The Developing Church
It is very striking, meanwhile, to notice the clear purpose with which, during all this troubled period, Wesley kept loyal to his own ideals, and the insight and vigilance with which he continued to shape the movement under his care, making its discipline perfect and its machinery complete. He saw, for example, with a flash of statesmanlike insight, the need of giving to his work coherence and unity. The societies had burst into the blossom of the class-meeting, with infinite advantage in the way of stimulus and oversight. But the societies as a whole were unrelated fragments. Each class-meeting resembled a tiny living cell; a society was a congeries of such cells. The problem was to knit these scattered cells, or congeries of cells, into one vital organism.
In the Conference of 1763 the question was asked: “Can there be any such thing as a general union of each society throughout England?” A somewhat crude suggestion was offered in reply: “May not all the societies in England be considered as one body, united by one Spirit? May not that in London, the mother church, consult for the good of all the societies? May not the stewards of that society answer letters from all parts, and give advice, at least in temporals?”i
But this was obviously no solution to the problem. How could the state of all the societies be known to the stewards of the London societies? Even if this spacious knowledge were attained, and if the stewards were clothed with some power of advice, or of government, this would not knit the societies into a single organism. It would only create a little spiritual oligarchy, which might well become a despotism. Wesley had hardly yet realised that in his new order of itinerating “helpers” he was creating a force hitherto unknown in ecclesiastical history, a corporate pastorate; a pastorate which belonged
‘Myles, p. 90.
to the whole Church, and not to individual charges in it. When the pastorate became in this way a unit, the churches under the care of such a pastorate must be a unit too. And this corporate pastorate was to find in the annual Conference exactly such an instrument for the government of the Church as a whole as was needed. But Wesley, we repeat, as yet hardly realised the range and power of the very machinery he had created.
All through these troubled years the characteristic institutions of Methodism were swiftly taking shape. The training of the helpers grows in method and thoroughness. The famous “rules of a helper” — rules which still form the marching orders of every Methodist preacher in the world, and are read year by year in every Methodist Synod — belong to this period. Nothing can well be stronger, finer, or loftier than the counsels — counsels which have the accent and the urgency of commands — by which Wesley at this time was moulding the habits of his many agents, and creating traditions for unborn generations. Whoever reads these admonitions finds himself in contact with a very remarkable body of literature. In form they are severely condensed, yet absolutely clear English, English that Swift or Cobbett might have envied, but could not have surpassed. And the moral quality of these admonitions is even more remarkable than their literary energy. The swift, terse, abrupt sentences have the rush and impact of bullets; they are charged with a spiritual intensity which has the clearness of flame without its heat. Wesley’s counsels and rebukes are as swift and urgent as messages from the unseen. Here are examples: —
“Sleep not more than you need; talk not more than you need. And never be idle, nor triflingly employed. But if you can do but one — either follow your studies, or instruct the ignorant — let your studies alone; I would throw by all the libraries in the world rather than be guilty of the perdition of one soul.’”
Then follows a series of almost fierce self-questionings : —
“Why are we not more knowing? A. Because we are idle. “We forget the very first rule, ‘Be diligent. Never be unemployed a moment. Never be triflingly employed.’...
‘Myles, p. 115.
“Which of you spends as many hours a day in God’s work as you did formerly in man’s work? We talk, talk — or read history, or what comes next to hand. We must, absolutely must, cure this evil, or give up the whole work.
“But how? 1. Read the most useful books, and that regularly and constantly. Steadily spend all the morning in this employ, or at least five hours in twenty-four.
“‘But I read only the Bible.’ Then you ought to teach others to read only the Bible; and, by parity of reason, to hear only the Bible. But if so, you need preach no more. Just so said George Bell. And what is the fruit? Why, now he neither reads the Bible nor anything else. If you need no book but the Bible, you are got above St. Paul. He wanted others, too. Bring the books, says he, but especially the parchments; those written on parchment.
“‘But I have no taste for reading.’ Contract a taste for it by use, or return to your trade.
“‘But different men have different tastes.’ Therefore some may read less than others; but none should read less than this.
“The sum is. Go into every house in course, and teach every one therein, young and old, if they belong to us, to be Christians, inwardly and outwardly. Make every particular plain to their understanding. Fix it in their memory. Write it on their heart. In order to this, there must be line upon line, precept upon precept. I remember to have heard my father asking my mother, ‘How could you have the patience to tell that blockhead the same thing twenty times over?’ She answered, ‘Why, if I had told him but nineteen times, I should have lost all my labour.’ What patience, indeed, what love, what knowledge is requisite for this!
“Over and above: wherever there are ten children in a society, spend at least an hour with them twice a week. And do this, not in a dull, dry, formal manner, but in earnest, with your might.
“‘But I have no gift for this.’ Gift or no gift, you are to do it else you are not called to be a Methodist preacher. Do it as you can, till you can do it as you would.’”
Wesley’s standard for his helpers in every realm was of an heroic pitch. He required them to work with the utmost energy of which they were capable; but they must be students as well as workers! No man ever hated ignorance, and the fanaticism bred of ignorance, more than he. Here are examples of the admonitions with which he strove to enforce on his busy helpers the habits and temper of students: —
“What general method of employing our time would you advise us to? A. 1. As often as possible to rise at four. 2. From four to five in the morning, and from five to six in the evening to meditate, pray, and read, partly the Scriptures, with the Notes on
‘Myles, p. 115.
the New Testament, partly Kempis and the Instructions for Children, and partly the closely practical parts of the Christian Library. 3. Prom six in the morning till twelve (allowing an hour for breakfast), to read in order, with much prayer. Bishop Pearson on the Creed, Mr. Boehm’s and Nelson’s sermons, the remaining parts of the Christian Library, our other tracts and poems, ‘Paradise Lost,’ and Professor Frank’s works.
“How may we be more useful in conversation? A. 1. Fix the end of each conversation before you begin. 2. Watch and pray during the time. 3. Spend two or three minutes every hour in earnest prayer. 4. Rarely spend above an hour at a time in conversing with any one.’”
Amongst the quaint but intensely practical counsels he gives are some as to the art of escaping popularity: —
“How shall we avoid popularity? We mean such esteem and love from the people as is not for the glory of God. 1. Earnestly pray for a piercing sense of the danger and the sinfulness of it. 2. Take care how you ingratiate yourself with any people by slackness of discipline. 3. Or by any method which another preacher cannot follow. 4. Warn the people among whom you are most of esteeming or loving you too much 5. Converse sparingly with those who are particularly fond of you.’”
Times and men are strangely changed since those words were written. What preacher to-day has to study anxiously “how to avoid popularity,” or finds any necessity for warning the people amongst whom he labours against “esteeming him or loving him too much”!
Wesley had quite a modern conception of the possibilities of the press as a teaching instrument, and as early as 1747 he had organised a tract society. Two years later he began to compile the “Christian Library,” a series of fifty volumes. A Methodist might be poor, but Wesley was determined he should not be illiterate. Later he taught his helpers that to put a good book into a home was to plant in it a permanent civilising force; and so they must sell books as diligently as they preached sermons. He says: “Let each of you do like William Pennington: carry books with you through every round. Exert yourselves in this. Be not ashamed. Be not weary. Leave no stone unturned.” To one of his preachers he writes: “It is of unspeakable use to spread our practical tracts in every society. Billy Pennington, in one year, sold more of these in Cornwall than had been sold for seven
‘Myles, p. 97. ‘Ibid., p. 98. years before. So may you, if you take the same method. Carry one sort of books with you the first time you go the round; another sort the second time; and so on. Preach on the subject at each place; and, after preaching, encourage the congregation to buy and read the tract.”
Finance has always, and necessarily, filled a great space in Methodist affairs, and the frugalitj’ and business sense which mark Wesley’s financial methods are very striking. At first Wesley’s helpers were like the Seventy whom Christ sent out as the earliest preachers of Christianity. They took neither purse nor scrip with them. Their pockets were almost as empty as those of mendicant friars, though their heads were better furnished, and their hearts carried a more radiant sunshine. But in due course salaries had to be paid to the men and a provision made for their wives.
The salaries, looked at with modern eyes, were, as we have already shown, of an almost incredibly microscopic scale. What an heroic and long since extinct order of preachers’ wives, too, must that first generation of Methodist preachers have discovered, since they could live and clothe themselves decently, and contrive to be cheerful, on an allowance of four shillings a week, with an addition of twenty shillings per quarter for each child! Wesley made a provision for his worn-out preachers, but it was in principle only a form of self-help. A regulation passed in 1763 required each preacher, out of his scanty salary, to contribute ten shillings yearly. This sum was lodged in the hands of three stewards, and formed a fund out of which allowances were paid for old or sickly preachers, or for their widows. The fund was painfully modest in scale, but it was the germ out of which have grown the great pension funds of modern Methodism.
Wesley, it may be added, had a wholesome horror of debt; a hate of it which perhaps had its root in memories of his debt-contracting and debt-oppressed father. And he tried, but alas! with only imperfect success, to plant his own conscience on this subject amongst his societies. In 1756, when the work had been in progress for sixteen years, the debts of the Connexion, mainly on chapels, amounted to £4000. In 1771 they were not quite £7000, an average debt of less than £100 upon each chapel. These figures seem trivial when compared with the huge financial burdens of modern Methodism. On the Methodist churches of a single colony, with a population of a little over 1,000,000, there is, to-day, carried with smiling courage, nearly forty times the amount of the debt on all the Methodist churches in Great Britain a little over a century ago! Wesley’s Church has, somehow, acquired a temper of financial courage which would have left Wesley himself, and the early Methodist Conferences, almost paralysed with mingled amazement and alarm!
In 1767 Wesley started a fund for the extinction of the debts on his chapels. He proposed to raise £12,600 in two years, by subscriptions ranging from 5s. to two guineas. Such a scheme seems strangely modest when it is remembered that in 1900 the Wesleyan Churches of Great Britain raised £1,000,000 in a single effort, while the Methodist Churches in the United States in a similar way raised nearly £4,000,000. But the scheme of 1767 only partially succeeded. Two years afterwards £5,000 still remained unpaid; yet Wesley’s appeals to his people were pathetic, eloquent, and urgent in what ought to have been a resistless degree. “I think,” he wrote to one trusted adherent after another, “I think you love me, and the cause wherein I am engaged. You wish to ease me of any burden you can. You sincerely desire the salvation of souls and the prosperity of the work of God. Will you not then exert yourself on such an occasion as this?”
When in 1709 a second effort was made Wesley wrote: —
“Are the Methodists able to clear this in one year? Yes, as able as they are to clear £50. But are they willing? That I cannot tell. I am sure a few of them are, even of those who have a large measure of worldly goods; yea, and those who are lately increased in substance, who have twice, perhaps ten or twenty times, as much as when they saw me first. Are you one of them? Whether you are or not, whether your substance is less or more, are you willing to give what assistance you can? to do what you can without hurting your family? ‘But if I do so, I cannot lay out so much, in such and such things, as I intended.’ That is true; but will this hurt you? What, if instead of enlarging, you should, for the present, contract your expenses? spend less, that you may be able to give more. Would there be any harm in this?’”
That letter is only a sample of similar communications addressed to other members of his societies. It would be
‘Tyerman, p. 613.
diflScult to imagine a more moving appeal, and it was weighted by the whole force of Wesley’s life and example. And yet the church debts of that period survived even such an appeal from such a man.
If any one wishes to realise the enormous growth of the Methodist Church in wealth, the new habits of generosity which have been created, and the degree in which the Christian conscience has grown instructed as to the use of money, let him imagine what sort of response such an appeal, from such lips, would evoke to-day.
Nothing is more striking in all Wesley’s instructions and appeals to his converts than the masterful note which runs through them. The accent of authority is always clear and high, and it is one more illustration of the fact that Methodism was in no sense, and at no stage of its history, a democracy. The crowd did not evolve Wesley and confer power upon him. He was never a demagogue, ruling the multitude by flattering it. From the very first, by the compulsion of events, and perhaps by natural temper and genius, Wesley was an autocrat. There were, of course, mixed elements in his character. He could be as docile as a child to any authority which had moral force behind it. But command was natural and easy for him. He was by necessity — and necessity in such a realm is only another word for divine purpose — the personal centre of the whole movement. And authority was for him inevitable.
Southey, who profoundly misreads Wesley’s character, says that “the love of power was the ruling passion in his mind.” Against Southey, however, may be set the judgment of a much keener mind than his, that of Miss Wedgwood. She expends pages to show that “supreme position was never an object of ambition to Wesley.” Wesley himself affirms this again and again, with a transparent sincerity which is irresistible: —
‘“The power I have,’ he says, ‘I never sought; it was the undesired, unexpected result of the work God was pleased to work by me. I have a thousand times sought to devolve it on others; but as yet I cannot; I therefore suffer it till I can find any to ease me of my burden.’ “’
Facts amply justify that bit of self -description. It
‘Southey, vol. ii. p. 70.
needs only a glance, indeed, at Wesley’s career to see that, so far from thrusting himself into the foremost place on every occasion, and assuming the accents of a leader, he may often be accused, with reason, of hanging back too long, and of failing in initiative. Charles Wesley, and not his older and more masterful brother, formed the Holy Club at Oxford, and first won the sneering title of “Methodist.” Morgan, in that society, and not Wesley, began philanthropic work. Whitefield and not Wesley was the first field-preacher. Wesley went to America because Oglethorpe persuaded him. He left America because his flock had revolted from him. He started the society at James Hutton’s house under Bohler’s advice. He always, in a word, needed some external impulse before he moved.
That he had no ambition to be the founder of a new Church is proved by the whole story of his work. He strained the loyalty of his people to breaking point in the effort to keep Methodism, as an organisation and a leaven, within the Anglican Church. But power was thrust upon him by the mere course of events; and he had enough of the temper of a born leader of men not to fling off the burden of inevitable authority, when it was necessary to the effectiveness of his work, and to the security of its results. He describes, with a frankness so courageous that it is nothing less than amusing, the origin of his own authority. The people, he declares, sought him out, not he them. And Wesley proceeds to trace this relation of dependence on their side, and of authority on his, right through the whole gamut of his workers.
This was the case with his societies: —
“The desire was on their part, not on mine; my desire was to live and die in retirement; but I did not see that I could refuse them my help and be guiltless before God. Here commenced my power; namely, a power to appoint, when, where, and how they should meet; and to remove those whose life showed that they had no desire to flee from the wrath to come. And this power remained the same, whether people meeting together number twelve, twelve hundred, or twelve thousand.”
This was repeated in the case of the stewards: “Let it be remarked, it was I myself, not the people, who chose the stewards, and appointed to each the distinct work wherein he was to help me as long as I chose.” The preachers, again, with their rauge of work and of gifts, stood in the same relation of dependence on Wesley: —
“Observe these likewise desired me, not I them. And here commenced my power to appoint each of these, when, where, and how to labour; that is, while he chose to continue with me; for each had a power to go away when he pleased, as I had also to go away from them, or any of them, if I saw sufficient cause. The case continued the same when the number of preachers increased. I had just the same power still to appoint when, where, and how each should help me; and to tell any, if I saw cause, ‘I do not desire your help any longer.’ On these terms, and no other, we joined at first; on these we continue joined.’”
The Conference became in due course the centre of authority for Methodism. But Wesley proceeds to show with the utmost plainness that he was absolute in the Conference; it was his creation, the reflex of his will, the servant of his plans: —
“Observe; I myself sent for these, of my own free choice; and I sent for thenq to advise, not to govern me. Neither did I, at any of those times, divest myself of any part of that power which the providence of God had cast upon me, without any design or choice of mine. What is that power? It is a power of admitting into, and excluding from, the societies under my care; of choosing and removing stewards; of receiving or not receiving helpers; of appointing them when, where, and how to help me; and of desiring them to meet me when I see good. And as it was merely in obedience to the providence of God, and for the good of the people, that I at first accepted this power, which I never sought — nay, a hundred times laboured to throw off — so it is on the same considerations, not for profit, honour, or pleasure, that I use it at this day.”
Wesley recites all this not in the least with the accents of an autocrat, jealous of his right to rule, but of a witness explaining facts.
His power, of course, was not like that of Ignatius Loyola, the authority of a despot over a celibate Order, an Order composed of men taught to think freedom a sin, and bondage of piety. Wesley’s as.sistants and helpers came of the sturdy British stock. They were men nursed in freedom, with all natural ties about them. And Wesley’s power was not that of a lord over serfs, but of a father among his children. They were his spiritual off- .spring. His training and intellect, his natural gifts and
‘Southey, vol. ii. p. 71.
range of knowledge, strengthened all his spiritual claims to authority. And it may be added that the course of history steadily and curiously multiplied his power.
For thirty years before his death Wesley’s stood as lonely as an Alpine peak. He was not merely without rivals, but almost without comrades; and he had no visible successor. Everything centred in him and depended on him. His assistants were but his spiritual children. It is diflBcult to find in history a parallel to the exact type of authority which, during the later years of his career at least, hung on Wesley’s lips and was carried on the tip of his pen. And the stamp of that masterful will is on his church at a hundred points to-day.