CHAPTER XXX.

THE WESLEYAN MOVEMENT.

IN 1738 John Wesley returned to London from Georgia, in British North America. He had been absent more than two years. He had gone to Georgia to propagate the faith to which he was devoted; to convert the native Indians and to regenerate the British colonists. He did not accomplish much in either way. The colonists preferred to live their careless, joyous, often dissolute lives, and the stern spirit of Wesley had no charm for them. The Indians refused to be christianised; one chief giving as his reason for the refusal a melancholy fact. which has kept others as well as him from conversion to the true faith. He said he did not want to become a Christian because the Christians in Savannah got drunk, told lies, and beat men and women. Wesley had, before leaving England, founded a small religious brotherhood, and on his return he at once set to work to strengthen and enlarge it.

John Wesley was in every sense a remarkable If anyone in the modern world can be said to have had a distinct religious mission, Wesley

man.

1738.

JOHN WESLEY.

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persecuted for John Wesley's

certainly can be thus described. He was born in 1703 at Epworth, in Lincolnshire. John Wesley came of a family distinguished for its churchmen and ministers. His father was a clergyman of the Church of England, and rector of the parish of Epworth; his grandfather was also a clergyman, but became a Nonconformist minister, and seems to have been a good deal his opinions on religious discipline. father was a sincere and devout man, with a certain literary repute and well read in theology, but of narrow mind and dogmatic, unyielding temper. The right of King William to the Throne was an article of faith with him, and it came on him one day with the shock of a terrible surprise that his wife did not altogether share his conviction. He vowed that he would never live with her again unless or until she became of his way of thinking; and he straightway left the house, nor did he return to his home and his wife until after the death of the King, when the controversy might be considered as having closed. The King died so soon, however, that the pair were only separated for about a year; but it may fairly be assumed that, had the King lived twenty years, Wesley would not have returned to his wife unless she had signified to him that she had renounced her pestilent scepticism.

The same stern strength of resolve which Wesley, the father, showed in this extraordinary course was shown by the son at many a grave public crisis in his career. The birth of John Wesley was the

and his wife.

result of the reconciliation between the elder Wesley There were other children, elder and younger; one of whom, Charles, became in after-life the faithful companion and colleague of his brother. John and Charles Wesley were educated at Oxford, and were distinguished there by the fervour of their religious zeal and the austerity of their lives. There were other young men there at the time who grew into close affinity with the Wesleys. There was George Whitefield, the son of a Gloucester innkeeper, who at one time was employed as a drawer in his mother's taproom; and there was James Hervey, afterwards author of the flowery and sentimental Meditations,' that became for a while so famous-a book which Southey describes as laudable in purpose and vicious in style.' These young men, with others, formed a sort of little religious association or companionship of their own. They used to hold meetings for their mutual instruction and improvement in religious faith and life. They shunned all amusement and all ordinary social intercourse. They were ridiculed and laughed at, and various nicknames were bestowed on them. One of these nicknames they accepted and adopted; as the Flemish Gueux had done, and many another religious sect and political party as well. Those who chose to laugh at them saw especial absurdity in their formal and methodical way of managing their spiritual exercises and their daily lives. The jesters dubbed them Methodists; Wesley and his friends welcomed the

1738.

A TORPID CHURCH.

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title ; and the fame of the Methodists now folds in the orb of the earth.

have

her.

Wesley and his friends had in the beginning, and for long years after, no idea whatever of leaving the fold of the English Church. They had as little thought of that kind as in a later generation had the men who made the Free Church of Scotland. Probably their ideas were very vague in their earlier years. They were young men tremendously in earnest; they were aflame in spirit and conscience with religious zeal; and they saw that the Church of England was not doing the work that might been and ought to have been expected of She had ceased utterly to be a missionary Church. She troubled herself in no wise about spreading the glad tidings of salvation among the heathen. At home she was absolutely out of touch with the great bulk of the people. The poor and the ignorant were left quietly to their own resources. The clergymen of the Church of England were not indeed by any means a body of men wanting in personal morality, or even in religious feeling, but they had little or no religious activity because they had little or no religious zeal. They performed perfunctorily their perfunctory duties; and that as a rule was all they did.

Atterbury, Burnet, Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the torpid condition into which the Church had fallen. Decorum seemed to be the highest reach of the spiritual

lives of most of the clergy. One finds curious confirmation of the statements made publicly by men like Atterbury and Burnet in some of the appeals privately made by Swift to his powerful friends for the promotion of poor and deserving clergymen whose poverty and merit had been brought under his notice. The recommendation generally begins and ends in the fact that each particular man had led a decent, respectable life; that he was striving to bring up honestly a large family; and that his living or curacy was not enough to maintain him in comfort. We hardly ever hear of the work which the good man had been doing among the poor, the ignorant, and the sinful. Swift has said many hard and even terrible things about bishops and deans, and vicars and curates. But these stern accusations do not form anything like as formidable a testimony against the condition into which the Church had fallen as will be found in the exceptional praise which he gives to those whom he specially desires to recommend for promotion; and in the fact that the highest reach of that praise comes to nothing more than the assurance that the man had led a decent life, had a large family, and was very poor. Such a recommendation as that would not have counted for much with John Wesley. He would have wanted to know what work the clergyman had done outside his own domestic life; what ignorance had he enlightened, what sinners had he brought to repentance.

Things were still worse in the Established Church of Ireland. Hardly a pastor of that Church could