From The Contemporary Review. WESLEYAN METHODISM, IN WESLEY'S

LIFETIME AND AFTER.

grace and faith, which was not being preached by the clergy of the time, and which might act with regenerative power upon the prevailing ungodliness. He assumed the manner of a reprover and in

otic adventure of his own. He was picked out for it and solemnly sent forth, as we may say, by the Church. Up to the time 5. BEFORE leaving the subject of Meth- of his so-called conversion, certainly, there odism as it was in Wesley's lifetime, there was no coldness between him and the auis one other point which claims distinct thorities of the Church. After he had notice the question of the treatment of become a disciple of Peter Böhler, his Wesley by the Church of England. One own attitude toward the Church was alof the commonest beliefs now current tered. He felt that he had had a truth about his history is, that he was "thrust revealed to him—that of salvation by out" from the Church. The rulers of the Church in those days acted, it is thought, with extraordinary blindness, and through their want of sympathy and appreciation drove an apostolic man into reluctant nonconformity. We are constructor, beginning with William Law, tinually called upon to admire, with mortification and sorrow, the superior wisdom of the Church of Rome, which made of St. Dominic or St. Ignatius what the Church of England might have made of Wesley the head of an order devoted to the interests of the Church. There is some truth, no doubt, but hardly less of error, in this view of the treatment of Wesley by the Church of England.

If the Church of England had been wholly different from what it was, no one can say what might or might not have happened. Wesley himself would have been different, to begin with, for he was a genuine product of the Church of that age. We can easily wish that the Church had been more enlightened, and had had more fervour or more authority. But the rulers of the Church - Potter, Gibson, Sherlock, Lowth were anything but bigoted and harsh in their action towards Wesley. They neither "thrust him out" by any formal act, nor did anything to which such a phrase could be applied. Of one thing the student of Wesley's life will have no doubt that if he had sat in the seat of Potter or Gibson, he would have been far less tolerant, far more imperious, far more ready to excommunicate, than either of these prelates.

We have seen what extraordinary encouragement was given to Whitefield when a youth, by the bishop of Gloucester. Similarly, the first Methodistic practices of Morgan and the Wesleys received the cordial sanction of, the bishop of Oxford. Wesley's mission to Georgia was no quix

whom he took to task in a style which every one feels to have been painfully unbecoming. But he rightly contended that what he was now preaching was good Church of England doctrine. And that there was no overwhelming prejudice against it amongst the clergy seems to be shown by the fact that in 1738, the year of his conversion, he preached in twenty-six different churches in London. It is true that when he began to insist upon a "sensible assurance of pardon" in all cases of saving faith, his teaching was opposed and denounced as fanatical and dangerous; and he himself was hardly content unless he did stir up opposition. But when he and his brother, in the October of that year, had an interview with Bishop Gibson, the bishop shewed himself very unwilling to accept any challenge from them. He smoothed down their doctrine of assurance into something unobjectionable, and on Wesley's asking whether "religious societies were conventicles" the bishop answered, "I think not, but I determine nothing," and recommended them to read the acts on the subject for themselves. They requested that he would not receive any accusation against them but at the mouth of two or three witnesses, and he replied, "No, by no means; and you may have free access to me at all times."

But Wesley was now making it difficult for the clergy to invite or admit him into their pulpits. On the one hand, he was known to them as an Oxford scholar and as a High Churchman of rare and primitive devotion; but on the other hand, he

was proclaiming that he had just become | thus suddenly transformed, vehemently a Christian of a new and outlandish type, denouncing the Christianity by which he an enthusiastic disciple of a set of for- had acquired respect and honour in the eigners whom he himself in a very short | Church, having done nothing as yet to time repudiated and denounced for their prove his sanity, but exhibiting many plain extravagances. The clergy might hear of symptoms of being over-excited, was not him and his associates spending the night so welcomed by the London clergy as to at a religious meeting till three in the be invited to preach, in the early part of morning, and then falling prostrate, and 1739, in more than four of the London shouting forth praises to God; of their churches. This want of confidence on the habitually casting lots to find out what it part of the parochial clergy is now thus renwas the divine will that they should do; dered: "Priests and their parasites gagged of their affirming that the change which him in the metropolis." The newspapers was to make any one a child of God not of the day were relating, for the encouronly took place in most cases suddenly, agement of the clergy, how Whitefield but might be produced in sleep. They had allowed himself to be pushed by a might learn that Wesley, at the end of the crowd into the pulpit of St. Margaret's, year 1738, had drawn up the following set Westminster, and had preached in defiof questions for the Moravian "band so-ance of the rector and churchwardens; cieties," to be asked of every member at and how Charles Wesley, having been rethe weekly meeting: "What known sins fused permission to preach in Bloomshave you committed since our last meet-bury Church, had been active enough to ing? What temptations have you met secure the pulpit before the incumbent, with? How were you delivered? What who had intended to preach himself, and have you thought, said, or done, of which who sat astonished below. At this very you doubt whether it be sin or not? Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?" Wesley's language, after becoming a disciple of Peter Böhler, did, as we know, "shock" some of his most religious and warm-hearted friends his brother Charles, Broughton, Hervey, and others. Already revivalist scenes and miraculous cures were beginning to be talked of. In March, 1739, Wesley was in a house at Oxford, arguing about justification:

In the midst of the dispute [he writes] James Mears's wife began to be in pain. I prayed with her when Mr. Washington was gone, and then we went down to sister Thomas's. In the way Mrs. Mears's agony so increased that she could not avoid crying out aloud in the strect. With much difficulty we got her to Mrs. Shrieve's, when God heard us and sent her [spiritual] deliverance. Presently, Mrs. Shrieve fell into a strange agony, both of body and mind; her teeth gnashed

together, her knees smote each other, and her whole body trembled exceedingly. We prayed on; and within an hour the storm ceased, and she now enjoys a sweet calm.

The indictment on Wesley's behalf against the bishops and clergy of the Church of England is that an evangelist

time interviews took place between the Wesleys and the higher dignitaries of the Church, of which an account is given by Charles Wesley in his journal. On the 21st February he and his brother called on Archbishop Potter, who had previously been bishop of Oxford. The archbishop shewed them great affection: spoke mildly of Whitefield; cautioned them to give no more umbrage than necessary, to forbear exceptional phrases, and to keep to him they expected persecution, but would the doctrines of the Church. They told abide by the Church till her articles and homilies were repealed. They then went on to see the bishop of London, who denied that he had condemned them or even heard much about them. Whitefield's journal, he said, was tainted with enthusiasm, though Whitefield himself was a pious, well-meaning youth. He warned them against antinomianism and dismissed them kindly.

On April 2nd in this year, Wesley, following the example of Whitefield, began out-door preaching. His position was

Wesley himself used the word "enthusiasm" as one of reproach. It meant hot-headed fanaticism.

now a very curious one. He entirely be- | great grief at what he regarded as the lieved that his commission to preach de- schismatical proceedings of John and pended on his ordination as a priest of the Charles. "As I told Jack, I am not afraid Church of England; but his, he thought, the Church should excommunicate him was an exceptional case; "I look upon (discipline is at too low an ebb) but, that all the world as my parish ;" and he would he should excommunicate the Church. It preach and administer the sacraments is pretty near it. . . . He only who ruleth wherever he pleased. He expected per- the madness of the people can stop them secution, and certainly did his best to pro- from being a formed sect." Wesley grew voke it. But, strange as it seems, he was more and more confident, as he saw the never the object of any formal ecclesias- fruit of his preaching, that a special call tical censure. There was never a time from God placed him supra disciplinam. when all the churches in England were A book which happened to fall in his way, actually closed to him. To be excluded in January 1746, supplied him with a thefrom churches meant, with him, not to be ory which suited the exigencies of his free to preach in any church at whose position, and by which he justified his doors he might choose to knock. "If subsequent proceedings. This was Lord they do not ask me to preach in their King's "Inquiry into the Constitution, churches, they are accountable for my Discipline, Unity, and Worship of the preaching in the fields." His out-door Primitive Church;" from which Wesley preaching began at Bristol, although, for a | learnt that "bishops and presbyters are time at least, he had liberty to preach in essentially of one order." Thenceforth Clifton Church. Here also occurred the bodily convulsions which brought discredit upon the beginnings of Methodism. On June 25th, Whitefield wrote to Wesley, "I cannot think it right in you to give so much encouragement to those convulsions which people have been thrown into under your ministry. Were I to do so, how many would cry out every night!" It is remarkable that, with regard to these, both Whitefield and Charles Wesley, men of far more excitable natures, were saner than John Wesley. Charles Wesley stopped the fits by threatening to have any one who fell into them carried out. But his brother prayed over them, and treated them as conflicts between the Spirit of God and the evil one. But through all these irregularities Wesley retained his rights as a clergyman untouched. In the year 1747, a complaint was made to Bishop Gibson by the churchwardens of St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield, that Wesley was allowed by the rector to preach very frequently in the church. The bishop replied, "What would you have me do? I have no right to hinder him. Mr. Wesley is a clergyman, regularly ordained, and under no ecclesiastical censure." His elder brother Samuel, who died in 1739, writing to their mother a few days before his death, expressed his

he assumed that according to the usage of the primitive Church, he, being a regularlyordained presbyter, was also a bishop, and was within his rights in performing the functions of a bishop. In this persuasion, he gave formal ordination to several of his preachers. There was a certain middle period of his life, at which there are symptoms that his mind was wavering about the possibility of remaining a member of the Church; but the influences which held him tied to the Church prevailed, and he became increasingly emphatic in deprecating separation. And such was the respect which his character inspired, and such the value set by Churchmen upon his avowed and resolute Toryism, that in the latter part of his life he had more invitations to preach in churches than he could accept. In 1775, he preached a sermon in Bethnal Green Church, in aid of the widows and orphans of the soldiers killed in America, in which he took occasion to speak in a strongly anti-democratic vein upon the condition of the nation, and which he specially prepared for publica. tion. In 1781, holding his Conference at Leeds, he preached in the parish church, and, with the assistance of ten other clergymen, administered the Lord's supper to eleven hundred communicants. Two instances will illustrate the courtesy shown