In Search of a Theology
At the beginning of 1725 Wesley, with a successful University course behind him, had to choose a career. His naturally oi)ened the gate to one of the three learned professions, the law, medicine, or the Church. Wesley had in a supreme degree some, at least, of the gifts which make a great lawyer; and he had strong natural tastes, as after years showed, in the direction of medicine. He dabbled in physic, indeed, throughout his whole life. But on the whole the Church was for him inevitable. The forces of heredity, the whole pressure of his training, and certain qualities of natural temperament carried him in that direction. There were college livings, too, and livings in the gift of Charterhouse, that made the outlook cheerful. His father had been pressing him in this direction; and early in the year Wesley wrote to Epworth saying he was disposed to take Orders.
The choice was for him of supreme importance, since it definitely threw his life into the currents of religion. Charles Wesley, when tracing the forces which turned his mind in the same direction, says, “Diligence led me into serious thinking.” The earnestness with which he bent himself to study awakened, as though with kindred but deeper vibrations, all his higher faculties. And with his brother John the decision to enter Holy Orders made him look at religion with new eyes. Later Wesley taught his Church that conversion was the essential pre-requisite for the ministerial oflSce; but in his own case that order was inverted. He decided to take Holy Orders, and then betook himself to “serious thinking” to discover what spiritual fitness he possessed for the calling he had selected!
It is curious to read his father’s discussion of the motives proper to a candidate for the great oflBce of the Christian ministry. He writes: — “My thoughts are: if it is no harm to desire getting into that office, even as Eli’s sons, 1o eat a piece of bread, yet certainly a desire and an intention to lead a stricter life, and a belief that one should do so, is a better reason. Though this should by all means be begim before, or ten to one it will deceive us afterwards.”
This seems a curiously inadequate account of the spiritual equipment necessary for one taking up an oflBce so great. His mother strikes a little loftier note: —
“Dear Jackt, — The alteration of your temper has occasioned me much speculation. I, who am apt to be sanguine, hope it may proceed from the operations of God’s Holy Spirit, that by taking away your relish of sensual enjoyments He may prepare and dispose your mind for a more serious and close application to things of a more sublime and spiritual nature. If it be so, happy are you if you cherish those dispositions, and now in good earnest resolve to make religion the business of your life.... Now I mention this, it calls to mind your letter to your father about taking Orders. I was much pleased with it, and liked the proposal well. ... I approve the disposition of your mind and think the sooner you are a deacon the better; because it may be an inducement to greater application in the study of practical divinity, which I humbly conceive is the best study for candidates for Orders.”
Mrs. Wesley, after her fashion, proposes that her son should instantly proceed to interrogate himself, “that you may know whether you have a reasonable hope of salvation — that is, whether you are in a state of faith and repentance or not. If you are,” she says, “the satisfaction of knowing it will abundantly reward your pains. If not, you will find a more reasonable occasion for tears than can be met with in a tragedy.”
This is good advice, no doubt; but here again is the same odd inversion of the true spiritual order. The ministerial oflSce comes first, and fitness for it afterwards! Her son is not to take Orders because he has the necessary equipment of practical divinity; he is to take Orders in order that he may study practical divinity.
Wesley, however, having decided on his career, set himself with characteristic thoroughness to prepare for it. His own record is: “When I was about twenty-two my father pressed me to enter into Holy Orders. I began to alter the whole form of my conversation and to set in earnest to enter upon a new life.”
A student, familiar with books, and accustomed to approach everything from the literary side, he betook himself to devotional literature; and three writers, widely separated from each other in time, and very diverse in genius and atmosphere — Thomas k Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and William Law — profoundly influenced him. Great, subtle, far-reaching is the power of a good book! In a sense, as Milton taught, it is’ an immortal force. The hand that wrote it, the brains in which it was conceived, turn to dust; but the book lives, and sings, or instructs, or warns, ever new generations of readers. The De Imitatione Christi has been printed in more languages, has found more readers, and perhaps has influenced more lives, than any other book save the Bible. Who actually wrote it is still matter for dispute; but that nameless monk in his far-off cell, who into the sentences of the Imitatio distilled, in Dean Milman’s words, “all that is elevating and passionate in all the older mystics,” first stirred, across three centuries, deep religious feeling in Wesley’s heart. As he read the immortal book, “I began to see,” he says, “that true religion was seated in the heart, and that God’s law extended to all our thoughts as well as words and actions.... I set apart an hour or two a day for religious retirement. I communicated every week; I watched against all sin, whether in word or deed. ... So that now doing so much and living so good a life I doubted not that I was a good Christian.”
Jeremy Taylor influenced Wesley almost as profoundly as did Thomas h Kempis. And yet no contrast could well be greater than that bewixt the two minds: Wesley with his logic, ice-clear and ice-cold, and his scorn of rhetoric; and Jeremy Taylor, “the golden-mouthed preacher,” with his more than tropical tangle of eloquence. Jeremy Taylor has been called “the Shakespeare of theology.” De Quincey tells how he once began an elaborate Life of the great divine, but never got farther than the first sentence — “Jeremy Taylor, the most eloquent and the subtlest of Christian philosophers, was the son of a barber and the son-in-law of a king.” But De Quincey, himself one of the supreme masters of style in English literature, is never tired of singing the praises of Jeremy Taylor’s prose. He classes him with the author of “Urn Burial” and with Jean Paul Richter, as the richest, the most dazzUng, and the most captivating of rhetoricians. And certainly the man who amid the tumult and strife of the Civil War wrote “The Rules of Holy Living and Holy Dying” had, perhaps, the most melodious voice in all Christian literature. It is still audible above the strife of parties and the clash of battle amid which Jeremy Taylor moved.
His scholarship, his spiritual glow, his gentle spirit for a time took captive Wesley’s mind. And yet Jeremy Taylor must have exercised, in some respects, an evil influence on Wesley. Coleridge declares that the author of “Holy Living and Holy Dying” was “half a Socinian in heart,” and it is certain that the Cross of Christ can be seen but very dimly through the golden mist of Taylor’s rhetoric. He was a protege of Archbishop Laud, and his High Churchmanship was so extreme that, like other and more modern Churchmanship of the same altitude, it is almost undistinguishable from Popery. Coleridge complains that “he never speaks with the slightest symptoms of affection or respect of Luther, Calvin, or any other of the great reformers, but he saints every trumpery monk or friar down to the very latest canonisations of the modern Popes.” Jeremy Taylor did not help to clarify Wesley’s theology; he served, indeed, to give it an added flavour of sacerdotalism.
But Wesley took neither himself nor his teachers on trust. He interrogated them, as he did his own spiritual condition, with tireless diligence. His common-sense, for example, rejects the ascetic element in the De Imitatione Christi, its quarrel with innocent gladness, its exaggeration of the spiritual value of sorrow. “I cannot think,” he tells his mother, “that when God sent us into the world He had irreversibly decreed that we should be perpetually miserable in it.” His father, on the whole, agi’eed with i Kemi)is. “Mortification,” he said, “was still an indispensable Christian duty.” But after all, the heroic strain in the Imitatio was too high for the good little rector, and, with a flash of unusual wisdom, he refers John to his mother, saying, “she had leisure to bolt the matter to the bran.”
Mrs. Wesley discusses with exquisite good sense the whole ethics of pleasure: — “Would you Judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure take this rule: Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things — in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.”
The wisest of casuists might find it diflScult to better that interpretation of human duty!
Wesley, with a fine readiness, absorbed what was sjnritually wholesome in his new teachers. From the Jmitatio Christi he learned something of the altitude and range of the spiritual life. After reading it he says, “I saw that giving even all my life to God, supposing it possible to do this, would profit me nothing, unless I gave my heart; yea, all my heart to Him.” Jeremy Taylor taught him the great truth, on which he dwells with such tender and moving emphasis, the need of absolute simplicity and purity of intention. “Instantly,” says Wesley, “I resolved to dedicate all my life to God — all my thoughts and words and actions — being thoroughly convinced that there is no medium, but that every part of my life — not some only — must be either a sacrifice to God or myself; that is the devil.”
But he questions, with invincible good sense, Jeremy Taylor’s exaggeration of the duty of humility. Was it really a form of piety to believe ourselves to be worse than anybody else? “It is all,” argues Wesley, “a question of fact. One, for instance, who is in company with a freethinker cannot avoid knowing himself to be the better of the two.”
At this stage, however, Wesley was more concerned, on the whole, with making his theology clear, than with his own spiritual condition. He discusses a hundred vexed questions in theology with his father and mother; and it is difiScult to believe that at that time any other correspondence in England could rival, in mingled sense and seriousness, the letters which passed betwixt John Wesley in Oxford and the family circle in the Epworth Rectory. His mother was, perhaps, the best theologian in the group, though her theology was not always of the evangelical type.
John Wesley discusses the perplexed question of predestination with her. “That doctrine,” she tells him, “as maintained by the rigid Calvinists, is very shocking, and ought to be abhorred; because it directly charges the most high God with being the Author of sin.” “God has an election,” she argues, “but it is founded on His foreknowledge, and does in no wise derogate from the glory of God’s free grace, nor impair the liberty of man.” Years afterwards, Wesley printed his mother’s letters in the Arminian Magazine, and they, no doubt, helped to shape his theology, and that of the Church he founded.
Mother and son again held debate on such questions as the true nature of faith, of repentance, of the Trinity; the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed; future punishment, the doctrine of assurance, &c., &c. On the subject of assurance Wesley, at this stage, held sounder views than his mother. “An absolute certainty that God has forgiven us,” she says, “you can never have until you come to heaven.” Wesley replies: “I am persuaded that we may know that we are now in a state of salvation, since that is expressly promised in the Holy Scriptures to our sincere endeavours.” But here he falters, and misses — as for the next thirteen years he missed — the great truth of the direct attestation the Holy Spirit bears in the believing soul of the forgiveness of sins. “We are surely,” says John Wesley, “able to judge of our own sincerity”; and the estimate the human soul is able to form of its own “sincerity” is, apparently, the sole foundation on which could be built the rejoicing certainty that sin is forgiven!
Wesley was ordained deacon on September 19, 1725; he preached his first sermon at South Leigh, a small village near Witney. Later, he spent the summer of 1726 at Epworth, preaching for his father and pursuing his own studies.
For his parents this must have been a delightful visit. John Wesley had upon him the fresh glories of his fellowship; life for him was opening very brilliantly; he was of blameless character, and stood on the threshold of the most sacred office a human being can hold. His father had written to him a few months before, when a new note of gravity had stolen into his son’s letters: “If you be but what you write, you and I shall be happy.” And now the father could judge that his son was “what he wrote.”
By the fireside of the rectory, every evening, Wesley sat with his father and mother and held high debate on great themes. He notes in his diary the range of topics over which the talk wandered: how to increase our faith, our hope, our love of God: i)rudence, sincerity, simplicity, &c. To a mother of Susannah Wesley’s grave and lofty bent, those fireside talks with her brilliant and accomplished son, who came to her from the atmosphere of a University, and was plainly on the entrance of a great career, must have been an exquisite pleasure.
But was Wesley, at this time, and in the clear Scriptural sense of the word, a Christian? He shall answer for himself. In 1744 he drew up a statement of the great evangelical truths which had changed his life, and by the preaching of which he was affecting the lives of multitudes. Then he looks back on the time we have just been describing: —
“‘It was many years,’ he says, ‘after I was ordained deacon before I was convinced of the great truths above recited; during all that time I was utterly ignorant of the nature and condition of justification. Sometimes I confounded it with sanctification, particularly when I was in Georgia. At other times I had some confused notion about the forgiveness of sins; but then I took it for granted the time of this must be either the hour of death or the day of judgment. I was equally Ignorant of the nature of saving faith, apprehending it to mean no more than a firm assent to all the propositions contained in the Old and New Testaments.’”
This was surely a very remarkable degree of theological ignorance to be found in a mind so clear, and one that had enjoyed such a training! But the theology of Epworth Parsonage, with all its seriousness and charm, was very defective. And while men are to be judged, not by their theology, but by their life, yet any grave misreading of divine truth must profoundly affect the life.
As for Wesley, an unrelenting thoroughness marked at every stage his temper in religion. He would have no uncertainties, no easy and soft illusions. Religion as a divine gift, and as a human experience, was something definite. He possessed it, or he did not possess it. No intermediate stage was thinkable. And with a wise — but almost unconscious — instinct he put his theology to the one final test. He cast it into the alembic of experience. He tried it by the challenge of life; of its power to colour and shape life. He spent the next thirteen years in that process; trying his creed with infinite courage, with transparent sincerity, and often with toil and suffering, by the rough acid of life, till at last he reached that conception of Christ and His Gospel which lifted his spirit up to such dazzling heights of gladness and power.
William Law, no doubt, influenced Wesley at this stage more profoundly than even Thomas h Kempis or Jeremy Taylor. Law’s ““Serious Call” is one of the great books of Christian literature. Dr. Johnson told Boswell that he had been a lax talker against religion till he read Law’s work. “I took up the book,” he said, “expecting to find it a dull book, as such books generally are; but I found Law quite an overmatch for me. That book first set me thinking in earnest.” Wesley, late in life, and after he had renounced Law himself as a religious guide, yet declared the “Serious Call” to be “unsurpassed in the English language for beauty of expression and for justness and depth of thought.”
Law lives vaguely in the popular memory as a mystic; and it is true that, as Soiithey puts it, “the man who had shaken so many intellects sacrificed his own at last to the reveries and rhapsodies of Jacob Behmen.” But if William Law ended in mysticism, his earlier years were unclouded by that evil fog.
There was no hint of the mystic in Law’s appearance — a stout, round-faced man, with ruddy, farmer-like cheeks, heavy of foot and solid of body. There is nothing, too, of myvstic nebulousness in his earlier works. It would be difficult to match Law for strong-fibred logic, for quick and piercing vision into the flaws of an adversary’s argument. His books are, for the modern taste, robbed of charm by the writer’s habit of personifying all his vices and virtues, and labelling them with Latinised names — “Paternus,” “Modestus,” &c. And yet few writers have such a command of resonant, expressive English as William Law. His terse sentences have in them, not seldom, a salt of satire not unworthy of Swift.
Law for some time was spiritual director of the household of the father of Gibbon, the famous historian, and was tutor to young Gibbon himself. There is an element of humour in that association — the combination of the mystic, who looked at the whole material world as a parable of the spiritual universe, and the arid sceptic, who treated the spiritual world as irrelevant, or even non-existent. Yet Law’s visible devoutness and sincerity won even Gibbon’s admiration. “If he finds a spark of piety in any mind,” he said, “Law will soon kindle it to a flame.”
The effect this great and powerful writer produced on Wesley he himself has described: —
“Meeting now with Mr. Law’s ‘Christian Perfection’ and ‘Serious Call,’ although I was much offended with many parts of both, yet they convinced me more than ever of the exceeding height and depth and breadth of the law of God. The light flowed in so mightily upon my soul that everything appeared in a new view. I cried to God for help; resolved as I had never done before, not to prolong the time of obeying Him. And, by my continued endeavour to keep His whole law inward and outward to the utmost of my power, I was persuaded that I should be accepted of Him, and that I was even then in a state of salvation.”