thy flower and thy promise, falls from thy bosom and finds no hope within thine arms?” With better title than even Newman Wesley might have written those words.
The story of the slow, reluctant, compelled steps by which Wesley formally separated — or prepared his followers for separation — from the Anglican Church will be told later. But there is already visible, at this early stage of its history, a fatal inability on the part of the Anglican Church to understand the new movement; a hopeless breach of sympathy with it; a mood of angry suspicion about it, which swiftly hardened into dislike, and even grew fierce with hate. “We cannot but regard you,” wrote one of the Anglican leaders of that day, “as our most dangerous enemies.” And yet the Church of that day had many enemies — gigantic national vices, a triumphant infidelity, a spiritual indiflfereuce that lay like an Antarctic frost on a whole people.
The Fellows of Magdalen required candidates for university prizes to sign a paper renouncing “the practice and principles of the people called Methodists.” Bishops levelled their charges at the unfortunate Methodists. The clergy not seldom inspired, and sometimes even publicly led, the mobs against them. They were forbidden to preach under Church roofs, and then treated as criminal, because they preached under the open sky. “They thrust us into the mud,” says Wesley, “and then complained because we were dirty.”
Wesley and his comrades, on their part, had at first an almost passionate eagerness of obedience. It was only when ecclesiastical obedience meant disobedience to some spiritual obligation — when the lower duty was in conflict with the higher — that a breach occurred. There is an amusing account of an interview betwixt Gibson, Bishop of London, and the two Wesley s. Gibson, as we have already said, was a fair type of the Hanoverian divines of that day; a scholar, a politician — he was familiarly known as the “Pope” of Walpole, the Prime Minister — a man who cared much for secular peace and little for spiritual ideals. Each of the brothers had his special difficulty to submit to the Bishop. John Wesley, the graver spirit of the two, his mind full of the new spiritual movement beginning to stir, asked his bishop whether, if he preached a sermon to one of his societies, this turned it into a conventicle, and so made it illegal. Charles Wesley, always the High Churchman, began to argue for the rebaptizing of Dissenters. And his logic was resistless! If the High Church theory is true — if baptism carries with it such tremendous consequences, and if issues so vast depend on the right set of fingers being employed — ought not an unhappy Dissenter’s salvation to be put beyond doubt by the process of rebaptizing him? “Sure and unsure,” Charles Wesley told his bishop, “were not the same.”
Gibson looked at the two brothers with alarm, and satisfied neither of them. An eighteenth-century bishop was required, no doubt, like modern bishops, to walk on a tight rope with much anxious balancing; but Gibson was only the Lord Melbourne of a century later in lawn sleeves and an apron. His ideal about everything is expressed by Melbourne’s famous question: “Can’t you let it alone?” These young men were enthusiasts; and “enthusiasm” was the one deadly and unforgivable offence of which the eighteenth-century divine could be guilty. The mere hint or whisper of it affected all the Anglican leaders of that day as a sudden rise in the thermometer might affect a company of architects who had just succeeded in raising a palace of ice. It was a secret omen of swift-coming and inevitable ruin!
The Church of England, moreover, is a bundle of theological compromises. In the variety of their contents, the Thirty-nine Articles resemble the sheet Peter saw in vision let down from heaven. Now enthusiasm is always fatal to compromise. So the Articles were, for the clergy of that day, either attenuated into metaphors or frozen into icicles. But Methodism offered them the startling apparition of these same Articles suddenly become alive, translated out of decorous abstractions into living conduct; visiting the gaols, preaching in the fields, talking the language of the common people. And the leaders of the new movement, when bishops frowned on them, church doors were shut against them, and the symbols of Christ’s death were refu.sed to them, instead of betaking themselves out of the Church and turning Dissenters, insisted on stopping inside it, and even on trying to mend it! “You,” cried the exasperated divines of that day, “are our most dangerous enemies.”
The Anglican Church in the eighteenth century was, in brief, a sort of theological Sargasso Sea. On its weedy and tideless waters institutions and articles floated as wrecks float in those tepid latitudes. The movement originated by Wesley and his fellows resembled a Gulf Stream set suddenly flowing through the stagnant depths, a gale of bracing northern air suddenly blowing across the moveless atmosphere, much to the disturbance of all the weed-grown hulls floating peacefully there.
On the part of the Anglican Church there was no formal act of expulsion registered. But there was a wordless, a more than half unconscious, but a final rejection of the new spiritual movement and all it meant; a rejection which constitutes one of the most tragical chapters in the history of that Church. And that rejection, it is clear, was due to a fundamental discord of temper, the inevitable and eternal quarrel betwixt fire and ice.
Four bishops have won an evil fame for themselves by their dealings with Whitefield and the Wesleys. Gibson, Bishop of London, began by being politely tolerant of the new movement, and ended by throwing his whole weight into the scales against it. He published a notable tract against the Methodists, in which he laments through whole pages that the Methodists declined to emigrate from the Established Church. The Act of Toleration of 1689, exempted from certain penal statutes persons who dissented from the Church of England; and any person who desired to acquire the most rudimentary liberty of conscience and of act had to pay the price of declaring himself a Dissenter. But the Methodists refused to label themselves with that title. They crowded to the services of the Church. They thronged to the Communion table in such numbers that, as Gibson lamented almost with tears, a clergyman had not time to dine before afternoon service! The Wesleys, he added indignantly, “have had the boldness to preach in the fields and other open places, and by public advertisements to invite the rabble to be their hearers”; and still, as this curious bishop complained, they refused to emigrate from the Church — a Church which certainly had no message for “the rabble,” and no desire to be charged with one.
Gibson was particularly affronted with the place given in the working theology of these new religious teachers to the Holy Spirit. He, like many of his clergy, held the curious theory that the Divine Spirit acted everywhere in general, but nowhere in particular; while the deluded Methodists actually taught the incredible doctrine that the Holy Spirit worked in individual souls, and manifested His influence at particular moments. Whitefield answered the bishop very happily: —
“Does it not frequently happen, my Lord, that the comfort and happiness of our whole lives depend on one particular action? And where then is the absurdity of saying that the Holy Spirit may, even in the minutest circumstances, direct and rule our hearts?... Did I not, when ordained deacon, affirm ‘that I was inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon me that office and ministration’? Did not my Lord of Gloucester, when he ordained me priest, say unto me, ‘Receive thou the Holy Ghost now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands’? And is not this, my Lord, a reasonable evidence that I act by a divine commission? If this be not true, must not all those whom your Lordship ordains act only by a human commission?”’
One of Gibson’s clergy, Church, Prebend of St. Paul’s, had published a pamphlet in support of his diocesan, declaring that the Methodists were “rooting out the remains of piety and devotion in the weak and well-meaning.” Wesley, who was always sensitive to any attack on the practical result of his work, fell upon the unfortunate prebend with the fury and impact of a thunderbolt. “The people,” Church wrote, “went on in a quiet and regular practice of their duty before you deluded them.” We.sley replies: —
“Let us bring this question into as narrow a compass as possible. Let us go no further as to time than seven years past, as to place than London and the part adjoining, as to persons than you and me, Thomas Church preaching one doctrine, John Wesley the other. Now then, let us consider with meekness and fear what have been the consequences of each doctrine. I beseech you to consider in the secret of your heart how many sinners you have converted to God. By their fruits we shall know them. By this test let them be tried. How many outwardly and habitually wicked men have you brought to uniform habits of outward holiness? ‘Tis an awful thought. Can you instance in a hundred? In fifty? In twenty? In ten? It not, take heed unto yourself and to your doctrine. It cannot be that both are right before God. Consider now (I would not speak, but I dare not
‘Wedgwood, p. 305.
refrain) what have been the consequences of even my preaching the other doctrine? By the fruits shall we know those of whom I speak, even the cloud of witnesses who at this hour experience the doctrine I preach to be the power of God unto salvation. The habitual drunkard that was, is now temperate in all things. The whoremonger now flees fornication. He that stole steals no more, but works with his hands. He that has cursed or swore, perhaps at every sentence, has now learned to serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice unto Him with reverence. These are demonstrable facts. I can name the men, with their several places of abode.’”
Wesley usually treated bishops with respect, but a later charge of Bishop Gibson, written in 1747, roused his indignation. He accused Wesley of teaching that favoured a low type of morality, and charged his clergy to warn mankind in general against the Methodists. Wesley replied in words which vibrate with a grave and noble indignation: —
“Here is an angel of the Church of Christ, one of the stars in God’s right hand, calling together all the subordinate pastors, for whom he is to give an account to God, and directing them in the name of the Great Shepherd of the sheep, the First Begotten from the dead, the Prince of the kings of the earth, how to make full proof of their ministry, that they may be free from the blood of all men; how to feed the flock of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood! To this end they are all assemgled together. And what is the substance of all his instructions? ‘Reverend brethren, I charge you all, lift up your voice like a trumpet, and warn, and arm, and fortify all mankind — against a people called Methodists.’
“Is it possible? Could your lordship discern no other enemies of the Gospel of Christ? Are there no Papists, no Deists in the land? Have the Methodists (so-called) monopolised all the sins, as well as errors, in the nation? Is Methodism the only spreading sin to be found without the Bills of Morality?’”
Bishop Lavington added himself later to the choir of bishops lifting up their voices in rebuke of Methodism, and his contribution to the angry music was of a very shrill kind. Bishop Lavington, says Miss Wedgwood with feminine energy, “deserves to be coupled with the men who flung dead cats and rotten eggs at the Methodists, not with those who assailed their tenets with arguments, or even serious rebuke.” The particular missile Lavington flung at Methodism was the charge that it was but Roman
•Wedgwood, p. 306.
*lbid., p. 310.
Catholicism thinly disguised. Methodism reproduced, he asserted, every evil quality of Eomanism; its bigotry, its fanaticism, its falsehood. Bishop Lavington made an excursion into heathen realms in search of a parallel to Methodism, and found it in the Eleusinian mysteries. In the filthiest reading of those mysteries the Bishop discovers what he thinks is a final explanation of Methodism; it is the work of some evil spirit, a sort of magical operation of diabolical illusion.
Both Wesley and Whitefield replied to Bishop Laving-I ton, Wesley in a tone of severity, Whitefield in a gentler note; and for once Whitefield proved the more formidable disputant. Gentleness is sometimes a more effective weapon than anger. He showed, with fine and resistless logic, that Bishop Lavington’s attack on the enthusiasm of the new movement was an assault rather upon Christianity than upon Methodism. The episcopal logic that condemned Wesley and Whitefield would have smitten with equal fury St. Peter and St. Paul.
Bishop Horne, of Norwich, showed a better temper than his brother bishops, but his logic was as feeble and I as strange as theirs, and his dislike of Methodism as I acute. In a sermon preached before the University of Oxford he charged “the new lights of the tabernacle and the Foundry” with evil teaching as to faith and lax teaching as to morality. “Have you ever read,” Wesley replied, “the writings of which you speak?” As a matter of fact Horne had not thought it necessary to read Wesley’s writings before replying to them. For Horne, as for many others disputants, the business of refuting his opponent’s opinions was made much easier by taking the precaution of omitting to know what they were. “Had you only taken the trouble of reading one tract — the ‘Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,’” said Wesley, “you would have seen that a great part of what you affirm is what I never denied.” And he proceeded to show, what indeed was obvious, that all he taught was found in the Articles and in the Bible.
Warburton, the great literary bully of his day, fell upon the Methodists with a bludgeon. Warburton was by original profession an attorney, a calling for which nature plainly intended him, but ill-fortune, both for himself and for the Church, made him a bishop; though
De Quincey suggests that Warburton’s betaking himself to long sleeves and an apron saved the twelve judges of that day from being driven mad by his amazing gifts of angry controversy. Bentley dismissed Warburton’s scholarship by saying that he was “a man of monstrous appetite but bad digestion”; and a competent critic has suflBciently described his controversial style by saying that Warburton’s stock argument is a threat to cudgel any one who disputes his opinion.
Warburton’s arrogance soared to strange altitudes. His creed, says Leslie Stephen, might be summed up in the words, “There is but one God, and Warburton is His attorney-general I” He led for years “the life of a terrier in a rat-pit worrying all sorts of theological vermin.” It was his agreeable habit to describe his opponents as “wretches, the most contemptible for their facts, the most infernal for their morals.” And this terrier in long sleeves and episcopal apron treated the Wesleys as so much vermin to be worried, and with a sort of canine relish.
How a divine of this temper assailed such men as Whitefield and the Wesleys may be guessed. He declared that the Holy Spirit had fulfilled his office when the canon of Scripture was completed. It was mere fanaticism to claim the enlightening grace of that Spirit in modern days; as if, Warburton shouted, in indignant tones, “it needed the further assistance of the Holy Spirit to explain His own meaning.” Then this “father in God” fell upon John Wesley personally. He was cowardly, he was false, he was vindictive; he challenged persecution and then ran away from it; he was a mere wily and malignant hypocrite, &c., &c. And these were the kindest words that a bishop of the Anglican Church could find to expend on a son of that Church who was toiling with an intensity of zeal, unparalleled since apostolic days, to bring fallen men and women into Christ’s kingdom!
Who reads these faded ipamphlets and letters in which still smoulder the fire of far-off and long-dead controversies finds himself irresistibly on Wesley’s side; and this is not merely because he writes better English, employs a more convincing logic, and bears himself with a finer temper than his opponents. He dwells visibly on a higher level than they. He represents a different religious climate. Here is a mati who sees the real end for which all Church machinery exists; and he will not sacrifice these great ends for some small, irrelevant — not to say impertinent — question of machinery. For him, at least, the end is more than the means, and nobler. Moorfields, where such vast open-air crowds hung on Wesley’s preaching, happened to be in the ecclesiastical parish of a certain Dr. Buclsley, otherwise quite unknown to history; and the Bishop of London, who thought much of his clergy’s rights and little of the sad crowds outside all the churches, wept rhetorical tears through a whole episcopal charge over the injuries Dr. Buckley suffered by Wesley preaching in the open air within the bounds of his parish. Here are a few sentences from Wesley’s reply: —
“There are, in and near Moorfields, ten thousand poor souls, for whom Christ died, rushing headlong into hell. Is Dr. Buckley, the parochial minister, both willing and able to stop them? If so, let it be done, and I have no place in these parts. I go, and call other sinners to repentance. But if, after all that he has done, and all that he can do, they are still in the broad way to destruction, let me see if God will put a word even in my mouth.”
Later will be discussed the whole subject of the relation betwixt the Church of England and Wesley, and the events which compelled him to form what proved to be a separate Church. But the general attitude of the Church towards the revival is to be judged by the utterances of its leaders, such as we have described. And the example of the bishops provoked, as was natural, rough imitation. Bishops wrote tx’eatises against the Methodists; the clergy preached sermons against them; the mob flung stones. Each class used its own weapons. Lawn sleeves in episcopal palaces, when translated into the vernacular, became mere mud and cudgels. The clergy, it may be added, not seldom carried their hate of the revival to the sacramental table itself. Thus Charles Wesley records in his Journal: —
“Sunday, July 27. — I heard a miserable sermon at Temple Church, recommending religion as the most likely way to raise a fortune. After it proclamation was made that all should depart who were not of the parish. While the shepherd was driving away the lambs, I stayed, suspecting nothing, till the clerk came to me, and said, ‘Mr. Beecher bids you go away; for he will not give you the Sacrament.’ I went to the vestry door, and mildly desired Mr. Beecher to admit me. He asked, ‘Are you of this parish?’ I answered, ‘Sir, you see I am a clergyman.’ Dropping his first pretence, he charged me with rebellion in expounding the Scripture without authority, and said, in express words, ‘I repel you from the Sacrament’ I replied, ‘I cite you to answer this before Jesus Christ at the day of judgment.’ This enraged him above measure. He called out, ‘Here! take away this maul’ The constables were ordered to attend; I suppose lest the furious colliers should take the Sacrament by force. But I saved them the trouble of taking away ‘this man,’ and quietly retired.”
What profit is there recalling to human memory such old, far-off, unhappy, and now forgotten, conflicts? But this controversy, like that with the Moravians, and that with Whitefield, heli)ed to shape history. And the history of which the Methodist Church to-day is the outcome cannot be understood without the tale of this dispute being told.