Wesleyanism

“ WESLEY'S BIBLE AND CASE.
Slavery, in Wesley's time, was strongly supported by the English government. She had enriched herself from the African slave trade. Her great maritime cities were built on the bones, sinews, and flesh, cemented by the blood, of oppressed bondmen. To oppose slavery was to oppose the government. Wesley met this gigantic evil with Christian courage. What was true of England was also true of her colonies. He united with Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others to oppose the evil. ”

“ How wisely and temperately she defends herself to her husband, winning the assent even of that somewhat narrow and arbitrary mind! With wisdom, even so tempered by a heart of charity and forbearance, did John and Charles Wesley maintain against the world of customs the bold and original methods which the deep emotions of their souls dictated to them, and won its assent; at least we think there is no sect on which the others collectively look with as little intolerance as on Methodism. ”

“ Wesley himself says, one circumstance is quite peculiar to the Methodists, the terms upon which any person may be admitted into their society, 'they do not impose, in order to their admission, any opinions whatever; one conviction, and one only, is required, a real desire to save their souls; where this is, it is enough, they desire no more, they lay stress upon nothing else, they ask only, "is thy heart herein as my heart? if it be, give me thy hand." Is there any other society in Great Britain and Ireland that is so remote from bigotry? ”

“ The Wesleyans, who used always to refuse to call themselves Dissenters, whose best men still shrink from the name, the Wesleyans, a wing of the Church, founded for godliness, the Wesleyans more and more, with their very growth as a separate denomination, feel the secular ambition of being great as a denomination, of being effaced by nobody, of giving contentment to this self-importance, of indulging this ordinary self; and I should not wonder if within twenty years they were keen political Dissenters. A triumph of Puritanism is abundantly possible ”

“ Pioneer people are too intent on maintaining life to go into the abstrusities of either ethics or theology. Wesley soon saw that his powers demanded a wider field. The experience, though, had done him much good, especially in two ways. He had gotten a glimpse of chattel slavery and made a remark about it that is forever fixed in literature, "Human slavery is the sum of all villainies." Then he had met on shipboard a party of Moravians, and was so impressed by them that he straightway began to study German. ”

“ When Wesley was on his death-bed he wrote to Wilberforce cheering him in his struggle against the slave trade.
"Unless God has raised you up for this very thing," writes Wesley, "you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils, but if God be for you who can be against you?... Go on in the name of God and in the power of His might till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it." ”

“ Religion was a cold and lifeless thing among the governing class, and the Wesleyan movement, which began about this time to breathe a new moral spirit into the common people, was treated by the bulk of fashionable society with extreme contempt. Toleration sprang more often from indifference than from generosity, and when the French Revolution broke out most of the Whig aristocracy deserted to the Established Church as one of the strongholds of reaction. ”

“ Nothing of this is contemplated in the Wesleyan system; freedom of thought has not usually fared well in the society; minds are too closely interlocked and riveted, frequently not only with other, but with inferior minds. It is therefore a community for the poor and the uneducated, or it is nothing; and if it is not like the Romish system, dangerous by the possession of an audacious hierarchy, it must be admitted that it may become so in virtue of a system of spiritual espionage scarcely less effective than the confessional.
Did John Wesley know human nature? ”

“ This is highly insulting, and I wonder that your Ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.' Yet it was that same Revival of religion in the days of Wesley and Whitefield that saved England when the evil days befell in the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. There is no nobler figure in all history than that of John Wesley riding over the whole country, reading as he rode, contesting all England for God, everywhere wakening the dead. ”

“ Indeed, there is not much about this period of English history concerning which the modern Englishman can feel really proud except that great religious revival which began with the thoughts and the teachings of John Wesley. One turns in relief from the partisan struggles in Parliament and out of it, from the intrigues and counter-intrigues of selfish and perfidious statesmen, and {145} the alcove conspiracies of worthless women, to Wesley and his religious visions, to Whitefield and his colliers, to Charles Wesley and his sweet devotional hymns. ”

“ Wesley published an abridgment of this piece for the use of the methodist societies, summarising it in conclusion with contemptuous coarseness: ‘The sum of all this: one in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected: nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will: the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can. Witness my hand, A—T—.’ Toplady replied in ‘A Letter to Mr. Wesley’ (1770) , charging him with clandestine printing, coarseness, evasiveness, unfairness, and raking together stories against Wesley's general conduct. ”

“ In the light of our present knowledge it does not appear impossible that if an inner circle of World Revolution exists it consists of a purely International group of men whose aim is that of Weishaupt--the destruction of the present system of society. ”

“ Many of us are unable to have any manner of sympathy with the precise doctrines and the forms of faith which Wesley taught. But the man must have no sympathy with faith or religious feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. ”

“ Barker is preacher, John Wesley, offered George III. the services of his forty thousand Methodists to put down the American rebellion. What American, what republican, then, of spirit or intelligence, can for an hour profess himself a follower in religion of such a fanatic as Wesley, with this well-known fact staring him in the face? How noble the conduct of Catholic France, or Catholic Ireland, when compared with Protestant England or Protestant Germany, at the time of the revolution! ”

“ And this can only be realized in a state of liberty and moral and social equality, free from all the obstacles which subordination, rank and riches throw in the way of man. "Our secret association," wrote Weishaupt, "works in a way that nothing can withstand it, and man shall soon be free and happy." ”

“ Thus did the hot-headed friends of King George II. do their utmost to make leal Methodists disloyal to the throne and house of Hanover; but the effort failed; for, from first to last, more faithful subjects than Wesley’s followers the throne of England has never had. “It is my religion,” wrote Wesley, more than thirty years after this, “which obliges me to put men in mind to be subject to principalities and powers. Loyalty is with me an essential branch of religion, and which I am sorry any Methodist should forget. ”

“ This last is weakness unless allied with wise decision and force, generosity when it is thus tempered. To the character of John Wesley it imparted a persuasive nobleness, and hallowed his earnestness with mercy. He had in a striking degree another of those balances between opposite forces which mark the great man. He kept himself open to new inspirations, was bold in apprehending and quick in carrying them out. Yet with a resolve once taken he showed a steadiness of purpose beyond what the timid scholars of tradition can conceive. ”

“ And it was in preaching to the outcasts that Wesley found himself, and was "converted." He says, "My work in America failed because I had not then given my heart to my Savior."
Now he got the "power," and whether this word means to his followers what it meant to him is a question we need not analyze. Power comes by abandonment: the orator who flings convention to the winds and gives himself to the theme finds power.
The opposition and the ridicule were all very necessary factors in allowing Wesley to find his true self. ”

“ This pretence of having discovered some fund of ancient wisdom is the invariable ruse of secret society adepts; the one thing never admitted is the identity of the individuals from whom one is receiving direction. Weishaupt himself declares that he has got it all out of books by means of arduous and unremitting labour. "What it costs me to read, study, think, write, cross out, and re-write!" he complains to Marius and Cato.508 Thus, according to Weishaupt the whole system is the work of his own unaided genius, and the supreme direction remains in his hands alone. ”

“ Who has need of another depends on him and has resigned his rights. So to need little is the first step to freedom; therefore savages and the most highly enlightened are perhaps the only free men. The art of more and more limiting one's needs is at the same time the art of attaining freedom....535
Weishaupt then goes on to show how the further evil of Patriotism arose:
With the origin of nations and peoples the world ceased to be a great family, a single kingdom: the great tie of nature was torn.... Nationalism took the place of human love.... ”

“ We who claim to be followers of Wesley, and who glory in the rich fruit of these unexampled labors, sufferings, and sacrifices, might with propriety inquire whether we would be willing to endure such toil and "despise such shame," that we might transmit to the children of a future generation the rich inheritance which we enjoy. ”

“ Weishaupt then struck out alone, availing himself of the medium of his lecture room to spread among his pupils his pet theories of equality and internationalism, and his philosophy of the pastoral virtues. He drew for them fascinating pictures of a happy society, where "every office was held by a man of talent and virtue and every talent is set in a place fit for its exertion." ”

“ Yet the boys and men who do these things every day and are not rebuked by their pastors and masters are, or are supposed to be, the spiritual children and descendants of John Wesley, who converted and made them what they are, the most religious people in Britain! Wesley, the most compassionate of men, who not only loved all creatures but actually believed that they too, like men, were destined to know a future life! ”

“ Men and women had to be startled into a sense of the need of their spiritual regeneration. Wesley and the comrades who worked with him in the beginning, and with some of whom, like Whitefield, he ceased after a while to work, were just the men needed to call aloud to the people and make sure that their voices must be heard. They had to talk in a shout if they were to talk to any purpose. There was much in their style of eloquence against which a pure and cultured criticism would naturally protest. ”

“ Time has a way of reversing judgments, and not the least of the changes in men's thought has been the gradual transformation in the attitude of the historian toward Wesley, carried to his grave by six poor men in 1791. Now that one hundred and twenty years have passed, Wesley has thirty millions of followers, who believe in his method and are carrying forward his work. ”

“ Rigg, author of The Living Wesley, says: "No single man for centuries has moved the world as Wesley moved it; since Luther, no man."
Dr. Abel Stevens, the historian of Methodism, says Mr. Wesley "possessed, in an eminent degree, one trait of a master mind—the power of comprehending and managing at once the outlines and details of plans. It is this power that forms the philosophical genius in science; it is essential to the successful commander and great statesman. It is illustrated in the whole economical system of Methodism."
Bishop Coke, in speaking of Mr. ”

“ It was while he was a member of Lincoln College that that unparalleled religious career of Mr. Wesley, which has always been regarded as the most wonderful movement of modern times, began. "Whoever studies the simplicity of its beginning, the rapidity of its growth, the stability of its institutions, its present vitality and activity, its commanding position and prospective greatness, must confess the work to be not of man, but of God." ”

“ We must consider [says Weishaupt] , how we can begin to work under another form. If only the aim is achieved, it does not matter under what cover it takes place, and a cover is always necessary. For in concealment lies a great part of our strength. For this reason we must always cover ourselves with the name of another society. ”

“ Yet it can hardly be denied that there spring up at times men—like John Wesley or General Booth—of such incurable temperament as to be capable of abusing their freedom by the promulgation of doctrine or procedure, divergent from the current traditions of religion. ”

“ The older traditions reminiscent of the Catholic Unity were jettisoned, and the result is known to us all. The Walpurgisnacht orgies under Nazism bore bitter fruit in a cult of blood and soil that just missed wiping out the remnants of Western Christian Europe.
Western man for centuries now has lost the key to his own meaning. He has been striving for a long time to break out of the ruins of a City half destroyed at his own hands. Political Liberalism of the old-fashioned Marxian variety grew out of a psychological desire to get away from where man actually found himself. ”