{127} CHAPTER XXX.

THE WESLEYAN MOVEMENT.

[Sidenote: 1738—John Wesley]

In 1738 John Wesley returned to London from Georgia, in British North America. He had been absent more than two years. He had gone to Georgia to propagate the faith to which he was devoted; to convert the native Indians and to regenerate the British colonists. He did not accomplish much in either way. The colonists preferred to live their careless, joyous, often dissolute lives, and the stern spirit of Wesley had no charm for them. The Indians refused to be Christianized; one chief giving as his reason for the refusal a melancholy fact which has kept others as well as him from conversion to the true faith. He said he did not want to become a Christian because the Christians in Savannah got drunk, told lies, and beat men and women. Wesley had, before leaving England, founded a small religious brotherhood, and on his return he at once set to work to strengthen and enlarge it.

John Wesley was in every sense a remarkable man. If any one in the modern world can be said to have had a distinct religious mission, Wesley certainly can be thus described. He was born in 1703 at Epworth, in Lincolnshire. John Wesley came of a family distinguished for its Churchmen and ministers. His father was a clergyman of the Church of England, and rector of the parish of Epworth; his grandfather was also a clergyman, but became a Non-conformist minister, and seems to have been a good deal persecuted for his opinions on religious discipline. John Wesley's father was a sincere and devout man, with a certain literary repute and well read in {128} theology, but of narrow mind and dogmatic, unyielding temper. The right of King William to the Throne was an article of faith with him, and it came on him one day with the shock of a terrible surprise that his wife did not altogether share his conviction. He vowed that he would never live with her again unless or until she became of his way of thinking; and he straightway left the house, nor did he return to his home and his wife until after the death of the King, when the controversy might be considered as having closed. The King died so soon, however, that the pair were only separated for about a year; but it may fairly be assumed that, had the King lived twenty years, Wesley would not have returned to his wife unless she had signified to him that she had renounced her pestilent scepticism.

The same stern strength of resolve which Wesley, the father, showed in this extraordinary course was shown by the son at many a grave public crisis in his career. The birth of John Wesley was the result of the reconciliation between the elder Wesley and his wife. There were other children, elder and younger; one of whom, Charles, became in after-life the faithful companion and colleague of his brother. John and Charles Wesley were educated at Oxford, and were distinguished there by the fervor of their religious zeal and the austerity of their lives. There were other young men there at the time who grew into close affinity with the Wesleys. There was George Whitefield, the son of a Gloucester innkeeper, who at one time was employed as a drawer in his mother's tap-room; and there was James Hervey, afterwards author of the flowery and sentimental "Meditations," that became for a while so famous—a book which Southey describes "as laudable in purpose and vicious in style." These young men, with others, formed a sort of little religious association or companionship of their own. They used to hold meetings for their mutual instruction and improvement in religious faith and life. They shunned all amusement and all ordinary social intercourse. They were ridiculed {129} and laughed at, and various nicknames were bestowed on them. One of these nicknames they accepted and adopted; as the Flemish Gueux had done, and many another religious sect and political party as well. Those who chose to laugh at them saw especial absurdity in their formal and methodical way of managing their spiritual exercises and their daily lives. The jesters dubbed them Methodists; Wesley and his friends welcomed the title; and the fame of the Methodists now folds in the orb of the earth.

[Sidenote: 1738—Torpor of the English Church]

Wesley and his friends had in the beginning, and for long years after, no idea whatever of leaving the fold of the English Church. They had as little thought of that kind as in a later generation had the men who made the Free Church of Scotland. Probably their ideas were very vague in their earlier years. They were young men tremendously in earnest; they were aflame in spirit and conscience with religious zeal; and they saw that the Church of England was not doing the work that might have been and ought to have been expected of her. She had ceased utterly to be a missionary Church. She troubled herself in nowise about spreading the glad tidings of salvation among the heathen. At home she was absolutely out of touch with the great bulk of the people. The poor and the ignorant were left quietly to their own resources. The clergymen of the Church of England were not indeed by any means a body of men wanting in personal morality, or even in religious feeling, but they had as little or no religious activity because they had little or no religious zeal. They performed perfunctorily their perfunctory duties; and that, as a rule, was all they did.

Atterbury, Burnet, Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the torpid condition into which the Church had fallen. Decorum seemed to be the highest reach of the spiritual lives of most of the clergy. One finds curious confirmation of the statements {130} made publicly by men like Atterbury and Burnet in some of the appeals privately made by Swift to his powerful friends for the promotion of poor and deserving clergymen whose poverty and merit had been brought under his notice. The recommendation generally begins and ends in the fact that each particular man had led a decent, respectable life; that he was striving to bring up honestly a large family; and that his living or curacy was not enough to maintain him in comfort. We hardly ever hear of the work which the good man had been doing among the poor, the ignorant, and the sinful. Swift has said many hard and even terrible things about bishops and deans, and vicars and curates. But these stern accusations do not form anything like as formidable a testimony against the condition into which the Church had fallen as will be found in the exceptional praise which he gives to those whom he specially desires to recommend for promotion; and in the fact that the highest reach of that praise comes to nothing more than the assurance that the man had led a decent life, had a large family, and was very poor. Such a recommendation as that would not have counted for much with John Wesley. He would have wanted to know what work the clergyman had done outside his own domestic life; what ignorance had he enlightened, what sinners had he brought to repentance.

[Sidenote: 1738—An "archbishop of the slums"]

Things were still worse in the Established Church of Ireland. Hardly a pastor of that Church could speak three words of the language of the Irish people. Lord Stanhope, in his "History of England from the Peace of Utrecht," writes as if the Irish clergymen—the clergymen, that is, of the Established Church of Ireland—might have accomplished wonders in the way of converting the Irish peasantry to Protestantism if they only could have preached and controverted in the Irish language. We are convinced that they could have done nothing of the kind. The Irish Celtic population is in its very nature a Catholic population. Not all the preaching since Adam {131} could have made them other than that. Still it struck John Wesley very painfully later on that the effort was never made, and that the men who could not talk to the Irish people in their own tongue, and who did not take the trouble to learn the language, were not in a promising condition for the conversion of souls. The desire of Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the rest, seems only at first to have been an awakening of the Church in these islands to a sense of her duty. They do not appear to have had any very far-reaching hopes or plans. They saw that the work was left undone, and they labored to bring about a spirit which should lead men to the doing of it. At first they only held their little meetings on each succeeding Sunday; but they found themselves warming to the task, and they began to meet and confer very often. Their one thought was how to get at the people; how to get at the lowly, the ignorant, and the poor. Soon they began to see that the lowly, the ignorant, and the poor would not come to the Church, and that, therefore, the Church must go out to them. In a day much nearer to our own a prelate of the Established Church indulged in a very unlucky and unworthy sneer at the expense of the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. He called him an "Archbishop of the slums." The retort was easy and conclusive. It was an admission. "Exactly; that is just what I am. I am an archbishop of the slums; that is my business; that is what I desire to be. My ministry is among the hovels and the garrets and the slums; yours, I admit, is something very different."

This illustrates to the life the central idea which was forming itself gradually and slowly into shape in the mind of John Wesley and in the minds of his associates. They saw that archbishops of the slums were the very prelates whom England needed. Their souls revolted against the apparently accepted idea that the duties of a priest of the Church of England were fulfilled by the preaching of a chill, formal, written sermon once a week, and the attendance {132} on Court ceremonials, and the dining at the houses of those who would then have been called "the great." An institution which could do no more and strove to do no more than the Church of England was then doing did not seem to them to deserve the name of a Church. It was simply a branch of the Civil Service of the State. But Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the rest, fully believed at first that they could do something to quicken the Church into a real, a beneficent, and a religions activity. Most of them had for a long time a positive horror of open-air preaching and of the co-operation of lay preachers. Most of them for a long time clung to all the traditional forms and even formulas amid which they had grown up. What Wesley and the others did not see at first, or for long after, was that the Church of England was not then equal to the work which ought to have been hers. A great change was coming over the communities and the population of England. Small hamlets were turning into large towns. Great new manufacturing industries were creating new classes of working-men. Coal-mines were gathering together vast encampments of people where a little time before there had been idle heath or lonely hill-side. The Church of England, with her then hide-bound constitution and her traditional ways, was not equal to the new burdens which she was supposed to undertake. She suffered also from that lack of competition which is hurtful to so many institutions. The Church of Rome had been suppressed for the time in this country, and the most urgent means had been employed to keep the Dissenters down; therefore the Church of England had grown contented, sleek, inert, and was no longer equal to its work. This fact began after a while to impress itself more and more on the minds of the little band who worked with John Wesley. They resisted the idea to the very last; they hoped and believed and dreamed that they might still be part of the Church of England. They found themselves drawn outside the Church, and they found, too, that when once they had gone even a very little way out of the {133} fold, the gates were rudely closed against them, and they might not return. It was not that Wesley and his associates left the Church of England. The Church would not have them because they would persist in doing the work to which she would not even attempt to put a hand.

[Sidenote: 1738—John Wesley's Charity]

John Wesley had been profoundly impressed by William Law's pious and mystical book, "A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life," which was published in 1729. Law lived in London, and Wesley, who desired to be in frequent intercourse with him, used to walk to and from the metropolis for the purpose. The money he thus saved he gave to the poor. He wore his hair at one time very long in order to save the expense of cutting and dressing it, and thus have more money to give away in charity. He and his little band of associates, whose numbers swelled at one time up to twenty-five, but afterwards dropped down to five, imposed on themselves rules of discipline almost as harsh as those of a monastery of the Trappist order. They fasted every Wednesday and Friday, and they made it a duty to visit the prisons and hospitals. Wesley's father, who was growing old, was very anxious that his son should succeed him in the rectory of Epworth. John would not hear of it. In vain his father pressed and prayed; the son could not see his way in that direction. John Wesley has been blamed by some of his biographers for not accepting the task which his father desired and thought right to impose on him. But no one on earth could understand John Wesley's mission but John Wesley himself. When it was pressed upon him that in the living of Epworth he would have the charge of two thousand souls he said, "I see not how any man can take care of a hundred." It was pointed out to him that his little band of companions had been growing smaller and smaller; he only answered that he was purifying a fountain and not a stream. The illustration was effective and happy.

The truth is that the tremendous energies of John {134} Wesley could not possibly find employment within the narrow field of work adopted by the Established Church of his day. Wesley was a fighter; he had to go out into the broad living world and do battle there. He had originality as well as energy; he must do his work his own way; he could not be a minister of routine. He soon found it borne in upon him that he must speak to his fellow-man wherever he could find him. For a long time he held back from the thought of open-air preaching, but now he saw that it must be done. There was a period of his life, he says, when he would have thought the saving of a soul "a sin almost if it had not been done in a church." But from the first moment when he began to preach to crowds in the open air he must have felt that he had found his work at last. His friend and colleague Whitefield, who had more of the genius of an orator than Wesley, had preceded him in this path. One is a little surprised that such men as Wesley and Whitefield should ever have found any difficulty about preaching to a crowd in the open air. The Hill of Mars at Athens listened to an open-air sermon from an apostle, and Whitefield himself observed at a later date that the "Sermon on the Mount is a pretty remarkable precedent of field preaching."

[Sidenote: 1738—Wesley's superstition]

Meanwhile, however, Wesley's father died, and Wesley received an invitation to go out to Georgia with General Oglethorpe, the governor of that settlement, to preach to the Indians and the colonists. He sailed for the new colony on October 14, 1735. He was accompanied by his brother Charles and two other missionaries, and on board the vessel was a small band of men from "the meek Moravian Missions." The Moravian sect was then in its earliest working order. It had been founded—or perhaps it would be more fitting to say restored—not many years before, by the enthusiastic and devoted Count Von Zinzendorf. Wesley was greatly attracted by the ways and the spiritual life of the Moravians. It is worthy of note that when Count Zinzendorf began the formation or {135} restoration of Moravianism he had as little idea of departing from the fold of the Confession of Augsburg as Wesley had of leaving the Church of England. John Wesley did not, as we have said, accomplish much among the colonists and the Indians. Perhaps his ways were too dogmatic and dictatorial for the colonists. He departed altogether from the Church discipline in some of his religious exercises, while he clung to it pertinaciously in others. He offended local magnates by preaching at them from the pulpit, giving them pretty freely a piece of his mind as to their conduct and ways of life, and, indeed, turning them to public ridicule with rough and rasping sarcasms. With the Indians he could not do much, if only for the fact that he had to speak to them through an interpreter. The tongue, says Jean Paul Richter, is eloquent only in its own language, and the heart in its own religion. It certainly was not from lack of zeal and energy that Wesley failed to accomplish much among the Indians. He flung himself into the work with all his indomitable spirit and disregard for trouble and pain. One of his biographers tells us that "he exposed himself with the utmost indifference to every change of season and inclemency of weather; snow and hail, storm and tempest, had no effect on his iron body. He frequently lay down on the ground and slept all night with his hair frozen to the earth; he would swim over rivers with his clothes on and travel till they were dry, and all this without any apparent injury to his health." It is no wonder that Wesley soon began to regard himself as a man specially protected by divine power. He was deeply, romantically superstitious. He commonly guided his course by opening a page of the Bible and reading the first passage that met his eye. He saw visions; he believed in omens. He tells us himself of the instantaneous way in which some of his prayers for rescue from danger were answered from above. Those who believe that the work Wesley had to do was really great and beneficent work will hardly feel any regret that such a man should have allowed himself to be governed {136} by such ideas. It was necessary to the tasks he had to execute that he should believe himself to bear a charmed life.

Wesley was very near getting married in Georgia. A clever and pretty young woman in Savannah set herself at him. She consulted him about her spiritual salvation, she dressed always in white because she understood that he liked such simplicity of color, she nursed him when he was ill. The governor of the colony favored the young lady's intentions, which were indeed strictly honorable, being most distinctly matrimonial. At one time it seemed very likely that the marriage would take place, but Wesley's heart was evidently not in the affair. Some of his colleagues told him plainly enough that they believed the young lady to be merely playing a game, that she put on affection and devotion only that she might put on a wedding-dress. Wesley consulted some of the elders of the Moravian Church, and promised to abide by their decision. Their advice was that he should go no further with the young woman, and Wesley kept his word and refused to see her any more. She married, soon after, the chief magistrate of the colony, and before long we find Wesley publicly reprehending her for "something in her behavior of which he disapproved," and threatening even to exclude her from the communion of the Church until she should have signified her sincere repentance. Her family took legal proceedings against him. Wesley did not care; he was about to return to England, and he was called on to give bail for his reappearance in the colony. He contemptuously refused to do anything of the kind, and promptly sailed from Savannah.

This little episode of the Georgian girl is characteristic of the man. He did not care about marrying her, but it did not seem to him a matter of much importance either way, and he doubtless would have married her but that he thought it well to seek the advice of his Moravian friends, and bound himself to abide by their decision. That decision once given, he had no further wavering or {137} doubt, but the course he had taken and the manner in which he had completely thrown over the woman did not prevent him in the least from visiting her with a public rebuke when he saw something in her conduct of which he disapproved. He saw no reason why, because he refused to be her lover, he should fail in his duty as her minister.

[Sidenote: 1738—Wesley's unhappy marriage]

We may anticipate a little as to Wesley's personal history. Later in his life he married. He was not happy in his marriage. He took for his wife a widow who plagued him by her narrow-mindedness, her bitterness, and her jealousy. Wesley's care and kindness of the women who came under his ministrations set his wife wild with suspicion and anger. She could not believe that a man could be kind to a woman, even as a pastor, without having evil purpose in his heart. She had the temper of a virago; she stormed against her husband, she threatened him, she sometimes rushed at him and tore his hair; she repeatedly left his house, but was prevailed upon by him to return. At last after a fierce quarrel she flung out of the house, vowing that she would never come back. Wesley's comment, which he expressed in Latin, was stern and characteristic: "I have not left her, I have not put her away, I will never recall her." He kept his word.

Wesley started on his mission to preach to the people and to pray with them. Whitefield and Charles Wesley did the same. Charles Wesley was the hymn writer, the sweet singer, of the movement. The meetings began to grow larger, more enthusiastic, more impassioned, every day. John Wesley brought to his work "a frame of adamant" as well as "a soul of fire." No danger frighted him, and no labor tired. Rain, hail, snow, storm, were matters of indifference to him when he had any work to do. One reads the account of the toil he could cheerfully bear, the privations he could recklessly undergo, the physical obstacles he could surmount, with what would be a feeling of incredulity were it possible to doubt the unquestionable evidence of a whole cloud of {138} heterogeneous witnesses. Not Mark Antony, not Charles the Twelfth, not Napoleon, ever went through such physical suffering for the love of war, or for the conqueror's ambition, as Wesley was accustomed to undergo for the sake of preaching at the right time and in the right place to some crowd of ignorant and obscure men, the conversion of whom could bring him neither fame nor fortune.

All the phenomena with which we have been familiar in modern times of what are called "revivalist" meetings were common among the congregations to whom Wesley preached. Women especially were affected in this way. They raved, shrieked, struggled, flung themselves on the ground, fainted, cried out that they were possessed by evil spirits. Wesley rather encouraged these manifestations, and indeed quite believed in their genuineness. No doubt for the most part they were genuine: that is, they were the birth of hysterical, highly strung natures, stimulated into something like epilepsy or temporary insanity by the unbearable oppression of a wholly novel excitement. No such evidences of emotion were ever given in the parish church where the worthy clergyman read his duly prepared or perhaps thoughtfully purchased sermon. Sometimes a new form of hysteria possessed some of Wesley's congregations, and irrepressible peals of laughter broke from some of the brethren and sisters, who declared that they were forced to it by Satan. Wesley quite accepted this explanation, and so did most of his companions. Two ladies, however, refused to believe, and insisted that "any one might help laughing if she would." But very soon after these two sceptics were seized with the very same sort of irrepressible laughter. They continued for two days laughing almost without cessation, "a spectacle to all," as Wesley tells, "and were then upon prayer made for them delivered in a moment." It is almost needless now to say that bursts of irrepressible laughter are among the commonest forms of hysterical excitement.

[Sidenote: 1738—Whitefield's oratory]

The cooler common-sense of Charles Wesley, however, {139} saw these manifestations with different eyes. He felt sure that there was sometimes a good deal of affectation in them, and he publicly remonstrated with some women who, as it appeared to him, were needlessly making themselves ridiculous. He was probably right in these instances: the instinct of imitation is so strong among men and women that every genuine outburst of maniacal excitement is sure to be followed by some purely mimetic efforts of a similar demonstration. The novelty of the whole movement was enough to account for the genuine and the sham hysterics. It was an entirely new experience then for English men and women of the humblest class, and of that generation, to be addressed in great open-air masses by renowned and powerful preachers. Whitefield's first great effort at field-preaching was made for the benefit of the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol. Before many weeks had gone by, he could gather round him some twenty thousand of these men. Whitefield had a marvellous fervor and force of oratory. His voice, his gestures, his sudden and startling appeals, his solemn pauses, the dramatic and even theatric energy which he threw into his attitudes and his action, his flights of lofty and sustained declamation, contrasting with sentences of homely colloquialism, were overwhelming in their effect on such an audience. "The first discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne willing testimony to the irresistible power of a sermon from Whitefield.

Wesley and Whitefield did not remain long in spiritual companionship. They could not agree as to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. Wesley was opposed to {140} the doctrine; Whitefield willing to accept it. They discussed and discussed the question, but without drawing any nearer together. Indeed, as might naturally have been expected, they only fell more widely asunder, and after a while the difference of opinion grew to something like a personal estrangement. Wesley had already broken away from spiritual communion with some of his old friends, the Moravians. Probably he felt all the stronger for his own work now that he stood as a leader all but alone. He walked his own wild road; Whitefield took a path for himself. Wesley soon found that he was gaining more followers than he had lost. He had to adopt the practice of employing lay preachers; it was a matter of necessity to his task. He could not induce many clergymen to work under his guidance and after his fashion. The movement was spreading all over the country. Wesley became the centre and light of his wing of the campaign. The machinery of his organization was simple and strong. A conference was called together every year, which was composed of preachers selected by Wesley. These formed his cabinet or central board, and lent their authority to his decisions.

This was the germ of the great Wesleyan organization, which has since become so powerful, and has spread itself so widely over Great Britain and the American States. The preachers were sent by Wesley from one part of the country to another, just as he thought best; and it never occurred to any missionary to refuse, remonstrate, or even delay. The system was admirable; the discipline was perfect. Wesley was as completely in command of his body of missionaries as the general of the order of Jesuits is of those over whom he is called to exercise control. The humblest of the Wesleyan preachers caught something, caught indeed very much, of the energy, the courage, the devotion, the self-sacrifice, of their great leader. No doubt there were many errors and offences here and there. Good taste, sobriety of judgment, prudence, common-sense, were now and then offended. Most of the preachers were {141} ignorant men, who had nothing but an untaught enthusiasm and a rude, uncouth eloquence to carry them on. They had to preach to multitudes very often more ignorant and uncouth than themselves. It would be absolutely impossible under such conditions that there should not sometimes be offence, and, as Hamlet says, "much offence too." But there was no greater departure from the lines of propriety and good taste than any one who took a reasonable view of the whole work and its workers must have expected to find.

[Sidenote: 1738—Opposition to Wesleyanism]

Of course a strong opposition to the movement showed itself in many parts of the country. The Wesleyans were denounced; they were ridiculed; they were caricatured; they were threatened; they were set upon by ruffians; they were stoned by mobs. In some places it was said that the local magistrates actually connived with the attempt to drive them out by force. Projects are actually declared to have been formed for their complete extermination. Such projects, however, do not succeed. No amount of violence has ever yet exterminated religious zeal and impassioned, even let it be fanatical, enthusiasm. John Wesley went his way undismayed. He even appears to have positively enjoyed the excitement and the danger. The persecution began after a while to languish in its efforts, and the Wesleyans kept growing more and more numerous and strong. But the movement in growing grew away from the Church of England. Wesley had been drawn out of his original intent step after step. He could not help himself, once his movement had been started. He had had to take to field preaching, for the good reason that he could not otherwise reach the people whom it was his heart's warmest longing to reach. He had to take to employing lay preachers, because without them he could not have got his preaching done. At last he began to ordain ministers, and even, it is said, bishops, for the missions in America. He had, in fact, broken away altogether from the discipline of the Church of England, although he persisted to his dying day that he never had any design of {142} separating from the Church, "and had no such design now." Near to the close of his long life he declared, "I live and die a member of the Church of England, and none who regard my judgment or advice will ever separate from it." No one can doubt that Wesley spoke in full sincerity. When he stepped outside the pale of Church practice it was only to do what he believed ought to have been the work of the Church itself, but which the Church did not then care to attempt, and which, as he felt convinced, could not afford to wait for the indefinite time when the Church might have the spirit, the energy, and the resources needed for such an undertaking.

Wesley was a thorough despot; as much of a despot as Peter the Great or Napoleon. He took no trouble to disguise his despotic purpose. He did not shelter himself, as Napoleon once wished to do, under the draperies of a constitutional king. Wesley was satisfied in his own mind that he knew better than any other man how to guide his movements and govern his followers, and he told people that he knew it, and acted accordingly. The members of his conference, or what we have called his cabinet, were only like Clive's council of war; Wesley listened to their advice and their arguments, but acted according to his own judgment all the same. Late in his career it was charged against him that he was trying to turn himself into a sort of Methodist pope. He asked for some explanation of this, and was told that he had invested himself with arbitrary power. His answer was simple and straightforward. "If by arbitrary power you mean a power which I exercise singly, without any colleagues therein, this is certainly true; but I see no hurt in it." All the actions of his life show this complete faith in himself where the business of his mission was concerned. He was dogmatic, masterful, overbearing, very often far from amiable, sometimes all but unendurable, to those around him. But if he had not had these peculiar qualities or defects he would not have been the man that he was; he would not have been able to bear the charge of such a task at such a {143} time. It is probable that Hannibal did not cut through the Alps with vinegar; it is certain that he could not have pierced his way with honey.

[Sidenote: 1738—Religion out of fashion]

Nothing can better show than the rise and progress of the great Methodist movement how vast is the difference between a people and what is commonly called society. In society everywhere throughout England, in the great provincial cities as well as in the capital, religion seemed to have completely gone out of fashion. The Court cared nothing about it. The King had no real belief in his heart; he had as little faith in Divine guidance as he had in the honor of man or the chastity of woman. The Queen's devotional exercises were nothing but a mere performance carried on sometimes through a half-opened door, the attendant minister on one side of the door and the gossiping, chattering ladies on the other. The leading statesmen of the age were avowedly indifferent or professedly unbelieving. Bolingbroke was a preacher of unbelief. Walpole never seems to have cared to turn his thoughts for one moment to anything higher than his own political career, the upholding of his friends if they stood fast by him, and the downfall of his enemies. Chesterfield was not exactly the sort of man to be stirred into spiritual life. Morals were getting out of fashion as much as religion. Society had all the grossness without much of the wit which belonged to the days of the Restoration. Yet the mere fact that the Wesleyan movement made such sudden way among the poor and the lowly shows beyond question that the heart of the English people had not been corrupted. Conscience was asleep, but it was not dead. The first words of Wesley seemed to quicken it into a new life.

We have somewhat anticipated the actual course of events in order to show at once what the Wesleyan movement came to. During the lifetime of its founder it had grown into a great national and international institution. Since his time it has been spreading and growing all over the world where Christianity grows. It is the severest in {144} its discipline of all the Protestant churches, and yet it exercises a charm even over gentle and tender natures, and makes them its willing servants, while it teaches the wilder and fiercer spirits to bend their natures and tame their wild passions down. [Sidenote: 1738—The Wesleyan work] In the United States of America Wesleyanism is now one of the most popular and powerful of all the denominations of Christianity. It has since been divided up into many sections, both here and there, on questions of discipline, and even on questions of belief; but in its leading characteristics it has been faithful to the main purpose of its founder. Its success did not consist mainly in what it accomplished for its own people; it achieved a great work also by the impulse it gave to the Church of England. That Church for a while seemed to be filled with a reviving spiritual and ministerial activity. It appeared to take shame to itself that it had remained so long apathetic and perfunctory, and it flung itself into competition with the younger and more energetic mission. The English Church did not indeed retain this mood of ardor and of eagerness very long. After a time it relapsed into comparative inactivity; and a new and very different movement was needed at a period much nearer to our own to make it once again a ministering power to the people—to the poor. But for the time the revival of the Church was genuine and was beneficent. With the quickened religious vitality of the Wesleyan movement came also a quickened philanthropic spirit; a zeal for the instruction, the purification, and the better life of men and women. The common instinct of humanity always is to strive for higher and better ways of living, if only once the word of guidance is given and the soul of true manhood is roused to the work. Indeed, there is not much about this period of English history concerning which the modern Englishman can feel really proud except that great religious revival which began with the thoughts and the teachings of John Wesley. One turns in relief from the partisan struggles in Parliament and out of it, from the intrigues and counter-intrigues of selfish and perfidious statesmen, and {145} the alcove conspiracies of worthless women, to Wesley and his religious visions, to Whitefield and his colliers, to Charles Wesley and his sweet devotional hymns. Many of us are unable to have any manner of sympathy with the precise doctrines and the forms of faith which Wesley taught. But the man must have no sympathy with faith or religious feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's endurance. They brought tears to penitent eyes which had never been moistened before by any but the selfish sense of personal pain or grief. They pierced through the dull, vulgar, contaminated hideousness of low and vicious life, and sent streaming in upon it the light of a higher world and a better law. Every new Wesleyan became a missionary of Wesleyanism. The son converted the father, the daughter won over the heart of the mother. There was much that was hard, much that was fierce, in the doctrine and the discipline of Methodism, but that time was not one in which gentler teachings could much prevail. Men and women had to be startled into a sense of the need of their spiritual regeneration. Wesley and the comrades who worked with him in the beginning, and with some of whom, like Whitefield, he ceased after a while to work, were just the men needed to call aloud to the people and make sure that their voices must be heard. They had to talk in a shout if they were to talk to any purpose. There was much in their style of eloquence against which a pure and cultured criticism would naturally protest. But they did not speak for the pure and cultured criticism. They came to call ignorant sinners to repentance. They have the one great abiding {146} merit, they have the one enduring fame—that they saw their real business in life; that they kept to it through whatever disadvantage, pain, and danger; and that they accomplished what they had gone out to do. Their monument lives to-day in the living history of England and of America.

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