A Religion That Failed
The strain of such a religion as that on which Wesley was now trying to live was too much for human nature. Even Wesley’s tough body, with its nerves of wire and tissues of iron, broke down. His body might have survived the fasts he imposed upon it, the strain of work, the grudged allowance of sleep. But when to this was added a mind disquieted, a religious consciousness vexed and pricked with incessant doubts, it was no wonder that his health failed. It seemed, indeed, as if the ill-usage of his own body was at that time part of Wesley’s religion. In a humorous letter in verse which, on April 20, 1732, Samuel Wesley wrote to his brother Charles, he asks: —
“Does John seem bent beyond his strength to go;
To his frail carcass literally foe:
Lavish of health, as if in haste to die.
And shorten time t’ ensure eternity?”
His mother, with a touch of over-anxious motherly care, believed John was falling into consumption. He had serious haemorrhage of the lungs, and was for some time under medical treatment.
Another member of the little group, William Morgan, died at this time, and his death brought the Holy Club under the suspicion of having killed him by its austerities. His father had written to Morgan a fortnight before his death complaining: —
“It gives me sensible trouble to hear that you are going into villages about Holt, calling their children together and teaching them their prayers and catechism and giving them a shilling at your departure. I could not but advise with a wise, pious, and learned clergyman. He told me that he has known the worst of consequences follow from such blind zeal, and plainly satisfied me that it was a thorough mistake of true piety and religion.... He concluded that you were young, and, as yet, your judgment had not come to maturity. In time you would see the error of your way and think as he does, that you may walk uprightly and safely without endeavouring to outdo all the good bishops, clergy, and other pious and good men of the present and past ages.”
In the curious ethics of that age a “wise, pious, and learned clergyman” plainly thought that a young mau guilty of teaching little children how to pray was sinning against all religioij! When Morgan died Wesley was openly accused of being contributory to his death. This brought from him a long and noble letter, addressed to Morgan’s father, dated October 18, 1732, giving an account of the Holy Club and its methods. The letter — which forms the opening passage of the famous Journal — is both a history of the little society up to that date, and a defence, and is marked by qualities which make it one of the memorable documents of Christian literature.
The missing qualities in Wesley’s religious state at this time are sufficiently obvious. It utterly lacked the element of joy. Religion is meant to have for the spiritual landscape the office of sunshine, but in Wesley’s spiritual sky burned no divine light, whether of certainty or of hope. He imagined he could distil the rich wine of spiritual gladness out of mechanical religious exercises; but he found himself, to his own distress, and in his own words, “dull, flat, and unaffected in the use of the most solemn ordinances.” Fear, too,- like a shadow, haunted his mind: fear that he was not accepted before God; fear that he might lose what grace he had; fear both of life and of death. He dare not grant himself, he declared, the liberty that others enjoyed. His brother Samuel, whose letters are always rich in the salt of common-sense, had remonstrated with his younger brother for the austerities he practised and the rigours of alarmed self-interrogation under which he lived. John Wesley defends himself by the plea — in which there is an unconscious pathos — that he lacks his brother’s strength and dare take no risks.
“Mirth, I grant (he says), is very fit for you. But does it follow that It is fit for me? If you are to rejoice evermore because you have put your enemies to flight, am I to do the same while they continually assault me? You are very glad because you have passed from death to life. Well! but let liini be afraid who knows not whether he is to live or die. Whether this be my condition or no, who can tell better than myself?”
In a letter to his mother Wesley recites all the spiritual advantages and opportunities he enjoys, and asks, “What shall I do to make all these blessings effectual? Shall I quite break oft’ my pursuit of all learning but what immediately tends to practice? 1 once desired to make a fair show in languages and Philosophy; but it is past.” What, he cries, is “the snrest and shortest way” to the peace for which he sigiied? “Is it not to be humble? But the question recurs: How am I to do this? To own the necessity of it is not to be humble.”
Then this brilliant, masterful, all-accomplished Fellow of Lincoln, his body worn with fasting, his spirit weary with unsatisfied longing, turns to his mother with the gesture of a tired child. In the old, simple, far-off days at the rectory his mother was accustomed to give an hour every Thursday for religious talk with “Jacky.” Wesley writes: —
“In many things you have interceded for me and prevailed. Who knows but in this, too, you may be successful? If you can spare me only that little part of Thursday evening which you formerly bestowed upon me in another manner, I doubt not but It will be as useful now for correcting my heart as it was then for forming my judgment. When I observe how fast life flies away and how slow improvement comes, I think one can never be too much afraid of dying before one has learned to live.”
Canon Overton, who energetically tries to button John Wesley up, through all the stages of his life, in a High Church cassock, contends that at this stage Wesley was a saint without knowing it. It is true that Wesley himself, who ought to know best about his own spiritual condition, declared afterwards that he was utterly ignorant of true religion at this time; but Canon Overton insists heroically on defending John Wesley against John Wesley. He tells the tale of Wesley’s diligence in all the ordinances of the Church, his zeal in acts of Christian beneficence, his lofty aspirations after Christian grace, and asks if that is not to be a good Christian, what is? “If John Wesley,” he says, “was not a true Christian [when in Georgia] God help millions of those who profess and call themselves Christians.”
But can any one study the religious experiences of Wesley at this time and pretend that they represent the spiritual mood religion is intended to create, and does create, in the believing heart? Wesley at this stage was living on what can only be described as the servile theory of religion. He had not yet learned the meaning of that great saying, “Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son!”
At times, however, Wesley makes it clear that, intellectually, he held all the evangelical doctrines. On January 1, 1733, for example, he preached in St. Mary’s, Oxford, a remarkable sermon on “The Circumcision of the Heart.” As a statement of the offices of the Holy Spirit in the human soul that sermon is unsurpassed for force and clearness. It still forms, indeed, one of the fifty-three sermons which, with Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament, constitute the theological standard of the Methodist Church everywhere. Here is Wesley’s definition of the spiritual state he is describing: —
“The circumcision of the heart is that habitual disposition of the soul which. In the sacred writings, is termed holiness, and which directly implies the being cleansed from sin, from all fllthiness both of the flesh and the spirit; and, by consequence, the being endued with those virtues which were also in Christ Jesus; the being so renewed in the image of our mind as to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.”
It would be diflScult, in the same number of words, to state more strongly that doctrine of “perfection” which is the characteristic — and in the eyes of many the scandal — of Wesley’s later ministry. Wesley himself, indeed, says, in 1765, “This sermon contained all that I now teach concerning salvation from all sin and loving God with an undivided heart.” And yet the sermon belongs to the period of his unilluminated theology; the time when Wesley himself was afflicted with perpetual doubts as to his own spiritual condition!
In the sermon of 1733 he goes on to define the faith which is the secret of Christian victory. It is, he says, “An unshaken assent to all that God hath revealed in Scripture; and in particular to those important truths, Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners; He bore our sins in His own body on the tree; He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” And there Wesley stopped. But in 1765, when he republished the sermon, he added, with a significant “Nota bene” as a footnote, the following passage: —
“It is likewise the revelation of Christ in our hearts; a divine evidence or conviction of His love; His free, unmerited love of me, a sinner; a sure confidence in His pardoning mercy wrought in us by the Holy Ghost; a confidence whereby every true believer is enabled to bear witness ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’; that I have an advocate with the Father, and that Jesus Christ the righteous is my Lord, and the propitiation for my sins. I know that He hath loved me, and given Himself for me; He hath reconciled me, even me to God, and I have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins.”
Wesley by this time has got his pronouns right! These words vibrate with the essential note of Christianity; the personal accent, the triumphant cadence! Here the central and divinest purpose in Christ’s redemption has become a realised human experience. Faith is not merely an intellectual assent to certain theological or historical propositions; it is the rejoicing trust of the personal soul in a personal Saviour. But this is exactly the missing note in the sermon of 1733, as it was in Wesley’s own experience at that date. And it is most instructive to see that little mosaic, on which is inscribed Wesley’s joyful experience in 1765 — an experience which had by that time endured for more than a quarter of a century — set as a witness amid the arid sentences of the sermon of 1733.
Another illustration of the curious theological oscillations of Wesley at this period — the fashion in which, while he grasped evangelical truth with his intellect, he utterly failed to realise it in his experience — is found in the contrast betwixt the first little book he ever printed, a book of prayers in 1733, and his second original publication some eighteen months afterwards, the sermon on “The Trouble and Rest of Good Men.” The prayers glow with evangelical fervour. For vision, simplicity, directness, and beauty they are unmatched. But in the sermon of 1735 Wesley is the High Churchman again. He has swung back into the realm of sacerdotal theology! Perfect holiness, he declares, “is not found on earth. Some remains of our disease will ever be felt. Who,” he asks, “will deliver us from the body of this death?” His curiously unevangelical answer is “Death will deliver us! Death shall destroy at once the whole body of sin.”
Death, in brief, is the Christ of the soul, and is the only deliverer the soul will ever know! Wesley, it is plain, had at this time no clear, sustained vision of Christian truth, verified in his own experience. He swings like a pendulum betwixt contradictory conceptions.
An odd illustration of Wesley’s changing moods is found in the somewhat absurd correspondence he carried on at this time with a woman who in after years attained social an literary fame — Mary Granville, afterwards Mrs. Pendarvis. She was three years older than Wesley, a young and fascinating widow, the niece of Lord Lansdowne, rich, witty, beautiful. Wesley met her at the house of the Kirkhams, and the youthful Fellow of Lincoln College and the brilliant and fashionable young widow correspondeed with each other. Wesley labelled himself “Cyrus,” Mary Granville was disguised as “Aspasia”; and for many months Cyrus and Aspasia exchanged letters through which there runs a curious mixture of theology, and of a personal feeling that trembled on the verge of mere flirtation. Cyrus cries, “Tell me, Aspasia, if it be a fault that my heart burns within me when I reflect on the many marks of regard you have already shown me.” Then he exhorts Aspasia to “pray for him,” and discusses with her some problem in theology. “Oh, Cyrus!” writes Aspasia, “how noble a defence you make! And how you are adorned with the beauty of holiness.” Later, Aspasia complains that “Cyrus by this time had blotted me out of his memory.”
There is the oddest mixture of doctrinal discussion and of very human sentiment in this correspondence, and Cyrus plainly was in imminent danger of forgetting the theologian in the lover. Sometimes, indeed, he crossed the line; and the lady herself — though too late, and only when Wesley had moved into quite another realm of feeling — was visibly more than willing to infuse a very human warmth into her letters.
It sheds some curious light on Wesley’s mood where the fair sex is concerned to notice that the correspondence with Aspasia blossomed on the stock of an earlier correspondence — that with Miss Betty Kirkham — a correspondence in which beat the pulse of a very definite and human love. Betty Kirkham was the sister of his college friend, and that Wesley loved her in his temperate fashion, and would have married her, can hardly be doubted. Some unkind force — perhaps parental authority on the one side or the other — interfered. Betty Kirkham married some one else, and died after a very brief wedded life. It was in the house of the Kirkhams that Wesley met Mrs. Pendarvis. Wesley, in his correspondence with Betty Kirkham, labelled her Varanese, and his earlier letters to Aspasia are full of references to “my ., my dear V.” Wesley, however, kept a vigilant and scientific eye on his own emotions as a lover; and he tells Aspasia, “I cannot but often observe with pleasure the great resemblance between the emotions I feel in writing to Aspasia and that with which my heart frequently overflowed in the beginning of my intercourse with our dear V.”
This is another proof that Wesley was destitute of any quick sense of humour. How could he expect one Toung lady to be interested in the circumstance that the business of writing to her excited in her correspondent exactly the same emotions which the process of writing to an earlier and lost love once awakened! All through his life Wesley never comes so near the point of being absurd as when he is in love, or is in the earlier stages of love. Perhaps, indeed, he never felt love in the usual human sense. But he was nurtured in a household singularly rich in feminine influences. He knew, as few men could have known, how keen a woman’s intelligence may be, how quick her wit, how tender her affections, how clear her spiritual insight. And all through his life he eagerly sought the friendship of clever and pure women.