Wesley’s Critics
It is interesting — it may serve, indeed, to correct the over-estimate of uncritical admirers — to note the aspect Wesley wears when contemplated through unfriendly spectacles. Of the purely domestic biographies of Wesley — lives written by his own followers — no word need be said here; but Wesley has been unfortunate in what may be called his outside biographers. To translate such a career as his into purely literary terms is a difficult task; and an adequate literary representation of the man and his work is not easily discoverable.
Southey’s “Life,” it is true, is a bit of careful workmanship, showing both skill and industry. But there is a fatal breach of spiritual sympathy betwixt Southey and his subject. He misreads Wesley’s character completely, and discovers in a vulgar love of power the explanation of Wesley’s amazing toils! Miss Wedgwood’s “John Wesley” has incomparably more spiritual insight than Southey’s “Life.” If Miss Wedgwood has not philosophic penetration, quick, womanly intuition is a very adequate substitute for it. But her work deals inadequately with the facts of Wesley’s career; it does not pretend to be either a history or a biography. Isaac Taylor’s “Methodism” has still less of either history or biography than Miss Wedgwood’s work; it is a mere tangle of misty generalisations. Canon Overton’s “Wesley” has about it a pleasant honesty and directness; but it is an attempt to button up John Wesley and his whole work in an Anglican cassock. Snell’s “Wesley” is a very inadequate monograph. It has neither facts enough for a biography, nor insight enough for a philosoi)hy.
Leslie Stephen, in his “History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century,” gives much space to Wesley and the Revival, and he is, in some respects, the most formidable critic both of the man and the movement. He has a wide knowledge of the period, though his knowledge has both the merits and the defects which mark a barrister’s knowledge of his brief. It is fluent, but external. And Stephen makes no attempt to see the landscape, and to set Wesley and his work in true historical perspective; yet his authority as a critic makes his estimate impressive for the average reader.
On some serious grounds, of course, Sir Leslie Stephen may be challenged in advance, as a competent judge of Wesley and his work. He is disqualified for that oflBce by his own deep-seated prepossessions. He sets out, for example, by dismissing the validity of spiritual phenomena from the realm of intellectual respect. This is as though somebody undertook a criticism of Newton’s “Principia,” and set out by a quarrel with mathematics. Stephen, too, judges the Revival of the eighteenth century by purely literary tests, and as a contribution to what he calls philosophy. This, again, is as though one judged a specific for the plague by the colour of the label on the bottle which holds it.
In spite of himself, however, Leslie Stephen is betrayed again and again into spacious compliments to Wesley and his work. “Wesleyanism” he calls “the most important phenomenon of the century.” Of Wesley himself, he says that “no such leader of men appeared in the eighteenth century”; and yet it is the century of Marlborough; of the two Pitts; of Clive, and of Warren Hastings; of Voltaire; of Frederick the Great, and of George Washington! Gtephen is obviously moved to a degree he is reluctant to confess by admiration of Law — with his profound spirituality, his clear vision of eternal things; but he thinks Wesley the more commanding figure. “Law,” he says, “retired from the world; Wesley sought to subdue the world.”
Yet Leslie Stephen’s compliments are spoiled by blunders nothing less than wonderful in a man so able — blunders which argue a sort of iutellectnal, as well as spiritual blindness. Thus he says that Wesley’s “amazing soundness of health” explains the radiant character of his religion! It would be difficult to discover a more complete example of the inversion of cause and effect than this. It is like saying that the deei-rooted strength of the oak is due to the acorns which hang from its branches. Wesley’s theology, again, he traces to non-theological roots — a performance which shows that
Stephen missed the essential keynote of Wesley’s character. He says, for example, that he is an Arminian, not on any grounds of reason, but simply “from the instinct of a born ruler of men,” His belief at this point is not built on the authority of Scripture, or on the processess of philosophy, but only on “a keen sense of practical efficiency.” “He is an Arminian that he may preach repentance.”
Such a travesty of Wesley’s sermon on “Free Grace” seems to prove that Stephen had never read it. Leslie Stephen indeed betrays an uneasy consciousness that he is wading in waters too deep for his sounding, and dealing with matters beyond the categories of his logic. He confesses, for example, that when criticising Law’s writings, he is conscious that he somewhat resembles Mephistopheles in the cathedral!
The summary of the teaching of Wesley and his helpers offered by Leslie Stephen certainly represents a curious completeness of misconception. He undertakes to put himself at the standpoint of the preachers of the Revival: —
“What, they seemed to have tacitly inquired, is the argument which will induce an ignorant miner or a small tradesman in a country town to give up drinking and cock-fighting? The obvious answer was: Tell him that he is going straight to hell-fire to be tortured for all eternity. Preach that consoling truth to him long enough, and vigorously enough, and in a large enough crowd of his fellows, and he may be thrown into a fit of excitement that may form a crisis in his life. Represent God to him by the image most familiar to his imagination as a severe creditor Who won’t excuse a farthing of the debt, and Christ as the Benefactor Who has freely offered to clear the score. The doctrine may not be very refined or philosophical; but it is suflBciently congenial to the vague beliefs implanted in his mind by tradition, to give a leverage for your appeals.’”
Now, almost every sentence in Wesley’s “Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion” refutes that burlesque of the teaching of the great Revival. We have only to put beside Stephen’s travesty Wesley’s own statement of the theology he and his helpers taught to see this.
“We see on every side (wrote Wesley), either men of no religion at all, or men of a lifeless, formal religion. We are grieved
^“Pjstory of European Thought,” vol. ii. p. 421. at the sight, and should greatly rejoice, if by any means we might convince some, that there is a better religion to be attained, a religion worthy of God that gave it. And this we conceive to be no other than love; the love of Grod and of all mankind, the loving God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, as having first loved us, as the Fountain of all the good we have received, and of all we ever hope to enjoy; and the loving every soul which God hath made, every man on earth, as our own soul.
“This love we believe to be the medicine of life, the never-failing remedy, for all the evils of a disordered world, for all the miseries and vices of men. Wherever this is, there are virtue and happiness, going hand in hand. There is humbleness of mind, gentleness, long-suffering, the whole image of God, and, at the same time, a peace that passeth all understanding, and joy unspeakable and full of glory.
“‘Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind;
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned:
Desires composed, affections ever even.
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heaven.’
“This religion we long to see established in the world, a religion of love, and joy, and peace, having its seat in the heart, in the inmost soul, but ever showing itself, by its fruits, continually springing forth not only in all innocence (for love worketh no ill to his neighbour), but likewise in every kind of beneficence, spreading virtue and happiness all around it.
“We declare it to all mankind: for we desire not that others should wander out of the way, as we have done before them; but rather that they may profit by our loss, that they may go (though we did not, having then no man to guide us) the straight “way to the religion of love, even by faith.”*
These sentences are sufficient to prove that looking at the teaching of the Revival through Leslie Stephen’s account of it, is like contemplating a landscape through a bit of smoked glass.
This, again, is how Leslie Stephen, on philosophical grounds, undertakes to explain Methodism, and to predict its failure: —
“The true explanation is to be found in the growth of a great population outside the rusty ecclesiastical machinery. The refuse thus cast aside took fire by spontaneous combustion. The great masses of the untaught and uncared for inherited a tradition of the old theology. As they multiplied and developed, the need of some mode of satisfying the religious instincts became more pressing; and, as the pure sceptics had nothing to say, and the oflScial clergy could only say something in which they did not believe, Wesley’s resuscitation of the old creed gave just the
^“Appeal,” pp. 1, 2.
WESLF.Y AND HTS CENTURY
necessary impulse. Its want of any direct connection with that speculative movement could not stifle it, but it condemned it to barrenness. Wesleyanism in the eighteenth century represents heat without light — a blind protest of the masses, and a vague feeling after some satisfaction to the instinct which ends only in a recrudescence of obsolete ideas.’”
Now, as a scientific interpretation of a great historical phenomenon, this explanation is nothing less than childish. The spiritual movement which, to borrow the words of one of the best of English historians, “reformed our prisons, abolished the slave-trade, taught clemency to our penal laws, gave the first impulse to our popular education,” is, when translated into the terms of Leslie Stephen’s philosophy, nothing more than a certain accidental “accumulation of human refuse” taking fire by “spontaneous combustion.” This is like oflfering the burning of a dungheap as an explanation of the rise in the Eastern skies of some great planet.
Such a misreading of plain English, on the part of a critic so able, and in purpose so honest, is nothing less than a literary curiosity. But how can a man, himself without spiritual faith, either understand or interxjret a movement so intensely spiritual as that of which Wesley is the symbol? Leslie Stephen’s sceptical assumptions seem to bring with them a sort of paralysis of the critical faculties.
Stephen, for example, undertakes to describe and assess Wesley’s great treatise on “Original Sin.” Wesley here is not dealing with a theological abstraction — a puzzle in logic, a problem in philosophy. He is discussing the great central fact in human history — the existence of moral evil; a fact whose witness lies deep in human consciousness itself, and whose record is written on every page of the world’s story. Leslie Stephen discovers in the treatise nothing but “a wearisome wrangle over texts with little reference to the deeper philosophical grounds of the problem.”
Now, the Bible, on any reading of its character, is the great spiritual text-book of the human race. No other book pierces so deeply into the very heart of the great mystery of human life — the existence of evil. But Leslie
•“History of European Thought,” vol. ii. p. 424.
Stephen assumes in advance that the Bible on this subject is out of court. Any reference to it may be dismissed as “a wearisome wrangle over texts.” The problem is purely philosophical, and is capable of being dealt with only by philosophers; and by philosophers whose chief qualification lies in the fact that they reject the Bible! Theologians do not deserve so much as a hearing in such a cause. Now, this is as if one contended that any reference to the Nautical Almanac in the business of navigation must be an impertinence!
The vice of all such criticism of Wesley and the Revival is to be found in the silent assumption that the intellect, in the only form deserving of respect, must be always on the side of scepticism. Stephen describes, for example, the attitude towards Christianity which the general human mind took in the eighteenth century. “The intellectual,” he says, “became sceptical with Hume; the imaginative turned mystics with Law; while those in whom the moral sense and a keen eye for the facts of life were most strongly developed, sympathised with Wesley.” But the two later groups are silently dismissed from the “intellectual” realm, and the authority of “intellect” is left with the sceptics! And underlying all Leslie Stephen’s criticisms of the Revival, and vitiating them, is the assumption, marked by an arrogance so complete that it is unconscious of itself, that literature is more than religion, and nobler; that the intellect is higher than the conscience; that to write a book is a better title to human fame than to reform a nation; that what cannot be expressed in literary terms, and measured by literary tests, has no title to enduring remembrance.
Fletcher of Madeley, and men of his type, are to be “pitied,” because, “while discussing matters which seem to them of importance” — such matters as sin and its remedy; the soul and its relation to God; life and death and judgment to come — “they are really without any adequate system of philosophy.” They are unconscious, indeed, that “a philosophy” is necessary; so they are dismissed as belonging to the mere “side-currents of the world’s thought”; while Rousseau, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hume “belong to the main stream of European thought.” Wesley’s system, we are assured, is pre-doomed to barrenness, because it “has no philosophic basis.”
And yet Stephen admits Wesley “founded a body which, eighty years after his death, could boast of 12,000,000 adherents, and whose reaction upon other bodies is fully as important as its direct influence.” And what philosopher, it may be asked, has ever performed such a miracle! Now, if Wesley ha only spent his life, and employed his intense industry, in spinning some shining web of “philosophy,” he might have found a place beside Hume or Gibbon or Voltaire! Instead of wandering in such high realms, Wesley kept to the common earth. His aim, as Leslie Stephen puts it, was “to stamp out vice, to suppress drinking and debauchery, to show men the plain path to heaven, and force them into it by intelligible threats and promises.” “He differs,” Stephen goes on to explain, “from the ordinary moralists in the strong conviction that a mere collection of good precepts will never change men’s lives without an appeal to their feelings and their imagination.”
Wesley himself might have accepted the statement that his aim was “to stamp out vice,” and “to show men the plain path to heaven”; but he would have protested vehemently that he did not find the energy which was to cleanse human life in any appeal to the mere feeling and imagination of his hearers. He found that healing force in quite another realm; in the spiritual energies which stream from the cross of Jesus Christ, and in the saving oflSces of the Holy Spirit. And working with these sublime forces he did “stamp out vice” in vast multitudes. He did this for more than fifty years; did it on a scale without precedent in English history, and did it in a fashion so enduring, that to-day great Churches in every land where the English tongue is spoken bear his name. Suppose Hume or Gibbon had been set this task!
This whole criticism of Wesley and his work, like nearly every other literary explanation of the man and his movement yet attempted, is utterly vitiated by the false scale of values on which it proceeds. The greatest forces in human life, however, are not philosophical theories, but moral impulses. And the final standard for men and theories is not intellectual, but ethical.
Which was the nobler figure — the figure which represents the central stream of European thought — Robert Raikes, the Gloucestershire banker, who invented Sunday-schools; or Rousseau, stealiug through the darkness of a street in Paris to drop his tifth illegitimate child into the receiving-box of a foundling hospital, and then hastening back to add a uew paragraph to his Contrat Social?
It is possible to put side by side, as opposing types, men who were contemporaries in the eighteenth century: Hume, weaving metaphysical arguments to prove miracles impossible, and Silas Told, the prisoner’s friend, actually working spiritual miracles in the cells of Newgate; Gibbon, writing those famous chapters in his great history for the destruction of Christian faith, and Law, Gibbon’s tutor, making Christianity credible, on Gibbon’s own testimony, by his life; Rousseau, writing sentimental discourses, while abandoning his own children, and Howard, spending his life in visiting the prisons of Europe, and giving humanity a new authority over the conscience of the race by his example. These are figures in picturesque opposition to each other; and literature reserves its highest honours for one set — for Hume and Gibbon, for Voltaire and Rousseau I Leslie Stephen declares that they, and they only, “belong to the main stream of European thought.”
But these judgments proceed, it must be repeated, on a false scale of values. Life is more than speculation; morality is greater than literature. To save a drunkard from his vice, to make a harlot chaste, a wife-beater gentle, a thief honest; to cleanse a city slum, to dry a widow’s tears, to shelter a child’s helplessness, this is not merely a better contribution to the world’s life than to write the most ingenious philosophical treatise, or to teach words to march in rhyme through the stanzas of a great poem. It represents a loftier order of forces.
Human judgment, to be absolutely true, must reflect the divine judgment. To think as God thinks, to love what He loves, to hate what He hates, to assess all things as by His judgment — this is the last and highest effort of human wisdom. And tried by that great test, who stands higher; Hume or Wesley, Gibbon or Law, Rousseau or Fletcher? Leslie Stephen, and men of his school, vote with the philosophei’s; but the human conscience stands arrayed on the side of the saints I And the best human intelligence, as soon as it has come to terms with conscience, will be on their side too!
It is interesting to speculate how Wesley would have borne himself had he lived in the hurry and press of the twentieth century. Would his theory of life and religion have stood the challenge of modern problems? How would he have been affected by the criticism which resolves the Bible into a jumble of undated and authorless myths? With what eyes would Wesley have looked, that is to say, on a Rainbow Bible? How would he have dealt with all the new, fermenting unbeliefs, bred of science, or of half-science? Would his faith have been shaken by the biology which links man to the ape; the astronomy that dwarfs the solar system itself to a mere point in the measureless depths of the universe, and sees the earth as an insignificant speck in those awful spaces? How would he have dealt with the secular temper of the present age; the temper which cares very much for this world and leaves the next out of its arithmetic?
It is idle to say that these things do not count. Wesley in the twentieth century would have been a different man from Wesley in the eighteenth century. Leslie Stephen is moved to a sort of angry wonder at Wesley’s indifference to what he regards as the victorious attack of Hume and Gibbon on the Christian faith. Although these men were his contemporaries, yet Wesley, he complains, is “as indifferent to the doubts expressed by Hume as if the two men had lived in different hemispheres or centuries.” The explanation, of course, lies in the fact that Wesley lived in a realm where these doubts did not run! He, no doubt, would have agreed with De Quincey’s triumphant answer to Hume; but he had a better answer than even that. The logic designed to prove miracles could not happen — or, at least, could not be proved, if they did happen — was idle breath to a man who saw miracles of the highest order — spiritual miracles, that is — happening daily.
And it may be confidently said Wesley would have been unshaken by even the strenuous and many-voiced unbelief of to-day. The larger knowledge of the twentieth century might have altered the accent of his teaching, but not its substance. It might have varied the form of its work; it would not have changed its aim, nor have lessened its energy. He would have fallen back on the triumphant certainties of his own experience.
He would have held firm to his belief in the validity of spiritual phenomena, the veracity of the spiritual consciousness. The triumphant logic of the verified results of Christianity would have been for Wesley in the twentieth century — as it was to him in the eighteenth century — the rock on which he stood. God, he would have said, is not a problem to be solved; He is a person to be known; and he would have borrowed Tennyson’s fine line —
“Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”
He would have claimed that Spirit answers to spirit in us; the living Spirit of God to the believing human spirit.
And Wesley, even amid the tumult and dust of modern life, would have kept in clear vision the eternal perspective of life and duty, which was his characteristic. Duty is more urgent than speculation. We shall not be judged by what we know, but by what we do. Religion has a thousand problems challenging solution; they will challenge solution still, perhaps ten thousand years hence, and in other worlds. But duty is the one luminous point in human life. There are things which are near, urgent, sacred; things as to which no debate is possible — the plain law of obedience; of surrender to God; of faith in Christ; of service to our fellow-men. Christianity, he would have said, is a realised and supernatural deliverance, to be received by faith; and as to the reality of which our own deepest consciousness can judge. The Bible is not an old almanac, about which the chief thing is the correctness of its dates. The critics, to his clear and earnest eye, would have seemed like men so occupied in discussing the shape of the vessel which carries the living water of truth, and the clay of which it is composed, that they forget the precious draught itself for lack of which the world is perishing.
The Bible, he would have said, on any theory, is a divine revelation; a law of conduct, a chart by which we are to sail. It is not a puzzle to be solved, but a system of precepts to be obeyed. And Wesley would have called on listening crowds to-day in accents as urgent and convinced as he did over a hundred years ago, to accept the message
WESLEY AND HTS CENTURY
of the divine boolc, ami to shape life by its laws. The l)riiK’iples, in a word, on which Wesley believed and lived and worked in the eighteenth century would, for hiui, have been just as effective if they had been suddenly transferred to the twentieth century.