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Title: The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America
Author: Hood, Edwin Paxton
Language: English
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The Great Revival.—Frontispiece.
[Illustration:
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.
--------------
CHAP. PAGE.
I. THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN 7
II. FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN 24
III. OXFORD: NEW LIGHTS AND OLD LANTERNS 48
IV. CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE 68
FIELDS
V. THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE 86
VI. THE SINGERS OF THE REVIVAL 109
VII. LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS 132
VIII. A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS 154
IX. BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS 180
X. THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL—ROBERT 193
RAIKES
XI. THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD 216
XII. MISSIONARY SOCIETIES 250
XIII. AFTERMATH 260
XIV. REVIVAL IN THE NEW WORLD 281
APPENDICES 303
INDEX 321
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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 _m_any 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_.
Footnote 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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.
Footnote 5:
Appendix E.
Footnote 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?
[Illustration:
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.
Footnote 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.
[Illustration:
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!”
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.
Footnote 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.
[Illustration:
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.
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 10:
See Appendix
Footnote 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.
Footnote 12:
See Appendix.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.”
[Illustration:
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,
Late Vicar of Everton,
And an itinerant servant of Jesus Christ,
Who loved his Master, and His work,
And after running on His errands many years,
Was called up to wait on Him above.
Reader,
Art thou born again?
No salvation without a New Birth!
I was born in sin, February, 1716,
Remained ignorant of my fallen state till 1730,
Lived proudly on Faith and Works for Salvation
Till 1751.
Was admitted to Everton Vicarage, 1755.
Fled to Jesus alone for refuge, 1756.
Fell asleep in Christ Jesus, January 22, 1793.
With the exception of the date of his death, it was written by the hand
that moulders beneath the stone; it is characteristic that its writer
caused himself to be buried in that part of the churchyard where, up to
that time, only those had been interred who had destroyed themselves, or
come to an ignominious end. Before his death he had often said that he
would take this effectual means of consecrating that unhallowed spot.
This epitaph sufficiently shows that John Berridge was an original
character. Southey says of him that he was a buffoon and a fanatic.
Southey’s judgments about the men of the Revival were frequently as
shallow as they were unjust; he must have felt a sharp sting when, as
doubtless was the case, he heard the well-known anecdote of George IV.,
who, on reading Richard Watson’s calm reply to Southey’s attacks on the
Methodist leaders, exclaimed, as he laid down the book, “Oh, my poor
Poet Laureate!” He deserved all that and a good deal more, if only for
the verdict we have quoted on Berridge. So far as scholarship may test a
man, John Berridge was most likely a far deeper scholar than Dr.
Southey; he was a distinguished member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and for
many years read and studied fourteen hours a day; but he was an
uncontrollable droll and humourist; pithy proverbs fell spontaneously
along all his speech. As one critic says of his style, “It was like
granulated salt.” As a preacher, he was equal to any multitudes; he
lived among farmers and graziers, and the twinkling of his eye, all
alive with shrewd cheerfulness, compelled attention even before he
opened his lips. The late Dr. Guthrie, not long before his death,
thought it worth his while to republish _The Christian World Unmasked;
pray Come and Peep_; and it is characteristic of Berridge throughout.
After his conversion, his Bishop called him up and threatened to send
him to gaol for preaching out of his parish. Our readers may imagine
with such a man what sort of conference it was, and which of the two
would be likely to get the worst of it: “I tell you,” said the Bishop,
“if you continue preaching where you have no right, you are very likely
to be sent to Huntingdon Gaol.” “I have no more regard for a gaol than
other folks,” said he; “but I would rather go there with a good
conscience than be at liberty without one.” The conference is too long
for quotation, but Berridge held on his way; he became one of the most
beloved and intimate friends of the Countess of Huntingdon; and if he
shocked his bishop by preaching out of his own parish, he must have
roused his wrath by preaching in her ladyship’s chapel in London, and
throughout the country. His letters to the Countess are as
characteristic as his speech, or any other of his writings. Thus he
writes to her about young Rowland Hill, “I find you have got honest
Rowland down to Bath; he is a pretty young spaniel, fit for land or
water, and he has a wonderful yelp; he forsakes father and mother and
brethren, and gives up all for Jesus, and I believe he will prove a
useful labourer if he keeps clear of petticoat snares.” No doubt,
Berridge sometimes seemed not only racy, but rude; but his words were
wonderfully calculated to meet the average and level of an immense
congregation. While he lived on terms of fellowship with all the great
leaders of the movement, he was faithful as the vicar of his own parish,
and was the apostle of the whole region of Bedfordshire.
With all his shrewd worldly wisdom, Berridge had a most benevolent hand;
he was rich, and devoted far more than the income of his vicarage to
helping his poor neighbours, supporting itinerant ministers, renting
houses and barns for preaching the Gospel, and, however far he travelled
to preach, always disbursing his expenses from his own pocket. How he
would have loved John Bunyan, and how John Bunyan would have loved him!
It is curious that within a few miles of the place where the illustrious
dreamer was so long imprisoned, one should arise out of the very Church
which persecuted Bunyan, to do for a long succession of years, on the
same ground, the work for which he was persecuted.
[Illustration:
Haworth Church.
]
From the low Bedford level, what a flight to the wildest spot in wild
Yorkshire, Haworth, and its venerable old parish church, celebrated now
as a classic region, haunted by the memory of the author of _Jane Eyre_,
and all the Brontë family; but in the times of which we are writing, the
vicar, William Grimshaw, was quite as queer and quaint a creature as
Berridge. A wild spot now—a stern, grand place; desolate moors still
seeming to stretch all round it; though more easily reached in this day,
it must indeed have been a rough solitude when William Grimshaw became
its vicar, in 1742. He was born in 1708; he died in 1763. He was a man
something of the nature of the wild moors around him. When he became the
pastor of the parish, the people all round him were plunged in the most
sottish heathenism. The pastor was a kind of son of the desert, and he
became such an one as the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. The people
were rough, they perhaps needed a rough shepherd; they had one. The
character of Grimshaw is that of a rough, faithful, and not less
beautiful shepherd’s dog. On the Sabbath morning he would commence his
service, giving out the psalm, and having taken note of the absentees
from the congregation, would start off, while the psalm was being sung,
to drive in the loiterers, visiting the ale-houses, routing out the
drinkers, and literally compelling them to come into the parish church.
One Sabbath morning, a stranger riding through Haworth, seeing some men
scrambling over a garden wall, and some others leaping through a low
window, imagined the house was on fire. He inquired what was the matter.
One of them cried out, “The parson’s a coming!” and that explained the
riddle. Upon another occasion, as a man was passing through the village,
on the Sabbath day, on his way to call a doctor, his horse lost a shoe.
He found his way to the village smithy to have his loss repaired. The
blacksmith told him that it was the Lord’s day, and the work could not
be done unless the minister gave his permission. So they went to the
parson, who, of course, as the case was urgent and necessary, gave his
consent. But the story illustrates the mastery the vicar attained over
the rough minds around him. He was a man of a hardy mould. He was
intensely earnest. He not only effected a mighty moral change in his own
parish, but Haworth was visited every Sabbath by pilgrims from miles
round to listen to this singular, strong, mountain voice; so that the
church became unequal to the great congregations, and he often had to
preach in the churchyard, a desolate looking spot now, but alive with
mighty concourses then. It is said that his strong, pithy words haunted
men long after they were spoken, as the infidel nobleman, who, in an
affected manner, told him he was unable to see the truth of
Christianity. “The fault,” said the rough vicar, “is not so much in your
lordship’s head as in your heart.”
[Illustration:
GRIMSHAW’S HOUSE.
]
Grimshaw was the first who kindled in the wild heights of Yorkshire the
flames of the Revival. His mind was stirred simultaneously with others,
but he does not appear to have received either from Whitefield or Wesley
the impulses which created his extraordinary character, though he, of
course, entered heartily into all their work. They visited Haworth, and
preached to immense concourses there. As to Grimshaw himself, in the
most irregular manner, he preached in the Methodist conventicles and
dissenting chapels in all the country round. He effected an entire
change in his own neighbourhood. He put down the races; he reformed the
village feasts, wakes, and fairs. He was often expecting suspension, and
at last he was cited before the Archbishop, who inquired of him as to
the number of his communicants. “How many,” said his grace, “had you
when you first went to Haworth?” “Twelve.” “And how many now?” “In the
summer, about twelve hundred.” The astonished Archbishop turned to his
assistants in the examination, and said, “I really cannot find fault
with Mr. Grimshaw when he brings so many people to the Lord’s Table.”
Southey is also complimentary, in his own way, to this singular
clergyman, and says, “He was certainly mad!”
[Illustration:
William Grimshaw.
]
It was what Festus said to Paul; but the madness of the pastor of
Haworth was a blessing to the farms and cottages of those wild
moorlands. He was a child of nature in her most beautiful moods,
glorified by Divine grace. The freshness and buoyancy of the heath his
foot so lightly pressed, and the torrents which sung around him, were
but typical of his hardy naturalness and beauty of character. Truly it
has been said, it was not more natural that the gentle lover of nature
should lie at the foot of Helvellyn, than that this watchman of the
mountains should sleep at the foot of the hills amongst which he had so
faithfully laboured. He died comparatively young. His last words were
very characteristic. Robert Shaw, an old Methodist preacher, called upon
him; he said, “I will pray for you as long as I live, and if there is
praying in heaven, I will pray for you there; I am as happy as I can be
on earth, and as sure of glory as if I were in it.” His last words were,
“Here goes an unprofitable servant!”
The wild Yorkshire of that day took up the Revival with a will; and
Henry Venn, of Huddersfield, we suppose, has even transcended by his
usefulness the fame of either Berridge or Grimshaw; he was born in 1724,
and died in 1797. His life was genial and fruitful, and to his church in
Huddersfield the people poured in droves to listen to him. It has been
said his life was like a field of wheat, or a fine summer day. And how
are these to be painted or put upon the canvas? He could scarcely be
called eccentric, excepting in the sense in which earnestness, holiness,
and usefulness are always eccentric. His influence may be said, in some
directions, to continue still. He was one of the indefatigable
coadjutors of the Countess in all her work, and towards the close of his
life he came to London to throw his influence round young Rowland Hill,
by preaching for some time in Surrey Chapel.
In another district of Yorkshire, a mighty movement was going on,
commencing about 1734. Benjamin Ingham, whom we met some time since at
Oxford, as a member of the Holy Club, was living at Ossett, near
Dewsbury. He had married Lady Margaret Hastings, a younger sister of the
Countess of Huntingdon. He had received ordination in the Church of
England, but his irregularities had forced him out. Like the Wesleys, in
the earlier part of his history, he became enchanted with the devotional
life of the Moravians, and at this period he introduced with marvellous
results a modified Moravianism into the West Riding of Yorkshire. He
founded as many as eighty Societies; but he appears to have attempted to
carry out an impossible scheme, the union of the Moravian discipline and
doctrine with his idea of Congregationalism. His influence over the West
Riding for a long time was immense; but, most naturally, divisions
arose, and the purely Moravian element separated itself into its own
order of Church life, while the Methodist element was absorbed in the
great and growing Wesleyan Societies. He was a friend of Count
Zinzendorf, who was his guest for a long time at Ledstone House. The
shock which his Society sustained, and the death of Lady Margaret, his
admirable and beloved wife, were blows from which the good man never
recovered; but the effects of his usefulness continued, although he
passed; and if the reader ever visits the little Moravian Colony and
Institution of Fulneck, near Leeds, in Yorkshire, he may be pleased to
remember that this is also one of the offshoots of the Great Revival.
It is a sudden leap from the West Riding of Yorkshire to Truro, the
charming little capital of Western Cornwall. We are here met by an
imperishable and beautiful name, that of Samuel Walker, the minister; he
was born in 1714, and died in 1761. His influence over his town was
great and abiding, and Walker of Truro is a name which to this day
retains its fragrance, as associated with the restoration of his town
from wild depravity to purity and exemplary piety.
How impossible it is to do more than merely mention the names of men,
every action of whose lives was consecrated, and every breath an ardent
flame, all helping on and urging forward the great work of rousing a
careless world and a careless Church. What an influence had William
Romaine, who for a long time, it has been said, was one of the sights of
London; it was rather drolly put when it was said, “People came from the
country to see Garrick act and to hear Romaine preach!” Nor let our
readers suppose that he was a mere sensational orator; he was a great
scholar. We hear of him first as the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and
the editor of the four volumes of Calasio’s _Hebrew Concordance_; then
he caught the evangelic fire; he became one of the chaplains of the
Countess of Huntingdon, and, so far as the Church of the Establishment
was concerned, he was the most considerable light of London for a period
of nearly fifty years; and very singular was his history in this
relation, especially in some of the churches whose pulpits he filled. It
seems singular to us now how even his great talents could obtain for him
the place of morning lecturer at St. George’s, Hanover Square; but the
charge was soon urged against him that he vulgarised that most
fashionable of congregations, and most uncomfortably crowded the church.
He was appointed evening lecturer at St. Dunstan’s in Fleet Street; but
the rector barred his entrance into the pulpit, seating himself there
during the time of prayers, so that the preacher might be unable to
enter. Lord Mansfield decided that, after seven in the evening, the
church was not the rector’s, but that Mr. Romaine was entitled to the
use of it; then, at seven in the evening, the churchwardens closed the
church doors, and kept the congregation outside, wearying them in the
rain or in the cold. At length, the patience of the churchwardens gave
way before the persistency of the people and the preacher; but it was an
age of candles, and they refused to light the church, and Mr. Romaine
often preached in a crowded church by the light of one candle. They paid
him the merest minimum which he could demand, or which they were
compelled to pay; sometimes only eighteen pounds a year. But he was a
hardy man, and he lived on the plainest fare, and dressed in homespun
cloth. He was dragged repeatedly before courts of law, but he was as
difficult to manage here as in the church; he brought his judges to the
statutes, none of which he had broken. Every effort was made to expel
him from the Church, but he would not be cast out; and at last he
appears to have settled himself, as such men generally do, into an
irresistible fact. He became the Rector of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars. There
he preached those sermons which were shaped afterwards into the
favourite book of our forefathers, _The Life, Walk, and Triumph of
Faith_. Born in 1714, he died in 1795. His last years were clothed with
a pleasant serenity, although, perhaps, some have detected in his
character marks of a severity, probably the result of those conflicts
which, through so many years, he had with such remarkable consistency
sustained.
[Illustration:
ST. ANN’S, BLACKFRIARS.
]
And surely we ought to mention, in this right noble band, John Newton;
but he brings us near to the time when the passion of the Revival was
settling itself into organisation and calm; when the fury of persecution
was ceasing; Methodism was becoming even a respectable and acknowledged
fact. John Newton was born in 1725, and died in 1807. All his sympathies
were with the theology and the activities of the revivalists; but before
he most singularly found himself the Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, and
St. Mary Woolchurch, he had led a life which, for its marvellous variety
of incident, reads like one of Defoe’s fictions.
[Illustration:
St. Mary Woolnoth.
John Newton.
]
But his parlour in No. 8 Coleman Street Buildings, on a Friday evening,
was thronged by all the dignitaries of the evangelical movement of his
day. As he said, “I was a wild beast on the coast of Africa, but the
Lord caught me and tamed me; and now you come to see me as people go to
see the lions in the Tower.” A grand old man was John Newton, the young
sailor transformed into the saintly old rector; there he sat with few
traces of the parson about him, in his blue pea-jacket, and his black
neckerchief, liking still to retain something of the freedom of his old
blue seas; full of quaint wisdom, which never, like that of his friend
Berridge, became rude or droll; quietly sitting there and meditating;
his enthusiastic life apparently having subsided into stillness, while
the Hannah Mores, Wilberforces, Claudius Buchanans, and John Campbells,
went to him to find their enthusiasm confirmed. The friend of Cowper,
who surely deserves to be called the Poet Laureate of the
Revival—himself the author of some of the sweetest hymns we still sing;
the biographer of his own wonderful career, and of the life of his
friend and brother-in-arms, William Grimshaw; one of the finest of our
religious letter-writers; with capacities within him for almost
everything he might have thought it wise to undertake, he now seems to
us appropriately to close this small gallery we have attempted to
present. When the spirit of the Revival was either settling into
firmness and consolidation, or striking out into those new and
marvellous fields of labour—its natural outgrowth—which another chapter
may present succinctly to the eye, John Newton, by his great experience
of men, his profound faith, his steady hand and clear eye, became the
wise adviser and fosterer of schemes whose gigantic enterprise would
certainly have astonished even his capacious intelligence.
In closing this chapter it is quite worth while to notice that, various
as were the characters of these men, and of their innumerable comrades,
to whom we do homage, although we have no space even to mention their
names, their strength arose from the certainty and the confidence with
which they spoke; there was nothing tentative about their teaching. That
great scholar, Sir William Hamilton, says that “assurance is the
_punctum saliens_, that is the strong point of Luther’s system;” so it
was with all these men, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we
have seen;” it was the full assurance of knowledge; and it gave them
authority over the men with whom they wrestled, whether in public or
private. Whitefield and Wesley alike, and all their followers, had
strong faith in God. They were believers in the personal regard of God
for the souls of men; and every idea of prayer supposes some such
personal regard, whether offered by the highest of high Calvinists, or
the simplest primitive Methodist; the whole spirit of the Revival turned
on this; these men, as they strongly believed, were able, by the strong
attractive force of their own nature, to compel other minds to their
convictions. Their history strongly illustrates that that teaching which
oscillates to and fro in a pendulous uncertainty is powerless to reform
character or influence mind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS.
The preceding chapters have shown that the Great Revival was creating
over the wild moral wastes of England a pure and spiritual atmosphere,
and its movements and organisations were taking root in every direction.
Voltaire, and that pedantic cluster of conceited infidels, the
Bolingbrokes, Middletons, and Mandevilles, Chubbs, Woolstons, and
Collinses, who prophesied that Christian faith was fast vanishing from
the earth, were slightly premature. It is, indeed, interesting to notice
the contrast in this period between England and the then most unhappy
sister-kingdom of France: there, indeed, Christian faith did seem to be
trodden underfoot of men. While a great silent, hallowed revolution was
going on in one, all things were preparing for a tremendous revolution
in the other. It was just about the time that the Revival was leavening
English society that Lord Chesterfield summed up what he had noticed in
France, in the following words: “In short, all the symptoms which I have
ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in
government, now exist and daily increase in France.” The words were
spoken several years before that terrible Revolution came, which
conducted the King, the Queen, and almost all the aristocracy,
respectability, and lingering piety of the nation to the scaffold. It
was a wonderful compensation. A few years before, a sovereign had cast
away from his nation, and from around his throne, all the social
elements which could guard and give dignity to it; how natural, then,
that the whole _canaille_ of the kingdom should rush upon the throne of
his successor, and cast it and its occupant into the bonfire of the
Reign of Terror!
In Britain, from some cause, all was different. This period of the
Revival has been truly called the starting-point of the modern religious
history of that land; and, somehow, all things were singularly combining
to give to the nation a new-born happiness, to create new facilities for
mental growth and culture, and to enlarge and to fill their cup of
national joy. It will be noticed that these things did not descend to
the nation generally from the highest places of the land. With the
exception of the sovereign, we cannot see many instances of a lively
interest in the moral well-being of the people. Other exceptions there
were, but they were very few. From the people themselves, and from the
causes we have described, originated and spread those means which,
amidst the wild agitations of revolution, as they came foaming over the
Channel, and which were rather aided than repressed by the unwisdom of
many of the governments and magistrates, calmed and enlightened the
public mind, and secured the order of society, and the stability of the
throne.
The historians of Wesleyanism—we will say it respectfully, but still
very firmly—have been too uniformly disposed to see in their own society
the centre and the spring of all those amazing means of social
regeneration to which the period of the Revival gave birth. Dr. Abel
Stevens specially seems to regard Methodism and Wesleyanism as
conterminous. It would seem from him that the work of the
printing-office, the book or the tract society, schools and missions,
and the various means of social amelioration or redemption, all have
their origin in Wesleyanism. We may give the largest honour to the
venerable name of Wesley, and accept this history by Dr. Stevens as the
best, yet as an American he did not fully know what had been done by
others not in the Connexion. There was an immense field of Methodism
which did not fall beneath the dominion of Wesley, and had no relation
to the Wesleyan Conference. The same spirit touched simultaneously many
minds, quite separated by ecclesiastical and social relations, but all
wrought up to the same end. These pages have been greatly devoted to
reminiscences of the great preachers, and illustrations of the preaching
power of the Revival, but our readers know that the Revival did not end
in preaching. These voices stirred the slumbering mind of the nation
like a thunder-peal, but they roused to work and practical effort. The
great characteristic of all that came out of the movement may be summed
up in the often-quoted expression, “A single eye to the glory of God.”
As one of the clergymen of Yorkshire, earnest and active in those times,
was wont to say, “I do love those one-eyed Christians.”
We shall have occasion to mention the name of Robert Raikes, and that
name reminds us not only of Gloucester, but of Gloucestershire; many
circumstances gave to that most charming county a conspicuous place.
Lying in the immediate neighbourhood of Bath, it attracted the attention
of the Countess of Huntingdon. “As sure as God is in Gloucestershire,”
was an old proverb, first used in monastic days, then applied to the
Reformation time, when Tyndale, the first translator of the English New
Testament, had his home in the lovely village of North Nibley; but it
became yet more true when Whitefield preached to the immense concourses
on Stinchcombe Hill; when Rodborough and Ebley, and the valley of the
Stroud Water were lit up with Revival beacons, and when Rowland Hill
established his vicarage at Wotton-under-Edge; then, in its immediate
neighbourhood, arose that beautiful Christian worker, the close friend
of George Whitefield, Cornelius Winter; and from his labours came forth
his most eminent pupil, and great preacher, William Jay.
And the Revival took effect on distinct circles which certainly seemed
outside of the Methodist movement, but which yet, assuredly, belonged to
it; the Clapham Sect, for instance. “The Clapham Sect” is a designation
originating in the facetious and satiric brain of Sydney Smith, than
whom the Revival never had a more unjust, ungenerous, or ungracious
critic; but the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_, in which the flippant
sting of speech first appeared, years afterwards consecrated the term
and made it historical in the elegant essay of Sir James Stephen. By his
pen the sect, with all its leaders, acts, and consequences, are
pleasantly described in the _Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography_; and
surely this was as much the result of the Great Revival as the
“evangelical succession” which calls forth the exercise in previous
pages of the same interesting pen; it was all a natural evangelical
succession, that of which we have spoken before, as enthusiasm for
humanity growing out of enthusiasm for Divine truth. Men who have become
fairly impressed by a sense of their own immortality and its redemption
in Christ, become interested in the temporal well-being and the eternal
welfare of others. It has always been so, and is so still, that men who
have not a sense of man’s immortal welfare have usually cared but little
about his temporal interests. Hospitals and churches, orphanages and
missionary societies, usually grow out of the same spiritual root.
We scarcely need ask our readers to accompany us to the pleasant little
village of Clapham, and its sweet sequestered Common, then so far
removed from the great metropolis; surrounded by the homes of wealthy
men, merchants, statesmen, eminent preachers, all of them infected with
the spirit of the Revival, and all of them noteworthy in the story of
those means which were to shiver the chains of the slave, to carry light
to dark heathen minds, and to hand out the Bible to English villages and
far-off nations. We have been desirous of conveying the impression that
those were times of a singular and almost simultaneous spiritual
upheaval; it was as if, in different regions of the great lake of
humanity, submerged islands suddenly appeared from beneath the waves;
and it is not too much to say that all those various means which have so
tended to beautify and bless the world, schemes of education, schemes
for the improvement of prison discipline, schemes of missionary
enterprise for the extension of Christian influence in the East Indies,
the destruction of slavery in the West Indies, and the abolition of the
slave trade throughout the British Empire; Bible societies and Tract
societies, and, in fact, the whole munificent machinery and organisation
of our day, sprang forth from that revival of the last century. It seems
now like a magnificent burst of enthusiasm; yet, ultimately it was based
upon only two or three great elements of faith: the spiritual world was
an intense reality; the soul of every man, woman, and child on the face
of the earth had an endowment of immortality; they were precious to the
Redeemer, they ought, therefore, to be precious to all the followers of
the Redeemer. Charged with these truths, their spirits inflamed to a
holy enthusiasm by them, from parlours and drawing-rooms, from the lowly
homes and cottages of England, all these new professors appeared to be
in search of occasions for doing good; the schemes worked themselves
through all the varieties of human temperament and imperfection; but,
looking back, it must surely be admitted that they achieved glorious
results.
[Illustration:
John Thornton.
]
If the reader, impressed by veneration, should make a pilgrimage to
Clapham Common, and inquire from some one of the oldest inhabitants
which was the house in which John Shore, the great Lord Teignmouth, the
first President of the Bible Society, lived, his soul within him might
be a little vexed to be informed that yonder large building at the
extreme corner of the common, the great Roman Catholic Redemptionist
College, is the house. There, were canvassed and brooded over a number
of the schemes to which we have referred. Thither from his own house,
close to the well-known “Plough”—its site now covered by suburban
shops—went the great Zachary Macaulay, sometimes accompanied by his son,
a bright, intelligent lad, afterwards known as Thomas Babington
Macaulay. John Shore had been Governor of India, at Calcutta. On the
common resided also, for some time, William Wilberforce. These were the
great statesmen who were desirous of organising great plans, from which
the consummating prayer of David in the 72nd Psalm should be realised.
Then there was another house on the common, the mansion of John
Thornton, which seemed to share with that of Lord Teignmouth the honours
of these Divine committees of ways and means. Before the establishment
of the Bible Society, Mr. Thornton had been in the habit of spending two
thousand pounds a year in the distribution of Bibles and Testaments—a
very Bible Society in himself. It is, perhaps, not too much to say,
there was scarcely a thought which had for its object the well-being of
the human family but it found its representation and discussion in those
palatial abodes on Clapham Common. There were Granville Sharp and Thomas
Clarkson; thither, how often went cheery old John Newton, to whom, first
of all, on arriving in London, went every holy wayfarer from the
provinces, wayfarers who soon found their entrance beneath his
protecting wing, and cheery introduction to these pleasant circles.
Beneath the incentives of his animating words, the fervid earnestness of
Claudius Buchanan found its pathway of power, and _The Star of the
East_—his great sermon on “Missions to India,”—was first seen shining
over Clapham Common; and it was the same genial tongue which encouraged
that fine, but almost forgotten man, John Campbell, in the enterprise of
his spirit, to pierce into the deserts of Africa. We may notice how
great ideas perpetuate themselves into generations, when we remember
that it was John Campbell who first took out Robert Moffat, and settled
him down in the field of his wonderful labours.
Sir James Stephen, in his admirable paper, is far from exhausting all
the memories of that Clapham Sect. There was another house, not in
Clapham, but not far removed—Hatcham House, as we remember it—a noble
mansion, standing in its park, opposite where the old lane turned off
from the main road to Peckham. There lived Joseph Hardcastle—certainly
one of the Clapham Sect—Wilberforce’s close and intimate friend, a
munificent merchant prince, in whose offices in the City were held for a
long time all the earliest committee meetings of the Bible Society, the
Religious Tract Society, and the London Missionary Society, and from
whom appear to have emanated the first suggestions for the limitation of
the powers of the East India Company in supporting and sanctioning, by
the English Government, Hindoo infanticide and idolatry. Among all the
glorious names of the Clapham Sect, not one shines out more beautifully
than that of this noble Christian gentleman.
Perhaps a natural delicacy withheld Sir James Stephen from chronicling
the story of his own father, Sir George Stephen; and there was Thomas
Gisborne, most charming of English preachers of the Church of England
evangelical school; and Sir Robert Grant, whose hymns are still among
the sweetest in our national psalmody. But we can do no more than thus
say that it was from hence that the spirit of the Revival rose in new
strength, and taking to itself the wings of the morning, spread to the
uttermost parts of the earth.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X
THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL.—ROBERT RAIKES.
In the year 1880 was celebrated in England and America the centenary of
Sunday-schools. The life and labours of Robert Raikes, whose name has
long been familiar as “a household word” in connection with such
institutions, were reviewed, and fresh interest added to that early work
for the young.
[Illustration:
ROBERT RAIKES AND HIS SCHOLARS.
]
Gloucestershire, if not one of the largest, is certainly one of the
fairest—as, indeed, its name is said to imply: from _Glaw_, an old
British word signifying “fair”—it is one of the fairest, and it ought to
be one of the most famous, counties of England. Many are its
distinguished worthies: John de Trevisa was Vicar of Berkeley, in
Gloucestershire, and a contemporary with John Wyclif, and, like him, he
had a strong aversion to the practices of the Church of Rome, and an
earnest desire to make the Scriptures known to his parishioners; and in
Nibley, in Gloucestershire, was born, and lived, William Tyndale, in
whose noble heart the great idea sprang up that Christian Englishmen
should read the New Testament in their own mother-tongue, and who said
to a celebrated priest, “If God spares my life, I will take care that a
plough-boy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.” The story of
the great translator and martyr is most interesting. Gloucestershire has
been famous, too, for its contributions to the noble army of martyrs,
notably, not only James Baynham, but, in Gloucester, its bishop, John
Hooper, was in 1555 burnt to death. In Berkeley the very distinguished
physician, and first promulgator of the doctrine of vaccination, Dr.
Edward Jenner, the son of the vicar, was born; and from the Old Bell, in
Gloucester, went forth the wonderful preacher George Whitefield, to
arouse the sleeping Church in England and America from its lethargy. The
quaint old proverb to which we have already alluded—“As sure as God is
in Gloucestershire”—was very complimentary, but not very correct; it
arose from the amazing ecclesiastical wealth of the county, which was so
rich that it attracted the notice of the papal court, and four Italian
bishops held it in succession for fifty years; one of these, Giulio de
Medici, became Pope Clement VII., succeeding Pope Leo X. in the papacy
in 1523. This eminent ecclesiastical fame no doubt originated the
proverb; but it acquired a tone of reality and truth rather from the
martyrdom of its bishop than from the elevation of his predecessor to
the papal tiara; rather from Tyndale, William Sarton, and his brother
weaver-martyrs, than from its costly and magnificent endowments; from
Whitefield and Jenner rather than from its crowd of priests and friars.
Thus Gloucestershire has certainly considerable eminence among English
counties. To other distinguished names must be added that of Robert
Raikes, who must ever be regarded as the founder of Sabbath-schools. It
is not intended by this that there had never been any attempts made to
gather the children on the Sabbath for some kind of religious
instruction—although such attempts were very few, and a diligent search
has probably brought them all [?] under our knowledge; but the example
and the influence of Raikes gave to the idea the character of a
movement; it stirred the whole country, from the throne itself, the King
and Queen, the bishops, and the clergy; all classes of ministers and
laymen became interested in what was evidently an easy and happy method
of seizing upon the multitudes of lost children who in that day were
“perishing for lack of knowledge.”
Mr. Joseph Stratford, in his _Biographical Sketches of the Great and
Good Men in Gloucestershire_, and Mr. Alfred Gregory, in his _Life of
Robert Raikes_—to which works we must confess our obligation for much of
the information contained in this chapter—have both done honour to the
several humbler and more obscure labourers whose hearts were moved to
attempt the work to which Raikes gave a national importance, and which
from his hands, and from his time, became henceforth a perpetual
institution in the Church work of every denomination of Christian
believers and labourers. The Rev. Joseph Alleine, the author of _The
Alarm to the Unconverted_, an eminent Nonconformist minister of Taunton,
adopted the plan of gathering the young people together for instruction
on the Lord’s day. Even in Gloucestershire, before Raikes was born, in
the village of Flaxley, on the borders of the Forest of Dean—Flaxley, of
which the poet Bloomfield sings:
“’Mid depths of shade gay sunbeams broke
Through noble Flaxley’s bowers of oak;
Where many a cottage, trim and gay,
Whispered delight through all the way:”
in the old Cistercian Abbey, Mrs. Catharine Boevey, the lady of the
abbey, had one of the earliest and pleasantest Sabbath-schools. Her
monument in Flaxley Church, erected after her death in 1726, records her
“clothing and feeding her indigent neighbours, and teaching their
children, some of whom she entertained at her house, and examined them
herself.” Six of the poor children, it is elsewhere stated, “by turns
dined at her residence on Sundays, and were afterwards heard say the
Catechism.”
We read of a humbler labourer, realising, perhaps, more the idea of a
Sabbath-school teacher, in Bolton, in Lancashire, James Hey, or “Old
Jemmy o’ th’ Hey.” Old Jemmy, Mr. Gregory tells us, employed the working
days of the week in winding bobbins for weavers, and on Sundays he
taught the boys and girls of the neighbourhood to read. His school
assembled twice each Sunday, in the cottage of a neighbour, and the time
of commencing was announced, not by the ringing of a bell, but by an
excellent substitute, an old brass pestle and mortar. After a while, Mr.
Adam Compton, a paper manufacturer in the neighbourhood, began to supply
Jemmy with books, and subscriptions in money were given him; he was thus
enabled to form three branch establishments, the teachers of which were
paid one shilling each Sunday for their services. Besides these there
are several other instances: in 1763 the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey
established something like a Sunday-school at Catterick, in Yorkshire;
at High Wycombe, in 1769, Miss Hannah Ball, a young Methodist lady,
formed a Sunday-school in her town; and at Macclesfield that admirable
and excellent man, the Rev. David Simpson, originated a similar plan of
usefulness; and, contemporary with Mr. Raikes, in the old Whitefield
Tabernacle, at Dursley, in Gloucestershire, we find Mr. William King, a
woollen card-maker, attempting the work of teaching on a Sunday, and
coming into Gloucester to take counsel with Mr. Raikes as to the best
way of carrying it forward. Such, scattered over the face of the
country, at great distances, and in no way representing a general plan
of useful labour, were the hints and efforts before the idea took what
may be called an apostolic shape in the person of Robert Raikes.
Notwithstanding the instances we have given, Mr. Raikes must really be
regarded as the founder of Sunday-schools as an extended organisation.
With him they became more than a notion, or a mere piece of local
effort; and his position and profession, and the high respect in which
he was held in the city in which he lived, all alike enabled him to give
publicity to the plan: and before he commenced this movement, he was
known as a philanthropist; indeed, John Howard himself bears something
like the same relation to prison philanthropy which Raikes bears to
Sunday-schools. No one doubts that Howard was the great apostle of
prisons; but it seems that before he commenced his great prison crusade,
Raikes had laboured diligently to reform the Gloucester gaol. The
condition of the prisoners was most pitiable, and Raikes, nearly twenty
years before he commenced the Sunday-school system, had been working
among them, attempting their material, moral, and spiritual improvement,
by which he had earned for himself the designation of the “Teacher of
the Poor.” Howard visited Raikes in Gloucester, and bears his testimony
to the blessedness and benevolence of his labours in the prison there;
and the gaol appears not unnaturally to have suggested the idea of the
Sunday-school to the benevolent-hearted man. It was a dreadful state of
society. Some idea may be formed of it from a paragraph in the
_Gloucester Journal_ for June, 1783, the paper of which Raikes was the
editor and proprietor: it is mentioned that no less than sixty-six
persons were committed to the Castle in one week, and Mr. Raikes adds,
“The prison is already so full that all the gaoler’s stock of fetters is
occupied, and the smiths are hard at work casting new ones.” He goes on
to say: “The people sent in are neither disappointed soldiers nor
sailors, but chiefly frequenters of ale-houses and skittle-alleys.”
Then, in another paragraph, he goes on to remark, “The ships about to
sail for Botany Bay will carry about one thousand miserable creatures,
who might have lived perfectly happy in this country had they been early
taught good principles, and to avoid the danger of associating with
those who make sobriety and industry the objects of their ridicule.”
From sentences like these it is easy to see the direction in which the
mind of the good man was moving, before he commenced the work which has
given such a happy and abiding perpetuity to his name. He gathered the
children; the streets were full of noise and disturbances every Sunday.
In a little while, says the Rev. Dr. Glass, Mr. Raikes found himself
surrounded by such a set of little ragamuffins as would have disgusted
other men less zealous to do good, and less earnest to disseminate
comfort, exhortation, and benefit to all around him, than the founder of
Sunday-schools. He prevented their running about in wild disorder
through the streets. By and by, he arranged that a number of them should
meet him at seven o’clock on the Sunday morning in the cathedral close,
when he and they all went into the cathedral together to an early
service. The increase of the numbers was rapid; Mr. Raikes was looked up
to as the commander-in-chief of this ragged regiment. It is testified
that a change took place and passed over the streets of the old
Gloucester city on the Sunday. A glance at the features of Mr. Raikes
will assure the reader that he was an amiable and gentle man, but that
by no means implies always a weak one. He appears to have had plenty of
strength, self-possession, and knowledge of the world. He also belonged
to, and moved in, good society; and this is not without its influence.
As he told the King, in the course of a long interview, when the King
and Queen sent for him to Windsor, to talk over his system with him, in
order that they might, in some sense, be his disciples, and adopt and
recommend his plan: it was “botanising in human nature.” “All that I
require,” said Raikes, to the parents of the children, “are clean hands,
clean faces, and their hair combed.” To many who were barefooted, after
they had shown some regularity of attendance, he gave shoes, and others
he clothed. Yes, it was “botanising in human nature;” and very many
anecdotes show what flowers sprang up out of the black soil in the path
of the good man.
All the stories told of Raikes show that the law of kindness was usually
on his lips. A sulky, stubborn girl had resisted all reproofs and
correction, and had refused to ask forgiveness of her mother. In the
presence of the mother, Raikes said to the girl, “Well, if you have no
regard for yourself, I have much for you. You will be ruined and lost if
you do not become a good girl; and if you will not humble yourself, I
must humble myself on your behalf and make a beginning for you;” and
then, with great solemnity, he entreated the mother to forgive the girl,
using such words that he overcame the girl’s pride. The stubborn
creature actually fell on her knees, and begged her mother’s
forgiveness, and never gave Mr. Raikes or her mother trouble afterwards.
It is a very simple anecdote; but it shows the Divine spirit in the
method of the man; and the more closely we come into a personal
knowledge of his character, the more admirable and lovable it seems.
Thus literally true and beautiful are the words of the hymn:
“Like a lone husbandman, forlorn,
The man of Gloucester went,
Bearing his seeds of precious corn;
And God the blessing sent.
Now, watered long by faith and prayer,
From year to year it grows,
Till heath, and hill, and desert bare,
Do blossom as the rose.”
Mr. Raikes was a Churchman; he was so happy as to have, near to his own
parish of St. Mary-le-Crypt, in Gloucester, an intimate friend, the
Rector of St. Aldate’s—a neighbouring parish in the same city—the Rev.
Thomas Stock, whose monument in the church truly testifies that “to him,
in conjunction with Robert Raikes, Esquire, is justly attributed the
honour of having planned and instituted the first Sunday-school in the
kingdom.” Mr. Stock was but a young man in 1780, for he died in 1803,
then only fifty-four years of age; he must have been, at the time of the
first institution of Sunday-schools, a young man of fine and tender
instincts. He appears, simultaneously with Mr. Raikes’s movement, to
have formed a Sunday-school in his own parish, taking upon himself the
superintendence of it, and the responsibility of such expenses as it
involved. But Mr. Stock says, in a letter written in 1788, “The progress
of the institution through the kingdom is justly attributed to the
constant representations which Mr. Raikes made in his own paper of the
benefits which he saw would probably arise from it.” At the time Mr.
Raikes began the work, he was about forty-four years of age; it was a
great thing in that day to possess a respectable journal, a newspaper of
acknowledged character and influence; to this, very likely, we owe it,
in some considerable measure, that the work in Gloucester became
extensively known and spread, and expanded into a great movement. But he
does not appear to have used the columns of his newspaper for the
purpose of calling attention to the usefulness and desirability of the
work until after it had been in operation about three years; in 1783 and
1784, very modestly he commends the system to general adoption.
[Illustration:
Robert Raikes.
]
It is remarkable that in the course of two or three years, several
bishops—the Bishop of Gloucester, in the cathedral, the Bishops of
Chester and Salisbury, in their charges to the clergy of their
dioceses—strongly commended the plan. All orders of mind poured around
the movement their commendation; even Adam Smith, whom no one will think
likely to have fallen into exaggerated expressions where Christian
activity is concerned, said, “No plan has promised to effect a change of
manners with equal ease and simplicity, since the days of the apostles.”
The poet Cowper declared that he knew of no nobler means by which a
reformation of the lower classes could be effected. Some attempts have
been made to claim for John Wesley the honour of inaugurating the
Sunday-school system; considering the intensely practical character of
that venerated man, and how much he was in advance of his times in most
of his activities, it is a wonder that he did not; but his venerable
memory has honours, certainly, in all sufficiency. He wrote his first
commendation of Sunday-schools in the _Arminian Magazine_ of 1784. He
says, “I find these schools spring up wherever I go; perhaps God may
have a deeper end therein than men are aware of; who knows but that some
of these schools may become nurseries for Christians?” Prophetic as
these words are, this is fainter and tardier praise than we should have
expected from him; but in 1787 he writes more warmly, expresses his
belief that these schools will be one great means of reviving religion
throughout the kingdom, and expresses “wonder that Satan has not sent
out some able champion against them.” In 1788 he says: “I verily think
that these schools are one of the noblest specimens of charity which
have been set on foot in England since the days of William the
Conqueror.”
Some estimate may be formed of the rapidity with which the movement
spread, when we find that in this year, 1787, the number of children
taught in Sunday-schools in Manchester alone, on the testimony of the
very eminent John Nichols, the great printer and anecdotist, was no
fewer than five thousand. It was in this year also, 1787, that Mr.
Raikes was visiting some relatives in the neighbourhood of Windsor. He
must have attained to the dignity of a celebrity; nor is this wonderful,
when we remember the universal acceptance with which his great idea of
Sunday-schools had been honoured. The Queen invited him to visit her,
and inquired of him, he says, “by what accident a thought which promised
so much benefit to the lower order of people as the institution of
Sunday-schools, was suggested to his mind?” The visit was a long one; he
spent two hours with the Queen—the King also, we believe, being present
most of the time—not so much in expounding the system, for that was
simple enough, but they were curious as to what he had observed in the
change and improvement of the characters among whom he worked; and we
believe that it was then he told the King, in the words we have already
quoted, that he regarded his work as a kind of “botanising in human
nature;” this was a favourite phrase of his in describing the work. The
result of this visit was, that the Queen established a Sunday-school in
Windsor, and also a school of industry at Brentford, which the King and
Queen occasionally visited. It may be taken as an illustration of the
native modesty of Mr. Raikes’s own character that he never referred in
his paper to this distinguished notice of royalty.
Do our readers know anything of Mrs. Sarah Trimmer? A hundred years ago,
there was, probably, not a better-known woman in England; and although
her works have long ceased to exercise any influence, we suppose none,
in her time, were more eminently useful. Pious, devoted, earnestly
evangelical, if we speak of her as a kind of lesser Hannah More, the
remark must apply to her intellectual character rather than to her
reputation or her usefulness. Almost as soon as the Sunday-school idea
was announced, she stepped forward as its most able and intrepid
advocate; her _Economy of Charity_ exercised a large influence, and she
published a number of books, which, at that time, were admirably suited
to the level of the capacity which the Sunday-school teacher desired to
reach; she was also a great favourite with the King and Queen, and
appears to have visited them on the easy terms of friendship. The
intense interest she felt in Sunday-schools is manifest in innumerable
pages of the two volumes which record her life; certainly, she was often
at the ear of the royal pair, to whisper any good and pleasant thing
connected with the progress of her favourite thought. She repeatedly
expresses her obligation to Mr. Raikes; but her biographer only
expresses the simple truth when he says: “To Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester,
the nation is, in the first place, indebted for the happy idea of
collecting the children of the poor together on the Sabbath, and giving
them instruction suited to the sacredness of the day; but, perhaps, no
publication on this subject was of more utility than the _Economy of
Charity_. The influence of the work was very visible when it first made
its appearance, and proved a source of unspeakable gratification to the
author.”
It is not consistent with the aim of this book to enter at greater
length into the life of Robert Raikes; we have said sufficient to show
that the term which has been applied to him of “founder of
Sunday-schools,” is not misapplied. He was a simple and good man, on
whose heart, as into a fruitful soil, an idea fell, and it became a
realised conviction. Look at his portrait, and instantly there comes to
your mind Cowper’s well-known description of one of his friends,
“An honest man, close-buttoned to the chin,
Broadcloth without, and a warm heart within.”
No words can better describe him—not a tint of fanaticism seems to shade
his character; he had a warm enthusiasm for ends and aims which
commended themselves to his judgment. It is pleasant to know that, as he
lived when the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade was
commencing, he gave to the movement his hearty blessings and best
wishes. At sixty-seven years of age he retired from business; no doubt a
very well-to-do man, for he was the owner of two freehold estates near
Gloucester, and he received an annuity of three hundred pounds from the
_Gloucester Journal_. He died at his house in Bell Lane, in the city of
Gloucester, where he had taken up his residence when he retired from
active life; he died suddenly, in his seventy-sixth year, in 1811. Then
the family vault in St. Mary-le-Crypt, which sixty years before had
received his father’s ashes, received the body of the gentle
philanthropist. He had kept up his Sunday-school work and interest to
the close; and he left instructions that his Sunday-school children
should be invited to follow him to the grave, and that each of them
should receive a shilling and a plum cake. On the tablet over the place
where he sleeps an appropriate verse of Scripture well describes him:
“When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it
gave witness to me: because I delivered the poor that cried, and the
fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that
was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow’s heart to sing
for joy.”
It seems very questionable whether the slightest shade can cross the
memory of this plain, simply useful, and unostentatious man. And it
ought to be said that Anne Raikes, who rests in the same grave, appears
to have been every way the worthy companion of her husband. She was the
daughter of Thomas Trigg, Esq., of Newnham, in Gloucestershire; the
sister of Sir Thomas Trigg and Admiral John Trigg. They were married in
1767. She shared in all her husband’s large and charitable intentions,
and when he died he left the whole of his property to her. She survived
him seventeen years, and died in 1828, at the age of eighty-five.
[Illustration:
RAIKES’S HOUSE, GLOUCESTER.
]
The visitor to Gloucester will be surely struck by a quaint old house in
Southgate Street—still standing almost unaltered, save that the basement
is now divided into two shops. A few years since the old oak timbers
were braced, stained, and varnished. It is a fine specimen of the better
class of English residences of a hundred and fifty years since, and is
still remarkable in the old city, owing very much to the good taste
which governed their renovation. This was the printing-office of Robert
Raikes, a notice in the _Gloucester Journal_, dated August 19, 1758,
announcing his removal from Blackfriars Square to this house in
Southgate Street. The house now is in the occupation of Mrs. Watson. The
house where Raikes lived and died is nearly opposite. It will not be
difficult for the spectator to realise the pleasant image of the old
gentleman, dressed, after the fashion of the day, in his blue coat with
gold buttons, buff waistcoat, drab kerseymere breeches, white stockings,
and low shoes, passing beneath those ancient gables, and engaged in
those various public and private duties which we have attempted to
record. A century has passed away since then, and the simple lessons the
philanthropist attempted to impart to the young waifs and strays he
gathered about him have expanded into more comprehensive departments of
knowledge. The originator of Sunday-schools would be astonished were he
to step into almost any of those which have branched out from his
leading idea. It is still expanding; it is one of the most real and
intense activities of the Universal Church; but among the immense crowds
of those who, in England and America, are conducting Sunday-school
classes, it is, perhaps, not too much to say, that in not one is there a
more simple and earnest desire to do good than that which illuminated
the life, and lends a sweet and charming interest to the memory, of
Robert Raikes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD.
Dr. Abel Stevens, in his _History of Methodism_, says, “I congratulate
myself on the opportunity of reviving the memory of Silas Told;” and
speaks of the little biography in which Silas himself records his
adventures as “a record told with frank and affecting simplicity, in a
style of terse and flowing English Defoe might have envied.”
Such a testimony is well calculated to excite the curiosity of an
interested reader, especially as the two or three incidents mentioned
only serve to whet the appetite for more of the like description. The
little volume to which he refers has been for some years in the
possession of the author of this volume. It is indeed an astonishing
book; its alleged likeness to Defoe’s charmingly various style of
recital of adventures by sea and by land is no exaggeration, whilst as a
piece of real biography it may claim, and quite sustain, a place side by
side with the romantic and adventurous career of John Newton; but the
wild wonderfulness of the story of Silas seems to leave Newton’s in the
shade. Like Newton, Told was also a seer of visions and a dreamer of
dreams, and a believer, in special providences; and well might he
believe in such who was led certainly along as singular a path as any
mortal could tread. The only other memorial besides his own which has,
we believe, been penned of him—a brief recapitulations-well describes
him as honest, simple, and tender. Silas Told accompanied, in that awful
day, numbers of persons to the gallows, and attempted to console
sufferers and victims in circumstances of most harrowing and tragic
solemnity: he certainly furnished comfortable help and light when no
others were willing or able to sympathise or to help. John Wesley loved
him, and when Silas died he buried him, and says of him in his
_Journal_: “On the 20th of December, 1778, I buried what was mortal of
honest Silas Told. For many years he attended the malefactors in Newgate
without fee or reward; and I suppose no man, for this hundred years, has
been so successful in that melancholy office. God had given him peculiar
talents for it, and he had amazing success therein; the greatest part of
those whom he attended died in peace, and many of them in the triumph of
faith.” Such was Silas Told.
But before we come to those characteristic circumstances to which Wesley
refers, we must follow him through some of the wild scenes of his sailor
life. He was born in Bristol in 1711; his parents were respectable and
creditable people, but of somewhat faded families. His grandfather had
been an eminent physician in Bunhill Row, London; his mother was from
Exeter. * * *
Silas was educated in the noble foundation school of Edward Colston in
Bristol. The life of this excellent philanthropist was so remarkable,
and in many particulars so like his own, that we cannot wonder that he
stops for some pages in his early story to recite some of the remarkable
phenomena in Colston’s life. Silas’s childhood was singular, and the
stories he tells are especially noticeable, because in after-life the
turn of his character seems to have been especially real and practical.
Thus he tells how, when a child, wandering with his sister in the King’s
Wood, near Bristol, they lost their way, and were filled with the utmost
consternation, when suddenly, although no house was in view, nor, as
they thought, near, a dog came up behind them, and drove them clear out
of the wood into a path with which they were acquainted; especially it
was remarkable that the dog never barked at them, but when they looked
round about for the dog he was nowhere to be seen. Careless children out
for their own pleasure, they sauntered on their way again, and again
lost their way in the wood—were again bewildered, and in greater
perplexity than before, when, on a sudden looking up, they saw the same
dog making towards them; they ran from him in fright, but he followed
them, drove them out of the labyrinths, and did not leave them until
they could not possibly lose their way again. Simple Silas says, “I then
turned about to look for the dog, but saw no more of him, although we
were now upon an open common. This was the Lord’s doings, and marvellous
in our eyes.”
When he was twelve years of age, he appears to have been quite
singularly influenced by the reading of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_; and
late in life, when writing his biography, he briefly, but significantly,
attempts to reproduce the intense enjoyment he received—the book
evidently caught and coloured his whole imagination. At this time, too,
he was very nearly drowned, and while drowning, so far from having any
sense of terror, he had no sense nor idea of the things of this world,
but that it appeared to him he rushingly emerged out of thick darkness
into what appeared to him a glorious city, lustrous and brilliant, the
light of which seemed to illuminate the darkness through which he had
urged his way. It was as if the city had a floor like glass, and yet he
was sure that neither city nor floor had any substance; also he saw
people there; the inhabitants arrayed in robes of what seemed the finest
substance, but flowing from their necks to their feet; and yet he was
sensible too that they had no material substance; they moved, but did
not labour as in walking, but glided as if carried along by the wind;
and he testifies how he felt a wonderful joy and peace, and he never
forgot the impression through life, although soon recalled to the world
in which he was to sorrow and suffer so much. It is quite easy to see
John Bunyan in all this; but while he was thus pleasantly happy in his
visionary or intro-visionary state, a benevolent and tender-hearted
Dutchman, who had been among some haymakers in a field on the banks of
the river, was striking out after him among the willow-bushes and sedges
of the stream, from whence he was brought, body and soul, back to the
world again. Such are the glimpses of the childhood of Silas.
Then shortly comes a dismal transition from strange providences in the
wood, and enchanting visions beneath the waves, to the singularly severe
sufferings of a seafaring life. The ships in that day have left a grim
and ugly reputation surviving still. The term “sea-devil” has often been
used as descriptive of the masters of ships in that time. Silas seems to
have sailed under some of the worst specimens of this order. About the
age of fourteen he was bound apprentice to Captain Moses Lilly, and
started for his first voyage from Bristol to Jamaica. “Here,” he says,
“I may date my first sufferings.” He says the first of his afflictions
“was sea-sickness, which held me till my arrival in Jamaica;” and
considering that it was a voyage of fourteen weeks, it was a fair spell
of entertainment from that pleasant companion. They were short of water,
they were put on short allowance of food, and when having obtained their
freight, while lying in Kingston harbour, their vessel, and seventy-six
sail of ships, many of them very large, but all riding with three
anchors ahead, were all scattered by an astonishing hurricane, and all
the vessels in Port Royal shared the same fate. He tells how the corpses
of the drowned sailors strewed the shores, and how, immediately after
the subsidence of the hurricane, a pestilential sickness swept away
thousands of the natives. “Every morning,” he says, “I have observed
between thirty and forty corpses carried past my window; being very near
death myself, I expected every day to approach with the messenger of my
dissolution.”
During this time he appears to have been lying in a warehouse, with no
person to take care of him except a negro, who every day brought to him,
where he was laid in his hammock, Jesuit’s bark.
“At length,” he says, “my master gave me up, and I wandered up and down
the town, almost parched with the insufferable blaze of the sun, till I
resolved to lay me down and die, as I had neither money nor friend;
accordingly, I fixed upon a dunghill in the east end of the town of
Kingston, and being in such a weak condition, I pondered much upon Job’s
case, and considered mine similar to that of his; however, I was fully
resigned to death, nor had I the slightest expectation of relief from
any quarter; yet the kind providence of God was over me, and raised me
up a friend in an entire stranger. A London captain coming by was struck
with the sordid object, came up to me, and, in a very compassionate
manner, asked me if I was sensible of any friend upon the island from
whom I could obtain relief; he likewise asked me to whom I belonged. I
answered, to Captain Moses Lilly, and had been cast away in the late
hurricane. This captain appeared to have some knowledge of my master,
and, cursing him for a barbarous villain, told me he would compel him to
take proper care of me. About a quarter of an hour after this, my master
arrived, whom I had not seen before for six weeks, and took me to a
public-house kept by, a Mrs. Hutchinson, and there ordered me to be
taken proper care of. However, he soon quitted the island, and directed
his course for England, leaving me behind at his sick quarters; and, if
it should please God to permit my recovery, I was commanded to take my
passage to England in the _Montserrat_, Captain David Jones, a very
fatherly, tender-hearted man: this was the first alleviation of my
misery. Now the captain sent his son on shore, in order to receive me on
board. When I came alongside, Captain Jones, standing on the ship’s
gunwale, addressed me after a very humane and compassionate manner, with
expressions to the following effect: ‘Come, poor child, into the cabin,
and you shall want nothing that the ship affords; go, and my son shall
prepare for you, in the first place, a basin of good egg-flip, and
anything else that maybe conducive to your relief.’ But I, being very
bad with my fever and ague, could neither eat nor drink.”
A very pleasant captain, this seems, to have sailed with; but poor Silas
had very little of his company. However, the good captain and his
boatswain put their experiences together, and the poor boy was restored
to health, and after some singular adventures he reached Bristol.
Arriving there, however, Captain Lilly transferred him to a Captain
Timothy Tucker, of whom Silas bears the pleasing testimony, “A greater
villain, I firmly believe, never existed, although at home he assumed
the character and temper of a saint.” The wretch actually stole a white
woman from her own country to sell her to the black prince of Bonny, on
the African coast. They had not been long at sea before this delightful
person gave Silas a taste of his temper. Thinking the boy had taken too
much bread from the cask, he went to the cabin and brought back with him
his large horsewhip, “and exercised it,” says Silas, “about my body in
so unmerciful a manner, that not only the clothes on my back were cut to
pieces, but every sailor declared they could see my bones; and then he
threw me all along the deck, and jumped many times upon the pit of my
stomach, in order to endanger my life; and had not the people laid hold
of my two legs, and thrown me under the windlass, after the manner they
throw dead cats or dogs, he would have ended his despotic cruelty in
murder.” This free and easy mode of recreation was much indulged in by
seafaring officers in that time, but this Tucker appears to have been
really what Silas calls him, “a blood-thirsty devil;” and stories of
murder, and the incredible cruelties of the slave-trade lend their
horrible fascination to the narrative of Silas Told. How would it be
possible to work the commerce of the slave-trade without such characters
as this Tucker, who presents much more the appearance of a lawless
pirate than of the noble character we call a sailor?
Those readers who would like to follow poor Silas through the entire
details of his miseries on ship-board, his hairbreadth escapes from
peril and shipwreck, must read them in Silas’s own book, if they can
find it; but we may attempt to give some little account of his wreck
upon the American coast, in New England. Few stories can be more
charming than the picture he gives of his wanderings with his companions
after their escape from the wreck, not because he and they were
destitute, and all but naked, but because of the pleasant glimpses we
have of the simple, hospitable, home life in those beautiful old New
England days—hospitality of the most romantic and free-handed
description.
We will select two pictures, as illustrating something of the character
of New England settlements in those very early days of their history.
Silas and his companions were cast on shore, and had found refuge in a
tavern seven miles from the beach; he had no clothing; but the landlord
of the tavern gave him a pair of red breeches, the last he had after
supplying the rest. Silas goes on: “Ebenezer Allen, Governor of the
island, and who dwelt about six miles from the tavern, hearing of our
distress, made all possible haste to relieve us; and when he arrived at
the tavern, accompanied by his two eldest sons, he took Captain Seaborn,
his black servant, Joseph and myself through partiality, and escorted us
home to his own house. Between eleven and twelve at night we reached the
Governor’s mansion, all of us ashamed to be seen; we would fain have hid
ourselves in any dark hole or corner, as it was a truly magnificent
building, with wings on each side thereof, but, to our astonishment, we
were received into the great parlour, where were sitting by the fireside
two fine, portly ladies, attending the spit, which was burdened with a
very heavy quarter of house-lamb. Observing a large mahogany table to be
spread with a fine damask cloth, and every knife, fork, and plate to be
laid in a genteel mode, I was apprehensive that it was intended for the
entertainment of some persons of note or distinction, or, at least, for
a family supper. In a short time the joint was taken up, and laid on the
table, yet nobody sat down to eat; and as we were almost hid in one
corner of the room, the ladies turned round and said, ‘Poor men, why
don’t you come to supper?’ I replied, ‘Madam, we had no idea it was
prepared for us.’ The ladies then entreated us to eat without any fear
of them, assuring us that it was prepared for none others; and none of
us having eaten anything for near six and thirty hours before, we picked
the bones of the whole quarter, to which we had plenty of rich old cider
to drink: after supper we went to bed, and enjoyed so profound a sleep
that the next morning it was difficult for the old gentleman to awake
us. The following day I became the partaker of several second-hand
garments, and, as I was happily possessed of a little learning, it
caused me to be more abundantly caressed by the whole family, and
therefore I fared sumptuously every day.
“This unexpected change of circumstances and diet I undoubtedly
experienced in a very uncommon manner; but as I was strictly trained up
a Churchman, I could not support the idea of a Dissenter, although, God
knows, I had well-nigh by this time dissented from all that is truly
good. This proved a bar to my promotion, and my strong propensity to
sail for England to see my mother prevented my acceptance of the
greatest offer I ever received in my life before; for when the day came
that we were to quit the island, and to cross the sound over to a town
called Sandwich, on the main continent, the young esquire took me apart
from my associates, and earnestly entreated me to tarry with them,
saying that if I would accede to their proposals nothing should be
lacking to render my situation equivalent to the rest of the family. As
there were very few white men on the island, I was fixed upon, if
willing, to espouse one of the Governor’s daughters. I had been informed
that the Governor was immensely rich, having on the island two thousand
head of cattle and twenty thousand sheep, and every acre of land thereon
belonging to himself. However, I could not be prevailed upon to accept
the offer; therefore the Governor furnished us with forty shillings
each, and gave us a pass over to the town of Sandwich.”
Such passages as this show the severe experiences through which Silas
passed; they illustrate the education he was receiving for that life of
singular earnestness and tenderness which was to close and crown his
career; but we have made the extract here for the purpose of giving some
idea of that cheerful, hospitable, home life of New England in those
then almost wild regions which are now covered with the population of
towns.
Here is another instance, which occurred at Hanover, in the United
States, through which district Silas and his companions appear to have
been wending their way, seeking a return to England. “One Sunday, as my
companions and self were crossing the churchyard at the time of Divine
service, a well-dressed gentleman came out of the church and said,
‘Gentlemen, we do not suffer any person in this country to travel on the
Lord’s day.’ We gave him to understand that it was necessity which
constrained us to walk that way, as we had all been shipwrecked on St.
Martin’s [Martha’s (?)] Vineyard, and were journeying to Boston. The
gentleman was still dissatisfied, but quitted our company and went into
church. When we had gone a little farther, a large white house proved
the object of our attention. The door being wide open, we reasonably
imagined it was not in an unguarded state, without servants or others;
but as we all went into the kitchen, nobody appeared to be within, nor
was there an individual either above or below. However, I advised my
companions to tarry in the house until some person or other should
arrive. They did so, and in a short time afterwards two ladies, richly
dressed, with a footman following them, came in through the kitchen;
and, notwithstanding they turned round and saw us, who in so dirty and
disagreeable a garb and appearance might have terrified them
exceedingly, yet neither of them was observed to take any notice of us,
nor did either of them ask us any questions touching the cause of so
great an intrusion.
“About a quarter of an hour afterwards, a footman entered the kitchen
with a cloth and a large two-quart silver tankard full of rich cider,
also a loaf and cheese; but we, not knowing it was prepared for us, did
not attempt to partake thereof. At length the ladies coming into the
kitchen, and viewing us in our former position, desired to know the
reason of our malady, seeing we were not refreshing ourselves; whereupon
I urged the others to join with me in the acceptance of so hospitable a
proposal. After this the ladies commenced a similar inquiry into our
situation. I gave them as particular an account of every recent
vicissitude that befell us as I was capable of, with a genuine, relation
of our being shipwrecked, and the sole reasons of our travelling into
that country; likewise begged that they would excuse our impertinence,
as they were already informed of the cause; we were then emboldened to
ask the ladies if they could furnish us with a lodging that evening.
They replied it was uncertain whether our wishes could be accomplished
there, but that if we proceeded somewhat farther we should doubtless be
entertained and genteelly accommodated by their brother—a Quaker—whose
house was not more than a distance of seven miles. We thanked the
ladies, and set forward, and at about eight o’clock arrived at their
brother’s house. Fatigued with our journey, we hastened into the parlour
and delivered our message; whereupon a gentleman gave us to understand,
by his free and liberal conduct, that he was the Quaker referred to by
the aforesaid ladies, who, total strangers as we were, used us with a
degree of hospitality impossible to be exceeded; indeed, I could venture
to say that the accommodations we met with at the Quaker’s house, seeing
they were imparted to us with such affectionate sympathy, greatly
outweighed those we formerly experienced.
“After our banquet, the gentleman took us up into a fine spacious
bed-chamber, with desirable bedding and very costly chintz curtains. We
enjoyed a sound night’s rest, and arose between seven and eight the next
morning, and were entertained with a good breakfast; returned many
thanks for the unrestrained friendship and liberality, and departed
therefrom, fully purposed to direct our course for Boston, which was not
more than seven miles farther. Here all the land was strewed with
plenty, the orchards were replete with apple-trees and pears; they had
cider-presses in the centre of their orchards, and great quantities of
fine cider, and any person might become a partaker thereof for the mere
trouble of asking. We soon entered Boston, a commodious, beautiful city,
with seventeen spired meetings, the dissenting religion being then
established in that part of the world. I resided here for the space of
four months, and lodged with Captain Seaborn at Deacon Townshend’s;
deacon of the North Meeting, and by trade a blacksmith.” He gives a
glowing and beautiful description of the high moral and religious
character of Boston; here also he met with a stroke of good fortune in
receiving some arrears of salvage for a vessel he had assisted in saving
before his last wreck. Such are specimens of the interest and
entertainment afforded in the earlier parts of this pleasant piece of
autobiography. But we must hasten past his adventures, both in the
island of Antigua and among the islands of the Mediterranean.
It is not wonderful that the great sufferings and toils of Silas should,
even at a very early period of life, prostrate his health, and subject
him to repeated vehement attacks of illness. He was but twenty-three
when he married; still, however, a sailor, and destined yet for some
wild experiences on the seas. Not long, however. A married life disposed
him for a home life, and he accepted, while still a very young man, the
position of a schoolmaster, beneath the patronage of a Lady Luther, in
the county of Essex. He was not in this position very long. Silas,
although an unconverted man, must have had strong religious feelings;
and the clergyman of the parish, fond of smoking and drinking with
him—and it may well be conceived what an entertaining companion Silas
must have been in those days, with his budget of adventures—ridiculed
him for his faith in the Scriptures and his belief in Bible theology.
This so shocked Silas, that, making no special profession of religion,
he yet separated himself from the clergyman’s company, and shortly after
he left that neighbourhood, and again sought his fortune, but without
any very cheerful prospects, in London.
It was in 1740 that a young blacksmith introduced him to the people whom
he had hitherto hated and despised—the Methodists. He heard John Wesley
preach at the Foundry in the Moor Fields from the text, “I write unto
you, little children, for your sins are forgiven you.” This set his soul
on fire; he became a Methodist, notwithstanding the very vehement
opposition of his wife, to whom he appears to have been very tenderly
attached, and who herself was a very motherly and virtuous woman, but
altogether indisposed to the new notions, as many people considered
them. He improved in circumstances, and became a responsible managing
clerk on a wharf at Wapping. While there Mr. Wesley repeatedly and
earnestly pressed him to take charge of the charity school he had
established at the Foundry. After long hesitation he did so; and it was
here that while attending a service at five o’clock in the morning, he
heard Mr. Wesley preach from the text, “I was sick, and in prison, and
ye visited me not.” By a most remarkable application of this charge to
himself, Silas testifies that his mind was stirred with a strange
compunction, as he thought that he had never cared for, or attempted to
ameliorate the condition, or to minister to the souls of the crowds of
those unhappy malefactors who then almost weekly expiated their
offences, very often of the most trivial description, on the gallows. It
seems that the hearing that sermon proved to be a most remarkable
turning-point in the life of Silas. Through it he became most eminently
useful during a very remarkable and painful career; and his after-life
is surrounded by such a succession of romantic incidents that they at
once equal, if they do not transcend, and strangely contrast with his
wild adventures on the seas.
And here we may pause a moment to reflect how every man’s work derives
its character from what he was before. What thousands of sailors, in
that day, passed through all the trials which Silas passed, leaving them
still only rough sailor men! In him all the roughness seemed only to
strike down to depths of wonderful compassion and tenderness. Singular
was the university in which he graduated to become so great and powerful
a preacher! How he preached we do not know, but his words must have been
warm and touching, faithful and loving, judging from their results; and
as to his pulpit, we do not hear that it was in chapels or churches—his
audience was very much confined to the condemned cell, and to the cart
from whence the poor victims were “turned off,” as it was called in
those days. In this work he found his singular niche. How long it often
takes for a man to find his place in the work that is given him to do;
and when the place is found, sometimes, how long it takes to fit nicely
and admirably into the work itself! what sharp angles have, to be rubbed
away, what difficulties to be overcome! It is wonderful, with all the
horrible experiences through which this man had passed, and spectacles
of cruelty so revolting that they seem almost to shake our faith, not
merely in man, but even in a just and overruling God, that every
sentiment of religion and tenderness had not been eradicated from his
nature; but it would appear that the old gracious influences of
childhood—the days of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and the wonderful vision
when drowning beneath the waters, had never been effaced through all his
strange and chequered career, although certainly not untainted by the
sins of the ordinary sailor’s life. The work in which he was now to be
engaged needed a very tender and affectionate nature; but ordinary
tenderness starts back and is repelled by cruel and repulsive scenes.
Told’s education on the seas, like that of a surgeon in a hospital,
enabled him to look on harrowing sights of suffering without wincing, or
losing in his tender interest his own self-possession.
It ought not to be forgotten that John Howard, the great prison
philanthropist, belongs to the epoch of the Great Revival. Of him Edmund
Burke said, “He had visited all Europe in a circumnavigation of charity,
not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of
temples; not to collect medals or to collate manuscripts, but to dive
into the depths of dungeons and to plunge into the infections of
hospitals.” About the year 1760,[13] when he began his consecrated work,
Silas Told, as a prison philanthropist upon a smaller, but equally
earnest scale, attempted to console the prisoners of Newgate.
Footnote 13:
See Appendix.
Shortly after hearing that sermon to which we have alluded, a messenger
came to him at the school to tell him that there were ten malefactors
lying under sentence of death in Newgate, some of them in a state of
considerable terror and alarm, and imploring him to find some one to
visit them. Here was the call to the work. The coincidences were
remarkable: John Wesley’s sermon, his own aroused and tender state of
mind produced by the sermon, and the occasion for the active and
practical exercise of his feeling. So opportunities would meet us of
turning suggestions into usefulness, if we watched for them.
The English laws were barbarous in those days; truly it has been said
that a fearfully heavyweight of blood rests upon the conscience of
England for the state of the law in those times. Few of those who have
given such honour to the noble labours of John Howard and the loving
ministrations of Elizabeth Fry ever heard of Silas Told. In a smaller
sphere than the first of these, and in a much more intensely painful
manner than the second, he anticipated the labours of both. He instantly
responded to this first call to Newgate. Two of the ten malefactors were
reprieved; he attended the remaining eight to the gallows. He had so
influenced the hearts of all of them in their cell that their obduracy
was broken down and softened—so great had been his power over them, that
locked up together in one cell the night before their execution, they
had spent it in prayer and solemn conversation. “At length they were
ordered into the cart, and I was prevailed upon to go with them. When we
were in the cart I addressed myself to each of them separately. The
first was Mr. Atkins, the son of a glazier in the city, a youth nineteen
years of age. I said to him, ‘My dear, are you afraid to die?’ He said,
‘No, sir; really I am not.’ I asked him wherefore he was not afraid to
die? and he said, ‘I have laid my soul at the feet of Jesus, therefore I
am not afraid to die.’ I then spake to Mr. Gardner, a journeyman
carpenter; he made a very comfortable report of the true peace of God
which he found reigning in his heart. The last person to whom I spoke
was one Thompson, a very illiterate young man; but he assured me he was
perfectly happy in his Saviour, and continued so until his last moments.
This was the first time of my visiting the malefactors in Newgate, and
then it was not without much shame and fear, because I clearly perceived
the greater part of the populace considered me as one of the sufferers.”
The most remarkable of this cluster was one John Lancaster—for what
offence he was sentenced to death does not appear; but the entire
account Silas gives of him, both in the prison and at the place of
execution, exhibits a fine, tender, and really holy character. The
attendant sheriff himself burst into tears before the beautiful
demeanour of this young man. However, so it was, that he was without any
friend in London to procure for his body a proper interment; and the
story of Silas admits us into a pretty spectacle of the times. After the
poor bodies were cut down, Lancaster’s was seized by a surgeons’ mob,
who intended to carry it over to Paddington. It was Silas’s first
experience, as we have seen; and he describes the whole scene as rather
like a great fair than an awful execution. In this confusion the body of
Lancaster had been seized, the crowd dispersed—all save some old woman,
who sold gin, and Silas himself, very likely smitten into extraordinary
meditation by a spectacle so new to him—when a company of eight sailors
appeared on the scene, with truncheons in their hands, who said they had
come to see the execution, and gazed with very menacing faces on the
vacated gallows from whence the bodies had been cut down. “Gentlemen,”
said the old woman, “I suppose you want the man that the surgeons have
got?” “Ay,” said the sailors, “where is he?” The old woman gave them to
understand that the body had been carried away to Paddington, and she
pointed them to the direct road. Away the sailors hastened—it may be
presumed that Lancaster was a sailor, and some old comrade of these men.
They demanded his body from the surgeons’ mob, and obtained it. What
they intended to do with it scarcely transpires; it is most likely that
they had intended a rescue at the foot of the gallows, and arrived too
late. However, hoisting it on their shoulders, away they marched with it
off to Islington, and thence round to Shoreditch; thence to a place
called Coventry’s Fields. By this time they were getting fairly wearied
out with their burden, and by unanimous consent they agreed to lay it on
the step of the first door they came to: this done, they started off. It
created some stir in the street, which brought down an old woman who
lived in the house to the step of the door, and who exclaimed, as she
saw the body, in a loud, agitated voice, “Lord! this is my son John
Lancaster!” It is probable that the old woman was a Methodist, for to
Silas Told and the Methodists she was indebted for a decent and
respectable burial for her son in a good strong coffin and decent
shroud. Silas and his wife went to see him whilst he was lying so,
previous to his burial. There was no alteration of his visage, no marks
of violence, and says Told, “A pleasant smile appeared on his
countenance, and he lay as in sweet sleep.” A singularly romantic story,
for it seems the sailors did not know at all to whom he belonged; and
what an insight into the social condition of London at that time!
Told did not give up his connection with his school at the Foundry, but
he devoted himself, sanctioned by John Wesley and his Church fellowship,
to the preaching and ministering to all the poor felons and malefactors
in London, including also, in this exercise of love, the work-houses for
twelve miles round London; he believed he had a message of tender
sympathy for those who were of this order, “sick and in prison.” It
seems strange to us, who know how much he had suffered himself, that the
old sailor possessed such a loving, tender, and affectionate heart; and
yet he tells how, in the earlier part of these very years, he was
haunted by irritating doubts and alarms: then came to him old mystical
revelations, such as those he had known when drowning, reminding us of
similar instances in the lives of John Howe and John Flavel; and the
noble man was strengthened.
He went on for twenty years in the way we have described; and the
interest of his autobiography compels the wish that it were much longer;
for, of course, the largest amount of his precious life of labour was
not set down, and cannot be recalled; and readers who are fond of
romance will find his name in connection with some of the most
remarkable executions of his time.
A singular circumstance was this: Four gentlemen—Mr. Brett, the son of
an eminent divine in Dublin; Whalley, a gentleman of considerable
fortune, possessed of three country-seats of his own; Dupree, “in every
particular,” says Silas, “a complete gentleman;” and Morgan, an officer
on board one of His Majesty’s ships of war—after dinner, upon the
occasion of their being at an election for the members for Chelmsford,
proposed to start forth, and, by way of recreation, rob somebody on the
highway. Away they went, and chanced upon a farmer, whom they eased of a
considerable sum of money. The farmer followed them into Chelmsford;
they were all secured, and next day removed to London; they took their
trials, and were sentenced, and left for execution. Told visited them
all in prison. Morgan was engaged to be married to Lady Elizabeth
Hamilton, the sister of the Duke of Hamilton. She repeatedly visited her
affianced husband in the cell, and Told was with them at most of their
interviews. It was supposed that, from the rank of the prisoners, and
the character of their offence, there would be no difficulty in
obtaining a reprieve; but the King was quite inexorable; he said, “his
subjects were not to be in bodily fear in order that men might gratify
their drunken whims.” Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, however, thrust herself
several times before the King; wept, threw herself on her knees, and
behaved altogether in such a manner that the King said, “Lady Betsy,
there is no standing your importunity any further; I will spare his
life, but on one condition—that he is not acquainted therewith until he
arrives at the place of execution;” and it was so. The other three
unfortunates were executed, and Lady Elizabeth, in her coach, received
her lover into it as he stepped from the cart. It is a sad story, but it
must have been a sweet satisfaction to the lady.
Far more dreadful were some cases which engaged the tender heart of
Silas. A young man, named Coleman, was tried for an aggravated assault
on a young woman. The young woman herself declared that Coleman was not
the man; but he had enemies who pressed apparent circumstances against
him, and urged them on the young woman, to induce her to change her
opinion. She never wavered; yet, singular to say, he was convicted and
executed. A short time after the real criminal was discovered, by his
own confession; he was also tried, condemned, and executed, and the
perjured witnesses against poor Coleman sentenced to stand in the
pillory.
But one of the most pitiful and dreadful cases in Silas Told’s
experience was that of Mary Edmondson, a sweet young girl, tried upon
mere circumstantial evidence, and executed on Kennington Common, for the
supposed murder of her aunt at Rotherhithe. She appears to have been
most brutally treated; the mob believed her to be guilty, and received
her with shocking execrations. Whether Silas had a prejudice against her
or not, we cannot say; it is not likely that he had a prejudice against
any suffering soul; but it so happened, he says, as he had not visited
her in her imprisonment, so he entertained no idea of seeing her suffer.
But as he was passing through the Borough, a pious cheesemonger, named
Skinner, called him into his shop, tenderly expressed deep interest in
her present and future state, and besought him to see her; so his first
interview with her was only just as she was going forth to her sad end.
Silas shall tell the story himself: “When she was brought into the room,
she stood with her back against the wainscot, but appeared perfectly
resigned to the will of God. I then addressed myself to her, saying, ‘My
dear, for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake, for the sake of your own
precious soul, do not die with a lie in your mouth; you are, in a few
moments, to appear in the presence of the holy God, who is of purer eyes
than to behold iniquity. Oh, consider what an eternity of misery must be
the position of all who die in their sins!’ She heard me with much
meekness and simplicity, but answered that she had already advanced the
truth, and must persevere in the same spirit to her last moments.”
Efforts were made to prevent Told from accompanying her any farther, and
the rioters were so exasperated against her that Told seems only to have
been safe by keeping near to the sheriff along the whole way. The
sheriff also told him that he would be giving a great satisfaction to
the whole nation, could he only bring her to a confession. “Now, as we
were proceeding on the road, the sheriff’s horse being close to the
cart, I looked up at her from under the horse’s bridle, and I said, ‘My
dear, look to Jesus.’ This quickened her spirit, insomuch that although
she had not looked about her before, she turned herself round to me, and
said, ‘Sir, I bless God I can look to Jesus—to my comfort.’”
Arrived at the place of execution, he spoke to her again solemnly, “Did
you not commit the act? Had you no concern therein? Were you not
interested in the murder?” She said, “I am as clear of the whole affair
as I was the day my mother brought me into the world.” She was very
young, she had all the aspects of innocence about her. The sheriff burst
into tears, and turned his head away, exclaiming, “Good God! it is a
second Coleman’s case!”
At this moment her cousin stepped up into the cart, and sought to kiss
her. She turned her face away, and pushed him off. She had before
charged him with being the murderer—and he was. When subsequently taken
up for another crime, he confessed the committal of this. Her aunt had
left to Mary, in the event of her death, more money than to this wretch.
The executioner drew the cart away, and Mary’s body—leaning the poor
head, in her last moments, on Silas’s shoulder—dear old Silas, her only
comfort in that terrible hour—fell into the arms of death. But he tells
how she was cold and still before the cart was drawn away.
But perhaps a still more pitiful case was that of poor Anderson, who was
hanged for stealing sixpence: he was a labouring man, and had been of
irreproachable character. He and his wife—far gone with child—were
destitute of money, clothes, and food. He said to his wife, “My dear, I
will go out, down to the quays; it may be that the Lord will provide me
with a loaf of bread.” All his efforts were fruitless, but passing
through Hoxton Fields, he met two washerwomen. He did not bid them stop,
but he said to one, “Mistress, I want money.” She gave him twopence. He
said to the other, “You have money, I know you have.” She said, “I have
fourpence.” He took that. Insensible of what might follow, as of what he
had done, he walked down into Old Street: there, the two women having
followed him gave him in charge of a constable. He was tried, sentenced
to death, and for this he died. “Never,” says Told, “through the years I
have attended the prisoners, have I seen such meek, loving, patient
spirits as this man and his wife.” Told attended him to execution, and
sought to comfort the poor fellow by promising him to look after his
wife; and most tenderly did Told and his wife redeem the promise, for
they took her for a short time into their own home. Told obtained a
housekeeper’s situation for her, and she became a creditable and
respected woman. He bound her daughter apprentice to a weaver, and she,
probably, turned out well, although he says, “I have never seen her but
twice since, which is many years ago.”
Our readers will, perhaps, think that it is time we drew these harrowing
stories to a close; but there are many more of them in this brief, but
most interesting, although forgotten autobiography. They are recited
with much pathos. We have the story of Harris, the flying highwayman; of
Bolland, a sheriff’s officer, who was executed for forging a note,
although he had refunded the money, and twice afterwards paid the sum of
the bill to secure himself. A young gentleman, named Slocomb, defrauded
his father of three hundred pounds; his father would not in any way
stir, or remit his claim, to save him. Told attended him and thought
highly of him, not only because he expressed himself with so much
resignation, but because he never indulged a complaint against him whom
Told calls “that lump of adamant, his father.” With him was executed
another young gentleman, named Powell, for forgery. Silas Told also
attended that cruel woman, Elizabeth Brownrigg, who was executed for the
atrocious murder of her apprentices. And of all the malefactors whom he
attended she seems to us the most unsatisfactory.
We trust our readers will not be displeased to receive these items from
the biography of a very remarkable, a singularly romantic and chequered,
as well as singularly useful career. References to Silas Told will be
found in most of the biographies of Wesley. Southey passes him by with a
very slight allusion. Tyerman dwells on his memory with a little more
tenderness; but, with the exception of Stevens, none has touched with
real interest upon this extraordinary though obscure man, and his
romantic life and labours in a very strange path of Christian
benevolence and usefulness. He was known, far and near, as the
“prisoners’ chaplain,” although an unpaid one. He closed his life in
1778, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. As we have seen, John Wesley
appropriately officiated at his funeral, and pronounced an affectionate
encomium over the remains of his honoured old friend and
fellow-labourer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII
MISSIONARY SOCIETIES.
Illustrating what we have said before, it remains to be noticed, that
nearly all the great societies sprang into existence almost
simultaneously. The foremost among these,[14] founded in 1792, was the
Baptist Missionary Society. It appears to have arisen from a suggestion
of William Carey, the celebrated Northamptonshire shoemaker, who
proposed as an inquiry to an association of Northamptonshire ministers,
“whether it were not practicable and obligatory to attempt the
conversion of the heathen.” It is certainly still a moot question
whether Le Verrier or Adams first laid the hand of science on the planet
Neptune; but it seems quite certain that, when one of God’s great
thoughts is throbbing in the heart of one of His apostles, the same
impulse and passion is stirring another, perhaps others, in remote and
faraway scenes. Altogether unknown to William Carey, that same year the
great Claudius Buchanan was dreaming his divine dreams about the
conquest of India for Christ, in St. Mary’s College, Cambridge.[15]
Undoubtedly the honour of the first consolidation of the thought into a
missionary enterprise must be given to William Carey and his little band
of obscure believers.
Footnote 14:
It is not implied that these were the first modern missionary
agencies. The Moravians had already sent the Gospel into many regions.
There were Swedish and Danish Missionary Societies also at work. In
1649 a Society for Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus
Christ in New England had been formed, and about 1697 the “Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge” and the “Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Foreign Parts” were established. See page 256 and foot
note.
Footnote 15:
See Appendix.
[Illustration:
William Carey.
]
At the close of Carey’s address, to which we have referred, a collection
was made for the purpose of attempting a missionary crusade upon
Hindostan, amounting to £13 2s. 6d. = $65.60. The wits made fine work of
this: the reader may still turn to Sydney Smith’s paper in the
_Edinburgh Review_, in which the idea and the effort are satirised as
that of “an army of maniacs setting forth to the conquest of India.” But
this humble effort resulted in magnificent achievements; Carey and his
illustrious coadjutors, Ward and Marshman, set forth, and became
stupendous Oriental scholars, translating the Word of Life into many
Indian dialects. Then came tempests of abuse and scurrility at home from
eminent pens. We experience a shame in reading them; but it shows the
catholicity of spirit pervading the minds of Christ’s real followers,
that Lord Teignmouth, and William Wilberforce, and Dr. Buchanan, were
amongst the ablest and most earnest defenders of the noble Baptist
missionaries. We are able to see now that this mission may be said to
have saved India to the British Empire. It not only created the scholars
to whom we have referred, and the bands of holy labourers, but also the
sagacity of Lord Lawrence, and the consecrated courage of Sir Henry
Havelock. We are prepared, therefore, to maintain that England is
indebted more to William Carey and his £13 2s 6d. than to the cunning of
Clive and the rapacity of Warren Hastings.
Another child of the Revival was born in 1795—the London Missionary
Society. But it would be idle to attempt to enumerate the names either
of its founders, its missionaries, or their fields of labour; let the
reader turn to the names of the founders, and he will find they were
nearly all enthusiasts who had been baptised into the spirit of the
Revival—Rowland Hill, Matthew Wilks, Alexander Waugh, William Kingsbury,
and, notably, Thomas Haweis, the Rector of Aldwinckle and chaplain to
the Countess of Huntingdon. Nor must we omit the name of David
Bogue,[16] that strong and eloquent intelligence, whose admirable and
suggestive work on _The Divine Authority of the_ _New Testament_, sent
to Napoleon in his exile at St. Helena by the Viscountess Duncan, was,
after the Emperor’s death, returned to the author full of annotations,
thus seeming to give some clue to those religious conversations, in
which the illustrious exile certainly astonishes us, not long before his
departure.
Footnote 16:
See Appendix.
It is the London Missionary Society which has covered the largest
surface of the earth with its missions, and it is not invidious to say
that its records register a larger range of conquests over heathenism
and idolatry than could be chronicled in any age since the first
apostles went upon their way. We have only to remember the Sandwich
Islands,[17] and the crowds of islands in the Southern Seas, with their
chief civiliser, the martyr of Erromanga; Africa, from the Cape along
through the deep interior, with Moffatt and Livingstone, whose
celebrated motto was, “The end of the geographical feat is the beginning
of the missionary enterprise;” China and Robert Morison; Madagascar and
William Ellis, and many other regions and names to justify our verdict.
Footnote 17:
(The civilisation and Christian character of these Islands is largely,
due to the labours of the missionaries of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions.—ED.)
In 1799 the Church Missionary Society came into existence. “What!” said
the passionate and earnest Rev. Melville Horne, in attempting to arouse
the clergy to missionary enthusiasm; “have Carey and the Baptists had
more forgiven than we, that they should love more? Have the fervent
Methodists and patient Moravians been extortionate publicans, that they
should expend their all in a cause which we decline? Have our
Independent brethren persecuted the Church more, that they should now be
more zealous in propagating the faith which it once destroyed?” And so
the Church Missionary Society arose;[18] and in 1804, the Bible Society;
in 1805, the British and Foreign School Society; in 1799, the Religious
Tract Society, which, since its foundation, has probably circulated not
less than five hundred millions of publications. The Wesleyan Missionary
Society—which claims in date to take precedence of all in its foundation
in the year 1769—was not formally constituted till 1817.[19]
Footnote 18:
See Appendix
Footnote 19:
(The great missionary organizations of America belong to the early
part of this century. The First day or Sunday-school Society was
formed in 1791; the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions in 1810; the American Baptist Missionary Union in 1814;
Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society in 1819; the Philadelphia Adult
and Sunday-school Union (which, in 1824, was merged in the American
Sunday-school Union) in 1817; the Protestant Episcopal Board of
Missions in 1821. Of Continental Societies, the Moravian Missionary
Society was formed in 1732; the Netherlands Missionary Society in
1797; the Basle Evangelical Mission in 1816. Appendix.—ED.)
Every one of these, and many other such associations, alike show the
vivid and vigorous spirit which was abroad seeking to secure the empire
of the world to the cause of Divine truth and love.
And, meantime, what works were going on at home? Education and
intelligence were widely spreading; simple academies were forming, like
that founded by the Countess of Huntingdon at Trevecca, where the minds
of young men were being moulded and informed to become the intelligent
vehicles of the Gospel message—eminently that of the great and good
Cornelius Winter, in Gloucestershire; and that of David Bogue at
Gosport; while, in the north of England, arose the small but very
effective colleges of Bradford and Rotherham; and the now handsome
Lancashire Independent College had its origin in the vestry of Mosley
Street Chapel, where the sainted William Roby, as tutor, gathered around
him a number of young men, and armed them with intellectual appliances
for the work of the ministry.
Some of the earliest efforts of Methodism, and some of the most
successful, had been in the gaols, and among the malefactors of the
country—notably in the wonderful labours of Silas Told, whose
extraordinary story has been recited in these pages. Silas passed away,
but an angel of light moved through the cells of Newgate in the person
of Elizabeth Fry, as beautiful and commanding in her presence as she was
holy in her sweet and fervid zeal. Now began thoughts too about the
waifs and strays of the population—the helpless and forgotten; and John
Townshend, an Independent minister, laid the foundation of the first
Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the noble institution of London.
In the world of politics, also, the men of the Revival were exercising
their influence, and procuring charters of freedom for the mind of the
nation. Has it not been ever true that civil and religious liberty have
flourished side by side? A blight cannot pass over one without withering
the other. The honour of the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts is
due to the Great Revival: the Toleration Act of those days was really
more oppressive on pious members of the Church of England than on
Dissenters; they could not obtain, as Dissenters could, a licence for
holding religious services in their houses, because they were members of
the Church of England.
William Wilberforce owed his first religious impressions to the
preaching of Whitefield; with all his fine liberality of heart, he
became an ardent member of the communion of the Church of England. It
seems incredible to us now that he lived constantly in the
expectation—we will not say fear—of indictments against him, for holding
prayer-meetings and religious services at his house in Kensington Gore.
Lord Barham, the father of the late amiable and excellent Baptist Noel,
was fined forty pounds, on two informations of his neighbour, the Earl
of Romney, for a breach of the statute in like services. That such a
state of things as this was changed to the free and happy ordinances now
in force, was owing to the spirit which was abroad, giving not only
freedom to the soul of the man, but dignity and independence to the
social life of the citizen. Everywhere, and in every department of life,
the spirit of the Revival moved over the face of the waters, dividing
the light from the darkness, and thus God said, “Let there be light, and
there was light.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII
AFTERMATH.
The effects of that great awakening which we have thus attempted
concisely, but fairly, to delineate, are with us still; the strength is
diffused, the tone and colour are modified. One chief purpose has guided
the pen of the writer throughout: it has been to show that the immense
regeneration effected in English manners and society during the later
years of the last century and the first of the present, was the result
of a secret, silent, most subtle spiritual force, awakening the minds
and hearts of men in most opposite parts of the nation, and in widely
different social circumstances. We would give all honour where honour is
due, remembering that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from
above.” There are writers whose special admiration is given to some
favourite sect, some effective movement, or some especially beloved
name; but a dispassionate view, an entrance—if we may be permitted so to
speak of it—into the camera, the chamber of the times, presents to the
eye a long succession of actors, and brings out into the clear light a
wonderful variety of influences all simultaneously at work to redeem
society from its darkness, and to give it a higher degree of spiritual
purity and mental and moral dignity.
The first great workers were passing away, most of them, as is usually
the case, dying on Pisgah, seeing most distinctly the future results of
their work, but scarcely permitted to enter upon the full realisation of
it. In 1791, in the eighty-fourth year of her age, died the revered
Countess of Huntingdon; her last words, “My work is done; I have nothing
to do but to go to my Father!” No chronicle of convent or of
canonisation, nor any story of biography, can record, a more simple,
saintly, and utterly unselfish life. To the last unwearied, she was
daily occupied in writing long letters, arranging for her many
ministers, disposing of her chapel trusts; sometimes feeling that her
rank, and certain suppositions as to the extent of her wealth, made her
an object upon which men were not indisposed to exercise their rapacity.
Still, as compared with the state of society when she commenced her
work, in this her closing year, she must have looked over a hopeful and
promising future, as sweet and enchanting as the ineffably lovely
scenery upon which her eyes opened at Castle Doddington, and the
neighbouring beauties of her first wedded home.
[Illustration:
JOHN WESLEY’S TOMB, CITY ROAD, LONDON.
]
In 1791, John Wesley, in his eighty-eighth year, entered into his rest,
faithfully murmuring, as well as weakness and stammering lips could
articulate, “The best of all is, God is with us!” Abel Stevens says,
“His life stands out in the history of the world, unquestionably
pre-eminent in religious labours above that of any other man since the
apostolic age.” It is not necessary, in order to do Wesley sufficient
honour, to indulge in such invidious comparisons. It is significant,
however, that the last straggling syllables which ever fell from the pen
in his beloved hand, were in a letter to William Wilberforce, cheering
him on in his efforts for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade.
Charles Wesley had preceded his brother to his rest in 1788, in the
eightieth year of his age.
[Illustration:
JOHN WESLEY. M.A.
BORN JUNE 17, 1703; DIED MARCH 2, 1791.
CHARLES WESLEY. M.A.
BORN DECEMBER 18, 1708; DIED MARCH 29, 1788.
“THE BEST OF ALL IS, GOD IS WITH US.”
“I LOOK UPON ALL THE WORLD AS MY PARISH.”
The Wesley Monument.
]
Thus the earlier labourers were passing away, and the work of the
Revival was passing into other forms, illustrating how not only “one
generation passeth away, and another cometh,” but also how, as the
workers pass, the work abides. It would be very pleasant to spend some
time in noticing the interior of many old halls, which were now opening,
at once for the entertainment of evangelists, and for Divine service;
prejudices were dying out, and so far from the new religious life
proving inimical to the repose of the country, it was found to be
probably its surest security and friend; and while the efforts were
growing for carrying to far-distant regions the truth which enlightens
and saves, anecdotes are not wanting to show that it was this very
spirit which created a tender interest in maintaining and devising means
to make more secure the minister’s happiness at home.
From many points of view William Wilberforce maybe regarded as the
central man of the Revival in its new and crowning aspect; as he bore
the standard of England at that great funeral which did honour to all
that was mortal of his friend William Pitt, on its way to the vaults of
the old Abbey, so, as his predecessors departed, it devolved on him to
bear the standard of those truths and principles which had effected the
great change, and which were to effect, if possible, yet greater
changes. By his sweet, winning, and if silvery, yet enchaining and
overwhelming eloquence, by his conversation, which cannot have been,
from the traditions which are preserved of it, less than wonderful, and
by his lucid and practical pen, he continued to give eminent effect to
the Revival, and to procure for its doctrines acceptance in the highest
circles of society. It is perhaps difficult now to understand the cause
of the wonderful influence produced by his _Practical View of
Christianity_; that book itself illustrates how the seeds of things are
transmitted through many generations. It is a long way to look back to
the poor pedlar who called at the farm door of Richard Baxter’s father
in Eaton-Constantine, and sold there Richard Sibbs’s _Bruised Reed_, but
that was the birth-hour of that great and transcendently glorious book,
_The Saint’s Everlasting Rest_. _The Saint’s Everlasting Rest_ was the
inspiration of Philip Doddridge, and to it we owe his _Rise and Progress
of Religion in the Soul_. Wilberforce read that book, and it moved him
to the desire to speak out its earnestness, pathos, and solemnity in
tones suitable to the spirit of the Great Revival which had been going
on around him. A young clergyman read the result of Wilberforce’s wish
in his _Practical View of Christianity_, and he testifies, “To that book
I owe a debt of gratitude; to my unsought and unexpected introduction to
it, I owe the first sacred impressions which I ever received as to the
spiritual nature of the Gospel system, the vital character of personal
religion, the corruption of the human heart, and the way of salvation by
Jesus Christ.” And all this was very shortly given to the world in those
beautiful pieces, which it surely must be ever a pleasure to read,
whether, for their tender delineation of the most important truths, or
the exquisite language, and the delightful charm of natural scenery and
pathetic reflection in which the experiences of _The Young Cottager_,
_The Dairyman’s Daughter_, and other “short and simple annals of the
poor,” are conveyed through the fascinating pen of Legh Richmond.
In this eminently lovely and lovable life we meet with one on whom,
assuredly, the mantle of the old clerical fathers of the Revival had
fallen. He was a Churchman and a clergyman, he loved and honoured his
Church and its services exceedingly; but it seems impossible to detect,
in any single act of his life or word of his writings, a tinge of
acerbity or bitterness. The quiet and mellowed charm of his tracts—which
are certainly among the finest pieces of writing in that way which we
possess—appear to have pervaded his whole life. Brading, in the Isle of
Wight, has been marvellously transformed since he was the vicar of its
simple little church; the old parsonage, where little Jane talked with
her pastor, is now only a memory, and no longer, as we saw it first many
years since, a feature in the charming landscape; and the little
epitaphs which the vicar himself wrote for the stones, or wooden
memorials over the graves of his parishioners, are all obliterated by
time. Several years since we sought in vain for the sweet verse on his
own infant daughter, although about thirty-five years since we read it
there:
“This early bud, so young and fair,
Called hence by early doom,
Just came to show how sweet a flower
In Paradise should bloom.”
But these little papers of this excellent man circulated wherever the
English language was spoken or read, and the spirit of their pages
penetrated farther than the pages themselves; while they seem to present
in a more pleasant, winning and portable form the spirit of the Revival,
divested of much of the ruggedness which had, naturally, characterized
its earlier pens.
Indeed, if some generalisation were needed to express the phase into
which the Revival was passing, at this, the earlier part of the present
century, it should be called the “literary.” Eminent names were
appearing, and eminent pens, to gather up the elements of faith which
had moved the minds and tongues of men in past years, and to arrest the
conscience through the eye. This opens up a field so large that we
cannot do justice to it in these brief sketches. To name here only one
other writer;—Thomas Scott, the commentator on the Bible, and author of
_The Force of Truth_, is acknowledged to have exerted an influence the
greatness of which has been described in glowing terms by men such as
Sir. James Stephen and John Henry Newman.
[Illustration:
CHARLES SIMEON.
]
No idea can be formed by those of the present generation of the immense
influence Charles Simeon exercised over the mind of the Church of
England. He was the leader of the growing evangelical party in the
Church; his doctrines were exactly those which had been the favourite on
the lips of Whitefield, Berridge, Grimshaw, and Newton. His family was
ancient and respectable, he was the son of a Berkshire squire. He had
been educated at Eton, and afterwards at King’s College, Cambridge; he
became very wealthy. His accession to the life of the Revival seemed
like an immense addition of natural influence: he was faithful and
earnest, and, in the habits of his mind and character, exactly what we
understand by the thorough English gentleman; almost may it be said that
he made the Revival “gentlemanly” in clergymen. He opened the course of
his fifty-six years’ ministry in Cambridge amidst a storm of
persecution; the church wardens attempted to crush him, the pews of his
church were locked up, and he was even locked out of the building.
Through all this he passed, and he became, for the greater part of the
long period we have mentioned, the most noted preacher of his town and
university; and he published, certainly, in his _Horæ Homileticæ_ a
greater number of attempts at opening texts in the form of sermons, than
had ever been given to the world. Simeon devoted his own fortune and
means for the purchase of advowsons, in order that the pulpits of
churches might be filled by the representatives of his own opinions. No
history of the Revival can be complete without noticing this phase,
which scattered over England, far more extensively than can be here
described, a new order of clergyman, who have maintained in their
circles evangelical truth, and have held no inconsiderable sway over the
mind of the country.
We only know history through men; events are only possible through men,
of whose mind and activity they are the manifestation. This brief
succession of sketches has been very greatly a series of portraits
standing out prominently from the scenery to which the character gave
effect; but of this singular, almost simultaneous movement, how much has
been left unrecorded! It remains unquestionably true that no adequate
and perfectly impartial review of the Revival has ever yet been written.
[Illustration:
Boston Elm.
]
The story of the Revival in Wales, what it found there, and what it
effected, is one of its most interesting chapters. How deep was the
slumber when, about 1735-37, Howell Harris began to traverse the
Principality, exhorting his neighbours concerning the interests of their
souls! another illustration that it was not from one single spring that
the streams of the Revival poured over the land. It was rather like some
great mountain, such as Plinlimmon, from whose high centre, elevated
among the clouds, leap forth five rivers, meandering among the rocks in
their brook-like way, until at last they pour themselves along the
lowlands in broad and even magnificent streams, either uniting as the
Severn and the Wye, or finding their separate way to the ocean.
Whitefield found his way to Wales, but Howell Harris was already pouring
out his consecrated life there; to his assistance came the voice of
Rowlands, “the thunderer,” as he was called. Scientific sermon-makers
would say that Harris was no great preacher; but he has been described
as the most successful and wonderful one who ever ascended pulpit or
platform in the Principality. By the mingling of his tears and his
terrors, in seven years he roused the whole country from one end to the
other, north and south; communicating the impulse of his zeal to many
like-minded men, by whose impassioned words and indefatigable labours
the work was continued with signal and lasting results.[20]
Footnote 20:
See a series of papers on “Welsh Preaching and Preachers” in the
_Sunday at Home_, for 1876.
If the first throbbings of the coming Revival were felt in Northampton,
in America, in 1734, beneath the truly awful words of the great Jonathan
Edwards, it was from England it derived its sustenance, and assumed
organisation and shape. The Boston Elm, a venerable tree near the centre
of Boston Park, or common, whose decayed limbs are still held together
by clamps or rivets of iron, while a railing defends it from rude hands,
is an object as sacred to the traditions of Methodism in the United
States, as is Gwennap Pit to those of Methodism in Western England.
There Jesse Lee, the first founder of Methodism in New England,
commenced the work in 1790, which has issued in an organisation even
more extensive and gigantic than that which is associated with the
Conference in England. As the United States have inherited from the
mother country their language, their literature, and their principles of
law, so also those great agitations of spiritual life to which we have
concisely referred, crossed the Atlantic, and spread themselves with
power there.[21]
Footnote 21:
See Chapter XIV., The Revival in the New World.
It is not within our province to attempt to enumerate all the sects,
each with its larger or lesser proportion of spiritual power, religious
activity, and general acceptance among the people, to which the Revival
gave birth;—such as the large body of the Bible Christians of the West
of England; the Primitive Methodists of the North, those who called
themselves the New Connection Methodists, or the United Free Church
Association. All these, and others, are branches from the great central
stem. Neither is it in our province to notice how the same universal
agitation of religious feeling, at exactly the same time, gave birth to
other forms, not regarded with so much complacency;—such as the rugged
and faulty faith and following of that curious creature, William
Huntington, who, singular to say, found also his best biographer in
Robert Southey; or the strangely multifarious works and rationalistic
development of Baron Swedenborg, which have, at least, the merit of
giving a more spiritual rendering to the Christian system than that
which was found in the prevalent Arianism of the period of their
publication. Turn wherever we may, it is the same. There was a deeper
upheaving of the religious life, and far more widely spread, than
perhaps any age of the world since the time of the apostles had known
before.
A change passed over the whole of English society. That social state
which we find described in the pages of Fielding and Smollett, and less
respectable writers, passed away, and passed away, we trust, for ever.
The language of impurity indulged with freedom by the dramatists of the
period when the Revival arose, and read, and read aloud, by ladies and
young girls in drawing-rooms, or by parlour firesides, became shameful
and dishonoured. In the course of fifty years, society, if not entirely
purged—for when may we hope for that blessedness?—was purified. A sense
of religious decorum, and some idea of religious duty, took possession
of homes and minds which were not at all impressed, either by the
doctrines or the discipline of Methodism. All this arose from the new
life which had been created.
It was a fruitful soil upon which the revivalists worked. There was a
reverence for the Bible as the word of God, a faith often held very
ignorantly, but it pervaded the land. The Book was there in every parish
church, and in every hamlet; it became a kind of nexus of union for true
minds when they felt the power of Divine principles. Thus, when, as the
Revival strengthened itself, the great Evangelic party—a term which
seems to us less open to exception than “the Methodist party,” because
far more inclusive—met with the members of the Society of Friends, they
found that, with some substantial differences, they had principles in
common. The Quakers had been long in the land, but excepting in their
own persons—and they were few in number—they had not given much effect
to their principles. Methodism roused the country; Quakerism, with its
more quiet thought, gave suggestions, plans, largely supplied money. The
great works which these two have since unitedly accomplished of
educating the nation, and shaking off the chain of the slave abroad,
neither could have accomplished singly; the conscience of the country
was prepared by Evangelic sentiment. In taking up and working out the
great ideas of the Revival, we have never been indifferent to the share
due to members of the Society of Friends. We have already spoken of
Elizabeth Fry, to whom many of the princes of Europe in turn paid
honour, to whom with singular simplicity they listened as they heard her
preach. There are many names on which we should like a little to dwell;
missionaries as arduous and earnest as any we have mentioned, such as
Stephen Grellet, Thomas Shillitoe, and Thomas Chalkley. But this would
enter into a larger plan than we dare to entertain. Our object now is
only to say, how greatly other nations, and the world at large, have
benefited by the awakening the conscience, the setting free the mind,
the education of the character, by bringing all into immediate contact
with the Word of God and the truth which it unveils.
Situated as we are now, amidst the movements and agitations of uncertain
seas of thought, wondering as to the future, with strong adjurations on
every hand to renounce the Word of Life, and to trust ourselves to the
filmy rationalism of modern speculation; while we feel that for the
future, and for those seas over which we look there are no tide-tables,
we may, at least, safely affirm this, that the Bible carries us beyond
the highest water-mark; that, as societies have constructed themselves
out of its principles they have built safely, not only for eternal hope,
but for human and social happiness also; and we may safely ask human
thought—which, unaided and unenlightened by revelation, has had a pretty
fair field for the exercise and display of its power in the history of
the world—to show to us a single chapter in all the ages of its history,
which has effected so much for human, spiritual, intellectual, and
social well-being, as that which records the results of the Great
Revival of the Last Century.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV
THE REVIVAL IN THE NEW WORLD.
[BY THE EDITOR.]
The labours of Whitefield had a remarkable influence upon the extension
of the Great Revival in the colonies of America. In these days of
mammoth steamships and rapid railways, equipped with drawing-room
coaches, travelling has become a pleasant pastime; but a century and a
half ago, when the sailing vessel and the old lumbering stage-coach were
the most rapid and the chief means of public conveyance, and when these
were often uncertain and irregular, subjecting the traveller to frequent
and annoying delays, if not disappointments, it must have been a
formidable undertaking to cross the Atlantic and to journey through a
new country, almost a wilderness, such long distances as from Georgia to
Massachusetts. Yet Whitefield, with a zeal and a holy desire in “hunting
for souls,” made seven visits to America, crossing the ocean in
sailing-vessels thirteen times (“one voyage lasting eleven weeks”), and
travelled on his preaching tours almost constantly. In one of these
visits he went upwards of 1,100 miles through this then sparsely settled
country, and endured hardships and exposures from which a far stronger
and more vigorous constitution might well shrink.
As in England, so in the American colonies, the decay of vital godliness
which preceded the great awakening had been long and deep. It began in
the latter part of the 17th century, and its progress was observed with
alarm by many of the notable and godly men of the day. Governor
Stoughton, previous to resigning the pulpit for the bench, proclaimed,
at Boston, that “many had become like Joash after the death of
Jehoiada—rotten, hypocritical, and a lie!” The venerable Torrey of
Weymouth, in a sermon before the legislature, exclaimed, “There is
already a great death upon religion; little more left than a name to
live. It is dying as to the being of it, by the general failure of the
work of conversion.”
Mather, in 1700, asserts: “If the begun apostasy should proceed as fast
the next thirty years as it has done these last, it will come to that in
New England (except the gospel itself depart with the order of it) that
churches must be gathered out of churches.” President Willard also
published a sermon in the same year on “The Perils of the Times
Displayed,” in which he asks, “Whence is there such a prevalency of so
many immoralities amongst professors? Why so little success of the
gospel? How few thorough conversions to be observed; how scarce and
seldom! * * * It has been a frequent observation that if one generation
begins to decline, the next that follows usually grows worse; and so on,
until God pours out his spirit again upon them.”
It was thirty years before the dawn of the great awakening began to
appear, even in the colony of Massachusetts; but there were many godly
men in various portions of the American colonies who had not yet bowed
the knee to the Baal of worldliness, and who earnestly sought, by great
fidelity in the presentation of the truth, to arrest the evil tendency
of the times. Among them was that greatest of American theologians,
Jonathan Edwards. Beholding the melancholy state of religion, not only
at Northampton, but in the surrounding regions, and that this evil
tendency was corrupting the Church, he began to preach with greater
boldness, more especially with the purpose of keeping error out of the
Church than with the design of awakening sinners. He was a man, however,
whose convictions were exceedingly strong, and who preached the truth,
not simply for the purpose of gaining a worldly victory, but because he
loved the truth and the Spirit wrought mightily by it. A surprising work
of grace attended his preaching. There was a melting down of all classes
and ages, in an overwhelming solicitude about salvation; an absorbing
sense of eternal realities and self-abasement and self-condemnation; a
spirit of secret and social prayer, followed by a concern for the souls
of others; and this awakening was so sudden and solemn, that in many
instances it produced loud outcries, and in some cases convulsions.
Doubtless this great awakening was as much a surprise to Edwards as to
those to whom he ministered. Naturally, such a wonderful work could not
be confined to Northampton alone; it began to extend to other places in
the colony. Remarkable and widespread as this work of grace was,
however, it does not seem to have penetrated through New England
generally, until after the arrival of Whitefield. The effect of
Whitefield’s preaching in Boston, says his biographer, was amazing. Old
Mr. Walter, the successor of Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, declared
it was Puritanism revived. So great was the interest that his farewell
sermon was attended by twenty thousand persons. “Such a power and
presence of God with a preacher, and in religious assemblies,” says Dr.
Colman, “I never saw before. Every day gives me fresh proofs of Christ
speaking in him.” And this interest, great as it was, seemed, if
possible, exceeded at Northampton when Whitefield met Edwards and
reminded his people of the days of old. A like success attended
Whitefield’s ministry in the town and college of New Haven, and at
Harvard College the effect was remarkable. Secretary Willard, writing to
Whitefield, says: “That which forebodes the most lasting advantage is
the new state of things in the college, where the impressions of
religion have been and still are very general, and many in a judgment of
charity brought home to Christ. Divers gentlemen’s sons that were sent
there only for a more polite education, are now so full of zeal for the
cause of Christ and the love of souls as to devote themselves entirely
to the study of divinity.” And Dr. Colman wrote Whitefield, of
Cambridge: “The college is entirely changed; the students are full of
God, and will, I hope, come out blessings in their generation, and I
trust are so now to each other. The voice of prayer and praise fills
their chambers, and sincerity, fervency, and joy, with seriousness of
heart, sit visible on their faces.”
On his return to Boston, in 1745, Whitefield himself gives a similar
testimony in regard to the remarkable results of the Revival. He was
followed in his labours there by Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian from
New Jersey. That this was not an overdrawn picture of the work may be
inferred from a public testimony given by three of the leading ministers
in Boston, the Rev. Messrs. Prince, Webb, and Cooper. Among other
things, they said, “The wondrous work of God at this day making its
triumphant progress through the land has forced many men of clear minds,
strong powers, considerable knowledge, and firmly riveted in * * * *
Socinian tenets, to give them all up at once and yield to the adorable
sovereignty and irresistibility of the Divine Spirit in His saving
operations on the souls of men. For to see such men as these, some of
them of licentious lives, long inured in a course of vice and of high
spirits, coming to the preaching of the Word, some only out of
curiosity, and mere design to get matter of cavilling and banter, all at
once, in opposition to their inward resolutions and resistances, to fall
under an unexpected and hated power, to have all the strength of their
resolution and resistance taken away, to have such inward views of the
horrid wickedness not only of their lives but of their hearts, with
their exceeding great and immediate danger of eternal misery as has
amazed their souls and thrown them into distress unutterable, yea,
forced them to cry out in the assemblies with the greatest agonies, and
then, in two or three days, and sometimes sooner, to have such
unexpected and raised views of the infinite grace and love of God in
Christ, as have enabled them to believe in Him; lifted them at once out
of their distress; filled their hearts with admiration and joy
unspeakable and full of glory, breaking forth in their shining
countenances and transporting voices to the surprise of those about
them, kindling up at once into a flame of love to God in utter
detestation of their former courses and vicious habits,” fairly
characterises this wonderful work of God.
Gilbert Tennent, who was pressed into the field by Whitefield, was born
in Ireland, and brought to this country by his father, and was educated
for the ministry. As a preacher he was, in his vigorous days, equalled
by few. His reasoning powers were strong, his language was forcible and
often sublime, and his manner of address warm and earnest. His eloquence
was, however, rather bold and awful than soft and persuasive, he was
most pungent in his address to the conscience. When he wished to alarm
the sinner, he could represent in the most awful manner the terrors of
the Lord. With admirable dexterity he exposed the false hope of the
hypocrite, and searched the corrupt heart to the bottom. Such were some
of the qualifications of the man whom Whitefield chose to continue his
work in America. He entered on his new labours with almost rustic
simplicity, wearing his hair undressed and a large great-coat girt with
a leathern girdle. He was of lofty stature and dignified and grave
aspect. His career as a preacher in New Jersey had been remarkable, and
now in New England his ministry was hardly less successful than that of
Whitefield. He actually shook the country as with an earthquake.
Wherever he came hypocrisy and Pharisaism either fell before him or
gnashed their teeth against him. Cold orthodoxy also started from her
downy cushion to imitate or to denounce him. So testifies the author of
the “_Life and Times of Whitefield_.”
Whitefield’s first reception in New York was not particularly
flattering. He was refused the use of both the church and the
court-house. “The commissary of the Bishop,” he says, “was full of anger
and resentment, and denied me the use of his pulpit before I asked him
for it.” He replied, “I will preach in the fields, for all places are
alike to me.” At a subsequent visit he preached there seven weeks with
great acceptableness and success. Even his first labours were not wholly
in vain. Dr. Pemberton wrote to him that many were deeply affected, and
some who had been loose and profligate were ashamed and set upon
thorough reformation. The printers also at New York, as at Philadelphia,
applied to him for sermons to publish, assuring him “that hundreds had
called for them, and that thousands would purchase them.” Of his later
visit he says, “Such flocking of all ranks I never saw before.” At New
York many of the most respectable gentlemen and merchants went home with
him after his sermons to hear something more of the kingdom of Christ.
“At Philadelphia,” says Philip, in his Life and Times of Whitefield,
“his welcome was cordial. Ministers and laymen of all denominations
visited him, inviting him to preach. He was especially pleased to find
that they preferred sermons when not delivered within church walls. It
was well they did, for his fame had reached the city before he arrived
and this collected crowds which no church could contain. The court-house
steps became his pulpit, and neither he nor the people wearied, although
the cold winds of November blew upon them night after night.” Previous
to one of his visits in Philadelphia, a place was erected in which
Whitefield could preach, and its managers offered him £800 annually,
with liberty to travel six months in a year wherever he chose, if he
would become their pastor. Though pleased with the offer he promptly
declined it. He was more pleased to learn that in consequence of a
former visit there were so many under soul-sickness that even Gilbert
Tennent’s feet were blistered with walking from place to place to see
them.
Of his work in Maryland he writes, that he found those who had never
heard of redeeming grace. The harvest is promising. “Have Marylanders
also received the grace of God? Amazing love. Maryland is yielding
converts to Jesus; the Gospel is moving southwards.”
He frequently visited New Jersey (Princeton) College, and there won many
young and bright witnesses for Christ. Hearing that sixteen students had
been converted at a former visit, he again went thither to fan the flame
he had kindled among the students, and says that he had four sweet
seasons which resembled old times. His spirits rose at the sight of the
young soldiers who were to fight when he fell.
Although at times prejudice ran high against the Indians, Whitefield
espoused their cause as a philanthropist, and preached to them through
interpreters at the Indian school of Lebanon, under Dr. Wheelock, where
the sight of a promising nursery for future missionaries greatly
inspired him. And at one of the stations maintained by the sainted
Brainerd, he preached, found converted Indians, and saw nearly fifty
young ones in one school learning a Bible catechism. In the Indian
school at Lebanon he became so interested that he appealed to the public
and collected £120 at one meeting for its maintenance. Wherever he went
he saw the Redeemer’s stately steps in the great congregations which he
addressed.
If there was any one point about which Whitefield’s interest centered in
America, it was in the orphan asylum which he aided in establishing in
Georgia. This was his “Bethesda.” The prosperity of the orphan home was
engraved upon his heart as with the point of a diamond, and it was ever
vividly present to him wherever he went. At one of his visits on parting
with the inmates he says: “Oh, what a sweet meeting I had with my dear
friends! What God has prepared for me I know not; but surely I cannot
expect a greater happiness until I embrace the saints in glory! When I
parted my heart was ready to break with sorrow, but now it almost bursts
with joy. Oh, how did each in turn hang upon my neck, kiss and weep over
me with tears of joy! And my own soul was so full of the sense of God’s
love, when I embraced one friend in particular, that I thought I should
have expired in the place. I felt my soul so full of the sense of Divine
goodness that I wanted words to express myself. When we came to public
worship, young and old were all dissolved in tears. After service
several of my parishioners, all of my family, and the little children
returned home crying along the street, and some could not avoid praying
very loud. Being very weak in body I laid myself upon a bed, but finding
so many in a weeping condition I rose and betook myself to prayer again,
but had I not lifted up my voice very high the groans and cries of the
children would have prevented me from being heard. This continued for
near an hour, till at last, finding their concern rather to increase
than to abate, I desired all to retire. Then some or other might be
heard praying earnestly in every corner of the house. It happened at
this time to thunder and lighten, which added very much to the solemnity
of the night. * * * I mention the orphans in particular, that their
benefactors may rejoice at what God is doing for their souls.”
It is evident that Whitefield had a very tender heart towards all
children. One of his most effective sermons at Webb’s Chapel, Boston,
was occasioned by the touching remark of a dying boy, who had heard him
the day before. The boy was taken ill after the sermon, and said, “I
want to go to Mr. Whitefield’s God”—and expired. This touched the secret
place of both the thunder and the tears of Whitefield. He says, “It
encouraged me to speak to the little ones, but oh, how were the old
people affected when I said, ‘Little children, if your parents will not
come to Christ, do you come and go to heaven without them.’” After this
awful appeal no wonder that there were but few dry eyes.
Another remarkable evidence of the extent and power of the Revival, and
of the versatility of Mr. Whitefield’s talents, is shown in the effect
produced upon the negro mind. The intensest interest prevailed among
even the poorest slaves. Upon one occasion Whitefield was very ill, and
in the hands of the physician to the time when he was expected to
preach. Suddenly he exclaimed, “My pains are suspended; by the help of
God I will go and preach, and then come home and die!” With some
difficulty he reached the pulpit. All were surprised, and looked as
though they saw one risen from the dead. He says of himself, “I was as
pale as death, and told them they must look upon me as a dying man come
to bear my dying testimony to the truths I had formerly preached to
them. All seemed melted, and were drowned in tears. The cry after me
when I left the pulpit was like the cry of sincere mourners when
attending the funeral of a dear departed friend. Upon my coming home, I
was laid upon a bed upon the ground near the fire, and I heard them say,
‘He is gone!’ but God was pleased to order it otherwise. I gradually
recovered. At this time a poor negro woman insisted upon seeing him when
he began to recover. She came in and sat on the ground, and looked
earnestly into his face; then she said, in broken accents: “Massa, you
jest go to hebben’s gate; but Jesus Christ said, ‘Get you down, get you
down; you musn’t come here yet; go first and call some more poor
negroes.’” Many colored people came to him asking, “Have I a soul?” Many
societies for prayer and mutual instruction were set up. Mr. Seward, a
travelling companion of Whitefield,; relates that a drinking club,
whereof a clergyman was a member, had a negro boy attending them, who
used to mimic people for their diversion. They called on him to mimic
Whitefield, which he was very unwilling to do; but they insisted upon
it. He stood up and said:—“I speak the truth in Christ, I lie not,
unless you repent you will all be damned.” Seward adds, “This unexpected
speech broke up the club, which has never met since.”
At Savannah, Charleston, and other southern cities, the Great Revival
had a remarkable success. Josiah Smith, an Independent minister of
Charleston, published a sermon on the character and preaching of
Whitefield, defending his doctrines, his personal character, and
describing his manner of preaching. Of Whitefield’s power he says: “He
is certainly a finished preacher; a noble negligence ran through his
style; the passion and flame of his inspiration will, I trust, be long
felt by many. How was his tongue like the pen of a ready writer, touched
as with a coal from the altar! With what a flow of words, what a ready
profusion of language did he speak to us upon the concerns of our souls!
In what a flaming light did he set _our_ eternity before us! How
earnestly he pressed Christ upon us! The awe, the silence, the
attention, which sat upon the faces of the great audience was an
argument, how he could reign over all their powers. Many thought he
spake as never man spake before him. So charmed were the people with the
manner of his address that they shut up their shops, forgot their
secular business, and the oftener he preached the keener edge he seemed
to put upon their desires to hear him again. How awfully—with what
thunder and sound—did he discharge the artillery of heaven upon us!
Eternal themes, the tremendous solemnities of our religion were all
alive upon his tongue. He struck at the politest and most modish of our
vices, and at the most fashionable entertainments, regardless of every
one’s presence but His in whose name he spake with this authority. And I
dare warrant if none should go to these diversions until they had
answered the solemn questions he put to their consciences, our theatres
would soon sink and perish.” Mr. Smith adds that £600 were contributed
in Charleston to the orphan house.
The wonderful quickening which the Great Revival gave to benevolent and
charitable enterprises deserves at least a passing allusion. Besides
sending forth into mission work such men as David Brainerd, and even
Jonathan Edwards himself, it also laid the foundation more securely of
many of our Christian colleges, and of not a few of our orphan asylums.
Whitefield founded his Bethesda upon a tract of land covering about 500
acres, ten miles from Savannah, and laid out the plan of the building,
employed workmen, hired a large house, took in 24 orphans, incurred at
once the heavy responsibilities of a large family and a larger
institution, encouraged, as he says, by the example of Professor
Francke. Yet on looking back to this first undertaking he said: “I
forgot that Professor Francke built in a populous country and that I was
building at the very tail end of the world, which rendered it by far the
most expensive part of all his Majesty’s dominions; but had I received
more and ventured less, I should have suffered less and others more.” He
undertook to provide for his 40 orphans and 60 servants and workmen with
no fears nor misgivings of heart. “Near a hundred mouths,” he writes,
“are daily to be supplied with food. The expense is great, but our great
and good God, I am persuaded, will enable me to defray it.” He spent a
winter at Bethesda in 1764, and of the success of his orphanage he says,
“Peace and plenty reign at Bethesda; all things go on successfully. God
has given me great favour in the sight of the governor, council, and
assembly. A memorial was presented for an additional grant of land
consisting of about 2,000 acres, and was immediately complied with.
Every heart seems to leap for joy at the prospect of its future utility
to this and the neighbouring colonies.”
This great religious movement did not progress without stirring up much
bitterness. It was even asserted by President Clap, of New Haven, that
he came into New England to turn out the generality of their ministers,
and to replace them with ministers from England, Ireland, and Scotland.
“Such a thought,” replies Whitefield, “never entered my heart, neither
has, as I know of, my preaching any such tendency.” It is said of one
minister that he went merely to pick a hole in Whitefield’s coat, but
confessed that God picked a hole in his heart, and afterward healed it
by the blood of Christ. After one of his visits not less than twenty
ministers in the neighbourhood of Boston did not hesitate to call
Whitefield their spiritual father, tracing their conversion to his
preaching. These men immediately entered upon a similar work, spreading
the great awakening throughout that colony.
In the progress of this work under Whitefield and others, there were
frequent outbursts of wit and grim humor. Thus when pastors were shy of
giving Whitefield and his associates a place in their pulpits and the
people voted to allow them to preach in their churches, Whitefield said,
“The _lord_-brethren of New England could tyrannize as well as the
_lord_-bishops of Old England.” The caricatures issued from Boston in
regard to the work were designated as half-penny squibs; and a good old
Puritan of the city said, “they did not weigh much.”
Of the religion of America Whitefield writes: “I am more and more in
love with the good old Puritans. I am pleased at the thought of sitting
down hereafter with the venerable Cotton, Norton, Eliot, and that great
cloud of witnesses who first crossed the western ocean for the sake of
the sacred gospel and the faith once delivered to the saints. At present
my soul is so filled that I can scarce proceed.” Again he writes: “It is
too much for one man to be received as I have been by thousands. The
thoughts of it lay me low but I cannot get low enough. I would willingly
sink into nothing before the blessed Jesus—my all in all.” And again, “I
love those that thunder out the Word. The Christian world is in a deep
sleep, nothing but a loud voice can awaken them out of it. Had we a
thousand hands and tongues there is employment enough for them all.
People are everywhere ready to perish for lack of knowledge.” To an aged
veteran he writes from North Carolina, “I am here hunting in the
woods—these ungospelized wilds—for sinners. It is pleasant work, though
my body is weak and crazy. But after a short fermentation in the grave,
it will be fashioned like unto Christ’s glorious body. The thought of
this rejoices my soul and makes me long to leap my seventy years. I
sometimes think all will go to heaven before me. Pray for me as a dying
man, but, oh, pray that I may not go off as a snuff. I would fain die
blazing—not with human glory, but with the love of Jesus.” Such was the
spirit filling the great souls of those who were God’s instruments in
spreading the revival in America. Mr. Whitefield died at Newburyport,
Massachusetts, Sept. 30, 1770, having preached the day before at Exeter,
and his body rests in a crypt or tomb beneath the Presbyterian church at
that place.
Of the effects of the Great Revival in America, Dr. Abel Stevens says,
“The Congregational churches of New England, the Presbyterians and
Baptists of the Middle States, and the mixed colonies of the South, owe
their late religious life and energy mostly to the impulse given by his
[Whitefield’s] powerful ministrations.” * * * In Pennsylvania and New
Jersey, where Frelinghuysen, Blair, Rowland, and the two Tennents had
been labouring with evangelistic zeal, he was received as a prophet of
God, and it was then that the Presbyterian Church took that attitude of
evangelical power and aggression which has ever since characterized it.
A single incident will illustrate the effect of the Revival upon
unbelievers and skeptics. A noted officer of Philadelphia, who had long
been almost an atheist, crept into the crowd one night to hear a sermon
on the visit of Nicodemus to Christ. When he came home, his wife not
knowing where he had been, wished he had heard what she had been
hearing. He said nothing. Another and another of his family came in and
made a similar remark till he burst into tears and said, “I have been
hearing him and approve of his sermon.” He afterwards became a sincere
Christian with the spirit of a martyr.
These etchings of a few scenes and fewer facts indicate the scope, the
depth, and the sweep of the Great Revival of the 18th century in
America. No attempt has been made to sum up its results, nor has it come
within the purpose of this work to give an inward history of the
movement, nor to explain the philosophy of it. These intricate questions
may be left to philosophers; the Christian delights to know the facts;
he will cheerfully wait for the future life to unfold all the mystery
and philosophy of the plan and work of salvation. Then, as Whitefield
exclaims, “What amazing mysteries will be unfolded when each link in the
golden chain of providence and grace shall be seen and scanned by
beatified spirits in the kingdom of heaven! Then all will appear
symmetry and harmony, and even the most intricate and seemingly most
contrary dispensations, will be evidenced to be the result of infinite
and consummate wisdom, power, and love. Above all, there the believer
will see the infinite depths of that mystery of godliness, ‘God
manifested in the flesh,’ and join with that blessed choir, who, with a
restless unweariedness, are ever singing the song of Moses and the
Lamb.”
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APPENDIX A (PAGES 9 AND 97).
The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from
the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not
content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence,
they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for
whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too
minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was, with them, the
great end of existence. They rejected, with contempt, the ceremonious
homage which other sects substituted for the pure worship of the soul.
Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an
obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on his intolerable brightness,
and to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt
for terrestrial distinctions. The difference between the greatest and
the meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the
boundless interval which separated the whole race from Him on whom their
own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority
but His favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the
accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were
unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply
read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the
registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their
steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of
ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not
made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade
away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles or priests they looked
down with contempt, for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious
measure, and eloquent in a more sublime language—nobles by right of an
earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The
very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible
importance belonged, on whose slightest action the spirits of light and
darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been destined, before
Heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue
when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which
short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained
on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and
decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed His will by the pen of
the Evangelist, and the harp of the prophet. He had been wrested by no
common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed
by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice.
It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been
rent, that the dead had risen, that all nature had shuddered at the
sufferings of her expiring God.
Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men: the one all
self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm,
inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his
Maker, but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional
retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans and tears. He was
half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of
angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the
Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like
Vane, he thought himself entrusted with the sceptre of the millennial
year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God
had hid His face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or
girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had
left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the
godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their
groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had
little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate, or on
the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military
affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some
writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which
were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their
feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One
overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition
and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had
their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not
for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them stoics, had
cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised
them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might
lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They
went through the world, like Sir Artegal’s iron man Talus with his
flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human
beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible
to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon,
not to be withstood by any barrier.—_Macaulay’s Essay on Milton._
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APPENDIX B (PAGE 21).
“‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ is a domestic epic. Its hero is a country
parson—simple, pious and pure-hearted—a humourist in his way, a little
vain of his learning, a little proud of his fine family—sometimes rather
sententious, never pedantic, and a dogmatist only on the one favorite
topic of monogamy, which crops out now and then above the surface of his
character, only to give it a new charm. Its world is a rural district,
beyond whose limits the action rarely passes, and that only on great
occasions. Domestic affections and joys, relieved by its cares, its
foibles, and its little failings, cluster around the parsonage, till the
storms from the outward world invade its holiness and trouble its peace.
Then comes sorrow and suffering; and we have the hero, like the
patriarchal prince of the land of Uz, when the Lord ‘put forth His hand
and touched all that He had,’ meeting each new affliction with meekness
and with patience—rising from each new trial with renewed reliance upon
God, till the lowest depth of his earthly suffering becomes the highest
elevation of his moral strength.”
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APPENDIX C (PAGE 28).
The most interesting phases which the Reformation anywhere assumes,
especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther’s own
country, Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair, not a
religion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument,
the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it skeptical
contention; which, indeed, has jangled more and more, down to Voltairism
itself; through Gustavus Adolphus contentions onward to
French-Revolution cries! But on our island there arose a Puritanism,
which even got itself established as a Presbyterianism and national
church among the Scotch; which came forth as a real business of the
heart; and has produced in the world very notable fruit. In some senses
one may say it is the only phase of Protestantism that ever got to the
rank of being a faith, a true communication with Heaven, and of
exhibiting itself in history as such. We must spare a few words for
Knox; himself a brave and remarkable man; but still more important as
chief priest and founder, which one may consider him to be, of the faith
that became Scotland’s, New England’s, Oliver Cromwell’s. History will
have something to say about this for some time to come!
We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose, but
would find it a very rough, defective thing; but we, and all men, may
understand that it was a genuine thing; for nature has adopted it, and
it has grown and grows. I say sometimes that all goes by wager of battle
in this world; that _strength_, well understood, is the measure of all
worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a right thing. Look
now at American Saxondom; and at that little fact of the sailing of the
Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from Delft Haven, in Holland! Were we
of open sense, as the Greeks were, we had found a poem here; one of
nature’s own poems, such as she writes in broad facts over great
continents. For it was properly the beginning of America: there were
straggling settlers in America before, some material as of a body was
there; but the soul of it was first this. These poor men, driven out of
their own country, not able well to live in Holland, determined on
settling in the New World. Black, untamed forests are there, and wild,
savage creatures; but not so cruel as star-chamber hangmen. They thought
the earth would yield them food, if they tilled honestly; the
everlasting Heaven would stretch there, too, overhead; they should be
left in peace, to prepare for Eternity by living well in this world of
time; worshipping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way.
They clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little ship
Mayflower, and made ready to set sail. In _Neal’s History of the
Puritans_ is an account of the ceremony of their departure; solemnity,
we might call it, rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their
minister went down with them to the beach, and their brethren, whom they
were to leave behind; all joined in solemn prayer that God would have
pity on His poor children, and go with them into that waste wilderness,
for He also had made that, He was there also as well as here. Hah! These
men, I think, had a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes
strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only despicable,
laughable then; but nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has
got weapons and sinews; it has fire-arms, war navies; it has cunning in
its ten fingers, strength in its right arm: it can steer ships, fell
forests, remove mountains; it is one of the strongest things under this
sun at present!—_Carlyle on Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in
History._
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APPENDIX D (PAGE 36).
It has been said of Lady Huntingdon that “almost from infancy an
uncommon seriousness shaded the natural gladness of her childhood,” and
that, without any positive religious instruction, for none knew her
“inward sorrows,” when she was a “little girl, nor were there any around
her who could have led her to the balm there is in Gilead,” she devoutly
and diligently searched the Scriptures, if haply she might find that
precious something which her soul craved.
During the first years of her married life (she was married at the age
of 21 and in the year 1728), “her chief endeavor * * * was to maintain a
conscience void of offense. She strove to fulfill the various duties of
her position with scrupulous exactness; she was sincere, just and
upright; she prayed, fasted and gave alms; she was courteous,
considerate and charitable.”
Her husband, Lord Huntingdon, had a sister, Lady Margaret Hastings, who,
under the preaching of Mr. Ingham, in Ledstone Church in Yorkshire, was
converted. Afterwards, when visiting her brother, these words were
uttered by her: “Since I have known and believed in the Lord Jesus for
salvation, I have been as happy as an angel.” The expression was strange
to Lady Huntingdon—it alarmed her—she sought to work out a righteousness
of her own, but the effort only widened the breach between herself and
God. “Thus harassed by inward conflicts, Lady Huntingdon was thrown upon
a sick bed, and after many days and nights seemed hastening to the
grave. The fear of death fell terribly upon her.”
In that condition the words of Lady Margaret recurred with a new
meaning. “I too will wholly cast myself on Jesus Christ for life and
salvation,” was her last refuge; and from her bed she lifted up her
heart to God for pardon and mercy through the blood of His Son. “Lord, I
believe; help Thou mine unbelief,” was her prayer. Doubt and distress
vanished and joy and peace filled her bosom.—_From “Lady Huntingdon and
her Friends.” Compiled by Mrs. Helen C. Knight._
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APPENDIX E (PAGE 71).
“It is easier to justify the heads of the restored Clergy upon this
point [want of uniformity or unity in the Church of England], than to
excuse them for appropriating to themselves the wealth which, in
consequence of the long protracted calamities of the nation, was placed
at their disposal. The leases of the church lands had almost all fallen
in; there had been no renewal for twenty years, and the fines which were
now raised amounted to about a million and a half. Some of this money
was expended in repairing, as far as was reparable, that havoc in
churches and cathedrals which the fanatics had made in their abominable
reign; some also was disposed of in ransoming English slaves from the
Barbary pirates; but the greater part went to enrich individuals and
build up families, instead of being employed, as it ought to have been,
in improving the condition of the inferior clergy. Queen Anne applied
the tenths and first fruits to this most desirable object; but the
effect of her augmentation was slow and imperceptible: they continued in
a state of degrading poverty, and that poverty was another cause of the
declining influence of the Church, and the increasing irreligion of the
people.
A further cause is to be found in the relaxation of discipline. In the
Romish days it had been grossly abused; and latterly also it had been
brought into general abhorrence and contempt by the tyrannical measures
of Laud on one side, and the absurd vigor of Puritanism on the other.
The clergy had lost that authority which may always command at least the
appearance of respect; and they had lost that respect also by which the
place of authority may sometimes so much more worthily be supplied. For
the loss of power they were not censurable; but if they possessed little
of that influence which the minister who diligently and conscientiously
discharges his duty will certainly acquire, it is manifest that, as a
body, they must have been culpably remiss. From the Restoration to the
accession of the House of Hanover, the English Church could boast of
some of its brightest ornaments and ablest defenders; men who have
neither been surpassed in piety, nor in erudition, nor in industry, nor
in eloquence, nor in strength and subtlety of mind: and when the design
for re-establishing popery in these kingdoms was systematically pursued,
to them we are indebted for that calm and steady resistance, by which
our liberties, civil as well as religious, were preserved. But in the
great majority of the clergy zeal was awanting. The excellent Leighton
spoke of the Church as a fair carcass without a spirit; in doctrine, in
worship, and in the main part of its government, he thought it the best
constituted in the world, but one of the most corrupt in its
administration. And Burnet observes, that in his time our clergy had
less authority, and were under more contempt, than those of any other
church in Europe; for they were much the most remiss in their labors,
and the least severe in their lives. It was not that their lives were
scandalous; he entirely acquitted them of any such imputation; but they
were not exemplary as it became them to be: and in the sincerity and
grief of a pious and reflecting mind, he pronounced that they should
never regain the influence which they had lost, till they lived better
and labored more.”—_Southey’s Life of Wesley._
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APPENDIX F (PAGES 73 AND 98).
“The observant Frenchman to whom we have several times referred, M.
Grosley, says of the ‘sect of the Methodists,’ ‘this establishment has
borne all the persecutions that it could possibly apprehend in a country
as much disposed to persecution as England is the reverse.’ The light
literature of forty years overflows with ridicule of Methodism. The
preachers are pelted by the mob; the converts are held up to execration
as fanatics or hypocrites. Yet Methodism held the ground it had gained.
It had gone forth to utter the words of truth to men little above the
beasts that perish, and it had brought them to regard themselves, as
akin to humanity. The time would come when its earnestness would awaken
the Church itself from its somnolency, and the educated classes would
not be ashamed to be religious. There was wild enthusiasm enough in some
of the followers of Whitefield and Wesley; much self seeking; zeal
verging upon profaneness; moral conduct, strongly opposed to pious
profession. But these earnest men left a mark upon their time which can
never be effaced. The obscure young students at Oxford in 1736, who were
first called ‘Sacramentarians,’ then ‘Bible moths,’ and finally
‘Methodists, to whom the regular pulpits were closed, and who went forth
to preach in the fields—who separated from the Church more in form than
in reality—produced a moral revolution in England which probably saved
us from the fate of nations wholly abandoned to their own
devices.”—_From Knight’s History of England._
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGES 97 AND 98).
(_See Appendix A and F._)
--------------
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGE 114).
“The ‘two brothers in song’ (John and Charles Wesley) began their issue
of ‘Hymns and Sacred Songs’ in 1739, and continued at intervals to
supply Christian singers for half a century. Thirty-eight publications
appeared one after the other: now under the name of one brother, now
under that of the other; some with both names, and others nameless. The
two hymnists appear to have agreed that, in the volumes which bore their
joint names, they would not distinguish their hymns.”—_The Epworth
Singers and other poets of Methodism, by the Rev. S. W. Christophers,
Redruth, Cornwall._
--------------
APPENDIX (NOTE, PAGE 118).
The God of Abraham praise,
Who reigns enthron’d above;
Ancient of everlasting days,
And God of love:
Jehovah—great I Am—
By earth and Heavens confest;
I bow and bless the sacred name,
For ever bless’d.
The God of Abraham praise,
At whose supreme command
From earth I rise, and seek the joys
At His right hand:
I all on earth forsake,
Its wisdom, fame and power,
And Him my only portion make,
My Shield and Tower.
The God of Abraham praise,
Whose all-sufficient grace
Shall guide me all my happy days,
In all my ways:
He calls a worm His friend!
He calls Himself my God!
And He shall save me to the end,
Thro’ Jesus’ blood.
He by Himself hath sworn!
I on His oath depend,
I shall, on eagle’s wings up-borne,
To Heaven ascend;
I shall behold His face,
I shall His power adore,
And sing the wonders of His grace
For evermore.
Tho’ nature’s strength decay,
And earth and hell withstand,
To Canaan’s bounds I urge my way
At His command:
The wat’ry deep I pass,
With Jesus in my view;
And thro’ the howling wilderness
My way pursue.
The goodly land I see,
With peace and plenty bless’d;
A land of sacred liberty,
And endless rest.
There milk and honey flow,
And oil and wine abound,
And trees of life forever grow,
With mercy crown’d.
There dwells the Lord our King,
The Lord our Righteousness,
Triumphant o’er the world and sin,
The Prince of Peace;
On Sion’s sacred heights
His Kingdom still maintains;
And glorious with the saints in light,
Forever reigns.
He keeps His own secure,
He guards them by His side,
Arrays in garments white and pure
His spotless bride.
With streams of sacred bliss,
With groves of living joys,
With all the fruits of Paradise
He still supplies.
Before the great Three—One
They all exulting stand;
And tell the wonders He hath done,
Thro’ all their land:
The list’ning spheres attend,
And swell the growing fame;
And sing, in songs which never end,
The wondrous name.
The God who reigns on high,
The great Archangels sing,
And “Holy, holy, holy,” cry,
Almighty King!
Who was, and is, the same!
And evermore shall be;
Jehovah—Father—great I Am!
We worship Thee.
Before the Saviour’s face
The ransom’d nations bow;
O’erwhelmed at His Almighty grace,
Forever new:
He shows His prints of love—
They kindle—to a flame!
And sound through all the worlds above,
The slaughter’d Lamb.
The whole triumphant host
Give thanks to God on high;
“Hail, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!”
They ever cry:
Hail, Abraham’s God—and _mine_!
I join the heavenly lays,
All might and majesty are Thine,
And endless praise.
Thomas Olivers, the author of the above hymn, lived to see the issue of
at least thirty editions of it.
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGE 118).
THE LAST JUDGMENT.
BY THOMAS OLIVERS.
Come, immortal King of Glory,
Now in Majesty appear,
Bid the nations stand before Thee,
Each his final doom to hear,
Come to judgment,
Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come.
Speak the word, and lo! all nature
Flies before Thy glorious face,
Angels sing your great Creator,
Saints proclaim His sovereign grace,
While ye praise Him,
Lift your heads and see Him come.
See His beauty all resplendent,
View Him in His glory shine,
See His majesty transcendent,
Seated on His throne sublime:
Angels praise Him,
Saints and angels praise the Lamb.
Shout aloud, ye heavenly choirs,
Trumpet forth Jehovah’s praise;
Trumpets, voices, hearts and lyres!
Speak the wonders of His grace!
Sound before Him
Endless praises to His name.
Ransom’d sinners, see His ensign
Waving thro’ the purpled air!
‘Midst ten thousand lightnings daring,
Jesus’ praises to declare;
How tremendous
Is this dreadful, joyful day.
Crowns and sceptres fall before Him,
Kings and conquerors own His sway,
Fearless potentates are trembling,
While they see His lightnings play:
How triumphant
Is the world’s Redeemer now.
Noon-day beauty in its lustre
Doth in Jesus’ aspect shine,
Blazing comets are not fiercer
Than the flaming eyes Divine:
O, how dreadful
Doth the Crucified appear.
Hear His voice as mighty thunder,
Sounding in eternal roar!
Far surpassing many waters
Echoing wide from shore to shore:
Hear His accents
Through th’ unfathom’d deep resound:
“Come,” He saith, “ye heirs of glory,
Come, the purchase of my blood;
Bless’d ye are, and bless’d ye shall be,
Now ascend the mount of God;
Angels guard them
To the realms of endless day.”
See ten thousand flaming seraphs
From their thrones as lightnings fly;
“Take,” they cry, “your seats above us,
Nearest Him who rules the sky:
Favorite sinners,
How rewarded are you now!”
Haste and taste celestial pleasure;
Haste and reap immortal joys;
Haste and drink the crystal river;
Lift on high your choral voice,
While archangels
Shout aloud the great Amen.
But the angry Lamb’s determin’d
Every evil to descry;
They who have His love rejected
Shall before His vengeance fly,
When He drives them
To their everlasting doom.
Now, in awful expectation,
See the countless millions stand;
Dread, dismay, and sore vexation,
Seize the helpless, hopeless band;
Baleful thunders,
Stop and hear Jehovah’s voice!
“Go from me,” He saith, “ye cursed—
Ye for whom I bled in vain—
Ye who have my grace refused—
Hasten to eternal pain!”
How victorious
Is the conquering _Son of Man_!
See, in solemn pomp ascending,
Jesus and His glorious train;
Countless myriads now attend Him,
Rising to th’ imperial plain;
Hallelujah!
To the bless’d Immanuel’s name!
In full triumph see them marching
Through the gates of massy light;
While the city walls are sparkling
With meridian’s glory bright;
How stupendous
Are the glories of the Lamb!
On His throne of radiant azure,
High above all heights He reigns—
Reigns amidst immortal pleasure,
While refulgent glory flames;
How diffusive
Shines the golden blaze around!
All the heavenly powers adore Him,
Circling round his orient seat;
Ransom’d saints with angels vying,
Loudest praises to repeat;
How exalted
Is His praise, and how profound!
Every throne and every mansion,
All ye heavenly arches ring;
Echo to the Lord salvation,
Glory to our glorious King!
Boundless praises
All ye heavenly orbs resound.
Praise be to the Father given,
Praise to the Incarnate Son,
Praise the Spirit, one and Seven,
Praise the mystic Three in One;
Hallelujah!
Everlasting praise be Thine!
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGE 120).
ROCK OF AGES—IN LATIN.
BY W. E. GLADSTONE.
Jesus, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus,
Tu per lympham profluentem,
Tu per sanguinem tepentem,
In peccata me redunda,
Tolle culpam, sordes munda.
Coram Te, nec justus forem
Quamvis totâ si laborem,
Nec si fide nunquam cesso,
Fletu stillans indefesso:
Tibi soli tantum munus;
Salva me, Salvator unus!
Nil in manu mecum fero,
Sed me versus crucem gero;
Vestimenta nudus oro,
Opem debilis imploro;
Fontem Christi quæro immundus
Nisi laves, moribundus.
Dum hos artus vita regit;
Quando nox sepulchro tegit;
Mortuos cum stare jubes,
Sedens Judex inter nubes;
Jesus, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus.
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGE 236).
From the “Memoirs of Howard, compiled from his diary, his confidential
letters, and other authentic documents, by James Baldwin Brown,” it
appears that in the year 1755, on a voyage to Portugal, the vessel in
which he was, was captured by a French privateer, and carried into
Brest, where he and the other passengers, along with the crew, were cast
into a filthy dungeon, and there kept a considerable time without
nourishment. There they lay for six days and nights. The floor, with
nothing but straw upon it, was their sleeping place. He was afterwards
removed to Morlaix, and thence to Carpaix, where he was two months upon
parole. At the latter place “he corresponded with the English prisoners
at Brest, Morlaix and Dinnan; and had sufficient evidence of their being
treated with such barbarity that many hundreds had perished; and that
thirty-six were buried in a hole at Dinnan in one day.”
Through his benevolent and timely interference on their behalf, when he
himself had regained his freedom, the prisoners of war in these three
prisons were released and sent home to England in the first cartel
ships.
Till the year 1773 it does not appear that he was actively engaged in
any philanthropic work on behalf of prisoners. In the year 1730 there
had been a commission of enquiry in the House of Commons on the state of
prisons, and condition of their inmates, but nothing seems to have
followed from it, and it was not till March, 1774, when Howard received
the thanks of the House for the information which, he communicated to
them on the subject, that the great work assumed shape. In 1773, having
been appointed sheriff of Bedford, the distress of prisoners came under
his notice. He engaged himself in a most minute inspection, and the
consequence was the devotion of every faculty of his existence to the
correction of the abuses existing in similar institutions as the friend
of those who had no friend.
In that Christlike work he continued till his death, on 20th January,
1790, at Cherson, Russian Tartary, having in the meantime inspected
prisons in England, Scotland and Ireland, France, Holland, Flanders,
Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the
Netherlands, Malta, Turkey, Prussia and Russia.
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGE 253).
At Michaelmas time, 1791, Mr. Buchanan was admitted a member of Queen’s
College, Cambridge, having left London on the 24th October. He was then
25 years of age. In consequence of a letter from his mother he attended
the preaching of John Newton, with whom he kept up a correspondence when
at college. In one of his replies to Mr. Newton he wrote: “You ask me
whether I would prefer preaching the Gospel to the fame of learning? Ay,
that would I, gladly, were I convinced it was the will of God, that I
should depart this night for Nova Zembla, or the Antipodes, to testify
of Him. I would not wait for an admit or a college exit.” Some time in
the year 1794, the first proposal appears to have been made to him to go
out to India, and on this occasion he wrote Mr. Newton, saying, “I have
only time to say, that with respect to my going to India, I must decline
giving an opinion. * * * It is with great pleasure I submit this matter
to the determination of yourself and Mr. Thornton and Mr. Grant. All I
wish to ascertain is the will of God.” In a subsequent letter he wrote,
“I am equally ready to preach the Gospel in the next village, or at the
end of the earth.”
After taking his degree of B.A., he was ordained a deacon by the Bishop
of London on 20th September, 1795, when he became Mr. Newton’s curate,
which he held till March, 1796, when he was appointed one of the
chaplains to the East India Company. Soon after, he received priest’s
orders, and on 11th August, 1796, sailed from Portsmouth, England, for
Calcutta, where he landed 10th March, 1797. In May following he
proceeded to the military station of Barackpore. But it was not till the
beginning of the present century that he fairly developed his plans for
the extension of the Redeemer’s Kingdom in India.—_From Memoirs of Rev.
Claudius Buchanan._
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGE 254).
In the month of September, 1794, a paper was published in the
_Evangelical Magazine_, urging the formation of a mission to the heathen
on the broadest possible basis. The writer of that paper was the Rev.
David Bogue, D.D., of Gosport, Hampshire, and two months after its
appearance a conference, attended by representatives from several
Evangelical bodies, was held to take action in the matter. The result
was an address to ministers and members of various churches, and the
appointment of a committee to diffuse information upon the subject.
Thereafter, and in September, 1795, a large and influential meeting,
extending over three days, at which the Rev. Dr. Harris preached from
Mark xv: 16, and the Rev. J. Burder and the Rev. Rowland Hill and many
others took part. At that meeting the society was formed, and it was
resolved, with reference to its agents and their converts, “That it
should be entirely left with those whom God might call into the
fellowship of His Son among them, to assume for themselves such a form
of church government as to them shall appear most agreeable to the Word
of God.”
The Rev. David Bogue, D.D., has therefore well been styled “the father
and founder” of the institution.
--------------
APPENDIX (PAGE 256).
At a meeting held in Leeds, 5th October, 1813, it was resolved to
constitute a society to be called “The Methodist Missionary Society for
the Leeds District,” of which branches were to be formed in the several
circuits, whose duty it should be to collect subscriptions in behalf of
missions and to remit them to an already existing committee in London.
It was from this point that, by general consent, the origin of the
Wesleyan Missionary Society is reckoned.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX.
Academy, Doddridge’s, 29
Lady Huntingdon’s, 257
Aftermath, 260
Age before the Revival, The 32
Albert, Prince, 120
Alleine, Rev. Joseph, 197
Allen, Ebenezer, Governor of Martha’s Vineyard, 226
America, Awakening in, 28, 73, 85, 281
American Baptist Missionary Union, 256
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 255, 256
American Revival, 28, 73, 85, 281
Sunday-school Union, 256
Amusements, 15
Anabaptists, 52
Ancaster, Duchess of 37, 41
Anecdotes, 17–20, 37, 39, 41, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 69, 70, 72, 76,
82–84, 87, 89, 94, 96, 100, 103, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116, 125, 129,
130, 133–135, 137, 138, 140, 143–145, 148, 151, 153, 158, 159, 161,
166, 172, 177, 183, 194, 198, 200, 202, 218, 234, 236, 239, 243,
245, 247, 255, 256, 266, 288, 291, 293, 294, 298, 300, 301
Aram, Eugene, 147
Armenianism, 60
Arrests, 102
Atheism, Prevalence of, 15
Austrian Exiles, 28
Baptist Missionary Society, 250
Union, American, 256
Band-Meetings, etc., Origin of, 100
Basle Evangelical Mission, 256
Baynham, James, 195
Baxter, Richard, 266
Benson, Bishop, 69, 70
Bernard of Clairvaux, 114
Cluny, 114
Berridge, John, 150, 157, 169, 177, 270
Bible, The, the Power of God, 7, 279, 286
Reverenced, 277
Translated for India, 253
Bible Society, The 186, 189, 191, 256
Blomfield, Bishop, 18
Bloomfield, 197
Blossoms in the Wilderness, 180
Bogue, David, 254, 257, 320
Bolingbroke, Lord, 41, 60, 180
Borlase, Dr., 102
Boston in 1730, 232
Elm, 275
State of Society in, 282
Bradford, Joseph, 138
Britain’s Obligations to Missions for India, 254
British and Foreign School Society, 256
_British Quarterly_, 52, 92
Brontë Family, 160
_Bruised Reed_, 266
Buchanan, Claudius, 178, 190, 253, 254, 319
Buckingham, Duchess of, 38, 39
Bunyan, John, 160
Burke, Edmund, 236
Butler, Bishop, 22
Byron, 117
Calvin’s Institutes, 61
Calvinistic Methodists, 101
Campbell, John, 178, 190
Captains of Ships in 18th Century, 221, 224
Cardigan, Lady, 42
Carey, William, 250
Carlyle, Thomas, 28, 305
Cennick, John, 123
Chatsworth, 49
Cheerfulness and Joy Significant of Revival, 98, 99, 101, 109, 124
Chesterfield, Lord, 41, 180
Christian Remembrances, 123
“_Christian World Unmasked, The_; _Pray Come and Peep_,”, 158
Christianity, Effect of, 98, 185
Chrysostom, 52
Church of England, Evangelical Party in, 269
Religion in, 15, 18, 233
Disabilities against Members of, 258
Opposition to Methodism, 99
Opposition to Revival, 22, 70, 156, 159, 172, 270
Southey on the Clergy of the, 308
Church Signs and Counter-signs, 99
Church’s, Rev. Thomas, Denunciation of Evil, 21
Chubbs, 180
Church Missionary Society, 255
City Road Chapel, 91
Clapham Sect, 184, 189, 191
Clarkson, Thomas, 190
Clergy, Corruption of, 18
Coates, Alexander, 153
Colman, Dr., Testimony of, 285
Colliers, The, 75
Collins, 180
Colston, Edward, 218
Colston’s School, Bristol, 218
Compton, Adam, 198
Congregationalism, 170
Controversialists of Revival, 117, 119
Conversions, 219, 234, 238, 258, 266, 267, 284, 290
Cornwall, 116, 131, 171
Cottage Visitation, 50
Cowper, William, 126, 178, 207, 211
Cradle of London Methodism, 91
Crime in 18th Century, 14, 16, 21, 242
Criminals, Condition of, 200, 237, 239, 244
Criminal Law in 18th Century, 14, 237, 242, 244, 247, 248, 259
Danish Hymns, 131
Missionary Society, 250
Darkness before Dawn, 7, 107
Dawn, First Streaks of, 24
Deaf and Dumb Asylum, 258
Defoe, 177, 216
Deism, Prevalence of, 15
Derby, Earl of, 129
Dissenters, Disabilities of, 258
Dissent in, Boston, in 1730, 232
Divine authority of the New Testament, The, 255
Doddridge, Philip, 28, 31, 110, 113, 126, 267
his Academy, 29
his Friends, 36, 58
his Hymns, 29
Drawing-Room Preaching, 37, 38, 40
Effect of, 43
Drury Lane, 155
Dying Words, 169, 261, 262, 300
East India Company, 191
Economy of Charity, 210
_Edinburgh Review_, 69, 184, 253
Education, Neglect of, 16
Spreading, 257
Edwards, Jonathan, 28, 275, 283, 296
Effect of Rejection of Gospel, 7
Eighteenth Century Revival, 9, 277
Emerson, quoted, 12
England and France Contrasted, 23, 180
England, State of Religion in, 23
Epitaphs, 156, 197, 212, 268
Episcopal Board of Missions, Methodist, 256
Protestant, 256
Epworth, 43, 53, 94, 97
Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography, 184
Everton, 156
Excitement of the Revival, 68
Executions at Tyburn in 1738, 14
Exiles in England, 28
Experiences of Christians expressed in Song, 128
Eyre, Jane, 160
Fair-Preaching, 83
Fenwick, Michael, 137
Ferrars, Lady, 40
Field-Preaching, 68, 89, 101, 104
First Day or Sunday-school Society, 256
Flaxley, 197
Fletcher of Madsley, 149
Florence, 7
Foote, the Actor, 154
Founders of London Missionary Society, 254
Foundry, The Moorfields, 91
France, 7, 180
Free Church of England, 101
French Protestants in England, 25
Fry, Elizabeth, 237, 258, 278
Gambold, John, 50, 64
Garrick, David, 155, 172
George II, 181
George IV, 158
Gerhardt, Paul, 113
German Empire, 7
Hymns, 131
Germain, Lady Betty, 41
Gisborne, Thomas, 192
Gladstone, W. E., 119, 317
Gloucestershire, 183, 193, 213
God’s Method of Diffusing the Truth, 12, 13
Goethe, 28, 305
Goldsmith, 21
Gospel Preached in Song, 114
Grant, James, 126
Sir Robert, 192
Gregory, Alfred, 196
Greenfield, Edward, 102
Griggs, Joseph, 126
Grimshaw, William, 160, 169, 178, 270
Guthrie, Dr., 158
Gwennap Pit, 103, 275
Haime, John, 151
Hamilton, Duchess of, 41
Lady Elizabeth, 243
Sir William, 179
Hardcastle, Joseph, 191
Hardships, 221
Harris, Howell, 272
Harvard College, Religion in, 285
Hastings, Lady Margaret, 170, 171
Haweis, Thomas, 254
Haworth, 160
Haymarket Theatre, 154
Helmsley, 119
Herbert, George, 110
Hervey, James, 50, 57, 60
Writings, 63
Hey, James (Old Jemmie o’ the Hey), 198
Hill, Rowland, 120, 159, 170, 254
Holy Club, The, 51, 54, 57, 60, 65, 170
Spirit, The, the Power, 85
Hooper, John, 195
Hopper, Christopher, 151
Horne, Dr., 66
Hospitality in New England, 225, 229, 231
Hostility to Revival, 21, 32, 61, 77, 288
Howard, John, 236, 318
Hymns, 115, 118, 119, 122, 125–130, 203, 311, 313
Character of, 127, 131
Influence of, 98, 99, 101, 109, 112, 129
of Doddridge, 29, 110
of Watts, 29, 31, 110
of Wesley, 112
Hymnists of the Revival, 109, 121, 123, 126, 192
Huddersfield, 169
Huguenots, The, 24, 98
Descendants in England, 26
Influence on Revival, 26
Settlement in England, 26
Huntingdon, Lady, 20, 35, 46, 50, 64, 66, 69, 91, 101, 124, 135, 143,
148, 155, 159, 169, 172, 183, 254, 257, 261, 307
Huntingdon, William, 276
Hupton, Job, 127
Independents, 256
Indians, Cause of, Espoused by Whitefield, 290
Ingham, Benjamin, 50, 170
Itinerancy, by Wesley, 93
Itinerant Preachers, 116, 160
Jay, William, 184
Jenner, Dr. Edward, 195
Johnson, Samuel, 55
Joss, Toriel, 149
Juvenal, 52
Kempis, Thomas à., 55, 59
Kingsbury, William, 254
Kirk, John, Author of “Mother of the Wesleys”, 44
Lackington, 154
Lancashire, 131
Independent College, 257
Lanterns, New Lights and Old, 48
Lavington, Bishop, 70
Law, William, 53
Lay Preaching, 132, 136, 139, 147–149, 151
Lecky on the Effect of the Revival, 10
Lee, Jesse, 275
Literature, State of, at beginning of 18th Century. How Affected by
Revival, 16, 269
Livingstone, 255
Local Preachers, 136
Wesley’s Reasons for, 136
London Missionary Society, 191, 254, 255, 319
Love of Souls, 101, 185, 186, 281
Luther, 7, 57, 110, 114, 179
Lyttleton, Lord, 17, 40, 42
Macaulay, 86, 97, 99, 189
Tribute to Puritans, 9, 97, 303–305
McOwan, Peter, 130
Mann, Sir Horace, 40
Mansfield, Lord, 172
Marlborough, Duchess of, 37, 39, 42
Marshman and Ward, 253
Martyrs, 195
Maxfield, Thomas, 115, 134
Melcombe, Lord, 42
Methodism, 182, 257, 275, 278
in New England, 275
Methodists acknowledged, 177, 256
and Puritans Compared, 98
Methodists and Quakers, 278
Methodist Band-Meetings, etc., 100
Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society, 256
Methodists, Beginning of, 45, 52, 80, 91
Calvinistic and Wesleyan, 101
Methodists, Creed of, 100
Early, 98, 102, 309
Effect of, 35, 129
Efforts of Earliest, 257
Expelled from Oxford, 66
Growth of, 40, 170
in United States, 275
Held as Opposed to Church of England, 66, 70, 94, 99
Hymnals, 32
Manifestations of, 85
Origin of Name, 52, 60, 309
Regarded as Enemies, 21, 70, 94, 99, 139, 143, 144, 233, 309
Methodists, Sects of, 276
Middleton, 180
Milton, 110
_Minor, The_, 154
Mission Enterprises, 186, 250, 256
to Africa, 191, 255
to China, 255
to India, 190, 253
to Madagascar, 255
to South Seas, 255
Missionary Societies, 250, 256, 320
Moffat, Robert, 191, 255
Molière, 155
Montague, Duchess of, 42
Montgomery, James, 118
Moorfields, London, 84, 91, 134, 149, 233
Morality at Beginning of 18th Century, 16
Moravians, The, 35, 64, 113, 170, 250, 256
More, Hannah, 178, 210
Morgan, 50
Mystery of Life, The, 65
Napoleon at St. Helena, 255
Nash, Beau, Overcome by Wesley, 87
Nelson, John, 139
Netherlands Missionary Society, 256
Newman, John Henry, 269
Newton, John, 123, 126, 149, 174, 190, 216, 217, 270
Noel, Baptist, 259
Nonconformists, Religion Among, 15
Oliver, John, 115
Olivers, Thomas, 115, 125, 311, 313
One-eyed Christians, 183
Orphan Asylum in Georgia, 291, 296
Oxford, 48, 65
Forecasting Future of Union, 48
Oxford Methodists, 49
Society, 54
Parson, John, 151
Perronet, Edward, 125
Persecution, 102, 139, 143, 270
Philadelphia Adult and Sunday-school Union, 256
Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 219, 236
Pitt, William, 42, 266
Politics Influenced by Revival, 258
Pope, 38
Portraits of Revivalists, 154, 271
Power of Song, 114
_Practical View of Christianity_, 266, 267
Prayer, 102
Preacher and Robbers, The, 151
Preaching at Beginning of 18th Century, 61
by Laymen, 132, 136, 139, 147, 148, 149, 151
in Drawing-Room, 37, 38, 40
Effect of, 7, 98, 99, 101, 107, 139, 143
Prejudices Against Lay Preachers, 132
Prison Philanthropy, 199, 217, 234, 236, 241, 246, 248, 258, 318
Promoting Christian Knowledge, Society for, 250
Propagation of Gospel, Society for, in New England, 250
Propagation of Gospel, Society for, in Foreign Parts, 250
Protestant Episcopal Board of Missions, 256
Puritans, The, 8, 9, 35, 52, 98, 303, 305
Macaulay’s estimate of, 9, 97, 303
and Methodists Compared, 98
Quakers, The, 35, 231, 278
_Quarterly Review_, 125, 126
Quietists, 55
Quixote, the Spiritual, 154
Raikes, Anne, 213
Raikes, Robert, 183, 193, 194, 196, 201, 211, 214
at Windsor, 202, 208
House at Gloucester, 213
Raymont of Pegnafort, 93
Reciprocation the Soul of Methodism, 100
Redruth, Cornwall, 103
Reformation, The, 8
Reign of Terror, 181
Rejection of Gospel, its Effect on Nations, 7
Religion, State of
at Beginning of 18th Century, 10, 22, 23, 107
State of and After Revival Contrasted, 13, 277
Religious Tract Society, 191, 256
Repeal of Test and Corporation Acts, 258
Revival, The, Anecdotes of (See Anecdotes.)
Revival Beacons, 184
Becomes Educational, 193, 257, 278
Beginning of, 24, 28, 35, 39, 49, 57, 73, 181, 186
Cheerfulness and Joy of, 98, 99, 101, 109, 124
Conservative, 86
Dawn of, 24, 48, 49
Depth of, 277
Done Most for Well-being of Mankind, 280
Effect on Literature, 260
Effect of on World at Large, 279, 293
Effects of, 8, 10, 13, 107, 115, 129, 132, 147, 166, 171, 180, 183,
186, 258, 259, 260, 269, 277, 279, 285, 293, 296, 300
Evangelical in England, 8, 271,
Fair-Preaching, 83
Field-Preaching, 68, 89, 101, 104
Foremost Names in, 46, 154
Fruit of, 180, 186
Revival, Growth of, 73, 265
Hostility to, 21, 22, 32, 61, 77, 94, 102, 154, 156, 159, 172, 288,
298
Importance of, 10
in Wales, 272
in America, 275, 281, 288, 295, 300
at Kingswood, 77
Lay Preaching, 132, 135, 139, 147, 148, 149, 151
Sects Formed, 276
Singers of, 109, 121, 123, 126, 192, 310
Spiritual, 114, 285
Revivalist Portraits, 154, 271
Richmond Legh, 267
Ridicule of Revivalists, 154, 253, 298
Rise and Progress in the Soul, 267
Ritual Absent in Revival, 114
Rock of Ages, 119
Rockingham, Lady, 40
Rogers’ Lives of Early Preachers, 151
Romaine, William, 149, 172
Roman Catholics, 133, 145, 193
Romelly, Sir Samuel, 26
Romish Stories and Incidents in Work of Wesley, 133, 145
Romney, Earl, 259
Rosary, The, 99
Rowlands, 272
Sabbath Observance, 17, 229
Sacred Song, Power of, 109, 113, 127
Sailors’ Hardships, etc., 221, 224, 240
_Saints Everlasting Rest_, 267
Salvation by Grace the Grand Doctrine of the Revival, 60, 186, 270, 284
Sandwich Islands, 255
Sandys, 110
Sarton, William, 195
Saunderson, Lady Frances, 37
Savonarola, 7
Schools, Sunday, 16, 196–199, 201, 204
School, Sunday, Commended, 207, 208
Effect of, 201, 215
First Day or Society, 256
Growth of, 208, 209, 215
Scott, Captain Jonathan, 149
Thomas, 269
Walter, Sir, 117
Sects Rising from Revival: Bible Christians of West of England, 276
Primitive Methodists Of the North, 276
New Connection Methodists, 276
United Free Church Association, 276
Selborne, Lord, Referred to, 125
Sharp, Granville, 190
Shaw, Robert, 169
Ships of 18th Century, 220
Shirley, Lady Fanny, 64
Mr. (Lady Huntingdon’s Cousin), 20
Sidney, Sir Philip, 110
Simeon, Charles, 269
Singers of the Revival, 109, 121, 123, 126, 192, 310
Slave Abolition, 186, 211, 265, 278
Smiles, Dr., referred to, 24
Smith, Adam, 207
Sydney, 184, 253
Society, State of, at beginning of 18th Century, 10, 16, 24, 75, 277,
282, 294
State of and after Revival, Contrasted, 13, 277
Somerset, Duchess of, 36
Songs Used in Great National Movements, 109
Southey, 71, 83, 89, 93, 115, 130, 133, 146, 147, 157, 166, 249, 276,
308
Spain, 7
Spencer, 52
St. Ambrose, 117
St. Ann’s, Black Friars, London, 174
St. George’s, Hanover Square, London, 172
Stage Libels against the Revivalists, 154
Staniforth, Sampson, 151
Stanhope, Earl, Testimony to Wesley, 10
Starting Point, The, of Modern Religious History, 181
Steam Engine, The, 12
Steele, Miss, 126
Stephen, Sir James, 83, 184, 191, 192, 269
Sir George, 192
Stevens, Dr. Abel, 27, 83, 182, 216, 249, 262, 300
Stocker, John, 127
Stock, Thomas, 204
Story, George, 147
Stratford, Joseph, 196
Streaks of Dawn, First, 24
Suffolk, Countess of, 40
Swedenborg, 276
Swedish Missionary Society, 250
Taylor, Isaac, 45, 83, 128
Teachers, Character of at Beginning of 18th Century, 17
Te Deum, 114
Teignmouth, Lord, 189, 254
Tennent, Gilbert, 286, 287, 290
“_The Last Judgment_”, 118
Thomson, Mr., The Vicar of St. Gennys, 70
Thornton, John, 190
Ticket, The, 99
Told, Silas, 216, 257
his Preaching and his Work, 235
Toleration Act, 258
Toplady, Augustus, 119, 121
Tottenham Court Chapel, 120, 150
Townshend, Lady, 37
John, 258
Lord, 42
Tractarian Movement, The, 48
Tract Societies, 186, 191
Trevisa, John De, 193
Trimmer, Sarah, Mrs., 209
Trophies of Revival, 115
Turnpikes in England, 93
Tyerman, Mr., referred to, 27, 43, 249
Tyndale, William, 183, 193
Venn, Henry, 169
Vicar of Wakefield, 21, 267, 305
Voltaire, 51, 180
Wales, 272
Walker, Samuel, 171
Walpole, Horace, 39, 43, 79, 83, 154
Walsh, Thomas, 135, 145
Warburton, Bishop, on Wesley, 22
Ward and Marshman, 253
Watson, Richard, 158
Watt, James, 12
Watts, Isaac, 29, 110, 122, 128
Friends of, 36
his Mother, 26
Hymns of, 29, 113
Literary Labors, 29
Waugh, Alexander, 254
Welsh Preaching and Preachers, 275
Wesleyan Methodists, 101
Missionary Society, 256, 320
Wesleyan Societies, 170, 182
Wesleyanism, Historians of, 182
Wesley, Charles, 45, 50, 57, 118, 121, 128, 265
Wesley, John, 21, 26, 46, 50, 53, 80, 92, 122, 136, 165, 179, 182, 207
as an Administrator, 82, 86
and Church Polity, 82, 86
and Bradford, 138
and Fenwick, 137
and Nelson, 145
and Silas Told, 217, 233, 237, 249
and Walsh, 146
and Whitefield Compared, 69, 80, 86, 87, 89, 148
and Field-Preaching, 89
Wesley, John,
and Methodists Regarded as Enemies, 21, 94, 99
and Hervey’s Teaching, 59
at Epworth, 43, 53, 94, 95
at the Foundry, Moorfields (City Road Chapel), 91
at Glasgow, 11
at Gwennap Pit, 103
at Oxford, 50, 53
at York, 96
Compared with Calvin, 69
Conversion, Time of, 58
Creed, 100
Death of, 262
Early Religious Experiences, 53
Effect of His Preaching on Himself, 82
Effect of His Preaching on Others, 82, 87, 96, 114
Estimate of by Macaulay, 86, 89
Expelled from Church of England, 68, 69
Expelled from Oxford, 65
Hymns, 112, 113, 114, 124, 126
Influence of, 10, 26, 182
Itinerancy, 93
on Sabbath-Schools, 208
Parish, the World, 91
Power over Others, 82, 87, 137
Preaching in Epworth Church-yard, 95
Restrictions on Lay Preachers, 134
Tomb, 262
Translations, 113
Victory of, over Nash, 87
Wesley, Samuel, 43, 53
Susannah, 44, 134
her Sayings, 45
Weston, Favel, 58, 62
Wilberforce, William, 178, 189, 191, 254, 258, 265, 266
Wilderness, Blossoms in, 180
Wilks, Matthew, 254
Winter, Cornelius, 184, 257
Wiseman, Cardinal, 131
White, Rev George, Vicar of Colne, 71
Whitefield, George, 32, 46, 52, 60, 69, 73, 86, 122, 148, 165, 179,
184, 195, 258, 270, 284
and the Children, 292
Among the Indians, 290
and the Poor Woman, 56
and Wesley Compared, 69, 80, 86, 87, 89, 148
and the Recruiting Sergeant, 84
Among the Nobility, 36, 38, 41, 79
Among the Roughs, 83, 115
at Boston, New England, 284, 285
at Cambridge, New England, 28
at Harvard, 285
at Kingswood, Bristol, 73
at Princeton, 290
at Gloucester, 73
at New Haven, 285
at Oxford, 49, 54
at the Tower of London, 73
Compared with Luther, 69
Description of his Preaching During Thunder Storm, 79
Early Religious Experience, 55
Whitefield, George,
Effect of his Preaching on Himself, 80, 81, 294
Effect on Others, 43, 76, 79, 82–84, 87, 115, 284, 294, 295, 301
First Meeting Charles Wesley, 56
in Georgia, 291
Journeys, 281
in New York, 288
in America, 73, 85, 281
in Wales, 272
in London, 81
in Maryland, 290
in Moorfields, London, 84
in Philadelphia, 289
on Toriel Joss and Newton, 149
Preaching of, 73, 295
on Religion in America, 299
Orphan Asylum in Georgia, 291, 296
Regarded as a Fanatic, 83
Ridiculed, 154
The First in the Opening of the Methodist Movement, 80
Treatment of Those Who Opposed Themselves to Him, 78, 298
Watts’ Blessing of, 32
Williams, John (Martyr of Erromanga) 255
Woolston, 180
Work Done in the Revival, 66
Wyclif, John, 193
Xavier, Francis, 93
York, Wesley at, 96
Yorkshire, 131, 139, 160, 170
Yorkshire, Apostles of, 139
Young Cottager, The, 267
Zinzendorf, Count, Hymns of, 113, 171
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Several footnote references just said “See Appendix.” without
specifying which (there are 15.) The references have been resolved
as well as was possible.
○ Some footnotes had no references to them in the text. These were
assumed to be additional material for the entire page, or pages,
and a reference was created.
○ Some index entries were reformatted to be more consistent with the
majority of the entries.
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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