Child Piety
Religion is, of course, the supreme fact in John Wesley’s life, the oue thing that gives it historic and immortal interest. In the great realm of religion he found the forces which enabled him to write his signature so deeply on human history. In its service he did the work which has made his name famous for all time. Apart from the great revival in which he was the chief actor, he would, no doubt, have i)layed a considerable part in the world of his day. A brain so clear and nimble, a body so tough, a figure so trim, a capacity for work so amazing, must have won for him success in any realm and under any conditions. Had he remained the prim High Churchman with a purely mechanical religion, he might have worn the lawn sleeves of a bishop, and his name would probably be carved to-day in fading letters on a tomb in some English cathedral. But in that case his sole title to human recollection would be a dozen arid volumes of controversial divinity. Wesley changed the very currents of English history; he gave a new development to English Protestantism, and so made himself visible for all time; and he was able to do this because he mastered the central, essential secret of religion and made his life the channel through which the great forces which belong to religion flowed into the life of his countrymen. And it is the religious history of John Wesley which still supremely concerns the world.
We have described the i)urely human and secular elements in his training up to this point, that his spiritual history may be told as a separate record, and so may be seen in unbroken perspective.
In a sense John Wesley’s spiritual history is a curiously modern story, and Wesley himself, looked at religiously, is the most modern of men. In his biography all the schools of the religious life of to-day are reflected and reproduced. Scieuce reports that in the pre-natal stages of the human infant the whole physiological chain of existence, link by link, is, so to speak, rehearsed. So the stages of religious experience through which John Wesley passed cover the whole range of the religious moods and emotions which stir men’s lives to day.
We have what may be called the religion of childhood — the only religion some people ever know — a purely imitative thing, impressed on the life from without by force of discipline, the result of domestic training, but without any vital and spiritual root. We have the religion of the High Churchman, resolved into a machinery of external rules and maintained by external discipline; of the legalist, with all the saving elements of religion frozen into ice, and only its ethics left alive; of the ascetic, who tries to save his soul by afflicting his body — “salvation by starvation,” as some wit has called it; of the mystic, who loses touch of solid ground and of homely duties and drifts away into some dim realm of fog.
All these types exist in Wesley. He tried all readings of religion; tried them earnestly; tried them with heroic thoroughness; spent thirteen years in the process — and found himself a spiritual brankrupt at the end!
He learned at last the deep, eternal secret of religion; religion as a present and personal deliverance; a deliverance verified in the consciousness and bringing the redeemed soul into terms of sonship with God; religion with its secret of power over sin; its great gift of a morality set on flame by love. And with that supreme discovery his life was transfigured. Wesley’s religious experiences are thus “the history of a soul”; but they are much more. They are the story of great schools for religion I’eproduced within the boundaries of one earnest life. All the successive moods of Wesley’s religious experience are alive to-day; they exist contemporaneously, as separate types of religion., In Wesley’s spiritual development, too, all these transitions of experience can be seen with crystalline clearness, they can be followed with unclouded certainty. His was a soul, in all its moods, set in crystal; and his habit of relentless self-analysis, the unreserve both of his letters and of his immortal Journal, the exquisite simplicity of his style, make it i)Ossible to follow without effort all the stages of his religious evolution. He has throughout his whole life the frankness of Rousseau without his sly self -consciousness; and he moves, of course, in a realm so high that he seems to belong to another spiritual order than the famous Savoyard. Then, too, we have Wesley’s self-judgments revised by himself at wide intervals both of time and of spiritual progress. Thus he sets his youth in the high lights, and tries it by the fervours, of his conversion. Later he retries both by the wise and sober judgment of his old age. So we have the Wesley, say, of 1728 judged by the Wesley of 1738; and both again re-judged by the Wesley of 1788. If ever it could be said of a human soul that it might be studied in detail, and under the miscroscope, this may be said of John Wesley.
Some of the elements of what may be called child-religion lie on the surface, and are easily described and assessed. A child acquires readily a crust of external habit, impressed by rule; a whole system of simple and undiscriminating beliefs — beliefs unequipped with proofs — unrelated, fndeed, to the reason and accepted on authority. This docile, imitative piety is as external to the soul as the skin is to the body; but it has many of the useful offices of a skin.
Now all these elements of child-religion Wesley had in a very high degree. His mother’s bent of character, her insistent and orderly discipline that shut round her children’s lives like an atmosphere, and with something of the perpetual and resistless pressure of an atmosphere, was exactly calculated to produce that casing of habit which makes so large a part of the religion of a child. What theology the child learned was naturally of a High Church type. He was taught, for example, that his sins had been washed away in baptism, and in after years he records gravely that “not till I was about ten years old had I sinned away that washing of the Holy Ghost which was given me in baptism.” He was further taught that he “could only be saved by keeping all the commandments of God”; a version of the Gospel of Christ which cost him afterwards years of suffering. The result of such discipline and teaching on a nature predisposed to meditative gravity was to produce a childish piety of an abnormal and almost uncomfortable seriousness. But it so completely satisfied the sacerdotal ideals of his father that, as we have seen, when the boy was scarcely eight years old he made him kneel at the table of the Lord’s Supper.
It was an age of wonderful children! Of Mrs. Wesley’s father, afterwards Dr. Annesley, it is gravely recorded that “when about fiVe or six years old he began a practice, which he afterwards continued, of reading twenty chapters every day in the Bible.” The phenomenon of a child not six years old who solemnly forms, in the cells of his infantile brain, the plan of reading twenty chapters of the Bible every day — and sticks to it through a long life — would in these modern days be reckoned nothing less than astonishing. Of Hetty Wesley, the sister of Johu, it is on record that at eight years of age she could rea<l the Greek Testament. Do any such wonderful children exist in these days?
I’erhaps Wesley’s own early and hot-house piety made him in later years too credulous of .infantile saints; it helps, indeed, to explain his melancholy Kingswood experiment, when he tried, on a large scale, to transfigure boys of seven or eight and ten into middle-aged saints.
But some of the sweeter and more gracious elements of child-piety are conspicuously absent from John Wesley’s childhood. The modern Church has happily learned to find in a little child’s religion some beautiful and most enviable graces; a confident trust that outruns the metaphysics of great theologians; an easy, happy love of God, that might almost seem irreverent but for its very simplicity; a gladness in religion as spontaneous as the singing of the birds, and as sweet; a simplicity of prayer that makes a listening mother both weep and smile. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” says Wordsworth; and about a little child, breathing the air of a Christian home, does lie the heaven of a simple-hearted love of God and of a trust in Him on which no shadow of doubt can fall. Christ stands close to the child’s heart. Nay, still as of old He sets the little child in the midst of His Church and warns us all that that way lies heaven!
Now these gracious elements of child-religion, glad, simple, and confident, John Wesley did not possess. They would have been for him an anachronism. They did not belong to his age, nor to the type of theology taught under the roof of Epworth parsonage. They formed no element in the measured, exact discipline — a discipline that dealt out hours and duties as a chemist counts the drops of a tincture — which was the best Mrs. Wesley herself, at this stage, knew. No child ever outruns the religion of its own mother; and if it was in one sense the merit, it was also the defect, of Susannah Wesley’s piety that it was constructed on the principle of a railway time-table, and with something of its mechanical effort. This was the school in which she herself had been nurtured. Writing in 1709 to her eldest son, Samuel, who was then at Westminster, she says: —
“I will tell you what rule I used to observe when I was in my father’s house and had as little, if not less, liberty than you have now. I used to allow myself as much time for recreation as I spent in private devotion. Not that I always spent so much, but I gave myself leave to go so far but no farther. So in all things else; appoint so much time for sleep, eating, company, &c.”
Now a girl who prayed by the clock, and measured her prayers, and then allowed herself exactly so much time for “recreation” as she had spent in prayer and no more, certainly understood the seriousness of religion; but what did she know of its gracious freedom? And this was the general characteristic of Susannah Wesley’s piety. There was an heroic fibre in it. It is impossible not to admire, almost with a touch of amazement, the resolute methods of her religion; its seriousness, its diligence, its energy of routine. This mother of nineteen children, for example — who had to be their teacher and almost their breadwinnei*, as well as their mother — yet resolutely spent one hour every morning and another every evening in prayer and meditation. In addition she generally stole another hour at noon for wholesome privacy, and was in the habit of writing down at such times her thoughts on great subjects. Many of these are still preserved, marked “Morning,” “Noon,” or “Evening”; and they have a certain loftiness of tone, a detachment from secular interests nothing less than amazing. Airs from other worlds seem to stir in them. Here is one example: —
“Evening. — If to esteem and to have the highest reverence for Thee; if constantly and sincerely to acknowledge Thee, the supreme, the only desirable good, be to love Thee, I do love Thee. If comparatively to despise and undervalue all the world contains, which is esteemed great, or fair, or good; if earnestly and constantly to desire Thee, Thy favour, Thy acceptance, Thyself, rather than any or all things Thou hast created, be to love Thee, I do love Thee!...
“If to rejoice in Thy essential majesty and glory; if to feel a vital joy o’erspread and cheer the heart at each, perception of Thy blessedness, at every thought that Thou art God; that all things are in Thy power; that there is none superior or equal to Thee, be to love Thee, I do love Thee!”
That is a remarkable bit of religious meditation. It might have been written by Madame Guyon. There are, indeed, many points of resemblance betwixt the mystical Frenchwoman and this practical, strong-souled Englishwoman. But if Madame Guyon had been the mother of nineteen children, and had to nourish them on the scanty income of the Epworth parsonage, it may be doubted whether her “reflections” would have had the serene altitude of the sentences we have quoted. Charles Wesley, in 1742, wrote his mother’s epitaph: —
“True daughter of affliction she,
Inured to pain and misery;
Mourned a long night of griefs and fears,
A legal night of seventy years.”
But that can hardly be described as a “legal night” in which shone such star-like thoughts as those we have quoted.
And yet the extract we have given shows the defects of the writer’s theology. It exactly reflects the spiritual methods of her son during the troubled years before his conversion. She has the essential graces of Christian character, but without any note of glad confidence or any certainty of acceptance before God. The methods of logic take the place in her spiritual life of the gracious “witness” of the Holy Spirit. She has to assure both God and herself that she loves by the help of syllogisms! In the language of technical theology she “confounded justification with sanctification”; and this was not a mere blunder in metaphysics. She believed, and she taught her children to believe, that the consciousness of acceptance with God came, not at the beginning of the Christian life, but at the end. It was not so much a motive to obedience as the reward of an obedience which existed independently of it.
If Mrs. Wesley had applied her theology to the story of the Prodigal Son she must have entirely rewritten that pearl of parables. She must have described the father as postponing the kiss, the ring, the best robe — all the pledges of restored son ship — until the poor, returning outcast had gone into the kitchen of his father’s house, done the work of a servant, and bought himself a decent suit of clothes with his own earnings! She herself said late in life that she had always regarded the consciousness of God’s forgiving grace as the rare experience of great saints, and an experience impossible to ordinary Christians.
Now what Mrs. Wesley did not know she could not teach, and this explains the missing elements in the childish piety of her great son.
Wesley’s youthful religion hardly survived the rough shocks of life at the Charterhouse and at Oxford. It passed away inevitably with the tender years which gave it birth. Wesley himself says, “Outward restraints being removed, I was much more negligent than before even of outward duties, and was continually guilty of outward sins which I knew to be such, though they were not scandalous in the eye of the world.” Wesley wrote these words in 1738, just after his conversion; and when, judging his past life by the test of the emotions and new-born ideals of that great experience, he naturally painted it in dark tints. “I still read the Scriptures,” he says, “and said my prayers morning and evening.” Then with a characteristic touch of what may be called ex post facto self -analysis, he adds: “What I then hoped to be saved by was (1) not being so bad as other people, (2) having still a kindness for religion, (3) reading the Bible, going to church and saying my prayers.” That was, of course, a singularly inadequate scheme of religion. And though it cannot be said that Wesley at any time plunged into vicious conduct, yet he fell into a frivolous mood. His conscience lost both alertness and authority. And by the time he had reached twenty-two — and for years before that, indeed — the purely imitative piety of his childhood had, even to his own consciousness, become a failure.