Wesley as a Preacher ''Wesley gave out no new commandments: he opened before the eyes of assembled thousands the small volume which contains them, and cried aloud, '""Read! Read!!"
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Wesley as a Preacher O John Wesley preaching was what the flapping of its wings is to a bird, an instinctive and necessary exercise; begun in early life, and continued to the extreme limits of age; an almost daily occupation, of which he never wearied, and in which he hardly ever felt fatigue. He practised it under most varied conditions— winter and summer, morning, noon, and night, in crowded buildings and in the open air, amid reverent stillness and under a rain of hostile missiles and abusive cries. '' During his halfcentury, of itinerant life he travelled a quarter of a million miles, and John Wesley on Preaching delivered more than forty thousand sermons."* If ever there was an instance in which the adage that '' practice makes perfect" had an opportunity of verifying itself, surely it was this, and judged by the popularity which attended him everywhere and to the end, his profiting must have appeared unto all.
What were the elements of his power? It is plain, to begin with, that he was favoured by the times.
The date of a man's birth not unfrequently fixes the measure of his stature, the scale of his influence.
A genius or a hero in one set of circumstances would hardly exceed the average in another. Even as an acorn dropped into a rocky crevice * TELFORD'S Life of John Wesley, p. 321.
Wesley as a Preacher will be stunted in its growth, so personality, powerful otherwise, may be compressed into comparative mediocrity by the hedging bars of circumstance. Wesley was singularly fortunate in this regard. He came when he was needed, when history had wrought a vacancy for him, when the gifts he possessed could be morticed with effect into the grooves of the times. His teaching attracted crowds, but the hunger of the multitudes for what the pastors of the day failed to supply was as potent a factor as the persuasiveness of the preacher. Half the eloquence of the pulpit is at all times in the congregation: and it is certain that a Wesley going forth today would not produce like results unless he had a message as commenJohn Wesley on Preaching surate to the age as the evangelical teaching was to the mind of the eighteenth century.
Still, this happy correlation of gift with need should not lead us to undervalue the former: for what the age fits itself on to and claims as its requirement is always a man, not the semblance of one. The magnet of circumstance draws to itself the best in what it touches, but it lacks virtue to attract and render visible what is not there. If there be no resonance in the bell, the clapper of the times will hammer it in vain. There was that in Wesley's nature which echoed to the call of his age, something that qualified him in an eminent degree for ministering to the spiritual needs of his contemporaries.
Wesley as a Preacher What he himself designates '' good breeding'"' was doubtless not one of the least of his qualifications. In his Address to the Clergy he says:
'*A clergyman ought certainly to have some degree of good breeding.
I mean address, easiness and propriety of behaviour, wherever his lot is cast. Perhaps, one might add, he should have (though not the stateliness, for he is the servant of all, yet) all the courtesy of a gentleman, joined with the correctness of a scholar."
Of this scholarly courtesy he was an admirable example, and the exhibition of it in his general bearing is one explanation of the hold he obtained upon the common people. It is doubtful whether a preacher of rude and ignorant type, however powerful
John Wesley on Preaching in other respects, would have held with so firm a grip the multitudes at Kingswood and Moorfields: for culture and graceful manners tell powerfully on rough minds. Crowds have always aristocratic leanings: and those which Wesley addressed were insensibly prejudiced in favour of one who, though a gentleman born and a University scholar, was ready to become one of themselves, and to preach to them in plain, strong English the gospel of Jesus Christ. His face, naturally winning, with its charm enhanced by the touch of intelligence, refinement, and purity, captivated their fancy, and contributed appreciable aid to his speech. 'That winsomeness of manner which in Elizabeth Fry quenched the coarseness of Newgate,
Wesley as a Preacher and led one of its degraded inmates to exclaim, ''The angels have lent their voices to you, ma'am," was present here, and won for Wesley an entrance to hearts that would have barred their doors to a less alluring visitor.
But while face and bearing exerted a wondrous charm, there was that in his speech itself which was hard to resist. It had qualities warranted to make an impression. One of the most noteworthy is its orderliness. The sentences are never loose, disjointed, never enfeebled by awkward or ineffective arrangement. A discourse of Wesley's has the order and precision of a squadron of infantry : each man in place, each step in time. His mind was so logical that it was difficult for John Wesley on Preaching his thoughts to be other than well assorted and fitly marshalled. They never tread on each other's heels, never push each other out of rank.
And yet the order is not that of a martinet, does not depress one by its uniformity, or waken a sigh for something less mechanical. There is an order fatal to spontaneity ; but Wesley's style, though always methodical, suggests the march of life rather than the trimness of death.
Nor is there to be found in it any of the muddiness of thought which makes for obscurity in expression.
Whether his sentiments be acceptable or otherwise, there is never any difficulty in apprehending what he means.
Impatient of mysticism, he lends no countenance to the cloudy thinking Wesley as a Preacher and vague diction with which it has affinity. Possibly his style would kindle in some a higher admiration were it less clear, had it now and then a little of the hazy glamour which more imaginative minds impart to their utterances. In this it falls short of the highest. The vision of genius is generally larger than its expression; it sees more than it can utter, and what it utters is often capable of ever-enlarging interpretations. Wesley is too lucid to be suggestive; he makes his deeps so clear that they become shallows; hardly ever do his sentences start in the reader's mind hints of a melody beyond the rhythm of their own tread. He leads one straight on, up hill and down dale, without ever lingering in a John Wesley on Preaching dreamy hollow or tapping a new vista by the way.
This glare, so unfruitful to the reflective mind, is precious to the multitude. The general does not wish to think, still less to dream, and is always grateful to the prophet who breaks its nutriment into such tiny morsels as render mastication superfluous. The very clearness which, owing to its frequent kinship with superficiality, would tempt the thinker to pass John Wesley by, was one of the qualities that commended him to the crowd, and enabled him to sway it towards righteousness.
Akin to this, and aided by it, is the peculiar directness of his speech. His words, like light, travel in straight lines, and have an instinctive percepWesley as a Preacher tion of their goal. They never stray, never falter, never miss the mark.
You stand in the crowd and hear the how that every word belongs to yourself. How does the preacher know you so well? Who has told him your history? Why should he fix his eyes on you alone? Who sharpened the arrows he shoots straight into your bosom ?
This effect was no doubt enhanced by the pointed use of personal pronouns. ''Who art thou that now seest and feelest both thine inward and outward ungodliness? Thou art the man!
I want thee for my Lord; I challenge thee for a child of God by faith. The Lord hath need of thee. Thou, who feelest thou art just fit for hell, art just
John Wesley on Preaching fit to advance His glory—the glory of His free grace, justifying the ungodly and him that worketh not. O come quickly! Believe in the Lord Jesus, and thou, even thou, art reconciled to God."" No wonder that under the storm of such appeals men felt as John Nelson describes: ''Oh, that was a blessed morning for my soul!
As soon as he got upon the stand, he stroked back his hair, and turned his face towards where I stood, and I thought he fixed his eyes upon me.
His countenance struck such an awful dread upon me before I heard him speak that it made my heart to beat like the pendulum of a clock; and when he did speak, I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me."
It need hardly be added that WesWesley as a Preacher ley's preaching was thoroughly practical. Even when doctrine is dealt with, it is always with a practical intent. He is not interested in theology as a science, and to have discussed it from a mere speculative standpoint he would have regarded as waste of time.
The application of New Testament teaching to human life, and especially to the varied phases and moods of spiritual experience, engrossed him before all else. So true is this that even his first discourse in the open air was an earnest and practical exposition of a portion of the Sermon on the Mount, and that sermon formed the basis of many of his discourses in the after years.
He was the expounder of the inwardness of the spiritual life and its John Wesley on Preaching conscious possession. Religion was something deeper than outward forms; and a man might not only be saved from sin, but know that he was saved; have not only forgiveness, but the joy of its realisation. His was a gospel of gladness and hope, and men's minds had been so dulled by formalism and indifference that they were startled by its proclamation as would be the dwellers in a dungeon by a sudden inrush of meridian splendour. And the joy of which Wesley was the bringer was a joy with which he held converse in his own heart. He was a liberated captive, and the rapture of emancipation irradiated his countenance, enriched the cadences of his voice, and imparted a triumphal certainty to his tones. Men-felt as they
Wesley as a Preacher listened that he was one in whom personal experience vitalised expression. He knew perfectly ''the secret of that purely Christian eloquence whose only law is sympathy, that speaks to people, not sternly as a prophet, but with the tenderness of a fellow-bondsman, who does not separate his lot from theirs, and has himself first reached the spiritual haven, into which he beseeches them for enter.' * His sermons were carefully prepared, but that impeded not the flow of extemporaneous utterance. Dr.
Johnson said, '' John Wesley can talk well on any subject," and the fluency so captivating in his ordinary conversation went with him into the pulpit,
* Viscount St. Cyres, Francois de Fénelon, p. 40.
John Wesley on Preaching and enabled him there to be master of himself and conqueror of others: but it was the fluency of reason rather than of passion; he swayed men by argument rather than declamation, and the wonder will always remain how one so self-possessed, so logical, so restrained, should lift the hearts of the multitude as the moon lifts the sea.