Read RELIGIOUS HYSTERIA, OR GETTING INSTANTANEOUSLY CONVERTED of The Christian Foundation / Scientific and Religious Journal‚Volume I‚ No. 9. September‚ 1880, free online book, by Aaron Walker, on ReadCentral.com.

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.