when we compare the security of public men like Grafton with the suddenness with which, like a shooting star, the light of Parnell went out one of the most powerful personalities in the politics of the nineteenth century. Lord Chesterfield instructs his son in the immoral arts as though he were imparting to him one of the essentials in the education of a gentleman.' On the lower scale, the people were sunk in ignorance and drunkenness. The brutal and criminal classes were so many that they frequently rose en masse and terrified a town. They flung open prisons, burnt houses, and sacked and pillaged at will. The futile dread of society manifested itself in the most absurdly extravagant penalties, which were as much an expression of the callousness and cruelty of the age as a determination to awe the criminal classes. It was a capital offense to cut down a tree, as well as to steal, twenty young thieves being strung up one morning in front of Newgate Prison. Drunkenness was fearfully prevalent. Men were invited into the ginshops to get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for sixpence. The philosopher Hartley thought such a state of things if continued could only lead to revolution. He did not live long enough to see that his forecast was justified as to France, though the evangelical revival, as Lecky admits, saved England from that fate.' THE CHURCH CLERGY. In regard to religion and the Church there was a brighter prospect, but with many dark lines. The great evil of plurality and nonresidence continued through the whole of the century. Bishop Burnet, who died in 1715, calls this practice "scandalous," and adds: "This is so shameful a profana- AND THE tion of holy things that it ought to be treated with detestation and horror. Do such men think on the vows they made in their ordination, on the rules in the Scriptures, or on the nature of their function, or that it is a care of souls? How long, how long shall this be the peculiar disgrace of our Church, which for aught I know is the only Church in the world that tolerates it!" 'Cf. Green, Hist. of the English People, iv, 121. “England alone escaped the contagion [of the French Revolution]. Many causes conspired to save her, but among them a prominent place must, I believe, be given to the new and vehement religious enthusiasm which was at that very time passing through the middle and lower classes of the people, which had enlisted in its service a large proportion of the wilder and more impetuous reformers, and which recoiled with horror from the antichristian tenets that were associated with the Revolution in France."-Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century, ii, 691-692. The best of the clergy complained that they had not more benefices by which to enrich themselves. For all this, vast numbers of the clergy were miserably poor, especially the curates. Owing to poverty, the low moral standard of the age, and other causes, many of the clergy lapsed from morality. Even Overton allows that disreputable ministers formed an exceptionally large class at the close of the seventeenth and during the first half of the eighteenth century.' The drunken fox-hunting parson has long since disappeared from the English Church, but for a long period he marked and marred its good name and holy work. Burnet characterizes the clergy of his day as the worst in Europe, "the most remiss of their labors in private and the least severe of their lives." Overton speaks of the position of the "parson who was simply the boon companion of the ignorant and sensual squire of the Hanoverian period." For this reason the clergy-or many of them-were held in contempt in the Georgian era. In 1738, Secker, the bishop of Oxford, says: "Christianity is now railed at and ridiculed with very little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all." "Since the Lollards," says Pattison, "there had never been a time when the ministers of religion were held in so much contempt as in the Hanoverian period, or when satire upon Churchmen was so congenial to the general feeling. There was no feeling against the Establishment, nor was Nonconformity ever less in favor. The contempt was for the persons, manners, and characters of ecclesiastics."" The sermons of the time reveal the common degeneracy. At the best they were good moral essays and amiable disquisitions, not to speak, of course, of the great and noble discourses of Butler, Sherlock, and men of that stamp. But of plain, practical sermons which seize the conscience, and of sermons which deal faithfully with the Gospel, the eighteenth century was lamentably deficient. The great lawyer Blackstone went from church to church in London to hear every clergyman of note, and he said it would have been impossible for him to determine whether the preacher was a follower of Confucius, Ma DEGENERATE 2 Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750, in Essays and Reviews, 5th ed., 1861, p. 315. Pattison says that this strain of contempt for the clergy runs through the whole literature of the period. "The unedifying lives of the clergy are a standard theme of sarcasm and continue to be so till a late period in the century, when a gradual change may be observed in the language of literature." homet, or of Christ. There may have been some exaggeration in this, but Overton speaks soberly when he says that the typical eighteenth century sermon was tame and colorless, stiff and formal, cold and artificial.' In a charge delivered in 1709 Bishop Horsley says that sermons have been reduced to mere moral essays. "We make no other use of the high commission we bear than to come abroad one day in seven, dressed in solemn looks and in the external garb of holiness, to be the apes of Epictetus." Preaching is the spiritual index of an age. A COLD AND AGE. Over the whole period might be written, Beware of enthusiasm. Bolingbroke, though a Deist, was in full sympathy with the spirit of the time when he said that it was blasphemy to affirm that man partakes of the divine nature, and that God breathes upon our spirits. The cynical Dean Swift claimed that all "violent zeal, even for truth, has a hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride."' That God speaks to the soul to-day to give it assurance of salvation and other blessing was considered by the whole Church as fanaticism. "Sir," said Bishop Butler to Wesley, "the pretending to extraordinary revelation and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing." John Byrom's rhymes have a wider reference than the words indicate. He is speaking of Warburton and his fellow anti-enthusiasts : "They think that now religion's sole defense Is learning history, and critic sense; That with apostles, as a needful guide, Of faith and manners for the Christian school, A characteristic judgment of the period is that of Bishop Lavington, who calls St. Francis of Assisi "at first only a wellminded but weak enthusiast, afterward a mere hypocrite and impostor." Ignatius Loyola he characterizes as an "errant, shatter-brained, visionary fanatic," and Methodists he claimed had a "similar texture of brain." 1 L. c., ii, 39. 8 ? Thoughts on Religion, in Works, viii, 53. 3 John Byrom, On Warburton's Sermon on the Operation of the Holy Spirit. CHAPTER II. JOHN WESLEY. THE man whom God raised up to stem the tide of worldliness and wickedness and bring in a regenerated England was John Wesley. His ancestry is a mystery and a study. William de Wel WESLEY'S lesley, first baron of Wellesley, 1343, married Alice, daughter of Sir John Trevelyn. From him descended Arthur Wellesley, who became Duke of Wellington, and at Waterloo saved Europe from the grasp of Napoleon. From this same William de Wellesley descended Sir Herbert Wesley or Wellesley, of Westleigh county, Devon. Thence the line of descent is as follows: John.... Sir Herbert Wesley Bartholomew.. (about 1595 to about 1680), educated at Oxford, married daughter of Sir Henry Colley, of Carberry Castle; became rector of Charmouth, in 1650; ejected by the Act of Uniformity in 1662; practiced medicine; and preached in Nonconformist churches. .(about 1636 to about 1670), educated at New Inn Hall, Oxford; married daughter of Rev. John White, of the Westminster Assembly; while a layman preached at Weymouth; minister of Winterbourne Whitchurch, Dorset, 1658; ejected by the Anglicans under Charles II, and four times imprisoned. Samuel....... (1662–1735), educated among Dissenters; changed views and joined Church of England; entered Exeter College, Oxford; curate in London; married (about 1689) Susannah, daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley, an eminent Nonconformist divine; rector of South Ormsby, in Lincolnshire, also chaplain to the Marquis of Normanby; and finally rector of Epworth, 1696-1735; a voluminous author, pious, learned, loyal, a Tory and High Churchman, but no bigot. WESLEY'S EDUCATION. The unbroken Wesley ancestry stood for piety, independence, and the love of learning, and it is not strange that these traits flowered out in John Wesley. His parents had nineteen children, of whom John was the fifteenth child and second surviving son. He was born at Epworth, June 17, 1703. His early training was under the care of his mother, one of the most remarkable women who ever lived, who for piety, character, BOYHOOD AND and conscientious devotion to principle stands preeminent among the women of all history. Her methods were exacting yet kindly. However far they seem from the easy-going ways of American households, it can be said that they proved effective. The results amply justified her strictness. But there was so much of kindness and considerateness mingled with her sterner requirements that she had her children's profound love and respect to the end.' A dramatic incident in his boyhood was his escape from the burning of the parsonage, February 9, 1709, which left an indelible impression of God's care. In 1714-20 he was a student of the Charterhouse School, London, and in 1720-4 scholar of Christ Church, Oxford, graduating B. A. in 1724. WESLEY'S His parents desired him to study for the ministry, and though he had not thought of this at first he consented to do it. His mother joined in this advice though, as she said, "Your father and I seldom think alike," and urged him to study practical divinity. He immediately took up The Imitation of Christ and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, though his first impression of those books was less favorable than it afterward became. He also objected to the predestination doctrine of the 17th Article of Religion and the damnatory clause of the Athanasian Creed. Thus early were his convictions maturing. His mother's correspondence on these points is interesting, and its anti-Calvinism reveals one of the forces which was working toward making the new age Arminian and not Calvinistic. He was ordained deacon by Bishop Potter, of Oxford, in 1725, and preached his first sermon the 16th of October following at South Leigh, near Witney, Oxfordshire. In 1726 he was elected fellow of Lincoln College, and the same year was made lecturer in Greek, and moderator of the classes. Long afterward he showed proof of his attainments in correcting the classical quotations of Bishop 1 See a full description of Mrs. Wesley's methods of child training in Mary Clarke, Susannah Wesley, Bost., 1886 (Famous Women Series), pp. 48 ff., and a series of articles by Faulkner on Wesley's Early Life, in Zion's Herald, Bost., Jan. 26, Feb. 23, April 27, 1898. |