Epilogue: The Continuity of Spiritual Impulse
It is possible to-day, as it never was before, to set Methodism in the perspective of history; to analyse and assess it; to discover the essential and imperishable characteristics in which lie the secret of its growth. And in (he actual illumination of events an answer can be found to the question, what Divine purpose there was, and is, in the Church which Wesley founded?
There is a temptation to define Methodism by negatives. It was not, like the great movement which bears the name of Luther, a theological reformation, a re-discovery of doctrine. It was not, like the English Reformation in the time of Henry VIII., a political movement. It was not, like the Scottish Reformation, a quarrel about ecclesiastical theories. But there is no adequate definition in a series of negatives, drawn out to no nuitter what length.
It is common, again, to fix upon some one special characteristic of Methodism, and offer the part as an explanation of the whole. That Methodism stands for the evangelical, as against the sacerdotal, version of Christianity has become a platitude. That it stands for the concrete, as against the metaphysical reading of theology, is a sister platitude. A creed drawn out in metaphysical propositions is one thing; a creed translated into terms of conduct, verified in the consciousness, a force shaping speech and temper and life, is quite another thing. “Experience” fills a large space in the terminology and literature of Methodism; and “experience” in the Methodist sense means doctrine translated into human and living terms.
Methodism, it is usual to say, stands for spiritual fact as against external form in ecclesiastical afifairs; and this is perfectly true.’ Varieties of Church order — Episcopal or Presbyterian — belong to the category of secondary values. Methodism, as a matter of fact, flourishes equally well with bishops or without them. The notion that the infinite and all-tender grace of Christ can trickle S09 through an ecclesiastical pipe of only one pattern is, to Methodism, abhorrent. If any one invited the world to believe that the sun shines on flowers of only one tint, the answer would be not merely that such a theory is in quarrel with the whole science of botany. Every cottage garden is its refutation! Every patch of flower-sprinkled grass disproves it.’ And the theory that God’s grace is confined to only one variety of ecclesiastical form is not only in quarrel with the essential genius of Christianity; it is contradicted by the visible facts of the world.
Methodism, again, stands for the imperial as against the parochial temper in Church work. “The world is my parish” was Wesley’s immortal phrase; inverting the common rule in which the “parish” becomes the world. The tradition Whitefield and Wesley created when they stepped from the pulpit to the hillside and the street, and began open-air preaching, is its inheritance. It stands, that is, for the aggressive as against the purely apologetic and defensive spirit in Christian service. And it is built on the present, as against the merely historic, theory of the office and power of the Holy Spirit. It believes, as we have already said, that Pentecost was not one particular cluster of hours, in an Eastern city, two thousand years distant. Pentecost lies about us! We are living in it; its airs blow upon us. The fiery tongues are gone, but the spiritual energies of which they were the symbol are the possession of the Church of to-day.
The unconfessed — perhaps the unconscious — but certainly the practical belief of a considerable portion of Christendom, is that the Holy Spirit fell upon the Church once, and shaped its history; but at a given date the Divine Spirit emigrated; and the Church of to-day is left without direct Divine guidance. It can only ascertain what is the will of that great Agent in human redemption by painfully searching amid the dusty records of far-off centuries!
Methodism, it may be added, is pledged to the family theory of Church relatioushij). Its membership is built on community of speech and experience; on a living and declared partnership in all the great forces of the spiritual life.
But all such definitions are partial. They express particular aspects of Methodism; they do not reach its central and unifying characteristic. Methodism, first and last, is the re-aflBrmation of the spiritual element in Christianity. It is the re-emergence in history, and in human consciousness, of the great spiritual forces which are the vital and essential characteristics of Christianity. The name, the machinery, the characteristic beliefs, the household bonds, the practical ideals of Methodism may exist; but they are not in themselves Methodism. They are simply the channels through which, if they are to have any value, must run that vivifying and supernatural impulse, the wave of spiritual energy, which was the essential characteristic of Wesley’s work.
And the most impressive feature of that work — that which differentiates it from so many other historic revivals, and is in a special sense the very signature of God upon it — is the unbroken continuity of spiritual impulse which runs through its history. Luther once said that no revival could last more than thirty years. Isaac Taylor extends the term to fifty years. And it has to be frankly admitted that time is a remor.seless critic of even religious movements. Its arresting force is visible in the spiritual realm. A great revival is usually linked to a single commanding figure, as, for example, with that of Jonathan Edwards, or of Thomas Finney in America, of the Erskines or McCheyne in Scotland, of Whitefield in England, of Dwight L. Moody in later times, &c. And the revival ends with the individual life; sometimes, indeed, before it. It is a wave that spends itself within some little definite area of time. Rarely does it outrun the span of a generation. A great revivalist, like a great statesman, easily becomes a spent force.
But the feature which separates Wesley’s work from other historic revivals is the sustained energy of spiritual force which marks it. This continuity of spiritual impulse ran through the whole term of Wesley’s life. His message kept to the very last its power to attract and sway crowds. The stream of conversions under his preaching never ceased to flow. And the movement which began with Wesley did not die with him. It survived his death. What is much more wonderful, it survived all the ecclesiastical quarrels which broke out amongst his followers after his death. A hundred temporary blunders in policy have not destroyed it. It has persisted in spite of half-a-dozen disruptions. It has run through a whole century since without rest or failure. It burns on with unquenched flame under all skies.
Methodism, it may be claimed, when set in the light of history, satisfies Newman’s famous seven tests of the reality of a Church — preservation of type, continuity of principle, power of ‘assimilation, logical sequence, anticipation of the future, conservative action on the past, and — most triumphant of all — undying vitality.
No one can realise the wonder of this sustained energy of life who does not remember how broken, how acrid with ecclesiastical quarrels, has been — through wide spaces, at least — the history of Methodism since its founder died. On all the analogies of history Methodism, when Wesley died, might have been expected to break up into quarrelling fragments, and to have expired in a tangle of schisms. The quarrels came fast and thick. There was one division within seven years of Wesley’s death; three in the first twenty-five years after his death; and a fourth a little later, the most tragical of all. The quarrels of 1847-50 cost the parent Church, in four sad years, more members than Wesley gained in forty years. And the divisions of Methodism, speaking generally, have had less justification in reason than any other to be found in the history of Christ’s Church. Not one of them represents a protest against doctrinal error, or a struggle for spiritual freedom.
The best way of realising how unnecessary were the divisions of Methodism, how microscopic the questions which gave birth to them, is to consider the aspect they wear to outsiders. Any respectable encyclopaedia which tries to express in plain English what is the exact difference betwixt a Wesleyan Methodist, a Primitive Methodist, a Bible Christian, or a United Free Methodist, &c., finds itself simply bankrupt. One of the best English encyclopaedias, for example, after an anxious study of the history and characteristics of the Bible Christian Church, says that the “principal difl’erence” betwixt it and its sister forms of Methodism “seems to be that the Bible Christians take a sitting posture at the Lord’s Supper,” To resolve the difference betwixt one variety of Methodism and another into the interval betwixt a chair and a hassock is surely very cruel!
A not unfriendly historian, J. R. Green, is puzzled by this evil fertility in divisions which marks one stage of Methodist history, and offers as an explanation the statement that “of all Protestant Churches, Methodism is the most rigid in its organisation, the most despotic in its government.” But that statement, if it ever was true, is true no longer!
Some divisions were, no doubt, inevitable in Methodist history; for when Wesley died, no true equipoise betwixt the forces and tendencies within its bounds had been reached. An institution which had felt from its very birth, and for so many years, the pressure of a single masterful hand could hardly develop in a moment the virtues both of flexibility and of self-poised stability. Methodism, too, was affected in its earlier years by the temper of secular politics outside it. The French Revolution, when Wesley lay dying, was beginning to shake, as with the thrust of an earthquake, and almost into ruin, all forms of human society, secular or religious. The influence of that great movement predisposed men for nearly a generation, both to vehemently demand changes, and to vehemently refuse them.
But whatever may be the explanation of the great and quick-following disruptions which rent Wesley’s Church asunder, and made it for a time resemble an exploded planet flying in fragments through the ecclesiastical heavens, it might have been predicted with the utmost confidence that these divisions would arrest all spiritual growth. The remarkable circumstance is that this was not the case! The spiritual impulse of Methodism has survived all its schisms. It has characterised in some degree or other each separate fragment. Sea transit has not killed it; new social and geographical environments have not arrested it. Methodism has crossed all the seas of the planet, and taken root on every soil. It has varied its name, its forms, its methods; but under all its forms, it has kept steadfastly loyal to its original ideal. And everywhere it is marked by that same strange continuity of spiritual impulse.
We have only to set side by side the statistics of Methodism in 1791, when Wesley died, with those of 1891 a century later, to realise this. But the present writer may be forgiven for offering another and a nearer proof of the inextinguishable vitality of Methodism. He belongs to the Australasian branch of Wesley’s Church, a branch which had not even begun to exist when Wesley died. It is parted from Wesley himself by more than a century of time, and from the parent Church by twelve thousand miles of sea space. The total population of Australasia is less than the population of London. It is only a handful of people sprinkled over a continent.
And yet in this one branch of contemporary Methodism, separated both in time and space so widely from its founder, and from the parent Church, there is, in some respects, a more spacious Methodism than the whole world knew when Wesley died. The members in Australasian class-meetings to-day exceed by 30 per cent, the total membership in Great Britain and Ireland in 1791. There were only 287 Methodist preachers in Great Britain when Wesley died, only 511 in the whole world. There are over 700 Methodist ministers in Australasia alone to-day!
Similar figures might be quoted from Canada and the United States, and they certainly prove the unexhausted life of Methodism. The pulses of that life beat in new lands, in a new century, and amongst new nations. In spite of a thousand human imperfections and mistakes and quarrels, Methodist history since Wesley died is but the translation into historic and visible fact of his dying and triumphant whisper, “The best of all is, God is with us!”