Through Sixty Years—And Beyond . ; ;

Through Sixty Years—And Beyond . ; ;

PART X

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

"To most great men it is given to do their work in a comparatively short time. By noon or afternoon they are done and gone. Wesley lived through the morning, through the noon hours, through afternoon and evening and far into the night.'"—CHARLEs EDWARD JEFFERSON.

PART X

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

O NE of the most notable features of Wesley's career was that it lasted so long.

If we are dealing, not with poets or seers who ina flash can open to us new worlds, but with administrative length of service, time itself counts mightily and may become in itself an overwhelming fact.

To select an illustration, slight in itself: Wesley kept a daily account of his money expenditures from the first day he had anything of which to keep account until within just a few years of his death. Here are a set of account books kept by a single hand, the accounts running through seventy years.

Or think of the time through which the Journal was kept.

Dip into the Journal anywhere and the first impression is not especially arresting. There isa record of duties done, sermons preached, groups met, books read, miles traveled, letters written, and prayers offered. Look merely at a few entries.and we find a straightforward

English style, sound practical sense, deep devotion. Read on, however, through the eight large volumes, and see always the same unceasing doing of these daily tasks until finally the effect becomes massive.

This goes on day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out, till we find ourselves in wonder and amazement, asking if this uniformly marching procession of deeds is never to stop or slow down.

It has been urged against the Journal that it was written for publication and that, therefore, Wesley always had his readers in mind. As late as 1781 he wrote: 'In Georgia I wrote three journals.

Afterward I extracted one from them all, for the use chiefly of the children of God, omitting abundance of things which I judged would not profit them."

It is also charged that he did not lay bare his heart in his Journal as those have done who were communing with themselves in their diaries.

There is a degree of truth here of which we may find occasion to speak again, but that truth has to be qualified by the length of years through which the entries took place.

In entries running through half a century a writer could not help revealing himself; he could not keep much back through so long a stretch.

The Journal had to be written through all ups-and-downs of moods and of feeling. No matter how

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much reserve Wesley might have had by native temperament, he could not have helped revealing himself through so many decades,

He could not have kept everything back. We cannot but conclude that something of everything in the man would have come out,

Through so many years every trait of character would have been manifest whether the writer intended it so or not,

It would be self-evidently impossible for any diarist to act a part through so long—and acting a part was not at all in harmony with the Wesley nature.

Even Wesley's critics would grant that any such course would have for Wesley been out of the question.

By the way, how few charges against Wesley made in his time have endured!

There isa slur or two in Walpole about Wesley's hoping to get some favor from Lord Dartmouth, a Methodist; and in the first years of his preaching Wesley felt it necessary to write to the Bishop of London denying malicious reports about Wesley's alleged personal immoralities.

None of this mud would stick, however.

His Jowrnel was his most confidential companion.

He could not for a lifetime have kept secrets from that. One student, not unfriendly, has remarked that in the Journal Wesley's soul was on parade, by which he meant that his soul was dressed up for public exhibition.

It is better for men, at least occasionally, to speak of Wesley in this fashion than in that of absolute adoration; but such comment overlooks the time through which the entries were made: through the larger part of the eighteenth century. That is too long for a parade.

In this realization of the extraordinary stretch of Wesley's life, we get the best testimony to his religious experience. How pathetic it is to see students of the highest Christian attainments searching through Wesley for single statements about distinctive spiritual climaxes!

It will be recalled that Wesley never claimed to have himself reached what he called "Christian perfection." Psychologists and theologians have perused the Jowrnal line by line to find some single statement on which they could themselves base a claim for such an experience for him.

Some have fancied they have found, not a claim, but a proof in a passage here or there. Meantime the total stupendous record is there of an experience more important than any single crisis could ever be: decade after decade filled with no other thoughts than those of labor for the beloved societies.

The danger with any devotion to an ideal is not of some excruciating moral disaster which wrecks faith.

The danger is merely that faith will die out, The temptations of long life have to

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS-AND BEYOND

do with the adjustment and readjustment to changing spiritual climates, the test being whether the life of the spirit can survive through these various stages. We look upon some lives that fade down into the commonplace in later years and sadly reflect that, if they had ceased ten years earlier, they would have left behind them memories of complete devotion to the loftiest spiritual realms.

. As life went on, however, it went on too long. The tragedy was that it just went on, and the enthusiasm for the ideal died out.

Or, in the spiritual climate to which the life advanced, there was not enough ozone, or oxygen, and the soul suffocated.

Or the life lost interest. So it was not with John Wesley. He ran with patience the length of the Christian race.

During all the phases of an abnormally long life Wesley held fast to the one ideal; held fast so tightly that he did not seem to realize that he was passing through successive phases of experience.

It has been said of him that one fault which he revealed in handling children was that he always looked upon a child just as he would upon an adult. Wesley always took himself as an adult. He exacted as much of himself when he was a young man as if he had already come to full maturity, and as much of himself after he had come to old age as if he were still only at maturity.

It is true that he never made as much of the relative aspects in human experience as he would have done if he had lived in an era that made more place for psychology, and for rhythm in men's lives.

It is a peculiarity and danger, however, of those who study so much into the relative and the rhythmic that they make everything relative, and finally get everything washed away as in a flow, the only factor abiding being the flow itself. We live in an age that abhors anything absolute, even the word itself.

It may be just as well, therefore, for us to contemplate a life that stretched through over eighty years and found something which, whether we call it absolute or not, remained much the same in the purpose of Wesley. The ideal which he pursued with an unresting quest never lost its spell over him.

That ideal to which he gave himself in early life grew both in size and fineness as the years went by.

Dr. Charles E. Jefferson once put a nobly eloquent emphasis on this time-stretch of Wesley's life and of its significance as making that life a revelation of divine power and grace.

Doctor Jefferson said, as already quoted, that some men die, as it were, before noon, and some in the afternoon, making a revelation of the divine indeed for which the world is grateful, but escaping some temptations and

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criticisms which come with longer life. Wesley, on the other hand, continued Doctor Jefferson, lived through the morning, and afternoon, and evening, and far into the night. 'Three generations came and went while he lived.

Wesley was probably seen and heard by more people in England than had been any other individual up to his time.

Rulers draw huge crowds of spectators whenever they go abroad, but the rulers of Wesley's day seldom went far outside of London, and there were four of them in his century: Anne, George I, George II, and George III. Wesley traveled in his ministry over two hundred thousand miles and preached to over forty thousand audiences.

Before the end came he was "by sight" the best-known human figure in England.

He was literally a public man.

Now, let the reader, if he has opportunity, dip into Wesley's writings wherever he pleases and search for any signs that Wesley was adjusting himself for an actor's part, or that he was conscious of being on a stage before all England. The reader will search in vain.

The intent to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land appears always and with equal clearness throughout the life. That intent was the absolute, always manifest through all the stages.

In saying what I did about the "relative" I did not mean to slur over the facts which underlie the conception of the relative in human existence.

Wesley passed through the changes which are natural to man: youth, early, full and later maturity, middle age, old age and advanced old age.

He said of himself, in 1775, that he knew more of England than any other man alive, so that he faced the influence of social change as shaping even the inner destinies of individuals.

'The inevitable changes that come to a changing world were his also.

I do insist, however, that the words which were almost his last, "he best of all is, God is with us," were the utterance of, and consummation of the purpose which had been his from Oxford days, and before.

I am loath to cease speaking of the length of Wesley's service.

"Retirement" is a fine word, and expresses a worthy social aim, this granting a worker an evening of quiet after he has served his day and generation, conceding a vantage ground from which he who has taken off the armor may look back peacefully upon the active strugglé.

Retirement, however, may be a season of dullness and deadness, of disillusionment and world-weariness.

We say that this is more or less dependent upon physical changes due to

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age; that the loss of idealism in a retired leader means nothing except that the springs of vitality have run low.

This is not always the whole truth.

The fading of the ideal may be owing to the fact that the leader has compromised here or there, not on mere nonessentials but on issues more important.

There is a moral ageing which does not necessarily have to do with bodily conditions, but with the sheer length of service.

One man grows old—and that suddenly—by yielding a moral value because he impatiently desires a quick result.

Another, for the opposite reason: he has worked so long upon ideal methods that he gives up any hope of success through them. Thus he begins to compromise,

"doing," as he says, "the best I can under the circumstances." Now, John Wesley was one of the most practically-minded religious leaders the Church has ever seen.

He was perfectly willing to act on what we today call the pragmatic method of testing a belief by its actual consequences.

Moreover, John Wesley grew old physically, and knew it. He finally set down a description of symptoms which he knew and called the marks of old age. January 1, 1790: "I am now an old man, decayed from head to foot. My eyes are dim; my right hand shakes much; my mouth is hot and dry every morning.

I have a lingering fever almost every day; my motion is weak and slow.

However, blessed be God, I do not slack my labor.

I can preach and work still."

Yet the ageing of the body did not mean any loosening of hold on the ideal.

Of course there are those who give much credit for John Wesley's success to the excellence of the body which nature had dowered him, and toa mental poise which came from physical soundness.

'This judgment is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

There was excellence of body and there was exactness of physical balance, but body and mind acted and reacted upon each other.

The mind worked upon the body; the steadiness of grasp upon Wesley's primary beliefs kept the body steady. No matter how splendidly endowed Wesley's body may have been, it could not have run so steadily for eighty-eight years if it had not been under control of asuperb mind. More than once he seemed near the end because of desperate illness and came back, that too in spite of wrong methods of treating the disease, through his sheer determination to have it so.

It is relevant and necessary to lay emphasis on Wesley's length of service because of the oft-recurring tendency among those who quote him to disparage "service." In the movement to celebrate

Wesley's Aldersgate experience the emphasis was twisted askew,

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and the impression left that the significant factors with Wesley were "experiences." We read of the futility of "service" and of the importance of getting into communion with God after the pattern of Wesley. We would not for an instant minimize the emotional stirring in the life of Wesley—Aldersgate or any other—but what was the fruit of those uplifts? What but the longest and richest sweep of service Methodism has ever seen?

'Those who exhort us to read Wesley to get ourselves free from all this running about, and working in committees and conferences, and striving to uplift the world, would better take the first months of their freedom to read the Journal and Letters.

If they retort that all Wesley's activity came out of the "quickenings," the reply is that indeed it did, and that, if like results do not now come out of such inner happenings as those we praise in Wesley, there is no use in trying to make those re-enforcements genuinely Wesleyan.

We may get puzzled as to the witness of inner assurance, and torture our minds as to just what the "witness" was to Wesley himself, but we cannot have the slightest doubt as to the witness of his experience to the world over eighty years of unceasing, unflagging performance of good deeds toward men.

We have frequently considered some of the abiding results of Wesley's work in the world; but, for the sake of showing some directions of the development of his own life, we instance two or three forms of growth which did involve change. Suppose we pick up a thread dropped in an earlier chapter and refer again to the remark of Wesley in his old age that, as he recalled how Charles and he used to preach that a man could not be saved without being conscious of salvation, he wondered that the people did not stone them.

This could only mean that he came to a conviction that his earlier preaching as to assurance was extreme and absurd, as, indeed, it was.

It assumed a knowledge of the working of the soul, of the forces which condition assurance, and a right to pass judgment, beyond anything vouchsafed to man.

What Wesley meant by saying that the people might have cast stones at them was that such preaching was a violation of that good sense which the ordinary man is quite as likely to possess as any teacher, no matter how devout or learned.

Wesley's final remark was an instance of intellectual and moral seasoning, if not ripening. The first years of the Wesley ministry carried the uncompromising spirit to the extreme. Everything had to be all or none; especially everything had to be just what the doctrine called for.

Here was a lamentable lack of

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

perspective in putting together nonessentials and essentials.

The essential in salvation was to have a purpose set to do the will of God.

'Assurance' and "witness" have always been confusing terms, in view of the fact that many of the finest souls in their service of men have never been willing to lay claim to any such assurance as Wesley and his early followers taught.

It is much more important to have men so saved in manner and degree that the neighbors bear witness to the salvation, than to have the professedly saved man doing the witnessing himself in verbal testimony. The fundamental requisite is to do the will of God.

Now, Wesley saw this as the years went by. His words about the people and the stoning meant a firmer grasp on his truth at the latter end of his life than at the beginning.

It is only one in such firm hold of his convictions as Wesley who can make such a statement as that which we have been considering.

In the earlier years Wesley would probably have been afraid to speak thus: afraid of the effect on those whom he was striving to convert; afraid of the effect on himself. The oft-quoted remark did not mean that Wesley held his teaching more loosely in hand as he came into years, but that he had learned what to hold.

He never ceased to preach assurance, but he ceased to be dogmatic about it.

As a further instance, there is his remark, already quoted, that he had ceased to be certain about almost everything except what he could establish by the Scriptures.

Here, again, one might suppose that the life was becoming lax as its springs of energy sank lower. The tenacity of Wesley's hold increased on the things he did know.

It is indeed sad and tragic when a mind, which has always been positive, becomes almost wholly negative as it draws toward its earthly close.

It was not so with Wesley.

His grip was closing in on what was supremely worth while.

It was as if a traveler about to embark for a foreign port should discover that most of the luggage, which he had carried about with him in the land which he was to leave, would be of no use to him in the country to which he was to sail.

It would be a mercy to see that it was of no further value. Take even the lapse of time; the body of formal knowledge which Wesley possessed is of slight value in this twentieth century, and our similar knowledge will have worth only to an antiquarian two centuries hence. Here is where the power to forget, both in the individual and in society, becomes a blessing.

"The best of all is, God is with us." When a man tells what is best in his thought, we know pretty well his scale of values. We know what he seeks

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to keep and what he is willing to drop. One of the blessed privileges toa man of the Wesley type is that of dropping off the nonessentials.

Otherwise the native tendency to positiveness, not to say dogmatism, would deprive the utterance of all perspective and proportion.

As it was, enough dogmatism even as to the insignificant clung to Wesley to the end.

Speaking of persistence of beliefs and notions, we cannot but notice how long ideas which are false and at the same time trivial or barbarous will cling to first-rate minds, probably because those minds have taken them as of the social heritage—matters of course.

There is, for example, the idea of hell, if not literally conceived, at least almost literally. One of the strangest phenomena in human history is just this: that natures naturally kindly will hold even for an hour, not to say a lifetime, notions as to punishment which would make God, the Judge, a savage. Las Casas, the apostle to the Indians, who gave the last ounce of his strength to the alleviation of the sufferings inflicted upon the American natives by the Spaniards, who called the Indians his dear lambs, spoke in the most casual fashion of the Indians who had died without the gospel as roasting in the eternal fires!

Wesley did better than that, for he believed that a "heathen" who had died without hearing the gospel would be judged by his attitude toward whatever moral light he might have had.

Wesley, however, for a long time seems to have assumed that children were born under the wrath of God.

We ask indulgence as we record again that along toward the close of his life he saw a group of children at play and remarked that it was hard for him to believe that they were under the divine wrath— which meant, of course, that he did not believe they were under that wrath. Then there was the notion that if one breaks the law in one item, one breaks the whole law, a Pauline legalism which went unchallenged for centuries.

'Together with it was the accompanying idea that all unrepentant sinners went wholesale into hell without a chance for a "hearing," and the failure to protest adequately against the presentation of the gospel of love in such terms that men were to be compelled to love by the threat of virtually external and artificial penalty.

All this Wesley accepted, as far as we can see, without registering much shock.

He did war against the Calvinistic barbarities, but the general hardness of the orthodoxy of the time he did not declare against, at least not directly.

Lecky has ground for saying that Wesley preached a religion of terrors. Yet, with his positive nature, he adopted or naturally gravitated toward

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

the definite preaching of divine love.

Even if he did take the accepted notion about hell as a literal matter of course, he himself preached something else.

Probably Wesley would have been scandalized if anyone had challenged him as to his soundness on a literal hell, but nevertheless he personally made little use of it.

Indeed, if we are to judge by the one hundred and fifty sermons Wesley left to us, his inheritance of the doctrine of a physical hell in which the orthodox of the time believed was something which he was practically allowing to "become atrophied by disuse," as the biologists say.

A most admirable trait in Wesley was an increasing hopefulness as to particular and general conditions as time went by.

To his mother he wrote as early as 1733 that he would not give up hope of any man short of ten years effort for him, and he held fast to this belief till the end. We may repeat that he had supposed, when he began his work, that the Methodist momentum would be spent in thirty years.

Before he died he declared that the force was continuing unabated because the people had learned to give so sacrificingly to Christian causes.

It is true that at times the old longing for the life at Oxford came back to him that he might there seek his God in peace and without any distraction, but this was only for the moment.

His satisfying joy was in his incessant activity, hardships and all—this too in the experience of one who in 1746 had written that he was tempted to be a philosophical sluggard rather than an itinerant preacher.

Wesley's determination to lead Methodism himself remained in strength to the end—if it was determination.

It was indeed not so much a determination as a taking for granted.

He did rule to the end.

The ability to do this was an immense tribute to the hold he had won over the people and to his own powers.

For, during his lifetime, the temper of the people of England, at least of the class among whom he worked, changed noticeably. When

Wesley was born, the class from whom he afterward drew his fol_ lowers had a habit of obedience. They seemed to like to obey.

The Industrial Revolution began from the first to alter, or at least to modify this, so that, by the time the Revolution got well going, there was almost a different class in England.

'Those reared on farms and in villages had high respect for the station of the upper classes, and landlords were looked upon as in these upper classes.

When those who would otherwise have lived out their days as tenants moved into factory towns, their old regard for position

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ceased to cast a spell over them.

They themselves did not quite fit into England's social scheme. They married and reared children in the factory towns and virtually became a class by themselves.

In spite of their hardships they came to a measure of independence in thought and attitude.

While Wesley does not say much about it himself, it is manifest that Methodism throve best in the new industrial centers.

At least he does not seem to think these classes were in so deplorable a plight as that of the farmers.

Students of the eighteenth century have a good déal to say about the happier lot of the worker on the farm as compared with that of the factory employee, inasmuch as the former has before him the beauties of nature for his companions and. the forces of nature for his coworkers.

That is the way it looks to a writer in a study.

In truth the farm worker, with no brighter future before him than he had in Wesley's day, is likely to live through just the dull, spiritless round that Wesley described as the farmer's lot.

In all ages of history the considerable proportion of those born to an agricultural life have sought to get away from it to the city, or the town, or the sea, or to anywhere else. Anyhow, the rising class—if we can call it that—in which Wesleyanism made its longest and fastest strides, did not care as much for people of place, did not show as, much deference to the highborn as had the lower classes, so called, shown at the time when Methodism took its start.

It was harder to keep things in order and in line in dealing with the industrial groups than with any other.

Yet Wesley did this, and did it by insisting that it must be so.

It is not to be wondered at that Wesley was never willing to give up his leadership: leaders old or young are never willing todothat. 'The power must be taken from the leaders either by the working of law or by the followers refusing to follow.

The marvel is that the Methodists, more and more of whom were coming from the industrial groups, accepted Wesley's leadership.

Of course back of that pre-eminence was fully a half century of success, but that is not always decisive with a social group becoming more and more conscious of its own powers and possibilities. Aristocrat though he was, Wesley dropped remarks here and there which revealed that he was quite aware of the power of the people, and of the folly of courses which were not in harmony with their fundamental likes and dislikes.

Finally there was a ruthlessness which marked Wesley to the end: his indifference to persecutions as compared with Charles; his writing to his sister, Mrs. Hall, that "the death of your children

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

is a great instance of the goodness of God towards you. You have often mentioned to me how much of your time they took up"; his willingness to break with individuals with whom he had been associated in the work dearest to him.

It was because he put the work itself—perhaps his own estimate of the needs of the work— above everything else.

If Wesley had been a general commanding an army, he would have been, at least in one respect, of the mould of the Duke of Wellington of England and of General Grant of the United States.

In military concerns he would not have allowed personal considerations to count as against what he conceived of as the proper plan of campaign and of the execution of the plan.

Wesley's ruthlessness, indeed, was not cruelty, but it was inexorable nevertheless.

Sooner or later he broke with almost every other leader with whom he had labored.

He broke with the Moravians, with Count Zinzendorf, with William Law, with George Whitefield, with the first of his lay preachers, Thomas Maxfield; with George

Bell, though he tried to hold Bell back from fanaticisms; with John Bennet and others of the preachers with whom he had been long associated; with his wife, with Charles Wesley.

As early as 1752 Charles had written to John asking for some of the money raised by the Methodists for the support of the preachers, only to receive the reply: "You have one hundred and fifty pounds for only two persons. To take anything more from the classes seems unreasonable." Charles's money came by settlement at marriage.

I do not mean that these various ruptures were violent, but they were breaks nevertheless.

In all the above cases Wesley was probably acting for the best, if his course can be called one of positive action rather than of allowing himself to drift away from others.

The only terms on which men could work with Wesley were his terms. He felt himself divinely called to the guidance of Methodism. He did not seek the responsibility: he felt it laid upon him.

Men like this seldom raise the question as to whether they are ever called to let go their control.

In his last years Wesley declared that he had come to the place where he desired someone to help him in stationing the preachers, but this was not to be taken seriously.

In two respects the leadership of Wesley fell short.

He could not, or did not, train ""understudies" and he did not delegate authority. The circumstances, of course, were unique. Wesley had a distrust of his followers as to their ability to control Methodist affairs.

He ought to have seen that they would take more and more into their own hands after he had gone, and have sought to train leaders

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who could guide with some practice in such guidance gained under himself.

He did consider designating John Fletcher as his successor, but here again he did not leave the impression that he actually would have made this choice if Fletcher had lived.

Still, this is only our surmise, due to the frailty of Fletcher's health and to the gentleness of his character.

Wesley's opinion of Fletcher, however, does indicate the surpassing importance to Wesley of having as a successor one who, in Wesley's judgment, realized in himself the type of religious character that Methodism sought to teach to the world.

That to Wesley was all-important.

Inadequacy in physical strength, or in knowledge of how to handle men, was secondary to the highest relation to God.

A competent executive can turn over to others whatever those others can do, and reserve to himself whatever tasks he can himself best do.

One reads through the Journal and the Letters seeking for instances in which Wesley thus delegated authority, but looks practically in vain.

There were, of course, the lay preachers, but even to them Wesley allowed scant liberty as to the content of their preaching.

I was referring more especially, however, to administrative activity.

Even when Wesley recognized that the societies in America had to go ahead after the Revolution under their own authority, he found it a strain to take his hands off and accede to the control by Asbury. How amazing this was! America had achieved political independence of England.

'There were three thousand miles of sea between England and America. Wesley had in the Revolution spoken most bitterly of the colonists. Nevertheless, the ruling passion was so strong in him that the American societies had deliberately to shake off his control.

He never made his adjustments to American Methodists. Within three years of the end he had to shoot a little dart: "You do not know the state of the English Methodists.

They do not roll in money, like many of the American Methodists."

We have looked at the qualities which remained strong in Wesley to the end of his life. We pass now to some Wesleyan consequences of Methodism which have persisted through the years.

Wesley was pre-eminently a doer of the Word.

His movement must be regarded first of all for its creation of a fact-situation; it has more and more to be reckoned with in the realm of the application of the gospel to individuals and societies.

It is objected, with force, that Wesleyanism has not made large, direct contribution to religious thinking.

Who, however, can deny Wesley's independ-

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ence? At the outset of his ministry he declares that Luther "makes nothing out, clears up not one considerable difficulty, is quite shallow, muddy—and confused." Behmen, the mystic, teaches "most sublime nonsense, inimitable bombast, fustian not to be paralleled."

What Wesleyanism did and has always done, has been to force itself indirectly at least upon the attention of all those who would understand the progress of Christianity during the past two centuries.

To begin with, the achievement of Wesley may be almost said to have been the discovery of a new world of human beings in the England of the eighteenth century.

Students of that century have commented on the little stir the philosophic and theological debates of the era made on the masses of the people. The century has been characterized as deistic, and no doubt it was so far as systematic thinking went.

Until Tom Paine appeared, however, with his Age of Reason, deism was seldom heard of among the masses, to whom, before Paine, nobody had dreamed it worth while to speak philosophically.

Part of the terrific outcry against Paine was due to his ability in getting his ideas before the attention of the masses, who had been not so much purposely ignored as never thought of.

Now, Wesley had been dealing with these masses long before Paine had been heard of. He had built Methodism into a solid fact before anyone dreamed what was going on. We have said that there is not much ground for maintaining that Wesley prevented the spread of revolutionary doctrines from France into England, but he did set limits to the spread of deism in England itself. There may not have been much of formal controversial attack on deism by Methodism, but there was in Methodism a wall which hindered the spread of deism among the people.

The Methodists thwarted the deistic philosophy without even hearing of it. Deism put God at a distance; Methodism brought God near and kept him near.

'There is only one document in all Wesley's writings, voluminous as they were, that is a direct polemic against deism.

'The limits were set by the actually changed lives among thousands upon thousands of men.

There were over seventy thousand Methodists in England when Wesley died.

The evangelism had been going on through nearly two generations, and perhaps seventy thousand others had died in the Methodist faith since Wesley's career had begun. Now, a Methodist was a fact.

He was ordinarily a man who had been doing one quality of deed and had turned away from that quality of deed to a better.

He had ceased an evil life and was living an-

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other. 'These changes in the converts had transformed all the relations of their lives.

Here were facts—over seventy thousand of them; here was a fact-situation created by an organized mass which deism could not account for.

A similar effect was that of the Wesleyan Movement in bringing to an end, or at least in reducing to comparative insignificance, the eighteenth century as the so-called Age of Reason.

Through a philosophic trend the century had come to believe in the virtual omnipotence of human reason.

In the seventeenth century John Locke had taught that the human mind was a blank tablet, tabula rasa, on which impressions were made through the senses.

Such sense impressions were called primary.

'The ideas which came out of the action and reactions and interactions of the primary impressions gave rise to secondary qualities—ideas like substance, cause and effect.

'The practical effect of all this was to surrender the chief place to matter, though Locke did not intend to aid materialism.

After Locke came Berkeley, the most powerful of idealists, who pointed out that he did not need material substance to produce the sense-impressions.

If there was any way of keeping the impressions before the mind, the material substance could fall into nothingness.

Berkeley maintained that there was a way of producing the impressions.

They were symbols of ideas in the mind of God, which included all things in its grasp, and by its own activity produced the impressions upon the mind of men.

All this went forward, of course, under belief in reason which felt itself competent to lay hold on all the secrets of the universe.

Of course philosophizing was in what might be called the upper circles. The ordinary people did not know much more about Locke and Berkeley than they do today. 'The conclusions reached in these upper circles led to a doubt of everything but reason itself.

Bishop Butler, in the famous Analogy, undertook to re-establish the foundations of Christianity by the use of reason itself.

His fundamental proposition was that probability is the guide of life, and that all reasonable men order their lives by such probability.

The usual experiences of men, therefore, supply illustrations and re-enforcements of the claim that what we see of the development of the human life in this present earthly existence makes it probable that the life will go on in some other phase beyond the earthly.

So with other fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

We are constantly acting in daily life on probabilities no more conclusive than

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

those required in accepting the Biblical revelation as to the nature of God and man.

Butler laid stress on reason and made a noble contribution to religious defense.

Wesley admired the Analogy, but his comment on it was significant, namely, that the argument was too abstruse for the ordinary reader to follow.

The strict reasoner of the age pronounced much of the Butler reasoning loose, and especially found the "probable" as the practically likely confused with the merely possible.

So that Butler was not easy enough for the plain man, and not stiff enough for the trained, virtually professional thinker.

Nevertheless, Butler has undying merit.

By making probability, or at bottom practical certainty, the guide of life he was doing just about what Wesley was doing.

Wesley's position was that we can be as certain of God as we can of anything else, and Butler's contention was virtually the same. We would not for an instant, however, seem to imply that Butler would have countenanced any such phrasing.

It was he who, as Bishop of Bristol, told Wesley that he considered Wesley's teachings of direct revelations from God asa "'very horrid thing." It was he too who all but ordered Wesley out of his diocese, and it was to him also that Wesley was possibly more defiant than toward any other official of the Church of England. Butler sought to use the weapon of reason in an age of reason against the assaults of reason upon Christianity.

His work has recently been admirably treated in Joseph Butler and the Age of Reason, by E. C. Mossner.

The powerful attack on Reason came from David Hume. We have said that Berkeley urged against materialism that, if the sensations upon the mind could be produced by any other agent, nobody needed matter to account for them.

Berkeley accounted for them as produced by the immediate agency of God.

With unsparing logic Hume sought to show that neither materialism nor idealism was needed. The sensations themselves are the facts; they are here with a propensity to feign substance, cause, and all other forces beyond themselves.

This was skepticism of reason itself.

Hume personally was and is something of an enigma. He used to say that, as he sat down to a game of cribbage with a friend, after working on his philosophy, all his reasonings seemed strangely unreal.

There is no ground for suspecting insincerity in him, but there is basis for wondering if he took his skepticism as seriously as did his readers.

Professor A. E. Taylor, of Edinburgh University, feels that there are even traces of a belief in theism in much that

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Hume wrote.

That may be.

Hume's attack was not specifically in the religious realm. 'The attack was not adequately met in direct reply until Thomas Hill Green, a hundred years after Hume, gave the world his definitive and decisive examination of Hume's skepticism.

The most important result of that skepticism was that he "woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber," to use Kant's own expression, and Kant moved into that deeper channel of philosophic exploration which has influenced, the world of abstract reflection ever since.

What has all this to do with Wesley?

Just this: that Wesley had created a fact-situation which the Hume skepticism did not touch. Wesley taught a reliance upon emotion—upon feeling in its upper reaches—as the method of communion with the Divine. Inasmuch as the Wesleyan Movement was not founded upon Reason of the type which gave its name as a description to the eighteenth century, skepticism of Reason did not touch that foundation. Here, again, the defense of Christianity was not, technically speaking, a defense at all, but a witness to experience in life itself.

Coming back to the figure of the seventy thousand Methodists in England at the close of Wesley's life, we may pertinently ask how many in England ever read Hume's skepticism?

The most popular, as being most readily understood, of all Hume's work was his assault on the credibility of miracles.

Probably not more than a few thousands of people in the England of his time ever read that.

The more important work, the exposition of his thoroughgoing skepticism, was likely not read by more than a few hundreds.

If Wesley found Butler too hard for the people to understand, it is interesting to speculate on what he would have said of Hume. In strict philosophy Hume was important.

In the actual religious currents of his time not especially so, for the Methodists were manifestly in possession of a life-force which was changing the temper of England.

To show how far the Methodist Revival was removed from abstract reasoning we need only remind ourselves that the most potent single factor in the Wesleyan success as a popular Movement was the singing of the Methodists.

The content of the songs, in spite of much theological overweight, was dignified to the point of nobility, and the tunes were peculiarly fitted to mass singing. John admitted that some of Charles's hymns were "bad" and "mean, but on the whole they had justness and strength of thought and beauty of expression." They were not intended to be solos, or selections for quartets, or sextets, or choruses, but for congregations—for multi-

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

tudes of singing people. They did not depend upon previous training in singing. Anybody could fall in and march along. The songs of Methodism were not purposely intended to counteract a skeptical tendency in philosophy. They were the irresistible spontaneous gushing forth of new-found springs of life, and they did create a situation of which philosophy—or reason, to use the term current in the eighteenth century—had to take account.

The fact thus brought forth into the life of the century could not easily be brushed aside.

"By their fruits ye shall know them." The singing came out of lives which had been turned from transgression to righteousness, out of despair to hope, out of dullness to alertness.

An entire social group had been spoken into newness of life. Men had been given something to do, something to think about, something to sing about.

With all his faults, Wesley was one of the mighty forces making for a greater certainty in the eighteenth century. i Just as there are those who insist that the Methodist Movement gave nothing to the world in the sphere of intellectual creation, so there are also those who will have it that the Movement did not have any significance for the revelation and contemplation of beauty.

Against this may be set the judgment of the Hammonds, who were not overfriendly to Methodism, to the effect that the songs of the Methodists were a worthy contribution to the aesthetic life of the bleak age. Some of the songs were genuine poetry: and John Wesley considered himself quite a critic on such matters.

Witness his remark in the Journal for 1756 that "'it is as impossible to write a fine poem in French as to make fine music on the jew'sharp'"—which rather disqualifies John as a judge.

Most of the tunes had elements of stirring beauty.

Words and music made a supreme requisite as revelations of the beautiful; they satisfied widespread cravings; they expressed moods altogether fitted to the people and their times; they tended to carry on out into action, without which, as William James says, the arousing of deep emotions may be worse than useless.

'There was a beauty about the singing which, perhaps, we have been too slow to recognize. The present-day interest in and emphasis on community singing 1s In a measure a tribute to the singing of Methodism.

If such singing ever becomes a lost art, something irreplaceable will be lost with it, even if we are not concerned with anything beyond the expression of beauty. The preaching places of the Methodists could not compare with the churches, even of the villages, for beauty—certainly

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not with the cathedrals—but, on the other hand, no musical expressions of that or any later day could compare in sheer moving quality of beauty with the melody of the Methodist hymns; democratic in that every one could find a place, his place, in it and throw into it all there was of himself.

If there is beauty in the sweep of wind through tree tops, in the beat and rote of sea waves, in the roar of a cataract, much more was there beauty in the songs of hundreds of Methodists. pouring forth in sheer excess of joy their vital tides of onrushing spiritual vigor and purpose.

Looking at the Methodist Movement as an outstanding social fact, or force, it may be fair to say that it was a reaction against the overemphasis on reason.

This will do as a partial explanation, but only as partial.

In physics, action and reaction, we are told, are equal. If we call Methodism a reaction, it was more than equal to the force of reason over against which it has been placed.

It was indeed opposed to the emphasis on reason, but it was life on its own account.

It is not to be explained merely as a reaction against a school of thought or tendencies in philosophy.

The majority of Methodists had never heard their century called the Age of Reason.

The Wesleyan Movement was not so much reaction as action.

In trying to keep our bearings as we think of Methodism as a social fact, we must not go so far as to minimize the place of reason in Wesley's own thinking. Wesley's own struggles, especially in the earlier years, were largely thought-struggles.

He was himself a product of the eighteenth century.

He could not write a sermon without working to an outline almost resembling the old-time scholasticism.

In his speaking he was systematic to a wearisome degree.

One cannot help wondering what the audiences made of Wesley's points in his sermons if he announced the numerical divisions as he printed them.

It is hard enough now to tell why some of the divisions were made and numbered.

Wesley never disparaged reason as such. What he did was to recognize data not given by reason itself, the data, however, to be worked over and interpreted by reason.

Hume used reason to overthrow reason, to establish total skepticism.

Wesley used reason to make manifest the limits of reason, to bring to light something given which came from over and beyond reason.

The method of Hume, whether so intended or not, was to beget skepticism; the method of Wesley, to use reason to beget faith.

Yet there is justice in the claim that Wesley's disparagement of reason did harm.

The contribution of Methodism to education,

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS-AND BEYOND

especially to what we now call adult education, was immeasurable.

Wesley was responsible for a lifting of the general intelligence of England, which was probably a better service than making himself clearer on the claims of abstract reasoning, but the effect of his total attitude came near being a disparagement of reason. He had a sneer at the British Museum because all the contents would be burned up at the last day. It is, of course, fair to point out that he was himself highly educated in a foremost educational institution, that he was scholarly enough to write grammars of foreign languages, including the Greek, that he was himself proficient in the solider learning of his day, but he did so put his emphasis that he practically minimized the place of reason. Iam not at all speaking of his intention.

It may be that this was inevitable. Wesley did not encourage wide reading among his people. He was willing that they should read, but he virtually chose the readings. The Christian Library, in fifty volumes—published at a loss of fifty pounds of his own money, by the way—selections of religious literature made by Wesley himself, is a monument of pedagogical discernment so far as adults are concerned.

It brought the teachings of the primitive Church through the works of leaders down to the tables of the humblest

Methodists.

As I write these lines, there is before me a set of the Library published in 1749.

On the inside of the cover is a note by a good Methodist that in three years he had found time to read all the volumes through; all his reading having been done before seven o'clock in the morning.

All the material in these fifty volumes is good, thoroughly orthodox, not calculated to raise question about anything in religion. There is published, for example, the classic of Baxter's Saint's Rest. It would never have occurred to Wesley, by the way, to publish any of Baxter's philippics against rackrenting landlords, or anything about Baxter's sufferings through persecution for his religious convictions.

Some of the books he recommended for the reading of young ladies in boarding schools were a fright—Rollin's Ancient History, one of the terrors of my own boyhood, and Malebranche.

The truth appears to be that Wesley's impulse to leadership extended far beyond merely practical affairs. He sought to take in hand the thinking of his followers.

His confidence in himself as a shaper of their ideas was supreme.

From this point his leadership assumes more than a mere personal and biographical importance, and has to be regarded as a social, and in England, a national phe-

JOHN WESLEY

nomenon.

Here was one man practically telling tens of thousands of followers what they should read.

Matthew Arnold once said of the United States, as we have already had occasion to note, that one mark of the intellectual inferiority of this nation was that so many of the inhabitants were Methodists, and that Methodists were followers of a third-rate mind.

The normal supposition is that, when a writer or an editor sets forth his views to the public, the readers can take them or leave them—as, indeed, they can.

Such was not quite the situation with the Methodists. To a determinative degree the channels of their thinking were laid out before them.

It is not exact to imagine Wesley as merely releasing ideas for them to take what they would.

This is to say that he seemed to distrust the ability of his followers to do any thinking on their own account.

His fear of their making blunders if they sought to govern themselves—I refer especially to any self-government by Methodists as a whole—had some foundation, for they had been without political training. Whether this is true on the intellectual side is more of a question.

Wesley did not encourage his preachers to speak on any themes outside what were conceived of as the specifically religious.

He himself reserved the privilege to say anything he pleased about anything; but he did not have, so far as we can see, any intention of sharing this privilege with anyone. The important controversial theme in his time was Calvinism and, of course, that called forth leaders whom it was not possible to ignore. The Calvinists virtually separated themselves from Wesley.

The main question is whether Wesley's influence, in a somewhat contemptuous attitude toward reason, marked the course of Methodism in any harmful extent.

We cannot resist the conclusion that it did, though this may have been inevitable.

While Wesley took himself as superior to the people whom he led, he was steeped in their presuppositions and prejudices. We have had occasion before to remark on the belief of the founder of Methodism in witchcraft.

It is a curious psychological question as to what this belief of Wesley in witchcraft fundamentally meant. The most casual reader of modern knowledge about the way human minds work will often raise question as to just what a man means when he says that he believes thus and so, and this too without any suspicion as to the sincerity of the professed belief. In Wesley's utterance on witchcraft and kindred themes he felt that the authority of the Bible was involved. With equal force, however, it may be

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

avowed that the primitive tendency toward superstition, which was native to him and re-enforced by the masses among whom he worked, was speaking through him. In any event, in these and similar matters, the mighty current of Wesley's leadership moved in the wrong direction, always with qualifications.

He had to cease to allow one of his first lay preachers to work in his societies because of Cennick's fear of ghosts and of seeing the devil.

If he had been content to utter some beliefs as his own personal concerns, the results might have been different; but he spoke them all forth as if they were deeply significant to him.

Inasmuch as the Methodist societies were almost his own private possessions, his personal beliefs fastened themselves upon his followers so firmly as to tinge darkly an entire social situation.

So that it will not do to say that the criticism of Methodism as an anti-rational, not to say irrational, social force can be met by pointing to Wesley's training and scholarship.

In some ways all this weight counted on the wrong side. Leadership sometimes exacts heavy social costs, especially leadership of large masses, for the followers are not and cannot always be discriminating. They are likely to take everything in the leader as about on the same plane.

Ifa Wesley, under whom they have attained to inner peace and power, goes out and measures the extent of the harm wrought by a landslide, or what looks like an earthquake, and tells his followers that the occurrence is a threat of God against sinful men, they believe him.

If he tells them that the physical contortions of men under deep conviction of sin are the direct manifestation of the presence and power of the devil, they believe that.

It requires the selection and sifting of some generations of study to reveal just what has helped men in the influence of a leader, or what in his teaching can be adapted to changing social pressures, and what has done harm.

For example, Wesley told his followers to get all they could, save all they could, give all they could, by which last advice he meant: Give all to the Lord, except what was

- morally due to dependents.

Before he died, Wesley modified this to warrant setting aside the capital which might be necessary for the conduct of any business in which the Methodist might be engaged. That opened a wide door. By the end of the first third of the nineteenth century not much was left of Wesley's threefold injunction except to earn money honestly and spend it in ways that could be employed in the name of the Lord Jesus. Practically, the directions given in the sermon on "The Use of Money" were of

JOHN WESLEY

more consequence than the threefold adage, which is more famous, for that adage could not stand the pressure of changing social demands, especially among the Methodists.

Students of the history of the early Church tell us that the effective force in deciding what scriptures were preserved was the result of their use in the churches.

Those teachers have lost all touch with actual social processes who will have it that the churches created the New Testament literature outright; but they are in close touch with those processes when they tell us that the churches determined, perhaps unconsciously, but nevertheless actually, just what should be handed down to the future.

'There was no longer a need, after a generation or two, for the reading of certain letters from church leaders, or for the singing of certain hymns. The same process has gone forward in Methodism, except that, through the organization which Wesley left, the standards of Methodism, chiefly the sermons, were purposely kept to the fore for over a century after their last revision by their author.

Those of us who are older can remember the entire sets of the sermons that used to stand on the shelves of Methodist preachers, or of the more earnest Methodist laymen. I myself can recall farmhouses in my youth on whose shelves Wesley's sermons occupied the place of honor, except when they were in use, which was often.

The good they accomplished was immense, but they did, by their overpositiveness, a positiveness which belonged as much to Wesley as his face, lead to an impatience of reasoning, reasoned though the sermons themselves were, and shut in the minds of the readers to narrow windows.

It was the selection of themes and ideas by Wesley himself that counted much with his followers.

John Pawson, one of Wesley's preachers, was, as already related, that vigorous brother typical of Methodist narrowness, who saw that a volume of Shakespeare, annotated by Wesley himself, was burned after Wesley's death.

Probably Wesley's notes on Shakespeare were of no special value, except for the light they might have thrown on Wesley himself; but John Pawson was just about the last man among the Methodists who should have been granted an opinion on such a question.

There is nothing that we know about him that warrants the belief that he had himself ever read a line of Shakespeare. Now, this judgment is just enough, but it overlooks that what training Pawson had he got chiefly from Wesley himself.

I mean that he was close enough to his leader to catch his measures and standards of emphasis. It is true that Wesley allowed himself readings and studies that

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

he would not have permitted to his followers.

From this angle of view, Pawson was probably justified in putting the notes in the fire.

The faithful might not have paid much attention to them, however.

They did not belong to the class of books that Wesley had trained the people to read.

It is strange, however, that, after he had been at work for nearly twenty years of preaching, Wesley expelled six for reading Behman and Law.

It was the hymns of the Methodists that made the popular impression.

Here the selective choice of the people was distinctly at work. The congregations kept their faith and enthusiasm alive by the singing. The dark side of the picture is that the congregations, even while singing of the great hope of the Christian, so long kept a disproportionate stress on the terrors of possible eternal loss.

The saved soul indeed stood on a narrow neck of land, rejoicing in eternal salvation but remembering always the possibility of falling off into hell.

Finally such hymns did sink into disuse and were allowed to drop out of memory. Then, too, a low notion of humanity, altogether out of harmony with Methodism, lasted a long time before it could be cast out.

Dr. William Rice of the New England Conference, father of Professor William North Rice, of Wesleyan

University, once worked on the revision of The Methodist Hymnal.

He was instrumental in having stricken from the Hymnal scores of characterizations of man as a worm.

Just what made that word a favorite with the early Methodists there is no telling.

The term certainly did not come from the study of the New Testament. How the Wesleys came to tolerate such a word is a puzzle.

There was nothing in the emphasis of Wesley to predispose the Methodists toward the newer views of the universe which so expanded human thought in the eighteenth century.

Wesley did not accept the Copernican view of the universe, which is not to be wondered at, for it took two hundred and fifty years for that view to attain at all general acceptance. Wesley did not accept Newton's more important theories.

This is not to be wondered at either.

Newton died in 1727, when Wesley was twenty-four years old.

There was no reason why Wesley should have been especially impressed by Newton, unless it was by the experiments in optics.

Newton's work was highly technical and mathematical.

Naturally, ++ at first did not attract much attention.

The Methodists would not have made much of the Newtonian theory of gravitation, not much more than they would have made of the binomial theorem and the calculus.

We are likely to forget that in those days an-

JOHN WESLEY

nouncements of the most far-reaching changes in men's conception of the universe only slowly made their way into the understanding of the people. There was nothing in Wesley's utterance or attitude that would have predisposed his followers to a friendly or even an interested attitude toward theories of the physical universe which are today accepted as of common knowledge.

About all that can be said is that the Methodist organization was not so ironclad as to prove irresistible to the changes of social climate as these came along. Wesley was as scornful as any theological dogmatist of the claims of science, especially when these appeared to conflict with the commonly accepted teaching of the Scriptures, let us say; but he did not create in Methodism such a temper of resistance to the spread of scientific ideas as to leave Methodism far in the rear, as intelligent men accepted views of the universe which on their first announcement seemed revolutionary.

In the relation to expanding views of the physical world Wesley left the doors of Methodism closed but not locked.

While we are speaking of Newton, we may note that Wesley was not more off the track in some of his views than was Newton.

The immortal mathematician, whose work remained without any important modification till Einstein appeared a few years ago, was through his mathematical task at a comparatively early age and thereafter gave himself to study of Biblical matters of no moment whatever, reaching conclusions which could be as easily ridiculed as any of Wesley's whimsies.

'The difference was, of course, that Newton was not playing any considerable part before the people of England.

Only a few, comparatively speaking, had heard even of his laws of motion, and fewer still knew what they meant.

Those who did know of him thought of him as the Director of the Mint; Wesley was known by sight all over England. From 1744 on to the end Wesley complains of his workers that they do not often enough send to him stories of remarkable conversions and remarkable triumphs of confidence on deathbeds.

All this is open and aboveboard, with no attempt at concealment whatever—completely sincere on Wesley's part. Wesley estimated these experiences as the surest signs of the Divine Presence, and yet he had a keen instinct for what was most potent in impressing the minds of the largest number.

He had an uncanny discernment of what was an extraordinary development of the ordinary, and what was extraordinary as a departure from the ordinary.

The result is that, after two

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS-AND BEYOND

hundred years when one speaks to us of a "Methodistic" experience, we know pretty well what is meant.

We look once more at some of the limitations under which Wesley worked and some of the limitations within which his system has moved since his death.

This theme of the limitations upon the growth of institutions has never yet been given the amount of attention it deserves.

Do institutions resemble organic forms, which follow laws which appear to determine the size which they shall reach?

Look out over the tops of the trees of a forest and note how slight is the range variations of height reached by the mature growths. Why is it that of millions upon millions of men the range of the variation height of the adults isso small? Do men in their institutional activities move thus within limits? Wesley believed that rhythm marked even Methodism's revival efforts.

In 1783 he wrote in a letter that "a swift increase is almost always followed by a decrease equally swift," and in 1787: "After an amazing flow we must expect ebb."

Without attempting any theories as to the hidden forces limiting the size of institutions, we can see some factors about whose action we need have little doubt.

It is thus with Wesley's influence in Methodism. We can understand better what he did if we look at some things he did not, or perhaps could not, do.

To start with the somewhat artificial, we may note one or two geographical considerations.

Wesley made over a score of journeys to Ireland.

His work there has not been considered on the same plane of success as that in England or America.

The Cambridge History of the Eighteenth Century dismisses the career of Wesley in Ireland summarily, with the remark that Wesley accomplished but little in Ireland. He accomplished enough, however, to make him think it was worth while to go to Ireland repeatedly—that, too, in spite of manifold hardship and some persecution. Through the years the work in Ireland has endured.

He was not deceived as to the Irish, however.

In 1750 he wrote that murder was a venial sin in Ireland.

What the criticism means is that Wesley could not achieve sweeping success in a Roman Catholic country.

Even the Catholics came out in unusual numbers to hear him, but he did not win adherents to his society from them. This may have been due somewhat to his opposition to toleration for the Roman Catholics in England, though in some respects and at some times, notably in 1741, he was charged with receiving large remittances from Roman

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Catholics in Spain. When his nephew, Samuel, planned to join the Roman Catholic Church, John wrote to him as if he were departing into outer darkness.

Still, it would not have been much different if Wesley's attitude had been friendliness itself.

"The Roman Catholic Church has always been proof against direct persuasion by other branches of Christianity.

What has happened is that the positive insistence upon faith, and not ecclesiastical good works, has brought a vitality to Roman Catholic life which it might otherwise have lacked. Many of us who think that the contribution of the Reformation to religion is to be seen only in Protestantism itself have failed to notice that the Reformation led to the doing away in the Roman

Church of many of the abuses which called forth the Reformation, and gave Rome herself a new lease on life.

The truth is that the Roman Church in Ireland took hold of the lives of its believers from more angles than did the Methodist societies.

It could throw around its members an atmosphere which Methodism could not produce, at least in the early stages of its career.

'The Roman Church was able to bring to bear upon children influences which Methodism could not rival, and was more skillful in its appeals to children than were Wesley and his preachers.

In Scotland also Wesley did not have extraordinary success. In 1771 he wrote that McNab, one of his preachers, must be lost to common sense to preach against perseverance in Scotland.

He wrote in 1774 that the Scots are terrible critics. He did indeed send some of his preachers there, and even ordained two or three to perform the rites of the Church there. Among them, John Pawson had full clerical rights for a time. When he came back to England and had to take off his "bands," he did so in no very pious mood.

Wesley would have denied that the Methodist labors in Scotland were a failure.

''Failure'' is indeed too strong a word, but the success was limited.

Here again Wesley had to meet religious doctrines and practices which were the outcome of generations of church experiences. The Scotch temperament did not warm easily to the enthusiasm of the Methodists, and could not adjust itself readily to putting religious stress on inner conviction and awareness rather than on acceptance of dogma. Wesleyan success depended upon awakening in hearers a feeling of need—a spiritual miracle to which the Wesleyans found themselves unequal in Scotland.

In long-settled communities, among fixed religious institu-

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

tions, Wesley could make headway only slowly.

The mass of his converts came from among those whom we should call unchurched.

In trying to hold his people fast to the Church of England, much of Wesley's difficulty was due to his having to deal with persons who had never had anything to do with the Church of England.

The Methodist society was the only religious organization they had known.

So in Scotland the religious conditions, organizationally speaking, were too firmly set for any wide effects of Methodism.

The success of Methodism in the American colonies, and afterward in the new lands to the American west, was due to the movement's getting into new fields where the institutions were not too solidified. The persistency of religious institutions is remarkable.

Where in America the first settlers were Congregational, or Baptist, or Episcopalian, or Roman Catholic, there these types of organization abide in more or less of strength to this day.

In America George Whitefield did not make any appreciable gains for Methodism as such.

His work was in re-enforcing the churches already established.

I am not thinking of the Methodism which is now an established institution in America, which moves along as other churches do, chiefly through holding children born in Methodist homes and in winning those brought in through the church school, but of the movement in the days when it still had on it the impress which made it most fitting to call it Wesleyan.

Here it may be appropriate to say that looking at the characteristic Methodist procedure, if not policy, which "spreads" rather than concentrates, leading to results often superficial, we cannot fail to see that the superficiality of the work of Methodism was to be expected in a religious effort whose avowed aim was to "spread."

The result has been to cover a wide extent of thin cultivation, leaying to the after times to dig more deeply into the soil.

Now, this predominantly extensive result was foreign to the spirit of John Wesley.

He did not have overmuch of missionary spirit in the present-day almost technical sense.

As late as 1783 he called the preachers together to discuss missions to the East Indies and ''decided there is no call thither yet.'"" When he said that the world was his parish he meant he would speak wherever he pleased.

In whatever part he was he would declare salvation.

He was thorough in his own search for the highest possible type of religious experience and in his insistence upon such search by his followers. Nobody can look through the earlier years of Wesley's life and fail to see

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the desperate thoroughness with which he sought perfection.

If anything, the criticism could be urged that he tried to carry the spiritual quest too far into details, often getting his accent on trifles of no moral consequence.

The same thoroughness marked him as an organizer.

He knew nothing of what present-day ecclesiastical criticism calls the padding of statistics. He would ask for the lists of the members of the Methodist society wherever he went, and then, by personal

Visitation of the members, would determine whether he ought to continue to carry names upon the lists where no fruit of righteous living was manifest.

He was altogether open in declaring results that must have been disheartening.

Ardent as was his devotion to the preaching of what he called Christian perfection, he admitted time and again that the results were so meager as to cause him to ask whether the preachers should not cease preaching upon this theme.

No matter what we may think about Wesley's idea of perfection, we cannot help a tinge of the feeling of pathos as we read in his last writings how few there were among the Methodists who could be said to have achieved any conspicuous success in the search for the highest religious experience. How significant it is that Wesley knew their number with almost absolute exactness!

There is some reason to believe that Wesley planned the spreading method, for the sake of getting a given area covered as soon as possible. He seldom planned anything far ahead, but he could not help seeing the significance of the response of numbers as such.

He had to give himself to the message that would reach the most hearers.

'Take just one item: the worth of every individual soul in the sight of God, his surpassing achievement when masses did not know whether they had any souls or not, or whether those souls had any significance before whatever God there might be. Wesley never spoke of the Methodists as being other than a minority group, with a limited and restricted aim, in the midst of a larger group. If this seems to introduce a divisive spirit into the Church, let it be remembered that nothing is more divisive than a uniformity and sameness which finally breaks, or at least cracks, of its own weight.

The limitations under which Wesley was willing to work indicated that the best course for a society is to get its own view and practice out into full expression.

If the united Church, when it comes, is made up of societies as constituent organs, each organ will have to serve the whole by being fully what it is and by cherishing, as Wesley did, a charitable spirit

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

toward other organs.

In the days to come the united Church, if it renders service at all in the social realms, will have to find place for prophetic voices coming out of minorities, which will disturb the peace of the Church as a whole.

Wesley knew that making his society as radically distinctive as it was, insisting on its running true to itself, maintaining that those who could not fit into Methodism were free to go elsewhere, he had to recognize like rights in other groups.

All this means that the founder of Methodism pointed the way toward any church union worth having.

Wesley avowed that he was not a dissenter, though his ancestors had been spirited dissenters.

Dissent meant opposition to the Church, and Wesley believed in and was loyal to the Church.

He felt that the English Church was failing just because it was not welcoming the society which could do it the most good. Wesley's narrowness was that merely of the cutting edge. It had to have weight back of it to give the edge drive and penetration.

By his being himself the center around which Methodism could so largely mass itself, he found the needed weight.

One other limitation I have already mentioned more than once: the limitation which came out of the class to whom Wesley preached.

He did not get far with the more privileged groups.

I put here an excerpt from Horace Walpole, which shows the temper of the upper classes toward Methodism:

To the Earl of Strafford Strawberry Hill, July 5, 1761.

My dear Lord, .

. The apostle Whitefield is come to some shame: he went to Lady Huntingdon lately, and asked for forty pounds for some distressed saint or other.

She said she had not so much money in the house, but would give it him the first time she had. He was very pressing, but in vain.

At last he said, "There's your watch and trinkets, you don't want such vanities; I will have that."

She would have put him off: but he persisting, she said, "Well, if you must have it, you must."

About a fortnight afterwards, going to his house, and being carried into his wife's chamber, among the paraphernalia of the latter the countess found her own offering.

This has made a terrible schism; she tells the story herself—I had not it from Saint Francis, but I hope it is true.

Adieu, My dear Lord!

The longer Wesley worked among the lower groups, the more surely he saw that he had to confine himself to those groups. There is not much ground for doubt that the remark of one of the better

JOHN WESLEY

privileged to the Countess of Huntingdon in protest against the preaching of the Methodists as putting men all together as sinners without regard to their positions in this world, represented the feeling of the higher-placed groups in England in the eighteenth century.

There was a class complacency which it was hard to disturb.

Wesley would not do anything, or countenance anything which would slow down the vigor of Methodism.

If this was limitation, he made the most of it.

One of the forces most certain to cut into the driving power of any socially forward-looking movement is support by the more favored groups.

It was a sure instinct in Wesley that made him frown upon the presence of the well to do among his societies.

If, now, Wesley had been the head of a Church, he would have had no warrant for thus throwing barriers in the way of rich men's becoming Methodists, for he would have had to concede the right of the rich to place in a Church.

Not so, however, in a society whose aim was militancy. Making all allowance for the inevitable exceptions, it is next to impossible to fit those who have much of this world's goods into aggressive Christian tasks when those tasks look beyond the personal inner religious experience.

Movements of the Wesleyan stamp are seldom understood in their own day.

William Hogarth, the artist, painted the more degraded aspects of English life in the eighteenth century. Hogarth was probably stirred by a genuine moral disgust against the evil which he saw around him.

To get an impression of the extent to which Wesley was taken as of the same type of persons whom he himself was striving to save, we have only to remember that Hogarth produced a print which was one of the bitterest slurs on Methodism ever perpetrated.

The picture was made in 1762 and was entitled:

"Credulity, Superstition, Fanaticism—a Medley."

The scene is in a tabernacle—a Methodist revivalistic meeting.

Under the preacher's gown is a harlequin's jacket; his head is that of a Roman Catholic priest. Part of the audience is wild to the verge of insanity.

In one pew a devil is whispering in the ear of one of the audience.

Another devil stands on the edge of the pulpit.

A frenzied fanatic—a woman—sprawls on the floor. A Turk, looking in at the window, thanks God that he is not a Methodist.

A witch on a broomstick is just above the preacher. There are other symbols literally too numerous to mention—the whole done with Hogarth's genius and with his power to depict the horrible.

In the above paragraph I have followed the key to the symbols |

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

given by Marjorie Bowen in her William Hogarth, the Cockney's Mirror.

Miss Bowen is a sympathetic student of Hogarth, but declares that there is no reason to suppose that Hogarth knew anything about the "'tenets" of Wesleyanism.

Yet the picture gives a hint of the extent to which Wesley was supposed to have connected himself with the lower human strata.

The truth is that he paid chief attention, after the Movement began to show its strength, to the lowlier classes: though there is no justice in Hogarth's description as applied to Wesleyanism.

Wesley called himself a Tory and a High Churchman. He was sure that those favored like himself were under obligation to help those not so favored.

Yet, with the exception of a few, among them John Fletcher and Thomas Coke, he did not attract to himself men of higher "birth" whom he put into positions of responsibility.

There is not much indication that he tried to attract the better born and better bred. There may be many reasons for this, one of them that he was not likely to get on with men on a plane of culture as high as his own unless they would obey him to the last detail.

Whatever the reasons, the instinct was probably sound. The Methodists had mostly to be led by leaders from among themselves. How futile is the question itself as to the alleged futility of Wesley's work on the ground that he was not an outright originator!

Some have said that the mystery of Wesley is that there is no mystery, that the means used were so commonplace that all mystery vanishes.

Yet this brings the mystery back: which is that with so little so much could be done; that with the ordinary so extraordinary gains could be won; that with the natural so much of the supernatural could be revealed; that with the earthy so much of the heavenly could be attained.

I think I have mentioned the chief features in the career of Wesley that are commonly reckoned as especially strange. We need to remind ourselves that there is much that is puzzling in any career as far back in time from us as Wesley now is. 'There are always

shreds and patches of peculiar times clinging to any historical character no matter how enlightened. Men in one day accept much which will seem absurd to later days without thinking about it at all.

I have already more than once mentioned Richard Baxter, because he was the outstanding religious figure in England of the seventeenth century as Wesley was of the eighteenth; a man who excelled in profundity of intellect as did Wesley in reach of will

JOHN WESLEY

activity.

Baxter lived until within a dozen years of the birth of Wesley. He had many of the same superstitions as Wesley, relying, for instance, for the cure of a troublesome illness on moss taken from the inside of a human skull.

He too gave himself to practicing medicine with about the same queer cures as Wesley's.

The two men talked in about the same fashion about diseases.

It was not they who were talking but the times in which they lived.

Scientific control of disease had not yet begun.

In all such realms the world was just about what it had been for a thousand years. A single scientific discovery will change a course of human procedure within a quarter of a century, a course which has been traveled by hundreds of thousands of human beings from time immemorial.

Wesley was a child of his time.

In spite of the radiance of the Methodist message there was about it a weight of tragedy.

It broke through the tragedy in its opposition to Calvinism, but it accepted as a matter of course a dark background for its message, perhaps darker than Calvinism itself, for Calvinism was a comfortable belief to those who held it. No Calvinists, as previously suggested, contemplated themselves as lost, whereas Methodists lived in fear of such possibility.

I refer to such notions as that men are born under wrath.

Here, again, the darkness came out of the time and was an age-old inheritance.

'The times were tragic—indeed all history had been tragic.

If men were to think at all of a divine Kingdom, they painted it as like unto the earthly kingdoms which they knew: resting on force, on arbitrary decrees, on favoritism toward the powerful.

'Traits like this inevitably colored the notion of the rulership over the world.

One disadvantage about the doctrine of the divine right of kings was that it seemed to suggest the kind of sway that the Divine King exercised over men.

We must not, however, take the gloom of the age too seriously, though it was now and again subject to strange terrors, as from the so-called French prophets who suffered from a lunacy from a belief in inspiration, which students of the time have pronounced responsible for the century's dread of "enthusiasm.'"' Human nature has a way of adjusting itself to what seems to men of a later time like intolerable tragedy.

The men of the eighteenth century did not take their troubles so gravely as we fancy they did as we look back to the formal catalogues of their beliefs.

Nevertheless, the beliefs were bad enough.

It was bad enough to have to make adjustments tosuch gloomy religion.

It was like becoming callous to evil. Getting used to a theory which taught of children as born in wrath

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

was about as bad as the fact of such birth would have been—if there had been such a fact.

There are some pictures—indeed, some of them actually painted—which aim to set out the significant meanings of Wesley's life. One is that illustration of the "'brand plucked from the burning." Copies of that steel engraving used to decorate Methodist walls by the score.

The picture was not excellent from the artistic angle except in its suggestion of the fury of the flames.

It leaves the impression that the rescue of young John could have been easier than the narrative makes out.

Then there is, or once was, the picture of Wesley preaching on his father's tomb, which has dramatic merit suggesting the futility of the stupid injustice against Wesley wherever the English clergy got their chance.

There is also a picture of Wesley's death which seems to aim at making the event as public as possible—a crowd in a room which could not possibly have held so many persons.

at least some of the persons in the picture were not present when Wesley died.

Passing away from these actual attempts at setting Wesleyan scenes before us, there are one or two lifelike strokes which call up

Wesley very vividly.

First is the fact that Wesley was about five feet five inches and never weighed more than one hundred and twenty pounds. There is Sir Leslie Stephen's remark that he looked like a "human gamecock." This is not altogether reverent, but it is graphic: a man trained down to the bone; all vigor and alertness.

There is also the swift phrase of Horace Walpole, who for an instant saw and heard Wesley speaking in a street: the one word "actor," which gives us Wesley's perfect self-command and his control over his audiences, a control so absolute that a noted psychologist of our time has told us that it can only be accounted for on the supposition of hypnotism. A white-haired actor, of long familiarity with what he had to say, suggests much.

There are one or two other scenes which we can readily put before our imaginations. Take one, often enough described.

On ~ one of his horseback journeys Wesley came into a company with a horseman who fell to talking Calvinism.

Not knowing who his companion was, this horseman freed his mind on the preaching and character of John Wesley.

Whereupon Wesley revealed himself.

The Calvinist put spurs to his horse and sought to flee, but the Arminian of his own free choice and self-determination would not be put off.

So away they went, uphill and down dale to the next town.

What this picture signifies it might be a little hard to say,

JOHN WESLEY

but it becomes pleasanter the longer one thinks of it. Probably Calvinism was never more forcibly attacked than in the phrases which Wesley shouted at his companion from horseback.

Surely, under the circumstances, the discussion could not have been pro- - nounced academic, or abstract, or verbose.

Still another picture is the portrait which shows Wesley walking along in company with two fellow Methodists, Wesley in the center.

The portrait could not have been painted so as to put Wesley at less advantage so far as his stature was concerned—the companions appearing notably tall, far overtopping their diminutive associate.

Yet something about the picture suggests the superiority of Wesley unmistakably.

Little men seem to take a queer pleasure in stretching themselves up to their full height, and thus succeed only in showing how small they are.

Not so with Wesley. There is something about that picture as he walks along with the two tall men which suggests intellectual and moral height.

Another picture suggested by Wesley's own statement could be that of his riding along on horseback, with the bridle reins lying loose on the horse's neck.

Wesley used to say that a horse under reins thus loose and picking his own path, would never stumble.

Whether this is correct or not, the writer is not horseman enough to say.

It is tolerably certain, however, that, if one held the horse with a tight rein, one could not do much reading.

It is a fair surmise also that Wesley could easily become so absorbed in his book as not to be aware whether his horse stumbled or not.

Still another picture could be most interesting: that of the coach transformed into a traveling study. After Wesley had come far into years his friends presented him with a coach, to lighten the wear and tear of travel. He boarded up one side of it and filled that side with book shelves.

'Then he put in a table so that he might write as much as he liked.

One who knows anything of the strain of writing on the smoothest moving Pullman today can only marvel at writing done in Wesley's coach, especially after people began to refer "to the rumbling old carriage.'

It is said that Wesley finally abandoned this writing in the coach for fear that such continued effort might injure his eyes—this when he was well past seventy years of age!

Further material on which we can let our imaginations paint a picture is Wesley's account of how in the early days of their evangelistic journeys he and Charles read together as they walked. They

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

would walk in single file, almost like a convict lockstep. The one behind did the reading.

The one in front broke the force of the wind for the reader and selected the path, stepping around the holes or the stones or the mud. This enabled the reader to give his whole attention to the book.

Of course they took turns in reading. One cannot help wondering whether it was not better to let John do the reading on windy days, for his short stature would not have done much to shield Charles when it was the turn of Charles to read. How can we match this plan for ingenuity, energy, and persistence?

Probably the best picture is the one we do not see: Wesley alone on the roads of England.

It would not be accurate to say that Wesley was lonely, but he must have been alone quite as much as any public man of his century in England.

Doctor Johnson used to complain that Wesley would never have his talk out, and some have likewise maintained that he was too busy even to think his thought through. Wesley had time enough to carry his thought through, but he gave himself so much to the practical that he did not create any theological system as such. What was he thinking of on the roads of England?

Probably of his societies by name, of preachers by name, of followers by name.

One last glimpse of the Evangelist is left to us from the pen of Crabbe Robinson.

October 18th, 1790.

Dear Brother:

... I felt a great Satisfaction last Week, on Monday, in hearing (excuse me now) that veteran in the Service of God, the Rev. John Wesley. I was informed in the Afternoon that he was in Town and would preach that Evening.

Unfortunately a sick Man had sent to have his Will made directly, and it was given to me to write.

But Mr. Francis, seeing how mortified I appeared, gave it to some one else, and I went to the Chapel.

At another time, and not knowing the Man, I should almost have ridiculed his figure.

Far from it now.

I lookt upon him with a respect bordering upon Enthusiasm.

After the people had sung one Verse of a hymn he arose, and said; "It gives me a great pleasure to find that you have not lost your Singing.

Neither Men nor Women— you have not forgot a single Note. And I hope that by the assistance of the same God which enables you to sing well, you may do all other things well."

A Universal Amen followed.

At the End of every Head or Division of His Discourse, he finished by a kind of Prayer, a Momentary

Wish as it were, not consisting of more than three or four words, which was always followed by a Universal Buzz.

His discourse was short—the

JOHN WESLEY

Text I could not hear.

After the last prayer, he rose up and addressed. the people on Liberality of Sentiment, and spoke much against refusing to join with any Congregation on account of difference in Opinion.

He said, "If they do but fear God, work righteousness, and keep his commandments, we have nothing to object to." He preached again on Tuesday Evening, but I was out of Town with Mr. Francis all day, holding a Court Baron...

I remain, etc., H. C. R.

I wish to express my gratitude for the attention Arnold Lunn has drawn to a letter which seems to me to be one of the highest notes Wesley ever struck.

If I were to think one last thought about Wesley, or say one last word about him, I should prefer above all else to read the letter which I here print in full. The introductory note in Telford's edition of Wesley's Letters tells that William

Shent, a Methodist worker, had fallen into sin and had been forsaken by the Methodists.

To the Society at Keighley London, January 11, 1779.

I have a few questions which I desire may be proposed to the Society at Keighley.

Who was the occasion of the Methodist preachers first setting foot in Leeds? William Shent.

Who received John Nelson into his house at his first coming thither?

William Shent.

Who was it that invited me and received me when I came?

William Shent.

Who was it that stood by me while I preached in the street with stones flying on every side? William Shent.

Who was it bore the storm of persecution for the whole town and stemmed it at the peril of his life?

William Shent.

Whose word did God bless for many years in an eminent manner?

William Shent's.

By whom were many children now in Paradise begotten in the Lord, and many now alive? William Shent.

Who is he that is now ready to be broken up and turned into the street?

William Shent.

And does nobody care for this? William Shent fell into sin and was publicly expelled the Society; but must he also be stoned?

Must he with his gray hairs and all his children be without a place to lay his head? Can you suffer this? O tell it not in Gath! Where is gratitude?

THROUGH SIXTY YEARS—AND BEYOND

Where is compassion?

Where is Christianity?

Where is humanity?

Where is concern for the cause of God? Who is a wise man among you?

Who is concerned for the Gospel? Who has put on bowels of mercy?

Let him rise and exert himself in this matter.

You here, all arise as one man and roll away the reproach.

Let us set him on his feet once more.

It may save both him and his family. But what we do, let it be done quickly.

I am, dear brethren Your affectionate brother, JouHN WESLEY.

INDEX A Cartwright, Peter, 103 Causton, 58 Cennick, John, 123, 333 Charles I, 159, 257, 260 Charles II, 16 Charterhouse, 23-27, 59, 169 Chartist Movement, 76, 295 Chesterfield, Lord, 113, 242 Christian Library, the, 120, 331 Christian Perfection, 36, 248 Church, L. F., 45 Clement of Alexandria, 36 Cockney's Mirror, 343 Coke, Thomas, 48, 184, 185, 186, 187, 280,

Acton, Lord, 167, 168, 170, 174, 301 Addison, Joseph, 291 Agassiz, Louis, 308 Age of Queen Anne, 289 Age of Reason, 325, 327 America, Methodism in, 184-87, 339 American Revolution, 72, 233, 261, 262, 268, 280, 286 Ancient History, 331 Arminian Magazine, the, 96, 124 Arthur, William, 273 Asbury, Francis, 116, 185, 186, 187, 280

Cole, G. D. H., 289 B Bagehot, Walter, 244 Bath, 103 Baxter, Richard, 161, 174, 246, 331, 343,

Cole, William, 305 Coleridge, S. T., 167 Columbus, Christopher, 257 Contemporary Review, 188 Cornwall, 277 Coulson, Samuel, 273 Cowper, William, 145, 278-79 Cromwell, Oliver, 260 Curtis, O. A., 206

Bebb, E. D., 253 Behmen, Jacob, 149, 161, 325, 335 Bell, George, 138, 323 Bennet, John, 221, 222, 223, 229, 323 Bentham, Jeremy, 251, 270 Berkeley, George, 32, 33, 34, 116, 326, 327

Birrell, Augustine, 15, 159 Bohler, Peter, 60, 65, 66, 72 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 73, 271, 290 Boswell, James, 15, 20, 290 Bowen, Marjorie, 230, 343 Bretherton, F, F., 212 Bristol, 74, 84 Broughton, T., 40 Bryan, William Jennings, 86 Bunting, Jabez, 223, 294 Bunyan, John, 26 Burke, Edmund, 256, 291, 309 Burns, Robert, 310 D Dartmouth, Lord, 314 Darwin, Charles, 62, 63, 105 Davenport, F. M., 103, 292 Defoe, Daniel, 309 Delamotte, C., 36 Dickens, Charles, 310 Dodd, Doctor, 114, 115 Déllinger, 174 Don Quixote, 54 . Burton, John, 41 E Butler, Joseph (Bishop), 88, 172, 212, 326,

Ecce Homo, 276 Edwards, Jonathan, 146 Edwards, Maldwyn, 309 Einstein, Albert, 336 Eliot, Charles W., 18, 73 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 301

England, Social Evils in, 233-310 Epworth, 9-23, 105, 139, 245 Cc Caesar, Julius, 286 Calm Address, the, 260 Calvin, John, 142, 143, 144, 145, 157, 274,

Cambridge History of the Eighteenth Century, 167, 331

INDEX

"Epworth Noises," 14, 15, 17, 78, 92, 290 Essentials of Democracy, 182 Hinduism, 150 Hindustan, 261 History of England, 27, 119, 120 History of Freedom, 301 Hobhouse, L. T., 301 Hogarth, William, 342, 343 Holy Club, the, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40,

F Ténelon, 149 Fielding, Henry, 309 Fletcher, John, 128, 155, 156, 324, 343 Fox, C. J., 256, 291 Fox, George, 21 Francis, Mr., 347, 348 Franklin, Benjamin, 28, 29, 85, 86, 117,

41, 43, 45, 74, 135.

(See also Oxford Club) Holy Living, 36 Hopkey, Sophy (Sophia), 13, 50, 51, 52, 53,

58, 65, 220 Howard, John, 39, 115 Hudson, 39, 40 Hughes, Hugh Price, 180 Hume, David, 258, 327, 328, 330 Huntingdon, Countess of, 37, 146, 147, 162, 265 Frederica, 42 French Revolution, 47, 73, 233, 244, 245,

257, 268, 272, 285, 290 G 219, 242, 341, 342 Hutton, James, 217, 219 Garretson, Freeborn, 48 Garrick, David, 85 Geneva, 144 George I, 316 George II, 316 George III, 245, 257, 258, 261, 316 Georgia, 41-54, 58, 60, 65, 66, 79, 81, 85,

Hylas, 33 Hymnal, 335 India, 186 Indies, 280 Industrial Revolution, 73, 181, 233, 262110, 135, 257, 267 Germany, 256 72, 275, 276, 287, 291, 300, 309, 321 Ingham, Benjamin, 36, 41 Gibbon, E., 27 Gibson, Bishop, 305 Goethe, 290 Goldsmith, Oliver, 119, 310 Gore, Charles (Bishop), 255 Grant, U. S., 323 Green, John Richard, 210, 309 Green, Thomas Hill, 209, 328 Green Pastures, 305 Guyon, Madame, 149 J Jamaica, 282 James, William, 50, 61, 90, 91, 92, 124,

183, 193, 197, 329 Jarvis, John Wesley, 23 Jasper, John, 304 Jefferson, Charles Edward, 311, 315, 316

Johnson, Samuel, 15, 17, 20, 31, 114, 121, H 260, 261, 290, 347 Jones, William, 22 Joy, James R., 23 Just Price, 246 Juxon, Dr., 260 Haime, John, 125 Hall, Westley, 20, 121, 122 Hall, Mrs. Westley, 107, 121, 122, 322 Halley, 33 Hammond, J. L., and Barbara, 87, 181, K 262, 273, 276, 296, 297, 298, 299, 302, 304, 329 Hampson, John, 130, 227 Hampson, John, Jr., 130, 227 Harrison, G. Elsie, 229, 230 Hegel, 151 Henry VIII, 15, 178, 263 Herrnhut, 65, 66 Kant, Immanuel, 75, 290, 328 Kepler, 33 King, William, 11 Kingswood School, 18, 83, 84, 269, 277,

Kirkham, Betty, 24 Kirkham, Sally, 24 Knox, Alexander, 92 Knox, John, 79 Hill, Rowland, 146 Hilton, Jane, 252

INDEX L Mossner, E. C., 327 Murray, Alexander, 229, 230 Murray, Grace, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, Lambert, Nancy, 23 Las Casas, 280, 281, 320 Laski, Harold J., 287 Latimer, Hugh, 104 Lausanne, 74 Law, William, 35, 36, 66, 149, 167, 199,

225, 226, 229, 230 Mysticism, 149, 150, 154, 157, 158, 161 N Nelson, John, 124, 160, 245, 348 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 290 Newington, 39, 40 Newton, Sir Isaac, 33, 35, 36, 62, 63, 197,

335 Lay Preachers, 123, 124, 125, 136, 187 Lear, King, 307 Lecky, W. E. H., 47, 50, 242, 320 Lee, Umphrey, 13, 59 Legal Hundred, 126, 128, 130, 179, 227, 281, 335, 336 Non-conformity and Social and Economic Life, 254 North, Eric M., 309 272, 275, 293, 295, 299 Leger, A., 224 Lenin, Nikolay, 237, 243 Life of Lord Shaftesbury, 273 Life of Wesley, 130, 167 Lincoln, Abraham, 176, 252 Lindsay, A. D., 182 Lioyd's Evening Post, 250 Locke, John, 326 Lunn, Arnold, 348 O Oglethorpe, James, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 65

"Old Jeffery," 15, 290 Overton, J. H., 292 Oxford, 12, 27-41, 48, 99, 100, 186, 192,

256, 321 Oxford Club, 44, 109, 115, 192.

(See Holy Club) M P Macaulay, Thomas B., 96, 273, 296, 309 Machiavelli, 258, 259 Malebranche, 331 Malthus, Thomas, 62, 251, 270, 293 Marlborough, Duke of, 229 Marx, Karl, 208, 245 Mary, Queen of Scots, 119 Maxfield, Thomas, 124, 136, 138, 323 MacArthur, Miss, 309McNabb, 338 "Mesopotamia," 85

Methodism and the Working Class MovePaine, Tom, 259, 325 Panza, Sancho, 54 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 180:

Paul, Saint, 63, 99, 160, 196 Pawson, John, 199, 205, 334, 335, 338 Peasants' Revolt, 256 Pembroke College, 36 Pepys, Samuel, 211 Perfection, Christian, 35, 191-216, 314, 340

Perronet, Edward, 199 Peter, 204 Philadelphia, 85, 262 Philonous, 33 Pitt, William, 256, 291 Poincaré, Henri, 61, 62 Political Quarterly, 272 Pompey, 286 Poor Law, 266 Pope, the, 144, 175, 178 Pope, Alexander, 291 Primitive Methodism, 299 Primitive Physic, 115, 116, 118, 243 Primitive Tracts in Religious Revivals, ment of England, 237 Methodism and Social Reform, 233-310 Methodism, slur on, 342 Methodism's Independence, 167-188 Methodist Movement, 182-240, 329. (See Wesleyan Movement) Methodist Revival, 304, 328.

(See Wesleyan Revival) Miller, Alice, 89, 90 Minutes of the Conferences, 82, 163 Moore, Henry, 51 Moorfields, 74 Moravians, the, 21, 44, 49, 50, 60, 65, 66,

Protestantism, 285 Protestants, 269 Puritans, 16, 94, 205, 259, 286, 303 67, 70, 79 Morgan, William, 36, 38 Morgan, Mr. (father of William), 38

INDEX

Q Queen Anne, 87, 289, 316 Quietism, 79, 80, 139 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 20 Smollet, T., 119 Societies, Methodist, 74, 75, 109, 110, 113,

114, 135, 174 Son to Susanna, 229 Southey, Robert, 60, 130, 167, 239 Spangenberg, A. G., 72 Spanish America, 281 Stephen, Leslie, 58, 210, 345 Stephenson, G. J., 20 Stevens, Abel, 101 R Ramsay, William, 103 Rapin, 119 Read, 39 Reformation, the, 169, 174, 269, 281, 301

"Retirement," 316

Revolutionary War (see American Revo- . Story of the Durham Miners, 272 Streeter, B. H., 143 Successful Merchant, The, 273-75 Swift, Jonathan, 258, 291, 296, 309 lution) Ricardo, David, 251 Rice, William, 335 Rice, William North, 335 Richardson, S., 309 Richelieu, Cardinal, 96, 296 Robespierre, 245, 246 Robinson, Crabbe, 347 Rodin, 31 Rollin, 331 Roman Catholic Church, 15, 74, 94, 111, 4% Tawney, R. H., 272, 274 Taylor, A. E., 327 Taylor, E. R., 309 'Taylor, Jeremy, 35, 36, 191 'Telford, J., 348 Thorwaldsen, 203 Tongue of Flame, 273 Toplady, A. M., 146 Trevelyan, G. M., 289 Tyburn, 41 Tyerman, L., 24, 25, 35, 59, 207, 222, 224,

136, 174, 175, 178, 181, 254, 255, 259, 295, 337 Roosevelt, Theodore, 48, 136, 259 Rousseau, J. J., 46, 47, 257, 290 Royce, Josiah, 151 Russell, Bertrand, 153 Russia, 244 Ryan, Sarah, 112, 113, 228 Ryle, 233

U United States, 332; Government, 182 Vv N) Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 62, 91, 124 Vazeille, Mrs. A. N., 224, 225 (see Mrs.

Sacheverell, Doctor, 27, 120 Sadler, Doctor, 272, 273 John Wesley) Veblen, Thorstein, 252 Venus of Milo, 204 Voltaire, 245, 259 St. Paul, the Traveler and Roman Citizen, 103

Saint's Rest, 331 Salzburg, 65 Savannah, 42 Scotland, 79, 338, 339 Seeley, J. R., 276 Shadford, George, 286 Shaftesbury, Lord, 273, 276, 277, 287, 288,

WwW Wallas, Graham, 61 Walpole, Horace, 76, 77, 103, 104, 305, 306, 314, 341, 345 War of Jenkin's Ear, 120 Warner, W. J., 309 292, 293, 294, 300 Shakespeare, William, 15, 119, 205, 307,

Shallow, Simple Master, 307 Shent, William, 348 Simon, J. S., 74, 104, 229 Slavery, 42, 278, 280, 281, 282, 283 Smith, Adam, 249, 251, 271, 293 Wealth of Nations, 249 Wearmouth, R. F., 237 Weber, Max, 274 Wedgwood, Julia, 130 Weller, Sam, 242 Wellington, Duke of, 24, 73, 323

INDEX Wesley, Anne, 12, 23 Wesley, Charles, 21, 23, 30, 36, 38, 39, 40, Wesley, Kezia, 20, 21 Wesley, Martha, 20, 121, 122 Wesley, Mary, 21 Wesley, Sally, 249 Wesley, Samuel, Sr., 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,

42, 45, 50, 52, 72, 74, 82, 84, 90, 94, 95, 110, 125, 187, 201, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 221-26, 229, 249, 322, 323, 328,

Wesley, Emilia, 21 Wesley, Hetty, 20, 23 Wesley, John, life at Epworth, 9-23; res16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 38, 42, 53,

87, 120, 146, 183, 220, 229, 244 Wesley, Samuel, Jr., 21, 28, 71, 88, 105, 135, 207 Wesley, Samuel, 3d, 338 Wesley, Susanna, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, cue from fire, 10, 11; relationship with Miss Hopkey, 13, 50, 54; Fellow of Lincoln, 14, 74, 296; inherited characteristics, 12, 13, 16, 17; refuses father's parish, 18; enters Charterhouse, 24; at Oxford, 12, 27-41, 48, 99, 100, 186, 192,

256, 321; fear of the sea, 43, 44; letter to mother, 33; as leader of Holy Club, 36; and prison reform, 39-42; seeker after perfection, 35, 191-216; sojourn in America, 41-54; ministry to Indians, 42,

46, 47, 48, 78; and slavery, 42, 278, 280, 283; persor.al assurance of salvation, 50;

Aldersgate experience, 57-67, 317, 318; interview with Bohler, 60; establishes first Methodist Society, 74; return from Germany, 74; and farm life, 77; contempt of rich, 76-77; starts field preaching, 78; sermons, 96-99; appearance of,

103; emphasis on itinerant preaching, 104-05; as organizer, 109-131; seeks to relieve suffering, 115-118; as historian,

119; selects Legal Hundred, 126; defender of his faith, 135, 163; and ordination, 170; and separation of Methodism from Church of England, 168-188; ordination of ministers, 184; proposes to Grace Murray, 221; marriage, 224; social achievements, 233-310; opposition to liquor, 283, 284; attitude toward suicide, 284-85; pictures of, 345-47; Through Sixty Years—and Beyond, 31121, 22, 26, 27, 32, 33, 59, 88, 121, 135,

136, 137, 190, 219, 229 Wesley's Last Love, 224 Wesleyan Movement, 160, 300, 326, 328, 330.

(See Methodist Movement) Wesleyan Revival, 40, 80, 83, 84, 92, 136, 297.

(See Methodist Revival) Whatcoat, Richard, 286 Whitefield, George, 36, 37, 53, 75, 78, 82,

Pa 84, 85, 86, 90, 98, 101, 102, 123, 128, 146, 147, 172, 194, 223, 242, 280, 282, 305, 339, 341 Whitehead, John, 116 Whitelamb, John, 21 Wilberforce, W., 278, 282 Wilkes, J., 258 William and Mary, 16, 159 Williamson (husband of S. Hopkey), 53,

Wilson, Woodrow, 154 Winchester, C. T., 130 Woodforde, James, 22, 180, 181, 277 Wordsworth, William, 310 Wrestling Jacob, 230 Y Young, Arthur, 73 Z Zinzendorf, Count, 65, 66, 67, 217, 219,

Wesley, Mrs. John, 112, 223-29

16237

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aoe ea McConnell, Francis John, bp., 187 141953.

John Wesley ,by; Francis J. McConnell. New York, Chicago ,etc.; The Abingdon press ; 1940, 019397

1. Wesley, John, 1708-1791.

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