Wesley’s Odd Opinions

Weslky’s mind, with its positive and logical turn, easily crystallised into definite opinions; while its qualities of courage and independence gave to many of these an original turn. He was a man of relentless method, and he had a tireless industry in recording everything he saw or experienced. His opinions, as a result, on all sorts of subjects — profane and secular, historical and literary — are scattered with great abundance through his Journal and correspondence. Not seldom they represent hasty judgments, or are built on half knowledge of things; but they are usually marked with great shrewdness, and always by great confidence; and their very positiveness and originality give them very often a look of humour.

On historical characters, for example, Wesley’s judgments are marked by great pungency and frankness, and, if generally accepted, would bring to wreck not a few great reputations. He was a good Tory, but he had too much resolute common-sense to cheri.sh any illusion about that “royal martyr” Charles I. “The chief sin which brought the king to the block,” Wesley says, “was his persecuting the real Christians.” Wesley tells the story of the death of “that monster of cruelty, Graham of Claverhouse, afterwards, as a reward for his execrable villainies, created Lord Dundee.” “The tradition current in Scotland,” says Wesley, “is: At the battle of Killiecrankie, being armed in steel from head to foot, he was brandishing his sword over his head, and swearing a broad oath, that before the sun went down, he would not leave an Englishman alive. Just then a musket-ball struck him under the arm, at the joints of his armour. Is it enthusiasm to say ‘Thus the hand of God rewarded him according to his works’?”

As for Charles II., after reading an account of the sufferings of the Presbyterians in Scotland, during his reign, Wesley writes: “Oh, what a blessed governor was that good-natured man, so-called King Charles II.! Bloody Queen Mary was a lamb, a mere dove, in comparison.” “Many of the Protestant Bishops of King Charles,” he says again, “had neither more religion or humanity than the Popish Bishops of Queen Mary.”

Wesley is ironically sceptical as to St. Patrick and his performances, and the perusal of the life of that saint leaves him under the melancholy conviction that it is a myth, or at least the story “smells strong of romance.”

“‘I never heard before,’ says Wesley, ‘of an apostle sleeping thirty-five years, and beginning to preach at threescore. But his success staggers me the most of all. No blood of the martyrs is here; no reproach; no scandal of the Cross; no persecution to those that will live godly. Nothing is to be heard of, from the beginning to the end, but kings, nobles, warriors, bowing down before him. Thousands are converted, without any opposition at all; twelve thousand at one sermon. If these things were so, either there was then no devil in the world, or St. Patrick did not preach the Gospel of Christ’”

As to the monkish traditions that in the seventh or eighth century Ireland was sown thick with colleges, and the whole island a centre whence piety and learning streamed on wondering mankind; “this,” says Wesley bluntly, “ranks with the history of Bel and the Dragon.”

Walpole’s “Historic Doubts” convinced Wesley that Richard III. was neither a hunchback nor a savage, and he explains the univer.sal tradition to the contrary by saying that, “for fifty years no one could contradict that account but at the peril of his head.” Wesley finds time and curiosity enough to visit the Waxworks in Spring Gardens, and reports that most of these royalties show their characters in the countenance, and very unamiable characters, apparently, they exhibit. “Sense and majesty appear in the King of Spain; dulness and sottishness in the King of France; infernal subtlety in the late King of Prussia (as well as in the skeleton Voltaire); calmness and humanity in the Emperor, and King of Portugal; exquisite stupidity in the Prince of Orange; and amazing coarseness, with everything that is unamiable, in the Czarina.” Wesley’s views of “that poor injured woman, Mary Queen of Scots,” will delight most Scotchmen. He records that Dr. Stuart, in his “History of Scotland,” “proves, beyond all possibility of doubt, that the charges against Queen Mary were totally groundless; that she was betrayed basely by her own servants, from the beginning to the end; and that she was not only one of the best princesses then in Europe, but one of the most blameless, yea, and the most pious women!” Of James I., Wesley cherishes the darkest views; “a covetous and bloodthirsty tyrant” is his summary. Of George II., Wesley asks, “Will England ever have a better prince?”

Having strayed by some odd eddy of circumstance into the House of Lords, when the King was present, Wesley draws a picturesque little vignette of him.

“I was in the robe-chamber, adjoining the House of Lords, when the King put on his robes. His brow was much furrowed with age, and quite clouded with care. And is this all the world can give even to a king, all the grandeur it can afford? A blanket of ermine round his shoulders, so heavy and cumbersome he can scarce move under it. An huge heap of borrowed hair, with a few plates of gold and glittering stones upon his head! Alas, what a bauble is human greatness!”

Wesley, on another occasion, spends two or three hours in the House of Lords, and says, “I had frequently heard that this was the most venerable assembly in Europe, but how was I disappointed!”

Wesley’s literary judgments are equally positive and unconventional. He has no superstitious regard for great reputations; he thumps them, indeed, with a courage which is always amusing, and sometimes very refreshing. Rousseau he describes as “a shallow yet supercilious infidel, two degrees below Voltaire.” “Sure,” he cries, “a more consummate coxcomb never saw the sun.”

“He is a mere misanthrope; a cynic all over. So, indeed, is his brother-infidel, Voltaire; and well-nigh as great a coxcomb. As to his book, the advices which are good are trite and common, only disguised under new expressions. And those which are new, which are really his own, are lighter than vanity itself. Such discoveries I always expect from those who are too wise to believe their Bibles.”

Voltaire’s name is made the text of a very amusing discussion on languages. Wesley has read the “Henriade,” and as a result he says —

I was more than ever convinced, that the French is the poorest, meanest language in Europe; that it is no more comparable to the German or Spanish, than a bagpipe is to an organ;

WESLF.Y AND HIS CENTURY

and that, with regard to poetry in particular, considering the incorrigible uncouthness of their measure, and their always writing in rhyme (to say nothing of their vile double rhymes, nay, and frequent false rhymes), it is as impossible to write a fine poem in French, as to make fine music upon a Jew’s harp!”

Sterne fares badly at John Wesley’s hands, as might be expected. Two men more absolutely opposed in temper and genius can hardly be imagined. “The word ‘sentimental,’” Wesley says, “is not sense; he might as well have used the word ‘continental,’” and the “Sentimental Journey” he sums up in the phrase, “One fool makes many.” Where questions of morality are concerned, Wesley’s judgment is inexorable. He made a careful study of Macchiavelli’s famous and wicked book.

“I weighed the sentiments that were less common; transcribed the passages wherein they were contained; compared one passage with another, and endeavoured to form a cool, impartial judgment. And my cool judgment is, that if all the other doctrines of devils which have been committed to writing since letters were in the world were collected together in one volume, it would fall short of this; and that should a prince form himself by this book, so calmly recommending hypocrisy, treachery, lying, robbery, oppression, adultery, whoredom, and murder of all kinds, Domitian or Nero would be an angel of light compared to that man.”

Of an English writer, equally evil in his teaching, Wesley writes — perhaps because he was an Englishman — in yet severer terms. He had read Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees,” and finds it more atrocious than Macchiavelli’s “Prince.”

“The Italian recommends only a few vices, as useful to some particular men, and on some particular occasions; but the Englishman loves and cordially recommends vice of every kind, not only as useful now and then, but as absolutely necessary at all times for all communities!”

But if Wesley is stern against immoral teaching, he is quick to see, and generous to praise, any good even in those most unlike himself. He read “that surprising book the ‘Life of Ignatius Loyola,’” and says “he was surely one of the greatest men that ever was engaged in the support of so bad a cause.”

The belief that God’s mercy was co-extensive with His universe; that sound faith might be hidden beneath the appearance of heresy, and that many will be saved by Christ who never heard the name of Christ, was held by Wesley strongly. Thus he says: “I read to-day part of the meditations of Marcus Antoninus. What a strange emperor! And what a strange heathen!... I make no doubt but this is one of those ‘many who shall come from the East and the West, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while the children of the kingdom, nominal Christians, are shut out.’” On the other hand, he thinks it open to grave doubt “whether Judas claims so hot a place in hell as Alexander the Great!” He plainly holds the greatest soldier of all history was little better than a murderer on a great scale, as “he slew thousands, both in battle, and in and after taking cities, for no other crime than defending their wives and children.”

Wesley’s judgments of ecclesiastical persons and events are marked by robust good sense. He reads the history of the Puritans, and is able to see both the cruelty of their oppressors and the wroug-headedness of the Puritans themselves. “I stand in amaze, first, at the execrable spirit of persecution which drove these venerable men out of the Church, and with which Queen Elizabeth’s clergy were as deeply tinctured as ever Queen Mary’s were; secondly, at the weakness of those holy confessors, many of whom spent so much of their time and strength in disputing about surplices and hoods, or kneeling at the Lord’s Supper.” He reads Baxter’s “History of the Councils,” and is filled with righteous anger at the story of what Christ’s earthly Church has suffered from those who imagined they were serving it.

“What a company of execrable wretches have they been (one cannot justly give them a milder title), who have almost in every age since St. Cyprian taken upon them to govern the Church! How has one Council been perpetually cursing another, and delivering all over to Satan, whether predecessors or contemporaries, who did not implicitly receive their determinations, though generally trifling, sometimes false, and frequently unintelligible or self-contradictory! Surely Mahometanism was let loose to reform the Christians!”

On some subjects Wesley cherished peculiar views. He believed, for example, that a future life for animals was possible, or even probable. The creatures have suffered in that reign of pain and death which the sin of man has called into existence; why should they not share in the results of man’s redemption? The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together; and, says Wesley, “whether men attend or not, their groans are not dispersed in idle” air, but enter into the ears of Him Who made them.” And this groaning creation “waits for the redemption.” “The promise, ‘Neither shall there be any more pain,’ will take place,” says Wesley, “not in man alone, but in every creature according to his capacity; the whole brute creation will be restored to all that they have lost. And what,” he asks, “if it should please the all-wise and all-gracious Creator to raise them higher in the scale of beings? What if it should please Him, when He makes us equal to angels, to make them what we are now — creatures capable of God?”

Coleridge adds a somewhat cruel footnote to these sentences. “There is no meaning,” he says, “in the word ‘them’ as applied to flies, fish, worms, &c. If I suffer a door to fall in pieces and put a dog in the passage instead, can I be said to have raised the door into a dog?”

Wesley believed in witches; not in any particular witch, that is, but in the reality, in some cases, of witchcraft. He had persuaded himself, indeed, that to surrender belief in witchcraft would be to quarrel with the authority of the Bible; a circumstance which proves that his logic was not always sufficiently qualified by intelligence.

While in so many respects in advance of his century, Wesley, in brief, in some matters shared its prejudices. It must be remembered that in the eighteenth century his Majesty’s judges “believed in witches,” and the laws of the realm treated witchcraft as a real and deadly fact, to be dealt with adequately only by the stake or the gallows. Two witches were executed at Northampton in 1705, and five more in 1712. A woman was executed in Scotland for witchcraft in 1722. When the law took witchcraft seriously enough to hang or burn women supposed to practise the black art, Wesley may be forgiven for believing genliine cases of witchcraft to exist.

Wesley’s political opinions were sometimes of an odd complexion. In his famous letter to Lord North on the American troubles he sets out by saying, “I am a High Churchman, the sou of a High Churchman, bred up from my childhood in the highest uotions of passive obedience and non-resistance,” and those words exi)ress with perfect accuracy the general bent of Wesley’s politics. But his conscience, or his reason, when any adequate occasion arose, broke away completely from the intolerant and stupid Toryism by which Great Britain, through wide spaces of the eighteenth century, was hag-ridden.

On the American trouble, Wesley’s publications, it must be admitted, are of a very tangled and contradictory sort, due to the conflict betwixt the original Tory bias inherited from his father, and his own larger and wiser mind. In 1T(»8, in his ‘Tree Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs,” he declared he was not able to defend the measures which had been taken in regard to America. “F doubt,” he added, “whether any man can defend them, either on the foot of law, equity, or prudence.” But in 1775 he published his “Calm Address to our American Colonies.” That address was only Dr. Johnson’s pamphlet, “Taxation no Tyranny,” slightly abridged, and it reflected Johnson’s stubborn Tory prejudices. The discontented Americans, the pamphlet argued, were the de- .scendants of men who either had no votes, or had resigned them by emigration. They had a right to the shelter of the laws, but had no right to any voice in their making. Their only business in the matter of taxes was to pay them. Wesley’s pamphlet was for the British Cabinet an immense gain, but for the public generally it was an immense iperplexity. Wesley seemed to be guilty of a double offence. He had turned his back on himself; he had stolen Dr. Johnson’s thunder.

A Baptist minister named Caleb Evans, a man of intelligence and character, produced a new charge against Wesley. He had recommended a certain iamphlet, “An Argument in Defence of the Exclusive Right of the Colonists to Tax Themselves,” and now he had himself written a pamphlet in an exactly opposite sense. Wesley denied that he had seen the book, but abimdant evidence was produced to show that this was not the case. He had certainly recommended the book to some of his friends. Wesley’s own explanation came later, and was sufficiently dear. Writing to a correspondent, he says: — “I will simply tell you the thing as it is. As I was returning from the Leeds Conference, one gave me the tract which you refer to, part of which I read on my journey. The spirit of it I observed to be admirably good, and I then thought the arguments conclusive. In consequence of which, I suppose (though I do not remember it), I recommended it both to you and others; but I had so entirely forgotten it that, even when it was brought to me the other day, I -could not recollect that I had seen it.”

This cleared Wesley from one charge, but there remained the undeniable fact that he had published two sets of completely opposite ojiinions on the American trouble. Wesley explains the matter in a letter so characteristic, alike in its brevity and its frankness, that it deserves to be reproduced: —

“Rev. Sir, — You affirm (1) that I once ‘doubted whether the measures taken with respect to America could be defended, either on the foot of law, equity, or prudence.’ I did doubt of these five years, nay, indeed, five months ago. You affirm (2) that I ‘declared’ (last year) ‘the Americans were an oppressed, injured people.’ I do not remember that I did; but very possibly I might. You affirm (3) that I then ‘strongly recommended an argument for the exclusive right of the colonies to tax themselves.’ I believe I did; but I am now of another mind.”

The Tory in Wesley, in a word, responding to the strident accents of that yet more robust Tory, Dr. Johnson, was now triumphant! And yet, even on the American question, Wesley somehow read the situation, and was able to forecast its issue, better than nearly all the statesmen of his time. There is something of a prophetic strain in his letter to Lord North: —

“Is it common-sense to use force towards the Americans? Whatever has been affirmed, these men will not be frightened, and they will not be conquered easily. Some of our valiant officers say that ‘two thousand men will clear America of these rebels.’ No, nor twenty thousand, be they rebels or not, not perhaps treble that number. They are strong; they are valiant; they are one and all enthusiasts, enthusiasts for liberty, calm, deliberate enthusiasts. In a short time they will understand discipline as well as their assailants. But you are informed ‘they are divided among themselves.’ So was poor Rehoboam informed concerning the ten tribes; so was Philip informed concerning the people of the Netherlands. No; they are terribly united; they think they are contending for their wives, children, and liberty. Their supplies are at hand, ours are three thousand miles off. Are we able to conquer the Americans, suppose they are left to themselves? We are not sure of this, nor are we sure that all our neighbours will stand stock-still.”

In Wesley’s Journal are to be found many curious self-judgments. He watches himself, the play of his own mind, the changes of his own feelings, the effect external things have upon him; and generally contemplates himself with a sort of detached and scientific interest which is amusing. Thus, in his Journal, under date August 8, 1756, he writes, “I find it of great use to be in suspense. It is an excellent means of breaking our will.” Wesley knew that — if only as the result of the rush of crowding duties, all clamouring for instant settlement — he ran the risk of hasty decisions. The practice of settling a matter offhand, and too often on half knowledge, grew into a tyrannical habit. So he found a healthful discipline in what to most people is the secret of weakness — the habit of suspense.

Wesley notes, too, the ebb and flow of his own tastes. Here is an entry in his Journal which shows how this busiest of living men, absorbed in the affairs of other people, yet found time to study himself: —

“Tuesday, July 3, 1764. — I was reflecting on an odd circumstance which I cannot account for. I never relish a tune at first hearing, not till I have almost learned to sing it; and as I learn it more perfectly, I gradually lose my relish for it. I observe something similar in poetry; yea, in all the objects of imagination. I seldom relish verses at first hearing. Till I have heard them over and over, they give me no pleasure; and they give me next to none when I have heard them a few time more, so as to be quite familiar. Just so a face or a picture which does not strike me at first, becomes more pleasing as I grow more acquainted with it; but only to a certain point. For when I am too much acquainted, it is no longer pleasing. Oh, how imperfectly do we understand even the machine which we carry about us!”

It is amusing to notice how Wesley finds his very virtues are apt to become his snares. He was the most forgiving of men, but charity itself may become an enervation; and Wesley began to question whether he did not forgive too easily. “Others,” he says, “are most assaulted in the weak side of their soul; but with me it is quite otherwise. If I have any strength at all (and I have none but what I have received), it is in forgiving injuries. And on this very side T am assaulted, more frequently than on any other. Yet leave me not here one hour to myself, or 1 shall betray myself and Thee!”

Wesley’s habit of exaggerating the importance of the particular evil he was trying to mend finds an amusing illustration in the onslaught he made on that very harmless fluid — tea. He persuaded himself that he had only escaped from an attack of paralysis by giving up tea; and he believed that half the poverty of the nation might be abolished at a stroke, if people would abandon the use of this dangerous fluid. His argument against the use of tea is, in fact, a sort of unconscious burlesque of the logic to-day employed against the use of alcoholic liquors. He represents one obstinate objector saying, “Tea does me no harm; why, then, should I leave it off?” Wesley’s reply is that everybody is responsible for his example. A person of cast-iron stomach, capable of resisting the deadly corrosions of tea, might by his example tempt some weak brother to still swallow that poisonous fluid, to his ruin. “You have need,” Wesley cries to all his followers, “to abhor it as deadly poison, and to renounce it from this very hour!” Wesley himself gave up the use of tea, and substituted sugar and hot water for twelve years, until Dr. Fothergill, his medical attendant, ordered him to resume its use. And the author of the tract on tea for the rest of his life was a tea-drinker!

Perhaps the most striking exami)le of Wesley’s odd opinions is to be found in the history of Kingswood school. The inspiration to which the school owed its origin was noble. It was meant to be a provision for the children of his helpers. “Was it fit,” asked Wesley, “that the children of those who leave home, wife, and all that is dear to save souls from death should want what is needful either for soul or body?” Lady Maxwell supplied the funds for starting Kingswood, and Wesley seized the opportunity for creating what he fondly believed would be an ideal institution — a Christian school, a fountain of Christianised knowledge. No child was to be received over twelve years of age. and only the children of such parents as desired that they should be, “not almost, but altogether. Christians.” There was to be a Spartan strain in the school. The children of “tender” parents, Wesley said, had no business there; and evei“y parent was required to give a pledge that he would not take his child from school, “no, not for a day, till he took him for good and all.” But Wesley, much as he loved children, did not in the least understand child nature, and he drew up a time-table for the little boys of Kingswood which was admirably calculated to make them either lunatics or hypocrites.

They were to rise at four, winter and summer; each little boy was to spend the hour from four to five in prayer, singing, and self-examiuation. The humane imagination is distressed as it dwells on the spectacle of twenty-eight little boys, their senses drowsed with sleep, getting up at four o’clock on a bitter winter morning, and spending a whole hour in the process of examining the souls within their shivering little bodies. Then commenced the round of hard work, sustained by plain fare, and unlit by any cheerfulness of play. Wesley, says Southey, had learned a sour German proverb, “He that plays when he is a child will play when he is a man,” and he had forgotten the wholesome English saying, the reflex of cheerful common-sense, that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” No holidays, no games, no boy to be for an instant out of the company of a master — these were not the conditions to produce a healthy and happy boyhood.

As a matter of fact, Kingswood comes next to his own wife in the vexation it caused Wesley. Human nature was in quarrel with his dreadful time-table. He could not get masters to enforce it, or children to survive it. The school began with twenty-eight pupils; and the second year the number had shrunk to eighteen. Out of the eighteen, Wesley records that “four or five of them were very uncommonly wicked”; two had to be dismissed as incorrigible: and five more fled — wise youths! “I spent more money, time, and care on this than almost any design I ever had,” says Wesley. “I wonder how I am withheld from dropping the whole design, so many diflSculties continually attend it.” But it was not in his nature to abandon a plan easily. In 1766 he writes: “I told my whole mind to the masters and servants, and spoke to the children in a far stronger manner than I ever did before. I will kill or cure. I will have one or the other; a Christian school or none at all.”

A jury of mothers, empowered to sit in judgment on Wesley’s ideas of a Christian school, might have brought in a verdict which would have surprised him. The account of Kingswood given by Adam Clarke, a quite impar; tial witness, resembles nothing so miuh as a chapter from the records of “Dotheboys Hall” in “Nicholas Nickleby.” But Wesley was reluctant to give up an experinient <lear to him. So late as 1783, when the school had been thirty-five years in existence, a resolution of the Conference declares that “either the school should cease, or the rules of it be particularly observed; particularly that the children should never play, and that a master should be always present with them.”

The school, no doubt, produced some good scholars, and had a certain fame; and Wesley’s indomitable will, at the cost of much youthful suffering, prevailed. Wesley’s last reference to Kingswood, indeed, has in it a note of exultation. On September 11, 1789, he writes, “I went over to Kingswood. Sweet recess, where everything now is just as I wish! I spent some time with the children, all of whom behaved well.” But if we had a faithful transcript of the letters the poor little boys at Kingswood wrote to their mothers, we might discover that Wesley’s “sweet recess” wore, to the unhappy boys who dwelt in it, a very different aspect. Kingswood School achieved one result its founder never contemplated. It proves that he could, on occasion, blunder as badly as ordinary men. No mother can read the story of the school and quite forgive Wesley. A later and wiser Methodism, it is pleasant to record, has completely transfigured the institution. To-day it reaches Wesley’s ends without using his methods.