CHAPTER XIII.

THE CHURCH AGAINST THE METHODISTS.

IT has been seen how, from the time that Wesley set his foot on English soil after his sojourn in Georgia, the clergy were his strenuous opponents, and the dates of the first disturbances produced by his preaching have made it evident that this cause had nothing to do with their opposition. Wesley did not at once give up the attempt to keep his place as a minister of the Church. Sometimes his requests to be allowed the use of a pulpit were received with civility, and even gratitude, but we never, in the earlier stages of Methodism, find the attempt repeated; any clergyman who admitted him made himself the mark of so much obloquy among his brethren, that either he himself was afraid to admit Wesley a second time or Wesley was too considerate to ask him. How far the most zealous of the body were prepared to go in their opposition has been seen in the Staffordshire riots, and might be still further illustrated by the accounts of tumults in Cornwall, which were also stirred up, as Wesley believed, by clergymen.

The hostility of the Church is perhaps still more impressively manifested by a letter which was addressed to the Fellows of Magdalen by a Mr. Graves,

in 1742, declaring that a paper which they had made it a condition of some necessary testimonial that he should sign, and by which he renounced the modern practice and principles of the people commonly called Methodists, was extorted from him by 'a sinful fear of man,' and was not to be considered binding upon him. This deliberate act on the part of a specially Church body is a clearer indication of the attitude taken by the clergy than any extravagances of individual clergymen; and we may take the particular instances of Methodist principles and practice which Mr. Graves was called upon to renounce as a fair account of what gave offence to the Church of that day, viz. the habit of 'preaching in fields, of assembling together and expounding the Scripture in private houses, and elsewhere than in churches, in an irregular manner, and the pretensions to an extraordinary inspiration and inward feeling of the Holy Spirit.' Now to find fault with the Methodists for preaching in the fields, under the circumstances, was to find fault with them for preaching at all. To this day,' writes Wesley in his journal for 1772, 'field *preaching is a cross to me;' and there is no reason to suspect any self-deception in the words. The irregular times and places of preaching which were the result of his expulsion from the pulpit cannot therefore be the cause of that expulsion, and we are reduced to this statement of Methodist principles as 'the pretensions to an extraordinary inspiration and inward feeling of the Holy Spirit,' as a sufficient use why Wesley and those who thought with him should by the clergy of that day be considered heretics.

This is a conviction which will be strengthened by almost every word which was written by them against him. It is quite evident to any one who will give even a hasty glance at the pamphlets which were issued against the Methodists that what was offensive in them was their doctrine; and yet this fact is so strange (for their doctrine was simply that of the Thirty-nine Articles), that it is necessary here to give some specimens of the evidence which forces us to believe it.

It is somewhat surprising to find how early the Methodists had attracted attention. The first pamphlet published against them appeared as early as 1736, when the Wesleys were in Georgia, and Whitefield just beginning to preach to crowded congregations in London. It was a mere selection of extracts from seventeenth-century divines, drawn up by a 'lover of religion' as an antidote to the views of the new Oxford sect, and the passage which it quotes from Archbishop Sharp so exactly points out the point at issue between them and the Church of that day as to be worth quoting here. 'Some will take the term of Regeneration in a literal sense, though it ought to be understood figuratively, that is, we are not to imagine the word imports a new soul created in man by the Spirit of God, which is the literal sense; but only that the same mind which before was ignorant of and averse to the things of God is now enlightened, and doth more delight therein than before. Nor are those words "We are all dead in trespasses and sins, and that God by Christ hath quickened and created us again to good works," to be strictly understood, but only meta

phorically. For here is neither a proper death, a proper quickening, nor a proper creation. ... We should not therefore interpret such words in a literal sense, lest we entangle ourselves in as many difficulties as the Papists are in their doctrine of transubstantiation, by their construing literally those words, "This is my body.

Archbishop Sharp was a liberal and amiable Churchman, who had been a kind friend to Wesley's father, and deserves to be favourably remembered for having visited the wretched Jeffreys in prison. He had taken a judicious path between High and Low Church, as indeed is implied in his having attained the primacy; and though he died an old man in 1713, he may, as far as this extract goes, be taken as the spokesman of the Church of the eighteenth century. His words, then, form a fitting introduction to those of his younger brethren. Four Bishops, all extremely unlike each other, attacked the Methodists with more or less violence, and a notice of their opposition will form a sufficient sample of what this body of reformers had to undergo from their brethren.

Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London (1669-1748), the only one of these four Bishops with whom the Wesleys had any personal intercourse, is a typical prelate of the day. He exhibits all those characteristics of eighteenth-century theology which an attempt has been made to trace in a former chapter, and not much besides. His principal work was a codex of ecclesiastical law, a collection of obsolete enactments, a large number of which we may be quite certain were defied whenever anything happened to which they could apply;-one, for instance, being that any one neglect

ing to come to church should forfeit £20 a month; and another, that any one striking with any weapon in the churchyard, even in his own defence, should have his ears cut off. Bishop Gibson was a great friend of Sir Robert Walpole, and was called his Pope, till an opposition to a measure called the Quakers' Tithe Bill offended the Minister, and lost him his chance of the primacy. He was a cautious, moderate, rather timid man, whose chief wish in all ecclesiastical matters was to keep things quiet. This sort of bishop was not very likely to get on with the Wesleys, and it is curious and yet natural that their first collision was occasioned by the High Church zeal of the two brothers. They called upon him in 1738, to set themselves right with him as to the accusations already spread against them. Dr. Gibson received them very civilly, made light of the accusations against them, and promised them access to him at all times. Charles Wesley, always the closest adherent of the Church, and indeed of every other person and thing of which the brothers were joint adherents, then proceeded to worry the Bishop about re-baptizing Dissenters. The Hanoverian Bishops were all Low Church men, and Dr. Gibson had no sympathy whatever with the Wesleys' baptismal zeal; the practice, he told them, was wholly irregular, being at variance with the wide tolerance of the Church, which recognized Dissenters' baptism. Charles, however, informed him that he should always consider it necessary to administer this rite wherever the Dissenters who were admitted to the Church desired it. Dr. Gibson did not want to make martyrs about Baptism, or anything else, and only got angry when,