The Final Steps
The question whether Wesley intended his followers to remain a society or to become a Church is, as we have said, one of purely academic, or even antiquarian, interest. The relation of Methodism to the Anglican Church was decided in the end by forces outside Wesley’s will. Some of these forces are to be found in the character of the clergy of that day and the policy they adopted. The drunken curate who at Epworth denied Wesley the Sacrament in his father’s church; the clergy who inspired mobs to attack the Methodists, and sometimes led them in the attack, were no doubt evil exceptions to their class. But the utterly unspiritual character of the clergy made it impossible to leave the converts won by the Revival in their careless hands. To have done this would have been a crime against human souls. Moreover, the great mass of the clergy, from the Bishops downwards, were resolutely bent on driving the early Methodists out of the Church. “You are our greatest enemies,” Prebend Church wrote to Wesley in 1744; and that dreadful sentence makes audible what, for many sad years, was the general mind of the clergy towards the Revival.
“It was not in the power of the Bishops to crush the new order,” says Miss Wedgwood, “but the strange anomalies of English law left it in their ijower to force it to become a sect.” No religious meetings outside the ordinary services of the Church could be held without a licence under the Toleration Act; and those taking part in such meetings, in order to secure the right to hold them, had to register themselves as Dissenters. This law extended to America, and so the first Methodist Church in the United States was adorned with that very unecclesiastical bit of architecture — a chimney. When a Methodist church was built it had to disguise itself as a house in order to secure the right to exist.
It can easily be seen what a formidable weapon such
WESLEY AND HIS CEKTURY
a law was in the bauds of the clergy, and it was used against the Methodists with relentless severity. The last important letter Wesley wrote, says Miss Wedgwood, “was a remonstrance addressed to a Bishop who, by giving information against all Methodists meeting in unlicensed houses, and getting them fined, forced them to apply for a licence as Dissenters.”
The state of the law, and the temper of the clergy in the use of that law, thus compelled Wesley, in even the earliest stages of his work, to take steps which were in effect acts of separation from the Church of England. He could only secure for his helpers the most rudimentary liberties of speech by labelling them Dissenters; and so, in 1748, the new room at Bristol was licensed, and Methodists using it were described in the licence as “Protestant subjects dissenting from the Church of England.”
City Road Chapel, from 1778, became Wesley’s headquarters, and it was in itself a visible symbol of the relation the Methodist movement has assumed towards the Church. It was an unconsecrated building; but services were held in it in church hours, and the sacraments were systematically administered there. The very building was thus a bit of concrete dissent, a symbol of the new Church which had already come into existence, but had hardly attained self-consciousness. In 1784, Wesley writes in his Journal, “a kind of separation has already taken place, and will inevitably spread, though by slow degrees.” “Their enemies,” he says again, “provoke them to it, the clergy in particular, most of whom, far from thanking them for continuing in the Church, use all the means in their power, fair and unfair, to drive them out of it.”
The question of the sacraments, however, proved the turning point in the relations betwixt Methodism and the Church. The Salvation Army, to-day, treats the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as, at best, a luxury, and makes no arrangement to gather its converts round the table of the Lord; and this is a fatal defect in its organisation. But Wesley held that the administration of the sacraments was binding on the Christian conscience, and he required his converts to observe them as a matter of duty and value them as a means of grace. But they must resort to the parish church in order to attend the Lord’s Supper; and here, too, often, was found a clergyman whose character was an offence to morals, or an intolerant fanatic who drove them from Christ’s table as mere intruders. The Wesleys themselves repeatedly suffered that indignity in their own persons. At Bristol, as early as 1740, Wesley’s converts were repelled by the clergy, on an agreed plan, and with unrelenting severity, from the Lord’s table, and this explains why the new room there was licensed so early as a dissenting place of worship.
But Wesley’s instinct for order made it intolerable to him that the Sacrament should be administered by any one save an ordained minister. At Bristol and London he was able, with the help of a few clergy who stood by him, to maintain the regular administration of the sacraments. But to do this over the area of the three liingdoms was practically imi)ossible; and in America geography and history alike made the situation incomparably more difficult. Here were a few almost accidental clergy scattered at distant points over the area of a continent. Political passion burned like a flame through the whole community, and in nine cases out of ten these clergj’ were in open political quarrel with their own flocks. The attempt to keep the fast-growing Methodist Societies dependent for the sacraments on a handful of Anglican clergymen under such conditions, both of geography and politics, was idle. Then came the War of Independence, and like some fierce whirlwind it drove the Anglican clergy from the field completely.
Wesley, as we have seen, appealed to the English Bishops to ordain at least one of his helpers for the purpose of administering the sacraments in America, but the appeal was rejected. The Bishops were careless of even their own flocks in the revolting colonies. They were politicians rather than pastors, and were not disposed to exhibit any very tender anxiety for the spiritual interests of mere rebels. On the High Church theory the sacraments are essential to salvation; they can only be administered by persons duly ordained, and in the Apostolic Succession. To refuse, or to delay, the presence of properly ordained clergymen to a whole community is, on the sacerdotal logic, to imperil the eternal welfare of human souls. Yet, when a delegate from the United States came to Englaud to i)rocure episcopal ordination, for the purpose of taking back to the dying souls of a continent the mystic grace of which ordination is supposed to be the exclusive channel, he was kept knocking at the doors of episcojjal palaces for two years. Benjamin Franklin wrote in characteristic accents of common-sense on the situation: “A hundred years hence, when people are more enlightened, ‘twill be wondered at that men in America, qualified by their learning and piety to pray for and instruct their neighbours, should not be permitted to do it till they have made a voyage of 6000 miles to ask leave of a cross old gentleman at Canterbury.”
Wesley found that he must provide for his own flock in America. The sacraments must be maintained, and they must be administered by duly ordained men. But Wesley held that he himself was as much as episcopos, and as fully entitled to ordain, as any Bishop in the land. “Lord King’s account of the primitive Church,” he says, “convinced me, many years ago, that Bishops and presbyters are the same order, and consequently have the same right to ordain.” He had held his hand too long, to the sore injury of his Societies in America, and at the risk of rending Methodism in that country to fragments. Accordingly, on September 2, 1784, he ordained Coke as Superintendent or Bishop, and Whatcoat and Vasey as presbyters, for America.
This act plainly brought to open rupture the whole relations of Methodism and the Church of England. Charles Wesley was thrown into a mood of frantic re-i monstrance: —
“I can scarce believe it (he wrote) that in his eighty-second year, my brother, my old, intimate friend and companion, should have assumed the episcopal character, ordained elders, consecrated a Bishop, and sent him to ordain our lay-preachers in America. How was he surprised into so rash an action? Lord Mansfield told me last year that ordination was separation. This my brother does not, and will not, see; or that he has renounced the principles and practice of his whole life; that he has! acted contrary to all his declarations, protestations, and writings; robbed his friends of their boastings; realised the Nag’s Head ordination; and left an indelible blot on his name, as long as it shall be remembered. Thus our partnership here is dissolved, but not our friendship. I have taken him for better, for worse, till death do us part; or, rather, reunites us in love ineeparable.”
He wrote in distressed and pathetic terms to John Wesley himself: “Before you have quite broken down the bridge, stop and consider. Go to your grave in peace, or at least suffer me to go before this ruin. So much I think you owe to my father, my brother, and to me, as to stay till I am taken from this evil. I am on the brink of the grave. Do not push me in, or embitter my last moments.... This letter is a debt to our parents, and to our brother, as well as to you.”
John Wesley’s reply is calm, but unyielding: —
“I will tell you my thoughts in all simplicity (he writes to him on August 19, 1785). If you agree with me, well. If not, we can, as Mr. Whitefield used to say ‘agree to disagree.’ For these forty years I have been in doubt concerning that question, What obedience is due to ‘heathenish priests and mitred infidels’? [A line of his brother’s.] I have from time to time proposed my doubts to the most pious and sensible clergymen I know. But they gave me no satisfaction. Rather, they seemed to be puzzled as well as me. Obedience I have always paid to the Bishops, ’ in obedience to the laws of the land. But I cannot see that I am under any obligation to obey them farther than those laws require.
“It is in obedience to these laws that I have never exercised in England the power which I believe God has given me. I
( firmly believe I am a Scriptural episcopos, as much as any man in England, or in Europe. For the uninterrupted succession I know to be a fable, which no man ever did or can prove. But this does in no way interfere with my remaining in the Church of England, from which I have no more desire to separate than I had fifty years ago. ... I no more separate from it now than I did in the year 1758. I submit still (though sometimes with a doubting conscience) to ‘mitred infidels.’ I walk still by the same rule I have done for between forty and fifty years. I do
y nothing rashly. It is not likely I should. The heyday of my
(blood is over. If you will go on hand in hand with me, do. But do not hinder me, if you will not help me.”
Charles Wesley wrote again, declaring he was filled i with alarm at “an approaching schism as causeless and unprovoked as the American Revolution, and at your own eternal disgrace. I,” he said, “creep on in the old way in which we set out together, and trust to continue
I in it until I finish my course.” Then the brother in him
I I breaks out. “We have taken each other for better, for worse, till death do us — part? — no, till we meet eternally. Therein, in the love which never faileth, I am your
’ affectionate friend and brother.”
‘John Wesley brought the correspondence to a close by saying, “I see no use of you and me disputing together, for neither of us is likely to convince the other.” Charles Wesley had disavowed his own juvenile line about “heathenish priests and mitred infidels,” but John Wesley goes on to say, “Your verse is a sad truth. I see fifty times more of England than you do, and I find few exceptions to it.” Then he adds: “If you will not or cannot help me yourself, do not hinder those that can and will. I must, and will, save as many souls as I can while I live, without being careful about what may possibly be when I die.”
Wesley, meanwhile, had published a statement explaining and justifying the American ordinations. It runs: —
Bristol, September 10, 1784. — To Dr. Coke, Mr. Asbury, and our other brethren in North America. By a very uncommon train of providences, many of the provinces of North America are totally disjoined from their mother country, and erected into independent States. The English Government has no authority over them, either civil or ecclesiastical, any more than over the States of Holland. A civil authority is exercised over them partly by the Congress, partly by the Provincial Assemblies. But no one either exercises or claims any ecclesiastical authority at all. In this particular situation some thousands of the inhabitants of these States desire my advice; and, in compliance with their desire, I have drawn up a little sketch.
“... The case is widely different between England and North America. Here there are Bishops who have a legal jurisdiction. In America there are none. Neither any parish ministers. So that, for hundreds of miles together, there is none either to baptize or to administer the Lord’s Supper. Here, therefore, my scruples are at an end; and I conceive myself at full liberty, as I violate no order, and invade no man’s right, by appointing and sending labourers into the harvest.
“I have, accordingly, appointed Dr. Coke and Mr. Francis Asbury to be joint Superintendents over our brethren in North America; as also Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey to act as elders among them, by baptizing and administering the Lord’s Supper....
“If any one will point out a more rational and Scriptural way of feeding and guiding these poor sheep in the wilderness, I will gladly embrace it. At present, I cannot see any better method than I have taken.”’
It is to be noted, Wesley ordained Coke as “Superintendent,” not as Bishop. He knew the power of words, and desired to avoid the use of a term sure to provoke controversy. With the stubborn conversatism of his type,
•Smith, p. 512. too, he was anxious to preserve old verbal forms, even when they became charged with new meanings. But Coke and Asbury in America discovered no necessity for putting any verbal disguise on recognised facts, and they adopted the term Bishop. It is still amusing to read Wesley’s alarmed comments on this circumstance. He writes to Asbury: —
“In one point, my dear brother, I am a little afraid, both the doctor and you differ from me. I study to be little; you study to be great. I creep; you strut along. I found a school; you a college! Nay, call it after your own names! Oh, beware, do not seek to be something! Let me be nothing, and ‘Christ be all in all!’
“One instance of this, of your greatness, has given me great concern. How can you, how dare you, suffer yourself to be called ‘Bishop’? I shudder, I start at the very thought! Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; but they shall never, by my consent, call me ‘Bishop’! For my sake, for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake, put a full end to this! Let the Presbyterians do what they please; but let the Methodists know their calling better.”
That letter shows how complete, on certain subjects, was Wesley’s slavery to words, even at this late period of his life. He could do bold things, revolutionary things. But in characteristic English fashion he wanted to label them with tame and conventional phrases.
Having adopted, on clear and reasoned principles, the policy of ordaining his own helpers, Wesley steadily pro-. ceeded to give it larger application. He ordained other helpers, but always on the logic of necessity, and only in the order of necessity. He would do what the plain facts of each case required; but still with as little disturbance of existing order, and as little shock to the prejudices of others, as possible. In 1785, “having,” he writes, “with a few other friends weighed the matter thoroughly, I yielded to their judgment, and set apart three of our well-tried preachers, John Pawsou, Thomas Hanby, Joseph Taylor, to minister in Scotland.” He further recommended to the Scotch Methodists the use of the abridged Common Prayer, a circumstance which showed that John Wesley did not even yet understand the Scottish character.
Wesley recites the reasons which moved him to ordain these three helpers for Scotland. There could be no conflict of jurisdiction, as no Anglican Bishop had any spiritual charge beyond the Border. Wesley’s further reasons are: (1) The desire of doing more good; (2) the absolute necessity of the case, as the Scotch ministers had repeatedly refused to give the Methodists the Sacrament unless they would leave the Societies.
In 1786 he ordained helpers for Ireland and the West Indies. On November 3, 1787, in his very last Journal occurs a very notable record: “I had a long conversation with Mr. Clulow (as Attorney) on that execrable Act called the Conventicle Act. After consulting the Act of Toleration, with that of the fourteenth [tenth, Author] of Queen Anne, we were both clearly convinced that it was the safest way to license all our chapels and all our travelling preachers; and that no justice, or bench of justices, has any authority to refuse licensing either the house or the preachers.”
On February 27, 1789, Wesley ordained Alexander Mather as Superintendent or Bishop, and Thomas Rankin and Henry Moore as presbyters, for England. He clothed them with power to feed the flock of Christ, and to administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper according to the usages of the Church of England, and within the boundaries of England. And he set apart Mather as Superintendent or Bishop that he might ordain other helpers, and so a regular ministry in the Methodist Church be maintained even after Wesley’s death.i
And he did all this knowing, in Lord Mansfield’s words, that “ordination is separation.” In these plain and great facts, not in casual phrases picked from his letters and Journal, is to be found Wesley’s purpose as to the future of Methodism.
Wesley’s ordinations are explained by Knox, in a letter which Southey published as an appendix to his biography, as due to an old man’s failure in reasoning faculties. But this explanation proves, for the High Church critics who quote it, quite too much. Wesley ordained Coke, Vasey, and Whatcoat in 1784, and. on Knox’s theory, his memory and intellect were then suffering from senile decay. But the famous Korah sermon, which is a mine of delightful quotations for the sacerdotal critics of Methodism, was preached in 1789, or five years later, and must, on Alex-
‘Jackson’s “Life of Charles Wesley,” p. 431. ander Knox’s logic, represent, still more completely than even the much-challenged ordinations, the decay of Wesley’s reasoning faculty!
The Korah sermon — a sermon on the ministerial oflSce — is, of course, perfectly consistent with Wesley’s whole policy. It was preached at Coi’k on May 4, 1789, and intended as a rebuke to some Irish helpers who had taken upon themselves to administer the Sacrament without Wesley’s authority. “Where did I appoint you to do this?” he asks. “Nowhere at all. In doing it you renounce the first principle of Methodism, which is wholly and solely to preach the Gospel.” Wesley would ordain his helpers to administer the Sacraments when he found this to be necessary, but he would not tolerate his helpers ordaining themselves. And it must be remembered that, not quite three months before he preached the Korah sermon, he ordained Mather as a Superintendent or Bishop, and Rankin and Moore as presbyters, for England.
It is often said, in spite of the facts which are here recited, that Wesley never intended Methodism to be anything more than a society within the Church. He planned it as a society, he left it a society; he forbade it to be a Church. The answer, of course, is obvious that, whatever Wesley intended, history has proved Methodism to be a Church in the largest sense; and its founder, like the men who laid the foundation of the great American republic, builded better than he knew.
But was Wesley deceived by a phrase? Did he look upon the great spiritual system taking shape about him, with its perfect and flexible organisation, as a mere “society,” an accidental, or at least temporary, cluster of unrelated atoms? In his famous sermon on Schism Wesley discusses at length the question. What is a Church? “A more ambiguous word than this — the Church” — he says, “is scarcely to be found in the English language.” But with his keen logic, and his terse, nervous English, Wesley struck out all ambiguity from the word. “The Catholic or Universal Church,” he says, “is all the persons in the universe whom God had called out of the world. A national Church is that part of the great body of the Universal Church which inhabits any one kingdom or nation.” The Church of England was a national
Church in that sense. But what, reduced to its simplest and imperishable elements, is a Church? “Two or three Christian believers united together,” Wesley replies, “are a Church. A particular Church may consist of any number of persons, whether two or three or two or three millions.”
Wesley, in a word, drew deep and clear the distinction betwixt the national Establishment and a Church. They were not equivalent terms. Methodism was not a national Church; but tried by the tests of the spiritual order to which it belonged, it was a true Church. As a matter of fact, Wesley often uses the terms “Society” and “Church” as interchangeable. His obstinate and, on the whole, wise mental habit of using old terms, even when they are charged with new meanings, disguises this fact from many critics. But the fact is beyond doubt. As early as 1749 he is discussing in the Conference of that year a scheme for linking the Societies together. “May not that in London, the mother Church,” he asks, “consult with the others for the sake of all the Churches?”i
The Societies, already, in Wesley’s eyes, were true Churches in the exact sense of that definition of a Church which we have already quoted.
For Methodists themselves the question whether Methodism is a true Church is not to be determined by the labours of antiquarians, or settled by quotations and dates from Wesley’s Journal. The question belongs to another and a loftier realm, and is determined by graver tests. Let the essential character of the Methodist revival be remembered. It was a re-birth of the spiritual elements of Christianity; a new manifestation of its spiritual force; a return to its simpler forms. It raised, and raises, no question as to the mere externalities of religion. It broke out of the spiritual realm; it worked by spiritual forces, and for only spiritual ends. And a true and profound philosophy, in harmony with this, underlay the whole movement and determined the ecclesiastical forms in which the new spiritual life was to express itself.
In what may be called the grammar of Methodism the emphasis lay, not on creeds, or symbols, or questions of Church polity and order. It rested on spiritual quali-
‘Minutes of Conference, 1749, p. 44. ties; on the relation of the personal soul to the personal Saviour.
Its theology stands in direct relation to spiritual life. Its Church polity is a wedlock of vital doctrines and of practical experiences. The Church, according to its definition, is spiritual life — the spiritual life of individual souls — organised, knitted together in organic forms for ends of worship and service. All forms, symbols, methods, creeds are secondary to this, and are of value only as they ensure this.
Let it be asked, why does a great writer like Isaac Taylor, an historian who is also a philosopher, and who, in a sense, is a severe critic of Methodism, yet declare that “Methodism is the starting-point of our modern religious history,” and that “the events whence the religious epoch now current dates its commencement is the field-preaching of Whitefield and Wesley in 1739.” It is because Methodism set in true and spiritual perspective all that relates to the Church and to religion. In the Church of that sad day second things had become first. The external was more than the spiritual. Rites and symbols and creeds were not merely means to an end greater than themselves — the creation of a spiritual life — they were ends in themselves.
Methodism was preceded by the German Reformation of Luther, and the English Reformation of Cranmer. But both these were incomplete. Luther’s Reformation was marred by the Papal strain left in it. There is a sacramentarian taint in its theology. “It began in ideas,” says one keen critic, “and ended in force.” It certainly was a reformation arrested in mid-career. The English Reformation of the sixteenth century was in the main political. It left State and Church linked together, to the injury of both. How imperfect a divorce from the Papacy it effected is proved by the frequent relapses into Papal doctrine of which its history is full. Edward VI. was followed by “Bloody” Mary, Elizabeth by Charles I., Cromwell by James II. and Charles II., of whom one died a Papist, and the other inverted the policy of Henri Quatre, and sold a kingdom for a Mass.
Anglicanism, in a word, with its sacramentarian theology and its prelatical rule, and the Puritanism of the Commonwealth, with its fierce temper and political leaven, represent the swing of the pendulum to opposite extremes. Methodism, on the other hand, with all its limitations, aims at a purely spiritual reading of Christianity. Forms to it are secondary matters. It can do with Bishops or without them. The Presbyterian or the Episcopal theory of Church government may be equally, or unequally, efifective; but neither is mandatory. The fiercest doctrinal controversy in Wesley’s life was that concerning Calvinism. But when he abridged the “articles of religion” for his Societies in America, he phrased them so as to leave that great controversy wholly untouched, and make it possible for Calvinist and Arminian alike to sing the same hymns and worship under the same church roof. Wesley himself said once to his preachers, “I have no more right to object to a man for holding a different opinion from my own than I have to differ with a man because he wears a wig and I wear my own hair, though I have a right to object if he shakes the powder about my eyes.”
Wesley thus was a great religious leader to whom spiritual fact was everything and ecclesiastical form nothing. It was inevitable that he should be careless as to the exact ecclesiastical definition of his own movement. Was Methodism a Church, or to become a Church? If so, what label must it bear? By what form should it be governed? These were questions which Wesley was not anxious either to ask or to answer. He postponed them in order to escape controversy; he left them to be settled by history. The critics of after generations wage interminable debate on these points. To Wesley himself any importance the debate had was due to the persistence and tyranny of old mental habits. To his Church the debate has neither reality nor significance. It represents a quarrel of ecclesiastical antiquarians. It is a question which history has settled — or rather God, who works through history, and shapes it.