If step we meet with some direct miraculous interference. it rains during a sermon or blows during a sea voyage, Wesley prays, and his prayers are answered. If his horse runs away, the Devil has caused the mishap; when the horse stops, God has interposed. He collects stories of ghosts and visions and witches with a constant interest and perfect credulity. I cannot give up to all the deists in Great Britain the existence of witchcraft till I give up the credit of all history, sacred and profane." He holds that not only the Lisbon earthquake, but even a certain landslip at Whiston cliffs, in Yorkshire, which seems to have done no particular harm to anybody, was distinctly miraculous.2 The Devil condescends at times to the smallest practical jokes. On one occasion he hoaxed Wesley and his brother by forcing them to laugh hysterically when they wanted to sing psalms.3 The stories are for the most part of that provokingly prosiac turn which is characteristic of their origin amongst commonplace people. They do not recall the poetical, if hideous, superstitions of an age which has still a genuine mythology; but should rather be classed with De Foe's anecdotes in the 'History of the Devil' and the ghost of Mrs. Veal. Wesley's common sense, like Johnson's, breaks out unexpectedly against the strange stories of other people. He ranks the voyages of Captain Cook with those of Robinson Crusoe, because he will not believe that the natives of two islands, at a distance of 1,100 miles in latitude, can understand each other's language. In the common phrase, he ridicules the credulity of sceptics-a phrase which simply means that, as his canons of proof are different from those of Hume and Voltaire, he sometimes rejects what they accept, as well as frequently differing in the opposite direction. 89. Thus we already find in Wesley that aversion to scientific reasoning which has become characteristic of orthodox theologians. He makes in one place the remarkable statement that he is convinced, 'from many experiments,' that he could not 'study to any degree of perfection either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a deist, if not an atheist.' 5 Others, he adds, may study those subjects all their lives without any inconvenience. His ignorance, of 5 Ib. viii. 384. 15 1 Wesley, v. 190. 3 Ib. ii. 33. 2 course, does not prevent him from forming some very decided opinions as to the value of scientific researches. He disbelieves altogether in the Newtonian astronomy. He doubts whether any man knows the distance of the sun or moon.' He thinks that Jones (of Nayland) has totally overthrown the Newtonian principles, though he might not have established the Hutchin. sonian; and that Dr. Rogers has proved the whole framework of modern astronomy to be quite uncertain, if not self-contradictory. The scepticism of believers is at least as curious as the credulity of sceptics. A man who thus stands outside the whole sphere of scientific enquiry could of course have little interest in the speculative philosophy with which it was associated. He occasionally expresses a hearty contempt for the deists of the time, and for the moral philosophers of the Hutcheson school, whose optimistic complacency was abhorrent to all his views of human nature, and the system of divine government.3 For the most part he is content to leave the deistical doctrine to decay by its inherent weakness. Once or twice, however, he directly confronts the sceptic. In 1749, for example, he spent nearly three weeks in the unpleasing employment '4 of answering Middleton's 'Free Enquiry.' The argument shows plainly enough that Wesley is trying to solve a problem requiring long and difficult historical investigations, by help of the data supplied by his antagonist. He can merely cavil at particular passages, without setting forth an independent theory of his own. The two, moreover, are not on the same plane of argument. The dilemma which Middleton put to his antagonist is meaningless for Wesley. You acknowledge, says Middleton in substance, that miracles have ceased; if so, why do you hold that they were ever wrought? To a man who believes that his prayers are daily answered by direct interposition, that the Devil is as busy as the constable, that modern diseases, like the old, were caused by devils, and that most lunatics are demoniacs," the question has no significance. The position which to Middleton seemed to be a reductio ad absurdum was with Wesley a simple statement of everyday experience. As against War Wesley, iv. 228. Ib. iv. 261. See .g. Wesley, vii. 249, x. 14, 331. burton or Sherlock, the argument was unanswerable. As against Wesley, it was so much empty parade. 90. I have already touched upon Warburton's assault upon Wesley. As the typical enthusiast of the day, Wesley was equally offensive to the good and the bad instincts of his contemporaries, to their strong common sense and their easy-going indifference. Sermons and farces, grave appeals from the respectable classes, and coarse taunts from the debased and the worldly-minded, showered upon the rising sect along with the more tangible missiles of popular wrath. We need not ask what judgment was passed upon Christian in Vanity Fair. Nor is it necessary to dwell at length upon the more respectable denunciations. The most conspicuous assault was Bishop Lavington's 'Enthusiasm of Papists and Methodists Compared.' It is an elaboration of a comparison suggested by Warburton between Wesley and Loyola. Loyola, says Warburton, was the most remarkable among 'the successful impostors which have set out in all the blaze of fanaticism' and 'completed their schemes amidst the cool depths and stillness of politics.'1 Lavington drew out at considerable length the parallel between the superstitious beliefs and practices of the Wesleyans and those embodied in the lives of Catholic saints. To the historical enquirer the resemblance is undoubtedly curious, and analogous phenomena might be discovered far beyond the limits of Christianity. A controversialist less short-sighted than Warburton or Lavington would certainly not have inferred that the force thus manifested was one to be despised and rejected by the official guardians of a belief in supernaturalism. The Lavingtons of the time were content, however indignant at the disturber of their calm, to call Wesley knave, hypocrite, enthusiast, or papist, without being led to any philosophical estimate of the disagreeable phenomenon. They accepted the position, so naïvely interpreted by Warburton, and so skilfully undermined by Middleton. They held that a church might safely rest its claim to authority upon past miracles, and at the same time deny the reality of modern interpositions of Providence. They combined, that is, Hume's view of the eighteenth century with Wesley's view of the 1 Warburton's Works, viii. 382. first. They had thus put the religious impulse into a strait waistcoat, and imagined that the force thus doomed to inaction could retain sufficient power to be useful without being troublesome. 91. The conclusion of Wesley's answer to Middleton gives the key to his position. The traditional evidence of Christianity might be destroyed without injuring the faith. The believer would still be able to say to those who were striking at it, 'Beat on the sack of Anaxagoras. But you can no more hurt my evidence of Christianity, than the tyrant could hurt the spirit of that wise man.' The ultimate and incontrovertible evidence is the evidence of the believer's heart. Christianity gives the light for which we long; and the light is its own evidence. This is the sum of the believer's argument: 'One thing I know; I was blind, and now I see.' This is the argument which may satisfy a woman or a child; not that historical argument which, according to worthy Lelands and Doddridges, might be made clear to a ploughboy. Here, in fact, we come once more to the sentiment which was the turning point in contemporary thought. Wesley, like Law, says seriously what Dodwell said ironically.2 Christianity is not founded on argument, but upon sentiment interpreted as God's voice speaking to the soul. The phrase embodies the revolt of the emotional nature against an effete theological system. Men in whom the intellectual instincts were predominant became sceptical with Hume; men of warmer temperament, of greater imaginative power, and narrower logical faculty, might take shelter in Law's theosophical refuge; those in whom a strong moral sense, and a keen eye for the facts of life, were most strongly developed, would sympathise with Wesley. 92. The relation between Law and Wesley passed through several phases. Wesley never became a mystic, though much attracted by some of the mystical teaching. He not only wrote an angry letter to Law on breaking with him (in 1738); but eighteen years later (1756) he made a formal attack upon Law's mystical doctrines. In later years he softened towards his old master. His sermons frequently mention Law with the Wesley, xiii. 256, 257. 2 See Wesley's reference to Dodwell's tract in the 'Earnest Appeal,' xii. 14. highest respect. In 1789 he speaks of the 'Serious Call' as a treatise which will hardly be excelled, if it be equalled, in the English tongue, either for beauty of expression or for Cestice and depth of thought.' Elsewhere he speaks of Law's two practical treatises as 'sowing the seed' of Methodism, and first ‘stemming the torrent' of infidelity and immorality, which had overspread the nation since the Restoration. The force of Law's moral teaching was not obscured to him by his indifference to Law's theology. Law was 93. Agreeing with Law's central method, and, like him, appealing to the heart from the intellect, Wesley's divergence was determined by the difference in character of the philosophical recluse and the active reformer. more impressed by the inadequacy of the ordinary creed to satisfy the intellect or stimulate the emotions; Wesley by its impotence in the warfare with vice and corruption. Law retired from the world; Wesley sought to subdue the world. Law felt that a new philosophy was required to meet the searching scepticism of the day; Wesley was indifferent to all philosophical difficulties, and, instead of endeavouring to cut away the logical standing-ground of scepticism, sought to overpower it by infusing a stronger zeal into the decaying organisation of the Church. So far as Wesley dealt at all in speculation, it was because certain difficulties were forced upon him by the mode in which his followers interpreted speculation into practice. To Wesley, as to Law, the resuscitation of religious emotions presented itself as a supernatural interference, or, as they would have said, as the outpouring of a divine influence into the human heart. Law, in his study, could abandon himself to the current of his emotions, and set himself to frame a higher theology, free from the crude anthropomorphism of the orthodox creed. He could evade the cavils of the deist by adopting a more pantheistic conception of the Deity. Wesley had to meet very different difficulties. Law's pure and unselfish nature produced nothing but elevating visions under the raptures of religious excitement. But very different results followed when a similar stimulant was administered to thousands of ignorant and brutal human beings of the ordinary mould. The Warburtons and the 1 Wesley, x. 429. 2 Ib. ix. 298. |