John Wesley's Awakening

James Richard Joy

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839744952
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

John Wesley (1703-1791) was an English cleric, theologian and evangelist who was a leader of a revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism. The societies he founded became the dominant form of the independent Methodist movement that continues to this day.
"The old-time, narrow, sectarian view of Wesley as the Founder of Methodism, and therefore the patron-saint and peculiar property of one denomination, dispraised and undervalued by all others, has largely given way to the world-view which ranks him with the major prophets, apostles, and saints of all time. His tablet is in Westminster Abbey, with the memorials of monarchs, statesmen, empire-builders, philanthropists, and men of letters. The scholars of two continents have begun to recognize him as belonging in the grand succession of Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Wesley—the great awakeners of the human soul—themselves awakened by the touch of God.
"This book owes its existence to a call for something which should present in brief compass and in non-theological language the personality and work of John Wesley, with special reference to the spiritual experience at Aldersgate, which marked the turning-point in his career."

III—HAVING AND DOING

I do not know whether I am likely to have among my readers anyone who has ever contested an English or Scottish county in a parliamentary election since household suffrage. If I have, that tired soul will know how severe is the strain of its three weeks, and how impossible it seems at the end of the first week that you should be able to keep it going for another fortnight, and how, when the last night arrived, you felt that, had the strife been accidentally prolonged another seven days you must have perished by the wayside. Well, John Wesley contested the three kingdoms in the cause of Jesus Christ during a campaign which lasted fifty years. He did it for the most part on horseback. He paid more turnpikes than any man who ever bestrode a beast. Eight thousand miles was his annual record for many a long year, during each of which he seldom preached less frequently than a thousand times. Had he but preserved his scores at all the inns where he lodged they would have made by themselves a history of prices. And through it all, he never knew what depress of spirits meant, though he had much to try him—suits in chancery and a jealous wife....Exertion so prolonged, enthusiasm so sustained, argues a remarkable man; while the organization he created, the system he founded, the view of life he promulgated, is still a great fact among us.

If you want to get into the eighteenth century, to feel its pulses throb beneath your finger, deny yourself your annual reading of Boswell or your biennial retreat with Sterne, and ride up and down the country with the greatest force of the eighteenth century in England. His Journal for fifty years is the most amazing record of human exertion ever penned or endured.

—RT. HON. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, K.C., M.P. Quoted in Letters of John Wesley, edited by George Eayrs. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1915.

CHAPTER VII—A NEW CREATURE

WESLEY’S biographers disagree as to what happened at Aldersgate. Some aver that until that hour he was a sinner, a lost soul, “a child of wrath,” to use one of his own phrases, and that there, in the twinkling of an eye, he was converted, passing from death unto life. Others would date his start in the Christian life from good resolutions formed at Oxford in 1725, and which were deepened in 1729, when he was the leader of The Holy Club—the Oxford Methodists. They regard the Aldersgate experience as little more than a momentary flutter of emotion, soon forgotten, and rarely, if ever, mentioned in his numerous reviews of the stages of his spiritual development, in his Journal, his tracts, and his published sermons.

The unanswerable reply to those who would explain away the Aldersgate experience is that from that hour Wesley was a changed man—revolutionized! Had his heart ceased to beat, instead of being “strangely warmed,” in that exciting moment, he would never have been heard of. For he had reached his thirty-fifth year and had given thirteen years to the ministry without lifting his head above the crowd, as scholar, preacher, theologian, or administrator. Without his post-Aldersgate fame the Oxford Methodists would have passed out of mind with other nine days’ wonders of a college generation. Even the Georgia fiasco would soon have blown over. There would have been no Methodist societies, no worldwide Methodism, and no Evangelical Revival, at least at the time and in the form that history records.

Wesley’s career from 1703 to 1738, interesting as it now is to the last detail, was comparatively obscure and commonplace. But, after Aldersgate, from 1738 to 1791, when he died at the age of eighty-eight, he was the outstanding figure and the greatest force in the English-speaking world. Holding no ecclesiastical rank or office, except as an ordained priest of the Church of England, he exercised a more potent influence upon the life of his time than any archbishop. Indeed, sober and unprejudiced students of the political and social history of the English nation have rated Wesley’s contribution even above the victories of the great prime minister, William Pitt.

Aldersgate marks the crisis, the turning-point in Wesley’s career. That he was already, and had long been, a Christian in a very real sense, no one can doubt who has observed his conduct and character at Epworth, at Oxford, and in Savannah. But that his was an uninspired, infertile, and to him a profoundly unsatisfying type of religion, all must allow. The Aldersgate experience was in the fullest sense of the word an awakening. All his slumbering spiritual gifts and powers were aroused to vigorous and productive life. The vision which there burst upon him was like the throwing of an electric switch, releasing energy into the marvelous mechanism prepared by nature, nurture, and all his previous training. The spark had been lacking. The motor had been missing on half its cylinders. The personal relation between himself and God, of which he first became poignantly conscious at that definite point of time, suffered its temporary fluctuations, as careful readers of the Journal are aware. Yet through over fifty years of a most strenuous life it was without cessation his animating and driving force. His rare confessions that he had lost the sense of “assurance” are attributable to his undesirable habit as a spiritual valetudinarian of forever taking his own temperature and studying the chart. These may be disregarded. From Aldersgate to the end he is God’s good man, as he never was before, and his life-purpose, no longer focused on his own soul, was to win as many as possible to his blissful state and to “spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.”

It was this astounding transformation, this tremendous awakening and energizing of an individual soul that gives Aldersgate its assured place in Christian annals.

Wesley’s emergence as a religious leader was not accomplished overnight. But he and his associates—his brother Charles and their friend George Whitefield—met the several situations as they arose. Within the next three years they committed themselves to certain practices, which from the point of view of the Church were grossly irregular if not schismatic. Among these things were:

Preaching without regard to parish bounds.

Preaching out of doors and in unconsecrated houses.

Preaching by laymen.

The building of preaching-houses.

Establishing schools.

Organizing the United Societies.

Substituting the singing of hymns for the Psalter.

The limited scope of the present work permits only a rapid survey of the rise of these distinctive Methodist institutions and forms. They followed Aldersgate, and in most cases were the consequences of it, or of similar experiences of the other Methodist leaders. But without some knowledge of their origin and development it is impossible to draw an adequate picture of the height, depth, breadth, and strength of Wesley’s work.

Yet at this juncture the most conspicuous figure in the Methodist group was neither John nor Charles Wesley, but their eloquent young comrade, the Rev. George Whitefield.

Whitefield was a poor Gloucester boy, a tapster in a tavern, who worked his way through Oxford as a “servitor,” fell in with the Wesleys there, and joined The Holy Club shortly before they sailed for Georgia. They came back to find that he was ordained and had already caught the public ear with his dramatic eloquence, but in response to Wesley’s call for help was just starting for Savannah. A few months later saw him again in London, crowding every church with his picturesque and passionate sermons, and wringing the shillings from buttoned-up pockets by his piteous appeals for his Georgia orphanage. But when he preached salvation by faith alone, the clergy gave him the cold shoulder, and church doors were slammed in his face. Where, then, was he to take collections? In February, 1739, he was the unfortunate center of an unseemly disturbance in Saint Margaret’s Church, Westminster, which has been called a fracas, and which the yellow press noised throughout the kingdom. Despairing of success in London, and being a West Countryman himself, he went to his sister’s in Bristol, then the second city of England, where he was no stranger. He found the clergy cool to him, even there, partly, no doubt, because he was after money, but chiefly because he was tarred with the Methodist stick. What to do? His orphans must be housed, clothed, and fed, and he was the only one to secure the funds.

Just outside of bustling Bristol, with its shipping, its shops and banks, was a region called Kingswood, because it had once been a royal chase, but was now a black waste of coalpits, around which clustered the grimy shacks of the colliers, swarming with ragged and unkempt children. School there was none, and the parish church was miles away. There was no tougher community in the West Country, and in hard times the rough miners would terrorize the thrifty city whose wealth in part was drawn from their toil. When Whitefield had been in Bristol before going to Georgia, someone had asked him: “Why cross the ocean to find heathens to preach to? There are Indians enough in Kingswood!” Into this “No Man’s Land” he now went, and taking a stand lifted up his voice in preaching and prayer—sounds seldom heard in that community. A few hundred curious idlers listened, entranced. Next day a Bristol church opened its pulpit to him, and crowds came to listen. But the chancellor of the diocese (who was a fancier of fighting-cocks!), served notice that he was to preach no more without a license. (“No wonder,” says Thackeray, “that Wesley quitted the insulted temple to pray on the hillside!”) The doors being barred, Whitefield preached to larger crowds in church-yards, on the bowling green, and at Kingswood repeatedly to thousands of colliers. The collections did not suffer, and he was soon off to Georgia, begging John Wesley to take his place.

Though in frail health, Wesley went on to Bristol March 31, 1739. He had never been there before. He sat up half the night hearing Whitefield’s story. He felt that he could meet the societies and talk in the jails, but could he, a clergyman, bring himself to preach anywhere except in a church, duly consecrated by a bishop? He had never done that, except in Georgia, where there were no bishops and no churches, and once at Tyburn, when he was moved to address a crowd gathered to see a man hanged. But next day he stood by consenting, when Whitefield, a clergyman no less than he, preached on the bowling green and at Kingswood. That night, meeting one of the societies, his theme was “The Sermon on the Mount,” which, he noted, “was a remarkably good precedent for field-preaching!” The next day, April 2, he preached in a brickyard; the Rubicon was crossed! He says, “At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation to about three thousand people from the appropriate text, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.’” He might have searched his Bible from cover to cover without finding a more suitable text. He never regretted the plunge and he never retreated, though he says, “I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching, having been all my life (until very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin, if it had not been done in a church!” He justified himself thus: “Consider coolly if it was not highly expedient that something of this kind should be....Had the minister of the parish preached like an angel, it had profited them nothing, for they heard him not. But when one came and said, ‘Yonder is a man preaching on the top of a mountain!’ they ran in droves to hear what he would say; and God spoke to their hearts. It is hard to conceive anything else which would have reached them.”

Before the end of May, Wesley had settled down to this routine at Bristol: “Every morning I preached and read prayers at Newgate (jail). Every evening I expounded a portion of Scripture in one or more of the societies. On Monday afternoon I preached abroad near Bristol; on Tuesday at Bath; and Two-Mile Hill alternately; on Wednesday at Baptist Mills; every other Thursday near Pensford; every other Friday in another part of Kingswood; on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, in the middle of the city; on Sunday at 11, at Hannam Mount, at 2 at Clifton, and at 5 at Rose Green.—And hitherto, as my days so my strength hath been.”

It is clear that, the ice once broken, he no longer shivered on the bank, but plunged in, and made a success of field preaching wherever he could find hearers and standing room.

Wesley’s systematic instruction of the Bristol societies added so many members that the usual meeting places were soon outgrown. Here was a problem. Wesley solved it by buying a small inside lot between Broadmead and the open space called the Horsefair, from which it was entered by a narrow alley. On May 12, 1739, the corner stone was laid, and an unpretentious structure was begun. It was the first building erected anywhere in the world for Methodist use—the first of more than one hundred thousand. Reconstructed of bricks in 1748, when an apartment for Mr. Wesley and a stall for his horse were added, it is still owned and used by Methodists. What to name it was a puzzle. Wesley, the churchman, could not think of it as a “church,” since no bishop had blessed it. “Chapel” savored of Dissent and Nonconformity. Even “meeting-house” had its sectarian connotations, though “preaching-house” might be tolerated. Wesley avoided all these difficulties. To him it was “the New Room in the Horsefair,” and such it is called to this day. It is a shrine which attracts Methodist pilgrims from all parts of the globe, and its neat, but severely plain precincts, the tiny stable built against the wall for the preacher’s nag (indispensable to a traveling ministry), and the superb equestrian statue of Wesley, himself, “the Horseman of the Lord,” in the forecourt leave an impression which no pilgrim can forget.

Money was scarce in the Bristol Societies, and the New Room was not only the pioneer Methodist property, but carried the first Methodist debt! Wesley’s first idea of vesting the title in eleven trustees (feoffees), was abandoned on the advice of London friends, who warned him that, “Such feoffees always would have it in their power to control me, and if I preached not as they liked, to turn me out of the room I had built.” So he assumed the title, himself. “Money,” he says, “I had none, it is true, nor any human prospect or probability of procuring it, but I knew ‘the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ and in His name set out, nothing doubting.” His friends came to the rescue. As new property was acquired in future, it was always so tied up that Mr. Wesley exercised control—a legal authority which in 1784 he transferred by deed poll to a “legal hundred,” chosen by the Conference members from their own number, “thus assuring the continuance of the people called Methodists as a Christian communion separate from all others, self-governing and self-perpetuating.”

When in 1738 the Wesley brothers decided not to return to the university work and residence which they had resigned to go to Georgia, they were left without home or settled occupation. Charles applied unsuccessfully for a church “living,” but was denied a parish. John received his stipend as Fellow of Lincoln, till 1751, though his teaching position had lapsed and he had no pupils—nor was likely to have any, with his present notoriety! Being barred from pulpits they gave much time to the Religious Societies.

In some doubts of their rights as clergymen without parishes the brothers interviewed the Bishop of London and other authorities, but received little encouragement that, if they continued to preach the “new” doctrines, they would be permitted to serve the churches. They were plainly warned that the bishop had the right to silence them. Yet they went on. Let John explain why: “On scriptural grounds I do not think it hard to justify what I am doing. God, in Scripture, commands me, according to my power, to instruct the ignorant, reform the wicked, confirm the virtuous. Man forbids me to do this in another’s parish, that is, in effect, not to do it at all, seeing I have no parish of my own, nor probably ever shall. Whom, then, shall I hear—God or man? If it be just to obey man rather than God, judge ye. I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far, I mean, that in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.”

In Bristol John Wesley was even forbidden to speak to the prisoners in the jail! This touched his satiric vein: “So we are forbid to go to Newgate for fear of making them wicked, and to Bedlam for fear of drivin...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• FOREWORD: FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
• I-SEEKING
• II-FINDING
• III-HAVING AND DOING
• SUGGESTIONS-To Leaders of Study Groups
• BIBLIOGRAPHY