The Young People's Wesley

CHAPTER XIX.

WESLEY'S CHARACTER AS ESTIMATED BY UNBIASED JUDGES.

Rev. Dr. Rigg, author of The Living Wesley, says: "No single man for centuries has moved the world as Wesley moved it; since Luther, no man."

Dr. Abel Stevens, the historian of Methodism, says Mr. Wesley "possessed, in an eminent degree, one trait of a master mind—the power of comprehending and managing at once the outlines and details of plans. It is this power that forms the philosophical genius in science; it is essential to the successful commander and great statesman. It is illustrated in the whole economical system of Methodism."

Bishop Coke, in speaking of Mr. Wesley's unbounded benevolence, says: "Sometimes, indeed, the love which believeth and hopeth all things, of which he had so large a share, laid him open to imposition, and wisdom slept at the door of love; if there was any fault in his public character, it was an excess of mercy."

Mr. Lecky (no mean judge) has this to say: "The evangelical movement which directly or indirectly originated with Wesley produced a general revival of religious feeling which has incalculably increased the efficiency of almost every religious body in the community, while at the same time it has materially affected party politics."

In Green's History of the English People he speaks of Wesley and Whitefield thus: "In power as a preacher Wesley ranked next to Whitefield; as a hymn writer he stood second to his brother Charles. But, combining in some degree the excellences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly deficient—an indefatigable industry, cool judgment, command over others, a faculty of organization, and a union of patience and moderation, with an imperious ambition which marked him as a ruler of men." "If men may be measured by the work they have accomplished, John Wesley can hardly fail to be recorded as the greatest figure that has appeared in the religious world since the days of the Reformation."

When Dean Stanley, in 1876, unveiled the memorial tablet erected in Westminster Abbey to the memory of John and Charles Wesley, consisting of medallion profiles of these great men, he said: "John Wesley is presented as preaching on his father's tomb, and I have always thought that it is, as it were, a parable which represented his relation to national institutions. He took his stand on his father's tomb—on the venerable and ancestral traditions of the country and the Church. That was the stand from which he addressed the world; it was not from points of disagreement, but from the points of agreement, with those in the Christian religion that he produced those great effects which have never since died out in English Christendom. It is because of his having been in that age, which I am inclined to think has been unduly disparaged, the reviver of religious fervor among our churches that we all feel we owe him a debt of gratitude, and that he ought to have this monument placed among those of the benefactors of England. These men had a perfect right to this national and lasting honor."

Mr. Augustin Birrell, queen's councilor and member of Parliament, in a lecture before the Royal Institute of London, says of John Wesley: "The life of John Wesley, who was born in 1703 and died in 1791, covered, practically, the whole of the eighteenth century, of which he was one of the most remarkable and strenuous figures, and his Journals were the most amazing records of human exertion ever penned by man. Those who have ever contested a parliamentary election know how exhausting was the experience; yet John Wesley contested the three kingdoms in the cause of Christ, and during the contest, which lasted forty-four years, he paid more turnpike toll than any man who ever lived. His usual record of travel was eight thousand miles a year [we think this an overestimate], and even when he was an old man it seldom fell below five thousand miles. Wesley was a great bit of the eighteenth century, and was, therefore, a great revealing record of the century. He was a cool, level-headed man, and had he devoted his talents to any other pursuit than that of spreading religion he must have acquired a large fortune; but from the first day of his life, almost, he learned to regard religion as his business."

"A greater poet may rise than Homer or Milton," says Dr. Dobbins, "a greater theologian than Calvin, a greater philosopher than Bacon, a greater dramatist than any of ancient or modern fame; but a more distinguished revivalist of the churches than John Wesley, never."

"Taking him altogether," says Mr. Tyerman, "Wesley is a man sui generis. He stands alone; he has no successor; no one like him went before; no contemporary was a coequal. There was a wholeness about the man such as is rarely seen. His physique, his genius, his wit, his penetration, his judgment, his memory, his beneficence, his religion, his diligence, his conversation, his courteousness, his manners, and his dress made him as perfect as we ever expect man to be on this side of heaven." He arose with the lark, traveled with the sun, preached like an angel through three kingdoms, claimed the world for his parish, and died like a hero, shouting, "The best of all is, God is with us."

Wilberforce said, "I consider Wesley as the most influential mind of the last century—the man who will have produced the greatest effects centuries, or perhaps millenniums, hence, if the present race of men should continue so long."

No more graphic description of the Wesleyan movement has appeared than that given by F. W. Farrar, Dean of Canterbury. He says:

John Wesley found a Church forgetful and neglectful of its duties, somnolent in the plethora of riches, and either unmindful or unwisely mindful of the poor. He found churches empty, dirty, neglected, crumbling into hideous disrepair; he found the work of the ministry performed in a manner scandalously perfunctory.... But John Wesley, becoming magnetic with moral sincerity, flashed into myriads of hearts fat as brawn, cold as ice, hard as the nether millstone, the burning spark of his own intense convictions, and thus he saved the Church....

Although the world and the Church have learned to be comparatively generous to Wesley, now that a hundred years have sped away, and though the roar of contemporary scandal has long since ceased, I doubt whether even now he is at all adequately appreciated. I doubt whether many are aware of the extent to which to this day the impulse to every great work of philanthropy and social reformation has been due to his energy and insight. The British and the Foreign Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society, the London Missionary Society, even the Church Missionary Society, owe not a little to his initiative. The vast spread of religious instruction by weekly periodicals, and the cheap press, with all its stupendous consequences, were inaugurated by him. He gave a great extension to Sunday schools and the work of Robert Raikes. He gave a great impulse both to national education and to technical education, and in starting the work of Silas Told, the foundry teacher, he anticipated the humble and holy work of John Pounds, the Portsmouth cobbler. He started in his own person the funeral reform, which is only now beginning to attract public attention, when in his will he directed that at his obsequies there should be no hearse, no escutcheon, no coach, no pomp. He visited prisons and ameliorated the lot of prisoners before John Howard; and his very last letter was written to stimulate William Wilberforce in his parliamentary labors for the emancipation of the slave. When we add to this the revival of fervent worship and devout hymnology among Christian congregations, and their deliverance from the drawling doggerel of Sternhold and Hopkins, and the frigid nullities of Tate and Brady, we have indeed shown how splendid was the list of his achievements, and that, as Isaac Taylor says, he furnished "the starting point for our modern religious history in all that is characteristic of the present time."

And yet, in this long and splendid catalogue, we have not mentioned his greatest and most distinctive work, which was that through him to the poor the Gospel was again preached. Let Whitefield have the credit of having been the first to make the green grass his pulpit and the heaven his sounding-board; but Wesley instantly followed, at all costs, the then daring example, and through all evil report and all furious opposition he continued it until at last at Kingswood, at the age of eighty-one, he preached in the open air, under the shade of trees which he himself had planted, and surrounded by the children and children's children of his old disciples, who had long since passed away. Overwhelming evidence exists to show what preaching was before and in his day; overwhelming evidence exists to show what the Church and people of England were before and in his day—how dull, how vapid, how soulless, how Christless was the preaching; how torpid, how Laodicean was the Church; how godless, how steeped in immorality was the land. To Wesley was mainly granted the task, for which he was set apart by the hands of invisible consecration—the task which even an archangel might have envied him—of awakening a mighty revival of the religious life in those dead pulpits, in that slumbering Church, in that corrupt society. His was the religious sincerity which not only founded the Wesleyan community, but, working through the heart of the very Church which had despised him, flashed fire into her whitening embers. Changing its outward forms, the work of John Wesley caused, first, the evangelical movement, then the high church movement, and, in its enthusiasm of humanity, has even reappeared in all that is best in the humble Salvationists, who learned from the example of Wesley what Bishop Lightfoot called "that lost secret of Christianity, the compulsion of human souls." Recognizing no utterance of authority as equally supreme with that which came to him from the Sinai of conscience, Wesley did the thing and scorned the consequence. His was the voice which offered hope to the despairing and welcome to the outcast.... The poet says:

"Of those three hundred grant but three
To make a new ThermopylÆ."

And when I think of John Wesley, the organizer, of Charles Wesley, the poet, of George Whitefield, the orator, of this mighty movement, I feel inclined to say of those three self-sacrificing and holy men, Grant but even one to help in the mighty work which yet remains to be accomplished! Had we but three such now,

"Hoary-headed selfishness would feel
His deathblow, and would totter to his grave;
A brighter light attend the human day,
When every transfer of earth's natural gift
Should be a commerce of good words and works."

Wesley's grave drawing JOHN WESLEY'S GRAVE.

We have, it is true, hundreds of faithful workers in the Church of England and in other religious communities. But for the slaying of dragons, the rekindlement of irresistible enthusiasm, the redress of intolerable wrongs, a Church needs many Pentecosts and many resurrections. And these, in the providence of God, are brought about, not by committees and conferences and common workers, but by men who escape the average; by men who come forth from the multitude; by men who, not content to trudge on in the beaten paths of commonplace and the cart-ruts of routine, go forth, according to their Lord's command, into the highways and hedges; by men in whom the love of God burns like a consuming flame upon the altar of the heart; by men who have become electric to make myriads of other souls thrill with their own holy zeal. Such men are necessarily rare, but God's richest boon to any nation, to any society, to any Church, is the presence and work of such a man—and such a man was John Wesley.

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