WESLEY'S SERVICES TO ENGLAND.
THE interesting ceremonies connected with the Wesley Commemoration appeal to a far wider audience than that embraced within the limits of the denomination which calls itself by Wesley's venerable name. They also appeal to many who would hesitate to accept the particular theology which Wesley held, and who can no longer find much interest in the controversy between Calvinist and Arminian. England, as a whole, is as truly interested in Wesley as in Shake- speare; and it may well be doubted whether in the long course of her history any one person has ever influenced her life in so direct, palpable, and powerful a way as has John Wesley. We do not, of course, forget that Wesley was but one of a number of religious teachers and reformers whom we identify with the movement towards what we may call "vital religion." We do not forget the gentle poet of the movement, William Cowper, nor the sweet hymnist, Charles Wesley, nor the wonderful preacher, George Whitefield. We must not even forget contemporary movements in other lands, which we are apt to lose sight of under the great stress of the French Revolution, but vihich have a vital union with the English Methodist revival. But when all is said and done John Wesley remains the one supreme and towering figure, a characteristic product of England, and one of the noblest and most saintly of her sons.
If it be asked what is Wesley's supreme title to fame, the
answer, we think, would be that he arrested the moral and spiritual decline of England, and that he was the chief agent in the renewal of her inward and spiritual life. Though the story has been often told, we doubt whether any person who has either no vivid imagination or no very intimate acquaintance with the history of the time can realise how rotten was the condition of England in the middle of the last century. There seemed to be scarcely a healthy piece of social tissue. An agnostic Whiggism had degraded the Church from a spiritual organisation into a mere political mechanism ; it had, as Cowper later on put it, made—
"The symbols of atoning grace An office-key, a picklock to a place."
The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed ; half the parishes in England were void of spiritual life, many were sunk in the lowest vice without restraint or reproof. The governing classes were perhaps even feebler and more corrupt than in the reign of the second Charles. Sir George Trevelyan in his admirable work on the American Revolu- tion has shown how England's failure in her struggle with her Colonies was in no small degree due to her immorality and corruption; and that was when a distinct movement up- ward had begun. What must have been the condition a quarter of a century before? It seemed as though all the purity and earnestness of the English-speaking folk must henceforth be sought an the other side of the Atlantic where simple and healthy Puritan life had made its home. The new industry, ill understood and unregulated, was making slaves of the poor, while the rich were living in practical atheism, and to sneer at religion was the part of a man of fashion. Englishmen were being enriched by slavery and the slave trade, to the horrors of which they were utterly callous. Gibbon and Adam Smith have described for us the learned ignorance and blank indifference of the Universities, Horace Walpole has given us an insight into the lives of the upper classes and the morals (or no-morals) of public men. It seemed as though English society were doomed to decadence.
Humanly speaking, we may say that such a decadence would have ensued had it not been for the new movement of which Wesley was the leading religious and moral expres- sion. It may seem at first sight strange to associate his name with those of such different persons as Richardson, Goldsmith, and Rousseau. And yet the philosophic observer, who, like the zoologist, must seek below the surface for real affinities, knows that all represented, each in his way, the movement from routine and dead formalism to sincerity and life. As Rousseau roused Europe from dead beliefs to living ideas, so did Wesley rouse England from _death in "trespasses and sins" to a new life of divine possibilities. What the mechanical morals of sleepy Anglican rectors could not do for England, this holy man with his soul aflame with a sacrbd zeal and love accomplished. Think of those poor degraded miners with the tears making white channels down their black faces, and their hearts full of the new teaching that the world was the outcome of divine love and themselves the objects of divine care. It was as truly a revelation to them as to the weary slaves of ancient Rome. It transformed life for them, for it began at the right end, by making obedience to moral law easy in the light of Christian grace and love. Moreover, no spiritual renewal stops at purely spiritual results ; it overflows the whole nature and tends to produce good fathers and good citizens as well as saints. We owe it largely to the Methodist movement that, while the French could only renew their outworn structure by violent revolution, the English could transform theirs by peaceable means. Yet Wesley was no quietist, no retiring ascetic. He faced the evils of his time as boldly as Savonarola. Like his contemporary, Dr. Johnson, he was a Tory who at times was consumed with wrath at the existence of social wrongs, and wrote and spoke as a kind of fervid political evangelist. He denounced slavery as the "sum of all villainies," and this in the age when the pions John Newton was enjoying "sweet" converse with the Lord in the hold of a slaver. It is grossly unfair to connect the movement of " vital " religion with "otherworldliness," though we may admit the partial impeachment urged by George Eliot in her analysis of Dr. Young. The names of Howard, Wilberforce, Elizabeth Fry, Zachary Macaulay, rise in judgment against so false an assertion. To tell the truth, English reforming zeal has mainly come from two quarters,—from Evangelical religion, and from an earnest and sincere, though often crude and aggressive "free-thought." But assuredly the father of vigorous social reform was John Wesley ; he laboured and others entered into his labours.
But Wesley and his co-workers produced not only a great moral, but also a great intellectual, change in England. We doubt if what the Germans call the weltanschauung of a nation was ever so rapidly transformed as was that of England in the last century. Think of the change from the aridity of the Deistic controversy and the hollow brilliancy of Bolingbroke and Chesterfield to the green pastures and still waters a the "Lyrical Ballads," and ask yourself what could have wrought such a marvellous resurrection from the dead. We cannot perhaps explain this, for the spirit, in the last analysis, moveth where it listeth, but we do see that the new literature and thought sprang from a new soil, watered by a new faith which once more saw the world to be divine, and men to be vitally related in social bonds forged by God himself. We do not suppose that the zealous converts of Methodism and the earnest preachers of the Evangelical revival could appreciate the fairy loveliness of the poetry of Coleridge, or the bare grandeur of Wordsworth's noble sonnets. But we do say that each shared the new life, that each had passed from the desert of mechanism and formality into the promised land of freedom and truth. We also cannot fail to connect Wesley's movement with that later Oxford Movement, so different in many ways but yet like it, a part of that great spiritual uprising against the tyranny of the world and the things of sense. Regarded as a mere separate movement, the Evangelicalism which came between the Wesleyan revival and the Tractarian development is past and gone ; and the mere Oxford Movement per as is passing. But if we regard these diverse movements as phases of the spiritual life of England, out of which all manner of noble growths (including the inevitable tares which spring up with the wheat) have come enriching and enlarging our vast heritage, then we can trace back to Wesley in a supreme degree the source of this great and beneficent influence to which England owes so much. And the movement in its main issue and character has largely ex- pressed the nature of its founder. We have our fanaticisms and our ridiculous sects, as Voltaire told us in those days of brilliant sceptical criticism before Wesley's career Vegan; but the same religious ideal in the main holds the nation as it held Wesley himself. He was a man of culture as well as a. man of piety ; while burning with zeal for his fellow-men, he was never vain, egotistic, or blunder- ing. He carried into his religion a fine instinct for the "minor moralities of life," and the Bole matter for regret which we can associate with him was the bitter con- troversy with Toplady, who, however, was the more to blame. In the familiar words of the Bidding Prayer, we associate Wesley with "sound learning" as well as "religious educa- tion," and we recognise that hie genius for organisation was as remarkable as his genius for piety. His memorable mission to America showed that spirit in him which justifies his saying that the world was his parish. May the country which bore him and the University which reared him give us in the coming century such another religious leader to aid us, in the spirit of sobriety and truth, in the eternal contest with the evils and sins which grow like weeds in our human soil.
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