John Wesley and Modern Religion perceive the importance of "attitude," of the disposition of the heart, of love. But, undoubtedly, he came to see more clearly the place of love in religion.
Love, he saw, drives out evil, is the motive of obedience to God and service to mankind.
To root religion in the irrational nature of man was in accordance with the drift of the age. Shaftesbury had based his ethical theory on natural benevolence, although he had, of course, guarded his theory by positing the necessity of social good and of a wellbalanced individual. The notion that goodness is rooted in good nature was becoming popular; Fielding's highest praise seems to have been to say of a man that he had a "benevolent heart." In this view, which was developing during this period, it is true that "conscience ceases to be a power that sits in judgment on the ordinary self and inhibits its impulses. It tends, so far as it is recognized at all, to become itself an instinct and an emotion." *° How did Wesley's idea of religion as love fit into the growing romantic tendency to exalt the instincts and emotions of man?
In the first place, it must be remembered that Wesley thought of love, in the religious sense, as the gift of God. Man in his natural state, unassisted by the divine grace, is incapable of the love of God or of his neighbor in any truly religious way. The love of God is called out by the perception that God loves us, and that perception is faith. Man sees that God has, for Christ's sake, forgiven his sins and does now love him; "we love Him because He first loved us." Then is the love of God shed abroad in man's heart by the Holy Spirit. Now this may seem a o Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion gesture to theological necessity; but it is, in reality, a true expression of Wesley's belief that religious love is not a natural instinct, not simply the overflow of "natural benevolence," but a response to a perception, or an experience, of the love of God. There is here an objective reference which cannot be ignored if one is to understand Wesley's meaning. 7
Moreover, he sometimes equates love with holiness.
This is because Wesley conceives of love as active good will and as the intention of man's innermost being.
Nothing but God is the religious man's desire and goal; and this intention of the heart, supplemented by active good will, at once cleanses and energizes. As has been said, Wesley meant by love, not simply an emotion, but a "sentiment," a complex of emotions.
Love is not mere feeling but the whole direction of life. The significance of "the love of God shed abroad" in the heart is stated clearly in Wesley's heaven is opened in the soul, that the proper heavenly state commences, while the love of God, as loving us, is shed abroad in the heart, instantly producing love to all mankind; general, pure benevolence, together with its genuine fruits, lowhness, meekness, patience, contentedness in every state; an entire, clear, full acquiescence in the whole will of God, enabling us to 'rejoice evermore, and in everything to give eanks, °°"
But there is undoubtedly a tone of feeling in love so defined. It may vary from the strange warming of the heart which was perhaps Wesley's own most
John Wesley and Modern Religion emotional experience of religion, to the Beatific Vision which is the lot of the saints above:
The flame of angelical love Is kindled at Jesus's face; And all the enjoyment above Consists in the rapturous gaze!
The religion of love, as preached by the Wesleys as well as by their followers, was oftentimes an intensely emotional religion. Joy and peace, as well as love, are the fruits of the Spirit; and men can feel these. But, in addition to these, the man who hears the gospel is subject to other emotions.
The sinner confronted with his lost estate was normally supposed to be stricken with the danger of his situation.'? And there was further the melancholy of those who regarded life as a vale of tears. One of the first editions of the Methodist hymn book carried a hymn which for lugubriousness equals the best efforts of the "Graveyard" poets.
Thou wretched man of sorrow, Whose eye all day o'erflow, Indulge thy grief and borrow The night for farther woe; In ceaseless lamentation Thy solemn moments spend, And groan in expectation, That pain with life shall end.
Till then in fix'd despair Of all relief I live, My utmost burden bear, And now retire to grieve; Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion To taste my only pleasure, In secret sighs complain, Augment my mournful measure And aggravate my pain.
This suggests that some of the Methodists enjoyed their sorrow; and, while these lines cannot be charged to John Wesley, it is well known that he had no little fondness for Young's "Night Thoughts," a poem marked by a melancholy approaching self-pity. Wesley believed, as he once wrote to one of his correspondents, that "it is a blessed thing to sorrow after a godly sort." * Such an attitude was fostered by the ascetic element in Wesley; his fear of worldliness caused him to forbid much that would have contributed to the merriment of his people. And there was in him something akin to melancholy also. In describing the religion of love, Wesley quoted Pope's lines:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind; Each prayer accepted, and each wish resign'd; Desires composed, affections ever even, Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heaven.
Nevertheless, John Wesley was not given to lowness of spirits, and one of his preachers asserted that Wesley tempted him to levity. Certainly, if Wesley could not at times escape the fashionable melancholy, normally he was for cheerfulness and joy. Of some of his brother's hymns, John Wesley wrote: "some still savor of that poisonous mysticism, with which we were both not a little tainted before we went to America. This gave a gloomy caste, first to his mind, and then to many of his verses. This made him freJohn Wesley and Modern Religion quently describe religion as a melancholy thing. ..." ™
While it is impossible now to tell exactly which hymns were written by John and which by Charles, it may be inferred from the above that John Wesley preferred songs in which the joy of religion was set forth.
And certainly the Methodist hymnbook contained many of the sort. On his birthday, the Methodist could sing:
The glad morning appears When an heir of salvation was born!
From Jehovah I came, For his glory I am, And to Him I with singing return.
At any time, Wesley's follower could sing of the fruits of the Spirit:
We who in Christ believe That He for us hath died, His unknown peace receive, And feel his blood applied:
Exults for joy our rising soul, Disburden'd of her load, And swells unutterably full Of glory and of God.
How happy are they, Who the Savior obey, And have laid up their treasures above, Tongue cannot express The sweet comfort and peace Of a soul in its earliest love.
In the heavenly Lamb Thrice happy I am; My heart it doth dance at the sound of Thy name. emsfreSa Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion There is no question as to the intensity of the emotional reactions manifested in the Methodist meetings.
The most violent occurred only during the first two years and largely in certain areas. Davenport thought that these manifestations were owing to the ignorant character of the people to whom the Methodists came in these areas and during these years.'° At any rate, the "scenes" did not recur after that time under the preaching of the Wesleys themselves. One or two quotations will illustrate the more extreme type of experiences.
"As my mother bore me with great pain [wrote one], so did I feel great pain in my soul in being born of God. Indeed I thought the pains of death were upon me, and that my soul was then taking leave of the body. I thought I was going to Him whom I saw with strong faith standing ready to receive me.
In this violent agony I continued about four hours; and then I began to feel the 'Spirit of God bearing Witness with my spirit that I was born of God.' Because I was a child of God He 'sent forth the Spirit of His Son into me, crying, Abba, Father.' For that is the cry of every new-born soul. O mighty, powerful, happy change! I who had nothing but devils ready to drag me to hell, now found I had angels to guard me to my reconciled Father; and my Judge, who just before stood ready to condemn me, was now become my righteousness. But I cannot express what God hath done for my soul. ...I loved. The Spirit cried strong in my heart. I trembled: I sang: I joined my voice with those that 'excel in strength.' " *®
In these early meetings men and women were John Wesley and Modern Religion struck down; and strong crying and tears, followed by shouts of joy, excited the wonder of some and the ribaldry of others. One such scene may serve for many which occurred in the years immediately succeeding 1738. In Baldwin Street, Bristol—the date is April, 1739—-Wesley expounded the fourth chapter of Acts. "We then called upon God to confirm
His word. Immediately one that stood by (to our no small surprise) cried out aloud, with the utmost vehemence, even as in the agonies of death. But we continued in prayer till 'a new song was put in her mouth, a thanksgiving unto our God.' Soon after, two other persons (well known in this place, as labouring to live in all good conscience towards all men) were seized with strong pain, and constrained to 'roar for the disquietness of their heart.' But it was not long before they likewise burst forth into praise to God their Saviour. The last who called upon God, as out of the belly of hell, was J[ohn] E[llis], a stranger in Bristol. And in a short space he also was overwhelmed with joy and love, knowing that God had healed his backslidings." *7 Attention has been frequently called to the psychological conditions evoked by the Wesleys in the setting and conduct of their meetings. Interest was aroused by early morning meetings or by the spectacle of a clergyman in canonicals preaching on the street or in the fields. Sometimes the place was such as to affect the emotions, and the sight of a great crowd listening intently or joining lustily in song was itself moving. "I cannot say I have ever seen a more awful sight," wrote Wesley of such scenes, "than when
Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion on Rose-Green, or the top of Hannam Mount, some thousands of people were calmly joined together in solemn waiting upon God, while They stood, and under open air adored The God who made both air, earth, heaven, and sky.
And, whether they were listening to his word with attention as still as night, or were lifting up their voice in praise as the sound of many waters, many a time have I been constrained to say in my heart, 'How dreadful is this place! This' also 'is no other than the house of God! This is the gate of heaven.'
The hymns and the tunes to which they were sung also contributed to the psychological conditions. As Dimond says, "the mental condition desired in the congregation is akin to that induced by the romantic poet, who seeks to create in the minds of his readers
'that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.'" 1? In this condition, the crowd was suggestible to a high degree.
There is evidence that the hymns created in many the surprise and interest which is necessary if the state of "poetic faith" is to be attained. The hymns also offered an opportunity of emotional expression for the congregation. In words which were usually understandable and with tunes sometimes taken from popular songs and at all times singable, the people could express their penitence, their resolutions, their fears, their sorrows, and their joys.
One must not forget, too, the often demonstrated power of the Christian story over the minds and hearts of men. The elemental drama of the life and John Wesley and Modern Religion death of Jesus has for centuries been the most deeply affecting of all of mankind's stories. If Wesley, unlike Whitefield, did not make use of dramatic methods in his preaching, he presupposed always the saga of the Cross. And he and his brother reinforced the power of the sermon with their emphasis upon the sacraments, especially the Lord's Supper, ancient symbol of the broken body and of the shed blood. With hymns written for these dramatic observances, the Wesleys reinforced the emotional appeal of the symbol. In this manner they dramatized the Christian
Year and the Christian life. The Wesleys published, for example, Hymns on the Lord's Supper, Hymns for the Nativity, Hymns for our Lord's Resurrection,
Hymns for Ascension Day, Hymns on the Great Festivals, Hymns for New Year's Day, Hymns for Times of Trouble, Hymns of Petition and Thanksgiving,
Funeral Hymns, Hymns for the Watchnight, Hymns of Intercession. And within these and other collections were hymns for every Christian mood.
There was another way in which Wesley uncovered the sources of deep feeling. He taught his followers to regard the disinherited with sympathy. In this there is no little of what the eighteenth century called "'sensibility."" Wesley advised Lady Maxwell of his doubt that anyone can have too much sensibility of human pain "unless it unfits one for duties of life," 2° and he wrote Hannah Ball that sensibility is not too great unless "it hurts the body or unfits you for some part of your duty." ** This sensibility —
Wesley would increase by contact with the poor. He advised ladies of his acquaintance to visit the poor, Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion overcoming their repugnance to "dirt and an hundred disgusting circumstances." ?? For this reason he advised carrying relief rather than sending it: so doing one comforted the poor and helped oneself, "'as it is far more apt to soften our heart, and make us naturally care for each other." * While Wesley devised some meritorious social plans, such as lending money to workmen so that they might buy their own tools, on the whole his approach was individualistic. He endeavored to create sympathy, to arouse a sense of brotherhood for all the poor children of God. If one reads Wesley's tract, "Thoughts upon Slavery," ** the method by which he did this becomes evident. The Negroes are first described in their African home. Wesley had learned that the North American Indian was not the idyllic savage, but he yet believed that the Negro was. He quotes from a Frenchman's account of parts of Guinea:
"Which way soever I turned my eyes, I beheld a perfect image of pure nature: an agreeable solitude, bounded on every side by a charming landscape; the rural situation of cottages in the midst of trees; the ease and quietness of the Negroes, reclined under the shade of the spreading foliage, with the simplicity of their dress and manner: The whole revived in my mind the idea of our first parents, and I seemed to contemplate the world in its primitive state." 'These
Negroes were a reasonable, peaceable people, civil and courteous, practicing justice, mercy, and truth above the Europeans of the eighteenth century. But from this Eden on earth the Negroes were taken with every cruelty and sold in America. There, "banished
John Wesley and Modern Religion from their country, from their friends and relations forever, from every comfort of life, they are reduced to a state scarce any way preferableto that of beasts of burden." In his terse way Wesley sketched a horrible picture of life in slavery. "In general, a few roots, not of the nicest kind, usually yams or potatoes, are their food; and two rags, that neither screen them from the heat of the day, nor the cold of the night, their covering." '""The time they work in the West Indies is from day-break to noon, and from two o'clock till dark; during which time, they are attended by overseers, who, if they think them dilatory, or think anything not so well done as it should be, whip them most unmercifully, so that you may see their bodies long after wealed and scarred usually from the shoulders to the waist." "Did the Creator intend that the noblest creatures in the visible world should live such a life as this?
"Are these thy glorious work, Parent of Good?"
In the same way, Wesley pictured the horrors of war. Inasermon preached in 1775 for the benefit of the widows and orphans of the soldiers "'who lately fell near Boston, in New England," Wesley painted with only a little stronger colors than in other denunciations of war, although here his zeal was fed by his Tory sentiments: "But who can describe the complicated misery which is contained in this [the fell monster, war]? Hark! the cannon's roar! A pitchy cloud covers the face of the sky. Noise, confusion, terror, reign over all! Dying groans are on every side. The bodies of men are pierced, torn,
Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion hewed in pieces; their blood is poured on the earth like water! Their souls take their flight into the eternal world; perhaps into everlasting misery. The ministers of grace turn away from the horrid scene; the ministers of vengeance triumph." "But which of these warriors all the while considered the wife of his youth, that is now left a disconsolate widow,—perhaps with none that careth for her; perhaps, deprived of her only comfort and support, and not having where to lay her head? Who considered his helpless children, now desolate orphans,—it may be crying for bread, while their mother has nothing left to give them but her sorrows and her tears?" *° Hogarth depicted the horrors of Gin Lane; Wesley described the houses of the distillers. These distillers were murderers '"'of His Majesty's subjects by wholesale, neither does their eye pity or spare." And what is their gain? "Is it not the blood of these men?
Who then would envy their large estates and sumptuous palaces? A curse is in the midst of them: the curse of God cleaves to the stones, the timber, the furniture of them! The curse of God is in their gardens, their walks, their groves; a fire that burns to the nethermost hell! Blood, blood is there: the foundation, the floor, the walls, the roof, are stained with blood!" 7° Wesley, with his constant journeying, demanded much of his horse as well as of himself; but he was careful to admonish his preachers to care for the beasts that bore them, even entering such advice into the Minutes of the Conference of 1765. There are not many passages in Wesley's writings about cruelty
John Wesley and Modern Religion to animals, although in several places he speculates about their souls, their state in the time of man's innocence, and the possibility of their moving up the Chain of Being in some future time. But in his
Journal for 1756 he printed in full a long letter about kindness to animals which breathes the spirit of romantic sympathy. "Is it not unnatural and inhuman," asks the writer of the letter, "to put them to more pain than is necessary for the service of man?
. . « May not the great law of equity, doing as we would be done to, be extended even to them? May we not suppose ourselves in their place, and thence determine what they may fairly expect from us?
. . . If tenderness, mercy, and compassion to the brute creatures were impressed on the infant breast, and conducted into action according to its little power, would it not be confirmed in the human heart?
And might not this early prepossession be for ever established there, and through a happy bias extend its benevolence to the whole creation? Does not experience show the sad effects of a contrary education?
While children, instead of being taught benevolence to irrationals, are suffered to torment first poor little insects and then every helpless creature that comes in their way, can it be expected that, being thus inured to cruelty and oppression even in their tender years, they should relent when they come to age and be susceptible of compassion even to rationals? .. .
I am persuaded you are not insensible of the pain given to every Christian, every humane heart, by those savage diversions, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, horse-racing, and hunting? Can any of these irrational and Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion unnatural sports appear otherwise than cruel, unless through early prejudice or entire want of consideration and reflection? And if a man is void of these, does he deserve the name of man?" 77
There is no question that Wesley approved the sentiments of this letter, but one would hesitate to say that he would have gone as far as the evangelical
I would not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polish'd manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
In his sermon before the ""Humane Society," 3 an organization to revive those apparently struck with sudden death, Wesley appealed to the sensibilities of both
Christian and non-Christian. To those who did not believe in "that Revelation which breathes nothing but benevolence," he said: '""Yet even to you I would address a few words; for, if you are not Christians, you are men. You too are susceptible of kind impressions: You have the feelings of humanity. Has not your heart too glowed at that noble sentiment; worthy the heart and the lips of the highest Christian,—
Homo sum: Humanus nihil a me alienum puto?
Have you not also sympathized with the afflicted?
How many times have you been pained at human misery? When you have beheld a scene of deep distress, has not your soul melted within you?
"'And now and then a sigh you stole, And tears began to flow." 7° John Wesley and Modern Religion To the Christian, Wesley plead that the language of their heart might be:
Thy mind throughout my life be shown, While list'ning to the wretches' cry, The widows and the orphans' groan, On mercy's wings I swiftly fly, The poor and helpless to relieve, My life, my all, for them to give!
So much space has been given to the emotional basis of Wesley's humanitarianism because it has not always been understood that, in stirring the hearts of his hearers, he laid a deep foundation for the humanitarian passion of early Methodists and contributed to the reform movements of the nineteenth century.
Giving to the people a release for their emotions in religion, Wesley also directed them to new objects for their sympathies: the poor, the slaves, the victims of predatory society, even the animals themselves. But in this Wesley avoided that evil which has been charged against some of the romantic tendencies of the period. Professor Babbitt quotes from Burke a cutting criticism: '""The greatest crimes do not arise so. much from a want of feeling for others as from an over-sensibility for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires... . They [he refers to the French
'philosophes'] explode or render odious or contemptible that class of virtues which restrain the appetite.
These are at least nine out of ten of the virtues. In the place of all this they substitute a virtue which they call humanity or benevolence. ... When their disciples are thus left free and guided only by present feeling,
Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion they are no longer to be depended on for good or evile Whatever may have been true of the "philosophes,"
Wesley cannot be charged with having reduced morality to present feeling. Throughout his life he had 'no patience with the doctrine that one is to do good only when feeling free to do it.°? Wesley once remarked that his mother did not feel for others nearly so much as did his father, but she did ten times more; and he advised his correspondent to labor to do, leaving God to supply the feeling.** In the light of what has been said in previous chapters, there is no need to labor this point; but it should be kept in mind by all who attempt to estimate the emotional content of Wesley's teaching. After all, he had said that sensibility could not be too great wmless it interfered with one's duty. Duty is the word which distinguishes
Wesley from the natural romanticists: for duty with him implied a higher reference, the will of God. Wesley's grand motive for humanitarian work was the imitation of Christ.
There is no need to say anything further in regard to Wesley's doctrine of variability. Certainly he did not believe in or encourage a mechanical uniformity _ in the religious life. But contemporary attention was centered too much upon the unusual features in Methodism. The extraordinary scenes which accompanied the first Methodist meetings raised the old fears of popular tumult and forever associated Methodism, in the minds of many, with disorder and distraction. It is untrue to say that Wesley himself preferred the abnormal; but he was interested in it. It should not be
John Wesley and Modern Religion surprising, then, that less-balanced minds should have welcomed the unusual in experience and have made the test of truth the measure of departure from the normal.
One of Wesley's early opponents declared a characteristic of an enthusiast to be a desire to wander and to travel in far countries.**" When Wesley returned from America, one of his attractions for the crowds was that he had been in a strange and romantic land. He had gone there expecting to learn from the simple savage, but in this he had been disillusioned.
Nevertheless, after his "conversion," he had started out for Herrnhut, the abode of the Moravians in Germany, "to see where the Christians live." But if Wesley was undeceived in America and in Germany, he still retained his illusions about other far-off places.
As has been seen, he was quite willing to believe that Negroes dwelt in idyllic peace and innocence in Africa. But whatever may have been true of his successors in the Church of England and out of it, Wesley's romantic interest in far countries—he was continuously reading travel books—had little to do with his missionary interest. Except for America, he was not greatly concerned to establish missions. The main reason, of course, was that Wesley's practical sense forbade his undertaking any enterprise unless he was in condition adequately to support it. But he was also not much taken with the missionary accomplishments of the past. The Jesuits had, he thought, done everything but preach the gospel; and while he was convinced that savages could become Christians— the miners of Kingwood were near enough savages—
Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion Wesley did little himself to establish missions beyond those set up among English colonists.
There was, indeed, a far-off ideal before Wesley's eyes. He desired always to re-establish primitive Christianity. He thought of his work as an attempt to set up a New Testament fellowship. Reverencing as he did the early Fathers of the Church as those nearest to the fountain-head, he kept before himself always the ideal—or what he thought to be the ideal— of the first decades. To his First Appeal he appended a poem, "Primitive Christianity," which is partly as follows:
A little Church in every house, They joyfully conspired to raise Their ceaseless sacrifice of praise.
O What an age of golden days!
O what a choice, peculiar race!
Wash'd in the Lamb's all-cleansing blood, Anointed Kings and priests to God.
Where shall I wander now to find The successors they left behind?
The faithful whom I seek in vain, Are 'minished from the sons of men.
Ye different sects, who all declare, "Lo, here is Christ!" or, ''Christ is there!"
Your stronger proofs divinely give, And shew me where the Christians live.
And Wesley's was undoubtedly the exhortation of the poem:
In them let all mankind behold | How Christians lived in days of old.
John Wesley and Modern Religion In looking back over Wesley's teaching, his individualism, his insistence upon the varieties of Christian experience, upon the place of emotion in the religious life, his laying of an emotional basis for good deeds, and his setting up as an ideal the life of a faroff, partially understood, and much simpler day, it is easy to see that he was opening the way for an intensely individualistic, subjective, and emotional religion.
He intended to do nothing of the sort. His own temperament and training, his own philosophic position and prejudices, all guarded him against the excesses of such a faith. He could no more reduce religion to feeling than to ceremony or dogma. He could not conceive of a religion of the "natural man." Fallen as he is, man must have the workings of divine grace and the constant discipline of a true imitation of Christ and the aid of the Church. The Bible, interpreted usually by the Fathers of the first three Christian centuries, and reason, as well as one's own experience and the experience of one's fellows, must all be called in. These protected Wesley from romantic excesses. He could go far in appreciation of feelings and diversities; but he could only go so far.
Not so with his followers. They lacked his training and prejudices; they also lacked his nature. Only constant effort kept the fanatics weeded out of the societies, and not always before they had done real hurt.
Sometimes, indeed, Wesley, in his kindness—Charles called it credulity—allowed those to remain who were obviously not balanced, emotionally at least.
And in frontier America, there was little Church tradition, little training in self-discipline, little of that Individualism and Emotion in Wesley's Religion experience which usually kept the Oxford scholar neatly within the bounds of common sense. The preacher who came with his stirring message of heart religion appealed to untutored men, and he called them to a religion of the spirit, not of forms and ceremonies and ordinances. The class-meetings did much to offset the pure romanticism of this early Methodism, and the ascetic tradition helped also. But, on the whole, the world has concluded that Methodism was a religion of feeling. But what the Founder of Methodism intended is another matter.
CHAPTER XII JOHN WESLEY AND MODERN RELIGION At the conclusion of this study of Wesley's experience and theology there remains the direct question as to his relation to modern religion. How far did he influence the religion of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And how far and in what way is his work pertinent to-day? ?
It is beyond disputing that Wesley contributed to the spread of a religion of feeling. An individualistic, emotional religion was inevitably the result of Methodist preaching under the circumstances of their work. In England, the classes to which the Methodists generally appealed were those who were strangers to that Chesterfieldian suppression of feelings which has always been practiced in certain circles. When the miners of Kingswood listened to the eloquence of the preacher, tears made white furrows down their blackened faces. Powerful fears and powerful joys produced scenes which marked Methodist meetings in America and § gave to Wesley'sy followers the nickname of "noisy Methodists." The people of the frontiers had little warmth or color in their lives; dangers and privations left them little time or means for the enjoyment of any but the more primitive emotions. For them the camp meeting with its stirring preaching and singing was an escape from grim everyday realities. orsa e= John Wesley and Modern Religion In both England and America, the appeal of the Methodists to the individual was in perfect accord with the circumstances of the people. It was in the industrial North, not in the agricultural South, of England that the Methodists found their converts.
In the towns springing up around the new industries of the early nineteenth century, the population was cut off from older institutions. The Church did little to care for these new areas of dense population, and the Methodists came to supply the lack. In America, the settlements were isolated by forests and streams from the stable institutions of an older society; and the strongly individualistic tone of American life made the Methodist message especially appealing.
Certainly, it is in the conditions which, both in England and America, favored an emotional, individualistic religion that one must find reasons for the popularity and growth of the Methodists. This is not to forget the self-sacrificing work of the circuit riders in both countries nor the influence of a message which had left off much which common people neither understood nor desired. But the time was propitious: in literature, feeling was a dominant note; in politics, liberty was a slogan.
Historians of theology have long recognized that Wesley and Methodism, taken in its broadest sense, contributed to the breaking up of the old orthodoxy and of eighteenth-century rationalism. In this way, they were important factors in creating the modern age. Interpreters of our "religious situation" are likely to dwell upon the intellectual sources of contemporary religion.' If Christian experience is to John Wesley and Modern Religion the fore in large areas of Western Christendom, Schleiermacher is praised or condemned according to the predilection of the writer." And the strong ethical interest of modern religion is traced back through Ritschl to Kant. There is no thought of denying the importance of these thinkers for theology. But an idea does not usually appear first in formal theology and then later in popular religion. The formulations of the theologians, if not derived at least partly from popular religion, are received by the people because
of previous preparation by circumstances or the emphases of accepted leaders. Certainly, before the work of Schleiermacher had much influence in England and America, the Methodist Revival had prepared millions to minimize orthodoxy and to rely on inner experience rather than upon syllogisms. On the whole, Schleiermacher influenced the theologians;
John Wesley, the preachers.
The contribution of the Methodists to the breakdown of the older orthodoxy and rationalism was in their emphasis upon a milder conception of God, upon Christian experience as taking precedence over dogmas, and in their stress upon feeling. While the Methodist preachers, unlike Wesley, were rather fond of hell in their preaching, they insisted upon the mercy of God offered to all and combatted the ideas of the Calvinists as too harsh to be true to the gospel picture. Frequently, they poured scorn upon the subtleties of the theologians and reduced the gospel to a simplicity that was bare indeed. And as they preached the necessity of conviction and conversion, of assurance, of "heartfelt" religion, the Methodists helped
John Wesley and Modern Religion make the climate impossible for stringent orthodoxies or rationalistic appeals.
It is necessary to say more concerning one of the characteristics of much modern religion, the emphasis upon Christian experience. Schleiermacher gave this respectability in theology, and the idea of the priority of experience became central in much Christian thought in the nineteenth century. The results for theology were, as President McGiffert pointed out several years ago, to change theology from "'a system of metaphysics, or an effort to explain the world of man and nature" to "a formulation of the truth given in the religious experience of the man who theologizes."" Psychology and not philosophy became the characteristic Christian discipline. A religion which exalted experience was for many reasons acceptable in the nineteenth century. Traditional religious authorities were being called into question by natural science and the new historical criticism.
When men were doubtful of the Bible as it had been understood by pre-nineteenth century piety, when their conceptions of the natural world were being dissolved by the new science, they turned gratefully to the inner witness.
If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, I heard a voice, ''believe no more,"
And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep, A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered, "I have felt."
John Wesley and Modern Religion In a transition period, this appeal to experience undoubtedly saved Christian apologetics from becoming simply an echo of arguments which had long since lost their meaning. It was natural that theology should turn its attention to the analysis of this experience. Thus was opened up a fruitful field; and much good work, some of it of enduring value, was done in the study of the varieties of religious experience. At last, it seemed that religion could become a science, or, at the least, the object of disinterested, scientific investigation. If little could be known directly about God, the soul of man could be examined in conversion, in faith, in love. It was also natural that interest should be aroused in directing religious experience; and hence arose the important work of religious education. These modern preoccupations are rooted in the doctrine of Christian experience. One cannot be educated in religion who is merely the passive recipient of uncontrollable grace.
So far as preparation for these developments of modern religion is concerned, much must be attributed to the influence of Methodism. And it is not accidental that the Methodist churches have gone far — in religious education, although their contributions to the psychology of religion have not been so noteworthy. In some other ways, the influence of Methodism is discernible. It is tempting to find Wesley's — influence in the social gospel so characteristic of recent years in England and America. Perhaps the widespread interest of Methodists in social reform is a transfer of their belief in individual perfection to a belief in the perfect society. But Wesley's influence
John Wesley and Modern Religion here is doubtless rather in the strongly ethical tone of his teaching.
Certainly, humanitarianism as a whole owes much to the Evangelical Movement. Not only Wesley but all those who rediscovered the poor and aroused pity for them are responsible for modern humanitarianism. And the Methodists did their part to promote benevolent feelings. However inadequate as a motive for social action, the broadening of the horizon of Christian people is one of the heartening achievements of modern religion.
Eighteenth-century Methodism's passion for perfection has not been so prominent in modern Methodist circles. However faulty and dangerous the movements, unquestionably the various types of Pentecostalism have been largely the witnesses of the abiding power of genuine desire for perfect obedience and a life given "wholly to God." Too often these have taken the forms of a "spiritualism"'"—in the older theological sense—divorced from ethical and churchly meanings. But this influence is yet active in numerous sects and cults which have great appeal among the masses. ae In America, Methodism has aided also that extreme individualism which transformed the Church into a mere association distinguishable from other organizations only by its interest in religion. A passion for multiplying organizational machinery has become in many groups the only sign of corporate life. It is not accidental that the Methodists in America have led in the race to create the maximum number of boards and committees. The somewhat inJohn Wesley and Modern Religion volved machinery of Methodism from the beginning gave a proper start for this, and the gibe that Methodism suffers from "wheels within wheels" has become increasingly true. But, in the meantime, the Church idea has been lost and its place taken by the notion of Christianity as an individual possession and experience which really needs, except for promotional purposes, no corporate expression.
Along these lines must Wesley's influence in the nineteenth century be traced: the mitigation of orthodoxy, the softening of older, mechanical, and harsh conceptions of God and His relations to the world; the exaltation of Christian experience; the dominance of ethical interest; a marked humanitarianism; a lingering, if sporadic, interest in perfection; and a predilection for organization. But these have prepared the way for exaggeration and for developments which have gone farther than the devout ever dreamed. Indeed, the preaching of Methodists and of Methodistic denominations prepared the way for much which would not have been accepted widely if the shibboleths of popular religion and of theology had not often been the same. And these developments. have brought at last a storm of criticism which bids fair to bring all that is called '"'modern religion" into disrepute. This is not the place to review the whole field upon which there is to-day so much marching and countermarching that the main impression obtainable by the onlooker is simply that there is something vitally wrong with religion. The purpose here is to consider only those attacks which are directed at elements in modern faith which have relation, howJohn Wesley and Modern Religion ever remote, with Methodism. On the whole, the charges against religion to-day are that it is not religious, and that, such as it is, there is no efficient gearing with the problems of contemporary life.
That religion has in large part lost its vitality, and more especially in the areas where the cultural level is relatively high, needs no particular proving. Certainly there remains, in sections of Protestantism at least, little sense of the awfulness of God, of Otto's mysterium tremendum. If the God of Calvinism is dead, his place has been taken by an Indulgent Being who is surprisingly like a complacent American father.» The story of the prodigal son no longer astonishes by its portrayal of forgiveness. 'The modern reaction is: "What else could the father have done?"
And the a fortiori argument once so popular against the Calvinistic conception of an angry God, that the Deity could not do what a good man would not do, has been changed to read that God does only what a good man does.
But more directly is attack being made against an overemphasis upon Christian experience. If we can learn about God only from our own experience, then
God may be only an experience of man. And so He has become for many only a projection of man's ideals, social and individual. So far has this gone that a serious student of worship is compelled to begin with the question whether a modern man can worship.* All this has been helped by the domination of science, which has intrenched man and his experiences within the closed system of the natural order. .If man can know God only through his own experiences and man
John Wesley and Modern Religion is only a part of the natural order, then God becomes simply one factor, if one, in the Universe that man knows.
Religion, so conceived, loses its autonomy and becomes only a part of the cultural life of man. Indeed, the term is broadened to include all man's non-egoistic interests. In 1915, President McGiffert recognized this tendency in modern religion, when he commented on the influence of Schleiermacher: "'one of the most notable things in the modern situation is the vast enlargement and enrichment of the idea of religion to which the emancipation from the old servitude has led. It is widely recognized to-day that whenever a man is interested in something else than the life of the mere senses, or is devoted to something eeeenoS else than his own selfish welfare, there is religion." ®
If God has been humanized, and if religion has been reduced to a cultural phenomenon, the ethical side of religion has been exalted. Be religious in order to be good was the watchword of the Enlightenment; but modern religion has tended to say that morality is religion. And in compensation for the loss of God, man has deified his moral passion. Consequently, the very age that saw the attenuation of traditional religion saw the rise of an even deeper ethical interest.
This was also a part of man's modern outlook. Since God, such as He is, is to be found in man's moral ideals, these ideals may be realized. Utopiais just around the corner. 'Therefore, in America especially, the emotional drive formerly directed toward God and canalized in love toward God and toward men because they __ are His children, was utilized for reform. But this
John Wesley and Modern Religion very reform has run into strange waters. Whereas the western world seemed on its happy way to a promised land of motor cars and high wages, the debacle of the post-war period has left men hopeless as to the ultimate attainment of social perfection. So long as "'progress" seemed always to win, it was enough if religion furnished the cheering section in our economic and political stadium. But progress fumbled, and the cheer leaders have been strangely quiet. With a somewhat sickening abruptness it has become evident that modern religion has little to say when the Chamber of Commerce fails.
In another way, there is disillusionment. So sure was everyone that the battle for religious tolerance had been won, that it has been difficult to persuade some that there is actually being fought out again the old struggle between man's conscience and the State.
And it is hard to meet the logic of a State which claims to be the embodiment of man's national and racial ideals and demands the right to take its place in the pantheon of gods who are themselves simply the projections of man's ideals. It is true also that much of the demand that the Church shall be free to speak on every issue, political, economic, and moral, seems beside the point when one remembers that the Church has little or nothing to say.
The dilemma of modern Christianity is plain enough. Having reduced religion to the experience of the religious man, having refused to seek God except in consciousness, modern man has awakened to the fact that God has been lost in the Universe of which man is so small a part. And man, the magnifJohn Wesley and Modern Religion icent conqueror of the nineteenth century, has been lost also. The war informed many people of a depth in human depravity which had been forgotten or ignored. This was followed by a popular literature which left no cupboard unopened. Whereas it had been the thing to look on the sunny side of the street, readers came to expect nothing less than incest and murder in their mildest novels. The list of evils from which people pray to be delivered in the Litany seemed to many a woefully inadequate account of human perversities. Especially was this true for those whom psychoanalysis taught to believe that the minds of clergymen and superannuated maiden aunts are sinks of iniquity. It was a bad time to talk of the evidences of Christian experience.
It has become, moreover, a bad time to talk of the possibility of "educating" men into the Kingdom of God. If human beings are as they have been pictured in popular literature and in popular "'scientific" books for the last decade or so, then the doctrine of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards are understatements of mankind's predicament. And what is true of religious education is true also of the "social gospel."
The prohibition debacle marked the end of an era in man's hope for social regeneration. Right or wrong, the prohibition crusade in America was the result of a great faith in man's betterment by social control; and its end was for many a terrible disillusionment.
In the field of politics the same thing is to be seen.
Religious writers tiring of smooth talk about a better world are saying openly that moral man lives always in an immoral society. It is a poor time for idealists
John Wesley and Modern Religion and for the hope to build Jerusalem in England's fair and pleasant land.
It is perhaps unnecessary to say that many voices have been raised against the reduction of religion to human aspirations or to a corollary of modern optimism. In this country, notable efforts have been madeto establish a "realistic theology" which will do justice to the hard facts of life without sacrificing all that has been gained by earlier emphasis upon Christian experience and moral effort.® But the major attacks which have been launched against modern religion have gone at the roots.
The most widely advertised of these is a reassertion of the transcendence of God. God is in heaven, man is upon earth. There can be no commerce between them save as God breaks through from beyond upon man's passivity. "All experience is itself relative.
Wherever experience is taken as the starting point, the religious relationship from the very first is based upon something human and relative which cannot possibly represent the Absolute."* And man is evil; there is a positive something blocking the way between him and God which can only be removed by the Atonement of Christ. There is no room for earthbound man to seek assurance and comfort, save in his knowledge of his own sinfulness and of the revelation made in Christ. Certainly, there is little place here for a social ethic based upon the possibility of man's achieving a better world here and now. The return is to a more than Calvinistic conception of God yonder and man here, and to man's utter dependence upon the will of God, unconditioned, absolute.
John Wesley and Modern Religion There is also an attack being made upon modern religion from another quarter.' The subjectivism and optimism of religion is assailed by Catholic doctrine.
Man has nothing to worship because he finds God only in himself. Against this is set the "objective" worship of Catholicism; man is made dependent upon the grace of God mediated through the Church. Authority is not in the religious consciousness but in the institution. Over against the anarchic character of present-day religion, Catholicism sets the unified authority of the Church which interprets and directs and mediates for man. Catholicism spends no time talking about bringing in the Kingdom of God by the natural efforts of men of good-will. Christianity is a supernatural life, and only those whose lives have been raised to the supernatural plane by the infusion of grace can hope to be lifted above the evils inherent in the natural man.
It would be useless to elaborate upon the importance of these two movements, which have been brought to attention in this country mainly by the followers of Karl Barth and by Anglo-Catholicism.
Their attacks are against liberalism in religion, and the term takes in much more than the characteristicsof modern religion which have been detailed here. But both strike at any religion which gives a primary place to Christian experience; and Barthianism seems to many to make ethical striving not indifferent but apparently useless for this world. Both correct tendencies in modern religion which most theologians now deplore; and it would seem that, unless there is amendment of these obvious fallacies, there must be a comfe
John Wesley and Modern Religion plete reorientation of the religious thought of this generation.
It has been the purpose of this study to determine, as accurately as possible, the facts concerning John Wesley's experience and theology. In the course of the study it has become apparent that in many ways his thought differed from that which has been popularly ascribed to him. Undoubtedly his influence in the nineteenth century was along lines coinciding with the Romantic interests manifested in so many fields in that century. But the full significance of Wesley cannot be understood by a study of those parts of his message which were most readily appreciated by his contemporaries or by his immediate followers. Every generation hears according to its predilections, and often the very assumptions which a prophet holds as primary are lost. This, the present writer ventures to think, is precisely what happened to John Wesley.
The real Wesley, seen in the light of his full intention, has.a word not only for a generation exulting in spiritual freedom and in the employment of their emotions in religious experience, but for a time that has seen the results of overemphasis upon these elements of religion.
Over against a humanistic religion it is entirely proper to set Wesley's religion of grace.® Religion, for Wesley, is God-given. This, it must be repeated, is not the note of one Christian system but of historic
Christianity from the beginning. Religion is directed toward God, not as a natural law, not as a projection of man's ideals, not as the creation of his social ''consciousness," but as objective reality. Only, it would
O15 John Wesley and Modern Religion be untrue to Wesley and to countless other Christian thinkers, to make God completely_ objective in the sense that man and the world are outside of him as a table is objective to the cabinet worker who makes it. In so far as eighteenth-century terminology made it possible, Wesley expressed his belief in a God who is both transcendent and immanent. Modern nervous- "ness over "both-ands" ought not to make us forget that some things are both-and. Wesley's belief in God as objective Reality and his God-centered religion of grace did not commit him to a God who is
"completely other," whose commerce with man is only by a breaking through from the beyond upon man's incapacity and passivity.
Wesley's opinion of the nature of man cannot be described simply by saying that he accepted the dogma of the Fall. It is truer to say that Wesley expressed his essential ideas of man through this doctrine, adapted and interpreted in the light of eighteenthcentury philosophy, natural science, and psychology, as well as eighteenth-century theology. Whether
Wesley would have believed in the dogma of the Fall of Man if he had lived in the nineteenth century no one knows, but for Wesley in the eighteenth century there was no other explanation possible to a religious man educated as he had been. But it is evident to all who read his writings that he was sure that the contemporary picture of man bore out the doctrine that man is evil. His own experiences and his observations of war and slavery were his evidences. There is a universe of difference between man as Wesley knew him in America and Europe and the "natural
John Wesley and Modern Religion man" of Rousseau's rosy dreams. Yet the inference must not be pushed too far.
Wesley did not conceive of man as absolutely corrupted and helpless to the point that he can be saved only by the breaking through of the irresistible grace of God. If there were such a thing as a purely "'natural man," this would be so. But there is no "'natural man." All men have the preventing grace of God which enables them to co-operate with grace. Man is thus dependent upon God, but man is also dependent upon his own efforts; for no grace is effectual without the response of man. This is neither Calvinism nor Rousseauism. It is a realistic view of man's evil, individual and social, coupled with a belief that man can be rescued from his dire condition by the grace of God seconded by man's effort.
"The bias of nature is set the wrong way," said Wesley; and he did not mean that the universe is made wrong, but that things are out of joint. And what modern writer, psychoanalyzing his grandfather or viewing the iniquities of society, will say that he was in error? But something can be done about it besides waiting for the irresistible grace of God or of Economic Forces. In a little pamphlet directed against the teachings of Rousseau's Emile, Wesley states one thing that can be done. "Education," he wrote, "'is designed to set it right. This, by the grace of God, is to turn the bias from self-will, pride, anger, revenge, and the love of the world, to resignation, lowhness, meekness, and the love of God.'® Wesley's interest was primarily in the individual, and it may be said, once for all, that his educational methods were usually
John Wesley and Modern Religion wrong; but his conception of the place of education for Christian living was right. Man, co-operating with the grace of God, can do something to change the bias.
But Wesley's realism in regard to man extended beyond a pessimistic opinion of man's bias toward evil.
He did not expect that man's experience of conversion and of present salvation would necessarily produce a Christian life. Therefore, he included in the program of his societies a system of education and of discipline. For this he made use of the traditional exercises of the Christian Church, fasting, meditation, prayer, and constant good works, as well as the guidance of religious societies -and classes. 'There is no claim that Wesley's system is one which could be adopted in all ages and times. It was freely charged in the middle of the last century by writers in the main sympathetic, that the structure of Methodism narrowed the life of its adherents, perpetuated a cramping and erroneous set of doctrines, and encouraged an uncontrolled emotionalism. Whether this is true or not is beside the point. What Wesley intended for a people, largely uneducated and cared for by no religious agency, and what may have come of his system are different things. But in a day when religion is rebuked for an unwarranted trust in a discredited human nature, Wesley stands out as a realistic leader who believed that the bias of human nature can only be changed by the grace of God plus discipline and education.
And this was to be carried on within a Church.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Isaac Taylor John Wesley and Modern Religion criticized the Methodists for the "sectarianism" of their organization. But Wesley did not intend for his followers to be organized into the close system of a sect, much less into an imitation of a modern business corporation. The Church was to furnish the broader outlook, while the societies within the Church provided intense discipline and training. If Methodists turned their societies into a "gathered" church, a sect for the converted, Wesley isnot toblame. While he denied divine authority to any type of organization, he never conceived of Christianity without a Church. To him the ministry is a ministry sent of God but set apart by the Church, and the sacraments are means of grace. The true Church is always the invisible company of God's children, but the visible
Church is necessary for a Christian's life here. There must be corporate life and worship within the "'catholic seminary of divine love."
Wesley could not have shared the hope of the nineteenth century—and many of. his followers—that God in His goodness is automatically bringing the world nearer and nearer to the Utopia of the Kingdom. A Tory, he did not share the growing enthusiasm of his age for social reform. The reason is largely that he was a Tory; but another reason is that he did not believe human nature sufficiently good for such large-scale experiments. Human nature must be changed first. True he would have nothing of the limitations of providence which were current in orthodox eighteenth-century theology. God is in everything, nature, history, and in the actions of the man who would respond to grace. He held to a belief in Sh John Wesley and Modern Religion God's personal providence that is impossible for this age; but he did not believe in inevitable progress. The individual or nation that sinneth shall die. Only changed men can bring a changed world. It was oldfashioned in the days of Rousseau and Cordorcet; it is new-fashioned now.
It is unnecessary to add to what has already been said about Wesley's ethical teaching. Man must goon striving; and so highly did Wesley value moral effort that he was sure that God would finally reject none who feared Him and worked righteousness. For the heathen this meant those who followed the light they had. But the true Christian lives a supernatural life: it is the life of God in the soul of man. And living so, there is no compromise with worldly orders or ideas. This gives the anachronistic tone to his teaching about money. Man's vocation is in the world, and so far as he can he lives in it; but he judges the world by Christian standards. In this Wesley recaptured, or rather carried over, the traditional autonomy of Christianity. There can be no surrender to the time-spirit: Christians in their outlook on life must be something more than mirrors of contemporary economic and political theories; in Wesley's own words, they must be "'singular" or be damned.
Wesley was also, it must not be left unsaid, a son of the Enlightenment. The great movement which did so much to free Western men from the shackles of superstition did much also for the founder of Methodism. If the modern revolt against what is called liberalism means a return to unworthy ideas about God, to aristocratic doctrines of the elect, to a John Wesley and Modern Religion fanatical shutting up of the grace of God to those who can pronounce theological shibboleths or to those who belong to certain cults, then the world had better go on with liberalism. And Wesley is not a forerunner of any such crusade for obscurantism. If his heterodoxies have become orthodoxies, it is his spirit that counts. He conceived of the Christian life as extending through all the stages from little children to perfect men and women. Little children are little children, and adults are adults; but God is the Father of all, and the Church is the home for all who desire to flee from the wrath to come and to be saved from their sins and who desire the help of the people of God in working out their salvation.
Notable in Wesley's liberalism is his doctrine of Christian authority. If the nineteenth century—and some modern commentators—have erred in calling
Wesley as a witness to the sole authority of Christian experience, so do they err who make Wesley a fundamentalist who would have nothing but the naked
-word of Scripture. He knew the Christian tradition and respected it; the early Fathers are the best interpreters of the Scriptures: but man's reason and experience must also be called in. We know little of God, according to Wesley, speaking of natural theology, save as we know him in the world about us: and all man's knowledge must be brought into play here.
In terms of eighteenth-century thought, old-fashioned enough now, Wesley was contending that man must use all the channels open to human personality that by all means he may reach the ultimate authority
John Wesley and Modern Religion E For Wesley, then, God is God and not man; and man is a sinful creature living in an imperfect body, as his times—and ours—attest. Nor can education or social efforts alone suffice to bring order to his chaos and righteousness to his ways. But neither is the unassisted grace of God, mediated through sacraments or experienced in emotional moments, conversion or anything else, sufficient for the regeneration of man and his society. There must be constant moral struggle, the effort of man in education and discipline. The grace of God is given, but it must be accompanied by man's effort. And not alone; there is no such thing as "'solitary religion."> Man must have a corporate religious life, and the sacraments are means of grace, material accompaniments of God's continuous favor. In all there must be the free exercise of man's mind working on the material of tradition, of the world about him, and of his own experience.
But to say this and no more would be to repeat the — error of the nineteenth century in another way.
Wesley's religion was a personal experience of the love of God and of the love of man. In him lived again the spirit of the great mystics, not their ecstasies but _ their sense of the nearness and goodness of God. With him religion became once more a flaming fire, a pas-_ sion for perfection which swept aside economic theories and ancient respectabilities. He was not in the genteel tradition, but in the way of the prophets.
Entrenched social wrong and individual evil alike became the enemies of the Almighty. But he was also a prophet of the joyful heart. Again and again, John
Wesley warned his followers that he was not responJohn Wesley and Modern Religion sible for the theology of Charles' hymns; but he kept on singing them. Religion is joy and peace, as well as righteousness. If God is a hidden God, He may be found, in part at least, in the experience of man; for religion is the life of God in the soul of man.
It is this combination of mystical experience with the ethical, the rational, and the institutional elements in religion which gives Wesley his place in the history of Christianity. Phrased in another way, it may be said that he joined the tendencies toward regulation and control, toward uniformity and universality, with the tendencies toward emotion, diversity, and freedom.
And he did this without sacrificing either the doctrine of grace or the ethical interests of religion: 'The earth brings forth no corn (as the}soul no holiness)," he wrote, "without both the care and toil of man, and the benign influence of heaven." For our times, therefore, he is a prophet warning against the separation of God and man by minimizing the place of either. But above all he is a prophet calling men to 'repentance. The problems of our fathers have given
place to the dilemmas of the modern world. But the ancient word lives on. And those who would make normative neither the traditions of past ages nor the latest findings of contemporaries, may well turn to one who stood at the beginning of our modern world, bringing with him old-world conceptions of Christianity and merging them with the intuitions of the newer time.
NOTES THE basis of modern editions of the works of John Wesley is the third edition, edited by Thomas Jackson in 1831. Quotations from the works in these notes are from an 1872 reprint of this edition in 14 volumes. The pagination differs somewhat in different issues, but the references can be easily found. The standard edition of the Journal was edited by Nehemiah Curnock in 8 volumes, London, Epworth Press,
1909-16; of the first 53 sermons, the Standard Sermons, edited by Edward H. Sugden, 2 vols., London, Epworth Press, 1921; of the letters, The Letters of John Wesley, edited by John Telford, 8 vols., London,
Epworth Press, 1931. The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, collected and arranged by G.
Osborn, 13 vols., London, Wesleyan Methodist Conference Office, 1868-72, are also frequently referred toin the notes. The bibliography of the Wesleys is by Green, second edition, London, Methodist Publishing
House, 1906. The Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society are indispensable aids to all students of Wesley.
CHAPTER I 1. For unfavorable criticism of Methodism as a social and political force, see especially the works of J. L. and B. Hammond, e.g., The Town Labourer,
1760-1832, New York, Longmans, 1919. A more favorable view is taken by Elie Halévy, History of the English People in 1815, London, Unwin, 1924.
Recent books which display a sound knowledge of the Wesleyan Movement and of English social and political history are: Wellman J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution, London, Longmans, 1930;
Maldwyn Hughes, John Wesley and the Eighteenth Century, New York, John Wesley and Modern Religion Abingdon, 1933; E. R. Taylor, Methodism and Politics, 1791-1851, Cambridge, University Press, 1935.
2. Herbert Heaton, art., "Industrial Revolution," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.
3. See Maldwyn Hughes, op. cit., chap. vi.
4. Johnson's England, Edited by A. S. Turberville, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1933, vol. ii, p. 29.
5. Cf. William Allan Neilson, Essentials of Poetry, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, c. 1912.
6. Robert M. Wernaer, Romanticism and the Romantic School in Germany, New York, Appleton, 1910, pp. 6-7.
7. Cf. Irving Babbitt's works, esp. Rousseau and Romanticism, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1919. On the different definitions of Romanticism, see Paul Kaufman, "Defining Romanticism," Modern Language
Notes, vol. 40 (1925), pp. 193-204; Arthur O. Lovejoy, "On the Discriminations of Romanticisms," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, vol. 39 (1924), pp. 229-253. The most extensive bibliography of Romanticism is in Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism. A later, but much shorter, bibliography is appended to G. Ant. Borghese's art., "Romanticism," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. .
8. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, New York, Macmillan, 1927, p. 118.
9. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, London, Kegan Paul, 1925, p. 299.
10. See Chauncey Brewster Tinker's charming book by this title, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1922. -See also H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage,
New York, Columbia University Press, 1928.
11. Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Optimism and Romanticism," Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol. 20 (1927), pp. 921-945.
12. J. H. Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1926, p. 391.
13. H. L. Stewart, "Theology and Romanticism," Harvard Theological Review, vol. 13 (1920), pp. 361-389.
14. Otto Pfleiderer, The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of Its History, — Eng. Trans., London, 1886-88, vol. i, p. 262.
15. John Baillie, The Interpretation of Religion, New York, Scribners, 1928, pt. ii, chap. iii.
16. A. C. McGiffert, Protestant Thought before Kant, New York, Scribners, 1915, p. 175. For suggestions as to the relations between Methodism and the Romantic Movement in Literature, see A. W. Harrison, '"Romanticism in Religious Revivals," Hibbert Journal, July, 1933; F. Brompton Harvey,
"Methodism and the Romantic Movement," London Quarterly and Holborn Review, July, 1934.
CHAPTER II 1. Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669-1748, Oxford, University Press, 1926, p. 5.
Notes 2. Sydney G. Dimond, The Psychology of the Methodist Revival, Oxford, University Press, 1926, p. 25.
3. Johnson's England, vol. i, p. i.
4. Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation (first edition, London, 1730; the edition quoted was published in Newburgh, 1798), pp. 188-190
5. Arthur O. Lovejoy, "The Parallel of Deism and Classicism," Modern Philology, vol. 29 (1932), p. 3.
6. The Art of Preaching: in Imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry. London:
Printed for R. Dodsley, at Tully's Head, in Pall Mall.
7. The classical account of the Religious Societies is Josiah Woodward, Account of the Rise and Progress of the Religious Societies in the City of London. 'The sixth edition of this work was published in 1744. For good accounts of the societies, see John S. Simon, John Wesley and the Religious
Societies, London, Epworth Press, 1921, chap. i; J. Wickham Legg, English Church Life from the Restoration to the Tractarian Movement, London,
Longmans, 1914, chap. ix.
8. Legg, op. cit., p. 309.
9. Ibid., p. 310. - 10. Ibid., pp. 295-296, 313.
11. J. H. Overton, Life in the English Church, 1660-1714, London, 1885, pp. 216-219; cf. Simon, op. cit., p. 21.
12. Legg, op. cit., p. 338. On devotional works in this period see below, chap. xi.
13. On Wesley's indebtedness to Jeremy Taylor, see Curnock's Introduction to the Standard Edition of the Journal, vol. i, p. 51, and Wesley's Preface to the first journal, vol. i, p. 83. Wesley was not introduced to Taylor, nor for that matter to Kempis and other devotional writers, by his mother, as has often been suggested. Curnock thought that the most likely person was a younger daughter of the Rev. Lionel Kirkham, rector of Stanton.
(Journal, vol. i, pp. 15-16.) 14. Simon, op. ci#., p. 51.
16. Thomas Comber, Christianity no Enthusiasm, London, 1678, p. 88.
17. See G. M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne: Blenheim, London, Longmans, 1930, p. 52.
18. Legg, op. cit., p. 383.
20. Samuel Wesley, Poems on Several Occasions, London, 1736, pp. 65-77.
21. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 70.
22. Robert Nelson, Practice of True Devotion, in relation to the End, as well as the Means of Religion, London, n.d., p. xx.
24. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, London, John Murray, 1926, p. 227.
25. On this phase of seventeenth-century English religious life, see Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, London, Macmillan, 1909; and Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, London, Macmillan, 1914. On John Wesley and Modern Religion the early Quakers, see William Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism,
London, Macmillan, 1912. Margaret Lewis Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme, New York, Oxford University Press, 1914, attempts to trace the influence of Boehme in England, particularly on Milton. I have tried to trace the doctrine of immediate inspiration in this period in my Historical Backgrounds of Early Methodist Enthusiasm, New York, Columbia University Press, 1931.
26. Lee, op. cit., pp. 56-57, and the references given there.