Heart Warming
HEART WARMING
It was May 24, 1738, and John Wesley was walking slowly away from St. Paul's Cathedral.
Not for him were the ecstasies of his younger brother.
He had been depressed for days on end, and whether it was the spring, or the Georgia Trustees, or the consciousness of failure in the center of his soul, the times were sadly out of joint. There was nothing in the politics of his country to stimulate his enthusiasm, for England was being kept well to the safety first rule of the road under that most reasonable of Prime Ministers,
Robert Walpole.
Gone were those wondrous days when Cavalier and Roundhead clashed together with the honors even between God and the King.
Gone were the days when men spoke and prayed in Parliament as though they did the Lord service.
England had settled down to make money and to bank down the hidden fires, and it looked very much as though there remained no scope for Susanna Wesley's son and the Brand plucked from the burning. The last thing that Prime Minister Walpole wanted was the outbreak of any sort of fire.
The notes of Purcell's anthem in St. Paul's were dying on Ludgate Hill, and as they floated away over the house-tops they twisted the heartstrings of
SON
TO SUSANNA
John Wesley with a strange sadness. Those pure notes were beating in his mind as on some familiar spinet:
"Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord God, hear my prayer."
They had all been so fond of Purcell in those golden days in the Cotswolds, and Aspasia had played divinely on the harpsichord. They had even all stood up and danced the stately minuet, and Purcell was not above writing that sort of music also. The old strains must have sung themselves again to him, so wistfully, as John Wesley walked down
Ludgate Hill.
They had danced at the wedding of Varanese, and there was all that weight of sadness again at his heart as he walked and wondered.
Then had been golden dreams that would not be denied, but now the world of grey old London wrapped him about in despair. He had lost a good deal of sleep by sitting up with his brother at the beginning of his illness, and now that he had recovered in that instantaneous fashion and outstripped him in this matter of conversion John was left lonely indeed and tired out into the bargain.
It was in this mood that a friend met him with an invitation to come to a meeting of a religious society in Aldersgate Street that night.
It was the last thing in the world that John Wesley wanted to do, for nothing now seemed real to him in this strange business of religion but those haunting notes of despair from the organ of St. Paul's.
He confessed that to more meetings and more religion he went "very unwillingly." Yet salvation for him, too, was round only the next corner in the road.
In Aldersgate Street that
HEART WARMING
night all heaven came down to meet the son of Susanna Wesley.
Unaware of straying angels, he loitered into the stuffy little room and listened with the others to the reading from Luther's introduction to the Epistle to the Romans, and it was just in that reading that his spirit was stabbed broad awake.
The truth was that the tide of History was setting in through that arid little room and John Wesley was directly in its path. As Luther had toiled terribly to save himself, so had Wesley.
As the German monk had climbed laboriously the sacred steps at Rome, so had Wesley ascended in spirit the awful steeps of heaven, and at the end both had known that they could never thus compass their hearts' desire or wash away one sin for all their toil.
Luther had stood up like a man on those steps up which he had crawled on hands and knees, and through the pearly air of Rome had heard the challenge of Paul of Tarsus: The just shall live by faith."
Wesley heard the same words so long afterwards in a little room in London when it was towards evening and the day was far spent, and he almost gasped in astonishment: "What, have we then nothing to do?" "No! Nothing! But only accept of Him who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption."
To tell John Wesley he had nothing to do in this herculean task of religion was like bidding the patient relax before analysis. With his taut little frame unbraced and his heart quite empty the love of God came in like a flood. He knew and felt deep down in his being that his sins, which were many, were all
SON
TO SUSANNA
forgiven.
There was a sin of pride, a sin of fear, and well he knew that other hateful sin against love that had made him act like a madman in Georgia. Now the love of God had come in to purify and cover every spot of unkindness in the soul of the sinner, and what the law could not do had been done once for all on Calvary.
So Wesley's Journal records that momentous transaction of May 24, 1738: "In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street where 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."
Susanna Wesley had been right after all, for it was really all a question of fire and firebrands.
It had all begun in the light of the soldiers' camp fires on the hill outside the city wall at Jerusalem.
Flames had flickered upon saintly heads in an upper room in that old town, and in Rome had lighted up Nero's garden with the light of burning martyrs.
Westward that flame had glowed around poor priest and Lollard of fourteenth-century England, and from them the fires had roared into the faggots around the body of John
Hus.
In that awful bonfire he had lightened the Moravians, and Luther had greeted the blaze from afar.
The monk of Erfurt had, in his turn, taken up the torch and lighted with it the fires in Smithfield
HEART WARMING
Market.
So close were they to the little room in Aldersgate that John Wesley could not hope to escape the general conflagration.
From that little room the flames swept on until America, India, and the islands of the sea sang of this same "refining fire."
The songs of the people called Methodists are strangely full of fire, for they are the songs of the people of the warmed heart:
"See how great a flame aspires, Kindled by a spark of grace!
Jesus' love the nations fires, Sets the kingdoms on a blaze.
To bring fire on earth He came; Kindled in some hearts it is:
O that all might catch the flame, All partake the glorious bliss!"
The fire motif again!
Strange that that should be the way that salvation came.
Wesley had told Miss Sophy that he dared not take fire into his bosom lest he should be burned, and he had kept the God that answers by fire at an equal distance with equal caution.
Now Gre had fallen from heaven and yet he was not consumed.
He had pleaded with Aspasia in those old romantic days in Oxford: "Tell me if it be a fault that my heart burns within me when I reflect on the many marks of regard you have already shown." But to feel like that about God!
Dare he?
Could he?
There round his heart was that strange warmth. It was just that glorious thing called love, there, at
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TO SUSANNA
the very soul of his being.
Here was no reasoned argument for God's existence, no desperate fight for cold morality, but here was the inspiration and the glory of passion—"I felt my heart strangely warmed."
Now this John Wesley had been so frightened of fire.
The crackling and the roar of Susanna's exhortations had never left him.
Was he not always the Brand plucked from the burning on that awful night of old confusion and trouble at Epworth long ago? Now in the strangest way the Divine Analyst had resolved the complex in that very element of fervent heat—
"I felt my heart strangely warmed." There was something in it of the sunshine of the Cotswold Hills, something of the 4 Kempis pattern, something of home, a hint of western seas—but more, far more, than these.
He saw no man any longer save Jesus only, and when he awoke next morning he was still with Christ.
John Wesley's immediate reaction to daylight and the toils of a new day was 'Jesus, Master."
So he waked with the password of his own great campaign on his lips after that night of purification, and ever afterwards his myriad followers would name the date of May 24, 1738, with reverence.
He had kept many sorrowful dates in his diary before, but now he had_ done with the old style. A new day had dawned for John Wesley, and incidentally for England and for America beyond the seas.
Whatever men may make of conversion, however psychologists may explain the varieties of religious experience, something happened to John Wesley that night to transform him into a
HEART WARMING
leader of men.
He had failed hopelessly in the new colony of Georgia on his first mission, now he had an evangel that was simply cut out for backwoodsmen.
At the time of England's colonial expansion there was the gospel ready to march with the flag.
It needed no cassock, no priest, no altar, but warmed hearts and that indwelling Mystic Presence.
Where Christ is, there is the Church.
So it is but fitting that at the heart of the Empire, there in the swirling roar of London, a little brass plate should mark the place of this strange heart-warming of two hundred years ago.
It is nailed to Barclay's Bank in Aldersgate Street and reads thus: "The probable site where on May 24, 1738, John Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed.
This experience of grace was the beginning of Methodism.
This tablet is gratefully placed here by the Drew Theological Seminary of the Methodist
Episcopal Church, Madison, New Jersey, U. S. A."
So Aldersgate Street had made amends for Georgia, and so had come about the miracle of God's own good time.