John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness
John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness David Guy On 30 January 1751, having received 'a pressing letter', John
Wesley rode to Oxford that he might vote 'in the election for a member of Parliament which was to be next day'. It was not a short or easy journey. Setting out early with a few companions,
Wesley rode over icy roads into the teeth of a biting wind. A friend's horse slipped and sustained injury.
Nevertheless, about seven in the evening God brought us safe to Oxford. A congregation was waiting for me at Mr Evans', whom I immediately addressed in these awful words, What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?'
So there we see him, citizen of two worlds, prepared to travel at some hazard of life and limb to participate in the affairs of an earthly kingdom, but exhorting his hearers to set their affections on a heavenly realm.
How are we to assess this gentleman-evangelist with his feet on the earth (or in the stirrups) and his head in the clouds — or so it would appear to our contemporaries — and how judge the social consequences of his life and work? Was his message a direction or a distraction?
Leaving aside the 'this-worldly' emphasis in Wesley's call to salvation (though we shall have cause to note it shortly) we may remark that it is impossible to evaluate Wesley's social influence fairly if we forget that he was a man of the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth or twentieth.
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives His parents quarrelled over family prayers for a usurper king, and dynastic questions far more than social or economic problems dominated the pulpit whenever the preacher wandered into the political arena. That particular issue was not settled until the collapse of the '45 rebellion, when John Wesley was already into his stride as an itinerant preacher. He was an old man when the French Revolution began to change the agenda, but even then the preoccupation was with political theory rather than economics.
To criticize Wesley's approach to social questions because he was pre-Marx, pre-Beveridge and pre-Keynes is to take an attitude hardly worthy of serious consideration. But on the other hand, we shall fail to do justice to Wesley's social impact if we are so much the children of our own age that we judge social progress only in terms of shared material wealth or improved environment.
Human life is a unity and progress which cannot be measured only in moral or spiritual terms, but neither can it be truly assessed if such considerations are disallowed. Wesley's significance emerges when, and only when, the importance of moral transformation in the individual — and his immediate and sometimes widening circle — is given due weight. Then we begin to understand why, in the words of G. M. Trevelyan, 'a new chapter in the religious, social and educational history of the working class'* began with the work of the Wesleys and Whitefield.
This has been said so often that it loses its edge unless we bear in mind the state of the labouring classes in the England of Wesley's youth and early manhood. In 1752, the Bishop of Gloucester wrote to his colleague in the See of Cloyne:
Your lordship calls this the freest country in Europe. There is indeed freedom of one kind in it ... a most unbounded licentiousness of all sorts .
. a regard to nothing but diversion and vicious pleasures. ... Our people are now become what they never were before, cruel. These accursed spiritous liquours which, to the shame of the Government, are so easily to be had, and in such quantities drunk, have changed the very nature of our people.
Gin was one undoubted factor: apathy, despair and ignorance also played their part. The aggression of the Epworth villagers to the Wesley family may have expressed not only resistance to unwonted religious zeal but resentment of the régime of squire and
John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness
parson smouldering in half-remembered hopes of the generations which had hailed false dawns at the time of the Civil War or the Glorious Revolution. Again, we must stress that it is against this background that Wesley's social impact must be seen.
It hardly needs saying that Wesley did not set out to alter the structures of society, nor did he view himself as a social reformer, except in the sense that every evangelist hopes to see a changed society through changed people. But that he expected a practical result cannot be doubted. From his earliest days, and especially after reading Law's Serious Call, Wesley's concept of religion was both emotional and practical — the power of God producing inner peace and empowering outward conduct. Hence, 'you have nothing to do but save souls', for the converted would press on towards that holiness which was to be always 'social holiness'. And as they followed after perfection they would serve the present age.
The Revival did change England, though it did not, of course, produce that root and branch transformation of which revivalists dream.
The converted remained a minority that effected change in many areas of national life. In his life of Cromwell, Thomas Carlyle distinguished between a 'valet-population' in which 'knaves and cowards and cunning and greedy persons' can claim 'almost with general consent' that they 'were the orthodox party', and a moral society which does its best to discourage them. If the eighteenth century began with a valet-population gaping in admiration at the ruthless rich and ostentatious oppressor, and gave way to a nineteenth century which-— with all its faults and pockets of humbug
— did hold sincerely to other ideals, this was itself a social transformation.
It was not all that the godly had hoped for and it was not all the work of the Wesleys; evangelical Anglicans shared the labour and the heat of the conflict and the Enlightenment was not without its effect. But it was Wesley and his preachers who took the light into places where the darkness was deepest and who challenged evil in its heartlands — Wesley preaching against slavery in Bristol which depended on the trade for its prosperity is an example that springs immediately to mind.
- Wesley, then — or rather, those who would do him justice 200 years later — must claim a lion's share of credit for national resurgence seen in moral terms and social advance. As has been
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives said, England was changed because men and women were converted. But to Wesley also — and in this he stands alone — belongs the credit for the other great result of the Revival: the emergence of a disciplined minority, able to raise themselves socially and point their contemporaries to similar possibilities. In the words of Professor Plumb:
Methodism gave far more than emotional release; it brought.a sense of purpose and a field for the exercise of both will and power.
To men and women who were just climbing out of utter poverty by the dint of their own thrifty endeavour this concentration of will and purpose was particularly appealing.
The oligarchical and rigid nature of local institutions meant that there was little hope for ambitious men and women with a social conscience.
All doors were closed to them, including, of course, those of the established Church, but Wesley provided an organization in which they could fulfil their need for power and their sense of duty.* With this background to our thinking we must assess Wesley's influence by scratching the surface of three areas of interest:
1. Wesley's personal response to social problems by preaching, teaching action and attitude.
2. Wesley's influence upon his converts and later generations influenced by his life-style and holiness teaching.
3. Wesley's experiments in social service and the relevance of his teaching to both community care and social protest.
To turn to the first: Wesley's concern for the poor — like his passion for scriptural holiness — preceded his evangelical conversion and can be seen in his student days at Oxford where, in Tyerman's account, he sold the pictures on his study walls to relieve the distress of a servant girl for whose education the Holy
Club had already made provision. The man who could never keep money in his pocket was later to challenge his wealthy hearers to heed the cry of the poor.
Having food and raiment.
. we may, if the love of God is in our hearts, 'be therewith content'. But what shall they do who have none of these? .
. how many are there in this Christian country
John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness
that toil, and labour, and sweat, and have it (food) not at the last, but struggle with weariness and hunger together? ..
. You that live at ease in the earth, that want nothing but eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to understand how well God hath dealt with you, 1s it not worse to seek bread day by day and find none?
Perhaps to find the comfort also of five or six children crying for what he has not to give! Who can tell what this means unless he hath felt it himself? I am astonished that it occasions no more than heaviness even in them that believe.°
To Lord Dartmouth, leading evangelical layman and member of the Government, Wesley wrote in 1775 that 'trade in general is exceedingly decayed and thousands of people are quite unemployed. Some I know have perished for want of bread; others I have seen creeping up and down like walking shadows'.°
Aware of need but with no political solutions — though he did suggest some economic panaceas which did not carry conviction then and are not highly regarded by modern students — Wesley's recourse was to call for true discipleship or practical religion. And this he proceeded to do, without fear or favour, though he learned by experience how many went away sorrowful because they had great possessions.
In Sermon 23 'Upon Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth', Wesley pleads for purity of intention in ordinary business. By this he means seeking God's glory in the use of wealth rather than personal security or aggrandisement. He calls on preachers to warn the wealthy against seeking to be richer yet: "It may be one in a thousand will have ears to hear.
. .. Having admitted that a man must provide for his family and invest sensibly in his business, Wesley insists that whoever he is that, owing no man anything and having food and raiment for himself and his household, together with a sufficiency to carry on his worldly business ... seeks still a larger portion on earth, he lives in an open, habitual denial of the Lord that bought him.'
In this preaching Wesley was swimming against the tide. Asa Briggs has noted the 'change in attitude to the making of wealth' that accompanied the Restoration and was accepted without
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives question by Hanoverian times. 'After 1660 moral or ethical debate on permissibility of interest gave way to practical discussion concerning its level.
. "Did men content themselves with bare necessaries, we should have a poor world"'.
The preacher of today who echoes Wesley may expect a similar reaction from many of his hearers, but the fearless correspondent's challenge to Sir James Lowther, '.. . examine yourself whether you do not love money? If so, you cannot lave God',? has a strangely New Testament ring to it, more, perhaps, than attaches to the more fashionable strictures of some of today's popular evangelists.
And yet the problems remain; 'matted problems', William Sangster called them, remarking that it is 'hard to believe.
. that a man of Wesley's mental stature really believed that he was commending a complete cure'.'° But the challenge of his teaching endures.
It formed a necessary foundation for the call he made to his followers to renounce some of the respectable (or locally accepted) ways of increasing their worldly wealth and to seek only for the true riches that endure.
This call included denouncing the taking of bribes when the practice was part of the electoral pattern, and a warning against participating in smuggling at a time when large sections of the population engaged in evasion of hated — and heavy — customs duties.
Wesley's social protest included his pioneering of the attack on the Slave Trade. His pamphlet Thoughts on Slavery was published in 1774 when the trade seemed entrenched and unstoppable; his well-known letter to William Wilberforce, one of his last writings, was the word of a veteran who knows how long the walls of Jericho may resist the blowing of the trumpets of the Lord's people.
All this is well known, but it is sometimes forgotten that Wesley offered a challenge to the class divisions of the eighteenth century which was every bit as disturbing to his contemporaries as any attack upon their money-making methods. The challenge was not so much in what he said as in his readiness to say it to duke as well as dustman, and those who became uneasy when they heard ladies and gentlemen included among the lost sinners that Jesus came to save were right to be worried, for this was a levelling Gospel and socially subversive in the true sense. As Arnold Lunn has said:
John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness
Wesley was so obsessed by the eternal values that he completely lost all sense of class values .
. (he) told people exactly what he thought of them, but there was no hint of condescension in his
'openness'. He never patronised people. ... He did not spare people when he thought them wrong, but the preachers who resented Charles' condescending manner accepted without question John Wesley's quiet assumption of autocratic power. '!
It is to those preachers, and to the class and band leaders and the committed folk in the meeting houses that we must now turn our attention. Had Wesley been only a preacher he would — under God — have made a tremendous impact on the England of his day, but his continuing influence is seen through the ongoing life of the Societies he organized and their offshoots.
It is registered in the lives of his followers and of those they in turn influenced; in the official policies of movements and the dayto-day service of individuals; in the immediate response of contemporaries and the ongoing work of later generations within the Wesley tradition.
Where do we begin? With the vast numbers influenced by the preaching and hymns of the Revival and far outnumbering
Wesley's official followers? It is easy enough to find evidence of social change there, though to a more limited degree. In 1772
Wesley referred to some newly-built factories where the workforce had been notorious for swearing and blasphemy but where some of the women employed, influenced by the local Methodist meetings, had so impressed their workmates that 'in three of the factories no more lewdness or profaneness was found for ..
. blasphemies were turned into praise'
Was this social progress? Working conditions remained the same — unless one includes among working conditions the moral tone, the effect of conversation on conduct, relationships and character. (There may even be some of our contemporaries, suffering sexual harassment amid hygenic conditions, who would sigh for a change of the kind Wesley noted in the 'dark, satanic mills'.) Or should we note the social consequences of the quest for Christian Perfection among those who embraced Wesley's teaching in its entirety? Certainly their patient endurance of persecution, upright honesty and unfailing industry impressed those
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives around them. Typical, perhaps, is the story of Hudson Taylor's forebears in Barnsley who slowly wore down the opposition of their persecutors by patience and principled living. It was the practice of Hudson's father, James Taylor, never to delay the repayment of a debt even by a day because his creditor would lose interest, even though a trifling sum.'%
But for an all-round summary of the effect of Methodism on Wesley's followers we must borrow the words of David Edwards.
He (Wesley) insisted on temperance.... He was equally emphatic about cleanliness and hygiene generally. And he gave these working men and women a new vision of what life could be. .
.. He encouraged them to read the Bible day by day — and much else, ordering his preachers to carry books and pamphlets around with them. For his people's benefit he supplied concise guides to the Bible, history, literature, philosophy, politics, economics, medicine and science. He encouraged them to educate their children.
. to hope for heaven, and meanwhile to work for heaven on earth, transfiguring their daily labours in the spirit of Charles Wesley's hymn, 'Forth in thy name, O
Lord, I go'. Those who were not willing to live and to labour in this spirit were told to go forth more rudely. "4
The last point is important. Assurance must be balanced by conduct: by their fruits ye shall know them. What could have been an orgy of emotionalism was protected, purified and directed by an insistence on godly living that was not under law but did employ rules. Hence the comment of Max Warren:
There is something wholly one-sided and inaccurate in the popular picture of Evangelical religion as being one of unbridled individualism.
The disciplined fellowship of religious societies is the real clue to Evangelical religion.»
So it was and, thanks to Wesley's continuing influence, so it continued to be. Compare Wesley's advice to his preachers with William Booth's orders to his soldiers one hundred years later.
John Wesley's rules for preachers, delivered at Conference in 1763 began: 'Be diligent, never unemployed or triflingly employed.' In 1769 he was writing to a preacher in Ireland:
John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness
Be active, be diligent; avoid all laziness, sloth, indolence. Fly from every degree, every appearance of it; else you will never be more than half a Christian. ..
. Be cleanly .
. use all diligence to be clean.... Whatever clothes you wear, let them be whole.
. Let none ever see a ragged Methodist.'® William Booth, who said, 'For me, as a young man, there was one God and John Wesley was his prophet,' found himself the leader of a new religious movement towards the end of the nineteenth century. Like Wesley before him, Booth set out simple lines of guidance for his converts and assistants.
Orders and Regulations for Soldiers of The Salvation Army (1898) stated:
Industry: No circumstances are an excuse for being idle or unemployed.
. He (the soldier) should never allow himself to be inactive. If he has nothing to do for himself he should do something for others. If he has nothing for his hands to be engaged upon he should engage his mind ..
. he can always engage his soul in prayer.
. Cleanliness: As far as his trade, calling and employment will allow, the Salvation Soldier should be clean in his hands and clothing.
I am not suggesting that William Booth deliberately modelled his regulations on Wesley's advice to his followers, but it seems clear that the nineteenth-century evangelist retained many of the emphases impressed upon his mind in formative years.
Wesley's teaching on scriptural holiness also finds an echo in Booth's call to regular, weekly self-examination in which the salvationist should ask himself (among other things): 'Am I conscious of any pride or haughtiness in my manner or bearing?
Do I conform to the fashions and customs of the world? .
. Am I in danger of being carried away with worldly desire to be rich or admired?'? That Wesley's call to Christian Perfection, the 'grand depositum' that was to characterize his followers and be their special care, should leave its mark on the Booths is not strange when one considers that it played its part in leading them to break with the Methodist New Connexion that they might devote themselves entirely to evangelism among the poor. Some months before that departure, Catherine Booth told her parents that she and her husband had given themselves to renewed and more earnest study of Wesley's holiness teaching, and the unexpected
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives result, for Catherine, had been 'a renewal of the evangelistic question'. Previously rebuffed when they had asked Conference to agree to William Booth's setting aside to full-time revivalistic work, the young couple were becoming reconciled to their situation — until the search for holiness revived 'the evangelistic question', first for Catherine and then for William. The wife, who had previously held back, wrote:
Such an unexpected surrender on my part, of course, revived William's yearnings toward the evangelistic work, though in quite another spirit to that in which he used to long for it."®
It is indisputable that John Wesley's call to holiness stands behind evangelism and social service in five continents, beginning as it did in a man's abandonment to seeming obscurity in East
London because of a spiritual renewal that drove him back to his essential work but 'in quite another spirit'.
The Salvation Army, whether viewed as an evangelistic movement or an expression of social service, was not, of course, the only outcome of the great revival of the previous century. Dr M. G.
Jones wrote of how the 'religious revivals, by stressing the sense of individual responsibility, changed a trickle of private and semiprivate benevolence into a spate of organised philanthropy '.'? The onflowing spate was a varied stream; we may note individuals and associations, organizations and trends; Britain was not the only land affected, and the results were seen in political action as well as philanthropy. Let Wesley himself lead us into our third and final area of interest — practical service to the needy.
John Wesley was a practical man. Describing the beginnings of Methodism to the Rev. Vincent Perronet, he wrote first of evangelism, then of the organization of the converts, then of the relief of want. Under this last heading he described the work of a 'Visitor of the sick.
. To relieve them if they are in want'. But this opened up another area of need.
... many who were not sick, were not able to provide for themselves.
. chiefly feeble, aged widows. I consulted with the Stewards how they might be relieved. They all agreed if we could keep them in one house it would not only be far less expensive to us, but also more comfortable for them.
. we have nine widows, one blind woman, two poor children, two upper
John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness
servants, a man and a maid. I might add, four or five preachers; for I myself, as well as the other preachers who are in town, diet with the poor on the same food and at the same table; and we rejoice therein as a comfortable earnest of our eating bread together in our Father's kingdom."° He went on to mention the founding of a school for widows and orphans and the care of (at that time) sixty children, also a scheme to help those in a small way of business who had, in modern terms, a temporary cash-flow problem. In all these endeavours there is a complete lack of that spirit of patronage or lordly paternalism which was later to disfigure so much of the philanthropy of the succeeding era, and the picture of Wesley enjoying a simple meal with poor widows and some of his preachers and finding it a sacramental experience — a comfortable earnest of our eating bread together in our Father's kingdom — is a delightful one.
Those who followed him into costly and consistent caring were not always among his declared followers, but were often inspired by their example and by the social dimension of that holiness doctrine which Wesley constantly commended. Among those beyond the bounds of official Methodism we may note Hannah
More who, in 1785, under the influence of the Wesleyan call to perfection, resolved to dedicate herself to God 'with a more entire surrender than I have ever made'. The consequences included association with Wilberforce in his many reforming endeavours and the setting up, in her own locality, of a school for poor children. This aroused the wrath of local property owners who saw the seeds of revolution in the education of those whom Providence had decreed should be ignorant, but Hannah had made 'a more entire surrender' and did not draw back.
Among those who enjoyed a specifically Wesleyan upbringing was Hudson Taylor, who, at seventeen, wrote that he was longing
'for this perfect holiness'. Out of the joys and agonies of that period came a sense of acceptance for service: 'From that time the conviction never left me that I was called to China.'*' Wesley's holiness teaching and the eventual emergence of the China Inland
Mission are not unrelated.
- Social service leads to social protest — as many of Wesley's children were to discover. The revelation of human need set against a vision of the kingdom draws out the implications ofa call
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives to Christian perfection and can produce a Christian radicalism described by Theodore Runyon:
When Christian perfection becomes the goal of the individual, a fundamental hope is engendered that the future can surpass the present. Concomitantly, a holy dissatisfaction is aroused with regard to any present state of affairs. ..
. Moreover, this holy dissatisfaction is readily ihansicianle ee the realms of the individual to that of society."
I have not forgotten that John Wesley's particular doctrine of entire sanctification was a cause of controversy during his lifetime and of some bewilderment to many of his followers. It has its problems. It is not, however, the theory that matters so much as the vision. By placing before his converts the prospect of freedom from all conscious sin, Wesley inspired in many an intolerance of personal imperfections that was to become in time a refusal to settle for the injustices and wrongs perpetrated by society.
Compassion for the poor very easily franslated into passion for social progress and this involved political action.
To ask if Wesley — a man of the eighteenth century, as I have said — would have approved of the Chartists or the early-day socialists is as sensible as to ask if Nelson would have welcomed steam-driven ironclads. Politically Wesley was a man of his time.
But his preaching — and, as we have seen, his insistence on disciplined living — raised up a task force for change.
That this task force did not always enjoy the approval of those who had legally inherited Wesley's mantle, is well-known.
Even after the 1832 Reform Act the Methodist Conference issued another of its warnings against listening to political debates 'with too warm an interest'.... Many individual
Methodists, particularly in the splinter groups, continued to defy such discouraging guidance.*3 By 1844, however, the voice of Methodism was to be heard in other than the 'splinter groups'. When the Home Secretary, Sir
James Graham, resisted the demand for a restriction of women's and children's labour to ten hours per day on the grounds of expense to the nation, but was willing to settle for twelve hours, a writer in the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine commented:
John Wesley: Apostle of Social Holiness
If the protection for which Lord Ashley contended is right, let it be granted; and in granting it let the legislature do homage to that never-failing Providence which ordereth all things in Heaven and Earth. If it is wrong, let it be shown so, and let not an argument of injustice and humanity on one side be met with an argument of pounds, shillings and pence on the other.*4
Mention of Lord Ashley — later the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury — reminds us that the ongoing work of the revival was shared, as the Revival itself had been shared, by Evangelicals outside the Wesleyan tradition, but the influence of John Wesley had been paramount and remained powerful. In the 1880s a woman's voice
— Catherine Booth's — denounced the enthronement of market forces in the realms of human need, appealing for 'wholesome houses for the poor at such a rental as they could comfortably pay' and recognizing that such provision would require 'a benevolence willing to lend, hoping for nothing again'.*° This was almost as impractical as John Wesley's call to despise money — and as scriptural and relevant to human need.
A hundred years after Catherine Booth, Dr Donald Burke writes that, Wesleyan theology, when linked to the establishment of the Kingdom of God, should not motivate us so much to the provision of social services which are merely ameliorative or cosmetic. The commitment to the Kingdom motivates us to strive for social reform or, perhaps, more appropriately, social recreation."° John Wesley, apostle of social righteousness: by his words, attitudes and example, challenging the social evils of his own day; through his evangelistic ministry and leadership raising up a people motivated to good works and serious living who would follow after that holiness which would be seen as a goal for their own souls and — in many cases — a challenge to the accepted ways of society. Wesley's mission was used to bring about change — often immediate in the personal realm but also long-lasting and developing in the social.
Men and women were liberated for service and advance. "To you,' wrote Joseph Priestly in his Address to the Methodists in 1791, 'is the civilization, the industry and sobriety of great numbers of the
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives labouring part of the community owing.' And that was only the beginning.