EX
JOHN WESLEY'S
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
IN MEMORY OF
MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER
John Wesley's Place
in History
By
WOODROW WILSON
President of the United States
THE ABINGDON PRESS
NEW YORK CINCINNATI
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED AT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
ON THE OCCASION OF THE
WESLEY BICENTENNIAL
JOHN WESLEY'S PLACE
IN HISTORY
JOHN WESLEY lived and wrought
while the Georges reigned. He
was born but a year after Anne be-
came queen, a year before the battle
of Blenheim was fought; while England
was still caught in the toils of the
wars into which her great constitu-
tional revolution had drawn her; when
Marlborough was in the field, and the
armies afoot which were to make the
ancient realm free to go her own way
without dictation from any prince in
Europe. But when he came to man-
hood, and to the days in which his
work was to begin, all things had
fallen quiet again. Wars were over
2047007
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
and the pipes of peace breathed sooth-
ing strains. The day of change had
passed and gone, and bluff Sir Robert
Walpole ruled the land, holding it
quiet, aloof from excitement, to the
steady humdrum course of business, in
which questions of the treasury and
of the routine of administration were
talked about, not questions of con-
stitutional right or any matter of
deep conviction. The first of the
dull Georges had come suitably into
the play at the center of the slow
plot, bringing with him the vulgar
airs of the provincial court of obscure
Hanover, and views that put states-
manship out of the question.
The real eighteenth century had set
in, whose annals even its own his-
torians have pronounced to be tedious,
unheroic, without noble or moving
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
plot, though they would fain make
what they can of the story. They
have found it dull because it lacked
dramatic unity. Its wars were fought
for mere political advantage — because
politicians had intrigued and thrones
fallen vacant; for the adjustment of
the balance of power or the aggran-
dizement of dynasties; and represented
neither the growth of empires nor the
progress of political ideals. All re-
ligion, they say, had cooled and
philanthropy had not been born. The
thinkers of the day had as little
elevation of thought as the statesmen,
the preachers as little ardor as the
atheistical wits, whose unbelief they
scarcely troubled themselves to chal-
lenge. The poor were unspeakably
degraded and the rich had flung morals
to the winds. There was no ad-
5
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
venture of mind or conscience that
seemed worth risking a fall for.
But the historians who paint this
somber picture look too little upon
individuals, upon details, upon the
life that plays outside the field of
politics and of philosophical thinking.
They are in search of policies, move-
ments, great and serious combinations
of men, events that alter the course
of history, or letters that cry a chal-
lenge to the spirits. Forget statecraft,
forego seeking the materials for sys-
tematic narrative, and look upon the
eighteenth century as you would look
upon your own day, as a period of
human life whose details are its real
substance, and you will find enough
and to spare of human interest. The
literary annals of a time, when Swift
and Addison and Berkeley and Butler
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
and Pope and Gray and Defoe and
Richardson and Fielding and Smollett
and Sterne and Samuel Johnson and
Goldsmith and Burke and Hume and
Gibbon and Cowper and Burns wrote,
and in which Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Byron, Shelley, and Keats were born,
cannot be called barren or without
spiritual significance.
No doubt the wits of Queen Anne's
time courted a muse too prim, too
precise, too much without passion to
seem to us worthy to stand with the
great spirit of letters that speaks in
the noble poetry with which the next
century was ushered in; but there was
here a very sweet relief from the
ungoverned passions of the Restora-
tion, the licentious force of men who
knew the restraints neither of purity
nor of taste; and he must need strong
7
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
spices in his food who finds Swift
insipid. No doubt Fielding is coarse,
and Richardson prolix and sentimental,
Sterne prurient and without true tonic
for the mind, but the world which
these men uncovered will always stand
real and vivid before our eyes. It
is a crowded and lively stage with
living persons upon it; the eighteenth
century can never seem a time vague
and distant after we have read those
pages of intimate revelation. No doubt
Dr. Johnson failed to speak any vital
philosophy of life and uttered only
common sense, and the talk at the
Turk's Head Tavern ran upon pre-
serving the English Constitution rather
than upon improving it; but it is
noteworthy that Mr. Goldsmith, who
was of that company, was born of
the same century that produced Lau-
8
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
rence Sterne, and that "She Stoops
to Conquer" and the "Vicar of Wake-
field," with their sweet savor of purity
and modesty and grace, no less than
"Tristram Shandy" and "Tom Jones,"
with their pungent odor, blossomed in
the unweeded garden of that careless
age. Burns sang with clear throat
and an unschooled rapture at the
North, and the bards were born who
were to bring the next age in with
strains that rule our spirits still.
A deep pulse beat in that unevent-
ful century. All things were making
ready for a great change. When the
century began it was the morrow of
a great struggle, from whose passionate
endeavors men rested with a certain
lassitude, with a great weariness and
longing for peace. The travail of the
civil wars had not ended with the
9
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
mastery of Cromwell, the Restoration
of Charles, and the ousting of James;
it had ended only with the constitu-
tional revolution which followed 1688,
and with the triumphs of the Prince
of Orange. It had been compounded
of every element that can excite or
subdue the spirits of men. Questions
of politics had sprung out of ques-
tions of religion, and men had found
their souls staked upon the issue.
The wits of the Restoration tried to
laugh the ardor off, but it burned
persistent until its work was done
and the liberties of England spread
to every field of thought or action.
No wonder the days of Queen Anne
seemed dull and thoughtless after
such an age; and yet no wonder there
was a sharp reaction. No wonder
questions of religion were avoided,
10
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
minor questions of reform postponed.
No wonder Sir Robert sought to cool
the body politic and calm men's minds
for business. But other forces were
gathering head as hot as those which
had but just subsided. This long age
of apparent reaction was in fact an
age of preparation also; was not merely
the morrow of one revolution, but
was also the eve of another, more
tremendous still, which was to shake
the whole fabric of society. England
had no direct part in bringing the
French Revolution on, but she drank
with the rest of the wine of the age
which produced it, and before it came
had had her own rude awakening in
the revolt of her American colonies.
Great industrial changes were in
progress, too. This century, so dull
to the political historian, was the cen-
11
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTOKY
tury in which the world of our own
day was born, the century of that
industrial revolution which made po-
litical ambition thenceforth an instru-
ment of material achievement, of
commerce and manufacture. These
were the days in which canals began
to be built in England, to open her
inland markets to the world and
shorten and multiply her routes of
trade; when the spinning jenny was
invented and the steam engine and
the spinning machine and the weaver's
mule; when cities which had slept
since the middle ages waked of a
sudden to new life and new cities
sprang up where only hamlets had
been. Peasants crowded into the towns
for work; the countrysides saw their
life upset, unsettled; idlers thronged
the highways and the marts, their old
12
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTOKY
life at the plow or in the village given
up, no settled new life found; there
were not police enough to check or
hinder vagrancy, and sturdy beggars
were all too ready to turn their hands
to crime and riot. The old order was
breaking up, and men did not readily
find their places in the new.
The new age found its philosophy
in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations,"
the philosophy of self-interest, and
men thought too constantly upon these
things to think deeply on any others.
An industrial age, an age of indus-
trial beginnings, offers new adventures
to the mind, and men turn their
energies into the channels of material
power. It is no time for speculations
concerning another world; the imme-
diate task is to fill this world with
wealth and fortune and all the enginery
13
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
of material success. It is no time
to regard men as living souls; they
must be thought of rather as tools,
as workmen, as producers of wealth,
the builders of industry, and the cap-
tains of soldiers of fortune. Men must
talk of fiscal problems, of the laws
of commerce, of the raw materials
and the processes of manufacture, of
the facilitation of exchange. Politics
centers in the budget, and the freedom
men think of is rather the freedom of
the market than the freedom of the
hustings or of the voting booth.
And yet there are here great energies
let loose which have not wrought their
full effect upon the minds of men in
the mere doing of their daily tasks
or the mere planning of their fortunes.
Men must think and long as well as
toil; the wider the world upon which
14
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
they spend themselves the wider the
sweep of their thoughts, the restless,
unceasing excursions of their hope.
The mind of England did not lie
quiet through those unquiet days. All
things were making and to be made,
new thoughts of life as well as new
ways of living. Masters and laborers
alike were sharing in the new birth
of society. And in the midst of these
scenes, this shifting of the forces of
the world, this passing of old things
and birth of new, stood John Wesley,
the child, the contemporary, the spir-
itual protagonist of the eighteenth
century. Born before Blenheim had
been fought, he lived until the fires
of the French Revolution were ablaze.
He was as much the child of his age
as Bolingbroke was, or Robert Burns.
We ought long ago to have perceived
15
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
that no century yields a single type.
There are countrysides the land over
which know nothing of London town.
The Vicar of Wakefield rules his parish
as no rollicking, free-thinking fellow
can who sups with Laurence Sterne.
Sir Roger de Coverley is as truly a
gentleman of his age as Squire Western.
Quiet homes breed their own sons.
The Scots country at the North has
its own free race of poets and think-
ers, men, some of them, as stern as
puritans in the midst of the loose
age. Many a quiet village church in
England hears preaching which has no
likeness at all to the cool rationalistic
discourse of vicars and curates whom
the spiritual blight of the age has
touched, and witnesses in its vicarage
a life as simple, as grave, as elevated
above the vain pursuits of the world
16
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
as any household of puritan days had
seen. England was steadied in that
day, as always, by her great pervasive
middle class, whose affections did not
veer amidst the heady gusts even of
that time of change, when the world
was in transformation; whose life held
to the same standards, whose thoughts
traveled old accustomed ways. The
indifference of the church did not
destroy their religion. They did not
lose their prepossessions for the orderly
manners and morals that kept life pure.
It was no anomaly, therefore, that
the son of Samuel and Susanna Wesley
should come from the Epworth rectory
to preach forth righteousness and judg-
ment to come to the men of the eigh-
teenth century. Epworth, in quiet
Lincolnshire, was typical English land
and lay remote from the follies and
17
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
fashions of the age. There was sober
thinking and plain living — there where
low monotonous levels ran flat to the
spreading Humber and the coasts of
the sea. The children of that vicarage,
swarming a little host about its hearth,
were bred in love and fear, love of
rectitude and fear of sin, their imagina-
tion filled with the ancient sanctions of
the religion of the prophets and the
martyrs, their lives drilled to right
action and the studious service of God.
Some things in the intercourse and
discipline of that household strike us
with a sort of awe, some with repul-
sion. Those children lived too much
in the presence of things unseen; the
inflexible consciences of the parents
who ruled them brought them under
a rigid discipline which disturbed their
spirits as much as it enlightened them.
18
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTOKY
But, though gaiety and lightness of
heart were there shut out, love was
not, nor sweetness. No one can read
Susanna Wesley's rules for the instruc-
tion and development of her children
without seeing the tender heart of
the true woman, whose children were
the light of her eyes. This mother
was a true counsellor and her children
resorted to her as to a sort of prov-
idence, feeling safe when she approved.
For the stronger spirits among them
the regime of that household was a
keen and wholesome tonic.
And John Wesley was certainly one
of the stronger spirits. He came out
of the hands of his mother with the
temper of a piece of fine steel. All
that was executive and fit for mastery
in the discipline of belief seemed to
come to perfection in him. He dealt
19
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
with the spirits of other men with
the unerring capacity of a man of
affairs — a sort of spiritual statesman,
a politician of God, speaking the policy
of a kingdom unseen, but real and
destined to prevail over all king-
doms else.
He did not deem himself a re-
former; he deemed himself merely a
minister and servant of the church
and the faith in which he had been
bred, and meant that no man should
avoid him upon his errand though it
were necessary to search the by-ways
and beat the hedges to find those
whom he sought. He did not spring
to his mission like a man who had
seen a vision and conceived the plan
of his life beforehand, whole, and with
its goal marked upon it as upon a
map. He learned what it was to be
20
from day to day, as other men do.
He did not halt or hesitate, not be-
cause his vision went forward to the
end, but because his will was sound,
unfailing, sure of its immediate pur-
pose. His "Journal" is as notable a
record of common sense and sound
practical judgment as Benjamin Frank-
lin's "Autobiography" or the letters of
Washington. It is his clear knowledge
of his duty and mission from day to
day that is remarkable, and the effi-
ciency with which he moved from
purpose to purpose. It was a very
simple thing that he did, taking it
in its main outlines and conceptions.
Conceiving religion vitally, as it had
been conceived in his own home,
he preached it with a vigor, an
explicitness, a directness of phrase
and particularity of application which
21
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTOKY
shocked the sober decorum of his
fellow ministers of the church so much
that he was more and more shut out
from their pulpits. He got no church
of his own; probably no single parish
would have satisfied his ardor had a
living been found for him. He would
not sit still. The conviction of the
truth was upon him; he was a messen-
ger of God, and if he could not preach
in the churches, where it seemed to
him the duty of every man who loved
the order and dignity of divine service
to stand if he would deliver the word
of God, he must, as God's man of
affairs, stand in the fields as Mr.
Whitefield did and proclaim it to all
who could come within the sound of
his voice.
And so he made the whole kingdom
his parish, took horse like a courier
22
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTOEY
and carried his news along every high-
way. Slowly, with no premeditated
plan, going now here, now there, as
some call of counsel or opportunity
directed him, he moved as if from stage
to stage of a journey; and as he went
did his errand as if instinctively. No
stranger at an inn, no traveler met
upon the road left him without hear-
ing of his business. Those he could
not come to a natural parley with he
waylaid. The language of his "Jour-
nal" is sometimes almost that of the
highwayman. "At Gerard's Cross," he
says, "I plainly declared to those whom
God gave into my hands the faith as
it is in Jesus: as I did the next day
to a young man I overtook on the
road." The sober passion of the task
grew upon him as it unfolded itself
under his hand from month to month,
23
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
from year to year. He was more and
more upon the highways; his journeys
lengthened, carried him into regions
where preachers had never gone be-
fore, to the collieries, to the tin mines,
to the fishing villages of the coast,
and made him familiar with every
countryside of the kingdom, his slight
and sturdy figure and shrewd, kind
face known everywhere. It was not
long before he was in the saddle from
year's end to year's end, always going
forward as if upon an enterprise, but
never hurried, always ready to stop
and talk upon the one thing that
absorbed him, making conversation and
discourse his business, seizing upon a
handful of listeners no less eagerly
than upon a multitude.
The news got carried abroad as he
traveled that he was coming, and he
24
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
was expected with a sort of excite-
ment. Some feared him. His kind
had never been known in England
since the wandering friars of the mid-
dle ages fell quiet and were gone.
And no friar had ever spoken as this
man spoke. He was not like Mr.
Whitefield; his errand seemed hardly
the same. Mr. Whitefield swayed men
with a power known time out of
mind, the power of the consummate
orator whose words possess the mind
and rule the spirit while he speaks.
There was no magic of oratory in
Mr. Wesley's tone or presence. There
was something more singular, more in-
timate, more searching. He com-
manded so quietly, wore so subtle
an air of gentle majesty, attached
men to himself so like a party leader,
whose coming draws together a com-
25
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
pany of partisans, and whose going
leaves an organized band of adherents,
that cautious men were uneasy and
suspicious concerning him. He seemed
a sort of revolutionist, left no com-
munity as he found it, set men by
the ears. It was hard to believe that
he had no covert errand, that he
meant nothing more than to preach
the peaceable riches of Christ. "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 re-
covery of sight to the blind; to set at
liberty them that are bruised, to pro-
claim the acceptable year of the Lord"
—this had been the text from which
he preached his first sermon by the
highway, standing upon a little emi-
26
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
nence just outside the town of Bristol.
It described his mission — but not to
his enemies. The churches had been
shut against him, not because he
preached, but because he preached with
so disturbing a force and directness,
as if he had come to take the peace
of the church away and stir men to a
great spiritual revolution; and uneasy
questionings arose about him. Why
was he so busy? Why did he confer
so often with an intimate group of
friends, as if upon some deep plan,
appoint rendezvous with them, and
seem to know always which way he
must turn next, and when? Why was
he so restless, so indomitably eager
to make the next move in his mysteri-
ous journey? Why did he push on
through any weather and look to his
mount like a trooper on campaign?
27
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
Did he mean to upset the country?
Men had seen the government of
England disturbed before that by fa-
natics who talked only of religion and
of judgment to come. The Puritan and
the Roundhead had been men of this
kind, and the Scottish Covenanters.
Was it not possible that John Wesley
was the emissary of a party or of
some pretender, or even of the sinister
Church of Rome?
He lived such calumnies down. No
mobs dogged his steps after men had
once come to know him and perceived
the real quality he was of. Indeed,
from the very first men had surrendered
their suspicions upon sight of him.
It was impossible, it would seem, not
to trust him when once you had looked
into his calm gray eyes. He was so
friendly, so simple, so open, so ready
28
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
to meet your challenge with temperate
and reasonable reply, that it was im-
possible to deem him subtle, politic,
covert, a man to preach one thing and
plan another. There was something,
too, in his speech and in the way he
bore himself which discovered the heart
of every man he dealt with. Men
would raise their hands to strike him
in the mob and, having caught the
look in his still eye, bring them down
to stroke his hair. Something issued
forth from him which penetrated and
subdued them — some suggestion of pur-
ity, some intimation of love, some sign
of innocence and nobility — some power
at once of rebuke and attraction which
he must have caught from his Master.
And so there came a day Vhen prej-
udice stood abashed before him, and
men everywhere hailed his coming as
29
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
the coming of a friend and pastor.
He became not only the best known
man in the kingdom — that of course,
because he went everywhere — but also
the best loved and the most wel-
come.
And yet the first judgment of him
had not been wholly wrong. A sort
of revolution followed him, after all.
It was not merely that he came and
went so constantly and moved every
countryside with his preaching. Some-
thing remained after he was gone: the
touch of the statesman men had at
first taken him to be. He was a min-
ister of the Church of England. He
loved her practices and had not will-
ingly broken with them. It had been
with the keenest reluctance that he
consented to preach in the fields, out-
side the sacred precincts of a church,
30
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
"having been all my life," as he said,
"so tenacious of every point relating
to decency and order that I should
have thought the saving of souls al-
most a sin if it had not been done in
a church." He never broke with the
communion he loved. But his work in
the wide parish of a whole kingdom
could not be done alone, and not
many men bred to the orders of the
church could be found to assist him;
he was forced by sheer drift of cir-
cumstances to establish a sort of lay
society, a sort of salvation army, to
till the fields he had plowed. He was
a born leader of men. The conferences
he held with the friends he loved and
trusted were councils of campaign, and
did hold long plans in view, as his
enemies suspected. They have a high
and honorable place in the history of
31
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
the statesmanship of salvation. It was
a chief part of Wesley's singular power
that everything he touched took shape
as if with a sort of institutional life.
He was not so great a preacher as
Whitefield or so moving a poet as his
brother Charles; men counseled him
who were more expert and profound
theologians than he and more subtle
reasoners upon the processes of salva-
tion. But in him all things seemed
combined; no one power seemed more
excellent than another, and every power
expressed itself in action under the
certain operation of his planning will.
He almost unwittingly left a church
behind him.
It is this statesmanship in the
man that gives him precedence in
the annals of his day. Men's spirits
were not dead; they are never dead;
32
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTOKY
but they sometimes stand confused,
daunted, or amazed as they did amidst
the shifting scenes of the eighteenth
century, and wait to be commanded.
This man commanded them, and kept
his command over them, not only by
the way he held the eye of the whole
nation in his incessant tireless jour-
neys, his presence everywhere, his
winning power of address, but also by
setting up deputies, classes, societies,
where he himself could not be, with
their places of meeting, their organ-
izations and efficient way of action.
He was as practical and attentive to
details as a master of industry, and
as keen to keep hold of the business
he had set afoot. It was a happy
gibe that dubbed the men of his way
Methodists. It was the method of his
evangelization that gave it permanence
33
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
and historical significance. He would
in any case have been a notable figure,
a moving force in the history of his
age. His mere preaching, his striking
personality, his mere presence every-
where in the story of the time, his mere
vagrancy and indomitable charm,would
have drawn every historian to speak
of him and make much of his pic-
turesque part in the motley drama of
the century; but as it is they have
been constrained to put him among
statesmen as well as in their catalogues
of saints and missionaries.
History is inexorable with men who
isolate themselves. They are suffered
oftentimes to find a place in literature,
but never in the story of events or
in any serious reckoning of cause and
effect. They may be interesting, but
they are not important. The mere
34
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
revolutionist looks small enough when
his day is passed; the mere agitator
struts but a little while and without
applause amidst the scenes and events
which men remember. It is the men
who make as well as destroy who
really serve their race, and it is note-
worthy how action predominated in
Wesley from the first. The little
coterie at Oxford, to which we look
back as to the first associates in the
movement which John Wesley dom-
inated, were as fervent in their prayers,
in their musings upon the Scripture,
in their visits to the poor and outcast,
before John Wesley joined them as
afterward. Their zeal had its roots in
the divine pity which must lie at the
heart of every evangelistic movement
— pity for those to whom the gospel
is not preached, whom no light of
35
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
Christian guidance had reached, the
men in the jails and in the purlieus
of the towns whom the church does
not seek or touch; but he gave them
leadership and the spirit of achieve-
ment. His genius for action touched
everything he was associated with;
every enterprise took from him an
impulse of efficiency.
Unquestionably this man altered and
in his day governed the spiritual his-
tory of England and the English-
speaking race on both sides of the sea;
and we ask what was ready at his
hand, what did he bring into being
of the things he seemed to create?
The originative power of the indi-
vidual in affairs must always remain
a mystery, a theme more full of ques-
tions than of answers. What would
the eighteenth century in England have
36
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
produced of spiritual betterment with-
out John Wesley? What did he give
it which it could not have got without
him? These are questions which no
man can answer. But one thing is
plain: Wesley did not create life, he
only summoned it to consciousness.
The eighteenth century was not dead;
it was not even asleep; it was only
confused, unorganized, without author-
itative leadership in matters of faith
and doctrine, uncertain of its direc-
tion.
Wesley's own Journal affords us an
authentic picture of the time, mixed,
as always, of good and bad. He
fared well or ill upon his journeys as
England was itself made up. The
self-government of England in that
day was a thing uncentered and un-
systematic in a degree it is nowadays
37
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
difficult for us to imagine. The coun-
try gentlemen, who were magistrates,
ruled as they pleased in the country-
sides, whether in matters of justice
or administration, without dictation or
suggestion from London; and yet ruled
rather as representatives than as mas-
ters. They were neighbors the year
around to the people they ruled; their
interests were not divorced from the
interests of the rest. Local pride and
a public spirit traditional amongst them
held them generally to a just and up-
right course. But the process of justice
with them was a process of opinion as
much as of law. It was an inquest
of the neighborhood, and each neighbor-
hood dealt with visitors and vagrants
as it would. There was everywhere the
free touch of individuality. The roads
were not policed; the towns were not
38
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
patrolled — good men and bad had al-
most equal leave to live as they
pleased. If things went wrong the
nearest magistrate must be looked up
at his home or stopped in his carriage
as he passed along the highway and
asked to pass judgment as chief neigh-
bor and arbiter of the place. And
so Mr. Wesley dealt with individuals
—it was the English way. His safety
lay in the love and admiration he won
or in the sense of fair play to which
his frank and open methods appealed;
his peril, in the passions of the crowds
or of the individuals who pressed
about him full of hatred and evil
thoughts.
The noteworthy thing was how many
good men he found along these high-
ways where Tom Jones had traveled,
how many were glad to listen to him
39
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
and rejoiced at the message he brought,
how many were just and thoughtful
and compassionate, and waited for
the gospel with an open heart. This
man, as I have said, was no engaging
orator, whom it would have been a
pleasure to hear upon any theme.
He spoke very searching words,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
cutting the conscience to the quick.
It was no pastime to hear him. It
was the more singular, therefore, the
more significant, the more pitiful, how
eagerly he was sought out, as if by
men who knew their sore need and
would fain hear some word of help,
though it were a word also of stern
rebuke and of fearful portent to those
who went astray. The spiritual hun-
ger of men was manifest, their need
of the church, their instinct to be
40
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
saved. The time was ready and cried
out for a spiritual revival.
The church was dead and Wesley
awakened it; the poor were neglected
and Wesley sought them out; the
gospel was shrunken into formulas and
Wesley flung it fresh upon the air
once more in the speech of common
men; the air was stagnant and fetid;
he cleared and purified it by speaking
always and everywhere the word of
God; and men's spirits responded,
leaped at the message, and were made
wholesome as they comprehended it.
It was a voice for which they had
waited, though they knew it not. It
would not have been heard had it
come untimely. It was the voice of
the century's longing heard in the
mouth of this one man more per-
fectly, more potently, than in the
41
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
mouth of any other — and this man a
master of other men, a leader who
left his hearers wiser than he found
them in the practical means of salva-
tion.
And so everything that made for
the regeneration of the times seemed
to link itself with Methodism. The
great impulse of humane feeling which
marked the closing years of the cen-
tury seemed in no small measure to
spring from it: the reform of prisons,
the agitation for the abolition of slav-
ery, the establishment of missionary
societies and Bible societies, the intro-
duction into life, and even into law,
of pity for the poor, compassion for
those who must suffer. The noble
philanthropies and reforms which
brighten the annals of the nineteenth
century had their spiritual birth in
42
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
the eighteenth. Wesley had carried
Christianity to the masses of the
people, had renewed the mission of
Christ himself, and all things began
to take color from what he had done.
Men to whom Methodism meant noth-
ing, yet, in fact, followed this man
to whom Methodism owed its estab-
lishment.
No doubt he played no small part
in saving England from the madness
which fell upon France ere the cen-
tury ended. The English poor bore
no such intolerable burdens as the
poor of France had to endure. There
was no such insensate preservation of
old abuses in England as maddened
the unhappy country across the Chan-
nel. But society was in sharp transi-
tion in England; one industrial age
was giving place to another, and the
43
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
poor particularly were sadly at a loss
to find their places in the new. Work
was hard to get, and the new work
of pent-up towns was harder to under-
stand and to do than the old familiar
work in the field or in the village
shops. There were sharper contrasts
now than before between rich and
poor, and the rich were no longer
always settled neighbors in some coun-
tryside, but often upstart merchants
in the towns, innovating manufacturers
who seemed bent upon making society
over to suit their own interests. It
might have gone hard with order and
government in a nation so upset,
transformed, distracted, had not the
hopeful lessons of religion been taught
broadcast and the people made to
feel that once more pity and salva-
tion had sought them out.
44
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
There is a deep fascination in this
mystery of what one man may do
to change the face of his age. John
Wesley, we have had reason to say,
planned no reform, premeditated no
revivification of society; his was simply
the work of an efficient conviction.
How far he was himself a product of
the century which he revived it were
a futile piece of metaphysic to inquire.
That even his convictions were born
of his age may go without saying:
they are born in us also by a study
of his age, and no century listens to
a voice out of another — least of all
out of a century yet to come. What
is important for us is the method and
cause of John Wesley's success. His
method was as simple as the object
he had in view. He wanted to get
at men, and he went directly to them,
45
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
not so much like a priest as like a
fellow man standing in a like need
with themselves. And the cause of
his success? Genius, no doubt, and
the gifts of a leader of men, but also
something less singular, though per-
haps not less individual — a clear con-
viction of revealed truth and of its
power to save. Neither men nor
society can be saved by opinions;
nothing has power to prevail but the
conviction which commands, not the
mind merely, but the will and the
whole spirit as well. It is this, and
this only, that makes one spirit the
master of others, and no man need
fear to use his conviction in any age.
It will not fail of its power. Its magic
has no sorcery of words, no trick of
personal magnetism. It concentrates
personality as if into a single element
46
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
of sheer force, and transforms con-
duct into a life.
John Wesley's place in history is
the place of the evangelist who is
also a master of affairs. The evan-
gelization of the world will always
be the road to fame and power, but
only to those who take it seeking,
not these things, but the kingdom of
God; and if the evangelist be what
John Wesley was, a man poised in
spirit, deeply conversant with the na-
tures of his fellow-men, studious of
the truth, sober to think, prompt and
yet not rash to act, apt to speak
without excitement and yet with a
keen power of conviction, he can do
for another age what John Wesley
did for the eighteenth century. His
age was singular in its need, as he
was singular in his gifts and power.
47
WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTOKY
The eighteenth century cried out for
deliverance and light, and God had
prepared this man to show again the
might and the blessing of his salvation.
48
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