The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century / With a supplemental chapter on the revival in America
Date: 2019-12-31T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Evangelical Revival

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Title: The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century

Author: Edwin Paxton Hood

Release date: December 31, 2019 [eBook #61062]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT REVIVAL OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ***

The Great Revival.—Frontispiece.

The Foundry, Moorfields.

THE

GREAT REVIVAL

OF

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

BY
REV. EDWIN PAXTON HOOD,
AUTHOR OF

“Isaac Watts: his Life and Writings, his Home and Friends,” etc.

With a Supplemental Chapter on the Revival in America.

PHILADELPHIA:

AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION,

1122 Chestnut Street.

NEW YORK.    CHICAGO.

EDITOR’S NOTE.

The only changes made in revising this work are in the local allusions to England as “our country,” etc., and in a few phrases and expressions naturally arising from the original preparation of the chapters for successive numbers of a magazine. If any reader thinks that the Author’s enthusiasm in his subject has caused him to ascribe too great influence to the “Methodist movement,” and not to give due recognition to other potent agencies in the “great awakening” of the last century, let him remember that this volume does not profess to give a complete, but only a partial history of the Great Revival. Indeed, the Author’s graphic pictures relate chiefly to the movement, as it swept over London and the great mining centres of England, where the truth, as proclaimed by the great leaders, Whitefield, the Wesleys, and their co-laborers, won its greatest victories, and where Methodism has ever continued to render some of its most valiant and glorious services for Christ. It is not to be inferred that in Scotland, Ireland, and in the American colonies, as in many portions of England, other organizations, dissenting societies and churches were not a power in spreading the Great Revival movement.

A brief chapter has been added at the close, sketching some phases of the revival in the American colonies, under the labors of Edwards, Whitefield, the Tennents, and their associates. Whatever other material has been added by the Editor is indicated by brackets, thus leaving the distinguished Author’s views and expressions intact.

An Index has also been added, to increase the permanent value of the book to the reader. If the history of the remarkable “religious awakenings” of the eighteenth century were more diligently studied, and the holy enthusiasm and wonderful zeal of those great leaders in “hunting for souls” were to inspire workers of this century, what marvellous conquests and victories should we witness for the Son of God!

Philadelphia, March, 1882.

PREFACE.

The author of the following pages begs that they may be read kindly—and, he will venture to say, not critically. Originally published as a series of papers in the Sunday at Home, * * * they are only Vignettes—etchings. The History of the great Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Century yet remains unwritten; not often has the world known such a marvellous awakening of religious thought; and, as we are further removed in time, so, perhaps, we are better able to judge of the momentous circumstances, could we but seize the point of view.

CONTENTS.

| CHAP. | PAGE.
I. | The Darkness Before the Dawn | 7
II. | First Streaks of Dawn | 24
III. | Oxford: New Lights and Old Lanterns | 48
IV. | Cast Out from the Church—Taking to the Fields | 68
V. | The Revival Conservative | 86
VI. | The Singers of the Revival | 109
VII. | Lay Preaching and Lay Preachers | 132
VIII. | A Gallery of Revivalist Portraits | 154
IX. | Blossoms in the Wilderness | 180
X. | The Revival Becomes Educational—Robert Raikes | 193
XI. | The Romantic Story of Silas Told | 216
XII. | Missionary Societies | 250
XIII. | Aftermath | 260
XIV. | Revival in the New World | 281
| Appendices | 303
| Index | 321

THE GREAT REVIVAL.

CHAPTER I

DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN.

It cannot be too often remembered or repeated that when the Bible has been brought face to face with the conscience of corrupt society, in every age it has shown itself to be that which it professes, and which its believers declare it to be—“the great power of God.” It proved itself thus amidst the hoary and decaying corruptions of the ancient civilisation, when its truths were first published to the Roman Empire; it proclaimed its power to the impure but polished society of Florence, when Savonarola preached his wonderful sermons in St. Mark’s; and effected the same results throughout the whole German Empire, when Bible truth sounded forth from Luther’s trumpet-tones. The same principle is illustrated where the great evangelical truths of the New Testament entered nations, as in Spain or France, only to be rejected. From that rejection and the martyrdoms of the first believers; those nations have never recovered themselves even to this hour; and of the two nations, that in which the rejection was the most haughty and cruel, has suffered most from its renunciation.

England has passed through three great evangelical revivals.

The first, the period of the Reformation, whose force was latent there, even before the waves of the great German revolution reached its shores, and called forth the pen of a monarch, and that monarch a haughty Tudor, to enter the lists of disputation with the lowly-born son of a miner of Hartz Mountains. What that Reformation effected in England we all very well know; the changes it wrought in opinion, the martyrs who passed away in their chariots of fire in vindication of its doctrines, the great writers and preachers to whose works and names we frequently and lovingly refer.

Then came the second great evangelical revival, the period of Puritanism,[1] whose central interests gather round the great civil wars. This was the time, and these were the opinions which produced some of the most massive and magnificent writers of our language; the whole mind of the country was stirred to its deepest heart by faith in those truths, which to believe enobles human nature, and enables it to endure “as seeing Him who is invisible.” There can be no doubt that it produced some of the grandest and noblest minds, whether for service by sword or pen, in the pulpit or the cabinet, that the world has known. Lord Macaulay’s magnificently glowing description of the English Puritan, and how he attained, by his evangelical opinions, his stature of strength, will be familiar to all readers who know his essay on Milton.

1.  Appendix A.

But the present aim is to gather up some of the facts and impressions, and briefly to recite some of the influences of the third great evangelical revival in the Eighteenth Century. We are guilty of no exaggeration in saying that these have been equally deserving historic fame with either of the preceding. The story has less, perhaps, to excite some of our most passionate human interests; it had not to make its way through stakes and scaffolds, although it could recite many tales of persecution; it unsheathed no sword, the weapons of its warfare were not carnal; and on the whole, it may be said its doctrine distilled “as the dew;” yet it is not too much to say that from the revival of the last century came forth that wonderfully manifold reticulation and holy machinery of piety and benevolence, we find in such active operation around us to-day.

All impartial historians of the period place this most remarkable religious impulse in the rank of the very foremost phenomena of the times. The calm and able historian, Earl Stanhope, speaking of it, as “despised at its commencement,” continues, “with less immediate importance than wars or political changes, it endures long after not only the result but the memory of these has passed away, and thousands” (his lordship ought to have said millions) “who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole, continue to follow the precepts, and venerate the name of John Wesley.” While the latest, a still more able and equally impartial and quiet historian, Mr. Lecky, says, “Our splendid victories by land and sea must yield in real importance to this religious revolution; it exercised a profound and lasting influence upon the spirit of the Established Church of England, upon the amount and distribution of the moral forces of that nation, and even upon the course of its political history.”

Shall we, then, first attempt to obtain some adequate idea of what this Revival effected, by a slight effort to realise what sort of world and state of society it was into which the Revival came? One writer truly remarks, “Never has century risen on christian England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Queen Anne, and which reached its misty noon beneath the second George, a dewless night succeeded by a dewless dawn. There was no freshness in the past and no promise in the future; the Puritans were buried, the Methodists were not born.” It is unquestionably true that black, bad and corrupt as society was, for the most part, all round, in the eighteenth century, intellectual and spiritual forces broke forth, simultaneously we had almost said, and believing, as we do, in the Providence which governed the rise of both, we may say, consentaneously, which have left far behind all social regenerations which the pen of history has recited before. Of almost all the fruits we enjoy, it may be said the seeds were planted then; even those which, like the printing-press or the gospel, had been planted ages before, were so transplanted as to flourish with a new vigour.

Our eye has been taught to rest on an interesting incident. It was in 1757 John Wesley, travelling and preaching, then about fifty years of age, but still with nearly forty years of work before him, arrived in Glasgow. He saw in the University its library and its pictures; but, had he possessed the vision of a Hebrew seer he might have glanced up from the quadrangle of the college to the humble rooms, up a spiral staircase, of a young workman, over whose lodging was the sign and information that they were tenanted by a “mathematical instrument maker to the University.” This young man, living there upon a poor fare, and eking out a poor subsistence, with many thoughts burdening his mind, was destined to be the founder of the greatest commercial and material revolution the world has known: through him seems to have been fulfilled the wonderfully significant prophecy of Nahum: “The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.” This young man was James Watt, who gave to the world the steam engine. A few years after he gave his mighty invention to Birmingham; and the world has never been the same world since. “By that invention,” says Emerson, “one man can do the work of two hundred and fifty men;” and in Manchester alone and in its vicinity there are probably sixty thousand boilers, and the aggregate power of a million horses.

Let not the allusion seem out of place. That age was the seed-time of the present harvest fields; in that time those great religious ideas which have wrought such an astonishing revolution, acquired body and form; and we ought to notice how, when God sets free some new idea, He also calls into existence the new vehicle for its diffusion. He did not trust the early christian faith to the old Latin races, to the selfish and æsthetic Greek, or to the merely conservative Hebrew; He “hissed,” in the graphic language of the old Bible, for a new race, and gave the New Testament to the Teutonic people, who have ever been its chief guardians and expositors; and thus, in all reviews of the development and unfolding of the religious life in the times of which we speak, we have to notice how the material and the spiritual changes have re-acted on each other, while both have brought a change which has indeed “made all things new.”

Contrasting the state of society after the rise of the Great Revival with what it was before, the present with the past, it is quite obvious that something has brought about a general decency and decorum of manners, a tenderness and benevolence of sentiment, a religious interest in, and observance of, pious usages, not to speak of a depth of religious life and conviction, and a general purity and nobility of literary taste, which did not exist before. All these must be credited to this great movement. It is not in the nature of steam engines, whether stationary or locomotive, nor in printing presses, or Staffordshire potteries, undirected by spiritual forces, to raise the morals or to improve the manners of mankind.

If sometimes in the presence of the spectacles of ignorance, crime, irreligion, and corruption in our own day, we are filled with a sense of despair for the prospects of society, it may be well to take a retrospect of what society was in England at the commencement of the last century. When George III. ascended the throne the population of England was not much over five millions; at the commencement of the present century it was nearly eleven millions; but with the intensely crowded population of the present day, the cancerous elements of society, the dangerous, pauperised, and criminal classes are in far less proportion, not merely relatively, but really. It was a small country, and possessed few inhabitants. There are few circumstances which can give us much pleasure in the review. National distress was constantly making itself bitterly felt; it was the age of mobs and riots. The state of the criminal law was cruel in the extreme. Blackstone calculates that for no fewer than one hundred and sixty offences, some of them of the most frivolous description, the judge was bound to pronounce sentence of death. Crime, of course, flourished. During the year 1738 no fewer than fifty-two criminals were hanged at Tyburn. During that and the preceding years, twelve thousand persons had been convicted, within the Bills of Mortality, for smuggling gin and selling it without licence. The amusements of all classes of people were exactly of that order calculated to create a cruel disposition, and thus to encourage crime; bear-baiting, bull-baiting, prize-fighting, cock-fighting: on a Shrove Tuesday it was dangerous to pass down any public street. This was the day selected for the barbarity of tying a harmless cock to a stake, there to be battered to death by throwing a stick at it from a certain distance. The grim humour of the people took this form of expressing the national hatred to the French, from the Latin name for the cock, Gallus. It was in truth a barbarous pun.

With abundant wealth and means of happiness, the people fell far short of what we should consider comfort now. Life and liberty were cheap, and a prevalent Deism or Atheism was united to a wild licentiousness of manners, brutalising all classes of society. For the most part, the Church of England had so shamefully forgotten or neglected her duty—this is admitted now by all her most ardent ministers—while the Noncomformists had sunk generally into so cold an indifferentism in devotion, and so hard and sceptical a frame in theology, that every interest in the land was surrendered to profligacy and recklessness, and, in thoughtful minds, to despair. Society in general was spiritually dead. The literature of England, with two or three famous exceptions, suffered a temporary eclipse. Such as it was, it was perverted from all high purposes, and was utterly alien to all purity and moral dignity. A good idea of the moral tone of the times might be obtained by running the eye over a few volumes of the old plays of this period, many of them even written by ladies; it is amazing to us now to think not only that they could be tolerated, but even applauded. The gaols were filled with culprits; but this did not prevent the heaths, moors, and forests from swarming with highwaymen, and the cities with burglars. In the remote regions of England, such as Cornwall in the west, Yorkshire and Northumberland in the north, and especially in the midland Staffordshire, the manners were wild and savage, passing all conception and description. We have to conceive of a state of society divested of all the educational, philanthropic, and benevolent activities of modern times. There were no Sunday-schools, and few day-schools; here and there, some fortunate neighbourhood possessed a grammar-school from some old foundation. Or, perhaps some solitary chapel, retreating into a bye-lane in the metropolitan city, or the country town, or, more probably, far away from any town, stood at some confluence of roads, a monument of old intolerance; but, as we said, religious life was in fact dead, or lying in a trance.

As to the religious teachers of those times, we know of no period in our history concerning which it might so appropriately be said, in the words of the prophet, “The pastors” are “become brutish, and have not sought the Lord.” In the life of a singular man, but not a good one, Thomas Lord Lyttleton, in a letter dated 1775, we have a most graphic portrait of a country clergyman, a friend of Lyttleton, who went by the designation of “Parson Adams.” We suppose him to be no bad representative of the average parson of that day—coarse, profane, jocular, irreligious. On a Saturday evening he told Lyttleton, his host, that he should send his flocks to grass on the approaching Sabbath. “The next morning,” says Lyttleton, “we hinted to him that the company did not wish to restrain him from attending the Divine service of the parish; but he declared that it would be adding contempt to neglect if, when he had absented himself from his own church he should go to any other. This curious etiquette he strictly observed; and we passed a Sabbath contrary, I fear, both to law and to gospel.”

If we desire to obtain some knowledge of what the Church of England was, as represented by her clergy when George III. was king, we should go to her own records; and for the later years of his reign, notably to the life of that learned, active, and amiable man, Dr. Blomfield, Bishop of London, whose memory was a wonderful repository of anecdotes, not tending to elevate the clergy of those times in popular estimation. Intoxication was a vice very characteristic of the cloth: on one occasion the bishop reproved one of his Chester clergy for drunkenness: he replied, “But, my lord, I never was drunk on duty.” “On duty!” exclaimed the bishop; “and pray, sir, when is a clergyman not on duty?” “True,” said the other; “my lord, I never thought of that.” The bishop went into a poor man’s cottage in one of the valleys in the Lake district, and asked whether his clergyman ever visited him. The poor man replied that he did very frequently. The bishop was delighted, and expressed his gratification at this pastoral oversight; and this led to the discovery that there were a good many foxes on the hills behind the house, which gave the occasion for the frequency of calls which could scarcely be considered pastoral. The chaplain and son-in-law of Bishop North examined candidates for orders in a tent on a cricket-field, he being engaged as one of the players; the chaplain of Bishop Douglas examined whilst shaving; Bishop Watson never resided in his diocese during an episcopate of thirty-four years.

And those who preached seem rarely to have been of a very edifying order of preachers; Bishop Blomfield used to relate how, in his boyhood, when at Bury St. Edmund’s, the Marquis of Bristol had given a number of scarlet cloaks to some poor old women; they all appeared at church on the following Sunday, resplendent in their new and bright array, and the clergyman made the donation of the marquis the subject of his discourse, announcing his text with a graceful wave of his hand towards the poor old bodies who were sitting there all together: “Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these!” This worthy seems to have been very capable of such things: on another occasion a dole of potatoes was distributed by the local authorities in Bury, and this also was improved in a sermon. “He had himself,” the bishop says, “a very corpulent frame, and pompous manner, and a habit of rolling from side to side while he delivered himself of his breathing thoughts and burning words; on the occasion of the potato dole, he chose for his singularly appropriate text (Exodus xvi. 15): ‘And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna;’ and thence he proceeded to discourse to the recipients of the potatoes on the warning furnished by the Israelites against the sin of gluttony, and the wickedness of taking more than their share.”

When that admirable man, Mr. Shirley, began his evangelistic ministry as the friend and coadjutor of his cousin, the Countess of Huntingdon, a curate went to the archbishop to complain of his unclerical proceedings: “Oh, your grace, I have something of great importance to communicate; it will astonish you!” “Indeed, what can it be?” said the archbishop. “Why, my lord,” replied he, throwing into his countenance an expression of horror, and expecting the archbishop to be petrified with astonishment, “he actually wears white stockings!” “Very unclerical indeed,” said the archbishop, apparently much surprised; he drew his chair near to the curate, and with peculiar earnestness, and in a sort of confidential whisper, said, “Now tell me—I ask this with peculiar feelings of interest—does Mr. Shirley wear them over his boots?” “Why, no, your grace, I cannot say he does.” “Well, sir, the first time you ever hear of Mr. Shirley wearing them over his boots, be so good as to warn me, and I shall know how to deal with him!”

We would not, on the other hand, be unjust. We may well believe that there were hamlets and villages where country clergymen realised their duties and fulfilled them, and not only deserved all the merit of Goldsmith’s charming picture,[2] but were faithful ministers of the New Testament too. But our words and illustrations refer to the average character presented to us by the Church; and this, again, is illustrated by the vehement hostility presented on all hands to the first indications of the Great Revival. For instance, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Church, Vicar of Battersea, in a well-known sermon on charity schools, deplored and denounced the enormous wickedness of the times; after saying, “Our streets are grievously infested; every day we see the most dreadful confusions, daring villanies, dangers, and mischiefs, arising from the want of sentiments of piety,” he continues: “For our own sakes and our posterity’s everything should be encouraged which will contribute to suppressing these evils, and keep the poor from stealing, lying, drunkenness, cruelty, or taking God’s name in vain. While we feel our disease, ’tis madness to set aside any remedy which has power to check its fury.” Having said this, with a perfectly startling inconsistency he turns round, and addressing himself to Wesley and the Methodists, he says, “We cannot but regard you as our most dangerous enemies.”

2.  Appendix B.

When the Great Revival arose, the Church of England set herself, everywhere, in full array against it; she possessed but few great minds. The massive intellects of Butler and Berkeley belonged to the immediately preceding age. The most active intellect on the bench of bishops was, no doubt, that of Warburton; and it is sad to think that he descended to a tone of scurrility and injustice in his attack on Wesley, which, if worthy of his really quarrelsome temper, was altogether unworthy of his position and his powers.

Thus, whether we derive our impressions from the so-called Church of that time, or from society at large, we obtain the evidences of a deplorable recklessness of all ordinary principles of religion, honour, or decorum. Bishop Butler had written, in the “Advertisement” to his Analogy, and he appears to have been referring to the clerical and educated opinion of his time: “It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious;” and he wrote his great work for the purpose of arguing the reasonableness of the christian religion, even on the principles of the Deism prevalent everywhere around him in the Church and society. Addison had declared that there was “less appearance of religion in England than in any neighbouring state or kingdom, whether Protestant or Catholic;” and Montesquieu came to the country, and having made his notes, published, probably with some French exaggeration, that there was “no religion in England, and that the subject, if mentioned in society, excited nothing but laughter.”

Such was the state of England, when, as we must think, by the special providence of God, the voices were heard crying in the wilderness. From the earlier years of the last century they continued sounding with such clearness and strength, from the centre to the remotest corners of the kingdom; from, the coasts, where the Cornish wrecker pursued his strange craft of crime, along all the highways and hedges, where rudeness and violence of every description made their occasions for theft, outrage, and cruelty, until the whole English nation became, as if instinctively, alive with a new-born soul, and not in vision, but in reality, something was beheld like that seen by the prophet in the valley of vision—dry bones clothed with flesh, and standing up “an exceeding great army,” no longer on the side of corruption and death, but ready with song and speech, and consistent living, to take their place on the side of the Lord.

CHAPTER II

FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN.

In the history of the circumstances which brought about the Great Revival, we must not fail to notice those which were in action even before the great apostles of the Revival appeared. We have already given what may almost be called a silhouette of society, an outline, for the most part, all dark; and yet in the same period there were relieving tints, just as sometimes, upon a silhouette-portrait, you have seen an attempt to throw in some resemblance to the features by a touch of gold.

Chief among these is one we do not remember ever to have seen noticed in this connection—the curious invasion of our country by the French at the close of the seventeenth century. That cruel exodus which poured itself upon our shores in the great and even horrible persecution of the Protestants of France, when the blind bigotry of Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes, was to us, as a nation, a really incalculable blessing. It is quite singular, in reading Dr. Smiles’s Huguenots, to notice the large variety of names of illustrious exiles, eminent for learning, science, character, and rank, who found a refuge here. The folly of the King of France expelled the chief captains of industry; they came hither and established their manufactures in different departments, creating and carrying on new modes of industry. Also great numbers of Protestant clergymen settled here, and formed respectable French churches; some of the most eminent ministers of our various denominations at this moment are descendants of those men. Their descendants are in our peerage; they are on our bench of bishops; they are at the bar; they stand high in the ranks of commerce. At the commencement of the eighteenth century, their ancestors were settled on English shores; in all instances men who had fled from comfort and domestic peace, in many instances from affluence and fame, rather than be false to their conscience or to their Saviour. The cruelties of that dreadful persecution which banished from France almost every human element it was desirable to retain in it, while they were, no doubt, there the great ultimate cause of the French Revolution, brought to England what must have been even as the very seasoning of society, the salt of our earth in the subsequent age of corruption. Most of the children of these men were brought up in the discipline of religious households, such as that which Sir Samuel Romilly—himself one of the descendants of an earlier band of refugees. Dr. Watts’s mother was a child of a French exile. Clusters of them grew up in many neighbourhoods in the country, notably in Southampton, Norwich, Canterbury, in many parts of London, where Spitalfields especially was a French colony. When the Revival commenced, these were ready to aid its various movements by their character and influence. Some fell into the Wesleyan ranks, though, probably, most, like the eminent scholar and preacher, William Romaine, one of the sons of the exile, maintained the more Calvinistic faith, reflecting most nearly the old creed of the Huguenot.

This surmise of the influence of that noble invasion upon the national well-being of Britain is justified by inference from the facts. It is very interesting to attempt to realise the religious life of eminent activity and usefulness sustained in different parts of the country before the Revival dawned, and which must have had an influence in fostering it when it arose. And, indeed, while we would desire to give all grateful honour to the extraordinary men (especially to such a man as John Wesley, who achieved so much through a life in which the length and the usefulness were equal to each other, since only when he died did he cease to animate by his personal influence the immense organisation he had formed), yet it seems really impossible to regard any one mind as the seed and source of the great movement. It was as if some cyclone of spiritual power swept all round the nation—or, as if a subtle, unseen train had been laid by many men, simultaneously, in many counties, and the spark was struck, and the whole was suddenly wrapped in a Divine flame.

Dr. Abel Stevens, in his most interesting, indeed, charming history of Methodism, from his point of view, gives to his own beloved leader and Church the credit of the entire movement; so also does Mr. Tyerman, in his elaborate life of Wesley. But this is quite contrary to all dispassionate dealing with facts; there were many men and many means in quiet operation, some of these even before Wesley was born, of which his prehensile mind availed itself to draw them into his gigantic work; and there were many which had operated, and continued to operate, which would not fit themselves into his exact, and somewhat exacting, groove of Church life.

We have said it was as if a cyclone of spiritual power were steadily sweeping round the minds of men and nations, for there were undoubted gusts of remarkable spiritual life in both hemispheres, at least fifty years before Methodism had distinctly asserted itself as a fact. Most remarkable was the “Great Awakening” in America, in Massachusetts—especially at Northampton (that is a remarkable story, which will always be associated with the name of Jonathan Edwards).[3] We have referred to the exodus of the persecuted from France; equally remarkable was another exodus of persecuted Protestants from Salzburg, in Austria. The madness of the Church of Rome again cast forth an immense host of the holiest and most industrious citizens. At the call of conscience they marched forth in a body, taking joyfully the spoiling of their goods rather than disavow their faith: such men with their families are a treasure to any nation amongst whom they may settle. Thomas Carlyle has paid a glowing historical eulogy to the memory of these men, and the exodus has furnished Goethe with the subject of one of his most charming poems.

3.  See Appendix C.

Philip Doddridge’s work was almost done before the Methodist movement was known. It seems to us that no adequate honour has ever yet been paid to that most beautiful and remarkably inclusive life. It was public, it was known and noticed, but it was passed almost in retreat in Northampton. That he was a preacher and pastor of a Church was but a slight portion of the life which succumbed, yet in the prime of his days, to consumption. His academy for the education of young ministers seems to us, even now, something like a model of what such an academy should be; his lectures to his students are remarkably full and scholarly and complete. From thence went forth men like the saintly Risdon Darracott, the scholarly and suggestive Hugh Farmer, Benjamin Fawcett, and Andrew Kippis. The hymns of Doddridge were among the earliest, as they are still among the sweetest, of that kind of offering to our modern Church; their clear, elevated, thrush-like sweetness, like the more uplifted seraphic trumpet tones of Watts, broke in upon a time when there was no sacred song worthy of the name in the Church, and anticipated the hour when the melodious acclamations of the people should be one of the most cherished elements of Christian service.

ISAAC WATTS.

And Isaac Watts was, by far, the senior of Doddridge; he lived very much the life of a hermit. Although the pastor of a city church, he was sequestered and withdrawn from public life in Theobalds, or Stoke Newington, where, however, he prosecuted a course of sacred labor of a marvellously manifold description, inter-meddling with every kind of learning, and consecrating it all to the great end of the christian ministry and the producing of books, which, whether as catechisms for children, treatises for the formation of mental character, philosophic essays grappling with the difficulties of scholarly minds, or “comfortable words” to “rock the cradle of declining age,” were all to become of value when the nation should awake to a real spiritual power. They are mostly laid aside now; but they have served more than one generation well; and he, beyond question, was the first who taught the Protestant Christian Church in England to sing. His hymns and psalms were sounding on when John Wesley was yet a child, and numbers of them were appropriated in the first Methodist hymn-book. But Watts and Doddridge, by the conditions of their physical and mental being, were unfitted for popular leaders. Perhaps, also, it must be admitted that they had not that which has been called the “instinct for souls;” they were concerned rather to illustrate and expound the truth of God, and to “adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour,” by their lives, than to flash new convictions into the hearts of men. It is characteristic that, good and great as they were, they were both at first inimical to the Great Revival; it seemed to them a suspicious movement. The aged Watts cautioned his younger friend Doddridge against encouraging it, especially the preaching of Whitefield; yet they both lived to give their whole hearts to it; and some of Watts’s last words were in blessing, when, near death, he received a visit from the great evangelist.

PHILIP DODDRIDGE.

Thus we need to notice a little carefully the age immediately preceding the rise of what we call Methodism, in order to understand what Methodism really effected; we have seen that the dreadful condition of society was not inconsistent with the existence over the country of eminently holy men, and of even hallowed christian families and circles. If space allowed, it would be very pleasant to step into, and sketch the life of many an interior; and it would scarcely be a work of fancy, but of authentic knowledge. There were yet many which almost retained the character of Puritan households, and among them several baronial halls. Nor ought we to forget that those consistent: and high-minded Christian folk, the Quakers [Friends], were a much larger body then than now, although, like the Shunammite lady, they especially dwelt among their own people. The Moravians also were in England; but all existed like little scattered hamlet patches of spiritual life; they were respectably conservative of their own usages. Methodism brought enthusiasm to religion, and the instinct for souls, united to a power of organisation hitherto unknown to the religious life.

Doddridge’s House, Northampton.

At what hour shall we fix the earliest dawn of the Great Revival? Among the earliest tints of the “morning spread upon the mountains,” which was to descend into the valley, and illuminate all the plains, was the conversion of that extraordinary woman, Selina Shirley, the Countess of Huntingdon; it is scarcely too much to call her the Mother of the Revival; it is not too much to apply to her the language of the great Hebrew song—“The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased until that I arose: I arose a mother in Israel.” She illustrates the difference of which we spoke just now, for there can be no doubt that she had a passionate instinct for souls, to do good to souls, to save souls. Her injunctions for the destruction of all her private papers have been so far complied with as to leave the earlier history of her mind, and the circumstances which brought about her conversion, for the most part unknown. It is certain that she was on terms of intimate friendship with both Watts and Doddridge, but especially with Doddridge. Another intimate friend of the Countess was Watts’s very close friend, the Duchess of Somerset; and thus the links of the story seem to run, like that old and well-known instance of communicated influence, when Andrew found his own brother, Simon, and these in turn found Philip and Nathaniel. It was very natural that, beholding the state of society about her, she should be interested, first, as it seems, for those of her own order; it was at a later time, when she became acquainted with Whitefield, that he justified her drawing-room assemblies, by reminding her—not, perhaps, with exact critical propriety—of the text in Galatians, where Paul mentioned how he preached “privately to those of reputation.”[4] For some time this appears to have been the aim of the good Countess, much in accordance with that pretty saying of hers, that “there was a text in which she blessed God for the insertion of the letter M: ‘not many noble.’” The beautiful Countess was a heroine in her own line from the earliest days of her conversion. Belonging to one of the noblest families of England, she had an entrance to the highest circles, and her heart felt very pitiful for, especially, the women of fashion around her, brokenhearted with disappointment, or sick with ennui.

4.  Appendix D.

Among these was Sarah, the great Duchess of Marlborough, apparently one of the intimate friends of the Countess; her letters are most characteristic. She mentions that the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Townshend, and others, had just heard Mr. Whitefield preach, and “What they said of the sermon has made me lament ever since that I did not hear it; it might have been the means of doing me some good, for good, alas! I do want; but where among the corrupt sons and daughters of Adam am I to find it?” She goes on: “Dear, good Lady Huntingdon, I have no comfort in my own family; I hope you will shortly come and see me; I always feel more happy and more contented after an hour’s conversation with you; when alone, my reflections and recollection almost kill me. Now there is Lady Frances Saunderson’s great rout to-morrow night; all the world will be there, and I must go. I hate that woman as much as I hate a physician, but I must go, if for no other purpose than to mortify and spite her. This is very wicked, I know, but I confess all my little peccadilloes to you, for I know your goodness will lead you to be mild and forgiving; and perhaps my wicked heart may gain some good from you in the end.” And then she closes her note with some remarks on “that crooked, perverse little wretch at Twickenham,” by which pleasant designation she means the poet, Pope.

Another, and another order of character, was the Duchess of Buckingham; she came to hear Whitefield preach in the drawing-room, and was quite scandalised. In a letter to the Countess, she says, “The doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence: it is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth; this is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.” Such were some of the materials the Countess attempted to gather in her drawing-rooms, if possible to cure the aching of empty hearts. If the two duchesses met together, it is very likely they would be antipathetic to each other; a prouder old lady than Sarah, the English empire did not contain, but she was proud that she was the wife and widow of the great Marlborough. The Duchess of Buckingham was equally proud that she was the natural daughter of James II. When her son, the Duke of Buckingham, died, she sent to the old Duchess of Marlborough to borrow the magnificent car which had borne John Churchill’s body to the Abbey, and the fiery old Duchess sent her back word, “It had carried Lord Marlborough, and should never be profaned by any other corpse.” The message was not likely to act as an entente cordiale in such society as we have described.

The mention of these names will show the reader that we are speaking of a time when the Revival had not wrought itself into a great movement. The Countess continued to make enthusiastic efforts for those of her own order—we are afraid, with a few distinguished exceptions, without any great amount of success; but certainly, were it possible for us to look into the drawing-room in South Audley Street, in those closing years of the reign of George II., we might well be astonished at the brilliancy of the concourse, and the finding ourselves in the company of some of the most distinguished names of the highest rank and fashion of the period. It was the age of that cold, sardonic sneerer, Horace Walpole; he writes to Florence, to his friend Sir Horace Mann, in his scoffing fashion: “If you ever think of returning to England, you must prepare yourself with Methodism; this sect increases as fast as almost any religious nonsense ever did; Lady Fanny Shirley has chosen this way of bestowing the dregs of her beauty, and Lyttleton is very near making the same sacrifice of the dregs of all those various characters that he has worn. The Methodists love your big sinners as proper subjects to work upon, and indeed they have a plentiful harvest.” Then he satirises Lady Ferrars, whom he styles “General, my Lady Dowager Ferrars.” But, indeed, it is impossible to enumerate the names of all, or any proportion of the number who attended this brilliant circle. Sometimes unhappy events took place; Mr. Whitefield was sometimes too dreadfully, although unconsciously, faithful. Lady Rockingham, who really seems to have been inclined to do good, begged the Countess to permit her to bring the Countess of Suffolk, well known as the powerful mistress of George II. Whitefield “knew nothing of the matter;” but some arrow “drawn at a venture,” and which probably might have as well fitted many another lady about the court or in that very room, exactly hit the Countess. However much she fidgeted with irritation, she sat out the service in silence; but, as soon as it was over, the beautiful fury burst forth in all the stormful speech of a termagant or virago. She abused Lady Huntingdon; she declared that the whole service had been a premeditated attack upon herself. Her relatives, Lady Bertie, the celebrated Lady Betty Germain, the Duchess of Ancaster, one of the most beautiful women in England, and who, afterwards, with the Duchess of Hamilton, conducted the future queen of George III. to England’s shores, expostulated with her, commanded her to be silent, and attempted to explain her mistake; they insisted that she should apologise to Lady Huntingdon for her behaviour, and, in an ungracious manner, she did so; but we learn that she never honoured the assembly again with her presence.

What a singular assembly from time to time! the square dark face of that old gentleman, painfully hobbling in on his crutched stick—face once as handsome as that of St. John, now the disappointed, moody features of the massive, but sceptical intelligence of Bolingbroke; poor worn-out old Chesterfield, cold and courtly, yet seeming so genial and humane, coming again and again, and yet again; those reckless wits, and leaders of the ton and all high society, Bubb Doddington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, and George Selwyn; the Duchess of Montague, with her young daughter; Lady Cardigan, often there, if her mother, Sarah of Marlborough, were but seldom a visitor. Charles Townshend, the great minister, often came; and his friend, Lord Lyttleton, who really must have been in sympathy with some of the objects of the assembly, if we may judge from his Essay on the Conversion of St. Paul, a piece of writing which will never lose its value. There you might have seen even the great commoner, William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham; but we can understand why he would be there to listen to the manifold notes of an eloquence singularly resembling, in many particulars, his own. And, in fact, where such persons were present, we might be sure that the entire nobility of the country was represented. It might be tempting to loiter amidst these scenes a little longer. It was an experiment made by the Countess; she probably found it almost a failure, and, in the course of a few years, turned her attention to the larger ideas connected with the evangelisation of England, and the training of young men for the work of the ministry. She long outlived all those brilliant hosts she had gathered round her in the prime of life. But we cannot doubt that some good was effected by this preaching to “people of reputation.” Courtiers like Walpole sneered, but it saved the movement to a great degree, when it became popular, from being suspected as the result of political faction; and probably, as all these nobles and gentry passed away to their various country seats, when they heard of the preachers in their neighbourhoods, and received the complaints of the bishops and their clergy, with some contempt for the messengers, they were able to feel, and to say, that there was nothing much more dreadful than the love of God and His good will to men in their message.

It seems a very sudden leap from the saloons of the West End to a Lincolnshire kitchen; but in the kitchen of that most romantic old vicarage of Epworth, it has been truly said, the most vigorous form of Methodism had its origin. There, at the close of the seventeenth century, and the commencement of the eighteenth, lived and laboured old Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles Wesley. Samuel was in every sense a wonderful man, more wonderful than most people know, though Mr. Tyerman has done his best to set him forth in a very clear and pleasant light, in his very entertaining biography. Scholar, preacher, pastor, and poet was Samuel Wesley; he led a life full of romantic incident, and full of troubles, of which the two most notable are debts and ghosts: debts, we must say, in passing, which had more to do with unavoidable calamity than with any personal imprudence. The good man would have been shocked, and have counted it one of his sorest troubles, could he, in some real horoscope, have forecast what “Jackey,” his son John, was to be. But it was his wife, Susannah Wesley, patient housewife, much-enduring, much-suffering woman, Mary and Martha in one, saint as sacredly sweet as any who have seemed worthy of a place in any calendar of saints, Catholic or Protestant, mother of children, all of whom were remarkable—two of them wonderful, and a third highly eminent—it was Susannah Wesley, whose instinct for souls led her to look abroad over all the parish in which she lived, with a tender, spiritual affection; in her husband’s absence, turning the large kitchen into a church, inviting her poor neighbours into it, and, somewhat at first to the distress of her husband, preaching to and praying with them there. This brief reference can only memorialise her name; read John Kirk’s little volume, and learn to love and revere “the mother of the Wesleys!” The freedom and elevation of her religious life, and her practical sagacity, it is not difficult to see, must have given hints and ideas which took shape and body in the large movement of which her son John came to be regarded, and is still regarded, as the patriarch. Thus Isaac Taylor says, “The Wesleys’ mother was the mother of Methodism in a religious and moral sense, for her courage, her submissiveness to authority, the high tone of her mind, its independence, and its self-control, the warmth of her devotional feelings, and the practical direction given to them, came up, and were visibly repeated in the character and conduct of her sons.” Later on in life she became one of the wisest advisers of her son, in his employment of the auxiliaries to his own usefulness. Perhaps, if we could see spirits as they are, we might see in this woman a higher and loftier type of life than in either of those who first received life from her bosom; some of her quiet words have all the passion and sweetness of Charles’s hymns. Our space will not permit many quotations, but take the following words, and the sweet meditation in prose of the much-enduring, and often patiently suffering lady in the old world country vicarage, which read like many of her son’s notes in verse: “If to esteem and have the highest reverence for Thee; if constantly and sincerely to acknowledge Thee the supreme, and only desirable good, be to love Thee, I do love Thee! If to rejoice in Thy essential majesty and glory; if to feel a vital joy overspread and cheer the heart at each perception of Thy blessedness, at every thought that Thou art God, and that all things are in Thy power; that there is none superior or equal to Thee, be to love Thee, I do love Thee! If comparatively to despise and undervalue all the world contains, which is esteemed great, fair, or good; if earnestly and constantly to desire Thee, Thy favour, Thy acceptance, Thyself, rather than any, or all things Thou hast created, be to love Thee, I do love Thee!” At length she died as she had lived, her last words to her sons breathing the spirit of her singular life: “Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God!”

Thus, from the polite circles of London, from the obscure old farm-like vicarage, the rude and rough old English home, events were preparing themselves. John Wesley was born in 1703; the Countess of Huntingdon in 1707: near in their birth time, how far apart the scenery and the circumstances in which their eyes first opened to the light. Whitefield was born later, amidst the still less auspicious scenery of the old Bell Inn, at Gloucester, in 1714. These were undoubtedly among the foremost names in the great palpitation of thought, feeling, and holy action the country was to experience. Future chapters will show a number of other names, which were simultaneously coming forth and educating for the great conflict. So it has always been, and singularly so, as illustrating the order of Providence, and the way in which it gives a new personality to the men whom it designs to aid its purposes. In every part of the country, all unknown to each other, in families separated by position and taste, by birth and circumstances, a band of workers was preparing to produce an entire moral change in the features of the country.

CHAPTER III

OXFORD: NEW LIGHTS AND OLD LANTERNS.

It is remarkable that one of the very earliest movements of the new evangelical succession should manifest itself in Oxford—many minded Oxford—whose distant spires and antique towers have looked down through so many ages upon the varying opinions which have surged up around and within her walls. Lord Bacon has somewhere said that the opinions, feelings, and thoughts of the young men of any present generation forecast the whole popular mind of the future age. No remark can be more true, as exhibited generally in fact. Thus it is not too much to say that Oxford has usually been a barometer of coming opinions: either by her adhesion or antagonism to them, she has indicated the pathway of the nearing weather, either for calm or storm. It was so in the dark ages, with the old scholastic philosophy; it was so in the times immediately succeeding them: in our own day, the great Tractarian movement, with all its influences Rome-ward, arose in Oxford; later still, the strong tendencies of high intellectual infidelity, and denial of the sacred prerogatives and rights of the Holy Scriptures, sent forth some of their earliest notes from Oxford. Oxford has been likened to the magnificent conservatory at Chatsworth, where art combines with nature, and achieves all that wealth and taste could command; but the air is heavy and close, and rich as the forms and colours are around the spectator, there is depression and repression, even a sense of oppression, upon the spirits, and we are glad to escape into the breezy chase, and among the old trees again. This is hardly true of Oxford; no doubt the air is hushed, and the influences combine to weigh down the mere visitor by a sense of the hoariness of the past, and the black antiquity and frost of ages; but somehow there is a mind in Oxford which is always alive—not merely a scholarly knowledge, but a subtle apprehension of the coming winds—even as certain creatures forebode and know the coming storm before the rain falls or the thunder rolls.

We may presume that most of our readers are acquainted with the designation, “the Oxford Methodists;” but, perhaps, some are not aware that the term was applied to a cluster of young students, who, in a time when the university was delivered over to the usual dissoluteness and godless indifference of the age, met together in each other’s rooms for the purpose of sustaining each other in the determination to live a holy life, and to bring their mutual help to the reading and opening of the Word of God. From different parts of the country they met together there; when they went forth, their works, their spheres were different; but the power and the beauty of the old college days seem to have accompanied them through life; they realised the Divine life as a real power from that commencement to the close of their career, although it is equally interesting to notice how the framework of their opinions changed. Some of their names are comparatively unknown now, but John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and James Hervey, are well known; nor is John Gambold unknown, nor Benjamin Ingham, who married into the family of the Countess of Huntingdon, of whom we will speak a little more particularly when we visit the wild Yorkshire of those days; nor Morgan of Christ Church, whose influence is described as the most beautiful of all, a young man of delicate constitution and intense enthusiasm, who visited and talked with the prisoners in the neighbourhood, visited the cottages around to read and pray, left his memory as a blessing upon his companions, and was very early called away to his reward. This obscure life seems to have been one most honoured in that which came to be called by the wits of Oxford, “The Holy Club.”

It was just about this time that Voltaire was predicting that, in the next generation, Christianity would be overthrown and unknown throughout the whole civilised world. Christianity has lived through, and long outlived many such predictions. Voltaire had said, “It took twelve men to set up Christianity; it would only take one” (conceitedly referring to himself) “to overthrow it;” but the work of those whom he called the “twelve men” is still of some account in the world—their words are still of some authority, and there are very few people on the face of the earth at this moment who know much of, and fewer still who care much for the wit of the vain old infidel. That Voltaire’s prediction was not fulfilled, under the Providential influence of that Divine Spirit who never leaves us in our low estate, was greatly owing to this obscure and despised “Holy Club” of Oxford. These young men were feeling their way, groping, as they afterwards admitted, and somewhat in the dark, after those experiences, which, as they were to be assurances to themselves, should be also their most certain means of usefulness to others.

They were also called Methodists. It is singular, but neither the precise etymology nor the first appropriation of the term Methodist has, we believe, ever been distinctly or satisfactorily settled. Some have derived it from an allusion in Juvenal to a quack physician, some to a passage from the writings of Chrysostom, who says, “to be a methodist is to be beguiled,” and which was employed in a pamphlet against Mr. Whitefield. Like some other phrases, it is not easy to settle its first import or importation into our language. Certainly it is much older than the times to which this book especially refers. It seems to be even contemporary with the term Puritan, since we find Spencer, the librarian of Sion College under Cromwell, writing, “Where are now our Anabaptists and plain pack-staff Methodists, who esteem all flowers of rhetoric in sermons no better than stinking weeds?” A writer in the British Quarterly tells a curious story how once in a parish church in Huntingdonshire, he was listening to a clergyman, notorious alike by his private character and vehement intolerance, who was entertaining his audience, on a week evening, by a discourse from the text, Ephesians iv. 14, “Whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” He said to his people, “Now, you do not know Greek; I know Greek, and I am going to tell you what this text really says; it says, ‘they lie in wait to make you Methodists.’ The word used here is Methodeian, that is really the word that is used, and that is really what Paul said, ‘They lie in wait to make you Methodists’—a Methodist means a deceiver, and one who deludes, cheats, and beguiles.” The Grecian scholar was a little at fault in his next allusion, for he proceeded to quote that other text, “We are not ignorant of his devices,” and seemed to be under the impression that “device” was the same word as that on which he had expended his criticism. “Now,” said he, “you may be ignorant, because you do not know Greek, but we are not ignorant of his devices, that is, of his methods, his deceivers, that is, his Methodists.” In such empty wit and ignorant punning it is very likely that the term had its origin.

John Wesley passed through a long, singular, and what we may call a parti-coloured experience, before his mind came out into the light. In those days his mind was a singular combination of High Churchism, amounting to what we should call Ritualism now, and mysticism, both of which influences he brought from Epworth: the first from his father, the second from the strong fascination of the writings of William Law. He found, however, in the “Holy Club” that which helped him. He tells us how, when at Epworth, he travelled many miles to see a “serious man,” and to take counsel from him. “Sir,” said this person, as if the right word were given to him at the right moment, exactly meeting the necessities of the man standing before him, “Sir, you wish to serve God and to go to heaven: remember you cannot serve Him alone; you must therefore find companions, or make them. The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.” It must be admitted that the enthusiasm of the mystics has always been rather personal than social; but the society at Oxford was almost monastic, nor is it wonderful that, with the spectacle of the dissolute life around them, these earnest men adopted rules of the severest self-denial and asceticism. John Wesley arrived in Oxford first in 1720; he left for some time. Returning home to assist his father, he became, as we know, to his father’s immense exultation, Fellow of Lincoln College.

In 1733 George Whitefield arrived at Oxford, then in his nineteenth year. Like most of this band, Whitefield was, if not really, comparatively poor, and dependent upon help to enable him to pursue his studies; not so poor, perhaps, as an illustrious predecessor in the same college (Pembroke), who had left only the year before, one Samuel Johnson, the state of whose shoes excited so much commiseration in some benevolent heart, that a pair of new ones was placed outside his rooms, only, however, creating surprise in the morning, when he was seen indignantly kicking them up and down the passage. Whitefield was not troubled by such over-sensitive and delicate feelings; men are made differently. Johnson’s rugged independence did its work; and the easy facility and amiable disposition, which could receive favours without a sense of degradation, were very essential to what Whitefield was to be. He, however, when he came to Oxford, was caught in the same glamour of mysticism as John Wesley. But in this case it was Thomas à-Kempis who had besieged the soul of the young enthusiast; he was miserable, his life, his heart and mind were crushed beneath this altogether inhuman and unattainable standard for salvation. He was a Quietist—what a paradox!—Whitefield a Quietist! He was seeking salvation by works of righteousness which he could do. He was practising the severest austerities and renouncing the claims of an external world; he was living an internal life which God did not intend should bring to him either rest or calm; for, in that case, how could he ever have stirred the deep foundations of universal sympathy?

But that heart, whose very mould was tenderness, was easily called aside by the sight of suffering; and there is an interesting story, how, at this time, in one of his walks by the banks of the river, in such a frame of mind as we have described, he met a poor woman whose appearance was discomposed. Naturally enough, he talked with her, and found that her husband was in the gaol in Oxford, that she had run away from home, unable to endure any longer the crying of her children from hunger, and that she even then meditated drowning herself. He gave her immediate relief, but arranged with her to meet him, and see her husband together in the evening at the prison. He appears to have done them both good, ministering to their temporal necessities; he prayed with them, brought them to the knowledge of the grace which saves, and late on in life he says, “They are both now living, and I trust will be my joy and crown of rejoicing in the day of the Lord Jesus.” Happy is the man to whose life such an incident as this is given; it calls life away from its dreary introspections, and sets it upon a trail of outwardness, which is spiritual health; no one can attain to much religious happiness until he knows that he has been the means of good to some suffering soul. Faith grows in us by the revelation that we have been used to do good to others.

It was about this time that Charles Wesley met Whitefield moodily walking through the college corridors. The misery of his appearance struck him, and he invited him to his rooms to breakfast. The memory of the meeting never passed away; Charles Wesley refers to it in his elegy on Whitefield. In a short time he leaped forth into spiritual freedom, and almost immediately became, youth as he was, preacher, and we may almost say, apostle. The change in his mind seems to have been as instantaneous and as luminous as Luther’s at Erfurt. Whitefield was at work, commencing upon his own great scale, long before the Wesleys. John had to go to America, and to be entangled there by his High Church notions; and then there were his Moravian proclivities, so that, altogether, years passed by before he found his way out into a light so clear as to be able to reflect it on the minds of others.

To some of the members of this “Holy Club,” we shall not be able to refer again; we must, therefore, mention them now. Especially is some reference due to James Hervey; his name is now rather a legend and tradition than an active influence in our religious literature; but how popular once, do not the oldest memories amongst us well know? On some important points of doctrine he parted company from his friends and fellow-students, the Wesleys. John Wesley used to declare that he himself was not converted till his thirty-seventh year, so that we must modify any impressions we may have from similar declarations made by the amiable Vicar of Weston Favel: the term conversion, used in such a sense, in all probability means simply a change in the point of view, an alteration of opinion, giving a more clear apprehension of truth. Hervey was always infirm in health, tall, spectral; and, while possessing a mind teeming with pleasing and poetic fancies, and a power of perceiving happy analogies, we should regard him as singularly wanting in that fine solvent of all true genius, geniality. Hence, all his letters read like sermons; but his poor, infirm frame was the tabernacle of an intensely fervent soul. Shortly after his settlement in his village in Northamptonshire he was recommended by his physician to follow the plough, that he might receive the scent of the fresh earth; a curious recommendation, but it led to a conversation with the ploughman, which completely overturned the young scholar’s scheme of theology. The ploughman was a member of the Church of Dr. Doddridge, afterwards one of Hervey’s most intimate friends. As they walked together, the young minister asked the old ploughman what he thought was the hardest thing in religion? The ploughman very respectfully returned the question. Hervey replied, “I think the hardest thing in religion is to deny sinful self,” and he proceeded, at some length, of course, to dilate upon and expound the difficulty, from which our readers will see that, at this time, his mind must have been under the same influences as those we meet in The Imitation of Thomas à-Kempis. “No, sir,” said the old ploughman, “the hardest thing in religion is to deny righteous self,” and he proceeded to unfold the principles of his faith. At the time, Hervey thought the ploughman a fool, but the conversation was not forgotten, and he declares that it was this view of things which created for him a new creed. Our readers, perhaps, know his Theron and Aspasia: we owe that book to the conversation with the ploughman; all its pages, alive with descriptions of natural scenery, historical and classical allusion, and glittering with chromatic fancy through the three thick volumes, are written for the purpose of unfolding and enforcing—to put it in old theological phraseology—the imputed and imparted righteousness of Christ, the great point of divergence in teaching between Hervey and John Wesley.

Thus the term Methodism cannot, any more than Christianity, be contented with, or contained in one particular line of opinion. Thus, for instance, among the members of the “Holy Club” we find the two Wesleys and others distinctly Arminian—the apostles of that form of thought which especially teaches us that we must attain to the grace of God; while Whitefield first, and Hervey afterwards, became the teachers of that doctrine which announces the irresistible grace of God as that which is outside of us, and comes down upon us. No doubt the doctrines were too sharply separated by their respective leaders. In the ultimate issue, both believed alike that all was of grace, and all of God; but experience makes every man’s point of view; as he feels, so he sees. The grand thought about all these men in this Great Revival was that they believed in, and untiringly and with immense confidence announced, that which smote upon the minds of their hearers almost like a new revelation; in an age of indifference and Deism they declared that “the grace of God hath appeared unto all men.”

There is a very interesting anecdote showing how, about this time, even the massive and sardonic intellect of Lord Bolingbroke almost gave way. He was called upon once by a High Church dignitary, his intimate friend, Dr. Church, Vicar of Battersea, and Prebendary of St. Paul’s, to whom we have already referred as from the first opposed to the Revival, and, to the doctor’s amazement, he found Bolingbroke reading Calvin’s Institutes. The peer asked the preacher, the infidel the professed Christian, what he thought of it. “Oh,” said the doctor, “we think nothing of such antiquated stuff; we think it enough to preach the importance of morality and virtue, and have long given up all that talk about Divine grace.” Bolingbroke’s face and eyes were a study at all times, but we could wish to have seen him turn in his chair, and fix his eyes on the vicar as he said: “Look you, doctor. You know I don’t believe the Bible to be a Divine revelation, but those who do can never defend it but upon the principle of the doctrine of Divine grace. To say the truth, there have been times when I have been almost persuaded to believe it upon this view of things; and there is one argument I have felt which has gone very far with me on behalf of its authenticity, which is, that the belief in it exists upon earth even when committed to the care of such as you, who pretend to believe in it, and yet deny the only principle upon which it is defensible.” The worn-out statesman and hard-headed old peer hit the question of his own day, and forecast all the sceptical strife of ours; for all such questions are summed in one, Is there supernatural grace, and has that grace appeared unto men? This was the one faith of all these revivalists. The world was eager to hear it, for the aching heart of the world longs to believe that it is true. The conversation we have recited shows that even Bolingbroke wished that it might be true.

WESTON FAVEL CHURCH,
(Where James Hervey Preached.)

The new creed of Hervey changed the whole character of his preaching. The little church of Weston Favel, a short distance from the town of Northampton, became quite a shrine for pilgrimages; he was often compelled to preach in the churchyard. He was assuredly an intense lover of natural scenery, a student of natural theology of the old school. His writing is now said to be meretricious and gaudy. One critic says that children will always prefer a red to a white sugar-plum, and that the tea is nicer to them when they drink it from a cup painted with coloured flowers; and this, perhaps, not unfairly, describes the style of Hervey; we have prettiness rather than power, elegant disquisition rather than nervous expression, which is all the more wonderful, as he must have been an accomplished Latin scholar. But he had a mind of gorgeous fullness, and his splendid conceptions bore him into a train of what now seem almost glittering extravagances. Hervey was in the manner of his life a sickly recluse, and we easily call up the figure of the old bachelor—for he never married—alternately watching his saucepan of gruel on the fire, and his favourite microscope on the study table. He was greatly beloved by the Countess of Huntingdon, perhaps yet more by Lady Fanny Shirley—the subject of Walpole’s sneer. He was, no doubt, the writer of the movement, and its thoughts in his books must have seemed like “butter in a lordly dish.” But his course was comparatively brief; his work was accomplished at the age of forty-five. He died in his chair, his last words, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy most comfortable salvation;” shortly after, “The conflict is over; all is done;” the last words of all, “Precious salvation.” And so passed away one of the most amiable and accomplished of all the revivalists.

John Gambold, although ever an excellent and admirable man, lived the life rather of a secluded mystic, than that of an active reformer. He became a minister of the Church of England, but afterwards left that communion, not from any dissensions either from the doctrines or the discipline of the Church, but simply because he found his spiritual relationships more in harmony with those of the Moravians, of whose Church he died a bishop. We presume few readers are acquainted with his poetical works; nor are there many words among them of remarkable strength. The Mystery of Life is certainly pleasingly impressive; and his epitaph on himself deserves quotation:

“Ask not, ‘Who ended here his span?’

His name, reproach, and praise, was Man.

‘Did no great deeds adorn his course?’

No deed of his but showed him worse:

One thing was great, which God supplied,

He suffered human life—and died.

‘What points of knowledge did he gain?’

That life was sacred all—and vain:

‘Sacred, how high? and vain, how low?’

He knew not here, but died to know.”

Such were some of the men who went forth from Oxford. Meantime, as the flame of revival was spreading, Oxford again starts into singular notice; how the “Holy Club” escaped official censure and condemnation seems strange, but in 1768 the members of a similar club were, for meeting together for prayer and reading the Scriptures, all summarily expelled from the university. Their number was seven. Several of the heads of houses spoke in their favour, the principal of their own hall, Dr. Dixon, moved an amendment against their expulsion, on the ground of their admirable conduct and exemplary piety. Not a word was alleged against them, only that some of them were the sons of tradesmen, and that all of them “held Methodistical tenets, taking upon them to pray, read and expound the Scriptures, and sing hymns at private houses.” These practices were considered as hostile to the Articles and interests of the Church of England, and sentence was pronounced against them.

Of course this expulsion created a great agitation at the time; and as the moral character of the young men was so perfectly unimpeachable, it no doubt greatly aided the cause of the Revival. Dr. Horne, Bishop of Norwich, author of the Commentary On the Psalms—no Methodist, although an admirable and evangelical man—denounced the measure in a pamphlet in the strongest terms. The well-known wit and Baptist minister of Devonshire Square in London, Macgowan, lashed the transaction in his piece called The Shaver. All the young men seem to have turned out well. Some, like Thomas Jones, who afterwards became curate of Clifton, and married the sister of Lady Austen, Cowper’s friend—found admission into the Church of England; the others instantly found help from the Countess of Huntingdon, who sent them to finish their studies at her college in Trevecca, and afterwards secured them places in connection with her work of evangelisation. The transaction gives a singular idea of what Oxford was in 1768, and prepares us for the vehement persecutions by which the representatives of Oxford all over the country armed themselves to resist the Revival, whilst it justifies our designation of this chapter, “New Lights and Old Lanterns.”

CHAPTER IV

CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE FIELDS.

It was field-preaching, preaching in the open air, which first gave national distinctiveness to the Revival, and constituted it a movement. Assuredly any occasions of excitement we have known, give no idea whatever of the immense agitations which speedily rolled over the country, from one end to the other, when these great revivalists began their work in the fields. And the excitement continued, rolling on through London, and through the counties of England, from the west to the north, not for days, weeks, or months merely, but through long years, until the religious life of the land was entirely rekindled, and its morals and manners re-moulded; and all this, especially in its origination, without money, no large sums being subscribed or guaranteed to sustain the work. The work was done, not only without might or power, but assuredly in the very teeth of the malevolence of might and of power; nor is it too much to say that it probably would not have been done, could not have been done, had the churches, chapels, and great cathedrals been thrown open to the preachers.

It seems a singular thing to say, but we should speak of Whitefield as the Luther of this Great Revival, and of Wesley as its Calvin. Both in the quality of their work and in their relation in point of time, this analogy is not so unnatural as it perhaps seems at first. The impetuosity and passion, the vehemence and sleepless vigilance of Whitefield first broke open the way; the calm, cautious, frequently even nervously timid intelligence of Wesley organised the work.

How could a writer, in a recent number of the Edinburgh Review, say: “It is a great mistake to complain, as so many do, that the Church cast out the Wesleys. We have seen at the beginning how kindly, and even cordially, they were treated by the leading members of the episcopate.” Surely any history of Methodism contradicts this statement. Bishop Benson, indeed, ordained Whitefield, but he bitterly lamented to the Countess of Huntingdon that he had done so, attributing to him what seemed to the Bishop the mischief of the evangelical movement. “My lord,” said the Countess, “mark my words: when you are on your dying bed, that will be one of the few ordinations you will reflect upon with complaisance.”

The words were, in a remarkable degree, prophetic; when the Bishop was on his death-bed he sent ten guineas to Mr. Whitefield as a token of his “regard, veneration, and affection,” and begged the great field-preacher to remember him in prayer. If the bishops were kind and cordial to the first Methodists, they certainly took a singular way of dissembling their love. For instance, Bishop Lavington, of Exeter, whose well-known two volumes on Methodism are really a curiosity of episcopal scurrility, was in a passion with everything that looked like Whitefieldism in his diocese. Mr. Thomson, the Vicar of St. Gennys, was a dissipated clergyman, a character of known immorality; he was a rich man, and not dependent upon his vicarage. In the midst of his sinful life conscience was arrested; he became converted; he countenanced and threw open his pulpit to Mr. Whitefield; he became now as remarkable for his devout life and fervent gospel preaching as he had been before for his ungodliness. What made it all the worse was, that he was a man of real genius. Now all his brethren in the ministry disowned him, and closed their pulpits against him; and presently Bishop Lavington summoned him to appear before him to answer the charges made against him by his brethren for his Methodistical practices. “Sir,” said the Bishop, in the course of conversation, “if you pursue these practices, and countenance Whitefield, I will strip your gown from off you.” Mr. Thomson had on his gown at the time—more frequently worn by ministers of the Church then than now. To the amazement of the Bishop, Mr. Thomson exclaimed, “I will save your lordship the trouble!” He took off his gown, dropped it at the Bishop’s feet, saying, “My lord, I can preach without a gown!” and before the Bishop could recover from his astonishment he was gone. This was an instance, however, in which the Bishop was so decidedly in the wrong that he sent for the vicar again, apologised to him; and the circumstance, indeed, led to the entertainment by the Bishop of views which were somewhat milder with reference to Methodism than those which still give notoriety to his name.

GEORGE WHITEFIELD.

Southey[5], in his certainly not impartial volumes, admits that, for the most part, the condition of the clergy was dreadful; it is not wonderful that they closed their churches against the innovators. There was, for instance, the Vicar of Colne, the Rev. George White; when the preachers came into his neighbourhood, it was his usual practice to call his parishioners together by the beat of a drum, to issue a proclamation at the market-cross, and enlist a mob for the defence of the Church against the Methodists. Here is a copy of the proclamation, a curiosity in its way: “Notice is hereby given that if any man be mindful to enlist in His Majesty’s service, under the command of the Rev. Mr. George White, Commander-in-Chief, and John Bannister, Lieutenant-General of His Majesty’s forces for the defence of the Church of England, and the support of the manufactory in and about Colne, both which are now in danger, let him repair to the drumhead at the Cross, where each man shall receive a pint of ale in advance, and all other proper encouragements.” Such are some of the instances, which might be multiplied to any extent, showing the reception given to the revivalists by the clergy of the time. But let no reader suppose that, in reciting these things, we are willingly dwelling upon facts not creditable to the Church, or that we forget how many of her most admirable members have made an abundant amende honorable by their eulogies since; nor are we forgetting that Nonconformist chapels, whose cold respectability of service and theology were sadly outraged by the new teachers, were not more readily opened than the churches were to men with whom the Word of the Lord was as a fire, or as a hammer to break the rock in pieces.[6] Whitefield soon felt his power. Immediately after his ordination, he in some way became for a time an occasional supply at the chapel in the Tower; he found a straggling congregation of twenty or thirty hearers; after a service or two the place was overflowing, and remained so. During his short residence in that neighbourhood the youth continued throughout the whole week preaching to the soldiers, preaching to prisoners, holding services on Sunday mornings for young men before the ordinary service. He was still ostensibly at Oxford; a profitable living was offered to him in London, and instantly declined. He went to Gloucester, to Bristol, to Kingswood. Of course it is impossible to follow Whitefield step by step through his career; we can only rapidly bring out a crayon sketch of the chief features of his work. He made voyages to Georgia; voyaging was no pastime in those days, and he spent a great amount of time in transit to and fro on the seas; our business with him is chiefly as the first field-preacher; and Kingswood, near Bristol, appears to have been the first place where this great work was to be tried. It was then, what it is still, a region of rough collieries, the Black Country of the West; the people themselves were of the roughest order. Whitefield spoke at Bristol, to some friends, of his probable speedy embarkation to preach the Gospel among the Indians of America; and they said to him, “What need of going abroad to do this? Have we not Indians enough at home? If you have a mind to convert Indians, there are colliers enough in Kingswood!” A savage race! As to taking to the fields in this instance, it was simply a necessity; there were no churches from whence the preacher could be ejected. Try to realize it: the heathen society, indoctrinated only in brutal sports; the rough, black labour only typical of the rough, black minds, the rough, black souls. Surely he must have been a very brave man; nor was he one at all of that order of apostles whose native roughness is well fitted, it seems, to challenge roughness to civility.

5.  Appendix E.

6.  Appendix F.

Whitefield was a perfect gentleman, of manners most affectionate and amiable; altogether the most unlikely creature, it seems, to rise triumphant over the execrations of a mighty mob. The oratory of Whitefield seems to us almost the greatest mystery in the history of eloquence: his voice must have been wonderful; its strength was overwhelming, but it was not a roar; its modulations and inflections were equal to its strength, so that it had the all-commanding tones of a bell in its clearness, and all the modulations of an organ in its variety and sweetness. Kingswood only stands as a representative of crowds of other such places, where savages fell before the enchantment of his sweet music. Read any accounts of him, and it will be seen that we do not exaggerate in speaking of him as the very Orpheus of the pulpit. Assuredly, as it has been said Orpheus, by the power of his music, drew trees, stones, the frozen mountain-tops, and the floods to bow to his melody, so men, “stockish, hard, and full of rage,” felt a change pass over their nature, as they came under the spell of Whitefield. Yet, perhaps, he would not have gone to Kingswood had he not been inhibited from preaching in the Bristol churches. He had preached in St. Mary Redcliff, and the following day had preached opening sermons in the parish church of SS. Philip and Jacob, and then he was called before the Chancellor of the diocese, who asked him for his licence by which he was permitted to preach in that diocese. Whitefield said he was an ordained minister of the Church of England, and as to the special licence, it was obsolete. “Why did you not ask,” he said, “for the licence of the clergyman who preached for you last Thursday?” The Chancellor replied, “That is no business of yours.” Whitefield said, “There is a canon forbidding clergymen to frequent taverns and play at cards, why is that not enforced?” The Chancellor evaded this, but charged Whitefield with preaching false doctrine; Whitefield replied that he preached what he knew to be the truth, and he would continue to preach. “Then,” said the Chancellor, “I will excommunicate you!” The end of it was that all the city churches were shut against him. “But,” he says, “if they were all open, they would not contain half the people who come to hear. So at three in the afternoon I went to Kingswood among the colliers.” Whitefield laid his case in a very respectful letter, before the Bishop, but on he went. As to Kingswood, tears poured down the black faces of the colliers; the great audiences are described as being drenched in tears. Whitefield himself was in a passion of tears. “How can I help weeping,” he said to them, “when you have not wept for yourselves?” And they began to weep. Thus in 1739 began the mighty work at Kingswood, which has been a great Methodist colony from that day to this. That was a good morning’s work for the cause of Christ when the Chancellor shut the doors of the churches of Bristol against the brave and beautiful preacher, and threatened to excommunicate him. Was it not said of old, “Thou makest the wrath of man to praise Thee”?

Now, then, see him girt and road-ready; we might be sure that the example of the Chancellor of Bristol would be pretty generally followed. The old ecclesiastical corporations set themselves in array against him; but how futile the endeavour! Their canons and rubrics were like the building of hedges to confine an eagle, and they only left him without a choice—without any choice but to fulfil his instinct for souls, and to soar. Other “little brief authorities,” mayors, aldermen, and such like, issued their fulminations. Coming to Basingstoke, the mayor, one John Abbott, inhibited him. John Abbott seems to have been a burly butcher. The intercourse and correspondence between the two is very humorously characteristic; but, although it gives an insight as to the antagonism which frequently awaited Whitefield, it is too long to quote in this brief sketch. The butcher-mayor was coarse and insolent; Whitefield never lost his sweet graciousness; writing to abusive butchers or abusive bishops, as in his reply to Lavington, he never lost his temper, never indulged in satire, never exhibits any great marks of genius, writes straight to the point, simply vindicates himself and his course, never retracts, never apologises, goes straight on.

There is no other instance of a preacher who was so equally at home and equally impressive and commanding in the most various and dissimilar circles and scenes; it is significant of the notice he excited that his name occurs so frequently in the correspondence of that cold and heartless man and flippant sneerer, Horace Walpole, whose allusions to him are usually disgraceful; but so it was, he was equally commanding in the polished and select circles of the drawing-room, surrounded by dukes and duchesses, great statesmen and philosophers, or in the large old tabernacle or parish church, surrounded by more orderly and saintly worshippers, or in nature’s vast and grand cathedrals, with twenty or thirty thousand people around him.

From the day when he went to Kingswood, we may run a rapid eye along the perspective of his career—in fields, on heaths, and on commons, it was the same everywhere; from his intense life we might find many scenes for description: take one or two. On the breast of the mountain, the trees and hedges full of people, hushed to profound silence, the open firmament above him, the prospect of adjacent fields—the sight of thousands on thousands of people; some in coaches, some on horseback, and all affected, or drenched in tears. Sometimes evening approaches, and then he says, “Beneath the twilight it was too much for me, and quite overcame me.” There was one night never to be forgotten. While he was preaching it lightened exceedingly; his spirit rose on the tempest; his voice tolled out the doom and decay hanging over all nature; he preached the warnings and the consolations of the coming of the Son of man. The thunder broke over his head, the lightning shone along the preacher’s path, it ran along the ground in wild glares from one part of heaven to the other; the whole audience shook like the leaves of a forest in the wind, whilst high amidst the thunders and the lightnings, the preacher’s voice rose, exclaiming, “Oh; my friends, the wrath of God! the wrath of God!” Then his spirit seemed to pass serenely right through the tempest, and he talked of Christ, who swept the wrath away; and then he told how he longed for the time when Christ should be revealed, amidst the flaming fire, consuming all natural things. “Oh,” exclaimed he, “that my soul may be in a like flame when He shall come to call me!” Can we realize what his soul must have been who could burn with such seraphic ardours in the midst of such scenes?

WHITEFIELD PREACHING IN LONDON.

So he opened the way everywhere, by his field-preaching, for John Wesley. Truly it has been said, “Whitefield, and not Wesley, is the prominent figure in the opening of the Methodist movement;” and the time we must assign to this first popular agitation is the winter of 1738-39. The two men were immensely different. To Whitefield the preaching was no light work; it was not talking. After one of his sermons, drenched through, he would lie down, spent, sobbing, exhausted, death-like: John Wesley, after one of his most effective sermons, in which he also had shaken men’s souls, would just quietly mount his little pony, and ride off to the next village or town, reading his book as he went, or stopping by the way to pluck curious flowers or simples from the hedges; the poise of their spirits was so different. All great movements need two men, Moses and Aaron; the prophet Elijah must go before, “to restore all things.” Whitefield lived in the immediate neighbourhood and breathed the air of essential truth; Wesley looked at men, and saw how all remained undone until the work took coherency and shape. As he says, “I was convinced that preaching like an apostle, without joining together those that are awakened, and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer.” Whitefield preached like an apostle; the scenes we have described appear charming rural scenes, in which men’s hearts were bowed and hushed before him; but there were widely different scenes when he defied the devil, and sought to win his victims away, even in fairs and wakes—the most wild and dissolute periodical pests and nuisances of the age. Rough human nature went down before him, as in the instance of the man who came with heavy stones to pelt him, and suddenly found his hands as it were tied, and himself in tears, and, at the close, went up to the preacher, and said, “I came here only to break your head, and you have broken my heart!”

But the roughs of London seem to have been worse than the roughs of Kingswood; and we cannot wonder that men like Walpole, and even polite and refined religious men, thought that a man who could go right into St. Bartholomew’s Fair, in Moorfields, and Finsbury, take his station among drummers, trumpeters, merry-andrews, harlequins, and all kinds of wild beasts, must be “mad”; it must have seemed the height of fanaticism, like preaching to a real Gadarene swinery. All the historians of the movement—Sir James Stephen, Dr. Abel Stevens, Dr. Southey, Isaac Taylor, and others, recite with admiration the story of the way in which he wrestled successfully with the merry-andrews. He began to preach at six o’clock in the morning; stones, dirt, rotten eggs were hurled at him. “My soul was among lions,” he says; but the marvellous voice overcame, and he went on speaking, and we know how tenderly he would speak to them, of their own miseries, and the dangers of their own sins; the great multitude—it was between twenty and thirty thousand—“became like lambs;” he finished, went away, and, in the wilder time—in the afternoon—he came again. In the meantime there had been organisations to put him down: here was a man with a long heavy whip to strike the preacher; there was a recruiting sergeant who had been engaged with drum and fife to interrupt him. As he appeared on the outskirts of the crowd, Whitefield, who well knew how to catch the humour of the people too, exclaimed, “Make way for the king’s officer!” and the mob divided, while, to his surprise, the recruiting officer, with his drum, found himself immediately beneath Whitefield; it was easy to manage him now. The crowd around roared like wild beasts; it must have been a tremendous scene. Will it be believed—it seems incredible—that he continued there, preaching, praying, singing, until the night fell? He won a decided victory, and the next day received no fewer than a thousand notes from persons, “brands plucked from the burning,” who spoke of the convictions through which they had passed, and implored the preacher to remember them in his prayers.

This was in Moorfields, in which neighbourhood since, the followers both of Wesley and of Whitefield have found their tabernacles and most eminent fields of usefulness. Many have attempted fair-preaching since Whitefield’s day, but not, we believe, with much success; it needs a remarkable combination of powers to make such efforts successful. Whitefield was able to attempt to outbid the showmen, merry-andrews, and harlequins, and he succeeded. No wonder they called him a fanatic; he might have said, “If we be beside ourselves, it is for God, that by all means we may save some!”

But what we have been especially desirous that our readers should note is, that these more vehement manifestations of Methodism were not the result of any methodised plan, but were a simple yielding to, and taking possession of circumstances; it was as if “the Spirit of the Lord” came down upon the leaders, and “carried them whither they knew not.”

[For an account of Whitefield’s labours in America, and the spread of the Great Revival there, the reader is referred to the supplemental chapter at the end of this volume.]

CHAPTER V

THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE.

Lord Macaulay’s verdict upon John Wesley, that he possessed a “genius for government not inferior to that of Richelieu,” received immediate demonstration when he came actively into the movement, and has been abundantly confirmed since his death, in the history of the society which he founded. It has been said that all institutions are the prolonged shadow of one mind, and that by the inclusiveness, or power of perpetuity in the institution, we may know the mind of the founder. Much of our last chapter was devoted to some attempt to realise the place and power of Whitefield;[7] what he was in relation to the Revival may be defined by the remark, often made, and by capable critics, that while there have been multitudes of better sermon-makers, it is uncertain whether the Church ever had so great a pulpit orator. In Wesley’s mind everything became structural and organic; he was a mighty master of administration; but he also followed Whitefield’s example, and took to the fields; and very great, indeed, amazing results, followed his ministry.

7.  See Chapter XIV. for his place and power in America.

Many of the incidents which are impressive and amusing show the difference between the men. Whitefield overwhelmed the people: Wesley met insolence and antagonism by some sharp, concise, and cuttingly appropriate retort, which was remarkable, considering his stature. But both his presence and his words must have been unusually commanding: “Be silent, or begone,” he turned round sharply and said once to some violent disturbers, and they were obedient to the command.

Wesley’s rencontre with Beau Nash at Bath is a fair illustration of his quiet and almost obscurely sarcastic method of confounding a troublesome person. Preaching in the open air at Bath, the King of Bath, the Master of the Ceremonies, Nash, was so unwise as to attempt to put down the apostolic man. Nash’s character was bad; it was that of an idle, heartless, licentious dangler on the skirts of high society. He appeared in the crowd, and authoritatively asked Wesley by what right he dared to stand there. The congregation was not wholly of the poor; there were a number of fashionable and noble persons present, and among them many with whom this attack had been pre-arranged, and who expected to see the discomfiture of the Methodist by the courtly and fashionable old dandy. Wesley replied to the question simply and quietly that he stood there by the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to him “by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid hands on me and said, ‘Take thou authority to preach the Gospel!’” Nash began to bustle and to be turbulent, and he exclaimed, “This is contrary to Act of Parliament; this is a conventicle.” “Sir,” said Wesley, “the Act you refer to applies to seditious meetings: here is no sedition, no shadow of sedition; the meeting is not, therefore, contrary to the Act.” Nash stormed, “I say it is; besides, your preaching frightens people out of their wits.” “Sir,” said Wesley, “give me leave to ask, Did you ever hear me preach?” “No!” “How, then, can you judge of what you have never heard?” “Sir, by common report.” “Common report is not enough,” said Wesley; “again give me leave to ask is your name not Nash?” “My name is Nash.” And then the reader must imagine Wesley’s thin, clear, piercing voice, cutting through the crowd: “Sir, I dare not judge of you by common report.” There does not seem much in it, but the effect was overwhelming. Nash tried to bully it out a little; but, to make his discomfiture complete, the people took up the case, and especially one old woman, whose daughter had come to grief through the fop, in her way so set forth his sins that he was glad to retreat in dismay. On another occasion, when attempts were made to assault Wesley, there was some uncertainty about his person, and the assailants were saying, “Which is he? which is he?” he stood still as he was walking down the crowded street, turned upon them, and said, “I am he;” and they instantly fell back, awed into involuntary silence and respect.

It is characteristic that while Whitefield simply took to the work of field-preaching, and preaching in the open air, and troubled himself very little about finding or giving reasons for the irregularity of the proceeding, Wesley defended the practice with formidable arguments. It is remarkable that the practice should have been deemed so irregular, or should need vindication, considering that our Lord had given to it the sanction of His example, and that it had been adopted by the apostles and fathers, the greatest of the Catholic preachers, and the reformers of every age. A history of field and street-preaching would form a large and interesting chapter of Church history. Southey quotes a very happy series of arguments from one of Wesley’s appeals: “What need is there,” he says, speaking for his antagonists, “of this preaching in the fields and streets? Are there not churches enough to preach in?” “No, my friend, there are not, not for us to preach in. You forget we are not suffered to preach there, else we should prefer them to any place whatever.” “Well, there are ministers enough without you.” “Ministers enough, and churches enough! For what? To reclaim all the sinners within the four seas? and one plain reason why these sinners are never reclaimed is this: they never come into a church. Will you say, as some tender-hearted Christians I have heard, ‘Then it is their own fault; let them die and be damned!’ I grant it may be their own fault, but the Saviour of souls came after us, and so we ought to seek to save that which is lost.” He went on to confess the irregularity, but he retorted that those persons who compelled him to be irregular had no right to censure him for irregularity. “Will they throw a man into the dirt,” said he, “and beat him because he is dirty? Of all men living those clergymen ought not to complain who believe I preach the Gospel; if they will not ask me to preach in their churches, they are accountable for my preaching in the fields.” This is a fair illustration of the neat shrewdness, the compact, incisive common sense of Wesley’s mind. Thus he argued himself into that sphere of labour which justified him in after years in saying, without any extravagance, “The world is my parish.”

We have said the Revival became conservative. It is true the Countess of Huntingdon did much to make it so; but it assumed a shape of vitality, and a force of coherent strength, chiefly from the touch of Wesley’s administrative mind. The present City Road Chapel, which was opened in 1776, opposite Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, is probably the first illustration of this fact; it stands where stood the Foundry—time-honoured spot in the history of Methodism. It stood in Moorfields; the City Road was a mere lane then. The building had been used by government for casting cannon; it was a rude ruin. Wesley purchased it and the site at the very commencement of his work, in 1739; he turned it into a temple. As the years passed on it became the cradle of London Methodism, accommodating fifteen hundred people. Until within twenty years of Wesley’s purchase this had been a kind of Woolwich Arsenal to the government; it became a temple of peace, and here came “band-rooms,” school-rooms, book-rooms—the first saplings of Methodist usefulness.

JOHN WESLEY.

It has been truly said by a writer in the British Quarterly, that the most romantic lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar do not present a more startling succession of incidents than those which meet us in the life and labours of Wesley. Romish stories claim that Blessed Raymond, of Pegnafort, spread his cloak upon the sea to transport him across the water, sailing one hundred and sixty miles in six hours, and entering his convent through closed doors! The devout and zealous Francis Xavier spent three whole days in two different places at the same time, preaching all the while! Rome shines out in transactions like these: Wesley does not; but he seems to have been almost ubiquitous, and he moves with a rapidity reminding us of that flying angel who had the everlasting Gospel to preach, and he shines alike in his conflicts with nature and the still wilder tempests caused by the passions of men. We read of his travelling, through the long wintry hours, two hundred and eighty miles on horseback, in six days; it was a wonderful feat in those times. When Wesley first began his itinerancy there were no turnpikes in the country; but before he closed his career, he had probably paid more, says Dr. Southey, for turnpikes, than any other man in England, for no other man in England travelled so much. His were no pleasant journeys, as of summer days; he travelled through the fens of Lincolnshire when the waters were out; and over the fells of Northumberland when they were covered with snow. Speaking of one tremendous journey, through dreadful weather, he says, “Many a rough journey have I had before; but one like this I never had, between wind and hail, and rain, and ice, and snow, and driving sleet, and piercing cold; but it is past. Those days will return no more, and are therefore as though they had never been.

“‘And pain, like pleasure, is a dream!’”

How singular was his visit to Epworth, where he found the church of his childhood, his father’s church, the church of his own first ministrations, closed against him! The minister of the church was a drunkard; he had been under great obligations, both to Wesley himself and to the Wesley family, but he assailed him with the most offensive brutality; and when Wesley, denied the pulpit, signified his intention of simply partaking of the Lord’s Supper with the parishioners on the following Sunday, the coarse man sent word, “Tell Mr. Wesley I shall not give him the Sacrament, for he is not fit.” It seems to have cut Mr. Wesley very deeply. “It was fit,” he says, “that he who repelled me from the table where I had myself so often distributed the bread of life, should be one who owed his all in this world to the tender love my father had shown to his, as well as personally to himself.” He stayed there, however, eight days, and preached every evening in the churchyard, standing on his father’s tomb; truly a singular sight, the living son, the prophet of his age, surely little short of inspired, preaching from his dead father’s grave with such pathos and power as we may well conceive. “I am well assured,” he says, “I did far more good to my old Lincolnshire parishioners by preaching three days on my father’s tomb than I did by preaching three years in his pulpit!”

WESLEY PREACHING IN EPWORTH CHURCHYARD.

As he travelled to and fro, odd mistakes sometimes happened. Arrived at York, he went into the church in St. Saviour’s Gate; the rector, one Mr. Cordeau, had often warned his congregation against going to hear “that vagabond Wesley” preach. It was usual in that day for ministers of the Establishment to wear the cassock or gown, just as everywhere in France we see the French abbés. Wesley had on his gown, like a university man in a university town. Mr. Cordeau, not knowing who he was, offered him his pulpit; Wesley was quite willing, and always ready. Sermons leaped impromptu from his lips, and this sermon was an impressive one; at its close the clerk asked the rector if he knew who the preacher was. “No.” “Why, sir, it was that vagabond Wesley!” “Ah, indeed!” said the astonished clergyman; “well, never mind, we have had a good sermon.” The anecdotes of the incidents which waited upon the preacher in his travels are of every order of humorous, affecting, and romantic interest; they are spread over a large variety of volumes, and even still need to be gathered, framed, and hung in the light of some effective chronicle.

EPWORTH CHURCH.

The brilliant passage in which Lord Macaulay portrays, as with the pencil of a Vandyke, the features of the great English Puritans, is worthy of attention. Perhaps, even had the great essayist attempted the task, he had scarcely the requisite sympathies to give an effective portrait or portraits of the early Methodists; indeed, their characters are different, as different as a portrait from the pencil of Denner to one from that of Vandyke, or of Velasquez; but as Denner is wonderful too, although so homely, so the Methodist is a study. The early Methodist was, perhaps, usually a very simple, what we should call an ignorant, man, but he had “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” He was not such an one as the early Puritan[8] or the ancient Huguenot, those children of the camp and of the sword, Nonconformist Templars and Crusaders, whose theology had trained them for the battle-field, teaching them to frown defiance on kings, and to treat with contempt the proudest nobles, if they were merely unsanctified men. The Methodist was not such an one as the stern Ironside of Cromwell; as he lived in a more cheerful age, so he was the subject of a more cheerful piety; he was as loyal as he was lowly. He had been forgotten or neglected by all the priests and Levites of the land; but a voice had reached him, and raised him to the rank of a living, conscious, immortal soul. He also was one for whom Christ died. A new life had created new interests in him; and Christianity, really believed, does ennoble a man—how can it do otherwise? It gives self-respect to a man, it shows to him a new purpose and business in life; moreover, it creates a spirit of holy cheerfulness and joy; and thus came about that state of mind which Wesley made subservient to organisation—the necessity for meetings and reciprocations. It has been said that every church must have some sign or counter-sign, some symbol to make it popularly successful. St. Dominic gave to his order the Rosary; John Wesley gave to his Society the Ticket. There were no chapels, or but few, and none to open their doors to these strange new pilgrims to the celestial city. We have seen that the churches were closed against them. Lord Macaulay says, had John Wesley risen in the Church of Rome, she would have thrown her arms round him, only regarding him as the founder of a new order, with certain peculiarities calculated to increase and to extend her empire, and in due time have given to him the honours of canonisation.

8.  See Appendix A.

The English clergy as a body gathered up their garments and shrunk from all contact with the Methodists as from a pestilence. What could be done? Something must be done to prevent them from falling back into the world. Piety needs habit, and must become habitual to be safe, even as the fine-twined linen of the veil, and the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat, were shut in and all their glory defended by the rude coverings of badger-skins. John Wesley knew that the safety of the converted would be in frequent meetings for singing and prayer and conversation. Reciprocation is the soul of Methodism; so they assembled in each others’ houses, in rude and lonely but convenient rooms, by farm-house ingles, in lone hamlets. Thus was created a homely piety, often rugged enough, no doubt, but full of beautiful and pathetic instincts. So grew what came to be called band-meetings, class-meetings, love-feasts, and all the innumerable means by which the Methodist Society worked, until it became like a wheel within a wheel; simple enough, however, in the days to which we are referring. “Look to the Lord, and faithfully attend all the means of grace appointed in the Society.” Such was, practically, the whole of Methodism. So that famous old lady, whose bright example has so often been held up on Methodist platforms, when called upon to state the items of her creed, did so very sufficiently when she summed it up in the four particulars of “repentance towards God; faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; a penny a week; and a shilling a quarter.” Wesley seems to have summed the Methodist creed more simply still: “Belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and an earnest desire to flee from the wrath to come.” This was his condition of Church fellowship. When the faith became more consciously objective, it too was seized by the passionate instinct, the desire t o save souls. This drove the early Methodists out on great occasions to call vast multitudes together on heaths, on moors. Perhaps—but this was at a later time—some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the preachers; though the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks, and subsided into the organisation of the Countess of Huntingdon, which was, in fact, a kind of Free Church of England. The followers of Wesley sought the sequestration of nature, or in cities and towns they took to the streets or the broad ways and outlying fields. In some neighbourhoods a little room was built, containing the germ of what in a few years became a large Wesleyan Society. The burden of all these meetings, and all their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the sweetness and fulness of Jesus. They had intense faith in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; and their great interest was in souls on the brink of perdition. They knew little of spiritual difficulties or speculative despair; their conflict was with the world, the flesh, and the devil; and in this person, whose features have lately become somewhat dim, and who has wrapped himself in a new cloak of darkness, they did really believe. Wesley dealt with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; he and his band of preachers had little regard to proprieties, and it was not a polished time; so, ungraceful and undignified, the face weary, and the hand heavy with toil, they seemed out of breath pursuing souls. The strength of all these men was that they had a definite creed, and they sought to guard it by a definite Church life. The early Methodist had also cultivated the mighty instinct of prayer, about which he had no philosophy, but believing that God heard him, he quite simply indulged in it as a passion, and in this to him there was at once a meaning and a joy. We are not under the necessity of vindicating every phase of the great movement, we are simply writing down some particulars of its history, and how it was that it grew and prevailed. God’s ministry goes on by various means, ordinary and extraordinary; that is the difference between rivers and rains, between dews and lightnings.

A very interesting chapter, perhaps a volume, might be compiled from the old records of the mere anecdotes—the very humours—of the persecution attending on the Revival. Thus, in Cornwall, Edward Greenfield, a tanner, with a wife and seven children, was arrested under a warrant granted by Dr. Borlase, the eminent antiquary, who was, however, a bitter foe to Methodism. It was inquired what was the objection to Greenfield, a peaceable, inoffensive man; and the answer was, “The man is well enough, but the gentlemen round about can’t bear his impudence; why, he says he knows his sins are forgiven!” The story is well known how, in one place, a whole waggon-load of Methodists were taken before the magistrates; but when the question was asked in court what they had done, a profound silence fell over the assembly, for no one was prepared with a charge against them, till somebody exclaimed, “They pretended to be better than other people, and prayed from morning till night!” And another voice shouted out, “And they’ve convarted my wife; till she went among they, she had a tongue of her own, and now she’s as quiet as a lamb!” “Take them all back, take them all back,” said the sensible magistrate, “and let them convert all the scolds in the town!”

There is a spot in Cornwall which may be said to be consecrated and set apart to the memory of Wesley; it is in the immediate neighbourhood of Redruth, a wild, bare, rugged-looking region now, very suggestive of its savage aspect upwards of a hundred years since. The spot to which we refer is the Gwennap Pit; it is a wild amphitheatre, cut out among the hills, capable of holding about thirty thousand persons. Its natural walls slant upwards, and the place has altogether wonderful properties for the carrying the human voice. Wesley began to preach in this spot in 1762. When he first visited Cornwall, the savage mobs of what used to be called “West Barbary,” howled and roared upon him like lions or wild beasts; in his later years of visitation, no emperor or sovereign prince could have been received with more reverence and affection. The streets were lined and the windows of the houses thronged with gazing crowds, to see him as he walked along; and no wonder, for Cornwall was one of the chief territories of that singular ecclesiastical kingdom of which he was the founder. When he first went into Cornwall, it was really a region of savage irreligion and heathenism. The reader of his life often finds, usually about once a year, the visit to Gwennap Pit recorded: he preached his first sermon there, as we have said, in 1762; at the age of eighty-six he preached his last in 1789. There, from time to time, they poured in from all the country round to see and to listen to the words of this truly reverend father.

The Great Revival.
Wesley Preaching in Gwennap Pit.

The traditions of Methodism have few more imposing scenes. Gwennap Pit was, perhaps, Wesley’s most famous cathedral; a magnificent church, if we may apply that term to a building of nature, among the wild moors; it was thronged by hushed and devout worshippers. Until Wesley went among these people, the whole immense population might have said, “No man cared for our souls;” now they poured in to see him there: wild miners from the immediate neighbourhood, fishermen from the coast, men who until their conversion had pursued the wrecker’s remorseless and criminal career, smugglers, more quiet men and their families less savage, but not less ignorant, from their shieling, or lowly farmstead on the distant heath. A strange throng, if we think of it, men who had never used God’s name except in an oath, and who had never breathed a prayer except for the special providence of a shipwreck, and who with wicked barbarity had kindled their delusive lights along the coasts, to fascinate unfortunate ships to the cruel cliffs! But a Divine power had passed over them, and they were changed, with their families; and hither they came to gladden the heart of the old patriarch in the wild glen—a strange spot, and not unbeautiful, roofed over by the blue heavens. Amidst the broom, the twittering birds, the heath flower, and the scantling of trees, amidst the venerable rocks, it must have been wonderful to hear the thirty thousand voices welling up, and singing Wesley’s words:

“Suffice that for the season past,
Hell’s horrid language filled our tongues;
We all Thy words behind us cast,
And loudly sang the drunkard’s songs.
But, oh, the power of grace Divine!
In hymns we now our voices raise,
Loudly in strange hosannahs join,
While blasphemies are turned to praise!”

Such was one of the triumphs of the Great Revival.

CHAPTER VI

THE SINGERS OF THE REVIVAL.

Chief of all the auxiliary circumstances which aided the Great Revival, beyond a question, was this: that it taught the people of England, for the first time, the real power of sacred song. That man in the north of England who, when taken, by a companion who had been converted, to a great Methodist preaching, and being asked at the close of the service how he had enjoyed it, replied, “Weel, I didna care sae mich aboot the preaching, but, eh, man! yon ballants were grand,” was no doubt a representative character. And the great and subduing power of large bodies of people, moved as with one heart and one voice, must have greatly aided to produce those effects which we are attempting to realise. All great national movements have acknowledged and used the power of song. For man is a born singer, and if he cannot sing himself he likes to feel the power of those who can. It has been so in political movements: there were the songs of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. And the greatest religious movements through all the Christian ages have acknowledged the power of sacred song, even from the days of the apostles, and from the time of St. Ambrose in Milan. Luther soon found that he must teach the people to sing. That is a pleasant little story, how once, as he was sitting at his window, he heard a blind beggar sing. It was something about the grace of God, and Luther says the strain brought tears into his eyes. Then, he says, the thought suddenly flashed into his mind, “If I could only make gospel songs which people could sing, and which would spread themselves up and down the cities!” He directly set to work upon this inspiration, and let fly song after song, each like a lark mounting towards heaven’s gate, full of New Testament music. “He took care,” says one writer, in mentioning the incident, “that each song should have some rememberable word or refrain; such as ‘Jesus,’ ‘Believe and be saved,’ ‘Come unto Me,’ ‘Gospel,’ ‘Grace,’ ‘Worthy is the Lamb,’ and so on.”

Until Watts and Doddridge appeared, England had no popular sacred melodies. Amongst the works of the poets, such as Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, Sandys, George Herbert, and others, a few were scattered up and down; but they mostly lacked the subtle element which constitutes a hymn. For, just as a man may be a great poet, and utterly fail in the power to write a good song, so a man may be a great sacred poet, and yet miss the faculty which makes the hymn-writer. It is singular, it is almost indefinable. The subtle something which catches the essential elements of a great human experience, and gives it lyrical expression, takes that which other men put into creeds, sermons, theological essays, and sets it flying, as we just now said, like “the lark to heaven’s gate.” It ought never to be forgotten that Watts was, in fact, the creator of the English hymn. He wrote many lines which good taste can in no case approve; but here again the old proverb holds true, “The house that is building does not look like the house that is built.” And the great number of following writers, while they have felt the inspiration he gave to the Church, have moulded their lines by a more fastidious taste, which, if it has sometimes improved the metre or the sentiment, has possibly diminished in the strength. We will venture to say that even now there is a greater average of majesty of thought and expression in Watts’s hymns than in any other of our great hymn-writers; although, in some cases, we find here and there a piece which may equal, and some one or two which are said to surpass, the flights of the sweet singer of Stoke Newington. But the hymns of Watts, as a whole, were not so well fitted to a great and popular revival, to the expression of a tumultuous and passionate experience, as some we shall notice. They were, as a whole, especially wanting in the social element, and the finest of them sound like notes from the harp of some solitary angel. One cannot give to them the designation which the Wesleys gave to large sections of their hymns, “suitable for experience meetings.” Praise rather than experience is the characteristic of Watts, although there are noble exceptions. Our readers will perhaps remember a well-known and pleasing instance in a letter from Doddridge to his aged friend. Doddridge had been preaching on a summer evening in some plain old village chapel in Northamptonshire, when at the close of the service was “given out,” as we say, that hymn commencing:

“Give me the wings of faith to rise.”

We can suppose the melody to which it was sung to have been very rude; but it was, perhaps, new to the people, and the preacher was affected as he saw how, over the congregation, the people were singing earnestly, and melted to tears while they sang; and at the close of the service many old people gathered round Doddridge, their hearts all alive with the hymn, and they wished it were possible, only for once, to look upon the face of the dear old Dr. Watts. Doddridge was so pleased that he thought his old friend would be pleased also, and so he wrote the account of the little incident in a letter to him. In many other parts of the country, no doubt, the people were waiting and wishful for popular sacred harmonies. And when the Great Revival came, and congregations met by thousands, and multitudes who had been accustomed to song, thoughtless, foolish, very often sinful and licentious, still needed to sing (for song and human nature are inseparable, apparently, so far as we know anything about it, in the next world as well as in this), it was necessary that, as they had been “brought up out of the horrible pit and miry clay,” “a new song of praise” should be put in the mouth. John Wesley had heard much of Moravian singing. He took Count Zinzendorf’s hymns, translated them, and immensely improved them; he was the first who introduced into our psalmody the noble words of Paul Gerhardt. Some of the finest of all the hymns in the Wesleyan collection are these translations. Watts was unsparingly used. Wesley’s first effort to meet this necessity of the Revival was the publication of his collection in 1739.[9] And thus, most likely without knowing the anecdote of Luther we have quoted above, Wesley and his coadjutors did exactly what the Reformer had done. They gave effect to the Revival by the ordinance of song, and preached the Gospel in sweet words, and often recurring Gospel refrains.

9.  See Appendix.

The remark is true that there was no art, no splendid form of worship or ritual; early Methodism and the entire evangelic movement were as free from all this as Clairvaux in the Valley of Wormwood, when Bernard ministered there with all his monks around him, or as Cluny when Bernard de Morlaix chanted his “Jerusalem the Golden.” Like all great religious movements which have shaken men’s souls, this was purely spiritual, or if it had a secular expression it was not artificial. Loud amens resounded as the preacher spoke or prayed, and then the hearty gushes of, perhaps, not melodious song united all hearts in some litany or Te Deum in new-born verse from some of the singers of the last revival. Amongst infuriated mobs, we read how Wesley found a retreat in song, and overpowered the multitude with what we, perhaps, should not regard melody. Thus, when at Bengeworth in 1740, where Wesley was set upon by a crowd, and it was proposed by one that they should take him away and duck him, he broke out into singing with his redoubted friend, Thomas Maxfield. He allowed them to carry him whither they would; at the bridge end of the street the mob retreated and left him; but he took his stand on the bridge, and striking up—

“Angel of God, whate’er betide,

Thy summons I obey,”

preached a useful and effective sermon to hundreds who remained to listen, from the text, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

But the contributions of Watts and Wesley are so well known that it is more important to notice here that as the Revival moved on, very soon other remarkable lyrists appeared to contribute, if few, yet really effective words. Of these none is more remarkable than the mighty cobbler, Thomas Olivers, a “sturdy Welshman,” as Southey calls him. He is not to be confounded with John Oliver, also one of the notabilities of the Revival. Thomas was really an astonishing trophy of the movement; before his conversion he was a thoroughly bad fellow, a kind of wandering reprobate, an idle, dissipated man. He fell beneath the power of Whitefield, whom he heard preach from the text, “Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” He had made comic songs about Whitefield, and sung them with applause in tap-rooms. As Whitefield came in his way, he went with the purpose of obtaining fresh fuel for his ridicule. The heart of the man was completely broken, and he felt so much compunction for what he had done against the man for whom he now felt so deep a reverence and awe, that he used to follow him in the streets, and though he did not speak to him, he says he could scarcely refrain from kissing the prints of his footsteps. And now, he says, at the beginning of his new life, what we can well believe of an imagination so intense and strong, “I saw God in everything: the heavens, the earth and all therein showed me something of Him; yea, even from a drop of water, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand, I received instruction.” He was about seriously to enter into a settled and respectable way of business when John Wesley heard of him; and although he was converted under Whitefield, Wesley persuaded him to yield himself to his direction for the work of preaching as one of his itinerant band, and sent him into Cornwall—just the man we should think for Cornwall, fiery and imaginative: off he went, in 1753. He was born in 1725. He testifies that he was “unable to buy a horse, so, with my boots on my legs, my great-coat on my back, and my bag with my books and linen across my shoulders, I set out for Cornwall on foot.” Henceforth there were forty-six years on earth before him, during which he witnessed a magnificent confession before many witnesses. He became one of the foremost controversialists when dissensions arose among the men of the Revival. He acquired a knowledge of the languages, especially of Hebrew, and was a great reader. Wesley appointed him as his editor and general proofreader; but he could never be taught to punctuate properly, and the punctilious Wesley could not tolerate his inaccuracies as they slipped through the proof, so he did not retain this post long. But Wesley loved him, and in 1799 he descended into Wesley’s own tomb, and his remains lie there, in the cemetery of the City Road Chapel. He wrote more prose than poetry; but, like St. Ambrose, he is made immortal by a single hymn. He is the author of one of the most majestic hymns in all hymnology. Byron and Scott wrote Hebrew melodies, but they will not bear comparison with this one. While in London upon one occasion, he went into the Jewish synagogue, and he heard sung there by a rabbi, Dr. Leoni, an old air, a melody which so enchanted him and fixed itself in his memory, that he went home, and instantly produced what he called “a hymn to the God of Abraham,” arranged to the air he had heard. And thus we possess that which we so frequently sing,

“The God of Abraham praise!”[10]

It is principally known by its first four verses; there are twelve. “There is not,” says James Montgomery, “in our language a lyric of more majestic style, more elevated thought, or more glorious imagery; * * * like a stately pile of architecture, severe and simple in design; it strikes less on the first view than after deliberate examination, * * * the mind itself grows greater in contemplating it;” and he continues, “On account of the peculiarity of the measure, none but a person of equal musical and poetical taste could have produced the harmony perceptible in the verse.” There will, perhaps, always be a doubt whether Olivers was the author of the hymn,

“Lo! He comes with clouds descending.”

If Charles Wesley were the author, he undoubtedly derived the inspiration of the piece from Olivers’ hymn, “The Last Judgment:”[11] it is in the same metre, and probably Wesley took the thought and the metre, and adapted it to popular service. What is undoubted is that Olivers, who is the author of the metre, is also the author of the fine old tune “Helmsley,” to which the hymn was usually sung until quite recent times; the tune was originally called “Olivers.”

10.  See Appendix

11.  See Appendix

It is but a natural step from Thomas Olivers to his great antagonist, Augustus Toplady; he also is made immortal by a hymn. He wrote many fine ones, full of melody, pathos, and affecting imagery. Toplady, as all our readers know, was a clergyman, the Vicar of Broad Hembury, in Devonshire. He took the strong Calvinistic side in the controversies which arose in the course of the Great Revival; Olivers took the strong Arminian side. They were not very civil to each other; and the scholarly clergyman no doubt felt his dignity somewhat hurt by the rugged contact with the cobbler; but the quarrels are forgotten now, and there is scarcely a hymn-book in which the hymn of Olivers is not found within a few pages of

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me!”

To this hymn has been given almost universally the palm as the finest hymn in our language. Where there are so many, at once deeply expressive in experience, and subdued and elevated in feeling, we perhaps may be forgiven if we hesitate before praise so eminently high. Mr. Gladstone’s translation into the Latin, in the estimation of eminent scholars, even carries a more thrilling and penetrative awe.[12] But Toplady wrote many other hymns quite equal in pathos and poetic merit. The characteristic of “Rock of Ages” is its depth of penitential devotion. A volume might be written on the history of this expressive hymn. Innumerable are the multitudes whom these words have sustained when dying; they were among the last which lingered on the lips of Prince Albert as he was passing away; and to how many, through every variety of social distinction, have they been at once the creed and consolation! It is by his hymns that Toplady will be chiefly remembered. For years he was hovering along on the borders of the grave, slowly dying of consumption; and he died in 1778, in the thirty-eighth year of his age. It was his especial wish that he should be buried with more than quiet, that no announcement should be made of the funeral, and that there should be no especial service at his grave: it testifies, however, to the high regard in which he was held that thousands followed him to his burial in Tottenham Court Road Chapel; and when we know that his dear friend Rowland Hill conducted the service, we can scarcely be surprised, or offended, that he broke through the injunctions of his friend, and addressed the multitude in affectionate commemoration of the sweet singer.

12.  See Appendix.

AUGUSTUS TOPLADY.

Toplady we should regard as the chief singer of the Revival, after Charles Wesley, although entirely of another order; not so social as meditative, and reminding us, in many of his pieces, of the characteristics we have attributed to Watts. His midnight hymn is a piece of uncommon sublimity; portions of it seem almost unfit for congregational singing; but for inward plaintive meditation, for reading in the evening family prayer, when the hushed stillness of night is over the household, and the pilgrim of life is about to commit himself to the unconsciousness of sleep, the verses seem tenderly suggestive:

“Thy ministering spirits descend,
And watch while Thy saints are asleep;
By day and by night they attend,
The heirs of salvation to keep.
Bright seraphs despatched from the throne,
Fly swift to their stations assigned;
And angels elect are sent down
To guard the elect of mankind.

“Their worship no interval knows;
Their fervour is still on the wing;
And, while they protect my repose,
They chant to the praise of my King.
I, too, at the season ordained,
Their chorus forever shall join,
And love and adore without end,
Their gracious Creator and mine.”

We have noticed in a previous chapter that when Whitefield separated himself from Wesley, the Revival took two distinctly different routes. We only refer to this again for the purpose of remarking that as Toplady was intensely Calvinistic in his method of Divine grace, so his hymns, also, reflect in all its fulness that creed; yet they are full of tenderness, and well calculated frequently to arouse dormant devotion. “Your harps, ye trembling saints;” “Emptied of earth I fain would be;” “When languor and disease invade;” “Jesus, immutably the same;” “A debtor to mercy alone,” and many another, leave nothing to be desired either on the score of devotion, poetry, or melody.

In a far humbler sphere, but representing the same faith and fervour as Toplady, and also carried away young, was Cennick. In an article in the Christian Remembrancer, on English hymnology, written very much for the purpose of throwing contempt on all the hymn-writers of the Revival, Cennick is spoken of as “a low and violent person; his hymns peculiarly offensive, both as to matter and manner.” Some exceptions are made by the reviewer for “Children of the Heavenly King.” We may presume, therefore, that to this writer, “Thou dear Redeemer, dying Lamb,” is one of the “peculiarly offensive.” This is not wonderful, when in the next page we read that “the hymns of Newton are the very essence of doggerel.” This sounds rather strange, as a verdict, to those who have felt the particular charm of that much-loved hymn, “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!” It is not without a purpose that we refer to this paper in the Christian Remembrancer—evidently by a very scholarly hand—because its whole tone shows how the sacred song of the Revival would be likely to be regarded by those who had no sympathy with its evangelical teaching. The writer, for instance, speaking of Wesley’s hymns, doubts whether any of them could possibly be included by any chance in English hymnology! “Jesus, lover of my soul,” is said, “in some small degree to approximate to the model of a Church hymn!” Of the Countess of Huntingdon’s hymn-book, the writer says, “We shall certainly not notice the raving profanity!” It is not necessary further either to sadden or to irritate the reader by similar expressions; but the entire paper, and the criticisms we have cited, will show what was likely to be the effect of the hymns of the Revival on many similar minds of that time. In fact, the joy of the Revival work arose from this, that no person, no priest, nor Church usage, was needed to interpose between the soul and the Saviour. Faith in Christ, and His immediate, personal presence with the soul seeking Him by faith, as it was the burden of the best of the sermons, so it was, also, of all the great hymns.

The origin and the authors of several eminent hymns are certainly obscure. To Edward Perronet must be assigned the authorship of the fine coronation anthem of the Lamb that was slain: “All hail the power of Jesus’ name!”

Another, which has become a universal favourite, is “Beyond the glittering starry globe.” This is a noble and inspiring hymn; only a few verses are usually quoted in our hymn-books. Lord Selborne divides its authorship between Fanch and Turner. We have seen it attributed to Olivers; this is certainly a mistake. The Quarterly Review, in a very able paper on hymnology, reproducing an old legend concerning it, traces it to two brothers in a humble situation in life, one an itinerant preacher, the other a porter. The preacher desired the porter to carry a letter for him. “I can’t go,” said the porter, “I am writing a hymn.” “You write a hymn, indeed! Nonsense! you go with the letter, and I will finish the hymn.” He went, and returned, but the hymn was unfinished. The preacher had taken it up at the third verse, and his muse had forsaken him at the eighth. “Give me the pen,” said the porter, and he wrote off,

“They brought His chariot from above,
To bear Him to His throne;
Clapped their triumphant wings, and cried,
‘The glorious work is done!’”

Unfortunately the author of the paper in the Quarterly Review appears never to have seen the hymn in its entirety. The verse he cites is not the eighth, but the twenty-second, and it has been mutilated almost wherever quoted; the verse itself is part of an apostrophe to the angels, recalling their ministrations round our Lord:

“Tended His chariot up the sky,
And bore Him to His throne;
Then swept your golden harps and cried,
‘The glorious work is done!’”

Whoever wrote the hymn had the imagination of a poet, the fine pathos of a believer, and a strong lyrical power of expression.

Anecdotes of the origin of many of our great hymns of this period are as interesting as they are almost innumerable; those of which we are speaking are hymns of the Revival—to speak concisely—perhaps commenced with the Wesleys, and closed with Cowper and Newton. It must not be supposed that there were no singers save those whose verses found their way into the Wesleyan or other great collections of hymns; there were James Grant, Joseph Griggs, especially notable, Miss Steele, the author of a great number of hymns of universal acceptance in all our churches, and which are more like those of Doddridge than any other since his day. Then there was John Stocker,—but we would particularly notice Job Hupton, the author of a hymn which has never been included in any hymn-book except Our Hymn Book, edited by the author of this volume, but which is scarcely inferior to “Beyond the glittering starry sky.”

“Come, ye saints, and raise an anthem,
Cleave the skies with shouts of praise,
Sing to Him who found a ransom,
Ancient of eternal days.
Bring your harps, and bring your odours,
Sweep the string and pour the lay;
View His works! behold His wonders!
Let hosannas crown the day!”

The hymn is far too long for quotation. Job Hupton was a Baptist minister in the neighbourhood of Beccles, where he died in 1849, in the eighty-eighth year of his age, and the sixty-fifth of his ministry.

Thus there was set free throughout the country a spirit of sacred song which was new to the experience of the nation: it was boldly evangelical; it was devoted, not to the eulogy of Church forms and days; there was not a syllable of Mariolatry; but praise to Christ, earnest meditation upon the state of man without His work, and the blessedness of the soul which had risen to the saving apprehension of it. This forms the whole substance of the Divine melody. It has seemed to some that the most perfect hymn in the English language is, “Jesus! lover of my soul.” Sentiments may differ, arising from modifications of experience, but that hymn undoubtedly is the very essence of all the hymns which were sung in the days of the Great Revival. For the first time there was given to Christian experience that which met it at every turn. Watts found such a choir, and such an audience for his devotions, as he had never known in his life; and “Charles Wesley,” says Isaac Taylor, “has been drawing thousands in his wake and onward, from earth to heaven.” The hymns met and united all companies and all societies. The bridal party returned from church, singing,

“We kindly help each other,

Till all shall wear the starry crown.”

If they gathered round the grave, they sang;—and what a variety of glorious funereal hymns they had! But that was a great favourite:

“There all the ship’s company meet,
Who sailed with their Saviour beneath;
With shoutings each other they greet,
And triumph o’er sorrow and death.”

Few separations took place without that song,

“Blest be the dear uniting love,

That will not let us part.”

While others became such favourites that even almost every service had to be hallowed by them; such as,

“Jesus! the name high over all,

In hell, or earth, or sky;”

while an equal favourite almost, was,

“Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing

My great Redeemer’s praise!”

They must soon have become very well known, for so early as 1748, when a sad cluster of convicts, horse-stealers, highway robbers, burglars, smugglers, and thieves, were led forth to execution, the turnkey of the prison said he had never seen such people before. The Methodists had been among them; they had all yielded themselves to the power of “the truth as it is in Jesus,” and on their way to Tyburn they all sang together,

“Lamb of God! whose bleeding love
We now recall to mind,
Send the answer from above,
And let us mercy find;
Think on us, who think of Thee,
And every struggling soul release;
Oh! remember Calvary,
And let us go in peace!”

The hymns found their way to sick beds. The old Earl of Derby, the grandfather of the present peer, was dying at Knowsley. He had for his housekeeper there a Mrs. Brass, a good and faithful Methodist; the old Earl was fond of talking with her upon religious matters, and one day she read to him the well-known hymn, “All ye that pass by, to Jesus draw nigh.” When she came to the lines,

“The Lord in the day of His anger did lay

Our sins on the Lamb, and he bore them away,”

the Earl looked up and said, “Stop! don’t you think, Mrs. Brass, that ought to be, ‘The Lord in the day of his mercy did lay’?”

The old lady did not admit the validity of his lordship’s theology; but it very abundantly showed that his experience had passed through the verse, and reached to the true meaning of the hymn. An old blind woman was hearing Peter McOwan preach. He quoted these lines:

“The Lord pours eyesight on the blind;

The Lord supports the fainting mind.”

The poor old woman was not happy until she met the preacher, and she said, “But are there really such sweet verses? Are you sure the book contains such a hymn?” and he read the whole to her. It is one by Watts:

“I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath.”

Innumerable are the anecdotes of these hymns; they inaugurated really the rise of English hymnology; and it is not too much to say that, as compared with them, many more recent hymns are as tinsel compared with gold. A writer truly says: “They sob, they swell, they meet the spirit in its most hushed and plaintive mood. They roll and bear it aloft, in its most inspired and prophetic moods, as on the surge of more than a mighty organ swell; among the mines and quarries, and wild moors of Cornwall, among the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in chambers of death, in the most joyous assemblages of the household, they have relieved the hard lot, and sweetened the pleasant one; and even in other lands soldiers and sailors, slaves and prisoners, have recited with what joy these words have entered into their life.”

Thus the great hymns of this period grew and became a religious power in the land, strangely contradicting a verdict which Cardinal Wiseman pronounced some years since, that “all Protestant devotion is dead.” While we give all honour to the fine hymns of Denmark and Germany, many of the best of which were translated with the movement, it may, with no exaggeration, be said that the hymnology of England in the eighteenth century is the finest and most complete which the history of the Church has known.

CHAPTER VII

LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS.

There came with the work of the Revival a practice, without which it is more than questionable if it would have obtained such a rapid and abiding hold upon the various populations and districts of the country; this was lay preaching. The designation must have a more inclusive interpretation than we generally apply to it; we must understand by it rather the work of those men who, in contradistinction to the great leaders of the Revival—men of scholarship, of universities, and of education—possessed none of these qualifications, or but in a more slight and undisciplined degree. They were converted men, modified by various temperaments; they one and all possessed an ardent zeal; but, in many instances, we shall find that they were as much devoted to the work of the ministry as those who had received a regular ordination. It is singular that prejudices so strong should exist against lay preaching and preachers, for the practice has surely received the sanction of the most ancient usages of the Church, as even Dr. Southey admits, in his notes to the Life of Wesley. Thus, in the history of the Church, this phenomenon could scarcely be regarded as new. Orders of preaching friars; “hedge-preachers,” “black, white, and grey,” with all their company; disciples of Francis, Dominic, or Ignatius, had spread over Europe during the dark and mediæval ages. Although this rousing element of Church life had not found much expression in the churches of the Reformation, yet with the impulse of the new Revival, up started these men by multitudes. The reason of this was very simple. There is a well-known little anecdote of some town missionary standing up in a broad highway preaching to a multitude. He was arrested by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked him from the edge of the crowd by what authority he dared to stand there? and who had given him the right to preach? The man had his New Testament in his hand; he rapidly turned to the last chapter of it, and said, “I find it written here, ‘Let him that heareth say, Come!’ I have heard, and I would say Come!” The anecdote represents sufficiently the rise and progress of lay preaching in the Revival. There first appeared, naturally, a simple set of men, who, in their different spheres, would, perhaps, lead and direct a prayer-meeting, and round it with some pious and gentle exhortation. We have already pointed out the necessity soon felt for frequent and reciprocative services; these were not the lay preachers to whom we refer; but in this fraternal form of Church fellowship, the lay preacher had his origin.

Wesley imposed restrictions upon his helpers which he soon found himself compelled to renounce. John Wesley was a strong adherent to the idea of Church order. The first lay preacher in his communion who leapt over the traces was Thomas Maxfield. It was at the Foundry in Moor Fields. Wesley was in Bristol, and the intelligence was conveyed to him. He appears to have regarded it as a serious and dangerous innovation. The good Susannah Wesley, his mother—now past threescore years and ten—infirm and feeble, was yet living in the Chapel House of the Foundry. To her John hurried on his arrival in London; and after his affectionate salutations and inquiries, he expressed such a manifest dissatisfaction and anxiety that she inquired the cause. With some indignation and unusual abruptness, he said, “Thomas Maxfield has turned preacher, I find;” and then the wise and saintly woman gave him her advice. She reminded him that, from her prejudices against lay preaching he could not suspect her of favouring anything of the kind; “but take care,” she said, “what you do respecting that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are.” She advised her son to hear Maxfield for himself. He did so, and at once buried all his prejudices. He exclaimed after the sermon, “It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good!” and Thomas Maxfield became the first of a host who spread all over the country.

It may be supposed that the Countess of Huntingdon very naturally shared all Wesley’s prejudices against lay preaching; but she heard Maxfield preach, and she wrote of him, “God has raised one from the stones to sit among the princes of the people. He is my astonishment; how is God’s power shown in weakness!” and she soon set herself to the work of supplying an order of men, of whom Maxfield was the first to lead the way. By-and-by came another innovation: the lay evangelists at first never went into the pulpit, but spoke from among the people, or from the desk. The first who broke through this usage was Thomas Walsh; we will say more of him presently. He was a man of deep humility, and his life reveals entire and extraordinary consecration; but he believed himself to be an ambassador for Christ, and he walked directly up into the pulpit, never questioning, but quite disregarding the usual custom. The majesty of his manner, his solemn, impressive, and commanding eloquence, forbade all remark; and henceforth all the lay preachers followed his example. There arose a band of extraordinary men. Let the reader refer to the chronicles of their lives, and the effects of their labours, and he will not suppose that he has seen anything in our day at all approaching to what they were.

Local preachers have now long been part of the great organisation of Methodism. But in the period to which we refer, it must be remembered that the pen had not commenced the exercise of its more popular influence. There were few authors, few journalists, very few really popular books; these men, then, with their various gifts of elevated holiness, broad and rugged humour, or glowing imagination, went to and fro among the people, rousing and instructing the dormant mind of the country. Then it was Wesley’s great aim to sustain interest by variety. Wesley himself said that he believed he should preach himself and his congregation asleep if he were to confine his ministrations to one pulpit for twelve months. We would take the liberty to say in reference to this, that it would depend upon whether he kept his own mind fresh and wakeful during the time. He writes, however: “We have found by long and constant experience, that a frequent change of teachers is best; this preacher has one talent, that another. No one whom I ever knew has all the talents which are needful for beginning, continuing, and perfecting the work in a whole congregation; neither,” he adds, “can he find matter for preaching morning and evening, nor will the people come to hear him; hence he grows cold, and so do the people; whereas if he never stays more than a fortnight together in one place, he may find matter enough, and the people will gladly hear him.”

This certainly gives an idea but of a plain order of services; and, no doubt, some of Wesley’s preachers were of the plainest. There was Michael Fenwick, of whom Wesley says, “he was just made to travel with me—an excellent groom, valet de chambre, nurse, and, upon occasion, a tolerable preacher.” This good man was one day vain enough to complain to Wesley, that although he was constantly travelling with him, his name was never inserted in Wesley’s published Journals. In the next number he found himself immortalised with his master there. “I left Epworth,” writes Wesley, “with great satisfaction, and about one, preached at Clayworth. I think none were unmoved but Michael Fenwick, who fell fast asleep under an adjoining hayrick.”

A higher type of man, but still of the very plain order of preachers, was Joseph Bradford. He also was Wesley’s frequent travelling companion, and he judged no service too servile by which he could show his reverence for his master. But on one occasion Wesley directed him to carry a packet of letters to the post. The occasion was very extraordinary, and Bradford wished to hear Wesley’s sermon first. Wesley was urgent and insisted that the letters must go. Bradford refused; he would hear the sermon. “Then,” said Wesley, “you and I must part!” “Very good, sir,” said Bradford. The service was over. They slept in the same room. On rising in the morning, Wesley accosted his old friend and companion, and asked if he had considered what had been said, that they must part. “Yes, sir,” replied Bradford. “And must we part?” inquired Wesley. “Please yourself, sir,” was the reply. “Will you ask my pardon?” rejoined Wesley. “No, sir.” “You wont?” “No, sir.” “Then I will ask yours,” replied the great man. It is said that Bradford melted under the words, and wept like a child. But we must not convey the idea that the early preachers were generally of this order. “In a great house there are vessels to honour and vessels to dishonour.” “Vessels of dishonour” assuredly were none of these men: but there were some who attained to a greatness almost as remarkable as the greatness of the three, Whitefield and the Wesleys.

What a man was John Nelson! His was a life full of singular incidents. It was truly apostolic, whether we consider its holy magnanimity, the violence and vehemence of the cruel persecutions he encountered, or his singular power over excited mobs; reminding us sometimes of Paul fighting as with wild beasts at Ephesus, or standing with cunning tact, and disarming at once captain and crowd on the steps of the Castle at Jerusalem. Then, although he was but a poor working stonemason, he had a high gentlemanly bearing, before which those who considered themselves gentlemen, magistrates and others, fell back abashed and ashamed. He was one of the prophets of Yorkshire; and many of the large Societies at this day in Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford owe their foundation to him. It seems wonderful to us now, that merely preaching the word of truth, and especially as John Nelson preached it, with such a cheerful, radiant, and even heavenly manner, should bring out mighty mobs to assault him. The stories of his itinerancy are innumerable, and his life is really one of the most romantic in these preaching annals. At Nottingham, while he was preaching, the crowds threw squibs at him and round him; but, as he was still pursuing his path of speech, a sergeant in the army pressed up to him, with tears, saying, “In the presence of God and all this company, I beg your pardon. I came here on purpose to mob you, but I have been compelled to hear you; and I here declare I believe you to be a servant of the living God!” He threw his arms round Nelson’s neck, kissed him, and went away weeping; and we see him no more. Perhaps more remarkable still was his reception at Grimsby. There the clergyman of the parish hired a drummer to gather a great mob, as he said, “to defend the rights of the Church.” The storm which raged round Nelson was wild and ferocious; but it illustrates the power of this extraordinary man over his rudest hearers, that after beating his drum for a long time, the poor drummer threw it away, and stood listening, the tears running down his cheeks.

John Nelson at Nottingham.

Nelson was a man of immense physical strength; his own trade had fostered this, and before his conversion he had, no doubt, been feared as a man who could hit out and hit hard. As the most effectual means of silencing him, he was pressed for a soldier; but John was not only a Methodist, he had adopted the Quaker notion that a Christian dare not fight; and he seems to have been a real torment to the officers and men of the regiment, who indeed marched him about different parts of the country, but could not get him either to accept the king’s money or to submit to drill. An officer put him in prison for rebuking his profanity, and threatened to chastise him. Nelson says, “It caused a sore temptation to arise in me; to think that a wicked, ignorant man should thus torment me, and I able to tie his head and heels together. I found an old man’s bone in me; but the Lord lifted up the standard within, else should I have wrung his neck and set my foot upon him.”

At length, after three months, the Countess of Huntingdon procured his discharge. The regiment was in Newcastle. He preached there on the evening of the day on which he was liberated, and it is testified that a number of the soldiers from his regiment came to hear him, and parted from him with tears. He was arrested as a vagrant, without any visible means of living. A gentleman instantly stepped forward and offered five hundred pounds bail; but the bail was refused. He was able to prove that he was a high-charactered, industrious workman; but it availed nothing. Crowds wept and prayed for him as he was borne through the streets. “Fear not!” he cried, “oh, friends; God hath His way in the whirlwind, and in the storm. Only pray that my faith fail not!” It was at Bradford. They thrust him into a most filthy dungeon. The authorities would give him no food. The people thrust in food, water, and candles. He shared these with some wretched prisoners in the same cage, and he sang hymns, and talked to them all night. He was marched off to York; but there the excitement was so great when it was known that John Nelson was coming a prisoner that armed troops were ordered out to guard him. He says, “Hell from beneath was moved to meet me at my coming!” All the windows were crowded with people—some in sympathy, but most cheering and huzzaing as if some great political traitor had been arrested; but he says, “The Lord made my brow like brass, so that I could look upon all the people as grasshoppers, and pass through the city as if there had been none in it but God and me.”

Such was John Nelson. These anecdotes are sufficient to show the manner of man he was. He has been truly called “the proto-martyr of Methodism.” But it is not in a hint or two that all can be said which ought to be said of this noble and extraordinary man. His conversion, perhaps, sank down to deeper roots than in many instances. The thoughts of Methodism found him perplexed with those agonizing questions which have tormented men in all ages, until they have realized the truth as it is in Jesus. His life was guilty of no immoralities; he had a happy, humble home, was industrious, and receiving good wages; but as he walked to and fro among the fields he was distressed, “for,” he said, “surely God never made man to be such a riddle to himself, and to leave him so.” He heard Wesley preach. “Then,” he says, “my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock, and I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me;” and so, in short, he became a Methodist, and a Methodist preacher; and among the noble names in the history of the Church of Christ, in his own line and order, it may be doubted whether a nobler name can be mentioned than that of John Nelson.

Quite another order of man, less human, but equally divine, was Thomas Walsh. His parents were Romanists, and he was intended by them for the Romish priesthood; and he appears to have been an intense Romanist ascetic until about eighteen years of age. He had a thoughtful and exceedingly intense nature, and his faith was no rest to him. In his dilemma he heard a Methodist preacher speak one day from the text, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” It appears to have been the turning-point of a remarkable life.

“The life of Thomas Walsh,” says Dr. Southey, “might almost convince a Catholic that saints were to be found in other communions as well as in the Church of Rome.” Walsh became a great biblical scholar; he was an Irishman, he mastered the native Irish, that he might preach in it; but Latin, Greek, and Hebrew became familiar to him; and of the Hebrew, especially, it is said that he studied so deeply, that his memory was an entire concordance of the whole Bible. His soul was as a flame of fire, but it burnt out the body quickly. John Wesley says of him, “I do not remember ever to have known a man who, in so few years as he remained upon earth, was the instrument of converting so many sinners.” He became mighty in his influence over the Roman Catholics. The priests said that “Walsh had died some years ago, and that he who went about preaching, on mountains and highways, in meadows, private houses, prisons, and ships, was a devil who had assumed his shape.” This was the only way in which they could account for the extraordinary influence he possessed. His labours were greatly divided between Ireland and London, but everywhere he bore down all before him by a kind of absorbed ecstasy of ardent faith; but he died at the age of twenty-seven. While lying on his death-bed he was oppressed with a sense of despair, even of his salvation. The sufferings of his mind on this account were protracted and intense; at last he broke out in an exclamation, “He is come! He is come! My Beloved is mine, and I am His for ever!” and so he fell back and died. Thomas Walsh is a great name still in the records of the lay preachers of early Methodism.

All orders of men rose: different from any we have mentioned was George Story, whose quiet, but earnest and reasonable nature, seems to have commanded the especial love of Southey. He appears never to have become what some call an enthusiast; but he interestingly illustrates, that it was not merely over the rugged and uninformed minds that the power of the Revival exercised its influence. Very curiously, he appears to have been converted by thinking about Eugene Aram, the well-known scholar, whose name has become so celebrated in fiction and in poetry, and who had a short time before been executed for murder at York. Story was impressed by the importance of the acquisition of knowledge, and Aram’s extraordinary attainments kindled in his mind a sense of admiration and emulation; but, as he thought upon his life, he reasoned, “What did this man’s learning profit him? It did not save him from becoming a thief and a murderer, or even from attempting his own life.” It was an immense suggestion to him; it led him upon another track of thinking. The Methodists came through his village; he yielded himself to the influence, and Dr. Southey thinks “there is not in the whole biography of Methodism a more interesting or remarkable case than his.” He became a great preacher, but disarmed and convinced men rather by his calm, dispassionate elevation of manner, than by such weapons as the cheerful bonhomie of Nelson, or the fervid fire of Walsh.

But we are, perhaps, conveying the idea that it was only beneath the administration of John Wesley that these great lay preachers were to be found. It was not so; but no doubt beneath that administration their itinerancy became more systematic and organised. Whitefield does not appear to have at all shared Wesley’s prejudices on this means of usefulness; but those men who fell beneath the influence of Whitefield, or the Countess, seem soon to meet us as settled ministers, in many, if not in all instances. Among them there are few greater names in the whole Revival than those of Captain Jonathan Scott and the renowned Captain Toriel Joss. Captain Scott was a captain of dragoons, and one of the heroes of Minden; he was converted by the instrumentality of William Romaine, who, in spite of his prejudices against lay preaching, encouraged him in his excursions, in which he spoke to immense crowds with great effect. Fletcher, of Madeley, said, “his coat shames many a black one.” He was a gentleman of an ancient and opulent family, and the Countess, who, naturally, was delighted to see people of her own order by her side, felt herself greatly strengthened by him. It was said, when he preached at Leeds, the whole town turned out to hear him; and he was one of the great preachers of the Tabernacle in Moorfields, during more than twenty years. But yet a far more famous man was Toriel Joss. He was a captain of the seas, and had led a life which somewhat reminds us of Newton’s. He was a good and even great sailor, but he became a greater preacher. Whitefield said of these two men, that “God, who sitteth upon the flood, can bring a shark from the ocean, and a lion from the forest, to show forth his praise.” Joss was a man of property, with a fair prospect of considerable wealth, when he renounced the seas and became one of the great lay preachers. Whitefield insisted that he should abandon the chart, the compass, and the deck, and take to the pulpit. He did so. In London his fame was second only to that of Whitefield himself. He became Whitefield’s coadjutor at the Tabernacle, where, first as associate pastor, and afterwards as pastor, he continued for thirty years. The chapel at Tottenham Court Road was his chief field, and John Berridge called him “Whitefield’s Archdeacon of Tottenham.”

TABERNACLE, MOORFIELDS.

We cannot particularise others: there were Sampson Staniforth, the soldier, Alexander Mather, Christopher Hopper, John Haime, John Parson—and these are only representative names. There were crowds of them; they travelled to and fro, with hard fare, throughout the land. Their excursions were not recreations or amusements. Attempt to think what England was at that time. It is a fact that they often had to swim through streams and wade through snows to keep their appointments; often to sleep in summer in the open air, beneath the trees of a forest. Sometimes a preacher was seen with a spade strapped to his back, to cut a way for man and horse through the heavy snow-drifts. Highwaymen were abroad, and there are many odd stories about their encounters with these men; but, then, usually, they had nothing to lose. Rogers, in his Lives of the Early Preachers, tells a characteristic story. One of these lay preachers, as usual on horseback, was waylaid by three robbers; one of them seized the bridle of his horse, the second put a pistol to his head, the third began to pull him from the saddle—all, of course, declaring that they would have his money or his life. The preacher looked solemnly at them, and asked them “if they had prayed that morning.” This confounded them a little, still they continued their work of plunder. One pulled out a knife to rip the saddle-bag open; the preacher said, “There are only some books and tracts there; as to money, I have only twopence halfpenny in my pocket;” he took it out and gave it them. “All that I have of value about me,” he said, “is my coat. I am a servant of God; I am going on His errand to preach; but let me kneel down and pray with you; that will do you more good than anything I can give you.” One of them said, “I will have nothing to do with anything we can get from this man!” They had taken his watch; they restored this, and took up the bags and fastened them again on the horse. The preacher thanked them for their great civility to him; “But now,” said he, “I will pray!” and he fell upon his knees, and prayed with great power. Two of the rascals, utterly frightened at this treatment, started off as fast as their legs could carry them; the third—he who had first refused to have anything to do with the job—continued on his knees with the preacher; and when they parted company he promised that he would try to lead a new life, and hoped to become a new man.

Should the reader search the old magazines and documents in which are enshrined the records of the early days of the Revival, he will find many incidents showing what a romantic story is this of the self-denials, the difficulties, and enthusiasm of these men, whose best record is on high—most of them faithful men, like Alexander Coates, who, after a life of singular length and usefulness in the work, went to his rest. His talents were said to be extraordinary, both in preaching and in conversation. Just as he was dying, one of his brethren called upon him and said, “You don’t think you have followed a cunningly-devised fable now?” “No, no, no!” said the dying man. “And what do you see?” “Land ahead!” said the old man. They were his last words. Such were the men of this Great Revival; so they lived their lives of faithful usefulness, and so they passed away.

CHAPTER VIII

A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS.

If we were writing a sustained history of the Revival, we might devote some pages, at this period, to notice the varied forms of satire and ribaldry by which it was greeted. While the noble bands of preachers were pursuing their way, instructing and awakening the popular mind of the country, not only heartless and affected dilettanti, like Horace Walpole, regarded it with the condescension of their supercilious sneers, but for the more popular taste there was The Spiritual Quixote, a book which even now has its readers, and in which Whitefield and his followers were held up to ridicule; and Lackington, the great bookseller, in his disgraceful, but entertaining autobiography, attempted to cover the Societies of Wesley with his scurrility. It was about the year 1750 that The Minor was brought out on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre; the author was that great comedian, but most despicable and dissolute character, Foote. The play lies before us as we write; we have taken it down to notice the really shameless buffoonery and falsehood in which it indulges. Whitefield is especially libelled and burlesqued. The Countess of Huntingdon waited personally on the Lord Chamberlain, and besought him to suppress it; it was not much to the credit of his lordship’s knowledge, that he declared, had he known the evil influence of the thing before it was licensed, it should not have been produced, but being licensed, it was beyond his control. Then the good Countess waited on David Garrick; Garrick knew and admired Whitefield; he received her with distinguished kindness and respect, and it is to his honour that, through his influence, it was temporarily suppressed. It seems a singular compensation that the author of this piece, who permitted himself to indulge in the most disgraceful insinuations against one of the holiest and purest of men, a few years after was charged with a great crime, of which he was, no doubt, quite innocent, and died a broken-hearted and beggared man.

Another of these disgraceful stage libels, The Hypocrite, appeared at Drury Lane in 1768; in it are the well-known characters of Dr. Cantwell, and Mawworm, and old Lady Lambert. There is more of a kind of genius in it than in The Minor, but it was all stolen property, and little more than an appropriation from Molière’s Tartuffe and Cibber’s Nonjuror. All these things are forgotten now; but they are worthy of notice as entering into the history of the Revival, and showing the malice which was stirred in multitudes of minds against men and designs, on the whole, so innocent and holy. Was it not written from of old, “The carnal mind is enmity against God”?

But as to the movement itself, companions-in-arms, and of a very high order alike for valour and character, crowded to the field; we have referred to several distinguished laymen; it is at least equally important to notice that while the leaders of the Church were, as a body, set in array against it—while archbishops and bishops of that day frowned, or scoffed and scorned, there were a number of clergymen whose piety, whose wit and eloquence, whose affluent humour, whose learning, whose intrepidity and sleepless variety of labour, surround their names, even now as then, with a charm of interest, making every life as it comes before us a readable and delightful recreation. Some of them were assuredly oddities; it is not long since we made a pilgrimage to Everton, in Bedfordshire, to read the singular epitaph, on the tomb in the churchyard, of one of the oddest and most extraordinary of all these men. Even if our readers have read that epitaph, it will do them no harm to read it again:

Here lie
The earthly remains of
John Berridge,
Late Vicar of Everton,
And an itinerant servant of Jesus Christ,
Who loved his Master, and His work,
And after running on His errands many years,
Was called up to wait on Him above.
Reader,
Art thou born again?
No salvation without a New Birth!
I was born in sin, February, 1716,

Remained ignorant of my fallen state till 1730,

Lived proudly on Faith and Works for Salvation

Till 1751.

Was admitted to Everton Vicarage, 1755.

Fled to Jesus alone for refuge, 1756.

Fell asleep in Christ Jesus, January 22, 1793.

With the exception of the date of his death, it was written by the hand that moulders beneath the stone; it is characteristic that its writer caused himself to be buried in that part of the churchyard where, up to that time, only those had been interred who had destroyed themselves, or come to an ignominious end. Before his death he had often said that he would take this effectual means of consecrating that unhallowed spot.

This epitaph sufficiently shows that John Berridge was an original character. Southey says of him that he was a buffoon and a fanatic. Southey’s judgments about the men of the Revival were frequently as shallow as they were unjust; he must have felt a sharp sting when, as doubtless was the case, he heard the well-known anecdote of George IV., who, on reading Richard Watson’s calm reply to Southey’s attacks on the Methodist leaders, exclaimed, as he laid down the book, “Oh, my poor Poet Laureate!” He deserved all that and a good deal more, if only for the verdict we have quoted on Berridge. So far as scholarship may test a man, John Berridge was most likely a far deeper scholar than Dr. Southey; he was a distinguished member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and for many years read and studied fourteen hours a day; but he was an uncontrollable droll and humourist; pithy proverbs fell spontaneously along all his speech. As one critic says of his style, “It was like granulated salt.” As a preacher, he was equal to any multitudes; he lived among farmers and graziers, and the twinkling of his eye, all alive with shrewd cheerfulness, compelled attention even before he opened his lips. The late Dr. Guthrie, not long before his death, thought it worth his while to republish The Christian World Unmasked; pray Come and Peep; and it is characteristic of Berridge throughout.

After his conversion, his Bishop called him up and threatened to send him to gaol for preaching out of his parish. Our readers may imagine with such a man what sort of conference it was, and which of the two would be likely to get the worst of it: “I tell you,” said the Bishop, “if you continue preaching where you have no right, you are very likely to be sent to Huntingdon Gaol.” “I have no more regard for a gaol than other folks,” said he; “but I would rather go there with a good conscience than be at liberty without one.” The conference is too long for quotation, but Berridge held on his way; he became one of the most beloved and intimate friends of the Countess of Huntingdon; and if he shocked his bishop by preaching out of his own parish, he must have roused his wrath by preaching in her ladyship’s chapel in London, and throughout the country. His letters to the Countess are as characteristic as his speech, or any other of his writings. Thus he writes to her about young Rowland Hill, “I find you have got honest Rowland down to Bath; he is a pretty young spaniel, fit for land or water, and he has a wonderful yelp; he forsakes father and mother and brethren, and gives up all for Jesus, and I believe he will prove a useful labourer if he keeps clear of petticoat snares.” No doubt, Berridge sometimes seemed not only racy, but rude; but his words were wonderfully calculated to meet the average and level of an immense congregation. While he lived on terms of fellowship with all the great leaders of the movement, he was faithful as the vicar of his own parish, and was the apostle of the whole region of Bedfordshire.

With all his shrewd worldly wisdom, Berridge had a most benevolent hand; he was rich, and devoted far more than the income of his vicarage to helping his poor neighbours, supporting itinerant ministers, renting houses and barns for preaching the Gospel, and, however far he travelled to preach, always disbursing his expenses from his own pocket. How he would have loved John Bunyan, and how John Bunyan would have loved him! It is curious that within a few miles of the place where the illustrious dreamer was so long imprisoned, one should arise out of the very Church which persecuted Bunyan, to do for a long succession of years, on the same ground, the work for which he was persecuted.

Haworth Church.

From the low Bedford level, what a flight to the wildest spot in wild Yorkshire, Haworth, and its venerable old parish church, celebrated now as a classic region, haunted by the memory of the author of Jane Eyre, and all the Brontë family; but in the times of which we are writing, the vicar, William Grimshaw, was quite as queer and quaint a creature as Berridge. A wild spot now—a stern, grand place; desolate moors still seeming to stretch all round it; though more easily reached in this day, it must indeed have been a rough solitude when William Grimshaw became its vicar, in 1742. He was born in 1708; he died in 1763. He was a man something of the nature of the wild moors around him. When he became the pastor of the parish, the people all round him were plunged in the most sottish heathenism. The pastor was a kind of son of the desert, and he became such an one as the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. The people were rough, they perhaps needed a rough shepherd; they had one. The character of Grimshaw is that of a rough, faithful, and not less beautiful shepherd’s dog. On the Sabbath morning he would commence his service, giving out the psalm, and having taken note of the absentees from the congregation, would start off, while the psalm was being sung, to drive in the loiterers, visiting the ale-houses, routing out the drinkers, and literally compelling them to come into the parish church. One Sabbath morning, a stranger riding through Haworth, seeing some men scrambling over a garden wall, and some others leaping through a low window, imagined the house was on fire. He inquired what was the matter. One of them cried out, “The parson’s a coming!” and that explained the riddle. Upon another occasion, as a man was passing through the village, on the Sabbath day, on his way to call a doctor, his horse lost a shoe. He found his way to the village smithy to have his loss repaired. The blacksmith told him that it was the Lord’s day, and the work could not be done unless the minister gave his permission. So they went to the parson, who, of course, as the case was urgent and necessary, gave his consent. But the story illustrates the mastery the vicar attained over the rough minds around him. He was a man of a hardy mould. He was intensely earnest. He not only effected a mighty moral change in his own parish, but Haworth was visited every Sabbath by pilgrims from miles round to listen to this singular, strong, mountain voice; so that the church became unequal to the great congregations, and he often had to preach in the churchyard, a desolate looking spot now, but alive with mighty concourses then. It is said that his strong, pithy words haunted men long after they were spoken, as the infidel nobleman, who, in an affected manner, told him he was unable to see the truth of Christianity. “The fault,” said the rough vicar, “is not so much in your lordship’s head as in your heart.”

GRIMSHAW’S HOUSE.

Grimshaw was the first who kindled in the wild heights of Yorkshire the flames of the Revival. His mind was stirred simultaneously with others, but he does not appear to have received either from Whitefield or Wesley the impulses which created his extraordinary character, though he, of course, entered heartily into all their work. They visited Haworth, and preached to immense concourses there. As to Grimshaw himself, in the most irregular manner, he preached in the Methodist conventicles and dissenting chapels in all the country round. He effected an entire change in his own neighbourhood. He put down the races; he reformed the village feasts, wakes, and fairs. He was often expecting suspension, and at last he was cited before the Archbishop, who inquired of him as to the number of his communicants. “How many,” said his grace, “had you when you first went to Haworth?” “Twelve.” “And how many now?” “In the summer, about twelve hundred.” The astonished Archbishop turned to his assistants in the examination, and said, “I really cannot find fault with Mr. Grimshaw when he brings so many people to the Lord’s Table.” Southey is also complimentary, in his own way, to this singular clergyman, and says, “He was certainly mad!”

William Grimshaw.

It was what Festus said to Paul; but the madness of the pastor of Haworth was a blessing to the farms and cottages of those wild moorlands. He was a child of nature in her most beautiful moods, glorified by Divine grace. The freshness and buoyancy of the heath his foot so lightly pressed, and the torrents which sung around him, were but typical of his hardy naturalness and beauty of character. Truly it has been said, it was not more natural that the gentle lover of nature should lie at the foot of Helvellyn, than that this watchman of the mountains should sleep at the foot of the hills amongst which he had so faithfully laboured. He died comparatively young. His last words were very characteristic. Robert Shaw, an old Methodist preacher, called upon him; he said, “I will pray for you as long as I live, and if there is praying in heaven, I will pray for you there; I am as happy as I can be on earth, and as sure of glory as if I were in it.” His last words were, “Here goes an unprofitable servant!”

The wild Yorkshire of that day took up the Revival with a will; and Henry Venn, of Huddersfield, we suppose, has even transcended by his usefulness the fame of either Berridge or Grimshaw; he was born in 1724, and died in 1797. His life was genial and fruitful, and to his church in Huddersfield the people poured in droves to listen to him. It has been said his life was like a field of wheat, or a fine summer day. And how are these to be painted or put upon the canvas? He could scarcely be called eccentric, excepting in the sense in which earnestness, holiness, and usefulness are always eccentric. His influence may be said, in some directions, to continue still. He was one of the indefatigable coadjutors of the Countess in all her work, and towards the close of his life he came to London to throw his influence round young Rowland Hill, by preaching for some time in Surrey Chapel.

In another district of Yorkshire, a mighty movement was going on, commencing about 1734. Benjamin Ingham, whom we met some time since at Oxford, as a member of the Holy Club, was living at Ossett, near Dewsbury. He had married Lady Margaret Hastings, a younger sister of the Countess of Huntingdon. He had received ordination in the Church of England, but his irregularities had forced him out. Like the Wesleys, in the earlier part of his history, he became enchanted with the devotional life of the Moravians, and at this period he introduced with marvellous results a modified Moravianism into the West Riding of Yorkshire. He founded as many as eighty Societies; but he appears to have attempted to carry out an impossible scheme, the union of the Moravian discipline and doctrine with his idea of Congregationalism. His influence over the West Riding for a long time was immense; but, most naturally, divisions arose, and the purely Moravian element separated itself into its own order of Church life, while the Methodist element was absorbed in the great and growing Wesleyan Societies. He was a friend of Count Zinzendorf, who was his guest for a long time at Ledstone House. The shock which his Society sustained, and the death of Lady Margaret, his admirable and beloved wife, were blows from which the good man never recovered; but the effects of his usefulness continued, although he passed; and if the reader ever visits the little Moravian Colony and Institution of Fulneck, near Leeds, in Yorkshire, he may be pleased to remember that this is also one of the offshoots of the Great Revival.

It is a sudden leap from the West Riding of Yorkshire to Truro, the charming little capital of Western Cornwall. We are here met by an imperishable and beautiful name, that of Samuel Walker, the minister; he was born in 1714, and died in 1761. His influence over his town was great and abiding, and Walker of Truro is a name which to this day retains its fragrance, as associated with the restoration of his town from wild depravity to purity and exemplary piety.

How impossible it is to do more than merely mention the names of men, every action of whose lives was consecrated, and every breath an ardent flame, all helping on and urging forward the great work of rousing a careless world and a careless Church. What an influence had William Romaine, who for a long time, it has been said, was one of the sights of London; it was rather drolly put when it was said, “People came from the country to see Garrick act and to hear Romaine preach!” Nor let our readers suppose that he was a mere sensational orator; he was a great scholar. We hear of him first as the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and the editor of the four volumes of Calasio’s Hebrew Concordance; then he caught the evangelic fire; he became one of the chaplains of the Countess of Huntingdon, and, so far as the Church of the Establishment was concerned, he was the most considerable light of London for a period of nearly fifty years; and very singular was his history in this relation, especially in some of the churches whose pulpits he filled. It seems singular to us now how even his great talents could obtain for him the place of morning lecturer at St. George’s, Hanover Square; but the charge was soon urged against him that he vulgarised that most fashionable of congregations, and most uncomfortably crowded the church. He was appointed evening lecturer at St. Dunstan’s in Fleet Street; but the rector barred his entrance into the pulpit, seating himself there during the time of prayers, so that the preacher might be unable to enter. Lord Mansfield decided that, after seven in the evening, the church was not the rector’s, but that Mr. Romaine was entitled to the use of it; then, at seven in the evening, the churchwardens closed the church doors, and kept the congregation outside, wearying them in the rain or in the cold. At length, the patience of the churchwardens gave way before the persistency of the people and the preacher; but it was an age of candles, and they refused to light the church, and Mr. Romaine often preached in a crowded church by the light of one candle. They paid him the merest minimum which he could demand, or which they were compelled to pay; sometimes only eighteen pounds a year. But he was a hardy man, and he lived on the plainest fare, and dressed in homespun cloth. He was dragged repeatedly before courts of law, but he was as difficult to manage here as in the church; he brought his judges to the statutes, none of which he had broken. Every effort was made to expel him from the Church, but he would not be cast out; and at last he appears to have settled himself, as such men generally do, into an irresistible fact. He became the Rector of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars. There he preached those sermons which were shaped afterwards into the favourite book of our forefathers, The Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith. Born in 1714, he died in 1795. His last years were clothed with a pleasant serenity, although, perhaps, some have detected in his character marks of a severity, probably the result of those conflicts which, through so many years, he had with such remarkable consistency sustained.

ST. ANN’S, BLACKFRIARS.

And surely we ought to mention, in this right noble band, John Newton; but he brings us near to the time when the passion of the Revival was settling itself into organisation and calm; when the fury of persecution was ceasing; Methodism was becoming even a respectable and acknowledged fact. John Newton was born in 1725, and died in 1807. All his sympathies were with the theology and the activities of the revivalists; but before he most singularly found himself the Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, and St. Mary Woolchurch, he had led a life which, for its marvellous variety of incident, reads like one of Defoe’s fictions.

St. Mary Woolnoth.
John Newton.

But his parlour in No. 8 Coleman Street Buildings, on a Friday evening, was thronged by all the dignitaries of the evangelical movement of his day. As he said, “I was a wild beast on the coast of Africa, but the Lord caught me and tamed me; and now you come to see me as people go to see the lions in the Tower.” A grand old man was John Newton, the young sailor transformed into the saintly old rector; there he sat with few traces of the parson about him, in his blue pea-jacket, and his black neckerchief, liking still to retain something of the freedom of his old blue seas; full of quaint wisdom, which never, like that of his friend Berridge, became rude or droll; quietly sitting there and meditating; his enthusiastic life apparently having subsided into stillness, while the Hannah Mores, Wilberforces, Claudius Buchanans, and John Campbells, went to him to find their enthusiasm confirmed. The friend of Cowper, who surely deserves to be called the Poet Laureate of the Revival—himself the author of some of the sweetest hymns we still sing; the biographer of his own wonderful career, and of the life of his friend and brother-in-arms, William Grimshaw; one of the finest of our religious letter-writers; with capacities within him for almost everything he might have thought it wise to undertake, he now seems to us appropriately to close this small gallery we have attempted to present. When the spirit of the Revival was either settling into firmness and consolidation, or striking out into those new and marvellous fields of labour—its natural outgrowth—which another chapter may present succinctly to the eye, John Newton, by his great experience of men, his profound faith, his steady hand and clear eye, became the wise adviser and fosterer of schemes whose gigantic enterprise would certainly have astonished even his capacious intelligence.

In closing this chapter it is quite worth while to notice that, various as were the characters of these men, and of their innumerable comrades, to whom we do homage, although we have no space even to mention their names, their strength arose from the certainty and the confidence with which they spoke; there was nothing tentative about their teaching. That great scholar, Sir William Hamilton, says that “assurance is the punctum saliens, that is the strong point of Luther’s system;” so it was with all these men, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen;” it was the full assurance of knowledge; and it gave them authority over the men with whom they wrestled, whether in public or private. Whitefield and Wesley alike, and all their followers, had strong faith in God. They were believers in the personal regard of God for the souls of men; and every idea of prayer supposes some such personal regard, whether offered by the highest of high Calvinists, or the simplest primitive Methodist; the whole spirit of the Revival turned on this; these men, as they strongly believed, were able, by the strong attractive force of their own nature, to compel other minds to their convictions. Their history strongly illustrates that that teaching which oscillates to and fro in a pendulous uncertainty is powerless to reform character or influence mind.

CHAPTER IX

BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS.

The preceding chapters have shown that the Great Revival was creating over the wild moral wastes of England a pure and spiritual atmosphere, and its movements and organisations were taking root in every direction. Voltaire, and that pedantic cluster of conceited infidels, the Bolingbrokes, Middletons, and Mandevilles, Chubbs, Woolstons, and Collinses, who prophesied that Christian faith was fast vanishing from the earth, were slightly premature. It is, indeed, interesting to notice the contrast in this period between England and the then most unhappy sister-kingdom of France: there, indeed, Christian faith did seem to be trodden underfoot of men. While a great silent, hallowed revolution was going on in one, all things were preparing for a tremendous revolution in the other. It was just about the time that the Revival was leavening English society that Lord Chesterfield summed up what he had noticed in France, in the following words: “In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase in France.” The words were spoken several years before that terrible Revolution came, which conducted the King, the Queen, and almost all the aristocracy, respectability, and lingering piety of the nation to the scaffold. It was a wonderful compensation. A few years before, a sovereign had cast away from his nation, and from around his throne, all the social elements which could guard and give dignity to it; how natural, then, that the whole canaille of the kingdom should rush upon the throne of his successor, and cast it and its occupant into the bonfire of the Reign of Terror!

In Britain, from some cause, all was different. This period of the Revival has been truly called the starting-point of the modern religious history of that land; and, somehow, all things were singularly combining to give to the nation a new-born happiness, to create new facilities for mental growth and culture, and to enlarge and to fill their cup of national joy. It will be noticed that these things did not descend to the nation generally from the highest places of the land. With the exception of the sovereign, we cannot see many instances of a lively interest in the moral well-being of the people. Other exceptions there were, but they were very few. From the people themselves, and from the causes we have described, originated and spread those means which, amidst the wild agitations of revolution, as they came foaming over the Channel, and which were rather aided than repressed by the unwisdom of many of the governments and magistrates, calmed and enlightened the public mind, and secured the order of society, and the stability of the throne.

The historians of Wesleyanism—we will say it respectfully, but still very firmly—have been too uniformly disposed to see in their own society the centre and the spring of all those amazing means of social regeneration to which the period of the Revival gave birth. Dr. Abel Stevens specially seems to regard Methodism and Wesleyanism as conterminous. It would seem from him that the work of the printing-office, the book or the tract society, schools and missions, and the various means of social amelioration or redemption, all have their origin in Wesleyanism. We may give the largest honour to the venerable name of Wesley, and accept this history by Dr. Stevens as the best, yet as an American he did not fully know what had been done by others not in the Connexion. There was an immense field of Methodism which did not fall beneath the dominion of Wesley, and had no relation to the Wesleyan Conference. The same spirit touched simultaneously many minds, quite separated by ecclesiastical and social relations, but all wrought up to the same end. These pages have been greatly devoted to reminiscences of the great preachers, and illustrations of the preaching power of the Revival, but our readers know that the Revival did not end in preaching. These voices stirred the slumbering mind of the nation like a thunder-peal, but they roused to work and practical effort. The great characteristic of all that came out of the movement may be summed up in the often-quoted expression, “A single eye to the glory of God.” As one of the clergymen of Yorkshire, earnest and active in those times, was wont to say, “I do love those one-eyed Christians.”

We shall have occasion to mention the name of Robert Raikes, and that name reminds us not only of Gloucester, but of Gloucestershire; many circumstances gave to that most charming county a conspicuous place. Lying in the immediate neighbourhood of Bath, it attracted the attention of the Countess of Huntingdon. “As sure as God is in Gloucestershire,” was an old proverb, first used in monastic days, then applied to the Reformation time, when Tyndale, the first translator of the English New Testament, had his home in the lovely village of North Nibley; but it became yet more true when Whitefield preached to the immense concourses on Stinchcombe Hill; when Rodborough and Ebley, and the valley of the Stroud Water were lit up with Revival beacons, and when Rowland Hill established his vicarage at Wotton-under-Edge; then, in its immediate neighbourhood, arose that beautiful Christian worker, the close friend of George Whitefield, Cornelius Winter; and from his labours came forth his most eminent pupil, and great preacher, William Jay.

And the Revival took effect on distinct circles which certainly seemed outside of the Methodist movement, but which yet, assuredly, belonged to it; the Clapham Sect, for instance. “The Clapham Sect” is a designation originating in the facetious and satiric brain of Sydney Smith, than whom the Revival never had a more unjust, ungenerous, or ungracious critic; but the pages of the Edinburgh Review, in which the flippant sting of speech first appeared, years afterwards consecrated the term and made it historical in the elegant essay of Sir James Stephen. By his pen the sect, with all its leaders, acts, and consequences, are pleasantly described in the Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography; and surely this was as much the result of the Great Revival as the “evangelical succession” which calls forth the exercise in previous pages of the same interesting pen; it was all a natural evangelical succession, that of which we have spoken before, as enthusiasm for humanity growing out of enthusiasm for Divine truth. Men who have become fairly impressed by a sense of their own immortality and its redemption in Christ, become interested in the temporal well-being and the eternal welfare of others. It has always been so, and is so still, that men who have not a sense of man’s immortal welfare have usually cared but little about his temporal interests. Hospitals and churches, orphanages and missionary societies, usually grow out of the same spiritual root.

We scarcely need ask our readers to accompany us to the pleasant little village of Clapham, and its sweet sequestered Common, then so far removed from the great metropolis; surrounded by the homes of wealthy men, merchants, statesmen, eminent preachers, all of them infected with the spirit of the Revival, and all of them noteworthy in the story of those means which were to shiver the chains of the slave, to carry light to dark heathen minds, and to hand out the Bible to English villages and far-off nations. We have been desirous of conveying the impression that those were times of a singular and almost simultaneous spiritual upheaval; it was as if, in different regions of the great lake of humanity, submerged islands suddenly appeared from beneath the waves; and it is not too much to say that all those various means which have so tended to beautify and bless the world, schemes of education, schemes for the improvement of prison discipline, schemes of missionary enterprise for the extension of Christian influence in the East Indies, the destruction of slavery in the West Indies, and the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire; Bible societies and Tract societies, and, in fact, the whole munificent machinery and organisation of our day, sprang forth from that revival of the last century. It seems now like a magnificent burst of enthusiasm; yet, ultimately it was based upon only two or three great elements of faith: the spiritual world was an intense reality; the soul of every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth had an endowment of immortality; they were precious to the Redeemer, they ought, therefore, to be precious to all the followers of the Redeemer. Charged with these truths, their spirits inflamed to a holy enthusiasm by them, from parlours and drawing-rooms, from the lowly homes and cottages of England, all these new professors appeared to be in search of occasions for doing good; the schemes worked themselves through all the varieties of human temperament and imperfection; but, looking back, it must surely be admitted that they achieved glorious results.

John Thornton.

If the reader, impressed by veneration, should make a pilgrimage to Clapham Common, and inquire from some one of the oldest inhabitants which was the house in which John Shore, the great Lord Teignmouth, the first President of the Bible Society, lived, his soul within him might be a little vexed to be informed that yonder large building at the extreme corner of the common, the great Roman Catholic Redemptionist College, is the house. There, were canvassed and brooded over a number of the schemes to which we have referred. Thither from his own house, close to the well-known “Plough”—its site now covered by suburban shops—went the great Zachary Macaulay, sometimes accompanied by his son, a bright, intelligent lad, afterwards known as Thomas Babington Macaulay. John Shore had been Governor of India, at Calcutta. On the common resided also, for some time, William Wilberforce. These were the great statesmen who were desirous of organising great plans, from which the consummating prayer of David in the 72nd Psalm should be realised. Then there was another house on the common, the mansion of John Thornton, which seemed to share with that of Lord Teignmouth the honours of these Divine committees of ways and means. Before the establishment of the Bible Society, Mr. Thornton had been in the habit of spending two thousand pounds a year in the distribution of Bibles and Testaments—a very Bible Society in himself. It is, perhaps, not too much to say, there was scarcely a thought which had for its object the well-being of the human family but it found its representation and discussion in those palatial abodes on Clapham Common. There were Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson; thither, how often went cheery old John Newton, to whom, first of all, on arriving in London, went every holy wayfarer from the provinces, wayfarers who soon found their entrance beneath his protecting wing, and cheery introduction to these pleasant circles. Beneath the incentives of his animating words, the fervid earnestness of Claudius Buchanan found its pathway of power, and The Star of the East—his great sermon on “Missions to India,”—was first seen shining over Clapham Common; and it was the same genial tongue which encouraged that fine, but almost forgotten man, John Campbell, in the enterprise of his spirit, to pierce into the deserts of Africa. We may notice how great ideas perpetuate themselves into generations, when we remember that it was John Campbell who first took out Robert Moffat, and settled him down in the field of his wonderful labours.

Sir James Stephen, in his admirable paper, is far from exhausting all the memories of that Clapham Sect. There was another house, not in Clapham, but not far removed—Hatcham House, as we remember it—a noble mansion, standing in its park, opposite where the old lane turned off from the main road to Peckham. There lived Joseph Hardcastle—certainly one of the Clapham Sect—Wilberforce’s close and intimate friend, a munificent merchant prince, in whose offices in the City were held for a long time all the earliest committee meetings of the Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society, and the London Missionary Society, and from whom appear to have emanated the first suggestions for the limitation of the powers of the East India Company in supporting and sanctioning, by the English Government, Hindoo infanticide and idolatry. Among all the glorious names of the Clapham Sect, not one shines out more beautifully than that of this noble Christian gentleman.

Perhaps a natural delicacy withheld Sir James Stephen from chronicling the story of his own father, Sir George Stephen; and there was Thomas Gisborne, most charming of English preachers of the Church of England evangelical school; and Sir Robert Grant, whose hymns are still among the sweetest in our national psalmody. But we can do no more than thus say that it was from hence that the spirit of the Revival rose in new strength, and taking to itself the wings of the morning, spread to the uttermost parts of the earth.

CHAPTER X

THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL.—ROBERT RAIKES.

In the year 1880 was celebrated in England and America the centenary of Sunday-schools. The life and labours of Robert Raikes, whose name has long been familiar as “a household word” in connection with such institutions, were reviewed, and fresh interest added to that early work for the young.

ROBERT RAIKES AND HIS SCHOLARS.

Gloucestershire, if not one of the largest, is certainly one of the fairest—as, indeed, its name is said to imply: from Glaw, an old British word signifying “fair”—it is one of the fairest, and it ought to be one of the most famous, counties of England. Many are its distinguished worthies: John de Trevisa was Vicar of Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, and a contemporary with John Wyclif, and, like him, he had a strong aversion to the practices of the Church of Rome, and an earnest desire to make the Scriptures known to his parishioners; and in Nibley, in Gloucestershire, was born, and lived, William Tyndale, in whose noble heart the great idea sprang up that Christian Englishmen should read the New Testament in their own mother-tongue, and who said to a celebrated priest, “If God spares my life, I will take care that a plough-boy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.” The story of the great translator and martyr is most interesting. Gloucestershire has been famous, too, for its contributions to the noble army of martyrs, notably, not only James Baynham, but, in Gloucester, its bishop, John Hooper, was in 1555 burnt to death. In Berkeley the very distinguished physician, and first promulgator of the doctrine of vaccination, Dr. Edward Jenner, the son of the vicar, was born; and from the Old Bell, in Gloucester, went forth the wonderful preacher George Whitefield, to arouse the sleeping Church in England and America from its lethargy. The quaint old proverb to which we have already alluded—“As sure as God is in Gloucestershire”—was very complimentary, but not very correct; it arose from the amazing ecclesiastical wealth of the county, which was so rich that it attracted the notice of the papal court, and four Italian bishops held it in succession for fifty years; one of these, Giulio de Medici, became Pope Clement VII., succeeding Pope Leo X. in the papacy in 1523. This eminent ecclesiastical fame no doubt originated the proverb; but it acquired a tone of reality and truth rather from the martyrdom of its bishop than from the elevation of his predecessor to the papal tiara; rather from Tyndale, William Sarton, and his brother weaver-martyrs, than from its costly and magnificent endowments; from Whitefield and Jenner rather than from its crowd of priests and friars.

Thus Gloucestershire has certainly considerable eminence among English counties. To other distinguished names must be added that of Robert Raikes, who must ever be regarded as the founder of Sabbath-schools. It is not intended by this that there had never been any attempts made to gather the children on the Sabbath for some kind of religious instruction—although such attempts were very few, and a diligent search has probably brought them all [?] under our knowledge; but the example and the influence of Raikes gave to the idea the character of a movement; it stirred the whole country, from the throne itself, the King and Queen, the bishops, and the clergy; all classes of ministers and laymen became interested in what was evidently an easy and happy method of seizing upon the multitudes of lost children who in that day were “perishing for lack of knowledge.”

Mr. Joseph Stratford, in his Biographical Sketches of the Great and Good Men in Gloucestershire, and Mr. Alfred Gregory, in his Life of Robert Raikes—to which works we must confess our obligation for much of the information contained in this chapter—have both done honour to the several humbler and more obscure labourers whose hearts were moved to attempt the work to which Raikes gave a national importance, and which from his hands, and from his time, became henceforth a perpetual institution in the Church work of every denomination of Christian believers and labourers. The Rev. Joseph Alleine, the author of The Alarm to the Unconverted, an eminent Nonconformist minister of Taunton, adopted the plan of gathering the young people together for instruction on the Lord’s day. Even in Gloucestershire, before Raikes was born, in the village of Flaxley, on the borders of the Forest of Dean—Flaxley, of which the poet Bloomfield sings:

“’Mid depths of shade gay sunbeams broke
Through noble Flaxley’s bowers of oak;
Where many a cottage, trim and gay,
Whispered delight through all the way:”

in the old Cistercian Abbey, Mrs. Catharine Boevey, the lady of the abbey, had one of the earliest and pleasantest Sabbath-schools. Her monument in Flaxley Church, erected after her death in 1726, records her “clothing and feeding her indigent neighbours, and teaching their children, some of whom she entertained at her house, and examined them herself.” Six of the poor children, it is elsewhere stated, “by turns dined at her residence on Sundays, and were afterwards heard say the Catechism.”

We read of a humbler labourer, realising, perhaps, more the idea of a Sabbath-school teacher, in Bolton, in Lancashire, James Hey, or “Old Jemmy o’ th’ Hey.” Old Jemmy, Mr. Gregory tells us, employed the working days of the week in winding bobbins for weavers, and on Sundays he taught the boys and girls of the neighbourhood to read. His school assembled twice each Sunday, in the cottage of a neighbour, and the time of commencing was announced, not by the ringing of a bell, but by an excellent substitute, an old brass pestle and mortar. After a while, Mr. Adam Compton, a paper manufacturer in the neighbourhood, began to supply Jemmy with books, and subscriptions in money were given him; he was thus enabled to form three branch establishments, the teachers of which were paid one shilling each Sunday for their services. Besides these there are several other instances: in 1763 the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey established something like a Sunday-school at Catterick, in Yorkshire; at High Wycombe, in 1769, Miss Hannah Ball, a young Methodist lady, formed a Sunday-school in her town; and at Macclesfield that admirable and excellent man, the Rev. David Simpson, originated a similar plan of usefulness; and, contemporary with Mr. Raikes, in the old Whitefield Tabernacle, at Dursley, in Gloucestershire, we find Mr. William King, a woollen card-maker, attempting the work of teaching on a Sunday, and coming into Gloucester to take counsel with Mr. Raikes as to the best way of carrying it forward. Such, scattered over the face of the country, at great distances, and in no way representing a general plan of useful labour, were the hints and efforts before the idea took what may be called an apostolic shape in the person of Robert Raikes.

Notwithstanding the instances we have given, Mr. Raikes must really be regarded as the founder of Sunday-schools as an extended organisation. With him they became more than a notion, or a mere piece of local effort; and his position and profession, and the high respect in which he was held in the city in which he lived, all alike enabled him to give publicity to the plan: and before he commenced this movement, he was known as a philanthropist; indeed, John Howard himself bears something like the same relation to prison philanthropy which Raikes bears to Sunday-schools. No one doubts that Howard was the great apostle of prisons; but it seems that before he commenced his great prison crusade, Raikes had laboured diligently to reform the Gloucester gaol. The condition of the prisoners was most pitiable, and Raikes, nearly twenty years before he commenced the Sunday-school system, had been working among them, attempting their material, moral, and spiritual improvement, by which he had earned for himself the designation of the “Teacher of the Poor.” Howard visited Raikes in Gloucester, and bears his testimony to the blessedness and benevolence of his labours in the prison there; and the gaol appears not unnaturally to have suggested the idea of the Sunday-school to the benevolent-hearted man. It was a dreadful state of society. Some idea may be formed of it from a paragraph in the Gloucester Journal for June, 1783, the paper of which Raikes was the editor and proprietor: it is mentioned that no less than sixty-six persons were committed to the Castle in one week, and Mr. Raikes adds, “The prison is already so full that all the gaoler’s stock of fetters is occupied, and the smiths are hard at work casting new ones.” He goes on to say: “The people sent in are neither disappointed soldiers nor sailors, but chiefly frequenters of ale-houses and skittle-alleys.” Then, in another paragraph, he goes on to remark, “The ships about to sail for Botany Bay will carry about one thousand miserable creatures, who might have lived perfectly happy in this country had they been early taught good principles, and to avoid the danger of associating with those who make sobriety and industry the objects of their ridicule.”

From sentences like these it is easy to see the direction in which the mind of the good man was moving, before he commenced the work which has given such a happy and abiding perpetuity to his name. He gathered the children; the streets were full of noise and disturbances every Sunday. In a little while, says the Rev. Dr. Glass, Mr. Raikes found himself surrounded by such a set of little ragamuffins as would have disgusted other men less zealous to do good, and less earnest to disseminate comfort, exhortation, and benefit to all around him, than the founder of Sunday-schools. He prevented their running about in wild disorder through the streets. By and by, he arranged that a number of them should meet him at seven o’clock on the Sunday morning in the cathedral close, when he and they all went into the cathedral together to an early service. The increase of the numbers was rapid; Mr. Raikes was looked up to as the commander-in-chief of this ragged regiment. It is testified that a change took place and passed over the streets of the old Gloucester city on the Sunday. A glance at the features of Mr. Raikes will assure the reader that he was an amiable and gentle man, but that by no means implies always a weak one. He appears to have had plenty of strength, self-possession, and knowledge of the world. He also belonged to, and moved in, good society; and this is not without its influence. As he told the King, in the course of a long interview, when the King and Queen sent for him to Windsor, to talk over his system with him, in order that they might, in some sense, be his disciples, and adopt and recommend his plan: it was “botanising in human nature.” “All that I require,” said Raikes, to the parents of the children, “are clean hands, clean faces, and their hair combed.” To many who were barefooted, after they had shown some regularity of attendance, he gave shoes, and others he clothed. Yes, it was “botanising in human nature;” and very many anecdotes show what flowers sprang up out of the black soil in the path of the good man.

All the stories told of Raikes show that the law of kindness was usually on his lips. A sulky, stubborn girl had resisted all reproofs and correction, and had refused to ask forgiveness of her mother. In the presence of the mother, Raikes said to the girl, “Well, if you have no regard for yourself, I have much for you. You will be ruined and lost if you do not become a good girl; and if you will not humble yourself, I must humble myself on your behalf and make a beginning for you;” and then, with great solemnity, he entreated the mother to forgive the girl, using such words that he overcame the girl’s pride. The stubborn creature actually fell on her knees, and begged her mother’s forgiveness, and never gave Mr. Raikes or her mother trouble afterwards. It is a very simple anecdote; but it shows the Divine spirit in the method of the man; and the more closely we come into a personal knowledge of his character, the more admirable and lovable it seems. Thus literally true and beautiful are the words of the hymn:

“Like a lone husbandman, forlorn,
The man of Gloucester went,
Bearing his seeds of precious corn;
And God the blessing sent.

Now, watered long by faith and prayer,
From year to year it grows,
Till heath, and hill, and desert bare,
Do blossom as the rose.”

Mr. Raikes was a Churchman; he was so happy as to have, near to his own parish of St. Mary-le-Crypt, in Gloucester, an intimate friend, the Rector of St. Aldate’s—a neighbouring parish in the same city—the Rev. Thomas Stock, whose monument in the church truly testifies that “to him, in conjunction with Robert Raikes, Esquire, is justly attributed the honour of having planned and instituted the first Sunday-school in the kingdom.” Mr. Stock was but a young man in 1780, for he died in 1803, then only fifty-four years of age; he must have been, at the time of the first institution of Sunday-schools, a young man of fine and tender instincts. He appears, simultaneously with Mr. Raikes’s movement, to have formed a Sunday-school in his own parish, taking upon himself the superintendence of it, and the responsibility of such expenses as it involved. But Mr. Stock says, in a letter written in 1788, “The progress of the institution through the kingdom is justly attributed to the constant representations which Mr. Raikes made in his own paper of the benefits which he saw would probably arise from it.” At the time Mr. Raikes began the work, he was about forty-four years of age; it was a great thing in that day to possess a respectable journal, a newspaper of acknowledged character and influence; to this, very likely, we owe it, in some considerable measure, that the work in Gloucester became extensively known and spread, and expanded into a great movement. But he does not appear to have used the columns of his newspaper for the purpose of calling attention to the usefulness and desirability of the work until after it had been in operation about three years; in 1783 and 1784, very modestly he commends the system to general adoption.

Robert Raikes.

It is remarkable that in the course of two or three years, several bishops—the Bishop of Gloucester, in the cathedral, the Bishops of Chester and Salisbury, in their charges to the clergy of their dioceses—strongly commended the plan. All orders of mind poured around the movement their commendation; even Adam Smith, whom no one will think likely to have fallen into exaggerated expressions where Christian activity is concerned, said, “No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity, since the days of the apostles.” The poet Cowper declared that he knew of no nobler means by which a reformation of the lower classes could be effected. Some attempts have been made to claim for John Wesley the honour of inaugurating the Sunday-school system; considering the intensely practical character of that venerated man, and how much he was in advance of his times in most of his activities, it is a wonder that he did not; but his venerable memory has honours, certainly, in all sufficiency. He wrote his first commendation of Sunday-schools in the Arminian Magazine of 1784. He says, “I find these schools spring up wherever I go; perhaps God may have a deeper end therein than men are aware of; who knows but that some of these schools may become nurseries for Christians?” Prophetic as these words are, this is fainter and tardier praise than we should have expected from him; but in 1787 he writes more warmly, expresses his belief that these schools will be one great means of reviving religion throughout the kingdom, and expresses “wonder that Satan has not sent out some able champion against them.” In 1788 he says: “I verily think that these schools are one of the noblest specimens of charity which have been set on foot in England since the days of William the Conqueror.”

Some estimate may be formed of the rapidity with which the movement spread, when we find that in this year, 1787, the number of children taught in Sunday-schools in Manchester alone, on the testimony of the very eminent John Nichols, the great printer and anecdotist, was no fewer than five thousand. It was in this year also, 1787, that Mr. Raikes was visiting some relatives in the neighbourhood of Windsor. He must have attained to the dignity of a celebrity; nor is this wonderful, when we remember the universal acceptance with which his great idea of Sunday-schools had been honoured. The Queen invited him to visit her, and inquired of him, he says, “by what accident a thought which promised so much benefit to the lower order of people as the institution of Sunday-schools, was suggested to his mind?” The visit was a long one; he spent two hours with the Queen—the King also, we believe, being present most of the time—not so much in expounding the system, for that was simple enough, but they were curious as to what he had observed in the change and improvement of the characters among whom he worked; and we believe that it was then he told the King, in the words we have already quoted, that he regarded his work as a kind of “botanising in human nature;” this was a favourite phrase of his in describing the work. The result of this visit was, that the Queen established a Sunday-school in Windsor, and also a school of industry at Brentford, which the King and Queen occasionally visited. It may be taken as an illustration of the native modesty of Mr. Raikes’s own character that he never referred in his paper to this distinguished notice of royalty.

Do our readers know anything of Mrs. Sarah Trimmer? A hundred years ago, there was, probably, not a better-known woman in England; and although her works have long ceased to exercise any influence, we suppose none, in her time, were more eminently useful. Pious, devoted, earnestly evangelical, if we speak of her as a kind of lesser Hannah More, the remark must apply to her intellectual character rather than to her reputation or her usefulness. Almost as soon as the Sunday-school idea was announced, she stepped forward as its most able and intrepid advocate; her Economy of Charity exercised a large influence, and she published a number of books, which, at that time, were admirably suited to the level of the capacity which the Sunday-school teacher desired to reach; she was also a great favourite with the King and Queen, and appears to have visited them on the easy terms of friendship. The intense interest she felt in Sunday-schools is manifest in innumerable pages of the two volumes which record her life; certainly, she was often at the ear of the royal pair, to whisper any good and pleasant thing connected with the progress of her favourite thought. She repeatedly expresses her obligation to Mr. Raikes; but her biographer only expresses the simple truth when he says: “To Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester, the nation is, in the first place, indebted for the happy idea of collecting the children of the poor together on the Sabbath, and giving them instruction suited to the sacredness of the day; but, perhaps, no publication on this subject was of more utility than the Economy of Charity. The influence of the work was very visible when it first made its appearance, and proved a source of unspeakable gratification to the author.”

It is not consistent with the aim of this book to enter at greater length into the life of Robert Raikes; we have said sufficient to show that the term which has been applied to him of “founder of Sunday-schools,” is not misapplied. He was a simple and good man, on whose heart, as into a fruitful soil, an idea fell, and it became a realised conviction. Look at his portrait, and instantly there comes to your mind Cowper’s well-known description of one of his friends,

“An honest man, close-buttoned to the chin,

Broadcloth without, and a warm heart within.”

No words can better describe him—not a tint of fanaticism seems to shade his character; he had a warm enthusiasm for ends and aims which commended themselves to his judgment. It is pleasant to know that, as he lived when the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade was commencing, he gave to the movement his hearty blessings and best wishes. At sixty-seven years of age he retired from business; no doubt a very well-to-do man, for he was the owner of two freehold estates near Gloucester, and he received an annuity of three hundred pounds from the Gloucester Journal. He died at his house in Bell Lane, in the city of Gloucester, where he had taken up his residence when he retired from active life; he died suddenly, in his seventy-sixth year, in 1811. Then the family vault in St. Mary-le-Crypt, which sixty years before had received his father’s ashes, received the body of the gentle philanthropist. He had kept up his Sunday-school work and interest to the close; and he left instructions that his Sunday-school children should be invited to follow him to the grave, and that each of them should receive a shilling and a plum cake. On the tablet over the place where he sleeps an appropriate verse of Scripture well describes him: “When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me: because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.”

It seems very questionable whether the slightest shade can cross the memory of this plain, simply useful, and unostentatious man. And it ought to be said that Anne Raikes, who rests in the same grave, appears to have been every way the worthy companion of her husband. She was the daughter of Thomas Trigg, Esq., of Newnham, in Gloucestershire; the sister of Sir Thomas Trigg and Admiral John Trigg. They were married in 1767. She shared in all her husband’s large and charitable intentions, and when he died he left the whole of his property to her. She survived him seventeen years, and died in 1828, at the age of eighty-five.

RAIKES’S HOUSE, GLOUCESTER.

The visitor to Gloucester will be surely struck by a quaint old house in Southgate Street—still standing almost unaltered, save that the basement is now divided into two shops. A few years since the old oak timbers were braced, stained, and varnished. It is a fine specimen of the better class of English residences of a hundred and fifty years since, and is still remarkable in the old city, owing very much to the good taste which governed their renovation. This was the printing-office of Robert Raikes, a notice in the Gloucester Journal, dated August 19, 1758, announcing his removal from Blackfriars Square to this house in Southgate Street. The house now is in the occupation of Mrs. Watson. The house where Raikes lived and died is nearly opposite. It will not be difficult for the spectator to realise the pleasant image of the old gentleman, dressed, after the fashion of the day, in his blue coat with gold buttons, buff waistcoat, drab kerseymere breeches, white stockings, and low shoes, passing beneath those ancient gables, and engaged in those various public and private duties which we have attempted to record. A century has passed away since then, and the simple lessons the philanthropist attempted to impart to the young waifs and strays he gathered about him have expanded into more comprehensive departments of knowledge. The originator of Sunday-schools would be astonished were he to step into almost any of those which have branched out from his leading idea. It is still expanding; it is one of the most real and intense activities of the Universal Church; but among the immense crowds of those who, in England and America, are conducting Sunday-school classes, it is, perhaps, not too much to say, that in not one is there a more simple and earnest desire to do good than that which illuminated the life, and lends a sweet and charming interest to the memory, of Robert Raikes.

CHAPTER XI

THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD.

Dr. Abel Stevens, in his History of Methodism, says, “I congratulate myself on the opportunity of reviving the memory of Silas Told;” and speaks of the little biography in which Silas himself records his adventures as “a record told with frank and affecting simplicity, in a style of terse and flowing English Defoe might have envied.”

Such a testimony is well calculated to excite the curiosity of an interested reader, especially as the two or three incidents mentioned only serve to whet the appetite for more of the like description. The little volume to which he refers has been for some years in the possession of the author of this volume. It is indeed an astonishing book; its alleged likeness to Defoe’s charmingly various style of recital of adventures by sea and by land is no exaggeration, whilst as a piece of real biography it may claim, and quite sustain, a place side by side with the romantic and adventurous career of John Newton; but the wild wonderfulness of the story of Silas seems to leave Newton’s in the shade. Like Newton, Told was also a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, and a believer, in special providences; and well might he believe in such who was led certainly along as singular a path as any mortal could tread. The only other memorial besides his own which has, we believe, been penned of him—a brief recapitulations-well describes him as honest, simple, and tender. Silas Told accompanied, in that awful day, numbers of persons to the gallows, and attempted to console sufferers and victims in circumstances of most harrowing and tragic solemnity: he certainly furnished comfortable help and light when no others were willing or able to sympathise or to help. John Wesley loved him, and when Silas died he buried him, and says of him in his Journal: “On the 20th of December, 1778, I buried what was mortal of honest Silas Told. For many years he attended the malefactors in Newgate without fee or reward; and I suppose no man, for this hundred years, has been so successful in that melancholy office. God had given him peculiar talents for it, and he had amazing success therein; the greatest part of those whom he attended died in peace, and many of them in the triumph of faith.” Such was Silas Told.

But before we come to those characteristic circumstances to which Wesley refers, we must follow him through some of the wild scenes of his sailor life. He was born in Bristol in 1711; his parents were respectable and creditable people, but of somewhat faded families. His grandfather had been an eminent physician in Bunhill Row, London; his mother was from Exeter. * * *

Silas was educated in the noble foundation school of Edward Colston in Bristol. The life of this excellent philanthropist was so remarkable, and in many particulars so like his own, that we cannot wonder that he stops for some pages in his early story to recite some of the remarkable phenomena in Colston’s life. Silas’s childhood was singular, and the stories he tells are especially noticeable, because in after-life the turn of his character seems to have been especially real and practical. Thus he tells how, when a child, wandering with his sister in the King’s Wood, near Bristol, they lost their way, and were filled with the utmost consternation, when suddenly, although no house was in view, nor, as they thought, near, a dog came up behind them, and drove them clear out of the wood into a path with which they were acquainted; especially it was remarkable that the dog never barked at them, but when they looked round about for the dog he was nowhere to be seen. Careless children out for their own pleasure, they sauntered on their way again, and again lost their way in the wood—were again bewildered, and in greater perplexity than before, when, on a sudden looking up, they saw the same dog making towards them; they ran from him in fright, but he followed them, drove them out of the labyrinths, and did not leave them until they could not possibly lose their way again. Simple Silas says, “I then turned about to look for the dog, but saw no more of him, although we were now upon an open common. This was the Lord’s doings, and marvellous in our eyes.”

When he was twelve years of age, he appears to have been quite singularly influenced by the reading of the Pilgrim’s Progress; and late in life, when writing his biography, he briefly, but significantly, attempts to reproduce the intense enjoyment he received—the book evidently caught and coloured his whole imagination. At this time, too, he was very nearly drowned, and while drowning, so far from having any sense of terror, he had no sense nor idea of the things of this world, but that it appeared to him he rushingly emerged out of thick darkness into what appeared to him a glorious city, lustrous and brilliant, the light of which seemed to illuminate the darkness through which he had urged his way. It was as if the city had a floor like glass, and yet he was sure that neither city nor floor had any substance; also he saw people there; the inhabitants arrayed in robes of what seemed the finest substance, but flowing from their necks to their feet; and yet he was sensible too that they had no material substance; they moved, but did not labour as in walking, but glided as if carried along by the wind; and he testifies how he felt a wonderful joy and peace, and he never forgot the impression through life, although soon recalled to the world in which he was to sorrow and suffer so much. It is quite easy to see John Bunyan in all this; but while he was thus pleasantly happy in his visionary or intro-visionary state, a benevolent and tender-hearted Dutchman, who had been among some haymakers in a field on the banks of the river, was striking out after him among the willow-bushes and sedges of the stream, from whence he was brought, body and soul, back to the world again. Such are the glimpses of the childhood of Silas.

Then shortly comes a dismal transition from strange providences in the wood, and enchanting visions beneath the waves, to the singularly severe sufferings of a seafaring life. The ships in that day have left a grim and ugly reputation surviving still. The term “sea-devil” has often been used as descriptive of the masters of ships in that time. Silas seems to have sailed under some of the worst specimens of this order. About the age of fourteen he was bound apprentice to Captain Moses Lilly, and started for his first voyage from Bristol to Jamaica. “Here,” he says, “I may date my first sufferings.” He says the first of his afflictions “was sea-sickness, which held me till my arrival in Jamaica;” and considering that it was a voyage of fourteen weeks, it was a fair spell of entertainment from that pleasant companion. They were short of water, they were put on short allowance of food, and when having obtained their freight, while lying in Kingston harbour, their vessel, and seventy-six sail of ships, many of them very large, but all riding with three anchors ahead, were all scattered by an astonishing hurricane, and all the vessels in Port Royal shared the same fate. He tells how the corpses of the drowned sailors strewed the shores, and how, immediately after the subsidence of the hurricane, a pestilential sickness swept away thousands of the natives. “Every morning,” he says, “I have observed between thirty and forty corpses carried past my window; being very near death myself, I expected every day to approach with the messenger of my dissolution.”

During this time he appears to have been lying in a warehouse, with no person to take care of him except a negro, who every day brought to him, where he was laid in his hammock, Jesuit’s bark.

“At length,” he says, “my master gave me up, and I wandered up and down the town, almost parched with the insufferable blaze of the sun, till I resolved to lay me down and die, as I had neither money nor friend; accordingly, I fixed upon a dunghill in the east end of the town of Kingston, and being in such a weak condition, I pondered much upon Job’s case, and considered mine similar to that of his; however, I was fully resigned to death, nor had I the slightest expectation of relief from any quarter; yet the kind providence of God was over me, and raised me up a friend in an entire stranger. A London captain coming by was struck with the sordid object, came up to me, and, in a very compassionate manner, asked me if I was sensible of any friend upon the island from whom I could obtain relief; he likewise asked me to whom I belonged. I answered, to Captain Moses Lilly, and had been cast away in the late hurricane. This captain appeared to have some knowledge of my master, and, cursing him for a barbarous villain, told me he would compel him to take proper care of me. About a quarter of an hour after this, my master arrived, whom I had not seen before for six weeks, and took me to a public-house kept by, a Mrs. Hutchinson, and there ordered me to be taken proper care of. However, he soon quitted the island, and directed his course for England, leaving me behind at his sick quarters; and, if it should please God to permit my recovery, I was commanded to take my passage to England in the Montserrat, Captain David Jones, a very fatherly, tender-hearted man: this was the first alleviation of my misery. Now the captain sent his son on shore, in order to receive me on board. When I came alongside, Captain Jones, standing on the ship’s gunwale, addressed me after a very humane and compassionate manner, with expressions to the following effect: ‘Come, poor child, into the cabin, and you shall want nothing that the ship affords; go, and my son shall prepare for you, in the first place, a basin of good egg-flip, and anything else that maybe conducive to your relief.’ But I, being very bad with my fever and ague, could neither eat nor drink.”

A very pleasant captain, this seems, to have sailed with; but poor Silas had very little of his company. However, the good captain and his boatswain put their experiences together, and the poor boy was restored to health, and after some singular adventures he reached Bristol. Arriving there, however, Captain Lilly transferred him to a Captain Timothy Tucker, of whom Silas bears the pleasing testimony, “A greater villain, I firmly believe, never existed, although at home he assumed the character and temper of a saint.” The wretch actually stole a white woman from her own country to sell her to the black prince of Bonny, on the African coast. They had not been long at sea before this delightful person gave Silas a taste of his temper. Thinking the boy had taken too much bread from the cask, he went to the cabin and brought back with him his large horsewhip, “and exercised it,” says Silas, “about my body in so unmerciful a manner, that not only the clothes on my back were cut to pieces, but every sailor declared they could see my bones; and then he threw me all along the deck, and jumped many times upon the pit of my stomach, in order to endanger my life; and had not the people laid hold of my two legs, and thrown me under the windlass, after the manner they throw dead cats or dogs, he would have ended his despotic cruelty in murder.” This free and easy mode of recreation was much indulged in by seafaring officers in that time, but this Tucker appears to have been really what Silas calls him, “a blood-thirsty devil;” and stories of murder, and the incredible cruelties of the slave-trade lend their horrible fascination to the narrative of Silas Told. How would it be possible to work the commerce of the slave-trade without such characters as this Tucker, who presents much more the appearance of a lawless pirate than of the noble character we call a sailor?

Those readers who would like to follow poor Silas through the entire details of his miseries on ship-board, his hairbreadth escapes from peril and shipwreck, must read them in Silas’s own book, if they can find it; but we may attempt to give some little account of his wreck upon the American coast, in New England. Few stories can be more charming than the picture he gives of his wanderings with his companions after their escape from the wreck, not because he and they were destitute, and all but naked, but because of the pleasant glimpses we have of the simple, hospitable, home life in those beautiful old New England days—hospitality of the most romantic and free-handed description.

We will select two pictures, as illustrating something of the character of New England settlements in those very early days of their history. Silas and his companions were cast on shore, and had found refuge in a tavern seven miles from the beach; he had no clothing; but the landlord of the tavern gave him a pair of red breeches, the last he had after supplying the rest. Silas goes on: “Ebenezer Allen, Governor of the island, and who dwelt about six miles from the tavern, hearing of our distress, made all possible haste to relieve us; and when he arrived at the tavern, accompanied by his two eldest sons, he took Captain Seaborn, his black servant, Joseph and myself through partiality, and escorted us home to his own house. Between eleven and twelve at night we reached the Governor’s mansion, all of us ashamed to be seen; we would fain have hid ourselves in any dark hole or corner, as it was a truly magnificent building, with wings on each side thereof, but, to our astonishment, we were received into the great parlour, where were sitting by the fireside two fine, portly ladies, attending the spit, which was burdened with a very heavy quarter of house-lamb. Observing a large mahogany table to be spread with a fine damask cloth, and every knife, fork, and plate to be laid in a genteel mode, I was apprehensive that it was intended for the entertainment of some persons of note or distinction, or, at least, for a family supper. In a short time the joint was taken up, and laid on the table, yet nobody sat down to eat; and as we were almost hid in one corner of the room, the ladies turned round and said, ‘Poor men, why don’t you come to supper?’ I replied, ‘Madam, we had no idea it was prepared for us.’ The ladies then entreated us to eat without any fear of them, assuring us that it was prepared for none others; and none of us having eaten anything for near six and thirty hours before, we picked the bones of the whole quarter, to which we had plenty of rich old cider to drink: after supper we went to bed, and enjoyed so profound a sleep that the next morning it was difficult for the old gentleman to awake us. The following day I became the partaker of several second-hand garments, and, as I was happily possessed of a little learning, it caused me to be more abundantly caressed by the whole family, and therefore I fared sumptuously every day.

“This unexpected change of circumstances and diet I undoubtedly experienced in a very uncommon manner; but as I was strictly trained up a Churchman, I could not support the idea of a Dissenter, although, God knows, I had well-nigh by this time dissented from all that is truly good. This proved a bar to my promotion, and my strong propensity to sail for England to see my mother prevented my acceptance of the greatest offer I ever received in my life before; for when the day came that we were to quit the island, and to cross the sound over to a town called Sandwich, on the main continent, the young esquire took me apart from my associates, and earnestly entreated me to tarry with them, saying that if I would accede to their proposals nothing should be lacking to render my situation equivalent to the rest of the family. As there were very few white men on the island, I was fixed upon, if willing, to espouse one of the Governor’s daughters. I had been informed that the Governor was immensely rich, having on the island two thousand head of cattle and twenty thousand sheep, and every acre of land thereon belonging to himself. However, I could not be prevailed upon to accept the offer; therefore the Governor furnished us with forty shillings each, and gave us a pass over to the town of Sandwich.”

Such passages as this show the severe experiences through which Silas passed; they illustrate the education he was receiving for that life of singular earnestness and tenderness which was to close and crown his career; but we have made the extract here for the purpose of giving some idea of that cheerful, hospitable, home life of New England in those then almost wild regions which are now covered with the population of towns.

Here is another instance, which occurred at Hanover, in the United States, through which district Silas and his companions appear to have been wending their way, seeking a return to England. “One Sunday, as my companions and self were crossing the churchyard at the time of Divine service, a well-dressed gentleman came out of the church and said, ‘Gentlemen, we do not suffer any person in this country to travel on the Lord’s day.’ We gave him to understand that it was necessity which constrained us to walk that way, as we had all been shipwrecked on St. Martin’s [Martha’s (?)] Vineyard, and were journeying to Boston. The gentleman was still dissatisfied, but quitted our company and went into church. When we had gone a little farther, a large white house proved the object of our attention. The door being wide open, we reasonably imagined it was not in an unguarded state, without servants or others; but as we all went into the kitchen, nobody appeared to be within, nor was there an individual either above or below. However, I advised my companions to tarry in the house until some person or other should arrive. They did so, and in a short time afterwards two ladies, richly dressed, with a footman following them, came in through the kitchen; and, notwithstanding they turned round and saw us, who in so dirty and disagreeable a garb and appearance might have terrified them exceedingly, yet neither of them was observed to take any notice of us, nor did either of them ask us any questions touching the cause of so great an intrusion.

“About a quarter of an hour afterwards, a footman entered the kitchen with a cloth and a large two-quart silver tankard full of rich cider, also a loaf and cheese; but we, not knowing it was prepared for us, did not attempt to partake thereof. At length the ladies coming into the kitchen, and viewing us in our former position, desired to know the reason of our malady, seeing we were not refreshing ourselves; whereupon I urged the others to join with me in the acceptance of so hospitable a proposal. After this the ladies commenced a similar inquiry into our situation. I gave them as particular an account of every recent vicissitude that befell us as I was capable of, with a genuine, relation of our being shipwrecked, and the sole reasons of our travelling into that country; likewise begged that they would excuse our impertinence, as they were already informed of the cause; we were then emboldened to ask the ladies if they could furnish us with a lodging that evening. They replied it was uncertain whether our wishes could be accomplished there, but that if we proceeded somewhat farther we should doubtless be entertained and genteelly accommodated by their brother—a Quaker—whose house was not more than a distance of seven miles. We thanked the ladies, and set forward, and at about eight o’clock arrived at their brother’s house. Fatigued with our journey, we hastened into the parlour and delivered our message; whereupon a gentleman gave us to understand, by his free and liberal conduct, that he was the Quaker referred to by the aforesaid ladies, who, total strangers as we were, used us with a degree of hospitality impossible to be exceeded; indeed, I could venture to say that the accommodations we met with at the Quaker’s house, seeing they were imparted to us with such affectionate sympathy, greatly outweighed those we formerly experienced.

“After our banquet, the gentleman took us up into a fine spacious bed-chamber, with desirable bedding and very costly chintz curtains. We enjoyed a sound night’s rest, and arose between seven and eight the next morning, and were entertained with a good breakfast; returned many thanks for the unrestrained friendship and liberality, and departed therefrom, fully purposed to direct our course for Boston, which was not more than seven miles farther. Here all the land was strewed with plenty, the orchards were replete with apple-trees and pears; they had cider-presses in the centre of their orchards, and great quantities of fine cider, and any person might become a partaker thereof for the mere trouble of asking. We soon entered Boston, a commodious, beautiful city, with seventeen spired meetings, the dissenting religion being then established in that part of the world. I resided here for the space of four months, and lodged with Captain Seaborn at Deacon Townshend’s; deacon of the North Meeting, and by trade a blacksmith.” He gives a glowing and beautiful description of the high moral and religious character of Boston; here also he met with a stroke of good fortune in receiving some arrears of salvage for a vessel he had assisted in saving before his last wreck. Such are specimens of the interest and entertainment afforded in the earlier parts of this pleasant piece of autobiography. But we must hasten past his adventures, both in the island of Antigua and among the islands of the Mediterranean.

It is not wonderful that the great sufferings and toils of Silas should, even at a very early period of life, prostrate his health, and subject him to repeated vehement attacks of illness. He was but twenty-three when he married; still, however, a sailor, and destined yet for some wild experiences on the seas. Not long, however. A married life disposed him for a home life, and he accepted, while still a very young man, the position of a schoolmaster, beneath the patronage of a Lady Luther, in the county of Essex. He was not in this position very long. Silas, although an unconverted man, must have had strong religious feelings; and the clergyman of the parish, fond of smoking and drinking with him—and it may well be conceived what an entertaining companion Silas must have been in those days, with his budget of adventures—ridiculed him for his faith in the Scriptures and his belief in Bible theology. This so shocked Silas, that, making no special profession of religion, he yet separated himself from the clergyman’s company, and shortly after he left that neighbourhood, and again sought his fortune, but without any very cheerful prospects, in London.

It was in 1740 that a young blacksmith introduced him to the people whom he had hitherto hated and despised—the Methodists. He heard John Wesley preach at the Foundry in the Moor Fields from the text, “I write unto you, little children, for your sins are forgiven you.” This set his soul on fire; he became a Methodist, notwithstanding the very vehement opposition of his wife, to whom he appears to have been very tenderly attached, and who herself was a very motherly and virtuous woman, but altogether indisposed to the new notions, as many people considered them. He improved in circumstances, and became a responsible managing clerk on a wharf at Wapping. While there Mr. Wesley repeatedly and earnestly pressed him to take charge of the charity school he had established at the Foundry. After long hesitation he did so; and it was here that while attending a service at five o’clock in the morning, he heard Mr. Wesley preach from the text, “I was sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.” By a most remarkable application of this charge to himself, Silas testifies that his mind was stirred with a strange compunction, as he thought that he had never cared for, or attempted to ameliorate the condition, or to minister to the souls of the crowds of those unhappy malefactors who then almost weekly expiated their offences, very often of the most trivial description, on the gallows. It seems that the hearing that sermon proved to be a most remarkable turning-point in the life of Silas. Through it he became most eminently useful during a very remarkable and painful career; and his after-life is surrounded by such a succession of romantic incidents that they at once equal, if they do not transcend, and strangely contrast with his wild adventures on the seas.

And here we may pause a moment to reflect how every man’s work derives its character from what he was before. What thousands of sailors, in that day, passed through all the trials which Silas passed, leaving them still only rough sailor men! In him all the roughness seemed only to strike down to depths of wonderful compassion and tenderness. Singular was the university in which he graduated to become so great and powerful a preacher! How he preached we do not know, but his words must have been warm and touching, faithful and loving, judging from their results; and as to his pulpit, we do not hear that it was in chapels or churches—his audience was very much confined to the condemned cell, and to the cart from whence the poor victims were “turned off,” as it was called in those days. In this work he found his singular niche. How long it often takes for a man to find his place in the work that is given him to do; and when the place is found, sometimes, how long it takes to fit nicely and admirably into the work itself! what sharp angles have, to be rubbed away, what difficulties to be overcome! It is wonderful, with all the horrible experiences through which this man had passed, and spectacles of cruelty so revolting that they seem almost to shake our faith, not merely in man, but even in a just and overruling God, that every sentiment of religion and tenderness had not been eradicated from his nature; but it would appear that the old gracious influences of childhood—the days of the Pilgrim’s Progress, and the wonderful vision when drowning beneath the waters, had never been effaced through all his strange and chequered career, although certainly not untainted by the sins of the ordinary sailor’s life. The work in which he was now to be engaged needed a very tender and affectionate nature; but ordinary tenderness starts back and is repelled by cruel and repulsive scenes. Told’s education on the seas, like that of a surgeon in a hospital, enabled him to look on harrowing sights of suffering without wincing, or losing in his tender interest his own self-possession.

It ought not to be forgotten that John Howard, the great prison philanthropist, belongs to the epoch of the Great Revival. Of him Edmund Burke said, “He had visited all Europe in a circumnavigation of charity, not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to collect medals or to collate manuscripts, but to dive into the depths of dungeons and to plunge into the infections of hospitals.” About the year 1760,[13] when he began his consecrated work, Silas Told, as a prison philanthropist upon a smaller, but equally earnest scale, attempted to console the prisoners of Newgate.

13.  See Appendix.

Shortly after hearing that sermon to which we have alluded, a messenger came to him at the school to tell him that there were ten malefactors lying under sentence of death in Newgate, some of them in a state of considerable terror and alarm, and imploring him to find some one to visit them. Here was the call to the work. The coincidences were remarkable: John Wesley’s sermon, his own aroused and tender state of mind produced by the sermon, and the occasion for the active and practical exercise of his feeling. So opportunities would meet us of turning suggestions into usefulness, if we watched for them.

The English laws were barbarous in those days; truly it has been said that a fearfully heavyweight of blood rests upon the conscience of England for the state of the law in those times. Few of those who have given such honour to the noble labours of John Howard and the loving ministrations of Elizabeth Fry ever heard of Silas Told. In a smaller sphere than the first of these, and in a much more intensely painful manner than the second, he anticipated the labours of both. He instantly responded to this first call to Newgate. Two of the ten malefactors were reprieved; he attended the remaining eight to the gallows. He had so influenced the hearts of all of them in their cell that their obduracy was broken down and softened—so great had been his power over them, that locked up together in one cell the night before their execution, they had spent it in prayer and solemn conversation. “At length they were ordered into the cart, and I was prevailed upon to go with them. When we were in the cart I addressed myself to each of them separately. The first was Mr. Atkins, the son of a glazier in the city, a youth nineteen years of age. I said to him, ‘My dear, are you afraid to die?’ He said, ‘No, sir; really I am not.’ I asked him wherefore he was not afraid to die? and he said, ‘I have laid my soul at the feet of Jesus, therefore I am not afraid to die.’ I then spake to Mr. Gardner, a journeyman carpenter; he made a very comfortable report of the true peace of God which he found reigning in his heart. The last person to whom I spoke was one Thompson, a very illiterate young man; but he assured me he was perfectly happy in his Saviour, and continued so until his last moments. This was the first time of my visiting the malefactors in Newgate, and then it was not without much shame and fear, because I clearly perceived the greater part of the populace considered me as one of the sufferers.”

The most remarkable of this cluster was one John Lancaster—for what offence he was sentenced to death does not appear; but the entire account Silas gives of him, both in the prison and at the place of execution, exhibits a fine, tender, and really holy character. The attendant sheriff himself burst into tears before the beautiful demeanour of this young man. However, so it was, that he was without any friend in London to procure for his body a proper interment; and the story of Silas admits us into a pretty spectacle of the times. After the poor bodies were cut down, Lancaster’s was seized by a surgeons’ mob, who intended to carry it over to Paddington. It was Silas’s first experience, as we have seen; and he describes the whole scene as rather like a great fair than an awful execution. In this confusion the body of Lancaster had been seized, the crowd dispersed—all save some old woman, who sold gin, and Silas himself, very likely smitten into extraordinary meditation by a spectacle so new to him—when a company of eight sailors appeared on the scene, with truncheons in their hands, who said they had come to see the execution, and gazed with very menacing faces on the vacated gallows from whence the bodies had been cut down. “Gentlemen,” said the old woman, “I suppose you want the man that the surgeons have got?” “Ay,” said the sailors, “where is he?” The old woman gave them to understand that the body had been carried away to Paddington, and she pointed them to the direct road. Away the sailors hastened—it may be presumed that Lancaster was a sailor, and some old comrade of these men. They demanded his body from the surgeons’ mob, and obtained it. What they intended to do with it scarcely transpires; it is most likely that they had intended a rescue at the foot of the gallows, and arrived too late. However, hoisting it on their shoulders, away they marched with it off to Islington, and thence round to Shoreditch; thence to a place called Coventry’s Fields. By this time they were getting fairly wearied out with their burden, and by unanimous consent they agreed to lay it on the step of the first door they came to: this done, they started off. It created some stir in the street, which brought down an old woman who lived in the house to the step of the door, and who exclaimed, as she saw the body, in a loud, agitated voice, “Lord! this is my son John Lancaster!” It is probable that the old woman was a Methodist, for to Silas Told and the Methodists she was indebted for a decent and respectable burial for her son in a good strong coffin and decent shroud. Silas and his wife went to see him whilst he was lying so, previous to his burial. There was no alteration of his visage, no marks of violence, and says Told, “A pleasant smile appeared on his countenance, and he lay as in sweet sleep.” A singularly romantic story, for it seems the sailors did not know at all to whom he belonged; and what an insight into the social condition of London at that time!

Told did not give up his connection with his school at the Foundry, but he devoted himself, sanctioned by John Wesley and his Church fellowship, to the preaching and ministering to all the poor felons and malefactors in London, including also, in this exercise of love, the work-houses for twelve miles round London; he believed he had a message of tender sympathy for those who were of this order, “sick and in prison.” It seems strange to us, who know how much he had suffered himself, that the old sailor possessed such a loving, tender, and affectionate heart; and yet he tells how, in the earlier part of these very years, he was haunted by irritating doubts and alarms: then came to him old mystical revelations, such as those he had known when drowning, reminding us of similar instances in the lives of John Howe and John Flavel; and the noble man was strengthened.

He went on for twenty years in the way we have described; and the interest of his autobiography compels the wish that it were much longer; for, of course, the largest amount of his precious life of labour was not set down, and cannot be recalled; and readers who are fond of romance will find his name in connection with some of the most remarkable executions of his time.

A singular circumstance was this: Four gentlemen—Mr. Brett, the son of an eminent divine in Dublin; Whalley, a gentleman of considerable fortune, possessed of three country-seats of his own; Dupree, “in every particular,” says Silas, “a complete gentleman;” and Morgan, an officer on board one of His Majesty’s ships of war—after dinner, upon the occasion of their being at an election for the members for Chelmsford, proposed to start forth, and, by way of recreation, rob somebody on the highway. Away they went, and chanced upon a farmer, whom they eased of a considerable sum of money. The farmer followed them into Chelmsford; they were all secured, and next day removed to London; they took their trials, and were sentenced, and left for execution. Told visited them all in prison. Morgan was engaged to be married to Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, the sister of the Duke of Hamilton. She repeatedly visited her affianced husband in the cell, and Told was with them at most of their interviews. It was supposed that, from the rank of the prisoners, and the character of their offence, there would be no difficulty in obtaining a reprieve; but the King was quite inexorable; he said, “his subjects were not to be in bodily fear in order that men might gratify their drunken whims.” Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, however, thrust herself several times before the King; wept, threw herself on her knees, and behaved altogether in such a manner that the King said, “Lady Betsy, there is no standing your importunity any further; I will spare his life, but on one condition—that he is not acquainted therewith until he arrives at the place of execution;” and it was so. The other three unfortunates were executed, and Lady Elizabeth, in her coach, received her lover into it as he stepped from the cart. It is a sad story, but it must have been a sweet satisfaction to the lady.

Far more dreadful were some cases which engaged the tender heart of Silas. A young man, named Coleman, was tried for an aggravated assault on a young woman. The young woman herself declared that Coleman was not the man; but he had enemies who pressed apparent circumstances against him, and urged them on the young woman, to induce her to change her opinion. She never wavered; yet, singular to say, he was convicted and executed. A short time after the real criminal was discovered, by his own confession; he was also tried, condemned, and executed, and the perjured witnesses against poor Coleman sentenced to stand in the pillory.

But one of the most pitiful and dreadful cases in Silas Told’s experience was that of Mary Edmondson, a sweet young girl, tried upon mere circumstantial evidence, and executed on Kennington Common, for the supposed murder of her aunt at Rotherhithe. She appears to have been most brutally treated; the mob believed her to be guilty, and received her with shocking execrations. Whether Silas had a prejudice against her or not, we cannot say; it is not likely that he had a prejudice against any suffering soul; but it so happened, he says, as he had not visited her in her imprisonment, so he entertained no idea of seeing her suffer. But as he was passing through the Borough, a pious cheesemonger, named Skinner, called him into his shop, tenderly expressed deep interest in her present and future state, and besought him to see her; so his first interview with her was only just as she was going forth to her sad end.

Silas shall tell the story himself: “When she was brought into the room, she stood with her back against the wainscot, but appeared perfectly resigned to the will of God. I then addressed myself to her, saying, ‘My dear, for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake, for the sake of your own precious soul, do not die with a lie in your mouth; you are, in a few moments, to appear in the presence of the holy God, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. Oh, consider what an eternity of misery must be the position of all who die in their sins!’ She heard me with much meekness and simplicity, but answered that she had already advanced the truth, and must persevere in the same spirit to her last moments.” Efforts were made to prevent Told from accompanying her any farther, and the rioters were so exasperated against her that Told seems only to have been safe by keeping near to the sheriff along the whole way. The sheriff also told him that he would be giving a great satisfaction to the whole nation, could he only bring her to a confession. “Now, as we were proceeding on the road, the sheriff’s horse being close to the cart, I looked up at her from under the horse’s bridle, and I said, ‘My dear, look to Jesus.’ This quickened her spirit, insomuch that although she had not looked about her before, she turned herself round to me, and said, ‘Sir, I bless God I can look to Jesus—to my comfort.’”

Arrived at the place of execution, he spoke to her again solemnly, “Did you not commit the act? Had you no concern therein? Were you not interested in the murder?” She said, “I am as clear of the whole affair as I was the day my mother brought me into the world.” She was very young, she had all the aspects of innocence about her. The sheriff burst into tears, and turned his head away, exclaiming, “Good God! it is a second Coleman’s case!”

At this moment her cousin stepped up into the cart, and sought to kiss her. She turned her face away, and pushed him off. She had before charged him with being the murderer—and he was. When subsequently taken up for another crime, he confessed the committal of this. Her aunt had left to Mary, in the event of her death, more money than to this wretch. The executioner drew the cart away, and Mary’s body—leaning the poor head, in her last moments, on Silas’s shoulder—dear old Silas, her only comfort in that terrible hour—fell into the arms of death. But he tells how she was cold and still before the cart was drawn away.

But perhaps a still more pitiful case was that of poor Anderson, who was hanged for stealing sixpence: he was a labouring man, and had been of irreproachable character. He and his wife—far gone with child—were destitute of money, clothes, and food. He said to his wife, “My dear, I will go out, down to the quays; it may be that the Lord will provide me with a loaf of bread.” All his efforts were fruitless, but passing through Hoxton Fields, he met two washerwomen. He did not bid them stop, but he said to one, “Mistress, I want money.” She gave him twopence. He said to the other, “You have money, I know you have.” She said, “I have fourpence.” He took that. Insensible of what might follow, as of what he had done, he walked down into Old Street: there, the two women having followed him gave him in charge of a constable. He was tried, sentenced to death, and for this he died. “Never,” says Told, “through the years I have attended the prisoners, have I seen such meek, loving, patient spirits as this man and his wife.” Told attended him to execution, and sought to comfort the poor fellow by promising him to look after his wife; and most tenderly did Told and his wife redeem the promise, for they took her for a short time into their own home. Told obtained a housekeeper’s situation for her, and she became a creditable and respected woman. He bound her daughter apprentice to a weaver, and she, probably, turned out well, although he says, “I have never seen her but twice since, which is many years ago.”

Our readers will, perhaps, think that it is time we drew these harrowing stories to a close; but there are many more of them in this brief, but most interesting, although forgotten autobiography. They are recited with much pathos. We have the story of Harris, the flying highwayman; of Bolland, a sheriff’s officer, who was executed for forging a note, although he had refunded the money, and twice afterwards paid the sum of the bill to secure himself. A young gentleman, named Slocomb, defrauded his father of three hundred pounds; his father would not in any way stir, or remit his claim, to save him. Told attended him and thought highly of him, not only because he expressed himself with so much resignation, but because he never indulged a complaint against him whom Told calls “that lump of adamant, his father.” With him was executed another young gentleman, named Powell, for forgery. Silas Told also attended that cruel woman, Elizabeth Brownrigg, who was executed for the atrocious murder of her apprentices. And of all the malefactors whom he attended she seems to us the most unsatisfactory.

We trust our readers will not be displeased to receive these items from the biography of a very remarkable, a singularly romantic and chequered, as well as singularly useful career. References to Silas Told will be found in most of the biographies of Wesley. Southey passes him by with a very slight allusion. Tyerman dwells on his memory with a little more tenderness; but, with the exception of Stevens, none has touched with real interest upon this extraordinary though obscure man, and his romantic life and labours in a very strange path of Christian benevolence and usefulness. He was known, far and near, as the “prisoners’ chaplain,” although an unpaid one. He closed his life in 1778, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. As we have seen, John Wesley appropriately officiated at his funeral, and pronounced an affectionate encomium over the remains of his honoured old friend and fellow-labourer.

CHAPTER XII

MISSIONARY SOCIETIES.

Illustrating what we have said before, it remains to be noticed, that nearly all the great societies sprang into existence almost simultaneously. The foremost among these,[14] founded in 1792, was the Baptist Missionary Society. It appears to have arisen from a suggestion of William Carey, the celebrated Northamptonshire shoemaker, who proposed as an inquiry to an association of Northamptonshire ministers, “whether it were not practicable and obligatory to attempt the conversion of the heathen.” It is certainly still a moot question whether Le Verrier or Adams first laid the hand of science on the planet Neptune; but it seems quite certain that, when one of God’s great thoughts is throbbing in the heart of one of His apostles, the same impulse and passion is stirring another, perhaps others, in remote and faraway scenes. Altogether unknown to William Carey, that same year the great Claudius Buchanan was dreaming his divine dreams about the conquest of India for Christ, in St. Mary’s College, Cambridge.[15] Undoubtedly the honour of the first consolidation of the thought into a missionary enterprise must be given to William Carey and his little band of obscure believers.

14.  It is not implied that these were the first modern missionary agencies. The Moravians had already sent the Gospel into many regions. There were Swedish and Danish Missionary Societies also at work. In 1649 a Society for Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England had been formed, and about 1697 the “Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” and the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts” were established. See page 256 and foot note.

15.  See Appendix.

William Carey.

At the close of Carey’s address, to which we have referred, a collection was made for the purpose of attempting a missionary crusade upon Hindostan, amounting to £13 2s. 6d. = $65.60. The wits made fine work of this: the reader may still turn to Sydney Smith’s paper in the Edinburgh Review, in which the idea and the effort are satirised as that of “an army of maniacs setting forth to the conquest of India.” But this humble effort resulted in magnificent achievements; Carey and his illustrious coadjutors, Ward and Marshman, set forth, and became stupendous Oriental scholars, translating the Word of Life into many Indian dialects. Then came tempests of abuse and scurrility at home from eminent pens. We experience a shame in reading them; but it shows the catholicity of spirit pervading the minds of Christ’s real followers, that Lord Teignmouth, and William Wilberforce, and Dr. Buchanan, were amongst the ablest and most earnest defenders of the noble Baptist missionaries. We are able to see now that this mission may be said to have saved India to the British Empire. It not only created the scholars to whom we have referred, and the bands of holy labourers, but also the sagacity of Lord Lawrence, and the consecrated courage of Sir Henry Havelock. We are prepared, therefore, to maintain that England is indebted more to William Carey and his £13 2s 6d. than to the cunning of Clive and the rapacity of Warren Hastings.

Another child of the Revival was born in 1795—the London Missionary Society. But it would be idle to attempt to enumerate the names either of its founders, its missionaries, or their fields of labour; let the reader turn to the names of the founders, and he will find they were nearly all enthusiasts who had been baptised into the spirit of the Revival—Rowland Hill, Matthew Wilks, Alexander Waugh, William Kingsbury, and, notably, Thomas Haweis, the Rector of Aldwinckle and chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon. Nor must we omit the name of David Bogue,[16] that strong and eloquent intelligence, whose admirable and suggestive work on The Divine Authority of the New Testament, sent to Napoleon in his exile at St. Helena by the Viscountess Duncan, was, after the Emperor’s death, returned to the author full of annotations, thus seeming to give some clue to those religious conversations, in which the illustrious exile certainly astonishes us, not long before his departure.

16.  See Appendix.

It is the London Missionary Society which has covered the largest surface of the earth with its missions, and it is not invidious to say that its records register a larger range of conquests over heathenism and idolatry than could be chronicled in any age since the first apostles went upon their way. We have only to remember the Sandwich Islands,[17] and the crowds of islands in the Southern Seas, with their chief civiliser, the martyr of Erromanga; Africa, from the Cape along through the deep interior, with Moffatt and Livingstone, whose celebrated motto was, “The end of the geographical feat is the beginning of the missionary enterprise;” China and Robert Morison; Madagascar and William Ellis, and many other regions and names to justify our verdict.

17.  (The civilisation and Christian character of these Islands is largely, due to the labours of the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.—Ed.)

In 1799 the Church Missionary Society came into existence. “What!” said the passionate and earnest Rev. Melville Horne, in attempting to arouse the clergy to missionary enthusiasm; “have Carey and the Baptists had more forgiven than we, that they should love more? Have the fervent Methodists and patient Moravians been extortionate publicans, that they should expend their all in a cause which we decline? Have our Independent brethren persecuted the Church more, that they should now be more zealous in propagating the faith which it once destroyed?” And so the Church Missionary Society arose;[18] and in 1804, the Bible Society; in 1805, the British and Foreign School Society; in 1799, the Religious Tract Society, which, since its foundation, has probably circulated not less than five hundred millions of publications. The Wesleyan Missionary Society—which claims in date to take precedence of all in its foundation in the year 1769—was not formally constituted till 1817.[19]

18.  See Appendix

19.  (The great missionary organizations of America belong to the early part of this century. The First day or Sunday-school Society was formed in 1791; the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810; the American Baptist Missionary Union in 1814; Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society in 1819; the Philadelphia Adult and Sunday-school Union (which, in 1824, was merged in the American Sunday-school Union) in 1817; the Protestant Episcopal Board of Missions in 1821. Of Continental Societies, the Moravian Missionary Society was formed in 1732; the Netherlands Missionary Society in 1797; the Basle Evangelical Mission in 1816. Appendix.—Ed.)

Every one of these, and many other such associations, alike show the vivid and vigorous spirit which was abroad seeking to secure the empire of the world to the cause of Divine truth and love.

And, meantime, what works were going on at home? Education and intelligence were widely spreading; simple academies were forming, like that founded by the Countess of Huntingdon at Trevecca, where the minds of young men were being moulded and informed to become the intelligent vehicles of the Gospel message—eminently that of the great and good Cornelius Winter, in Gloucestershire; and that of David Bogue at Gosport; while, in the north of England, arose the small but very effective colleges of Bradford and Rotherham; and the now handsome Lancashire Independent College had its origin in the vestry of Mosley Street Chapel, where the sainted William Roby, as tutor, gathered around him a number of young men, and armed them with intellectual appliances for the work of the ministry.

Some of the earliest efforts of Methodism, and some of the most successful, had been in the gaols, and among the malefactors of the country—notably in the wonderful labours of Silas Told, whose extraordinary story has been recited in these pages. Silas passed away, but an angel of light moved through the cells of Newgate in the person of Elizabeth Fry, as beautiful and commanding in her presence as she was holy in her sweet and fervid zeal. Now began thoughts too about the waifs and strays of the population—the helpless and forgotten; and John Townshend, an Independent minister, laid the foundation of the first Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the noble institution of London.

In the world of politics, also, the men of the Revival were exercising their influence, and procuring charters of freedom for the mind of the nation. Has it not been ever true that civil and religious liberty have flourished side by side? A blight cannot pass over one without withering the other. The honour of the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts is due to the Great Revival: the Toleration Act of those days was really more oppressive on pious members of the Church of England than on Dissenters; they could not obtain, as Dissenters could, a licence for holding religious services in their houses, because they were members of the Church of England.

William Wilberforce owed his first religious impressions to the preaching of Whitefield; with all his fine liberality of heart, he became an ardent member of the communion of the Church of England. It seems incredible to us now that he lived constantly in the expectation—we will not say fear—of indictments against him, for holding prayer-meetings and religious services at his house in Kensington Gore. Lord Barham, the father of the late amiable and excellent Baptist Noel, was fined forty pounds, on two informations of his neighbour, the Earl of Romney, for a breach of the statute in like services. That such a state of things as this was changed to the free and happy ordinances now in force, was owing to the spirit which was abroad, giving not only freedom to the soul of the man, but dignity and independence to the social life of the citizen. Everywhere, and in every department of life, the spirit of the Revival moved over the face of the waters, dividing the light from the darkness, and thus God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.”

CHAPTER XIII

AFTERMATH.

The effects of that great awakening which we have thus attempted concisely, but fairly, to delineate, are with us still; the strength is diffused, the tone and colour are modified. One chief purpose has guided the pen of the writer throughout: it has been to show that the immense regeneration effected in English manners and society during the later years of the last century and the first of the present, was the result of a secret, silent, most subtle spiritual force, awakening the minds and hearts of men in most opposite parts of the nation, and in widely different social circumstances. We would give all honour where honour is due, remembering that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.” There are writers whose special admiration is given to some favourite sect, some effective movement, or some especially beloved name; but a dispassionate view, an entrance—if we may be permitted so to speak of it—into the camera, the chamber of the times, presents to the eye a long succession of actors, and brings out into the clear light a wonderful variety of influences all simultaneously at work to redeem society from its darkness, and to give it a higher degree of spiritual purity and mental and moral dignity.

The first great workers were passing away, most of them, as is usually the case, dying on Pisgah, seeing most distinctly the future results of their work, but scarcely permitted to enter upon the full realisation of it. In 1791, in the eighty-fourth year of her age, died the revered Countess of Huntingdon; her last words, “My work is done; I have nothing to do but to go to my Father!” No chronicle of convent or of canonisation, nor any story of biography, can record, a more simple, saintly, and utterly unselfish life. To the last unwearied, she was daily occupied in writing long letters, arranging for her many ministers, disposing of her chapel trusts; sometimes feeling that her rank, and certain suppositions as to the extent of her wealth, made her an object upon which men were not indisposed to exercise their rapacity. Still, as compared with the state of society when she commenced her work, in this her closing year, she must have looked over a hopeful and promising future, as sweet and enchanting as the ineffably lovely scenery upon which her eyes opened at Castle Doddington, and the neighbouring beauties of her first wedded home.

JOHN WESLEY’S TOMB, CITY ROAD, LONDON.

In 1791, John Wesley, in his eighty-eighth year, entered into his rest, faithfully murmuring, as well as weakness and stammering lips could articulate, “The best of all is, God is with us!” Abel Stevens says, “His life stands out in the history of the world, unquestionably pre-eminent in religious labours above that of any other man since the apostolic age.” It is not necessary, in order to do Wesley sufficient honour, to indulge in such invidious comparisons. It is significant, however, that the last straggling syllables which ever fell from the pen in his beloved hand, were in a letter to William Wilberforce, cheering him on in his efforts for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Charles Wesley had preceded his brother to his rest in 1788, in the eightieth year of his age.

JOHN WESLEY. M.A.
BORN JUNE 17, 1703; DIED MARCH 2, 1791.
CHARLES WESLEY. M.A.
BORN DECEMBER 18, 1708; DIED MARCH 29, 1788.
“THE BEST OF ALL IS, GOD IS WITH US.”
“I LOOK UPON ALL THE WORLD AS MY PARISH.”
The Wesley Monument.

Thus the earlier labourers were passing away, and the work of the Revival was passing into other forms, illustrating how not only “one generation passeth away, and another cometh,” but also how, as the workers pass, the work abides. It would be very pleasant to spend some time in noticing the interior of many old halls, which were now opening, at once for the entertainment of evangelists, and for Divine service; prejudices were dying out, and so far from the new religious life proving inimical to the repose of the country, it was found to be probably its surest security and friend; and while the efforts were growing for carrying to far-distant regions the truth which enlightens and saves, anecdotes are not wanting to show that it was this very spirit which created a tender interest in maintaining and devising means to make more secure the minister’s happiness at home.

From many points of view William Wilberforce maybe regarded as the central man of the Revival in its new and crowning aspect; as he bore the standard of England at that great funeral which did honour to all that was mortal of his friend William Pitt, on its way to the vaults of the old Abbey, so, as his predecessors departed, it devolved on him to bear the standard of those truths and principles which had effected the great change, and which were to effect, if possible, yet greater changes. By his sweet, winning, and if silvery, yet enchaining and overwhelming eloquence, by his conversation, which cannot have been, from the traditions which are preserved of it, less than wonderful, and by his lucid and practical pen, he continued to give eminent effect to the Revival, and to procure for its doctrines acceptance in the highest circles of society. It is perhaps difficult now to understand the cause of the wonderful influence produced by his Practical View of Christianity; that book itself illustrates how the seeds of things are transmitted through many generations. It is a long way to look back to the poor pedlar who called at the farm door of Richard Baxter’s father in Eaton-Constantine, and sold there Richard Sibbs’s Bruised Reed, but that was the birth-hour of that great and transcendently glorious book, The Saint’s Everlasting Rest. The Saint’s Everlasting Rest was the inspiration of Philip Doddridge, and to it we owe his Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Wilberforce read that book, and it moved him to the desire to speak out its earnestness, pathos, and solemnity in tones suitable to the spirit of the Great Revival which had been going on around him. A young clergyman read the result of Wilberforce’s wish in his Practical View of Christianity, and he testifies, “To that book I owe a debt of gratitude; to my unsought and unexpected introduction to it, I owe the first sacred impressions which I ever received as to the spiritual nature of the Gospel system, the vital character of personal religion, the corruption of the human heart, and the way of salvation by Jesus Christ.” And all this was very shortly given to the world in those beautiful pieces, which it surely must be ever a pleasure to read, whether, for their tender delineation of the most important truths, or the exquisite language, and the delightful charm of natural scenery and pathetic reflection in which the experiences of The Young Cottager, The Dairyman’s Daughter, and other “short and simple annals of the poor,” are conveyed through the fascinating pen of Legh Richmond.

In this eminently lovely and lovable life we meet with one on whom, assuredly, the mantle of the old clerical fathers of the Revival had fallen. He was a Churchman and a clergyman, he loved and honoured his Church and its services exceedingly; but it seems impossible to detect, in any single act of his life or word of his writings, a tinge of acerbity or bitterness. The quiet and mellowed charm of his tracts—which are certainly among the finest pieces of writing in that way which we possess—appear to have pervaded his whole life. Brading, in the Isle of Wight, has been marvellously transformed since he was the vicar of its simple little church; the old parsonage, where little Jane talked with her pastor, is now only a memory, and no longer, as we saw it first many years since, a feature in the charming landscape; and the little epitaphs which the vicar himself wrote for the stones, or wooden memorials over the graves of his parishioners, are all obliterated by time. Several years since we sought in vain for the sweet verse on his own infant daughter, although about thirty-five years since we read it there:

“This early bud, so young and fair,
Called hence by early doom,
Just came to show how sweet a flower
In Paradise should bloom.”

But these little papers of this excellent man circulated wherever the English language was spoken or read, and the spirit of their pages penetrated farther than the pages themselves; while they seem to present in a more pleasant, winning and portable form the spirit of the Revival, divested of much of the ruggedness which had, naturally, characterized its earlier pens.

Indeed, if some generalisation were needed to express the phase into which the Revival was passing, at this, the earlier part of the present century, it should be called the “literary.” Eminent names were appearing, and eminent pens, to gather up the elements of faith which had moved the minds and tongues of men in past years, and to arrest the conscience through the eye. This opens up a field so large that we cannot do justice to it in these brief sketches. To name here only one other writer;—Thomas Scott, the commentator on the Bible, and author of The Force of Truth, is acknowledged to have exerted an influence the greatness of which has been described in glowing terms by men such as Sir. James Stephen and John Henry Newman.

CHARLES SIMEON.

No idea can be formed by those of the present generation of the immense influence Charles Simeon exercised over the mind of the Church of England. He was the leader of the growing evangelical party in the Church; his doctrines were exactly those which had been the favourite on the lips of Whitefield, Berridge, Grimshaw, and Newton. His family was ancient and respectable, he was the son of a Berkshire squire. He had been educated at Eton, and afterwards at King’s College, Cambridge; he became very wealthy. His accession to the life of the Revival seemed like an immense addition of natural influence: he was faithful and earnest, and, in the habits of his mind and character, exactly what we understand by the thorough English gentleman; almost may it be said that he made the Revival “gentlemanly” in clergymen. He opened the course of his fifty-six years’ ministry in Cambridge amidst a storm of persecution; the church wardens attempted to crush him, the pews of his church were locked up, and he was even locked out of the building. Through all this he passed, and he became, for the greater part of the long period we have mentioned, the most noted preacher of his town and university; and he published, certainly, in his Horæ Homileticæ a greater number of attempts at opening texts in the form of sermons, than had ever been given to the world. Simeon devoted his own fortune and means for the purchase of advowsons, in order that the pulpits of churches might be filled by the representatives of his own opinions. No history of the Revival can be complete without noticing this phase, which scattered over England, far more extensively than can be here described, a new order of clergyman, who have maintained in their circles evangelical truth, and have held no inconsiderable sway over the mind of the country.

We only know history through men; events are only possible through men, of whose mind and activity they are the manifestation. This brief succession of sketches has been very greatly a series of portraits standing out prominently from the scenery to which the character gave effect; but of this singular, almost simultaneous movement, how much has been left unrecorded! It remains unquestionably true that no adequate and perfectly impartial review of the Revival has ever yet been written.

Boston Elm.

The story of the Revival in Wales, what it found there, and what it effected, is one of its most interesting chapters. How deep was the slumber when, about 1735-37, Howell Harris began to traverse the Principality, exhorting his neighbours concerning the interests of their souls! another illustration that it was not from one single spring that the streams of the Revival poured over the land. It was rather like some great mountain, such as Plinlimmon, from whose high centre, elevated among the clouds, leap forth five rivers, meandering among the rocks in their brook-like way, until at last they pour themselves along the lowlands in broad and even magnificent streams, either uniting as the Severn and the Wye, or finding their separate way to the ocean. Whitefield found his way to Wales, but Howell Harris was already pouring out his consecrated life there; to his assistance came the voice of Rowlands, “the thunderer,” as he was called. Scientific sermon-makers would say that Harris was no great preacher; but he has been described as the most successful and wonderful one who ever ascended pulpit or platform in the Principality. By the mingling of his tears and his terrors, in seven years he roused the whole country from one end to the other, north and south; communicating the impulse of his zeal to many like-minded men, by whose impassioned words and indefatigable labours the work was continued with signal and lasting results.[20]

20.  See a series of papers on “Welsh Preaching and Preachers” in the Sunday at Home, for 1876.

If the first throbbings of the coming Revival were felt in Northampton, in America, in 1734, beneath the truly awful words of the great Jonathan Edwards, it was from England it derived its sustenance, and assumed organisation and shape. The Boston Elm, a venerable tree near the centre of Boston Park, or common, whose decayed limbs are still held together by clamps or rivets of iron, while a railing defends it from rude hands, is an object as sacred to the traditions of Methodism in the United States, as is Gwennap Pit to those of Methodism in Western England. There Jesse Lee, the first founder of Methodism in New England, commenced the work in 1790, which has issued in an organisation even more extensive and gigantic than that which is associated with the Conference in England. As the United States have inherited from the mother country their language, their literature, and their principles of law, so also those great agitations of spiritual life to which we have concisely referred, crossed the Atlantic, and spread themselves with power there.[21]

21.  See Chapter XIV., The Revival in the New World.

It is not within our province to attempt to enumerate all the sects, each with its larger or lesser proportion of spiritual power, religious activity, and general acceptance among the people, to which the Revival gave birth;—such as the large body of the Bible Christians of the West of England; the Primitive Methodists of the North, those who called themselves the New Connection Methodists, or the United Free Church Association. All these, and others, are branches from the great central stem. Neither is it in our province to notice how the same universal agitation of religious feeling, at exactly the same time, gave birth to other forms, not regarded with so much complacency;—such as the rugged and faulty faith and following of that curious creature, William Huntington, who, singular to say, found also his best biographer in Robert Southey; or the strangely multifarious works and rationalistic development of Baron Swedenborg, which have, at least, the merit of giving a more spiritual rendering to the Christian system than that which was found in the prevalent Arianism of the period of their publication. Turn wherever we may, it is the same. There was a deeper upheaving of the religious life, and far more widely spread, than perhaps any age of the world since the time of the apostles had known before.

A change passed over the whole of English society. That social state which we find described in the pages of Fielding and Smollett, and less respectable writers, passed away, and passed away, we trust, for ever. The language of impurity indulged with freedom by the dramatists of the period when the Revival arose, and read, and read aloud, by ladies and young girls in drawing-rooms, or by parlour firesides, became shameful and dishonoured. In the course of fifty years, society, if not entirely purged—for when may we hope for that blessedness?—was purified. A sense of religious decorum, and some idea of religious duty, took possession of homes and minds which were not at all impressed, either by the doctrines or the discipline of Methodism. All this arose from the new life which had been created.

It was a fruitful soil upon which the revivalists worked. There was a reverence for the Bible as the word of God, a faith often held very ignorantly, but it pervaded the land. The Book was there in every parish church, and in every hamlet; it became a kind of nexus of union for true minds when they felt the power of Divine principles. Thus, when, as the Revival strengthened itself, the great Evangelic party—a term which seems to us less open to exception than “the Methodist party,” because far more inclusive—met with the members of the Society of Friends, they found that, with some substantial differences, they had principles in common. The Quakers had been long in the land, but excepting in their own persons—and they were few in number—they had not given much effect to their principles. Methodism roused the country; Quakerism, with its more quiet thought, gave suggestions, plans, largely supplied money. The great works which these two have since unitedly accomplished of educating the nation, and shaking off the chain of the slave abroad, neither could have accomplished singly; the conscience of the country was prepared by Evangelic sentiment. In taking up and working out the great ideas of the Revival, we have never been indifferent to the share due to members of the Society of Friends. We have already spoken of Elizabeth Fry, to whom many of the princes of Europe in turn paid honour, to whom with singular simplicity they listened as they heard her preach. There are many names on which we should like a little to dwell; missionaries as arduous and earnest as any we have mentioned, such as Stephen Grellet, Thomas Shillitoe, and Thomas Chalkley. But this would enter into a larger plan than we dare to entertain. Our object now is only to say, how greatly other nations, and the world at large, have benefited by the awakening the conscience, the setting free the mind, the education of the character, by bringing all into immediate contact with the Word of God and the truth which it unveils.

Situated as we are now, amidst the movements and agitations of uncertain seas of thought, wondering as to the future, with strong adjurations on every hand to renounce the Word of Life, and to trust ourselves to the filmy rationalism of modern speculation; while we feel that for the future, and for those seas over which we look there are no tide-tables, we may, at least, safely affirm this, that the Bible carries us beyond the highest water-mark; that, as societies have constructed themselves out of its principles they have built safely, not only for eternal hope, but for human and social happiness also; and we may safely ask human thought—which, unaided and unenlightened by revelation, has had a pretty fair field for the exercise and display of its power in the history of the world—to show to us a single chapter in all the ages of its history, which has effected so much for human, spiritual, intellectual, and social well-being, as that which records the results of the Great Revival of the Last Century.

CHAPTER XIV

THE REVIVAL IN THE NEW WORLD.

[BY THE EDITOR.]

The labours of Whitefield had a remarkable influence upon the extension of the Great Revival in the colonies of America. In these days of mammoth steamships and rapid railways, equipped with drawing-room coaches, travelling has become a pleasant pastime; but a century and a half ago, when the sailing vessel and the old lumbering stage-coach were the most rapid and the chief means of public conveyance, and when these were often uncertain and irregular, subjecting the traveller to frequent and annoying delays, if not disappointments, it must have been a formidable undertaking to cross the Atlantic and to journey through a new country, almost a wilderness, such long distances as from Georgia to Massachusetts. Yet Whitefield, with a zeal and a holy desire in “hunting for souls,” made seven visits to America, crossing the ocean in sailing-vessels thirteen times (“one voyage lasting eleven weeks”), and travelled on his preaching tours almost constantly. In one of these visits he went upwards of 1,100 miles through this then sparsely settled country, and endured hardships and exposures from which a far stronger and more vigorous constitution might well shrink.

As in England, so in the American colonies, the decay of vital godliness which preceded the great awakening had been long and deep. It began in the latter part of the 17th century, and its progress was observed with alarm by many of the notable and godly men of the day. Governor Stoughton, previous to resigning the pulpit for the bench, proclaimed, at Boston, that “many had become like Joash after the death of Jehoiada—rotten, hypocritical, and a lie!” The venerable Torrey of Weymouth, in a sermon before the legislature, exclaimed, “There is already a great death upon religion; little more left than a name to live. It is dying as to the being of it, by the general failure of the work of conversion.”

Mather, in 1700, asserts: “If the begun apostasy should proceed as fast the next thirty years as it has done these last, it will come to that in New England (except the gospel itself depart with the order of it) that churches must be gathered out of churches.” President Willard also published a sermon in the same year on “The Perils of the Times Displayed,” in which he asks, “Whence is there such a prevalency of so many immoralities amongst professors? Why so little success of the gospel? How few thorough conversions to be observed; how scarce and seldom! * * * It has been a frequent observation that if one generation begins to decline, the next that follows usually grows worse; and so on, until God pours out his spirit again upon them.”

It was thirty years before the dawn of the great awakening began to appear, even in the colony of Massachusetts; but there were many godly men in various portions of the American colonies who had not yet bowed the knee to the Baal of worldliness, and who earnestly sought, by great fidelity in the presentation of the truth, to arrest the evil tendency of the times. Among them was that greatest of American theologians, Jonathan Edwards. Beholding the melancholy state of religion, not only at Northampton, but in the surrounding regions, and that this evil tendency was corrupting the Church, he began to preach with greater boldness, more especially with the purpose of keeping error out of the Church than with the design of awakening sinners. He was a man, however, whose convictions were exceedingly strong, and who preached the truth, not simply for the purpose of gaining a worldly victory, but because he loved the truth and the Spirit wrought mightily by it. A surprising work of grace attended his preaching. There was a melting down of all classes and ages, in an overwhelming solicitude about salvation; an absorbing sense of eternal realities and self-abasement and self-condemnation; a spirit of secret and social prayer, followed by a concern for the souls of others; and this awakening was so sudden and solemn, that in many instances it produced loud outcries, and in some cases convulsions. Doubtless this great awakening was as much a surprise to Edwards as to those to whom he ministered. Naturally, such a wonderful work could not be confined to Northampton alone; it began to extend to other places in the colony. Remarkable and widespread as this work of grace was, however, it does not seem to have penetrated through New England generally, until after the arrival of Whitefield. The effect of Whitefield’s preaching in Boston, says his biographer, was amazing. Old Mr. Walter, the successor of Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, declared it was Puritanism revived. So great was the interest that his farewell sermon was attended by twenty thousand persons. “Such a power and presence of God with a preacher, and in religious assemblies,” says Dr. Colman, “I never saw before. Every day gives me fresh proofs of Christ speaking in him.” And this interest, great as it was, seemed, if possible, exceeded at Northampton when Whitefield met Edwards and reminded his people of the days of old. A like success attended Whitefield’s ministry in the town and college of New Haven, and at Harvard College the effect was remarkable. Secretary Willard, writing to Whitefield, says: “That which forebodes the most lasting advantage is the new state of things in the college, where the impressions of religion have been and still are very general, and many in a judgment of charity brought home to Christ. Divers gentlemen’s sons that were sent there only for a more polite education, are now so full of zeal for the cause of Christ and the love of souls as to devote themselves entirely to the study of divinity.” And Dr. Colman wrote Whitefield, of Cambridge: “The college is entirely changed; the students are full of God, and will, I hope, come out blessings in their generation, and I trust are so now to each other. The voice of prayer and praise fills their chambers, and sincerity, fervency, and joy, with seriousness of heart, sit visible on their faces.”

On his return to Boston, in 1745, Whitefield himself gives a similar testimony in regard to the remarkable results of the Revival. He was followed in his labours there by Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian from New Jersey. That this was not an overdrawn picture of the work may be inferred from a public testimony given by three of the leading ministers in Boston, the Rev. Messrs. Prince, Webb, and Cooper. Among other things, they said, “The wondrous work of God at this day making its triumphant progress through the land has forced many men of clear minds, strong powers, considerable knowledge, and firmly riveted in * * * * Socinian tenets, to give them all up at once and yield to the adorable sovereignty and irresistibility of the Divine Spirit in His saving operations on the souls of men. For to see such men as these, some of them of licentious lives, long inured in a course of vice and of high spirits, coming to the preaching of the Word, some only out of curiosity, and mere design to get matter of cavilling and banter, all at once, in opposition to their inward resolutions and resistances, to fall under an unexpected and hated power, to have all the strength of their resolution and resistance taken away, to have such inward views of the horrid wickedness not only of their lives but of their hearts, with their exceeding great and immediate danger of eternal misery as has amazed their souls and thrown them into distress unutterable, yea, forced them to cry out in the assemblies with the greatest agonies, and then, in two or three days, and sometimes sooner, to have such unexpected and raised views of the infinite grace and love of God in Christ, as have enabled them to believe in Him; lifted them at once out of their distress; filled their hearts with admiration and joy unspeakable and full of glory, breaking forth in their shining countenances and transporting voices to the surprise of those about them, kindling up at once into a flame of love to God in utter detestation of their former courses and vicious habits,” fairly characterises this wonderful work of God.

Gilbert Tennent, who was pressed into the field by Whitefield, was born in Ireland, and brought to this country by his father, and was educated for the ministry. As a preacher he was, in his vigorous days, equalled by few. His reasoning powers were strong, his language was forcible and often sublime, and his manner of address warm and earnest. His eloquence was, however, rather bold and awful than soft and persuasive, he was most pungent in his address to the conscience. When he wished to alarm the sinner, he could represent in the most awful manner the terrors of the Lord. With admirable dexterity he exposed the false hope of the hypocrite, and searched the corrupt heart to the bottom. Such were some of the qualifications of the man whom Whitefield chose to continue his work in America. He entered on his new labours with almost rustic simplicity, wearing his hair undressed and a large great-coat girt with a leathern girdle. He was of lofty stature and dignified and grave aspect. His career as a preacher in New Jersey had been remarkable, and now in New England his ministry was hardly less successful than that of Whitefield. He actually shook the country as with an earthquake. Wherever he came hypocrisy and Pharisaism either fell before him or gnashed their teeth against him. Cold orthodoxy also started from her downy cushion to imitate or to denounce him. So testifies the author of the “Life and Times of Whitefield.”

Whitefield’s first reception in New York was not particularly flattering. He was refused the use of both the church and the court-house. “The commissary of the Bishop,” he says, “was full of anger and resentment, and denied me the use of his pulpit before I asked him for it.” He replied, “I will preach in the fields, for all places are alike to me.” At a subsequent visit he preached there seven weeks with great acceptableness and success. Even his first labours were not wholly in vain. Dr. Pemberton wrote to him that many were deeply affected, and some who had been loose and profligate were ashamed and set upon thorough reformation. The printers also at New York, as at Philadelphia, applied to him for sermons to publish, assuring him “that hundreds had called for them, and that thousands would purchase them.” Of his later visit he says, “Such flocking of all ranks I never saw before.” At New York many of the most respectable gentlemen and merchants went home with him after his sermons to hear something more of the kingdom of Christ.

“At Philadelphia,” says Philip, in his Life and Times of Whitefield, “his welcome was cordial. Ministers and laymen of all denominations visited him, inviting him to preach. He was especially pleased to find that they preferred sermons when not delivered within church walls. It was well they did, for his fame had reached the city before he arrived and this collected crowds which no church could contain. The court-house steps became his pulpit, and neither he nor the people wearied, although the cold winds of November blew upon them night after night.” Previous to one of his visits in Philadelphia, a place was erected in which Whitefield could preach, and its managers offered him £800 annually, with liberty to travel six months in a year wherever he chose, if he would become their pastor. Though pleased with the offer he promptly declined it. He was more pleased to learn that in consequence of a former visit there were so many under soul-sickness that even Gilbert Tennent’s feet were blistered with walking from place to place to see them.

Of his work in Maryland he writes, that he found those who had never heard of redeeming grace. The harvest is promising. “Have Marylanders also received the grace of God? Amazing love. Maryland is yielding converts to Jesus; the Gospel is moving southwards.”

He frequently visited New Jersey (Princeton) College, and there won many young and bright witnesses for Christ. Hearing that sixteen students had been converted at a former visit, he again went thither to fan the flame he had kindled among the students, and says that he had four sweet seasons which resembled old times. His spirits rose at the sight of the young soldiers who were to fight when he fell.

Although at times prejudice ran high against the Indians, Whitefield espoused their cause as a philanthropist, and preached to them through interpreters at the Indian school of Lebanon, under Dr. Wheelock, where the sight of a promising nursery for future missionaries greatly inspired him. And at one of the stations maintained by the sainted Brainerd, he preached, found converted Indians, and saw nearly fifty young ones in one school learning a Bible catechism. In the Indian school at Lebanon he became so interested that he appealed to the public and collected £120 at one meeting for its maintenance. Wherever he went he saw the Redeemer’s stately steps in the great congregations which he addressed.

If there was any one point about which Whitefield’s interest centered in America, it was in the orphan asylum which he aided in establishing in Georgia. This was his “Bethesda.” The prosperity of the orphan home was engraved upon his heart as with the point of a diamond, and it was ever vividly present to him wherever he went. At one of his visits on parting with the inmates he says: “Oh, what a sweet meeting I had with my dear friends! What God has prepared for me I know not; but surely I cannot expect a greater happiness until I embrace the saints in glory! When I parted my heart was ready to break with sorrow, but now it almost bursts with joy. Oh, how did each in turn hang upon my neck, kiss and weep over me with tears of joy! And my own soul was so full of the sense of God’s love, when I embraced one friend in particular, that I thought I should have expired in the place. I felt my soul so full of the sense of Divine goodness that I wanted words to express myself. When we came to public worship, young and old were all dissolved in tears. After service several of my parishioners, all of my family, and the little children returned home crying along the street, and some could not avoid praying very loud. Being very weak in body I laid myself upon a bed, but finding so many in a weeping condition I rose and betook myself to prayer again, but had I not lifted up my voice very high the groans and cries of the children would have prevented me from being heard. This continued for near an hour, till at last, finding their concern rather to increase than to abate, I desired all to retire. Then some or other might be heard praying earnestly in every corner of the house. It happened at this time to thunder and lighten, which added very much to the solemnity of the night. * * * I mention the orphans in particular, that their benefactors may rejoice at what God is doing for their souls.”

It is evident that Whitefield had a very tender heart towards all children. One of his most effective sermons at Webb’s Chapel, Boston, was occasioned by the touching remark of a dying boy, who had heard him the day before. The boy was taken ill after the sermon, and said, “I want to go to Mr. Whitefield’s God”—and expired. This touched the secret place of both the thunder and the tears of Whitefield. He says, “It encouraged me to speak to the little ones, but oh, how were the old people affected when I said, ‘Little children, if your parents will not come to Christ, do you come and go to heaven without them.’” After this awful appeal no wonder that there were but few dry eyes.

Another remarkable evidence of the extent and power of the Revival, and of the versatility of Mr. Whitefield’s talents, is shown in the effect produced upon the negro mind. The intensest interest prevailed among even the poorest slaves. Upon one occasion Whitefield was very ill, and in the hands of the physician to the time when he was expected to preach. Suddenly he exclaimed, “My pains are suspended; by the help of God I will go and preach, and then come home and die!” With some difficulty he reached the pulpit. All were surprised, and looked as though they saw one risen from the dead. He says of himself, “I was as pale as death, and told them they must look upon me as a dying man come to bear my dying testimony to the truths I had formerly preached to them. All seemed melted, and were drowned in tears. The cry after me when I left the pulpit was like the cry of sincere mourners when attending the funeral of a dear departed friend. Upon my coming home, I was laid upon a bed upon the ground near the fire, and I heard them say, ‘He is gone!’ but God was pleased to order it otherwise. I gradually recovered. At this time a poor negro woman insisted upon seeing him when he began to recover. She came in and sat on the ground, and looked earnestly into his face; then she said, in broken accents: “Massa, you jest go to hebben’s gate; but Jesus Christ said, ‘Get you down, get you down; you musn’t come here yet; go first and call some more poor negroes.’” Many colored people came to him asking, “Have I a soul?” Many societies for prayer and mutual instruction were set up. Mr. Seward, a travelling companion of Whitefield,; relates that a drinking club, whereof a clergyman was a member, had a negro boy attending them, who used to mimic people for their diversion. They called on him to mimic Whitefield, which he was very unwilling to do; but they insisted upon it. He stood up and said:—“I speak the truth in Christ, I lie not, unless you repent you will all be damned.” Seward adds, “This unexpected speech broke up the club, which has never met since.”

At Savannah, Charleston, and other southern cities, the Great Revival had a remarkable success. Josiah Smith, an Independent minister of Charleston, published a sermon on the character and preaching of Whitefield, defending his doctrines, his personal character, and describing his manner of preaching. Of Whitefield’s power he says: “He is certainly a finished preacher; a noble negligence ran through his style; the passion and flame of his inspiration will, I trust, be long felt by many. How was his tongue like the pen of a ready writer, touched as with a coal from the altar! With what a flow of words, what a ready profusion of language did he speak to us upon the concerns of our souls! In what a flaming light did he set our eternity before us! How earnestly he pressed Christ upon us! The awe, the silence, the attention, which sat upon the faces of the great audience was an argument, how he could reign over all their powers. Many thought he spake as never man spake before him. So charmed were the people with the manner of his address that they shut up their shops, forgot their secular business, and the oftener he preached the keener edge he seemed to put upon their desires to hear him again. How awfully—with what thunder and sound—did he discharge the artillery of heaven upon us! Eternal themes, the tremendous solemnities of our religion were all alive upon his tongue. He struck at the politest and most modish of our vices, and at the most fashionable entertainments, regardless of every one’s presence but His in whose name he spake with this authority. And I dare warrant if none should go to these diversions until they had answered the solemn questions he put to their consciences, our theatres would soon sink and perish.” Mr. Smith adds that £600 were contributed in Charleston to the orphan house.

The wonderful quickening which the Great Revival gave to benevolent and charitable enterprises deserves at least a passing allusion. Besides sending forth into mission work such men as David Brainerd, and even Jonathan Edwards himself, it also laid the foundation more securely of many of our Christian colleges, and of not a few of our orphan asylums. Whitefield founded his Bethesda upon a tract of land covering about 500 acres, ten miles from Savannah, and laid out the plan of the building, employed workmen, hired a large house, took in 24 orphans, incurred at once the heavy responsibilities of a large family and a larger institution, encouraged, as he says, by the example of Professor Francke. Yet on looking back to this first undertaking he said: “I forgot that Professor Francke built in a populous country and that I was building at the very tail end of the world, which rendered it by far the most expensive part of all his Majesty’s dominions; but had I received more and ventured less, I should have suffered less and others more.” He undertook to provide for his 40 orphans and 60 servants and workmen with no fears nor misgivings of heart. “Near a hundred mouths,” he writes, “are daily to be supplied with food. The expense is great, but our great and good God, I am persuaded, will enable me to defray it.” He spent a winter at Bethesda in 1764, and of the success of his orphanage he says, “Peace and plenty reign at Bethesda; all things go on successfully. God has given me great favour in the sight of the governor, council, and assembly. A memorial was presented for an additional grant of land consisting of about 2,000 acres, and was immediately complied with. Every heart seems to leap for joy at the prospect of its future utility to this and the neighbouring colonies.”

This great religious movement did not progress without stirring up much bitterness. It was even asserted by President Clap, of New Haven, that he came into New England to turn out the generality of their ministers, and to replace them with ministers from England, Ireland, and Scotland. “Such a thought,” replies Whitefield, “never entered my heart, neither has, as I know of, my preaching any such tendency.” It is said of one minister that he went merely to pick a hole in Whitefield’s coat, but confessed that God picked a hole in his heart, and afterward healed it by the blood of Christ. After one of his visits not less than twenty ministers in the neighbourhood of Boston did not hesitate to call Whitefield their spiritual father, tracing their conversion to his preaching. These men immediately entered upon a similar work, spreading the great awakening throughout that colony.

In the progress of this work under Whitefield and others, there were frequent outbursts of wit and grim humor. Thus when pastors were shy of giving Whitefield and his associates a place in their pulpits and the people voted to allow them to preach in their churches, Whitefield said, “The lord-brethren of New England could tyrannize as well as the lord-bishops of Old England.” The caricatures issued from Boston in regard to the work were designated as half-penny squibs; and a good old Puritan of the city said, “they did not weigh much.”

Of the religion of America Whitefield writes: “I am more and more in love with the good old Puritans. I am pleased at the thought of sitting down hereafter with the venerable Cotton, Norton, Eliot, and that great cloud of witnesses who first crossed the western ocean for the sake of the sacred gospel and the faith once delivered to the saints. At present my soul is so filled that I can scarce proceed.” Again he writes: “It is too much for one man to be received as I have been by thousands. The thoughts of it lay me low but I cannot get low enough. I would willingly sink into nothing before the blessed Jesus—my all in all.” And again, “I love those that thunder out the Word. The Christian world is in a deep sleep, nothing but a loud voice can awaken them out of it. Had we a thousand hands and tongues there is employment enough for them all. People are everywhere ready to perish for lack of knowledge.” To an aged veteran he writes from North Carolina, “I am here hunting in the woods—these ungospelized wilds—for sinners. It is pleasant work, though my body is weak and crazy. But after a short fermentation in the grave, it will be fashioned like unto Christ’s glorious body. The thought of this rejoices my soul and makes me long to leap my seventy years. I sometimes think all will go to heaven before me. Pray for me as a dying man, but, oh, pray that I may not go off as a snuff. I would fain die blazing—not with human glory, but with the love of Jesus.” Such was the spirit filling the great souls of those who were God’s instruments in spreading the revival in America. Mr. Whitefield died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, Sept. 30, 1770, having preached the day before at Exeter, and his body rests in a crypt or tomb beneath the Presbyterian church at that place.

Of the effects of the Great Revival in America, Dr. Abel Stevens says, “The Congregational churches of New England, the Presbyterians and Baptists of the Middle States, and the mixed colonies of the South, owe their late religious life and energy mostly to the impulse given by his [Whitefield’s] powerful ministrations.” * * * In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where Frelinghuysen, Blair, Rowland, and the two Tennents had been labouring with evangelistic zeal, he was received as a prophet of God, and it was then that the Presbyterian Church took that attitude of evangelical power and aggression which has ever since characterized it.

A single incident will illustrate the effect of the Revival upon unbelievers and skeptics. A noted officer of Philadelphia, who had long been almost an atheist, crept into the crowd one night to hear a sermon on the visit of Nicodemus to Christ. When he came home, his wife not knowing where he had been, wished he had heard what she had been hearing. He said nothing. Another and another of his family came in and made a similar remark till he burst into tears and said, “I have been hearing him and approve of his sermon.” He afterwards became a sincere Christian with the spirit of a martyr.

These etchings of a few scenes and fewer facts indicate the scope, the depth, and the sweep of the Great Revival of the 18th century in America. No attempt has been made to sum up its results, nor has it come within the purpose of this work to give an inward history of the movement, nor to explain the philosophy of it. These intricate questions may be left to philosophers; the Christian delights to know the facts; he will cheerfully wait for the future life to unfold all the mystery and philosophy of the plan and work of salvation. Then, as Whitefield exclaims, “What amazing mysteries will be unfolded when each link in the golden chain of providence and grace shall be seen and scanned by beatified spirits in the kingdom of heaven! Then all will appear symmetry and harmony, and even the most intricate and seemingly most contrary dispensations, will be evidenced to be the result of infinite and consummate wisdom, power, and love. Above all, there the believer will see the infinite depths of that mystery of godliness, ‘God manifested in the flesh,’ and join with that blessed choir, who, with a restless unweariedness, are ever singing the song of Moses and the Lamb.”

APPENDIX A (Pages 9 and 97).

The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was, with them, the great end of existence. They rejected, with contempt, the ceremonious homage which other sects substituted for the pure worship of the soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on his intolerable brightness, and to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference between the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from Him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority but His favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles or priests they looked down with contempt, for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious measure, and eloquent in a more sublime language—nobles by right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged, on whose slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been destined, before Heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed His will by the pen of the Evangelist, and the harp of the prophet. He had been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had risen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God.

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men: the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker, but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself entrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid His face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate, or on the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world, like Sir Artegal’s iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.—Macaulay’s Essay on Milton.

APPENDIX B (Page 21).

“‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ is a domestic epic. Its hero is a country parson—simple, pious and pure-hearted—a humourist in his way, a little vain of his learning, a little proud of his fine family—sometimes rather sententious, never pedantic, and a dogmatist only on the one favorite topic of monogamy, which crops out now and then above the surface of his character, only to give it a new charm. Its world is a rural district, beyond whose limits the action rarely passes, and that only on great occasions. Domestic affections and joys, relieved by its cares, its foibles, and its little failings, cluster around the parsonage, till the storms from the outward world invade its holiness and trouble its peace. Then comes sorrow and suffering; and we have the hero, like the patriarchal prince of the land of Uz, when the Lord ‘put forth His hand and touched all that He had,’ meeting each new affliction with meekness and with patience—rising from each new trial with renewed reliance upon God, till the lowest depth of his earthly suffering becomes the highest elevation of his moral strength.”

APPENDIX C (Page 28).

The most interesting phases which the Reformation anywhere assumes, especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther’s own country, Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair, not a religion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it skeptical contention; which, indeed, has jangled more and more, down to Voltairism itself; through Gustavus Adolphus contentions onward to French-Revolution cries! But on our island there arose a Puritanism, which even got itself established as a Presbyterianism and national church among the Scotch; which came forth as a real business of the heart; and has produced in the world very notable fruit. In some senses one may say it is the only phase of Protestantism that ever got to the rank of being a faith, a true communication with Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in history as such. We must spare a few words for Knox; himself a brave and remarkable man; but still more important as chief priest and founder, which one may consider him to be, of the faith that became Scotland’s, New England’s, Oliver Cromwell’s. History will have something to say about this for some time to come!

We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose, but would find it a very rough, defective thing; but we, and all men, may understand that it was a genuine thing; for nature has adopted it, and it has grown and grows. I say sometimes that all goes by wager of battle in this world; that strength, well understood, is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a right thing. Look now at American Saxondom; and at that little fact of the sailing of the Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from Delft Haven, in Holland! Were we of open sense, as the Greeks were, we had found a poem here; one of nature’s own poems, such as she writes in broad facts over great continents. For it was properly the beginning of America: there were straggling settlers in America before, some material as of a body was there; but the soul of it was first this. These poor men, driven out of their own country, not able well to live in Holland, determined on settling in the New World. Black, untamed forests are there, and wild, savage creatures; but not so cruel as star-chamber hangmen. They thought the earth would yield them food, if they tilled honestly; the everlasting Heaven would stretch there, too, overhead; they should be left in peace, to prepare for Eternity by living well in this world of time; worshipping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way. They clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little ship Mayflower, and made ready to set sail. In Neal’s History of the Puritans is an account of the ceremony of their departure; solemnity, we might call it, rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister went down with them to the beach, and their brethren, whom they were to leave behind; all joined in solemn prayer that God would have pity on His poor children, and go with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that, He was there also as well as here. Hah! These men, I think, had a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then; but nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews; it has fire-arms, war navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm: it can steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains; it is one of the strongest things under this sun at present!—Carlyle on Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History.

APPENDIX D (Page 36).

It has been said of Lady Huntingdon that “almost from infancy an uncommon seriousness shaded the natural gladness of her childhood,” and that, without any positive religious instruction, for none knew her “inward sorrows,” when she was a “little girl, nor were there any around her who could have led her to the balm there is in Gilead,” she devoutly and diligently searched the Scriptures, if haply she might find that precious something which her soul craved.

During the first years of her married life (she was married at the age of 21 and in the year 1728), “her chief endeavor * * * was to maintain a conscience void of offense. She strove to fulfill the various duties of her position with scrupulous exactness; she was sincere, just and upright; she prayed, fasted and gave alms; she was courteous, considerate and charitable.”

Her husband, Lord Huntingdon, had a sister, Lady Margaret Hastings, who, under the preaching of Mr. Ingham, in Ledstone Church in Yorkshire, was converted. Afterwards, when visiting her brother, these words were uttered by her: “Since I have known and believed in the Lord Jesus for salvation, I have been as happy as an angel.” The expression was strange to Lady Huntingdon—it alarmed her—she sought to work out a righteousness of her own, but the effort only widened the breach between herself and God. “Thus harassed by inward conflicts, Lady Huntingdon was thrown upon a sick bed, and after many days and nights seemed hastening to the grave. The fear of death fell terribly upon her.”

In that condition the words of Lady Margaret recurred with a new meaning. “I too will wholly cast myself on Jesus Christ for life and salvation,” was her last refuge; and from her bed she lifted up her heart to God for pardon and mercy through the blood of His Son. “Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief,” was her prayer. Doubt and distress vanished and joy and peace filled her bosom.—From “Lady Huntingdon and her Friends.” Compiled by Mrs. Helen C. Knight.

APPENDIX E (Page 71).

“It is easier to justify the heads of the restored Clergy upon this point [want of uniformity or unity in the Church of England], than to excuse them for appropriating to themselves the wealth which, in consequence of the long protracted calamities of the nation, was placed at their disposal. The leases of the church lands had almost all fallen in; there had been no renewal for twenty years, and the fines which were now raised amounted to about a million and a half. Some of this money was expended in repairing, as far as was reparable, that havoc in churches and cathedrals which the fanatics had made in their abominable reign; some also was disposed of in ransoming English slaves from the Barbary pirates; but the greater part went to enrich individuals and build up families, instead of being employed, as it ought to have been, in improving the condition of the inferior clergy. Queen Anne applied the tenths and first fruits to this most desirable object; but the effect of her augmentation was slow and imperceptible: they continued in a state of degrading poverty, and that poverty was another cause of the declining influence of the Church, and the increasing irreligion of the people.

A further cause is to be found in the relaxation of discipline. In the Romish days it had been grossly abused; and latterly also it had been brought into general abhorrence and contempt by the tyrannical measures of Laud on one side, and the absurd vigor of Puritanism on the other. The clergy had lost that authority which may always command at least the appearance of respect; and they had lost that respect also by which the place of authority may sometimes so much more worthily be supplied. For the loss of power they were not censurable; but if they possessed little of that influence which the minister who diligently and conscientiously discharges his duty will certainly acquire, it is manifest that, as a body, they must have been culpably remiss. From the Restoration to the accession of the House of Hanover, the English Church could boast of some of its brightest ornaments and ablest defenders; men who have neither been surpassed in piety, nor in erudition, nor in industry, nor in eloquence, nor in strength and subtlety of mind: and when the design for re-establishing popery in these kingdoms was systematically pursued, to them we are indebted for that calm and steady resistance, by which our liberties, civil as well as religious, were preserved. But in the great majority of the clergy zeal was awanting. The excellent Leighton spoke of the Church as a fair carcass without a spirit; in doctrine, in worship, and in the main part of its government, he thought it the best constituted in the world, but one of the most corrupt in its administration. And Burnet observes, that in his time our clergy had less authority, and were under more contempt, than those of any other church in Europe; for they were much the most remiss in their labors, and the least severe in their lives. It was not that their lives were scandalous; he entirely acquitted them of any such imputation; but they were not exemplary as it became them to be: and in the sincerity and grief of a pious and reflecting mind, he pronounced that they should never regain the influence which they had lost, till they lived better and labored more.”—Southey’s Life of Wesley.

APPENDIX F (Pages 73 and 98).

“The observant Frenchman to whom we have several times referred, M. Grosley, says of the ‘sect of the Methodists,’ ‘this establishment has borne all the persecutions that it could possibly apprehend in a country as much disposed to persecution as England is the reverse.’ The light literature of forty years overflows with ridicule of Methodism. The preachers are pelted by the mob; the converts are held up to execration as fanatics or hypocrites. Yet Methodism held the ground it had gained. It had gone forth to utter the words of truth to men little above the beasts that perish, and it had brought them to regard themselves, as akin to humanity. The time would come when its earnestness would awaken the Church itself from its somnolency, and the educated classes would not be ashamed to be religious. There was wild enthusiasm enough in some of the followers of Whitefield and Wesley; much self seeking; zeal verging upon profaneness; moral conduct, strongly opposed to pious profession. But these earnest men left a mark upon their time which can never be effaced. The obscure young students at Oxford in 1736, who were first called ‘Sacramentarians,’ then ‘Bible moths,’ and finally ‘Methodists, to whom the regular pulpits were closed, and who went forth to preach in the fields—who separated from the Church more in form than in reality—produced a moral revolution in England which probably saved us from the fate of nations wholly abandoned to their own devices.”—From Knight’s History of England.

APPENDIX (Pages 97 and 98).

(See Appendix A and F.)

APPENDIX (Page 114).

“The ‘two brothers in song’ (John and Charles Wesley) began their issue of ‘Hymns and Sacred Songs’ in 1739, and continued at intervals to supply Christian singers for half a century. Thirty-eight publications appeared one after the other: now under the name of one brother, now under that of the other; some with both names, and others nameless. The two hymnists appear to have agreed that, in the volumes which bore their joint names, they would not distinguish their hymns.”—The Epworth Singers and other poets of Methodism, by the Rev. S. W. Christophers, Redruth, Cornwall.

APPENDIX (Note, Page 118).

The God of Abraham praise,
Who reigns enthron’d above;
Ancient of everlasting days,
And God of love:
Jehovah—great I Am—
By earth and Heavens confest;
I bow and bless the sacred name,
For ever bless’d.

The God of Abraham praise,
At whose supreme command
From earth I rise, and seek the joys
At His right hand:
I all on earth forsake,
Its wisdom, fame and power,
And Him my only portion make,
My Shield and Tower.

The God of Abraham praise,

Whose all-sufficient grace

Shall guide me all my happy days,

In all my ways:

He calls a worm His friend!

He calls Himself my God!

And He shall save me to the end,

Thro’ Jesus’ blood.

He by Himself hath sworn!
I on His oath depend,
I shall, on eagle’s wings up-borne,
To Heaven ascend;
I shall behold His face,
I shall His power adore,
And sing the wonders of His grace
For evermore.

Tho’ nature’s strength decay,
And earth and hell withstand,
To Canaan’s bounds I urge my way
At His command:
The wat’ry deep I pass,
With Jesus in my view;
And thro’ the howling wilderness
My way pursue.

The goodly land I see,
With peace and plenty bless’d;
A land of sacred liberty,
And endless rest.
There milk and honey flow,
And oil and wine abound,
And trees of life forever grow,
With mercy crown’d.

There dwells the Lord our King,
The Lord our Righteousness,
Triumphant o’er the world and sin,
The Prince of Peace;
On Sion’s sacred heights
His Kingdom still maintains;
And glorious with the saints in light,
Forever reigns.

He keeps His own secure,
He guards them by His side,
Arrays in garments white and pure
His spotless bride.
With streams of sacred bliss,
With groves of living joys,
With all the fruits of Paradise
He still supplies.

Before the great Three—One
They all exulting stand;
And tell the wonders He hath done,
Thro’ all their land:
The list’ning spheres attend,
And swell the growing fame;
And sing, in songs which never end,
The wondrous name.

The God who reigns on high,

The great Archangels sing,

And “Holy, holy, holy,” cry,

Almighty King!

Who was, and is, the same!

And evermore shall be;

Jehovah—Father—great I Am!

We worship Thee.

Before the Saviour’s face
The ransom’d nations bow;
O’erwhelmed at His Almighty grace,
Forever new:
He shows His prints of love—
They kindle—to a flame!
And sound through all the worlds above,
The slaughter’d Lamb.

The whole triumphant host

Give thanks to God on high;

“Hail, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!”

They ever cry:

Hail, Abraham’s God—and mine!

I join the heavenly lays,

All might and majesty are Thine,

And endless praise.

Thomas Olivers, the author of the above hymn, lived to see the issue of at least thirty editions of it.

APPENDIX (Page 118).
THE LAST JUDGMENT.
BY THOMAS OLIVERS.

Come, immortal King of Glory,
Now in Majesty appear,
Bid the nations stand before Thee,
Each his final doom to hear,

Come to judgment,

Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come.

Speak the word, and lo! all nature
Flies before Thy glorious face,
Angels sing your great Creator,
Saints proclaim His sovereign grace,
While ye praise Him,
Lift your heads and see Him come.

See His beauty all resplendent,
View Him in His glory shine,
See His majesty transcendent,
Seated on His throne sublime:
Angels praise Him,
Saints and angels praise the Lamb.

Shout aloud, ye heavenly choirs,

Trumpet forth Jehovah’s praise;

Trumpets, voices, hearts and lyres!

Speak the wonders of His grace!

Sound before Him

Endless praises to His name.

Ransom’d sinners, see His ensign
Waving thro’ the purpled air!
‘Midst ten thousand lightnings daring,
Jesus’ praises to declare;
How tremendous
Is this dreadful, joyful day.

Crowns and sceptres fall before Him,
Kings and conquerors own His sway,
Fearless potentates are trembling,
While they see His lightnings play:
How triumphant
Is the world’s Redeemer now.

Noon-day beauty in its lustre
Doth in Jesus’ aspect shine,
Blazing comets are not fiercer
Than the flaming eyes Divine:
O, how dreadful
Doth the Crucified appear.

Hear His voice as mighty thunder,

Sounding in eternal roar!

Far surpassing many waters

Echoing wide from shore to shore:

Hear His accents

Through th’ unfathom’d deep resound:

“Come,” He saith, “ye heirs of glory,
Come, the purchase of my blood;
Bless’d ye are, and bless’d ye shall be,
Now ascend the mount of God;
Angels guard them
To the realms of endless day.”

See ten thousand flaming seraphs
From their thrones as lightnings fly;
“Take,” they cry, “your seats above us,
Nearest Him who rules the sky:
Favorite sinners,
How rewarded are you now!”

Haste and taste celestial pleasure;
Haste and reap immortal joys;
Haste and drink the crystal river;
Lift on high your choral voice,
While archangels
Shout aloud the great Amen.

But the angry Lamb’s determin’d
Every evil to descry;
They who have His love rejected
Shall before His vengeance fly,
When He drives them
To their everlasting doom.

Now, in awful expectation,
See the countless millions stand;
Dread, dismay, and sore vexation,
Seize the helpless, hopeless band;
Baleful thunders,
Stop and hear Jehovah’s voice!

“Go from me,” He saith, “ye cursed—
Ye for whom I bled in vain—
Ye who have my grace refused—
Hasten to eternal pain!”
How victorious
Is the conquering Son of Man!

See, in solemn pomp ascending,
Jesus and His glorious train;
Countless myriads now attend Him,
Rising to th’ imperial plain;
Hallelujah!
To the bless’d Immanuel’s name!

In full triumph see them marching
Through the gates of massy light;
While the city walls are sparkling
With meridian’s glory bright;
How stupendous
Are the glories of the Lamb!

On His throne of radiant azure,
High above all heights He reigns—
Reigns amidst immortal pleasure,
While refulgent glory flames;
How diffusive
Shines the golden blaze around!

All the heavenly powers adore Him,
Circling round his orient seat;
Ransom’d saints with angels vying,
Loudest praises to repeat;
How exalted
Is His praise, and how profound!

Every throne and every mansion,
All ye heavenly arches ring;
Echo to the Lord salvation,
Glory to our glorious King!
Boundless praises
All ye heavenly orbs resound.

Praise be to the Father given,
Praise to the Incarnate Son,
Praise the Spirit, one and Seven,
Praise the mystic Three in One;
Hallelujah!
Everlasting praise be Thine!

APPENDIX (Page 120).
ROCK OF AGES—In Latin.
BY W. E. GLADSTONE.

Jesus, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus,
Tu per lympham profluentem,
Tu per sanguinem tepentem,
In peccata me redunda,
Tolle culpam, sordes munda.

Coram Te, nec justus forem
Quamvis totâ si laborem,
Nec si fide nunquam cesso,
Fletu stillans indefesso:
Tibi soli tantum munus;
Salva me, Salvator unus!

Nil in manu mecum fero,
Sed me versus crucem gero;
Vestimenta nudus oro,
Opem debilis imploro;
Fontem Christi quæro immundus
Nisi laves, moribundus.

Dum hos artus vita regit;
Quando nox sepulchro tegit;
Mortuos cum stare jubes,
Sedens Judex inter nubes;
Jesus, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus.

APPENDIX (Page 236).

From the “Memoirs of Howard, compiled from his diary, his confidential letters, and other authentic documents, by James Baldwin Brown,” it appears that in the year 1755, on a voyage to Portugal, the vessel in which he was, was captured by a French privateer, and carried into Brest, where he and the other passengers, along with the crew, were cast into a filthy dungeon, and there kept a considerable time without nourishment. There they lay for six days and nights. The floor, with nothing but straw upon it, was their sleeping place. He was afterwards removed to Morlaix, and thence to Carpaix, where he was two months upon parole. At the latter place “he corresponded with the English prisoners at Brest, Morlaix and Dinnan; and had sufficient evidence of their being treated with such barbarity that many hundreds had perished; and that thirty-six were buried in a hole at Dinnan in one day.”

Through his benevolent and timely interference on their behalf, when he himself had regained his freedom, the prisoners of war in these three prisons were released and sent home to England in the first cartel ships.

Till the year 1773 it does not appear that he was actively engaged in any philanthropic work on behalf of prisoners. In the year 1730 there had been a commission of enquiry in the House of Commons on the state of prisons, and condition of their inmates, but nothing seems to have followed from it, and it was not till March, 1774, when Howard received the thanks of the House for the information which, he communicated to them on the subject, that the great work assumed shape. In 1773, having been appointed sheriff of Bedford, the distress of prisoners came under his notice. He engaged himself in a most minute inspection, and the consequence was the devotion of every faculty of his existence to the correction of the abuses existing in similar institutions as the friend of those who had no friend.

In that Christlike work he continued till his death, on 20th January, 1790, at Cherson, Russian Tartary, having in the meantime inspected prisons in England, Scotland and Ireland, France, Holland, Flanders, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Malta, Turkey, Prussia and Russia.

APPENDIX (Page 253).

At Michaelmas time, 1791, Mr. Buchanan was admitted a member of Queen’s College, Cambridge, having left London on the 24th October. He was then 25 years of age. In consequence of a letter from his mother he attended the preaching of John Newton, with whom he kept up a correspondence when at college. In one of his replies to Mr. Newton he wrote: “You ask me whether I would prefer preaching the Gospel to the fame of learning? Ay, that would I, gladly, were I convinced it was the will of God, that I should depart this night for Nova Zembla, or the Antipodes, to testify of Him. I would not wait for an admit or a college exit.” Some time in the year 1794, the first proposal appears to have been made to him to go out to India, and on this occasion he wrote Mr. Newton, saying, “I have only time to say, that with respect to my going to India, I must decline giving an opinion. * * * It is with great pleasure I submit this matter to the determination of yourself and Mr. Thornton and Mr. Grant. All I wish to ascertain is the will of God.” In a subsequent letter he wrote, “I am equally ready to preach the Gospel in the next village, or at the end of the earth.”

After taking his degree of B.A., he was ordained a deacon by the Bishop of London on 20th September, 1795, when he became Mr. Newton’s curate, which he held till March, 1796, when he was appointed one of the chaplains to the East India Company. Soon after, he received priest’s orders, and on 11th August, 1796, sailed from Portsmouth, England, for Calcutta, where he landed 10th March, 1797. In May following he proceeded to the military station of Barackpore. But it was not till the beginning of the present century that he fairly developed his plans for the extension of the Redeemer’s Kingdom in India.—From Memoirs of Rev. Claudius Buchanan.

APPENDIX (Page 254).

In the month of September, 1794, a paper was published in the Evangelical Magazine, urging the formation of a mission to the heathen on the broadest possible basis. The writer of that paper was the Rev. David Bogue, D.D., of Gosport, Hampshire, and two months after its appearance a conference, attended by representatives from several Evangelical bodies, was held to take action in the matter. The result was an address to ministers and members of various churches, and the appointment of a committee to diffuse information upon the subject. Thereafter, and in September, 1795, a large and influential meeting, extending over three days, at which the Rev. Dr. Harris preached from Mark xv: 16, and the Rev. J. Burder and the Rev. Rowland Hill and many others took part. At that meeting the society was formed, and it was resolved, with reference to its agents and their converts, “That it should be entirely left with those whom God might call into the fellowship of His Son among them, to assume for themselves such a form of church government as to them shall appear most agreeable to the Word of God.”

The Rev. David Bogue, D.D., has therefore well been styled “the father and founder” of the institution.

APPENDIX (Page 256).

At a meeting held in Leeds, 5th October, 1813, it was resolved to constitute a society to be called “The Methodist Missionary Society for the Leeds District,” of which branches were to be formed in the several circuits, whose duty it should be to collect subscriptions in behalf of missions and to remit them to an already existing committee in London. It was from this point that, by general consent, the origin of the Wesleyan Missionary Society is reckoned.

INDEX.

Academy, Doddridge’s, 29

- Lady Huntingdon’s, 257

Aftermath, 260
Age before the Revival, The 32
Albert, Prince, 120
Alleine, Rev. Joseph, 197

Allen, Ebenezer, Governor of Martha’s Vineyard, 226

America, Awakening in, 28, 73, 85, 281

American Baptist Missionary Union, 256

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 255, 256

American Revival, 28, 73, 85, 281

- Sunday-school Union, 256

Amusements, 15
Anabaptists, 52
Ancaster, Duchess of 37, 41

Anecdotes, 17–20, 37, 39, 41, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 69, 70, 72, 76, 82–84, 87, 89, 94, 96, 100, 103, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116, 125, 129, 130, 133–135, 137, 138, 140, 143–145, 148, 151, 153, 158, 159, 161, 166, 172, 177, 183, 194, 198, 200, 202, 218, 234, 236, 239, 243, 245, 247, 255, 256, 266, 288, 291, 293, 294, 298, 300, 301

Aram, Eugene, 147
Armenianism, 60
Arrests, 102
Atheism, Prevalence of, 15
Austrian Exiles, 28

Baptist Missionary Society, 250

- Union, American, 256

Band-Meetings, etc., Origin of, 100
Basle Evangelical Mission, 256
Baynham, James, 195
Baxter, Richard, 266
Benson, Bishop, 69, 70

Bernard of Clairvaux, 114

- Cluny, 114

Berridge, John, 150, 157, 169, 177, 270

Bible, The, the Power of God, 7, 279, 286

- Reverenced, 277

- Translated for India, 253

Bible Society, The 186, 189, 191, 256
Blomfield, Bishop, 18
Bloomfield, 197
Blossoms in the Wilderness, 180
Bogue, David, 254, 257, 320
Bolingbroke, Lord, 41, 60, 180
Borlase, Dr., 102

Boston in 1730, 232

- Elm, 275

- State of Society in, 282

Bradford, Joseph, 138

Britain’s Obligations to Missions for India, 254

British and Foreign School Society, 256
British Quarterly, 52, 92
Brontë Family, 160
Bruised Reed, 266
Buchanan, Claudius, 178, 190, 253, 254, 319
Buckingham, Duchess of, 38, 39
Bunyan, John, 160
Burke, Edmund, 236
Butler, Bishop, 22
Byron, 117
Calvin’s Institutes, 61
Calvinistic Methodists, 101
Campbell, John, 178, 190
Captains of Ships in 18th Century, 221, 224
Cardigan, Lady, 42
Carey, William, 250
Carlyle, Thomas, 28, 305
Cennick, John, 123
Chatsworth, 49

Cheerfulness and Joy Significant of Revival, 98, 99, 101, 109, 124

Chesterfield, Lord, 41, 180

Christian Remembrances, 123

“Christian World Unmasked, The; Pray Come and Peep,”, 158

Christianity, Effect of, 98, 185

Chrysostom, 52

Church of England, Evangelical Party in, 269

- Religion in, 15, 18, 233
- Disabilities against Members of, 258
- Opposition to Methodism, 99

- Opposition to Revival, 22, 70, 156, 159, 172, 270

- Southey on the Clergy of the, 308

Church Signs and Counter-signs, 99

Church’s, Rev. Thomas, Denunciation of Evil, 21

Chubbs, 180
Church Missionary Society, 255
City Road Chapel, 91
Clapham Sect, 184, 189, 191
Clarkson, Thomas, 190
Clergy, Corruption of, 18
Coates, Alexander, 153
Colman, Dr., Testimony of, 285
Colliers, The, 75
Collins, 180
Colston, Edward, 218
Colston’s School, Bristol, 218
Compton, Adam, 198
Congregationalism, 170
Controversialists of Revival, 117, 119

Conversions, 219, 234, 238, 258, 266, 267, 284, 290

Cornwall, 116, 131, 171
Cottage Visitation, 50
Cowper, William, 126, 178, 207, 211
Cradle of London Methodism, 91
Crime in 18th Century, 14, 16, 21, 242
Criminals, Condition of, 200, 237, 239, 244

Criminal Law in 18th Century, 14, 237, 242, 244, 247, 248, 259

Danish Hymns, 131

- Missionary Society, 250

Darkness before Dawn, 7, 107
Dawn, First Streaks of, 24
Deaf and Dumb Asylum, 258
Defoe, 177, 216
Deism, Prevalence of, 15
Derby, Earl of, 129
Dissenters, Disabilities of, 258
Dissent in, Boston, in 1730, 232

Divine authority of the New Testament, The, 255

Doddridge, Philip, 28, 31, 110, 113, 126, 267

- his Academy, 29
- his Friends, 36, 58
- his Hymns, 29

Drawing-Room Preaching, 37, 38, 40

- Effect of, 43

Drury Lane, 155
Dying Words, 169, 261, 262, 300
East India Company, 191
Economy of Charity, 210
Edinburgh Review, 69, 184, 253

Education, Neglect of, 16

- Spreading, 257

Edwards, Jonathan, 28, 275, 283, 296
Effect of Rejection of Gospel, 7
Eighteenth Century Revival, 9, 277
Emerson, quoted, 12
England and France Contrasted, 23, 180
England, State of Religion in, 23
Epitaphs, 156, 197, 212, 268

Episcopal Board of Missions, Methodist, 256

- Protestant, 256

Epworth, 43, 53, 94, 97
Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography, 184
Everton, 156
Excitement of the Revival, 68
Executions at Tyburn in 1738, 14
Exiles in England, 28

Experiences of Christians expressed in Song, 128

Eyre, Jane, 160
Fair-Preaching, 83
Fenwick, Michael, 137
Ferrars, Lady, 40
Field-Preaching, 68, 89, 101, 104
First Day or Sunday-school Society, 256
Flaxley, 197
Fletcher of Madsley, 149
Florence, 7
Foote, the Actor, 154
Founders of London Missionary Society, 254
Foundry, The Moorfields, 91
France, 7, 180
Free Church of England, 101
French Protestants in England, 25
Fry, Elizabeth, 237, 258, 278
Gambold, John, 50, 64
Garrick, David, 155, 172
George II, 181
George IV, 158
Gerhardt, Paul, 113

German Empire, 7

- Hymns, 131

Germain, Lady Betty, 41
Gisborne, Thomas, 192
Gladstone, W. E., 119, 317
Gloucestershire, 183, 193, 213
God’s Method of Diffusing the Truth, 12, 13
Goethe, 28, 305
Goldsmith, 21
Gospel Preached in Song, 114

Grant, James, 126

- Sir Robert, 192

Gregory, Alfred, 196
Greenfield, Edward, 102
Griggs, Joseph, 126
Grimshaw, William, 160, 169, 178, 270
Guthrie, Dr., 158
Gwennap Pit, 103, 275
Haime, John, 151

Hamilton, Duchess of, 41

- Lady Elizabeth, 243

- Sir William, 179

Hardcastle, Joseph, 191
Hardships, 221
Harris, Howell, 272
Harvard College, Religion in, 285
Hastings, Lady Margaret, 170, 171
Haweis, Thomas, 254
Haworth, 160
Haymarket Theatre, 154
Helmsley, 119
Herbert, George, 110

Hervey, James, 50, 57, 60

- Writings, 63

Hey, James (Old Jemmie o’ the Hey), 198

Hill, Rowland, 120, 159, 170, 254

Holy Club, The, 51, 54, 57, 60, 65, 170

- Spirit, The, the Power, 85

Hooper, John, 195
Hopper, Christopher, 151
Horne, Dr., 66
Hospitality in New England, 225, 229, 231
Hostility to Revival, 21, 32, 61, 77, 288
Howard, John, 236, 318

Hymns, 115, 118, 119, 122, 125–130, 203, 311, 313

- Character of, 127, 131
- Influence of, 98, 99, 101, 109, 112, 129
- of Doddridge, 29, 110
- of Watts, 29, 31, 110
- of Wesley, 112

Hymnists of the Revival, 109, 121, 123, 126, 192

Huddersfield, 169

Huguenots, The, 24, 98

- Descendants in England, 26
- Influence on Revival, 26
- Settlement in England, 26

Huntingdon, Lady, 20, 35, 46, 50, 64, 66, 69, 91, 101, 124, 135, 143, 148, 155, 159, 169, 172, 183, 254, 257, 261, 307

Huntingdon, William, 276
Hupton, Job, 127
Independents, 256

Indians, Cause of, Espoused by Whitefield, 290

Ingham, Benjamin, 50, 170
Itinerancy, by Wesley, 93
Itinerant Preachers, 116, 160
Jay, William, 184
Jenner, Dr. Edward, 195
Johnson, Samuel, 55
Joss, Toriel, 149
Juvenal, 52
Kempis, Thomas à., 55, 59
Kingsbury, William, 254

Kirk, John, Author of “Mother of the Wesleys”, 44

Lackington, 154

Lancashire, 131

- Independent College, 257

Lanterns, New Lights and Old, 48
Lavington, Bishop, 70
Law, William, 53
Lay Preaching, 132, 136, 139, 147–149, 151
Lecky on the Effect of the Revival, 10
Lee, Jesse, 275

Literature, State of, at beginning of 18th Century. How Affected by Revival, 16, 269

Livingstone, 255

Local Preachers, 136

- Wesley’s Reasons for, 136

London Missionary Society, 191, 254, 255, 319
Love of Souls, 101, 185, 186, 281
Luther, 7, 57, 110, 114, 179
Lyttleton, Lord, 17, 40, 42

Macaulay, 86, 97, 99, 189

- Tribute to Puritans, 9, 97, 303–305

McOwan, Peter, 130
Mann, Sir Horace, 40
Mansfield, Lord, 172
Marlborough, Duchess of, 37, 39, 42
Marshman and Ward, 253
Martyrs, 195
Maxfield, Thomas, 115, 134
Melcombe, Lord, 42

Methodism, 182, 257, 275, 278

- in New England, 275

Methodists acknowledged, 177, 256

- and Puritans Compared, 98

Methodists and Quakers, 278
Methodist Band-Meetings, etc., 100
Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society, 256

Methodists, Beginning of, 45, 52, 80, 91

- Calvinistic and Wesleyan, 101

Methodists, Creed of, 100

- Early, 98, 102, 309
- Effect of, 35, 129
- Efforts of Earliest, 257
- Expelled from Oxford, 66
- Growth of, 40, 170
- in United States, 275

- Held as Opposed to Church of England, 66, 70, 94, 99

- Hymnals, 32
- Manifestations of, 85
- Origin of Name, 52, 60, 309

- Regarded as Enemies, 21, 70, 94, 99, 139, 143, 144, 233, 309

Methodists, Sects of, 276
Middleton, 180
Milton, 110
Minor, The, 154

Mission Enterprises, 186, 250, 256

- to Africa, 191, 255
- to China, 255
- to India, 190, 253
- to Madagascar, 255
- to South Seas, 255

Missionary Societies, 250, 256, 320
Moffat, Robert, 191, 255
Molière, 155
Montague, Duchess of, 42
Montgomery, James, 118
Moorfields, London, 84, 91, 134, 149, 233
Morality at Beginning of 18th Century, 16
Moravians, The, 35, 64, 113, 170, 250, 256
More, Hannah, 178, 210
Morgan, 50
Mystery of Life, The, 65
Napoleon at St. Helena, 255
Nash, Beau, Overcome by Wesley, 87
Nelson, John, 139
Netherlands Missionary Society, 256
Newman, John Henry, 269

Newton, John, 123, 126, 149, 174, 190, 216, 217, 270

Noel, Baptist, 259
Nonconformists, Religion Among, 15
Oliver, John, 115
Olivers, Thomas, 115, 125, 311, 313
One-eyed Christians, 183
Orphan Asylum in Georgia, 291, 296

Oxford, 48, 65

- Forecasting Future of Union, 48

Oxford Methodists, 49

- Society, 54

Parson, John, 151
Perronet, Edward, 125
Persecution, 102, 139, 143, 270

Philadelphia Adult and Sunday-school Union, 256

Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 219, 236
Pitt, William, 42, 266
Politics Influenced by Revival, 258
Pope, 38
Portraits of Revivalists, 154, 271
Power of Song, 114
Practical View of Christianity, 266, 267
Prayer, 102
Preacher and Robbers, The, 151

Preaching at Beginning of 18th Century, 61

- by Laymen, 132, 136, 139, 147, 148, 149, 151

- in Drawing-Room, 37, 38, 40

- Effect of, 7, 98, 99, 101, 107, 139, 143

Prejudices Against Lay Preachers, 132

Prison Philanthropy, 199, 217, 234, 236, 241, 246, 248, 258, 318

Promoting Christian Knowledge, Society for, 250

Propagation of Gospel, Society for, in New England, 250

Propagation of Gospel, Society for, in Foreign Parts, 250

Protestant Episcopal Board of Missions, 256

Puritans, The, 8, 9, 35, 52, 98, 303, 305

- Macaulay’s estimate of, 9, 97, 303

- and Methodists Compared, 98

Quakers, The, 35, 231, 278
Quarterly Review, 125, 126
Quietists, 55
Quixote, the Spiritual, 154
Raikes, Anne, 213

Raikes, Robert, 183, 193, 194, 196, 201, 211, 214

- at Windsor, 202, 208

- House at Gloucester, 213

Raymont of Pegnafort, 93
Reciprocation the Soul of Methodism, 100
Redruth, Cornwall, 103
Reformation, The, 8
Reign of Terror, 181
Rejection of Gospel, its Effect on Nations, 7

Religion, State of

- at Beginning of 18th Century, 10, 22, 23, 107

- State of and After Revival Contrasted, 13, 277

Religious Tract Society, 191, 256
Repeal of Test and Corporation Acts, 258
Revival, The, Anecdotes of (See Anecdotes.)

Revival Beacons, 184

- Becomes Educational, 193, 257, 278

- Beginning of, 24, 28, 35, 39, 49, 57, 73, 181, 186

- Cheerfulness and Joy of, 98, 99, 101, 109, 124

- Conservative, 86
- Dawn of, 24, 48, 49
- Depth of, 277
- Done Most for Well-being of Mankind, 280
- Effect on Literature, 260
- Effect of on World at Large, 279, 293

- Effects of, 8, 10, 13, 107, 115, 129, 132, 147, 166, 171, 180, 183, 186, 258, 259, 260, 269, 277, 279, 285, 293, 296, 300

- Evangelical in England, 8, 271,
- Fair-Preaching, 83
- Field-Preaching, 68, 89, 101, 104
- Foremost Names in, 46, 154
- Fruit of, 180, 186

Revival, Growth of, 73, 265

- Hostility to, 21, 22, 32, 61, 77, 94, 102, 154, 156, 159, 172, 288, 298

- Importance of, 10
- in Wales, 272
- in America, 275, 281, 288, 295, 300
- at Kingswood, 77

- Lay Preaching, 132, 135, 139, 147, 148, 149, 151

- Sects Formed, 276
- Singers of, 109, 121, 123, 126, 192, 310
- Spiritual, 114, 285

Revivalist Portraits, 154, 271
Richmond Legh, 267
Ridicule of Revivalists, 154, 253, 298
Rise and Progress in the Soul, 267
Ritual Absent in Revival, 114
Rock of Ages, 119
Rockingham, Lady, 40
Rogers’ Lives of Early Preachers, 151
Romaine, William, 149, 172
Roman Catholics, 133, 145, 193
Romelly, Sir Samuel, 26

Romish Stories and Incidents in Work of Wesley, 133, 145

Romney, Earl, 259
Rosary, The, 99
Rowlands, 272
Sabbath Observance, 17, 229
Sacred Song, Power of, 109, 113, 127
Sailors’ Hardships, etc., 221, 224, 240
Saints Everlasting Rest, 267

Salvation by Grace the Grand Doctrine of the Revival, 60, 186, 270, 284

Sandwich Islands, 255
Sandys, 110
Sarton, William, 195
Saunderson, Lady Frances, 37
Savonarola, 7
Schools, Sunday, 16, 196–199, 201, 204

School, Sunday, Commended, 207, 208

- Effect of, 201, 215
- First Day or Society, 256
- Growth of, 208, 209, 215

Scott, Captain Jonathan, 149

- Thomas, 269

- Walter, Sir, 117

Sects Rising from Revival: Bible Christians of West of England, 276

- Primitive Methodists Of the North, 276
- New Connection Methodists, 276
- United Free Church Association, 276

Selborne, Lord, Referred to, 125
Sharp, Granville, 190
Shaw, Robert, 169
Ships of 18th Century, 220

Shirley, Lady Fanny, 64

- Mr. (Lady Huntingdon’s Cousin), 20

Sidney, Sir Philip, 110

Simeon, Charles, 269

Singers of the Revival, 109, 121, 123, 126, 192, 310

Slave Abolition, 186, 211, 265, 278

Smiles, Dr., referred to, 24

Smith, Adam, 207

- Sydney, 184, 253

Society, State of, at beginning of 18th Century, 10, 16, 24, 75, 277, 282, 294

- State of and after Revival, Contrasted, 13, 277

Somerset, Duchess of, 36

Songs Used in Great National Movements, 109

Southey, 71, 83, 89, 93, 115, 130, 133, 146, 147, 157, 166, 249, 276, 308

Spain, 7
Spencer, 52
St. Ambrose, 117
St. Ann’s, Black Friars, London, 174
St. George’s, Hanover Square, London, 172
Stage Libels against the Revivalists, 154
Staniforth, Sampson, 151
Stanhope, Earl, Testimony to Wesley, 10

Starting Point, The, of Modern Religious History, 181

Steam Engine, The, 12

Steele, Miss, 126

Stephen, Sir James, 83, 184, 191, 192, 269

- Sir George, 192

Stevens, Dr. Abel, 27, 83, 182, 216, 249, 262, 300

Stocker, John, 127
Stock, Thomas, 204
Story, George, 147
Stratford, Joseph, 196
Streaks of Dawn, First, 24
Suffolk, Countess of, 40
Swedenborg, 276
Swedish Missionary Society, 250
Taylor, Isaac, 45, 83, 128

Teachers, Character of at Beginning of 18th Century, 17

Te Deum, 114
Teignmouth, Lord, 189, 254
Tennent, Gilbert, 286, 287, 290
“The Last Judgment”, 118
Thomson, Mr., The Vicar of St. Gennys, 70
Thornton, John, 190
Ticket, The, 99

Told, Silas, 216, 257

- his Preaching and his Work, 235

Toleration Act, 258
Toplady, Augustus, 119, 121
Tottenham Court Chapel, 120, 150

Townshend, Lady, 37

- John, 258

- Lord, 42

Tractarian Movement, The, 48
Tract Societies, 186, 191
Trevisa, John De, 193
Trimmer, Sarah, Mrs., 209
Trophies of Revival, 115
Turnpikes in England, 93
Tyerman, Mr., referred to, 27, 43, 249
Tyndale, William, 183, 193
Venn, Henry, 169
Vicar of Wakefield, 21, 267, 305
Voltaire, 51, 180
Wales, 272
Walker, Samuel, 171
Walpole, Horace, 39, 43, 79, 83, 154
Walsh, Thomas, 135, 145
Warburton, Bishop, on Wesley, 22
Ward and Marshman, 253
Watson, Richard, 158
Watt, James, 12

Watts, Isaac, 29, 110, 122, 128

- Friends of, 36
- his Mother, 26
- Hymns of, 29, 113
- Literary Labors, 29

Waugh, Alexander, 254

Welsh Preaching and Preachers, 275

Wesleyan Methodists, 101

- Missionary Society, 256, 320

Wesleyan Societies, 170, 182

Wesleyanism, Historians of, 182

Wesley, Charles, 45, 50, 57, 118, 121, 128, 265

Wesley, John, 21, 26, 46, 50, 53, 80, 92, 122, 136, 165, 179, 182, 207

- as an Administrator, 82, 86
- and Church Polity, 82, 86
- and Bradford, 138
- and Fenwick, 137
- and Nelson, 145
- and Silas Told, 217, 233, 237, 249
- and Walsh, 146

- and Whitefield Compared, 69, 80, 86, 87, 89, 148

- and Field-Preaching, 89

Wesley, John,

- and Methodists Regarded as Enemies, 21, 94, 99

- and Hervey’s Teaching, 59

- at Epworth, 43, 53, 94, 95

- at the Foundry, Moorfields (City Road Chapel), 91

- at Glasgow, 11
- at Gwennap Pit, 103
- at Oxford, 50, 53
- at York, 96
- Compared with Calvin, 69
- Conversion, Time of, 58
- Creed, 100
- Death of, 262
- Early Religious Experiences, 53
- Effect of His Preaching on Himself, 82

- Effect of His Preaching on Others, 82, 87, 96, 114

- Estimate of by Macaulay, 86, 89
- Expelled from Church of England, 68, 69
- Expelled from Oxford, 65
- Hymns, 112, 113, 114, 124, 126
- Influence of, 10, 26, 182
- Itinerancy, 93
- on Sabbath-Schools, 208
- Parish, the World, 91
- Power over Others, 82, 87, 137
- Preaching in Epworth Church-yard, 95
- Restrictions on Lay Preachers, 134
- Tomb, 262
- Translations, 113
- Victory of, over Nash, 87

Wesley, Samuel, 43, 53

- Susannah, 44, 134

- her Sayings, 45

Weston, Favel, 58, 62

Wilberforce, William, 178, 189, 191, 254, 258, 265, 266

Wilderness, Blossoms in, 180
Wilks, Matthew, 254
Winter, Cornelius, 184, 257
Wiseman, Cardinal, 131
White, Rev George, Vicar of Colne, 71

Whitefield, George, 32, 46, 52, 60, 69, 73, 86, 122, 148, 165, 179, 184, 195, 258, 270, 284

- and the Children, 292
- Among the Indians, 290
- and the Poor Woman, 56

- and Wesley Compared, 69, 80, 86, 87, 89, 148

- and the Recruiting Sergeant, 84
- Among the Nobility, 36, 38, 41, 79
- Among the Roughs, 83, 115
- at Boston, New England, 284, 285
- at Cambridge, New England, 28
- at Harvard, 285
- at Kingswood, Bristol, 73
- at Princeton, 290
- at Gloucester, 73
- at New Haven, 285
- at Oxford, 49, 54
- at the Tower of London, 73
- Compared with Luther, 69

- Description of his Preaching During Thunder Storm, 79

- Early Religious Experience, 55

Whitefield, George,

- Effect of his Preaching on Himself, 80, 81, 294

- Effect on Others, 43, 76, 79, 82–84, 87, 115, 284, 294, 295, 301

- First Meeting Charles Wesley, 56
- in Georgia, 291
- Journeys, 281
- in New York, 288
- in America, 73, 85, 281
- in Wales, 272
- in London, 81
- in Maryland, 290
- in Moorfields, London, 84
- in Philadelphia, 289
- on Toriel Joss and Newton, 149
- Preaching of, 73, 295
- on Religion in America, 299
- Orphan Asylum in Georgia, 291, 296
- Regarded as a Fanatic, 83
- Ridiculed, 154

- The First in the Opening of the Methodist Movement, 80

- Treatment of Those Who Opposed Themselves to Him, 78, 298

- Watts’ Blessing of, 32

Williams, John (Martyr of Erromanga) 255
Woolston, 180
Work Done in the Revival, 66
Wyclif, John, 193
Xavier, Francis, 93
York, Wesley at, 96
Yorkshire, 131, 139, 160, 170
Yorkshire, Apostles of, 139
Young Cottager, The, 267
Zinzendorf, Count, Hymns of, 113, 171

- Transcriber’s Notes:

- Several footnote references just said “See Appendix.” without specifying which (there are 15.) The references have been resolved as well as was possible.

- Some footnotes had no references to them in the text. These were assumed to be additional material for the entire page, or pages, and a reference was created.

- Some index entries were reformatted to be more consistent with the majority of the entries.

- Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

- Typographical errors were silently corrected.

- Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.

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Table of Contents

- THE GREAT REVIVAL OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

- EDITOR’S NOTE.

- PREFACE.

- CONTENTS.

- CHAPTER I DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN.

- CHAPTER II FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN.

- CHAPTER III OXFORD: NEW LIGHTS AND OLD LANTERNS.

- CHAPTER IV CAST OUT FROM THE CHURCH—TAKING TO THE FIELDS.

- CHAPTER V THE REVIVAL CONSERVATIVE.

- CHAPTER VI THE SINGERS OF THE REVIVAL.

- CHAPTER VII LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS.

- CHAPTER VIII A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS.

- CHAPTER IX BLOSSOMS IN THE WILDERNESS.

- CHAPTER X THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL.—ROBERT RAIKES.

- CHAPTER XI THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD.

- CHAPTER XII MISSIONARY SOCIETIES.

- CHAPTER XIII AFTERMATH.

- CHAPTER XIV THE REVIVAL IN THE NEW WORLD. [BY THE EDITOR.]

- APPENDIX A (Pages 9 and 97).

- APPENDIX B (Page 21).

- APPENDIX C (Page 28).

- APPENDIX D (Page 36).

- APPENDIX E (Page 71).

- APPENDIX F (Pages 73 and 98).

- APPENDIX (Page 114).

- APPENDIX (Note, Page 118).

- APPENDIX (Page 118). THE LAST JUDGMENT. BY THOMAS OLIVERS.

- APPENDIX (Page 120). ROCK OF AGES—In Latin. BY W. E. GLADSTONE.

- APPENDIX (Page 236).

- APPENDIX (Page 253).

- APPENDIX (Page 254).

- APPENDIX (Page 256).

- INDEX.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE