John Wesley: Some Aspects of the Eighteenth Century in England
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Wesley Bi-Centenary Manuals No. 5
JOHN WESLEY
Some AsPECTs OF THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY IN ENGLAND
JOHN WESLEY
SOME ASPECTS OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
AUGUSTINE BIRRELL
THE EPWORTH PRESS
(EDGAR C. BARTON)
25-35 City Road, London, E.C.1
This essay on John Wesley is reprinted from The Collected Essays and Addresses of the Rt. Hon. Augustine
Birrell, 1880-1920, issued in 1922, by kind permission of the publishers, Messrs. J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
Theo! ogy | ibrary
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AT. CLAREMONT
California All rights reserved First issued in this Edition, January, 1938 Made in Great Britain
JOHN WESLEY
SOME ASPECTS OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
IT was a fortunate thing for historians, moralists, philosophers, and every other kind of book-maker when it became the habit to chop up the annals of mankind into centuries.
It is a meaningless division save for the purpose of counting, and yet such is our passion for generalization, so fond are we of distinguishing and differentiating, that we all of us have long ago endowed each one of the nineteen Christian centuries (to wander back no further) with its own characteristics and attributes.
These arbitrary divisions of time have thus become sober realities; they stalk majestically across the stage of memory, they tread the boards each in its own garb, making appropriate gestures and uttering familiar catch-words. Lord Clarendon's History is not more unlike Gibbon's, Bishop
Ken is not more unlike Bishop Hoadly, Prince Rupert is not more unlike John Churchill, than is the seventeenth century as we choose to depict it unlike the eighteenth. And yet full well do we know in the bottom of our hearts, those unpleasing depths where we seldom dredge for fear of the
John Wesley consequences, how impossible it is to compress into the lines of a single figure, however animated
— its countenance or mobile its features, the vast tide of human existence as it flows gigantically along regardless of methods of counting time.
The eighteenth century in England does not lack its historians and painters, who have treated their great subject, sometimes after a pre-Raphaelite fashion, and sometimes after the manner of the impressionists.
It has been loaded with abuse by picturesque historians and high-flying divines and romantic poets.
Its political franchise was certainly restricted, while its civil list was unduly extended.
It whitewashed its churches, and even sought to rationalize its religion. No less emancipated an intelligence than Mark Pattison's pronounced the first half of the eighteenth century to be 'an age destitute of faith and earnestness — an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without insight, and whose public men were without character'.
Harsh words indeed, but not lightly written.
Yet when abandoning generalities and dwelling on the details of the time as it was then spent in England, it is difficult to reconcile all one's reading with any very sweeping assertions. It was a brutal. age, no doubt — an age of the press-gang, of the whipping-post, of gaol-fever, and all the horrors of the criminal code; an ignorant age, when the population, lords and louts alike, drank with great freedom and reckoned cock-fighting among the
John Wesley
more innocent joys of life; when education of the kind called popular, or, more correctly, primary — for popular it is not and never will be — was hardly thought of; a corrupt age, when offices and votes were bought and sold, and bishops owed their sees to the King's women.
Brutal, ignorant, and corrupt.
That the eighteenth century in England was all this, is it not written in the storied page of Hogarth? Charles
Lamb quotes with critical approval the answer of the man who, when asked to name his favourite author, replied: 'Next to Shakespeare, Hogarth.'
We all love a crowded gallery — people coming, going, incidents, emotions, passions evil as well as good, for there is nothing we cannot forgive humanity - and Hogarth's gallery teems with the life of the eighteenth century; catches, as only great painters can, its most evanescent glances, and records its desperate efforts to amuse itself or forget itself between two eternities. And though so true a humorist could not be oblivious of the kindly side of life or be without some gracious touches and affectionate portrayals, still, roughly speaking, the great historian of the eighteenth century in England affirms the brutal view of it, its cruelty, its horror.
How people can frame Hogarth's prints and hang them up in their rooms is more than I can say.
But there are other authorities, other aspects, other books.
Two of the catchwords of the
John Wesley eighteenth century are sentimentality and enthustasm.
The first of the two is supposed.to have been invented by the famous author of the History of Clarissa Harlowe, a Series of Letters.
He it was, that little printer and warden of a city company, who first opened the rusty floodgates of English tears and taught the South Briton how to weep as he had never wept before. But it is with enthustasm I would deal to-day. During the eighteenth century 'enthusiasm' is a word of almost as frequent occurrence as either wit or parts.
It has been pointed out by an ingenious friend of my own that Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, employs the word 'wit' forty-seven times and in at least seven different senses;1 and as for 'parts', though the word may be found in Sidney and Spenser, the eighteenth century made it peculiarly its own.
But 'enthusiasm' is also a very frequent word.
Lord Shaftesbury, the third Earl and the author of the Characteristicks before the century was in its
wrote his famous Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, in which he is supposed to have said: 'Ridicule is the test of truth.' He never said so anywhere in so many words, but he gets very near it in this letter, in which he describes enthusiasm as one of the dangers of the age, a terrible distemper, almost as bad as the small-pox. In the opinion of my lord enthusiasm is a modification of the spleen, having its centre in an ill-regulated religion.
True 1 Pope's Essay on Criticism, edited by A. S. West; Cambridge University Press, 1896.
John Wesley
religion, in the opinion of that third Lord Shaftesbury, is based on good humour. He observes in his fashionable way: ''Tis in adversity chiefly or in ill-health, under affliction or disturbance of mind or discomposure of temper, that we have recourse to religion, though in reality we are never so unfit to think of it as at such a dark and heavy hour.
We can never be fit to contemplate anything above us when we are in no condition to look into ourselves and calmly examine the temper of our own minds and passions, for then it is we see wrath and fury and revenge and terror in the Deity when we are full of disturbances and fears within, and have by suffering and anxiety lost so much of the natural calm and easiness of our temper.'
Thus did the infant century at the very outset of its journey meet, in the shape of this elegant peer, its Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, who, you will remember, in reply to Christian's distracted 'I know what I would obtain; it is ease for my heavy burden', observes, in the same sense as Shaftesbury, though in homelier language: "But why wilt thou seek for ease in this way, seeing so many dangers attend it, especially since (hadst thou but patience to hear me) I could direct thee to the obtaining of what thou desirest, without the dangers that thou in this way wilt run thyself intoyea, and the remedy is at hand? Besides I will add that instead of those dangers, thou shalt meet with much safety, friendship, and content.'
Why wilt thou seek for ease in this way when if
John Wesley you will only be good-humoured, sensible, and let the world wag, you will meet with much safety, friendship, and content?
All through the eighteenth century, from Lord Shaftesbury at the beginning to Bishop Lavington nearer its close, enthusiasm continued the béte noire of all those decent people who think that as God made the world He should be left alone to mend it. The inherent absurdity of enthusiasm seldom failed to illuminate the good-natured countenance of David Hume with a smile half a philosopher's and half a man of the world's, while it provoked a not ill-natured sneer from Gibbon, who, though he wrote the history of the fall of the Roman Empire was taken quite by surprise, and, indeed, terribly put out, by the fall of the French monarchy in his own day. He, while referring to the author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy
Life, one of the most characteristic books of the eighteenth century, observes in that way of his so suggestive of a snug corner and a library chair:
'Had not Law's vigorous mind been clouded by enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of his time.'
Devoutness, holiness, the inward life, the flight from wrath to come, the horror of sin, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, raptures, transports, fancies, visions, voices — all these things and more are included in that word 'enthusiasm', which is for ever cropping up in this eighteenth century, the reason being that the century was full of it,
John Wesley
and during its years countless thousands of pilgrims not only played the fool in Vanity Fair and made beasts of themselves in Gin Lane, but with groans and trembling passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and caught glimpses of the towers and palaces of the city of God.
We have too few books which bring home to us in concrete form the lives and thoughts of our forefathers.
Historians we know, good, bad, and indifferent, the learned but dull, the dull but conscientious, the picturesque but false; the historian who writes his history because he has a grudge against the Church of England, whose orders he has renounced; his Anglican rival, who writes his because he resents as a personal affront the attitude of the Church of Rome to the English branch; the Nonconformist historian, who has his quarrel both with the Vatican and Lambeth, and is better read in his Calamy's WNonconformist Memorial than in his Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy. They all have their value, these historians, and their vogue.
Gladly do I give them place.
But they none of them supply us with what we want. Suppose, for example, I want to be infected with the learning and the leisure of the eighteenth century: the generalizations of the regular historian are of no use to me. Their pages contain no microbes, distil no perfumes.
If Mr. Austin Dobson's poems are by my side, or his prose studies, they will for a brief season lay me low; but a resurrectionary tour de force has never the
John Wesley reposeful air of Nature. For such a purpose as I have just indicated there is nothing quite so good as the seventeen volumes of Nichols's Anecdotes and Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. In a sense, and a very real sense, too, these portly tomes may be called utterly insignificant. They rarely recall a name of first-class importance or record a fact in itself worth mentioning. They force you to spend your time in the company of historians, not of empires, but of counties, of typographers, antiquaries, classical scholars, lettered divines, librarians at great houses, learned tradesmen (for such freaks existed in the eighteenth century); they tell you of lives wasted in colleges and country rectories; they remind you of forgotten controversies and foolish personal enmities; they are full of Latin epitaphs. And every now and again in your country wanderings the originals of these epitaphs will stare at you from some snug transept corner, or meet your eye as you wander westward down the nave of an abbey church or other oldworld burying-place. You will not be troubled with enthusiasm in Mr. Nichols's collections, but to read them is to live in the eighteenth century.
In sundry moods they will serve your turn well enough, but the reaction must come, when you will grow impatient of all this trifling, and demand to be quit of tiresome coteries and tenth-rate literature and to be admitted into the life of the nation. Then, if you are wise, you will carefully replace Mr. Nichols on the shelf (for it is childish
John Wesley
to knock books about, and the mood will recur) and take down The Journal of the Reverend Fohn
Wesley, A.M., sometime Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.
John Wesley, born as he was in 1703, and dying as he did in 1791, covers as nearly as mortal man
may the whole of the eighteenth century, of which he was one of the most typical figures, and certainly the most strenuous. He began his published
Journal on October 14, 1735, and its last entry is under date Sunday, October 24, 1790, when in the morning he explained to a numerous congregation in Spitalfields Church 'The Whole Armour of God', and in the afternoon enforced to a still larger audience in St. Paul's, Shadwell, the great truth, 'One thing is needful', the last words of the Journal being:
'I hope many even then resolved to choose the better part.'
Between those two Octobers there lies the most amazing record of human exertion ever penned or endured.
I do not know whether I am likely to have among my readers any one who has ever contested an English or Scotch county in a Parliamentary election since household suffrage.
If I have, that tired soul will know how severe is the strain of its three weeks, and how impossible it seemed at the end of the first week that you should be able to keep it going for another fortnight, and how when the last night arrived you felt that had the strife been accidentally prolonged another
John Wesley seven days you must have perished by the wayside.
Well, John Wesley contested the three kingdoms in the cause of Christ during a campaign which lasted forty years. He did it for the most part on horseback. He paid more turnpikes than any man who ever bestrode a beast. Eight thousand miles was his annual record for many a long year, during each of which he seldom preached less frequently than a thousand times. Had he but preserved his scores at all the inns where he lodged, they would have made by themselves a history of prices. And throughout it all he never knew what depression of spirits meant, though he had much to try him — suits in Chancery and a jealous wife.
In the course of this unparalleled contest Wesley visited again and again the most out-of-the-way districts, the remotest corners of England — places which to-day lie far removed even from the searcher after the picturesque.
Even in 1899, when the map of England looks like a gridiron of railways, none but the sturdiest of pedestrians, the most determined of cyclists, can retrace the steps of Wesley and his horse and stand by the rocks and the natural amphitheatres in Cornwall and Northumberland, in Lancashire and Berkshire, where he preached his gospel to the heathen. Exertion so prolonged, enthusiasm so sustained, argues a remarkable man, while the organization he created, the system he founded, the view of life he promulgated, is still a great fact among us. No other name than Wesley's lies embalmed as his
John Wesley
does. Yet he is not a popular figure. Our standard historians — save, indeed, Mr. Lecky — have dismissed him curtly. The fact is, Wesley puts your ordinary historian out of conceit with himself.
How much easier to weave into your' page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn's, to make it blush with sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanize it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the Constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of Bristol or on to the bleak moors near Burslem, where he met face to face, in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity, the living men, women, and children who made up the nation!
It has perhaps also to be admitted that to found great organizations is to build your tomb.
A splendid tomb it may be, a veritable sarcophagus, but none the less a tomb. John Wesley's chapels lie a little heavily on John Wesley. Even so do the glories of Rome make us forgetful of the grave in Syria.
It has been said that Wesley's character lacks charm, that mighty antiseptic.
It is not easy to define charm, which is not a catalogue of qualities, but a mixture. Let no one deny charm to Wesley who has not read his Journal. Southey's Life is a dull, almost a stupid book, which happily there is no need to read. Read the Journal, which is a
John Wesley book full of plots and plays and novels, which quivers with life and is crammed full of character.
John Wesley came of a stock which had been much harassed and put about by our unhappy religious difficulties. Politics, business, and religion are the three things Englishmen are said to worry themselves about.
The Wesleys early took up with religion. John Wesley's great-grandfather and grandfather were both ejected from their livings in 1662, and the grandfather was so bullied and oppressed by the Five Mile Act that he early gave up the ghost, whereupon his remains were refused what is called Christian burial, though a holier and more primitive man never drew breath.
This poor persecuted spirit left two sons according to the flesh, Matthew and Samuel; and Samuel it was who in his turn became the father of John and Charles Wesley.
Samuel Wesley, though minded to share the lot, hard though that lot was, of his progenitors, had the moderation of mind, the Christian conservatism, perhaps even the disposition to Toryism, which marked the family, and, being sent to a Dissenting college, became disgusted with the ferocity and bigotry he happened there to encounter. Those were the days of the Calf's Head
Club and feastings on January 29, graceless meals for which Samuel Wesley had no stomach.
His turn was for the things that are 'quiet, wise, and good'. He departed from the Dissenting seminary, and in 1685 entered himself as a poor scholar at
John Wesley
Exeter College, Oxford. He brought £2 6s. with him, and as for prospects, he had none.
Exeter received him. During the eighteenth century our two universities, famous despite their faults, were always open to the poor scholar who was ready to subscribe, not to boat clubs or cricket clubs, but to the Thirty-nine Articles.
Three Archbishops of Canterbury during the eighteenth century were the sons of small tradesmen. There was, in fact, much less snobbery and moneyworship during the century when the British
Empire was being won than during the century when it is being talked about. Samuel Wesley was. allowed to remain at Oxford, where he supported himself by devices known to his tribe, and when he left the University to be ordained he had clear in his pouch, after discharging his few debts, £10 155.
He had thus made £7 19s. out of his university, and had his education, as it were, thrown in for nothing. He soon obtained a curacy in London, and married a daughter of the well-known ejected clergyman, Dr. Annesley, about whom you may read in another eighteenth-century book, The Life and Errors of Fohn Dunton.
The mother of the Wesleys was a remarkable woman, though cast in a mould not much to our minds nowadays. She had nineteen children, and greatly prided herself on having taught them, one after another, by frequent chastisements, to —- what do you think? -cry softly. She had theories of education, and strength of will and of arm, too,
John Wesley to carry them out. She knew Latin and Greek, and though a stern, forbidding, almost an unfeeling parent, she was successful in winning and retaining, not only the respect, but the affection of such of her huge family as lived to grow up. But out_of the nineteen, thirteen early succumbed.
Infant mortality was one of the great facts of the eighteenth century, whose Rachels had to learn to cry softly over their dead babes. The mother of the Wesleys thought more of her children's souls than of their bodies.
The revolution of 1688 threatened to disturb the early married life of Samuel Wesley and his spouse.
The husband wrote a pamphlet in which he defended revolution principles, but the wife secretly adhered to the old cause; nor was it until a year before Dutch William's death that the rector made the discovery that the wife of his bosom, who had sworn to obey him and regard him as her overlord, was not in the habit of saying
'Amen' to his fervent prayers on behalf of his suffering sovereign.
An explanation was demanded and the truth extracted, namely, that in the opinion of the rector's wife her true king lived over the water. The rector at once refused to live with Mrs. Wesley any longer until she recanted. This she refused to do, and for a twelvemonth the couple dwelt apart, when William III having the good sense to die, a reconciliation became possible. If John Wesley was occasionally a little pig-headed, need one wonder? The story
John W esley
of the fire at Epworth Rectory and the miraculous escape of the infant John was once a tale as well known as Alfred in the neat-herd's hut, and pictures of it still hang up in many a collier's home.
John Wesley received a sound classical education at Charterhouse and Christ Church, and remained all his life very much the scholar and the gentleman. No company was too good for John
Wesley, and nobody knew better than he did that had he cared to carry his powerful intelligence, his flawless constitution, and his infinite capacity for taking pains, into any of the markets of the world, he must have earned for himself place, fame, and fortune.
Coming, however, as he did of a theological stock, having a saint for a father and_a notable devout woman for a mother, Wesley from his early
"days | learned to regard. religion as the business of his life, just as the younger Pitt came to regard the House of Commons as the future theatre of his actions. After a good deal of heart-searching and theological talk with his mother, Wesley was ordained a deacon by the excellent Potter, afterward Primate, but then (1725) Bishop of Oxford.
In the following year Wesley was elected a Fellow of Lincoln, to the great delight of his father.
'Whatever I am', said the good old man, 'my Jack is Fellow of Lincoln.'
In trying to form even a glimmering idea of the state of the Church of England in 1725, when
John Wesley Wesley took orders, there are some incidents in its past history which must not be overlooked.
I mean its repeated purgings.
Evictions are, of course, of frequent occurrence in all Church histories, but the Church of England has been peculiarly unlucky in this respect.
Let me, in a handful of sentences, recall the facts. I pass over the puzzling and unedifying events of King Henry
VIII's time, the Protestant rule of his short-lived son, the frank Romanism of his eldest daughter, and begin with Elizabeth, who succeeded in November, 1558.
Crowned though she was according to the Catholic ceremonial, including the unction and the Pontifical Mass, it appears to have been well understood by those in high place that England, having got a new master, must be prepared once more for new men and new measures. They were indeed strange times. Can it be that the country did not care about the continuity of its Church? The Act of Supremacy soon made its appearance, annexing to the Crown all jurisdictions, spiritual and ecclesiastical, for the visitation and reformation of the ecclesiastical state and persons, and of all errors, heresies, and schisms. The inevitable oath was directed to be taken under the usual penalties — first, loss of property, then loss of life. When Queen Mary died there were but fifteen Anglican bishops alive.
Of these, fourteen refused the oath, and were turned neck-and-crop out of their sees. They went away quickly enough, and disappeared into
John Wesley
obscurity.
Elizabeth called them a lazy set of scamps. We have no evidence that they were anything of the kind. Hardships and indignities were heaped upon them. Some died in prison, others in retirement; one or two escaped abroad.
It seems to be the fact that they all died in their beds.
They had no mind either to burn or hang.
Jeremy Collier gives us, in addition to those fourteen prelates, a list of three bishops-elect, one abbot, one abbess, four priors, twelve deans, fourteen archdeacons, sixty canons, one hundred priests, all well preferred, fifteen heads of colleges, and about twenty doctors of both faculties — all what one may call stationary people hard to move, who were at this same time deprived of their places, profits, and dignities.
It does not seem a great many out of the nine thousand spiritual places in England. Still, to lose its whole hierarchy
(except the Bishop of Llandaff) at one blow was a shrewd knock, nor, we may be sure, did the bishops-elect, the deans, the archdeacons and canons, the heads of houses and doctors of divinity, and the one hundred well-preferred priests, go out without rendings of the heart and bitter reflections.
There were no newspapers to record their emotions or to summarize their losses under the heading 'Crisis in the Church'; but we may be sure they were pious men, sick of shuffles and crowned
'heads, while of those who remained, who can tell with what uneasiness of mind, with what pangs of conscience, they did so?
John Wesley This is Purge No. 1, and it got rid of the old Roman pietist; and let no man deny to the Church of Rome one of the notes of a true
Church — the capacity to breed saints.
Purge No. 2 was numerically more important.
Charles I got into those difficulties which brought his comely head to the scaffold, and the beneficed clergy were made subject to visitation by order of the House of Commons and in large numbers turned adrift.
That many of these clergy were illiterate and unfit for their office is true enough, but in the teeth of the protests made by the best men among the Puritan party, other tests than those of learning and piety were imposed and enforced. Loyalty to the dead king, or malignancy, as it was termed, was counted to be a disqualification for a country parson; a sour observance of Sunday was reckoned as piety; and many a good man who had earned and deserved the love of his parishioners was evicted to make way for a Presbyterian. How many parsons were turned out during the Commonwealth it is hard to say, but many hundreds there certainly were, and among them were numbered some of the very choicest spirits of the age.
Purge No. 3 is the one best known in Nonconformist circles.
It occurred after the restoration of the Stuarts, when two thousand of the clergy, including a large number of the intruders of the Commonwealth, were turned out of their livings for refusing to take the oath required by the Act
John Wesley
of Uniformity.
The celebrated Richard Baxter (who refused a bishopric) tells us in his Life, which is one of the best books in existence, how these evicted tenants were made up. The passage is too long to be here quoted, and it is enough to say that by this purge the Church of England lost a host of her clergy who had no objection to bishops or to a Liturgy, who had never signed the Solemn
League and Covenant, who had been against the Civil War, but who were unwilling, because unable, to give their unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer. But they had to go. They were devout, they were learned, they were peaceful, they were sensible. It mattered not; out they went, like Wesley's own grandfather, and were hunted from place to place like wolves.
Purge No. 4 has still to be endured. The Stuarts ran their destined course. The blessed restoration was in less than thirty years succeeded by the glorious revolution, and a fresh oath had, of course, to be invented as a burden upon the conscience of the established clergy.
It was in form simple enough:
'I, A. B., do sincerely promise and swear to bear true allegiance to their Majesties King William and Queen Mary.' But to appreciate its horrid significance, we must remember that the now mouldy doctrines of 'Divine right' and 'passive obedience' were then as much the talk of the clergy of the Church of England as incense, lights, and the sacramental
John Wesley theory are to-day. The books and pamphlets on these subjects may still be counted, though hardly read, in thousands. The Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Sancroft) and five of his brethren, including Bishop Ken, were deprived of their sees, and at least four hundred divines followed them into exile.
These were the non-jurors, men of fabulous learning and primitive piety, who added evangelical fervour and simplicity to High Church doctrine. To read the lives of these men is.to live among the saints and doctors, and their expulsion from the Church they alone loved and they alone could properly defend diverted into alien channels the very qualities we find so sorely lacking in the Anglican Church of the eighteenth century. How absurd to grumble at the Hoadlys and Watsons, the Hurds and the Warburtons! They were all that was left. Faith and fervour, primitive piety,
Puritan zeal, Catholic devotion — each in its turn had been decimated and cast out. What a history it is! Whether you read it in the Roman page of Lingard and Dodd and Morris, or in the Anglican record of Collier, or turn over the biographies to be found in our old friends Walker and Calamy, what can you do but hold up your hands in horror and amazement? Wherever and whenever there was goodness, piety, faith, devotion, out it had to go.
It was indeed as into a dungeon, stripped, swept, and bare, that the Church of England stepped at the revolution, and in that dungeon she lay for a hundred years.
Since then many
John Wesley
things have happened. There has been a revival of faith and fervour in the Church of England, so much so that Purge No. 5 may shortly be expected.
The reason why I have dwelt at great length on these facts of Church history is because we should have them in mind if we are to understand what may be called the status quo ante bellum John
Wesley waged with the Devil in Great Britain.
Wesley's motive never eludes us.
In his early manhood, after being greatly affected by Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying and the Imitatio hristi, and by Law's Serious Call and Christian
Pe on, he met 'a serious man', who said to him: 'Sir i serv heaven. Remember, you cannot serve Him alone.
You must therefore find companions or make them.
The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.' He was very confident, this serious man, and Wesley never forgot his message: "You must find companions or make them. The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.' These words for ever sounded in Wesley's ears, determining his theology, which rejected the stern individualism of Calvin, and fashioning his whole polity, his famous class meetings and generally gregarious methods.
Therefore to him it was given Many to save with himself.
We may continue the quotation and apply to
John Wesley Wesley the words of Mr. Arnold's memorial to his father:
Languor was not in his heart, Weakness not in his word, Weariness not on his brow.
If you ask what is the impression left upon the reader of the Journal as to the condition of England question, the answer will vary very much with the tenderness of the reader's conscience and with the extent of his acquaintance with the general behaviour of mankind at all times and in all places. Wesley himself is no alarmist, no sentimentalist; he never gushes, seldom exaggerates, and always writes on an easy level.
Naturally enough he clings to the supernatural, and is always disposed to believe in the bona fides of ghosts and the diabolical origin of strange noises; but outside this realm of speculation Wesley describes things as he saw them. In the first published words of his friend Dr. Johnson, 'he meets with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour their prey without tears, and his cataracts fall from the rocks without deafening the neighbouring inhabitants'.
Wesley's humour is of the species donnish, and his modes and methods quietly persistent.
On Thursday, the goth May (1742), I set out. The next afternoon I stopped a little at Newport-Pagnell, and then rode on till I overtook a serious man, with whom I immediately fell into conversation. He presently
John Wesley
gave me to know what his opinions were, therefore I said nothing to contradict them. But that did not content him. He was quite uneasy to know 'whether I held the doctrines of the decrees as he did'; but I told him over and over: 'We had better keep to practical things, lest we should be angry at one another.' And so we did for two miles, till he caught me unawares, and dragged me into the dispute before I knew where I was. He then grew warmer and warmer; told me I was rotten at heart, and supposed I was one of John Wesley's followers.
I told him 'No, Iam John Wesley himself'. Upon which — 'Improvisum aspris veluti qui sentibus anguem
Presset' — he would gladly have run away outright, but being the better mounted of the two I kept close to his side, and endeavoured to show him his heart till we came into the street of Northampton.
What a picture have we here of a fine May morning in 1742, the unhappy Calvinist trying to shake off the Arminian Wesley! But he cannot do it. John Wesley ts the better mounted of the two, and so they scamper together into Northampton.
The England described in the Journal is an England still full of theology. All kinds of queer folk abound; strange subjects are discussed in odd places.
There was drunkenness and cockfighting, no doubt, but there were also Deists, Mystics, Swedenborgians, Antinomians, Necessitarians, Anabaptists, Quakers, nascent heresies and slow-dying delusions.
Villages were divided into rival groups, which fiercely argued the nicest points in the aptest language. Nowadays in one's
John Wesley rambles a man is as likely to encounter a grey badger as a black Calvinist.
The clergy of the Established Church were jealous of Wesley's interference in their parishes, nor was this unnatural; he was not a Nonconformist, but a brother Churchman. What right had he to be so peripatetic? But Wesley seldom records any instance of gross clerical misconduct.
Of one drunken parson he does indeed tell us, and he speaks disapprovingly of another whom he found one very hot day consuming a pot of beer in a lone alehouse. I am bound to confess I have never had any but kindly feelings toward that thirsty ecclesiastic. What, I wonder, was he thinking of as Wesley rode by ? Méditations Libres d'un
Solitaire Inconnu - unpublished!
When Wesley, with that dauntless courage of his — a courage which never forsook him, which he wore on every occasion with the delightful ease of a soldier — pushed his way into fierce districts, amid rough miners dwelling in their own village communities almost outside the law, what most strikes one with admiration, not less in Wesley's
Journal than in George Fox's (a kindred though earlier volume), is the essential fitness for freedom of our rudest populations. They were coarse and brutal and savage, but rarely did they fail to recognize the high character and lofty motives of the dignified mortal who had travelled so far to speak to them. Wesley was occasionally hustled, and once or twice pelted with mud and stones, but
John Wesley
at no time were his sufferings at the hands of the mob to be compared with the indignities it was long the fashion to heap upon the heads of Parliamentary candidates. The mob knew and appreciated the difference between a Bubb Dodington and a John Wesley.
I do not think any ordinary Barichmen will be much horrified at the demeanour of the populace.
If there was disturbance it was usually quelled.
At Norwich, two soldiers who disturbed a congregation were seized and carried before their commanding officer, who ordered them to be soundly whipped. In Wesley's opinion they richly deserved all they got. He was no sentimentalist, although an enthusiast.
Where the reader of the Journal will be shocked is when his attention is called to the public side of the country — to the state of the gaols, to Newgate, to Bethlehem, to the criminal code, to the brutality of so many of the judges and the harshness of the magistrates, to the supineness of the bishops, to the extinction in high places of the missionary spirit — in short, to the heavy slumber of humanity.
Wesley was full of compassion — of a compassion wholly free from hysterics and credulity. In public affairs his was the composed zeal of a Howard.
His efforts to penetrate the dark places were long in vain. He says in his dry way: "They won't let me go to Bedlam because they say I make the inmates mad, or into Newgate because I make them wicked.' The reader of the Journal will be
John Wesley at no loss to see what these sapient, magistrates meant.
Wesley was a terribly exciting preacher, quiet though his manner was. He pushed matters home without flinching. He made people cry out and fall down, nor did it surprise him that they should. You will find some strange biographies in the Journal. Consider that of John Lancaster for a moment.
He was a young fellow who fell into bad company, stole some velvet, and was sentenced to death, and lay for awhile in Newgate awaiting his hour. A good Methodist woman,
Sarah Peters, obtained permission to visit him, though the fever was raging in the prison at the time. Lancaster had no difficulty in collecting six or seven other prisoners, all like himself waiting to be strangled, and Sarah Peters prayed with them and sang hymns, the clergy of the diocese being otherwise occupied. When the eve of their execution arrived, the poor creatures begged that Sarah Peters might be allowed to remain with them to continue her exhortations; but this could not be. In her absence, however, they contrived to console one another, for that devilish device of a later age, solitary confinement, was then unknown. When the bellman came round at midnight to tell them, 'Remember you are to die to-day', they cried out: 'Welcome news — welcome news!' How they met their deaths you can read for yourselves in the Journal, which concludes the narrative with a true eighteenth-century touch:
'John Lancaster's body was carried away by a
John Wesley
company hired by the surgeons, but a crew of sailors pursued them, took it from them by force, and delivered it to his mother, by which means it was decently interred in the presence of many who praised God on his behalf.'
If you want to get into the eighteenth century, to feel its pulses throb beneath your finger, be content sometimes to leave the letters of Horace Walpole unturned, resist the drowsy temptation to waste your time over the learned triflers who sleep in the seventeen volumes of Nichols — nay, even deny yourself your annual reading of Boswell or your biennial retreat with Sterne, and ride up and down the country with the greatest force of the eighteenth century in England.
No man lived nearer the centre than John Wesley, neither Clive nor Pitt, neither Mansfield nor Johnson. You cannot cut him out of our national life. No single figure influenced so many minds, no single voice touched so many hearts.
No other man did such a life's work for England.
As a writer he has not achieved distinction. He was no Athanasius, no Augustine. He was ever a preacher and an organizer, a labourer in the service of humanity; but, happily for us, his
Journal remains, and from it we can learn better than from anywhere else what manner of man he was, and the character of the times during which he lived and moved and had his being. hee Cres
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