"i, Na its t uh fie er teeat JOHN WESLEY AND MODERN RELIGION By UMPHREY LEE, Ph.D., D.D.
SET UP, ELECTROTYPED, PRINTED, AND BOUND BY THE PARTHENON PRESS AT NASHVILLE TENNESSEE, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Ee C To UMPHREY LEE, JR.
WITH THE HOPE THAT HE WILL GROW UP A LOVER OF BOOKS DMWaycf Veh} aieIG PREFACE THE following study of Wesley's religion and theology is offered both as a contribution to the history of modern Christianity and as an evaluation of Wesley's place in present-day religion. It is the author's conviction that the traditional conception of Wesley's experience and thought is in many ways misleading, and that a truer picture may now be presented by use of the richer materials available to the student.
These materials concern not only Wesley but also the life and thought of his century; and this volume is an attempt to depict Wesley in the light of his century instead of in the light of nineteenth-century Methodism or of nineteenth-century ideas of the eighteenth century. The notes give not only authority for quotations and statements but also try to indicate some of the literature on the subject.
I am under obligation to many friends who have read parts or all of the manuscript and have helped with their criticism. Among these I must mention
Professors N. C. McPherson, Jr., and Robert W.
Goodloe of Southern Methodist University. Professor John H. McGinnis of the same institution has wasted no little time with me in discussions of the eighteenth century and the Romantic Movement. It is not his fault if I am yet far from a correct understanding of the dominant trends of the period. The publishers' readers have also helped with pertinent criticisms; and I am under obligation to the publishers themselves and to Mr. Lovick Pierce, in particular, for vii John Wesley and Modern Religion many courtesies. My wife has helped, not only with the proof-reading and other drudgery, but throughout the preparation of the manuscript.
Permission has been granted by the Epworth Press for quotations from the Standard Edition of the Journal of John Wesley, edited by Nehemiah Curnock; the Standard Edition of the Letters of John
Wesley, edited by John Telford; and also the Standard Edition of John Wesley's Sermons, annotated by Dr.
E. H. Sugden. The Abingdon Press, New York, are the American agents for these publications and have also given consent to their use in this volume.
Vill TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE INTERPRETATION OF WESLEY.......... 1
John Wesley as a modern prophet. "Modern times." Wesley and the modern world. His religiousness. Methodism and eighteenth-century science. Methodism and the Industrial
Revolution." The Romantic Movement. What is Romanticism? " A changed world-view. Romanticism and religion.' President McGiffert on Methodism. Traditional picture of Wesley's experience and theology. How far true? Wesley and nineteenth-century Methodism. A _ better understanding of Wesley possible to-day. Importance of this understanding.
II. RELIGION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGEO rine yon ci kak eM Des TU eo ne tne 18 State of the Church. The Deists.' '"Deism and Classicism." Eighteenth-century "Moderation."
The Religious Societies. Books of devotion.
High Church. Individualistic tendencies. The influence of Puritanism. Watts's hymns. Turbulent years. 'Prophets' and mystics. v ""Wonder" in the eighteenth century. "
Ill. WEsLEY's TRAINING AT EPWORTH AND Ox- | Re Se en caunmau Vinton tye hele eh eS Agia id Wai oy fybe, Epworth. Samuel Wesley: a High Churchman; a poet. Susannah Wesley: opinions; methodicity; practicality; her epitaph. John Wesley's childhood: parental influence; Old Jeffrey; "a brand plucked from the burning"; pride; his fear of the sea; suppressed emotions. John Wesley at Charterhouse. Oxford in the eighteenth century.
Wesley and logic. "Useful knowledge." The two tendencies in Wesley's mind. / ix John Wesley and Modern Religion IV. WEsLEY IN OXFORD AND AMERICA........
Wesley's experience in 1725. William Law on perfection. Wesley's sermon, January 1, 1733. His opinions in 1731. High Churchmanship. The Oxford Club. Assurance.Y Good works."
European Protestantism and Mysticism: Wesley's reasons for going to America. His experiences on the voyage and in Georgia. Sophia
Hopkey. Difficulty with his emotions. The Charlestown Hymnbook. His reading in Georgia. Faith. Fear of the sea. Gains from American experiences.
V. WESLEY's RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE..........
Return from Georgia. Summaries of spiritual condition. Peter Bohler. Wesley on his religious history and condition in 1738. Aldersgate Street,
May 24, 1738. Interpretations of this experience.
Wesley's estimates of his condition after 1738.
"I do not love God. I never did" (1766).
Reasons for these estimates: his search for perfection; his lack of "feeling." ~ His reinterpretation of his experience.» Wesley publishes retractions concerning his condition before 1738. The significance of the Aldersgate experience. Wesley's religious life: prayer; the means of grace;
VI. THE Basses or WEsLEY's THEOLOGY).\)4305 110 His Anglican background. The development of his thought. Difficulty in appreciating eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Wesley's old-world views; his practical interests. His doctrine of God: the great Reality; transcendence and immanence; the significance of his belief in miracles; the lover of man. Wesley's doctrine of man: the Chain of Being; the image of God; the x Contents Fall; original sin; Wesley's psychology; restoration of man. Preventing grace. Wesley and Calvinism. Wesley's association of Calvinism with deterministic physics and psychology.
Authority in religion: the Bible; the Ante-Nicene Fathers; Reason; Christian experience. The meaning of Christian experience; evidential value; guidance; the experience of others. at LHe DOCTRINE OF SALVATION." 0%) (.:. 144
Wesley on orthodoxy. A psychological analysis of salvation. The new birth. Instantaneous conversion. "An irreconcilable variability." 'Realization" of the love of God. Origins of Wesley's doctrine of faith. Meaning of faith; sources of definition; justifying faith; faith as intuitive knowledge. Assurance; some Christians may not have it. Religion as love; Easter and Good Friday. Outward obedience a substantial part of religion. Salvation by grace. Faith and works.
Development of doctrine. Wesley on Luther.
Present and final salvation. The Minutes of 1770: controversy over them; Fletcher's interpretation. Wesley on faith and works. Union of Catholic and Protestant doctrines.
Rett SGEIRISTIAN? PERFECTION (200 Oe 174 Perfectibility in the eighteenth century. " Relation of Wesley's doctrine of perfection to his experience. Origins and development of his doctrine.
What changes were made after 1738. Confusion of conversion and perfection. Original sin and perfection. Sanctification both gradual and instantaneous: Faith. Grace and holiness. Perfection both goal and attainment. Wesley's ethical interest./ Religion and morality.' Perfection sought in ordinary life.. Economic morality. xi * oF John Wesley and Modern Religion The distinctive vocation of the Christian man.
Perfection a doctrine of development. iX, THe DISCIPLINE OF LIFE eee Wesley a Methodist by nature and training. Influence of Taylor, a Kempis, and Law. The Oxford
Methodists. Wesley's "austerity" at Oxford and in America. The purpose of rules. The observances of the Church. Holy days. Fasting.
Public and private devotion. Wesley and devotional literature. Organization of the Societies: directions to the '"'bands"; directions from the Large Minutes. Methodist services: love feasts; watch nights; "means of grace."
X. WEsLEY's DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH.'....
Church and sect. Wesley's Churchmanship. Early opinions: Apostolic Constitutions; the Lord's Supper; baptismal regeneration; '"'the Catholic seminary of divine love." Wesley's views after 1738. .Discussion of separation from the Church.
Wesley's conception of his Societies; shown in setting up American Methodism. His later views on baptism; on the Lord's Supper; Hymns on the Lord's Supper; a "converting ordinance." Persistence of these views. Wesley on church government: his earlier views; changes; authority for changes. The views of Stillingfleet and King.
Wesley's ordinations; interpretations. His practical purpose; his conception of the Church and of church government; his ideas of administration. Wesley's ordination of Coke. What he meant to do. Bishops and presbyters. His design for the Methodists. xii Contents XI. INDIVIDUALISM AND EMOTION IN WESLEY'S
PE IGTON |? OR ee ane aeie ULLALBiteBay IE The tension in Wesley's religion and theology.
Sources of the Wesleyan piety. His individualism; relation to his Churchmanship. 'The varieties of religious experience." Irrational roots of religion. How Wesley differed from those who exalted irrational aspects of human life. An emotional religion: melancholy; joy; "'scenes"' at Methodist meetings; psychological conditions evoked in the meetings; songs; the Christian drama. Emotional bases of Wesley's humanitarianism: sympathy for the poor; attitude toward slavery; toward war; toward drink; cruelty to animals. Feeling and duty. Wesley's interest in the unusual. Contrast between Wesley and his followers.
XII. JoHN WEsLEY AND MODERN RELIGION... . 300
Methodism in the nineteenth century an emotional, individualistic religion. Popular influence in weakening the old orthodoxy. A milder conception of God. Emphasis upon Christian experience. Humanitarianism. Organization and the Church idea. Criticism of modern religion:
God as an Indulgent Father; God reduced to phase of human experience; confusion of religion and morality. Disillusionments concerning man and the social gospel. Reactions against modern religion: in name of the Divine Transcendence; in favor of Catholic doctrine. The significance of the real Wesley. Wesley and liberalism.
Wesley's fusion of tendencies too often separated in religion. A modern prophet. ge OO vee oe ae 323 Vt Bhi iterae)i}1/1 Nae Ac AS A AE pagpea CHAPTER I THE INTERPRETATION OF WESLEY In the Great East Window of Liverpool Cathedral,
Protestantism's "modern" cathedral par excellence, one panel, as is meet in a Te Deum window, is devoted to the Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets. Isaiah and Elijah are there, as are also St. Bernard and St. Francis; and the prophetic succession is continued in Cranmer,
Butler, Keble, and Westcott. In this latter group, standing a little back as if doubtful whether the Anglican authorities really meant to include him, is
John Wesley, father of the people called Methodists.
The visitor in Liverpool who recalls Wesley's struggle with the Church of England in the eighteenth century may ask why the Establishment has now put Wesley among the prophets. Cynics will quote old lines about the cities which claimed Homer dead, but more thoughtful men will take the appraisal seriously and will seek the reasons therefor both in Wesley and in his times.
An obvious reason for setting Wesley in "the goodly fellowship" is that his is one of the most numerous and influential movements inaugurated in Protestantism in modern times. One must, of course, remember, in making such a statement, that 'modern times" do not really go back beyond the seventeenth century.
While history must not be divided into neat chronological bundles, it was from the seventeenth century John Wesley and Modern Religion that the western world began to manifest the characteristics of the present era. In order to make clear the argument of this book, it will be well to look at this statement a little more closely.
It was in the latter seventeenth century that Western men began to adopt rather generally a modern conception of the physical universe. More and more men began to think of the universe as a mechanism, like Paley's watch, determined by a few simple laws which Newton had discovered. And _ this mechanical ordering was gradually conceived as characteristic of all things, of all beings, from the lowest organism to the man capable of appreciating the excellencies of the British constitution. It was in this period, too, that the Western world began to take on the appearance which it bears to-day. In the latter eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries, in England, and later on the Continent and in North
America, industrial cities sprang up and the now familiar ugliness of factories began to smirch the landscape. The whole fabric of an industrial civilization was rising. But there was another change which took place, a change in the world-view. Over against the mechanistic theories which characterized the new sciences arose a view which is known as "romantic."
The romanticists despised, or pretended to despise, the scientist who would peep and botanize on his mother's grave; they preferred to obtain their knowledge by intuition, communing with daffodils, having intimations of immortality by ruined abbeys. For them the expansive emotions were better than cold reason and denying conscience. And in the face of civilized i The Interpretation of Wesley complexities they exalted the savage, the peasant, and the child.
The point is that the world of science, of the Industrial Revolution, and of the Romantic Movement is the modern world; and John Wesley's life and work lie within the boundaries of this period. That his movement is one of the largest arising in Protestantism in the modern era needs little proof. Statistics of Methodism show this, but they do not tell the whole of Methodist influence. To a large extent, evangelical
Christianity has been moved, if not directly by Wesley or Methodism, at least by tendencies which owe much to him. "We are all Methodists now," complains a Protestant Episcopalian expounder of Karl Barth; and for good or evil the fact is undeniable that millions in America and England who care little for the first
Methodist have adopted the religious position which is usually associated with his work.
But mere contemporaneousness, although it may explain why Wesley is modern, hardly justifies including him among the prophets. The latter term implies that he had a word for the modern world.
And, indeed, the historian has before him the problem of the success of Methodism. Why did Wesley's revival appeal to so large a number of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And why did
Methodist theology come to be so widely adopted in English-speaking Christendom? 'These questions can only be answered by a study of the congruities of Methodism and the modern world. That is to say,
Methodism cannot be understood merely by a study of its ancestry. Only as the movement is seen in John Wesley and Modern Religion relation to the temper of the world to which it ministered can the true character of the Wesleyan revival be discovered. 'To study Methodism thus is not simply to sketch in eighteenth-century local color, as early Renaissance painters used to put in mountains or Greek columns. The most profitable method is to set Wesley's experience and theology against the background of great modern movements, those movements which were to give character to the present era.
In no sense does such an approach ignore the essential religiousness of Wesley. The student of Wesley must never forget that Wesley believed in God, that he trusted in Christ. To him Jesus of Nazareth was not an incidental figure in the world's cultural history, but the center of all life, the ground of all human hope. Nor can Wesley be understood by those who are ignorant of the Christian tradition.
To know him one must understand the rock from which he was hewn. But no man can merely revive a former theology or a past religious movement; and Wesley did not simply reproduce first-century or sixteenth-century Christianity. His movement, like every other, spoke the language of its age and was influenced by the movements of the time.
Some students have found an affinity between Wesley's methods and thought and the nascent scientific ideas of the eighteenth century. It is true that, in the formulation of his doctrines, in the gathering of data concerning religious experience, Wesley used a method which approximates that which is now called experimental. It would be correct to speak of the empirical character of Methodism, but The Interpretation of Wesley scientific is not the word. If one wishes to use the word to indicate the practical-mindedness of eighteenth-century Englishmen, which prepared the way for later scientific advance and for the utilitarianism which furthered mechanical methods and mechanical views, then Wesley, too, may be called scientific.
But further than this one may not go.
Some social historians have explained Methodism, to their own satisfaction, as a by-product of the Industrial Revolution.' The latter movement with the congestion of population in cities, unsanitary and oppressive conditions in factories, the break-up of the supposedly idyllic cottage manufactories, brought with it misery and unrest. Methodism, so runs the theory, was an emotional escape for the poor, who were caught in a maelstrom which quickly engulfed them; in Lecky's famous phrase, the religious revival saved England from a revolution. To this theory, however, there are some very pertinent objections.
In the first place, there was no such sudden break between the old order and the new as some historians have imagined. So slowly, indeed, did the changes come about that some writers now object to the phrase, '"The Industrial Revolution," since '"'a revolution which continued for 150 years and had been in preparation for another 150 years may well seem to need a new label." ? There was, it is true, a quickened tempo after 1750. The first changes were in the newer industries of iron, cotton, and pottery; but the factory system developed slowly. And the theory that Methodism was a by-product of the Industrial
Revolution, an opiate for an oppressed proletariat, John Wesley and Modern Religion breaks down in collision with the calendar. Historians have sometimes been overly fond of chronology, but one can hardly dispense with it altogether.
The facts are that most of the inventions which made modern industrial development possible came after 1763, when Wesley had been carrying on his religious revival for nearly a quarter of a century; and Watt's steam engine came into use, even in a very restricted way, only a few years before Wesley's death.
In the second place, recent study of social conditions in the eighteenth century have led to some revisions of former estimates. It would seem that writers have been inclined to reconstruct conditions in the eighteenth century in accordance with late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century social theories. Poor housing conditions, child labor, long hours of work were undoubtedly evils of the factory system; but these existed before the factories came.
And there is now evidence that the protests against them which arose during the period when the factories were developing were signs of an awakening social conscience rather than of entirely new miseries. In other words, Methodism did not arise as an opiate for people suffering from the evils of the new industrial system; and therefore, the theory that Wesley succeeded in sidetracking the emotions of an oppressed proletariat so that they fixed their minds on heaven rather than on justice here, thus averting a revolution, is no longer tenable. The conditions which produced the French Revolution did not exist to the same degree in eighteenth-century England. It is probable that The Interpretation of Wesley the latter country would not have had a "French Revolution," even if Wesley had never lived.*
True, Methodism flourished mainly in the districts which were to be the centers of England's new industrial society. The triangle formed by London,
Bristol, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne contains the major territory of the Wesleyan movement in the eighteenth century. But whatever escape Methodists found in the revival was an escape from the untoward conditions of England before power-industry had transformed the country. The exact relations of Wesleyanism and the Industrial Revolution will not be determined until there have been completed adequate biographical studies of the leaders and workers in those movements in the nineteenth century.
It has become almost a commonplace to relate Wesley to the third of the modern movements mentioned—that is, Romanticism. Wesley, it is said, inaugurated a Romantic Movement in Religion. It has become the more common to speak of such a relationship since "Romantic Movement" has been extended to denote a widespread change in standards of value in many areas. "The French Revolution and Napoleon, Shelley and Byron and Beethoven, and the new Houses of Parliament" * have all been crowded together as different manifestations of Romanticism.
Such verbal hospitality is a bit disconcerting. And it is the more disconcerting when one considers that no two writers seem to agree as to what Romanticism is.
To some, Romanticism is a term applicable only in literary or zsthetic theory, designating perhaps a preference for the predominance of imagination over Z John Wesley and Modern Religion reason and the sense of fact." To others the word stands for one of the fundamental characteristics of humanity, the second member of the series: "Head and Heart; Intellect and Feeling; Reserve and Passion;
Selection and Sympathy; Restraint and Enthusiasm; Obedience and Freedom." ® Yet others conceive Romanticism as the submergence of man in Nature, an emotional naturalism.' And so the list runs on: the assertion of the self; a return to the Middle Ages; escape from reality.
If it is difficult to arrive at a definition of Romanticism which will satisfy anyone but the author of the definition, it is nevertheless beyond doubt that the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries saw a change in the world view; and this change has affected wide areas of life down to our own times. It is possible, without insisting upon any definition of Romanticism, to indicate certain aspects of this shift in the world view.
In part, this change was a revolt against the narrow intellectualism of the eighteenth century. While recognizing definite limits of the human understanding, it was assumed that man might by reasoning find out all that could be known of the universe and of life.
Professor Whitehead speaks of "the jaunty assurance" of Pope when he writes of the universe as "a mighty maze! but not without a plan." * And whether one wrote a poem, planned a garden, or directed a life, reason was the guide. The young Wesley spoke the language of his time when he wrote his mother that faith is "an assent to any truth upon rational grounds."
Against this hegemony of the reason certain writers The Interpretation of Wesley revolted in the name of forgotten aspects of human nature. The heart also has its reasons.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
And intuition may be the road to deeper reality, to "something interfused."
The "return to Nature," about which so much has been said in discussions of English Romanticism, was not merely preference for landscapes. Neither was it altogether a submergence of man in the flux of nature. In part, at least, this preoccupation with nature, with daffodils and yellow primroses, was an assertion of man's place in the universe as that of more than an observer of the Universal Machine.
Modern critics of Newtonian science, with full recognition of the epochal importance of its conceptions, nevertheless point out that it dwarfed man himself.
"Wherever was taught as truth the universal formula of gravitation, there was also insinuated as a nimbus of surrounding belief that man is but the puny and local spectator, nay, irrelevant product of an infinite, self-moving engine, which existed eternally before him and will be eternally after him, enshrining the rigour of mathematical relationships while banishing into impotence all ideal imaginations. . . ."° The romantic poet's impatience with those who would peep and botanize sprang from a conviction that there are other avenues to truth than analysis and another role for man to play than that of an admiring timekeeper to mechanical Nature.
John Wesley and Modern Religion Opposed to the conception of Nature as a complicated mechanism was the idea of Nature as the simple, the spontaneous. Genius is the gift of Nature as grace is the gift of God. This view was carried to the point of idealizing the savage, the peasant and the child.
Most is to be expected from those who are unspoiled by the sophistications of the town and its culture; mute, inglorious Miltons are possibly buried in every country churchyard. South Sea Islanders were actually lionized in London society in the middle of the eighteenth century. The "noble savage' was thought of as living in original purity, uncontaminated by civilization. This was '"Nature's Simple
It was to be expected that those who sought for simplicity and spontaneity as opposed to the mechanical in life and thought should look back to more unsophisticated and, presumably, nobler times.
Somewhere in the past men had been purer, living nearer to the fountains of unsullied Nature. In England, the cult of the Middle Ages was partly admiration for a period which was thought to have been less hampered by the claims of reason and to have shown the exuberance of unfettered Nature.
For many in Western Europe, thought, belief, the arts, political life, all had been carried on under the principle that "excellence consists in conformity to a standard conceived as universal, static, uncomplicated, uniform for every rational being." ** The revolt against such a conception was not necessarily a revolt against authority, but against too much regulation. The riches of individual life and growth must
The Interpretation of Wesley not be crushed by mechanical control. It is in this sense that there was a preference for those tendencies which emphasized "'a richly diversified development of individuals and groups rather than a mathematical uniformity, and, most significant of all, the genesis and growth of things rather than their mechanical uniformity."
A movement which affected so many areas of life could not leave religion unaffected. It is interesting to note the ways in which historians have found traces of what is called Romanticism in religion. One writer sees its effects in heightened traditionalism. 'Alike in art, in literature, in philosophy, in religion, a single impulse had revealed itself. It was the impulse to look backward rather than forward, reverence for the primitive, distrust of 'march of intellect'....a suspicion that science was about to overstep its limits to the eternal undoing of the human spirit, a passionate return to the natural instincts against the artificial contrivances of an arrogant Reason." ** An earlier writer interpreted fondness of especially Continental
Romanticists for the Middle Ages as a preference for the medieval "combination of depth of feeling with rudeness of manners," its myths, tales, legends, enthusiasms, and adventures.** Another theologian classes as romantic the theologies which define religion as essentially feeling, which presuppose a religious sense, or emphasize "'experience." *° There have been only tentative efforts to illuminate the exact relations of Methodism and the changed world view; but the likenesses have been often emphasized. "Methodism," wrote the late President
John Wesley and Modern Religion McGiffert, "put an end to the barren rationalism of the eighteenth century; it substituted immediate experience for reasoned demonstration, direct knowledge for indirect in the religious sphere... . it brought the feelings once more into repute, and aided the nineteenth-century reaction against the narrow intellectualism of the eighteenth; it gave a new meaning and an independent value to religion; it promoted individualism and emancipation from the bondage of ecclesiasticism."' *° But President McGiffert's words are the guarded words of a trained scholar. He recognizes the ways in which Methodism "aided" and "promoted" certain tendencies; he does not say that these were Wesley's only interests or intentions. Yet this is precisely what has often been implied by Methodist and non-Methodist scholars alike. 'To say that Wesley was a romanticist in that he "emphasized the emotional rather than the rational side of human nature, a richly diversified development of the individual and groups rather than a mathematical uniformity, and, most significant of all, the genesis and growth of things rather than their mechanical ordering" is one thing. To say that Wesley depreciated the rational sideof human nature; that he cared nothing for uniformity, for rules (saving, of course, moral ones), or for institutions; that he preached a religion of feeling, would be quite another thing.
It is instructive to look for a moment at the traditional picture of Wesley's experience and theology, teenie ~According to this view he was brought up a High
Churchman, devoted to form and order, accepting The Interpretation of Wesley uniformity in doctrine and discipline as necessary to salvation. In this faith he lived a blameless but unfruitful life at Oxford and in America. But learning from the Moravians the Lutheran—or was it the Calvinist?—doctrine of justification by faith, he struggled with a sense of sin, of unbelief, until he was converted in a little meeting in Aldersgate Street,
May 24, 1738. From this time, the spiritual birthday both of Wesley and of Methodism, he preached a radically changed message. Justification is by faith | only; man must be converted, and that instantaneous- | ly; he must know his sins to be forgiven by the witness | of the Holy Spirit; he must be sanctified by a work of | grace, also receivable instantaneously by faith. Ex- | perience is the great word, for that only is religion | which one feels. An emotional, individualistic religion required a voluntary Church composed of converted members. To promote this, Wesley and his { | helpers organized missions and societies and, finally, a Church. With his conversion Wesley's High
Churchmanship disappeared, and a religion of individual experience, colored strongly by emotion, took its place. Methodism became an English Pietism; and individualism, feeling, experience, freedom from ecclesiasticism became the marks of the new movement. Sometimes to this is added the revival of orthodoxy of the Reformation type. Signs of a faith other than this in Wesley's later years are laid to the infirmities of old age. His true message was that of 1738, the year of the conversion.
One hastens to add that this view has, in parts, been challenged by many Methodist and non-Methodist John Wesley and Modern Religion scholars; but it has been so widely held both by apologists and by attackers of Methodism that it may well be called the traditional interpretation. But one cannot avoid the question: 'How far does this truly represent Wesley himself?" 'That it has often been the message of Methodists cannot be denied; and many students of the movement have assumed that Methodism must have represented the teachings of the founder. In America, the exigency of controversy drove the defenders of American Methodism to identify the religion preached during the early nineteenth century with the doctrine of Wesley himself.
In England, the necessity of defending a lay ministry, not only against the attacks of the Establishment but also against the criticisms of some of the Methodists themselves, produced a similar appeal to the principles of the "venerable Father."' And tradition is strong.
Once believed that Methodism is a romantic religious movement deriving its principal doctrines from the ""faith-religion" of Luther and Calvin, by way of Moravianism, it is difficult to persuade even historians to revise their opinions. "Look," they say, "at Methodists of the nineteenth century, and see if they are not wearing the many-colored cloak which their father gave them."
He would be a bold man, indeed, who would claim that the followers of Wesley completely misunderstood him. The tradition of Wesley must be allowed to stand as evidence, and good evidence, as to the way in which the nineteenth century and many in the eighteenth century understood him. But it is also fallacious to assume that any institution necessarily
The Interpretation of Wesley reproduces with accuracy the intentions of its founder. Certainly most historians do not now believe that the Franciscan Order faithfully reproduced the ideals of St. Francis. And Methodism in nineteenth-century England, to say nothing of Methodism on the American frontier, faced conditions, participated in a time-spirit, which must have colored its conception of religion.
In the case of Wesley another consideration must be given weight. It is unnecessary, at this late date, to insist upon his keenness of mind or upon the variety of his interests. But Wesley was a genius, and sometimes a genius is not best understood by those who stand closest to him. Frequently it requires the perspective of time for a right appreciation of a great man's mind. That Wesley was not entirely understood in his own day is evidenced by the opposition he met from some who, all agree now, were both wise and good. And even Wesley's closest friends disagreed in their interpretations of his motives. Dr.
John Whitehead, who preached Wesley's funeral sermon, was sure that Wesley's ordinations were the acts of an old man overborne by the importunities of his preachers. Yet the majority of Methodist preachers were equally positive that Wesley deliberately sought to set up, both in England and America, a Methodist Church. That such disagreements occurred can be no surprise to those who remember that Wesley's mind had been open, for more than threescore years, to more diverse influences than that of any other Churchman in England. He had, during a long life, conversed with all sorts and conditions of Loe John Wesley and Modern Religion men. He had watched men and movements in faraway America, in the Germanies, and in every nook and corner of the British Isles. Nurtured in the traditions of the Church of England, he had associated with some of the leading Nonjurors. He was, for a Church of England clergyman, more than usually well read in the history and doctrine of the Catholic branch of Christianity. And books in almost every conceivable field of learning, so far as they were available to an eighteenth-century man in Western Europe, are noted in his remarkable Journal. Of the modern languages, he read German, French, Spanish, and Italian. 'This is not to claim great scholarship for Wesley, but a wide mental horizon. It would be re- | markable if a mind so virile should not have taken on a breadth and depth not easily cramped into simple doctrinal formulas. And it would be still more remarkable if men of less experience, however excellent they may have been in other ways, should have grasped Wesley's thought in all its variety and richness. :
It should be possible, therefore, after the lapse of almost one hundred and fifty years, to assess more accurately the traditional picture. In considering
Wesley's religion and theology, it is tempting to discuss how far he was a romantic; but the word is too indefinite. It is better to ask how far Wesley was part of the modern movement—call it what one will— toward a preference for emotion, individualism, diversity, and growth, over reason, uniformity, and regulation. This is not merely an academic question.
To-day both the defenders of tradition and their The Interpretation of Wesley opponents are uniting in attack upon what has been called "'modern religion." Feeling, they say, has been too much exalted; subjectivism has been reduced to an absurdity; freedom has become anarchy. As in politics, in economics, and in literature, so also in religion there is a demand for reassessment. A reexamination of Wesley's religion and theology is necessary, therefore, for anyone who would hazard an opinion as to his importance for contemporary religion. Only by such a re-examination can one hope to determine whether John Wesley is a stained-glass saint or a living prophet.