Wesley's Religious Experience and would be accompanied by the witness of the Spirit that he was a child of God. In this state of mind, Wesley met a young German, a Moravian missionary on his way to Georgia, Peter Bohler. During the next three months, until Bohler sailed, Wesley saw the Moravian missionary several times. They went to Oxford together and talked much; but Wesley says that he did not understand Bohler, and Bohler's comment was: "My brother, my brother, that philosophy of yours must be purged away." * A month later,
Bohler convinced Wesley of unbelief, although, according to his Journal, he had already come to that conclusion before arriving in London. Bohler advised Wesley to preach faith until he had it, and then to preach it because he had it. At subsequent meetings, Bohler discoursed on the holiness and happiness which attend faith. Wesley had read Haliburton, and he was ready to adduce the Scottish writer as an example of instantaneous conversion." Bohler convinced him that in the early days of the Church, conversion was instantaneous; and several were brought to Wesley to testify to their conversion in the same manner. "Here ended my disputing," said Wesley;
"T could now only cry out, "Lord, help Thou my unbelief.' " ° Father Piette has argued that Bohler was not teaching Wesley justification by faith, but the primary place of the love of God in Christian experience; and there is ground for the argument.' When Bohler sailed for America, he wrote to Wesley, urging him to "taste, and then see, how exceedingly (vehementer) the Son of God has loved you, and loves you still; and John Wesley and Modern Religion that so you may continually trust confidently (confidere) in Him, and feel His life in you and in your flesh." He was obviously pleading here for Wesley to realize the love of God, and calling Wesley's failure to grasp the necessity of this, unbelief. 'Beware the sin of unbelief," he wrote, ''and if you have not conquered it yet, see that you conquer it to-morrow through the blood of Christ." ° Toward the close of the letter Bohler associates himself with Wesley and his companions by changing from the second person to the first. He would have Wesley and his brother
Charles and Hall admonish one another "to believe, and then to walk circumspectly in the sight of God, to fight lawfully against the devil and the world, and to crucify and to tread all sin under our feet, as far as we are permitted through the grace of the second
The fact that Wesley's translation of Bohler's Latin letter has certain strange omissions and changes points to a misunderstanding of the Moravian's meaning.'® Wesley had decided he was not a Christian, and he was sure that Bohler thought the same. Later, he understood better what his German > friend was driving at.
Wesley was approaching the resolution of the inner conflict which had developed slowly for many years by reason of the submergence of his emotional nature, becoming critical when, disappointed in himself and in men, he had met experience after experience which had torn away the intellectual and disciplinary covering of his natural feelings. He now sat down once more to sum up his spiritual pilgrimage.
In the light of his belief that he had overlooked the Wesley's Religious Experience power of faith in Christian living, his former life seemed less than Christian. Again we set down the record as it is, without consideration of his later and more mature judgment.
In his Oxford days, said Wesley, he had aimed at inward holiness, "the image of God." But he had not found assurance or comfort. Nor could the mystics help him, for they only substituted inward works for outer works. At Savannah he had been beating the air. "In this vile, abject state of bondage to sin, I was indeed fighting continually, but not conquering.
Before I had willingly served sin: now it was unwillingly; but still I served it. I fell, and rose, and fell again. Sometimes I was overcome, and in heaviness; sometimes I overcame, and was in joy. For as in the former state I had some foretastes of the terrors of the law; so had I in this, of the comforts of the gospel.
During this whole struggle between nature and grace, which had now continued above ten years, I had many remarkable returns to prayer, especially when I was in trouble; I had many sensible comforts, which are indeed no other than short anticipations of the life of faith. But I was still 'under the law,' not 'under grace' (the state most who are called Christians are content to live and die in); for I was only striving with, not freed from, sin. Neither had I the witness of the Spirit with my spirit, and indeed could not; for I 'sought it not by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law.' " ** Wesley's meaning is clear, although his analysis is slightly different from his earlier summaries. He was seeking inward peace and assurance, and he was
John Wesley and Modern Religion looking for a permanent plane of living where he should conquer always, instead of fighting and sometimes falling. Later it will be seen how Wesley came gradually to understand that life is not made up of such permanent planes of existence where men, haying achieved, go on at the same exalted level. Also he was later to understand that the assurance of salvation which he coveted is not always to be found in those who are indubitably Christians. But, for the time, his own strivings had prepared him psychologically for Peter Bohler's teaching, as Wesley understood it. Faith is the gift of God; it may be had instantaneously. "I was now thoroughly convinced,"
Wesley wrote in a summary of his religious experience, "and, by the grace of God, I resolved to seek it unto the end, (1) by absolutely renouncing all dependence, in whole or in part, upon my own works of righteousness; on which I had really grounded my hope of salvation, though I knew it not, from my youth up;
(2) by adding to the constant use of all the other means of grace, continual prayer for this very thing, justifying, saving faith, a full reliance on the blood of Christ shed for me; a trust in Him, as my Christ, as —- my sole justification, sanctification, and redemption, 47
Two things should be noticed here. In the first place, he had not been aware that he was trusting in his own works. Yet this problem was before his mind years before. He was not an ignorant man hearing for the first time of justification by faith, but a trained student of theology who had tried to avoid either extreme, trusting in faith without works or in Wesley's Religious Experience works without faith. But now he identified his condition with that of those who believe in salvation by works alone. In the second place, he determined to seek this faith by prayer, in addition to the use of "'all the other means of grace." Nothing in his new attitude excluded the means of grace; he still sought his new life within the institutions of the Church.
On Wednesday, May 24, 1738, he opened his Testament (evidently practicing a sort of bibliomancy) at the words, "There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that ye should be partakers of the divine nature." Later he read, *'Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." At St. Paul's in the afternoon, the anthem was '"'Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice... O Israel, trust in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption.
And He shall redeem Israel from all his sins."" In the evening he went to a society in Aldersgate Street where some one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. ''About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." *'
Any interpretation of John Wesley's personal religion is determined by the significance given to his Aldersgate Street experience. Traditionally, Methodists and non-Methodists alike have seen in this experience the evangelical conversion of Wesley. But John Wesley and Modern Religion of late years more and more scholars have classified this as a mystical rather than an evangelical conversion. Dimond points out the likeness between the mystic "Awakening, Purgation, and Illumination" and Wesley's religious crisis in 1725, '"'the discipline during the intervening period, and the conversion in 1738." ** The proper approach to an evaluation of the 1738 experience is by a study of Wesley's subsequent religious life and of his own more mature conclusions concerning his "conversion" and his whole religious experience.
In the first place, Wesley persisted for some time in the belief that, prior to May 24, 1738, he had not been a Christian. On October 30, 1738, he wrote his brother Samuel, who did not look with a friendly eye on what he considered his brother's extravagances:
"By a Christian I mean one who so believes in Christ as that sin hath no more dominion over him; and in this obvious sense of the word I was not a Christian till May the 24th last past."'" But Wesley was troubled by his persistent spiritual unevenness. heyeeeeaageeFaa
At the time of his "'conversion,' Wesley was astonished that he did not feel those "transports of joy" usually associated with conversion. He concluded that in this experiences vary.'® On January 4, 1739, there is a pathetic summary of his condition, in which Wesley declares explicitly: "I affirm I am not a Christian now.... that I am not a Christian at this day I as assuredly know as that Jesus is the Christ." His reasons are that he does not have the fruits of the Spirit, love, peace, and joy. "I do not love either the Father or the Son.'' He knows this because he feels
Wesley's Religious Experience it; "there is no word more proper, more clear, or more strong." Moreover, he still is "hankering after a happiness in loving and being loved by one or another." "Though I have endured hardships, though
I have in all things denied myself and taken up my cross, | am not a Christian. My works are nothing, my sufferings are nothing; I have not the fruits of the Spirit of Christ. Though I have constantly used all the means of grace for twenty years, I am not a Chrisae
This cannot be dismissed as a mood, for Wesley was not given to moods. It is plain that he had been disappointed in not finding the inner peace and joy which he craved. Moreover, he had not found the freedom from all wrong desires and wandering thoughts which he had expected. When his doctrines are examined, it will be seen how his own experience parallels the working out of his theories concerning sin in believers and concerning the stages of the Christian life which succeed forgiveness of sins and adoption into the family of God. Wesley's high ideal of the Christian life led him to doubt his own Christianity when he did not have the assurance which he craved and the perfection which he longed for; moreover his new estimate of the place of emotion in the religious life led him to anticipate an evenness and an intensity of feeling which he did not have.
Canon Overton, a sympathetic Anglican biographer of Wesley, thought that the outburst of January, 1739, was the last evidence of spiritual uneasiness in Wesley's experience. "Henceforth," said Canon
Overton, "during the whole of his long life hardly John Wesley and Modern Religion the shadow of a doubt about his spiritual state crossed his path; clouds and darkness constantly swept over his outer life, but there was perpetual and unclouded sunshine within." '* 'The facts do not bear this out.
In April, 1739, Wesley wrote to James Hutton, describing the great work at Bristol, but saying: "I am still dead and cold, unless while I am speaking." "
But far more important is a letter which Wesley wrote to his brother, Charles, in 1766, twenty-eight years after the Aldersgate experience, concealing significant parts of his thought in shorthand or Greek.
"In one of my last I was saying that I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) I do not love
God. I never did. Therefore I never believed in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore I am only an honest heathen, a proselyte of the Temple, one of the God-fearers. And yet to be so employed of God! and so hedged in that I can neither get forward nor backward! Surely there never was such an instance before, from the beginning of the world! If I ever have had that faith, it would not be so strange. But I never had any other evidence of the eternal or invisible world than I have now; and that is none at all, unless such as fairly shines from reason's glimmering ray. I have no direct witness, I do not say that I am a child of God, but of anything invisible or eternal. |
"And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. And yet I find rather an increase than a . decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every
Wesley's Religious Ex perience part of it. I am borne along, I know not how, that I can't stand still. I want all the world to come to him whom I know not. Neither am I impelled to this by fear of any kind. I have no more fear than love. Or if I have any fear, it is not that of falling into hell but of falling into nothing.
"I hope you are with Billy Evans. If there is an Israelite indeed, I think he is one. O insist everywhere on full redemption, receivable by faith alone! Consequently to be looked for now. You are made, as it were, for this very thing. Just here you are in your element. In connexion I beat you; but in strong, pointed sentences you beat me. Go on, in your own way, what God has peculiarly called you to. Press the instantaneous blessing: then I shall have more time for my peculiar calling, enforcing the gradual work." "° This letter must be understood in reference to its historical setting. In the early part of the 1760's, beginning at Otley, there had been an outburst of claims to perfect love. Many professed that they had passed suddenly from the status of justified souls to that of sanctified. The doctrinal implications will be reviewed in another chapter, but the meaning for Wesley was that he was faced again with claims to a greater intensity and constancy of emotional states than he had himself attained. He who had preached that men are to strive for a love which casteth out even the suggestion of evil and which gives a high and unchanging level of emotional stability, had not himself received such a salvation. Moreover, he had preached that a man could not stand still, that he
John Wesley and Modern Religion must either go forward or backward. His own experience seemed to contradict his doctrine.
The truth is that Wesley had from the first been seeking nothing less than perfection. He found that a trained will and disciplined mind do not mean perfection, for the emotions are unruly. Then, in the enthusiasm of 1738 and immediately afterward, he had expected complete peace and joy and constant dominion over every taint of sin, inward and outward, as a result of the realization of the boundless love of God through faith. But he had been compelled, through the years, to readjust his doctrines, as his sermons on ""Wandering Thoughts," "Sin in Believers,"' and the like, testify. There must be another stage in the Christian life: the justified man must be sanctified. But Wesley himself had not reached this high plateau of the Spirit, where, as he believed at first, men may be free from even the suggestion of evil.
Indeed, Wesley was by nature and training little fitted for experiences of emotional intensity.
Throughout his life he had rationed his time and allotted his tasks with a methodicity impossible to more ~ romantic natures. Sometimes, even in his old age, he looked back with a kind of nostalgia to the ordered days at Oxford. 'Let me be again an Oxford Methodist!"? he cried to Charles in 1772. 'I am often in doubt whether it would not be best for me to resume all my Oxford rules, great and small. I did then walk closely with God and redeem the time." 7* Feelings are desirable, but Wesley could not rid himself of his reliance upon reason administering by the rules of Wesley's Religious Experience logic. In 1786, he wrote to Elizabeth Ritchie that he had not heard or read of anything like his own experience. Count Zinzendorf had said that there are three ways by which God leads his people: by apposite texts of Scripture, by impressions, by plain and clear reasons. Wesley had been led by reason and Scripture, but rarely by impressions. "I see," he wrote, '"abundantly more than I feel." And there is something
pathetic in the line with which he concludes: "I want to feel more love and zeal for God." *° "T want to feel." 'This is a recurring note in Wesley's long years. Not that he was by any means devoid of feeling, but there was not that ebullience of emotion which some seem to have. The reader who comes to Wesley's Journal with the idea that he was a preacher of feeling cannot but be surprised at the paucity of reference to the great evangelist's own feelings. There are occasional entries: "The longer
I spoke the more strength I had, till at twelve I was as one refreshed with wine"; 'I explained the nature of inward religion, words flowing upon me faster than
I could speak"; "I intended to have given an exhortation to the Society; but as soon as we met, the Spirit of supplication fell upon us, so that I could hardly do anything but pray and give thanks." But compared to the mass of the Journal such entries are rare.
The high emotional experiences recorded there are of other people. Wesley himself had earnests of the feeling which others had, and he would have liked to feel more. In the 1737 hymn book, he transcribed
Addison's hymn, '"When all thy mercies, O my God"; . 95
John Wesley and Modern Religion but the latter lines of the first stanza he changed to read, Why my cold heart, art thou not lost In wonder, love and praise?
It is illustrative of the ease with which theories can. be made that this, on first glance, seems only a proof of Wesley's preconverted state of soul. But Wesley never changed the lines. To the time of his last hymn book, he continued to reprint the hymn as he had printed it almost half a century before. Apparently, to the end it was to him a remarkable fact that he felt no more than he did.
With these facts in mind, one is prepared to understand Wesley's reinterpretation of his own experience, a reinterpretation which made possible one of his great intuitive syntheses. By readjusting his ideas concerning his own experience he was enabled to see the deeper significance of the doctrines he had been preaching concerning the progressive nature of the Christian life. So long as he thought of himself as having been a sinner before 1738, so long he was unable to appreciate some aspects of the Christian life and so long his own spiritual history puzzled him.
A few years after Wesley wrote to his brother that he did not have the love of God in his heart, he issued the first volume of his Works, the first collected edition, for which he had bought new paper and new type. In the first volume, which appeared in 1771,
Wesley set forth reasons for the new collected edition in thirty-two duodecimo volumes. One of the reasons was that typographical errors and others which obscured the sense must be corrected. Then he added a Wesley's Religious Experience paragraph which should long ago have given students a key to one of the most important changes in' his thought. "But as necessary as these corrections were," he wrote, "'there were others of a different kind, which were more necessary still. In revising what I had wrote on so many various subjects and occasions, and for so long a course of years, I found cause for not only rational or verbal corrections, but frequently for correcting the sense also. I am the more concerned to do this, because none but myself has a right to do it. Accordingly I have altered many words or sentences; many others I have omitted, and in various parts I have added more or less as I judged the subject required: So that in this edition, I present to serious and candid men, my last and maturest thoughts: agreeable, I hope, to Scripture, Reason, and Christian Antiquity." ** It was for this edition that Wesley corrected his first two journals, modifying or recanting some strong expressions which he had used indicating that, before his conversion in 1738, he had not been a Christian. In the summary of his condition which concludes the last Savannah Journal, Wesley made several corrections. 'To the statement, "that I, who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God," he added: "I am not sure of this."
To his judgment that all his sacrifice and striving were but "dung and dross," since they were not ennobled by faith, he appended the statement: "I had even then the faith of a servant, though not that of a son." And the collection of condemnations which were summed up in the conclusion, that he was then
John Wesley and Modern Religion "a child of wrath," he withdrew with the simple words, "I believe not." He had defined the faith which he lacked as 'fa sure trust and confidence in God, that, through the merits of Christ, my sins are forgiven, and I reconciled to the favour of God." He amended this by inserting after the words, ""The faith
I want [lack] is," the explanation, "the faith of a son." And in the first summary which occurs in the Journal account of May 19-24, 1738, Wesley corrects his exclamation, "Oh let no one deceive us by vain words, as if we had already attained this faith!"
"That is," runs the correction, "the proper Christian faith ie The importance of these corrections lies partly in the fact that they were introduced into the copy which Wesley so carefully prepared for the edition which was to carry needed corrections of his writings.
He had definitely moderated his former estimates of his condition before 1738, estimates which had been written down under the influence of those troublous days when he returned from the struggles in Georgia to the difficulties at home. Now, he set forth his corrections so that there might be no mistake about it.
But Wesley had not reckoned with his printer.
William Pine of Bristol has been well called the world's worst printer. He omitted whole pages and so bungled the text that Wesley added a page of errata to each volume, calling attention, sometimes sharply, _ to the omissions and errors of his printer. |
It is part of the irony of history that Wesley was defeated first of all by his printer, and secondly by his editors and biographers. The corrections to the SaWesley's Religious Experience vannah Journal did not become a part of the text until 1829-1831, when Thomas Jackson edited the Third Collected Edition of Wesley's Works. Jackson stated that for these corrections he had the authority of Wesley's own corrections of the First Collected
Edition, and subsequent editors and biographers have only copied Jackson's note. Indeed, a recent writer has gone so far as to question the authenticity of the corrections, declaring that they cannot be used in any account of Wesley's thought, on the ground that they were never authorized for publication during Wesley's lifetime." For this reason it is necessary to state clearly the authority for the statement made above, that Wesley included these corrections in his copy for the 1771-74 edition of his Works. All that was necessary to assure anyone of Wesley's inclusion of these retractions and modifications was to turn to the back of the volume containing the First and Second Journals. In volume xxvi of The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. ... Bristol: Printed by William Pine, in Wine Street. MDCCLXXIV, is a list of errata containing every one of the corrections about which so much ado has been made. When the second edition was printed in 1809, the editor simply overlooked or ignored the errata, and Jackson was the first to include them; but even Dr. Curnock, to whom all students of Methodism owe so much, failed to notice that Wesley had included these corrections of earlier statements concerning his religious experience in the errata attached to the first edition.
So much has been said about the authenticity of Wesley's corrections because they are vital to a corJohn Wesley and Modern Religion rect interpretation of his experience. But this is not the only evidence that Wesley did not, in later life, regard his experience of May 24, 1738, as a conversion in the usual sense that the word carries in evangelical circles. It has been strangely assumed by many who write or speak about Wesley, that he dated everything in his religious experience from the Aldersgate episode, and that he made that the starting point of Methodism. Asa matter of fact, after the first year or two, he never mentioned the occurrence in his writings.
In his Short History of the People Called Methodists, which he appended to his Concise History of the Church, he makes no reference to the Aldersgate experience, the only mention of anything connected with it being the statement: "In all our steps we were greatly assisted by the advice and exhortations of Peter Bohler, an excellent young man, belonging to the society commonly called Moravians" **; and he is speaking here of the organization of the societies, not of his personal experience. The Methodist societies he dates back to 1729, which is, of course, the date of the Holy Club of Oxford. When Wesley delivered the address at the laying of the cornerstone of the City
Road Chapel in London, April 21, 1770, he reviewed the history of Methodism. It was an epochal occasion for him, the establishment of Methodism in perma- — nent and respectable headquarters in the capitol. But he began his story of Methodism with his acquaintance with a Kempis and Bishop Taylor; and of Aldersgate ©
Street and of Peter Bohler there is never a word.""
Wesley did often refer to 1738 as an epoch in his and in Methodist history; but his references must be Wesley's Religious Experience taken for what they mean and not changed into a mythical chronology referring to his conversion.
Wesley understood, of course, that his new understanding of justification by faith—whether this was a restatement of Luther's or Calvin's doctrine will be considered later—meant a change in his theological and evangelistic message. 'Therefore his references:
"Forty years ago I knew and preached every Christian doctrine which I preach now"; "'And this is the doctrine which I have constantly believed and taught for near eight and twenty years." In another sense,
1738 was an epochal year. It marked what Wesley recognized as the third stage in the rise of the Methodist Societies. In his A Short History of the People
Called Methodists, written in 1781 and appended to his Concise Ecclesiastical History, he wrote:
"On Monday, May 1, our little society began in London. But it may be observed, the first rise of Methodism, so called, was in November, 1729, when four of us met together at Oxford; the second was at Savannah, in April, 1736, when twenty or thirty persons met at my house; the last was at London, on this day, when forty or fifty of us agreed to meet together every Wednesday evening, in order to a free conversation, begun and ended with singing and prayer." ° To attempt to place in their historical perspective the events of 1738 is not in any way to minimize the importance of Aldersgate Street for John Wesley and for Methodism. But it is necessary to emphasize that attempts to interpret that experience as an evangelical conversion which transformed Wesley from a sinner
John Wesley and Modern Religion to a saint, or from a naturalistic humanist to a Christian, are in contradiction to Wesley's own judgment and misreadings of the facts. There can be no doubt that Wesley changed his mind about the Aldersgalal experience: the alterations in the Journal included by |
Wesley in the 1771 edition of his Works, with the) express statement that important changes were tobe __ made, puts this beyond a doubt. And the other evidence is equally convincing. It must be taken, therefore, either that Wesley, in his later years, suffered a retrogression of spirit and became a man unable to understand his own spiritual history, or that his later views represent -his mature judgment, that they are the Wesleyan interpretation.
According to the corrections which Wesley made in his Journal, he was before 1738 a servant of God, having Christian faith, but lacking the full, filial faith which characterizes "adult" children of God.
In 1736, Spangenberg had been describing the fruits of faith. Wesley cried: "If this be so, I have no © faith!" 'That wise man, Mr. Spangenberg," replied:
"Habes fidem, sed exiguam: You have faith, but it is" weak." In 1771, Wesley recalled this, and wrote to Benson: "Here, in this very point, is your mistake.
You was as really a believer when you came to Kingswood as you are now. ... You have faith, but it is weak. This was your case too." *? In 1785, Wesley retold the same story to Mary Cooke, adding: '""The very same thing I say to you, my dear friend. You have faith, but it is only as a grain of mustard-seed."
Wesley had decided that Aldersgate Street marked a stage in his religious experience, and a very important Wesley's Religious Experience stage; but it was neither the beginning of his Chinistian life nor the end of it.
And this seems a true analysis. For fifteen years, or thereabout, before 1738 he had been seeking Christian Perfection. In doing so, he had disciplined himself as few men have. His methodical and rationalistic nature made this his natural course: and he did not give over this discipline till death. But his emotional life was suppressed. His mother had taught him so; and his own ascetic beliefs had emphasized the tendency. But in Georgia he had found his reason and will insufficient. All too painfully he was reminded of his lack of emotional stability and of peace.
He believed the love of God and man to be the essence of religion; but he had not realized that love. The vital, vivid sense that God loves and forgives had not been a part of his own experience.
The fusing of his personality demanded an emotional experience, and apparently the evening when his heart was "strangely warmed" saw the time when, in Dimond's words, "'a powerful self-sentiment became identified, in ways too profound and secret for self-analysis, with a disinterested religious sentiment, the object of which was God revealed in Christ." **
Or, it might be expressed by saying that Wesley had reached the stage when all his energies and interests were channeled into his devotion to God. His conversion, in short, was not an evangelical but a mystical conversion—that is, the conversion of a religious man to a higher state of religious devotion. His is nearer the type of Pascal than of Augustine. But he was too much the Briton 'of the eighteenth century to John Wesley and Modern Religion experience the mystical union with God which characterized the classical mystics. His strangely warmed heart signifies what Piette calls an "intense perception of the love of God." *? And this perception of the love of God awoke in him an answering love. It was not highly emotional, and it was never to be. But it was an unwavering devotion.
Wesley never claimed to have attained perfect love or Christian Perfection; but no student of his life can fail to be impressed with the consistent quality of his long years of almost unbelievable activity. The troubled hours, noted above, seem to have broken in only when he struggled. to find a satisfactory explanation of apparent inconsistencies in his experience. But these hours were few, and there is no trace of them whatsoever during the last twenty years of his life. He was cheerful, he never complained, and he maintained a level of activity which is yet a wonder to the readers of his Journal. There are evidences of some emotional peaks in his experience, but not many.
Although quick tempered and not by nature a humble man, Wesley lived for nearly sixty-five years on an. ethical plane worthy of a saint. At the same time, he tried diligently to find some solid, rational expression of his faith; and, while his theology was often inconsistent and is certainly not fully adequate for later generations, he himself was never satisfied until he had reached a mental synthesis agreeable with his own intellectual presuppositions. Beauty did not, indeed, play any large place in Wesley's life; but he made no inconsiderable contribution to hymnology, and he was quick to appreciate the place of song in Wesley's Religious Experience Christian societies. There is reason then for including
Wesley, along with St. Francis, Wyclif, and Luther, among those in whom Christian ideas and experience have reasserted themselves "with fresh, creative energy." This Professor Lyman has done, illustrating his thesis, that religious creativity "is proportionate to the vital union effected between the four typical religious motives—the ethical, the mystical, the aesthetic, and the philosophic." * To use another terminology, Wesley was a mixture of classical and romantic tendencies. Always he maintained his passion for holiness, which demanded of him the constant imitation of Christ, which led him not only to form religious societies, but to use constantly the means of grace. But orientated with this was a conscious religious experience, embracing trust and insight and the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, and peace.
This analysis of Wesley's religion may be confirmed by a study of what is a normative element in religious life: his experience of prayer. For almost sixty-six years, as the Diaries extant indicate, Wesley gave a large place to prayer. In the earlier Diaries, he used much the short prayers known as "ejaculatory," but always he notes the hours when he spent at least a few moments in prayer. And his last days were, in this, much as his first. For Monday, February 21,
1791, the pertinent entries are: "5 prayed... 7.30... eee 10... prayer... 5.45... prayer... 7... prayer." The next day, he notes again: "4.30 feed. 7.90... prayer...4... prayed...8... prayed." On Wednesday, the 24th, he wrote: '4.45
John Wesley and Modern Religion prayed .).:. 6.30\prayed .)...2..)... prayer). 930s prayed." ** This was six days before his death.
At times in the Journal, prayer is powerfully emotional; but these are almost always the prayers of other people. In 1764, Wesley told of a prayer by a woman in society. The prayer "was perfectly an original; odd and unconnected, made up of disjointed fragments, and yet like a flame of fire. Every sentence went through my heart, and I believe the heart of every one present. For many months I have found nothing like it. It was good for me to be there."
This is perhaps what Wesley meant by "passive prayer." "At some times," he wrote in 1769, "it is needful to say, 'I will pray with the Spirit and with the understanding also.' At other times the understanding has little to do, while the soul is poured forth in passive prayer." ?* Wesley thought that prayer is "but the desire of the soul expressed in words"; and for this reason he doubted that there is much value in teaching children to repeat prayers before they are awakened.*"
Wesley was alive to the subjective value of praying.
He was sure "that the end of your praying is not to inform God, as though He knew not your wants already; but rather to inform yourselves; to fix the sense of those wants more deeply in your hearts, and the senseof your continual dependence on Him who only is able to supply all your wants." ** But on the whole, Wesley's prayers were of the simple type which Heiler calls '"'prophetic prayers," asking for whatever is felt asa real want. In 1770, Wesley wrote to Mrs.
Barton: "For many years I had a kind of scruple with Wesley's Religious Experience regard to praying for temporal things. But three or four years ago I was thoroughly persuaded that scruple was unnecessary. Being then straitened much,
I made it matter of prayer; and I had an immediate answer. It is true we can only ask outward blessings with reserve, 'If this is best; if it be thy will.'
Wesley here refers to a personal scruple which may have inhibited his own praying; but he had before held that prayer may be for temporal as well as for spiritual blessings. He had written to Bishop Warburton in 1762, that he believed '""God now hears and answers prayer even beyond the ordinary course of nature; otherwise the clerk was in the right who, in order to prevent the fanaticism of his rector, told him, 'Sir, you should not pray for fair weather yet; for the moon does not change till Saturday.'
But if Wesley thought that prayer is the desire of the soul expressed in words and believed that one may sometimes pray with little exercise of the understanding, he would have nothing of prayer which depended upon impulse. 'In like manner," he wrote to a correspondent in 1748, "'you are as really moved by the Spirit to pray, whether it be in public or private, when you have a conviction it is the will of God you should, as when you have the strongest impulse upon your heart." ** And he urged his people to have fixed times for prayer, that they might acquire a "taste" which they had not. "Whether you like it or no," he advised a preacher, "read and pray daily. It is for your life; there is no other way: else you will be a trifler all your days and a pretty, superficial preacher.
John Wesley and Modern Religion Do justice to your own soul; give it time and means to grow. Do not starve yourself any longer." *?
Nor did Wesley care for the "mental prayer" of the mystics. He believed that "the Scripture by 'prayer' almost always means vocal prayer... . It is therefore our wisdom to force ourselves to prayer—to pray, whether we can pray or no. And many times while we are so doing the fire will fall from heaven, and we shall know our labour was not in vain."
In prayer, then, as in the rest of his religious life, Wesley valued "feeling," but did not much trust it.
Habit remained as real to him as in his Oxford days.
Man must seek by constant, regular activity, even in prayer; and if "the fire fall," the religious man is to be thankful.
No account of Wesley's religious life would be complete without reference to his constant use of the means of grace. It has apparently been assumed by some that his defense of the Church of England was owing to an inconsistent conservatism which moved him to oppose any change of allegiance on the part of the Methodists. In fact, Wesley was devoted to the Church of his childhood. He accounted her liturgy the best of any national Church in the world, and when he prepared the liturgy for the American Methodists he made only such changes as seemed to him advisable for doctrinal or prudential reasons.** His
Journal is full of references to the services which he attended, and he was moved deeply by her anthems and psalms. If he moderated his views of the Church and her orders, he maintained his belief in the value of the sacraments. It should not be forgotten that WesWesley's Religious Experience ley received the Lord's Supper on an average of once every five days "throughout his apostolic life." *
The ordinances of the Church were to him a real part of the ministry of the love of God.
In prayer, in attendance upon the ordinances of the Church, in activity Wesley spent his saintly life, seeking that Christian Perfection which was to him the summation of religion.
For him, whatever may have been true of some of his followers, the search was never ended in any final status; he lived, as the Minutes of 1770 phrased it, moment by moment. There was stability in his life, but it was the stability of growth, of a Pilgrim's
Progress; yet on the whole, the progress was that of a Happy Pilgrim. In his old age, some of his preachers said to him: "Mr. Wesley, you often ask us about our experience, we should like to be favoured with yours." Wesley's reply was to quote two stanzas of one of his brother's hymns, which were not an assertion but a prayer.
Jesus, confirm my heart's desire To work, and speak, and think for thee; Still let me guard the holy fire, And still stir up thy gift in me; Ready for all thy perfect will, My acts of faith and love repeat, Till death thy endless mercies seal, And make my sacrifice complete.*® eOa CHAPTER VI THE BASES OF WESLEY'S THEOLOGY FoR many years it was customary to speak of Wesley as a great evangelist and organizer whose doctrines were borrowed from German Pietists and English Dissenters. Recently this view has been challenged, but it is yet taken for granted by many that he was a reviver of half-forgotten doctrines. There is no intention to claim great theological originality for Wesley, but it is argued here that Wesley's position, theologically as well as otherwise, gives him importance for modern religion. It is necessary, therefore, to turn to a consideration of his thought.
The student who would understand Wesley's mature conclusions concerning Christianity must keep certain facts in mind. In the first place, he must remember that Wesley's background was Anglican-) ism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Many seeming inconsistencies in Wesley will disappear when one ceases to cramp him into the mold of Ger- ' man Pietism or of English Dissent. In the second \* — place, the student must keep in mind that Wesley was typically British in his major interest: holiness. From Hobbes to the nineteenth century, British philoso- — 5 phers and theologians have been chiefly moralists. It is not an historical accident that both the Oxford
Movements, that of Wesley in the eighteenth and that The Bases of Wesley's Theology of Newman in the nineteenth century, were orientated to this idea. If one seeks for symbolic coincidences, they may be found in the sermons which heralded the two movements. In 1733, Wesley preached at Oxford on "The Circumcision of the Heart'; in 1833, Keble preached at Oxford the sermon which Newman said ushered in the Tractarian Revival, on "National Apostacy." ?
But one must not lose sight of another fact, that Wesley's thought developed and matured through the years. It has long been recognized that he changed his views on several important matters about 1738, but too many have assumed that this was the only, or at least the last change which he made. But just as his interpretations of his own religious experience developed until he was almost seventy years old, so also his theology changed. The student of Wesley must make up his mind whether he calls the theology which Wesley held in 173 that which he held in 1738, or that which he held in 1770, "Wesley's theology."
It is assumed in this book that the views which Wesley reached in his later period represent his mature convictions. The changes must not be exaggerated; but they must be recognized. It is therefore necessary to trace their development in order to explain his mature views.
So much preliminary statement is required, and even this is not sufficient. Professor Clement C. J.
Webb referred to the difficulty of recovering the theology of the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century because of the changes in thought since that time. The doctrine of evolution and the wide
John Wesley and Modern Religion acceptation of the results of biblical criticism have naturalized certain categories until it is with effort that the student can think himself back into the earlier part of the last century. But the Oxford
Movement itself has added to the difficulty. Certain conceptions of Catholic theology have been so grafted to the idea especially of High Churchmanship that it is not easy to enter into the spirit of Anglicanism as it was before either Tractarianism or Evangelicalism.
John Wesley was of the eighteenth century; and he was nourished in High Church Anglicanism as that — was understood in the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One must be content to see him, therefore,in the light of his time. It may be that he is the more meaningful in that he stood close to an older and almost lost world.
To understand Wesley's thought one must beais with his assumptions, with those beliefs which underlay all his later amplifications and changes. And here one cannot ignore the mental atmosphere of his home and early training. Wesley was, for example, from an old-world family where, in spite of education and considerable sophistication, spirits and goblins yet lived. Nor is this to be dismissed as preparation only for superstition. Such an atmosphere kept minds pliable when mechanistic philosophies would have stamped out all the poetry of life. However deplorable as intellectual error, it was good that some in the eighteenth century never got completely away from — | old-world views; else would posterity have been the poorer for the lack of that poetry which is one of the gifts of that century to ours." It is in this light that The Bases of Wesley's Theology one should view the understratum of credulity in Wesley's mind. It leavened the too intellectualistic and too materialistic bent which was his both by nature and training.
In accord with his practical interests Wesley was ' concerned with theology principally as it bore on practical matters. Speculative doctrines Wesley usually accepted according to the prejudices of his education or to the appeal that the doctrine made to his common sense. He believed most heartily in the Trinity, but he would not contend for the term. He thought that Servetus was not really anti-trinitarian, although he dared not use the words "Trinity" or "Person." "I dare," commented Wesley, '"'and I think them very good words. But I should think it very hard to be burned alive for not using them; especially with a slow fire, made of moist, green wood." * Wesley's doctrine 2a aang seems to have been the conventional substitutionary theory, but he gave it a simple statement: "God will not inflict on that (justified) sinner what he deserved to suffer, because the Son of His love hath suffered for him." * Justifying faith, for him, was a confidence that "Christ died for my sins, that He loved me, and gave Himself for me.' Wesley's religious needs and his practical interests demanded this much; they did not demand more. It is true that the work of Christ had great
'importance in Wesley's eyes, for this work is the ground of man's salvation. But this is not to say that Wesley attached great importance to any doctrine of the atonement. The love of God in Christ was the essence of the matter for him. "
John Wesley and Modern Religion | For Wesley, God is, of course, the reality of realities. Of the two classical modes of conceiving God, as being or activity, the latter was always uppermost in Wesley's mind. While he did not use the jargon of modern theology, he clearly had in mind that which is meant by transcendence and immanence; and his position can be stated only by saying that God is both transcendent and immanent.
God is an objective reality, to use the modern terminology. Wesley would have had nothing of the talk about God as a "projection" of human ideals; but to assume that for this reason Wesley is to be catalogued _ with those who relegate God to immeasurable distance from mankind is to mistake his real meaning.
When he speaks of eternity, he is careful to warn his readers against assuming that God is any less mindful of his children. Man must remember that "nothing is little or great, that no duration is long or short before _
Him." ® Man may be aware of the infinite distance _ between God in heaven and man on earth, but this ~ distance means nothing to God. But it is not only ~ that this distance means nothing to God, but that God is actually near to man. a If God is transcendent, He is also immanent. How —
God sustains the universe, man does not know. "Perhaps what the ancient philosopher speaks of the soul, in regard to its residence in the body, that it is tofain toto, et tota in qualibet, might, in some sense be ~ spoken of the omnipresent Spirit, in regard to the ~
Universe." ° In his third discourse "Upon our Lord's_ "that God is in all things, and that we are to see the* 114 | The Bases of Wesley's Theology Creator in the glass of every creature; that we should use and look upon nothing as separate from God, which indeed is a kind of practical Atheism; but, with a true magnificence of thought, survey heaven and them all in being, who pervades and actuates the whole created frame, and is, in a true sense, the soul of the universe." 7
It would be folly to expect of Wesley a philosophical consistency untrue, not only to his nature and interests, but to his time. He did not work out the implications of his belief in the immanence of God for a philosophy of natural law. Indeed, there are times when he speaks of God in terms which show that he is, at the moment, thinking in the traditional way of a God outside his creation, as the God of the Deists was outside. But it is evident that Wesley's belief in God's closer, more intimate relation with nature, expressed in such passages as that quoted above, was his real answer to the mechanistic, deistic theories of his time. God is both transcendent and immanent.
It will be shown later that he would have nothing of the deterministic philosophy associated with Calvinistic transcendence, and it would be equally wrong to claim his suffrage for the determinism implied in - modern immanental philosophy. He held to a simpler theology. "That fine poet," Alexander Pope, was in error when he wrote:
He sees with equal eye, as Lord of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall.
John Wesley and Modern Religion This would be to reduce life to a uniformity which man cannot allow. God feedeth the fowls of the air; but "are not ye much better than they?" God does deviate from his general laws. Again Wesley quoted
Pope to disagree with him:
Shall burning Etna, of a sage required, Forget to thunder, and recall her fires?
On air or sea new motions be imprest, O blameless Bethel! to relieve thy breast!
When the loose mountain trembles from on high, Shall gravitation cease, if you go by?
Or some old temple, nodding to its fall, > For Chartres' head reserve the hanging wall? :
To this Wesley replied, simply, yes. "If it please God to continue the life of any of his servants, He will suspend that or any other law of nature." ®
This attitude of Wesley may, in part, be attributed to the more credulous side of his nature; but it is rooted deep in his instinctive rebellion against a mechanized conception of the Universe. God is not a great machinist viewing his works with Olympian satisfaction. i Wesley's theology demanded a closer correlation of God with His world than contemporary thought allowed. He voiced this belief, in terms of traditional theology, by insisting that God has not precluded
Himself "from thus exerting His sovereign power from working miracles in any kind or degree, in any age, to the end of the world." ® It is hard for modern readers to understand that this point of miracles and — when they ended was a crucial one for pre-nineteenthcentury theologians. The whole relation of theology
The Bases of Wesley's Theology to a mechanized Universe was determined by the answer to this question: "Did God ever work miracles, and, if so, when did He stop working them?" The Catholic said: "God has never stopped; He may work miracles at any time." The Protestant said that God
"worked them in apostolic times, perhaps until the close of the third century." The skeptic said: 'God may never have worked them"'; and he could adduce
Hume's brilliant essay in support. As theology came} to terms with eighteenth-century natural philosophy, | it tried to push miracles more and more into the background. God's world is a beautiful machine, like
Paley's watch; its ordering must not, cannot be disturbed. True, we continue to worship God because He is a Great Mechanic; but He must not tamper with the machine.
Against such a conception, the Romantic poets took up a semi-pantheism, a belief in "something interfused." According to Professor Whitehead, they revolted against the lifeless mechanism of the New- | tonian world-machine toward a more organic conception of life.1? It must not be thought that Wesley was consciously attempting a philosophic correction of Newtonian physics. But he did come down on the side of a more fluid universe as against the carpenter idea of God. And he did it by taking the Catholic position, that the relations of God and his world remain as they have always been, intimate and effective.
Miracles ceased after the third century, not because God had withdrawn from his world, but because the love of men had grown cold. Man may live, if not in Tr?
John Wesley and Modern Religion expectation of God's intervention, at least in assurance of its possibility.
If God is not limited in His relations with his Universe by mechanical barriers, He is limited by His own nature. He cannot, for example, destroy out of the soul of man "that image of Himself wherein He made him"—a point to which the argument must return.
Moreover, God is not only sovereign but governor."
Here Wesley adopted the argument of Grotius. God is not only powerful but just, and this precludes Him from foreordaining part of His creatures to life everlasting and part to damnation. Everywhere Wesley insists upon the goodness, the mercy, the love of God.
However great, however far off according to human comparisons, God is the loving One whom men may love. To forget this is to ignore the heart of the Wesleyan message.
It is sometimes assumed that all Wesley had to say about man is contained in his doctrine of original sin. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Only in the larger setting of his doctrine of man can one understand his doctrines of sin, of evil, and of salvation.
In the first place, Wesley accepted the contemporary doctrine of a "universal chain of being" (Scala Naturae). In his A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation: or, a Compendium of Natural Philosophy, Wesley made use of Bonnet's Contemplation of Nature to expound this doctrine. 'The whole progress of nature is so gradual, that the entire chasm from a plant to man, is filled up with divers kinds of creatures, rising one above another, by so gentle an T he Bases of Wesley's Theology ascent, that the transitions from one species to another, are almost insensible." 1" In other words, man is but one species in a chain of beings which stretches from the plants to man. Wesley was sure that the chain went on to include angelic beings also.
But what is the demarcation between man and the brutes? Wesley did not believe that the line of division is reason. If one uses the word understanding, instead of reason, then it is plain that brutes also have understanding. He was sure, as he set forth in a very ingenious sermon on ""The General Deliverance," that the brutes had lost by the Fall of Man, and that, in consequence, some of them "have, at present, little more understanding than the earth on which they crawl, or the rock to which they adhere." ** But the dividing line between man and beast is not mental.
Man is made in the image of God, and what this means Wesley explains repeatedly. "God did not make him mere matter, a piece of senseless, unintelligent clay; but a spirit like himself, although clothed with a material vehicle. As such he was endued with understanding; with a will including various affections; and with liberty, a power of using them in a right or wrong manner, of choosing good or evil...."1* In this there is similarity to the brutes, which have will and affections and a measure of liberty, although these have been impaired, if not lost, in the Fall. But their affections and liberty are directed toward "loving obedience to man," while man's nature is capable of "loving obedience to God." This is the impassable barrier between man and the brutes, that they cannot know and love God.'® But Wesley hoped perth John Wesley and Modern Religion that the consummation when the "creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, into the glorious liberty of the sons of God," may mean that the brutes will be moved up the Scale to the position which man now occupies, while men are made "'equal to angels." '° Man, in his primitive purity, had, according to Wesley, both the natural and the moral image of God. ©
The natural image was his "power of self-motion, understanding, will and liberty." The moral image of God was man's original perfection. 'This was the supreme perfection of man... the continually seeing, and loving, and obeying the Father of the spirits of all flesh." *7 But in the Fall man lost "the moral image of God, and, in part, the natural." 1° Sin and evil are the results of man's possessing the natural image of God—that is, of his possession of liberty to choose how his affections are disposed. Having this liberty, man chose evil. He lost, therefore, the moral image of God, holiness and righteousness.
That Wesley regarded human nature as corrupt is too well known to need proof. This comes, in part, from his theological heritage. It has been mistakenly assumed that Wesley learned from William Law a mystical doctrine of the essential divinityof human nature. The assumption is the result of confusing
Law's earlier writings with his later ones, written under the influence of Jakob Boehme. Human nature, according to Law, in his Christian Perfection —
(1726), is diseased; mankind is 'ta Race of fallen Spirits." *° "Nor did the High Church Arminianism in which Wesley was trained teach the natural
120 The Bases of Wesley's Theology religious or moral ability of man. Arminianism was a doctrine of grace, presuming original sin in man. But the main support of the doctrine of original sin was for Wesley unquestionably his own observations. Before going to America, he had pictured the savages as living an idyllic life; but, after his return, he referred over and over to their depravity. Their "natural religion" seemed to him the grand answer to all doctrines of man's natural goodness. In the beginning of his treatise on original sin, Wesley devotes pages to a survey of history and of the contemporary world in proof of man's corruption. Some of his examples are strikingly modern: "There is a still more horrid reproach to the Christian name, yea, to the name of man, to all reason and humanity. There is war in the world! war between men! war between Christians! . . . Now, who can reconcile war, I will not say to religion, but to any degree of reason or common sense?"
This original sin of man is not simply the sum total of his evil acts but an inherent disposition toward evil.
Sin, for Wesley, is actual transgression, but this rooted in an evil tendency which man has by the Fall of Adam. As one commentator remarks, Wesley never freed himself entirely from the belief that sin is a , substance. 'The Christian may triumph over actual sin; but inbred, original sin remains in him until it has been removed by sanctification. But Wesley's common sense saved him from more than one awkward theory. In dealing with the practical needs of his people, he was a shrewd analyst and a helpful adviser, although his theoretical explanations sometimes
Se John Wesley and Modern Religion limped. It was plain to him that there is something radically wrong in the world; and so radical is this wrongness that Wesley could not see it simply as the mass of individual transgressions. 'The roots lie in a corrupt human nature made worse by a bad education. He freely criticized social wrongs, but he saw them always as the result of a corrupt heart.
Man lost not only the moral image of God, but, in part at least, he lost the natural image. His will became infirm, since his affections were not guided by an unerring reason. Likewise, his liberty ceased to be freedom "wholly guided by his understanding." In all this Wesley's emphasis upon understanding, or intelligence, must be noted. 'This emphasis is even more noticeable when it is inquired how the Fall of man affected his understanding. Before this lapse, man's spirit probably "discerned truth by intuition''; his knowledge was limited, but he was not subject to error. But with the Fall man's knowledge ceased to be by intuition; he knew not immediately but mediately.21 What Wesley thought about the nae ture of man's knowledge can be learned by studying his psychology, which in many respects was thoroughly Lockian. Especially did Wesley adopt the empirical side of Locke's psychology, whether or not di- — rectly from Locke. But Wesley was unwilling to push his empiricism to its logical conclusion. There — are no innate ideas, all ideas being received through the senses; but Wesley would not go on to question whether the senses may not be deceived as to the external world. Certainly, he would not agree that the The Bases of Wesley's Theology external world exists only in the representation of the senses.
In fact, Wesley would not go even so far as Locke in some matters. Whereas Locke concluded that "secondary qualities," colors and the like, being somewhat confused and vague, must be attributed to the mind of the observer, Wesley contended for the objective reality of both primary and secondary qualities. "When I say," wrote Wesley, " "That cloth is of red colour,' I mean its surface is so disposed as to reflect the red (that is, the largest) rays of light. When
I say, "The Sky is blue,' I mean it is so disposed as to reflect the blue (that is, the smallest rays of light)."
His decision was: "Colour therefore is a real material thing. There is no illusion in the case, unless you confound the perception with the thing perceived."
Except when the Holy Spirit has restored in man the image of God, the divine ways and purposes may be known to man, aside from revelation, only in God's works. And the intuitive knowledge possible even to the man in whom the image of God has been restored was greatly restricted by Wesley. Like Locke, Wesley distrusted mysticism. Professor Clement C. J.
Webb thinks that there is some connection between an empirical psychology which finds in sensation the only avenue to reality and religious movements stressing the feelings as "the test of spiritual contact with the object of religious faith." ** There is doubtless some truth in this observation, but Wesley did not depend much upon "'feelings," whatever his psychology.
Man, corrupted by the Fall, has lost the moral im- | 123 John Wesley and Modern Religion age of God, and, in part, the natural image also. How is this to be restored? Since the natural man is incapable of good, and impaired in will and understanding, it would seem that one is thrown back upon the _ irresistible grace of Calvinistic theology. But for Wesley the "natural man" is a logical abstraction.
Like the economic man or the caricatures set up today by amateur psychologists, anthropologists, and theogetas logians, the "natural man" does not exist. The truth is that "there is no man that is in a state of mere nature; there is no man, unless he has quenched the Spirit, that is wholly void of the grace of God. No © man living is entirely destitute of what is vulgarly f called natural conscience. But this is not natural: it is v" '4 more properly termed, preventing grace. Everyman has a greater or less measure of this, which waiteth not for the call of man. Every man has, sooner or later, good desires, although the generality of men stifle them before they can strike deep root, or produce any : considerable fruit. Everyone has some measure of \ — that light, some faint glimmering ray, which sooner or later, more or less, enlightens every man that cometh __ into the world. And everyone, unless he be of the small number whose conscience is seared as with a __ hot iron, feels more or less uneasy when he acts contrary to the light of his own conscience. So that no ~~ man sins because he has not grace, but because he does not use the grace which he hath." ** a _ This is Wesley's way of escape from the theological ¥ g and psychological dilemma which the doctrine of — original sin poses for all who adopt it. To understand how Wesley could hold to the doctrine of origThe Bases of Wesley's Theology inal sin and at the same time reject Calvinism, one must grasp this essential fact, that, for Wesley, the "natural man" is only a logical fiction. In this world man exists as a natural man plus the prevenient grace of God. And this grace is not the forgiving favor of God granted in what the Reformed theologians called justification; this grace is empowering grace. "Stir up the spark of grace which is now in you," exhorted
Wesley, "and he will give you more grace." On this road man may go, accepting greater and greater grace until God restores in him the lost image.
It is thus true to say that Wesley did not believe that man can by his own unaided efforts achieve any good thing. It is true that Wesley poured scorn on talk about natural morality and natural piety. There is no innate knowledge of God, no natural intuition of divine things. But there is possibility of good in man, for God has given him grace, a light which lightens every man that cometh into the world.
Twentieth-century readers may remark that there is little difference between a doctrine of natural ability and a doctrine of prevenient grace; but the eighteenth century saw a deal of difference. By the doctrine of prevenient grace two important truths could bepreserved. In the first place, proper emphasis could be laid upon "man'sS proneness to evil, a proneness which modern men, aware of social imperfections and of man's instinctive tendencies, will be the last to_ deny. In the sécond place, the divine initiative could be safeguarded. Religion is not the evolution of man's nature; it implies the emergence of new factors in the total situation. And a great company has always
John Wesley and Modern Religion testified that man's religious life begins and ends in God.
The contrast of Calvinistic theology with Wesley's is plain if one will consider the differing explanations which the two theologies offer of this dilemma of man dead in trespasses and sin. In accordance with Catholic theology, Wesley positeda prevenientgrace which enables man to accept increased grace and to go on by the help of God to higher:stages of the Christian. life. The Anglican Articleswereambiguous, and both Catholic and Calvinistic interpretations were put upon them. The tenth Article declares that man cannot "turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God"; wherefore "we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God without the grace of God preventing us, that we may have a good ~ will, and working with us, when we have that good will." Although the latter phrase is almost a direct quotation from Augustine, the Article was never quite satisfactory to the Calvinists. In 1643, the Assembly of Divines proposed a revision of the Articles, — desiring to interpolate in Article X words which would make clear that preventing grace works "so effectually in us, as that it determineth our will to that which is good." *> On the other hand, the Article was freely interpreted according to the Catholic __ conception of grace. It was in this sense that John
Wesley's father understood it. Samuel Wesley believed that no man can do an "action properly and perfectly acceptable to God by his own natural abilities, abstracted from the assistance of God's Spirit,
The Bases of Wesley's Theology but by His common assistance he may pray, abstain from sin, and practice duty; and, if he continues in these good actions, he will have still more aid, and go on to perfection." *® In contrast with this position, the Calvinists could see salvation possible only by the irresistible power of divine grace overwhelming helpless and hopeless man. 'The distinction is between mar empowered to choose and man compelled to obey; and in that distinction, however hidden under theo. logical subtleties, is the essential difference between two philosophies.
It has been pointed out above that present-day critics of Newtonian science stress the metaphysical implications of that science by which man becomes "the puny and local spectator," the "irrelevant product of an infinite, self-moving engine." Professor Whitehead has drawn the parallel between the irresistible grace of Calvinism and Jansenism and "'the irresistible mechanism of nature" with neither of which man can co-operate. It was precisely along this line that Wesley made one of his most fundamental attacks upon Calvinism. In two short papers, "Thoughts on Necessity" and "A Thought on Necessity," published in 1774 and in 1780 respectively, Wesley connects a mechanical philosophy of the world, a necessitarian psychology, and Calvinism." The mechanical philosophy he sets forth in a paraphrase of the words of Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782): "The universe is.one immense machine, one amazing piece of clock-work, consisting of innumerable wheels fitly framed, and indubitably linked together. Man is one of these wheels, fixed in the middle of this vast