EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
T HAS BEEN SHREWDLY STATED THAT TRUE GREATNESS GROWS. IT
lee only endures, but actually increases. The stature of those whose greatness springs from goodness (as the highest always does) is enhanced as the years go by, and succeeding generations recognize more and more of significance in their character and influence. This is a principle clearly distinguishable in the case of those whom God has chosen to be lights of the world in their several generations. "The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day'' (Proverbs
4: 18). It is for himself, as that Scripture suggests, but where greatness is allied to righteousness it seems as if the illumination is also conveyed to subsequent ages.
"Some men grow larger as they walk away from their own time''—so writes Ola Elizabeth Winslow in her perceptive study of Bunyan.! That is certainly true of John Wesley. He a always been known as an outstanding figure in the history of the Christian Church. But his stock improves as the march of time takes us further from his century, and it can be argued that never was he more discussed and appreciated than today.
We are beginning to realize the measure of his greatness, under God. The judgements of Augustine Birrell that he was "the greatest force of the eighteenth century," and of Sir Charles Grant Robertson that he represents "'the most striking of eighteenth-century figures," are widely accepted." An editorial in The Times Literary Supplement has reaffirmed this conviction: "No historian can miss the immense raising of the nation's spiritual temper by Wesley in his own movement and through its effects in the Church of England. When we review the nineteenth century we find the evils which we criticize in our own, sometimes in worse shapes, but we see a high seriousness and far less confusion of mind. The recovery of the national mind and character started with Wesley.'
This acclaim is not confined to Great Britain, of course. Wesley's fame is universal. In the language of William Ewart Gladstone, his "life and acts have taken their place in the religious history not only of England,
1 Ola Elizabeth Winslow, John Bunyan (1961), p. 20.
2 Augustine Birrell, Miscellanies (1901), p. 34; Robertson, op. cit., p. 386.
8 Cf. Times Literary Supplement, 21st May, 1938.
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but of Christendom.' It is from this broad standpoint that Prof. Martin Schmidt has embarked on his recent theological biography, as he describes it.? He sees in Wesley a man who lived and acted as an ecumenical
Christian, in the New Testament connotation of that much controverted adjective. He regards him as belonging to the whole Church, since the last of the major ecclesiastical organizations to have come into being in the development of Christianity originated with him. Although that was not what he intended at first, Wesley found himself borne along by the tide of the Spirit, and this factor unites him with all those significant figures before him (especially at the time of the Protestant Reformation) who found themselves in similar situations. The man who took the world as his parish now has the eyes of the world upon him.
In our survey we have sought to analyse the distinctive contribution of John Wesley, not only to his own generation, but to those which have succeeded, and, in particular, ours today. This has been no strictly academic exercise: throughout we have been concerned to discover what can be learned from Wesley about the continuing task of evangelism. We have tried to show where Wesley's real significance lay. His genius was so many-sided that it is possible to overlook the essential factor—the more so if we are not interested in recognizing it. But in the preceding pages we have been sufficiently reminded that '""Wesley was from the first the complete evangelist," as Richard Pyke rightly insisted.t No category is more expressive of his basic concern than this.
We have traced the providential steps in Wesley's training as an evangelist. The remarkable impact of his upbringing has been assessed. The combination of the best both in the Anglican and Puritans traditions helped to mould him into an apostle to the nation. The discipline of study equipped him intellectually to be a defender of the faith. But most of all, the abject failure of self-effort and ascetic rigorism to bring him either peace of soul or a sense of fulfilment in his ministry, ultimately led him to seek salvation where alone it can be found—namely, in an unconditional reliance on the merits of Christ the Redeemer. It was Wesley's conversion that made him an evangelist. Until the experience at Aldersgate Street on the 24th May,
1738, he was too preoccupied with the problem of saving his own soul to be effective in winning others. After that determinative encounter he resolved in his brother's words, "To spend, and to be spent, for them Who have not yet my Saviour known''s Henceforward it was on these that he was to prove his lifelong mission.
1 William Ewart Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years 1843-1878 (1879), Vol. VII, p.
205.
2 Schmidt, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 10.
Sr bide spas 4 Pyke, op. cit., p. 77.
5 Wesley's Hymns, No. 433, V. 3, lines 5, 6.
THE BURNING HEART
According to Hugh of St. Victor, the medieval exegete, there are three stages of faith.1 Wesley passed through each. The first consists in an acceptance of Christian teaching, without reflection or an understanding of why it is worthy of belief. On his own admission, this was Wesley's position as a schoolboy at Charterhouse. It would have been surprising at that age if he had advanced much further. Despite his candid confession, however, we can be sure that, since from childhood he always required a reason for all that he was asked to do, he had already begun to probe the rationale of belief. This process continued at Oxford. It led to a logical formulation which temporarily satisfied his mind, but, tied as he was to a virtually humanistic conception of justification by works, he lamentably failed to find that inner repose of soul which he so desperately sought.
The second stage of faith involves the approval of reason. In Wesley's case, it was through the guidance of the Moravians that he rediscovered the Reformed teaching on justification in the Anglican standards, and eventually embraced it mentally as an article of beliefin March 1738. This was his intellectual conversion, as we have defined it. But the third stage of faith, declared Hugh of St. Victor, is only reached when a man inwardly experiences what he has believed with his mind. It is then that he comes into perfect union with God in Christ—a union mediated both by love and knowledge.? It was into this experiential appropriation of salvation by grace through faith alone that Wesley entered at Aldersgate Street. It supplied the capstone of conviction, and at the same time fired him with missionary zeal. He had sailed to Georgia three years before, but his motive then was primarily to save himself. Now his own account was settled, and he could devote himself with a single eye to the redemption of his fellows.
We would therefore wish to qualify the contention of Prof. Umphrey Lee that "'attempts to interpret that experience as an evangelical conversion which transformed Wesley from a sinner to a saint, or from a naturalistic humanist into a Christian, are in contradiction to Wesley's own judgement and misreadings of the facts." This is not to deny that Wesley had been devoutly religious at least since 1725, and that his practical humanism was set within a framework of supernatural revelation.
But for all that, it is surely plain beyond argument that the pre-Aldersgate Wesley would never have turned Britain upside down. He was still homo perturbatus, and as such quite unready to undertake the mission God had for him. He lacked a sense of acceptance and consequently a sense of dynamic. His conversion alone brought deliverance, confidence and direction.
Wesley became the man he is now hailed as being through divine intervention. No doubt many of his qualities already lay hidden within his personality, but it was only at the touch of the Spirit that they sprang to 1 Hugo de S. Victor, De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, I.x.4 (J. P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina, Vol. CLXXVI, p. 232.
2Tbid.
8 Umphrey Lee, John Wesley and Modern Religion (1936), pp. 101-102.
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life and received their necessary integration. All that Wesley was and did can be traced back to that transforming experience. If the Damascus road explains Paul the apostle; if the Milanese garden accounts for Augustine of Hippo, the doctor of the Church; if the Black Tower at Wittenberg gave birth to Martin Luther as the pioneer Reformer; then Aldersgate
Street, London, produced John Wesley the evangelist.
Wesley had now found his forte. He was not to spend his days in academic seclusion as a university don. He was not to exercise a parochial ministry in the Anglican Church. He was to become an evangelist at large. "If either by a natural or an acquired power of persuasion I can prevail upon sinners to turn to God, am I to bury even that talent in the earth?"' Wesley inquired of "John Smith." " 'No; but try if you cannot do more good in a college or in a parish.' I have tried both, and I could not do any substantial good, either to my pupils or my parishioners. Among my parishioners in Lincolnshire I tried for some years; but I am well assured I did far more good to them by preaching three days on my father's tomb than I did by preachjng three years in his pulpit."
As we have seen, it was when the doors of the churches were shut on him, as he preached what was considered to be dangerously innovative doctrine, that in April 1739 he was constrained to take to the open air.
This was the decisive step which inaugurated the mission to Britain. Already George Whitefield had anticipated it, and the pair of them, despite their variant emphases, were to be the twin instruments of the Spirit in the awakening of thousands. There was a divine overruling in the restrictions which drove Wesley to operate outside the orbit of the Established
Church. The need of the hour was for the adaptation of the Christian strategy to reach out to the people where they were, and, as F. J. Snell observed, "the ossified Church of England had lost this faculty." Dissent was in little better shape: according to Halévy it "'had lost all capacity for propaganda." Wesley was propelled by the Spirit into the true sphere of evangelism. He took the message to the people where they were. He refused to be shackled by ecclesiastical proprieties. He cheerfully abandoned his own reputation for respectability in a way which would have been inconceivable before his evangelical conversion. He addressed himself wholeheartedly to the central task of the true Church—namely, the preaching of the gospel to those who most need to hear it. He embarked upon his incredible itinerancy, becoming, in the vivid words of Rupp, ia human sputnik, a Don Quixote for Christ's sake.'
Wesley achieved what must always be the first objective of an evan1Cf, A. Skevington Wood, "Lessons from Wesley's Experience," Christianity
Today, Vol. VII (1963), p. 724.
2 Letters, Vol. Il, p. 96. To "John Smith," 25th March, 1747.
3 F, J. Snell, Wesley and Methodism (1900), p. 117.
4 Halévy, op. cit., p. 407.
5 E, Gordon Rupp, "The Future of the Methodist Tradition," London Quarterly and Holborn Review, 1959, p. 266.
THE BURNING HEART
gelist. He actually got in touch with the people, and managed to communicate his message to them. We have indicated the means by which this was done and the heterogeneous character of his audiences. But his heart went out to the underprivileged. It was his overriding concern that the poor should have the gospel preached to them. In this, he was eminently successful and the fruit was plentiful. Although it is fictional, a letter in Samuel Richardson's novel Sir Charles Grandison, written in 1753, reflects what must have been happening in fact. "Mrs. O'Hara is turned Methodist...
. Thank God she is anything that is serious. Those people really have great merit with me in her conversion. I am sorry that our ownclergy are not as zealously in earnest as they. They have really given a face of religion to subterranean collicrs, tinners, and the most profligate of men, who hardly ever before heard either of the word or the thing."? Historians nae continue to underline the beneficial effect of Wesley's preaching to the depressed classes. ""A feeling of purpose, a trust in Providence, was thus given to those who might otherwise have been filled only with the violence of despair," explains J. Steven Watson in a recent volume in the Oxford History of England.?
Tribute is also paid to the efficiency of Wesley's follow-up programme.
Prof. R. W. Greaves refers to the fact that "'in a lifetime of immense pastoral activity, in the course of great journeys all over the British Isles, and by a vast correspondence," Wesley '"'had been the leader in creating a great, flexible, and effective organization.''? Prof. Basil Williams declared that "John Wesley's greatness consisted not only in his power as a preacher, but also in his initiation of the vast system by which his teaching was to be kept alive and vigorous." It could well be claimed that Wesley was a pioneer in modern methods of post-natal care in evangelism.
We have devoted considerable space to an examination of Wesley's message and its biblical presuppositions. It is fashionable to suggest that here Wesley was a man of his age, and that neither his view of Scripture nor his presentation of the gospel is viable today. Sufficient evidence has been produced to warn us against so facile a judgement. The Bible was already under rationalistic fire in the eighteenth century, and there were many who found it more convenient to modify the less palatable elements in the Christian message. Indeed it was the contrast between Wesley's vibrant, incisive exhortations and the innocuous tepidity of the average discourse of the day which arrested attention. Before the revival, preaching in England had declined into intolerable dullness.5 "The more doc1 Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1752), Vol. VI. Letter 9.
2 J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III 1760-1815 (1960), p. 38.
8 New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, p. 138.
4 Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760 (1939), p. 97.
Stephen, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 337. Referring to the sermons of the period, Stephen wrote: "Dull, duller and dullest are a sufficient critical vocabulary to describe their merits."
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trinal aspects of religion were softened down, or suffered silently to recede," according to Lecky, "and, before the eighteenth century had much advanced, sermons had very generally become mere moral essays, characterized chiefly by a cold good sense, and appealing almost exclusively to prudential nature."
It was the fear of causing offence which robbed the contemporary pulpit of its pungency, and reduced the saving message to a colourless apology. The scandal of the Cross is also its power. To trim the gospel is to devitalize it. As Canon Overton observed, with reference to the Tillotsonian type of preaching, "'what is intended to offend nobody is apt also to affect nobody." An extreme instance of such reticence is to be found in the career of Dr. Knightly Chetwood, Dean of Gloucester from 1707 to 1720. On one occasion he was preaching at court, and somewhat diffidently threatened sinners with punishment "in a place which he thought it not decent to name in so polite an assembly." This prompted Alexander
Pope's reference to "the soft Dean .
.. who never mentions Hell to ears polite." It is not difficult to appreciate that Wesley's full-blooded proclamation of an uncompromising gospel, together with the sanctions of judgement to come, produced a startling effect on his hearers, who were struck by such unaccustomed frankness. It still remains true that those who shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God, defeat their own ends. The aim of the evangelist is not to please his hearers, but to save them. That can only be done through the offence of the Cross.
As Alan Walker puts it, evangelism is still "God's word for this hour.''
Wesley's task is ours. We live in a world of which he could hardly have dreamed. Yet even in a technological society, man without God is as lost as ever he was. His environment may differ, but his fundamental need is the same. He may reach the moon, but he will still be a sinner when he gets there. We can only agree with General Omar Bradley's assessment that modern man is "'a nuclear giant and an ethical infant.'' It must be the major strategy of the Church to reach him with the good news of Christ.
1 Lecky, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 84.
2 John H. Overton, The Evangelical Revival in the Eighteenth Century (1886) p. 4.
3 The Poems of Alexander Pope, Vol. Ill, i, ed. F. W. Bateson (1951), p. 152, n. 150.
4 Ibid., p. 152, lines 149, 150. Epistles IV, To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.
The Dean would appear to be the same person as the '"'eminent divine" mentioned by Richard Steele (The Guardian, No. 17, 31st March, 1713) who "'told his congregation at Whitehall that if they did not vouchsafe to give their lives a new turn, they must certainly go to a place which he did not think fit to name in that courtly audience."
Professor Williams (op. cit., p. 95, n. 1) identified the Dean with White Kennett of Peterborough, but this does not seem to be in character (cf. G. V. Bennett, White
Kennett 1660-1728, Bishop of Peterborough (1957), p. 184). As Bateson points out, a letter of Pope in the Daily Journal, 23rd December, 1731, supplies the likely clue, with a mention of Dean Chetwood and "'his courtly sermons."
5 Alan Walker, The Whole Gospel for the Whole World (1958), p. 13.
6 Cf. Leighton Ford, The Christian Persuader (1966), p. 26.
THE BURNING HEART
To have been reminded of one who bridged the gap in a bygone century should confirm the conviction that it can still be one today. The population explosion daily increases the magnitude of the mission. But the God who raised up Wesley and his colleagues can call out a task-force in our time too. That He may do so with similar effect must surely be the prayer of every Christian.