Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (127 page)

Wesley's mission was set amid rapid economic transformation in Britain, and a great shift in population to new manufacturing centres much accelerated during the course of his long ministry as the industrial revolution gained momentum. Such places were a problem for the established Church, whose ancient distribution of parishes was very difficult to amend and expand. How could the new populations receive the pastoral care they deserved and hear of the good news he had received? Wesley's answer was unconventional for a High Church Anglican: in 1739 he followed his friend and fellow clergyman George Whitefield (at first rather nervously) in preaching in the open air, as revivalist Jesuits did in Catholic Europe. He was astonished at the dramatic result. Crowds unused to such direct personal address or much consideration from educated clergymen were gripped by mass emotion and a sense of their own sin and its release. They laughed, they wept, they rolled on the ground. Something must be done with them.

Wesley relished organizing people. He sent out travelling ('itinerant') preachers to build up societies from among the excited crowds, who found peace and personal dignity in the Christian message, and took on the Oxford nickname of 'Methodists'. Soon they learned to sing the hymns written by John's gifted brother Charles - around nine thousand in all. They featured much reference to divine wounds and blood (although not in the same soaking quantities that Moravians enjoyed) and through them ran a characteristic Wesley theme, that life could be totally transformed by this acceptance of Christ's sufferings: all for 'me'. That is a characteristic Evangelical emphasis on Jesus's direct address to the individual, the Saviour's gaze turned lovingly on the poorest wretch.
⁶²

Methodists can still thrill the listener when they return to this heritage, sung to one of their vigorous early hymn tunes, many of which delight in repeating the words in glorious tumbles of competing melody, before the satisfyingly harmonious resolution. These so-called 'fuguing tunes' require a certain skill to sing, and Methodists appreciated skill.
⁶³
Over time, their music became one of the distinguishing marks of the culture of the 'chapel', an all-embracing society which was a safe and wholesome setting for ordered family life. The English now prefer to sing one such fuguing tune from Kent called 'Cranbrook' to a nonsense verse, 'Ilkla Moor Batat', said to have been made up by a Yorkshire chapel choir out on a country jaunt, but 'Cranbrook' will be found to make a fine sound of Charles Wesley's original words. Effectively it is the universal anthem of Methodism:

Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer's praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace!

Jesus! - the name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease;
'Tis music in the sinner's ears,
'Tis life and health and peace.

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean;
His blood avails for me.
⁶⁴

Methodist hymns were an element in the gradual separation of Wesley's movement from the Church of England. The irregular and noisy activity of the Methodists deeply worried the Church authorities and infuriated many parish clergy. Faced with much hostility, Wesley had no choice in some places but to continue with open-air preaching, or even to forget his Anglican principles and accept the hospitality of Dissenting congregations. He built headquarters in London and Bristol in 1739; soon his societies were putting up other preaching houses ('chapels') for themselves all over the country (see Plate 38). This posed questions of identity - much as Wesley tried to avoid the issue by labelling his movement not a Church but a 'Connexion', and in mid-career (1758) writing a pamphlet entitled
Reasons against a separation from the Church of England
. Was he simply founding yet another new society to bring fresh life to Anglicanism? What about his congregations in Presbyterian Scotland, if this was so? The only legal way in either England or Scotland to sustain his preaching houses was to declare them to be Dissenting chapels and get them registered as the law demanded; reluctantly in 1787 he had to advise his societies that this must be done.

By then other circumstances had made this inevitable. Wesley's preachers had begun successful work in the British American colonies, but when revolution broke out in 1776, they were seriously affected. Many Anglican clergy withdrew and there was virtually no one left to whom Wesley's American followers could go to receive Holy Communion. Wesley, High Church sacramentalist that he was - both John and Charles were prepared to use the language of 'real presence' in talking about the Eucharist - saw this as a desperate situation. There was still no Anglican bishop in America to ordain new clergy and Wesley could not persuade any English bishop to do so. Accordingly he searched for precedents to help out, and more or less found what he wanted in the early history of the Church in Alexandria, where priests as well as bishops had been involved in ordinations. So, on the basis of being a 'Presbyter of the Church of England', he took it on himself to revive the practice. His brother Charles, also an Anglican clergyman, deplored the move, but John obstinately refused to recognize that he had done anything decisive, even when he went on to ordain men for areas within the British Isles and elsewhere where he thought an emergency justified the action. With further inconsistency, he was furious when the leaders of the American Methodists called themselves bishops - a tradition which has remained within the American tradition of Methodism. And even towards the end of his life he repeated (as did Charles, with rather less complication) that he lived and died a member of the Church of England.
⁶⁵

So Wesley in his latter days was an Anglican in the fashion that the elderly Zinzendorf was a Lutheran; he was, and was not. Born in a different time and place, Wesley might have founded a religious order or a flexibly structured society which could find a home in the Church as the Jesuits had done (and even they had experienced early difficulty), but the English Reformation had set its face against monasticism. Wesley's deliberate avoidance of the full consequences of his actions meant that he left a host of problems for his preachers and societies. On his death in 1791, they grappled with issues of identity and Church government which his immense personal prestige had postponed. The resulting quarrels were often bitter, and although British Methodism continued growing in numbers and influence, it was characterized for almost a century by constant internal schisms away from the original 'Wesleyan Connexion' - in fact, worldwide, Methodism has been extraordinarily fertile in creating new religious identities, as we will discover. Methodists still all sang Charles Wesley's hymns and shared a common ethos, practising a 'religion of the heart' which treasured Wesley's optimistic affirmation of the possibility of Christian perfection. Here once more was a typical Wesley contradiction. While John Wesley loved Luther's exposition of Christ's sacrifice for sin in his Passion and the need for the gift of free grace for salvation, his High Churchmanship led him to reject predestination and to affirm humanity's universal potential for acceptance by God. He wanted to challenge his converts to do their best in an active Christian life, and he commended the challenge to Reformed views of salvation offered by the sixteenth-century renegade Dutch Reformed minister Jacobus Arminius (see p. 649). He even called the house journal of his Methodists the
Arminian Magazine
to ram home the point; and it was a point with which most Church of England clergy would then have agreed. Wesley's distinctive soteriology was to have great long-term resonances.

By no means all the leading figures of the Evangelical Revival were swept into Wesley's Connexion or its offshoots. His early associate George Whitefield deeply disagreed with Wesley's rejection of Calvinist predestination, and he founded his own association of Calvinist congregations. Whitefield lacked Wesley's organizational talent; his genius lay in oratory (see Plate 37). His cenotaph in Old South Presbyterian Church, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, says with an idiom which may mislead modern ears but is intended as a compliment to a preacher of the post-Apostolic age, 'no other uninspired man ever preached to so large assemblies'. Many Evangelical clergy nevertheless managed to avoid the separation from the Church of England forced on the followers of Whitefield and Wesley. While Wesley famously wrote 'I look upon all the world as my parish', they were prepared to work within the existing parish structure of the Church of England.
⁶⁶
Through their energies, certain areas and parishes became strongholds of Evangelical practice. As a result, by the end of the eighteenth century, there was a recognizable Evangelical party among English clergy and gentry - still divided by those inclined to Calvinism and those like Wesley inclined to Arminianism.

Such Evangelicals and their Methodist and Dissenting allies or rivals began a long process of remoulding British social attitudes away from the extrovert consumerism of the eighteenth century, in an effort to make people exercise a self-discipline in their daily lives which would police itself, in the absence of any possibility of the national Church now doing so. Congregations were encouraged to better themselves materially as well as spiritually, a broad hint being given in one of Charles Wesley's best-loved hymns:

And can it be that I should gain
an interest in the Saviour's blood!
Died he for me? who caused his pain!
For me? who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Here Wesley's fertile imagination has sought his controlling metaphor in the language of a vigorously commercial society: sinners 'gain an interest' in the Saviour's blood, just as they might gain an 'interest', a commercial stake, in a little shop, a busy workshop - perhaps even, if they did well enough, a factory or a bank. Such would be the aspiration of many of the struggling, financially vulnerable people who sang Wesley's hymn, turning their sense of joy and relief at their salvation to making a more decent life for themselves and their families. Hard work was allied with strict morality; if ever there was anything resembling the 'Protestant work ethic', it came out of Methodism and the Evangelical Revival rather than the sixteenth-century Reformation.
⁶⁷
One of the most remarkable English Evangelical activists in education and charity among the poor both nationwide and in her native West Country, Hannah More, has appropriately been styled by her recent biographer 'the first Victorian'. Even though she died when the future Queen Victoria was only fourteen, More anticipated and set patterns for the moral seriousness which was the preferred public self-image of most nineteenth-century Britons.
⁶⁸
The effect did not wear off until the 1960s (see pp. 985-901).

Evangelicals were by nature activists, and they began to follow the Moravians abroad. In doing so, they did much to influence the behaviour of two great international institutions created by a century of warfare and imperial expansion, the British army and navy. Many of John Wesley's travelling preachers were former soldiers, ideally suited to the rigorous life he required of them. Worldwide in range and a solvent of local difference among their recruits, the British armed forces have often been injudiciously ignored as agents in the spread of Evangelical revival, probably because of traditional unflattering stereotypes about military behaviour. We need to see the army as like other institutions and communities in flux in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where uprooted individuals sought identity and frameworks for their lives amid confusion and danger: Evangelical principles were as likely to appeal to soldiers as to anyone else, perhaps more in view of their confrontations with violence and death. Moreover, the British army's and navy's steady embrace of a non-partisan patriotism chimed well with a general tendency in British Evangelicalism to keep away from politics unless absolutely necessary, while tending to patriotic conservatism.
⁶⁹

THE GREAT AWAKENINGS AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

American Evangelicalism had its own preoccupations, which from the early eighteenth century produced its distinctive style of Protestant revival, soon christened 'Great Awakenings'. These emerged at a time when the leaderships of many American Churches were feeling that the dreams of the first colonists had been betrayed; the Church establishments in several colonies represented only a minority of the population, and many people had no Church contacts at all. Just as in Old England, systems of Church discipline, once so important in New England's sense of its identity, were now impossible to enforce. The tensions in trying to maintain them against such frightening phenomena as premarital sex and Quakers produced one embarrassing high-profile excess in 1692 at Salem, Massachusetts. A short-lived and belated repetition of Protestant English paranoia about witches led to around 150 prosecutions and nineteen executions, and then in short order to the discrediting of the old ethos. A similar witchcraft case in Connecticut in the same year was dropped after widespread and powerfully expressed disquiet from clergy and laity alike, and indeed one of the judges in the Salem trials, Samuel Sewall, subsequently repented and five years later publicly asked fellow members of his Boston congregation for forgiveness for what he had done.
⁷⁰

Before Wesley's movement reached across the Atlantic, the Awakenings in the northern colonies were more purely Reformed, associated with Churches which sprang from Scottish or Dutch roots rather than from those of English origin. Scots had begun emigrating from their kingdom in the early seventeenth century, though their first destination had been not America but Ireland. King James VI and I, after succeeding to the English throne, encouraged them to settle there in order to counter Catholic militancy, sending them to the most troublesome part of Gaelic Ireland, Ulster. Those immigrants may not have been especially convinced Protestants to begin with, but they had every incentive to discover their Protestantism in the face of a resentful Catholic population whom they were seeking to supplant. Anxious, rootless, looking for identity in a strange land, they turned with fervour not so much to the feeble existing Protestant parish system of the Church of Ireland but to ministers of their own, who brought with them the vigorously developing popular life of the Scottish Kirk, centred on massive open-air occasional celebrations of the Eucharist, preceded by long periods of catechism and sermonizing. So large were the gatherings that often no church building could hold them and they turned into open-air 'Holy Fairs', occasions of mass celebration and socializing within a framework of emotional worship: a shared experience of ecstatic renewal, or 'revival'.
⁷¹