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THE BRAND PLUCKED FROM THE BURNING

EPWORTH OHN WESLEY lived from June 17, 1703, to March 2, 1791— J practically the whole of the eighteenth century.

Of all the great English leaders of that great century probably more has been written about Wesley than about any other, except possibly three or four statesmen, five or six scientific thinkers, and a general or two.

Substantially all is known that it is necessary to know to form approximately just judgments about him.

The opinion of virtually all students of his life is that he stands out above the other religious leaders of his time for two qualities— his God-consciousness, or awareness of God, or devotion to what appeared to him to be the will of God, or whatever we mean by a God-filled spirit.

On the other hand, the students concede to Wesley a talent for practical administration amounting to genius.

The Godward side of the life of Wesley, or of any religious leader for that matter, has to be taken as we find it, or as it comes to men as a gift. The wind bloweth where it listeth. The realm of practical affairs lies more within the reach of ordinary understanding.

It ought to be possible to consider the two phases in their relation to each other, especially the relation of Wesley's practical activities to what we think of as the deeper phases of his life. Itisa commonplace to all students of Wesley that he took expedients wherever he could find them, that the class meeting and the lay ministry and the system of Conferences were adopted as at hand in the actual circumstances, or were inevitable outcomes of those circumstances rather than deliberate creations. Consideration has been given to all such concerns as if they were details of a useful

'sort, valuable for a longer or shorter period. May it not be, however, that this practical bent of mind had an influence upon Wesley's idea of God, and of conversion, and of what he called Christian perfection, and of the Church? At any rate, it is with questions like this in the background that the present author asks his readers to look again at Wesley's life and career.

It is most significant for our purpose to get firm hold of the fact that the most practicallyminded churchman of the eighteenth century was the most per-

JOHN WESLEY

sistent seeker after the highest spiritual ideals for himself and others.

It was not possible for him to keep separate these two phases of his life and thought. The practical activities interpreted the ideal of perfection and the ideal of perfection influenced the activities.

We have all heard many times of the burning of the Rectory at Epworth when John was about six years old, of how John escaped by being plucked as a brand from the burning by one neighbor's standing on the shoulders of another and rescuing the boy who appeared at an upstairs window with the flames raging all around him.

This experience evidently made a deep impression on the mind of Wesley, for he often referred to himself as a brand plucked from the burning, and once, when he had gone far into years, stopped a public service when he recalled that the day was the anniversary of that boyhood event.

If one allows one's mind to play around the suggestiveness of that incident of the fire, it is found to be quite full of meaning.

Wesley's own feeling was sentimental.

The spectacular and dramatic features made him look upon it as providential deliverance from death.

From that point of view, its significance has possibly been overstressed.

The young Wesley knew exactly what to do when he saw the fire in his room: he moved a chair, according to his father, a chest, according to himself, up to the window and called for help.

If he had presence of mind and will to do that much, he would probably have had the alertness of mind and will to drop the ten or twelve feet to the ground if he must.

Still, events move quickly at a fire: Wesley's father says that the boy was scared, and thus lost time when the neighbor's face appeared at the window; a few minutes after Wesley had touched the ground the roof and possibly the wall of the house fell.

I have even called this section:

"The Brand Plucked From the Burning," for the suggestiveness of the expression. At least up to Aldersgate Wesley's life was tried and molded as by fire.

Moreover, quite as meaningful a question for Wesley as the saving of his life by Providence was that as to the actual cause of the fire itself. He in after years spoke of it as the deed of an incendiary, though he does not give his evidence, but he knew that attacks upon his father had been common enough during the earlier period of the life at Epworth.

Samuel Wesley favored the draining of the marsh land on which Epworth was built. The dwellers on that island of Axholme, a district of forty square miles surrounded by

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rivers, thought of their livelihood as in some way dependent on the marshes, and resented furiously Samuel's advocacy of improvements.

So they did burn his barn, and did attempt to ruin his stored crops, and did mutilate his cattle.

The elder Wesley suffered much for his convictions.

The recollection of what Samuel Wesley endured for his principles remained with his son all through life. When we read that in the days of his field preaching ruffians threw clods and stones and clubs at Wesley and that he took all this as a matter of course, we may remind ourselves that he had seen his father before him take outrages against himself as a matter of course.

There is not any indication that Samuel Wesley ever trimmed his views to avoid unpleasant consequences.

Part of the rage of his neighbors against him was due to his adhering stiffly to his own political opinions when all his community was against him.

I repeat that the significance of the famous fire was largely in its being of the type of opposition the'convictions and conduct of Samuel Wesley called forth.

If we look at the Wesley family at all closely, we may raise question as to whether Samuel Wesley has ever had justice done

_ him by the writers who tell of the greatness of his son.

Susanna Wesley herself is partly to blame for this injustice—or, at least lack of justice—because of that well-known and oft-quoted sentence in the letter to her son that it was part of the misfortune of the Wesley family that her husband and herself could not often completely agree.

Because of the almost incredible honor in which Susanna Wesley is held in Methodism, the ordinary Methodist forthwith assumes that this sentence leaves Samuel in a very bad plight indeed.

There evidently were divergences of opinion between the Wesleys, but that does not necessarily mean that either was wrong.

John Wesley is himself on record as saying that when Samuel noticed that Susanna was not responding with an "Amen" when he prayed for the king because she was a Jacobite, and not for William, he said that if there were two kings there would have to be two beds—and left his wife for over a year, while he betook himself to London, that there was a long interval between the birth of John

Wesley and the child who immediately preceded him.

Nobody ~ ever would have believed this story if it had not come from John Wesley. It would suggest an element of heartlessness which nothing else in the facts known about Samuel Wesley bears out. How reliable a witness is John Wesley here? Admittedly, he is dealing with a period before his own birth.

It is common enough in long-estab-

JOHN WESLEY

lished families for all sorts of legends to get started, especially when there is a flavor of the dramatic or sensational about them.

The trouble with the story is that it does not fit into the record. There is no way to adjust such a period of absence of Samuel Wesley as that required into the dates as we have them. The children came along at the same intervals as when Samuel was at home. John was born when Anne was twelve months old.

Moreover, an examination of Samuel Wesley's correspondence shows that he was never away from Epworth, even at the "Convocation," as long a time as the story assumes.

Whatever basis in fact the story had the telling must have been incredibly exaggerated, not to say distorted.

Samuel Wesley was stubborn enough, with the stubbornness of one who could hold fast to a plan year in and year out.

He wrote a commentary on the book of Job which called for almost illimitable persistence and patience. We smile at it today, but it was taken seriously and admiringly enough by the clergymen of the Church of England in his day, scores of whom bought the book.

Samuel Wesley was of indomitable will.

Mrs. Wesley is authority for the statement that her husband was not skilled in financial management.

Maybe so, but how anyone could have made so little money go so far is an insoluble mystery, explicable perhaps by the carefulness with which Samuel kept his records.

Every shilling received and set down was accounted for.

He worked his way through Oxford, beginning with two pounds and six shillings and leaving with ten pounds fifteen shillings.

The trouble was that he did not have money enough to meet burdens which were not of his own creation and seeking. John Wesley, when near the close of his life, ceased keeping accounts, stating that he had kept accurate record of his funds all his life, from childhood on.

He had the example of his father before his eyes.

It is true that Samuel Wesley went to prison as a punishment for debt.

The debt laws of the time were very stringent.

There is no sign that anybody found serious fault with Samuel Wesley for debt.

Nobody hinted that the unfortunate clergyman was guilty of any moral fault in his financial shortcoming.

He spent too much on others, attaining, however, to the satisfaction of being able to say that he had given his sons the best educations to be found in England.

So much has been said about Susanna's influence upon her son that it is just as well to think of the influence of the father.

Nobody has ever questioned his courage. There is a well-authenticated story to the effect that when a brigadier-general sitting near

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Samuel Wesley in an inn fell into obscene speech, Wesley offered the brigadier a glass of water with the suggestion that he wash out his mouth.

Friends restrained the irate militarist, who, according to the story, afterward apologized.

Dr. Umphrey Lee has forcefully showed us that Samuel Wesley was a strict disciplinarian in ecclesiastical requirements.

It gives us a glimpse at times far different from ours to read that he imposed a penalty upon an adulterous church member which compelled the penitent to walk upon a public street clad in a garment of contrition.

Such a demand today would meet with nothing but ridicule, but at the time it was anything but ridiculous.

It bore witness to the power of the old church to command and punish its members.

Now, let our minds step ahead about thirty years to John Wesley's muchquestioned and much-denounced treatment of a member of the church in Georgia during his work there in 1738—the exclusion of Miss Sophia Hopkey from the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

This regrettable episode was complicated by the fact that it had been commonly supposed that Wesley was to marry Miss Hopkey and that the engagement had ended unfortunately.

Wesley's disciplinary treatment of Miss Hopkey has often been looked upon as arising from resentment, or personal pique. It would be impossible completely to exonerate John Wesley from blame in this matter, but it would be negligent indeed for a student of Wesley's life not to see that he was acting in the spirit and manner of church discipline as he had seen it administered in the parish of Epworth. 'The young woman in question had failed in requirements of the Church

—of no vast consequence indeed—and Wesley was dealing with the situation as he thought he should in loyalty to the Church.

This does not make the action of Wesley any wiser or more sensible, but it does make it more intelligible to an age which, without such explanation, cannot understand it at all.

In spite of a stern, unyielding character Samuel Wesley must have been a likable human being.

Some features of the picture that has come down to us show that under all his systematic persistence in whatever he undertook was a fine devotion to his family.

We do not read of his ever punishing any of his children.

He insisted on being obeyed, even by his wife, but all through the variegated correspondence which he left behind him was a considerateness and regard for all with whom he came in contact.

In collecting the tithes due him from those who cultivated his land, he found one renter stealing from him and marched the offender

JOHN WESLEY

down in the market place and made him disgorge.

Shocked and outraged though he was, there is something almost whimsical about his telling of the attempted theft. Again he found that his parishioners were neglecting the christening of their children till these infants were grown into big lubberly boys, whom he had to take into his arms for the ceremony, the scene suggested being irresistibly funny, since Samuel Wesley measured only five feet and five and one half inches in height.

Once again he declared that Jack was so much given to reasoning that he wondered that the boy would attend to the most pressing necessities of nature unless a reason was possible for so doing. When John was at last made a Fellow of Lincoln, the father's pride could not contain itself, since, come what may, his Jack was a Fellow of Oxford.

His letters about his debts, in all their careful statements, reveal a touching anxiety and distress.

Another incident, or series of incidents, by which light is thrown on the character of the father, and of all the family, for that matter, consisted of the famous noises heard in the Epworth Rectory in the winter of 1716.

Knockings upon the walls and floors, rustlings as of the garments of an unseen passer-by, and the swift scuttling along of some indefinite animal form upset the calm of the family.

Quite a mass of written testimony survives to us describing the experience.

Some who knew of the noises were sure they were made by rats, others that they were pranks played by young men who might have come to call on the Wesley girls (a curious commentary on the notion that there was never anything but a somber spirit in the Wesley home). Others, including Samuel

Wesley and his wife and John—who, by the way, was not at home when the disturbances occurred—were positive that the sounds were supernatural.

'The spirit must have been a rowdy sort of poltergeist, for when Samuel Wesley would pray for the king the rappings, interpreted as expressive of disgust, were almost furious.

Now, no one can read such accounts without feeling that the writers were utterly sincere in their conviction as to supernatural origin. The pertinent question for us is not whether the disturbances were supernatural. Some of the Wesley biographers gravely tell us that we do not know what the causes were, with a hint at implication that they may have been supernatural after all. We do not indeed know what happened in that Epworth Rectory two hundred and fifty years ago, so far as concerns the noises, but we do know that all the persons in the house, and probably most outside

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the house in the village, believed in ghosts. The time was just a century later than that of Shakespeare, the significance of whose ghost scene in Hamlet, for example, lay in that theatergoers in Shakespeare's time believed in the return of departed spirits to visit the haunts of men.

Now, since the Wesley household believed in ghosts, we find something quite noteworthy in the attitude of the family to "Old Jeffery," as they called the supposed spirit.

Did they seek to move out of the house and abandon it as haunted?

They did not.

No ghost, real or imagined, could scare, after the first few disturbances, the Wesley children.

They took the noises as they came—tried at first to get into communication with the spirit, and finally treated "him" with an easy familiarity bordering on amusement.

Samuel tried to devise a scheme of return knocks to the tappings, with apparently as cool a rationalism as if he belonged to a psychical research society of our modern type. The girls used to believe that they felt Old Jeffery holding a door shut when they tried to open it. Instead of running and screaming in terror, they pulled harder on the door, and when they got it free indulged in ejaculations of contemptuous defiance at the rude visitor from the realms of shade. There have been those who have declared that the two most determinative incidents in the boyhood of Wesley were the fire and the uproar caused by Old Jeffery.

It is not easy to see just how one could accept such an extreme conclusion as this, but it is perhaps worth while to note that the attitude of John to the disturbances was essentially that which he took throughout his life to all reports of such phenomena. On the one hand he accepted them as supernatural, on the other he had toward them the temper of a rationalist.

He would travel long distances to see and talk with the subjects of what seemed to be extraordinary spiritual visitations, and then question the persons after the manner of a scientific inquirer.

He never lost interest in such. phenomena.

The last reference to Wesley in Boswell's Johnson has to do with a not altogether satisfactory answer of Wesley to a question of Johnson about a famous spiritualistic medium, as we should say today.

There is something pathetically tragic in that John, and his mother for that matter, seemed to bolster up their faith in the supernatural by these wretched noises.

Augustine Birrell has made a list of three or four "'purges" which reveal the unsettled religious state in which Samuel Wesley worked.

The first purge was that which drove the Roman Catholics out of power during Henry the VIII's reign.

Second, under

JOHN WESLEY

the Commonwealth the Puritans expelled as many as they could of those believing in episcopacy and High Church.

Third, when the Stuarts got back under Charles II they enacted an Act of Uniformity which sent two thousand more out of their livings. Fourth,

William and Mary came and brought dissension into Wesley's own household.

'There was no telling who was who and what was what in the religious period through which Samuel Wesley served.

We leave Samuel Wesley for the present with the remark that he was utterly devoted to the service of God, that he gave himself to incessant study of religious themes that we should not consider important today, that he expected obedience from his wife and children, though he always dealt with them in a spirit of respect for them, a respect which they fully returned.

Making all due allowance for the notions of the times as to parental authority, Samuel Wesley seems to have been on terms of frank intimacy with his children.

Speaking after the manner of a believer in heredity, Samuel Wesley showed himself the worthy son of a father who sacrificed virtually all hopes of ecclesiastical preferment for the sake of his convictions, being himself a dissenter.

Samuel Wesley revealed himself in nothing more worthy of his ancestry than in his returning to the fold of the Church of England against which his father had dissented so vigorously at such cost.

We come now to look for a little at Susanna Wesley, about whom an almost unassailable tradition for perfect handling of children has been built up. The more closely we look at Susanna the more wonderful she appears, though she loses something of the halo put upon her brow by those who believed her perfect in everything.

So far as family descent is concerned, she was a thoroughbred both on the father's and mother's side.

Intellectually she was a marvel.

At the age of thirteen she had gone over the arguments of dissenters and of believers in the Church of England and had decided for the Church.

Her letters to John on matters of church doctrine and religious experience show amazing discernment and acuteness, while the more intimate communications like that describing the fire, like that telling of the shortness of the Wesleys' material resources in response to a question of an archbishop, like that to her wealthy uncle about the state of the family finances, are worthy of a place in any collection of fine specimens of English prose.

Probably the best-known letter of hers was the one to John describing her bringing up of her children: of her teaching them to

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"cry softly" —if they were to cry at all; of her success in bringing each child (except one) to the mastery of the alphabet in a single day— two achievements of most doubtful value; of her inculcation of correctness in manners; the difference between her training and the lack of it in other homes of the village as shown in what the children brought back with them in rudeness and crudeness of word and deed after they came home from the sojourn with friendly neighbors made necessary by the famous fire.

Mrs. Wesley was system throughout.

It is not possible to see how she could have done anything at all if she had not been so.

Every hour, every minute of the day had its duty. Ina home where, first and last, nineteen children were born, just about everything had to be duty. Between the orderliness of the father and the system of the mother, the natural tendencies of John to like system got too much encouragement.

The effect of system on young Wesley's development was more decisive on his character and religious experience than any number of fires and ghostly noises ever could have been.

The oft-quoted remark of Samuel Johnson that Wesley would never stretch out his legs before the fire and have his talk out, dealt with a peculiarity that was fully developed before Wesley left Epworth.

There was not much chance for stretching the legs in easy relaxation in the home of Samuel and Susanna

Wesley and not much chance either of having a talk out.

The whole situation would have been one of intolerable strain if it had not been that every minute, like every penny, was saved.

Some of Mrs. Wesley's advice about children we insist was of uncertain value. With all her astounding abilities, it is to be questioned if there was much that was genial or amiable about her.

Possibly one should not look for amiability in a mother of nineteen children, nine of whom she had seen die in early infancy. Think of the sheer mass of grief thrown upon a mother's heart by such a stunning succession of calamities.

Anything would have seemed possible in somberness of view after a total of distresses like this.

Of course such woes were taken in those days pretty much as they came, for they seemed part of the regular ongoing of nature.

Not much was known of the care of infants. The increase of a nation's population was purchased at a terrible cost in the death of children that did not survive the first two years of life, the chief distress falling on the mothers.

To bring ten children to maturity out of nineteen was a notable achievement.

When all this is said, however, we still have considerable of a

JOHN WESLEY

problem in getting Mrs. Wesley's point of view about the proper rearing of children.

She told John that one must break the child's will in order to save its soul—grim method which hosts of Methodists have acted upon, and other hosts had followed since the beginning of time. There was one will she did not break—that of John.

There is no indication in the letters of her children that she broke the will of any. Those who, after the jargon of modern psychology, speak of John Wesley as a type of mother-fixation, would do well to point out to us just where this fixation showed itself fixed.

Wesley did indeed follow his mother's advice in many, many instances, even after he had come to full manhood—one of the worst instances being his attempts at the Kingswood School virtually to break the wills of his pupils, but he himself never followed his mother's judgment just because it was his mother's judgment. He insisted upon having reasons.

If Mrs. Wesley herself succeeded in breaking the wills of her children, the wills must have been terrible before they were broken, for each went forth from the home with a will all but inflexible.

President Eliot, of Harvard, once said that the best legacy a father could leave his children was the memory of a character they could respect, even if they might not be able to feel much emotional affection for the father. The element of truth here is probably as valid for mothers as for fathers.

'The children of the Wesley household loved their mother as they did their father, but the dominating element seems to have been respect. Even after he had come to manhood, John Wesley preached that children should obey their parents as long as their parents were alive.

He seems to have forgotten that in the one outstanding instance in which it was possible for him to obey his parents after he himself had become a man, he was positive in his refusal.

The instance was that of his denial of his father's request that he (John) follow him as rector of Epworth.

John did at last say he was willing to do so, but only after a long correspondence and persistent refusal. When he did yield, it was too late.

His reasons were good enough for himself but not for his father. John felt that he could do more good by remaining at Oxford than by working among the virtual barbarians at Epworth.

That was not just the way he put it, but that is what he meant. As for his preaching about obedience, that was a queer manifestation of the ultraconservatism which was at times dominant in Wesley. He himself had no children, but more and more he came to look upon Methodism and Methodists with the eyes of a parent and to desire

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to guide them in all things.

The preaching is significant, moreover, as showing the respect which Wesley cherished throughout his own life toward his own parents.

Both father and mother must have been remarkable indeed to have won such respect from a mirfd like that of John Wesley. His mother lived till long after the Methodist movement was in full sweep, and in many important directions, notably in that of lay preaching, helped by her advice to mark out its course.

I have spoken of the community around Epworth as virtual barbarians.

I do not think this opinion is unjust or overharsh.

Incendiaries, crop-destroyers, cattle-hockers they manifestly were in their relation to the Wesley family, or more particularly to Samuel, its head.

It is a wonder that the children ever looked back, as did John, even to the natural beauties of such a place with any fondness whatever, though the view from the churchyard is most impressive in the sweep over the low-lying landscape. Now, in such a community Mrs. Wesley won a striking spiritual victory. Her husband belonged to what in those days was known as the Convocation, an ecclesiastical assembly which sat in London while Parliament was in session, to act upon church matters.

This required Samuel Wesley to be absent from Epworth for weeks at a time. During one of these absences Mrs. Wesley called her children together on Sunday evenings for religious instruction, consisting chiefly of the reading

of such fine religious literature as her exquisite taste might select.

Then a few neighbors asked permission to come in, and then more, till finally the Rectory was at every meeting overcrowded.

Probably not many of the houseburners were in these audiences, but that there was any audience at all was a noble tribute to the instructions given by Mrs. Wesley and to her surpassing moral qualities. What she was doing, however, seemed to the ecclesiastical type of mind, including Samuel's, little short of scandalous, and she had to yield to her husband's positive orders to cease such irregularity—not, however, till she had gone to the utmost to get her husband's consent to her ministrations.

The stupidity of Samuel Wesley in this matter is almost beyond belief, or would be if we were not aware of the way the ecclesiastical mind works. The obvious good effects of such a course as that of Mrs. Wesley were not obvious to Samuel.

It would have seemed to the unsophisticated intelligence that what was needed was eyesight if insight was not available.

The simple fact that scores of hearers in a community like Epworth were get-

JOHN WESLEY

ting something they could not get anywhere else ought to have been enough for anyone except a true-to-form ecclesiastic.

The children of the household at Epworth were all of distinctive and separate quality.

The daughters were fearfully pinched by poverty, without much chance to get out, as the sons could, and earn a little money for themselves.

To their credit be it said that they were not of the docile, submissive sort who bear the afflictions of life without protest.

Their marriages were not notably fortunate.

Susanna, the younger, married a ne'er-do-well, bore with him patiently for a time and left him and would have nothing more to do with him.

Kezia, the youngest of the family, probably felt the pinch of poverty most.

She was the only one of the daughters who did not marry.

Her letters show a delicate richness of feeling, deserving of a better chance than she ever got. Martha married a preacher named Hall, a queer, twisted soul who finally gave up

Methodism and took to preaching and practicing polygamy.

Mrs.

Hall was a strong nature of a high intellectual cast. Her somber figure stands now and again across the pages of Boswell's Johnson.

Johnson evidently had genuine admiration for her, and, it appears, at one time asked her to become a member of the little circle that lived more or less continuously under his roof.

Another of the daughters, on rather strong evidence in a realm where strong evidence is often nothing more than gossip, is supposed to have been betrayed by a lover.

There are passages in Wesley's Journal which seem to bear this interpretation.

Arthur Quiller-Couch's Hetty Wesley is founded on this assumption, an assumption which Quiller-Couch maintains as fact.

Stevenson, who seems to have known more about the facts than anyone else, is authority for the statement that the scandal reached its climax when Hetty "stayed out" all one night with her lover.

Stevenson claims to have seen the correspondence in which this was established, and that is all there is. In the Journal passages the father and mother seem determined to exclude the unfortunate daughter from the home as "ruined."

No matter what her fault, it was not bad enough to warrant the attitude of her parents.

In this crisis John stands out in a moral strength and fineness above Samuel and Susanna, both of whom were equally merciless.

It is to be regretted that in Hetty Wesley, though the author's chief prejudice was against the father, he did not find it possible to soften his prejudice against John

Wesley also enough to recognize adequately the justice and kindliness of John.

In any event, Samuel insisted that the daughter,

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against whom suspicion had been directed, forthwith marry another suitor for her hand.

So the unhappy woman passed into a companionship in which she could find no joy, and met increasing sorrow with the years.

The artificiality and severity of Hetty's home training appear in that she was reading the Greek Testament by the time she was eight years old. The marriage of Mary—herself semi-invalid—to John Whitelamb, rector at Wroote, seems to have brought a degree of satisfaction though her husband never fully made adjustment to the Wesley household—but who could? On the whole, the lot and fate of the daughters arouse mingled feelings of sympathy for souls in frustration, of regret that the opportunities did not allow free play and development of talents which, under more favorable material circumstances, might have flowered into exceptional beauty.

Emilia at first was interested in a Quaker, who sought her hand, but after a while got through '"'with all followers of George Fox."

Emilia once wrote reproachfully to John for spending the money to visit the Moravians at Herrnhut while the family at Epworth was in such distress—one of those tragedies which the actors in them can never understand.

John wrote back with unpardonable severity, telling Emilia that her letter showed a sinful temper, and that inasmuch as she had sinned in one point, she had sinned in all and was as bad as a murderer—and worse. Kezia died unmarried at the age of thirty-two.

Like the other Wesleys, she was an excellent letter writer, given, as she said, to "impertinence and simplicity."

Mrs. Wesley was once asked by an ecclesiastical superior whether her table had ever lacked for bread.

She replied that she could not literally say yes, but that many times the getting of the bread cost so much effort that it did not seem to make much difference after she got it as to whether she ate it or not.

Of Charles we shall have abundant occasion to speak later.

Samuel, Jr., the favorite of his mother, was possibly the solidest and steadiest of the Wesley family. He came to be a man of thorough scholarship, rather hardheaded in his practical affairs, without much sympathy with what he called the "enthusiasms" of John.

When we look at the difficulties under which the Wesley family lived, we wonder that they achieved so much.

Poverty was always at hand, though probably there were never more than eight of the children at home at any one time—not more than the number in many a Methodist parsonage in America, today with no more money than the Wesleys had to live on.

There can be no doubt of the height of attainment in Christian character in any one of them.

JOHN WESLEY

The whole atmosphere is one of devotion to lofty religious ideals and to fineness in human contacts.

There is not much suggestion of anything sordid or contemptible in any records which have come down to us from the Epworth Rectory, and many records have come.

The excellent breeding and self-nurture of the parents repeated themselves in the children.

It would not be possible to find a coarse expression in any letter, or diary, or reported comvers2tion of any member of the Epworth household, though they cer tainly possessed the ability to speak frankly with one another. We must remind ourselves that nobody knew that through the after centuries the Wesley name was to be proclaimed to the ends of the earth. What records have reached us were made on the assumption that the household of the Epworth Rectory was like that of rectories elsewhere.

Nobody was acting in the belief that the later ages would carefully treasure every scrap of information about the Wesley family. This is, indeed, a commonplace reflection, but ene worthy of being constantly kept before us.

A further consideration is also important.

The eighteenth century was a period of serious decay in religious interest and moral conduct, but there were some bright spots. We mus? mot forget that the Rectory at Epworth, apart from the native endowment of the parents, could not have been the only such rectory in England. The children at Epworth certainly did not think that the conduct prescribed for them was different from that to be expected of the children of ministers anywhere. Diaries of country parsons, put into print in the past few years, have given us intimate glimpses of other rectories—diaries like that of James

Woodforde and William Jones, for example.

Both these diaries reveal most human qualities in their authors—without the extrzer dinary spiritual vigor of Samuel and Susanna Wesley—but they tell of lives devoted to pastoral service if not to reflection.

Not much was then being done for the people as sach through legislative or concerted social action.

This must have increased the sense of responsibility in scores of English rectortes.

We cannot believe that such centers of spiritual vitality as that of the Epworth Rectory were idle and futile. In the after years, after his father had passed away, John paid tribute to the effectivemess of his work. There were at any one time about eighteen hundred to two thousand lives for whom the Epworth rector must feel himself spiritually responsible. There were indeed sporting parsons in the eighteenth century Church of England; there always have been

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such. They lent color to the spectacular charges of the age as dissolute, but they were not all. There were other centers of righteousness like that at Epworth. The sons of Samuel Wesley reveal an unfaltering devotion to religious interests from the first. They went out from home with a feeling of religious trusteeship and stewardship..

It was this that helped make them such devotees of system.

'They must account for every penny that came into their hands and for every minute of time. The somberness of spirit that we often see in them was due to the feeling that the service of the divine called for all their resources, and they did not have much, for all their time, and the time was short. Burdens like these were put on their shoulders at Epworth and remained there till the end.

To the patient industry of Dr. James R. Joy I am indebted for the following item, which suggests manifestation of genius in the Wesley family, not hitherto recognized among Methodists: "John

Wesley Jarvis (1781-1840), a self-taught artist, who was considered the chief American portrait painter of his generation, and whose work is represented in the principal American collections, was a lineal descendant of Samuel and Susanna Wesley.

His mother, Nancy Lambert, was the granddaughter of Anne Wesley (b. 1702), a sister of John and Charles."

_ CHARTERHOUSE SCHOOL

Before following John Wesley to school and college we would do well to look at the educational training he received from his mother, who taught all the children in her own home.

We can judge pupils by at least one test which is of surpassing importance, namely, their command of their native tongue.

It is true that the style is the man, but nothing requires harder and more persistent application than does style. We are fortunate in having specimens of the English of almost all the Wesley children.

In simplicity and forthrightness all are much alike. Some of the daughters attempted verse, with no noteworthy poetic success, indeed, but still with enough to indicate knowledge of poetic meters and more than ordinary skill in phrasing.

If Hetty, long after she had come to maturity, did attempt to make "tear" fit with "beer" in her most pretentious poem, she did not sin more grievously in this respect than her brother Charles did upon occasion.

The foundations of John Wesley's written style must have been laid under his mother's training. From the time he began to write at all we recognize the signs of clearness, directness, and force

JOHN WESLEY

which were his for seventy-five years.

A distinguished student of English literature has said that to get vigor of direct expression like that of Wesley anywhere but from Wesley, we have to read the dispatches of the Duke of Wellington for objective and steady gaze upon facts as they are, for the concise and summary statement of things done.

It has been justly remarked that Wesley shared the sentimentalism of his age, which is true enough, but he succeeded marvelously in keeping the sentimentalism off his written pages.

There was, indeed, quite a lot of somewhat florid stuff in his correspondence with Betty Kirkham and Sally Kirkham, young women in his Oxford days, but, that aside, the writing seemed, indeed, of the kind with which later the Iron Duke wrote from the campaigns in Spain.

John Wesley went straight from his home to the Charterhouse School.

Not much has come down to us about his days there.

There could not have been more than fifty boys there in Wesley's time.

He was about ten when he entered and about seventeen when he left.

In an entry in his diary covering that period of his life he says: "'From ten to fourteen I had but little but bread to eat and not great plenty of that.

I believe this was so far from hurting me that it laid the foundation of lasting health." He appears to have studied Latin and Greek, with some Hebrew.

He also came in contact with Tooke, a noted teacher of mathematics at the school. Samuel told his son to be sure torun around the school yard three times every morning for exercise, which John did.

The quality of the instruction seems to have been high enough, as schools went in those days.

It was concerning the life at Charterhouse that Wesley wrote the famous passage about his entering school in a state of grace and coming out a sinner.

The passage describes adult experience, or is put in adult terms, for Wesley had no notion of the difference between a child's religion and a man's; or, if he did, he never saw fit to describe it in writing.

'Tyerman, far and away the most important of Wesley's biographers so far as collection and assembly of fact-material is concerned, took Wesley's statement of his sinful condition at full value and added to it, forgetting that Wesley had not given a single serious instance of what the sin was, and that Wesley was chronically given to self-depreciation in telling of his spiritual states.

As the case stands, the best course to take with all this period of falling away is to forget it, or at least to give it no appreciable weight. We know what Wesley was when he went to

Historical Society oouthern California - Arizone Conference

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Charterhouse and we know what he was when he came out.

He went in a well-trained boy, physically and mentally sound, and he came out with both physical and mental soundness intact.

His own statements about his loss of religious experience at school and 'T'yerman's statements, which were stronger than Wesley's—Wesley says that his sins were not scandalous in the eyes of the world—are the result of the attempt to fit the boy's experience into a dogmatic system.

Wesley had in his Epworth days a stiff religious training.

It was not to be expected that he would find such training anywhere else, certainly not in a boys' school.

He would at once notice the difference.

Charterhouse boys were given to the fagging system that prevailed at the time all over England—the older boys' compelling the younger to render them menial and even degrading services, a most excellent device for creating and developing bullies and yet of some worth as teaching youngsters to take care of themselves in outwitting the bullies.

In ah atmosphere like this the boy Wesley would probably find new trials and temptations. He probably reacted against bullying as any boy of spirit would. To take a self-depreciating statement, however, as if it meant a lapse into sin, under such circumstances, is absurd.

The early Methodists laid such stress on conversion as a turning from evil after experience of evil, that to deal with a conversion without such emphasis on knowledge of evil was difficult for them.

So, if one had committed no transgressions externally, one must have committed them in_wardly.

Wesley left Methodism a worthy statement of the ideal in the religious training of children, but his own practice and his own statements have done harm.

He probably had the yeasty ferment of soul which marks all adolescents and construed this as a lack of assurance of salvation, or, worse, the loss of it. 'To Tyerman at least Wesley simply had to be a sinner in order to be afterward a Christian.

Tyerman could not see that a Christian could have lofty ascents into the upper air of religious experience without necessarily starting from the mire of aswamp.

Wesley's experience started from a plateau of high living.

Here is how Wesley wrote about the Charterhouse life in after years: "I believe until I was ten years old I had not sinned away that washing of the Holy Ghost which was given me in baptism, having been strictly educated and carefully taught that I could only be saved by 'universal obedience,' by keeping all the commandments of God in the meaning of which I was diligently instructed.

And those instructions so far as they respected outward duties and sins I gladly received and often

JOHN WESLEY

thought of. But all that was said to me of inward obedience or holiness, I neither understood nor remembered.

'The next six or seven years were spent at school, where outward restraints being removed, I was much more negligent than before even of outward duties; and almost continually guilty of outward sins, which I knew to be such though they were not scandalous in the eyes of the world.

However, I still read the Scriptures and said my prayers morning and evening. And what I now hoped to be saved by was

(1) not being so bad as other people, (2) having still,a kindness for religion, and (3) reading the Bible, going to church, and saying my prayers."

I seek to put stress on all this because the religious experience of Wesley is regarded as classic among all students of the method of the human seizure of the divine.

Deep as may have been Wesley's distress over his spiritual condition, a distress which recurred until in his wide campaigning he became too preoccupied to dwell much on his own spiritual condition, he does not seem to have gone through a darkness of soul like that of Bunyan, for example.

He said repeatedly that throughout all his life he had never lost a night's sleep from any physical or mental pain until far along in years.

Statements like these, which slip into the Journal almost inadvertently, give us a hint of a background in our reflection on his experiences of spiritual distress. Coming back for the moment to Charterhouse, Wesley throughout his life used to make it a point to visit the old grounds at least once a year. There is nothing to indicate that he did this with any other purpose than to revive old memories, certainly nothing to hint that he did it with the purpose of brooding over a period of sin.

One further consideration makes us chary of accepting Wesley's own interpretation of his adolescent days. There can be no doubt as to the thoroughgoing rigor of the Epworth training.

From the date of the fire Susanna Wesley had felt a special responsibility for the religious nurture of the brand plucked from the burning.

It is not easy to suppose that Wesley lost the effects of this training as soon as he got away to school.

It was not the type of training easily lost, unless by reaction or revolt against overstrictness, and the extreme strictness was in the formal and systematic regularities.

'There was too much of this, but the harm was that Wesley never cast any of it out. He was oversystematic to the end of his life.

System nearly ruined him.

His father once said to him that not everything in this world was settled by logic.

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would have been well for John if he had learned earlier to weigh what his father had said.

Mrs. Wesley evidently had nearly systematized the life—at least in the phase of liveliness—out of herself.

There is not much that suggests sprightliness or buoyancy in what we know of her. A son at all like herself would likely have had moments of unhappiness at Charterhouse, but not necessarily because of sin. It is from the Charterhouse period that the good story about Doctor Sacheverell dates.

Sacheverell was the High Churchman for whom, according to John Wesley's History of England,

Samuel Wesley wrote a speech by which Doctor Sacheverell profited.

John went to Doctor Sacheverell for a small favor and got a mental bullying. When the little Wesley stood before the bully, he was met with: "You are too young to go to a university.

You cannot know Latin and Greek yet. Go back to school."

"I looked up at him as David looked at Goliath and despised him."

OXFORD At seventeen Wesley entered Oxford.

Here again we find an institution of the eighteenth century which has been a favorite object of attack.

'To read some authors one would suppose the eighteenth century to have been hopelessly sunk in iniquity, and the universities of the time to have been idling places of dissolute young men, who counted upon their wealth or their social position to give them whatever support they needed through life.

Relatively speaking, Oxford University probably did its work as well for its time as it did for later times.

Gibbon has written drastically of the Oxford of his day, but Gibbon got his training there.

It is quite common for brilliant students to go far beyond what gave them their start, and then look back superciliously on the beginnings.

'The educational institutions of the eighteenth century appear quite infantile to us of today, but that is because we look back through a larger educational experience than that of the teachers of two hundred and fifty years ago. We forget that the knowledge of today is the result of the labors of the men who came up through the older training.

Most of us have merely entered as beneficiaries into the present-day treasures, whereas the strugglers with the older knowledge were working toward the present knowledge as discoverers.

The older knowledge was at least provocative enough to start men toward something better. Wesley was critical of the college training of his day, but Wesley was to a degree the product of the training itself.

He had by native endowment an

JOHN WESLEY

enormous curiosity of the stamp we call scientific, and came out of Oxford with that curiosity livelier than ever.

Oxford never has laid the chief emphasis on the natural sciences, but she is surely entitled to credit for what her sons have done in the field of such sciences.

She has given them an ideal of the things worth while in life—a basis of thoroughgoing method, an enthusiasm for learning on its own account, a wide framework of general understanding.

If we are to study profitably the influence of Oxford on Wesley, the sensible course would seem to:be to look at Wesley as well as at Oxford.

Even if we grant that Oxford gave him nothing that he did not have before, it certainly provided the conditions under which what was in him came out into expression.

It will not do to say that Wesley became what he was in spite of Oxford.

Here again we have to look at Wesley's own attitude toward Oxford.

He was glad enough to live and work there.

Even when his father and brother urged him with all their persuasive power to apply for the parish of Epworth, he preferred to stay at Oxford.

Both Samuel, Sr., and Samuel, Jr.—remarkable for forthrightness of speech— seized upon this desire as proof of John's eagerness to remain in circumstances and environment which he liked best.

John made no pretense of denying that he liked Oxford better than Epworth.

At the time he thought of his father's parishioners as a rough set.

He did not foresee that all his own life was to be passed in dealing with rougher sets than any he would meet around Epworth, and he did feel that much of his training could be used to better advantage at Oxford than at Epworth. We have noted his father's anxiety to have him become Fellow at Oxford.

John showed no slackness in seeking the honor and opportunity, and having secured the post remained at Oxford till he was well past thirty years of age. The time came when Wesley bade farewell, virtually forever, to academic shades. We are not on that account to minimize the truth that those same circles put something into his life, or brought something out of it, for which the world cannot be too grateful.

Just one further word about getting a just perspective on institutions like Oxford.

We cannot go into details of Wesley's life there, a residence which covered a period of possibly three generations of college students.

We cannot judge any institution by the content of what was taught alone, the vital question always being as to what use was made of that content.

Benjamin Franklin, in whose experiments with electricity Wesley was always interested, would for a few minutes be an object of mirth if he were to reap-

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pear on a college campus with his kite and key. To find Franklin's real contemporaries of today, however, we should have to go into the laboratories where the most advanced experiments are being performed. Something of the same is to be said of Oxford in earlier centuries. The content of the teaching was not itself considerable, but that content was awakening some minds and putting them on the path of larger truth.

Wesley took with him to Oxford an insatiable intellectual curiosity and came away with it more marked than when he went in. It is true that in his later years he professed to value knowledge for the use that could be made of it for the help of men, but the other motive of knowledge for its own sake is clear enough.

For example, he said in his later years that the study of medicine, or of medicines, had been the chief avocation of his life.

It was out of such researches that his appalling book of prescriptions came.

Now, whenever Wesley deals with this field, the insatiable restless curiosity of the born knowledge-seeker is apparent.

Likewise with what we today should call religious psychology. Then there were his reflections on the Copernican theory, which can hardly be said to have had a practical aim.

In a word, Oxford deepened, if anything, Wesley's knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself, and that has been one of the aims of Oxford from the beginning.

Or perhaps the aim would be better stated as the pursuit of knowledge for its larger cultural results without overemphasis on the immediately practical.

Yet in dealing with John Wesley we no sooner say this than we have to turn at once to that ruling passion for, or slavery to, system which ruled him every minute of his waking life, a system which would have to be called chiefly practical.

As it happened, Oxford did something for that too. While at Oxford Wesley served as a chairman or moderator of a debating society which was an outstanding feature of the institution.

It was the duty of this functionary to sum up the discussions and point out fallacies and inadequacies of statement. We cannot imagine any student who needed such exercise less than did Wesley, for it increased an orderliness of mind which was by this time fast getting too orderly.

Wesley, however, then and afterward thought differently.

He attributed his power to detect weaknesses in an opponent's argument to the training in this Oxford group.

He would have done well to have kept constantly in mind his father's word that not everything in this world is settled by logic.

The foundation laid at Oxford in formal intellectual training

JOHN WESLEY

must have been solid. For years the two brothers, John and Charles, used to do a large share of their conversing with each other in Latin.

That means much for the training of their minds in exact scholarship. Who in these days thinks of studying Latin with any notion of mastering it well enough to speak it?

If John set out to master Latin, he probably mastered it down to the last possible detail.

Anybody who will glance through the Greek grammar which he prepared while he was working at his Methodist enterprises will marvel at the exactness of the scholarship. The basis of all this type of achievement, as likewise for the conquest of German,

French, Italian, and Spanish, was laid in the Oxford days. Whoever taught John Wesley to study did so by arousing in him an appetite for knowledge which never could be satisfied, or, at least, did not so teach him as to dull that appetite. Wesley once declared that he had to give up geometry because it was costing him too much in the time taken from spiritual exercises. He spoke as if this were a veritable sacrifice.

All such considerations we have to remember when we read later Wesley's disparagements of learning and his contemptuous word about the futility of the British Museum. A good deal of such disparagement in all times has come from those who have not been themselves learned, and has been a symptom of an inferiority complex. Wesley, on the other hand, knew what learning was, knew it even in its limitations. His disparagement came out of his preoccupation with the work of the divine in human lives. He saw the possibilities before the untrained mind which sought to open itself to the will of God.

He saw too the hindrances which intellectual pride sometimes puts in the way of understanding of the divine. As soon, however, as the untrained—even illiterate—life turned toward the divine, Wesley sought to put before that life all treasures for the dawning spiritual intelligence. The fifty volumes of the Christian library which Wesley edited are sufficient witness and testimony at this point—full of selections, for the most part, of the best of all the ages of religious thinking.

One result Oxford did not achieve for Wesley.

It developed his tendency to system, taught him the necessity of the widest possible reading, especially in the pursuit of historical subjects, and helped him to a wonderfully clear power of comprehensive summary.

It did not, however, make him a brooding thinker, with ability for sustained attention upon a problem to which he might set his mind.

Wesley's intellect was notable for the movement

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toward decisions.

On all the questions which came before him he seemed to think he had to take a vote.

He did not like to leave anything open. To be sure, his mind did move by slow ripening to mature convictions through the years, but ripened usually under the pressure of events.

He used to say of himself that he was more by himself during his periods of travel, and had more time for study than any other man whom he knew.

It is significant though that when he acquired a "'chaise"' in his later years, he sealed up one side of it to be used for book shelves and writing desk.

He had to have something in his hands—a book or a pen. A statue of the underlying conception of Rodin's "The Thinker" would never have been appropriate for Wesley.

System!

System!

System!

Every hour had its allotted task.

It is not too much to say that if he was considering the arguments of his Calvinist friends, he would probably reflect on predestination from ten in the morning till eleven, and on free grace from eleven till noon." At Oxford he reached the determination not to see any would-be companions in conversation who would not turn their attention to the same serious themes in which he was interested.

'There must have been a season along in those years when, except to a few friends, he was almost intolerable.

Yet it seems strange even to suspect this.

Of arresting presence, with fine features, with a lithe body kept supple by such splendid exercises as walking and swimming, he was of the type to attract attention and to win friends.

He must have missed a good deal at Oxford in not learning to talk in haphazard conversation with all sorts and conditions of men.

We do not wish to anticipate, but we cannot help letting our minds play a little with the idea of what a conversation between Wesley and Samuel Johnson would have been like—if it could have been carried through to an end.

In some respects the minds of these two were similar; both were men of wide-ranging observation though they were not likely to look long at the same objects.

The conversation probably never would have come to a natural end. Wesley could not have stood Johnson long enough; he could not have endured Johnson's lack of system, to say nothing of an untidiness which is forever associated with the memory of Johnson.

It is to be feared that Wesley would have thought Johnson's inner man untidy, though he did respect the essential greatness.

All these points of view seem important to me for the basis they supply in the consideration of Wesley's religious experience.

We are about to come to the Holy Club, and the beginnings of

JOHN WESLEY

Methodism.

Whatever the religious life and career of John Wesley, it did not make him anything other than he had been from the beginning so far as his fundamental qualities are concerned.

'The contribution which Wesley made on the side of religious experience was largely in his teaching about what he called Christian

Perfection.

As we look back now we can discern pretty clearly that, however we ourselves may interpret this experience, or way of life, or ideal, it was what Wesley was seeking for from the beginning of his serious religious strivings at Oxford and long before, though his own aim did not become sharply manifest till later.

A certain form of perfection Wesley strove after in everything he did, and that from the boyhood years at Oxford—the perfection of doing the best possible in whatever he undertook.

I say "doing the best possible," for everything significant in Wesley's life was something that could be put into practice, or about which something could be done.

Even in the mechanical phases of his work he could not endure to have anything left at loose ends. Admittedly, this may lead to leaving some of the most important matters at loose ends, but the passion for orderliness can have marked spiritual outcomes.

It can be described as a passion to go the full length, to do all for the ideal aimed at, the temper being that of the scientist or the artist, who will not stop short of perfection so far at least as his intention and determination are concerned.

Before leaving the more intellectual side of the life at Oxford, I wish to call attention to a letter written by John to his mother at Epworth from Oxford.

The date is 1725, the theme is the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley.

John was at the time about twenty-two years old.

Ona previous page I mentioned the fact that some writers on Wesley will have it that the relation of John to his mother was what the present-day psychologists call "mother-fixation'"—the life of the son being so controlled by the will of the mother and by such responsive dependence on the mother that the son all but lives in the life of the mother. Here in this letter is an instance of complete companionship between a mother and a son, a companionship the like of which it would be hard to find in accounts of such intimacies, but a companionship for which "fixation" is not ahappy term.

For there is no suggestion here of anything but what might be called a lofty friendship—a son of twenty-two talking to his mother on a plane of mutual understanding. Understanding of what?

Ofa philosophy which, though this may not have been surmised at the time, was indelibly to mark the idealistic course of

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philosophy for generations.

Berkeley is today, philosophically speaking, a vital figure, so vital as almost to be called a contemporary of many teachers in foremost philosophical chairs.

The son simply assumes that the mother could understand philosophy—as indeed, she could—and the mother receives the letter as if it were entirely in the customary course of ordinary events.

There is indeed nothing remarkable about John's criticism of Berkeley as to its content.

Berkeley moved in deeper channels than John fathomed, but that is not quite to the point.

His criticism is quite as sound as most of such criticism of Berkeley.

It has all the marks both of John's and of Susanna's form of reasoning—strict logic where logic may fail because of its strictness, or just because it is logic. What we have is two persons communing on the plane of reasoning of about the same high order as that which Newton and Halley had together when Halley was urging Newton to seek a mathematical proof for Kepler's discovery about the courses of planets as ellipses in their travels around the sun.

It would not have argued mother-fixation if Newton had been a woman and Halley his son.

That is to say, we are dealing here with an intellectual communion in which there is nothing in the content to suggest any of the modern psychological lingo. We have two minds

—John Wesley and his mother—meeting together on a theme in an unusual realm for such discussion; the two minds united, not in a queer fixation, but in mutual assumption by each that the other knew what he was talking about.

Christ Church, November 22, 1725.

Dear Mother,—I must beg leave to assure you that before I received yours I was fully convinced of two things,—first, that Mr. Berl-eley's notion, which at first sight appeared very plausible—as, indeed, an ingenious disputant will make almost anything appear—was utterly groundless; and that he either advanced a palpable falsehood, or said nothing at all:

. Mr. Berkeley's reasons on a second reading I found to be mere fallacy, though very artfully disguised.

From one or two you may easily judge of what kind his other arguments are.

He introduces Hylas charging Philonous with skepticism for denying the existence of sensible things: to which Philonous replies that, if denying the existence of sensible things constitute a skeptic, he will prove those to be such who assert sensible things to be material; for if all sensible things are material, then, if it be proved that nothing material exists, it will follow that no sensible thing exists; and that nothing material can exist he undertakes to demonstrate.

JOHN WESLEY

Matter, says he (by which you must mean something sensible, or else how came you to know of it?), you define as a solid extended substance, the existence of which is exterior to the mind and does in no ways depend on its being perceived; but if it appear that no sensible thing is exterior to the mind, your supposition of a sensible substance independent from it is a plain inconsistency.

Sensible things are those which are perceived By the senses; everything perceived by the senses is immediatly perceived (for the senses make no inferences, that is the province of reason); everything immediately perceived is a sensation; no sensation can exist but in a mind; ergo no sensible thing can exist but in a mind, which was to be proved.

Another of his arguments to the same purpose is this: Nothing can exist in fact the very notion of which implies a contradiction; nothing is impossible to conceive, unless the notion of it imply a contradiction.

But 'tis absolutely impossible to conceive anything existing otherwise than in some mind, because whatever anyone conceives is at that instant in hismind. Wherefore as matter is supposed to be a substance exterior to all minds, and as 'tis evident nothing can be even conceived exterior to all minds, 'tis equally evident there can be no such thing in being as matter.

Or such: Everything conceived is a conception, every conception is a thought, and every thought is in some mind; wherefore to say you can conceive a thing which exists in no mind is to say you conceive what is not conceived at all.

The flaws in his arguments, which do not appear at a distance, (may be) easily seen on a nearer inspection. He says, artfully enough in the preface, (in) order to give his proofs their full force, it will be necessary to place them in as many different lights as possible. By this means the object grows too big for the eye; whereas, had he contracted it into a narrower compass, the mind might readily have taken it in at one view and discerned where the failing lay.

How miserably does he play with the words "idea" and "sensation"!

Everything immediately perceived is a sensation.

Why?

Because a sensation is what is immediately perceived by the senses—that is, in plain English, everything immediately perceived is immediately perceived; a most admirable discovery, the glory of which I dare say no one will envy him.

And again: all sensible qualities are ideas, and no idea exists but in some mind—that is, all sensible qualities are objects of the mind in thinking, and no image of an external object painted on a mind exists otherwise than in some mind. And what then?

Rather jaunty criticism this, with its imputation of falsehood to Berkeley, and its summary dismissals of profound reasoning with _ waves of the hand.

Jaunty, but hardly fixation.

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Coming back now to the beginning of the quest for perfection, we note that this began in the reading of books on the devotional life by William Law and Jeremy Taylor.

It would be a wild misreading of the spiritual plight of Wesley to think of him as agonizing in distress over personal transgressions.

It is here that writers like 'Tyerman have so badly misled us.

Such men, looking upon the struggles of soul through which Wesley passed, think they must find some adequate cause for the distress in the recollection of past evil.

If souls are in sorrow, such interpreters assume there must be some specific cause for the sorrow. Now, as actual psychological fact, those whose lives have been passed in transgression are not always those who feel the deepest sorrow, for transgression is likely to blunt the sensitiveness out of which sorrow comes.

Hence the paradox that those who personally know the least of sin by experience feel most deeply their falling short of the ideal.

The man who has made the fewest mistakes may be the one who sees most clearly the distance between himself and the ideal.

Wesley's strain and tension came out of a pure mind's realization of how far away was the ideal.

His search for the truth meant that he already had it, at least in the realization of its worth.

The scientist who strives for the last item of knowledge relevant to his search is not driven by the haunting spell of past mistakes. He is drawn from ahead and from above.

The artist who seeks perfection in a curve of beauty is not under the bondage of past errors from which he is struggling to shake himself free. He is under the spell of the perfect curve and will not be content till he can draw or paint or carve it. He may never achieve it, but he will die trying.

How utterly absurd it would be to surmise that the artist must have sinned against artistic idealism and be seeking to atone for that sin in his unresting quest for perfect beauty!

Now, a reading of what Wesley said and did during the days at the Holy Club is amply explained by this interpretation of an indefatigable, persistent, unrelenting search for the utmost in religious experience.

It might be better to say the "utmost attainable," but that would not quite express the Wesley mood. He was determined to have it whether it was attainable or not.

Sir Isaac Newton's famous remark about his own ignorance is suggestively relevant here. Newton said of himself that he was like a child gathering a few pebbles from the shore of the ocean of truth, while the vast ocean itself stretched away illimitably.

Newton's spirit was not that of acquiescence with the handful of pebbles.

JOHN WESLEY

No more daring explorer ever sailed the ocean of truth itself than Newton.

So in the world of religious knowledge Wesley was as humble as Newton before the vastness of the sea of truth, and as determined as Newton to add to his own store.

The theological basis of the search was works like William Law on Christian Perfection, Jeremy Taylor on Holy Living, in the study of which Wesley was helped by his mother's discerning comments—writings of the Church Fathers, notably those of Clement of Alexandria.

In studying Law especially Wesley had a strange experience. By a paradoxical fatality it often happens that the seekers after the most spiritual illumination descend to the use of weapons in controversy which are almost if not quite carnal.

Wesley was deeply indebted to Law, but somehow got it into his head that in correspondence over holiness Law had not been quite fair with him, or not faithful in pointing out his (Wesley's) shortcomings.

Whereupon he addressed to Law a letter which was impertinent, not to say impudent.

In the temper and content of the correspondence Law had the better of it, though he himself later may have wandered far into mystic vagaries.

Perhaps, after all, such acrimonies are to be expected.

'The searchers after the highest religious experience, like those after the highest in science and art, get desperately serious. At first Wesley's striving after holiness was directed more Godward than manward, and more toward himself than toward his fellow men.

Anyhow, the squabble with Law was at the same instant genuinely true to Wesley and thoroughly deplorable.

Charles Wesley—not John—was, strictly speaking, the founder of the Holy Club, which at first was nothing more than a group for the study of and development of the higher religious life. Morgan, Delamotte, and Ingham were names afterward to become well known among Methodists, and a little later we find George Whitefield in the circle.

An instance of the Wesley democratic spirit appeared in this relation to Whitefield.

Whitefield was a servitor at Pembroke College, working his way through college by lowly services rendered to other students more fortunate than himself in social standing and material resources.

Wesley came from more favored social surroundings.

Never from the first, however, did either John or Charles Wesley show the slightest consciousness of social superiority.

'The Wesleys were by breeding and conviction Tories, High-Churchmen, Monarchists.

Not a trace of the aristo-_ cratic aloofness appears in the personal attitude of either of them

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toward other men.

Here again was a mark of the earnestness of their search for the highest.

They assumed from the outset that the Divine Spirit could speak through all sorts and conditions of men.

Moreover, they would not allow anything to stand in the way of the Christian brotherhood in which they both believed.

It is interesting to recall that as a matter of fact Whitefield seemed in the after years to enjoy most the society of the highborn, while the personal contacts in which Wesley seemed to take delight were with the lowlier.

This may not be altogether strange. The Countess of Huntingdon made more of an appeal to George Whitefield than she ever did to John Wesley.

It was an advantage to Wesley in dealing with the masses of people who became Methodists, masses that never had the advantages of a home of fine culture and high traditions, to belong himself to what was in the best sense an aristocratic family.

He was from the first devoid of all fear, of all taint of inferiority, in meeting the socially high-placed.

The words "Holy" and "Methodists," given to the little Oxford group of those seeking after the highest righteousness, were exactly descriptive and profoundly prophetic.

The aim from the beginning was holiness.

It was a happy providence that linked the suggestion of method with the pursuit of holiness.

Religion has in all times suffered from those who in a mistaken fashion have waited for the coming of the divine influx, from those who have wrongly used the passage which tells that the wind bloweth where it listeth, that men hear the sound thereof and cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. To be sure, the genuine mystics in all periods of the history of the Church have girded themselves for their task by the most earnest and careful preparation, with a system almost savoring of technique; but the notion is quite common that inner religious experience is largely a series of impressions or of states of soul, which come of themselves.

In his work as leader of Methodism Wesley had through an anxious crisis, or succession of crises, to meet quietists, who taught that the Christian must not seek to attain to religious peace or effectiveness by any means whatever, not even by the so-called means of grace.

The Holy Club's career was chiefly a search for the right means of attaining holiness— regularity of worship, system in study and prayer, persistence in right living before the world.

It is odd to reflect that the little group at Oxford ran in a kind of resumé about all the stages by which the Church as a whole has sought after success in Christian living—study, practice in specific

JOHN WESLEY

religious exercises, the creation of situations leading to sudden illumination. Among other practices was something closely resembling Romish asceticism.

It is ordinarily understood that Wesley's asceticism was merely extreme frugality, for the sake of better use of money than in customary expenditures, as when he wrote to his mother to tell her how much money he was saving for benevolent uses by not having his hair cut more than once a year.

Wesley, however, seemed to have a positive relish for ascetic sacrifices.

It was this apparent relish which later led to the charge that his asceticism had a Romish taint. There was certainly a trace of the abnormal in it. Among the most devout members of the Club was William Morgan, who was at first thought to have*died through the severity of the abstention and self-denials which he practiced as a member of the Club.

Mr. Morgan, Sr., father of William, at first believed this, but changed his criticism of the Club to enthusiastic praise when John Wesley wrote him a statement of the facts in the case.

Still there was enough stress laid on self-denial in itself to arouse suspicion that it*had gone to absurd and irrational lengths.

Other exercises of the Club were continued prayer and praise in the meetings till emotionalism broke all barriers.

At one such meeting an almost terrifying burst of feeling swept everything before it. The members broke at once into the Te Deum, which has likely never been sung with more sincere fervor than on that occasion.

'The account of the meeting, though, does not suggest the healthiest methods or the soundest results.

We must concede, however, the measurably well-regulated expression of the ecstasy in the singing of the Te Deum.

It would not have been surprising if the feeling on such occasions had found vent in incoherent ejaculations without any spiritual worth whatever.

More important still were the positive works of human helpfulness and relief to which the members devoted themselves.

We repeat that they never lost sight of the demand upon pure religion and undefiled, to visit the widows and the fatherless in their affliction as well as to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

The visits of the group were chiefly to those in prison, many of them under sentences of death.

'The report of what the Wesleys were doing reached the Epworth Rectory, with the hint that perhaps

John and Charles were touched with fanaticism.

Samuel, Sr., at once responded with his entire approval of the course of his sons.

It has been objected that the intention of all these visits of

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mercy was the salvation of the souls of the visitors, rather than the good of the visited.

Avowedly the aim of the young men was their own spiritual welfare.

It is true that the chief work of Wesley began after his regard was directed more away from himself to the needs of other men, but it is also true that, if these seekers were trying to develop their own religious forces by ministering to the needs of their fellow men, they were on the right track.

Not all searchers for inner life thus seized so unerringly upon the true path.

Inasmuch as the men of the Holy Club were striving to aid the distressed, some wise instinct or wise advice set before them the sufferers worst off. The laws of England against criminal offenses were in the eighteenth century indescribably severe, and some offenses then, such as indebtedness, would not be called offenses now.

Jails are never pleasant, and the jails then could never by any stretch of charitableness be called humane, or even decent. When

John Wesley came in the later times to commend the work of John Howard in prison reform, he could speak unsparingly of the terrors of jails, out of his own experience in visiting them from the days of the Holy Club on through many decades.

Possibly, with the exception of John Howard and hardened criminals, John Wesley knew more about the inside of jails than any man of his time.

The kind of experience the early Methodist leaders used to undergo can be at least glanced at from a passage in Charles Wesley's Journal under date of July 19, 1738. This was long after the period of the Holy Club, but it does show something of the task the young men set themselves, something of the social conditions of England, and something also of the frightful limitations of the understanding of Charles and presumably of the others also as to the implications of the gospel.

Charles had become interested in the spiritual state of a Negro and of prisoners named Read, Newington, and Hudson who were under sentence of death.

He went with one or two friends to the place of their execution.

Following is the exact quotation:

The black had spied me coming out of the coach and saluted me with his looks.

As often as his eyes met mine he smiled with the most composed, delightful countenance I ever saw.

Read caught hold of my hand in a transport of joy. Newington seemed perfectly pleased.

Hudson declared he was never better, or more at ease, in mind and body. None showed any natural terror of death: no fear, or crying, or tears.

All expressed their desire of our following them to paradise.

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I never saw such calm triumph, such incredible indifference to dying.

We sang several hymns: particularly "Behold the Saviour of mankind, Nailed to the shameful tree," and the hymn entitled "Faith in Christ," which concludes,

"A guilty, weak, and helpless worm Into Thy hands I fall:

Be Thou my life, my righteousness, My Jesus, and my all."

We prayed Him, in earnest faith, to receive their spirits.

I could do nothing but rejoice; kissed Newington and Hudson; took leave of each in particular.

Mr. Broughton bade them not to be surprised when the cart should draw away. They cheerfully replied they should not: expressed some concern as to how we should get back to our coach.

We left them going to meet their Lord, ready for the Bridegroom.

When the cart drew off not one stirred, or struggled for life, but meekly gave up their spirits. Exactly at twelve they were turned off. I spoke a few suitable words to the crowd; and returned, full of peace and confidence in our friends' happiness.

That hour under the gallows was the most blessed hour of my life.

Now, just a remark or two about all this. We have here an instance and illustration of work like that of the Holy Club during all the time the Club existed.

To begin with, the picture here is very vivid, though some of the phrasing is queer. What are we to make of encouragement to criminals about to be hanged not to feel

"surprised'' when the wagon should be pulled from under them and they left dangling in the air? Or what are we to make of the statement that these dying men were so at peace with God that they did not struggle in throes that are entirely beyond the control of the will, being involuntary muscular contractions?

The story is one of the complete absorption of Charles Wesley in producing what he thought of as a personal spiritual result.

We have here an example of the length to which an individual emphasis in religious experience can go.

It is a legitimate charge against the Wesleyan Revival that, so far as its direct and avowed aim was concerned, the stress on the personal aspects was wholly out of proportion.

There is not the slightest sign of any qualm or question here or elsewhere as to whether the doomed men were unjustly condemned or not.

Charles Wesley was presumably as kindly a man as was to be found in England. Yet he took the social

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callousness 'as a matter of course. The assumption here is that the men were dying justly. Perhaps they were, but, with the enormous list of capital offenses at the time, we cannot help wondering why question never seems to have crept into his mind.

The acquiescence here in a barbarous system almost passes belief.

Moreover, that presence of a crowd at the execution is indicative, though public executions are not even yet altogether a thing of the past. The worst of the story, however, is yet tocome.

The earlier part of the entry from which I have quoted is as follows: "By half-hour past ten we came to Tyburn, and waited till eleven: then were brought the children appointed to die."

Remember that the close of the entry was, '""That hour under the gallows was the most blessed hour of my life." 'Take this entry in its context as a revelation of the spirit of the times—with its overemphasis on a strained emotional state, with the casualness of the reference to the children who were to be "turned off," and it ranks high as a narrative of horrors.

The brighter side is that the souls of condemned men stand out as having such value in the sight of these workers.

Of course those about to be hanged had the opportunity of receiving the last rites at the hands of regular chaplains, but these victims seem to have refused such services.

Probably the services were perfunctory enough.

In any event, the object lesson of men like Charles Wesley and his companions, standing by to help men about to be executed, proclaimed a message of no small importance.

This was part of the Methodist contribution to democracy, this assumption of the worth of anybody's soul.

Only I wish Charles could have found some other expression than "the black."

GEORGIA We come now to one of the most perplexing and, in a way, distressing periods in the life of Wesley—his sojourn in America from November 10, 1735, till February 1, 1738, including the time taken to go out and return.

The journey outward required till February 4, 1736.

To get the true perspective on this period we may perhaps not go far astray in calling it an enterprise of the Holy

Club.

The Rev. Dr. John Burton, a trustee of the Georgia enterprise, to be further mentioned in a moment, had it in mind to try to persuade the Holy Club of Oxford to go out to Georgia. After some wavering consideration three men—John Wesley, whose mother approved the plan; Charles Wesley and Benjamin Ingham,

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all intimately familiar with the Holy Club—accepted the invitations and set sail for Georgia.

The Georgia movement was the outcome of the interest of James Oglethorpe in prison conditions of his day, and in the general economic situation in England, at bottom responsible for those conditions.

Oglethorpe was a member of Parliament for thirtytwo years and had become aroused by parliamentary investigations into the conditions of prisons, especially those in which honest debtors were confined.

He became convinced that the problem of these debtors could not be fully solved until something had been done to deal with unemployment.

The debtors discharged from prison could not find work, and so, through walking the streets, were likely to yield to temptations to steal. A company was formed with the purely philanthropic purpose of establishing a community at what we now call Savannah which would give these persons a new start and a fresh chance.

It is not fair to say that Georgia was colonized by "'jailbirds."" The colonists were jailbirds in the same fashion that Samuel Wesley, Sr., had been—in prison for debt— and there were others besides discharged prisoners who sought opportunity in the new colony, among them Protestants who were seeking ampler religious freedom. The plan was, on the part of the benevolently-minded persons who started the enterprise, to give the adventurers free passage out and to help them get a foothold in various forms of agriculture, including cotton and silk culture. The rum traffic was to be strictly controlled, the Indians dealt with fairly, receiving the same justice as the Englishmen.

Slavery was at first prohibited, the prohibitory action dating from 1735. Oglethorpe all his life stood against slavery, but by 1750 the act was repealed. John and Charles Wesley went as ministers of the Church of England to give the colonists the kind of religious service to which they had been accustomed.

At no time during the stay of John Wesley did the community or communities—for there was another settlement at Frederica, one hundred miles from Savan- »nah—number more than a thousand persons.

The chief task of "Wesley, according to his understanding before he left England, was spiritual supervision of the colony and a ministry to the Indians.

In addition to all this, after the return of Charles to England he served after a fashion as a sort of secretary to James Oglethorpe, the governor.

Georgia was founded with as pure unselfishness as any colony in America. The ideal was noble, but did not take account of practical difficulties. We are interested especially in what Wes-

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ley encountered and in the effect of Georgia on the development of his religious leadership and experience.

Wesley said he went to Georgia to save his own soul—an expression which has led to no end of misunderstanding.

The word is sometimes treated as if Wesley were like a penitent undergoing some difficult task for the sake of working out an atonement for a wrong or sinful life. Wesley usually talked of himself in terms of artificial and forced self-depreciation.

There were two poles to his religious life, the inner and the outer, with the inner at the outset almost frightfully overemphasized.

Let us remember the long background of the religious struggles of one whose ancestors for generations had sought for the best in religion, that best being conceived of as what might almost be called an immediate experience of God. Wesley's "saving his own soul" meant primarily the search for the utmost possible in the knowledge of God and the emotional warmth and glow which he was sure would come with that knowledge. The story of the earlier years of his ministry is that of an effort to get the two poles of the experience into right relation to one another—love of God balanced with work for men—or of the events by which these two poles were brought into right adjustment. Wesley, indeed, said that he went to Georgia to save his own soul, but he also said that he went that he might labor wholly for the glory of the Lord.

The voyage out lasted from November till the following February.

At once Wesley gave himself to systematic improvement of himself for the tasks ahead of him. Every minute of the day had its assigned duty—prayer, meditation, study of German, Latin,

French, Italian.

A record of times at prayer was kept in a diary, which afterward formed the base for the Journal.

I have counted through page after page the recorded periods of prayer in specimen days: the entries were seldom under four and often went to seven.

I admit that the exercise of counting thus was not healthy; it was about like counting the times in a day a man might avow interest in his best friend, or express love for his wife.

The ship was well fitted out as ships went in those days. The adventurers for the Holy Club—for that is what these young men were—could not have got through what they did in study and in instruction to the passengers if they had not been in fair comfort.

In a storm, however, there was discomfort enough, and danger enough.

It is supposed by those who have been best able to understand the Wesley psychology that John had a fear of the sea,

44.

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amounting to something like what we should today call an obsession or a complex.

Just how Wesley conquered that complex is not altogether clear, but we can at least guess that he won by going ahead in sea journeys, complex or no complex. By the time he had in the later years taken over forty journeys across the Irish Sea, some of them in extreme peril, he had certainly got rid of the complex.

On this point of the fear of the sea probably too much stress has been laid anyhow.

Whatever the cause of the fear, it was natural enough. There was-not sufficient reason to make the fear a sign of lack of reliance on God.

'The sailors had to do their work whether they were half-crazed with fright or not.

As for the Moravians, their quiet self-control, their singing in the storm were admirable, but not any more admirable than Wesley's attempts at the same crisis to help those scared or sick. At this stage of his life as well as ofttimes later Wesley seemed to have a veritable zeal for disparaging himself. We note that in spite of his word that he had come to America to save his own soul—leaving us with the unpleasant suggestion that he was not thinking of anything or anybody except himself—he was spontaneously helpful.

It was wholly natural for him to seek to be of any aid, and all forms of aid, to his fellow travelers. Some of the difficulty into which he got in Georgia came out of this irresistible desire to be of help. All of which must be reckoned in the account when we are inclined to construe too literally that statement about going to America to save his own soul.

Here, then, was this member of the Oxford Club, just a little beyond thirty years of age, going to a new land to set the principles of the Club—for that essentially was the aim of Wesley—with what might be called the real world before him.

At Oxford he could at evening time retreat behind the shelter of his college doors, no matter how terrible the events he had passed through during the day. Asa visitor to prisons he went into a world not his own, and went into it from the outside.

In Georgia he had to be himself a part of the world to which he sought to minister.

'There were on the vessel two women, altogether designing adventuresses, who, after the arrival in Georgia, gave him his first glimpse at how far such scheming persons can go.

Professing desire for religious help, they filled the mind of both Wesleys with slanderous stories against Oglethorpe. They were apparently trying to get Oglethorpe into their own power for their own purposes, whatever those purposes were.

The women acted in such irra-

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tional fashion that their schemes never have been altogether intelligible.

John Wesley was taken in by them, and for a time doubted the moral soundness of Oglethorpe, who was a straight soul in his personal morality.

In this gullibility Wesley did Oglethorpe a dire wrong and managed to get himself assaulted by one of the women, who attacked him with a pair of scissors. The difficulty with such breaches of friendship is that they never thoroughly heal.

'The good that came out of the experience was the vindication of Oglethorpe, the revelation of the possibility of such evil in women, and the opening of the eyes of Wesley to the fact that he could not trust his own complete good faith as a guarantee of the good faith of all whom he might meet.

The humiliating experience ought to have been at least significant enough to lead to that famous Methodist rule about conversing sparingly with women.

Another phase of experience that, as we look back, was well calculated to prepare at least in a small degree for the after-responsibilities was Wesley's various duties with the governor of the colony.

The secretaryship was more properly the function of Charles, but Oglethorpe appears in general to have preferred John to Charles.

There are still in existence official papers of Oglethorpe in the handwriting of John Wesley. For example, on July 26, 1736, Oglethorpe wrote to his trustees: "I shall reduce the expense by all possible means, especially by encouraging the lazy to leave the colony." Church, in his invaluable work on Oglethorpe, says that this letter is in the handwriting of John Wesley.

Wesley states that at periods he worked for stretches of six hours continuously with the governor, taking intervals now and again for prayer and praise.

In spite of various embarrassing episodes due to the overstrain of Wesley's piety, Oglethorpe was a good associate for a member of the Holy Club.

He was of high ideals, ideals perhaps a trifle too exalted for his task as governor, and yet with a fund of sound, practical sense to which Wesley needed to be constantly exposed. 'There is something about the character and career of James Oglethorpe which makes him of compelling interest after the lapse of two centuries.

One element is probably the uniqueness of his idea of colonization.

He recognized in his colonial sphere the opportunity of dealing with a social problem at home by handling the poordebtor difficulty constructively, and of marking out a path for a noble course for England in serving backward peoples in her new lands, peoples like the American Indians.

Considering his long experience in Parliament, his connections with the trustees of the

JOHN WESLEY

Georgia Trust Fund in London, and his own remarkable personal qualities, he presented to Wesley an opportunity through daily association which was of the first order as a practical training in statesmanship.

To be fully candid, we have to voice the opinion that Wesley must have been something of a trial to Oglethorpe, with his persistent pressure for religious exercises, some of which must, under the circumstances, have seemed artificial.

Think of yielding to the request of a secretary that five minutes out of every working hour be given to prayer.

Think too of Wesley's listening to wicked stories about the man who was virtually his chief.

Oglethorpe recognized Wesley's many excellences but, after Wesley had left Georgia, gave it as his opinion that the coming spiritual adviser to the colony ought to be of mature age. John Wesley got more from Oglethorpe than Oglethorpe from him.

In a wholly unconscious fashion Oglethorpe made a contribution to the Wesleyan Movement.

It was understood at the outset that Wesley's work was to be chiefly among the Indians.

Here again we have the man of the Holy Club seeking ideal conditions for the spread of religious truth.

Perhaps we should better say that he was seeking virgin minds whose acceptance of the gospel might throw light upon the gospel for the sake of the missionary himself.

'This is indeed warranted by Wesley's own statements, but we must be careful here.

This self-centered intention was all within a life which was naturally given to doing good to men.

Wesley assumed as a matter of course that he was to help men.

We are not to take his extreme words like that of going to America to save his own soul as meaning that he was withdrawing into himself to seek salvation.

Selfsalvation was the center of his goal, but he was no more independent of the other center than an ellipse is independent of either of its foci when the gaze of the mathematician is fixed on the other.

As to the Indians, Wesley started to Georgia long before Rousseau had made popular the notion of the noble Red Man as the unspoiled child of nature, but he at first made the same mistake that Rousseau made—and made famous—that civilization had spoiled human life by its myriad and manifold shackles.

He failed to see that the savage condition is one of conventions and laws and chains that put the savage into a slavery as heavy as that of civilization.

From morning to night, and from night to morning, the savage—including the Red Indian—is at the mercy of customs and taboos and superstitions. He is just as much the product of all these

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forces as the white man is the product of the social mysteries of England or France.

It was through a mind thus bound and ridden that the Indians of Georgia had to get what they could out of Wesley's preaching. They did not get much. He spoke of them at first in October, 1735, as having "no comments to construe away the text of the Scripture; no vain philosophy to corrupt it; no luxurious, sensuous, covetous, ambitious expounders to soften its unpleasing truths. They have no party, no interest to serve, and are therefore fit to receive the gospel in its simplicity.

They are as little children, humble, willing to learn, and eager to do the will of God." In 1737 he wrote of them as "gluttons, thieves, dissemblers, liars, murderers of fathers, murderers of mothers, murderers of their own children."

A good deal has been made of Lecky's statement that the preaching of Wesley saved England from horrors like the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. - This is an impressive utterance, possibly more rhetorical than historical. The second passage above about the Indians, however, did, we may fairly believe, have something to do with preserving the mind of England from the wild nonsense of Rousseau about the mind of the savage as a guide and norm for so-called civilized man.

'This description of the Indians is unjust, but it is nearer actual fact than Rousseau's— probably because founded more nearly on actual factual observation than on the fanciful speculations of Rousseau—though this is not intended to minimize the importance of Rousseau's other work.

The picture of the Indians which Wesley drew of them sitting on the banks-of streams, looking now at one another, now at the sky, and now at the bubbles on the water, was about the mildest

Wesley left us, and that was evidently written in contempt.

Wesley was not a success with Indians.

Speaking of the total situation in Georgia, Oglethorpe did more for the Red Man than did Wesley. We have in the contrast between the two types of work that between an intense idealism which is impatient of facts, and an idealism a portion of the intensity of which seeks what is best to do under given circumstances.

Oglethorpe's work had its tragedies— after Oglethorpe had gone—but it built on a sound basis of knowledge of the Indian character.

Like so many other evangelistic leaders, Wesley had to learn that in the proclamation of truth an understanding of the mind receiving the truth is quite as important as the mind of the one uttering it. This lesson Wesley did learn, perhaps learned it too well, for we do not find after Wesley's return

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to England any overwhelming interest in what we today think of as missionary work, work for the so-called backward peoples.

It is true that he complained that he went out to America primarily to preach to the Indians and that he did not get a fair opportunity to do so, but he evidently did not regard Indian communities as a favorable evangelistic opportunity, just as in earlier years he pronounced the inhabitants around Epworth as hopeless from his point of view of himself as a preacher.

It is true too that he seconded Coke's missionary enterprises, but not with any manifest feeling of his own responsibility.

"Missionary" had a wide meaning in those days. The American Methodists almost immediately after their organization as a Church set aside Freeborn Garretson as a missionary—to Nova Scotia!

It is indubitable that Wesley said, ""The world is my parish," but this had no reference to missionary tasks whatever.

The famous sentence was spoken of his ordinary tasks, and meant merely that he would preach wherever he pleased without regard to any Church of England bishop.

Wesley met obstacles to his unyielding religious demands, not only from designing individuals and from "the heathen," but from the settlers in Georgia.

Utterly open himself, with nothing in his consciousness of which he was ashamed, he could not see why, in his capacity as priest, he could not step into the inner personal lives of those for whose souls he felt responsible. The unfortunate truth was that many of the settlers did not care for his ministrations, or for those of anyone else.

'There were others who resented out of the evil of their own lives the presence of good in his life—and sought to bring him into disrespect in every conceivable fashion.

Theodore Roosevelt, a careful observer and close student of men under frontier conditions, has pointed out the changes in character that men undergo when transplanted from old and established communities to frontier settlements.

The man who at home cheerfully bears his share of the social burden becomes heroic in self-sacrifice when he moves to a sparsely populated frontier.

On the other hand, the mean man, or the revengeful man, becomes, upon slight provocation, a murderer when in pioneer conditions.

The reason seems to be that on the frontier the customary restraining pressures of social sentiment are relaxed and men show themselves for what they are in themselves.

Now, the Georgia settlement, when Wesley was there, did not number more than a thousand in population, a thousand people who had to live three thousand miles from all scenes to which they had been accustomed.

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The effect on Wesley made him overstrained in his set determination to carry through his religious purposes, but was not otherwise harmful.

Certainly, he kept himself in splendid physical condition if being able to sleep on rainsoaked earth without taking cold is any test. The effect on those who would have been displeased with Wesley in England was to make them hate him in Georgia. Charles

Wesley, who shared the enmity of the settlers, relates that when he was walking in the outskirts of Frederica a bullet whizzed past his head, evidently intended for him, which is just what is to be expected when in frontier conditions hatred has gone beyond a stage which in an old settlement would find vent in malicious speech, and seeks to kill. John Wesley was hated even more than Charles.

John kept himself strictly to his hard-and-fast program of daily tasks, thereby increasing the rage of the settlers against himself, and preventing anything like even a touch of homesickness in his own heart. One can go carefully through every paragraph of his Journal during this period and not find a sign of longing for England— quite remarkable when one thinks of the delights of the life which he left behind at Oxford.

A frontier community gets used to the notion of a relaxation of the rules of settled, so-called "'civilized" life. The existence at Georgia was not free from the alarms and terrors of possible dangers from savages and Spaniards, the nearest foreign neighbors, so that every man knew that he had to walk warily.

However, the settler, even though he was "regular" in his support of church at home, could not see why everything ecclesiastical had to be so much stiffer in Georgia. When Wesley insisted upon dipping babies into the water in baptism, unless physical health was thereby to be manifestly imperiled, it is not to be wondered at that the mothers of children born in a virtual wilderness did not care to have the Church add to the hardships of a life already hard enough.

The picture of Wesley here is not pleasant.

It suggests a life without much balance, not to say good sense.

The Church as a sacred institution in itself was bulking too largely in his thought.

Moreover, all this unyielding rigor suggested a mind not yet sure of itself.

Wesley was not yet strong enough to hold anything in an easy grasp.

He seemed afraid to surrender anything for fear he might have to give up all.

He was not sure of himself.

In Georgia occurred that oftquoted interview with the Moravian Bishop Spangenburg, in which the bishop laid it down so uncompromisingly that the belief that

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Christ died for the world, one's self included, was not enough, but one must have a personal assurance of Christ's salvation for one's own self.

This started Wesley anew on a quest for inner assurance arising out of a desperate fear that he was not himself saved.

Let us now glance ahead half a century to the day when John Wesley declared that as he looked back to the positiveness with which he and Charles had preached that a man was not saved until he knew he was saved and when he was saved, it was wonder the people did not stone them.

That is to say, the definiteness of that early preaching was a mistake, and that includes the ironclad doctrine of the Moravian bishop.

'This after-statement of Wesley is not to be taken as a sign of the mental relaxing that comes with old age.

It was a statement of mature judgment and is not to be passed over lightly.

If we seek standards by which to judge Wesley's work, we are fortunate indeed to find some from his own pen.

This matter is important because of its significance for the later course of Methodism.

There can be no doubt that there are for multitudes of souls just the type of experience that Spangenburg, and Wesley after him, had in mind; but there can be no doubt either that the effect of the unqualified teaching of such experience as a necessity for salvation has to be taken into the account in estimating the religious results of Methodism. 'Through such uncompromising sternness many souls were left in darkness, if not led into it.

Many found refuge in other religious groups who would have been more happy in Methodism.

Of course, if we are to judge the truth of a proposition merely by its spiritual effects, we can make out a good case for this doctrine, if in our effort we do not forget the harmful results as well as the helpful.

Spangenburg and Wesley, however, were not twentieth-century pragmatists of the school of William James.

'They thought of truth as absolute in its own right, and sincerely taught it as such.

Wesley's statement in later age did not mean that he thought he had used a tool in a bungling fashion, but that he had not hold of the full truth.

We have to concede a measure of force to Lecky's judgment that Wesley preached a religion of terrors, though the terrors were not those of hellfire but of requirement upon all seekers to attain a type of assurance without which they were to regard themselves as lost.

We come now to an experience of Wesley which seems strange judged by ordinary human standards, but which is not so strange when we know Wesley, with his intense piety—the story of his relations to "Sophy" Hopkey. It is perhaps worth while to note that the

THE BRAND PLUCKED FROM THE BURNING

more recent biographers of Wesley make more of this relationship than did the earlier.

Moore, one of the most important of all writers on Wesley, does not seem to know, or to remember, the name of the young woman.

Wesley does not appear to have spoken about the matter to anyone in England.

It may be that with our larger knowledge of the effects of such experiences for the entire after-life, we are wise in paying more attention to this early love affair than did Wesley's contemporaries, though it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of Miss Hopkey in Wesley's life. The young woman herself was only eighteen years old at the time, though here, again, we must not forget that in those times a young woman of eighteen was commonly regarded as having come virtually to full maturity.

Wesley was fully fourteen years the senior of Sophy Hopkey.

Before Wesley came to Georgia he had not had extensive acquaintance with women outside the Epworth home. There was indeed some fancy letter writing with the sisters of some of his college mates, most of it as far up in the air as such writing usually is. It is manifest, however, that Wesley's knowledge of women at the time of his sojourn in Georgia was altogether superficial.

To Wesley there seemed for a long period in his life no realization of any essential differences between children and adults, between the civilized and the savage, between men and women, between different persons.

His conceptions of persons were certainly oversimplified.

To his credit be it said that, until he found reasons for doing otherwise, he treated all whom he met as moved by the same interests and motives as himself.

In the critical juncture in which Wesley now found himself everything was complicated by the fact that he did not know himself.

It appears that he went out to Georgia with the idea that he would not marry.

The possibility that he might fall in love does not seem to have occurred to him.

Now, in circumstances like those in which Wesley lived in Georgia almost any man can fall in love with almost any woman.

Proximity counts mightily.

Miss Hopkey seems to have been an earnest, attractive young woman, with no especially distinguishing characteristics.

Wesley fell in love with her because he was so much in her company, or near her; there were not many other young women near at hand; she seems to have taken kindly to the exercises to which Wesley introduced her for the improvement of her intellectual and spiritual powers.

On some occasions they were thrown into quite intimate relations, as on a trip from

JOHN WESLEY

Frederica to Savannah on which they were together in almost complete intimacy much of the time.

On that trip the usual course in such intimacies seems to have been followed, automatically, or with the regular psychological sequences.

The two fell to talking about a man of Miss Sophy's acquaintance; Miss Sophy revealed that the man had asked for her hand, and next declared that she would not marry him. Whereupon Wesley made what was a full equivalent to declaration of love, and Miss Sophy burst into tears and asked him not to mention the matter again. This is the old, old path that has been trodden by thousands upon thousands of couples since time began, and will be traveled till the end of time.

The usual outcome is that a few further interviews bring to clearer understanding and finally to marriage.

From the time of this first interview Miss Hopkey acted much like a normal human being, and John Wesley not like one at all.

His conversation with Miss Sophy was, for the most part, preaching. He was clear as to the lines of conduct she should take and not at all clear about himself. We have to remind ourselves that during this troublous season Sophy Hopkey had to deal with John

Wesley as John Wesley was then.

She did not know what a world figure he was to become, nor did anyone else. He must have seemed to her the strangest person she had ever met in her brief eighteen years.

If she put up with all the queerness which he seems to have manifested, she must have been herself quite unusual.

There is nothing in the record that indicates that she could have understood what Wesley was about, any better than any other girl of eighteen could have understood a man of thirty-two who was preaching and seeking to practice an ideal of holy conduct almost incomprehensible in circumstances like those of the Georgia colony.

So Miss Hopkey suddenly married someone else.

Speaking again on the authority of all accounts that have come down to us, there was not the slightest trace of anything reprehensible in her conduct.

It would not be'strictly precise to say that Sophy Hopkey jilted John Wesley; she merely gave him up as an insoluble problem, possibly in a mood of desperation.

Now the trouble began. Wesley by this time was almost two personalities—a strict and stern ecclesiastical martinet and a man disappointed in love.

Acting in both capacities he avowed that the marriage of Miss Hopkey was illegal because of some irregularity about the banns.

Just how it was going to help anything or anybody to talk of such a detail as this does not appear.

More

THE BRAND PLUCKED FROM THE BURNING

folly followed, coming to a climax in Wesley's refusing the communion service to Mrs. Sophy because of her neglect of services preliminary to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

In all this Wesley thought he was acting as a faithful priest of the Church.

In an earlier section we saw that Samuel Wesley, Sr., made an erring communicant do public penance on the streets of Epworth.

The offense for which that penance was required was adultery, and was serious enough in the eyes of the community to sustain the rector in the inflicted penalty.

Not so with John's attempted punishment.

The Georgia community seems to have felt that Wesley's severity was unreasonable.

In any case Williamson, the husband of Sophy, tried to hail Wesley into court on ten charges, one of them being slander. The others were wholly ecclesiastical.

John was willing to meet the charge of slander, but denied that a civil court had any right to question his ecclesiastical conduct.

In'this he was fighting a battle which recurs in every generation, the same battle which is now on the point of breaking out, or actually breaking, in every land in Christendom.

All the positions he took in his defense were sound, judged by the wisdom of later centuries.

The charge of slander led to a wretched mass of vicious talk against Wesley himself, but had not enough merit in it to warrant trial. John Wesley never was guilty of slander against Sophy Hopkey.

He did all he could to get the case into court to clear himself but did not succeed, the energies of his enemies exhausting themselves in annoying him and in seeking to hinder him even when he was trying to leave for England.

At last he managed to get away, and reached England on February 1, 1738, after passing George Whitefield, who was leaving the shores of England for America just as Wesley drew near to them—Whitefield who, by the way, on arriving in Georgia found warrant for paying high tribute to the work of Wesley.

If Wesley looked longingly back to Georgia and its people, including Mrs. Sophy Williamson, he does not say so in any passage either in a letter or in the Journal.

One or two somewhat reckless historians have written as if Wesley had to leave Georgia, allowing the reader to infer that he was forced to go. This is utterly mistaken.

Wesley had to go in the sense that he saw that his work in America was done.

I have spoken plainly of the impracticalness of many of his plans, and the undiplomatic rigidity of his methods. There was, however, nothing to criticize in his conduct in any moral aspect. We have to write

JOHN WESLEY

down the fact that his ideals were too high to gain acceptance by the people of Georgia. The most careful perusal of his own correspondence, of his diary and Journal, of all available records of his life found in any source, fails to bring to light anything suggestive of self-seeking.

At that time money for his services was not forthcoming.

Probably he had then to endure a poverty that meant hunger; but if so, he took it all in the day's work. What he did was not productive of serious harm, but taught him lessons that worked powerfully for good in the spread of Methodism in England. The difficulty was that in Georgia he was the knightly Don Quixote, without the good hard sense, coarse good sense, if you wish, of any Sancho Panza.

PART II

THE HEART STRANGELY WARMED

ALDERSGATE—May 24, 1738, ro Apri, 1739

PART II

THE HEART STRANGELY WARMED

ALDERSGATE—MaAy 24, 1738, to Apri, 1739 " @ BOUT a quarter before nine, while [someone was reading

Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans] he was A describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed, I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death."

Wesley got back from Georgia on February 1, 1738.

On May 24, 1738, he had the famous Aldersgate experience.

We must seek as full an account as possible of this crisis, which has been almost as much discussed as any in religious history—the socalled conversion of Wesley.

It is important to set the whole scene in its true context.

The experiences leading up to Aldersgate are usually depicted as seasons of torment in Wesley's soul.

The relief following the experience is usually spoken of as a passage into a depth of peace never known before.

Now, all this has to be understood in terms of what Wesley has said of his own peculiarities.

The various entries in the Journal do not bear out quite such an agony of woe as some statements of some biographers suggest.

For example, Wesley was fond of telling of the soundness with which he slept— had slept every night of his life. The Journal tells us that he had never lain awake more than fifteen minutes in any night in practically his entire life.

This is, of course, one of those offhand statements that men make in after years when they look back on a life in which the usual course seems to have moved regularly from the beginning.

Still, the fact is not to be doubted that all his life Wesley reaped the benefit of his regular living in regularity and steadiness of mental processes.

Even if in those earlier times Wesley tended to asceticism, the asceticism was not as harmful as even the innocent dissipations of youth are likely to be.

Retirement and rising at fixed hours, simple and plain food, vigorous but not excessive exercise—all this makes for the best working of the body. No pictures of Wesley, or accounts of him, carry down

JOHN WESLEY

to us a hint of a body ever burdened with even a pound of excess weight—witness Leslie Stephen's picture of him as a "human gamecock"—and none of them suggest, on the other hand, the drawn pinched features of the ascetic. Whatever the experiences through which Wesley passed, we cannot easily think of him as walking the streets at night, or appearing with hair or clothes in disorder, or as gazing off into vacancy.

If we may use a dreadfully mechanical figure of speech, the currents of Wesley's life were pretty thoroughly canalized from the first.

There were not in them many rapids, or whirlpools, or marshy stretches, or cataracts.

'The stream did not vary much in depth and moved at an even flow. Let us get all this firmly before us as we come to Aldersgate.

There was, however, enough in what Wesley had passed through, especially in Georgia, to perplex if not to torment him.

Immediately after his heart became strangely warmed he tells us that he began to pray for his enemies.

Who could those enemies have been but Williamson and Causton and the rest of that ilk who had persecuted him in Georgia, with perhaps a stray thought now and then for Sophy Hopkey? He had put his type of religion to the test and the results in the working out had not been notably gratifying.

No one could have stood more stiffly for his religious conceptions than Wesley had done. The most he could feel about the outcome was that if he could have a second try at Georgia, he could do better.

The old adage tells us that we are to let justice be done though the heavens fall.

What kind of justice had Wesley meted out to Sophy Hopkey?

Nevertheless, more than one sage has observed that if justice makes the heavens fall, there may be something wrong with the justice.

It may have taken Wesley some time to get around to asking a pertinent question, but he asked it at last: "Is there anything wrong with the type of religion I have been preaching and practicing?"

Wesley was becoming convinced that his type of religion was not doing him much good and was not much helping anyone else.

Consider again the legalistic, formal type of the religion.

It consisted in doing things according to religious commandment.

The spirit was that of utter devotion to the loftiest conceivable ideal. We usually think of a legalist as one who, having fulfilled, let us say, his daily stint of good works, looks upon himself as thereafter free till the hour for the next duty arrives.

This form of legalism is rather comfortable.

Now, this was not Wesley's type.

He thought of all his Spartan self-discipline of the spirit

THE HEART STRANGELY WARMED

as a path to reach an ideal which he would not disobey in the least detail. Instead of leading to peace this course led in the opposite direction.

Indeed, ask often enough, 'Have I done enough?" and one is headed toward madness.

It is easy to say, as one looks back over the history of a group or an individual, that this or that must have, or not have, been thus and so.

There is no mistake, however, in our saying that Wesley must have been disappointed in his religious life in the months between February, 1738, and May of the same year. Allowing for all the tendencies in Wesley himself to iron response to an iron conviction of duty, he could not have found much satisfaction in the type of life he was leading.

He craved something more nourishing to the emotional life, something that he could feel. We can hardly call anything life which we cannot feel.

It was one thing when the seeker for thrills sought feeling; it was another when Wesley did so, for Wesley's mind and will had been, if anything, overworked in the service of the ideal.

He evidently desired something he had never had, and something which he perhaps had never seen anyone else have.

We cannot give too much honor to Susanna Wesley for her training of her son, but we cannot forget the almost exclusive predominance of the mind and will elements in that training.

Dr. Umphrey Lee has given us a worth-while hint as to a possible suggestiveness in the epitaph which John and Charles prepared for their mother—that strange reference to her having endured a legal night for seventy years.

"Night" as a word descriptive of religious experience provokes us to strange musings.

Those who coined the expression "legal night" knew the meanings of words and would not have spoken thus if the characterization had not been appropriate.

I have already referred to Tyerman's statement that John Wesley entered Charterhouse School a saint and had come out of it a sinner, as a perfect specimen of the result reached when a theologian simply has to make experience conform to theory.

Still, it is doubtful if Wesley ever saw at close range any religion that was strongly marked by religious satisfaction.

So far as we can make out, Wesley's religious experience had gone stale with him.

He had debated it threadbare.

To have suggested to him that he ease off a little from the intensity of his grasp would probably have horrified him.

Yet he was manifestly feeling after something which he could not get by being always keyed up to highest pitch. Something simply had to happen.

JOHN WESLEY

It was shortly after his return from Georgia that Wesley had his famous interview with Peter Bohler, the Moravian, in which Béhler told him that he must purge himself of his philosophy and preach faith till he had it, and after getting it, preach faith because he had it.

This advice it was which shocked Robert Southey— whose biography of Wesley never loses charm—as something insincere and tending to hypocrisy. We do not have to suppose that Bohler was urging Wesley to claim to have an experience which he did not have. A man can be convinced that religious experience in any phase is most desirable without saying that he has attained unto it himself.

There have been many preachers who have believed thoroughly in mystic visions without ever receiving one.

John Wesley came to believe in and preach the doctrine of Christian perfection, without ever claiming to have reached this state in his own life.

In any event Bohler's word sank deep into Wesley's mind and has to be reckoned as one of the factors in his conversion.

As we come to look at the conversion itself we have to recognize that there is about all such experiences an element that defies description or analysis, as all vital experiences have at their center a heart of mystery.

Still, some things about them can be known and profitably discussed.

We may well be thankful that modern psychological study has done so much in this field, provided we steer clear of dogmatism and scientific pedantry and such cumbersome terminology as "evangelical" conversion.

'The mind is the most delicate of organisms.

Its finer operations are subtle and illusive, only to be caught by the most delicate perceptions.

Moreover, processes of the mind fade into one another almost imperceptibly.

'There is required for their understanding not only the largest and most patient training, but also the acutest sympathy and intuition.

It is almost impossible to understand a religious feeling objectively, or from the outside.

The critical mood by its nature is likely to prevent sympathetic understanding of religious states of mind.

Yet there are some facts which appear in all psychological investigation, facts which we have all known after a fashion without realizing their universal nature.

For example, there is the rhythm in which all phases of life move.

There is no such experience as a living soul's ascending to a psychological plateau and staying there.

There are spiritual rhythms dependent upon the shorter and longer bodily rhythms.

We live not on straight

THE HEART STRANGELY WARMED

lines but on curves, and the curves are quite as much up and down as to one side and another.

Then there is the tendency of all inner life to respond to thinking which seems to come of itself, out of the subconscious, as we say in today's phrase.

So far as the entrance of truth into our minds is concerned, we are stormed upon by all manner of impressions which we do not invite to cross the threshold of consciousness.

They come without invitation, and will not leave at our order. They sink below the level of our purposive regard, or they hang around the fringes of our consciousness, always near.

In all thinking that we call creative we do best when we adjust ourselves to this tendency of an idea to take care of itself.

'The classic illustration is the statement of Poincaré, the famous mathematician, that in his handling a mathematical conception he would get it clearly stated to himself, think over it as long as he felt he was getting anywhere with it, and then cease to strain to hold the idea in his attention, letting it find its way about among the other contents of his mind.

Later he would deliberately lift the idea again into clear focus, doing this repeatedly until a solution would burst, sometimes suddenly, upon his mind.

'The schoolboy who is at all studious knows that after an evening's prolonged wrestle with a problem he may awake in the morning with the mystery or the perplexity solved.

He might easily make the mistake of thinking that the best way to deal with problems would be to sleep over them, without the evening's mental wrestling.

Let him try this, however, and he soon learns that he does not find any solution by illumination in the morning.

Now, all this is so thoroughly understood today that it is commonplace in intellectual method.

Graham Wallas calls this period of unsettled, rather formless mental effort the stage of incubation, which phrasing certainly links the mind's processes with the fundamental processes of physical organisms.

'The idea, or the sentiment, or the determination, goes through a ripening toward full fruitage.

Just what may bring the swift enlightenment at the end is not important.

William James speaks of some events, or expressions, or impressions as "'trigger-pullers" in human consciousness.

The mind becomes filled, or even clogged with content until some chance deed, or event, or feeling pulls the trigger and a sort of discharge clears the holding mind,

It may be just as well to quote here James's own description of conversion: "To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to

JOHN WESLEY

experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior, and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold on religious realities."*

This may seem as if we were trying to reduce religious phenomena to the plane of merely natural law, but we are assuming that we may follow Wesley himself in understanding that natural laws are divine methods.

John Wesley himself was a careful observer of psychological processes in religion.

He thought of God as working through these processes, though he did all in his power to observe and set down the most accurate and adequate notes of all unusual incidents and experiences which came to his attention.

With this assumption, then, that the divine works through the orderly laws of mind, let us look at one or two illustrations of swift crowning of long processes of thought by quick illumination. We have already mentioned Poincaré.

We might cite even more appropriately Newton and his falling apple. Whether that incident is historically and literally true or not, it might well have been true, for such an insignificant incident is just the type of occurrence which does lead to such momentous conclusions as Newton's grasp of the principle of universal gravitation.

'The story goes that Newton was sitting in his garden in deep reflection.

An apple fell. Newton said: "The apple falls.

The moon falls."

Now, Newton may not have said anything, and the apple may not have suggested anything to him, and he may not have been in his garden at all when the thought of gravitation occurred to him, but the incident is true to life, nevertheless, as showing how a long, laborious process of thinking may suddenly come to a climax in the midst of, and at the hint of, something apparently insignificant.

Another illustration, altogether authentic, can be found in Darwin's account of his first convincing glimpse of the importance of natural selection.

After months and years of study, Darwin was one day reading casually a passage from Malthus on population, in which Malthus was discussing the peculiarity of animal forms of life to increase in number up to the limit of food possibilities.

Instantly the conception of natural selection for which the scientist was searching dawned upon him.

The relevance of the Newton and Darwin illustrations here *The Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter on "Conversion," p. 189.

THE HEART STRANGELY WARMED

lies partly in that the processes had gone on through so long a time, periods longer than that of the acute phase of Wesley's spiritual struggle.

A difference between the two types of inner reaching for adjustment was that in the strictly intellectual spheres there was no fighting against foe, no hint of repression, while in the spiritual sphere there probably was a need of giving up ideas which had been considered nearly, if not quite, all-essential.

In spite of the earnestness of Wesley's search, one wonders whether he was as receptive to ideas about the spiritual life as were Newton and Darwin about the intellectual problems. What Wesley had in the end to turn from was virtually a system of religious idea and practice in which he had been nurtured from the beginnings of consciousness.

As soon as the light broke, he felt immense relief but he had held on to the Spartan, stoic notion so long that it was hard to let go. He had to change the inner attitude of his life up to 1738.

Now, what does Wesley say as to the meaning of the Aldersgate experience himself?

We have already used his own words:

"I felt my heart strangely warmed," etc.

How did he himself interpret it?

He thought of it as a passage from the state of a slave or a servant to that of ason.

'This is the heart of it all, and this is the heart of the gospel. We have in Saint Paul the same idea—the life of a servant to the law is like a body of death. When the heart can cry, "Abba, Father," all changes. We are not dealing with a hard-and-fast scheme of laws in whose remorselessness we find only despair, but with a Father who takes the will for the deed, who makes allowances, who makes possible new starts with the dawning of every day. There is no relief, no satisfaction in the law in itself, or in ideals in themselves, for, when we think we have kept the law or fulfilled the ideal, new laws and new ideals loom up before us, to which we cannot hope to attain.

In a way the difference here is that between thinking of law as instrument and thinking of it as end in itself.

Wesley would likely not have admitted that he was seeking to follow commandments as ends on their own account; he would have said that he was using these as means of grace, but he acted as if the laws stood in their own right.

Certainly, when he fully accepted the idea of communion with the Father as all-determining, the laws became in the deeper sense instrumental.

The experience of Wesley is a comment on the word of Jesus that after men have done all, they are unprofitable servants.

They attain whatever success they

JOHN WESLEY

reach as sons.

A son's work may be of value to a father not at all because of what it is in itself but because of the spirit of sonship it bears. A child's letter to a father is valuable not because of its qualities of penmanship and composition, but in spite of these, because it is an attempt to get into communion with the father.

The change of focus and emphasis meant everything to Wesley, yet we do badly in attempting to make the transformation unlimited and the break complete.

I have laid stress on the servantlike quality of the earlier years.

Let us not fancy for an instant that John Wesley was any the less industrious or systematic in his work after Aldersgate than before.

His deliverance was not from work but from a slavish spirit in his work.

If anything, his devotion to system increased.

The Aldersgate experience was in 1738:

Wesley died in 1791.

The entries in his Journal are just as detailed and exact in the last year as in the Georgia days.

Indeed, something in Wesley seems at Aldersgate to have been released for more and more activity.

Again, the experience did not lead to joy without interruption. The entries time and again in this year, 1738, reveal gloom, and doubt, and questioning.

Heaviness of soul was his after Aldersgate as before, till it lightened with the years.

Moreover, ideas and feelings did not clear up in Wesley's life all at once.

He felt the need of getting things into true perspective, and that took time.

His spiritual vision had so long been accustomed to one focus that it had to make its adjustment to the new focus. To use a too materialistic illustration we are aware that surgical operations on the human eyes for the correction of defective sight are not likely to bring true vision at once.

Sight is delicate, and depends upon the myriad movements of fine nerves and muscles to an incalculable degree.

To change these movements may mean the painful development of muscles almost atrophied through disuse, or the direction of muscles wrongly used to new functions.

We can easily suppose, without any strain on possibilities, that a child might conceivably be born into the world with closed eyelids which could not be opened except after surgical treatment.

The child might go on for years supposing himself hopelessly blind, with only faint glimmerings of light until surgery relieved him.

Now, if we should imagine that as soon as the lids opened the sight would be like that of anyone else, we should make serious mistake.

Even with perfect eyes after such treatment, seeing would have to be learned.

THE HEART STRANGELY WARMED

After Aldersgate, Wesley had to reorient himself.

It will be recalled that even after a more striking experience, that on the Damascus road, a greater than Wesley withdrew for long months into Arabia.

Paul's spiritual vision needed more than that scales fall from his eyes under the touch of Ananias.

To get his life adjusted to the new light and the new vision, Wesley determined to visit his friends, the Moravians, at Herrnhut.

Here seems as good a place as any for a word about the influence of the Moravians on Wesley and, through him, on Methodism.

To begin with, they took their religion seriously and went with it to the full length, or what they thought was the full length.

The Moravians had accepted Oglethorpe's invitation to Georgia to find a secure place for worship of God after their own fashion, after having moved about from one persecuting community to another in Central Europe.

Most of those, who settled in Georgia seem to have come from Salzburg.

We have already seen how deeply impressed Wesley was at the behavior of the Moravians in the Atlantic storm in midwinter, when the waves split the mainsail and drenched the cabins.

The Moravians had been inured to hardships and took them about as they came—all in the name of the Lord.

We have spoken of the impression made upon Wesley by Spangenburg and Béhler.

Remembering the profound communion with God which the Moravians seemed to hold at all times, Wesley sought them out in Herrnhut, where, to all intents and purposes, Count Zinzendorf was their absolute leader, not to say ruler.

In Georgia, Wesley's contacts with the, Moravians ought to have opened his eyes not only to their surpassing excellences but also to their limitations.

They had firm hold of some essentials but were not authorities on the finer points of anything.

When Wesley was fumbling along, making blunder after blunder in his relations with Sophia Hopkey, he made the worst blunder of all in submitting to the Moravian elders the question as to whether he should marry or not.

They promptly voted no.

Now, the men were older than John Wesley, but there does not seem to have been among them one who could take Wesley aside and give him a little normal human counsel.

The Moravians were no doubt rich toward God, but on the manward side they were somewhat poverty-stricken. un :

Again, the Moravians overdid the positiveness of their religious claim.

They had indeed earned their convictions.

'Their

JOHN WESLEY

spiritual freedom had been bought with a great price.

It was theirs.

If anyone like Wesley cared to accept their fellowship, he could do so on their terms. We remember the sureness and directness with which Spangenburg spoke, and the definiteness of Boéhler.

The latter had studied at Jena and possessed that contempt of the intellect which men often do who have accepted and profited by the training of the schools, and then by virtue of a religious experience appear almost to despise the schools.

In any event, Bohler told Wesley his philosophy must be purged away and then talked with a certainty which was not just what Wesley needed.

At first it looked as if Wesley's own spiritual arrogance in dealing with men might be increased by his contact with the Moravians.

Just a few days before the Aldersgate crisis he wrote as follows to William Law, a leader in religious thinking, superior to Wesley in such thinking, though Law afterward went far into the vagaries of mysticism.

After reproaching Law for not better instructing him in religion, Wesley wrote: "Once more, Sir, let me beg you to consider whether your extreme roughness and morose, and sour behavior, at least on many occasions, can possibly be the fruit of a living faith in Christ.'""

Whatever Aldersgate did for Wesley, it did not make any less his positiveness, even his overbearingness in his dealings with his fellows.

This may be just as well, having regard to the task ahead of him, but it causes strange suspicions as to just what Christian humility meant to Wesley.

Probably humility in the sight of God.

The visit to Herrnhut was somewhat disillusioning to Wesley.

There is a story that one day Wesley was working in a garden in the Moravian settlement.

'There is nothing incredible in this, inasmuch as Wesley was quite an outdoor man and at times during his Georgia life gave himself to the exercise and pleasure of "felling trees."

'The story goes on that Zinzendorf approached Wesley and asked him to leave his work and greet some worthy personage or other, and that Wesley demurred because his hands were soiled with earth, bringing down upon himself Zinzendorf's rebuke for lacking humility.

Most biographers insist that this is apocryphal, but it sounds like Zinzendorf, especially since Zinzendorf did not have any way of knowing at that time what a character in the religious world Wesley was to become.

It does not sound like sae It is hard to picture Wesley as taking orders from anyyThe Moravians were sure of everything about their own reli-

THE HEART STRANGELY WARMED

gious thought and practice.

To the end of his life Wesley never ceased to give them credit for the good they had done him, but he soon turned from their leadership.

On the whole, the credit given them for their part in shaping Methodism has probably been given full recognition.

In after years Wesley openly rebuked them for the abjectness of their dependence on Zinzendorf, for their lapsing at times into disingenuousness, for their tendencies to quietism.

It is hard to strike a balance here.

There were aspects in which the influence of the Moravians on Methodism was not the best.

The tendency to self-assurance, which came partly from Moravianism, was something which Wesley did not need.

PART III

TO APRIL 4, 1739

"T submitted to be more vile and [preached] in the highway."—JouRNAL, APRIL, 1739

PART III

TO APRIL 4, 1739

HERE was nothing especially exciting in the actual Aldersgate experience.

The psalm which Wesley read on May 24 for his morning devotions was deeply stirring, and the anthem, which Wesley heard as he strayed into Saint Paul's, was, as he looked back at it, fitted to prepare him for the spiritual relief which came at the meeting in the evening.

Wesley did not feel especially drawn to that meeting—indeed, felt reluctant to go, but he did go. When he arrived at a quarter before nine, someone

—oddly enough Wesley does not remember who—was reading from Luther's introduction to the Epistle to the Romans.

It is not possible to say just what it was in that introduction which brought the light to Wesley. There was a strange warming of the heart and the thought that God had for Christ's sake forgiven Wesley his sins.

Those who will have it that the experience must have been a tumultuous upheaval of emotion have little to build upon.

The man who sat or stood next to Wesley had probably not the slightest idea of a strange warming of his neighbor's heart. What happened?

Not a great deal of anything at first.

For some weeks Wesley still had his periods of dismay and despair. He told his intimate circle that he was not a Christian and never had been, with such emphasis that his brother Samuel was disturbed lest John be giving himself to something bordering on fanaticism.

Gradually there came a settling down of feeling and within something over a year Wesley had found himself.

His eyes were turned outward instead of inward.

The Aldersgate experience was the preparation for the work of the next fifty years.

Wesley could not have done what he did with his gaze fixed upon himself.

All the intensity of that inward gaze had to be turned outward.

He could not have done what he did and always have been considering his own spiritual state.

There was too much to be done, or too much kept crowding upon him. He had to find his own way along.

I have seen best to put the intensity of Aldersgate in immediate context with the vastness of what Wesley did. One man had for a time at least to do what it ought to have been the aim of the entire

JOHN WESLEY

English Church to accomplish.

That Church, with all the power it had in the eighteenth century, could not have done what Wesley did.

It could not have impressed the people.

It could not have gathered such crowds as came to hear Wesley.

It could not have found standing room for them in the churches.

'There was not a massiveness or a quality about the English Church which could have produced Wesley's work without Wesley.

I turn to some considerations—the list not exhaustive—to show how widely the Wesley fervor spread of itself.

Some of these may seem matter of fact and commonplace, but the enumeration of them ought to bear witness to the concept of the force that came with the realization that God was a Father and not a taskmaster.

Without trying to be strictly systematic let us look at some phases of Wesley's career after Aldersgate which show the volume and torrent of his rushing life. We must indeed never forget that in a revival such as the Methodist, the leader is quite as much follower as leader, if we mean_the following of events, even if he had at the beginning thought of himself as the leader.

Moreover, Wesley had literally no precedents by which to plot his course.

There had never been such a revival as the Methodist.

There had been mighty popular movements with something of a religious cast, but with the chief emphasis on economic or social conditions. 'The Wesleyan emphasis was almost wholly religious.

There were immense social consequences which we shall consider later, but these did not come directly within the field of Wesley's purposive aim.

Take the remark of Spangenberg to Wesley about the necessity of his knowing personally that Christ had forgiven his sins.

Rightly interpreted this remark is sound enough, but when it carries the implication of some special witness, presumably of feeling, we can see how fraught with peril it is. That many, many converts to Methodism rejoiced in marked emotional uplift in turning to God cannot be doubted, but that many, many seekers pursued into virtual despair what Spangenburg and Bohler and Wesley seemed to imply is equally indubitable.

It was for preaching overdefiniteness of assurance that John Wesley said late in life that he wondered that the people had not stoned himself and Charles.

It was too bad that Wesley's recognition and acknowledgment of mistakes often came so long after the mistakes had been made.

We are accustomed'to think of the Wesleyan revival as a long spiritual triumph once it had got well agoing. We cannot know the total of those— otherwise ready for deliberate acceptance of God—who were

TO APRIL 4, 1739

thrown into confusion by the narrowness of the tests insisted upon as marks of genuine Christian discipleship.

We say this at the outset to indicate that the Wesley preaching at the best had its limitations.

It had to feel its way along.

It is a common enough mistake in dealing with the career of leaders who have worked on vast scales to assume, not purposely but unconsciously, that those leaders have in their own time been in possession of all the knowledge which we of later eras hold of their various and varying situations. A college professor today may have more knowledge of the situation at Waterloo, let us say, on the day before the battle than Bonaparte and Wellington together possessed.

This, of course, was a single historical incident, but a similar consideration stands true of the knowledge of the actors in processes working through a half or a full century.

Wesley was among the best-informed men of the eighteenth century, as to possible large-scale movements in the population of England. He personally came to know England better than any other man of his century, yet he could only detect as in a haze religious tendencies which are sun-clear to us today. We look upon forces at work in the eighteenth century as inevitably bound to take a particular direction. Any historical movement seems to have been inevitable when it is completed. To those in the movements themselves, the tendencies seem to be anything but inevitable.

To mention stupendous historic transformations in Wesley's time—who could have foreseen the American Revolution, or the French Revolution, or _ the Industrial Revolution? Arthur Young traveled widely through France, especially among the peasants, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, and evidently did not see any foretokens of the storm so soon to break. There is nothing to indicate that Wesley foresaw the extent even of the Methodist movement or the direction it was to take. The late Charles W. Eliot was once complimented on the consistent plan which his long administration at Harvard had revealed.

Eliot replied that he had not at the time been aware of any plan, that his work had resembled that of an old minister whom he had once known, who when congratulated on the clearness of his sermon outlines had replied that he knew nothing of outlines, that he had written down a sentence at a time, thanking God for each sentence as it came and then setting himself to write another.

This was not quite an exact statement on Eliot's part, and would not have been a true description of what Wesley did, but Eliot's statement would, in a measure, hold both for him-

JOHN WESLEY

self as the remaker of Harvard and for Wesley as the maker of Methodism.

After Wesley returned from Germany he spent much of his time among Moravian groups in London.

There began to gather around him clusters of persons likeminded with himself, or likeminded enough to respond to his teaching concerning the inner nature of the Christian life. He was still Fellow of Lincoln, but his duties there did not prevent his moving freely among the groups which came more and more to be known as Methodists, a term at first derisive and finally descriptive. When Charles Wesley founded the Holy Club, he could not know that chiefly under the leadership of John similar clubs would spring up and grow, far outside of university circles, and into Methodist societies of which the first to be formally organized took shape at Moorfields in 1740, to be followed quickly by one at Bristol. At the first, however, the societies were too small to be an adequate field for the powers released in Wesley by Aldersgate.

'The idea and fact of societies were nothing new in the history of the Church of England.

Any important organization like the English Church, or the Roman Catholic Church, for that matter, has to leave place for the organization of groups of like-minded persons who, while loyal to the inclusive body, find in minority associations something to satisfy their more peculiar needs.

Indeed, it would seem that freedom thus to make provision for more intimate cravings is one of the conditions of the continuance of the existence of the larger body. Of course, as in the human organism, if these cells get to developing too much on their own, they threaten the life of the parent social organism, but if they are loyal to the main aim of the parent organism, they are beneficial to that organism. However this may be as a general law, minority societies had been a feature of English Church life for possibly a full century before Wesley was born. At the conference on Faith and Order at Lausanne in 1927 it is noteworthy that a bishop of the Church of England, pleading for the union of religious denominations, especially in England, argued that the aim of English ecclesiastical statesmanship should be to persuade the nonconformist denominations to come into the Church of England as societies, maintaining within that Church all they had found beneficial in their independent life. Simon, in writing the five volumes which are far and away the best history of Methodism yet given the world, devotes virtually

TO APRIL 4, 1739

an entire volume to the societies in the English Church before Wesley.

All his life Wesley held fast to this idea of the Methodists as composing societies loyal to the Church and yet fostering in the societies their own religious life.

It has to be admitted that in the leadership of the societies Wesley seldom or never troubled to counsel with bishops or other church officials.

His societies were never formally sanctioned by the English Church.

Formally Wesley paid honor to church officials; practically, he had almost nothing to do with them.

It may or may not be a tribute to the Church of England in the eighteenth century that it allowed Wesley complete freedom.

Whatever the reason for the Church's attitude— indifference, fear of making an enemy of so powerful and popular a leader as Wesley, or recognition of the genuine worth of Methodism—the fact remains that the English Church was tolerant, and that in her tolerance made possible some of the best developments in the thought and practice of Wesleyanism.

It is also true that Wesley, while so much a law unto himself, remained through all his life fundamentally loyal to the Church.

It was not possible to make a separate sect of the Methodists as long as Wesley lived.

What, however, fed the societies in their constant growth?

What but the great outside masses to whom, following Whitefield, Wesley went forth and made direct appeal?

The outstanding excellence of Methodism on the human side was its virtual discovery of a class or classes of people, whose existence was assumed but not particularly noticed by the more favored groups.

It would be sheer folly to assert that the classes which were "lower," and which largely through Methodism afterward came to be "middle," were ignored in the beginning of Wesley's evangelist career.

Everybody "knew they were there," but nobody reckoned them at anywhere near their true possibilities.

We today make much of Kant's doctrine of a human being as an end in himself, - never to be used as a tool, or instrument, or stuff by anyone but himself without his own consent.

The word of Kant's did not appear till Wesley had moved far into his career, but the latter had been acting upon the idea all the time. The consideration appears obvious enough to us now, as a principle of Christian society, but even we do not wholly practice it. One of the strangest phenomena in human affairs is the extent to which men can fail to see the most obvious implication of moral principles.

We are not to suppose that the so-called upper classes in England in the eighteenth century

JOHN WESLEY

were brutal or callous toward those less favored.

The higher knew the lower were there, but they simply did not think of them.

Of course some moral and human regard was paid them, but they were not taken into the reckoning.

The most of them did not count even as voters.

By the 1830's many, many of the Methodists had, largely through following the sober and thrifty lives inculcated by Methodism, become well to do, some of them rich. 'These fortunate ones looked askance at the Chartist Movement, which sought to give the franchise to the groups who stood in the same position occupied by the Methodists fifty or seventy-five years earlier.

Wesley gave himself to a ministry to the less-favored groups partly because he was shut up to doing so.

The rushing current dashed in vain against some barriers.

The more highly placed groups would not listen to him. Explain the limitation as we will, the truth is that Wesley could not do much with the class to which he himself by birth belonged.

It is interesting to observe that in spite of the barbarity, not to say savagery, with which the lower classes of England treated John Wesley and his preachers, he felt that he could better win mobs who threw clods and stones than the more cultivated social groups, and that he could carry them farther.

In the latter decade of the eighteenth century Wesley died full of honors, mourned by the whole nation.

The honor came to him late in life, however, and did not come to his followers in that century at all.

There are some conjectures that we may legitimately make as to an explanation here. By the time the Revival under Wesley was well afoot he had developed a keen sense of direction as to religious guidance. Out of the experience itself he came to an awareness of the possibilities of response from different groups.

In spite of all their roughness the less-favored groups had elemental qualities which provided a more promising field than did the sophisticated members of so-called higher society.

The class to whom and for whom Horace Walpole wrote could not make much of Wesley.

Wesley could not make much of the groups like Walpole, partly because of the fact itself that they regarded themselves as higher.

They felt no need and there was at the time no way of awakening that feeling.

Secure in financial strength especially, they did as men of their kind always have done—they put money in a false importance.

The impatience of Wesley with the rich was wholly justified.

Any leader who feels the responsibility for any social

TO APRIL 4, 1739

betterment, knows that while no betterment can come without material instruments, on the other hand wealth is the deadly foe of such movements.

There seems at times almost a personal soreness in Wesley's contempt of the rich and high-placed, but the contempt was correctly aimed.

Wesley surely understood the limitations within which his movement must expect to succeed, if we can speak of him as consciously thinking of a large-scale revival at all.

If one supposes that Wesley expected the Revival which bears his name to sweep everything before it, let him ponder the passage in which he declares that at the outset he did not expect the movement to last more than thirty years, and that he regarded it as an especial mark of divine favor that at the time at which he spoke it had gone fifty years.

The reason was that Wesley felt that with the practice of industry and thrift the Methodists would become well to do and yield to the temptations of the world to softness and needless self-indulgence.

He felt that the only way to meet this tendency was to preach a doctrine of self-denial which would virtually mean the giving of all one's money away. We shall deal with Wesley's rules about money later; all we seek to do here is to point out that Wesley himself felt that success would bring its own limitations, and set limits to the growth of Methodism.

Again, Wesley knew the limitations set by the character of the people of the more numerous classes among whom he moved in nationwide preaching campaigns.

At least at first he did not have much hope of farmers.

Consider the picture of farm life in his day which Wesley drew in a few swift strokes:

See that little house, under the wood, by the riverside!

There is rural life in perfection. How happy, then, is the farmer that lives there!

Let us take a detail of his happiness.

He rises with, or before the sun, calls his servants, looks to his swine and cows, then to his stables and barns.

He sees to the plowing and sowing his ground, in winter or in spring.

In summer and autumn he hurries and sweats among his mowers and reapers. And where is his happiness in the meantime? Which of these employments do we envy? Or do we envy the delicate repast that succeeds, which the poet so languishes for?—

"Oh the happiness of eating beans well greased with fat bacon!

Nay, and cabbage too!"—Was Horace in his senses when he talked thus, or the servile herd of his imitators?

Our eyes and ears may convince us there is not a less happy body of men in all England than the

JOHN WESLEY

country farmers. In general, their life is supremely dull; and it is unusually unhappy too. For, of all people in the kingdom, they are most discontented; seldom satisfied either with God or man.

It will be remembered that Wesley went out into the New World with large hopes as to the responsiveness of heathen Indians to the preaching of the gospel.

It does not appear that he even cherished similar hopes of the English farm workers. The urgency of his father that he seek the parish of Epworth failed partly because

John did not feel hopeful of doing much with the Epworth community, largely rural.

He does not seem to have regarded them as much higher, religiously speaking, than "heathens." He considered it wonderful that his father had made the transformation in his parishioners that did actually take place, but he evidently thought of that transformation as due to years of most painstaking pastoral service. Probably it was the cities and towns and the stirrings and premonitions of change coming from the new industrial energies that offered to Wesley his best chance, whether he himself realized the letting loose of these energies or not.

Probably he did not rely on much planning far ahead.

He entered open doors, or, better, he understood what doors would open under knocking or pressure.

The nation-wide success of Methodism came nevertheless with the adoption of field preaching by the Wesleys.

After Aldersgate there had to be some such method.

If Aldersgate was the inner preparation, the breaking of the path toward field preaching by Whitefield was the outer. The two fitted themselves to each other.

Wesley's yielding to Whitefield's urgency that he preach in the fields was as important a crisis as Aldersgate. This resulted from the closing of the doors of the churches to the evangelists, from the driving urgency in Wesley's soul, and from Whitefield's breaking the path. Wesley preached out of doors because he could not get indoors and because he could not get the masses of his hearers indoors.

It took some time to bring him to the resolution to go outside, partly because he himself was a churchman throughout, and the soul of regularity.

We may delay here an instant to notice how Wesley kept his balance between realistic recognition of what the English clergy in many instances were, and reverent, almost superstitious, regard for the Church as an institution.

With the memory of his own father's godliness always fresh in his mind, he could not disparage the clergy in any wholesale fashion: and he showed a patience in dealing with that clergy which is a spiritual

TO APRIL 4, 1739

marvel of the first order. Time and time again Wesley found that rectors of parishes were actually on the ground inciting ruffians to break up the Methodist meetings.

Many more of them let their sympathy with anti-Methodist violence be known.

This, then, was the double barrier that Wesley met, or would have met if he had been working from the start on some grand, or grandiose, scheme for the redemption of England—the sophisticated callousness of the more favored groups and the sodden insensateness of the less favored.

Looking the whole field over, Wesley might justifiably have said that it was of no use.

Moving along step by step, as he felt the obstacles give way before him, he finally developed a momentum which was the power of the movement.

I recur to this repeatedly because, as we look back, the work of Wesley seems to proceed on a plan foreseen from the beginning.

At one time Wesley thought his own death was close at hand, so close that he prepared an epitaph for his own tombstone.

Wesley had indeed long views, but he acted on short ones.

Wesley's realization of the limitations within which he must work is as outstanding a mark of his greatness as any he revealed.

Remember that he was a man of faith, and that his faith in the possibilities of divine grace in the soul of the individual was almost unlimited.

Yet in struggling with his task he counted his human resources to the last ounce, believing that the divine could work only through the human.

There is an old story that John Knox was interrupted by his wife in a midnight prayer for Scotland.

The wife pleaded with her husband to seek rest from a terrible agony of intercession.

Knox rebuked her with the reply that through his prayer he already had won half of Scotland and that, if she had not broken in upon him, he would have won it all by daybreak.

The story may be apocryphal but it is true to Knox.

Anything like it could never have been true to Wesley, as long as he remained Wesley.

Intercessory agonies like this were not com- | mon to the founder of Methodism.

'There was, indeed, in him a faith which at times bordered on the fanatical, but in the working out of the faith into practice the most careful calculation of means and ends, within the limits of the hand-to-hand nature of the campaigning itself.

It was over the questions of means and ends that Wesley soon came into conflict with the Moravians.

On his return from Georgia Wesley kept close to the Moravians until they began to preach quietism—the complete waiting on the Spirit of God with-

JOHN WESLEY

out the use of any means of grace, until the spirit had first spoken to the soul in pardon and peace.

All was to come from the Lord, with no reading of Scriptures, no attendance upon religious service, no meditation. It is easy to make a fine show of dependence on God by such method or lack of method and to slip farther from religious experience with the passage of every day. A merciful Providence working through John Wesley kept the Methodist Movement from falling asleep in this fashion. Why did not Wesley make more of Moravianism?

Because it was not big enough.

Nobody could preach quietistic Moravianism to masses of ten thousand.

In all consideration of differences in those days, we have to hold always before us that leaders and people were feeling their way along. They did not have our "knowledge after the event."

To many who surrounded Wesley it did not make any difference whether there was any widespread revival of religion or not.

Samuel Wesley had said to his sons, shortly before he died, that they would live to see the Lord's work revived in England, but he had scant company in this. The Moravians had fought for their type of religious thought and practice: they stubbornly held for their own way.

Quietism can be put plausibly because it seems so thoroughly to honor God. Wesley fell back on his own good sense in insisting that ends imply means, and that it is a Christian duty to find the means.

Quietism practically meant retreat.

Wesley was not given to retreat.

As we review these difficulties we have to revise many of our judgments as to the Wesleyan Revival. A few years ago it was the fashion among historians to disparage what they called the greatman-theory of history, insisting that vast general movements and not individuals determine the course of human affairs. One writer went so far a quarter century ago as to maintain that if John Wesley had not arisen to awaken England, some other leader would have appeared.

Such statements assume knowledge beyond that of the most of us.

It is no doubt true that leaders arrive in response to what we call the demands of the times, and often this demand is definite, especially in the material realms.

In response to conscious or half-conscious demands for larger control over nature, let us say, acute minds explore all possibilities because of the pressure behind them.

Or masses of mankind begin to feel cravings that some leader almost accidentally frames a theory or a doctrine to meet.

It was not quite so in the work of Wesley.

The times may have demanded a religious revival, but Wesley himself had to

TO APRIL 4, 1739

take a large part in shaping that demand.

He, at least in a degree, created the popular demand for the message he himself was to proclaim.

Here again we have an angle from which to look at Wesley's strength. He had come back from Georgia after the dubious career there.

Nothing in his recollections of Georgia could have called forth the powers which we see at work within the space of a few months.

As far as experience itself is responsible, we find the key in Aldersgate.

Yet after a period of getting adjusted to the new life of sonship as over against that of servantship, we do not find

Wesley often looking back to Aldersgate as such.

What I wish to say here is that, after getting upon the new plane of religious life,

Wesley was sure not only of the Divine Father but of himself as son.

He did not allow past failure to dog his steps.

In the brief passage of two years after the return from Georgia he was moving ahead with full power. We have here the signs of a positive assurance that he was working with God, together with a regal selfassertiveness which nothing could daunt. We have to judge John

Wesley's experience of assurance not only by what he said but by what he did.

In the earlier years of the evangelistic career he speaks now and then in phrases of self-questioning and, as we shall see later, some doubts came strongly upon him toward the close of his career, but he never seems to have known anything about an impulse to slow down.

Even if he did have his moments of selfdistrust, he had acquired such a momentum by habitual doing of what he thought to be the divine will that he kept right on without any slackening.

The Aldersgate crisis was no doubt the key to the inner assurance, after Wesley had become thoroughly adjusted to the life of a son and not that of a servant.

Nevertheless, the abiding satisfaction which marks Wesley from, let us say, the third or fourth year of his evangelistic effort clear on to the end of his life, was not in 'any experience to which he had to look back for re-enforcement.

It was in the satisfaction of the work itself, and the success which followed his adoption of field preaching.

He was a man of inexhaustible energy, especially of mind.

He had to have something that called for every ounce of his strength.

If there was anywhere in him a power that he felt was not being used, he was not easy.

Without subscribing too heartily to modern psychology, we may say that the assurance which finally came to Wesley and remained with him to the end was that of complete self-expression, or self-

JOHN WESLEY

realization.

He felt that he was getting out into utterance the best there was in him and all there was in him.

Another psychological term we can safely use, heavy and cumbersome though it is—integration.

Wesley's life became a unit.

It had always been a unit in aim after the highest religious experience.

That one line runs consistently through Wesley's life for all his more than eighty years. His assurance as to his relation to the Divine Father solidified still further the life around a center.

Beyond all this was the unity of the task to which he had given himself.

He found that the type of message he was preaching won enough response, after his revival was well launched, to call forth all his energies.

He did not have to waste time in prolonged consideration of what he would better do next.

He would do whatever the circumstances demanded in the furtherance of the work.

'The passage over from the slave or servant type of experience to the son type brought an easier flexibility of method.

He no longer saw the old-time sacredness in rules on their own account.

Everything had to be judged by the spiritual result, by which he meant the conviction of sonship.

'The adoption of field preaching opened the door through which the full strength of Wesley began to stride forth. Hence we put April

4, 1739, as a critical date in his career.

As to methods, the aim of Wesley was always to keep them in the minor place. Let one read through the Minutes of what came to be called the Conferences and one will see how thoroughly secondary were all organizational features. The Minutes were in the form of question and answer. Chief emphasis was placed on the various phases of religious truth which the Methodists proclaimed.

The aim at the beginning was to appear before whatever groups would receive the evangelists—at the beginning the evangelists were old members of the Holy Club—and preach the possibility of attaining assurance like that of the Wesleys, John and Charles, and George Whitefield. All these men had entered through religious crisis into like positiveness of assurance.

'They kept themselves to truth of which they could feel sure, which was the first, and perhaps the soundest feature of their method. I mean soundest for the purpose in hand, though, as I have said elsewhere, the positiveness became overpositiveness, not to say at times an irreverent and undignified familiarity with the Divine which has to be reckoned on the liability side of the ledger.

The converts naturally clustered together in little groups or societies which were afterward divided into "classes." These classes

TO APRIL 4, 1739

had at first the prosaic purpose of collecting funds.

An earnest layman, when confronted with the duty of helping get together what little money was needed for the few expenses of the society of which he was a member, agreed to collect a penny a week from a specified number of other members.

Wesley soon saw that this presented an almost ready-made instrument for spiritual guidance of those who yielded to the preaching.

By placing proper leaders over the groups he could make them useful and finally indispensable for religious instruction.

The classes became the means of testimony and of correction.

It soon appeared that the Wesleyan Revival was to be highly emotional. In the old phrase, the converts "had experiences." Any emotional movement needs to be kept in hand, for emotional fervor left to take its own course may run wild or, more likely, run through definite stages and then die, leaving-the life burned out. The criticism of Wesley that he allowed emotion free play is superficial. He sought to make place for feeling in religious experience, for he saw that the people who were responding to his appeals were not likely to find much satisfaction in anything outside of religion.

The aim had to be to keep the glow of joy, and the class helped toward that end.

It acted at once like a dam and a canal, storing up the flood waters and paying them out into useful streams.

This on the side of advantage. There is another side, not too good.

The class leader has often been called the drill-master of Methodism, and so he was.

Drilling, however, has about it a suggestion of regularity, of uniformity.

So it was with the Methodist class meeting. Certain terms were used descriptive of spiritual states, one being "the witness of the Spirit.' Now, this term belongs to all of Christianity.

It is not the peculiar property of Methodism.

Methodism, however, put into it a meaning of its own.

Moreover, the class meeting developed a standardized experience, or at least an experience which all alike were to seek after.

To take a single instance, Wesley never seemed to learn the difference between the mind of a child and that of aman.

'There could not be anything more mistaken than to put a child's transgression and a man's on the same plane.

Yet in the religious training of children at the Kingswood School Wesley did just that.

In the latter years he came to a more humane, not to say human view, and presumably to a better method.

The early leaders were many of them misleaders.

This attempted standardization of experience had harmful effects on Methodism till the rise of the present-day

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methods of religious education.

Every now and again a pastor finds members under the shadow of the fear that they have never attained to the type of religious experience taught by the old-time class leaders.

The class meeting provided the intensiveness of the Methodist Revival.

Open-air preaching made possible the large-scale extensive conquest.

It soon became clear that the Methodists could not speak in the churches—John, or Charles, or George Whitefield, all of whom were in orders.

For years after the Revival was under full headway, it was so unusual for John Wesley to be allowed to speak in a church that he made comments on every invitation as remarkable.

Wesley preached outdoors because he could not preach indoors.

Such indoor preaching was not worth while, in any event.

There was not the ability in the English Church to nurture the Wesley converts.

In the most merely happen-so way Whitefield began to preach to the miners around Bristol, more particularly in Kingswood. He began by speaking to the groups as they came out of the pits. The crowds grew rapidly till they reached astonishing figures. Whitefield pointed out the success of the method to Wesley, but had quite a struggle to get him to adopt it.

Wesley hesitated partly because of the irregularity of such procedure. The church was the place to preach.

Still, the churches were closed; and if they were opened, they were not big enough.

If the people were hungry to hear, if the churches were not open, what was one to do? We have to think ourselves back to Wesley's state of mind with determined effort.

Especially do those of us who have been reared in America have to use a good deal of will, a good deal of attentive and steady focusing of the mind to get the Wesley angle. The Church standing for generation after generation in the English village gathers around it a sacredness on its own account.

The ways of accustomed worship likewise come to have at least a sentimental tenderness of appeal.

'To all such influences Wesley was sensitive.

Moreover, it was just to say of him that he advanced walking backward.

There may have been another reason in the background of Wesley's mind—the contrast between himself and Whitefield as public speakers. 'There was something almost naive in Whitefield's assumption that another could succeed in open-air speaking in any such measure as he himself could.

Using the term "orator" in its ordinary indefinite meaning of power in speech over audiences,

TO APRIL 4, 1739

Whitefield was one of the most effective orators in the history of the English-speaking race.

We have heard the old, old comment of David Garrick that Whitefield could stir the soul of an audience by the way in which he pronounced "'Mesopotamia."" Everything about Whitefield, including his crossed or squint eyes, added to the force of his speech. We shall see later something of the unusual power produced upon hearers by Wesley—strange psychological phenomena. We do not hear much about such phenomena in connection with Whitefield's preaching. The effects were such as one would expect from oratory, the response to the sublimity of picturing with a big brush, the thrill at the dramatic, especially when judgment was the theme, the sheer emotional drive of the speaker.

Hardheaded and hardfisted men would go to meetings where Whitefield was to plead for funds for the support of the orphanage in Georgia. They would resolve to give only coppers, and would leave the meeting with their pockets empty of whatever they might have contained—copper, silver, or gold. Probably as shrewd a tribute as any ever paid to Whitefield as a pleader was the remark attributed to Benjamin Franklin that when he went to hear Whitefield, he left his purse at home. 'The reports that have come down to us of Whitefield lay more stress on oratorical results as such than upon strictly religious consequences. This is not in the least to disparage the religious purpose of Whitefield, or the depth of the impression left by him. Yet the recollections of his preaching after he had been gone for fifty years were chiefly of his oratory. Certainly, there is not much in his sermons as published to account for the effects he produced. The tragic gesture with which he greeted a crash of thunder at one of his open-air services is the kind of dramatic expression for which he was most famous.

His moral quality was not as thoroughgoing as that of Wesley, as appears from his attitude to slavery in America.

He accepted slavery in Georgia, in | connection with his orphanage enterprise, without any qualms or _ misgivings discernible in anything he said or did.

Wesley might well have shrunk from confronting crowds as large as those Whitefield usually addressed.

The size of the crowds is, of course, overstated by Wesley himself.

'There is no ground for saying that Whitefield or Wesley ever spoke effectively to audiences of twenty thousand, though Benjamin Franklin thinks

Whitefield possibly may have, as shown in the following excerpt from Franklin's Autobiography: "He [Whitefield] had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly,

JOHN WESLEY

that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observed the most exact silence. He preached one evening from the top of the Courthouse steps, which are in the middle of Market Street [Philadelphia], and on the west side of Second Street, which crosses it at right angles.

Both streets were filled with his hearers to a considerable distance.

Being among the hindmost in Market Street, I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backward down the street toward the river; and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front Street, when some noise in that street obscured it. Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand.

'This reconciled me to his having preached to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to the ancient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted." William Jennings Bryan spoke to as great crowds as ever came together in America to hear a speaker. To his largest crowds he would utter his sentences—at least the important ones— four times, moving in turn to each of the four sides of the platform.

No satisfactory preaching is possible under such conditions.

Nevertheless, the success of both Whitefield and Wesley in open-air preaching was the success of Methodism, even after we have cut their estimates of the numbers down to a half or a third.

Whitefield seems to have stumbled upon the open-air method almost by accident. When Wesley adopted it, he deliberately set himself to master even the physical requisites. He evidently asked of hearers who had been in the audience how well they had heard him, and, by questioning and observation, determined how to select tones and pitch so as to make his voice carry farthest.

That he became a master of natural speech before immense crowds is manifest from the fact that he declares again and again that such speech did not leave him tired, even after speaking to three or four audiences in a single day. 'The most of the accounts of his preaching which have been preserved to us come from those who stood close to him while he was speaking.

Now, the difference between what is remembered of Whitefield's sermons and what is remembered of Wesley is in the content, of which Wesley never lost sight.

The only reason for Wesley's taking up outdoor preaching was to get the message to the people,

TO APRIL 4, 1739

and he got that message so effectively uttered that the people did not have eyes or ears for anything else.

To explain the unusual effects of the preaching of Wesley, we have to remember some characteristics of the times.

As to the type of man whom Wesleyanism reached most deeply, we have to get firm realization that the middle of the eighteenth century was what the Hammonds call the "bleak age." A Methodist meeting in some

Sections of England was a more interesting occasion than anything else likely to take place, except the bull-baitings or the cockfights.

The hours of work were incredibly long, the work itself backbreaking.

There was not much to which to go. Now, even when the Methodist meeting was almost sure to be a scene of riot, it was at least interesting, even interest-compelling.

It brought crowds together to see what might happen, and something was likely to happen.

In all his long life Wesley néver resorted to anything even resembling sensationalism.

He had no tricks by which to catch the crowd.

Yet the fact itself that he was persistent in preaching was advertisement of drawing power.

Some went out of idle curiosity, some out of hostility, some out of more or less completely concealed admiration for the pluck of the preacher.

In all these groups Wesley had to create a demand for the gospel he was preaching.

The opposition of the Established Church clergy is considerable of a mystery. There were some clerics to whom the Wesleyan ministry would be an affront because it constituted a rebuke. The number of evil-minded, or even indifferent, clergy in the English

Church of the eighteenth century has been exaggerated, but there were all too many of them.

The granting of parishes as livings— the grant coming if not by direct royal favor at least by the favor of somebody in power—did not make for the most consecrated type of religious servant; though let us not forget that the parish of Epworth came to Samuel Wesley, Sr., by Queen Anne's favor, and it would be hard to find in the history of the English Church a more

devoted parish priest than Samuel Wesley.

That was the way priests found their fields in those days, all of them, and that includes the good among those not so good.

Still, the system did not make for the noblest devotion.

Large numbers of the clergy sincerely opposed Wesley on the ground of the overpositiveness of his teaching of assurance of salvation.

There was almost a morbid fear of anything suggestive of enthusiasm in Wesley's time.

He himself shrank from a form of

JOHN WESLEY

enthusiasm as we shall see later, the form that desires ends and neglects means.

The only object for which there was enthusiasm in those days was lack of enthusiasm.

The age was rationalistic and Wesley had to encounter rationalism, rationalist though he himself was by nature.

Perhaps the most influential theological work of his time was the Analogy of Bishop Joseph Butler.

Butler showed, perhaps conclusively, that probability is the guide of life, religious life as well as any other phase.

One who has read the Analogy would not suspect the author of being a fount of enthusiasm.

) Coming back to the claims of assurance of salvation on the part of the Methodists fostered by the preaching of Wesley, we must recognize that, as the Methodists taught assurance, it was virtually new.

The mistake was made of laying too much stress on assurance as attained in a crisis—preferably instantaneously— and of teaching, or at least implying, that the Methodist form was necessary to salvation.

Hence came the absurdity and, indeed, the scandal of proclaiming that good and devout persons who could not tell the date of their spiritual birth were possibly, if not probably, outside the kingdom of God.

In my boyhood I heard an oldtime Methodist extolling assurance by describing the awkward plight in which one would have to live if one did not know exactly one's birthday.

'This expositor did not seem to be aware that an awkward plight did not involve damnation, and that a man who is alive can manage to put up with a deal of awkwardness. Susanna

Wesley for a long time was not sure of the assurance which the teaching of her son implied, though she believed her father had something of the same type. Samuel Wesley, Jr., could not make much of his brother's doctrine.

With the ordinary hearers of Wesley there was resentment against the converts who claimed to be so sure that their sins were forgiven. Some of the resentment was no doubt justified, as arising from the obvious contradiction between profession and practice.

The claim to knowledge of sins forgiven for the most part, however, was unpopular because of its reproach to those who could not make such claim. Here we come upon a strange peculiarity of John Wesley—his willingness to encourage others to make claims for themselves which he was not willing to make for himself.

This will appear more clearly when we come to look at the teaching of Christian perfection.

If we take Wesley's own utterances about his assurance, we find it modest enough, but there must have been some-

TO APRIL 4, 1739

thing in the total situation which made the converts outrun their leader in their claims.

It is possible that we have here an instance of Wesley's openmindedness and teachableness in the presence of what seemed to him to be fact.

It is too much to say that Wesley was in any sense a scientist, except that he had markedly some scientific traits, an insatiably inquiring spirit, a respect for facts and a willingness to go with the facts whithersoever they might lead, though he himself was not always a trustworthy witness as to occurrences which he had seen.

We have in mind his attitude toward the nervous uproar which attended many of the Methodist meetings—men who had resisted conviction for sin falling prone upon the earth and screaming for mercy, women under religious excitement lapsing into unconsciousness. These phenomena are now intelligible enough—intelligible psychologically, I mean—to scientific students, but were not at all intelligible in psychological terms then.

Wesley observed some unusual instances with the utmost closeness, but all he could do was to set down what he saw, his testimony often impaired by his belief that supernatural agencies were at work.

He did not have any scientific principles by which to guide his observations.

We insert here an instance showing Wesley's careful examination of those passing through supernormal experiences.

In the afternoon I talked with two who had been several times in trances. What they all agreed in was (1) that at the time they went away, as they termed it, it was always at the time when they were fullest of the love of God; (2) that it came upon them in a moment without any previous notice, and took away all their senses and strength;

(3) that there were some exceptions, but in general from that moment they were in another world, knowing nothing of what was done or said by all that were normal about them.

[Same day] Mr. B. came up and told me Alice Miller (fifteen years old) was fallen into a trance.

I went down immediately and found her sitting on a stool and leaning against the wall with her eyes open and fixed upward.

I made a motion as if going to strike, but they continued immovable.

Her face showed an unspeakable mixture of reverence and love, while silent tears stole down her cheeks. Her lips were a little open and sometimes moved, but not enough to cause any sound.

I do not know whether I ever saw a human face look so beautiful. Sometimes it was covered with a smile, as from joy, mixing with love and reverence—but the tears fell still but not so fast.

Her pulse was quite regular. In about half an hour I observed her countenance change into

JOHN WESLEY

the form of fear, pity, and distress, and she burst into a flood of tears and cried out: '""Dear Lord, they will all be damned.

They will all be damned." But in about five minutes her smiles returned, and only love and joy appeared in her face. About half an hour after six I observed distress take place again, and soon after she wept bitterly and cried out,

"Dear Lord, they will all go to hell. The world will go to hell." Soon after she said: "Cry aloud, spare not." And in a few moments her look was composed again, and spoke a mixture of reverence, joy and love.

Then she said aloud: "Give God the glory." About seven her sense returned.

I asked, "Where have you been?"

"I have been with my Saviour." "In heaven or on earth?" "I cannot tell but I was in glory."

"Why, then, did you cry?" "Not for myself but for the world; for I saw they were on the brink of hell." "Why did you desire to give the glory to God?"

"Ministers that cry aloud to the world—else they will be proved—and then God will leave them and they will lose their own souls."

Now, these occurrences did not happen frequently under George Whitefield, whose hearers.were more likely almost to forget who they were and where they were under the spell of the dramatic magnetism of the speaker.

'They did not often take place in the audiences of Charles Wesley.

This is odd. Charles Wesley was a poet and John a man of affairs. Yet it was Charles who was inclined to brush all these phenomena to one side with an impatient common sense.

He even, on one occasion, announced to the audience that if any persons were seized by uncontrollable impulses, they would be taken forthwith to one corner of the room to be ministered to. This meeting was very quiet.

It may be that, though in this Charles had the right of it, John was thinking further than Charles. There isa common sense which is the outcome and product of years of adjustment to ordinary experience which guesses right in the presence of new facts, and there is an inferior common sense which is impatient of any departure from the regular just because it is a departure.

Where there are only two alternatives—a course being right or wrong—this so-called good sense may often take a stand which turns out to be right. On the other hand, there is the mind not always called sensible, which is more open to fresh impressions, which welcomes anything which promises to throw light, and which as a result, through a stretch of years, welcomes much which is not light at all.

Some thirty years ago William James appeared before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature to protest against repressive

TO APRIL 4, 1739

measures forbidding what seemed to be mistaken medical practices. James said that to himself the practice seemed to be questionable, but that he feared that the checking of practices of the kind might close the doors to the entrance of truths which might look strange and at first queer, but which nevertheless might turn out to be true.

Indeed, the temper of Wesley as to these unusual occurrences was quite like that of James in the scrutiny of the material on which he based his studies in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

James did not turn away from any material, no matter how apparently trivial or even unseemly, which made the slightest impression upon him as significant.

Commenting on the respect and care with which he treated some of this material, he once remarked that he was more of a Methodist than the Methodists themselves.

If a scientist was thus willing to explore all these phenomena for their scientific significance, why blame Wesley for like openness in the search for religious possibilities?

Again, let us note that the philosophy of the time was deistic— though few of those who heard Wesley preach knew anything about deism—the universe conceived of as a closed system running by itself, much as a cosmic clock, made and wound up by an almighty clockmaker, might be supposed to run.

The deists were not atheists theoretically.

'They were willing to accept the existence of God and to honor him after a fashion, but verily he was a God afar off.

For practical purposes there was not in deism any God worth having. Now, deism was in the background of Wesley's thinking, only he thought of God as intervening in the universe which divine power and wisdom had made.

It became of immense importance, then, to recognize a divine intervention, the creation of the conditions of a miracle, if one should happen.

Even if most of the leads to spiritual life through these strange happenings proved to be worthless, that did not prove that all were worthless

_—and Wesley kept on searching.

Still, again, Wesley believed in the existence of spirits, good and bad, which were always ready to break through into human affairs.

This is to us now mostly superstition of the past, and yet not so very far in the past. Here, again, we may point to the high priest of modern psychology, William James, who was always probing into psychic mysteries.

Of course it is possible to say that James did this on the scientific hypothesis that he would find nothing objective, that he would prove that there was nothing "there.

JOHN WESLEY

This is just say-so. James was not seeking to disprove but to find out.

The difference between James and Wesley was that Wesley lived in the eighteenth and James in the nineteenth century; that the temper of James was more for knowledge for its own sake and that of Wesley for knowledge for salvation's sake; that James was not concerned with what the discoveries might reveal as was Wesley. Wesley firmly believed in spirits good and bad.

Nobody could have convinced him that the noises at Epworth—made, indeed, while Wesley was away from home—were not the work of an evil spirit.

In the revival work Wesley was convinced for a time that some of the phenomena were signs of the unusual power of God and others the unusual power of the devil.

Most of these accompaniments of the Wesley preaching, whatever else we may say about them, had most potent advertising or "drawing efficiency."

One test we cannot well brush aside, namely, the genuinely changed lives of the majority of Wesley's converts.

As the movement progressed the strange accompaniments of surrender to Wesley's preaching of the divine will grew fewer and fewer and finally ceased, so that Wesley no longer put emphasis upon them. We think of them now as the working of minds under extraordinary strain of fear, or pent-up conviction of sin, or repressed emotion, all moving according to laws which we are coming more and more to understand, if not to control.

The essential is the moral and spiritual result, and this the Wesleyan movement achieved.

The question inevitably recurs as to the possible harm to those who needed spiritual quickening and who could not get it or were repelled by the Wesleyan preaching. The most of the criticism at this point comes from those already in other religious groups, like Alexander Knox, a firm friend of Wesley, a critic of many of his methods, who refused to count himself among the Methodists.

Many of the severest denouncers of the Revival were those members of the English Church who resented everything in Wesley which seemed to reflect on the Church.

As to those who were repelled from all religion by the peculiarities of Methodism and who never had been reconciled to religion—among them perhaps the Brontés—we must remember that such persons are always to be found at every widespread spiritual upheaval—and at other times, for that matter.

They are usually, probably almost always, genuinely earnest and sincere, but are not able to adjust themselves to the particular message. Human nature being what it is both in

TO APRIL 4, 1739

preachers and hearers, we have to say that here both sides are about equally to blame, or not to blame.

A word about "crowd contagion," since the term is so often used to explain, if not to disparage, the Wesleyan Revival.

We have been gravely told that crowds are worse than individuals as arousing the primitive instincts in men, that individuals in crowds yield to impulses to which they would never think of surrendering when by themselves.

If this were strictly true, it would be socially dangerous for men ever to assemble in crowds at all.

In dealing with contagion we cannot pass final judgment till we see what is caught. Ifa crowd by crowd-contagion catches a lynching impulse, the result is bad.

If it catches a glimpse of high spiritual values, what can we say but that the result is good? Values of this order stand in their own right, whether they are seized by men singly or in groups. Anyone who has had any experience with audiences knows that not only the lower but the higher emotions are quickened in the minds of the individuals present by the fact that the individual is listening in a group.

Speakers of the longest experience tell us that they themselves find the best in themselves drawn out into utterance by the audience.

If this is true in the effect of audience on speakers, why may it not be similarly true of the influence of the crowd upon the individual members of the crowd? To take an illustration from a slightly different realm, think of the rendition of an oratorio like

Handel's Messiah.

Here the importance of sheer size must not be overlooked.

The chorus must be large, and the audience must be large, for the best effect.

If an individual were to sit alone at a rehearsal of the oratorio, himself the only hearer, he would miss something, that something being the contagion of the audience.

Of course it is possible to say that an audience is different from a crowd, but the distinction is a little too fine when we are thinking of Wesley's meetings.

We must recognize that there was nothing in - Wesley's preaching which intentionally made appeal to the socalled primitive impulses, unless we will have it that the emotional results previously considered were of such order; and they counted for less and less as the years went by.

There were admittedly some features of the social atmosphere of the eighteenth century which created a situation lending itself to emotional explosion—though such explosion was more often in the nature of a spiritual relief than of frustration or desperation.

We of today cannot realize without deliberate effort the force of the

JOHN WESLEY

idea of hell on the minds of men two hundred years ago. Two centuries ago hell was not a figure of speech, or a picture statement of the consequences of sin.

'To the ordinary mind it was an actual reality.

'The Roman Church had through centuries taught an actual hell.

Just how men could believe in a hell of a type commonly accepted in Wesley's day we do not know. We are dealing here with one of the most baffling mysteries in human thinking. It may be that after the breakup of the Roman Empire the Church found it necessary to rule the minds of men, whose ancestors had been barbarians, by emphasis on what was the equivalent of force in the sphere of daily conduct. At any rate, many of the most kindly spirits of the olden days took literally the doctrine of a literal fire as an eternal punishment for sin. Wesley seems to have accepted this teaching.

In addition there was in England much of the Puritan spirit in its sterner aspect. We shall consider Wesley's attitude toward

Calvinism later, but we must remark here that the God of the popular understanding in the eighteenth century was pretty grim.

Over all—I am speaking now of the types of persons to whom Wesley most commonly preached—there was the cloud of tragedy.

Life was hard, without much to soften it.

Into all this came the preaching of Wesley which, with all its acceptance by inheritance of the stiff stuff of orthodoxy, was full of hope, and that too for every man.

In the circumstances the gospel has never been more worthy of its title of good news than in the sermons of John

Wesley.

The deists of the age virtually said that there was no news from God; the sterner Calvinists made the gospel bad news, except for themselves.

It was the task of Wesley to convince the masses of his time that there was at hand news from God, and that the news was good, or better than deism or Calvinism.

Here is perhaps the most fitting place for a word about the services of Charles Wesley.

Charles has been honored for the hymns which he left to the universal Church.

In fact, however, his service to Methodism was in opening a channel for the relief of pent-up emotion.

This relief became more than relief—it was uplift, itself a converting and exalting agency.

If it is true that the Revival let loose primitive traits, it is also true that in Charles

Wesley's hymns those traits were forthwith lifted up into the realm of high expression. What would otherwise have expressed a loosened tension through shouting or ejaculation, or other sheer nervous outbreak, found in the hymns utterance that was at once com-

TO APRIL 4, 1739

plete and worthy. Critics of Wesley's poetic productions have said that they now and again dropped into doggerel.

It may be so, more particularly when Wesley was jibing at an ecclesiastical or doctrinal foe, or when he was composing a jig-jog tune on horseback, but not so when he was composing hymns for the Revival.

It is true that while Wesley wrote over six thousand sets of verses only between four and five hundred are preserved today in the Wesleyan hymnbook, a few over fifty in the latest edition of the hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but that is not of much significance in estimating the importance of what Wesley did. He made the way of escape for strained and overwrought feeling, an escape which did not allow the feeling to run off and away, but which saved its value by binding it to lofty conception and deepened purpose.

In telling of their conversion convert after convert could find no better medium than to repeat one of Charles Wesley's hymns, of which the least worthy was far, far above much of the stuff we have all heard sung in church schools of a day much later than Wesley's.

Let us take one hymn with a stanza which was dropped from Methodist hymnals over a century ago, presumably because it offended poetic or religious taste.

At least the stanza has been called doggerel by a prominent writer on early Methodism.

I refer to lines which were formerly part of the hymn: "Oh, how happy are they, Who their Saviour obey." The concluding stanza ran:

"Fully justified I, I rode in the sky Nor envied Elijah his seat.

In a chariot of fire My soul mounted higher, And the moon, it was under my feet."

Now, admitting all that can be said against this as religious poetry, suppose we think of it as expression of escape from the cramping bonds of the existence from which the Methodist Revival brought deliverance to thousands of souls.

No matter where we rank it for its poetical effectiveness, we have to put it in a high place for its psychological effectiveness.

Utterances like this must be judged by their force in reaching the minds to whom they are addressed.

They even went farther down into the consciousness of the Methodist groups than did many of John's sermons, or they

JOHN WESLEY

feathered the arrows of the sermons so as to lend them more precise aim, and send them farther under the surface. They had supreme carrying and striking power.

John Wesley left behind him in print one hundred and fiftyone sermons.

The volumes in which they were published have had an incredible number of readers. Most of them were published in the Arminian Magazine before they were gathered together in book form.

Many of them are still read.

There is not a Methodist preacher the world around who has not read some of them, for all branches of Wesleyanism expect their candidates for the ministry to know something about the sermons of the founder of Methodism before being received into what is called "full connection." I wonder if it would be far astray to say that more persons had read some of Wesley's sermons than those of any other single preacher in the history of Christianity before the introduction of cheap printing about the middle of the last century.

It is not easy to say offhand just what has given the sermons their lasting power.

Of course it is always possible to say that John Wesley was first and foremost an organizing genius, with a mind, if we accept Macaulay's judgment, like that of Richelieu

(whatever this means), and that, through the organization of Methodism itself, he sent his preaching down through the after-generations.

This is only a partial explanation, for time and again the Methodist preachers have gone back to Wesley's sermons to renew their strength.

Some qualities the sermons do not have.

They are not in any degree what our fathers called oratorical.

Wesley put himself on record as caring nothing for "fine writing," which he condemned as ''French."" He seemed to think he could achieve this as well as most others if he should set himself to it, but he did not care for the style. 'There seems to be almost a note of irritation in his word here, as if he had met criticism for the plainness and directness of his pulpit utterances.

There can be no doubt as to the extreme care with which the Wesley sermons were prepared, at least for publication.

As the one hundred and fifty-one sermons have come down to us, they are the heart and substance of the teaching which made Methodism what it was, and for the most part has been. Some of their general characteristics are worth noting.

To begin with, they are true to Wesley, or to all the accounts of him that have reached us.

I repeat that they have been most carefully worked out.

Wesley wrote almost incessantly, this con-

TO APRIL 4, 1739

stant writing being, by the way, one of the marvels of his career.

He once spoke of himself as having to do so much traveling that he lived most of his time alone.

This time by himself he used largely in writing, writing in a coach rattling over the English roads.

No matter what the inconveniences, the writing was carefully done.

The result of all the writing and rewriting and compression is that we have Wesley.

It would not be possible to go through the sermons and find a sentence which does not have the marks and spirit of Wesley upon it.

Every sentence published must have been under his eyes scores upon scores of times.

The sermons are evidently those which Wesley thought of as best expressing Methodism, and which had accomplished the most for Methodism.

They are here just as Wesley wished the world to see them.

Every one of them is before us as he left it.

So that, if we wish to understand Wesley, we take a long step toward that understanding by reading the sermons.

'There they are, just as he taught.

If there had been in the sermons any substantial departure from what Wesley proclaimed as his message, hundreds of readers, who had previously heard the sermons, would have risen to point out the difference.

The statements of truths which made Methodism are here. We do not need any process of higher criticism to tell us what Wesley really preached. We need precious little interpretation to tell us what he meant.

With this solid mass before us, we can soon see some features of Wesley which he himself took for granted, but which are quite significant looked at in other times and circumstances.

'To start with, in spite of all its rationalism, the eighteenth century was sentimental.

I do not mean that the age was emotional in that "enthusiasm'"' which seemed so horrible to the period, to the upper classes especially.

It was, however, an era of appeal to tears, not boisterous outcrying but copious and profuse weeping.

The pathetic was relished as if it were a delicious morsel.

Books and sermons were often judged by their power to set people quietly weeping.

It seems paradoxical to speak of the age as at once rationalistic and sentimental, but so it was.

Of course, it is psychologically true that often the most sentimental eras are the hardest-hearted, because the sentiment, having wept itself out, cannot be held to any longworking persistence.

It arouses hopes which it does not fulfill.

It seems at times as if Wesley in preaching had deliberately and determinedly guarded himself against sentiment.

There is nothing suggestive of oratory in the sermons.

JOHN WESLEY

may well wonder if Westey himself was ever much moved by oratory. It woukd be interesting to Know what he thought af White. field's preaching as preaching. We know what he thought af White. field as aman.

He never ceased to hold him in highest regard, We hnow anly too well what he thought of the Calvinism af White. field's theology. What he thought of him as a preacher we have no way of telling accurately, Wesley never painted any pictures himself, never gave himself to dramatic attitudes, never even found much place for Ulastration. Whitefield is aii, in the tradition that crchpepminntnnte tan i ardbod wey ardor with a sermon till he had preached it fifty or sixty times. We

Sek dengan: Werkty Lacing: anip uech Sealing shou Anan Te seems just to say that Wesley thought of sermons from the instrumental poiat af view. He thought af the sermon aniy te ask the question as te what it coukd da. There is almost no reference to sermons throughout his writings except with this question in mind His own style is always rigorous, direct, and phain. He seems to wish to make it into veritable bread of life. Much of the material is dry, bat it never wears out the appetite. A remarkable peculiarity is that one can read on and on, if one is interested at all, without feeling as weary as is usual with sermonic productions.

Here they are—straight, hare, forcefal. No appeal to pathos, no touch of humor, no illustration, no long stops for pious eaculation, yet nourishing and sustaining. Generation after generation of Methodists Lived largely om this food.

While Wesley accepted the doctrines of his Ghurch, he did net give much space, at least im the printed sermons, to doctrine as such, except as it bore directly upon Hie. The sermons are ethical, met as moral esays, but as Chmistian truth bearing upon human conduct.

The moral teaching always hokis to the main mack. No superfine points are raised, no pumzies are played with, ne dubious points are stresed. The aim seems to be to make the way plain for the most limited of the wayfaring men.

Wesley always implied much that he did not ay. One cannot soeteeeLeniepetaheteatrpresieest paid his audiences the fine and altogether too rare

SSonaing than Chery canbl ex cally sneedendl Sa puttings of the truth. It is a curious commentary on these our days of supposedly widespread public education to learn that these sermons of Wesley had am immense reading In days that, we have

TO APRIL 4, 1739

often been told, did not do any reading at all. We are here in something of the same curious plight in which we find ourselves when we begin to think about those to whom, let us say, the Epistles of Paul were written. We have been so long accustomed to assume that no other age has reached our level of general understanding that we do not ask at all why it is, if this is so, that ordinary men of the time of Paul understood the Epistles so much better than we do. We have been told of recent years that the Greek of the New

Testament was the speech of the common people. Was the substance of Paul's Epistles to the Romans and Galatians, then, the thought of the common people?

Similarly, we have heard that in the day of Wesley the people were illiterate, that they were dull and heavy. No matter how we explain it all, John Wesley must have expected his hearers and readers by the thousands to understand him.

At least he assumed that they could be brought to understand. Here was respect toward an audience which itself is a tribute to the mind which showed the respect.

No preacher could have thought meanly of an audience to whom he could address such phrasings of truth as those embodied in the Wesley sermons.

It is verily a hard puzzle.

As something of an explanation may be the fact that, after Wesley once got well going, he knew the people of England as no other man of his century knewthem.

After many years of traveling he made this claim to knowledge for himself.

Shortly before the outbreak of the American War he wrote to a high government official and told him-point-blank that nobody was his, Wesley's, own superior in knowledge of what was going on in the mind of the people of England.

It must have been out of such fullness and exactitude of understanding that he addressed his hearers as he did.

If he did speak thus out of knowledge, he saw deeper than do most leaders of opinion.

For most leaders think themselves best qualified to minister to those who have had the best advantages.

The young minister going out to a parish today, like those which Wesley addressed, if such a parish could be found, would be dismayed and appalled.

It is only fair to remark that Wesley himself was thus both dismayed and appalled at the suggestion that he take the parish of Epworth, for example, back in those days when he was supposedly rendering such excellent service at Oxford.

He himself said that he felt called especially to work in a field like Oxford, just as many another young preacher has said since his time.

Now, evidently

JOHN WESLEY

something must have taken place in the inner spirit of Wesley to make him over into a preacher who would gladly give his best to make truth understood by the lowliest intelligences within reach.

We may get into confusion by overmuch reflection on the inner nature of the transformation of Wesley the Oxford recluse into Wesley the unresting preacher moving throughout all England, but the fact of the change, or contrast, itself is inescapable.

The change was not in the direction of phrase-making as such.

Apart from a half dozen sentences like '""The world is my parish,"

Wesley did not make phrases.

—The power of mind seems to have been one of increasing grasp on the essentials, with the ability to state and restate from differing angles the central dominating conception.

'The treasures of mind and heart always have this for their peculiarity, that the more determined the resolution to share them, the more genuinely they become the sharer's own.

Wesley's hold of the truths which made Methodism was not due merely to prolonged and solitary study—though there was that—but to incessant labor in actually stating and restating his message.

It is a commonplace among proclaimers of ideas that the easiest task is that of presentation to trained minds.

The scientific treatise, with its apparatus and furnishing of technical terms, may appear to the layman in such matters to have cost immense intellectual travail.

The discovery of the facts or the principles did indeed cost such incalculable labor, but not necessarily the stating of the results in language.

All a writer of a scientific monograph has to do is to get his ideas together in fairly presentable shape and the understanding mind of the reader will do the rest.

Far different, however, is the task of making these conceptions the property of the lay, or common, or plain man.

I linger perhaps for what may seem disproportionate length over considerations like this for what impresses me as a good reason.

It has been, or it used to be, the custom to disparage the intellectual qualities of John Wesley in laying stress on his genius as an organizer.

'The gloomy comment of Matthew Arnold on the prospects of culture in the United States will be recalled.

Arnold once expressed a misgiving as to the future of culture in this country because there were in America so many Methodists; and the Methodists could not rise high in the intellectual scale, hampered as they were by following the leadership of a third-rate mind like Wesley's.

We shall have occasion for a further remark or two later as to Wesley's intellectual services to the world, but we mention here

TO APRIL 4, 1739

the increasing respect for the power of the Wesley mind as we come to better recognition of the intellectual qualities required of him who would be a popularizer of any truth at all worth while. Now, if we are to put democracy in the place of supreme power as the social or governmental force, then clearly the man who best reaches the mind of the masses must be given credit for an indispensable power in the service of men. We see today especially the effort to which men go to capture, through the radio and the cheap press, the thinking of the mass about, it may be, commercial ventures of uncertain value.

The skill with which this is done, in its manifold forms ranging from advertising to advocacy of catchy political novelties, is one of the marvels of our day. Much of this is clearly antisocial, but the intellectual vigor here requisite cannot be wisely disparaged.

Higher in the scale is the achievement of him who gets sound scientific knowledge into the thinking of the people.

This has to be done if democracy is to gain that decent respect for expert knowledge without which it may come to grief. Scientists sometimes get impatient with the people for not accepting forthwith an expert scientist's sound knowledge rather than the nostrum of the quack. The seat of the trouble is that the quack does not know science, but he does know people and how to talk to them.

The remedy is to cease to disparage what we call the popularizer and to increase the honor to him who, once in possession of sound scientific principle, either himself develops the power to give it popular statement or hails as fellow worker the one who has such power.

The sheer intellectual ability to perform this task is of no mean order. On the side of statement, Wesleyanism was focused in Wesley. When we reflect that the generations to whom Wesley preached not only got such hold of his truth as to make it a working force in their own lives but that they sank it deep into the lives of their children, we get some measure of Wesley's ability as a proclaimer

_ of the gospel.

We must admit a good many mysteries in the career of Wesley as a preacher. We have difficulty in trying to fit him into our conceptions of open-air address before immense crowds.

It is easier to do this with Whitefield, though even with him we come upon much that we cannot understand.

Abel Stevens repeats the legend that the voice of Whitefield could be heard a mile—which may mean much, or perhaps not so much. Whitefield may have shouted out a call that could be heard a mile, with the configuration of the sur-

JOHN WESLEY

rounding ground and the atmospheric conditions just right, but we cannot imagine Wesley raising his voice in any such fashion.

He used with an expert's skill his vocal resources.

Moreover, his material was not the sort to be communicated in shouts, or even in a very high pitch of voice.

It was instruction and exposition and argument, none of which are best accomplished at the top of the voice. Probably the most important part of Wesley's preaching was not done before the vast crowds.

It is estimated that during the years of his itinerancy he preached over forty thousand times, which means, of course, that the most of the speaking must have been before rather small groups.

His utterance must have been of the conversational type.

We note too how many times he spoke at five o'clock in the morning, which means that many of his audiences must have been composed of small bands of earnest, sympathetic inquirers. Men by the thousands are not likely to assemble at five o'clock in the morning, nor are men prone to come together at that hour, no matter what the customs of the community as to rising, unless they are seriously-minded.

Everyone who writes about Wesley has much to say about this extraordinary power over hostile mobs.

His courage no one has ever doubted.

'The courage, however, was not merely that of a man indifferent to danger, callous as to what might happen, or the selfconfidence of one of imposing stature and manifest physical strength.

Just a moderate degree of animal courage, combined with obvious muscular resources, will protect a speaker from the ordinary mob's coming too close to him, until those on the outer circumference begin to push in. Now, Wesley did not possess the stature or the unusual physical might. He was five feet six inches in height and never weighed over one hundred and twenty pounds.

He did not outmob mobs, for that implies something of a mobpower in himself. We do not have much to go by in trying to picture him before hostile mobs, but we have something. We know that, because of shortness of stature, he had to stand upon a chair or a box, that he used his voice most skillfully, that he never appeared except when.he was the last word—not in fashion—but in neatness in dress, that the fineness and softness of his hair arrested any glance at all observant, that he gave always the impression of perfect self-control.

Most open-air speaking is a formless, catchas-catch-can, hit-or-miss affair, depending upon smartness, or quickness of tongue and readiness of wit. Wesley held his speech to his essential conceptions and, judging by his printed sermons,

TO APRIL 4, 1739

kept the main aim constantly before him.

In full possession of his message, he knew how to say it again and again. Probably most of those who intended merely to listen for a few minutes on the outer edge of the crowd, stayed till he finished; and those who did have to move on heard enough before they left to know what it was all about.

The self-control, according to all accounts, showed itself notably in his eyes.

He is himself authority for the statement that in meeting a mob he always looked directly into the faces of the leaders.

This itself must have been disconcerting, especially to leaders who in blind rage did not know what they were about. We are reminded of what Sir William Ramsay says of Saint Paul in St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen, namely, that it was the eyes of Paul which gave him his control in dealing with crowds, as suggested by recurring passages such as ''He fastened his eyes upon him." Probably a wild crowd has in it so much of the animal that a born ruler of men deals with it somewhat as an animal-tamer deals with a furious untamed beast, by looking directly into the savage eyes.

So marked was this power of Wesley's that Professor F. M.

Davenport, in Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, is of the opinion that the evangelist possessed virtually hypnotic skill.

Whatever it was, the weapon of defense was inner.

Anyone who has read the history of early Methodism both in England and in America has noticed a contrast between the ways in the two countries of meeting mob attack. Wesley never sought for any human help against mobs, beyond his own strange ability to control rioters, except what might come through the legal authorities, though he does speak somewhat appreciatively of the readiness of muscular

Methodist men, and of an occasional Methodist woman, to defend him with fistic might.

In America, on the other hand, the Methodist of the Peter Cartwright type was entirely willing, upon appropriate occasion, to use his fists.

To return to the preaching, we have from Horace Walpole one piercing ray of light thrown upon Wesley.

Walpole, detached and cynical though he may have always been, has in his letters probably given us more than any other single writer about the life of the eighteenth century from the angle of the more favored classes.

In October, 1776, Walpole happened upon Wesley preaching in the open air at Bath. Here is the picture that comes down to us.

; "Wesley is a clean, elderly man, fresh-colored, his hair

JOHN WESLEY

smoothly combed, but with a little souwpcon of curl at the ends.

Wondrous clever, but as evidently an actor as Garrick.

He spoke his sermons, but so fast and with so little accent, that I am sure he has often uttered it, for it was like a lesson.

There were facts and eloquence in it, but toward the end he exalted his voice and acted very highly enthusiastic, decried learning, told stories, like Latimer, of the fool of his college, who said 'I thanks God for everything.'

Except a few from curiosity, and some honorable women the congregation was very mean."

The impression is one of complete cleanness and tidiness in personal appearance, of extreme whiteness of hair, of one uttering something altogether familiar as if the speaker had delivered the same material many times before, of an actorlike quality in the delivery.

Just what it was in Wesley that made Walpole think of acting it would be hard to say, unless it be that absolute ease of self-possession of which we have had ample occasion to speak. Dr.

J. S. Simon, author of the monumental five-volume history of the Wesleyan movement, went to the pains to look up the text on which Wesley so preached as to give the impression to Walpole that the theme was an old one.

Quite likely the theme was old, for the text was: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

Speaking probably out of his own experience, Wesley did not feel that an ordinary minister, or an extraordinary one for that matter, could with profit speak from the same pulpit through more than a year's residence.

He insisted upon the itinerant system as indispensable for keeping the message fresh and vital. Remember that Wesley was not thinking in terms of a Church but of a society, and that of a predominantly, almost exclusively, evangelistic type.

He knew well enough that the English Church, from which he never wished to depart, had to do a more inclusive work than his societies—priestly, pastoral, administrative tasks which could not best be done by itinerants.

Methodist leadership, after Wesley was gone, misread his emphasis on itinerant preaching.

He had to train a group of preachers who had had no chance at the discipline of the schools.

He knew that the message which they could best proclaim was one centering in their own experiences, that the message would soon lose its force if repeated too often to the same group. A quite ordinary preacher can, by delivering the same message to different groups, so take advantage of the selective power of the attentive listening of the groups themselves as to produce a few sermons of outstanding effectiveness.

The preacher almost uncon-

TO APRIL 4, 1739

sciously comes to see what phrasings of the truth are most compelling and, by frequent repetition, increases the effectiveness.

Under the older idea of an itinerant episcopacy, where a bishop seldom preached to the same audience more than once in a long period, the bishop could create a few sermons almost certain to be oratorically dynamic.

It would not be fair to mention names, but let the reader whose memory goes back to the old system recall the preaching of some of the pulpit giants of those days.

How many of those preachers had more than five or six sermons in which they were outstanding?

It wasa realization of such possibilities and limitations that determined Wesley's emphasis on itinerancy.

If it be supposed that Wesley believed only in the itinerant ministry, we would do well to read again his word about the length of time it took his father to produce any deep spiritual result at Epworth, and about the success which Samuel Wesley at last won.

Like most other preachers, Wesley had his literary or philosophic pets which he exhibited upon occasion.

He did not leave these out when he came to publish the sermons.

For example, there are the paragraphs which have stirred ambitious evolutionists to claim Wesley as an evolutionist—his reference to consistent sequence in the cosmic creative processes, with each stage depending on what went before and leading in strict order to what was to come after. To read Darwinian evolutionism into this is a striking instance of scientific will-to-believe.

A more plausible exposition is that the paragraph is a manifestation of the confirmed orderliness of Wesley's own mind. Wesley delighted too to dwell upon his belief that God must have provided some form of immortality for animals.

This causes a smile, but is really a revelation that Wesley had acutely realized the most puzzling and baffling feature of the mystery of physical evil, namely, the vast extent of apparently purposeless pain in the animal world.

Methodist Jistorical Society Southern California - Arizona Conference * PART IV

THE PECULIAR TALENT

"I know this is the peculiar talent which God has given me wherein (by his Grace,) I am not behind the very chiefest of them."—To Mrs.

HALL, NEWCASTLE-ON-

TYNE, NOVEMBER 17, 1742.

bg Ue PART IV tae

THE PECULIAR TALENT

PASTOR HE inner life of Wesley found another vent in what he called his peculiar talent, that of organizer.

In discussing the methods by which Wesley kept Methodism going we should consider what we may call, in the broader meaning, his pastoral work—his personal attention to the condition of the individual members of the societies, the members who had been gathered in by the tremendous success of field preaching.

It may be justly said that the societies were organized around the idea of the pastoral care of individuals.

Wesley's purpose was to develop the highest type of individual Christian character. To do this he made the utmost possible use of social means.

It is odd to reflect that the religious leader who is so often quoted as preaching strictly an individual gospel, and as aiming at strictly individual results, should have relied so thoroughly on social instruments.

Of course what this comment means is that Wesley did not aim at the transformation of the general outside social, institutional forces.

This can be more adequately dealt with in a later connection. Here we note that Wesley deliberately chose social measures for the accomplishment of individual results.

We have already spoken of the classes and of their consequences, in some directions beneficial, in others harmful.

In addition to the classes there were "bands," each composed of members of the same sex, for intimate, personal, mutual confession and counsel.

The "bands" after full trial did not prove to be any better than other such organizations in the history of the Church.

Let us recall to our minds again and again that much of Wesley's method was influenced by his experience with the Oxford Club.

In that Club there was the freest baring of the life of each to the scrutiny of all the others.

Such exposure, however, justifiable in a picked group of friends of long familiarity with one another, was different from the intimacies encouraged among persons brought into the Methodist societies after all varieties of spiritual histories. Societies for counsel, surely; but for free and uncontrolled mutual confession, not so surely.

JOHN WESLEY

Of course we may defend Wesley's policy in this on the principle of sharing experiences.

Sometimes even today the sharing is discussed as if it were about on the same plane as the discussions of groups of scientists putting together, in round-table fashion, the results of discoveries.

Such data, however, from an objective field are quite different from those of the inner life. Sharing scientific information is far other than listening to a story of evil deeds brought out into confession.

There is soil and stain for many a sensitive soul even in hearing such description.

Again, some evil impulses are not exorcised by being told of but are made stronger by the fact that they are put into speech.

Here again we have to remember that Wesley had to find his way along by rule of thumb.

He had to learn the same lesson so painfully put to him in Georgia—that the higher the aim in seeking to guide souls, the more precise and exact must be the reckoning with the actual realities as presented by the lives of those he was trying tohelp. This business of the bands was found sooner or later to make trouble, as when, for example, a prominent woman in one of the societies confessed to a dawning affection for a worthy man in the same society.

It was too much to expect that sensation-loving human nature would hold this revelation as a confidence for long.

To speak bluntly, the good woman's confession "got out."

The most surprising feature of the incident was the surprise of Wesley himself.

Just how he supposed his bands could get far without such incidents, or accidents, it would be difficult to say.

Probably a key to Wesley's successes and difficulties in pastoral administration is to be found in his own nature. With all his astonishing versatility, which is suggestive of complexity in character,

Wesley seems to have been of extraordinary simplicity.

This may have been the ground for the remark of his brother Charles that John was made to be a prey—what the slang of the twentieth century would call ''an easy mark''—for the persons who in turn seem made to take advantage of such easiness.

Probably the judgment of Charles was hasty impatience. The truth seems to be that Wesley gave other people credit for purity of aim like his own, and for complete good faith similar to his own.

Wesley was singularly willing to let anybody and everybody look into his mind and heart.

He did not attempt to conceal anything, because he had nothing especially serious to conceal.

It is customary to say that John Wesley was thoroughly an Englishman.

He certainly was not English in his lack of reticence about inner experiences.

THE PECULIAR TALENT

There have been those who have supposed that in the reliance on bands, and classes as well, Wesley was trying to make use of what was good in the Roman Catholic confessional.

This may be true.

Wesley was so impressed with many features of Romanism that his attitudes lent some color to the charge that he had leanings toward papistry.

We shall have occasion to see that this accusation followed him throughout his life. Now, the confessional is founded on the idea that the priest has the power of absolution, that he can forgive sins and can free men from the penalties of sin. This is the essential relief in the confessional—the freedom from fear of hell, and hell was a fact in the belief of the Romanism of Wesley's day.

The relief in the bands was psychological, thoroughly human—that of talking something through and getting it out of one's mind.

The confessional is impersonal; the penitent may not know the priest into whose ears he is pouring his tale of sin. The pastoral service that Wesley had in view was that of such confidential and trustful intimacy that the confession of sin would relieve the confessor through the knowledge that some other human being knew and understood.

The ideal is good enough.

Here again, however, Wesley had to learn that human beings must be dealt with as they are, that confession to a skilled knower of, and sympathizer with, troubled souls is one thing and that the encouragement of confession to a group quite another.

Knowledge of psychology, in which, such as it was, Wesley took an absorbing interest in his own day, has gone far beyond anything dreamed of in the eighteenth century.

We know the danger of talking about our sins.

The fathers who spoke so familiarly of besetting sins did not seem to realize that the more a man speaks of his besetting sin the more the sin besets him.

As to confession, it is clear that if one had done a fellow human being a wrong, one ought to go to the utmost, not merely to confess the wrong, but to make amends.

Sins that have to do with the inner personal life, however, should be confessed indeed, but to God alone. Wesley was quite given to self-depreciation, but not in the concrete.

In the Journal, which was intended for the edification of the faithful, there is abundant disparagement of himself in vague general terms, but not much in concrete acknowledgment of particular acts of wrongdoing.

the confessions in the bands had been no more specific than Wesley's own admissions of evil deeds, no considerable harm would have been done.

Wesley's advice to his followers was that they should tell one

JOHN WESLEY

another of whatever each saw wrong in the other. If this is not done, according to Wesley, the unuttered feeling will fester.

The figure of speech used—'"'festering"—is not altogether happy.

If one could think of the cleansing of a festering sore as the removal of poison by a keen, swift stroke of a surgeon's lancet, one might see an aptness in Wesley's figure of speech.

'That is not often the way, however, that festered misunderstandings are dealt with.

There is a mussy poking and fussing about by bungling individuals, with the last state worse than the first.

Wesley had nothing in his own nature to help him in this intimate dealing with intimates.

He had a bland, unruffled quality of mind which no criticism was likely to disturb.

It is highly entertaining to run through the Journal, especially for the years when

Methodism was thoroughly going, and note the openness with which Wesley himself welcomed the criticism of the preachers and the complacency with which he contemplated it. After a piece of searching criticism directed against himself, he would enter the observation that the criticism was, of course, absurd.

The humorous aspect of all this was in that "of course."

I have said that Wesley had the temper of a religious scientist.

That is the only consideration which lifts some of his personal inquiries up into the sphere of dignity at all. There was indeed the determination to work righteousness down into the least and last detail of conduct, as, for example, the refusal to use tea as a beverage, but there was also a remorseless closeness of scrutiny.

We shall meet Sarah Ryan now and again, but we may quote here from a letter to her under date of February, 1756: ""The being continually watched over for evil; the having every word I spoke, every action I did, small and great, watched with no friendly eye: the hearing a thousand little, tart, unkind reflections, in return for the kindest words I could devise, 'Like drops of eating water on the marble,

At length have worn my sinking spirits down.'

Yet I could not say, "Take thy plague away from me'; but only, 'Let me be purified, not consumed.'''

Mrs. Wesley found this letter about herself in her husband's pocket.

Then he wrote again to Mrs. Ryan that he had not seen his wife in such a temper for several years. Now, this letter, under the circumstances, by which I mean the domestic difficulties which Wesley was facing at the moment, was just about the extreme limit of indiscretion, judged by any

THE PECULIAR TALENT

standards that human beings are accustomed to apply.

Yet, from the terms which Wesley used in another connection, we may fairly conclude that he was in genuine search of religious resources which he thought Sarah Ryan possessed. She was subject to peculiar religious sensitiveness, or Wesley thought she was.

Pastoral work, in the strict sense of visiting the members of the societies, Wesley seems to have disliked.

Yet he did it, and did it faithfully.

As soon as he came into a community where there was a Methodist society, he secured from the leaders a list of the members and started forth to call on every one of them.

His calls aimed definitely at finding out whether it was wise or not to continue to carry the names on the lists.

In some places he cut off as many as half the listas he foundit.

In 1758 he wrote "Though a man preach like an angel, he will neither collect, nor preserve a society, which is collected, without visiting them from house to house."

In 1774, at the age of seventy-one, he wrote: "I began at the east end of the town, to visit the society from house to house.

. This [visiting] is so grievous to flesh and blood, that I can prevail on few, even of our preachers to undertake it."

One of the surprises to the reader of the Journal is the heavy loss from year to year of those who, of their own free choice, had joined the societies.

This was partly due to the emotional stress under which many had come in, but also in part to the strictness of the Wesley scrutiny.

Wesley had before him the reports of leaders as well as the results of his own questionings.

Then there was the love feast—a spiritual communion of the Methodists who came together partaking of water and biscuit or wafer as the sign of their fellowship—admission to the love feast being by tickets distributed among those who had reached a prescribed number of attendances on the Methodist services.

I fear there was much that was mechanical and even wooden about all this.

Objective data, of course, can be gathered, records of attendance reported, statements of religious conditions repeated, but seldom enough basis laid by such means in every case to warrant exclusion from the society.

Moreover, it is doubtful if Wesley's interviews were always wise or skillful.

A man who makes careful entry in his diary of every prayer he utters during a day may miss much of the subtlety of question and interpretation of answer which marks the true physician of souls.

A modern physician to men's bodies knows that no matter how important the information about a patient he may learn from the nurse's chart, the chart can-

JOHN WESLEY

not tell all, or even the most relevant facts, In spiritual culture John Wesley was, as elsewhere and everywhere, too systematic.

We are mistaken, however, if we interpret his slashing of the society records by the standards by which we should judge a like policy in the pastorate of a church. We must insist again and again that Wesley never thought of himself as a rector of churches in dealing with his societies.

Much that Wesley did throughout his career is entirely misleading to us if we do not keep firm hold of the fact that he was working primarily in a society and not in a church, Somewhat akin to this theme of Wesley's pastoral efficiency is his personal relation to men in extreme difficulty. Within the last two or three years criticism against Wesley has revived in connection with the history of the case of Doctor Dodd. Dodd was an able writer on religious themes who lost his way morally and forged Lord Chesterfield's name and thereby stole a large sum of money.

The trangression was in itself a singularly crazy deed, both of the sum involved and the prominence of him whose name was dishonestly used.

Detection was inevitable, and carried the death penalty. Dodd was, of course, found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. The crime seems to have been one of those queer freaks of aberration for which a deeper knowledge of the mysteries of human nature makes more allowance now than then.

Dodd's services to the cause of Christian truth had been singularly valuable.

Keen students are sure that Wesley leaned heavily upon Dodd in some of his religious argument. The charge is that Wesley did not show much interest in aving the convicted doctor of divinity from execution—and that he appears badly by contrast with Dr. Samuel

Jehnson, who exerted himself to the utmost in the doomed man's behalf. The most, however, that can be urged against Wesley is that he was slow in bestirring himself.

There does not seem to have been anything that he left undone when ance he started, and there does not seem to have been much more that he could have done if he had started earlier. He called on Doctor Dodd in prison twice or more times. Still, the whole affair does leave a bad taste in one's mouth. Doctor Dodd was not a criminal in the ordinary sense.

The incident is revealing in that it shows the mildness of response that such events called forth from the public.

The penalty was out of all reason for an offense of the kind. It may be that the commonness of the death decree itself made even a man like John Wesley seem indifferent.

It is true that there were of

THE PECULIAR TALENT

fenses much less consequential punished in the same fashion.

Again, Wesley seems to have been more impressed with Doctor Dodd's penitence than with anything else, as if that were the only significant feature involved.

We cannot help remarking that, in the earlier years when the members of the Oxford Club did so much pastoral work in jails, they usually seemed to assume that the prisoners were getting about what they deserved.

The triumphs of grace too often delighted in were shown in the adjustment which condemned men made to their doom.

It is true that in his later career John Wesley stood nobly by John Howard in his work of prison reform, but he seems to have had in mind the wretched conditions of the prisons themselves.

If he had exploded now and then against the whole English system of dealing with crime, he would have been performing quite as religious a task as listening to the confessions of miserable unfortunates about to suffer the extreme penalty.

Here again, however, we have to be careful not to weigh the eighteenth century in the scales of the twentieth.

I suppose it is in order to consider the helpful works of Wesley, outside of the strictly religious, under the head of pastoral services, inasmuch as these were directed to the welfare of individuals. We look, then, at the attempts of Wesley to minister to the bodies of men.

Ina time like Wesley's it is almost impossible for ministers not to seek to relieve the sufferings of the diseased.

At the present day anyone who has traveled in mission fields in backward countries has noticed how many Christian workers are distributing simple medicinal remedies to the sick.

Sometimes the remedies are not so simple, and medical practicing by church workers becomes a peril. In my work asa Methodist bishop visiting missionary fields

I have now and again found native preachers distributing physical remedies, sometimes for fees, with no medical knowledge on the part of the preachers whatever.

The reason is the omnipresent horror of sickness and physical injury. Now, this omnipresent distress was always under Wesley's eyes.

He felt he had to do something, and he did what he could.

He set himself to investigate diseases and remedies.

He is himself the authority for the statement that through virtually all his working life he made the study of physical remedies his avocation.

With unwearying patience he read all that he could find on the methods of curing all manner of bodily disorders.

The results of this study he published in the book called Primitive Physic, with its copious recommendations of strenuous

JOHN WESLEY

and mighty remedies, and of tar water for almost everything. Here we have especially to take care lest we fall to gasping with astonishment at manifest ignorance and credulity.

Let us remember that all this was two hundred years ago.

Moreover, Wesley got the prescriptions which he brought together from the physicians of the time.

Dr. John Whitehead, who wrote the first good biography of Wesley, was a doctor. The prescriptions which Wesley wrote down for his people could not have been so very different from those of the regular practitioners, or they would have aroused the protests of Whitehead.

Medical practice was not then the scientifically equipped and socially supervised function it is today.

Berkeley, a contemporary of Wesley, was one of the profoundest philosophers of his time—indeed, it may well be of all times—yet Berkeley was as ardent in proclaiming the virtues of tar water as of idealism.

Indeed, some of the best phrasings of idealism—or the best sentences about certain phases of idealism—are to be found embedded in his discussions of tar water. Primitive Physic by Wesley is a revelation not so much of Wesley's own information as of the state of medical knowledge in England in his time. It is also a revelation of the popular thinking about the body and its ailments.

In out-of-theway communities today we find mothers, and more particularly grandmothers, recommending for babies, and older persons for that matter, the most astounding remedies, with each grandmother saying that the remedy is good because she got it from her grandmother. Now, it does not require a long line of grandmothers to carry us back to John Wesley's day.

It always seems humorous to us to come upon queer recommendations as to remedies for human illnesses in the writings of a man like John Wesley.

Let us not overlook the fact, then, that almost any specific for a disease would seem queer until it began to work.

The scientist proceeds here just by trying one article after another till he finds something that seems to succeed.

'There is no a priori reason why quinine should relieve malaria.

All we know is that it does.

The only way men found out the virtues of quinine was by experiment.

Now, our grandmothers were not skilled scientists, but in dealing with diseases they acted like scientists, at least in trying one thing after another.

I once earned the reproof of a doctor in referring jokingly to the remedies applied to Francis Asbury by the Methodist women of the early days of Methodism in America.

Asbury was a constant sufferer from inflamed throat, probably due to infected tonsils.

'The good women of the day used to cast horseshoe nails

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into some stewed concoction in order that the medicinal qualities of the iron might be available for the bishop's throat.

The physician reminded me that modern scientific knowledge recognizes the medicinal properties of iron, and declared that the women of one hundred and fifty years ago were feeling after knowledge which later investigation has confirmed.

In Wesley's day anybody could search for remedies for illness, and one man's search might prove as productive as another's.

Wesley was scientific in making place for the control of natural laws.

Long after his time men looked upon cholera as a direct scourge from God and insisted that the only way to combat it was by penitence and prayer. Wesley would have admitted, and urged, the need of spiritual resources in such a situation, but he would have tried also to find the natural remedies.

At least that is what he was always striving after for the relief of suffering mortals.

It is interesting to read of his researches into knowledge about electricity and his tests of electric processes on himself.

John Wesley took note of the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin while they were actually going forward, which is something of a proof that his temper was not wholly conservative.

We must not fail to see either that some of Wesley's general rules as to health were valuable for his day and for ours.

Suggestions as to moderation in diet abound in his discussions of health.

He knew nothing about calories, but he hit upon dietary habits that controlled them pretty well.

All his life he was himself a master of his body, making it do just about what he desired of it.

He did not know modern psychiatry, but in his own life and in his guidance of the life of others he was an earnest searcher after the laws of inner life, mistaken as were some of his methods.

He certainly knew the value of the regularities in the control of body and mind, the importance of the earlier hours of the night for sleep, the healthful efficacy of fresh air and plenty of it, the beneficial

- influence of a tranquil spirit. We smile at his advice to cure colds and other minor ailments by riding on horseback half a day in the teeth of a wind that could fairly be called a gale; but if we had seen the lack of ventilation in the humbler houses of the eighteenth century, we might have welcomed a remedy that would have driven fresh air into every cell of the lungs. We must not forget either that Wesley was entitled to some measure of authority as a health adviser because of his success in pulling himself back from death more than once.

In middle age he was so near death from "con-

JOHN WESLEY

sumption," possibly tuberculosis, that he all but gave up in despair, going so far down as to write an epitaph for his own tombstone, though this was probably nothing more than an instance of the demand of his system-loving mind that everything be ready for any contingency.

In this self-recovery, the determining force appears to have been Wesley's sheer resolve to get well. We believe today that the best treatment of such illness as Wesley seemed to have is rest, and we have difficulty in trying to imagine Wesley relying upon arest cure.

He did, however, bring himself back to strength after death had begun to draw alarmingly near.

By precept and example Wesley taught system for body and mind. We have already seen that we have to take the bad effects with the good in all this.

Wesley's system at times almost seems to take charge of him and march him off at its own behests. When a man lays so much stress on getting up on time to preach at five in the morning and has so much to say about it as Wesley had, it is a fair question as to whether the system itself is not counting too much with him.

On the other hand, it is likewise a fair question as to whether Wesley did not do quite as much for his followers by drilling them incessantly to religious habits as by any of his forms of stress on the value of extraordinary moments of uplift and insight. He aimed to utilize religious power, and to do that had to harness it to regularity of worship and deed.

Much of the Methodist system seems mechanical as we look back at it, but the use of the mechanical means themselves did something to bring religion into daily life. What Wesley achieved in this close intimacy with his people was to put into their hands tools for the development of, and expression of, and work of the religious life.

The maker of a spiritual tool is quite as important to mankind as the inventor of a material tool.

One of the farthest-reaching outcomes of Wesley's work was the setting of thousands upon thousands of men and women to systematic doing of what they were profoundly convinced was the will of God.

The outreach of Wesley's authority in this guidance of men in intimate practical affairs was astonishing.

For example, Primitive Physic brought Wesley in royalties the sum of thirty thousand pounds—$150,000 in American money—that too at a time when money was more valuable than now.

Wesley used the royalties as they came in to buy further copies of the book for free distribution.

While we are on this general theme, it may be relevant to state that Wesley aimed to make himself an educational factor among

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groups that had not much chance at the training or informing their minds.

He was indeed a man of one book—the Bible—but it would be preposterous to take this statement literally.

He read and wrote incessantly, always with the welfare of the ordinary people in mind.

He wrote on all ranges of themes to bring the more weighty subjects into the thinking of the Methodists, whose ideas of propriety were not always as broad as his own.

We have all read of the fate which befell his notes made on a copy of the plays of Shakespeare.

They were burned as useless "baggage."

John Pawson, one of the preachers who afterward enjoyed something like episcopal honors, seems to have been the one responsible for this brilliant feat.

Suppose we look at a work of Wesley's which had a predominantly educational aim, and that chiefly for Methodists.

I refer to Wesley's four-volume History of England. I pick out this book because some biographers ignore it altogether and others apologize for it, with the remark that, of course, Wesley was not a historian.

Having read the work through—the edition of 1776—the present writer, who is not a historian and lays no claim to expertness of judgment as to historical writing, nevertheless can speak as an ordinary reader, and does so with admiration and gratitude.

For the book seems to me abundantly worth while, when we consider the readers to whom it was addressed. A wise man once said that not to hit a mark at which one does not aim is in itself no great hardship, but that to be blamed therefor calls for much patience.

Wesley was time and again blamed for not hitting targets at which he did not aim. He was not aiming at historical research.

He was not working among libraries or state archives.

He had before him three histories of England—those of Goldsmith, Rapin, and Smollet—and depended upon them for the facts (one of the authors,

Smollet, by the way, being most hostile to Methodism). He wrote the book out on the road—in the homes of Methodists where he stayed, in inns, in his "chaise." What he did aim to do was to put before his followers a readable narrative written from the religious point of view.

The result was instructive and interesting.

With many of the characters Wesley wrote in the conventional fashion, accepting the conventional moral judgments upon them, but with others he dealt in such wise as to give glimpses into his own mind.

The style is straightforward and clear, the feeling for religious bearings pronounced, the prejudices manifest.

Oddly enough, Wesley was an intense partisan of Mary Queen of Scots and re-

JOHN WESLEY

garded her virtually asa martyr.

In date Wesley stood near enough to the events of which he treated in the later chapters to make his judgment almost that of a contemporary.

It is instructive to note that he reports his own father, Samuel Wesley, as the author of the speech, or speeches, with which the famous High Churchman,

Sacheverell, made such a stir ecclesiastically and politically in the early years of the eighteenth century, though John Wesley's authority is not always of the best on such points. We see the War of Jenkin's Ear so explained as to make it thoroughly intelligible, certainly to Englishmen.

We recognize too that, so far as national policies are concerned, Wesley regards the conduct of his country as mostly right. The book, indeed, has no lasting value as history.

The people for whom it was written are gone.

They evidently found the history to their needs, for, though it was published in four volumes, the edition was soon sold out.

Wesley received $2,000 in one sum for the book, to state the sum in American terms, and within a week had given it all away.

There were other books of the same aim as this History, books on all varieties of themes, written with the intent of building up the individual Methodists into intelligence and soundness of judgment concerning the world in which they lived.

The total pieces of printed matter published under Wesley's guidance would present, for the times, an incredible total.

Take the Christian Library, a collection of religious documents issued in fifty volumes. Wesley edited all this.

He never turned over such tasks to a secretary.

There is not a sentence in the entire fifty volumes that had not come repeatedly under his eye. The selection itself involved reading most, if not all, the important published religious utterances in the history of the Christian Church.

I refer especially to what we call devotional material.

To be sure, the volume of such output had been up to Wesley's day hardly a handful compared to what goes forth from the religious press in a decade now, but that mass was immense to be read and scrutinized and edited by one man, the man traveling on foot, on horseback, and in his carriage forty-five hundred or five thousand miles a year.

It is probably not too much to say that Wesley, in the half century of his leadership of the Methodists, made a wider distribution of religious writings dealing with the inner life than had any other man in the previous history of the Church. I have said that one element in the value of Wesley's work was his drilling the people called Methodists to well-determined lives.

It is equally pertinent to say that he accomplished an admi-

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rable result in making the Methodists, and that by the thousands, a society of readers, and that of the best books.

This division has aimed to treat of Wesley's pastoral work in the wider sense—that of shepherding lives toward the highest ideals.

I have spoken of his care of men in relation to the societies and of his interest in their physical and mental welfare.

It may be just as well to speak here of the spirit of Wesley in dealing with those whom he could not but regard as moral and spiritual offenders, though such a discussion may not seem to bear directly upon the theme of the section.

I do this also because there has been misunderstanding of the fact that Wesley so often broke with those who had been his close friends, as if this indicated a hard temper.

We shall have occasion to look at some of these instances later.

Suffice it to say here that these breaks had to do with principles, or what Wesley took to be principles.

Criticism as to sternness of temper certainly could not be urged against his attitude toward penitent offenders.

The most conspicuous case of kindly treatment of a wrongdoer was that of his relation to his brother-in-law, Hall. There was a twist in Hall's nature from the first.

He was a clergyman of the Church of England who sought the hand of one of Wesley's sisters in marriage, then jilted that sister and married another sister. This was a poor start, though the mother Susanna insisted that the facts warranted the courses of all three.

Shortly after the marriage Hall began to reveal a looseness as to marital relations. Then follows a horribly long story of infidelity, open and avowed, with Hall advocating and preaching and practicing polygamy.

Now, Wesley had every reason here to take the attitude that Hall had sinned beyond redemption.

He had the most serious of personal reasons especially.

Mrs. Hall was a most excellent woman.

It was she who appeared occasionally in the Samuel Johnson circle, as the members of that circle are set forever before the world of English in the unforgettable pictures of Boswell.

Wesley had abundant occasion to treat Hall as nothing more to him than a heathen man and a publican. ae Moreover, Wesley had the warrant of the opinion of his time in holding that Hall was a deliberate sinner, and that his fault was transgression of moral law. There was no need of saying anything more to any religious leader of the day than just that—that this man was a purposeful sinner. Modern psychology was not at hand then to tell men to incline a little more to leniency of judgment. Nobody

JOHN WESLEY

can today read through the account of Hall's performances and not feel that the case was at least partly pathologic.

Wesley was not thinking in terms of pathology or psychology, or what we call psychiatry.

He was thinking solely of sin and repentance.

He was familiar enough with Hall during Hall's closing days to pronounce a judgment that is a veritable miracle of charitableness.

He gave it as his conviction that Hall had been convinced of error and of sin, and died with assurance of divine pardon.

ORGANIZER

We come now to the quality in Wesley which practically all who have studied his life concede as pre-eminent—his effectiveness as an organizer in the stricter sense than that of the general pastoral oversight we have been considering.

Wesley himself seems to have recognized his peculiar strength in this respect.

In studying Wesley from this angle, it is well for us to see, if we can, what he was aiming at. There are some who tell us that he was not aiming at anything except to spread scriptural holiness; that he was in a worthy sense an opportunist, utilizing whatever means came to hand to advance the high ideals to which he had given himself.

There is much to bear this out in the Wesley career.

The class meeting began as an agency for collecting money contributions and ended as an instrument for standardizing Methodist spiritual life.

'The Conferences began just as conferences, meetings to confer about the best ways of advancing the spread of holiness.

They ended as a powerful organism for the control of preperty and the guidance of preaching and worship.

Outdoor preaching began because the audiences could not get indoors, and ended as the instrumentality which carried the gospel to thousands upon thousands who would never otherwise have heard it. Watchnight services arose in order that, in going to the Methodist meetings, the people might have the advantage of the light of the moon.

Lay preaching began just because the crowds were at hand waiting for preaching, willing to listen to anyone who would speak to them, and ended by the creation of almost a totally new method of largescale preaching of the evangel.

Other illustrations of Wesley's use of the instruments at hand will appear as we move along.

It would be in the highest degree absurd to disparage Wesley for thus utilizing means at hand instead of seeking to create new tools outright.

Wesley had no pride of originality.

He sought from the beginning to make popular throughout England the high-

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est type of Christian life attainable, popular as arousing popular response.

All else was secondary to this aim.

How often it happens that, when a leader acts on what may seem an impulse, the after-effect looks like the outworking of careful plan!

In making use of instruments already in a measure familiar, Wesley was insuring the success of his movement. Whether they knew it or not, the converts were asked to use in a different way what they had known, or known about, all their lives.

Take outdoor preaching itself.

The English, in the centers where the population was at all dense, were accustomed to get together in open spaces for all sorts of matches and sports, some of them rough.

A traveler through England today cannot help noticing in any open space near a population center the large number of persons in sight, especially on Sunday or a holiday.

This is, of course, partly to get outdoors, but the people assemble quickly at any spot where anything seems to promise to be of interest.

It is surprising that anyone should wonder that Whitefield, and after him Wesley, should take the perfectly natural step of going forth to speak to these crowds. Yet Wesley himself hesitated before taking the step, and significantly said at last, though with an air of defiance, that he was willing to make himself vile and yet more vile for the sake of the gospel—which shows how hard it was to take an entirely obvious step, and which increases also our respect for Whitefield as an innovator, to say nothing of Wesley's acceptance of the method.

All of this reveals also how limited was the service the Established Church was rendering at the time.

Christening, confirmation, marriage, death were, in the eighteenth century, the few occasions on which the masses of persons felt any pressing, inevitable need of the Church.

The opposition, or at least the questioning, aroused against open-air preaching is an indication of how little was expected of the Church at the time. Now, this method, which arose almost inevitably out of the circumstances, assuming the crowds and assuming the orator like Whitefield, led in the end to something resembling the discovery of a new world, or at least a new continent.

Coming back to the main question, we judge Wesley's achievements by what he expected todo. Admitting that his fundamental aim was the spread of scriptural holiness, he surely must have kept in mind always what would really spread his idea of holiness.

We must therefore look at the lay preachers whom Wesley sent into the field.

The first of these were John Cennick and

JOHN WESLEY

Thomas Maxfield.

In the Arminian Magazine Wesley published autobiographies of laymen to the number of thirty-six which have been gathered up and preserved in seven volumes.

It is said that a distinguished English bishop used to urge upon the ministers of his diocese the reading of these autobiographies as spiritual nourishment and stimulus.

Undoubtedly the narratives must have done good; certainly they have met a need or they would not have been so widely read. As means for the development of a wholesome religious life, however, they are of doubtful value. To begin with, they are too much alike.

The standardization of Methodist experience nowhere appears more distinctly than in the autobiographies of these Wesleyan preachers.

I do not in the least mean by this to question the sincerity of the narrators.

They were all sincere, desperately sincere.

They had all had the experiences which they described.

That was the advantage and that was the disadvantage. Nobody can read the narratives and not feel that he is in the presence of spiritual reality as far as the experiences themselves are concerned.

By standardized experiences I mean those that were alike. Methodism did just that: it gave multitudes of men experiences that were alike.

William James has been criticized because in The Varieties of Religious Experience he did not make more use of these Wesleyan autobiographies, and mentioned only one of them, that of John Nelson.

It may be that, in the mass of material which James had to go through in his studies, he did not give as much attention as he should have done to this

Methodist storehouse; but it may be, on the other hand, that James passed many of them over because they were so much like one another in characteristics to which he did give ample space in his book.

All run through the same stages of fearful distress, not to say agony; all come out finally into the light.

Again there is no perspective, no discrimination in the treatment of sin, or of sins.

It has been claimed as a virtue for Methodism, and for all evangelical groups for that matter, that for them sin is sin, small sins and great sins.

Now, anyone who has ever sought to fulfill a Christian ideal is aware that with the most earnest followers of the ideal there is the deepest sense of unworthiness.

Indeed, as previously stated, one of the paradoxes of the Christian life is that the man whose life is most free from sin is the one who feels sin most profoundly, just as the scientist who knows the most feels most keenly the vastness of his ignorance, and the artist who has come the nearest to the seizure of absolute beauty feels most

THE PECULIAR TALENT

heavily the fact that he cannot give beauty a perfect expression.

Confusion standeth at the door, however, when the seeker after the Christ-character puts all sorts of transgressions on the same plane— the heedlessness of childhood, the pursuit of comparatively innocent pleasures, the commission of trivial errors in the same class with serious violations of moral law.

To the credit of these Methodist helpers of Wesley be it said that, while they all had terrible remorse over sin, none of them in actual fact seem to have been notable moral offenders.

They appear to have felt a general conviction of unworthiness and to have attributed it to their having been guilty of offenses which were not especially serious.

The misery over sin which some of these men suffered in early and tender years is appalling.

Our knowledge of childhood today and our better attitude toward childhood are clearly revealed if we read some of these dreadful narratives.

There was John Haime, however, who stands apart as never attaining a standardized experience.

Haime never seems to have come fully out into the light of inner witness.

He preached faithfully and effectively, and deserves the honor which early Methodism gave him, but he did not have the typical Methodist experience.

It is surely to be regretted that the Methodists did not take more to heart, or to mind, the implications of the fact that Haime worked successfully without the type of experience which much Wesleyan preaching of the day made practically indispensable for salvation.

It was on these helpers that Wesley so much relied.

He did not regard them as trained spiritual leaders—they were helpers, lay helpers. He felt that they could actually preach better than many, perhaps most, of the clergy of the Established Church, but that is not saying much. The Church was not notably given to preaching, and not at all to evangelism.

Charles Wesley was outspoken in his opinion of the strictly lay character of the work of these men, but Charles was likely to give them less than justice, as John to give them more than justice.

Again and again we are forced to observe the hastiness of speech and deed of Charles Wesley. He would at once rule that the preachers of Wesley ought never be regarded as anything but laymen.

That judgment, we fear, came out of at least a trace of superiority in the feeling of Charles himself, who could not put men who had not his social connections and his academic training in a class with himself. John took his preachers for their merit in themselves, but he recognized their limitations and kept them under strict control.

JOHN WESLEY

An essential in Wesley's skill as an organizing leader was his determined keeping the authority over his preachers and his societies in his own hands.

Here again we have to try to get and keep Wesley's point of view.

He did not take himself as the head of a church but of a society.

What he did would have been despotic beyond all description if he had thought of himself as the head of a church, assuming to himself the right to say who should and who should not have the blessings of the Church, with no other reason assigned than that he chose to have itso. Likewise, his determining by his own mind and will alone how long the preachers could remain in a place, without regard to the wishes of either preachers or congregations, would have been intolerable if he had been the head of anything more than a society.

It was bad enough as it was.

It is refreshing to read in his Journal and Letters of an occasional Methodist preacher who balked at moving from his field, refreshing indeed to read of one brother of whom Wesley wrote that he wondered if he could ever get him out of his place.

We shall meet after a little the charge that Wesley was ambitious, but here we have to raise the question as to what would have happened, or what could have happened, or what might not have happened if Wesley had not been just about the type of despot he was, especially in the early years of Methodism. 'The preachers were not trained: they were valuable chiefly as witnesses to experience: their interpretations of their experiences were likely to go astray.

In fact, many who were most promising and, indeed, most successful at the beginning, finally broke away from Wesley.

Of course Wesley illustrates the old danger—that a dictator seldom knows to whom or when or how to surrender his power.

'This, however, is to anticipate.

It is enough here to remark that, while much of Wesley's ability lay in his recognition of the limitations in the midst of which he must work, the limitations of the nature of his society, the limitations in the human material of his helpers, he did not recognize some of his own limitations.

All things considered, it is just as well that he did not.

He kept things in his own hands until in 1784 he selected the Legal Hundred, the formal body which was to take legal control after he himself should have passed away.

Sooner or later Wesley was bound to meet the property problem—the control of the buildings in which the Methodists were to carry on their services. Like most problems Wesley had to meet, this came upon him almost before he was aware of it. As Methodism grew to some degree of material strength it was only to be

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expected that the lay members should desire to have preaching places built for their purposes—not somebody's dwelling place, not somebody's open field, but Methodist preaching centers built for Methodist purposes.

The aim that prompted this was obviously sound and generous. At first Wesley's rule was that the seats should not have backs, and that the women and the men were to be separated while in the house, the women sitting on one side of the room and the men on the other. It was not long, however, before the question began naturally to arise in the minds of the members, "Well, whose building is this anyway?'

The answer here was not always so easy as one might think.

Methodists in those days, like Methodists ever since, were prone to say nothing of Methodism's pleasant justification of a debt by the euphemism, "We are building for the future." Thus it became necessary for Wesley himself to take a hand in getting this or that society out of debt and, in the later period of his ministry, he found himself under the burden of raising money for chapels scattered throughout Methodism.

Even so the money came from Methodists, but it would never have come if Wesley had not raised it. No one can read through the Journal and the Letters of the days when Methodism had become thoroughly established and fail to see how persistently and how self-sacrificingly

Wesley worked at this problem of the debts on Methodist properties.

If anyone is tempted to believe that all that is necessary for getting money is to rouse the people to spiritual devotion and then allow the money to come of itself, let him read the efforts of Wesley to put the results of one of the mightiest revivals of all time on a sound financial foundation.

The sums were not large, judged by twentieth-century standards, but they involved immense personal effort in money-raising. There was nothing that could be made at all compulsory in the appeals to the Methodists.

Perhaps there never had been, up to Wesley's time, any solicitation for such a purpose on so wide a scale, with nothing to re-enforce the call except

Wesley's own hold on his people, nothing to which to appeal except to the voluntary willingness of the people to help.

'The money came hard.

The question as to the control of the chapels came to the front as soon as Methodism began to build. The first thought would be, and was, that the chapels should be put under the authority of trustees.

Did trustees therefore have the right to say who should preach in the chapels? The issue became especially acute at Bristol, where the laymen insisted upon such control.

'The problem

JOHN WESLEY

here was finally settled by putting the deed to the property in Wesley's hand; a course that was followed shortly by practically all chapels. Or, rather, it came to be understood that no chapel was to bear the name of Methodist unless the entire control was lodged in Wesley.

Wesley was intelligent enough to see that he must make some definite arrangement as to the control of Methodism after he should be gone, but he did not quite show the firmness of selfmastery during the days when he was maturing a plan for his successor, or successors, that he had previously revealed.

One trait of leadership Wesley lacked, or possessed in lesser degree: the power to delegate authority and to hold the receiver of such power responsible for its right use. To put it in another way, he did not have the power to hold strong leaders fast to him.

His relations to Whitefield were long strained, and after the Calvinist controversy, never cordial.

He sooner or later broke with almost every strong man with whom he had ever labored, including his brother Charles, though Charles on many an occasion unwarrantably projected himself into John's affairs. Charles never possessed sure discernment as to what might be strictly his own business.

It was toward the end of his active service that John admitted that the control of Methodism was despotic, a condition which he did not view with alarm as long as he himself was the despot.

At first Wesley thought that Fletcher of Madeley ought to be his successor, but Fletcher knew better, on grounds of health if on no others.

It is folly to guess what Fletcher would have done if he had ever come to the supreme authority in Methodism, but he was probably too delicate an instrument to follow Wesley.

Fletcher had for a long period tendencies to consumption, of which indeed he finally died.

I have already remarked that Wesley's notion of the best treatment for a cold or consumption was to mount a horse and ride from thirty to fifty miles a day in the face of whatever wind might be blowing, the fiercer the wind, the better.

Fletcher was of fine and high sensibilities, with power to melt congregations to tears, though what they were weeping about was not always obvious.

He lived like, and was, a saint, though not of the Wesley fiber, and with now and then a streak of hardness as when he refused a plea of his mother that he visit her, presumably for the last time.

The power finally went to the Legal Hundred—a group of one hundred Methodist preachers selected as indicated by Wesley himself.

If one wishes to get an impression both of the strength and

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weakness of Wesley's leadership, one has only to look over the lists of Methodist preachers at the time of Wesley's death and ask who in all the list would have been able alone to take Wesley's place.

One might also ask what dozen or twenty could have taken his place.

Wesley was, till nearly the close of his life, the indispensable man, but is that a tribute to his leadership? A master artist, indeed, passes and leaves no successor, but an organizer is not an artist except at organizing, and organizing implies the power to train understudies.

Here again we have to fall back upon Wesley's own aim. He was not thinking of founding a church.

Assuming that he meant what he said when he declared that he had not expected at the beginning that the Methodist Movement would run for more than thirty years, and that he was surprised when it continued for fifty in full vigor, he must have aimed chiefly at holding things together till there might come a better adjustment to the Church.

We cannot make sense of Wesley's career except by taking at about full value his own statement of Methodism as a society and not asa Church.

This is not in contradiction with more or less conscious adjustments to a growing demand for independence and separation from the Church by Methodists.

Wesley was not likely to change his views as to what course Methodism should take even if he realized the tendency to independence.

He was not much more in favor of self-determination by his people when he was over eighty than when he was under fifty. Probably he did take account of the tendencies of his people in so far as those entered into his half-conscious processes, but he was not likely to admit even to himself his doing so.

Here again Methodism suffered from the autocracy of its founder.

Wesley had to do everything himself.

He passed on the eligibility of virtually every member of the Methodist societies himself, when it came to revising the lists of members, not, indeed, after the membership had reached a total of from fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand members, but in the earlier formative and decisive decades. Moreover, the Wesley censorship was in the last degree effective. The preachers and laymen could not publish anything without Wesley's consent.

He had to know practically everything that was said and done in every Methodist chapel and community.

Now, no organization could long hold together under this leadership. So that the question arises as to whether Wesley himself did not suspect that the organization might break after he had gone,

JOHN WESLEY

and wished that, if it had to break, it would be in position to carry its vitality into the English Church.

Then there was the selection of the Legal Hundred. One hundred is an arbitrary figure and arbitrary figures are dangerous when personal choices are to be made. Presumably Wesley could not have done much other than he did, but he left sore spots in Methodism through leaving out some men who had been faithful and successful workers. There was, for example, John Hampson, Sr., utterly devoted to Wesley. Hampson was not among the Legal Hundred.

The ill wind, in this case, if it was an ill wind, did blow some good.

John Hampson, Sr., left a son, John, who wrote a Life of Wesley, published in the year of Wesley's death. 'The son evidently resented

Wesley's treatment of his father keenly enough to correct his own vision, so that he did not fall into that mood of extravagant and out-of-focus adulation of Wesley which injures nearly all friendly utterances about Methodism's founder. The author of that Life without being harsh, gives us a temper of approach which introduces a realistic note into the treatment of Wesley, a note Methodisis have always sadly needed. Hampson's book is out of print, but it is well worth being looked up and read by anyone who cares to see

Wesley in the flesh, before the period of apotheosis fully dawned.

Here it may be fitting to say a little about another life of Wesley, inasmuch as we have been discussing Wesley's leadership.

I refer to the Life by Robert Southey, the best written biography of Wesley, from the point of view of style, with the possible exception of that of Professor Caleb TT. Winchester, of Wesleyan University.

As a biography—and that is what Southey's book aims to be—it is authentic, ample, friendly, and sympathetic toward Wesley's purposes, and at the same time judicial toward some aspects of his philosophy and methods, though not as excellent in these respects as Julia Wedgwood.

Now, Southey possessed unbounded admiration for Wesley, but he declared in his Life, at what seems undue length, that Wesley was ambitious—for power, for his own supremacy overmen. 'Thereupon all the Methodist pens of the time began to race in defense of Wesley.

'The question was not worth quite so much ink.

It might have been said also that Wesley was avaricious, because of his persistent begging for money, if we did not know what he wanted the money for. There is no doubt that, in dealing with men, Wesley was self-assertive beyond all description, but it is well that it was so. Wesley had remarkable ability to take himself for granted.

'There was something charmingly naive in his recog-

THE PECULIAR TALENT

nition of his own peculiar fitnesses.

Just think what a plight the Methodist Movement would have been in if Wesley had too often passed through seasons of doubt and self-distrust!

Of course some would make the test here as to whether Wesley himself enjoyed power.

Probably he did.

He was one of those intensely vital beings who rejoice in the full expression and play of their energies.

The so-called "integration" of Wesley's life was, so far as we can see, the absorption of his whole being in the task before him. He was contented and happy. He was conscious of a fullness of inner life which could be expressed only by field preaching and what went with it. The people could not have been reached in regular church services even if they had been willing to attend them.

His inner experience and his outer method fit together like hand and glove.

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