METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1879. ART. I.—WESLEY AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY. A Biographical History of Philosophy. By G. H. LEWES. Two volumes. London. Wesley and Methodism. By ISAAC TAYLOR. England in the Eighteenth Century. By W. E. H. LECKEY. Two volumes. New York: Appletons. Short History of the English People. By J. R. GREEN. New York: Harper & Bros. Wesley has more sides to him than any man of his century, not excepting Washington; for Wesley's government was both of this world and not of this world. It was a spiritual power that is not to be measured by national lines and political influences. It is a force yet unabated; nay, more and more potent with every increasing year. To estimate that force no essay, no book, no hour, no year of hours, is sufficient. It has already entered every form of human action, molded States, fashioned philosophies, leavened literature, created philanthropies, extirpated iniquities, occupied with its influences every land under the whole heaven. The souls that have been affected by his having been, spiritually and immortally, are already numbered by scores, if not hundreds, of millions; for the spiritual life of a century and a half in Protestant Christendom has been filled with this force. All the agencies for the renewal of society have been touched to their issues by this man. Not a slave has been liberated, not a prisoner relieved, not a barbarism in warfare abolished, not a tract has given light and refreshment to the soul, not a Sunday-school scholar been taught, not a joyous Christian melody been sung, not a Bible been dropped gratuitously into a welcome or unwelcome hand, not a cheap and vivid Christian story been published, not a rumseller or drinker been suppressed, but that it can be traced as directly to John Wesley as the rays in the sky can be traced to the sun. These are but portions of his influence. He has affected medicine, and law, and politics, and literature. The change of medical treatment from the harsh, crude, cruel course of a century ago is due in no small degree to his common sense applied to the healing of the body. The other departments equally recognize his presence. Does this seem wild? Hear Sir James Stephen on one department of this work, a department already immeasurable in its influence. Speaking of the Clapham Sect, he says: "They were the sons, by natural and spiritual birth, of men who in the earlier days of Methodism had shaken off the lethargy in which, till then, the Churches of England had been entranced, of men by whose agency the great evangelic doctrine of faith, emerging in its primeval splendor, had not only overpowered the contrary heresies, but had, perhaps, obscured some kindred truths. In their one central and all-pervading idea they had found an influence hardly less than magical." Who was the father of the sires of these sons? He essays to give great glory to Whitefield, and in his "Evangelical Succession" confines his list exclusively to the Whitefieldians. Yet who was the father of Whitefield? Who took that raw and reckless youth, going from his drams to his prayers and from his prayers to his drams-a youth without consistency or constancy, without principle or purpose, without a more hopeful future than Chatterton or Goldsmith-who took him, molded him, made a man and a minister of him, under God, and sent him forth to shake the nations? Wesley. This same enlogist of Whitefield, describing the clownish servitor, full of spasms of piety and profanity, declares, "He became the associate of Charles, and the disciple of John Wesley. "These future chiefs of a religious revolution," he calls these Wesleys. As "the disciple of John Wesley," Whitefield always recognizes him as Master. He owed his strength and steadiness to the founder of Methodism. So all of Whitefield's influences, spiritual and other, excepting his one error of doctrine, are thus due, humanly speaking, to John Wesley. The Clapham Sect had in its lists such men as Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, Lord Teignmouth, the first President of the Bible Society and ruler of India, Sir John Shore, also ruler of India, Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay, Brougham, Henry Martyn -every philanthropist, social or religious, of England, a century and less ago. These men affected every realm of thought and duty. They organized every sort of philanthropy. As says Sir James Stephen: "They formed themselves into a confederacy, carefully-organized and fearlessly avowed, to send forth into all lands, but, above all, into their own, the two witnesses of the Church, Scripture and tradition-Scripture, to be interpreted by its divine Author to the devout worshiper; tradition, not of doctrinal tests, but of that inextinguishable zeal which, first kindled in the apostolic times, has never since wanted either altars to receive or attendant ministers to feed and propagate the flame." Well does he add: "Bibles, schools, missionaries, the circulation of evangelical books and the training of evangelical clergymen, the possession of well attended pulpits, war through the press and war in Parliament against every form of injustice which either law or custom sanctioned-such were the forces by which they hoped to extend the kingdom of light and to resist the tyranny with which the earth was threatened." Thus he confesses and concludes: "That confederacy which was pent up within the narrow limits of Clapham, which jocose men invidiously called a sect, is now spreading through the habitable globe. The day is not distant when it will assume the form, and be hailed by the glorious title, of the Universal Church." And all this philanthropic power is thus confessedly traced to John Wesley; for, speaking of the era of Whitefield, he says: "It was at this period that the Alma Mater of Laud and Sacheverell was nourishing in her bosom a little band of pupils destined to accomplish a momentous revolution in the national Church; and of this little band John Wesley was the acknowledged leader." We do not purpose to examine and illustrate the whole sphere of the influence of Wesley. One can see at a glance its vastness. The whole field of organized humanitarianism, of organized spiritual and ecclesiastical and Christian propagandism, is included in this range. Martyn translating the Scriptures into Persian and Hindustani, Judson into Burmese, Morrison into Chinese, Van Dyke into Arabic, Moffat into the South African dialects, are all because Wesley lived and wrought. Every missionary society, Bible, tract, and book society, sprang from his influence. Every Sunday-school book-alas, that it must be said, even in its weakness!-he is compelled to call his child; for he initiated that literature. Every temperance, antislavery, anti-tobacco, and woman suffrage society, much as one may dislike to acknowledge it, took its rise in the chambers of the Fellow and Vice-Rector of Lincoln. He first since Paul emancipated woman in the prayer-room and the pulpit. His principles necessitate her complete liberation. Green says of this movement of Wesley's, that "it changed in a few years the whole temper of English society. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education. The revival began in a small knot of Oxford students." After speaking of Charles Wesley and Whitefield, the same writer adds: "It was John Wesley who embodied in himself, not this or that side of this vast movement, but the very movement itself." * These facts are too patent to need discussion. Let us proceed to a more recondite study. At first glance one might say he did not influence literature and philosophy. The one was too refined, the other too subtle, for his practical, experimental, sociological facultie.s Yet both of these have felt the impress of his presence. His influence upon literature has been marked and marvelous. Thackeray and Dickens, Tennyson and Browning, though they knew it not, George Eliot and Charles Reade, Mrs. Stowe, and every reformatory romancer-even Oliver Wendell Holmes, who strikes at Christ, and yet is indebted to Wesley for the disposition and ability to strike-have another atmosphere blowing through their brain and giving character to their writings than they would have had if John Wesley had never lived. For each of them is a writer touched with reform. By comparing "Dotheboys-hall" with Fielding or Scott, we see the difference at a glance. Scott, though of the later generation, has no relation to these questions; nor Disraeli. Bulwer, a very slight one; his "Coming Race" is almost his only modern novel. Dickens is almost exclusively a reformer; Thackeray, largely so. The first reformatory novel, "The Fool of Quality," Wesley himself adopted into his library. He has been the father of multitudes of such, and has practically overturned that whole realm. It is, however, in his relation to modern philosophy, as the antagonist of material, as the exponent and starter out of spiritual or transcendental philosophy, that Wesley stands forth in a clearness of light that makes it impossible not to recognize and accept his sovereignty. To set this in sytematic form will be the aim and effort of this article. To do this justly we shall consider the status of philosophy when he arose, its theologic forms, and his relations to the same; his escape from it, how it was affected, and what were its revelations in him; his influence subsequently upon this department of thought, direct and indirect. I. Before we draw near Wesley, and the forces that made him, and that he made, look a little closer at the contest itself. * See also Leckey's "England in the Eighteenth Century." |