THE METHODIST NEW CONNEXION MAGAZINE. DECEMBER, 1852. DISCOURSES, ESSAYS, &c. PICTURES OF GENIUS.-THEIR LIGHTS AND THEIR SHADES. JOHN WESLEY AND GEORGE WHITEFIELD. In drawing a portrait of a man's mind, we frequently feel how much we should like to have a couple of hours' free conversation with him by the fire-side. It is true, we can converse with him in his works, or in his history; but here there is a stiffness and a precision, and a distance —a half-natural and a half-artificial air-which not infrequently is hard to get rid of, and which a familiar personal interview would effectually remove. We may, indeed, obtain his great thoughts, and read of his great deeds, but we don't so clearly see his less ones, nor his foibles, nor the muscular movement of his face, nor the peculiar glance of his eye. The mind-limner who is dealing with "spirits-departed" feels ready to turn temporary resurrectionist in order to reproduce his subject, and successfully to accomplish his difficult task. But the thought recurs that even then he would be defeated; for the spirit, which is the true man, and that he is in search of, would be gone. In attempting the portraitures of Wesley and Whitefield, we must again quietly submit to this misfortune, and produce pictures as near the original as we can, and those who desire better must seek them elsewhere, or patiently wait till they meet Wesley and Whitefield in the world of spirits. It would be useless to spend labour in describing the deplorable state of religion in this country at the time of the appearance of Wesley and Whitefield. It is notorious that nearly everything like religion had disappeared. A fearful dearth had reigned for years; a spiritual night had long brooded over and held the land in bondage. From Cape Wrath to Lizard Point, and from Lowestoft to St. David's Head, as far as religion was concerned (with a very few exceptions), there was darkness, there was an ominous silence, there was the image of spiritual death. There was the skeleton of religion-even this was often deformed-but the agents of motion, the circulating life-fluid, the vital organs, all sensibility, all consciousness, the last trace of animated organism, seemed to have disappeared. There was the chill of the corpse, and the gloom of midnight; and Wesley and Whitefield appeared-not as shooting stars, but as burning suns-not as "matter-of-course" formalists, but as earnest, uncompromising Christians, living and breathing, and reflecting, the very spirit and quintessence of primitive Christianity. Wesley and Whitefield soon saw that religion in this country was at a miserable discount; and in order that they might awake the public to its importance, they sought to drink deep of its pure streams themselves. They studied deeply the oracles of God, they united in earnest and devout prayer, they visited the poor and the sick, they penetrated the prisons in the neighbourhood of the college, and they distributed of their substance, and they carried the consolations of the Gospel wherever they had an opportunity. But Oxford could not long contain them. The apostolic spirit took hold of them, and they at once regarded the world as their parish, the Bible as their creed, Christ as their bishop, and commenced an aggression on the kingdom of Satan, penetrated the thickets of ignorance and the dens of vice, and speedily thousands were awakened to the paramount importance of their attention to spiritual interests. A religious movement set in, the effects of which now defy all human calculation, and which nothing can unfold but the vast cycles of eternity. The religious principle was deeply laid in the nature both of Wesley and Whitefield, and the annals of the Church present few men in whom it was so thoroughly cultivated. And their piety was of the sterling sort. It was no mere glitter on the surface. It was a substantive reality. It lived in them, and moved through them, and stirred the very depths of their souls. Their piety was not that conventional sort of thing which gets the credit of being pious without any of the genuine constituents of piety. We have much now of the counterfeit of Wesley and Whitefield; that is to say, we have much of their externals. It has become fashionable to copy these, but we have not so much of the soul and spirit of them, which alone can give them currency. It is not enough remembered that these are only media, that they only represent something, or, that they are simply symbols of positive value existingnot in them, but somewhere else; and that an attempt to put them in circulation in the place of sterling coin, not only excites the pity of the intelligent, but stirs their indignation. Wesley and Whitefield's was not a cant piety which consisted in a solemn countenance and a series of stereotyped phraseologies. It went deeper than the face, and further than words. With them it was a heart-principle which penetrated their entire nature. It was a vitality-something which lived-which lived under the control of high Christian sentiment, and which encircled them through their lives with a halo of glory. The peculiar religious dialect which now prevails amongst some dissenters may be, to a large extent, the phraseology of Wesley and Whitefield; but to the latter it was natural, and not a mere copy. It flowed from their lips as the true and living language of the heart, and not as a matter of course, without a corresponding inward emotion. We do not say, "Dispense with the phraseology of Wesley and Whitefield;" only when we adopt it, we should be careful to have Wesley and Whitefield's spirit, or it will fit very awkwardly, and it may leave the impression that we appear in another man's suit for a not very honourable purpose. Religion cannot be parrotted. It is not a rote affair, nor is it something to be put on and taken off like one's hat, nor does it run in families as a hereditary inheritance, nor in sects as an entailed estate. It is a great principle which absorbs into itself the whole man, which has its source in love to God, which finds its outlet in active benevolence, and its motives in a hearty obedience to a divine law. This was the religion of Wesley and Whitefield, which began with them at Oxford, and continued with them to the grave. The one grand absorbing aim of their religion was "the salvation of souls." Towards this point, everything in their thoughts and in their labours tended as to a centre. They were baptized with that heavenlove and that martyr spirit which led their Master to go lamb-like to the cross and to bleed out his life. Their religion glimmered in their features, and breathed in their words, and left a fragrance behind them wherever they went. They learned it in the Bible, they lived it in their lives, they preached it, they gloried in it, they leaned on it in their death. Their religion, too, was one which prepared them to make sacrifices, and to endure sufferings for the good of others. It conquered what is always a very stubborn element in human nature-the love of ease and emolument. Nothing would have been easier for them than to have settled down and grown fat in some quiet and profitable rectory or vicarage; and, indeed, no preferment the Church had to give was beyond the reach of either of their abilities. But confinement to a parish or a diocese would have been as the yoke of slavery to souls overflowing with a benevolence wide as the world, and with a zeal probably not equalled, certainly not excelled, since the age of the Apostles. And it required more than trifles to drive them from their work. They were slandered and maligned by the clergy of the Establishment, who evidently felt their "craft" was in danger. So rare were the manifestations of religion during this age, that they were branded as "enthusiasts" and "madmen"-a very ready way, by the by, of removing a disagreeable contrast produced by a comparison of their own character and labours, with the character and labours of Wesley and Whitefield. The piety of our reformers was such as made the empty professions of the clergy look unseemly, and the fruits of it appeared to imply that there was something wrong either in the spirit or the aims of the priests of the " Church." Those feelings which are commonly excited in human nature by a consciousness of being distanced began to show themselves; and an affected contempt was the result, which often ran into bitter revenge. The rabble was excited against the irregular preachers; and the sound of the horn and the drum assembled and excited the fury of mobs. But Wesley and Whitefield stood firm, and evinced the force of their religion and the inextinguishableness of their zeal. Stones and clods, decayed eggs and putrescent carcases, flew thickly about their ears, and besmeared their apparel; but these things failed to convince them that they were in the wrong, nor did they induce them to abandon their work of conversion. Wesley still penetrated the haunts of ignorance; and Whitefield still "hunted for souls." Tens of thousands rushed to hear them, and large numbers were brought to God. Whitefield, however, we imagine, was too wont to allow these rabblemobs to cool, not his piety, but his self-respect. Wesley, come what might, never sunk in his own esteem, but felt himself to be still John Wesley. An embruted population and an idle priesthood could never bow his spirit. But when Whitefield had felt the weight of a few stones under the influence of a kind of centrifugal force, when he had *It took a bold fellow to strike Wesley while he looked him in the face. His benignant countenance disarmed the fiercest of the mobs. The rabble could do best when they had his back to them. been honoured with a few showers of mud, he seemed to think himself a worse man, or at least to deem himself inexpressibly honoured when admitted after this to the society of the nobility. He says, "It was death to be despised, and worse than death to think of being laughed at by all;" and informs us, that it took "twice seven years of contempt to make contempt an agreeable companion." (We are inclined to think it was not exquisitely so at last.) His flattery to Lady Huntingdon was next door to the fulsome; and when he speaks of his having Chesterfield, Bolingbroke, and Hume for auditors, it is with a certain sort of complacency that borders closely on the vain. "I went home never more surprised at anything in my life." "The mighty, the noble, the wise have been to hear me." Thus," says he, "the world turns round;" evidently thinking himself in more honourable circumstances than when pelted with brickbats and bespattered with mud. This, however, is problematical. To us he seems the "nobler" when associating with the stones and dripping with the showers of priestly revenge. Whitefield forgot that he himself was by far the brightest star in the constellation at Lady Huntingdon's, and that his name would shine on the page of history when those of Chesterfield, and Hume, and Bolingbroke had retired from the gaze of mortals into the dark chaos of an oblivious forgetfulness. He says, with an air of vanity, that Chesterfield addressed him after a sermon, Sir, I shall not tell you what I shall tell others, how I approve of you." Whether this was a mere compliment, or whether it was a dictate of Chesterfield's idea of "good-breeding," or whether it was the sincere expression of his mind, is hard to tell; but the noble earl, doubtless, felt it to be inimitable condescension on his part. Whitefield, too, had some such notion. But he did not know how soon he would be above either his lordship's "approval" or blame, or he might well have addressed him in the spirit of self-importance and said, "Thanks, my lord, for your approval; but I do not need, much less do I bandy compliments." In the early stages of their career, Wesley and Whitefield were miserably hampered with a species of religious mysticism. It did not take their brain, but it seemed to take away their good sense. It did not positively shut them up in a cave, but it made them silly as monks who had been fastened some time in a convent. To ourselves, few things are so contemptible as a state of mind which despises and shuns social intercourse. There are some persons who look upon the attentions of their friends with about as much emotion as they do on a blast of wind, or a shower of rain. They appear only fit to be barred and bolted in an old castle, and now and then to look through its iron grids. They have nothing about them which leads them to join communion with the glorious earth and sky. They can walk out under the wide canopy of the universe, when Nature everywhere is overflowing with reverent worship, but it moves them not. Their papered walls and their plastered ceiling have attractions enough for them. We would be the last to wear out an existence with a perpetual and profitless gossip, or with an aimless or an equally useless habit of strolling about the country; but the man who fosters a disposition to escape from all companionship, and who has a constant hankering to retire into a cellar, not only becomes an ingrate by insulting his own social nature, and not less the Author of it, but convicts himself of a degree of pride and stupid self-sufficiency which gives him a claim to be transported to some distant desert, amid rocks and sands, where he may commune with beings of similar sensibility. Wesley and Whitefield discovered their mistake before this state of mind had thus far led them astray. It is true that the works and acquaintanceship of A'Kempis, and the venerable Law, first awoke them to a sense of the importance of vital religion, in contradistinction to the cold formalities of the age; but with this awakening was inspired an unsociableness of temper and disposition, which went far towards placing them side by side with the miserable hermits of the second century. They began to talk how distasteful was the world, and how they loved retirement, and all the rest of that inimitable nonsense which characterizes Popish monkery. In the case of Whitefield, if Philips* speaks truly, it brought on an illness which for some time threatened to cut short his life. His college tutor told a friend that he was mad; and when the latter advised Whitefield to mind his work and to be subject to the "higher powers," he told him "he had a new revelation." We take this to have been a mere laddish weakness, the result of a head full of foolish imaginings about his own cleverness in the religious life and his own self-importance as a student. A quietism like this, and so early, looks hardly square. Philips, indeed, sets to and censures freely the Wesleys, and even regrets Whitefield's association with them. We see no reason for this. If the Wesleys gave him advice, it was doubtless the best they had to offer, and his anxiety to read works of a "mystical" tendency, is evident enough from his own account, independent of any influence of the Wesleys. As to the regrets about the association of Whitefield with the Methodists of Oxford, we can see no reason for them, unless he wished to save himself the trouble of writing the excellent "Life and Times of Whitefield." For ourselves, we cannot but think that Whitefield owes his position principally to his association with the Wesleys. The writings of Law, though brim-full of the very cream of genuine religion, are nevertheless to be guarded against in their tendency to engender moroseness, and a sort of religious hypochondriacism. This faulty peculiarity of his works, where it does not act as in the case of Wesley and Whitefield, sometimes has a contrary influence, especially where it is seen and felt to be in direct antagonism with our social nature. Minds of a certain cast are thus tripped off their heels, and the consequence is, the appearance of a peculiar scepticism, which indulges towards religion, sometimes irreverent lampoons, and at others indirect sarcasms. It is worth inquiry how far Gibbon owed his defective faith to his intercourse with the good William Law and his writings. But as Wesley and Whitefield's "mortifications of the flesh" and self-imposed penances brought their own punishments, they saw the folly of breaking down strong and healthy constitutions, which an All Wise Providence had given for much higher purposes. They neglected, while abstaining from flesh, to take, like the Papists, a double supply of fish and eggs. Wesley and Whitefield soon broke through their cell tendencies, and, in imitation of their Master, set out on a mission to the world, in which they were in labours more abuudant,” and which, in a singularly short time, gave the lie to asceticism. But these early impressions gave a tinge to their characters (particularly in the case of 66 * See Philips's" Life and Times of Whitefield," pp. 17, 18, 19, &c. |