A Deeper Note

It is possible, at this stage, to assess roughly the influence that these three great books had on Wesley. They aroused his conscience. They gave him a transfiguring vision of the awful sweep and altitude of religion; how great were God’s claims, how vast was man’s duty. But if they awoke in him great aspirations they did not teach him the divine art of realising them. Their emphasis rested not on God’s grace, but on man’s duty. If, then, they awakened the conscience, they left it helpless. The great triumphant secret of Christianity: forgiveness — of grace, and through faith — and obedience, under the forces that stream into the soul through forgiveness, they left unrevealed. They missed, in a word, the order, eternal and changeless, which God has fixed for the spiritual life. In that order, forgiveness comes first. It is the Beautiful Gate into the temple of a godly life. Or, to vary the metaphor, it is the channel through which stream into the forgiven soul all those great forces of love and gratitude which make obedience not merely possible, but inevitable and exultant.

It is quite true that in each of these great books stray phrases are found which are as evangelical as anything in Charles Wesley’s most triumphant hymns, or in George Whitefield’s most passionate appeals. Law, for example, told Wesley, “You would have a philosophical religion; but there can be no such thing. Religion is the most simple thing in the world. It is only *We love Him because He first loved us.’” What words could go more directly to the heart of Christianity! St. John might have written them; St. Paul would have countersigned them.

But all the effective emphasis of Law’s writings lies elsewhere. And the strength of the three great books, which so powerfully influenced Wesley at this stage of his spiritual development, lies in the aflSrmation, we repeat, not so much of divine grace, as of human obligation. They clothed the great ethics of Christianity with more imperious authority to Wesley’s conscience; but they failed to teach the special message of Christianity, the relation of the personal soul to the personal Saviour. So they left him bankrupt of that spiritual energy, flowing direct from the Holy Spirit, which alone brings the lofty ethics of the New Testament within the realm of human possibility.

Wesley returned to Oxford in September 1726, and took his degree of Master of Arts in 1727. In August of the same year he became his father’s curate at Epworth and Wroot, until on November 22, 1729, he was recalled to Oxford. Wesley thus had more than two years of actual parish work as his father’s curate, fee possessed what would be almost universally regarded as pre-eminent endowments for success in that work. He was a scholar, a gentleman, with a trained brain, a tireless body, a matchless faculty for crystalline speech, an intense zeal, and a conception of religious duty almost austere in its thoroughness. He had, that is to say, all the human qualifications for success as a minister in at least as high a degree as at any stage of his whole life. And yet he failed, failed utterly and consciously — failed exactly as he afterwards failed at Georgia! He had not learned the first letter in the alphabet of success. He drew no crowds. He alarmed no consciences. He influenced no lives. His own summary of his work at that time is: “I preached much, but saw no fruit of my labour. Indeed, it could not be that I should, for I neither laid the foundation of repentance nor of believing the Gospel, taking it for granted that all to whom I preached were believers, and that many of them needed no repentance.” )

Wesley’s complete failure at this stage of his life is as significant as his amazing success at a later stage. During this period the serious, not to say the ascetic, note in his experience grew more dominant. When he came into residence at Lincoln College he writes: “Entering now upon a new world, I resolved to have no acquaintance by chance, but by choice, and to choose such only as I have reason to believe would help me on my way to heaven.” “I should prefer,” he writes again, “at least for some time, such a retirement as would seclude me from all the world to the station I am now in.” The impulse which makes the monk was stirring in Wesley’s chilled blood!

The mastership of a school in Yorkshire, proposed to him at this time, had the advantage of a good salary, but it had what in Wesley’s mood at that moment was the much greater charm of almost utter inaccessibility. He had, as a general rule, a singularly healthy imagination; but just now it was diseased, and what Wesley calls the “frightful description” given of the landscape about the school, and the difficulty of anybody getting to it, fascinated him. The school was given to some one else, and his mother, with characteristic good sense, writes to congratulate him upon having missed it. “That way of life,” she says, “would not have agreed with your constitution, and I hope God has better things for yon to do.”

In November 1729 Wesley was recalled to Oxford. An alarmed attempt was being made to restore the discipline of the University. As one detail, it was decided that the junior Fellows, who were chosen as Moderators, should in person attend to the duties of their office. In the Oxford of that day, the public disputations were amongst the most important functions of the University. At Lincoln College these were held daily, and the business of the Moderator was to preside at them. Wesley was recalled for that purpose, and threw himself, with characteristic energy, into the business. He found it an intellectual discipline of no mean value to himself. It increased his readiness of speech, his expertuess in debate, his quickness of vision for the flaws in an argument. It helped to give him that formidable quality as a controversialist which served him so well in later and more stormy years.

Wesley remained in Oxford from November 22, 1729, till he left for Georgia, on October 6, 1735. These six years were, for Wesley himself, years of striving without attaining; of great aspirations, and of great spiritual defeats. He was living, as some one has said, in the seventh chapter of Romans and had not yet reached the eighth! And in those six fateful years — years in which Wesley was practising the self-denial of an ascetic, and burning with the zeal of a fanatic — and all on a High Church theology — Methodism was born For Methodism, it must never be forgotten, shares and reflects all the spiritual stages of its founder. It began in the stage of his unilluminated and High Church theology, of his attempts to find salvation by works, to act on Christian ethics without the energy of Christian forces, to produce the fruits of Christian living while the root was non-existent.

When Wesley returned to Oxford he conceived of religion as a tireless industry in pious acts, an intense zeal in the discharge of external duties, a form of piety to be nourished by an incessant use of all external means of grace. And he found already in existence a tiny society which exactly reflected this conception of religion, and supplied the machinery for its exercise.

Charles Wesley, who was then a student at Christ Church, had resisted his elder brother’s first attempt lo put on him the stamp of his own gloomy and mechanical piety. “What!” he said, “would you have me to be a saint all at once?” While John Wesley, however, was toiling in his barren curacy at Wroot, Charles flung himself with new and serious diligence into his studies, and “diligence,” he records, “led me to serious thinking.” As one result of this new and graver mood he began attending the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper every week. And in the ethics of that day the whole temperature of religion turned round the question of how often the Lord’s Supper was taken. To take it once a week constituted piety — or oddity — according to the point of view of the critic.

There was always a singular charm in Charles Wesley’s personality. His more masterful brother dominated men; Charles Wesley drew them as the magnet draws steel. A little group of fellow-students gathered round him. They crystallised into a sort of club, they undertook to live by rule, and to meet frequently for the purpose of helping each other. This little group of ordered lives quickly arrested public attention. They took all duties seriously. Law of God, rule of the Church, statute of the University — all must be kept, and kept with exact precision. These were startling novelties! The lively wit of the University soon found a label for this cluster of oddities. They were the “Godly Club,” “Biblemoths,” “Sacramentarians.” But the ordered fashion of their lives finally determined their title. They were Methodists! So the great historic term emerges, though the youthful wit who invented — or rediscovered — it little dreamed that he had shaped a name for a great Church about to be born.

That original band of Methodists was a constellation of goodly names: Robert Kirkham, William Morgan, James Harvey, the author of the once famous and now happily forgotten “Meditations amongst the Tombs”; George Whitefield, the greatest preacher the English pulpit has ever known; Charles Kinchin, of saintly life. Of the little group three were tutors in the colleges, the rest were bachelors of arts or undergraduates.

Wesley, on his return to Oxford, found this Society in existence, and already beginning to attract respect from some and ridicule from many. He at once joined it, and became its leading spirit. His standing in the University, his energy of will, his quickness of speech, and his natural genius for influencing others at once made him the master spirit of the little club. “I hear,” wrote his father, “my sou John has the honour of being styled the ‘Father of the Holy Club.’ If it be so, I am sure I must be the grandfather of it.”

John Wesley stamped an even deeper seriousness on the life of the little club. He gave a new austerity to its discipline, a sharper strain to its order, a new daring to its zeal. The little company met every night to review what had been done, and to lay plans for the next day. The sick were visited, help was given to the poor, children were taught in the schools, visits were paid to the inmates of the workhouse and of the prison.

This tiny group of serious lives grew to fifteen in number. Its members fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. They subjected themselves to elaborate self-scrutiny. They multiplied, and drew yet more tense, the rules which regulated the employment of every hour and the use of every faculty. Mrs. Wesley’s advice to her son helped to determine the physiognomy of the little society. “Appoint,” she wrote, “so much time to sleep, eating, company, &c.,.. Often put yourselves the question, ‘Why do I do this or that?’ by which means you will come to such a steadiness and consistency as becomes a reasonable creature and a good Christian.”

The new club naturally kindled much ridicule: it soon provoked an opposition which grew violent. Here is a

curious story told in Benson’s “Wesley”: —

“A gentleman, eminent for learning and -well esteemed for piety, told his nephew, who had joined the little company, that if he dared to go to the weekly Communion any longer he would turn him out of doors. This argument had no success; the young gentleman communicated next week. The uncle now became more violent, and shook his nephew by the throat to convince him more effectually that receiving the Sacrament every week was founded in error; but this argument appearing to the young gentleman to have no weight in it he continued his weekly practice. This eminent person, so well esteemed for piety, now changed his mode of attack. ... By a soft obliging manner he melted down the young gentleman’s resolution of being so strictly religious, and from this time he began to absent himself five Sundays out of six from the Sacrament.... One of the seniors of the college consulting with the doctor, they prevailed with the other young gentlemen to promise they would only communicate three times a year.”

What must have been the religious climate of the great University when its heads set themselves in this fashion, and by such methods, to discourage piety amongst the undergraduates?

Wesley met the attacks on the little Society by drawing up, in the Socratic style, a series of questions, of which these are examples: —

“Whether we shall not be more happy hereafter the more good we do now?

“Whether we may not try to do good among the young gentlemen of the University; particularly whether we may not endeavour to convince them of the necessity of being Christians, and of being scholars?

“Whether we may not try to convince them of the necessity of method and industry, in order to either learning or virtue?

“Whether we may not try to confirm and increase their industry by communicating as often as they can?

“May we not try to do good to those who are hungry, naked, or sick? If we know any necessitous family, may we not give them a little money, clothes, or physic, as they want?

“If they can read, may we not give them a Bible, a Common Prayer-book?... May we not inquire now and then how they have used them, explain what they do not understand, and enforce what they do?

“May we not contribute what we are able towards having their children clothed and taught to read?

“May we not try to do good towards those who are in prison?... May we not lend small sums to those who are of any trade that they procure themselves tools and materials to work With?...”

There is, of course, a strain of Socratic irony in these interrogations. No one could (juarrel with the practices thus described without maliing open war on religion itself; and Wesley’s schedule of inconvenient and unanswerable queries undoubtedly, for the moment, silenced the scoffers. But if the diligence of the Methodists in practical beneficence increased, so the ascetic — not to say monkish — strain of their personal religion grew more intense. John Wesley drew up at this time, for himself and his companions, a scheme of self-examination which Southey declares, with some truth, might well be appended to the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Here are samples:

“Have I been simple and recollected in everything I did?” And under this head is a swarm of microscopic tests of “sincerity,” which the soul was to apply to itself. “Have I prayed with fervour?” Then follows a list of the times in each day at which prayer must be offered, and a series of tests for ascertaining the exact degree of fervour in each prayer — tests which irresistibly suggest a spiritual thermometer, with a graduated scale to register the rise of the mercury. Wesley adopted the practice his mother urged of asking, “Have I, in private prayer, frequently stopped short and observed what fervour in devotion?” That is, the anxious soul was to keep one eye directed to the Object of prayer, and the other vigilantly fixed upon itself, so as to observe its own behaviour. The ideal of each member of the Holy Club at this stage was, plainly, to keep his own soul under a microscope, and watch its motions with tireless suspicion.

The practical tests by which each member was to try himself were of a saner kind; but the note is pitched very high: —

“1. Have I embraced every probable opportunity of doing good, and of preventing, removing, or lessening evil? 2. Have I thought anything too dear to part with, to serve my neighbour? 3. Have I spent an hour at least every day in speaking to some one or other? 4. Have I in speaking to a stranger explained what religion is not (not negative, not external), and what it is, the recovery of the image of God; searched at what step in it he stops, and what makes him stop? 5. Have I persuaded all I could to attend public prayers, sermons, and sacraments, and in general to obey the laws of the Church Universal, the Church of England, the State, the University, and their respective colleges? 6. Have I, after every visit, asked him who went with me, did I say anything wrong? 7. Have I, when any one asked advice, directed and exhorted him with all my power? 8. Have I rejoiced with and for my neighbour in virtue or pleasure; grieved with him in pain, and for him in sin? 9. Has goodwill been, and appeared to be, the spring of all my actions towards others.”

It is impossible to deny that there is a lofty and Christ-like note in the type of life here aimed at, though the questions represent aims rather than attainments. And these fine virtues — charity, meekness, devotion, diligence — did they spring from no root? They were the genuine fruits of religion; but they sprang from the root of a theology maimed and incomplete. They left the soul without any assurance of acceptance, and the conscience without any atmosphere of peace.

As for Wesley himself, he toiled in the routine of good works with a diligence which can only be described as passionate, and with severities of self-denial almost worthy of an Indian fakir. He already had formed the habit of rising at four o’clock every morning, a practice which he kept up almost to the day of his death. He found when he had £30 a year he could live on £28, and he gave away the odd £2; and when he enjoyed his comfortable fellowship, he still lived on £28, and gave to the poor the remainder of his income. He fasted with an heroic diligence and severity, which at last broke down his health. He imposed on himself a taciturnity of iron quality. His brother Charles records, incidentally, “I cannot excuse my brother mentioning nothing of Epworth when he has just come from it. Taciturnity as to family affairs is his infirmity. ... It was much that he told me they were all well there, for he did not use to be so communicative.”

What a contrast this is to the radiant Wesley of after years, with his frank tongue and shining face; the Wesley of whom Dr. Johnson — to whom conversation was a luxury — said, “I could talk with him all day and all night, too”; the Wesley in whom Alexander Knox, who knew him as few men did, found “an habitual gaiety of heart” expressed continuously in both face and speech, and whom he describes as “the most perfect specimen of moral happiness which I ever saw.” In Wesley’s speech, look, and temper he discovered “more to teach me what a heaven upon earth is... than all I have elsewhere seen or heard or read, except in the Sacred Volume.” The difference betwixt the two Wesleys — Wesley the ascetic and Wesley the evangelist — is that betwixt a landscape on which the night is lying, and one on which the sun is risen. Knox describes Wesley as he was after he had found the great secret of the Christian life. At this stage he was only seeking it, and seeking it in the wrong direction.

‘Wesley’s earnestness at this time trembled on the edge of mere over-strained fanaticism. “I am tempted,” he writes, “to break off my pursuit of all learning but what immediately tends to practice.” He seriously contemplated the formation of a society for the yet more strict observance of saints’ days, of Saturday as a Christian festival, of all the fast-days of the ancient Church, &c. It became for him a matter of conscience that the wine used in the Sacrament should be mixed with water; for, says Wesley, “we were in the strongest sense High Churchmen.” “No man,” he says in a letter to his father, “is in a state of salvation until he is contemned by the whole world”; and Wesley, at this stage, was diligently qualifying himself for that contempt, and finding a morbid enjoyment in the process!

There is a strain of mysticism clearly visible, too, in Wesley’s religious mood at this stage, and it seems in irreconcilable conflict with the rigid and mechanical ritualism of his outward life. Mystic and ritualist: that is the strangest combination! They represent the union in one life of discordant elements. Mysticism and ritualism are not half-truths; they are contradictories. One lays supreme emphasis on external acts; the other denies the external world, and dwells in a land of dreams.

Wesley gets rid of his mysticism first; startled, as a nature so practical as his must have been, by its fundamental quarrel with practical religion. He writes to his brother Samuel an amazingly keen analysis of the essential characteristics of mysticism: —

“I think the rock on which I had the nearest made shipwreck of the faith was the writings of the mystics; under which term I comprehend all, and only those, who slight any of the means of grace. I have drawn up a short scheme of their doctrines and beg your thoughts upon it....

“Men utterly divested of free-will, of self-love and self-activity are entered into the passive state, and enjoy such a contemplation as is not only above faith, but above sight — such as is entirely free from images, thoughts, and discourse, and never interrupted by sins of infirmity or voluntary distractions. They have absolutely renounced their reason and understanding, else they could not be guided by a divine light. They seek no clear or particular knowledge of anything, but only an obscure, general knowledge, which is far better.

“Having thus attained the end, the means must cease. Hope is swallowed up in love. Sight, or something more than sight, takes the place of faith. All particular virtues they possess in the essence, and therefore need not the direct exercise of them.

“Sensible devotion in any prayer they despise; it being a great hindrance to perfection. The Scripture they need not read, for it is only His letter, with whom they converse face to face. Neither do they need the Lord’s Supper, for they never cease to remember Christ in the most acceptable manner.”

This is a reading of religion which comes perilously nears its very denial! Wesley quarrelled with mysticism on another ground. He was too keen a logician not to see that in the last analysis it is but the subtlest form of self-righteousness; and every form of self-righteousness is fundamentally a rejection of Christ and His redemption. “If righteousness is by the law” — or by any form of human effort — then, in Paul’s tremendous phrase, “then is Christ dead in vain.” His Cross is not merely an irrelevance, it is an impertinence. And nothing can be finer than the keen and peuertating logic with which Wesley tracks back mysticism to its ultimate root as a form of self -righteousness.

In writing to his brother from Georgia he had criticised Law’s mystical teaching. Law had taught him that outward works were nothing being alone; and, he adds, “he recommended to supply what was wanting in them, mental prayer and like exercises, as the most effectual means of purifying the soul and uniting it with God.”

Now, “these were in truth,” says Wesley, with a glance of characteristically keen vision, “as much my own works as visiting the sick or clothing the naked; and the union with God thus pursued was really my own righteousness as any I had before pursued under another name.” “All the other enemies of Christianity,” he writes elsewhere, “are trifles. The mystics are the most dangerous. They stab it in the vitals, and its most serious professors are most likely to fall by them.”