A Threatened Schism
Whitepibld died at Newburyport, in the United States, on September 30, 1770, and his death had some dramatic features which made it a fitting close to a great career. He had just finished a week of open-air services, marked by extraordinary power at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On his way home he addressed a vast assembly in the fields near Exeter. It was, though he knew it not, his last service, to use his own grandiose words, with “the sky for sounding-board”; and he was so carried away by a passion of emotion that he preached with unexhausted energy for two hours! Thirty-one years before, at Kingswood, he had first broken through all ecclesiastical conventions and preached in the open-air to the miners there, and his last open-air sermon was as mighty as his first.
On the evening of the same day, as the darkness fell, the crowd gathered round the house where Whitefield was staying. They pressed their way in and thronged the hall, eager to catch some more words from lips so eloquent. Whitefield was at supper; he was exhausted with fatigue, and broken with what, though he knew it not, was a mortal sickness, and he told a clergyman who was with him to address the people. “I cannot say a word,” he explained, and taking a candle he hastened to his room.
At the head of the stairs he stopped, and looked down on the faces upturned to him in the hall beneath. The appeal of those silent, eager countenances was irresistible, and with the lifted candle in his right hand Whitefield began to speak. The trembling, musical voice flowed on, the rush of words and thoughts never ceased till the candle held in the preacher’s hand burned away and, with a flash, expired. Whitefield, though nobody suspected it, was a dying man; the quenched flame of the candle was a parable.
Years before, looking forward with a gleam of prophet-like vision to his own dying hour, Whitefield had said, “I shall die silent. It has pleased God to enable me to bear so many testimonies for Him during my life that He will require none from me when I die.” And this was literally true. He slept that night till two o’clock, then awoke; an attack of asthma had seized him. He knew his end was come. Breath failed him. He fell on his knees, with choking respiration tried to pray, and died in the effort. His head was bowed, his hands stretched out in supplication, when the last breath fluttered over his lips.
The sober, practical British mind is apt to disparage mere gifts of speech, and to deny the title of greatness to any one who is nothing more than an orator. Whitefield, it is true, built no Church, and, in a sense, left no followers. He certainly added no new province to the realm of human knowledge, and he shaped no new channel in which the great forces of religion might permanently flow. But his greatness cannot be denied. For over thirty years he swayed vaster crowds by his preaching than any other orator known to the history of religion; and the mere estimate that he preached 18,000 sermons — an average, say, of more than ten a week — for the whole of his public ministry, gives a quite inadequate measure of his work. The scale of his audiences, the passion and length of his sermons — to say nothing of the crowded tasks which filled up the brief intervals betwixt his discourses — all have to be considered.
And Whitefield’s natural gifts — the deep, melodious voice, the rush of moving words, the dramatic gestures which great actors envied, the power, which is the supreme gift of oratory, of making vast audiences thrill with the exact emotions of the speaker’s own soul — all these in him were but the servants and instruments of still mightier forces, forces which stream out of the spiritual realm and shape the human soul itself to a new pattern.
It is sometimes forgotten that Whitefield did in America an almost greater work than that he accomplished in England. On the other side of the Atlantic he was, in a sense, the spiritual heir of Jonathan Edwards. What is known in the religious history of the United States as “the Great Awakening” had almost passed away when Whitefield stepped upon American soil; but his preaching
36T
renewed on a new scale that memorable work. He gave it a wider range and a nobler character than it had reached under Jonathan Edwards. Whitefield, in America no more than in England, built a Church which bears his name; but the religious life of neither England nor America would be quite the same to-day if George Whitefield, the servitor of the inn at Gloucester, the “poor scholar” of Pembroke College, the open-air preacher of the eighteenth century had never lived.
Over Whitefield’s ashes the fire of the great Calvinistic controversy was re-kindled, and burned more fiercely than even at first; perhaps for the reason that this time there was a woman in it! A woman, when she becomes a theologian, takes her theology, if not more earnestly, yet more vehemently, not to say shrewishly, than does a theologian of the opposite sex. She follows her logic more relentlessly to its uttermost conclusion; she is more fiercely jealous for the honour and the influence of her creed. And at this stage a woman was doing, in the Calvinistic branch of the Methodist revival, what Whitefield had refused to do, and knew, indeed, he could not do. “I should weave a Penelope’s web,” he said, “if I formed societies.” He had no organising gift; and without organisation there is no permanent work. But Lady Huntingdon was doing that very work, and doing it with signal energy and success.
She was a remarkable woman; had she belonged to the Church of Rome, as Macaulay says, she would have been adorned with the nimbus of a saint. She was the daughter of Earl Ferrers, the widow of the Earl of Huntingdon, and her rank and wealth enabled her to do for the Revival what no other person could have done. She opened new worlds to it. She gave it social prestige. She sheltered it from persecution. She invited Whitefield to her house, appointed him one of her chaplains, and gathered fashionable audiences under her own roof to listen to him. Chesterfield and Bolingbroke came, amongst others, to hear the famous preacher. Chesterfield listened with smiling courtesy, as unmoved as though he were listening to the twittering of a bird; but Bolingbroke — the rake, the wit, the friend of Voltaire, the politician who served all parties and was loyal to none — was strangely moved by Whitefield’s preaching.
He invited Whitefleld to visit him, and sought religious discourse with him. It may be suspected that he was simply in search of the flavours of a new excitement.
Lady Huntingdon surrendered herself fully to the ardours and ideals of the great religious movement in progress. She built chapels that bore her name in various parts of England, and by appointing the preachers as her chaplains escaped the difficulty that so much perplexed Wesley, who would not label himself and his preachers ^’dissenters,” and so secure the shelter of the Toleration Act, and yet found the doors of the Anglican churches shut against both him and them. Lady Huntingdon set up a great seminary for her chaplains at Trevecca, in Wales. Benson, one of Wesley’s helpers, was classical tutor in the college; the saintly Fletcher, for a time Wesley’s designated successor, was its principal.
Lady Huntingdon herself was a Calvinist of more resolute type than even Whitefleld. Buckle, in his “History of Civilisation,” says that Calvinism is a creed which has a democratic stamp, while Arminianism is aristocratic in its genius; but that generalisation inverts the truth. Calvinism, which creates a spiritual aristocracy of the elect, and limits God’s mercy to them, easily commends itself to an aristocratic mind like that of Lady Huntingdon. Southey is shrewd enough to see this, “She was,” he says, “predisposed unconsciously to favour a doctrine which makes a privileged order of souls.” Wesley and Whitefleld, living under the empire of great motives, and dealing with great affairs, were reluctant to be entangled in controversy. In his societies Wesley, as a settled policy, made no difference betwixt Calvinist and Arminian. The two great comrades recorded in a formal document their resolve, for the sake of peace, “to avoid preaching on Calvinistic topics to the utmost extent possible.” Charles Wesley — often shrewder than his brother — afterwards wrote on the document the words “vain agreement”! Controversy, betwixt even such men, when parted at one point by a theological gulf so profound, was inevitable. Yet the controversy betwixt them, described in a previous chapter, had run its course, and practically died away when an unhappy incident revived it.
Wesley laboured perpetually to keep the theology of the Revival in a state of what may be called sane equipoise. It tended to run to extremes, and it is easy to understand that tendency. Theology was no longer the luxury of scholars; it was the daily bread of the common people. Or, to vary the figure, theology had stepped out of the drowsy atmosphere of the Universities and of the Churches, and was walking on common earth amongst the crowds. That it sometimes lost its feet, or ran the risk of falling into the ditch on one side or the other, need excite no wonder. That is the perpetual danger of a religious movement which powerfully affects great multitudes.
What may be called the re-discovered doctrine of entire sanctification or “perfection,” for example, lent itself easily to exaggeration. It not seldom came into quarrel with rudimentary morality. It lapsed into Antinomianism, and there were shocking examples of this peril amongst Wesley’s own helpers.
In the Conference of 1771 Wesley set himself to correct this evil. He recited instances “in which,” to use his own words, “we have leaned too much towards Calvinism,” especially towards that aspect of Calvinism which denies, or seems to deny, to man himself any part in the business of his own salvation. That salvation could be by “works” had been denied with an emphasis which, in some eager ears, sounded like the assertion — the welcome assertion — that salvation and works are in eternal quarrel with each other! To rebuke this madness the Conference passed certain resolutions: —
“We have received it as a maxim that ‘a man is to do nothing in order to justification.’ Nothing can be more false. Whoever desires to find favour with God should ‘cease from evil, and learn to do well.’ Whoever repents should do ‘works meet for repentance.’ And if this is not in order to find favour, what does he do them for?
“Is not this ‘salvation by works’? Not by the merit of works, but by works as a condition.
“What have we been disputing about for these thirty years? I am afraid about words.
“As to merit itself, of which we have been so dreadfully afraid, we are rewarded ‘according to our works,’ yea ‘because of our works.’ How does this differ from for the sake of our works? And how differs this from secundum merita operum, as our works deserve? Can you split this hair? I doubt I cannot’”
‘Tyerman, iii. p. 73 These propositions, looked at with modern eyes, are offenceless; but to Lady Huntingdon and the jealous Calvinists about her, they seemed hardly less than blasphemous. They were the very negation of the Gospel! Wesley and all associated with him became vehemently suspect. They were betraying evangelical doctrine! Lady Huntingdon resolved to cleanse Trevecca, her training college, I’rom the evil taint. Everybody in the college who would not renounce the resolutions of the Conference must be dismissed. The resolutions were employed as a test; every student and master was required to write his verdict upon them, and to disavow them on penalty of expulsion. Benson, the classical master, was in this way compelled to resign his post.
Fletcher was the head of the college, a man whose saintliness, wedded to great intellectual gifts, moves even Southey to almost rapturous admiration: “A man of rare talents,” he says, “and rarer virtue. No age or country has ever produced a man of more fervent piety, or more perfect charity; no Church has ever possessed a more apostolic minister.” But since Fletcher could only hold his post at Trevecca at the price of disavowing Wesley, he resigned his office there. “If every Arminian,” he said, “must quit the college, I am discharged for one, for I cannot give up the possibility of salvation of all, any more than I can give up the truth and love of God.”
Wesley himself wrote to Lady Huntingdon disavowing the evil meaning which had been read into the resolutions. He concluded: —
“To be short. Such as I am, I love you well. You have one of the first places in my esteem and affection, and you once had some regard for me. But it cannot continue if it depends upon my seeing with your eyes. My dear friend, you seem not to have well learned yet the meaning of those words which I desire to have continually written upon my heart, ‘Whosoever doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother.’”
But when did soft words soothe ruffled theologians? The angry Calvinists were not in the least satisfied; and not content with purging their own stronghold, they determined to carry the war into the enemy’s country. They would attend the next Methodist Conference in a
‘Tyerman, iij, p. 93.
body and correct Wesley’s deplorable theology in the presence of his own helpers! A circular letter was issued, signed by Shirley, one of Lady Huntingdon’s chaplains, and addressed to everybody of influence in connection with the Revival known to hold Cavlinistic views. The j Conference was to be held at Bristol, and the circular j explained that “Lady Huntingdon and many other Christian friends, real Protestants,” intended to hold a meeting at Bristol at the same time: —
“It is further proposed that they go in a body to the said Conference and insist upon a formal recantation of the said minutes, and in case of a refusal that they sign and publish their protest against them. It is submitted to you whether it would not be right, in the opposition to be made to such dreadful heresy, to recommend it to as many of your Christian friends, as well of the Dissenters as of the Established Church, as you can prevail on to be there, the cause being of so public a nature.”^
Now, to insist upon Wesley, in the presence of his own Conference, making a formal recantation of truths which, only a year before, both he and the Conference had so solemnly affirmed, was a very daring undertaking. It illustrates, not so much the courage of Mr. Shirley and the whole corps of Lady Huntingdon’s chaplains, as their temporary loss of sanity. Wesley went on his busy way in his usual cool fashion, but he issued a brief exposition of the resolutions passed by the Conference of 1770, and wrote with his own hands, on the copy, “If the Calvinists do not, or will not, understand me, 1 understand myself, and I do not contradict anything I have written these thirty years.”
The recantation began, as a matter of fact, on Lady Huntingdon’s side. Time and reflection had cooled her vehemence. She wrote to We.sley the night before the Conference assembled, acknowledging that the circular letter was too hastily drawn up. Shirley, whose courage, too, had begun to evaporate, wrote, apologising for the offensive phraseology to be found in it. Not twenty persons answered to the call of the letter. The gentlemen who came to correct his theology were received by Wesley in the Conference with exquisite courtesy and good temper. He hated controversy, and was willing to sacrifice everything, except truth,’ to escape from it. Fifty-
‘Tyerman, iii. p. 94.
three of his preachers signed a statement which Shirley himself, at Wesley’s half-ironical request, prepared: —
“We hereby solemnly declare, in the sight of God, that we have no trust or confidence but in the alone merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, for justification or salvation either in life, death, or the day of judgment; and though no one is a real Christian believer (and consequently cannot be saved) who doth not good works, where there is time and opportunity, yet our works have no part in meriting or purchasing our salvation from first to last, either in whole or in part.”
Shirley, on his part, signed a public acknowledgment that he had mistaken the meaning of the resolutions. But, unhappily, the controversy was not ended. It was only transferred into the realm of literature. Fletcher had written a vindication of the assailed minutes, a very noble bit of writing, and including in it a fine appeal for brotherly loyalty to each other: —
“Of the two greatest and most useful ministers I ever knew (he wrote) one is no more. The other, after amazing labours, flies still, with unwearied diligence, through the three kingdoms, calling sinners to repentance. Though oppressed with the weight of nearly seventy years, and the cares of nearly thirty thousand souls, he shames still, by his unabated zeal and immense labours, all the young ministers in England, perhaps in Christendom. He has generally blown the Gospel trumpet, and rode twenty miles, before most of the professors, who despise his labours, have left their downy pillows. As he begins the day, the week, the year, so he concludes them, still intent upon extensive services for the glory of the Redeemer and the good of souls. And shall we lightly lift our pens, our tongues, our hands against him? No; let them rather forget their cunning. If we will quarrel, can we find nobody to fall out with but the minister upon whom God puts the greatest honour?”
Shirley replied to Fletcher, who, on his part, published five letters to Shirley, the first of his famous “Checks to Antinomianism.” Then followed the most lively and exasperated tempest of theological controversy that ever broke on English literature. The principal writers on the Calvinistic side were Richard and Rowland Hill, Berridge, of Evertou, and Toplady, who has been made immortal by his one matchless hymn, “Rock of Ages.” Wesley took little personal part in the controversy. One brief and deadly contribution which he made, it is true, kindled much anger. Toplady had published a “Treatise upon Absolute Predestination.” Wesley published a short analysis of this treatise, with the following summary: —
“The sum of all this: One in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can. Reader, believe this, or be damned. Witness my hand. — A. T.”
To see his theology condensed into a space so narrow, and transformed into concrete form so dreadful and endorsed with his own initials, filled Toplady with an anger almost too deep for words, and that anger explains the shrill tones in which he scolded at large.
The fight was carried on from the Arminian side not only by Fletcher of Madeley, but by Thomas Olivers, one of Wesley’s helpers, who had been a cobbler, and like Toplady was a hymnist. His well-known verses, ‘’The God of Abraham praise,” strike a loftier and more sustained — if less tender — note than even Toplady’s deathless hymn. Fletcher, alone amongst these angry divines, wrote with the temper of a saint and the manners of a gentleman; while he knew how to use a keenness of logic which recalls Pascal’s “Provincial Letters.” The other controversialists pursued each other with injurious epithets through countless reams of literature; and Toplady, sad to relate, had the most bitter tongue of all these shrewish theologians. “An Old Fox Tarred and Feathered,” is the title of one of his pamphlets on Wesley. Even for the gentle-spirited and saintly Fletcher Toplady employed no other weapon than a cudgel: “In the very few pages of Fletcher’s letters which he had i)erused,” he said, “the serious passages were dulness double-condensed and the lighter passages impudence double-distilled!”
The controversy is long dead; but the temper in which it was conducted is an euduring scandal to religion. What can be more amazing than the spectacle of two deeply religious men, one of whom had written “Rock of Ages,” a hymn which the Church of Christ will sing till earthly hymns are no longer needed; and the other had written one of the greatest of sacred lyrics — “The God of Abraham praise” — abusing each other with the temper and language of angry fishwives!
But it is pleasant to remember that this gust of theological passion quickly passed away. Fletcher, always the saint and the gentleman, was practically a dying man. He was about to leave England and try the effect of breathing once more his native air in Switzerland; and before he left he invited all the divines with whom he had been in controversy to meet him, that, “all doctrinal diflferences ajjart, he might testify his sincere regret for having given them the least displeasure, and receive from them some condescending assurance of reconciliation and goodwill.”
Nearly all the combatants in turn exhibited, in the later stages of the controversy, a more Christian temper. Rowland Hill suppressed one of his bitter pamphlets, in order, as he said, “to prevent the evil that might arise from my wrong touches upon the work of God.” Berridge received Fletcher at his parsonage, and as he crossed his threshold rushed to him with open arms and tear-wet cheeks. “How,” he cried, “could we write so about each other, when we each aimed at the same thing, the glory of God and the good of souls?” Toplady, almost alone, remained implacable.
Stevens, in his unwieldy but very able “History of Methodism,” says that the effect of this controversy was “to give a permanent character to the theology of Methodism; a resurrection to the faith which the Synod of Dort had proscribed; greater prominence to the doctrines of Arminius and Grotius than all their continental champions had secured for them; to spread evangelical Arminianism over England, over all the Protestant portion of the New World, and more or less around the whole world; to modify the theological tone of evangelical Christendom, and probably of all coming time.”
This is a wild over-statement. The Calvinistic dispute of 1770 and the following years is but one of the outer and remote vibrations of the earlier controversy betwixt Wesley and Whitefield thirty years before. The whole controversy was, no doubt, of importance as making definite and articulate the doctrine of Methodism on one particular and much-vexed point. But the earlier stage of the controversy was the more important. It was a conflict betwixt the two great leaders of the Revival. The controversy betwixt them moved at a high level, and occurring at a moment when the theology of Methodism was yet in the plastic stage, it did, in fact, determine that theology for all time. The controversy of 1770 and the following years was a battle betwixt smaller men. Its single permanent contribution to theological literature is found in Fletcher’s famous “Checks.” And Fletcher not only made the richest intellectual contribution to the controversy, he kindled in its smoke and dust the one clear flame of Christian spirit yet discoverable in it.
It may be added that, later, Lady Huntingdon herself shared Wesley’s fate. Her societies were driven from the place in the Anglican Church in which she had so long held them. The last thing she contemplated was turning the places of worship she built into dissenting chapels. She appointed the preachers her personal chaplains; this was supposed to be legally within her right as a peeress of the realm, and the device was understood to release both chapels and ministers from the Toleration Act. But in 1779 she purchased a great building called the Pantheon in the north of London, and made it the centre of a mission. The clergyman within whose parish the building stood claimed control over it, and as the result of a costly lawsuit Lady Huntingdon’s chaplains were prohibited from officiating in the new chapel; and the decision was found to apply to all her chapels. Lady Huntingdon found herself in cruel straits. She must close her chapels or label them dissenting places of worship. “I am compelled,” she wrote, “to turn the finest congregation, not only in England, but in any part of the world, into a dissenting meeting-house! I am to be cast out of the Church now, only for what I have been doing these forty years — speaking and living for Jesus Christ.”
Her chaplains were shut up to the same cruel choice, and, as a result, the Calvinistic branch shared the fate of the Arminian division of the Revival. It was driven to undertake a separate existence. And so “Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion” came into existence, and still survives, and the Anglican Church once more justified its title of “the Church of missed opportunities.”
Lady Huntingdon had to follow Wesley’s example at another point. Her preachers could no longer obtain ordination from the bishops. The sacraments, as a result, could not be administered; so her chaplains had themselves to ordain their own successors, and ordination, to quote Lord Mansfield, once more proved to be separation.
Lady Huntingdon herself died in 1791, the same year as Wesley. She was eighty-four years of age. Her sickness was of a peculiarly cruel and wasting character, but her death was the fitting crown of a saintly life. A blood-vessel broke just before she died, and, with her lips still wet with the crimson stain, she whispered, “I am well! All is well, well for ever. I see nothing but victory. The coming of the Lord draweth nigh, the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Then, with the gesture of a tired child, she lifted her hands and said, “I long to be at home; oh, I long to be at home.”
A little before she died she said — repeating the words over and over again — “I shall go to my Father this night;” and shortly after, ‘Can He forget to be gracious? Is there any end of His loving kindness?” Almost her last words were: “My work is done; I have nothing to do but to go to my Father.”