BY GEORGE HERBERT CURTEIS, M.A.,
Late Fellow and Sub-Rector of Exeter
College, Principal of the Litchfield Theological College,
and Prebendary of Litchfield Cathedral.
I fear it is impossible to deny, that
in the early part of the eighteenth century amid
the general coldness, languor, and want of enthusiasm
which characterized that effete epoch “the
Church of England, as well as all the dissenting bodies,
slumbered and slept.” At this epoch, the
Puritans were buried, and the Methodists were not born.
The Bishop of Litchfield, in a sermon delivered in
1724, said, “The Lord’s Day is now the
Devil’s market day.” In Litchfield
Cathedral Library is a copy of Dr. Balguy’s
Sermons, delivered in 1748, containing on the fly-leaf
an autograph remark by Bishop Bloomfield. It is
in these words, “No Christianity here.”
It is said of that period of time, by a noted minister
of the Church of England, that a dry rationalism had
taken possession of the church, and that all the powers
of her best intellects were engaged in hot contests
with Deists and Unitarians; that an equally dry morality
and stoical praise of “Virtue” formed the
chief part of the exhortations from the pulpit.
It was just in these times that the causes of the
reformation of John Wesley sprang into being.
Seven biographies of John Wesley have already been
written, and the subject seems far from being exhausted
even yet. As usual in such cases it is the earlier
publications which take the more sober view of his
character and history; while those of a later date
surround their hero with a halo of extravagant admiration.
Alexander Knox, a personal friend of Wesley’s,
thus writes of him: “How was he competent
to form a religious polity so compact, effective and
permanent? I can only express my firm conviction
that he was totally incapable of preconceiving such
a scheme. That he had uncommon acuteness in
fitting expedients to conjunctures is most certain;
this, in fact, was his great talent.”
(Letter appended to Southey’s Third Edition) Methodism, at the first, sprang up simply
as a revival.
Half a century ago a distinguished
Wesleyan wrote as follows: “Though Methodism
stands now in a different relation to the establishment
than in the days of Mr. Wesley, dissent has
never been professed by the body and for
obvious reasons: (1) A separation of a part of
the society from the church has not arisen from the
principles assumed by the professed Dissenters, and
usually made so prominent in their discussions on
the subject of establishments. (2) A considerable number
of our members are actually in the communion of the
Church of England to this day. (3) To leave that communion
is not, in any sense, a condition of membership with
us.” (R. Watson’s Observations)
“What may we reasonably believe
to be God’s design in raising up the preachers
called Methodists? Not to form any new sect, but
to reform the nation, particularly the church; and
to spread scriptural holiness over the land.”
(Large Minutes of Conference, 1744-89, Qu. 3.)
In the same, Qu. 45, we have this answer:
“We are not seceders, nor do we bear any resemblance
to them. We set out upon quite opposite principles.”
Southey says: “Wesley had now proposed to
himself a clear and determinate object. He hoped
to give a new impulse to the Church of England, to
awaken its dormant zeal, infuse life into a body where
nothing but life was wanting, and lead the way to the
performance of duties which the church had scandalously
neglected.” (Southey’s Life)
Mr Curties says: “A disastrous
period of Wesleyanism opened with John Wesley’s
voyage to America, in 1735. It was a mission nobly
undertaken, at the instance of Dr. Burton, of Corpus
College, and of the celebrated mystic, William Law;
and its purpose was twofold; first, that of ministering
to the settlers in Georgia, and then of evangelizing
the neighboring tribes of red Indians. (Southey’s
Life). But its results were far different
from those which either Wesley, or those who wished
him well, could have anticipated. For not only
were his services for the settlers rejected, and his
mission to the Indians a failure. (R. Watson’s
Life.) On his voyage out he had fallen in with
twenty-six Moravian fellow-passengers, on their way
from Germany to settle in Georgia; and they spoilt
all. On his as yet unsettled, enthusiastic, self-dissatisfied
frame of mind, the spectacle of their confident, tranquil,
yet fervid piety, fell like a spark on tinder.
He writes, in his journal, now first begun, ’From
friends in England I am awhile secluded; but God hath
opened me a door into the whole Moravian Church.’
Here, Wesley learned, and took in, the doctrines of
Peter Bohler, the Moravian, who taught thus:
First, when a man has a living faith in Christ, then
he is justified. Second, this living faith is
always given in a moment. Third, in that
moment he has peace with God. Fourth, which he
can not have without knowing he has it. Fifth,
and being born of God he sinneth not. Sixth, and he can not have this
deliverance from sin, without knowing that he has it. (Southeys Life)
Such is the origin of the Methodist
tenet “that there is a swift and royal road,
not only for some men, but for all men, by which the
highest spiritual things may be reached at a bound.”
Under such an impression John Wesley set about realizing
an instantaneous and sensible conversion. If
a man under high mental excitement is looking for such
a thing to occur, something will take place sooner
or later that will answer the expectation. So,
on Wednesday, May 24, 1738, about nine o’clock
in the evening, at a society’s meeting in Aldersgate
street, Wesley persuaded himself that he had felt
the desired transition and had passed from
what, to what? In the answer to that question
lies the whole doctrinal difference between modern
Methodism and the Church of England. Stevens,
in his history of Methodism 1, 108, says, Methodism
owes to Moravianism special obligations: (1) It
introduced Wesley into that regenerated spiritual
life, the supremacy of which over all ecclesiasticism
and dogmatism it was the appointed mission of Methodism
to reassert. But a still stranger event occurred
in John Wesley’s life, which contributed still
farther to darken and confuse his teaching at this
critical period of his career. He had been carried
away by his love of the Moravians so far as to take
a long journey, and to visit the headquarters of their
communion at Hernhutt, in Saxony. There he had
been an honored guest at the retreat which the enthusiast
Count Zinzendorf had carved out of his estate for
these hunted Bohemian followers of Huss and Wickliff.
But he had returned home, after a brief residence
among them, as Luther returned from Rome, not a little
shaken in his allegiance to their system. Indeed,
shortly afterwards he broke from them entirely; set
up a sort of English Moravianism of his own, and organized
it with “bands” and “class-meetings”
on the Moravian model. But his feelings as a
churchman revolted against their ultra-spiritualism;
repudiated their doctrine that sacraments and outward
means were nothing, and protested that a man must do
something more than wait, in quietude, until the influx
of God’s spirit came upon him, and filled, like
a rising tide, all the sluices and channels of his
soul. But no sooner had this unquiet soul emancipated
itself from one foreign influence than it was warped
out of its true course by another. German mysticism
had done its work on him, and its doctrine of regeneration
into God’s kingdom by an interior convulsion
of the mind had left its mark upon Wesleyanism for
all future time. But just as this extravagance
seemed likely to subside, and to be absorbed amid the
healthier atmosphere of an English churchman’s
common sense, most unhappily a strong breath of French
fanaticism suddenly set across his path, from
quite another quarter. And the singular phenomenon
now presented itself of an epidemic religious-hysteria
commingling with, and emphasizing into lamentable
extravagance, all the most dangerous features of the
Methodist-Moravian doctrine about the new birth.
So wonderfully is all the world connected together!
These French “convulsionists,”
who had, just before this time, brought their curious
mental malady with them into England, were refugees
from the atrocious dragonnades of Louis the
XIV. Maddened by his abominable and relentless
persécutions, deprived by his autocratic edicts
of all that life held dear, robbed of their children
at the sweet age of seven years old, broken on the
wheel, hunted among the mountains of the Cevennes,
beggared, insulted, tortured, massacred what
wonder that these poor Protestants lost the balance
of their mental powers and engendered a hysterical
disease? The disease is (I believe), under its
strangely mutable forms, well known to medical science,
though science has never yet been able to probe all
its mysterious depths. Its seat is, apparently,
the great nervous ganglia of nutrition, which lie in
the center of the body, and whose strange sympathetic
action with and upon the brain has led to all the
popular notions about the heart and neighboring organs
being the seat of various impassioned feelings.
Suffice it, however, at present, to observe that the
phenomena which this extraordinary and infectious
disease presented had sufficed to cheer the faith
and animate the ardor of the Calvinists in the Cevennes
against Rome.
The Cevennes is a range of mountains
in the south of France, divided into N. and S.
a wild rugged country, and the abode of many Protestants,
who here maintained themselves against the persécutions
of their enemies. (See Cavalier Jean).
Such, in fact, were the causes of the extasies or
irregular inspirations; the want of spiritual guides
and schools, spoliation, suffering, liability to torture,
and constant apprehension of the galley or the gibbet,
the minds of these unfortunate creatures became excited.
This religious enthusiasm began in
Vivarais, an old territory of France, in Languedoc,
on the Rhone, with the dragonnades and the revocation,
repeal of an edict, about the year 1686.
A practical proof of the morbific
power of the emotions and passions is found in the
frequent occurrence of psychopathitis in times
when all the elements of social life are in a state
of fermentation. In and after revolutions sudden
changes of fortune produce a thousand cases of mental
disorder.
The very same disease broke out among
the Romanists themselves, at Port Royal, in 1729.
In the previous century it had thrown whole nunneries
near Bordeaux into wild confusion. In the sixteenth
century it was known in Italy as the “Dancing
Mania,” or Tarantism. At the close of the
fifteenth century Tarantism had spread beyond
the borders of Apulia. The number of those affected
by it increased beyond all belief. Inquisitive
females joined the throng and caught the disease from
the mental poison which they eagerly received through
the eye. Foreigners of every color and race
were, in like manner, affected by it. Neither
youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even
old men of ninety threw aside their crutches, and
joined the most extravagant dancers. Subordinate
nervous attacks were much more frequent during the
seventeenth century, than at any former period. (Hecker,
Epidemics of the Middle Ages)
During the Middle Ages it appeared
in Germany. It was a convulsion, which in the
most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame;
and was propogated by the sight of the
sufferers. They continued dancing, for hours
together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell
to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then
complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if
in the agonies of death. They were haunted by
visions, and some of them afterwards asserted that
they had felt as if immersed in a stream of blood,
which obliged them to leap so high. George Fox,
Journal 1: “The word of the Lord
came to me again. So I went up and down the streets
crying, Woe to the bloody city, Lichfield! And
there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running
down the streets, and the market-place appeared like
a pool of blood.” In Germany it was called
St. John’s or St. Vitus’s dance.
And long before its first appearance in that precise
form, in 1374, it had, no doubt, been the real secret
of the bacchanalian orgies among the Greeks, and of
the frantic, dervish-like gestures and cuttings with
knives and lancets which we read of among Asiatic races.
In our own day and country (thank God) these extraordinary
and degrading spectacles are scarcely to be seen.
But the disease still lurks among
the superstitious Christians of Tigre in Abyssinia;
in Siberia; among the revivalists of Ireland and America;
and (in a very mild form), among the ignorant Welsh
Methodists, who are on this account popularly
called “Jumpers.” Now it so happened
that these poor hysterical French refugees had arrived
in great numbers in London, and had also visited Bristol,
shortly before the critical year 1739, when
the excitable George Whitfield landed from America,
and John Wesley returned home from Germany. Men’s
thoughts were then full of the (so called) “French
prophets.” A new religious enthusiasm was
floating in the atmosphere, and it only needed the
impulse of some exciting preaching, and the mental
tension which is always produced among expectant and
heated crowds, to generate infallibly an outbreak of
this unaccountable and infectious malady. Such
an occasion soon presented itself. In February,
1739, Whitfield, for the first time, preached in the
open air, at Kingswood, near his native place, Bristol,
to the wild and lawless colliers of the then
Black Country of England. In the May following
he persuaded John Wesley to join him there, and to
imitate his example. And then, for the first
time, religious hysteria began to manifest
itself in England. Men and women of all ages fell
down in convulsions, and cried aloud for mercy.
And honest John Wesley said, “I am persuaded
that it is the devil tearing them as they are coming
to Christ.” Wesley’s Journals.