Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America - Edwin Paxton Hood - Страница 6

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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.”