The Great Revival.—Frontispiece.

The Foundry, Moorfields.

THE
GREAT REVIVAL
OF
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

BY

REV. EDWIN PAXTON HOOD,

AUTHOR OF

“Isaac Watts: his Life and Writings, his Home and Friends,” etc.

With a Supplemental Chapter on the Revival in America.

PHILADELPHIA:

AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION,

1122 Chestnut Street.

NEW YORK. CHICAGO.

EDITOR’S NOTE.

The only changes made in revising this work are in the local allusions to England as “our country,” etc., and in a few phrases and expressions naturally arising from the original preparation of the chapters for successive numbers of a magazine. If any reader thinks that the Author’s enthusiasm in his subject has caused him to ascribe too great influence to the “Methodist movement,” and not to give due recognition to other potent agencies in the “great awakening” of the last century, let him remember that this volume does not profess to give a complete, but only a partial history of the Great Revival. Indeed, the Author’s graphic pictures relate chiefly to the movement, as it swept over London and the great mining centres of England, where the truth, as proclaimed by the great leaders, Whitefield, the Wesleys, and their co-laborers, won its greatest victories, and where Methodism has ever continued to render some of its most valiant and glorious services for Christ. It is not to be inferred that in Scotland, Ireland, and in the American colonies, as in many portions of England, other organizations, dissenting societies and churches were not a power in spreading the Great Revival movement.

A brief chapter has been added at the close, sketching some phases of the revival in the American colonies, under the labors of Edwards, Whitefield, the Tennents, and their associates. Whatever other material has been added by the Editor is indicated by brackets, thus leaving the distinguished Author’s views and expressions intact.

An Index has also been added, to increase the permanent value of the book to the reader. If the history of the remarkable “religious awakenings” of the eighteenth century were more diligently studied, and the holy enthusiasm and wonderful zeal of those great leaders in “hunting for souls” were to inspire workers of this century, what marvellous conquests and victories should we witness for the Son of God!

Philadelphia, March, 1882.

PREFACE.

The author of the following pages begs that they may be read kindly—and, he will venture to say, not critically. Originally published as a series of papers in the Sunday at Home, * * * they are only Vignettes—etchings. The History of the great Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Century yet remains unwritten; not often has the world known such a marvellous awakening of religious thought; and, as we are further removed in time, so, perhaps, we are better able to judge of the momentous circumstances, could we but seize the point of view.

CONTENTS.

THE GREAT REVIVAL.

CHAPTER I
DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN.

It cannot be too often remembered or repeated that when the Bible has been brought face to face with the conscience of corrupt society, in every age it has shown itself to be that which it professes, and which its believers declare it to be—“the great power of God.” It proved itself thus amidst the hoary and decaying corruptions of the ancient civilisation, when its truths were first published to the Roman Empire; it proclaimed its power to the impure but polished society of Florence, when Savonarola preached his wonderful sermons in St. Mark’s; and effected the same results throughout the whole German Empire, when Bible truth sounded forth from Luther’s trumpet-tones. The same principle is illustrated where the great evangelical truths of the New Testament entered nations, as in Spain or France, only to be rejected. From that rejection and the martyrdoms of the first believers; those nations have never recovered themselves even to this hour; and of the two nations, that in which the rejection was the most haughty and cruel, has suffered most from its renunciation.

England has passed through three great evangelical revivals.

The first, the period of the Reformation, whose force was latent there, even before the waves of the great German revolution reached its shores, and called forth the pen of a monarch, and that monarch a haughty Tudor, to enter the lists of disputation with the lowly-born son of a miner of Hartz Mountains. What that Reformation effected in England we all very well know; the changes it wrought in opinion, the martyrs who passed away in their chariots of fire in vindication of its doctrines, the great writers and preachers to whose works and names we frequently and lovingly refer.

Then came the second great evangelical revival, the period of Puritanism,[[1]] whose central interests gather round the great civil wars. This was the time, and these were the opinions which produced some of the most massive and magnificent writers of our language; the whole mind of the country was stirred to its deepest heart by faith in those truths, which to believe enobles human nature, and enables it to endure “as seeing Him who is invisible.” There can be no doubt that it produced some of the grandest and noblest minds, whether for service by sword or pen, in the pulpit or the cabinet, that the world has known. Lord Macaulay’s magnificently glowing description of the English Puritan, and how he attained, by his evangelical opinions, his stature of strength, will be familiar to all readers who know his essay on Milton.

[1]. Appendix [A].

But the present aim is to gather up some of the facts and impressions, and briefly to recite some of the influences of the third great evangelical revival in the Eighteenth Century. We are guilty of no exaggeration in saying that these have been equally deserving historic fame with either of the preceding. The story has less, perhaps, to excite some of our most passionate human interests; it had not to make its way through stakes and scaffolds, although it could recite many tales of persecution; it unsheathed no sword, the weapons of its warfare were not carnal; and on the whole, it may be said its doctrine distilled “as the dew;” yet it is not too much to say that from the revival of the last century came forth that wonderfully manifold reticulation and holy machinery of piety and benevolence, we find in such active operation around us to-day.

All impartial historians of the period place this most remarkable religious impulse in the rank of the very foremost phenomena of the times. The calm and able historian, Earl Stanhope, speaking of it, as “despised at its commencement,” continues, “with less immediate importance than wars or political changes, it endures long after not only the result but the memory of these has passed away, and thousands” (his lordship ought to have said millions) “who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole, continue to follow the precepts, and venerate the name of John Wesley.” While the latest, a still more able and equally impartial and quiet historian, Mr. Lecky, says, “Our splendid victories by land and sea must yield in real importance to this religious revolution; it exercised a profound and lasting influence upon the spirit of the Established Church of England, upon the amount and distribution of the moral forces of that nation, and even upon the course of its political history.”

Shall we, then, first attempt to obtain some adequate idea of what this Revival effected, by a slight effort to realise what sort of world and state of society it was into which the Revival came? One writer truly remarks, “Never has century risen on christian England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Queen Anne, and which reached its misty noon beneath the second George, a dewless night succeeded by a dewless dawn. There was no freshness in the past and no promise in the future; the Puritans were buried, the Methodists were not born.” It is unquestionably true that black, bad and corrupt as society was, for the most part, all round, in the eighteenth century, intellectual and spiritual forces broke forth, simultaneously we had almost said, and believing, as we do, in the Providence which governed the rise of both, we may say, consentaneously, which have left far behind all social regenerations which the pen of history has recited before. Of almost all the fruits we enjoy, it may be said the seeds were planted then; even those which, like the printing-press or the gospel, had been planted ages before, were so transplanted as to flourish with a new vigour.

Our eye has been taught to rest on an interesting incident. It was in 1757 John Wesley, travelling and preaching, then about fifty years of age, but still with nearly forty years of work before him, arrived in Glasgow. He saw in the University its library and its pictures; but, had he possessed the vision of a Hebrew seer he might have glanced up from the quadrangle of the college to the humble rooms, up a spiral staircase, of a young workman, over whose lodging was the sign and information that they were tenanted by a “mathematical instrument maker to the University.” This young man, living there upon a poor fare, and eking out a poor subsistence, with many thoughts burdening his mind, was destined to be the founder of the greatest commercial and material revolution the world has known: through him seems to have been fulfilled the wonderfully significant prophecy of Nahum: “The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.” This young man was James Watt, who gave to the world the steam engine. A few years after he gave his mighty invention to Birmingham; and the world has never been the same world since. “By that invention,” says Emerson, “one man can do the work of two hundred and fifty men;” and in Manchester alone and in its vicinity there are probably sixty thousand boilers, and the aggregate power of a million horses.

Let not the allusion seem out of place. That age was the seed-time of the present harvest fields; in that time those great religious ideas which have wrought such an astonishing revolution, acquired body and form; and we ought to notice how, when God sets free some new idea, He also calls into existence the new vehicle for its diffusion. He did not trust the early christian faith to the old Latin races, to the selfish and æsthetic Greek, or to the merely conservative Hebrew; He “hissed,” in the graphic language of the old Bible, for a new race, and gave the New Testament to the Teutonic people, who have ever been its chief guardians and expositors; and thus, in all reviews of the development and unfolding of the religious life in the times of which we speak, we have to notice how the material and the spiritual changes have re-acted on each other, while both have brought a change which has indeed “made all things new.”

Contrasting the state of society after the rise of the Great Revival with what it was before, the present with the past, it is quite obvious that something has brought about a general decency and decorum of manners, a tenderness and benevolence of sentiment, a religious interest in, and observance of, pious usages, not to speak of a depth of religious life and conviction, and a general purity and nobility of literary taste, which did not exist before. All these must be credited to this great movement. It is not in the nature of steam engines, whether stationary or locomotive, nor in printing presses, or Staffordshire potteries, undirected by spiritual forces, to raise the morals or to improve the manners of mankind.

If sometimes in the presence of the spectacles of ignorance, crime, irreligion, and corruption in our own day, we are filled with a sense of despair for the prospects of society, it may be well to take a retrospect of what society was in England at the commencement of the last century. When George III. ascended the throne the population of England was not much over five millions; at the commencement of the present century it was nearly eleven millions; but with the intensely crowded population of the present day, the cancerous elements of society, the dangerous, pauperised, and criminal classes are in far less proportion, not merely relatively, but really. It was a small country, and possessed few inhabitants. There are few circumstances which can give us much pleasure in the review. National distress was constantly making itself bitterly felt; it was the age of mobs and riots. The state of the criminal law was cruel in the extreme. Blackstone calculates that for no fewer than one hundred and sixty offences, some of them of the most frivolous description, the judge was bound to pronounce sentence of death. Crime, of course, flourished. During the year 1738 no fewer than fifty-two criminals were hanged at Tyburn. During that and the preceding years, twelve thousand persons had been convicted, within the Bills of Mortality, for smuggling gin and selling it without licence. The amusements of all classes of people were exactly of that order calculated to create a cruel disposition, and thus to encourage crime; bear-baiting, bull-baiting, prize-fighting, cock-fighting: on a Shrove Tuesday it was dangerous to pass down any public street. This was the day selected for the barbarity of tying a harmless cock to a stake, there to be battered to death by throwing a stick at it from a certain distance. The grim humour of the people took this form of expressing the national hatred to the French, from the Latin name for the cock, Gallus. It was in truth a barbarous pun.

With abundant wealth and means of happiness, the people fell far short of what we should consider comfort now. Life and liberty were cheap, and a prevalent Deism or Atheism was united to a wild licentiousness of manners, brutalising all classes of society. For the most part, the Church of England had so shamefully forgotten or neglected her duty—this is admitted now by all her most ardent ministers—while the Noncomformists had sunk generally into so cold an indifferentism in devotion, and so hard and sceptical a frame in theology, that every interest in the land was surrendered to profligacy and recklessness, and, in thoughtful minds, to despair. Society in general was spiritually dead. The literature of England, with two or three famous exceptions, suffered a temporary eclipse. Such as it was, it was perverted from all high purposes, and was utterly alien to all purity and moral dignity. A good idea of the moral tone of the times might be obtained by running the eye over a few volumes of the old plays of this period, many of them even written by ladies; it is amazing to us now to think not only that they could be tolerated, but even applauded. The gaols were filled with culprits; but this did not prevent the heaths, moors, and forests from swarming with highwaymen, and the cities with burglars. In the remote regions of England, such as Cornwall in the west, Yorkshire and Northumberland in the north, and especially in the midland Staffordshire, the manners were wild and savage, passing all conception and description. We have to conceive of a state of society divested of all the educational, philanthropic, and benevolent activities of modern times. There were no Sunday-schools, and few day-schools; here and there, some fortunate neighbourhood possessed a grammar-school from some old foundation. Or, perhaps some solitary chapel, retreating into a bye-lane in the metropolitan city, or the country town, or, more probably, far away from any town, stood at some confluence of roads, a monument of old intolerance; but, as we said, religious life was in fact dead, or lying in a trance.

As to the religious teachers of those times, we know of no period in our history concerning which it might so appropriately be said, in the words of the prophet, “The pastors” are “become brutish, and have not sought the Lord.” In the life of a singular man, but not a good one, Thomas Lord Lyttleton, in a letter dated 1775, we have a most graphic portrait of a country clergyman, a friend of Lyttleton, who went by the designation of “Parson Adams.” We suppose him to be no bad representative of the average parson of that day—coarse, profane, jocular, irreligious. On a Saturday evening he told Lyttleton, his host, that he should send his flocks to grass on the approaching Sabbath. “The next morning,” says Lyttleton, “we hinted to him that the company did not wish to restrain him from attending the Divine service of the parish; but he declared that it would be adding contempt to neglect if, when he had absented himself from his own church he should go to any other. This curious etiquette he strictly observed; and we passed a Sabbath contrary, I fear, both to law and to gospel.”

If we desire to obtain some knowledge of what the Church of England was, as represented by her clergy when George III. was king, we should go to her own records; and for the later years of his reign, notably to the life of that learned, active, and amiable man, Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of London, whose memory was a wonderful repository of anecdotes, not tending to elevate the clergy of those times in popular estimation. Intoxication was a vice very characteristic of the cloth: on one occasion the bishop reproved one of his Chester clergy for drunkenness: he replied, “But, my lord, I never was drunk on duty.” “On duty!” exclaimed the bishop; “and pray, sir, when is a clergyman not on duty?” “True,” said the other; “my lord, I never thought of that.” The bishop went into a poor man’s cottage in one of the valleys in the Lake district, and asked whether his clergyman ever visited him. The poor man replied that he did very frequently. The bishop was delighted, and expressed his gratification at this pastoral oversight; and this led to the discovery that there were a good many foxes on the hills behind the house, which gave the occasion for the frequency of calls which could scarcely be considered pastoral. The chaplain and son-in-law of Bishop North examined candidates for orders in a tent on a cricket-field, he being engaged as one of the players; the chaplain of Bishop Douglas examined whilst shaving; Bishop Watson never resided in his diocese during an episcopate of thirty-four years.

And those who preached seem rarely to have been of a very edifying order of preachers; Bishop Blomfield used to relate how, in his boyhood, when at Bury St. Edmund’s, the Marquis of Bristol had given a number of scarlet cloaks to some poor old women; they all appeared at church on the following Sunday, resplendent in their new and bright array, and the clergyman made the donation of the marquis the subject of his discourse, announcing his text with a graceful wave of his hand towards the poor old bodies who were sitting there all together: “Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these!” This worthy seems to have been very capable of such things: on another occasion a dole of potatoes was distributed by the local authorities in Bury, and this also was improved in a sermon. “He had himself,” the bishop says, “a very corpulent frame, and pompous manner, and a habit of rolling from side to side while he delivered himself of his breathing thoughts and burning words; on the occasion of the potato dole, he chose for his singularly appropriate text (Exodus xvi. 15): ‘And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna;’ and thence he proceeded to discourse to the recipients of the potatoes on the warning furnished by the Israelites against the sin of gluttony, and the wickedness of taking more than their share.”

When that admirable man, Mr. Shirley, began his evangelistic ministry as the friend and coadjutor of his cousin, the Countess of Huntingdon, a curate went to the archbishop to complain of his unclerical proceedings: “Oh, your grace, I have something of great importance to communicate; it will astonish you!” “Indeed, what can it be?” said the archbishop. “Why, my lord,” replied he, throwing into his countenance an expression of horror, and expecting the archbishop to be petrified with astonishment, “he actually wears white stockings!” “Very unclerical indeed,” said the archbishop, apparently much surprised; he drew his chair near to the curate, and with peculiar earnestness, and in a sort of confidential whisper, said, “Now tell me—I ask this with peculiar feelings of interest—does Mr. Shirley wear them over his boots?” “Why, no, your grace, I cannot say he does.” “Well, sir, the first time you ever hear of Mr. Shirley wearing them over his boots, be so good as to warn me, and I shall know how to deal with him!”

We would not, on the other hand, be unjust. We may well believe that there were hamlets and villages where country clergymen realised their duties and fulfilled them, and not only deserved all the merit of Goldsmith’s charming picture,[[2]] but were faithful ministers of the New Testament too. But our words and illustrations refer to the average character presented to us by the Church; and this, again, is illustrated by the vehement hostility presented on all hands to the first indications of the Great Revival. For instance, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Church, Vicar of Battersea, in a well-known sermon on charity schools, deplored and denounced the enormous wickedness of the times; after saying, “Our streets are grievously infested; every day we see the most dreadful confusions, daring villanies, dangers, and mischiefs, arising from the want of sentiments of piety,” he continues: “For our own sakes and our posterity’s everything should be encouraged which will contribute to suppressing these evils, and keep the poor from stealing, lying, drunkenness, cruelty, or taking God’s name in vain. While we feel our disease, ’tis madness to set aside any remedy which has power to check its fury.” Having said this, with a perfectly startling inconsistency he turns round, and addressing himself to Wesley and the Methodists, he says, “We cannot but regard you as our most dangerous enemies.”

[2]. Appendix [B].

When the Great Revival arose, the Church of England set herself, everywhere, in full array against it; she possessed but few great minds. The massive intellects of Butler and Berkeley belonged to the immediately preceding age. The most active intellect on the bench of bishops was, no doubt, that of Warburton; and it is sad to think that he descended to a tone of scurrility and injustice in his attack on Wesley, which, if worthy of his really quarrelsome temper, was altogether unworthy of his position and his powers.

Thus, whether we derive our impressions from the so-called Church of that time, or from society at large, we obtain the evidences of a deplorable recklessness of all ordinary principles of religion, honour, or decorum. Bishop Butler had written, in the “Advertisement” to his Analogy, and he appears to have been referring to the clerical and educated opinion of his time: “It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious;” and he wrote his great work for the purpose of arguing the reasonableness of the christian religion, even on the principles of the Deism prevalent everywhere around him in the Church and society. Addison had declared that there was “less appearance of religion in England than in any neighbouring state or kingdom, whether Protestant or Catholic;” and Montesquieu came to the country, and having made his notes, published, probably with some French exaggeration, that there was “no religion in England, and that the subject, if mentioned in society, excited nothing but laughter.”

Such was the state of England, when, as we must think, by the special providence of God, the voices were heard crying in the wilderness. From the earlier years of the last century they continued sounding with such clearness and strength, from the centre to the remotest corners of the kingdom; from, the coasts, where the Cornish wrecker pursued his strange craft of crime, along all the highways and hedges, where rudeness and violence of every description made their occasions for theft, outrage, and cruelty, until the whole English nation became, as if instinctively, alive with a new-born soul, and not in vision, but in reality, something was beheld like that seen by the prophet in the valley of vision—dry bones clothed with flesh, and standing up “an exceeding great army,” no longer on the side of corruption and death, but ready with song and speech, and consistent living, to take their place on the side of the Lord.

CHAPTER II
FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN.

In the history of the circumstances which brought about the Great Revival, we must not fail to notice those which were in action even before the great apostles of the Revival appeared. We have already given what may almost be called a silhouette of society, an outline, for the most part, all dark; and yet in the same period there were relieving tints, just as sometimes, upon a silhouette-portrait, you have seen an attempt to throw in some resemblance to the features by a touch of gold.

Chief among these is one we do not remember ever to have seen noticed in this connection—the curious invasion of our country by the French at the close of the seventeenth century. That cruel exodus which poured itself upon our shores in the great and even horrible persecution of the Protestants of France, when the blind bigotry of Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes, was to us, as a nation, a really incalculable blessing. It is quite singular, in reading Dr. Smiles’s Huguenots, to notice the large variety of names of illustrious exiles, eminent for learning, science, character, and rank, who found a refuge here. The folly of the King of France expelled the chief captains of industry; they came hither and established their manufactures in different departments, creating and carrying on new modes of industry. Also great numbers of Protestant clergymen settled here, and formed respectable French churches; some of the most eminent ministers of our various denominations at this moment are descendants of those men. Their descendants are in our peerage; they are on our bench of bishops; they are at the bar; they stand high in the ranks of commerce. At the commencement of the eighteenth century, their ancestors were settled on English shores; in all instances men who had fled from comfort and domestic peace, in many instances from affluence and fame, rather than be false to their conscience or to their Saviour. The cruelties of that dreadful persecution which banished from France almost every human element it was desirable to retain in it, while they were, no doubt, there the great ultimate cause of the French Revolution, brought to England what must have been even as the very seasoning of society, the salt of our earth in the subsequent age of corruption. Most of the children of these men were brought up in the discipline of religious households, such as that which Sir Samuel Romilly—himself one of the descendants of an earlier band of refugees. Dr. Watts’s mother was a child of a French exile. Clusters of them grew up in many neighbourhoods in the country, notably in Southampton, Norwich, Canterbury, in many parts of London, where Spitalfields especially was a French colony. When the Revival commenced, these were ready to aid its various movements by their character and influence. Some fell into the Wesleyan ranks, though, probably, most, like the eminent scholar and preacher, William Romaine, one of the sons of the exile, maintained the more Calvinistic faith, reflecting most nearly the old creed of the Huguenot.

This surmise of the influence of that noble invasion upon the national well-being of Britain is justified by inference from the facts. It is very interesting to attempt to realise the religious life of eminent activity and usefulness sustained in different parts of the country before the Revival dawned, and which must have had an influence in fostering it when it arose. And, indeed, while we would desire to give all grateful honour to the extraordinary men (especially to such a man as John Wesley, who achieved so much through a life in which the length and the usefulness were equal to each other, since only when he died did he cease to animate by his personal influence the immense organisation he had formed), yet it seems really impossible to regard any one mind as the seed and source of the great movement. It was as if some cyclone of spiritual power swept all round the nation—or, as if a subtle, unseen train had been laid by many men, simultaneously, in many counties, and the spark was struck, and the whole was suddenly wrapped in a Divine flame.

Dr. Abel Stevens, in his most interesting, indeed, charming history of Methodism, from his point of view, gives to his own beloved leader and Church the credit of the entire movement; so also does Mr. Tyerman, in his elaborate life of Wesley. But this is quite contrary to all dispassionate dealing with facts; there were many men and many means in quiet operation, some of these even before Wesley was born, of which his prehensile mind availed itself to draw them into his gigantic work; and there were many which had operated, and continued to operate, which would not fit themselves into his exact, and somewhat exacting, groove of Church life.

We have said it was as if a cyclone of spiritual power were steadily sweeping round the minds of men and nations, for there were undoubted gusts of remarkable spiritual life in both hemispheres, at least fifty years before Methodism had distinctly asserted itself as a fact. Most remarkable was the “Great Awakening” in America, in Massachusetts—especially at Northampton (that is a remarkable story, which will always be associated with the name of Jonathan Edwards).[[3]] We have referred to the exodus of the persecuted from France; equally remarkable was another exodus of persecuted Protestants from Salzburg, in Austria. The madness of the Church of Rome again cast forth an immense host of the holiest and most industrious citizens. At the call of conscience they marched forth in a body, taking joyfully the spoiling of their goods rather than disavow their faith: such men with their families are a treasure to any nation amongst whom they may settle. Thomas Carlyle has paid a glowing historical eulogy to the memory of these men, and the exodus has furnished Goethe with the subject of one of his most charming poems.

[3]. See Appendix [C].

Philip Doddridge’s work was almost done before the Methodist movement was known. It seems to us that no adequate honour has ever yet been paid to that most beautiful and remarkably inclusive life. It was public, it was known and noticed, but it was passed almost in retreat in Northampton. That he was a preacher and pastor of a Church was but a slight portion of the life which succumbed, yet in the prime of his days, to consumption. His academy for the education of young ministers seems to us, even now, something like a model of what such an academy should be; his lectures to his students are remarkably full and scholarly and complete. From thence went forth men like the saintly Risdon Darracott, the scholarly and suggestive Hugh Farmer, Benjamin Fawcett, and Andrew Kippis. The hymns of Doddridge were among the earliest, as they are still among the sweetest, of that kind of offering to our modern Church; their clear, elevated, thrush-like sweetness, like the more uplifted seraphic trumpet tones of Watts, broke in upon a time when there was no sacred song worthy of the name in the Church, and anticipated the hour when the melodious acclamations of the people should be one of the most cherished elements of Christian service.

ISAAC WATTS.

And Isaac Watts was, by far, the senior of Doddridge; he lived very much the life of a hermit. Although the pastor of a city church, he was sequestered and withdrawn from public life in Theobalds, or Stoke Newington, where, however, he prosecuted a course of sacred labor of a marvellously manifold description, inter-meddling with every kind of learning, and consecrating it all to the great end of the christian ministry and the producing of books, which, whether as catechisms for children, treatises for the formation of mental character, philosophic essays grappling with the difficulties of scholarly minds, or “comfortable words” to “rock the cradle of declining age,” were all to become of value when the nation should awake to a real spiritual power. They are mostly laid aside now; but they have served more than one generation well; and he, beyond question, was the first who taught the Protestant Christian Church in England to sing. His hymns and psalms were sounding on when John Wesley was yet a child, and numbers of them were appropriated in the first Methodist hymn-book. But Watts and Doddridge, by the conditions of their physical and mental being, were unfitted for popular leaders. Perhaps, also, it must be admitted that they had not that which has been called the “instinct for souls;” they were concerned rather to illustrate and expound the truth of God, and to “adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour,” by their lives, than to flash new convictions into the hearts of men. It is characteristic that, good and great as they were, they were both at first inimical to the Great Revival; it seemed to them a suspicious movement. The aged Watts cautioned his younger friend Doddridge against encouraging it, especially the preaching of Whitefield; yet they both lived to give their whole hearts to it; and some of Watts’s last words were in blessing, when, near death, he received a visit from the great evangelist.

PHILIP DODDRIDGE.

Thus we need to notice a little carefully the age immediately preceding the rise of what we call Methodism, in order to understand what Methodism really effected; we have seen that the dreadful condition of society was not inconsistent with the existence over the country of eminently holy men, and of even hallowed christian families and circles. If space allowed, it would be very pleasant to step into, and sketch the life of many an interior; and it would scarcely be a work of fancy, but of authentic knowledge. There were yet many which almost retained the character of Puritan households, and among them several baronial halls. Nor ought we to forget that those consistent: and high-minded Christian folk, the Quakers [Friends], were a much larger body then than now, although, like the Shunammite lady, they especially dwelt among their own people. The Moravians also were in England; but all existed like little scattered hamlet patches of spiritual life; they were respectably conservative of their own usages. Methodism brought enthusiasm to religion, and the instinct for souls, united to a power of organisation hitherto unknown to the religious life.

Doddridge’s House, Northampton.

At what hour shall we fix the earliest dawn of the Great Revival? Among the earliest tints of the “morning spread upon the mountains,” which was to descend into the valley, and illuminate all the plains, was the conversion of that extraordinary woman, Selina Shirley, the Countess of Huntingdon; it is scarcely too much to call her the Mother of the Revival; it is not too much to apply to her the language of the great Hebrew song—“The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased until that I arose: I arose a mother in Israel.” She illustrates the difference of which we spoke just now, for there can be no doubt that she had a passionate instinct for souls, to do good to souls, to save souls. Her injunctions for the destruction of all her private papers have been so far complied with as to leave the earlier history of her mind, and the circumstances which brought about her conversion, for the most part unknown. It is certain that she was on terms of intimate friendship with both Watts and Doddridge, but especially with Doddridge. Another intimate friend of the Countess was Watts’s very close friend, the Duchess of Somerset; and thus the links of the story seem to run, like that old and well-known instance of communicated influence, when Andrew found his own brother, Simon, and these in turn found Philip and Nathaniel. It was very natural that, beholding the state of society about her, she should be interested, first, as it seems, for those of her own order; it was at a later time, when she became acquainted with Whitefield, that he justified her drawing-room assemblies, by reminding her—not, perhaps, with exact critical propriety—of the text in Galatians, where Paul mentioned how he preached “privately to those of reputation.”[[4]] For some time this appears to have been the aim of the good Countess, much in accordance with that pretty saying of hers, that “there was a text in which she blessed God for the insertion of the letter M: ‘not many noble.’” The beautiful Countess was a heroine in her own line from the earliest days of her conversion. Belonging to one of the noblest families of England, she had an entrance to the highest circles, and her heart felt very pitiful for, especially, the women of fashion around her, brokenhearted with disappointment, or sick with ennui.

[4]. Appendix [D].

Among these was Sarah, the great Duchess of Marlborough, apparently one of the intimate friends of the Countess; her letters are most characteristic. She mentions that the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Townshend, and others, had just heard Mr. Whitefield preach, and “What they said of the sermon has made me lament ever since that I did not hear it; it might have been the means of doing me some good, for good, alas! I do want; but where among the corrupt sons and daughters of Adam am I to find it?” She goes on: “Dear, good Lady Huntingdon, I have no comfort in my own family; I hope you will shortly come and see me; I always feel more happy and more contented after an hour’s conversation with you; when alone, my reflections and recollection almost kill me. Now there is Lady Frances Saunderson’s great rout to-morrow night; all the world will be there, and I must go. I hate that woman as much as I hate a physician, but I must go, if for no other purpose than to mortify and spite her. This is very wicked, I know, but I confess all my little peccadilloes to you, for I know your goodness will lead you to be mild and forgiving; and perhaps my wicked heart may gain some good from you in the end.” And then she closes her note with some remarks on “that crooked, perverse little wretch at Twickenham,” by which pleasant designation she means the poet, Pope.

Another, and another order of character, was the Duchess of Buckingham; she came to hear Whitefield preach in the drawing-room, and was quite scandalised. In a letter to the Countess, she says, “The doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence: it is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth; this is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.” Such were some of the materials the Countess attempted to gather in her drawing-rooms, if possible to cure the aching of empty hearts. If the two duchesses met together, it is very likely they would be antipathetic to each other; a prouder old lady than Sarah, the English empire did not contain, but she was proud that she was the wife and widow of the great Marlborough. The Duchess of Buckingham was equally proud that she was the natural daughter of James II. When her son, the Duke of Buckingham, died, she sent to the old Duchess of Marlborough to borrow the magnificent car which had borne John Churchill’s body to the Abbey, and the fiery old Duchess sent her back word, “It had carried Lord Marlborough, and should never be profaned by any other corpse.” The message was not likely to act as an entente cordiale in such society as we have described.

The mention of these names will show the reader that we are speaking of a time when the Revival had not wrought itself into a great movement. The Countess continued to make enthusiastic efforts for those of her own order—we are afraid, with a few distinguished exceptions, without any great amount of success; but certainly, were it possible for us to look into the drawing-room in South Audley Street, in those closing years of the reign of George II., we might well be astonished at the brilliancy of the concourse, and the finding ourselves in the company of some of the most distinguished names of the highest rank and fashion of the period. It was the age of that cold, sardonic sneerer, Horace Walpole; he writes to Florence, to his friend Sir Horace Mann, in his scoffing fashion: “If you ever think of returning to England, you must prepare yourself with Methodism; this sect increases as fast as almost any religious nonsense ever did; Lady Fanny Shirley has chosen this way of bestowing the dregs of her beauty, and Lyttleton is very near making the same sacrifice of the dregs of all those various characters that he has worn. The Methodists love your big sinners as proper subjects to work upon, and indeed they have a plentiful harvest.” Then he satirises Lady Ferrars, whom he styles “General, my Lady Dowager Ferrars.” But, indeed, it is impossible to enumerate the names of all, or any proportion of the number who attended this brilliant circle. Sometimes unhappy events took place; Mr. Whitefield was sometimes too dreadfully, although unconsciously, faithful. Lady Rockingham, who really seems to have been inclined to do good, begged the Countess to permit her to bring the Countess of Suffolk, well known as the powerful mistress of George II. Whitefield “knew nothing of the matter;” but some arrow “drawn at a venture,” and which probably might have as well fitted many another lady about the court or in that very room, exactly hit the Countess. However much she fidgeted with irritation, she sat out the service in silence; but, as soon as it was over, the beautiful fury burst forth in all the stormful speech of a termagant or virago. She abused Lady Huntingdon; she declared that the whole service had been a premeditated attack upon herself. Her relatives, Lady Bertie, the celebrated Lady Betty Germain, the Duchess of Ancaster, one of the most beautiful women in England, and who, afterwards, with the Duchess of Hamilton, conducted the future queen of George III. to England’s shores, expostulated with her, commanded her to be silent, and attempted to explain her mistake; they insisted that she should apologise to Lady Huntingdon for her behaviour, and, in an ungracious manner, she did so; but we learn that she never honoured the assembly again with her presence.

What a singular assembly from time to time! the square dark face of that old gentleman, painfully hobbling in on his crutched stick—face once as handsome as that of St. John, now the disappointed, moody features of the massive, but sceptical intelligence of Bolingbroke; poor worn-out old Chesterfield, cold and courtly, yet seeming so genial and humane, coming again and again, and yet again; those reckless wits, and leaders of the ton and all high society, Bubb Doddington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, and George Selwyn; the Duchess of Montague, with her young daughter; Lady Cardigan, often there, if her mother, Sarah of Marlborough, were but seldom a visitor. Charles Townshend, the great minister, often came; and his friend, Lord Lyttleton, who really must have been in sympathy with some of the objects of the assembly, if we may judge from his Essay on the Conversion of St. Paul, a piece of writing which will never lose its value. There you might have seen even the great commoner, William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham; but we can understand why he would be there to listen to the manifold notes of an eloquence singularly resembling, in many particulars, his own. And, in fact, where such persons were present, we might be sure that the entire nobility of the country was represented. It might be tempting to loiter amidst these scenes a little longer. It was an experiment made by the Countess; she probably found it almost a failure, and, in the course of a few years, turned her attention to the larger ideas connected with the evangelisation of England, and the training of young men for the work of the ministry. She long outlived all those brilliant hosts she had gathered round her in the prime of life. But we cannot doubt that some good was effected by this preaching to “people of reputation.” Courtiers like Walpole sneered, but it saved the movement to a great degree, when it became popular, from being suspected as the result of political faction; and probably, as all these nobles and gentry passed away to their various country seats, when they heard of the preachers in their neighbourhoods, and received the complaints of the bishops and their clergy, with some contempt for the messengers, they were able to feel, and to say, that there was nothing much more dreadful than the love of God and His good will to men in their message.

It seems a very sudden leap from the saloons of the West End to a Lincolnshire kitchen; but in the kitchen of that most romantic old vicarage of Epworth, it has been truly said, the most vigorous form of Methodism had its origin. There, at the close of the seventeenth century, and the commencement of the eighteenth, lived and laboured old Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles Wesley. Samuel was in every sense a wonderful man, more wonderful than most people know, though Mr. Tyerman has done his best to set him forth in a very clear and pleasant light, in his very entertaining biography. Scholar, preacher, pastor, and poet was Samuel Wesley; he led a life full of romantic incident, and full of troubles, of which the two most notable are debts and ghosts: debts, we must say, in passing, which had more to do with unavoidable calamity than with any personal imprudence. The good man would have been shocked, and have counted it one of his sorest troubles, could he, in some real horoscope, have forecast what “Jackey,” his son John, was to be. But it was his wife, Susannah Wesley, patient housewife, much-enduring, much-suffering woman, Mary and Martha in one, saint as sacredly sweet as any who have seemed worthy of a place in any calendar of saints, Catholic or Protestant, mother of children, all of whom were remarkable—two of them wonderful, and a third highly eminent—it was Susannah Wesley, whose instinct for souls led her to look abroad over all the parish in which she lived, with a tender, spiritual affection; in her husband’s absence, turning the large kitchen into a church, inviting her poor neighbours into it, and, somewhat at first to the distress of her husband, preaching to and praying with them there. This brief reference can only memorialise her name; read John Kirk’s little volume, and learn to love and revere “the mother of the Wesleys!” The freedom and elevation of her religious life, and her practical sagacity, it is not difficult to see, must have given hints and ideas which took shape and body in the large movement of which her son John came to be regarded, and is still regarded, as the patriarch. Thus Isaac Taylor says, “The Wesleys’ mother was the mother of Methodism in a religious and moral sense, for her courage, her submissiveness to authority, the high tone of her mind, its independence, and its self-control, the warmth of her devotional feelings, and the practical direction given to them, came up, and were visibly repeated in the character and conduct of her sons.” Later on in life she became one of the wisest advisers of her son, in his employment of the auxiliaries to his own usefulness. Perhaps, if we could see spirits as they are, we might see in this woman a higher and loftier type of life than in either of those who first received life from her bosom; some of her quiet words have all the passion and sweetness of Charles’s hymns. Our space will not permit many quotations, but take the following words, and the sweet meditation in prose of the much-enduring, and often patiently suffering lady in the old world country vicarage, which read like many of her son’s notes in verse: “If to esteem and have the highest reverence for Thee; if constantly and sincerely to acknowledge Thee the supreme, and only desirable good, be to love Thee, I do love Thee! If to rejoice in Thy essential majesty and glory; if to feel a vital joy overspread and cheer the heart at each perception of Thy blessedness, at every thought that Thou art God, and that all things are in Thy power; that there is none superior or equal to Thee, be to love Thee, I do love Thee! If comparatively to despise and undervalue all the world contains, which is esteemed great, fair, or good; if earnestly and constantly to desire Thee, Thy favour, Thy acceptance, Thyself, rather than any, or all things Thou hast created, be to love Thee, I do love Thee!” At length she died as she had lived, her last words to her sons breathing the spirit of her singular life: “Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God!”

Thus, from the polite circles of London, from the obscure old farm-like vicarage, the rude and rough old English home, events were preparing themselves. John Wesley was born in 1703; the Countess of Huntingdon in 1707: near in their birth time, how far apart the scenery and the circumstances in which their eyes first opened to the light. Whitefield was born later, amidst the still less auspicious scenery of the old Bell Inn, at Gloucester, in 1714. These were undoubtedly among the foremost names in the great palpitation of thought, feeling, and holy action the country was to experience. Future chapters will show a number of other names, which were simultaneously coming forth and educating for the great conflict. So it has always been, and singularly so, as illustrating the order of Providence, and the way in which it gives a new personality to the men whom it designs to aid its purposes. In every part of the country, all unknown to each other, in families separated by position and taste, by birth and circumstances, a band of workers was preparing to produce an entire moral change in the features of the country.

CHAPTER III
OXFORD: NEW LIGHTS AND OLD LANTERNS.

It is remarkable that one of the very earliest movements of the new evangelical succession should manifest itself in Oxford—many minded Oxford—whose distant spires and antique towers have looked down through so many ages upon the varying opinions which have surged up around and within her walls. Lord Bacon has somewhere said that the opinions, feelings, and thoughts of the young men of any present generation forecast the whole popular mind of the future age. No remark can be more true, as exhibited generally in fact. Thus it is not too much to say that Oxford has usually been a barometer of coming opinions: either by her adhesion or antagonism to them, she has indicated the pathway of the nearing weather, either for calm or storm. It was so in the dark ages, with the old scholastic philosophy; it was so in the times immediately succeeding them: in our own day, the great Tractarian movement, with all its influences Rome-ward, arose in Oxford; later still, the strong tendencies of high intellectual infidelity, and denial of the sacred prerogatives and rights of the Holy Scriptures, sent forth some of their earliest notes from Oxford. Oxford has been likened to the magnificent conservatory at Chatsworth, where art combines with nature, and achieves all that wealth and taste could command; but the air is heavy and close, and rich as the forms and colours are around the spectator, there is depression and repression, even a sense of oppression, upon the spirits, and we are glad to escape into the breezy chase, and among the old trees again. This is hardly true of Oxford; no doubt the air is hushed, and the influences combine to weigh down the mere visitor by a sense of the hoariness of the past, and the black antiquity and frost of ages; but somehow there is a mind in Oxford which is always alive—not merely a scholarly knowledge, but a subtle apprehension of the coming winds—even as certain creatures forebode and know the coming storm before the rain falls or the thunder rolls.

We may presume that most of our readers are acquainted with the designation, “the Oxford Methodists;” but, perhaps, some are not aware that the term was applied to a cluster of young students, who, in a time when the university was delivered over to the usual dissoluteness and godless indifference of the age, met together in each other’s rooms for the purpose of sustaining each other in the determination to live a holy life, and to bring their mutual help to the reading and opening of the Word of God. From different parts of the country they met together there; when they went forth, their works, their spheres were different; but the power and the beauty of the old college days seem to have accompanied them through life; they realised the Divine life as a real power from that commencement to the close of their career, although it is equally interesting to notice how the framework of their opinions changed. Some of their names are comparatively unknown now, but John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and James Hervey, are well known; nor is John Gambold unknown, nor Benjamin Ingham, who married into the family of the Countess of Huntingdon, of whom we will speak a little more particularly when we visit the wild Yorkshire of those days; nor Morgan of Christ Church, whose influence is described as the most beautiful of all, a young man of delicate constitution and intense enthusiasm, who visited and talked with the prisoners in the neighbourhood, visited the cottages around to read and pray, left his memory as a blessing upon his companions, and was very early called away to his reward. This obscure life seems to have been one most honoured in that which came to be called by the wits of Oxford, “The Holy Club.”

It was just about this time that Voltaire was predicting that, in the next generation, Christianity would be overthrown and unknown throughout the whole civilised world. Christianity has lived through, and long outlived many such predictions. Voltaire had said, “It took twelve men to set up Christianity; it would only take one” (conceitedly referring to himself) “to overthrow it;” but the work of those whom he called the “twelve men” is still of some account in the world—their words are still of some authority, and there are very few people on the face of the earth at this moment who know much of, and fewer still who care much for the wit of the vain old infidel. That Voltaire’s prediction was not fulfilled, under the Providential influence of that Divine Spirit who never leaves us in our low estate, was greatly owing to this obscure and despised “Holy Club” of Oxford. These young men were feeling their way, groping, as they afterwards admitted, and somewhat in the dark, after those experiences, which, as they were to be assurances to themselves, should be also their most certain means of usefulness to others.

They were also called Methodists. It is singular, but neither the precise etymology nor the first appropriation of the term Methodist has, we believe, ever been distinctly or satisfactorily settled. Some have derived it from an allusion in Juvenal to a quack physician, some to a passage from the writings of Chrysostom, who says, “to be a methodist is to be beguiled,” and which was employed in a pamphlet against Mr. Whitefield. Like some other phrases, it is not easy to settle its first import or importation into our language. Certainly it is much older than the times to which this book especially refers. It seems to be even contemporary with the term Puritan, since we find Spencer, the librarian of Sion College under Cromwell, writing, “Where are now our Anabaptists and plain pack-staff Methodists, who esteem all flowers of rhetoric in sermons no better than stinking weeds?” A writer in the British Quarterly tells a curious story how once in a parish church in Huntingdonshire, he was listening to a clergyman, notorious alike by his private character and vehement intolerance, who was entertaining his audience, on a week evening, by a discourse from the text, Ephesians iv. 14, “Whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” He said to his people, “Now, you do not know Greek; I know Greek, and I am going to tell you what this text really says; it says, ‘they lie in wait to make you Methodists.’ The word used here is Methodeian, that is really the word that is used, and that is really what Paul said, ‘They lie in wait to make you Methodists’—a Methodist means a deceiver, and one who deludes, cheats, and beguiles.” The Grecian scholar was a little at fault in his next allusion, for he proceeded to quote that other text, “We are not ignorant of his devices,” and seemed to be under the impression that “device” was the same word as that on which he had expended his criticism. “Now,” said he, “you may be ignorant, because you do not know Greek, but we are not ignorant of his devices, that is, of his methods, his deceivers, that is, his Methodists.” In such empty wit and ignorant punning it is very likely that the term had its origin.

John Wesley passed through a long, singular, and what we may call a parti-coloured experience, before his mind came out into the light. In those days his mind was a singular combination of High Churchism, amounting to what we should call Ritualism now, and mysticism, both of which influences he brought from Epworth: the first from his father, the second from the strong fascination of the writings of William Law. He found, however, in the “Holy Club” that which helped him. He tells us how, when at Epworth, he travelled many miles to see a “serious man,” and to take counsel from him. “Sir,” said this person, as if the right word were given to him at the right moment, exactly meeting the necessities of the man standing before him, “Sir, you wish to serve God and to go to heaven: remember you cannot serve Him alone; you must therefore find companions, or make them. The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.” It must be admitted that the enthusiasm of the mystics has always been rather personal than social; but the society at Oxford was almost monastic, nor is it wonderful that, with the spectacle of the dissolute life around them, these earnest men adopted rules of the severest self-denial and asceticism. John Wesley arrived in Oxford first in 1720; he left for some time. Returning home to assist his father, he became, as we know, to his father’s immense exultation, Fellow of Lincoln College.

In 1733 George Whitefield arrived at Oxford, then in his nineteenth year. Like most of this band, Whitefield was, if not really, comparatively poor, and dependent upon help to enable him to pursue his studies; not so poor, perhaps, as an illustrious predecessor in the same college (Pembroke), who had left only the year before, one Samuel Johnson, the state of whose shoes excited so much commiseration in some benevolent heart, that a pair of new ones was placed outside his rooms, only, however, creating surprise in the morning, when he was seen indignantly kicking them up and down the passage. Whitefield was not troubled by such over-sensitive and delicate feelings; men are made differently. Johnson’s rugged independence did its work; and the easy facility and amiable disposition, which could receive favours without a sense of degradation, were very essential to what Whitefield was to be. He, however, when he came to Oxford, was caught in the same glamour of mysticism as John Wesley. But in this case it was Thomas à-Kempis who had besieged the soul of the young enthusiast; he was miserable, his life, his heart and mind were crushed beneath this altogether inhuman and unattainable standard for salvation. He was a Quietist—what a paradox!—Whitefield a Quietist! He was seeking salvation by works of righteousness which he could do. He was practising the severest austerities and renouncing the claims of an external world; he was living an internal life which God did not intend should bring to him either rest or calm; for, in that case, how could he ever have stirred the deep foundations of universal sympathy?

But that heart, whose very mould was tenderness, was easily called aside by the sight of suffering; and there is an interesting story, how, at this time, in one of his walks by the banks of the river, in such a frame of mind as we have described, he met a poor woman whose appearance was discomposed. Naturally enough, he talked with her, and found that her husband was in the gaol in Oxford, that she had run away from home, unable to endure any longer the crying of her children from hunger, and that she even then meditated drowning herself. He gave her immediate relief, but arranged with her to meet him, and see her husband together in the evening at the prison. He appears to have done them both good, ministering to their temporal necessities; he prayed with them, brought them to the knowledge of the grace which saves, and late on in life he says, “They are both now living, and I trust will be my joy and crown of rejoicing in the day of the Lord Jesus.” Happy is the man to whose life such an incident as this is given; it calls life away from its dreary introspections, and sets it upon a trail of outwardness, which is spiritual health; no one can attain to much religious happiness until he knows that he has been the means of good to some suffering soul. Faith grows in us by the revelation that we have been used to do good to others.

It was about this time that Charles Wesley met Whitefield moodily walking through the college corridors. The misery of his appearance struck him, and he invited him to his rooms to breakfast. The memory of the meeting never passed away; Charles Wesley refers to it in his elegy on Whitefield. In a short time he leaped forth into spiritual freedom, and almost immediately became, youth as he was, preacher, and we may almost say, apostle. The change in his mind seems to have been as instantaneous and as luminous as Luther’s at Erfurt. Whitefield was at work, commencing upon his own great scale, long before the Wesleys. John had to go to America, and to be entangled there by his High Church notions; and then there were his Moravian proclivities, so that, altogether, years passed by before he found his way out into a light so clear as to be able to reflect it on the minds of others.

To some of the members of this “Holy Club,” we shall not be able to refer again; we must, therefore, mention them now. Especially is some reference due to James Hervey; his name is now rather a legend and tradition than an active influence in our religious literature; but how popular once, do not the oldest memories amongst us well know? On some important points of doctrine he parted company from his friends and fellow-students, the Wesleys. John Wesley used to declare that he himself was not converted till his thirty-seventh year, so that we must modify any impressions we may have from similar declarations made by the amiable Vicar of Weston Favel: the term conversion, used in such a sense, in all probability means simply a change in the point of view, an alteration of opinion, giving a more clear apprehension of truth. Hervey was always infirm in health, tall, spectral; and, while possessing a mind teeming with pleasing and poetic fancies, and a power of perceiving happy analogies, we should regard him as singularly wanting in that fine solvent of all true genius, geniality. Hence, all his letters read like sermons; but his poor, infirm frame was the tabernacle of an intensely fervent soul. Shortly after his settlement in his village in Northamptonshire he was recommended by his physician to follow the plough, that he might receive the scent of the fresh earth; a curious recommendation, but it led to a conversation with the ploughman, which completely overturned the young scholar’s scheme of theology. The ploughman was a member of the Church of Dr. Doddridge, afterwards one of Hervey’s most intimate friends. As they walked together, the young minister asked the old ploughman what he thought was the hardest thing in religion? The ploughman very respectfully returned the question. Hervey replied, “I think the hardest thing in religion is to deny sinful self,” and he proceeded, at some length, of course, to dilate upon and expound the difficulty, from which our readers will see that, at this time, his mind must have been under the same influences as those we meet in The Imitation of Thomas à-Kempis. “No, sir,” said the old ploughman, “the hardest thing in religion is to deny righteous self,” and he proceeded to unfold the principles of his faith. At the time, Hervey thought the ploughman a fool, but the conversation was not forgotten, and he declares that it was this view of things which created for him a new creed. Our readers, perhaps, know his Theron and Aspasia: we owe that book to the conversation with the ploughman; all its pages, alive with descriptions of natural scenery, historical and classical allusion, and glittering with chromatic fancy through the three thick volumes, are written for the purpose of unfolding and enforcing—to put it in old theological phraseology—the imputed and imparted righteousness of Christ, the great point of divergence in teaching between Hervey and John Wesley.

Thus the term Methodism cannot, any more than Christianity, be contented with, or contained in one particular line of opinion. Thus, for instance, among the members of the “Holy Club” we find the two Wesleys and others distinctly Arminian—the apostles of that form of thought which especially teaches us that we must attain to the grace of God; while Whitefield first, and Hervey afterwards, became the teachers of that doctrine which announces the irresistible grace of God as that which is outside of us, and comes down upon us. No doubt the doctrines were too sharply separated by their respective leaders. In the ultimate issue, both believed alike that all was of grace, and all of God; but experience makes every man’s point of view; as he feels, so he sees. The grand thought about all these men in this Great Revival was that they believed in, and untiringly and with immense confidence announced, that which smote upon the minds of their hearers almost like a new revelation; in an age of indifference and Deism they declared that “the grace of God hath appeared unto all men.”

There is a very interesting anecdote showing how, about this time, even the massive and sardonic intellect of Lord Bolingbroke almost gave way. He was called upon once by a High Church dignitary, his intimate friend, Dr. Church, Vicar of Battersea, and Prebendary of St. Paul’s, to whom we have already referred as from the first opposed to the Revival, and, to the doctor’s amazement, he found Bolingbroke reading Calvin’s Institutes. The peer asked the preacher, the infidel the professed Christian, what he thought of it. “Oh,” said the doctor, “we think nothing of such antiquated stuff; we think it enough to preach the importance of morality and virtue, and have long given up all that talk about Divine grace.” Bolingbroke’s face and eyes were a study at all times, but we could wish to have seen him turn in his chair, and fix his eyes on the vicar as he said: “Look you, doctor. You know I don’t believe the Bible to be a Divine revelation, but those who do can never defend it but upon the principle of the doctrine of Divine grace. To say the truth, there have been times when I have been almost persuaded to believe it upon this view of things; and there is one argument I have felt which has gone very far with me on behalf of its authenticity, which is, that the belief in it exists upon earth even when committed to the care of such as you, who pretend to believe in it, and yet deny the only principle upon which it is defensible.” The worn-out statesman and hard-headed old peer hit the question of his own day, and forecast all the sceptical strife of ours; for all such questions are summed in one, Is there supernatural grace, and has that grace appeared unto men? This was the one faith of all these revivalists. The world was eager to hear it, for the aching heart of the world longs to believe that it is true. The conversation we have recited shows that even Bolingbroke wished that it might be true.

WESTON FAVEL CHURCH,
(Where James Hervey Preached.)

The new creed of Hervey changed the whole character of his preaching. The little church of Weston Favel, a short distance from the town of Northampton, became quite a shrine for pilgrimages; he was often compelled to preach in the churchyard. He was assuredly an intense lover of natural scenery, a student of natural theology of the old school. His writing is now said to be meretricious and gaudy. One critic says that children will always prefer a red to a white sugar-plum, and that the tea is nicer to them when they drink it from a cup painted with coloured flowers; and this, perhaps, not unfairly, describes the style of Hervey; we have prettiness rather than power, elegant disquisition rather than nervous expression, which is all the more wonderful, as he must have been an accomplished Latin scholar. But he had a mind of gorgeous fullness, and his splendid conceptions bore him into a train of what now seem almost glittering extravagances. Hervey was in the manner of his life a sickly recluse, and we easily call up the figure of the old bachelor—for he never married—alternately watching his saucepan of gruel on the fire, and his favourite microscope on the study table. He was greatly beloved by the Countess of Huntingdon, perhaps yet more by Lady Fanny Shirley—the subject of Walpole’s sneer. He was, no doubt, the writer of the movement, and its thoughts in his books must have seemed like “butter in a lordly dish.” But his course was comparatively brief; his work was accomplished at the age of forty-five. He died in his chair, his last words, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy most comfortable salvation;” shortly after, “The conflict is over; all is done;” the last words of all, “Precious salvation.” And so passed away one of the most amiable and accomplished of all the revivalists.

John Gambold, although ever an excellent and admirable man, lived the life rather of a secluded mystic, than that of an active reformer. He became a minister of the Church of England, but afterwards left that communion, not from any dissensions either from the doctrines or the discipline of the Church, but simply because he found his spiritual relationships more in harmony with those of the Moravians, of whose Church he died a bishop. We presume few readers are acquainted with his poetical works; nor are there many words among them of remarkable strength. The Mystery of Life is certainly pleasingly impressive; and his epitaph on himself deserves quotation:

“Ask not, ‘Who ended here his span?’

His name, reproach, and praise, was Man.

‘Did no great deeds adorn his course?’

No deed of his but showed him worse:

One thing was great, which God supplied,

He suffered human life—and died.

‘What points of knowledge did he gain?’

That life was sacred all—and vain:

‘Sacred, how high? and vain, how low?’

He knew not here, but died to know.”

Such were some of the men who went forth from Oxford. Meantime, as the flame of revival was spreading, Oxford again starts into singular notice; how the “Holy Club” escaped official censure and condemnation seems strange, but in 1768 the members of a similar club were, for meeting together for prayer and reading the Scriptures, all summarily expelled from the university. Their number was seven. Several of the heads of houses spoke in their favour, the principal of their own hall, Dr. Dixon, moved an amendment against their expulsion, on the ground of their admirable conduct and exemplary piety. Not a word was alleged against them, only that some of them were the sons of tradesmen, and that all of them “held Methodistical tenets, taking upon them to pray, read and expound the Scriptures, and sing hymns at private houses.” These practices were considered as hostile to the Articles and interests of the Church of England, and sentence was pronounced against them.

Of course this expulsion created a great agitation at the time; and as the moral character of the young men was so perfectly unimpeachable, it no doubt greatly aided the cause of the Revival. Dr. Horne, Bishop of Norwich, author of the Commentary On the Psalms—no Methodist, although an admirable and evangelical man—denounced the measure in a pamphlet in the strongest terms. The well-known wit and Baptist minister of Devonshire Square in London, Macgowan, lashed the transaction in his piece called The Shaver. All the young men seem to have turned out well. Some, like Thomas Jones, who afterwards became curate of Clifton, and married the sister of Lady Austen, Cowper’s friend—found admission into the Church of England; the others instantly found help from the Countess of Huntingdon, who sent them to finish their studies at her college in Trevecca, and afterwards secured them places in connection with her work of evangelisation. The transaction gives a singular idea of what Oxford was in 1768, and prepares us for the vehement persecutions by which the representatives of Oxford all over the country armed themselves to resist the Revival, whilst it justifies our designation of this chapter, “New Lights and Old Lanterns.”

CHAPTER IV
CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE FIELDS.

It was field-preaching, preaching in the open air, which first gave national distinctiveness to the Revival, and constituted it a movement. Assuredly any occasions of excitement we have known, give no idea whatever of the immense agitations which speedily rolled over the country, from one end to the other, when these great revivalists began their work in the fields. And the excitement continued, rolling on through London, and through the counties of England, from the west to the north, not for days, weeks, or months merely, but through long years, until the religious life of the land was entirely rekindled, and its morals and manners re-moulded; and all this, especially in its origination, without money, no large sums being subscribed or guaranteed to sustain the work. The work was done, not only without might or power, but assuredly in the very teeth of the malevolence of might and of power; nor is it too much to say that it probably would not have been done, could not have been done, had the churches, chapels, and great cathedrals been thrown open to the preachers.

It seems a singular thing to say, but we should speak of Whitefield as the Luther of this Great Revival, and of Wesley as its Calvin. Both in the quality of their work and in their relation in point of time, this analogy is not so unnatural as it perhaps seems at first. The impetuosity and passion, the vehemence and sleepless vigilance of Whitefield first broke open the way; the calm, cautious, frequently even nervously timid intelligence of Wesley organised the work.

How could a writer, in a recent number of the Edinburgh Review, say: “It is a great mistake to complain, as so many do, that the Church cast out the Wesleys. We have seen at the beginning how kindly, and even cordially, they were treated by the leading members of the episcopate.” Surely any history of Methodism contradicts this statement. Bishop Benson, indeed, ordained Whitefield, but he bitterly lamented to the Countess of Huntingdon that he had done so, attributing to him what seemed to the Bishop the mischief of the evangelical movement. “My lord,” said the Countess, “mark my words: when you are on your dying bed, that will be one of the few ordinations you will reflect upon with complaisance.”

The words were, in a remarkable degree, prophetic; when the Bishop was on his death-bed he sent ten guineas to Mr. Whitefield as a token of his “regard, veneration, and affection,” and begged the great field-preacher to remember him in prayer. If the bishops were kind and cordial to the first Methodists, they certainly took a singular way of dissembling their love. For instance, Bishop Lavington, of Exeter, whose well-known two volumes on Methodism are really a curiosity of episcopal scurrility, was in a passion with everything that looked like Whitefieldism in his diocese. Mr. Thomson, the Vicar of St. Gennys, was a dissipated clergyman, a character of known immorality; he was a rich man, and not dependent upon his vicarage. In the midst of his sinful life conscience was arrested; he became converted; he countenanced and threw open his pulpit to Mr. Whitefield; he became now as remarkable for his devout life and fervent gospel preaching as he had been before for his ungodliness. What made it all the worse was, that he was a man of real genius. Now all his brethren in the ministry disowned him, and closed their pulpits against him; and presently Bishop Lavington summoned him to appear before him to answer the charges made against him by his brethren for his Methodistical practices. “Sir,” said the Bishop, in the course of conversation, “if you pursue these practices, and countenance Whitefield, I will strip your gown from off you.” Mr. Thomson had on his gown at the time—more frequently worn by ministers of the Church then than now. To the amazement of the Bishop, Mr. Thomson exclaimed, “I will save your lordship the trouble!” He took off his gown, dropped it at the Bishop’s feet, saying, “My lord, I can preach without a gown!” and before the Bishop could recover from his astonishment he was gone. This was an instance, however, in which the Bishop was so decidedly in the wrong that he sent for the vicar again, apologised to him; and the circumstance, indeed, led to the entertainment by the Bishop of views which were somewhat milder with reference to Methodism than those which still give notoriety to his name.

GEORGE WHITEFIELD.

Southey[[5]], in his certainly not impartial volumes, admits that, for the most part, the condition of the clergy was dreadful; it is not wonderful that they closed their churches against the innovators. There was, for instance, the Vicar of Colne, the Rev. George White; when the preachers came into his neighbourhood, it was his usual practice to call his parishioners together by the beat of a drum, to issue a proclamation at the market-cross, and enlist a mob for the defence of the Church against the Methodists. Here is a copy of the proclamation, a curiosity in its way: “Notice is hereby given that if any man be mindful to enlist in His Majesty’s service, under the command of the Rev. Mr. George White, Commander-in-Chief, and John Bannister, Lieutenant-General of His Majesty’s forces for the defence of the Church of England, and the support of the manufactory in and about Colne, both which are now in danger, let him repair to the drumhead at the Cross, where each man shall receive a pint of ale in advance, and all other proper encouragements.” Such are some of the instances, which might be multiplied to any extent, showing the reception given to the revivalists by the clergy of the time. But let no reader suppose that, in reciting these things, we are willingly dwelling upon facts not creditable to the Church, or that we forget how many of her most admirable members have made an abundant amende honorable by their eulogies since; nor are we forgetting that Nonconformist chapels, whose cold respectability of service and theology were sadly outraged by the new teachers, were not more readily opened than the churches were to men with whom the Word of the Lord was as a fire, or as a hammer to break the rock in pieces.[[6]] Whitefield soon felt his power. Immediately after his ordination, he in some way became for a time an occasional supply at the chapel in the Tower; he found a straggling congregation of twenty or thirty hearers; after a service or two the place was overflowing, and remained so. During his short residence in that neighbourhood the youth continued throughout the whole week preaching to the soldiers, preaching to prisoners, holding services on Sunday mornings for young men before the ordinary service. He was still ostensibly at Oxford; a profitable living was offered to him in London, and instantly declined. He went to Gloucester, to Bristol, to Kingswood. Of course it is impossible to follow Whitefield step by step through his career; we can only rapidly bring out a crayon sketch of the chief features of his work. He made voyages to Georgia; voyaging was no pastime in those days, and he spent a great amount of time in transit to and fro on the seas; our business with him is chiefly as the first field-preacher; and Kingswood, near Bristol, appears to have been the first place where this great work was to be tried. It was then, what it is still, a region of rough collieries, the Black Country of the West; the people themselves were of the roughest order. Whitefield spoke at Bristol, to some friends, of his probable speedy embarkation to preach the Gospel among the Indians of America; and they said to him, “What need of going abroad to do this? Have we not Indians enough at home? If you have a mind to convert Indians, there are colliers enough in Kingswood!” A savage race! As to taking to the fields in this instance, it was simply a necessity; there were no churches from whence the preacher could be ejected. Try to realize it: the heathen society, indoctrinated only in brutal sports; the rough, black labour only typical of the rough, black minds, the rough, black souls. Surely he must have been a very brave man; nor was he one at all of that order of apostles whose native roughness is well fitted, it seems, to challenge roughness to civility.

[5]. Appendix [E].

[6]. Appendix [F].

Whitefield was a perfect gentleman, of manners most affectionate and amiable; altogether the most unlikely creature, it seems, to rise triumphant over the execrations of a mighty mob. The oratory of Whitefield seems to us almost the greatest mystery in the history of eloquence: his voice must have been wonderful; its strength was overwhelming, but it was not a roar; its modulations and inflections were equal to its strength, so that it had the all-commanding tones of a bell in its clearness, and all the modulations of an organ in its variety and sweetness. Kingswood only stands as a representative of crowds of other such places, where savages fell before the enchantment of his sweet music. Read any accounts of him, and it will be seen that we do not exaggerate in speaking of him as the very Orpheus of the pulpit. Assuredly, as it has been said Orpheus, by the power of his music, drew trees, stones, the frozen mountain-tops, and the floods to bow to his melody, so men, “stockish, hard, and full of rage,” felt a change pass over their nature, as they came under the spell of Whitefield. Yet, perhaps, he would not have gone to Kingswood had he not been inhibited from preaching in the Bristol churches. He had preached in St. Mary Redcliff, and the following day had preached opening sermons in the parish church of SS. Philip and Jacob, and then he was called before the Chancellor of the diocese, who asked him for his licence by which he was permitted to preach in that diocese. Whitefield said he was an ordained minister of the Church of England, and as to the special licence, it was obsolete. “Why did you not ask,” he said, “for the licence of the clergyman who preached for you last Thursday?” The Chancellor replied, “That is no business of yours.” Whitefield said, “There is a canon forbidding clergymen to frequent taverns and play at cards, why is that not enforced?” The Chancellor evaded this, but charged Whitefield with preaching false doctrine; Whitefield replied that he preached what he knew to be the truth, and he would continue to preach. “Then,” said the Chancellor, “I will excommunicate you!” The end of it was that all the city churches were shut against him. “But,” he says, “if they were all open, they would not contain half the people who come to hear. So at three in the afternoon I went to Kingswood among the colliers.” Whitefield laid his case in a very respectful letter, before the Bishop, but on he went. As to Kingswood, tears poured down the black faces of the colliers; the great audiences are described as being drenched in tears. Whitefield himself was in a passion of tears. “How can I help weeping,” he said to them, “when you have not wept for yourselves?” And they began to weep. Thus in 1739 began the mighty work at Kingswood, which has been a great Methodist colony from that day to this. That was a good morning’s work for the cause of Christ when the Chancellor shut the doors of the churches of Bristol against the brave and beautiful preacher, and threatened to excommunicate him. Was it not said of old, “Thou makest the wrath of man to praise Thee”?

Now, then, see him girt and road-ready; we might be sure that the example of the Chancellor of Bristol would be pretty generally followed. The old ecclesiastical corporations set themselves in array against him; but how futile the endeavour! Their canons and rubrics were like the building of hedges to confine an eagle, and they only left him without a choice—without any choice but to fulfil his instinct for souls, and to soar. Other “little brief authorities,” mayors, aldermen, and such like, issued their fulminations. Coming to Basingstoke, the mayor, one John Abbott, inhibited him. John Abbott seems to have been a burly butcher. The intercourse and correspondence between the two is very humorously characteristic; but, although it gives an insight as to the antagonism which frequently awaited Whitefield, it is too long to quote in this brief sketch. The butcher-mayor was coarse and insolent; Whitefield never lost his sweet graciousness; writing to abusive butchers or abusive bishops, as in his reply to Lavington, he never lost his temper, never indulged in satire, never exhibits any great marks of genius, writes straight to the point, simply vindicates himself and his course, never retracts, never apologises, goes straight on.

There is no other instance of a preacher who was so equally at home and equally impressive and commanding in the most various and dissimilar circles and scenes; it is significant of the notice he excited that his name occurs so frequently in the correspondence of that cold and heartless man and flippant sneerer, Horace Walpole, whose allusions to him are usually disgraceful; but so it was, he was equally commanding in the polished and select circles of the drawing-room, surrounded by dukes and duchesses, great statesmen and philosophers, or in the large old tabernacle or parish church, surrounded by more orderly and saintly worshippers, or in nature’s vast and grand cathedrals, with twenty or thirty thousand people around him.

From the day when he went to Kingswood, we may run a rapid eye along the perspective of his career—in fields, on heaths, and on commons, it was the same everywhere; from his intense life we might find many scenes for description: take one or two. On the breast of the mountain, the trees and hedges full of people, hushed to profound silence, the open firmament above him, the prospect of adjacent fields—the sight of thousands on thousands of people; some in coaches, some on horseback, and all affected, or drenched in tears. Sometimes evening approaches, and then he says, “Beneath the twilight it was too much for me, and quite overcame me.” There was one night never to be forgotten. While he was preaching it lightened exceedingly; his spirit rose on the tempest; his voice tolled out the doom and decay hanging over all nature; he preached the warnings and the consolations of the coming of the Son of man. The thunder broke over his head, the lightning shone along the preacher’s path, it ran along the ground in wild glares from one part of heaven to the other; the whole audience shook like the leaves of a forest in the wind, whilst high amidst the thunders and the lightnings, the preacher’s voice rose, exclaiming, “Oh; my friends, the wrath of God! the wrath of God!” Then his spirit seemed to pass serenely right through the tempest, and he talked of Christ, who swept the wrath away; and then he told how he longed for the time when Christ should be revealed, amidst the flaming fire, consuming all natural things. “Oh,” exclaimed he, “that my soul may be in a like flame when He shall come to call me!” Can we realize what his soul must have been who could burn with such seraphic ardours in the midst of such scenes?

WHITEFIELD PREACHING IN LONDON.

So he opened the way everywhere, by his field-preaching, for John Wesley. Truly it has been said, “Whitefield, and not Wesley, is the prominent figure in the opening of the Methodist movement;” and the time we must assign to this first popular agitation is the winter of 1738-39. The two men were immensely different. To Whitefield the preaching was no light work; it was not talking. After one of his sermons, drenched through, he would lie down, spent, sobbing, exhausted, death-like: John Wesley, after one of his most effective sermons, in which he also had shaken men’s souls, would just quietly mount his little pony, and ride off to the next village or town, reading his book as he went, or stopping by the way to pluck curious flowers or simples from the hedges; the poise of their spirits was so different. All great movements need two men, Moses and Aaron; the prophet Elijah must go before, “to restore all things.” Whitefield lived in the immediate neighbourhood and breathed the air of essential truth; Wesley looked at men, and saw how all remained undone until the work took coherency and shape. As he says, “I was convinced that preaching like an apostle, without joining together those that are awakened, and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer.” Whitefield preached like an apostle; the scenes we have described appear charming rural scenes, in which men’s hearts were bowed and hushed before him; but there were widely different scenes when he defied the devil, and sought to win his victims away, even in fairs and wakes—the most wild and dissolute periodical pests and nuisances of the age. Rough human nature went down before him, as in the instance of the man who came with heavy stones to pelt him, and suddenly found his hands as it were tied, and himself in tears, and, at the close, went up to the preacher, and said, “I came here only to break your head, and you have broken my heart!”

But the roughs of London seem to have been worse than the roughs of Kingswood; and we cannot wonder that men like Walpole, and even polite and refined religious men, thought that a man who could go right into St. Bartholomew’s Fair, in Moorfields, and Finsbury, take his station among drummers, trumpeters, merry-andrews, harlequins, and all kinds of wild beasts, must be “mad”; it must have seemed the height of fanaticism, like preaching to a real Gadarene swinery. All the historians of the movement—Sir James Stephen, Dr. Abel Stevens, Dr. Southey, Isaac Taylor, and others, recite with admiration the story of the way in which he wrestled successfully with the merry-andrews. He began to preach at six o’clock in the morning; stones, dirt, rotten eggs were hurled at him. “My soul was among lions,” he says; but the marvellous voice overcame, and he went on speaking, and we know how tenderly he would speak to them, of their own miseries, and the dangers of their own sins; the great multitude—it was between twenty and thirty thousand—“became like lambs;” he finished, went away, and, in the wilder time—in the afternoon—he came again. In the meantime there had been organisations to put him down: here was a man with a long heavy whip to strike the preacher; there was a recruiting sergeant who had been engaged with drum and fife to interrupt him. As he appeared on the outskirts of the crowd, Whitefield, who well knew how to catch the humour of the people too, exclaimed, “Make way for the king’s officer!” and the mob divided, while, to his surprise, the recruiting officer, with his drum, found himself immediately beneath Whitefield; it was easy to manage him now. The crowd around roared like wild beasts; it must have been a tremendous scene. Will it be believed—it seems incredible—that he continued there, preaching, praying, singing, until the night fell? He won a decided victory, and the next day received no fewer than a thousand notes from persons, “brands plucked from the burning,” who spoke of the convictions through which they had passed, and implored the preacher to remember them in his prayers.

This was in Moorfields, in which neighbourhood since, the followers both of Wesley and of Whitefield have found their tabernacles and most eminent fields of usefulness. Many have attempted fair-preaching since Whitefield’s day, but not, we believe, with much success; it needs a remarkable combination of powers to make such efforts successful. Whitefield was able to attempt to outbid the showmen, merry-andrews, and harlequins, and he succeeded. No wonder they called him a fanatic; he might have said, “If we be beside ourselves, it is for God, that by all means we may save some!”

But what we have been especially desirous that our readers should note is, that these more vehement manifestations of Methodism were not the result of any methodised plan, but were a simple yielding to, and taking possession of circumstances; it was as if “the Spirit of the Lord” came down upon the leaders, and “carried them whither they knew not.”

[For an account of Whitefield’s labours in America, and the spread of the Great Revival there, the reader is referred to the supplemental chapter at the end of this volume.]

CHAPTER V
THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE.

Lord Macaulay’s verdict upon John Wesley, that he possessed a “genius for government not inferior to that of Richelieu,” received immediate demonstration when he came actively into the movement, and has been abundantly confirmed since his death, in the history of the society which he founded. It has been said that all institutions are the prolonged shadow of one mind, and that by the inclusiveness, or power of perpetuity in the institution, we may know the mind of the founder. Much of our last chapter was devoted to some attempt to realise the place and power of Whitefield;[[7]] what he was in relation to the Revival may be defined by the remark, often made, and by capable critics, that while there have been multitudes of better sermon-makers, it is uncertain whether the Church ever had so great a pulpit orator. In Wesley’s mind everything became structural and organic; he was a mighty master of administration; but he also followed Whitefield’s example, and took to the fields; and very great, indeed, amazing results, followed his ministry.

[7]. See Chapter [XIV]. for his place and power in America.

Many of the incidents which are impressive and amusing show the difference between the men. Whitefield overwhelmed the people: Wesley met insolence and antagonism by some sharp, concise, and cuttingly appropriate retort, which was remarkable, considering his stature. But both his presence and his words must have been unusually commanding: “Be silent, or begone,” he turned round sharply and said once to some violent disturbers, and they were obedient to the command.

Wesley’s rencontre with Beau Nash at Bath is a fair illustration of his quiet and almost obscurely sarcastic method of confounding a troublesome person. Preaching in the open air at Bath, the King of Bath, the Master of the Ceremonies, Nash, was so unwise as to attempt to put down the apostolic man. Nash’s character was bad; it was that of an idle, heartless, licentious dangler on the skirts of high society. He appeared in the crowd, and authoritatively asked Wesley by what right he dared to stand there. The congregation was not wholly of the poor; there were a number of fashionable and noble persons present, and among them many with whom this attack had been pre-arranged, and who expected to see the discomfiture of the Methodist by the courtly and fashionable old dandy. Wesley replied to the question simply and quietly that he stood there by the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to him “by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid hands on me and said, ‘Take thou authority to preach the Gospel!’” Nash began to bustle and to be turbulent, and he exclaimed, “This is contrary to Act of Parliament; this is a conventicle.” “Sir,” said Wesley, “the Act you refer to applies to seditious meetings: here is no sedition, no shadow of sedition; the meeting is not, therefore, contrary to the Act.” Nash stormed, “I say it is; besides, your preaching frightens people out of their wits.” “Sir,” said Wesley, “give me leave to ask, Did you ever hear me preach?” “No!” “How, then, can you judge of what you have never heard?” “Sir, by common report.” “Common report is not enough,” said Wesley; “again give me leave to ask is your name not Nash?” “My name is Nash.” And then the reader must imagine Wesley’s thin, clear, piercing voice, cutting through the crowd: “Sir, I dare not judge of you by common report.” There does not seem much in it, but the effect was overwhelming. Nash tried to bully it out a little; but, to make his discomfiture complete, the people took up the case, and especially one old woman, whose daughter had come to grief through the fop, in her way so set forth his sins that he was glad to retreat in dismay. On another occasion, when attempts were made to assault Wesley, there was some uncertainty about his person, and the assailants were saying, “Which is he? which is he?” he stood still as he was walking down the crowded street, turned upon them, and said, “I am he;” and they instantly fell back, awed into involuntary silence and respect.

It is characteristic that while Whitefield simply took to the work of field-preaching, and preaching in the open air, and troubled himself very little about finding or giving reasons for the irregularity of the proceeding, Wesley defended the practice with formidable arguments. It is remarkable that the practice should have been deemed so irregular, or should need vindication, considering that our Lord had given to it the sanction of His example, and that it had been adopted by the apostles and fathers, the greatest of the Catholic preachers, and the reformers of every age. A history of field and street-preaching would form a large and interesting chapter of Church history. Southey quotes a very happy series of arguments from one of Wesley’s appeals: “What need is there,” he says, speaking for his antagonists, “of this preaching in the fields and streets? Are there not churches enough to preach in?” “No, my friend, there are not, not for us to preach in. You forget we are not suffered to preach there, else we should prefer them to any place whatever.” “Well, there are ministers enough without you.” “Ministers enough, and churches enough! For what? To reclaim all the sinners within the four seas? and one plain reason why these sinners are never reclaimed is this: they never come into a church. Will you say, as some tender-hearted Christians I have heard, ‘Then it is their own fault; let them die and be damned!’ I grant it may be their own fault, but the Saviour of souls came after us, and so we ought to seek to save that which is lost.” He went on to confess the irregularity, but he retorted that those persons who compelled him to be irregular had no right to censure him for irregularity. “Will they throw a man into the dirt,” said he, “and beat him because he is dirty? Of all men living those clergymen ought not to complain who believe I preach the Gospel; if they will not ask me to preach in their churches, they are accountable for my preaching in the fields.” This is a fair illustration of the neat shrewdness, the compact, incisive common sense of Wesley’s mind. Thus he argued himself into that sphere of labour which justified him in after years in saying, without any extravagance, “The world is my parish.”

We have said the Revival became conservative. It is true the Countess of Huntingdon did much to make it so; but it assumed a shape of vitality, and a force of coherent strength, chiefly from the touch of Wesley’s administrative mind. The present City Road Chapel, which was opened in 1776, opposite Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, is probably the first illustration of this fact; it stands where stood the Foundry—time-honoured spot in the history of Methodism. It stood in Moorfields; the City Road was a mere lane then. The building had been used by government for casting cannon; it was a rude ruin. Wesley purchased it and the site at the very commencement of his work, in 1739; he turned it into a temple. As the years passed on it became the cradle of London Methodism, accommodating fifteen hundred people. Until within twenty years of Wesley’s purchase this had been a kind of Woolwich Arsenal to the government; it became a temple of peace, and here came “band-rooms,” school-rooms, book-rooms—the first saplings of Methodist usefulness.

JOHN WESLEY.

It has been truly said by a writer in the British Quarterly, that the most romantic lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar do not present a more startling succession of incidents than those which meet us in the life and labours of Wesley. Romish stories claim that Blessed Raymond, of Pegnafort, spread his cloak upon the sea to transport him across the water, sailing one hundred and sixty miles in six hours, and entering his convent through closed doors! The devout and zealous Francis Xavier spent three whole days in two different places at the same time, preaching all the while! Rome shines out in transactions like these: Wesley does not; but he seems to have been almost ubiquitous, and he moves with a rapidity reminding us of that flying angel who had the everlasting Gospel to preach, and he shines alike in his conflicts with nature and the still wilder tempests caused by the passions of men. We read of his travelling, through the long wintry hours, two hundred and eighty miles on horseback, in six days; it was a wonderful feat in those times. When Wesley first began his itinerancy there were no turnpikes in the country; but before he closed his career, he had probably paid more, says Dr. Southey, for turnpikes, than any other man in England, for no other man in England travelled so much. His were no pleasant journeys, as of summer days; he travelled through the fens of Lincolnshire when the waters were out; and over the fells of Northumberland when they were covered with snow. Speaking of one tremendous journey, through dreadful weather, he says, “Many a rough journey have I had before; but one like this I never had, between wind and hail, and rain, and ice, and snow, and driving sleet, and piercing cold; but it is past. Those days will return no more, and are therefore as though they had never been.

“‘And pain, like pleasure, is a dream!’”

How singular was his visit to Epworth, where he found the church of his childhood, his father’s church, the church of his own first ministrations, closed against him! The minister of the church was a drunkard; he had been under great obligations, both to Wesley himself and to the Wesley family, but he assailed him with the most offensive brutality; and when Wesley, denied the pulpit, signified his intention of simply partaking of the Lord’s Supper with the parishioners on the following Sunday, the coarse man sent word, “Tell Mr. Wesley I shall not give him the Sacrament, for he is not fit.” It seems to have cut Mr. Wesley very deeply. “It was fit,” he says, “that he who repelled me from the table where I had myself so often distributed the bread of life, should be one who owed his all in this world to the tender love my father had shown to his, as well as personally to himself.” He stayed there, however, eight days, and preached every evening in the churchyard, standing on his father’s tomb; truly a singular sight, the living son, the prophet of his age, surely little short of inspired, preaching from his dead father’s grave with such pathos and power as we may well conceive. “I am well assured,” he says, “I did far more good to my old Lincolnshire parishioners by preaching three days on my father’s tomb than I did by preaching three years in his pulpit!”

WESLEY PREACHING IN EPWORTH CHURCHYARD.

As he travelled to and fro, odd mistakes sometimes happened. Arrived at York, he went into the church in St. Saviour’s Gate; the rector, one Mr. Cordeau, had often warned his congregation against going to hear “that vagabond Wesley” preach. It was usual in that day for ministers of the Establishment to wear the cassock or gown, just as everywhere in France we see the French abbés. Wesley had on his gown, like a university man in a university town. Mr. Cordeau, not knowing who he was, offered him his pulpit; Wesley was quite willing, and always ready. Sermons leaped impromptu from his lips, and this sermon was an impressive one; at its close the clerk asked the rector if he knew who the preacher was. “No.” “Why, sir, it was that vagabond Wesley!” “Ah, indeed!” said the astonished clergyman; “well, never mind, we have had a good sermon.” The anecdotes of the incidents which waited upon the preacher in his travels are of every order of humorous, affecting, and romantic interest; they are spread over a large variety of volumes, and even still need to be gathered, framed, and hung in the light of some effective chronicle.

EPWORTH CHURCH.

The brilliant passage in which Lord Macaulay portrays, as with the pencil of a Vandyke, the features of the great English Puritans, is worthy of attention. Perhaps, even had the great essayist attempted the task, he had scarcely the requisite sympathies to give an effective portrait or portraits of the early Methodists; indeed, their characters are different, as different as a portrait from the pencil of Denner to one from that of Vandyke, or of Velasquez; but as Denner is wonderful too, although so homely, so the Methodist is a study. The early Methodist was, perhaps, usually a very simple, what we should call an ignorant, man, but he had “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” He was not such an one as the early Puritan[[8]] or the ancient Huguenot, those children of the camp and of the sword, Nonconformist Templars and Crusaders, whose theology had trained them for the battle-field, teaching them to frown defiance on kings, and to treat with contempt the proudest nobles, if they were merely unsanctified men. The Methodist was not such an one as the stern Ironside of Cromwell; as he lived in a more cheerful age, so he was the subject of a more cheerful piety; he was as loyal as he was lowly. He had been forgotten or neglected by all the priests and Levites of the land; but a voice had reached him, and raised him to the rank of a living, conscious, immortal soul. He also was one for whom Christ died. A new life had created new interests in him; and Christianity, really believed, does ennoble a man—how can it do otherwise? It gives self-respect to a man, it shows to him a new purpose and business in life; moreover, it creates a spirit of holy cheerfulness and joy; and thus came about that state of mind which Wesley made subservient to organisation—the necessity for meetings and reciprocations. It has been said that every church must have some sign or counter-sign, some symbol to make it popularly successful. St. Dominic gave to his order the Rosary; John Wesley gave to his Society the Ticket. There were no chapels, or but few, and none to open their doors to these strange new pilgrims to the celestial city. We have seen that the churches were closed against them. Lord Macaulay says, had John Wesley risen in the Church of Rome, she would have thrown her arms round him, only regarding him as the founder of a new order, with certain peculiarities calculated to increase and to extend her empire, and in due time have given to him the honours of canonisation.

[8]. See Appendix [A].

The English clergy as a body gathered up their garments and shrunk from all contact with the Methodists as from a pestilence. What could be done? Something must be done to prevent them from falling back into the world. Piety needs habit, and must become habitual to be safe, even as the fine-twined linen of the veil, and the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat, were shut in and all their glory defended by the rude coverings of badger-skins. John Wesley knew that the safety of the converted would be in frequent meetings for singing and prayer and conversation. Reciprocation is the soul of Methodism; so they assembled in each others’ houses, in rude and lonely but convenient rooms, by farm-house ingles, in lone hamlets. Thus was created a homely piety, often rugged enough, no doubt, but full of beautiful and pathetic instincts. So grew what came to be called band-meetings, class-meetings, love-feasts, and all the innumerable means by which the Methodist Society worked, until it became like a wheel within a wheel; simple enough, however, in the days to which we are referring. “Look to the Lord, and faithfully attend all the means of grace appointed in the Society.” Such was, practically, the whole of Methodism. So that famous old lady, whose bright example has so often been held up on Methodist platforms, when called upon to state the items of her creed, did so very sufficiently when she summed it up in the four particulars of “repentance towards God; faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; a penny a week; and a shilling a quarter.” Wesley seems to have summed the Methodist creed more simply still: “Belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and an earnest desire to flee from the wrath to come.” This was his condition of Church fellowship. When the faith became more consciously objective, it too was seized by the passionate instinct, the desire t o save souls. This drove the early Methodists out on great occasions to call vast multitudes together on heaths, on moors. Perhaps—but this was at a later time—some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the preachers; though the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks, and subsided into the organisation of the Countess of Huntingdon, which was, in fact, a kind of Free Church of England. The followers of Wesley sought the sequestration of nature, or in cities and towns they took to the streets or the broad ways and outlying fields. In some neighbourhoods a little room was built, containing the germ of what in a few years became a large Wesleyan Society. The burden of all these meetings, and all their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the sweetness and fulness of Jesus. They had intense faith in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; and their great interest was in souls on the brink of perdition. They knew little of spiritual difficulties or speculative despair; their conflict was with the world, the flesh, and the devil; and in this person, whose features have lately become somewhat dim, and who has wrapped himself in a new cloak of darkness, they did really believe. Wesley dealt with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; he and his band of preachers had little regard to proprieties, and it was not a polished time; so, ungraceful and undignified, the face weary, and the hand heavy with toil, they seemed out of breath pursuing souls. The strength of all these men was that they had a definite creed, and they sought to guard it by a definite Church life. The early Methodist had also cultivated the mighty instinct of prayer, about which he had no philosophy, but believing that God heard him, he quite simply indulged in it as a passion, and in this to him there was at once a meaning and a joy. We are not under the necessity of vindicating every phase of the great movement, we are simply writing down some particulars of its history, and how it was that it grew and prevailed. God’s ministry goes on by various means, ordinary and extraordinary; that is the difference between rivers and rains, between dews and lightnings.

A very interesting chapter, perhaps a volume, might be compiled from the old records of the mere anecdotes—the very humours—of the persecution attending on the Revival. Thus, in Cornwall, Edward Greenfield, a tanner, with a wife and seven children, was arrested under a warrant granted by Dr. Borlase, the eminent antiquary, who was, however, a bitter foe to Methodism. It was inquired what was the objection to Greenfield, a peaceable, inoffensive man; and the answer was, “The man is well enough, but the gentlemen round about can’t bear his impudence; why, he says he knows his sins are forgiven!” The story is well known how, in one place, a whole waggon-load of Methodists were taken before the magistrates; but when the question was asked in court what they had done, a profound silence fell over the assembly, for no one was prepared with a charge against them, till somebody exclaimed, “They pretended to be better than other people, and prayed from morning till night!” And another voice shouted out, “And they’ve convarted my wife; till she went among they, she had a tongue of her own, and now she’s as quiet as a lamb!” “Take them all back, take them all back,” said the sensible magistrate, “and let them convert all the scolds in the town!”

There is a spot in Cornwall which may be said to be consecrated and set apart to the memory of Wesley; it is in the immediate neighbourhood of Redruth, a wild, bare, rugged-looking region now, very suggestive of its savage aspect upwards of a hundred years since. The spot to which we refer is the Gwennap Pit; it is a wild amphitheatre, cut out among the hills, capable of holding about thirty thousand persons. Its natural walls slant upwards, and the place has altogether wonderful properties for the carrying the human voice. Wesley began to preach in this spot in 1762. When he first visited Cornwall, the savage mobs of what used to be called “West Barbary,” howled and roared upon him like lions or wild beasts; in his later years of visitation, no emperor or sovereign prince could have been received with more reverence and affection. The streets were lined and the windows of the houses thronged with gazing crowds, to see him as he walked along; and no wonder, for Cornwall was one of the chief territories of that singular ecclesiastical kingdom of which he was the founder. When he first went into Cornwall, it was really a region of savage irreligion and heathenism. The reader of his life often finds, usually about once a year, the visit to Gwennap Pit recorded: he preached his first sermon there, as we have said, in 1762; at the age of eighty-six he preached his last in 1789. There, from time to time, they poured in from all the country round to see and to listen to the words of this truly reverend father.

The Great Revival.
Wesley Preaching in Gwennap Pit.

The traditions of Methodism have few more imposing scenes. Gwennap Pit was, perhaps, Wesley’s most famous cathedral; a magnificent church, if we may apply that term to a building of nature, among the wild moors; it was thronged by hushed and devout worshippers. Until Wesley went among these people, the whole immense population might have said, “No man cared for our souls;” now they poured in to see him there: wild miners from the immediate neighbourhood, fishermen from the coast, men who until their conversion had pursued the wrecker’s remorseless and criminal career, smugglers, more quiet men and their families less savage, but not less ignorant, from their shieling, or lowly farmstead on the distant heath. A strange throng, if we think of it, men who had never used God’s name except in an oath, and who had never breathed a prayer except for the special providence of a shipwreck, and who with wicked barbarity had kindled their delusive lights along the coasts, to fascinate unfortunate ships to the cruel cliffs! But a Divine power had passed over them, and they were changed, with their families; and hither they came to gladden the heart of the old patriarch in the wild glen—a strange spot, and not unbeautiful, roofed over by the blue heavens. Amidst the broom, the twittering birds, the heath flower, and the scantling of trees, amidst the venerable rocks, it must have been wonderful to hear the thirty thousand voices welling up, and singing Wesley’s words:

“Suffice that for the season past,

Hell’s horrid language filled our tongues;

We all Thy words behind us cast,

And loudly sang the drunkard’s songs.

But, oh, the power of grace Divine!

In hymns we now our voices raise,

Loudly in strange hosannahs join,

While blasphemies are turned to praise!”

Such was one of the triumphs of the Great Revival.

CHAPTER VI
THE SINGERS OF THE REVIVAL.

Chief of all the auxiliary circumstances which aided the Great Revival, beyond a question, was this: that it taught the people of England, for the first time, the real power of sacred song. That man in the north of England who, when taken, by a companion who had been converted, to a great Methodist preaching, and being asked at the close of the service how he had enjoyed it, replied, “Weel, I didna care sae mich aboot the preaching, but, eh, man! yon ballants were grand,” was no doubt a representative character. And the great and subduing power of large bodies of people, moved as with one heart and one voice, must have greatly aided to produce those effects which we are attempting to realise. All great national movements have acknowledged and used the power of song. For man is a born singer, and if he cannot sing himself he likes to feel the power of those who can. It has been so in political movements: there were the songs of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. And the greatest religious movements through all the Christian ages have acknowledged the power of sacred song, even from the days of the apostles, and from the time of St. Ambrose in Milan. Luther soon found that he must teach the people to sing. That is a pleasant little story, how once, as he was sitting at his window, he heard a blind beggar sing. It was something about the grace of God, and Luther says the strain brought tears into his eyes. Then, he says, the thought suddenly flashed into his mind, “If I could only make gospel songs which people could sing, and which would spread themselves up and down the cities!” He directly set to work upon this inspiration, and let fly song after song, each like a lark mounting towards heaven’s gate, full of New Testament music. “He took care,” says one writer, in mentioning the incident, “that each song should have some rememberable word or refrain; such as ‘Jesus,’ ‘Believe and be saved,’ ‘Come unto Me,’ ‘Gospel,’ ‘Grace,’ ‘Worthy is the Lamb,’ and so on.”

Until Watts and Doddridge appeared, England had no popular sacred melodies. Amongst the works of the poets, such as Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, Sandys, George Herbert, and others, a few were scattered up and down; but they mostly lacked the subtle element which constitutes a hymn. For, just as a man may be a great poet, and utterly fail in the power to write a good song, so a man may be a great sacred poet, and yet miss the faculty which makes the hymn-writer. It is singular, it is almost indefinable. The subtle something which catches the essential elements of a great human experience, and gives it lyrical expression, takes that which other men put into creeds, sermons, theological essays, and sets it flying, as we just now said, like “the lark to heaven’s gate.” It ought never to be forgotten that Watts was, in fact, the creator of the English hymn. He wrote many lines which good taste can in no case approve; but here again the old proverb holds true, “The house that is building does not look like the house that is built.” And the great number of following writers, while they have felt the inspiration he gave to the Church, have moulded their lines by a more fastidious taste, which, if it has sometimes improved the metre or the sentiment, has possibly diminished in the strength. We will venture to say that even now there is a greater average of majesty of thought and expression in Watts’s hymns than in any other of our great hymn-writers; although, in some cases, we find here and there a piece which may equal, and some one or two which are said to surpass, the flights of the sweet singer of Stoke Newington. But the hymns of Watts, as a whole, were not so well fitted to a great and popular revival, to the expression of a tumultuous and passionate experience, as some we shall notice. They were, as a whole, especially wanting in the social element, and the finest of them sound like notes from the harp of some solitary angel. One cannot give to them the designation which the Wesleys gave to large sections of their hymns, “suitable for experience meetings.” Praise rather than experience is the characteristic of Watts, although there are noble exceptions. Our readers will perhaps remember a well-known and pleasing instance in a letter from Doddridge to his aged friend. Doddridge had been preaching on a summer evening in some plain old village chapel in Northamptonshire, when at the close of the service was “given out,” as we say, that hymn commencing:

“Give me the wings of faith to rise.”

We can suppose the melody to which it was sung to have been very rude; but it was, perhaps, new to the people, and the preacher was affected as he saw how, over the congregation, the people were singing earnestly, and melted to tears while they sang; and at the close of the service many old people gathered round Doddridge, their hearts all alive with the hymn, and they wished it were possible, only for once, to look upon the face of the dear old Dr. Watts. Doddridge was so pleased that he thought his old friend would be pleased also, and so he wrote the account of the little incident in a letter to him. In many other parts of the country, no doubt, the people were waiting and wishful for popular sacred harmonies. And when the Great Revival came, and congregations met by thousands, and multitudes who had been accustomed to song, thoughtless, foolish, very often sinful and licentious, still needed to sing (for song and human nature are inseparable, apparently, so far as we know anything about it, in the next world as well as in this), it was necessary that, as they had been “brought up out of the horrible pit and miry clay,” “a new song of praise” should be put in the mouth. John Wesley had heard much of Moravian singing. He took Count Zinzendorf’s hymns, translated them, and immensely improved them; he was the first who introduced into our psalmody the noble words of Paul Gerhardt. Some of the finest of all the hymns in the Wesleyan collection are these translations. Watts was unsparingly used. Wesley’s first effort to meet this necessity of the Revival was the publication of his collection in 1739.[[9]] And thus, most likely without knowing the anecdote of Luther we have quoted above, Wesley and his coadjutors did exactly what the Reformer had done. They gave effect to the Revival by the ordinance of song, and preached the Gospel in sweet words, and often recurring Gospel refrains.

[9]. See [Appendix].

The remark is true that there was no art, no splendid form of worship or ritual; early Methodism and the entire evangelic movement were as free from all this as Clairvaux in the Valley of Wormwood, when Bernard ministered there with all his monks around him, or as Cluny when Bernard de Morlaix chanted his “Jerusalem the Golden.” Like all great religious movements which have shaken men’s souls, this was purely spiritual, or if it had a secular expression it was not artificial. Loud amens resounded as the preacher spoke or prayed, and then the hearty gushes of, perhaps, not melodious song united all hearts in some litany or Te Deum in new-born verse from some of the singers of the last revival. Amongst infuriated mobs, we read how Wesley found a retreat in song, and overpowered the multitude with what we, perhaps, should not regard melody. Thus, when at Bengeworth in 1740, where Wesley was set upon by a crowd, and it was proposed by one that they should take him away and duck him, he broke out into singing with his redoubted friend, Thomas Maxfield. He allowed them to carry him whither they would; at the bridge end of the street the mob retreated and left him; but he took his stand on the bridge, and striking up—

“Angel of God, whate’er betide,

Thy summons I obey,”

preached a useful and effective sermon to hundreds who remained to listen, from the text, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

But the contributions of Watts and Wesley are so well known that it is more important to notice here that as the Revival moved on, very soon other remarkable lyrists appeared to contribute, if few, yet really effective words. Of these none is more remarkable than the mighty cobbler, Thomas Olivers, a “sturdy Welshman,” as Southey calls him. He is not to be confounded with John Oliver, also one of the notabilities of the Revival. Thomas was really an astonishing trophy of the movement; before his conversion he was a thoroughly bad fellow, a kind of wandering reprobate, an idle, dissipated man. He fell beneath the power of Whitefield, whom he heard preach from the text, “Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” He had made comic songs about Whitefield, and sung them with applause in tap-rooms. As Whitefield came in his way, he went with the purpose of obtaining fresh fuel for his ridicule. The heart of the man was completely broken, and he felt so much compunction for what he had done against the man for whom he now felt so deep a reverence and awe, that he used to follow him in the streets, and though he did not speak to him, he says he could scarcely refrain from kissing the prints of his footsteps. And now, he says, at the beginning of his new life, what we can well believe of an imagination so intense and strong, “I saw God in everything: the heavens, the earth and all therein showed me something of Him; yea, even from a drop of water, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand, I received instruction.” He was about seriously to enter into a settled and respectable way of business when John Wesley heard of him; and although he was converted under Whitefield, Wesley persuaded him to yield himself to his direction for the work of preaching as one of his itinerant band, and sent him into Cornwall—just the man we should think for Cornwall, fiery and imaginative: off he went, in 1753. He was born in 1725. He testifies that he was “unable to buy a horse, so, with my boots on my legs, my great-coat on my back, and my bag with my books and linen across my shoulders, I set out for Cornwall on foot.” Henceforth there were forty-six years on earth before him, during which he witnessed a magnificent confession before many witnesses. He became one of the foremost controversialists when dissensions arose among the men of the Revival. He acquired a knowledge of the languages, especially of Hebrew, and was a great reader. Wesley appointed him as his editor and general proofreader; but he could never be taught to punctuate properly, and the punctilious Wesley could not tolerate his inaccuracies as they slipped through the proof, so he did not retain this post long. But Wesley loved him, and in 1799 he descended into Wesley’s own tomb, and his remains lie there, in the cemetery of the City Road Chapel. He wrote more prose than poetry; but, like St. Ambrose, he is made immortal by a single hymn. He is the author of one of the most majestic hymns in all hymnology. Byron and Scott wrote Hebrew melodies, but they will not bear comparison with this one. While in London upon one occasion, he went into the Jewish synagogue, and he heard sung there by a rabbi, Dr. Leoni, an old air, a melody which so enchanted him and fixed itself in his memory, that he went home, and instantly produced what he called “a hymn to the God of Abraham,” arranged to the air he had heard. And thus we possess that which we so frequently sing,

“The God of Abraham praise!”[[10]]

It is principally known by its first four verses; there are twelve. “There is not,” says James Montgomery, “in our language a lyric of more majestic style, more elevated thought, or more glorious imagery; * * * like a stately pile of architecture, severe and simple in design; it strikes less on the first view than after deliberate examination, * * * the mind itself grows greater in contemplating it;” and he continues, “On account of the peculiarity of the measure, none but a person of equal musical and poetical taste could have produced the harmony perceptible in the verse.” There will, perhaps, always be a doubt whether Olivers was the author of the hymn,

“Lo! He comes with clouds descending.”

If Charles Wesley were the author, he undoubtedly derived the inspiration of the piece from Olivers’ hymn, “The Last Judgment:”[[11]] it is in the same metre, and probably Wesley took the thought and the metre, and adapted it to popular service. What is undoubted is that Olivers, who is the author of the metre, is also the author of the fine old tune “Helmsley,” to which the hymn was usually sung until quite recent times; the tune was originally called “Olivers.”

[10]. See [Appendix]

[11]. See [Appendix]

It is but a natural step from Thomas Olivers to his great antagonist, Augustus Toplady; he also is made immortal by a hymn. He wrote many fine ones, full of melody, pathos, and affecting imagery. Toplady, as all our readers know, was a clergyman, the Vicar of Broad Hembury, in Devonshire. He took the strong Calvinistic side in the controversies which arose in the course of the Great Revival; Olivers took the strong Arminian side. They were not very civil to each other; and the scholarly clergyman no doubt felt his dignity somewhat hurt by the rugged contact with the cobbler; but the quarrels are forgotten now, and there is scarcely a hymn-book in which the hymn of Olivers is not found within a few pages of

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me!”

To this hymn has been given almost universally the palm as the finest hymn in our language. Where there are so many, at once deeply expressive in experience, and subdued and elevated in feeling, we perhaps may be forgiven if we hesitate before praise so eminently high. Mr. Gladstone’s translation into the Latin, in the estimation of eminent scholars, even carries a more thrilling and penetrative awe.[[12]] But Toplady wrote many other hymns quite equal in pathos and poetic merit. The characteristic of “Rock of Ages” is its depth of penitential devotion. A volume might be written on the history of this expressive hymn. Innumerable are the multitudes whom these words have sustained when dying; they were among the last which lingered on the lips of Prince Albert as he was passing away; and to how many, through every variety of social distinction, have they been at once the creed and consolation! It is by his hymns that Toplady will be chiefly remembered. For years he was hovering along on the borders of the grave, slowly dying of consumption; and he died in 1778, in the thirty-eighth year of his age. It was his especial wish that he should be buried with more than quiet, that no announcement should be made of the funeral, and that there should be no especial service at his grave: it testifies, however, to the high regard in which he was held that thousands followed him to his burial in Tottenham Court Road Chapel; and when we know that his dear friend Rowland Hill conducted the service, we can scarcely be surprised, or offended, that he broke through the injunctions of his friend, and addressed the multitude in affectionate commemoration of the sweet singer.

[12]. See [Appendix].

AUGUSTUS TOPLADY.

Toplady we should regard as the chief singer of the Revival, after Charles Wesley, although entirely of another order; not so social as meditative, and reminding us, in many of his pieces, of the characteristics we have attributed to Watts. His midnight hymn is a piece of uncommon sublimity; portions of it seem almost unfit for congregational singing; but for inward plaintive meditation, for reading in the evening family prayer, when the hushed stillness of night is over the household, and the pilgrim of life is about to commit himself to the unconsciousness of sleep, the verses seem tenderly suggestive:

“Thy ministering spirits descend,

And watch while Thy saints are asleep;

By day and by night they attend,

The heirs of salvation to keep.

Bright seraphs despatched from the throne,

Fly swift to their stations assigned;

And angels elect are sent down

To guard the elect of mankind.

“Their worship no interval knows;

Their fervour is still on the wing;

And, while they protect my repose,

They chant to the praise of my King.

I, too, at the season ordained,

Their chorus forever shall join,

And love and adore without end,

Their gracious Creator and mine.”

We have noticed in a previous chapter that when Whitefield separated himself from Wesley, the Revival took two distinctly different routes. We only refer to this again for the purpose of remarking that as Toplady was intensely Calvinistic in his method of Divine grace, so his hymns, also, reflect in all its fulness that creed; yet they are full of tenderness, and well calculated frequently to arouse dormant devotion. “Your harps, ye trembling saints;” “Emptied of earth I fain would be;” “When languor and disease invade;” “Jesus, immutably the same;” “A debtor to mercy alone,” and many another, leave nothing to be desired either on the score of devotion, poetry, or melody.

In a far humbler sphere, but representing the same faith and fervour as Toplady, and also carried away young, was Cennick. In an article in the Christian Remembrancer, on English hymnology, written very much for the purpose of throwing contempt on all the hymn-writers of the Revival, Cennick is spoken of as “a low and violent person; his hymns peculiarly offensive, both as to matter and manner.” Some exceptions are made by the reviewer for “Children of the Heavenly King.” We may presume, therefore, that to this writer, “Thou dear Redeemer, dying Lamb,” is one of the “peculiarly offensive.” This is not wonderful, when in the next page we read that “the hymns of Newton are the very essence of doggerel.” This sounds rather strange, as a verdict, to those who have felt the particular charm of that much-loved hymn, “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!” It is not without a purpose that we refer to this paper in the Christian Remembrancer—evidently by a very scholarly hand—because its whole tone shows how the sacred song of the Revival would be likely to be regarded by those who had no sympathy with its evangelical teaching. The writer, for instance, speaking of Wesley’s hymns, doubts whether any of them could possibly be included by any chance in English hymnology! “Jesus, lover of my soul,” is said, “in some small degree to approximate to the model of a Church hymn!” Of the Countess of Huntingdon’s hymn-book, the writer says, “We shall certainly not notice the raving profanity!” It is not necessary further either to sadden or to irritate the reader by similar expressions; but the entire paper, and the criticisms we have cited, will show what was likely to be the effect of the hymns of the Revival on many similar minds of that time. In fact, the joy of the Revival work arose from this, that no person, no priest, nor Church usage, was needed to interpose between the soul and the Saviour. Faith in Christ, and His immediate, personal presence with the soul seeking Him by faith, as it was the burden of the best of the sermons, so it was, also, of all the great hymns.

The origin and the authors of several eminent hymns are certainly obscure. To Edward Perronet must be assigned the authorship of the fine coronation anthem of the Lamb that was slain: “All hail the power of Jesus’ name!”

Another, which has become a universal favourite, is “Beyond the glittering starry globe.” This is a noble and inspiring hymn; only a few verses are usually quoted in our hymn-books. Lord Selborne divides its authorship between Fanch and Turner. We have seen it attributed to Olivers; this is certainly a mistake. The Quarterly Review, in a very able paper on hymnology, reproducing an old legend concerning it, traces it to two brothers in a humble situation in life, one an itinerant preacher, the other a porter. The preacher desired the porter to carry a letter for him. “I can’t go,” said the porter, “I am writing a hymn.” “You write a hymn, indeed! Nonsense! you go with the letter, and I will finish the hymn.” He went, and returned, but the hymn was unfinished. The preacher had taken it up at the third verse, and his muse had forsaken him at the eighth. “Give me the pen,” said the porter, and he wrote off,

“They brought His chariot from above,

To bear Him to His throne;

Clapped their triumphant wings, and cried,

‘The glorious work is done!’”

Unfortunately the author of the paper in the Quarterly Review appears never to have seen the hymn in its entirety. The verse he cites is not the eighth, but the twenty-second, and it has been mutilated almost wherever quoted; the verse itself is part of an apostrophe to the angels, recalling their ministrations round our Lord:

“Tended His chariot up the sky,

And bore Him to His throne;

Then swept your golden harps and cried,

‘The glorious work is done!’”

Whoever wrote the hymn had the imagination of a poet, the fine pathos of a believer, and a strong lyrical power of expression.

Anecdotes of the origin of many of our great hymns of this period are as interesting as they are almost innumerable; those of which we are speaking are hymns of the Revival—to speak concisely—perhaps commenced with the Wesleys, and closed with Cowper and Newton. It must not be supposed that there were no singers save those whose verses found their way into the Wesleyan or other great collections of hymns; there were James Grant, Joseph Griggs, especially notable, Miss Steele, the author of a great number of hymns of universal acceptance in all our churches, and which are more like those of Doddridge than any other since his day. Then there was John Stocker,—but we would particularly notice Job Hupton, the author of a hymn which has never been included in any hymn-book except Our Hymn Book, edited by the author of this volume, but which is scarcely inferior to “Beyond the glittering starry sky.”

“Come, ye saints, and raise an anthem,

Cleave the skies with shouts of praise,

Sing to Him who found a ransom,

Ancient of eternal days.

Bring your harps, and bring your odours,

Sweep the string and pour the lay;

View His works! behold His wonders!

Let hosannas crown the day!”

The hymn is far too long for quotation. Job Hupton was a Baptist minister in the neighbourhood of Beccles, where he died in 1849, in the eighty-eighth year of his age, and the sixty-fifth of his ministry.

Thus there was set free throughout the country a spirit of sacred song which was new to the experience of the nation: it was boldly evangelical; it was devoted, not to the eulogy of Church forms and days; there was not a syllable of Mariolatry; but praise to Christ, earnest meditation upon the state of man without His work, and the blessedness of the soul which had risen to the saving apprehension of it. This forms the whole substance of the Divine melody. It has seemed to some that the most perfect hymn in the English language is, “Jesus! lover of my soul.” Sentiments may differ, arising from modifications of experience, but that hymn undoubtedly is the very essence of all the hymns which were sung in the days of the Great Revival. For the first time there was given to Christian experience that which met it at every turn. Watts found such a choir, and such an audience for his devotions, as he had never known in his life; and “Charles Wesley,” says Isaac Taylor, “has been drawing thousands in his wake and onward, from earth to heaven.” The hymns met and united all companies and all societies. The bridal party returned from church, singing,

“We kindly help each other,

Till all shall wear the starry crown.”

If they gathered round the grave, they sang;—and what a variety of glorious funereal hymns they had! But that was a great favourite:

“There all the ship’s company meet,

Who sailed with their Saviour beneath;

With shoutings each other they greet,

And triumph o’er sorrow and death.”

Few separations took place without that song,

“Blest be the dear uniting love,

That will not let us part.”

While others became such favourites that even almost every service had to be hallowed by them; such as,

“Jesus! the name high over all,

In hell, or earth, or sky;”

while an equal favourite almost, was,

“Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing

My great Redeemer’s praise!”

They must soon have become very well known, for so early as 1748, when a sad cluster of convicts, horse-stealers, highway robbers, burglars, smugglers, and thieves, were led forth to execution, the turnkey of the prison said he had never seen such people before. The Methodists had been among them; they had all yielded themselves to the power of “the truth as it is in Jesus,” and on their way to Tyburn they all sang together,

“Lamb of God! whose bleeding love

We now recall to mind,

Send the answer from above,

And let us mercy find;

Think on us, who think of Thee,

And every struggling soul release;

Oh! remember Calvary,

And let us go in peace!”

The hymns found their way to sick beds. The old Earl of Derby, the grandfather of the present peer, was dying at Knowsley. He had for his housekeeper there a Mrs. Brass, a good and faithful Methodist; the old Earl was fond of talking with her upon religious matters, and one day she read to him the well-known hymn, “All ye that pass by, to Jesus draw nigh.” When she came to the lines,

“The Lord in the day of His anger did lay

Our sins on the Lamb, and he bore them away,”

the Earl looked up and said, “Stop! don’t you think, Mrs. Brass, that ought to be, ‘The Lord in the day of his mercy did lay’?”

The old lady did not admit the validity of his lordship’s theology; but it very abundantly showed that his experience had passed through the verse, and reached to the true meaning of the hymn. An old blind woman was hearing Peter McOwan preach. He quoted these lines:

“The Lord pours eyesight on the blind;

The Lord supports the fainting mind.”

The poor old woman was not happy until she met the preacher, and she said, “But are there really such sweet verses? Are you sure the book contains such a hymn?” and he read the whole to her. It is one by Watts:

“I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath.”

Innumerable are the anecdotes of these hymns; they inaugurated really the rise of English hymnology; and it is not too much to say that, as compared with them, many more recent hymns are as tinsel compared with gold. A writer truly says: “They sob, they swell, they meet the spirit in its most hushed and plaintive mood. They roll and bear it aloft, in its most inspired and prophetic moods, as on the surge of more than a mighty organ swell; among the mines and quarries, and wild moors of Cornwall, among the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in chambers of death, in the most joyous assemblages of the household, they have relieved the hard lot, and sweetened the pleasant one; and even in other lands soldiers and sailors, slaves and prisoners, have recited with what joy these words have entered into their life.”

Thus the great hymns of this period grew and became a religious power in the land, strangely contradicting a verdict which Cardinal Wiseman pronounced some years since, that “all Protestant devotion is dead.” While we give all honour to the fine hymns of Denmark and Germany, many of the best of which were translated with the movement, it may, with no exaggeration, be said that the hymnology of England in the eighteenth century is the finest and most complete which the history of the Church has known.

CHAPTER VII
LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS.

There came with the work of the Revival a practice, without which it is more than questionable if it would have obtained such a rapid and abiding hold upon the various populations and districts of the country; this was lay preaching. The designation must have a more inclusive interpretation than we generally apply to it; we must understand by it rather the work of those men who, in contradistinction to the great leaders of the Revival—men of scholarship, of universities, and of education—possessed none of these qualifications, or but in a more slight and undisciplined degree. They were converted men, modified by various temperaments; they one and all possessed an ardent zeal; but, in many instances, we shall find that they were as much devoted to the work of the ministry as those who had received a regular ordination. It is singular that prejudices so strong should exist against lay preaching and preachers, for the practice has surely received the sanction of the most ancient usages of the Church, as even Dr. Southey admits, in his notes to the Life of Wesley. Thus, in the history of the Church, this phenomenon could scarcely be regarded as new. Orders of preaching friars; “hedge-preachers,” “black, white, and grey,” with all their company; disciples of Francis, Dominic, or Ignatius, had spread over Europe during the dark and mediæval ages. Although this rousing element of Church life had not found much expression in the churches of the Reformation, yet with the impulse of the new Revival, up started these men by multitudes. The reason of this was very simple. There is a well-known little anecdote of some town missionary standing up in a broad highway preaching to a multitude. He was arrested by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked him from the edge of the crowd by what authority he dared to stand there? and who had given him the right to preach? The man had his New Testament in his hand; he rapidly turned to the last chapter of it, and said, “I find it written here, ‘Let him that heareth say, Come!’ I have heard, and I would say Come!” The anecdote represents sufficiently the rise and progress of lay preaching in the Revival. There first appeared, naturally, a simple set of men, who, in their different spheres, would, perhaps, lead and direct a prayer-meeting, and round it with some pious and gentle exhortation. We have already pointed out the necessity soon felt for frequent and reciprocative services; these were not the lay preachers to whom we refer; but in this fraternal form of Church fellowship, the lay preacher had his origin.

Wesley imposed restrictions upon his helpers which he soon found himself compelled to renounce. John Wesley was a strong adherent to the idea of Church order. The first lay preacher in his communion who leapt over the traces was Thomas Maxfield. It was at the Foundry in Moor Fields. Wesley was in Bristol, and the intelligence was conveyed to him. He appears to have regarded it as a serious and dangerous innovation. The good Susannah Wesley, his mother—now past threescore years and ten—infirm and feeble, was yet living in the Chapel House of the Foundry. To her John hurried on his arrival in London; and after his affectionate salutations and inquiries, he expressed such a manifest dissatisfaction and anxiety that she inquired the cause. With some indignation and unusual abruptness, he said, “Thomas Maxfield has turned preacher, I find;” and then the wise and saintly woman gave him her advice. She reminded him that, from her prejudices against lay preaching he could not suspect her of favouring anything of the kind; “but take care,” she said, “what you do respecting that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are.” She advised her son to hear Maxfield for himself. He did so, and at once buried all his prejudices. He exclaimed after the sermon, “It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good!” and Thomas Maxfield became the first of a host who spread all over the country.

It may be supposed that the Countess of Huntingdon very naturally shared all Wesley’s prejudices against lay preaching; but she heard Maxfield preach, and she wrote of him, “God has raised one from the stones to sit among the princes of the people. He is my astonishment; how is God’s power shown in weakness!” and she soon set herself to the work of supplying an order of men, of whom Maxfield was the first to lead the way. By-and-by came another innovation: the lay evangelists at first never went into the pulpit, but spoke from among the people, or from the desk. The first who broke through this usage was Thomas Walsh; we will say more of him presently. He was a man of deep humility, and his life reveals entire and extraordinary consecration; but he believed himself to be an ambassador for Christ, and he walked directly up into the pulpit, never questioning, but quite disregarding the usual custom. The majesty of his manner, his solemn, impressive, and commanding eloquence, forbade all remark; and henceforth all the lay preachers followed his example. There arose a band of extraordinary men. Let the reader refer to the chronicles of their lives, and the effects of their labours, and he will not suppose that he has seen anything in our day at all approaching to what they were.

Local preachers have now long been part of the great organisation of Methodism. But in the period to which we refer, it must be remembered that the pen had not commenced the exercise of its more popular influence. There were few authors, few journalists, very few really popular books; these men, then, with their various gifts of elevated holiness, broad and rugged humour, or glowing imagination, went to and fro among the people, rousing and instructing the dormant mind of the country. Then it was Wesley’s great aim to sustain interest by variety. Wesley himself said that he believed he should preach himself and his congregation asleep if he were to confine his ministrations to one pulpit for twelve months. We would take the liberty to say in reference to this, that it would depend upon whether he kept his own mind fresh and wakeful during the time. He writes, however: “We have found by long and constant experience, that a frequent change of teachers is best; this preacher has one talent, that another. No one whom I ever knew has all the talents which are needful for beginning, continuing, and perfecting the work in a whole congregation; neither,” he adds, “can he find matter for preaching morning and evening, nor will the people come to hear him; hence he grows cold, and so do the people; whereas if he never stays more than a fortnight together in one place, he may find matter enough, and the people will gladly hear him.”

This certainly gives an idea but of a plain order of services; and, no doubt, some of Wesley’s preachers were of the plainest. There was Michael Fenwick, of whom Wesley says, “he was just made to travel with me—an excellent groom, valet de chambre, nurse, and, upon occasion, a tolerable preacher.” This good man was one day vain enough to complain to Wesley, that although he was constantly travelling with him, his name was never inserted in Wesley’s published Journals. In the next number he found himself immortalised with his master there. “I left Epworth,” writes Wesley, “with great satisfaction, and about one, preached at Clayworth. I think none were unmoved but Michael Fenwick, who fell fast asleep under an adjoining hayrick.”

A higher type of man, but still of the very plain order of preachers, was Joseph Bradford. He also was Wesley’s frequent travelling companion, and he judged no service too servile by which he could show his reverence for his master. But on one occasion Wesley directed him to carry a packet of letters to the post. The occasion was very extraordinary, and Bradford wished to hear Wesley’s sermon first. Wesley was urgent and insisted that the letters must go. Bradford refused; he would hear the sermon. “Then,” said Wesley, “you and I must part!” “Very good, sir,” said Bradford. The service was over. They slept in the same room. On rising in the morning, Wesley accosted his old friend and companion, and asked if he had considered what had been said, that they must part. “Yes, sir,” replied Bradford. “And must we part?” inquired Wesley. “Please yourself, sir,” was the reply. “Will you ask my pardon?” rejoined Wesley. “No, sir.” “You wont?” “No, sir.” “Then I will ask yours,” replied the great man. It is said that Bradford melted under the words, and wept like a child. But we must not convey the idea that the early preachers were generally of this order. “In a great house there are vessels to honour and vessels to dishonour.” “Vessels of dishonour” assuredly were none of these men: but there were some who attained to a greatness almost as remarkable as the greatness of the three, Whitefield and the Wesleys.

What a man was John Nelson! His was a life full of singular incidents. It was truly apostolic, whether we consider its holy magnanimity, the violence and vehemence of the cruel persecutions he encountered, or his singular power over excited mobs; reminding us sometimes of Paul fighting as with wild beasts at Ephesus, or standing with cunning tact, and disarming at once captain and crowd on the steps of the Castle at Jerusalem. Then, although he was but a poor working stonemason, he had a high gentlemanly bearing, before which those who considered themselves gentlemen, magistrates and others, fell back abashed and ashamed. He was one of the prophets of Yorkshire; and many of the large Societies at this day in Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford owe their foundation to him. It seems wonderful to us now, that merely preaching the word of truth, and especially as John Nelson preached it, with such a cheerful, radiant, and even heavenly manner, should bring out mighty mobs to assault him. The stories of his itinerancy are innumerable, and his life is really one of the most romantic in these preaching annals. At Nottingham, while he was preaching, the crowds threw squibs at him and round him; but, as he was still pursuing his path of speech, a sergeant in the army pressed up to him, with tears, saying, “In the presence of God and all this company, I beg your pardon. I came here on purpose to mob you, but I have been compelled to hear you; and I here declare I believe you to be a servant of the living God!” He threw his arms round Nelson’s neck, kissed him, and went away weeping; and we see him no more. Perhaps more remarkable still was his reception at Grimsby. There the clergyman of the parish hired a drummer to gather a great mob, as he said, “to defend the rights of the Church.” The storm which raged round Nelson was wild and ferocious; but it illustrates the power of this extraordinary man over his rudest hearers, that after beating his drum for a long time, the poor drummer threw it away, and stood listening, the tears running down his cheeks.

John Nelson at Nottingham.

Nelson was a man of immense physical strength; his own trade had fostered this, and before his conversion he had, no doubt, been feared as a man who could hit out and hit hard. As the most effectual means of silencing him, he was pressed for a soldier; but John was not only a Methodist, he had adopted the Quaker notion that a Christian dare not fight; and he seems to have been a real torment to the officers and men of the regiment, who indeed marched him about different parts of the country, but could not get him either to accept the king’s money or to submit to drill. An officer put him in prison for rebuking his profanity, and threatened to chastise him. Nelson says, “It caused a sore temptation to arise in me; to think that a wicked, ignorant man should thus torment me, and I able to tie his head and heels together. I found an old man’s bone in me; but the Lord lifted up the standard within, else should I have wrung his neck and set my foot upon him.”

At length, after three months, the Countess of Huntingdon procured his discharge. The regiment was in Newcastle. He preached there on the evening of the day on which he was liberated, and it is testified that a number of the soldiers from his regiment came to hear him, and parted from him with tears. He was arrested as a vagrant, without any visible means of living. A gentleman instantly stepped forward and offered five hundred pounds bail; but the bail was refused. He was able to prove that he was a high-charactered, industrious workman; but it availed nothing. Crowds wept and prayed for him as he was borne through the streets. “Fear not!” he cried, “oh, friends; God hath His way in the whirlwind, and in the storm. Only pray that my faith fail not!” It was at Bradford. They thrust him into a most filthy dungeon. The authorities would give him no food. The people thrust in food, water, and candles. He shared these with some wretched prisoners in the same cage, and he sang hymns, and talked to them all night. He was marched off to York; but there the excitement was so great when it was known that John Nelson was coming a prisoner that armed troops were ordered out to guard him. He says, “Hell from beneath was moved to meet me at my coming!” All the windows were crowded with people—some in sympathy, but most cheering and huzzaing as if some great political traitor had been arrested; but he says, “The Lord made my brow like brass, so that I could look upon all the people as grasshoppers, and pass through the city as if there had been none in it but God and me.”

Such was John Nelson. These anecdotes are sufficient to show the manner of man he was. He has been truly called “the proto-martyr of Methodism.” But it is not in a hint or two that all can be said which ought to be said of this noble and extraordinary man. His conversion, perhaps, sank down to deeper roots than in many instances. The thoughts of Methodism found him perplexed with those agonizing questions which have tormented men in all ages, until they have realized the truth as it is in Jesus. His life was guilty of no immoralities; he had a happy, humble home, was industrious, and receiving good wages; but as he walked to and fro among the fields he was distressed, “for,” he said, “surely God never made man to be such a riddle to himself, and to leave him so.” He heard Wesley preach. “Then,” he says, “my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock, and I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me;” and so, in short, he became a Methodist, and a Methodist preacher; and among the noble names in the history of the Church of Christ, in his own line and order, it may be doubted whether a nobler name can be mentioned than that of John Nelson.

Quite another order of man, less human, but equally divine, was Thomas Walsh. His parents were Romanists, and he was intended by them for the Romish priesthood; and he appears to have been an intense Romanist ascetic until about eighteen years of age. He had a thoughtful and exceedingly intense nature, and his faith was no rest to him. In his dilemma he heard a Methodist preacher speak one day from the text, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” It appears to have been the turning-point of a remarkable life.

“The life of Thomas Walsh,” says Dr. Southey, “might almost convince a Catholic that saints were to be found in other communions as well as in the Church of Rome.” Walsh became a great biblical scholar; he was an Irishman, he mastered the native Irish, that he might preach in it; but Latin, Greek, and Hebrew became familiar to him; and of the Hebrew, especially, it is said that he studied so deeply, that his memory was an entire concordance of the whole Bible. His soul was as a flame of fire, but it burnt out the body quickly. John Wesley says of him, “I do not remember ever to have known a man who, in so few years as he remained upon earth, was the instrument of converting so many sinners.” He became mighty in his influence over the Roman Catholics. The priests said that “Walsh had died some years ago, and that he who went about preaching, on mountains and highways, in meadows, private houses, prisons, and ships, was a devil who had assumed his shape.” This was the only way in which they could account for the extraordinary influence he possessed. His labours were greatly divided between Ireland and London, but everywhere he bore down all before him by a kind of absorbed ecstasy of ardent faith; but he died at the age of twenty-seven. While lying on his death-bed he was oppressed with a sense of despair, even of his salvation. The sufferings of his mind on this account were protracted and intense; at last he broke out in an exclamation, “He is come! He is come! My Beloved is mine, and I am His for ever!” and so he fell back and died. Thomas Walsh is a great name still in the records of the lay preachers of early Methodism.

All orders of men rose: different from any we have mentioned was George Story, whose quiet, but earnest and reasonable nature, seems to have commanded the especial love of Southey. He appears never to have become what some call an enthusiast; but he interestingly illustrates, that it was not merely over the rugged and uninformed minds that the power of the Revival exercised its influence. Very curiously, he appears to have been converted by thinking about Eugene Aram, the well-known scholar, whose name has become so celebrated in fiction and in poetry, and who had a short time before been executed for murder at York. Story was impressed by the importance of the acquisition of knowledge, and Aram’s extraordinary attainments kindled in his mind a sense of admiration and emulation; but, as he thought upon his life, he reasoned, “What did this man’s learning profit him? It did not save him from becoming a thief and a murderer, or even from attempting his own life.” It was an immense suggestion to him; it led him upon another track of thinking. The Methodists came through his village; he yielded himself to the influence, and Dr. Southey thinks “there is not in the whole biography of Methodism a more interesting or remarkable case than his.” He became a great preacher, but disarmed and convinced men rather by his calm, dispassionate elevation of manner, than by such weapons as the cheerful bonhomie of Nelson, or the fervid fire of Walsh.

But we are, perhaps, conveying the idea that it was only beneath the administration of John Wesley that these great lay preachers were to be found. It was not so; but no doubt beneath that administration their itinerancy became more systematic and organised. Whitefield does not appear to have at all shared Wesley’s prejudices on this means of usefulness; but those men who fell beneath the influence of Whitefield, or the Countess, seem soon to meet us as settled ministers, in many, if not in all instances. Among them there are few greater names in the whole Revival than those of Captain Jonathan Scott and the renowned Captain Toriel Joss. Captain Scott was a captain of dragoons, and one of the heroes of Minden; he was converted by the instrumentality of William Romaine, who, in spite of his prejudices against lay preaching, encouraged him in his excursions, in which he spoke to immense crowds with great effect. Fletcher, of Madeley, said, “his coat shames many a black one.” He was a gentleman of an ancient and opulent family, and the Countess, who, naturally, was delighted to see people of her own order by her side, felt herself greatly strengthened by him. It was said, when he preached at Leeds, the whole town turned out to hear him; and he was one of the great preachers of the Tabernacle in Moorfields, during more than twenty years. But yet a far more famous man was Toriel Joss. He was a captain of the seas, and had led a life which somewhat reminds us of Newton’s. He was a good and even great sailor, but he became a greater preacher. Whitefield said of these two men, that “God, who sitteth upon the flood, can bring a shark from the ocean, and a lion from the forest, to show forth his praise.” Joss was a man of property, with a fair prospect of considerable wealth, when he renounced the seas and became one of the great lay preachers. Whitefield insisted that he should abandon the chart, the compass, and the deck, and take to the pulpit. He did so. In London his fame was second only to that of Whitefield himself. He became Whitefield’s coadjutor at the Tabernacle, where, first as associate pastor, and afterwards as pastor, he continued for thirty years. The chapel at Tottenham Court Road was his chief field, and John Berridge called him “Whitefield’s Archdeacon of Tottenham.”

TABERNACLE, MOORFIELDS.

We cannot particularise others: there were Sampson Staniforth, the soldier, Alexander Mather, Christopher Hopper, John Haime, John Parson—and these are only representative names. There were crowds of them; they travelled to and fro, with hard fare, throughout the land. Their excursions were not recreations or amusements. Attempt to think what England was at that time. It is a fact that they often had to swim through streams and wade through snows to keep their appointments; often to sleep in summer in the open air, beneath the trees of a forest. Sometimes a preacher was seen with a spade strapped to his back, to cut a way for man and horse through the heavy snow-drifts. Highwaymen were abroad, and there are many odd stories about their encounters with these men; but, then, usually, they had nothing to lose. Rogers, in his Lives of the Early Preachers, tells a characteristic story. One of these lay preachers, as usual on horseback, was waylaid by three robbers; one of them seized the bridle of his horse, the second put a pistol to his head, the third began to pull him from the saddle—all, of course, declaring that they would have his money or his life. The preacher looked solemnly at them, and asked them “if they had prayed that morning.” This confounded them a little, still they continued their work of plunder. One pulled out a knife to rip the saddle-bag open; the preacher said, “There are only some books and tracts there; as to money, I have only twopence halfpenny in my pocket;” he took it out and gave it them. “All that I have of value about me,” he said, “is my coat. I am a servant of God; I am going on His errand to preach; but let me kneel down and pray with you; that will do you more good than anything I can give you.” One of them said, “I will have nothing to do with anything we can get from this man!” They had taken his watch; they restored this, and took up the bags and fastened them again on the horse. The preacher thanked them for their great civility to him; “But now,” said he, “I will pray!” and he fell upon his knees, and prayed with great power. Two of the rascals, utterly frightened at this treatment, started off as fast as their legs could carry them; the third—he who had first refused to have anything to do with the job—continued on his knees with the preacher; and when they parted company he promised that he would try to lead a new life, and hoped to become a new man.

Should the reader search the old magazines and documents in which are enshrined the records of the early days of the Revival, he will find many incidents showing what a romantic story is this of the self-denials, the difficulties, and enthusiasm of these men, whose best record is on high—most of them faithful men, like Alexander Coates, who, after a life of singular length and usefulness in the work, went to his rest. His talents were said to be extraordinary, both in preaching and in conversation. Just as he was dying, one of his brethren called upon him and said, “You don’t think you have followed a cunningly-devised fable now?” “No, no, no!” said the dying man. “And what do you see?” “Land ahead!” said the old man. They were his last words. Such were the men of this Great Revival; so they lived their lives of faithful usefulness, and so they passed away.

CHAPTER VIII
A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS.

If we were writing a sustained history of the Revival, we might devote some pages, at this period, to notice the varied forms of satire and ribaldry by which it was greeted. While the noble bands of preachers were pursuing their way, instructing and awakening the popular mind of the country, not only heartless and affected dilettanti, like Horace Walpole, regarded it with the condescension of their supercilious sneers, but for the more popular taste there was The Spiritual Quixote, a book which even now has its readers, and in which Whitefield and his followers were held up to ridicule; and Lackington, the great bookseller, in his disgraceful, but entertaining autobiography, attempted to cover the Societies of Wesley with his scurrility. It was about the year 1750 that The Minor was brought out on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre; the author was that great comedian, but most despicable and dissolute character, Foote. The play lies before us as we write; we have taken it down to notice the really shameless buffoonery and falsehood in which it indulges. Whitefield is especially libelled and burlesqued. The Countess of Huntingdon waited personally on the Lord Chamberlain, and besought him to suppress it; it was not much to the credit of his lordship’s knowledge, that he declared, had he known the evil influence of the thing before it was licensed, it should not have been produced, but being licensed, it was beyond his control. Then the good Countess waited on David Garrick; Garrick knew and admired Whitefield; he received her with distinguished kindness and respect, and it is to his honour that, through his influence, it was temporarily suppressed. It seems a singular compensation that the author of this piece, who permitted himself to indulge in the most disgraceful insinuations against one of the holiest and purest of men, a few years after was charged with a great crime, of which he was, no doubt, quite innocent, and died a broken-hearted and beggared man.

Another of these disgraceful stage libels, The Hypocrite, appeared at Drury Lane in 1768; in it are the well-known characters of Dr. Cantwell, and Mawworm, and old Lady Lambert. There is more of a kind of genius in it than in The Minor, but it was all stolen property, and little more than an appropriation from Molière’s Tartuffe and Cibber’s Nonjuror. All these things are forgotten now; but they are worthy of notice as entering into the history of the Revival, and showing the malice which was stirred in multitudes of minds against men and designs, on the whole, so innocent and holy. Was it not written from of old, “The carnal mind is enmity against God”?

But as to the movement itself, companions-in-arms, and of a very high order alike for valour and character, crowded to the field; we have referred to several distinguished laymen; it is at least equally important to notice that while the leaders of the Church were, as a body, set in array against it—while archbishops and bishops of that day frowned, or scoffed and scorned, there were a number of clergymen whose piety, whose wit and eloquence, whose affluent humour, whose learning, whose intrepidity and sleepless variety of labour, surround their names, even now as then, with a charm of interest, making every life as it comes before us a readable and delightful recreation. Some of them were assuredly oddities; it is not long since we made a pilgrimage to Everton, in Bedfordshire, to read the singular epitaph, on the tomb in the churchyard, of one of the oddest and most extraordinary of all these men. Even if our readers have read that epitaph, it will do them no harm to read it again:

Here lie

The earthly remains of

John Berridge,