The Young People's Wesley Part 1

The Young People's Wesley.

by W. McDonald.

PREFACE.

MY sole object in the preparation of this little volume has been to meet what I regard as a real want--a Life of John Wesley which shall include all the essential facts in his remarkable career, presented in such a comprehensive form as to be quickly read and easily remembered by all; not so expensive as to be beyond the reach of those of the most limited means, and not so large as to require much time, even of the most busy worker, to master its contents. I have sought to give my readers a faithful view of the man--his origin, early life, conversion, marvelous ministry, what he did, how he did it, the doctrines he preached, the persecutions he encountered, and his triumphant end.

This revised and enlarged edition will be found to contain many interesting features not found in the first edition. I have added, also, a brief account of the introduction of Methodism into America, as well as John Wesley's influence at the opening of the twentieth century. For this interesting chapter I am indebted to Rev. W. H. Meredith, of the New England Conference, who kindly consented to a.s.sist me, in view of the pressure to get the ma.n.u.script ready on time.

It will appear, from all that has been said, that Mr. Wesley was the most remarkable character of the last century; and the influence of his life is more potent for good to-day than ever before, and must continue to augment--if his followers are true to their trust--till the end of time.

WILLIAM MCDONALD.

INTRODUCTION.

WHAT, another Life of John Wesley! Why not? This time a "Young People's Wesley." If ever the common people had an interest in any man, living or dead, that man is John Wesley. It is true that we already have many "Lives" of this remarkable man. They range from the ma.s.sive volumes of Tyerman down to the booklet of a few pages. The truth abides that of making many books there is no end, and so more Lives of Wesley will be written from time to time as the years and centuries come and go. The reason of this is that John Wesley is one of the greatest men of all the Christian centuries. When we undertake to enumerate the five greatest men that the English race has ever produced we must of necessity include the name of John Wesley. As the distance increases between the present time and the days of his protracted activity the grander does he appear.

The majority of the men of his day and generation did not comprehend him. They could not, for the plan of his aspirations and achievements was far above their thinking or living. They did not realize his greatness; they did not foresee the influence he was destined to exert on all future generations. He has been dead more than a hundred years, and yet to-day he is larger, vaster, and more powerful in the wide realm of intellectual and spiritual activities than he was at any time during his long and vigorous life. So far as we can judge, this development of the stature of this wonderful man will continue for ages.

Remember that John Wesley was well bred. On both his father's and mother's side he inherited the qualities of the best blood of England.

So far as we know, his ancestry was purely Saxon, and of the best type of English-Saxon lineage. On sea or land, in military affairs, as a diplomat or statesman, he would have been eminent. He was one of the most thorough and comprehensive scholars of his century. He was fully abreast of his times in all matters of natural science; he was a linguist of rare excellency; he was a metaphysician; he was at home in philosophy. He had the rare ability of using all he knew for the best and highest purposes. He was a real genius, not a crank. A genius utilizes environment; a genius dominates circ.u.mstances; a genius makes old things new; a genius pioneers mankind in its career of progress.

Because of these qualities and characteristics, men will never tire of reading the life, and men will never stop writing the life, of this man. Born in the humble rectory of Epworth, in the midst of the fens of Lincolnshire, his name and fame reach to the ends of the earth. Men know him not for what he might have been, but for what he was--a friend of all, and a prophet of G.o.d.

Just now when the common people are more and more educated, and nearly all of them are readers of books, and many of them interested in good books, it is important that we have a Life of Wesley that is perfectly adapted to those who are not critical historical students, but rather to those who want the gist of things, who want the substantial and essential facts in compressed shape.

It is believed that this volume will meet all these requirements, and that a careful perusal of its pages will put any person of ordinary intelligence in very close touch with one of the greatest religious and social reformers the world has ever known. This volume is one that might be read with great profit by every member of our Church, and by all Methodists everywhere. Especially would its reading help all our young people, and particularly the members of our Epworth League. It is certain that its reading would give them clear, definite, and correct views of the life and work of the founder of Methodism; and such views would be sure to lead to a more healthful and vigorous personal religious experience, and would encourage all heroic aspirations for the highest attainments in holy living, and excite the most ardent and persistent efforts for the salvation of all men. John Wesley knew that humanity had been redeemed by the sufferings and death of the Lord Jesus Christ. He knew that every redeemed soul might be saved. He knew that it was his business to bring redeemed humanity to the feet of its Redeemer.

Would that all his followers might share in this threefold knowledge; and that by the reading of this volume all might be led to consecrate themselves to the accomplishment of the supremely glorious task at which John Wesley wrought until he ceased at once to work and live. O, that all Methodists might follow John Wesley even as he followed Christ!

W. F. MALLALIEU.

Auburndale, Ma.s.s., April 8, 1901.

The Young People's Wesley.

CHAPTER I.

BORN IN TROUBLOUS TIMES.

DURING the latter part of the seventeenth and the first part of the eighteenth century England was the theater of stirring events. War was sounding its clarion notes through the land. Marlborough had achieved a series of brilliant victories on the Continent, which had filled and fired the national heart with the spirit of military glory.

The English, at that time, had an instinctive horror of popery and power. James II, cruel, arbitrary, and oppressive, had been hurled from the throne as a plotting papal tyrant, and his grandson, Charles Edward, known as the Pretender, was making every possible effort to regain the throne and to subject the people to absolute despotism. To add to their dismay, the fleets of France and Spain were hovering along the English coast, ready, at any favorable moment, to pounce upon her. The means of public communication by railroad and telegraph were unknown. There were few mails, and reliable information could not be readily or safely obtained. Under these circ.u.mstances it is not surprising that strange and exaggerated reports should have kept the public mind in a state of great excitement and general consternation.

It was also, pre-eminently, an infidel age. Disrespect for the Bible and the Christian religion prevailed among all cla.s.ses. Hobbes, with his scorpion tongue; Toland, with his papal-poisoned heart; Tindal, with his infidel dagger concealed under a cloak of mingled popery and Protestantism; Collins, with a heart full of deadly hate for Christianity; Chubb, with his deistical insidiousness; and Shaftesbury, with his platonic skepticism, hurled by wit and sarcasm--these, with their corrupt a.s.sociates, made that the infidel age of the world.

Christianity was everywhere held up to public reprobation and scorn.

It is true that Steele, Addison, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke, and Johnson exposed the follies and sins of the times, but the character of these efforts was generally more humorous and sarcastic than serious.

Occasionally they gave a sober rebuke of the religion of the day.

Berkeley attacked, with his keen logic and finished style, the skeptical opinions which prevailed. Most of his articles were on the subject of "Free Thinking." Johnson, the great moralist, stood up, it is said, "a great giant to battle, with both hands against all error in religion, whether in high places or low."

These men, and Young, with his vast religious pretentiousness, are said to have walked in the garments of literary and social chast.i.ty; but Swift, greater intellectually than any of them, and a high church dignitary to boot, would have disgraced the license of the "Merry Monarch's" court and outdone it in profanity. Even Dryden made the literature of Charles II's age infamous for all time.

"Licentiousness was the open and shameless profession of the higher cla.s.ses in the days of Charles, and in the time of Anne it still festered under the surface. Gambling was an almost universal practice among men and women alike. Lords and ladies were skilled in knavery; disgrace was not in cheating, but in being cheated. Both s.e.xes were given to profanity and drunkenness. Sarah Jennings, d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, could swear more bravely than her husband could fight. The wages of the poor were spent in guzzling beer, in wakes and fairs, badger-baiting and c.o.c.kfighting."[A] And yet the reign of Anne claims to have been the golden age of English literature. It did show a polish on the surface, but within it was "full of corruption and dead men's bones."

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN UNUSUAL VIEW OF THE EPWORTH RECTORY.]

Added to this, the Church, which should have been the light of the world, was in a most deplorable state. Irreligion and spiritual indifference had taken possession of priest and people, and ministers were sleeping over the threatened ruins of the Church, and, in too many instances, were hastening, by their open infidelity, the day of its ruin. The Established Church overtopped everything. She possessed great power and little piety. Her sacerdotal robes had been subst.i.tuted for the garments of holiness; her Prayer Book had extinguished those earnest, spontaneous soul-breathings which bring the burdened heart into sympathetic union with the sympathizing Saviour. Spirituality had well-nigh found a grave, from which it was feared there would be no resurrection. Isaac Taylor says: "The Church had become an ecclesiastical system, under which the people of England had lapsed into heathenism;" and "Nonconformity had lapsed into indifference, and was rapidly in a course to be found nowhere but in books." In France hot-headed, rationalistic infidelity was invading the strongholds of the Reformation, and French philosophers were spreading moral contagion through Europe, which resulted in the French Revolution. The only thing which saved England from the same catastrophe was the sudden rise of Methodism, which, as one writer says, "laid hold of the lower cla.s.ses and converted them before they were ripe for explosion." When preachers of the Gospel celebrated holy communion and preached to a handful of hearers on Sabbath morning, and devoted the afternoon to card-playing, and the rest of the week to hunting foxes, what else could have been expected? It is doubtful if in any period of the history of the Church the outlook had been darker.

The _North British Review_ says: "Never has a century risen on Christian England so void of soul and faith; it rose a sunless dawn following a dewless night. The Puritans were buried, and the Methodists were not born." The Bishop of Lichfield said, in a sermon: "The Lord's day now is the devil's market day. More lewdness, more drunkenness, more quarrels and murders, more sin is conceived and committed, than on all the other days of the week. Strong drink has become the epidemic distemper of the city of London. Sin in general has become so hardened and rampant that immoralities are defended, yea, justified, on principle. Every kind of sin has found a writer to teach and vindicate it."

"The philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke; the moralist was Addison; the minstrel was Pope; and the preacher was Atterbury. The world had an idle, discontented look of a morning after some mad holiday."

Over this state of moral and religious apostasy a few were found who made sad and bitter lamentations. Bishop Burnet was "filled with sad thoughts." "The clergy," he said, "were under more contempt than those of any other Church in Europe; for they were much more remiss in their labors and least severe in their lives. I cannot look on," he says, "without the deepest concern, when I see imminent ruin hanging over the Church, and, by consequence, over the Reformation. The outward state of things is black enough, G.o.d knows, but that which heightens my fears arises chiefly from the inward state into which we are fallen."

Bishop Gibson gives a heart-saddening view of the matter: "Profaneness and iniquity are grown bold and open." Bishop Butler declared the Church to be "only a subject of mirth and ridicule." Guyes, a Nonconformist divine, says that "preacher and people were content to lay Christ aside." Hurrian, another Dissenter, sees "faith, joy, and Christian zeal under a thick cloud." Bishop Taylor declares that "the spirit was grieved and offended by the abominable corruption that abounded;" while good Dr. Watts sings sadly of the "poor dying rate" at which the friends of Jesus lived, saying: "I am well satisfied that the great and general reason of this is the decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of men, and the little success that the administration of the Gospel has made of late in the conversion of sinners to holiness."

This was the state of the English Church, and of Dissenters as well, at the opening of the eighteenth century. And well it might be when, as has been said, the philosopher of the age was Bolingbroke, the moralist was Addison, the minstrel was Pope, and the preacher was Atterbury. But when darkness seems most dense the day-star of hope is near to rising.

On the 17th of June, 1703, was born in the obscure parish at Epworth, of Samuel and Susannah Wesley, John Wesley, the subject of this sketch. He was one of nineteen children. The names of fifteen have been recorded; the others, no doubt, died in infancy. Of these fifteen, John was the twelfth. He was born in the third year of the eighteenth century. His long life of eighty-eight years covered eleven of the twelve years of Queen Anne's reign, thirteen of that of George I, thirty-three of George II, and more than thirty of George III. This remarkable child was to more than revive the dead embers of the Reformation; he was chosen of G.o.d to inaugurate a spiritual movement which was to fill the world with the spirit of holy being and doing, and bring to the people ransomed by Jesus, in every clime and of every race, "freedom to worship G.o.d."

CHAPTER II.

THE WESLEY FAMILY.

SAMUEL WESLEY, father of John, was for forty years rector of Epworth Parish. He was an honest, conscientious, stern old Englishman; a firmer never clung to the mane of the British lion. He was the son of John Wesley, a Dissenting minister, who enjoyed, for a time, all the rights of churchmen. But, after the death of Cromwell, Charles II, whom the Dissenters had aided in restoring to the throne, and who had promised them toleration and liberty of conscience, on his return, finding the Church party in the ascendency, violated his pledge and approved of the most cruel and oppressive laws pa.s.sed by Parliament against Dissenters.

By one of these inhuman acts more than two thousand ministers, and among them many of the most pious, useful, learned, and conscientious in the land, were deprived of their places in the Church, of their homes and support, and were compelled to wander homeless and friendless, without being allowed to remain anywhere, until they found rest in the grave.

"Stopping the mouths of these faithful men," says Dr. Adam Clarke, "was a general curse to the nation. A torrent of iniquity, deep, rapid, and strong, deluged the whole land, and swept away G.o.dliness and vital religion from the kingdom. The king had no religion, either in power or in form, though a papist at heart. He was the most worthless that ever sat on a British throne, and profligate beyond all measure, without a single good quality to redeem his numerous bad ones; and Church and State joined hand in hand in persecution and intolerance. Since those barbarous and iniquitous times, what hath G.o.d wrought!"[B]

Mr. Wesley had been for some years pastor of Whitchurch, Dorchestershire, and was greatly beloved by his people. But the law forbade anyone attending a place of worship conducted by Dissenters.

Whoever was found in such an a.s.sembly was tried by a judge without a jury, and for the third offense was sentenced to transportation beyond the seas for seven years; and if the offender returned to his home before the seven years expired he was liable to capital punishment. This was an example of refined cruelty. The minister who had grown gray in the service of his Lord, whose annual income was barely sufficient to meet the pressing needs of his family, was turned adrift upon the world without support, and the poor man was not permitted to live within five miles of his charge, nor of any other which he might have formerly served. As Mr. Wesley could not teach, or preach, or hold private meetings, he, for a time, turned his attention to the practice of medicine for the support of his family.

He bade his weeping church adieu, and removed to Melcomb, a town some twenty miles away. He had preached for a time in Melcomb before he became vicar of Whitchurch, and hoped to find there a quiet retreat and sympathizing friends. But his family was scarcely settled when an order came prohibiting his settlement there, and fining a good lady twenty pounds for receiving him into her house. Driven from Melcomb, he sought shelter in Preston, by invitation of a kind friend, who offered him free rent. Then came the pa.s.sage of what was known as the "five-mile act,"

which required that Dissenting ministers should not reside within five miles of an incorporated town. Preston, though not an incorporated town, was within five miles of one. Finding no place for rest from the relentless persecution of the Established Church--persecution as cruel as Rome ever inflicted, save the death penalty, and that was imposed under certain conditions--he concluded to leave his home for a time and retire to some obscure village until he could, by prayer and deliberation, determine what to do. Here, alone with G.o.d, his decision was made. He fully decided that he could not, with a good conscience, obey the law of Conformity, as it was called. Conformity was to him apostasy.