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such moral victories as faith, vision and conscience alone could initiate: and he believed the prohibition of the mercenary traffic in distilled liquors, as essential to human welfare and balanced happiness, as the prohibition of the slave traffic.
Hence the above letter to Pitt.
In the " Rules of the Society of the People called Methodists" we read: "It is therefore expected of all who continue therein, that they should continue to evidence their desire for salvation, first, by doing no harm, by avoiding evil in every kind ; especially that which is generally practised.
Such is...
Drunkenness ;_ buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them, unless in cases of extreme necessity."
And among the special instructions laid down by Wesley for the guidance of his local and itinerant preachers, was the injunction that they were to taste intoxicating liquors "' on no pretext whatever."
Finally, too, it is notable that Wesley's Primitive Physic, which ran into nearly forty editions, was in part designed to free the English populace from the vulgar delusion, that alcohol is the universal medicine for most diseases which afflict mankind.
(ii) Legal, Political and State Affairs It cannot be over emphasised that to Wesley religion was the " be-all and end-all' of human life.
The soul of reformation, to him, was ever the reformation of the soul.
But human life being itself a social process, dependent for its existence upon the complex institutions of law and order, it follows that in a truly Christian community those institutions should be permeated with the spirit, and guided by the ethic, of the Gospel of Christ.
Religion to Wesley therefore was not in the nature of an external crown or apex, superimposed upon the social structure: rather was it a health-giving elixir, which alone could bring harmony, purpose and dignity to all the variegated but co-related organs and members of the body politic.
Concerning matters of law, politics and _ statecraft, accordingly, he repeatedly struck notes of no uncertain key.
The monotonous reiteration of words together with the irksome padding of legal documents, as an excuse to multiply lawyers' fees, have often been attacked, but rarely with greater pungency than by Wesley.
"I called on the solicitor whom I had employed in the suit lately commenced against me in Chancery," he notes in 1745, " and here I saw that foul monster, a Chancery bill!
A scroll it was of forty-two pages in large folio, to tell a story which needed not to have taken forty lines ! and stuffed with such stupid, senseless, improbable lies (many
1 See section 4 of Rules.
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of them, too, quite foreign to the question) as, I believe, would have cost the compiler his life in any heathen court either of Greece or Rome.
And this is Equity in a Christian country !
This is the English method of redressing their grievances.''4
The great evangelist was perhaps hyper-critical of the legal profession of his day : he refers to an honest lawyer as a " black swan,''? and repeatedly he condemns the " villainous tautology of lawyers."
Indeed his famous " Form for the Settling of Preaching Houses," which eminent solicitors have pronounced one of the tersest and clearest of legal documents, was compiled to eradicate the bewildering phraseology and tantalising repetitions, customary in such legal documents.
"I wrote a form for settling the preaching houses," he explains, "' without any superfluous words, which shall be used for the time to come, verbatim, for all the houses to which I contribute anything.
I will no more encourage that villainous tautology of lawyers, which is the scandal of our nation.''® Yet, if Wesley was unduly suspicious of lawyers, his aversion was inspired by humane motives.
He felt that Law, instead of acting as a medium of equity and a protection to the poor, frequently was being used to pervert equity and to embezzle the poor ; and to him perverted law, like perverted religion, was a loathsome, diabolical thing.
We quote in extenso a case in point:
'' We returned to York, where I was desired to call upon a poor prisoner in the castle.
I had formerly occasion to take notice of an hideous monster, called a Chancery Bill ;
I now saw the fellow to it, called a Declaration.
The plain fact was this: Some time since a man who lived near Yarm assisted others in running some brandy.
His share was near four pounds.
After he had wholly left off that bad work, and was following his own business, that of a weaver, he was arrested, and sent to York gaol; and, not long after, comes down a Declaration, ' that Jac. Wh had landed a vessel laded with brandy and Geneva, at the port of London, and sold them there, whereby he was indebted to his Majesty five hundred and seventy-seven pounds and upwards.'
And to tell this worthy story, the lawyer takes up thirteen or fourteen sheets of treble stamped paper.
O England, England! will this reproach never be rolled away from thee?
Is there anything like this to be found, either among Papists, Turks or heathens?
In the name of truth, justice, mercy and common sense, I ask :
1. Why do men lie for lyings sake?
Is it only to keep their hands in? What need else, of saying it was the port of London, when
1 Yournal, December 27th, 1745.
2 Ibid., October 2nd, 1764.
3 Ibid., June 8th, 1790.
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everyone knew the brandy was landed above three hundred miles from thence?
What a monstrous contempt of truth does this show, or rather hatred, to it!
2. Where is the justice of swelling four pounds into five hundred and seventy-seven ?
3. Where is the common sense of taking up fourteen sheets to tell a story that may be told in ten lines?
4. Where is the mercy of thus grinding the face of the poor, thus sucking the blood of a poor, beggared prisoner?
Would not this be execrable villainy, if the paper and writing together were only sixpence a sheet, when they have stripped him already of his little all, and not left him fourteen groats in the world? "!
No man of his century attacked the common practice of smuggling more stoutly or more effectively than Wesley.
Yet in this case he obviously considered the representatives of the Law more criminal than the imprisoned smuggler.
Purely party politics, received from Wesley no_ support.
Repeatedly, at election times, he convened the enfranchised members of his Societies and urged them to vote for the candidate of nobler character who would support humanitarian and Christian principles—for a lover '' of God and the King."
And by the King, he meant the symbol of a united nation, not the head of a faction or class.
But each elector, he insisted, must conscientiously settle the choice for himself, refraining always from ill word or ill deed toward those who voted on the other side.
Wesley coerced the political conscience of none of his followers.
He contented himself with the application of Christian principles to public life, and avoided factional or partisan association.
Nevertheless at one point he was adamant: he threw all his weight against "bribery and corruption '' in elections.
No members of his Societies should even "eat or drink"? at the expense of him for whom they voted.
Complete integrity and probity, he demanded in public as much as in private affairs.2_ Every elector, he urged, should use his franchise, as though the moral results of the Election
'"' depended on his vote alone.'''
Rotten boroughs to Wesley were a stupid anachronism, which more than once he exposed.
On October and, 1754, he wrote : "I walked to Old Sarum, which in spite of common sense, without house or inhabitants, still sends two members to Parliament.'* 'In spite of common sense,"' in the mouth of Wesley, was a phrase of biting condemnation.
Later he derided the political injustice which allowed Looe, a town 1 Fournal, July 3rd, 1671.
2 Ibid., October 6th, 1774.
Cf. Kant's '' Rule of Duty," in Critique of Practical Reason.
4 See Fournal (above date).
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half as large as Islington," to send '' four members to Parliament," though the largest county in North Wales sent but one ;? while in 1778, with his country at war, he pointed the absurdity of Queensborough containing "' above fifty houses," sending "two members to Parliament."?
Already we have had occasion to notice Wesley's abhorrence of Press Gangs, so common in his day; we also have noted his attacks on magistrates for encouraging mob violence and on judges for defending slavery.
But on numerous other public abuses, he turned the searchlight of truth.
The toll-gate system of public revenue, he censured as "'saddling the poor with the vile imposition of turn-pikes.'"'?
Concerning the notorious scandal of pluralities and sinecures in the State Church (often the fruit of political intrigue) he cried :
"' Oh what a curse in this poor land are pluralities and non-residence."
As for prison administration, he prepared the way for the coming of John Howard and Mrs. Fry, his spiritual children.
How familiar he was with contemporary prisons, may be gauged from the fact that "in one period of nine months "' he " preached at least sixty-seven times in various gaols,"'* and Marshalsea was by no means the only prison he depicted, '' a nursery of all manner of wickedness."
Indeed the more carefully one studies Wesley's prison associations, the more obvious it becomes that his fearless criticism of such public institutions, rather than the doctrine he preached, was the real reason why, for long, he was "forbidden to go to Newgate for fear of making them wicked, and to Bedlam for fear of driving them mad !''
Wesley's mind was too systematic and his study of history too comprehensive, to despise the vehicles of government and order.
Contrariwise, his conception of society being organic and not mechanical, he cherished for them instinctive respect ; but when such organisations, political or ecclesiastical, degenerated into a dress parade, behind which stalked injustice and tyranny, he was quick to tear off the mask—and not always with a gloved hand.
His numerous comments on Ireland, after intimate association, are highly illuminating.
A Protestant of Protestants and an Englishman to the bone,*® his heart burned at the pompous injustices he saw perpetrated in that unhappy land.
'' Nor is it any wonder," he thunders, " that those who are born Papists generally live and die such, when Protestants
1 See Fournal (Curnock), Vol. IV, p. 129.
2 Fournal, November 4th, 1778.
3 Fournal, June 15th, 1770.
4 Dr. Warner's Wesleyan Movement, etc., p. 237.
5 ¥ournal, February 22nd, 1750.
8 Though Wesley by ancestry was partly Irish, in temperament and outlook he was ultra-English.