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THE PLACE OF METHODISM IN THE
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THE

Plage of Methodism

IN THE

Catholic Church

By
HERBERT B. WORKMAN, D.Lit., D.D.
Principal of the Westminster Training College,
Senator of London University.

THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN
NEW YORK — CINCINNATI

Printed in England

SO majoiem D«t slortam
et
Jn Oulcem Abemortam
jftatcts
WALTER P. WORKMAN
SocU oltm tlrtn. Col!, (Jantab,
Sum Cbtteto vtcturua
ei tenebrts tn lucem mtfitavit
anno salutte
ivlti. Sept., mcmjvttt.

PREFACE
THIS little volume was originally published in 1909 as the
Introduction to the New History of Methodism. For some
years this work has been out of print. Many friends have
urged me to print the Introduction in separate form,
ascribing to it a value that is, possibly, the reflection of
their friendship. By the kindness of the proprietors of the
New History of Methodism this has been made possible. I
have taken advantage of the reprint thoroughly to revise
the whole, and in places considerably to expand the some
what condensed original. But in all essential matters the
reprint stands as when first written. This little volume
attempts to do for Methodism on the side of thought what
a companion volume, Methodism, written by me for the
Cambridge Press in 191 2, essayed to accomplish in its
historical setting. The two works are complementary. That
this reprint should be dated on the eve of the assembly in
London of the fifth Ecumenical Methodist Conference seems,
to the author at least, of some significance. I desire
also to acknowledge with gratitude criticisms received
from my friends, Dr. Tasker and Dr. Piatt, of which I
have availed myself in this reprint.
H. B. W.
Westminster, June 192 1.

CREDO IN SPIRITUM SANCTUM,
SANCTAM ECCLESIAM CATHOLICAM,
SANCTORUM COMMUNIONEM

All at once I looked up with terror.
He was there.
He himself with his human air.
No face: only the sight
Of a sweepy garment, vast and white,
With a hem that I could recognize.
My mind filled with the cataract,
At one bound of the mighty fact.
' I remember, he did say
Doubtless, that, to this world's end,
Where two or three should meet and pray,
He would be in the midst, their friend;
Certainly he was there with them ! '
Browning, Christmas Eve.

CONTENTS
I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY . . p. n
Limitations and reality — Especially in the history of the Church
— Which posits the activities of the Holy Spirit — Ecclesiastical
phenomena and a priori standards — Absurdity when applied to
Methodism — The development of ideas — Our programme.
II. THE 'IDEA' OF EXPERIENCE p. 16
Its history: the Medieval Church — The consciousness of soli
darity — Realism and the individual — The Reformation — Calvinism
— Deism — The Methodist reaction — Deism in France and Ger
many — The Work of Schleiermacher — Methodism and the appeal
to reason — The Reformers and authority; The Independents —
The Latitudinarians — Wesley's union of authority and experience
— Philosophy and experience — Wesley's philosophical position —
His claim for introspection.
111. THE DOCTRINE OF ASSURANCE . p. 33
Antagonism to the doctrine — Its novelty — The Medieval Church
— The Mystics — Wyclif— Calvin— -Luther's changed views — The
Anglican Church.
IV. THE HISTORIC WORK OF METHODISM . . p. 44
Modern science and experience— The dangers of Assurance—
The appeal to collective experience— The historic Creeds— The
danger of subjectivism; of egoism — The doctrine of Holiness-
Causes of misunderstanding — Conversion — Wesley's Arminianism
historically considered.
V. METHODISM AND PREVIOUS MOVEMENTS . p. 57
Prophetism — Montanism — Monasticism — The Franciscan Revi
val—Wesley and St. Francis— Contrast of characters— The call of
the laity— Democratic significance— Similarity of methods— Identi
fication of perfection and joy— Wyclif and Wesley— Wesley and
Loyola — Modern Methodist doctrine of the Will.

ro CONTENTS
VI. METHODISM AND MYSTICISM . . p. 77
Wesley and the Mystics— Causes of his dislike— Similarity of
Methodism and Mysticism — Points of difference — The doctrine of
Stillness — The social factor — The truth of Quietism — The .need of
Mysticism.
VII. METHODISM AND PURITANISM p. 88
The danger of Dualism — Emancipation through the Oxford
Movement — Other results of the Oxford Movement — The
Lambeth Appeal — Methodism and other Nonconformist churches.
VIII. METHODIST ORGANIZATION . p. 95
Wesley and Anglican Separation — Its Presbyterian character —
Relation to primitive Church — Revival of the apostolate— Its
cessation in Methodism with Coke — Place of women workers.
IX. CONCLUSION . . . . p. 103
Where Christ is there is His Church.

The Place of Methodism in the
Catholic Church
i
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
IN the writing of history few will deny that the formation
of accurate generalizations is more difficult than the dis>
covery or narration of the true facts. Many writers have
been so impressed with the absence of law in human pheno
mena, or rather with the difficulty of discerning in phenomena
the regulative laws of progress, that they have denied the
possibility of any philosophy of history worth the name.
History, they assert, is but the fretful foam
Of vehement action without scope or term.
The need, they claim, is the accurate presentation of the
facts themselves. From these facts each student must
form his own conclusions; their value is little other than
the reflection of his bias, or the articulation of hopes that
are such stuff as dreams are made of.
Whether a philosophy of history is possible it is not our its
present purpose to discuss. Nevertheless we may maintain !>¦«¦*«>¦«
that if it is impossible this is not because of the crooked reality.
nature of the phenomena of history, but by reason of the
limitations of the powers of the student. The study of a
fact in nature demands the keenest observation of the
trained intellect. But no intelligence can reconstruct
more than the barest outlines of the past; again, we are all
too much a part of the present, with its struggles and tumults,
to understand fully that human comedy in which we our
selves are the actors. In history, as in all human matters,
we work in the dark, speculating upon, rather than proving,

12

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Eipeciall?
in the
history of
the Church.

Which
posits the
activitiesoi the
Holy Spirit.

the elemental passions and motives which have shaped the
destinies of centuries. That the forces which underlie the
activities of men are not blind, but rather are moving
towards some goal that as yet we do not see, by ways
which we cannot always discern, is, to the Christian at all
events, a self-evident truth. If we cannot prove this conclu
sion from our incomplete survey of history itself, if indeed
such catastrophes as the fall of Rome in the fifth century,
or the Great War that has recently devastated Europe,
seem to militate against it, nevertheless we deduce it from
the fundamental premisses of our faith. The kingdom of
God may not come with observation; yet we believe that
it is slowly rising in our midst. At times we catch glimpses
of the laws which underlie its growth; we see the Master-
builder laying deep the foundations, or building thereon an
imperishable structure. And if there are hours of doubt
and darkness, faith flings herself back on the promises
of God: Was it vain, Thy Son's deep anguish,
Shall the strong retain the spoil?
If for the Christian these things are so in the region of
general history, much more are they true of the history of
the Church. For the history of the Church is but the story
of the growth of the kingdom of God. However difficult
may be the discovery of the laws of that growth, that such
laws exist must be axiomatic for all who believe in the
kingdom itself. For in the study of ecclesiastical history
we find more than the mutable actions of weak or passionate
humanity. That in the affairs of the Church human nature
exists, passionate enough and mutable enough, we do not
deny. But, in considering the final design, it is the Potter
that counts even more than the clay; time may run slow,
but the wheel and the Hand that turns it are fashioning
an ordered result.
We begin, then, our survey of the place of Methodism in
the life-history of the Church with this postulate: that the
history of the Church is the story of the workings of the
Divine Potter; and that underlying all the phenomena of
spiritual life and thought we may discern, if we will, the
activities of the Holy Spirit. A sect of the thirteenth
century known as Joachimists— or the believers in a work

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

13

called The Introduction to the Eternal Gospel^ — claimed that
theirs was the age of the Holy Spirit, that the dispensation
of the Father had been succeeded by that of the Son, who
in His turn had given place to the Spirit. In one sense we
may acknowledge that Joachim di Fiori and his followers
spoke the truth. 'Nothing,' said Tertullian, 'is without
stages, and the Holy Spirit is ever advancing towards better
things.'2 We cannot understand any other stand
point for the ecclesiastical historian. The story of the
Church is not the dull record of strife, stagnation, decay, or
change; nor can it be constructed by the postulation of
a priori conditions to which all its phenomena must bend,
or be rejected. In any scientific study of the dispensation
of the Holy Spirit we must form our laws of the growth of
the kingdom, not by enunciating a priori dogmas, but by
observing the conditions under which He has worked who
has produced in different forms and diverse manners that
continuity of life of which in all ages He is the Lord and
Giver. To the student approaching the study of Church history
from this standpoint, the question of the place of Methodism,
or for that matter of any form of faith, assumes a new
meaning. The dogmatist, claiming a knowledge of essential
truth as pretentious as it is unwarranted, is eager to judge
a religious movement by the agreement of its record with
certain a priori notions — for instance, the dogma of Apostolic
Succession. The scientific historian, unable thus to brush
aside concrete facts because they do not fit in with his
prejudices, will patiently examine the phenomena in question
as part of a vast field of similar phenomena, all of which in
their different ways are manifestations of the one life. Every
communion of thinkers, every phase of faith, has its place
in and its relation to the great whole, and plays some part,
it may be prolestant and transient merely, it may be of
more lasting constructive value, in the progress and develop
ment of the one Holy Catholic Church.
To most of our readers these remarks will appear trite and
commonplace. Unfortunately the dogmatism of certain
theologians renders it necessary for us thus to claim that
1 In reality the work of a Spiritual Franciscan called Gherardo da
Borgo San Donnino (1254).
* On the Veiling of Virgins, c. 1.

Ecclesiastical
phenomenanot to be
judged by
a priori
standards.

The absurdity
of this method
when applied
to Methodism.

14 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
Methodism has a place in the development of the kingdom
of God, and, so far as we can judge from existing phenomena,
forms part of His divine plan. A Church which enfolds
some forty million adherents, which is to-day the largest
Protestant Church in the world, which has established
itself in every quarter of the globe, and which in the great
American Republic, especially in the Middle States, is the
dominant religious power, is so manifestly a fact in the
sphere of the spiritual that it must either have a meaning
and place, or we must give up the attempt scientifically to
study Church history from phenomena, and fall back upon
the narrow horizons and attenuated conceptions of the a
priori dogmatist.
The develop- One other postulate is involved in our position. For us
mant of ideas, the history of the Church is the record of development.
With the final form that the life and doctrine of the Church
may assume we are not concerned; this we are content to
leave to the Will of the Spirit, Whose immanence in all
spiritual matters we dare not deny. But running through
the ages we see ever-developing purpose, ever-expanding
ideas. The life of the Church is a life of ceaseless growth ;
not only externally as witnessed in expanding borders, in
missionary conquests, in nobler ethics; but internally, in
her ideas of truth, and in the development of the dogmas
in which she seeks to express them. As a result of this
development the implicit of one age becomes the explicit
of the next. Life in its richness is ever assuming varied
forms, while conserving the one mystical unity. These
new forms in their turn lead to the apprehension of deeper
ideas. A concrete example will best show our meaning.
The doctrine of the Trinity, so imperfectly apprehended in
the second century, becomes the clear conviction of the
fourth, acquiring in the so-called Nicene creed a terminology
not the less valuable because the outcome of new needs
forcing the Church for its definitions outside the Bible.
Theories of Atonement which to Gregory the Great or to
Anselm were convincing, necessarily gave place to other
ideas. Gregory's puerile conception of a redemption from a
debt due to Satan, with its repulsive addition that the
Devil made a bad bargain, was seen to be akin to Gnostic
Dualism. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, with its wholly
external and institutional conception, so satisfactory to the

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 15
institutional forensic age in which it was moulded, was
followed by the larger idea of Abailard, with its emphasis
upon reconciliation through personal fellowship with Christ.1
Thus every age, provided always that it has the necessary
continuum of life, contributes something to the unfolding
of the one eternal truth, to the making explicit the whole
consciousness of God. The question therefore underlying
any spiritual movement — Montanism, Monasticism, Puritan
ism, Methodism, and the like — is not the existence of
mechanical connexion with something which has preceded
it, whether in the first or nineteenth centuries, but is the
fact of its life ; the idea that the life embodies ; its con
tribution, temporary or permanent, to the total of truth and
to the heritage of mankind; the causes which have led it
to outlive its usefulness or have enabled it to take a more
enduring place among spiritual forces ; in a word, its
fidelity to the call of the Spirit of God by Whose breath it
was called into being, and Whose purposes its existence has
fulfilled. That accomplished, it may pass away like Mosaism,
or yield to higher forms which owe their life to its being.
From this standpoint of the Idea which Methodism repre- Ow
sents we would approach our present subject. After an £,r<X,mm*
examination into the place thereof in the life and thought of work.
the Church we shall touch upon certain doctrines that may
be regarded as corollaries of the primary ' idea.' Thence we
shall pass to the consideration of the similarities and differ
ence between Methodism and other movements which pre
ceded it. The relations of Methodism to Nonconformity, to
the Evangelical Revival in the Anglican Church, to the
Oxford Movement, and to Mysticism will also receive atten
tion. We shall conclude with claiming for the organization
of Methodism in its broad outlines fidelity to the principles
and practices of the primitive Church.
1 1 have expanded this thought more fully in a chapter on ' The
Development of Doctrine ' in The Chief Corner Stone, 1914. See also,
H. Rashdall, 'The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919)
c.5, who points out (p. 242 f.) that the idea of ransom due to 'Satan
was started by Irenaeus. The greatness of Abailard's theory of
the Atonement lies in its clear vision of ' the immorality of anything
which make forgiveness arbitrary' {op. cit. 359 f.). He was thus
one of the leaders in opposition to Augustinian Predestuwianism.
In this as in much else Abailard was strangely modern,

1 6 THE PLACE OF METHODISM

II
THE 'IDEA' OF EXPERIENCE
Few would deny that the primary Idea of Methodism lies
in its emphasis of experience. The content and value of
this ' idea " we shall investigate later ; our first business
must be the answer to the question: What was it that led
the Methodists thus to emphasize experience? What were
the causes, historical and theological, which produced the
' idea ' ? If it be objected that it were better to know first
in what the ' idea ' consisted, we answer that by investigating
the historical causes we shall obtain a more adequate con
ception of the contents of the ' idea ' itself, and of the place
which Methodism takes thereby in the development of the
Church.
Iu history : For our purpose it is not necessary that we go back
the Medieval farther than the Reformation.1 The Reformation, in its
Church. £nai significance, was the protest of individualism against
the excessive solidarity characteristic of the medieval world.2
In the Roman Church the individual qua individual had
little or no place. His salvation was conditioned from first
to last by his belonging to a corporation, in whose privileges
and functions he shared; through whose sacraments his life
was nourished; by whose graduated hierarchy, though but
the meanest servant of the Church, he was linked on to the
supreme head; whose saints, — their human sympathies
deepened by their glory, — shielded him by their merits
1 It would be interesting to work out the relation of Wesley to St.
Augustine. No one emphasized more the value of inward experience,
and that union with the Eternal Reality is the goal of all striving.
But as a matter of fact there is nothing more difficult than to
estimate the direct effect of St. Augustine upon any religious leader,
inasmuch as in one form or another the many-sided theology of St.
Augustine lies at the root of every movement in the Church, however
otherwise contradictory, Indirectly St. Augustine influences even
those who never read a line of his writings.
2 See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought (1895),
pp. 241 ff ; a very suggestive volume.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 17
and intercessions. Through this corporation alone was he
brought into touch with his Saviour ; outside the corporation
his soul was lost. Men were saved both in this world
and the life to come by their fitting in with the whole.
In the greatest of all medieval poems the salvation of Dante
is only achieved by a scheme which brings within its
compass universal man, and which takes us for its accom
plishment through all the circles of earth, heaven, and hell.
In this corporation, also, all national distinctions were
obliterated; the Church was majestically one in creed,
ritual, discipline, and language. The grandeur of the
idea few will dispute; its extraordinary hold for long
centuries upon the consciences of men testifies to the strength
of its appeal. In the Roman Church the individual, as
Faber assured us from his own experience, realized the peace
which passes all understanding as he thus escaped from the
burden of his individuality, and found rest from storm and
passion in the consciousness of his oneness with an innu
merable company of others, holier, wiser, stronger than
himself whose merits he vicariously shared.
This consciousness of solidarity fitted in with all the The
conceptions, political and philosophical, of the times. In ""'^y'""
politics the ruling idea was the figment of the Holy Roman ° "" " ' '
Empire, the dream of the unity of all men in one world-state,
whose heads, pope and kaiser, were the co-regents of God.
For as soul and body are but one, so also were pope and
kaiser in their mutual dependence. The one was the
antitype of the other; the emperor a civil pope, the pope
a spiritual emperor. But by how much more Christ is
greater than Caesar by so much more must the unity of
all in one Church exceed the unity of all in one Empire.
That this dream was scarcely ever realized is beside the
mark; it was characteristic of the Middle Ages that failure
to reconcile belief and practice led neither to subtle
questionings nor rebellion. So in church and state, in
action and in thought, for over a thousand years solidarity
was the root-idea of the life of Europe. By this conception
the Church had overthrown the unregulated individualism
of the barbarian invaders and built up once more order in
place of chaos. In social life this conception manifested
itself at first in the growth of feudalism, which on one
side of its theory is the attempt to give every man his_
2

r8 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
place in the one social economy; then later in the strength
and dignity of civic feeling and in the power and extent
of the guilds, whose Socialism, so opposed to competition
and individualism, appeals strongly to the twentieth
century.
Realism This same consciousness of solidarity is found1 in medieval
?"i- -je i philosophy. The battle of the Realist and Nominalist
individual. r VI
was no barren logomachy; reduced to its final terms it
became a conflict between the claims of the individual
and the universal; nor was it by an accident that Realism,
or the assertion of our participation in the universal, was
generally allied with orthodoxy.1 In view of the emphasis
attached by Methodism to experience we should do well to
note that Realism, at any rate in its later forms, stood for
the protest of the medieval mind against any doctrine of
illusion. The Realist held that mental ideas are in some
sense of the word strict realities — the explanation of this
gave rise to the thirteen different schools of medieval
Realism which Prantl has distinguished. Thus theologically
we may claim that Realism was a form of the doctrine of
Assurance, the affirmation, as Carlyle would have phrased
it, of the Everlasting Yes, sought by the reduction of the
objective world to certain fundamental unities with all
knowledge amalgamated in a scheme of salvation. With
the rise of the Cartesian philosophy and its doctrine of
innate ideas, Assurance, as we shall see later, would be
found in the reality of consciousness leaving ' our views of
the universe shamelessly partial.' 2
J"? Against this exaggeration of solidarity the Reformation
« o ma ion. wag a many.gjjjefj protest ; in its beginnings political more
than religious, social rather than moral, a revolt against an
all centralized yet omnipresent world-power which had out
lived the conditions of its birth. In place of the Holy
Roman Empire we see the rise of separate nations, each
determined to work out its life, political and religious, on
its own lines. Side by side with this growth of the new
1 The great exception to this alliance arose towards the close of
the fifteenth century when Nominalism gave a more plausible explana
tion than Realism of the mystery of Transubstantiation. The Nomin
alist, who held that the universal was a more flatus vocis, found it
easy to believe in the annihilation of the substance.
2 H. O. Taylor, The Medieval Mind [2nd ed., 1914), ii, 425.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 19
nations we see the loss of the old civic spirit, and the
destruction of the medieval guild. In place of Realism and
Nominalism, we find the Renaissance, with its return from
the search after the universal to the triumphs of individual
genius in scholarship, art, and literature ; the pictures of
Raphael and the works of Shakespeare the highest expres
sion; the marvellous unity of a Gothic cathedral a lost
ideal. Instead of a salvation conditioned by corporate
relations, we find the assertion by Luther of the paramount
importance of the inner life of the individual. For whatever
else justification by faith may mean it stands for the claim
that between the individual and his Saviour no corporation,
no priest, no sacrament, no saints may intervene. The
diverse creeds of the Reformation — and their very diversity
was one of the fruits of this triumph of individualism —
agree at any rate in this fundamental position. But when the
attempt was made by the Reformers to define more accurately
the relation of the individual to God then difficulties began.
For this question involved also many others of vital bearing
upon life and thought. If the individual's salvation was con
ditioned by his own ' faith ' — the technical name in
Protestant theology for this individual relation to God —
what becomes of the sacraments, how must we interpret
them; what becomes of the Church; what is the relation
of this faith to consciousness ; above all, what are the limits
and claims of authority, and wherein must that authority
lie? In the various solutions given to these questions we
find the origin and apologia of the different Protestant
churches. As regards authority, the Reformers did not, on the whole, The
claim this prerogative for the individual. Luther, it is Refo™el'•
true, seems at times to do so, especially in the liberty he authority.
asserts for every man to examine the Scriptures for himself,
in his claim that even General Councils may err, and by the
daring act of his marriage. But Luther's logic was over
ruled by the necessities of the age, and by the tendency of
his strong personality to identify truth with his own view of
it. The peasants' revolt, the excesses of the Anabaptists,
as well as his differences with Carlstadt and Zwingli, led him
to the assertion of an authority other than that of the
individual. For the most part the reformers found this
authoritv in the Scriptures. For an infajlible Church they

2p THE PLACE OF METHODISM
substituted an infallible Book, whose authority and contents
they received on grounds which they did hot trouble to
analyse — the analysis of which, in fact, was forbidden.
Others, again, as for instance the Dutch Church, asserted the
authority of an unchangeable symbol, and declared the
Netherland Confession as set forth in the canons of the
Synod of Dort (i 619), to be infallible, for the Cnuts who bid
the tides to cease their advance find their historical parallel
in every ecclesiastical assembly. The result either way was
the same. Though the individual's salvation was conditioned
by his own subjective act, authority was -still wholly external.
In Calvinism The position was so contradictory that it was impossible
all becomes tnat ;t coui(j De maintained. To an external authority
Calvin, falling back upon certain elements in the many-
sided theology of St. Augustine, added purely objective
conditions of salvation. This ceased to be the act of the
individual, and became the result of immutable decrees.
Strange as it may seem, this elimination of the individual
was the result of the very emphasis that the Reformation,
especially the theologians of Geneva, placed upon the
individual. On one side Calvinism stood for the emphasis
of individuality; it placed the individual absolutely face to
face with God; there was nothing, neither priest nor
Church, not even a Saviour, between. In this we see the
secret of the strong, if rugged and dour, manhood which it
has always produced, whether in Scotland or South Africa.
But this very strength of individuality resulted, by a
familiar spiritual paradox, from the overwhelming conscious
ness of the believer that he was absolutely nothing before God.
God and His Will were all and in all ; the individual was but
the channel for His motions. Whether in heaven or in hell
the meanest being exists merely for the pleasure of the
Eternal, his every action limited and conditioned before all
time by sovereign decree. All is viewed, as Spinoza — the
representative in philosophy of this creed-^-would phrase it,
sub specie aelernitatis; his own nothingness has existed
from all eternity, and forms part of an eternal scheme —
this last, paradoxically, no mean exultation for the individual
otherwise reduced to a mere ' worm.'
Thus the ultimate result of the Reformation, on the side
of Geneva at least, was the elimination of the individual
in the assertion of whose claims and efforts the Reformation

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 21
had begun. All had become once more external: an
external source of authority — not the Church, but the Bible ;
external conditions of salvation — not the individual's faith,
but immutable decrees. Nor could these conditions be altered
by aught that the individual might experience or accomplish.
Strip this creed of its religious power, eliminate from it The resultant
all sense of mystery, reduce it to frozen metaphysics and the Del8m
supremacy of reason, rob it of all the nobility which the
overwhelming consciousness of the greatness of God had
imparted to the merest ' worm ' that lay at His feet, and
the logical result is Deism, the fashionable creed of the early
years of the eighteenth century.1 For if all is immutable de
cree there is neither logic nor need in prayer or worship ; these
things are but the idle beating of the wings against the prison
bars. The idea of an unrelated and irresponsible God who
has foreordained all must be the dissolvent of any belief
in the Bible, viewed, as the Puritans viewed it, as the record
of His interpositions in the affairs of men. Where all is
decree and foreknowledge, miracle is of necessity impos
sible, and the life and atonement of Jesus, at best, a work of
supererogation. In a word, this unrelatedness will express
itself in the denial of the possibility of all the acts arid
processes whereby the individual soul has sought to establish
relations with his Creator and Redeemer.
In a reaction against this Deism, Methodism had one of The
its roots. Wesley destroyed Deism, not by his pen, but by
his deeds. The Deist had appealed to logic ; Wesley, leaving
the more logical issues to Butler and Berkeley, appealed to
the heart. In place of a frozen theology he gave us a living
experience, in which God was not hidden, neither far off,
but very nigh. God, said the Deist, is unrelated. Wesley
taught once more the great Pauline truth: relation 'in
Christ Jesus,' the redeemed soul conscious of its sonship to
the Father through the Holy Spirit. Prayer, said the Deist,
is illogical and absurd ; God is not a man that He should
change. Wesley's answer was to teach men how to pray,
1 Objection may be taken that Calvinism in the Presbyterians and
Independents did not lead to Deism. We answer that it led to Arian
ism and Socinianism, from which the step to Deism is riot great.
The literature of Deism is considerable. The reader may perhaps
content himself with J. Leland, View of the Principal Deistic Writers,
2 vols. (1745, ' 1764, r&>7).

Methodistreaction.

22

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

It* value
shown by the
history of
Deism in
France and
Germany.

and so to pray that whether God was changed or not their
relations to God were for ever changed. There, is nothing
mysterious, the Deist claimed, in Christianity. Wesley
brought men face to face with the mystery of the Cross.
Miracles, the Deist' added, are impossible, a manifest con
tradiction. Wesley appealed to experience itself, and
adduced the supreme miracle of life, the break in all con
tinuity exemplified in every conversion of a sinner into a
saint, that right-about-face of all the forces of a depraved
character the explanation of which is beyond the ken of
any merely natural system of ethics.
That in the suppression of Deism as a force in English
life Methodism played a leading part is fully acknowledged.
This is seen the more clearly if we turn to the after career
of Deism in France and Germany. In the works of Voltaire,
Diderot, and Rousseau we gather the ripe fruit of the teach
ing of Toland,1 Collins,2 Woolston,8 TindaL* and other
English Deists. Almost all the writers of the Encyclopedic
were profoundly indebted to their English predecessors,
whose teaching they carried still further, applying its
powerful dissolvents to the State as well as to religion.
All that is needful, said Rousseau, is to return from an
artificial civilization to primitive nature, to the happy
ignorance, transparent manners, and simple virtues of
uncultivated man. But in France there was no Evangelical
Revival to deliver her from a movement that ultimately
became an engine of destruction; no Wesley to show that
not in primitive man, but. in the God-man alone would
salvation be found. In Germany the effects of Deism were
less violent but more lasting. There the Leibniz- Wolffian
philosophy, with its system of microcosms and macrocosms,
its predetermined harmonies and their optimistic fatalism,
and its sentimental coquettings of the ego with its own self,
had predisposed the thoughtful to welcome the deistical
writers. ' Illumination ' (Aufklarung), to use the new
name under which Deism masked, rapidly dominated the
Lutheran Church, captured the schools and universities,
1 Christianity not Mysterious (1696).
2 A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian
Religion (1724); Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (1737).
3 Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (1727-9).
* Christianity as Old as Creation (1730; 2nd part never published).

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 23
crushed out Pietism — which, in spite of a respect less than
just for thought and science, should yet be reverenced for
the value it attached to the religion of experience — and
reduced Protestant Germany by its ' theology of the under
standing ' to shallow utilitarianism and irrational ration
alism. The deliverance effected in England, on the
intellectual side by Butler and on the spiritual by Wesley,
in Germany was but partially accomplished by Kant and
Herder. The teaching of Kant was a healthful rebuke
to the low ideals of illuminism, but brought in an
ethical legalism that knew nothing of the liberty of the
sons of God, and a speculative pantheism that was destructive
of all personal religion. But in Schleiermacher (1768- 1834)
this pantheism became so leavened with Christianity as to
lead the way to a more living apprehension of religion and
the gospel. The influence of the German poet Herder
(1 744-1 803) with his stress on the value of feeling in
religion and his love of Christianity as the beautiful, will
not for one moment compare with that of the English
evangelist consumed with the passion for souls, not for
the beautiful or cultured alone, but for common
sinners. The work of Friedrich Schleiermacher,1 if only because The Work of
of its vital affinities with the Methodist spirit, claims more Schleier-
than the passing mention of his name. For in estimating
the intellectual and spiritual forces which have released
the modern world from the bondage of hard and sterile
rationalism in religion the influence of Schleiermacher is
easily the most powerful and pervasive. This man of
encyclopaedic learning, with a dialectic skill rare in any
age, and enshrined in a profoundly religious nature, ' the
prince of theologians,' ' the father of modern scientific
theology,' presents in his personality and teaching the
dominant characteristics of Butler and Wesley combined.
He was the first Protestant theologian to grasp clearly
the significance lof the new situation created by the
Evangelical Revival in which Methodism was born. His
appeal to spiritual experience as fundamental in religion
became in the dawn of the nineteenth century the start-
1 For the following paragraphs on Schleiermacher (pp. 23-26), I am
indebted to Dr. F. Piatt, of the Wesleyan Theological College,
Birmingham.

24 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
ing point of the emphasis upon the ultimate values of
the spiritual consciousness which is so characteristic of
present-day religion and its theological interpretation.
It is significant also that Wesley and Schleiermacher
drew the influences that quickened their souls from a
common source. For each of them fellowship with the
Moravians — ' the truest Christian community which exists
in the outward world,' as Schleiermacher asserts, — became a
creative spiritual force. During the closing years of
Wesley's life Schleiermacher was a pupil in the Moravian
schools at Niesky and Barby. There he entered into
the personal experiences of inward religion which in John
Wesley had ripened earlier in the Aldersgate meeting
house. For Schleiermacher these experiences, pruned by
years of philosophic doubt and chastened by aesthetic
friendships among the Romanticists, became the inspira
tion of the epoch-making Addresses on Religion1 addressed
to 'its cultured despisers,' delivered in Berlin in 1798.
His These Addresses induce moods of the spiritual con-
Addresses , sciousness not unlike the confidence inspired in the early
Methodists by the singing of the hymns of Charles Wesley;
they are prose poems glowing with the enthusiasm of a
new discovery; a single note sounds through them; from
beginning to end they announce that religion is the im
mediate contact of the soul with God; religion is neither
dogma nor rite; it is living experience, making its home
below thought, even below consciousness, in the emotional
nature of man and reaching God in the surrender of
absolute dependence. Men felt that a new prophet had
arisen as the warm glow of spiritual certainty touched
their hearts and released their minds from the religion of
rational propositions frozen hard in post-Reformation
Symbolics. These Addresses, and the subsequent organiz
ing by Schleiermacher of his philosophical interpretation
of 'the theology of the warmed heart,' characteristic of
Methodism, into his great theological system have done
more than any other movement of thought to set the
Methodist experience in the rank and succession of
philosophies of religion now dominant in the modern
mind. Every great era in philosophical or theological
1 Reden uber Die Religion, 1799, 2nd edition, 1806. Translated
by Prof. Oman, Schleiermacher and Religion, 1893.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 25
thought has originated in a return of the human spirit to
its own depths.1 Modern theological construction, in
augurated on the one hand by Schleiermacher's Glaubens-
lehre, and verified on the other by the Methodist witness
and its doctrine of Assurance, is such a returning-point
in the history of Christendom. Mediated through Ritschl
and his school, the demonstration of Schleiermacher's
philosophical theology and the main insistence of Wesley's
evangelical Sermons, that Christianity cannot be realized
except through the Christian experience, holds the allegiance
of the most influential theological teachers of Great
Britain and America in our own generation. The re
juvenescence of Protestant theology is mainly due to these
twin forces. The great gain of Schleiermacher's influence,
which has been as creative in theology as Kant's has been
in philosophy, is that the fruitage of the Methodist Revival
has been garnered in a systematic teaching of the Christian
faith for a generation which prefers psychological rather
than metaphysical categories for interpreting to a scientific
age the personal experience and verities of the Christian
redemption. Schleiermacher had to face the same current miscon- His Affinities
ceptions concerning religion which met Wesley. And *i* Wesley.
he faced them by the same fresh appeal to the power of
living experience. The first of these was that religion
consists essentially in knowledge and was dependent for
verification upon the syllogisms of formal logic. This was
his inheritance from the elaborate system-builders of
later Lutheranism. Men of his day held this heritage in
open contempt. The " cultured despisers of religion ' to
whom Schleiermacher spoke, naturally correspond with the
similar group in England which had been reduced by the
arid Deism of the day to the position Butler describes in
the preface to the Analogy — ' it has come to be taken
for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so
much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at
length discovered to be fictitious.' To meet these Schleier
macher mingled with amazing skill and felicity the methods
of Wesley and Butler. He preached 'heart religion' with
1 cf. the ' know thyself of Socrates, the Cogito ergo sum of
Descartes, ' the categorical imperative ' of Kant, the empirical
appeal of Locke and Hume.

and Life.

26 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
such persuasive fervour that thousands were brought into
the personal experience of Christ as Saviour,1 and he
delivered in the newly founded University of Berlin the
Lectures on the philosophical interpretation of the direct
experiences of the soul from which his system of theology
was fashioned. The open secret of his teaching is the
order in 'which these two — experience and theology—-
stand. First comes the reality, which is religion; then its
interpretation, which is theology; for Christianity cannot be
antecedently demonstrated on purely rational grounds with a
view to experience. Religion is first enjoyed then explained.
Morality The second note in Schleiermacher's authority is his
opposition to the current tendency to regard religion as
merely an attitude subservient to morality. Here the
inherited tradition was from Kant, who had ' reduced
religion to a footnote to the text of morality.' Schleier
macher claimed for religion a universal and necessary
place in human nature such as Kant had claimed for
the categorical imperative of the moral law. Morality
issues from life; the religious feeling is the spring and
strength of the moral emotions, whether personal or social,
issuing in elevated character, or in ideals realized in
fellowship. Fundamentally this religious feeling in Chris
tianity is the consciousness of redemption. Only in a
personality and community conscious of the Christian
reconciliation can the moral order find its true standard
and constraint. How surely these claims accord with
Wesley's conceptions of salvation, and of Christian Per
fection as Perfect Love, as also with his ideal of social
fellowship in the common life of his societies, will be
obvious. Wesley's dictum, 'You cannot go to heaven
alone,' and Schleiermacher's insistence that the Christian
society is essential for the Christian experience illustrate
reciprocally true affinities between personal experience of
religion and a community of holy love which, as the
Kingdom of God, is the dream of the modern reformer.
In estimating the world forces to which Methodism has
contributed, and of which in turn it forms a part, it is fitting,
therefore, to join Wesley and Schleiermacher, though they
moved in strangely different spheres.
1 Among these was Neander, the ecclesiastical historian, who was
thus led out of Judaism into evangelical Christianity. f

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 27
The Deistic controversy was not without its good side: Methodism
the effort, however exaggerated and superficial, to make aml *e
use of reason as the gift of God for the discovery and inves- "eason.
tigation of truth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century
it was still necessary to vindicate the right of every man
to think freely. The error of Deism lay in the claim that
unassisted reason was sufficient for all human needs. The
danger of its opponents, especially if narrow-minded and
illiterate men, was rather the exaltation of faith into some
thing independent of reason. That Methodism has emanci
pated itself from this danger, though not without toil and
trouble, is due to the emphasis laid by Wesley throughout his
life upon logic and argument. In the case of other leaders
a religion that set out to overthrow the dogmas of rational
ism by its vindication of the claims of a living experience
might have degenerated into a disastrous appeal to emotion
and feeling. But Wesley, by teaching his followers to think,1
set before his societies a better ideal.
We must retrace our steps. There are other lines of The
development in thought and life which we should note. We and"™hc-*ity ¦
have pointed out that the question of authority was never The
settled by the Reformers, or rather was settled by them on Independents.
lines contradictory in some respects to the root idea of the
Reformation. It was impossible that such a settlement
could be permanent. The Brownists in the reign of Eliza
beth, the Independents of the Commonwealth, and the Angli
can Latitudinarians of the seventeenth century showed the
way to revolt. They claimed for the individual his com-
pletest freedom — ' any man,' said Archbishop Tillotson, him
self the son of a prosperous Nonconformist clothworker of
Halifax, 'that hath the spirit of a man would break with
any church in the world upon this single point,' — freedom
no longer hampered by external authority, whether of
organic Church, of priesthood, or even of inspired Book.
To the authority of this last it is true that the Independents
did lip-service. But by allowing each man to interpret the
oracles according to his inner light they really reduced
the objective to the subjective, and placed the seat of
1 See especially his Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason, in which
Wesley refuses to be misled by the specious argument of the book
of H. Dodwell (the younger), Christianity not founded on Argument

28 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
authority, as did the Quakers, in the inner light. In this
direction therefore we see once more the ground prepared
for a later appeal to experience.
Wesley's debt The appeal to experience of the Wesleys was bound to
to them,— differ in many respects both from the broad sweep of the
Platonists who called in Plotinus and other pagan
philosophers, as well as from the appeal of the Friends
to the inner light, and from that of the Independents
to the individual; it reflected, in fact, as we might expect,
the mixed sources from which it sprang as well as the
religious experiences through which they had passed. The
Wesleys were of sturdy Noncomformist ancestry on both
sides; their grandfather and great-grandfather had lived
harassed, distrustful lives under the infamous persecution
Acts of the times. Their parents, it is true, had turned
their faces on their kinsfolk, and taken refuge in the church
which had persecuted them ; but their belief in the authority
of that church is less apparent than the strong individuality
of judgement which led them in early youth to take this
step. The ' conventicle ' which Susanna Wesley, their
mother, at one time held in the Epworth parsonage showed
that though at the age of thirteen she had renounced her
father's dissent, — or rather the Socinianism into which she
had reasoned herself — she had not wholly forgotten in
later life her early training. The sons, John and Charles,
nurtured on High Church doctrine, recognized the authority
of an organic Church, but could not tear out their Puritan
inheritance of a strong belief in individual judgement, and
in the value and reality of individual experience.
And to the In this matter of authority we see one link between
Wesley and the Latitudinarians, of whom Bishop Stilling-
fleet and Archbishop Tillotson may be taken as the represen
tatives. At first sight no two movements can seem further
apart than that of the Cambridge Platonists, cultivating
a cloistered piety and learning amid the upheaval of the
England of the Civil War and the Restoration, and the
active, uncloistered missionary life of Wesley. In this
world of limitations intensity and breadth can rarely be
found working together, and Methodism undoubtedly made
for the first rather than the second. Nevertheless the
Latitudinarians, in spite of their dread of all enthusiasm
and their desire that all things might be conducted with

Latitudin
arians

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 29
' moderation,' x in spite of what a contemporary called ' their
virtuous mediocrity,' were not without their influence upon
the Evangelical Revival. By their stress upon psychological
as distinct from dogmatic interpretation they prepared the
way for the appeal to experience. But the main work of
the Latitudinarians was the advocacy of toleration and
comprehension based upon their doctrine of the place of
reason in religion. Now throughout life Wesley 'never
ceased to be comparatively indifferent to orthodoxy, so
long as a man had the witness of the Spirit, proving itself
in works of faith.'2 Bishop Stillingfleet's Irenicum (1659)
originally published in defence of compromise with the
Presbyterians, led Wesley to believe in a Church constituted
upon a broad and comprehensive basis, tolerant of different
parties within its communion, including his own societies.
He would have protested as strongly as Chillingworth (T1644)
against minor differences being made the cause of loss of
unity. We believe also that he would have approved of
Tillotson's four cautions as to the proper limits within which
the right of private judgement should be exercised.8 The
archbishop's insistence upon the necessity of guides and
teachers and of due submission to authority was carried
out by Wesley in the formation of his societies. However
much the two might have differed on the doctrines of the
Atonement, of Future Punishment, or of Assurance — this
last to Tillotson a matter of logical proof, or reasonable
attestation — in their churchmanship the two were not far
apart. Through Tillotson also, or rather through the spirit
of the age of which Bishop Butler in this matter was the
chief representative, there crept into Methodism an unwhole^
some emphasis upon the prudential value of religion. The
self-love which Butler analysed in his Sermons (1726) the
'be good and then you will be happy ' of popular writers,
was characteristic of a utilitarian and commonplace century,
whose ' enthusiasts ' even had little sympathy with mysticism.
From this inheritance Methodism is not yet wholly
delivered. 1 See G. Burnet, History of My Own Time, ed, Oxford, 1823, i. 323 ff.
For the Cambridge Platonists see Diet. Rel. Ethics, iii. 167 f.
5 C. J. Abbey and J. H. Overton, The English Church in the
Eighteenth Century, (1878, 1881, 1896) i. 8,
sTillotson, Works, ii. 265-7,

3°

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Wesley'sonion of
authority and
experience,

Philosophy
in the
eighteenthcentury.

The conjunction of belief in the authority of an organic
church with insistence upon the value and reality of individual
experience as the final test, gives to Methodism its special
position in the catholic Church. We have the root idea
of the Independent joined to the root idea of the Anglican, a
primary insistence upon the value of the subjective joined
to the constant maintenance of the objective authority of
the Church. To plead that Wesley himself held con
tradictory views as to wherein lay the objective authority
of the Church is futile. Whatever may be said about the
logic of his churchmanship, — for he rowed one way while
looking another, — it cannot be gainsaid that he insisted
throughout life upon external authority as well as
upon inner illumination. If his enemies claimed, not with
out some grounds for their statement, that that external
authority was but himself, they would really do him an
injustice. Even in his most daring acts of assertion of
individual authority, resulting at times, as in his ordination
in 1 784 of bishops for America, in his violation of the canons
of the Church to which he professed allegiance, he believed,
rightly or wrongly, that he was but carrying out the powers
given to him as a presbyter of that Church. In this double
allegiance to the inner illumination as the final court of
appeal and to an ill-defined outer authority we see one
secret of the struggles which rent Methodism after Wesley's
death, producing in England the different types of
Methodism whose bringing together again into one is as
much to be desired as it is difficult to accomplish. Only
slowly, by mutual concession and under the pressure of
a more imperious duty, do two principles so diverse in
origin and tendency learn to accommodate themselves within
one system.
Thus far we have dwelt upon movements within the
Church. But there was another movement the under
standing of which is of the utmost importance. We allude
to philosophy. That Wesley, though a keen logician, knew
little or nothing of philosophy is beside the mark. The
Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, is potent alike in the uncon
scious and the conscious; only here and there do we find
souls able to withstand its influence — rari nantcs in gurgite
vaslo. As a matter of fact Methodism in spite of itself was
profoundly influenced by the drift of philosophy in England.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 31
Both alike appealed to experience; many would claim that
both alike exaggerated that appeal by their carelessness in
laying down the limits of its validity.
The appeal of philosophy to experience originated with It* appeal to
Descartes. In this matter, as in some of its issues, Cartesi- exPenence'
anism is the counterpart to the Reformation. By his great
dictum, Cogito ergo sum (' I think, therefore I am '), the
French thinker laid the sure foundations of ontology. As
some Methodist doctrines must find their ultimate justifica
tion in this identification of consciousness and reality, it were
interesting to speculate what would have been the result if
the extension by Malebranche of the Cartesian doctrine into
a mystical vision of all things in God had established itself
in Wesley's Oxford under the lead of that warm admirer
of Cambridge Platonism, John Norris of All Souls.1 But
the speculation is useless, for Oxford had followed the lead
of the Jesuits and banned Cartesianism,2 leaving English
philosophy to develop the Cartesian argument on lines of
reaction peculiar to itself. Hobbes and Locke twisted the
whole matter into one of deductive psychology. In
introspection, the examination of the contents of the mind
and feelings, they had endeavoured to find the grounds of
validity of thought and being. Such an effort was bound
to lead to nescience, as indeed we see when Hume, with
unflinching logic, carried on the work of Locke and Hobbes
to its legitimate conclusion. Introspection as a method
for the discovery of truth cannot but end, as he showed, in
the demonstration of its own impotence. The analysis of
mind resolves all into fleeting sensations, in which we can
find neither permanence of the ego nor warrant of belief
in aught objective, whether God, morality, or self.. Add
to this that Hobbes by his divorce of religion from reason
had made personal religion impossible. The ' waking ' of
Kant from his ' dogmatic slumbers ' saved philosophy from
the impasse into which the English school had thus led it.
By his categories of thought and his appeal to ' the
categorical imperative,' Kant demonstrated once more the
necessity of recognizing the authority both in ontology and
ethics of that which lies external to ourselves, the contents
1 See his Reason and Religion, 1689, pp. 187-194.
5 The Cambridge Platonists accepted Cartesjanism in the main.

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Wesley's
philosophicalposition.

His claim
for the
validity of
introspection.

of which can never be discovered by analysis or
introspection.1 But we are anticipating. Wesley knew nothing of Hume
or Kant; the Zeitgeist influenced him before Hume had
shown its logical issue, or Kant pointed out the more excel
lent way. Nevertheless in any survey of English thought the
place of Wesley cannot be neglected. For his appeal to
experience was not, as Warburton and other writers of the
eighteenth century urged, mere ' enthusiasm,' much less was
it the outcome of mysticism. In this appeal he was at one,
however unconsciously, with the English school, with an
important difference. The philosophers had confined them
selves too strictly to intellectual and sensational factors.
Wesley pleaded, though not of course in so many words,
for an enlargement so as to embrace spiritual phenomena
of the content of the mind to which the philosophers applied
their method of introspection. In modern terms, Wesley
claimed that spiritual phenomena have a reality of their own
which neither the scientist nor the psychologist can safely
ignore. Be this last as it may, there can be no doubt of Wesley's
claim for the validity of introspection. Untroubled by
any doubt as to the limitations of his method, unconscious
how completely he was in sympathy with the philosophic
drift of the age, profoundly unaware that that drift must
end in absolute nescience, Wesley made his appeal to
spiritual experiences and feelings, and claimed that in
these we may find objective reality. We see him time
after time putting his own soul under the microscope of
his relentless self-analysis, and accepting the results as the
authoritative decisions of God. To the dangers of this
theory, as afterwards illustrated by Hume, and to the cor
rection which time has applied, we shall return later.

1 On this section the student may be referred to T. H. Green, Intro-
duction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (1874); E. Caird,
Kant. (1889); the article on Cartesianism by E. Caird in Encyc. Brit.
(9th ed.); and the article on Descartes in Hastings' Diet, of Religion
and Ethics, iv. 643 f.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

ni
THE DOCTRINE OF ASSURANCE

OJ

WESLEY'S appeal to experience, though many-sided, is
known in the main, in its theological, aspects, as the doctrine
of Assurance. This was the fundamental contribution of
Methodism to the life and thought of the Church. The
question of the forgiveness of sins, of the soul's relation to
God, even the existence of the Trinity itself, was answered
by an appeal to one's own consciousness — not the universal
consciousness of men, but the enlightened consciousness of
the few, the spiritually-minded, to whom God had thus
given a ' special understanding.'1
The manifest difficulty of this restriction Wesley did not
attempt to meet; he would have fallen back for justifica
tion on the authority of St. Paul.2 He proclaimed with no
uncertain sound, not only that a man may know that
his sins are forgiven, but that he has within himself the
witness to his own relation to God.3 In his own conscious
ness he may find the certitude of the things wherein he
believes, of his pardon, adoption, and sonship. One re
striction Wesley made, of great importance in its bearing
on the religious controversies of the age : this consciousness
was no assurance of future perseverance;4 it was strictly
limited to the immediate content of the mind or soul.
Methodists to-day, and, for that matter, Christians in Tne
many other branches of the One Church, are so familiar fj^doetrin**
with this position, at any rate in some of its bearings, that
they find it difficult to account for the antagonism which
the doctrine at first aroused. They hardly realize how new
it was as a working principle of life. They forget the time
it took for Wesley himself to learn the great truth. The
disgust of the age with the first advocates of this doctrine
1 Methodist Hymn-Book (1904), No. 120. In all references to the
Hymn-Book I refer only, unless otherwise stated, to hymns of John
or Charles Wesley or hymns approved and adopted by them.
2 1 Cor. ii. 6; et passim.
5 Hymn-Book, 346, 368.
* Hymn-Book, 448 : ' Ah I Lord, with trembling I confess
A gracious soul may fall from grace.' 3

34 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
is not difficult to explain. Cultured society was largely
under the domination of the Deists. Religious certitude in
the sense of inward experience of the Holy Spirit's working
was not professed even by the godly. By the majority of
the writers of the age, including such Churchmen as War-
burton, all reference to the inner light of spiritual discern
ment was regarded with distrust as 'enthusiasm.' But
here were men, not many wise, not many noble, but the
base-born and erstwhile ungodly, the stonemason Nelson,1
the cobbler Olivers, common • soldiers as Haime, Stani-
forth and Bond, swearers and lewd livers as the miners of
Kingswood, who ran full tilt at the fundamental doctrine
of Deism, as they sang, with no uncertain sound :
My God, I am Thine,
What a comfort divine,
What a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine;
or unconsciously unfolded their philosophy:
We know, by faith we surely know,
The Son of God is come,
Is manifested here below,
And makes our hearts His home ;
To us He hath, in special love,
An understanding given,
To recognize Him from above
The Lord of earth and heaven.
Butler and All this was directly contrary to the spirit of the age,
Locke. ag expressed by Locke in the well-known passage that opens
his chapter on ' Enthusiasm,' with its warning that
We must not entertain any proposition with greater
assurance than the prop it is built upon will warrant.
Whosoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain,
receives not truth in the love of it; loves not truth for
truth's sake, but for some other by-end. For the evidence
that any proposition is true (except such as are self-
evident) lying only in the proof a man has of it, what
soever degrees of assent he affords it beyond the degree
of that evidence, it is plain that all the surplusage of
assurance is owing to some other affection, and not to the
love of truth.2
1 For the story of Nelson and others the student should read the
invaluable Lives of the Early Methodist Preachers (6 vols., 1865),
re-issued as Wesley's Veterans (7 vols., 191 4).
2 Human Understanding, Bk. iv. c. xix.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 35
Nor was it in accord with the mere probabilism of Butler's
Analogy. To some extent also the antipathy to the doctrine
was political. The staunch Toryism of the age felt that there
was danger to the Constitution in the presumption of ignorant
underlings to a knowledge denied to their betters. We
see this clearly in the well-known letter of the Duchess of
Buckingham, the illegitimate daughter of James II., to the
Countess of Huntingdon:
I thank your ladyship for the information concerning
the Methodist preaching; their doctrines are most repul
sive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and
disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endea
vouring to level all ranks and to do away with all
distinctions, as it is monstrous to be told that you have a
heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the
earth. This is highly offensive and insulting.
After this we are not surprised to learn that the Methodist
Edward Greenfield of St. Just, Cornwall, who had been
notorious for cursing, swearing and all manner of wickedness,
after his conversion was 'adjudged to banishment.' Wesley,
who records this, inquired the reason from
'a little gentleman at St. Just. He said: Why, the
man is well enough in other things, but his impudence
the gentlemen cannot stand. Why, sir, he says he knows
his sins are forgiven.'
At first, also, Wesley, as he acknowledged in his old
age, preached the doctrine in an uncharitable and exagger
ated form: j j ! j n i |<$| [#'TH
When fifty years ago my brother Charles and I, in the
simplicity of our hearts, taught the people that unless
they knew their sins were forgiven they were under the
wrath and curse of God, I marvel they did not stone us.
But this last was precisely what many of the people at
tempted. Nor must we overlook the antipathy of the Englishman Novelty of
in every age to a new idea, especially in the realm of tne doctrine.
religion. To the German new ideas are as the wine of
life, and he is in danger of becoming intoxicated by them;
the average Englishman on the contrary shuns them as
poison. And the novelty of this idea cannot be gainsaid.
Never before in the history of the Church since the writings
of St. Paul and the exultant ' we know ' of the Epistle of

36 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
St. John,1 had the doctrines of Assurance been so clearly
enunciated.
Th. This last point is so important that we shall do well
Medieval to pause for a moment and examine the matter. As re-
Chureh. gards the position of the Medieval Church there can be
no mistake. St. Augustine, it is true, whom Harnack
rightly calls the first real psychologist,2 had so described
his own experiences that all succeeding generations have
found in his Confessions the history of their own wanderings.
But it was not the experiences of St. Augustine with his
emphasis on the inward push of the soul God ward that
appealed to the medieval Church, but his conviction of an
imperial system as the instrument of grace in the midst
of a ruined world. To the medieval Church the doctrine
of Assurance was altogether contradictory to the whole
scheme of indulgence, penance, purgatory, and sacerdo
talism in general by which salvation was conditioned. We
see this clearly brought out in the tale of one of the saints
and doctors of the Church, Gregory the Great, to whom a
lady of the bedchamber at the court of Constantinople wrote
to say that she could have no peace until Gregory assured
her that it was revealed to him that her sins were forgiven.
To this the pope replied that she had required of him a
matter that was both difficult and unprofitable —
because thou oughtest not to become secure about thy
sins, except when, in the last day of thy life, thou shalt
be able no longer to bewail them. But until that day
comes, thou oughtest, ever suspicious and ever fearful,
to be afraid of faults and wash them with daily tears.3
Any other view, in fact, would have been destructive of the
priestly machinery of Rome, and incompatible with the
emphasis of probation and merit which Gregory did so
much to establish. In the official theological textbook of
the Middle Ages, Peter Lombard's Sentences, we are
expressly warned that ' to hope for anything without merit
is not hope but presumption.'4 As such the doctrine of
Assurance received the condemnation of the Council of
*I John, i. i, 5; ii. 3, 13, 14, 20, 27; iii. 1, 2, 14, 19; iv. 2, 6,
16; v. 2, 13, 18, 19, 20.
2 Hist. Dog. (3rd ed. 1905) v. 112.
% Epp. vii. 25.
4 Sentences, bk. iv„ dist. t6, 1,

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 37
Trent in spite of the pleading of the Scotist Ambrosius
Katherinus for the recognition of the certitudo gratiae
against the Thomists:1
No one (ran the decree) can know with a certainty of
faith which cannot be subject to illusion, that he has
obtained the grace of God . . Except by special revela
tion no one can know whom God hath elected.5
In modern Romanism, as developed by Alphonso Liguori,
the most influential Roman theologian of the last three
centuries, Assurance, it is true, has a place; but it is the
assurance which comes from the absolute authority of a
father-confessor.3 In this survey of the medieval Church we have been too
sweeping. We have forgotten the Mystics. With the
Mystics a doctrine of Assurance was a necessity; it was
part of their constant protest that the kingdom of heaven
is within.4 But to the Mystics, and Wesley's debt to them,
we shall return later.
If from the Roman Church we turn to the Reformers Wyclif.
we find the same result, though in a different form. Of
this no instance can be more instructive than Wyclif, who,
however, in this was not original, taking his doctrine for the
most part from Archbishop Bradwardine5 and St. Augustine.
One of the mistakes of Wyclif's scholastic method is to
identify too completely knowing and being; but knowing
with him is a purely intellectual act, totally distinct from
consciousness or assurance. As with Wyclif " charity ' is
the correlative of ' grace,' we are not surprised that he
should claim that ' working by right life, ended after God's
will, maketh a man God's child'; but the assurance of
this he denies even more vehemently than St. Gregory.
1 Thomas Aquinas, following St. Gregory, made certainty the result
of a divine revelation, ' revelat Deus hoc aliquando aliquibus ex
speciali privilegio ' (Summa, II, i., qu. 112, art. 5). See the admir
able article by Dr. Tasker on Certainty in Diet. Relig. Ethics, iii.
325 f-
2 Concil. Trident, vi. cc. 9, 12, 13. Cf. J. A. Moehler, Symbolism
(Eng. Trans., 1894,) 154 ff. 5. Paul craint de n'estre pas sauve is
the title of a work by the Jesuit Richeome (Oeuvres, 1628, i. 627).
3 Harnack, History of Dogma, vii. 108.
* See infra p. 80.
5 See Bradwardine's de Causa Dei contra Pelagium, ed. H.
Savile, itig.

38 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
No man, he claims, not even a pope, ' wots whether he be
of the church, or whether he be a limb of the fiend.' As
a corollary he denies that 'the church can be called the
whole body (universitas) of faithful travellers,' nor will he
allow that 'Christ is the head of all men, both of the
faithful and the unfaithful' as Thomas Aquinas had done,
but claims that this headship is restricted to the predes
tinate. All that he will grant is that 'as each man shall
hope that he be safe in bliss, so he should suppose that
he be a limb of Holy Church.' The stern doctrines of
Wyclif with his belief, inherited from Bradwardine, of
God's unchangeableness in love or hate allowed him no
other outlook. Hus in Bohemia — in this as in so much
else the mere echo of Wyclif — and the later Lollards in
England, followed his lead.1
Calvin. With Calvin as with Wyclif a logical doctrine of Assur
ance is impossible; for inasmuch as the source of salva
tion is external, in the immutable decrees, the certitude of
salvation must take the form of a special external revelation,
as in the theology of Gregory the Great and Thomas
Aquinas. A revelation of election to damnation is con
tradictory to the constituents of human nature — that way
madness lies. A consciousness of election to salvation is
possible; 'the enjoyment of their election is in some
measure communicated ' to the elect when they are called,
and, according to the Westminster Confession :
this certainty is not a bare, conjectural, and probable
persuasion, grounded upon a fallible hope, but an
infallible assurance of faith.
But the Helvetic Confession shows the loophole for doubt :
' If thou believest and art in Christ, hold without doubt
that thou art elect.' Now, Calvin's conception of human
nature necessitates the possibility of illusion, and this leads,
as Calvin owns, to the tortures of anxiety, ' the constant
struggle of the faithful with their own distrust.' ' If we
attempt to penetrate to the secret ordination of God we
shall be engulfed in that profound abyss.' Thus the whole
doctrine of Assurance is given away, for, as Calvin owns, the
1 For a fuller analysis of the teaching of Wyclif see my Dawn of
the Reformation,, i. 176, 215, also my article on Wyclif in Hastings,
Did. of Religion and Ethics. I hope shortly to publish a com
prehensive examination of the life and teaching of Wyclif.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 39
believer cannot help asking the question, ' What proof have
we of our election?' Hence the Westminster Confession,
and the Savoy Declaration of 1658 after it, claim that —
this infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence
of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and
conflict with many difficulties, before he be partaker
of it.1
When we turn to Luther we are met with a difficulty. Luther.
The doctrine of Assurance seems at first sight clearly bound
up alike with Luther's revolt against the medieval doctrine
and practice of merit, and with his cardinal principle of
justification by faith. What, for instance, could be nearer
the Methodist doctrine of Assurance than the following:
Faith is a living deliberate confidence in the grace of
God, so certain that for it one could die a thousand
deaths. And such confidence and knowledge of divine
grace makes us joyous, intrepid, and cheerful towards
God and all creation.
It is impossible for one who hopes in God not to
rejoice; even if the world falls to wreck he will be
undismayed under the ruins.
Thou must have heaven and be saved already before
thou canst do good works.
But even more than in individual passages the doctrine
of Assurance is expressed in the salient facts of Luther's
spiritual life. With the great German in his strength, as
any reader of his Letters* may see for himself, religion is
not so much a doctrine as an experience, the certainty that
by faith in Jesus Christ he had a gracious God. We see
him perhaps at his best in his touching letter of consolation
to his mother in her last illness:
You, dear mother, know the foundation of your
blessedness, Christ Jesus, who will never fail us, for He
is the saviour of all who, in their deep need, call upon
His name . . So we may be full of joy, and when sin
frightens us we may say, ' I will not listen to thy alarms,
1 See Calvin, Op. iii. 24, § 3, fol. 353, c. 2, § 17, fol. 198, or the
Consensus Genevensis, I Jan. 1552, in B. J. Kidd, Docs, of the Con
tinental Reformation (191 1) 643 f. W. Walker, Creeds of Congreg
ationalism (1893), p. 385..
* These can now be read in a selected English edition, translated
by Margaret A. Currie (1908).

views of faith.

40 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
but to my Saviours word of consolation. This is my
stay; upon it I will depend. It will not deceive me.1
With Luther all real life and blessedness is the outflow of
this certainty. Moreover his great historic cry at Worms,
' Gott helfe mir, Ich kann nicht anders,' is the eternal
voice of humanity, falling back upon the fundamental
experiences of the soul as the justification of action.
H" "^"P^ Why, then, it may justly be asked, did not the doctrine
of Assurance become with Luther not merely a recognized
part of Protestant theology, but a real factor in the life of
the Protestant churches? And probably it would have so
become had Luther always been careful to emphasize the
truth he undoubtedly held in his better moments, that
faith is no mere intellectual acceptance of Christ and His
atoning death, even though that acceptance be of a strictly
' apprehensive ' or personal kind, but involves a spiritual
incorporation of the soul with his Saviour. But Luther's
conflict with the ' Enthusiasts ' and Anabaptists as well as
his controversy with Zwingli led to a disastrous obscura
tion in his primary positions. Even in his lifetime there
were some who regarded his teaching on religious certainty
as defective. As Luther grew older his conception of
faith became more and more intellectual, till at last it com
prised little beyond the assent of the mind to certain articles
of an orthodox creed. In his later years Luther's theology
grew almost as scholastic as that of the Scotists and
Thomists whom he set out to slay, and Melanchthon pur
sued still farther the same mischievous course. When faith
is thus reduced to the assent of the intellect it ceases to have
that guarantee or assurance which faith can have only when
it is the consciousness of the soul transformed with the
passion of love. This is seen clearly when we remember
that the identification of faith and belief generally leads to
the degradation of morals into a subordinate place — as
alas! in that great blot upon the character of Luther, his
justification of the bigamy of Philip of Hesse. But when
actions become a secondary element in salvation, assurance
— a consciousness resulting from the whole life, one of the
elements in which, as Wesley would phrase it, is the witness
1 Currie op. cit., 265; cf. the strong Arminian tone of his letter of
July 20, 1528, to one doubting his el«cti»n to eternal life, it. 17* f.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 41
of our own spirit1 — is bound to be eliminated. The later
history of the Lutheran Church, in many of its aspects, is
the record of the desolation caused by this narrowing
faith to pure doctrine. Many Lutheran theologians have
dwelt on the ' testimonium Spiritus Sancti, less as the
inward assurance of personal salvation than as the guarantee
of the truth of Scripture, and indeed of Christian theology.'3
Nor must we forget that, in his battle with Erasmus, Luther,
exaggerating the truth which lay so near to his heart of
salvation by grace without merit, affirmed in almost reck
less language the impotence of the will. Predestination by
divine grace, he declared, was unconditional. All things
which happen happen by necessity, the treachery of Judas
as well as the conversion of St. Paul, Melanchthon, it is
true, who hated extremes, broke away from this disastrous
theory of the complete passivity of man in conversion and
the deadness of his will by propounding his doctrine of
synergism, a sublimated type of semi-Pelagianism in which
he gave to the human will the power of seeking after
grace. But the mischief of degrading faith into assent
was already accomplished.3
When we turn from the Continental Reformers to the Anglican
Anglican Church we meet with the same difficulty as in Cnuron'
the case of Luther. The doctrine of Assurance is undoubt-
1 Wesley defines this as ' the testimony of our own conscience
that G°d hath given us to be holy of heart, and holy in outward
conversation. It is a consciousness of our having received in and
by the spirit of adoption the tempers mentioned in the word of
God as belonging to His adopted children.'
2 Tasker, op. cit., 327, who, however, points out the exceptional
place given to the doctrine by the Erlangen School, especially
F. H. R. von Frank in his System of Christian Certitude (Eng. trans.
1886). Frank seems to have gone so far as to derive Christian
truth from Christian certainty.
3 For a study of Luther's doctrine I may refer to C. Beard, Reforma
tion in its Relation to Modern Thought, 3rd ed. 132 ff. ; Luther,
Works, ed. Walch, x. 1314, 1341, viii. 2623 ff., espec. viii. 2660.
Also Augsburg Confess, art. iv. ; Harnack, Hist. Dogma, vii. 168-267.
T. M. Lindsay, History of the Reformation (1906), i. 426-88;,
R. Seeberg, Dogmengeschichie, and F. Loofs, Leitfaden zum Stud.
d. Dogm. (1906). In passing one may note that Wesley in his
treatment of Luther shows little understanding or sympathy (cf.
Journal, ed. 1864, i. 29*).

42 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
edly taught, at any rate inferentially, both by its great
divines and in its Homilies} As illustrations we may
give the following from the Homilies:
The Spirit which God hath given us to assure us that
we are the sons of God, to enable us to call upon Him
as our Father.
Have a sure and constant faith ; not only that the
death of Christ is available for all the world, but that
He hath made a full and sufficient sacrifice for thee, a
perfect cleansing of thy sins, so that thou mayest say
with the apostle, ' He loved thee and gave Himself for
thee.' For this is to make Christ thine own, and to apply
His merits unto thyself.
Faith is a sure trust and confidence that God both
hath forgiven and will forgive our sins.
Even more striking is a passage in Hooker which seems to
have escaped Wesley's notice:
God hath left us infallible evidence whereby we may
at any time give true and righteous sentence upon our
selves. We cannot examine the hearts of other men,
we may our own. ' That we have passed from death to
life, we know it,' saith St. John, 'because we love our
brethren. I trust, beloved, we know that we are not
reprobates, because our spirit doth bear us record that
the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is in us.2
From such statements as the above, which might easily
be multiplied, the transition is not great to the Methodist
doctrine of Assurance :
That persuasion which is given by the Holy Spirit to
penitent and believing persons, that they are now ac
cepted of God, pardoned and adopted into God's family.
Nor must we overlook the thousands of lives in whom assur
ance was a veritable fact. ' The inward witness, son,' said
the dying Samuel Wesley to his son John, 'the inward
witness, this is the proof, the strongest proof of Christianity.'
Nevertheless the fact remains that, whatever may have
been the doctrine, explicit or implicit, of the Anglican
Church, Wesley's doctrine of Assurance was looked upon as
a dangerous innovation, the formulation of a new heresy, or
1 Wesley gives several passages in his Earnest Appeal and Farther
Appeal. In 1739 he issued a tract containing all these passages,
which ran through thirteen editions before 1770,
2R. Hooker, Works, ed. Keble (1874), iii. 673.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 43
the introduction on a wider basis of the Quaker doctrine
of the ' Inner Light.' Even leaders in the Church joined
in the popular outcry, and that not merely because of cer
tain exaggerations which they claimed to detect in Wesley's
teaching. In reality the whole story forms another illus
tration of the familiar truth, that it is not the same thing
for an article of faith tc have a place in the creeds and
formularies of a Church, and for that same article to be
a living factor in its life. The working creeds of a Church
are by no means the full contents of its official symbols.

44

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

IV,

THE HISTORIC WORK OF METHODISM

Modern
science and the
appeal to
experience.

In this appeal to experience — especially by his doctrine
of Assurance, taken in the main, without undue stress upon
mere detail — we believe that Wesley has made a lasting
contribution to the life and thought of the universal Church.
In this appeal we find the historic work and place of
Methodism. To this appeal we trace the outburst of exul
tant song which revolutionized the worship of all English
churches. Once let Methodism as a church lose this note,
and its historic justification has perished. This conscious
ness has given to its preaching its greatest power, is the
explanation of its fervid evangelistic appeals, lies at the
root of its special institution of the class-meeting, is the
essential qualification demanded from all candidates for
its ministry, and is one of the secrets of its hold upon the
masses. In this emphasis of experience lies also one cause
of the tendency towards superficial disintegration so un
fortunately illustrated in the history of Methodism in
England in the half century after Wesley's death. For a
living, vivid experience is naturally unwilling to be regulated
by rules and authority or to be cramped within the bounds
of the institution ; in other words, the religion of experience
is the complete expression of that individualism the desire
for which, as we have already seen, lay at the root of the
Reformation. The religion of experience-
battles everywhere with authority, with the dogmas of
infallibility, and the dogmas of agnosticism, with the
dogmas of arrogant assertion, and the dogmas of confi
dent denial.1
Before we proceed to consider the dangers and safeguards
of the doctrine of Assurance, it may be well to point out
how completely the emphasis placed by Wesley upon ex
perience is in accord with the best scientific thought of the
times. The fact that two centuries ago Locke could deny
the certainty of physical knowledge, and insist that such
1 C. J. Little, Christianity and the Nineteenth Century (1902), 48.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 45
knowledge hardly went beyond particular observations and
vague probabilities, has become almost incredible to a
generation which builds upon science as though it were
the rock of ages. We see also in the doctrine another
illustration of what Prof. James calls ' the admirable con-
gruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the
mind.'1 If we have read aright the drift of thought in the
last thirty years, especially as set out in the writings of T. H.
Green and of Bergson, it has set in steadily towards the
recognition of the reality and value of the phenomena of
experience. Green's doctrine of the reproduction of the
Eternal Consciousness in our consciousness has its echo in
the lives of thousands who could never understand his
Prolegomena to Ethics. Tolstoy is now not alone in his claim
that faith is among the forces by which men live, ' without
which I myself would not exist.' The days when belief
was explained as but the result of the association of ideas,
or when religion might be dismissed in the words of Grant
Allen as a ' grotesque fungoid growth ' which has some
how clustered round the primeval thread of ancestor wor
ship, have gone, we trust for ever. The indifference of
the scientist has given place to the more scientific interest of
the student of psychology and sociology. No thinker to-day
would deny the persistence and reality of religious pheno
mena, the part they play and have played in the evolution
of society, and in the development of the individual. The
subjective factors in the world of experience cannot be
omitted or suppressed for the sake of the objective. More
over thinkers to-day distinguish more clearly than did their
forerunners between logical certainty and psychological
certitude. It is in this last and not in the first that assur
ance finds its basis.8
Nor would the scientist turn to-day, as did Herbert
Spencer, for the explanation of the ecstasy of a St. Paul or
of a St. Francis, the sublime indifference of the martyrs,
the fervid zeal of a Xavier or Wesley, to the details of
ghost and ancestor worship amid primitive savages. As
Prof. James has shown us, it would be just as sensible to
' call religion an aberration of the digestive function ' or a
1 W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), 244.
3 See Diet. Relig. and Ethics, iii. 320 f. Article by H. Barker on
' Certainty.'

46 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
' perversion of the respiratory organs.' ' The plain truth is,'
he goes on to add, 'that to interpret religion one must in
the end look at the immediate content of the religious con
sciousness.' Even ' institutional religion ' must find, in the
long run, its warrant here; any church, however great the
emphasis it places upon organization as a means to an end,
is ultimately founded upon the consciousness of personal
communion with the divine, and the reality of that con
sciousness.1 But the further demonstration of this truth
lies outside our immediate purpose, and would require an
essay to itself.
The dangers The dangers of the doctrine of Assurance lie on the sur-
of A«»urance. face ancj have often been pointed out by critics. Some
have so phrased it, though not in official documents, as
to amount to the claim that a place must be conceded to
the emotions and desires in the determination of belief.
Such a claim ends in sheer individualism, in a superstruc
ture based upon mere subjectivity, in a religion which is
ever watching under the microscope its own motions with a
tireless suspicion which amounts to a negation of the grace
of God. Wesley, more by accident than design, or rather,
in the providence of God, effectually prevented this by
making the chief court of the appeal a social court. In his
system of class-meetings the basal principle of individual
experience was saved from excess by the correction given
through the experience of others, as well as by the spiritual
obedience demanded by the whole organization and frame
work of his societies. Individual experience is thus
balanced in the first instance by social fellowship, and that
again by connexionalism. In an effective practical fashion
the experience first of a wider circle and then of the whole
church is brought to bear upon the isolated feelings of the
separate member, thus giving to religious certainty both an
objective and a subjective basis. If it be argued that
connexionalism and experience lie in different spheres, one
in the world of thought, the other a matter of organization,
the answer of every Methodist would be none the less
certain. As the body conditions the spirit, so the organiza
tion controls, modifies, and co-ordinates individual experi
ence, not so much by ex cathedra utterances, or formal
claim, as by the sheer practical necessities of life. To
1 S«e James, oi>. cit., cc. i, 2, and 20.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 47
translate the same into philosophic phrase: in the working
of Methodism the appeal to individual experience is ever
checked and balanced by the appeal to collective experience,
though Methodism would reject the claim of Clasen and the
Ritschlian school, that the guarantee of assurance for the
individual is given by his membership in the organized
whole.1 For the collective experience of the Church is as much The appeal
a reality as the experience of the individual soul. There experience™
was a philosophy, the full fruition of which appeared in the
middle years of the nineteenth century, which looked upon
the larger organizations of life, e.g. the State and the
Church, as little more than collections of individuals, and
which attempted to build up the laws of their growth from
an analysis, more or less accurate, of the laws of growth of
their component parts. To-day thinkers of all schools
recognize that underlying this method there was a great
fallacy. Social organizations are not collections of atoms;
they have a life of their own, a soul of their own, and
conditions of growth of their own. There is a psychology
of the mob, but this is not reached by a study of the
psychology of the individuals which make it up. So with
the State, whose oversold is far away the most important
part in its life and is something far larger than the sum
of its parts. The appreciation of this great truth of the
soul of the organization lies at the root of all modern
Economics and Sociology.2 So with the Church, which in
a far wider and deeper sense than the State is an organization
— not the sum total of its unrelated individuals, but a unity,
animated and controlled by the one ever-expanding life of
the Spirit. The mystery of this life and unity, and the laws of
its growth, are not yet revealed unto us. But historians who
have neglected this biological concept have thereby been
led into hopeless anachronisms, judging too much from the
standpoint of their own age, instead of from that of the
spirit which animated the past. Thus Gibbon failed to
understand the Crusades; while the so-called Dark Ages
became unintelligible because no attempt was made to
iSee Tasker, op. cit., 330, and Tasker, Spiritual Religion (loor),
132 f.
2 Blindness to this truth led the older economists to that monstrous
concept, the Economic Man.

48 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
interpret them in terms of their own thinking and not by
the shibboleths of a more ' illuminated ' day. Dogmatists,
too, have only succeeded in dismembering the Body of
Christ by laying down a priori conditions out of touch with
facts. But the reality of the life of the Catholic Church, the
validity and growth of its experience, become manifest to
all who have turned from the profitless wrangle of conflict
ing organizations to the study of the soul-history of the
saints of God. But here again we touch a large subject,
into which, however fascinating, we cannot further enter.
In the sharper enunciation of this appeal to collective
, experience we find the main drift of present-day Methodist
thought and development. The doctrine of the Church,
the value of the judgement and experience of the Church
in contrast to the isolated individual, the continuity of the
one divine life running through all the centuries, the need
of clearer recognition of an objective value in the sacra
ments as the ordinances of Christ — to these great truths of
collective experience, Methodism to-day pays an ever-
increasing attention. And in this appeal to collective
experience Methodism discovers a new warrant for its own
beliefs. The experiences of the children of God in every
age are much the same, though the language in which they
are expressed may vary. Few things are so unchanging as
the soul of man and its deeper utterances. Moreover, just
as in science the test of reality is our power to repeat our
experiments, so also in religion. The communion of saints
is not merely the reproduction but the verification of ex
perience. Hence Methodism is rightly undisturbed by the
higher criticism of the Bible. Its results for the most part
bear only on the structure and framework of the records;
they often bring out into greater relief the eternal reality
of the experiences of the soul which the Book contains
and which have given to it perennial value.
The Histeric The appeal to experience will also explain the standpoint
Creed*. tnat Methodism takes as regards the two historic creeds of
the Church, the Latin symbol known as the Apostles' Creed,
and the Eastern symbol, framed at Nicea in 325 and en
larged at Constantinople in 381. These she accepts, not
because they were the work of a council, or even because
of their antiquity, but because they express the funda
mental facts of experience and life. We may take as an

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 49
illustration the Nicene Creed. There is no creed, with the
exception of the hymn mistakenly associated with the
name of Athanasius, which at first sight seems more com
pletely the expression of pure dialectics, the outcome of
Hellenistic logic attempting to formulate a system of specu
lative theology. But such an explanation is totally inade
quate, and has only arisen from the excessive abstraction of
thought from life. In reality the doctrines of Nicea were
the direct result of the richness and breadth of the spiritual
experiences which men felt they owed to their Saviour.
Nicea, studied in connexion with the three hundred years
that preceded it, becomes no longer the arena of contending
syllogisms but a crown laid at the feet of the triumphant
Christ. At Nicea many of the bishops of the dominant
party still bore in their persons the marks of the sufferings
they had endured for their Lord. That the Church in,' the
hour of her triumph should consent to abate in the smallest
iota the full rights of Christ was impossible. Veterans do
not so easily forget their General. Now the test of any
definition whether in physics or theology is its power of
fitting in with the facts of life. Judged by this test the
theologians of Nicea may be indifferent to criticism. Poor
at best as the definitions must be in which they attempted
to express all that Christ had meant to them, yet their
definitions have survived the wear and tear of centuries
because in a real way they embodied vital experiences.
The twentieth century may not approve of fourth-century
metaphysics, and may be bewildered by terms, some of
which have lost their meaning. Nevertheless the creeds of
Nicea and Chalcedon live because they are among the
affirmatives and imperatives which from time to time surge
up in consciousness, and which carry a larger authority than
belongs to any dialectic.1
In another direction also has the correction of experience The danger
come. The microscopic self-analysis in which Wesley ?' _*. .
r . J . , J lectivisn
revelled in his Oxford days, and from which he was never
1 The most difficult clause of the Apostles' Creed is the Descent
into Hades. This seems to have been first added at Aquileia. but
for what purpose is not now clear. Probably it was intended to
guard the reality of Christ's death against the subtle docetism of the
early fourth century. In this sense it still contains elements of
truth and life (A. C. McGiffert, The Apostles' Creed, 1902, pp. 191 f.)
-T

jectivism.

50 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
wholly free, even in his calmer old age, was at one time
the bane of some of his followers. But this subjectivism has
slowly given place to a larger conception of the grace
whereby we are saved — ' for if our heart condemn us, God
is greater than our heart and knoweth all things.' Assur
ance does not mean the reduction of the eternal Cross and
its effects in time to the fluctuating motions of our minds,
' little more,' as Coleridge put it, ' than a strong pulse or
throb of sensibility, accompanying the vehement volition of
acquiescence.' Assurance is rather the clear consciousness
of the tremendous objective force greater than ourselves,
'foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world,'
which God ' manifested at the end of the times for our sake,'
and which, by appropriation or assimilation, has entered
into our own lives. Assurance thus becomes one with
faith; for faith has ceased to be intellectual or emotional
assent, and has become a rejoicing consciousness; Christ's
redemption a realized human experience. Pusey's sneer
against ' justification by feeling ' is altogether wide of the
mark. From any such danger Wesley was delivered by
his visit to the Moravians at Herrnhut. There he learned
from Christian David that ' being justified is widely differ
ent from the full assurance of faith.'
'I now see clearly,' he writes, 'that we ought not to
insist on anything we feel, any more than on anything
we do, as if it were necessary previous to justification or
the remission oi sins.'
With this deliverance from the tyranny of the subjective
|and emotional there has come into Methodism a larger
toleration for forms of religious experience not her own.
Most men to-day would agree with Canon Overton's criti
cism of Wesley's excessive self-condemnation: 'If John
Wesley was not a true Christian (when in Georgia), God
help millions of those who profess and call themselves Chris
tians.' Wesley's condemnation of his own religious life
at Oxford as valueless did little harm, for it was limited
to himself, and, as a matter of fact, in his later years was
retracted. It would have accomplished untold mischief
if it had led ' the people called Methodists ' into a habit of
judging all men by their own emotions and experiences.
The measures of our mind are no test of the height and
depth and length and breadth of God's love even for our-

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 51
selves, much less for others, and no doctrine could be more
fatally narrowing than the extreme teaching of some of
the Moravians of Wesley's day who made the consciousness
of assurance an essential condition for partaking of the
Holy Communion. But this danger, though at one time
serious, has become a thing of the past.
A final danger of the doctrine of Assurance upon which The danger
critics have fastened is, unhappily, not limited to those who of es°i«>».
profess this grace. Assurance at times may become the
worst form of egoism or egotism, as we see abundantly
illustrated in the dreary Calvinistic controversy between
Whitefield and Wesley. But the cure for such egoism is
not to condemn the doctrine of Assurance, but to insist
upon the broader recognition of the varying contents of the
religious consciousness. Only by this means will men
attain the grace that Cromwell besought for the Kirk of
Scotland : ' I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think
it possible that you may be mistaken.'1 But in this matter
of narrowness rigid dogmatists of all schools have much
to learn.
Wesley's doctrine of Holiness, or ' perfect love,' is really The doctrine
a corollary of his appeal to experience. For if a son is ot Holines»'
conscious of his relation to his Father there must be the
possibility that that consciousness shall be complete, ' with
out a cloud between,' and as such the source of exquisite
joy and untroubled confidence:
My Father God! that gracious sound
Dispels my guilty fear,
Not all the harmony of heaven
Could so delight my ear!
That it is possible now is a further necessity, for otherwise
the experience would not be in consciousness. But when
we begin to give the full content of this consciousness, to
subject it to analysts, to write down cause and effect, to
express it in theological terms, then difficulties begin both
for Wesley and ourselves. Such difficulties spring wholly from
the attempt to define the undefinable. In reality, with
Wesley holiness was not a theory, but an experience, a life.
But this is true of the saints of God in every age. As
Wesley points out, the religion of ' perfect love ' is no new
religion : 1 Letters and Speeches, iii. 18.

52

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Holiness one
throughoutthe Church.

Causes of
misunder
standing.

It is beautifully summed up in that one comprehensive
petition, 'Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the
inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly
love Thee, and worthily magnify Thy Holy Name.'
In every age this desire has been the mark of the child of
the Father; the granting of this prayer his highest bliss.
Varieties in the definition of the mark are immaterial; it
is the conscious pursuit that gives unity to the saints of
all time. Not to recognize this is to rend the seamless robe
of Christ. St. Bernard, St. Francis, and Wesley might have
split hairs in attempting definitions; in the testimony of
their experience they are absolutely one. Let the reader
judge for himself — put side by side three characteristic
utterances, and point out, if he can, the fatal differences.
He will realize, instead, the fundamental agreements.
Bernard's ' Jesu, dulcis memoria ' -,1 the superb chapter in
the Little Flowers2 wherein Francis discoursed to brother
Leo, ' the little sheep of God,' of ' that wherein is perfect
joy ' ; the sections in a. 'Kempis entitled ' Of familiar
intercourse with Jesus ' ; and Charles Wesley's hymn entitled
Wrestling Jacob: Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life's short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness, I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move;
Thy nature and Thy name is Love;
are all from the same mint.
Nevertheless if we must dwell on differences we would
point out that these lie almost wholly in two directions.
St. Bernard — to take that great saint as an example of a
system — emphasized probation. Wesley, with his different
outlook, was bound to make this secondary to grace. But
to grace as such we cannot apply the categories of time.
Time, as Wesley felt, is not an actuality, only a quality of
consciousness. Unfortunately in trying to express this pro
found philosophical truth many of Wesley's followers, and
1 This hymn, though probably not by St. Bernard himself, is made
up from his writings. See my article on St. Bernard in Diet. Rel.
Ethics, ii. 530.
2 The Little Floivers of SI, Francis, Kng. Trans, by T. W.
Arnold, 1898, c. 8.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 53
Wesley himself occasionally,1 write as if time could be counted
by the strokes of the clock. But if ' time ' be translated into
terms of consciousness the difficulty sometimes found in
Wesley's doctrine of holiness, as also in his doctrine of con
version, at once disappears. In the case of conversion, for
instance, the more vivid and complete the consciousness,
especially as contrasted with previous experience, the more
' instantaneous ' — to use the word of offence — it will appear.
But analysis shows that the cause of this impression is not
'time,* but the fullness of the consciousness first of sin,
then of the Saviour. In modern Methodism ' time ' ele-.?
ments, in the ordinary sense of the term, both as regards
holiness and conversion, are thus increasingly regarded as
of secondary consequence.
A further doctrine which some have claimed as peculiar The doctrine
to Methodism is found in the stress laid upon conversion. fo Conversion
It is difficult to see how such an exaggeration has arisen.
Both the doctrine and the fact of conversion have been
upheld and borne witness to from the earlier days of the
Church down to the present time. But to the cold formalists
and Deists of the eighteenth century both doctrine and
fact seemed new. They would have sneered at The Con
fessions of St. Augustine ; of St. Francis they were ignorant ;
Bunyan they would have dismissed as an illiterate tinker.
But what was new in Methodism was not so much the fact
of conversion as the immediate consciousness of its accom
plishment, with all the joy that such consciousness brings.
But on this matter we have already sufficiently dwelt.
In reality the attack upon the Methodist doctrine of
Conversion, when care is taken to clear away such irrelevant
details of its ' instantaneousness,' is always directed from
one quarter. It resolves itself into a protest against any
conception of religion as an individual consciousness of
relation to God, which is not dependent upon sacraments or
church. But in this matter we are not careful to answer.
This is part of the inheritance of Methodism from the
Reformation.2 She would be false to herself and to her
1 Cf. L. Tyerman, Life of Wesley, i. 463 ; Works of Wesley, vi. 464,
a passage that reads like an extract from some modern work on reli
gious psychophysics, e.g. E. D. Starbuck's Psychology of Religion,
2nd ed. 1901.
* Supra, pp. 16, 18.

54

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Wesley'.
Arminianism.

The
corollary of
experience,

As shown in
its universal
acceptance to-day.

history if she suffered any tampering with this funda
mental truth.
Wesley's doctrine of Assurance involved as a necessary
corollary an Arminian theory of the Atonement. Wesley's
Arminianism, it is true, was reached by steps altogether
independent of those by which he was led to appeal to ex
perience; nevertheless we can see clearly to-day that the
one was the consequence of the other. For, as we have
already noted,1 the assurance of damnation by eternal decree
is so contradictory to the constituents of human nature as
to be inconceivable in the case of the healthy-minded.
Any appeal to experience which refuses to take account of
hope as one of the essential contents of experience is so
incomplete as to be valueless. Assurance, therefore, is not
and cannot be the negation of hope; it is rather the vivid
presentation of its reality, the realization in the concrete of
one's ideals and aspirations.
To the twentieth century the necessary Arminianism of
any appeal to experience seems axiomatic; largely, of
course, because this century starts with the postulate of the
Fatherhood of God, and has rejected the hard forensic
theories of the Atonement which satisfied an earlier genera
tion. The difficulty of the twentieth century is rather to
find in a scheme of perfect love any place for damnation at
all, except as the possible continuance of present conditions
— ' myself am hell, nor am I out of it. '2 But the eighteenth
century was not so troubled. Hell was still a potent living
reality, which played a tremendous part in the feelings of
both saint and sinner. The experience of hell, not imaginary
or symbolic, but actual anticipation, is one of the contents
of the soul to which Wesley and the early Methodists again
and again appealed. But in the providence of God Wesley
saw clearly the truth, hidden from Whitefield, that any such
appeal, nay, further, that any such experience, must rest
upon the possibility of repentance and reversal. Where
there is no hope there can be no gospel.
We have said that Wesley's belief in the universality of
'the gospel call was the necessary corollary of his appeal to
1 Supra, p. 38.
2 1 leave these sentences as originally written in 1909. But the
Great War has somewhat disturbed the facile optimism of the first
decade of the twentieth century, and of the Victorian era.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 55
experience. We see this more clearly if we try to present
to ourselves the arguments which have led well-nigh the
universal Church to discredit the Calvinism that appealed
so powerfully to a former generation. It is not that men
have now demonstrated by a surer logic the radical un
soundness of the Calvinist positions; nor are we able to
eliminate from the Bible the underlying determinism from
which no Eastern literature is wholly exempt. So far as
the Bible is concerned the dispassionate critic is driven to
confess that both sides are able to prove by its means their
own contention, and equally to disprove the theory of its
rival. But the Church to-day does not base its Arminianism
upon any biblical text, or series of texts or upon the
syllogisms of logic. Within living memory the doctrine
of the universality of the gospel call has passed from an
argument into a conviction, which, like every other funda
mental conviction, is not dependent upon proof, nor
assailable because of logical difficulties. We have here one
of the doctrines in which we see how completely the
ultimate standard of authority of any century must be
found in the organic living experience of the Church itself.
RighUy or wrongly, the average Christian has settled the
matter for himself by falling back upon his own conscious
ness of the fitness of things. Calvinism, as Wesley frankly
calls it, is 'an uncomfortable thought.' The all-pervasive
universalism of the age — a deduction from the universalism
of appeal for which Wesley contended — bases itself avowedly
upon its own inner consciousness of what is possible or prob
able in a moral world under a moral Governor. Whether
this appeal to inner consciousness, both collective and
individual, be valid or not is a matter into which we are not
called to inquire. Our present purpose is to point out that
Wesley's doctrine of Assurance, founded, as it was, upon the
appeal to experience, would have led inevitably in a later
generation to an Arminian doctrine of the Atonement, even
if at the time Wesley had thrown in his lot with Whitefield.
But Wesley's Arminianism was not a deduction of logic Wesley's
from certain fundamental premisses; he reached it rather Arminianism
through historical channels, largely through his parents, ^derwf.
For the introduction of Arminianism — to use a convenient
if somewhat inaccurate title for the rebellion in England
against Calvinism, parallel with, rather than consequent on,

56 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
that of Arminius in Holland x— seems to us to have been in
no small measure the most lasting part of the work of
Archbishop Laud, assisted, no doubt, on the intellectual
side by the influence of the Cambridge Platonists, and on
another side by men whom Laud despised, the Ana
baptist societies of the Smyth and Helwys type.2 He
found the Anglican Church saturated with the doctrines
and practices of Geneva largely through the sympathy of
his predecessor, Dr. Whitgift, with the Nine Lambeth
Articles 3 drawn up in 1595 by the Regius professor at
Cambridge, Dr. Whitaker, an unflinching adherent of
Calvin's system. As part of his protest against Geneva
Laud laid stress upon the more universal aspects of the
life and faith of the Church. 'Predestination,' as one of
his bishops wrote to him, 'is the root of all Puritanism,
and Puritanism the root of all rebellion and disobedient
intractableness.' By his repudiation of Calvinism, Laud
thus prepared the way for the return of the Church to more
'catholic' usage. For Calvinism and sacerdotalism-^-
whether in the extreme forms of the latter in the Roman
Church, or in its more moderate Anglican claims — are
ultimately incompatible. The conditions of salvation cannot
be at the same time ' immutable decrees,' and ' sacramental
grace ' and all that is involved in union with a living organic
church. The one must make the other needless and
illogical, as indeed Wyclif found when he worked out his
premisses to the end. Whether Laud's opposition to
Geneva, which began in his early Oxford days, was based
upon the deductions of logic or was the outcome of
practical considerations we cannot say ; that it was effectual
in saving the Anglican Church from adherence to Calvinism
none can deny. Through the Wesleys, father and son, this
part of Laud's High Churchmanship has passed into the
life-blood of Methodism.
1 The two movements were so independent in their origin that if is
needless to enter into the differences and agreements between
the teaching of Arminius and Wesley (cf. Piatt in Diet. Religion and
Ethics, vol. i. pp. 802 ff (1908); or W. B. Pope, Compendium of
Theology, ii. 78 ff.).
2 For these Arminian Baptists see R. Jones, Mystical Religion, 407 f.
3For these see Diet. Rel. Ethics, iii. 855. In Ireland they wer«
embodied in the Nineteen Irish Articles of 161 5.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 57

METHODISM AND PREVIOUS MOVEMENTS
In our first section we emphasized the unity and con
tinuity of the one life which runs through all the ages of
the Church, manifesting itself at different times in diverse
forms. In certain aspects of his work Wesley but continued
or revived methods and principles used by great predecessors.
A few illustrations of this unity may profitably detain us.
In spiritual matters there is little that is absolutely new;
for the soul itself, its sins and sorrows, changes but slowly
with the changing times.
We begin with the fundamental agreement between Prophetism.
Methodism and a movement in the early Church known as
'Prophetism.' As far back as the days of St. Paul the
' prophets ' were a recognized order in the church, suppressed
towards the close of the second century by the growing sacer
dotalism of the times, and by the exhaustion of the first
wave of spiritual enthusiasm and illumination, assisted by
recklessness and extravagance in the order itself. The
history of ' prophetism ' would lead us far afield, by disputed
paths. Suffice that the characteristic of the ' prophet ' was
his extempore, some claimed his inspired, utterance. He
was ' gifted ' to speak the word of God in free spontaneous
discourse, oftentimes in ecstatic forms. Many of the pro
phets, if not most, were under the influence of millenarian
and parousian beliefs, and have left us a chaotic wilderness of
'prophetic' literature, Sibylline Oracles and the like, whose
obscurity is its chief interest. Others, as Celsus complained,
made the staple of their preaching as 'they roamed like
tramps through cities and fortified places,' the retribution
so speedily to come upon the world. They received no
fixed salary, only in the place where they settled down
'the first of a baking of bread, or a jar of oil and wine.'
The need of testing the ' prophet '- was not overlooked ;
at first by broad if indefinite principles, which at a later

58 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
date, as we see in the Didache, gave place to more wooden
maxims.1
The duties The ' prophet ' was thus essentially a preacher, generally
°* tne . a travelling preacher, though, unlike the " apostle,' he
prop e ' was not deprived of the liberty of settling down in one
place. He differed from a 'teacher' by being a producer
and not an expounder simply; the emphasis was laid upon
intuition and not assimilation. He had nothing to do
with either the financial side of church life, or its pastoral
oversight, much less was he allowed to administer its
sacraments.2 These were matters reserved for other officers,
for the deacon, the presbyter, or the bishop, though there
was nothing to prevent these officers, at any rate in earliest
times, from being ' prophets ' as well. Even as a preacher
the prophet's business was rather to warn than to instruct;
he was the evangelist and not the overseer of the flock.
His special witness was to the spontaneous work of the Holy
Spirit, whose mouthpiece, oracle 'or ' forthteller ' he professed
to be. As such one special function seems to have been
reserved to him — the proclamation to backsliders of the
forgiveness of the Church.
Similarities The similarity between the early Methodist preacher and
b«5we«n . . the ' prophet ' is manifest. The two movements, in fact,
UIjop e",m stand for the same ' liberty of prophesying.' The enemies
Methodism. of the two were the same — occasional inner extravagance,
the opposition from without of those with whom order is
paramount. The duties of the two were much the same,
even to the matter of ' wandering,' and the manner of pay
ment of those who rested for a while on their ' circuits.'
But most important of all is the witness borne by both
movements to the free utterance of the Holy Spirit as one of
the elemental facts of a living faith. This utterance neither
the growth of sacerdotalism, nor the claims of decorum, nor
even the ' foolishness of preaching ' itself is able to destroy.
j That ' Prophetism ' is an essential part of Methodism is not
*i Cor. xii. 3; i John iv. i. Didtche, xi. 8-12. There is a
large literature on ' prophets.' The student may refer to T. M. Lindsay,
Church and Ministry in the Early Centuries, 1902; E. C. Selwyn,
Christian Prophets, 1900; Harnack in Enc. Brit. xix. 822 ff.; H. B.
Workman, Persecution in The Early Church, 3rd ed. 1906, 153 ff.
''Didache x. 7 is ambiguous. But Dr. Lindsay's interpretation (p.c.
95) seems to me inaccurate.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 59
only demonstrated by her early history, but also by one
curious fact. When at times Methodism has tended to lose
the ' liberty of prophesying,' whether in her prayer-meetings,
' love-feasts,' and ' band-meetings,' in the ministrations of
her local preachers, or otherwise, she has always seen the rise,
commonly by a secession from her own ranks, of a move
ment reviving the 'prophet.' One illustration may be found
in the story of the Bible Christians with their strong appeal
to Cornish enthusiasm; another is seen in the history of
the Salvation Army. This great host of ' prophets,' whose
devoted first ' General ' was once a Methodist minister,
was largely officered in its earlier days by earnest
Methodists, whose spirit of ' prophecy ' had found the
restraints of Mid- Victorian Methodism too exacting.
The reader will have gathered, from our remarks on Momanism.
Prophetism, that there are certain points of affinity between
Methodism and two other historic movements. We allude
to Montanism and the rise fourteen centuries later of the
Friends. Montanism, though eventually it stiffened into a
new legalism as deadly as the old which it sought to
supersede, in its origin was the protest of the second and
third centuries against the suppression of the ' prophet.'
In the words of that gem of Montanist literature, the
Passion of St. Perpetua,
It is only a weak and pusillanimous faith that
supposes that the grace of God worked only of old either
unto constancy in suffering or unto wonder of revelation;
whereas He worketh always as He promised. 1
With all its extravagance and crudeness Montanism bore
witness to the great truth of the free life of the Holy
Spirit, manifesting itself by other than sacerdotal channels.
We see this even in the claim of some of its leaders that
prophecy superseded earlier revelation. Montanism,* it is
true, was but a crude and imperfect type of the religion of
the Spirit; yet, in some aspects Methodism, though un-
1 Passio S. Perpetuae, i., ed. J. A. Robinson, 1891. For Perpetua
and her passion see my Persecution in the Early Church, 313 f.
2 For Montanism see A. Ritschl, Die Enstehung, Altkatholische
Kirche (1857), or G. N. Bonwetsch, Gesch. des M ontanismus (1881),
In 178 1 Wesley wrote: 'I have frequently been in doubt whether
Montanus was not one of the wisest and holiest men who was then
in the Christian Church.'

6o THE PLACE OF METHODISM
flinching in its faithfulness to historic revelation, was the
Montanism of the eighteenth century; a protest against an
age which had killed the doctrine of the Holy Spirit by
frozen rationalism and deadly secularism. In this protest
also, in spite of diversity in almost all else, Wesley could
have joined hands with George Fox, though his love of
order would have prevented him from sympathizing fully
with the wonderful life and visions of the mystic in ' leathern
breeches.' 1
The parallel The parallel between Montanism and Methodism does not
Methodism en<* ^ere : t^ie writings °f tne most illustrious of all Montan
ists, the orator Tertullian, show us that Montanism was
i a reaction against secularism in the Church. Western
Montanism — for the Phrygian form, with its extreme sensa
tional features, lies altogether outside our present comparison
— had no quarrel with the doctrine of the Catholic, or
' great ' Church, as it was then called, nor in the main with
Catholic ritual ; only it wanted to force back both into what
it deemed to be apostolic simplicity and purity, freed from
episcopal innovations. Its work was not to bring forward
new doctrine, but to emphasize the idea of the Paraclete;
that, as Tertullian puts it, all ' advance to better things '
must be ' by that Vicar of the Lord, the Holy Ghost.' 2
(The ideal of the Montanist and of the Methodist alike was
spirituality, what eighteenth-century divines call ' enthusi
asm.' To secure this, both were prepared to turn the
Church into ' societies,' however few and insignificant, shut
out from the world by rigorous discipline, and working upon
the world not so much by intercourse as by challenge.
Both alike were thus forced into a certain antagonism to
culture, from which Montanism, unlike Methodism, was
never delivered. Both alike suffered persecution from the
established Church of the times, with fatal effects for
Montanism. Both movements were accompanied by certain
1 Wesley rarely mentions Fox. This is the more remarkable inas
much as Wesley was acquainted with Barclay's Apology. The
similarity between Wesley and Fox in recording the business of
Conferences, etc., by question and answer, to which Methodism still
adheres, is apparently accidental. The meaning of Quakerism cannot
be better studied than in the works of that eminent Friend, Prof.
Rufus Jones.
2 On the Veiling of Virgins, c. i.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

61

remarkable manifestations of nervous excitement. By one
of the familiar paradoxes of history, Montanism, which began
in a claim for freedom ended in extreme rigidity, tied hand
and foot to the oracles of its ' prophets.' At one time there
was a danger lest this should happen also in Methodism,
but that happily has passed away.
From Prophetism, its outcome in Montanism, and its
revival in the Society of Friends we pass to the relation of
Methodism and Monasticism.1 At first sight the two move
ments would appear to have nothing in common; their
differences, certainly, are neither few nor insignificant. For
Monasticism too frequently identified religion with Calvary,
the foundation with the superstructure. Its consciousness
of the need of union with the Crucified did not always lead
to the joy of union with the risen, triumphant Christ.2 But
we must beware lest we are misled, as was Charles Wesley —
Not in the dark monastic cell
By vows and grates confined3 —
into taking some accidental circumstance for the essence
of a system.
Between Methodism and Monasticism there are at least i
six points of contact and similarity. In Monasticism, and
certainly in early Methodism — whether it is as true of
present-day Methodism may, perhaps, be doubted — there
was a common emphasis of the importance of the conquest
of self, in other words, of renunciation, as the one condi
tion of effective work for God. Both preached the great
truth that not by coming down to lower levels, but by
living on mountain tops, will men influence most powerfully
their fellows. An accommodated Christianity will never win
the age to whose supposed needs it has been adapted. In the

Monaitioism.

Both are
social.

1 For Monasticism see a slight sketch by Harnack, Monasticism,
trans. E. E. Kellett (1901); or my more complete study, The Involu
tion of the Monastic Ideal (1913), especially cc. 1 and 7. See also
the article of Dom Butler in Diet. Relig. and Ethics.
2 Romans, vi. 5.
3 C. Wesley did not know that out of the 520 monastic houses of
England only nine had cells. In a friary to have a cell for oneself
was so great a privilege that we find that it was sometimes a matter
of special papal indult. C. Wesley had obtained his ideas from the
Charterhouse. It should not be forgotten that one of the few
charterhouses in England was at Epworth.

62 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
secondplace Monasticism, as worked out by St. Benedict, and
developed by his successors — for the Carthusians were
always few, and the ascetic extremes of the monks of the
Nitria or of the East in general never won the West — was
essentially a social religion; men were to help each other
to the spiritual life under leadership and a rule.1 Nor was
this fellowship limited to the affairs of the soul : it extended,
far more completely than has ever been realized in Metho
dism — or, for that matter, is now possible — to all the
interests of life, to the work in the fields, to the home-life
in the cloister.
In both The third point of resemblance is equally striking.
Holiness Monasticism, especially in its origin, was the witness to a
character. sacerdotal age that holiness is a fact of character rather
/than an imputed act. Largely through the influence of St.
Cyprian the foundations of the Church, as it then existed
had been laid in the doctrines of apostolic succession and
a mediating priesthood; the coming of grace from without,
through channels other than the man himself. Against
this the monk was a silent but constant protest. He recoiled
from the growing conception that the Kingdom of God was
to be found in a great imperial organized society. Once
more he heard the eternal words : ' the Kingdom of God is
within you.' Monasticism never forgot that personal holiness
— the special definition given to the term need not now
concern us — is something far higher than any succession
can bestow. Instead of intermediate communion with God
through priests and sacraments, the monk upheld the ideal
of the direct intercourse of the soul with its Maker. Thus
in its origin Monasticism lay over against the Catholic
Church, with an ideal other than, possibly higher than, that
of the Church.
The Moreover, Monasticism, especially in its early days, was
priesthood of the protest that the laity also are priests unto God. The
earlier monks were generally laymen. St. Anthony, the
founder of Monasticism was a layman to the end. He
neither goes to church nor receives the Eucharist for
years, and yet continues in the closest intercommunion with
God. St. Jerome was ordained against his will and always
refused to consecrate the elements. His contempt for
1 The social aspect of Monasticism was especially prominent in the
clan-monasteries of Ireland, see Evolution of Monastic Ideal, c. 4,

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 63
apostolic succession is shown in his famous statement that
in the early days bishop and presbyter were interchangeable
terms, and that the hierarchy is an arrangement of human
origin. St. Martin, whose Life by Sulpicius Severus is one
of the gems of biography, refused all the efforts of Hilary
of Poitiers to make him a presbyter. He was only cap
tured and made priest and bishop by a stratagem. It is
true that in the course of time this distinction became lost,
and that the monk was often forced to join the priesthood
under pressure from without. The bishops felt the danger
of communities of laymen growing up within the Church,
which proclaimed to the world, by their very existence, an
ideal of religious life opposite to that sacramental and
sacerdotal theory on which their episcopal authority rested.
Nevertheless, in theory at least, the monk, even to the end,
was not necessarily a priest; whilst his abbot, oftentimes
exalted by papal sanction into the equal of a bishop, was
none other than a presbyter. We have a striking illus
tration of this anti-sacerdotalism in the Rule of St. Benedict.
Confession was not made to a priest, nor to the monastic
chaplain, but to the abbot or to the whole brotherhood,
even though they were laymen. In some respects the anti-
sacerdotalism of Methodism is but the development, under
a new form, of this constant protest of Monasticism.
A further point of contact is of equal importance. In The sacrifice
every monastery the service of God in the church was the °, pri"s;t;_l°
j • • _ .ji_i.ru t thanksgiving.
supreme duty; in some cases interrupted by brief hours for
sleep or work, in others carried on by relays without
cessation day or night, that the Master of the House,
whether He came at midnight or at cockcrow, should find
them waiting. But this service was rarely the adoration of
the mass ; its more usual form was a continuous ' sacrifice
of prayer and thanksgiving.' In an age when religion was
tending more and more to the external the monk laid the
emphasis upon prayer. ' What the sword is to the hunts
man, prayer is to the monk,' claimed Chrysostom. Anthony
spent long nights in prayer, and still was not satisfied. ' To
occupy oneself with God,' said St. Bernard, 'is the one
occupation of all occupations.' Monasticism was dissolved,
but this spirit survived in the Nonconformity of England
and America, with its consistent protest against any
sacerdotal conception of the Church. Little do the members

64

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Monasticism
and the
Annual
Conference.

of some humble class-meeting, as they meet together for
singing and prayer, the wayside preacher of the Salvation
Army, or the head of the family as he gathers his children
around him for worship, realize that they are perpetuating in
new ways the characteristic motive of a system that, pos
sibly, he despises and contemns.
A last point of comparison between Methodism and some
forms of Monasticism lies, curious to say, in the emphasis
placed by Wesley upon his annual omnicompetent Confer
ence. In the judgement of Dr. Fitchett ' the Conference is
perhaps the most original contribution that Methodism has
made to church history.'1 Dr. Fitchett overlooked the similar
institution in connexion with the Cistercians and the Friars.
The organization of the older Benedictine monasteries was
essentially what we should call to-day of a Congregational
type — i.e. each house was isolated and independent of all
others, unless indeed it were an offshoot, a dependent cell or
priory. But the Cistercians and the Friars were the founders
of connexionalism — for we may pass by the limited effort
in this direction of the Clugniac reformers.2 Every abbot
of a Cistercian house was bound to attend the Chapter-
General held annually at the mother-house at Citeaux, and
was under obligation to render account to the central
authority; much after the same manner as Methodist
' superintendents ' to their Conference.
The analogy between the organization of Methodism and
that of the Friars was even closer.3 The Franciscans, for
instance, were divided into ' Provinces,' over each of which
was a ' Provincial Minister,' among the Dominicans elected
for four years only. The ' Provinces ' were again divided
into ' Custodies,' under the charge of ' Custodians,'4 who
possessed general rights of supervision for their districts.
Every year Chapters-General were held — the first at Michael
mas, the second and more important at Whitsuntide.6 In
1 W. H. Fitchett, il'esley and His Century (1906), p. 347 f.
2 For this section scr my Monastic Ideal, c. 5.
* Op. cit., c. 6.
* The exact organization of the Custodies is not very clearly known.
(Op. cit., p. 295.)
'The annual Dominican chapter-general was held alternately at
Paris and Bologna; among the Franciscans, as in Methodism, it
roamed about.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 65
many of its powers this Whitsuntide gathering corresponded
with the Methodist Conference. The original purpose of
both Chapter-General and Conference was the same: the
forgathering of brethren from far and near that they
might gain new enthusiasm by the communion of saints.
How Wesley would have rejoiced in the testimony of
Cardinal Ugolino when he beheld, in 1221, three thousand
brethren gathered at ' the Chapter of the Rush-mats.'
Of a truth this is the camp and the army of the
knights of God. . . . Nor was there heard in so great
a multitude or idle speech or foolish jest, but where
soever a company of brothers was gathered together they
either prayed or said the office and bewailed their sins,
or discoursed concerning the salvation of souls.
How Wesley would have insisted that this was the ideal
he himself had formed for his own Conference, though he
might not have admitted to it, as did St. Francis, the
crowds of strangers. The growth of business soon led, in
the case of the Friars, to the restriction of the Chapter-
General to the ' delegates ' of the ' provinces ' ; in the case
of Methodism to the exclusion, by Wesley himself, of all
but a select band of preachers — the ' Legal Hundred ' — this
last an arrangement that speedily proved impossible to work,
though by a legal fiction it is maintained to this day. Both
Friars and Methodists found that this common government
by a central court united the whole body into a compact
effective instrument.
A comparison between Wesley and St. Francis, to one Methodism
detail of which we have already alluded, would have pj-anciscan
amazed no one more than Wesley himself. To the eighteenth Revival.
century St. Francis was unknown — ' a well-meaning man,'
said Wesley, ' though manifestly weak in his intellect ' I1 To
day the similarity between the two men, and between the
revivals jn which they were the leaders, is clear. John
Wesley was, in fact, the St. Francis of the eighteenth
century. Like him, he received in his spiritual experience the
direct call of God to a complete surrender of self.
Like him, he found in the love of God the central truth
which inspired his life and ruled his will. To live the
life of Jesus Christ in the world was the common object
1 Wesley, Eccl. Hist. ii. 258, who took it from Mosheim. s

66 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
of both— of the one through imitation of His poverty, of
the other of His sinless perfection. The revival of
personal religion in a coarse and profligate age through
the instrumentality of a society was their common
achievement. The Methodist, like the Friar Minor, took
the world as his parish. He planted himself in the
crowded cities and among the outcast populations. His
mission was to the poor, the unlearned, and the neglected.
He cared not for boundaries of parish or country. Borne
on the wings of love, he crossed the seas, bringing to all
who would hear the glad tidings of forgiveness.
Indeed, with due allowance for the differences of the
time, the methods as well as the objects of Wesley were
singularly like those of St. Francis. There was a similar
use of colloquial and simple sermons, similar reiteration
of a few all-important truths, similar renunciation of all
pomp and splendour of service or building, similar re
ligious use of hymns and music. Even the obstacles which
they encountered and the difficulties which they raised
were similar. The sneer of the worldly, the accusation of
fanaticism, the dread of the orderly, the dislike of the
parish clergy, the timidity of the bishops, the self-suffi
ciency of the members of the society themselves, were
trials common to both. That the sons of St. Francis
with all his individuality, remained devoted children of
the Church, that the sons of Wesley, with all his personal
loyalty, found their natural sphere outside the Church.
was due, under God, to the circumstances of the time.1
Wesley and The comparison between the two saints, might be pressed
St. Francis. to further detail. How easy it would be to mistake the
following appeal of St. Francis for one of Wesley's Twelve
Rules of a Helper : 2
By the holy love which is in God I pray all the friars,
ministers as well as others, to put aside every obstacle,
every care, every anxiety, that they may be able to
consecrate themselves entirely to serve, love, and honour
the Lord God with a pure heart, and a sincere purpose;
which is what He seeks above all things.
Or take the following from the Little Flowers. Change
the Tuscan blue for English grey, the romance of the
1 H. O. Wakeman, An Introduction to the History of the Church
of England (5th ed. 1898), p. 448; cf. A. Jessopp, Coming of the
Frias, 4th ed. 1890, p. 49.
2 Wesley, Works, viii. 309. A short code, full of sagacity and
common sense,

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 67
thirteenth century for a more monotonous and joyless age,
and have we not read the same in Wesley's Journals ?
Ye must needs know that St. Francis, being inspired of
God, set out for to go into Romagna with Brother Leo his
companion ; and as they went they passed by the foot of the
Castle of Montefeltro; in the which castle there was at
that time a great company of gentlefolk and much
feasting. . . And St. Francis spake unto Brother Leo,
Let us go up unto this feast, for with the help of God
we may win some good fruit of souls. Coming to the
castle, St. Francis entered in, and came to the courtyard
where all that great company of gentlefolk was gathered
together, and in fervency of spirit stood upon a parapet
and began to preach, taking as the text of his sermon
these words in the vulgar tongue —
So great the joys I have in sight
That every sorrow brings delight.1
As regards their characters the resemblance is less com- Comraat of
plete. Wesley is as complex as Francis is simple. In his ¦ cnaracl«r-
indifference to the sunnier sides of life Wesley was the child
of Puritanism; Francis, by his joyous simplicity and his in
tense sympathy with nature, was the founder, through Giotto,
Fra Angelico of Fiesole — the one Dominican who contri
buted to art2 — and others, of Italian art. Wesley, like all great
Englishmen, was a man of gigantic will. Cardinal Ugolini,
the evil genius of the movement, who succeeded in reducing
the Brothers Minor into auxiliaries of the papacy, would have
found it a difficult task to force the man ' whose genius for
government was not inferior to that of Richelieu ' into a
system destined to destroy his ideal. Wesley's keen eye
would have detected, his energy baffled, the snares that
thwarted St. Francis. Of Wesley we may say, with J. R.
Green, that ' no man ever stood at the head of a great
revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary ' ; of
St. Francis, that no man whose unconscious purpose was
so revolutionary so successfully strengthened existing
institutions. But the two were one in the purity of a
1 Little Flowers, Appendix on the ' Stigmata ' (first reflection).
For the origin of the Little Flowers see my Evolution, cit., p. 287 n.
2 For the relation of Francis to art see the important work of H.
Thodc, F. v. Assist it. d. Anfange d . Kunst d. Renaissance in
Italien (2nd ed. 1904, or French ed. 2 vols. Paris, 1909, finely
illustrated).

68 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
devotion in which there was neither the ineffectual selfish
ness of ' other-worldliness,' nor the blindness which makes
men the slaves of the present. The verdict of Thomas of
Celano — the author of that marvellous hymn, 'Dies irae,
dies ille,' — on the secret of his leader might equally have
been written of Wesley:
His genius, free from all taint, pierced through hidden
mysteries, and the lover's affection entered within,
whereas the knowledge of masters remains without.
Certain other matters in this comparison of Wesley and
St. Francis deserve special attention. We do well to
remember that Wesley's helpers and the Little Poor Brothers
of St. Francis were both originally laymen. The significance
of this fact cannot be exaggerated. For centuries the
laity had held little place in the organization of the church.
The call of Now Europe was flooded with a host of earnest laymen,
the laity. bound together in social service and the passion for souls,
most of whom earned their living, like St. Paul, by the
labour of their hands. When Brother Giles was waiting for
a ship whereby he might sail to the Holy Land, he carried
water and made willow baskets. When other occupations
failed, the brethren hired themselves out as servants. The
new place of the laity was also emphasized by St. Francis in
the foundation of his Tertiaries, or great guild of the
Brothers and Sisters of Penitence. Of this lay fraternity,
which to-day numbers its members as over two millions1
the obligations were peace and charity, while the rich were
to distribute their surplus wealth to the poor. To this
day the Franciscan order is the only one in which there is
no difference of costume between laymen and priests. All
this, designedly accomplished by St. Francis, was forced
upon Wesley in the working out of his mission. Wesley
found his Tertiaries in the development of his class-meetings.
Only slowly has there grown up in Methodism a difference
of spiritual rank between its ' local preachers * and its
itinerant ministers; while no one conversant with Metho
dism will deny that the key to its influence is its appeal
to the laity. Unlike the Anglican Church, Methodism
robbed of its ministry could still survive; deprived of its
1 The best account of the Tertiaries is in M. Heimbucher Die Orden
u. Kongregationen der Kal/t. Kirche (2nd ed. 1907), ii. 489-527. '

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 69
lay workers it would assuredly die. Not merely its bene
esse, but its esse, lies in their service.
The two revivals were also alike in their democratic' Democratic
significance. The Little Poor Brothers of Assisi sprang ''8nificance'
from the common soil. Hitherto monks had belonged for
the most part to the upper classes; only for the aristocrat
was there the refuge of the cloister.1 But in the Brother
hood of Francis caste distinctions were unknown; the men
whom feudalism and the Church had despised took the
world by storm. The Friars were recruited from the
lower middle classes, or from the artisans of the towns. The
true title of the order is untranslatable because of its demo
cratic significance. In all the towns of Italy the people
were divided into majores and minores ; the nearest equiva
lent would be ' guilded ' and " unguilded.' Francis deliber
ately changed the name of his disciples from the ' Penitents
of Assisi,' and enrolled himself with the latter; his was the
company of the Brothers Minor. That the appeal of
Methodism has as yet been limited almost wholly to the
same classes as the company of the Friars has been judged
by some to be a sign of its strength, by others a note of
weakness. But of the fact and of its democratic significance
there can be little doubt.
Allusion has already been made to the similarity of Simila,jjt£,
methods of the two saints. Both alike made it their rule of metho*s-
to go to those who needed them most. Both alike found
their flock in the slums and hovels of overcrowded cities
and neglected suburbs. Both alike were exposed to the per
secution of the mob. Both alike fell back on the ministry
of song and on field-preaching. In the preaching of both
men there was neither grace of oratory nor profundity of
thought, only the setting forth of the Saviour with burning
love and conviction. Thomas of Celano's remark upon the
preaching of his master, that Francis 'had first persuaded
himself by practice of that which he endeavoured to com
mend to others by his words,' might with equal justice be
applied to Wesley. For both alike believed that the Sermon
on the Mount was something more than a speculation in
ethics. For both St. Francis and Wesley to walk in the
light meant perpetual sunshine. They deemed perfection
See A. Savine, English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolu
tion (1909), pp. 263-7-

and joy.

70 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
and joy to be equivalent terms. The astonishing thing is
that both made thousands to realize this truth of a trans-
scendent idealism.
Identification On this identification of perfection and joy it were well
ti/^T*"™ to lm§er f°r a moment; for it is perhaps the most striking
of the many similarities between the two movements. For
this purpose we cannot do better than put side by side
certain characteristic documents. When Brother Bernard
drew nigh unto death: 'Sursum corda, Brother Bernard,
sursum corda,' cried Brother Giles with joyfulness. The
face of the dying saint —
grew bright and joyful beyond measure, as he replied :
' O brothers most dear, this I find within my soul,
that for a thousand worlds the like of this I would not
have served any other Lord.'
Brother Ruffino narrates that when he saw the Saviour,
His sign to him was this:
As long as thou shalt live thou shalt no more feel
sadness nor melancholy; he that made thee sad was the
devil. '
Brother Masseo was so filled with —
the light of God that from thenceforward he \va9 always
joyful and glad ; and oftentimes when he prayed he
would break forth into sounds of joy, cooing like a dove.
Even the well-known sermon of St. Francis to the birds1
is but a result of this joy, if read, as it should be, in its
context. For it is in the same chapter that we read how
Francis received the counsel of God —
that it behoved him by preaching to convert much people.
Thus saith the Lord : Say unto Brother Francis that God
has not called him to this estate for himself alone, but
to the end that he may gain fruit of souls and that many
through him may be saved.
Then there came upon him the great joy of souls, one result
of which, as he set out ' taking no thought for road or way,'
was his sermon to his 'little sisters the birds.' Or let the
reader take the wonderful eighth chapter of the Lillle
Flowers, wherein ' St. Francis set forth to Brother Leo, as
they were going by the way, what things were perfect joy ' ;
' If patiently we endure wrong and cruelty and rebuffs
without being disquieted and without murmuring, but
1 Little Flowers, c. 16.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 71
with humbleness and charity . . . thinking on the pains
of the blessed Christ, the which we ought to suffer for
the love of Him, Brother Leo, write that here and herein
is perfect joy.'
But most of all do we catch the new joy of Christ in
six lines by Brother Wernher von der Tegernsee :
Des solt du gewis sin;
Du bist min, ih bin din.
Du bist beslozzen
In minem herzen;
Verlorn is das sluzzelin
Du muost immer drinne sin1 —
h»»s which remind us of the German hymn translated by
Wesley : Take my poor heart, and let it be
For ever closed to all but Thee I
Seal Thou my breast, and let me wear
That pledge of love for ever there!
Other passages from the hymns and Journals of the Wesleys
that ring with the same note will readily occur to every
student; as for instance Charles Wesley's
With Thee conversing, we forget
All time, and toil, and care;
Labour is rest, and pain is sweet,
If Thou, my God, art here.
In the rise of Methodism this spiritual joy expressed itself
in an outburst of song that led to a revolution in the whole
character of English worship. ' Quires and places where
they sing ' were no longer confined to the stately cathedral ;
and the psalms in the wretched English of Sternhold and
Hopkins ceased to be the one permissible form of hymn.
A similar outburst of song accompanied the Franciscan re
vival, arising from the same joyousness of soul. We may
take as an instance Brother Jacoponi da Todi — the author
of the Stabat Mater, on whose tomb is written the touching
epitaph, ' Stultus propter Christum ' — was thrown into a
dungeon. 'A cesspool,' he writes, 'opens on it, hence a smell
not of musk. ... I am tripped up of my irons, and
wound round in a big chain.'
1 ' Thou art locked up in my heart ; the little key is lost ; thou must
remain inside.'

72 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
Nevertheless, such was his joy that he fills a volume with
love songs to Jesus.1
Wyclif and Between Wyclif and Wesley there would not have been,
Wesley. we imagine, much real sympathy. Wyclif's unimpassioned
piety, his stern determinism and consequent failure to
grasp the value of prayer, his lack of any consciousness
either of the tremendous reality of sin or of the reign of
grace, his scholastic subtleties, curiously combined in later
years with indifference to all studies but theology, his
Erastian conceptions of reformation, his somewhat doubtful
opportunism in political matters, the crudity and exaggera
tion in thought and utterance of many of his ideas,
especially towards the close, would not have appealed to
Wesley. On the contrary the vehemence of Wyclif's lan
guage, and the revolutionary character of many of his
proposals, especially of his doctrine of " dominion,' founded
on grace, would probably have estranged the more sober,
conservative Churchman. Wyclif never learned that a
mouldering fire and a powder magazine, however carefully
guarded, are dangerous neighbours. Wesley, on the con
trary, as we see from his unfortunate attitude in the
American War, was always on the side of authority. But
in two matters we can be sure of their perfect accord —
Wyclif's intense sympathy with the poor and the supreme
importance that he attached to the Scriptures as the rule
of faith and life. Wyclif's sorrow for the poor runs
through his works like a wail of love, and redeems his
fiercest denunciations, his most impossible schemes. Half
Wyclif's English writings might be compressed into his
bitter cry : ' Poor men have naked sides, and dead walls
have great plenty of waste gold.' Wyclif's insistence on the
supreme authority of the Bible and the right of the sober-
minded to interpret it for themselves was not less than that
of Luther, and won for him at an early date the proud
title of ' doctor evangelicus,' while he desired that above
all others his followers should be known as ' the men of
the Gospel.'
Their use In two matters Wesley and Wyclif were one in their
of the pen. methods — in their constant appeal by the pen, and in their
use of unauthorized preachers. In the vast range and
1 On this matter the student may consult A. F. Ozanam, Les poetes
Franciscains en Italie (6th ed. 1882).

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 73
extent of his writings Wyclif is incomparably the greater
of the two men; in the strenuousness of his intellectual
life Wyclif has had few superiors. His activity in bringing
out long scholastic treatises, or in editing popular editions
of his sermons and tractates, is almost incredible, more
especially when we consider the few years into which his
tireless energy compressed tasks that might well have
occupied a lifetime. For Wyclif was not merely the last
of the schoolmen, but the first of modern pamphleteers.
In homely English, in stinging sarcasm and bold invective,
he drove home arguments hitherto buried in crabbed Latin.
Nor must we forget the translation of the Vulgate into the
language of the people, carried out by Wyclif's followers,
especially Purvey, at the instigation of the master. Though
Wesley seems to have been strangely ignorant of Wyclif,1
the later reformer followed in the footsteps of the earlier
in his numerous tracts, written in terse logical English,
appealing to all sorts and conditions of men.2 Though later
Methodists too often neglected the effective use of the press,
Wesley himself was keenly alive to the opportunities it
afforded for reaching the people.
Wesley's early preachers and Wyclif's ' Biblemen ' have 'Biblemen'
often been compared. For Wyclif had unconsciously copied f" , .
the methods of St. Francis, and fallen back upon the lost
secret of the Brothers Minor. From Oxford, as from Assisi
two centuries before, Wyclif, like Wesley four centuries
later, sent out his " poor priests,' who, in the highways and
by-ways, if not in the churches then on the village greens,
should win the souls of the neglected. Clad in russet robes
of undressed wool, without sandals, purse or scrip, a staff
in their hands, dependent for food and shelter on the good
will of their neighbours, their only possession a few pages
of Wyclif's Bible — especially the translation of the Gospels
and epistles for Sundays — or his English tracts and ser
mons, constantly moving from place to place (for Wyclif
1 So far as I know he never mentions Wyclif. Wesley cannot
have read the great work of J. Lewis, The History of the Life and
Sufferings of John Wicliffe (1720), for he even speaks of Tindal's
Bible as the ' first English translation of the whole Bible ' {Works,
vii. 46).
2 For Wyclif's and Purvey's Bible see Miss M. Deanesly, The
Lollard Bible (1920).

74 TOE PLACE OF METHODISM
feared lest they should become ' possessioners '), not given
' to games or to chess ' but ' to the duties which befit
the priesthood,— studious acquaintance with God's law,
plain preaching of the word of God, and devout thankful
ness ' — Wyclif's ' poor priests,' like the Friars before them,
and Wesley's ' helpers ' on their ' circuits ' in later days,
soon became a power in the land. Wyclif's 'Biblemen^' it
is true, were not 'laymen,' as is so often assumed.1 Even
Archbishop Courtenay, their great enemy, only calls them
' unauthorized preachers ' — i.e. clerics without a bishop's
licence. Some, no doubt, like Wesley's Holy Club, were
men of culture, students attracted by Wyclif's enthusiasm at
Oxford; the majority, especially after his expulsion from
the university, were simple, unlettered clerks — ' an un
lettered man,' he said, ' with God's grace can do more for
building up the Church than many graduates.' But apart
from this question of orders — a word which to the medieval
mind had a wider connotation than that which it bears
to-day — the resemblance between Wyclif's Biblemen and
Wesley's early ' preachers ' is complete, the fear of be
coming ' possessioners ' included.
We*ley and Comparisons have sometimes been made between Wesley
L°r der1*1* ant* Ignatms OI Loyola,2 chiefly, of course, because of the
of the will. obedience exacted by both from their followers. But in the
case of Wesley the obedience was personal, in the case of
Loyola part of a system. The subjection of the will to
another, even in the smallest details of life, is the essence
of the Society of Jesus8 ; a doctrine utterly alien to the
Methodist spirit. And yet— for after all in the matters of
the soul unity is often to be found in the most diverse
phenomena — in this doctrine of the subjection of the will
modern Methodism and Jesuitism are one, up to a certain
point. In its recent preaching Methodism has recognized
the psychological truth somewhat hidden from a previous
generation that it is the will, and not the intellect or feelings,
that lies at the basis of experience and that constitutes the
1 For proofs see Fasciculi Zizaniorum (in the Rolls Series), 275 ;
D. Wilkins, Concilia (1737), iii. 158.
2 e.g. R. W. Church, Occasional Studies, 1897, i. 244; Macaulay,
Essays, ii. 143.
' Hence the fondness of the Jesuits for the philosophy of Duns
Scotus.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 75
essence of and gives unity to the ego, For man is neces
sarily a creature of action, even more than of sensation and ,
reflection.1 Methodist evangelists, therefore, have pointed
out that ' conversion ' is nothing else than the surrender of
the will,2 that holiness consists in the perfect surrender, that
the essence of sin lies in selfishness, or the exaltation of
self by the unsurrendered will. But this surrender is always
made immediately to Christ, never, as in the Society of
Jesus, to an earthly representative.
A criticism of these views lies outside our purpose. In Modern
some respects recent Methodist teaching as regards con- M«*ho<jj*
version and holiness has departed from the earlier practice. JhTwilL
But one criticism is very pertinent to our historical survey.
Jesuitism has always leaned towards semi-Pelagianism.
This, in fact, is the necessity of its outlook, for if the will
be utterly corrupt there can be no virtue in obedience,
however complete. Jesuitism, therefore, has always re
pudiated the extreme forms of Augustinian doctrine, and
in this has lain one secret of its hold upon men of affairs.
The Jesuits have never failed to recognize the value and
merit of human nature, and the corrective power of educa
tion and training. Modern Methodism, by similar insistence
upon the will as the root of sin, and upon the surrender of
the will as the way of conversion and the beginning of
holiness, is tending also, rightly or wrongly, in the same
direction. For if the will be utterly corrupt, no surrender
is possible and no education desirable. The will to win is
not only the secret of victory, as the Germans rightly
insisted, but must form the basis of any appeal to men as
distinct from the emotions of childhood and the intellec-
tualism of youth. Not to recognize this power of the will
is ultimately to land in the Calvinistic doctrine of election.
We must not only, as Loyola aptly puts it, pray as if all
depended on our prayer. We must act as if all depended
on our action.3 The repudiation, therefore, by the majority
1 See on this, Baron von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion,
i. c. 2. Hence the appeal of the Institutional Church.
2 Cf. von Hiigel, op. cit., \. 71, 'the distinctive religious act is,
as such, an unconditional surrender.
8 It is only necessary to remind the reader of Augustine's state
ment, ' inter faeces et urinam nascimur,' to see the degrading
tendencies of his theory, with its Gnostic survivals. Augustine saved

76 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
of modern Methodists of the doctrine of total depravity in
its extreme Augustinian forms, with its unjust condemnation
of the whole human race because of Adam's sin, and its
deadness of the will, is one of the marks of the times, and
is a necessary result of the triumph of Arminianism.
Theologically, however, the position is saved from semi-
Pelagianism, not by the synergism of Melanchthon, but by
the hypothesis of prevenient grace, the emphasis of which
by the late Dr. W. B. Pope was, perhaps, his most lasting
contribution to Methodist theology. The doctrine of pre
venient grace certainly gives to the Cross its value; the
atonement is powerful before all time. Of this prevenient
grace, as also of the eternal dynamic of the Cross, baptism
is the sign and confirmation.

his doctrine from many of its horrors by his claim for baptismal
regeneration. This indifference to action leads St. Augustine at
times into what Dr. Rashdall rightly calls ' moral callousness '
(Rashdall, Atonement, 344). It is not without cause that the revolt
of the modern Church against Augustine, and the increased stress
upon the place of will, has been accompanied by a remarkable
growth in church-consciousness of its duty in social reconstruction. In
modern education also there is an anti-Augustinian tendency. We
see this in the teaching of Dr. Montessori, the basis of which, as we
understand it, is fatal to any doctrine of total depravity.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ff
VI
METHODISM AND MYSTICISM
THE relation, historical and theological, of Methodism Wesley
and mysticism1 must not be overlooked. The debt of and Law'
Wesley himself is well known. At one time in his life, as
Dr. Rigg has shown, Wesley, in his desire to find rest, was
oscillating between mysticism and ritualism.2 Through
reading Thomas a Kempis he first saw 'that true religion
was seated in the heart,' while Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living
and Dying, Law's Serious Call and Christian Perfection
' convinced me more than ever of the exceeding height and
depth and breadth of the law of God.' In 1756 Wesley
recommended the works of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry
More, to the study of his brother clergymen. In his Chris
tian Library Wesley published not only The Homilies of
Macarius, but also such other works of mystics as Brother
Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of God, The Spiritual
Letters of Juan d'Avila and the Spiritual Guide of Molinos.
Indirectly, also, he had been influenced by the ' illuminated
Behmen' — in spite of his antipathy to what he calls his
' sublime nonsense ' — through Behmen's effect upon the
Pietists Spener and Francke, upon Count Zinzendorf and
the Moravians, and upon William Law, as we see in Law's
Spirit of Prayer. Now, of Methodism, as Warburton
claimed, ' William Law was the father, and Count Zinzen-
1 The reader desirous of further knowledge of Mysticism may refer
to the following: Inge, Christian Mysticism (1899) James, Varieties
of Religious Experience, cc. 16 and 17; Royce, The World and
the Individual; Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystias (1894), E.
Underhill, Mysticism, 6th ed., also John of Ruysbroeck ; Rufus
Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (1909); and above all the
masterly work of Baron von Hiigel, T 'he Mystical Element of
Religion, 2 vols., 1908 ; the older R. Vaughan, Hours with the
Mystics. The works of Tauler, Eckhart (see also Ueberweg, Hist.
Phil, i.), Suso, St. John of the Cross, Juliana of Norwich, St.
Teresa, and other mystics are now accessible in cheap editions and
translations. Law, Thomas a Kempis, and the Theologia Germanica
must not be overlooked.
SJ. H. Rigg, The Living Wesley, 2nd ed. 1891, p. 90.

78

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Wesley's
denunciation ef Mysticism.

Its causes.

dorf rocked the cradle ' ; x a remark true to this extent,
that it points out Wesley's debt to both, especially to Law.
As a later date Wesley denounced mysticism with a
characteristic thoroughness which at times degenerates
into unfairness. He writes :
All the other enemies of Christianity are trifles. The
mystics are the most dangerous. They stab it in the
vitals, and its most serious professors are most likely to
fall by them. . . . The whole of Behmenism, both phrase
and sense, is useless, most sublime nonsense, inimitable
bombast, fustian not to be paralleled. . . The mystic
writers are one great antichrist.
At another time, writing to his brother Samuel, he says :
' I think the rock on which I had the nearest made
shipwreck of the faith was the writing of the mystics.'
Hence Wesley falls foul of the primary work of one of the
great mystics of all times. Luther's Galatians, he tells us
in 1 74 1 , is ' quite shallow, muddy, and confused, deeply
tinctured with mysticism, and hence often dangerously
wrong.' He gives us to understand that he had done with
' enthusiasm ' for ever when he separated from the Mora
vians. So when the ' French prophets,' certain Camisards
from the Cevennes, stirred England with their spiritual
agitations, Wesley diagnosed the movement as ' natural
distemper ' ; to his later embarrassment when brought face
to face with the physical effects of his own preaching.
There were many features in the mysticism of the times
which will account for Wesley's dislike. Many of the
features characteristic of the early Quakers would not
commend themselves to a man so ordered and logical as
Wesley. The dangerous doctrines of the Ranters, whose
' cheap, half-digested spiritualism ' had led so many astray
in the days of the Commonwealth were not forgotten.2 The

1 Owing to limitations of space I have not entered into the rela
tions of Wesley and the Moravians. They are dealt with in all the
histories. In my judgement the contact of Moravianism and Metho
dism is surface contact, which may easily be exaggerated. There is an
historical interest, however, in tracing the links, causal or otherwise,
in the chain Wyclif— Hus— Moravians — Zinzendorf — Wesley. To the
Pietists, however, through John Wesley's translations, Methodism owes
some of its finest hymns.
2 For the Ranters see R. Jones, op. cit., c. 19.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 7g
extravagance of Molther's doctrine of ' stillness '—that the
single duty of a man desiring faith or to serve God perfectly
was ' to be still ' and do nothing, thus reducing prayer, the
means of grace, and good works into hindrances to salva
tion, not to say sins— naturally disgusted his logical common
sense and his energetic spirit. To Wesley communion with
God was no dreamy reverie in which the soul swoons
away into the unseen. It was rather the quickening of the
whole man, More sensibly within me live.
Let all my powers Thine entrance feel. '
Moreover much current mysticism lent itself to antino-
mianism. Now, Wesley abhorred antinomianism, the iron
of which, through an incident in his family history, had
entered deep into his soul. Antinomianism had ruined the
influence of his early friends the Moravians, and but for
his strong control would have gained a footing in his
societies. In addition to these two chief causes for his
dread of Mysticism, we gather ' from the many references
to the subject in his Journals and letters other reasons,
some of which were scarcely just. He believed that mysti
cism advocated a doctrine of union with God which would
rob man of his personality. He dreaded the mystic's ex
clusion of reason, as he deemed it, for the appeal to feeling.
He hated the 'fondling, amorous,' irreverent language and
symbolism which characterized some of its utterances.
With his usual common sense he refused to allow that it was
the uniform duty of the Christian ' to choose the most
disagreeable things, whether they come from God or the
world.' In much of this dislike to mysticism, Wesley, no
doubt, was the child of his age, which vehemently suspected
anything savouring of ' inner light.' The genius of Locke
was in the ascendant, and that was fatal to all forms of
transcendental or mystical thought.
Nevertheless Wesley was more influenced by mysticism The influence
than he was aware, for mystical ideas had filtered into the ol Mysticism
better religious life of his age from many sources. A Methodism.
definition of mysticism is peculiarly difficult, but under any
definition, and their name is legion, we hold that many
of the primary ideas of Methodism must be regarded as
mystical, for ' mysticism has been in all ages either
1 Hymn-Book, 245.

80 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
»
avowedly or virtually a reaction and protest against super
stitious dependence on the external props of Christian
certitude.'1 This harmony forms the argument of Bishop
Lavington's Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Con
sidered* a work regarded by the eighteenth century as a
triumph of logic. Lavington was right; we are not careful to
deny his main impeachment. Mysticism and Methodism both
build upon the foundation, not of argument or observation
or memory, or of the power to analyse and synthesize,
but of conscious spiritual experience. ' The faculty and
action of the soul by which we have an immediate experi
ence of objective reality, of the infinite and abiding, of a
spirit not all unlike, yet distinct from our own, which
penetrates and works within these our finite spirits and in
the world at large, especially in human history . . is met
by the mystical and the directly operative element of
religion.' 3 The doctrine of Assurance, moreover, is not
far removed from a belief in the ' inner light,' one result of
which is, as Frofessor Rufus Jones puts it :
' I know that I have found freedom from the sense of
sin, joy in union with the Infinite Spirit, peace through
forgiveness, only because / know it, because it is wit
nessed within.'4
j Hence mystics and Methodists are one in their claim for
, spiritual certitude, though the claim is stated by the mystic
in more unguarded language than by the Methodist. For
instance, the thirteenth-century Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck
writes :With our inner ears we shall hear the inborn Word of
the Father, and in this Word we shall receive all know
ledge and all truth.
Tauler is more cautious :
Dear children, no one ought to allow himself to be in
doubt of his own eternal life; he ought to be sure of it
and not only imagine it.
Put into modern language these statements of Ruys
broeck and other mystics, which might be multiplied
1 W. B. Pope, Compendium of Christian Theology (1880), iii. 123.
2 Published in 1749, 1754, and republished by R. Polwhele with
notes in 1820, 1833.
3 von Hiigel, op. cit., ii. 390.
1 R. Jones, Social Law in the Spiritual World (1904), 171 f.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 81
indefinitely are merely the extremer form of that which is
characteristic of Methodism also: the claim that 'states
of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive
intellect are for those who experience them states of know
ledge.' This Noetic quality, as Professor James calls it, is
common to both mysticism and Methodism.
Again, the Methodist insistence upon conversion is based The intuitive
in evangelical argument upon the existence of a faculty '*cu"Jr-
different from, nay, superior to, reason. In mysticism and
Methodism this intuitive faculty reigns supreme:
Where reason fails with all her powers,
There faith prevails, and love adores.
With this familiar Methodist hymn we may compare the
words of Ruysbroeck:
See now, here must our reason and all definite actions
give way, for our powers become simple in love, and are
silent and bend low before the manifestation of the
Father; for the manifestation of the Father raises the
soul above reason into nakedness without similitudes.
. Above all things, if we desire to enjoy God, or to
experience eternal life within us, we must rise far above
human reason, and enter into God through faith.
Or, for that matter, we might adduce the great pagan mystic
Plotinus, for there is no speech nor language where the
voice of mysticism is not heard :
We must first make the organ of vision analogous and
similar to the object which it is to contemplate. The
eye would never have perceived the sun, if it had not
first taken the form of the sun ; so likewise the soul could
never see beauty if it did not first become beautiful
itself; and all men should begin by making themselves
beautiful and divine, in order that they may obtain the
sight of the beautiful and divine.
The hands are the hands of the Greek pagan; the voice
is that of St. Paul.
By this insistence upon the spiritual faculty as higher
than reason, and the source of our spiritual knowledge,
Methodism becomes one also with mysticism in its constant
vindication of the spiritual rights of the uneducated against
the pretensions of mere learning; a vindication that at
times has degenerated into the contempt for learning which
has been the danger of mysticism in all ages. Said Tauler :
6

•f holiness.

82 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
Children, ye shall not seek after great science. Simply
enter into your own inner principle, and learn to know
what you yourselves are, spiritually and naturally, and
do not dive into the secret things of God.
The doctrine Between Wesley's doctrine of Christian Perfection and
that of the mystics there is, after all, no great gap, especially
if we remember that both Wesley and the mystics need
a little translation of technical terms. Writes Ruysbroeck:
The union with God which any loving spirit has
possessed in love draws towards the innermost centre of
its essence all loving spirits, and he who clings closely
to this attraction cannot fall into deadly sin. The con
templative one, who has renounced his own being and all
things else, does not experience an expulsive force,
because he no longer possesses anything, but is emptied
of all; and so he can always enter naked and imageless
into the secret place of his spirit. There he sees the
eternal light revealed, and in that light he feels an
eternal craving for union with God. And he himself
feels a constant fire of love which desires above all things
to be one with God. . . . This eternal craving for union
with God causes the spirit to glow evermore with love.
Or again :
We shall enjoy God, and, united in Him, we shall rest
in blessedness. And this measureless delight in super-
essential rest is the ultimate source of blessedness, for
we are then swallowed up in satisfaction beyond all
possibility of hunger.
Side by side with this we may put the words of one of
the greatest scholars and thinkers of the present age :
The vivid, continuous sense that God, tke Spirit up
holding our poor little spirits, is the true originator and
the true end of the whole movement, in all it may have
of spiritual beauty, truth, goodness, and vitality; that
all the various levels and kinds of reality and action
are, in whatever they have of worth, already immanently
fitted to stimulate, supplement, and purify each other by
Him Who, an infinite spiritual interiority Himself, gives
thus to each one of us indefinite opportunities for
actualizing our own degree and kind of spiritual
possibility and ideal; and that He it is who, however
dimly yet directly, touches our souls and awakens them
to that noblest, incurable discontent with our own petty
self and to that sense of and thirst for the Infinite and

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 83
Abiding, which articulates man's deepest requirement and
characteristic: this is the first experience and conviction,
without which all life, and life's centre, religion, are flat
and dreary, vain and philistine.1
Let the reader compare with these utterances Wesley's
doctrine of Christian perfection, as given, not in formal
treatises that chill, perhaps, by their logic and dogmatism,
but in hymns that warm the heart — for instance, his glowing
translation from Tersteegen :
Thou hidden love of God, whose height,
Whose depth unfathomed no man knows,
1 see from far Thy beauteous light,
Inly I sigh for Thy repose;
My heart is pained, nor can it be
At rest, till it finds rest in Thee.
or Charles Wesley's
Lord, I believe a rest remains
To all Thy people known;
A rest where pure enjoyment reigas
And Thou art loved alone.
or the mystical lines in one of his noble hymns to the
Holy Spirit: Plunged in the Godhead's deepest sea,
And lost in Thine immensity,
and he will realize the essential unity of Methodist and
mystic in spite of difference in technical terms. But after
all this is only to claim that in its doctrine of holiness both
Methodism and mysticism touch the basal fact of spiritual
consciousness, never more finely expressed than by the
great mystic, St. Augustine, in the opening words of his
Confessions : ' Thou hast created us unto Thyself, O God,
and our heart finds no rest until it rests in Thee.'
In his valuable examination of mysticism Professor James Points of
tells us that there are two necessary qualities or marks of di»»imitarity.
the mystical. The first he calls Ineffability, by which he
means ' that no adequate report thereof can be given in
words.' He goes on to add :
It follows from this that its quality must be directly
experienced ; it cannot be imparted or transferred to
others. No one can make clear to another who has never
had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it
1 yon Hiigel, op. cit., ii. 395.

84 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
consists. One must have musical ears to know the value
of a symphony.
j The second quality of mysticism Professor James tells us
is the Noetic quality :
Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states
seem to those who experience them to be also states of
knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of
truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. ... As a
rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority
for after-time.
That these two qualities of mysticism are qualities also of
Methodism is, we think, abundantly clear from our previous
analysis of Methodism and of the place therein of the doctrine
of Assurance. Professor James goes on to add ' two other
qualities, less sharply marked.' The first he calls Transiency,
Passmty. the second Passivity. Transiency seems to us to be rather a
matter of interest to psychologists; it is certainly the mark
of those more abnormal states which St. Paul called ' the
third heaven.' But the antagonism of Methodism to
Passivity is the dividing line between it and the more strictly
mystical groups of religious consciousness. The doctrine
of ' stillness,' the negative passivity which makes Eckhart
and Tauler use language curiously similar to that of Hegel,
is not a doctrine of Methodism.
Yet even in this matter it would be easy to exaggerate
the antagonism. Wesley laid a certain stress upon the
tranquil tarrying and spiritual ' quiet,' the sane emphasis
of which has been the great contribution of the Friends
(both the medieval Friends of God and the later Quakers), to
the Catholic Church. Some of his brother's hymns breathe
the true spirit of Quietism, especially his fine stanzas :
Open, Lord, my inward ear,
And bid my heart rejoice;
Bid my quiet spirit hear
Thy comfortable voice.
From the world of sin and noise
And hurry I withdraw;
For the small and inward voice
I wait with humble awe.
The lines remind us of the words of Tauler :
In the chamber of the heart God works. But what
He works in the souls of those with whom He holds
direct converse none can say, nor can any man give

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 85
account of it to another; but he only who has felt it
knows what it is, and even he can tell thee nothing of it,
save only that God in very truth hath possessed the
ground of his heart.
But with this last sentence Wesley would have had little
sympathy. He sang rather:
What we have felt and seen
With confidence we tell;
And publish to the sons of men
The signs infallible.
Quietism — against which Wesley revolted, and which Rome
condemned1 — is false when stated in its extremer terms.
Quietism, with its doctrine of the one act, neglected and
even despised vocal prayer and the historical and in
stitutional aspects of religion. Quietism, also, was too often
forgetful of morality, especially on its social and visible
sides. Nevertheless we must not forget the true Quietism,
never more needed that in this noisy, superficial age. For
Quietism stressed man's deep-seated necessity to purify him
self by detachment, not only from the things that are for
bidden, but even from those which are allowable. Ruys
broeck is right: it is
in the repose of our spirit that we receive the incompre
hensible splendour which envelopes and penetrates us,
just as the air is penetrated by the brightness of the sun.
And this splendour is merely a boundless vision, and a
boundless beholding.
In our judgement the real antagonism, as Wesley deemed, The influence
of Methodism and mysticism — or, as we should prefer to °f tne *oc,al
put it, the great corrective by Methodism of the dangers of
mysticism — lies in the emphasis by Methodism both of the
social factor, and especially that spiritual experiences are
not an end in themselves, but a means towards garnering
a richer harvest of souls. However mystical the experi
ences of its individual members, the narration of the same
to one another, much more the use of the same for winning
another, are in the long run fatal to the aberrations of the
mystic spirit. Mysticism, unlike Methodism, loves the sub
conscious, and the darkness which broods over the sea
of silence and isolation. Suso, Tauler, Eckhart — especially
1 In 1685-7 by the trial of Miguel de Molinos and his Guida
Spirituale.

86 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
Eckhart— in a Methodist class-meeting would be worse
than dumb; they would be unintelligible. Every reader
of Tauler's life is familiar with that wonderful scene in
Strassburg Cathedral when, instead of preaching, Tauler
stood in the pulpit waiting for a message that never came,
his sobs audible in the stillness.1 Such an experience
Wesley would have regarded as ' enthusiasm ' ; the needs
of the people before him, the imperious call to set forth the
Saviour in all His fullness, would have driven out all other
thoughts and itself become the message. Equally fatal
is the social factor and the belief in service for others to
the contempt for the outer ordinances of religion which has
ever been one of the stumbling-blocks of mysticism. Mys
ticism has not always sufficiently realized that Christ's
promise of the fullness of His presence is given to the
two or three who are gathered together. That no man
liveth to himself is as true in the spiritual sphere as in the
natural. For spiritual experiences are like unto ' a great
living Cloth of Gold with not only the woof going from
God to Man and from Man to God, but also the warp
going from Man to Man.'2
The truth of The social factor was also Wesley's test for the genuine-
Quietism. ness Q£ ajj outpourings of the Spirit; they must form part
of the common inheritance of faithful Christians. No
doubt there are dangers of exaggeration in this social
factor, as fatal, in their way, as the errors of Quietism.
Judged by Wesley's last test we should write down Joan of
Arc as an impostor instead of one of the truest prophets of
God. Repetition in others is no infallible measure of the
motions of the Spirit, though, no doubt, it will pass as a
rough working rule of life. Even less must we judge truth
by our powers of testimony. ' Woe to us,' said Carlyle, ' if
we have nothing in us except that which we can express and
show to others.' Methodism does not always sufficiently
remember that words, as it has been finely said, were in-
1 That this incident is probably not historical does not lessen its
value as illustration. The legends of Nicholas of Basel, to whom
the tale should be attributed, show the drift of medieval Mysticism.
In all probability Nicholas himself is not historical. See H. S.
Denifle, Der Gottesfrevnd im Oberlande (1870), or Diet. Relig. and
Ethics, vi. 139 f.
2 von Hiigel, op. cit., ii. 356.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 8/
Vented for the ordinary uses of life, and that they are un
happy, restless, and as bewildered as beggars round a throne
when from time to time some royal soul leads them else
where. At best, as Sir FitzJames Stephen truly expressed
it, ' Words on the highest subjects must be used as
signals made by spirits in prison to each other, with a
world of things to think and to say which our signals cannot
describe at all.' As Tauler puts it, those for whom
' eternity is the aim and dwelling-place ' should not be
' like unto foolish asses which never learn any other form
of speech than their own braying.' But this danger is
rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
Owing to their possession in common of many qualities, The need of
Methodism and mysticism alike have been regarded as yst'cl»B1'
philosophical empiricism, or sneered at as the glorification
of sentimentality. Methodism need be at no pains to dis
sociate herself from this joint charge. For mysticism
has been in the past, and will be in the future
the conception of men whose piety has been won after
long conflict, whose single-minded devotion to an
abstraction has resulted from a vast experience of the
painful complications of life. ... It has been the
ferment of the faith, the forerunner of spiritual liberty,
the inaccessible refuge of the nobler heretics, the teacher
of the despairing, the comforter of those who are weary
of finitude.1
The truths of mysticism neither grow old nor die. Maeter
linck is right:
To-day you may pass through the infirmaries of the
human soul, where all thoughts come day by day to die,
and you will not find there a single mystic thought.
On the contrary they are as potent for uplifting in the
twentieth century as in the days of Plato or St. Paul. If
kept in their proper sphere they form for the soul 'a
sobering, purifying, mortifying, vivifying bath and fire.'2
In her growing realization of unity with a sane mysticism
Methodism will find a most powerful weapon in the fight
of the future against the increasing materialism of thought
and life.
1 J Royce, The World and the Individual (1901, 1904), 81-5.
2 von Hiigel, ep. cit., i. 77.

88 THE PLACE OF METHODISM

VII
METHODISM AND PURITANISM
Asceticism. METHODISM has sometimes been charged with being
an ascetic religion. Its asceticism, in former days by no
means inconsiderable, was its inheritance from the puri
tanism in which it was cradled. Between asceticism and
puritanism there is one fundamental difference. Asceticism,
especially in the early ages of the Church, too often looked
upon mortification as a duty for its own sake ; the discipline
through which the athlete must pass in the course of
training (ao-zapis) became confused with the guerdon itself.
Hence the tortures of Eastern monks, the wild privations
of saints in every age. Such men considered their lives,
to quote the phrase of one of their own number, as
' pietatis palaestrae,' ' wrestling rings ' in which they were
1 the athletes of God,' and the foe the human in themselves.
Puritanism, on the contrary, the puritanism of Milton and
other nobler representatives, looked upon mortification as a
means to an end. In asceticism the attention is too often
fixed upon the process; in puritanism the thought was con
centrated upon the intended result. With rare good sense
Wesley rejected asceticism early in life. ' I cannot think,'
he writes to his mother, ' that when God sent us into the
world He had irreversibly decreed that we should be per
petually miserable in it.' So, in spite of occasional toyings
with asceticism, especially in his Oxford days, he put
aside the teaching of the De Imitatione Christi with its
condemnation of all mirth or pleasure as sinful or useless
in favour of the common-sense rule of his Puritan mother:
Would you judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of
pleasure? Take this rule: Whatever weakens your
reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, ob
scures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of
spiritual things — in short, whatever increases the strength
and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is
sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.
To this teaching Methodism, on the whole, has been true.
The danger, manifested more than once in its history, of

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 89
classifying things as 'worldly' or 'unworldly' by a rigid
external rule, instead of by their effect on spiritual life and
brotherhood,1 has given place to the greater danger which
it shares to-day with every church of forgetting that renun
ciation in some form or other is still
the strait and royal way
That leads us to the courts above.
If we claim that Methodism owes much of its strength to The danger of
the puritanism which it inherited, if we point to the loss of Dnalism-
this puritanism as one of the dangers of the present, this
must not blind us to some matters in which the puritanism
inherent in Methodism was not all gain. The danger of both
asceticism and puritanism is a dualism of life; the cutting
off of many human interests as alien from God ; the making
the Lord a god of the hills and not of the valleys.2 The
illustrations of this in the case of the extreme puritans are
many. The world will never cease to laugh at the folly
which banned the mincepie, which substituted verses of
the Bible for Christian names, or which discovered sin in a
' kist of whistles, a maypole, or a steeple.'
Methodism has suffered at times, especially in its early Emancipation
days, from a similar spirit of dualism. At one time this Oxford ' '
manifested itself in what might fairly be described as the Movement.
cultivation of the ugly, especially in the architecture of its
chapels, a fault aggravated by the philistinism of the
Georgian and early Victorian age. Occasionally this dualism
has taken the form of a suspicion of culture, especially of
the college training of its ministry, a feeling not wholly
extinct in certain circles. More often in its pulpit utterances
it has preached an indifference to, even a contempt for,
the results of science or criticism in their bearings upon
truth. At one time this dualism manifested itself in the
curious form of the holding aloof from all political and
social issues, more ostentatious, possibly, than real. But
this characteristic trait of the Cameronians was confined in
Methodism to its ministry, and that, chiefly, for the sake of
unity and peace. The days are long since past when the
advocacy of teetotalism by Methodist ministers was officially
frowned upon as a form of political activity.
In these matters Methodism by no means stands alone;
probably in all, with the exception of the political, it has
1 1 Cor. viii. 2 i Kings xx. 28.

90 THE PLACE OF, METHODISM
been less extreme than the Other Nonconformist churches.
For the most part this dualism was not so much a charac
teristic of Methodism as the result of the contracted horizons
of the times. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the
Evangelicals of the Church of England in the early nine
teenth century. From any extreme form of dualism Wesley
himself was remarkably free, but in this matter he was not
altogether able to resist his age. For her emancipation
from this dualism Methodism is indebted, to a larger extent
than she is aware, to the Oxford Movement. That all life,
whether culture, art, politics, the care of the body, amuse
ment, or business, must find its unity in Christ Jesus is the
great lesson which, more than any other, we have learned
from the teaching of Newman and his school. For New
man, by drawing attention to the value of the past, uncon
sciously moulded the outlook of the future. The smug
self-satisfaction of the mid- Victorians gave place to a new
but larger synthesis of life.
Othei results In certain other of their relations, however, the religious
jJj^ii£|tford revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have not
been so harmonious. The virtual suppression of Evan
gelicalism as a governing force in the Church of England,
largely because of its narrowness of outlook and restricted
scholarship, has made Methodism more conscious of itself
as the representative Evangelical Church of the country.
To some extent this consciousness owes its strength to the
pressure of an intolerant section of Anglicanism. Within
living memory this last has produced its effect. Even the
Wesleyan Methodist Church, which at one time was regarded
as a sort of poor relation of the Establishment, has drifted
into complete separation. The desire for unity, in which
Tractarianism began, has thus led, by a strange irony, to
a sharper division, a deep distrust of the fidelity of certain
sections in the Anglican Church, to the great principles of
the Reformation, a determination, if needful, to join battle
on this issue, and to sink every other consideration before
the maintenance in England of a Protestant evangelical
church. Harmony between the Anglican and Methodist
Churches will never be restored on the old basis. Only the
frankest recognition by the Anglican of the validity and
reality of the church life of Methodism, and of the great
truths for which it stands, can prevent a further widening

Movement.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 91
of the breach, than which we can conceive no greater
disaster to English religious life. Unless we err greatly, we
believe that such recognition is given, though, perhaps,
less fully than we might desire, in the stirring evangelical
letter of the recent Lambeth Conference, with its appeal
to try a new approach, to adopt a new point of view,
to look up to the reality as it is in God. ... In the
past negotiations for re-union have often started with the
attempt to define the measure of uniformity which is
essential. The impression has been given that nothing
else matters. Now we see that those elements of truth
about which differences have arisen are essential to the
fullness of the witness of the whole Church. . . It is
not by reducing the differing groups of Christians to
uniformity, but by rightly using their diversity that the
Church can become all things to all men. So long as
there is vital connexion with the Head, there is positive
value in the differentiation of the members.1
What immediate answer to this appeal should be given by
the Nonconformist Churches of England and Scotland is
a matter that lies beyond our province to discuss. But
for some of us it strikes a new note of hope, the renewal
of our belief that the Holy Spirit will lead His Church
into a higher, deeper fellowship of saints.
In this connexion it were well to remember the effect Methodisa
of Methodism in the erection of Nonconformity into a force i?d oth,r .
. „ , , , ,,,-, . . Noncenlerarist
representing m England at least half the nation, in America churohes.
a much larger proportion. Leaving America out of the
account, it is open to question whether, but for Methodism,
Nonconformity in England would not have become reduced
to a few insignificant extremists. When Wesley was born
many of the moderate Dissenters, of whom Baxter may be
taken as representative, were still in favour of inclusion
in a national church. The Independents, it is true, were
largely irreconcilable, so also were the Baptists. But both
were declining sects, whose religious life had suffered from
their constant controversies, and from the Socinianism of
many of their leaders. ' Those who are best acquainted with
the state of the English nation tell us that the Dissenting
interest declines from day to day.' So wrote the historian
Mosheim in 1740, and similar evidence could easily be
1 Evangelical Letter, p. 12.

92

THE PLACE OF METHODISM

Distrust gives
place to
alliance.

adduced from other sources.1 Between 17 14 and 173 1
more than fifty Nonconformist ministers took orders in the
Established Church. The stricter manners and the severe
morals of an earlier generation were disappearing, and with
them went the courage and enthusiasm of religious life.
The vital force of the Dissenters seemed to have become
exhausted by their long fight for existence. The preaching
of their ministers was too often cold and intellectual,
proiistanl rather than constructive. To the world outside
the chapel they made little appeal; for many, in fact, this
isolation was part of their rigid Calvinism. Even the
Quakers had lost their enthusiasms. They had substituted
discipline for spiritual guidance, ' and authority had passed
into the hands of men who permeated the Society with
petty conceptions. '2
In the providence of God, and by one of the ironies
of history, all this was altered, though not, it is true,
in his own lifetime, by a loyal son of the Anglican
Church. Wesley not only gave Nonconformity a new
religious life, but, by the immense additions that his own
revival ultimately gave to its ranks, made Nonconformity
into a great national force. Only slowly, as Dale reminds
us, did these results appear. For a long time Wesley's
Arminianism filled the leaders of Dissent with alarm; for
in many of their churches a loose Arminianism had led to
Socinianism, and quenched the fire of spiritual earnestness.
Hence at first the ' Arminian Methodists ' were regarded by
the Independents as the enemies of the ' doctrine of grace.'
Not until late in Wesley's life did the more serious Non
conformists discover the immense moral and spiritual
difference between the old Arminianism which they dreaded,
and the evangelical Arminianism, with its supreme loyalty
to Christ and His Cross, which Methodism proclaimed.
Then the flames kindled by Wesley began to spread; the
dry timber of the older Nonconformity took fire.* In the
nineteenth century William Jay, John Angell James, Thomas
1 See R. W. Dale, English Congregationalism (1907), 528 ff. ;
A. H. Drysdale, Presbyterians in England (1889), pp. 489-542.
2W. C. Braithwaite, Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience
(1909), p. 78.
3 R. W. Dale, Fellowship with Christ and other Disciples (1896),
' Theology of John Wesley,' 224.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 93
Raffles, and other great Dissenting leaders, owed much of
their zeal and success to their connexion with Methodism.
A passion for evangelistic work took possession of the Inde
pendents, and in consequence the walls of mutual distrust
which had long separated Methodism from sections of
Nonconformity were broken down. Rigid Calvinism gave
place to a nobler conception of the Divine Love. From
Methodism the older Dissenting churches gained, not only
a new theology, but new life, courage, and fidelity;
while Methodism, on its side, was slowly drawn during the
nineteenth century farther away from the Established
Church, into closer alliance with its Free Church brethren.
Thus Nonconformity gradually became conscious of its
essential unity. A common solicitude to make men Chris
tians led to a lessening emphasis of differences in mere
organization. The dissidence of dissent gave place to the
nobler conception of an evangelical solidarity, the end of
which is not yet.
In the judgement of some writers of repute the new life Methodism
which Wesley gave to Nonconformitv was not, perhaps, ^ ,•
, jo .'_ , . , , , Anglicanism.
the most potent result of his revival. By the withdrawal
from the Church of England of what would have formed a
strong Evangelical section, Methodism, we are told, upset
the balance so long maintained in Anglicanism, and made
it possible for the Tractarians to attempt to undo the work
of the Reformation. No task can be more difficult or useless
than to indicate the other directions which history would
have taken if certain events had not occurred — if the Persians
had conquered at Marathon, Harold at Hastings, and so on.
The different outlook to-day in the Anglican Church, if
Methodism had been welcomed by the bishops, as St.
Francis and St. Dominic were welcomed by Honorius III,
and Ignatius of Loyola by Paul III, belongs to the same
category of valueless speculation. Nor must we forget
that the Oxford Movement was largely a reaction against
a narrow, cramping Evangelicalism that often leaned
towards Calvinism. The reaction might not have been
the less vigorous and persistent — though the conflict
between the two sections would have been more strenuous —
if the Evangelicals, under the lead of Porteous, Simeon,
Wilberforce, and others, had been reinforced within the
Church by the Methodists, with their Arminian leaven. The

94 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
'Clapham sect,' thus broadly based on numbers, would have
become a permanent element in the Established Church.
The theological teaching of Hooker and Barrow would not
so easily have given place to that of Newman, Keble and
Pusey. The added importance given by Methodism to the
laity would have led to reform in church government at
least half a century earlier. Above all, the missionary
work of a united Church would have had a cogency of
appeal in heathen lands that unhappy divisions have too
often weakened. But such dreams are profitless save in
so far as they may give a hope for the future.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 95

VIII
METHODIST ORGANIZATION
WE have reserved to the last the most difficult topic:
the place of Methodism in the Catholic Church, as judged
by its ministerial organization. For herein we touch a
difference that at present is a serious barrier between good
men who otherwise see eye to eye in all essentials.
But as this is not the occasion for apology for one
view or another, but rather for the presentation of fact,
we may somewhat lessen the difficulties before us. In
one thing we may rejoice; the recent publication of the
Lambeth Appeal strikes, as we believe, a new note of
hope that even in this matter, in God's good time, the
loosened and broken bands of fellowship may once more
be knit together in unity.
The Lambeth Appeal enables us also to dismiss in a few Wesley and
lines a subject upon which much ink has been spilt in separation
more contentious days. Whether Wesley intended the A°™u^
creation of a separate Church is a question that it is Church.
impossible to answer, or rather which controversialists will
answer according to their preconceptions. Arguments on
both sides can easily be adduced both from his earlier
writings, when he was still under the influence of High
Church prejudices, and from the more mature convictions
of later life. For so logical a mind Wesley was remarkably
inconsistent. Many illustrations might be given; a few
must suffice. In 1787 he prophesied that 'when the
Methodists leave the Church of England God will leave
them,' and in 1789 declared that 'none who regarded his
judgement or advice would separate from the Church of
England.' But then it is just as easy to quote a chain of
sayings of an exactly opposite character from Wesley's lips
and pen. He repudiated the ' uninterrupted succession ' as
' a fable which no man ever did or could prove ' ; and as
early as 1758 based his Twelve Reasons against Separation,
not upon theory or lawfulness—' which itself may fee

inconsistencies.

96 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
disputed, being not so clear a point as some may imagine '
— but upon mere ' expediency.' . No. 8 of these Twelve
Reasons is absolutely fatal :
Because to form the plan of a new Church would
require infinite time and care (which might be far more
profitably bestowed) with much more wisdom and greater
depth and extensiveness of thought than any of us are
masters of.
Wesley's While Wesley's utterances on this question are thus
inconsistent both with High Church theory and with himself,
over his actions there can rest no doubt. At the very time
that he pleaded against separation he took legal steps to
give Methodism a continuity of existence as a separate
organization. In his ordination in 1784 of certain brethren
for America, in 1785 of helpers for Scotland, he might
plead as some excuse for his defiance of the canons of his
Church that both America and Scotland were outside
Anglican jurisdiction. But the same cannot be said for his
ordination in 1789 of helpers for England, nor for his
obtaining in 1787 a licence for some of his buildings as
Dissenting chapels. With Wesley theory and urgent need
were always pulling in opposite directions. The logical
Latin mind would have attempted to reconcile the two.
Like most Englishmen Wesley was untroubled by, scarcely
conscious of, their divergence. We see a similar breach
between practice and theory in some of the political
utterances of Oliver Cromwell. But both Cromwell and
Wesley, like most other great Englishmen, when at the
push of the pike, abandoned their theories for the practical
duties and needs which lay next to hand. Be this as it may,
Wesley's theories have little relevance to the facts of to-day.
In recent years historians have discussed at considerable
length the intentions of Magna Charta. We believe that in
the best informed opinion it is now clear that the great
Charter was intended by the barons to crush out rather than
develop the liberties which are popularly supposed to have
been founded upon it. Only by the accident of later editions
was the intention of its authors changed into the sure basis
of freedom. The underlying concepts of the barons at
Runnymede, and of Wesley when registering his Deed of
Declaration, will always be subjects of academic interest and

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 97
debate, provided only that the realities of to-day are not
thereby obscured or disregarded.
In the main outlines of its organization, both in America The
and in England, Methodism undoubtedly is Presbyterian. Presbyterian
This Presbyterian stamp was impressed upon it, curious as it Methodism" °
may seem, by Wesley himself; unconsciously, no doubt, for
the most part. But Wesley's American ' bishops,' his English
' superintendents,' his system of ' stewards,' his annual
' Conferences,' his ' quarterly meetings ' of the ministers
and laymen in every circuit, all fall in so closely with the
Presbyterian system that the later division into synods,
the later ordination of the ministers by the laying on of
hands of the senior brethren, the later admission of the
laity1 to all, or almost all, the courts of the church have
consolidated, not altered, the work he began. Even the
system whereby, for more than a century and a half,
Methodist ministers were forced every three years to root
themselves up and ' travel ' elsewhere has been slowly
displaced by one more elastic and more in harmony with
that of other Presbyterian churches.
To pass away to a more disputed question, we should Relation to
do well to inquire to what extent Methodism has con- l^e primitive
served the general organization of the primitive church. urc '
Of the orders, other than presbyters and bishops, recognized
in sub-apostolic times, for the models of which the church
was indebted to Judaism, Methodism has virtually retained
the majority, though under different names. In its
' stewards ' we may see efficient successors to the apostolic
'deacons'; to the relief afforded the pastorate by their
unwearied ' service of tables ' Methodism owes, on the
spiritual as well as on the financial side, an untold debt.
To the early 'prophets' we have already alluded; in its
'local preachers' and 'exhorters,' Methodism finds the
nearest analogy. The ' teachers ' — who, of course, had
nothing whatever to do with secular schools2 — discharged
1 1 am aware that there may be some dispute as to whether the
' elders ' of Presbyterianism are laymen or not (see J. H. Rigg, Church
Organization, 1887, 130 ff). But for all practical purposes they are as
much laymen as the ' stewards ' of Methodism.
2 See my Persecution in the Early Church, 173-5. For 'teachers'
see Lindsay, op. cit., 103 ff; Harnack, Expansion of Christianity,
Eng. Trans, by J. Moffatt, 1905, i. 444 ff. 7

origin.

98 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
functions some of which to-day are allotted to the ' leaders.'
On their instruction of the ' classes ' in the deeper things
of God the health, or rather the life, of Methodism as a
distinctive church largely depends.
Its historical Historically speaking, the presbyterian organization of
Methodism was due to Wesley's reading Baron King of
Ockham's Inquiry, and Stillingfleet's Irenicum. Baron
King's Inquiry into the Constitution, Discipline, Unity, and
Worship of the Catholic Church (1691) is a remarkable book,
and proved the first step towards his becoming the Lord
Chancellor. Its purpose was to promote the comprehension
of the Dissenters, for King had been brought up as a
Presbyterian. Only recently has it been superseded by
other works. In 1746 the Inquiry, in its second more com
plete edition (17 12), fell into the hands of Wesley. In
spite of his High Church prejudices he owned in his Journal
that it was an 'impartial draught.' Writing to Coke in
1 784 with reference to his ordination of ' superintendents '
and ' elders ' for America, he says :
Lord King's Account of the Primitive Church con
vinced me many years ago that Bishops and Presbyters
are the same order, and consequently have the same right
to ordain.
This impression was deepened by Stillingfleet's Irenicum
(1659). In 1756 Wesley writes:
As to my own judgement I still believe the Episcopal
form of Church government to be scriptural and apos
tolical. I mean, well agreeing with the practice and
writings of the apostles. But that it is prescribed in
Scripture I do not believe. This opinion which I once
zealously espoused I have been heartily ashamed of ever
since I read Bishop Stillingfleet's IrenicumA
'But were it otherwise,' Wesley goes on to add, 'I should
still call these "smaller points" than loving God and all
mankind.' To this position, so clearly enunciated by Wesley, Metho
dism in both continents still adheres. The first Conference
after Wesley's death emphatically declared the equality of
all the preachers. That Methodism has no objection to
episcopacy from a practical standpoint is shown by its
1 Works, xiii. 251, 211, and cf. Bennet's Minutes, s.v., 1747, printed
by the Wesley Historical Society, 1896, p. 47.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 99
system of ' superintendents ' in. England, of ' chairmen of
districts ' with their large though vague powers, and of
' bishops ' in America ; but it denies the special order
and exclusive grace. English 'superintendent' and
American 'bishop' are both one with their fellow presby
ters, in spite of the vast powers, such as no Anglican
bishop ever wields, that are given to the American bishop
between the quadrennial Conferences; nor is ordination
reserved for the ' superintendents ' or ' bishops,' to the ex
clusion of presbyters of mature experience. Whether in
this contention Methodism is right is a theme too large for
present discussion. In the judgement of the present writer
much spade work has yet to be done before the final verdict
of history can be given as to the place and meaning of the
episcopus and presbyter in the early history of the Church.
But whatever be the facts as to the second century, with its
undoubted growth of a monarchial episcopate, we know no
scholars who would be so daring as to pronounce that in
this matter historical criticism has shown that Methodism
is wholly at variance with the usages of the Apostolic
Church. 'Prophets' and 'teachers,' as Harnack has shown us, The revival
were both part of the ' prophetic ministry ' of the early "-o'.toiate.
Church. Conjoined with them were the 'apostles.' To
many who have not familiarized themselves with the
results of recent research it may seem strange to claim that
the chief office of the early Church revived by Methodism
was that of ' apostle.' 1 Owing to the reverence attached
to the Twelve Disciples, and the later restriction to them of
the title of ' apostle ' — a title not given them by Jesus —
the place of ' apostles ' in the primitive Church has been
somewhat obscured. Far into the second century, as the
Didache shows us, the ' apostles ' were the itinerant mis
sionaries of the Church. Their one occupation was to preach
the word, especially to the heathen, and in the pursuit of
this duty the ' apostle ' was sometimes called ' the evan
gelist.' An essential mark of their calling was their absolute
poverty; before being admitted to the ' apostolate ' they
must fulfil the demands of Christ, and divide their goods
among the needy. On no account must they settle down;
1 For ' apostles ' in the early Ghuech see Harnack, op. cit., i. 398-441.

ioo THE PLACE OF METHODISM
their duty called them to travel unceasingly in the interests
of their mission. They were regarded as assigned to the
Church as a whole, not to individual communities. Their
business, as Eusebius tells us, was to lay the foundations,
and then to hand over the work of 'edification' to more
settled pastors.
Its cessation With this brief explanation the revival of the ' apostolate '
with Coke. m Methodism is clear. The Wesleys — John throughout life,
Charles until about 1756, when his labours became restricted
— Whitefield, Asbury, and Coke, were genuine ' apostles,' in
their ceaseless ' evangelism,' in their ' apostolic poverty ' —
'two silver spoons,' writes John to the commissioner of
taxes, 'one in Bristol, the other in London' — and in their
claim that the world was their parish. Asbury, the native
of a Staffordshire village now swallowed up in Birming
ham, wrought more deeply into American life in its social,
moral, and religious facts than any other man of his age.
When he died, in 18 16, his incredible journeyings had
determined that Methodism should become the dominant
religion in the great new nation of the West.1 Coke,
though for many years linked with Asbury, refused to
confine his labours to any one continent. He dreamed of
a world-wide Methodism; his main desire was to carry
the gospel to the heathen. If Coke and Asbury had been
familiar with primitive usage they might have claimed the
title, for certainly they fulfilled all the requirements of the
' apostolate,' as their ' assistants,' to whom they entrusted
the building upon the foundations they laid, fulfilled those
of the office of ' prophet.' In the third and fourth centuries
the ' apostle ' disappeared as a permanent feature in the life
of the Church, largely through the jealousy of the ' episco-
pus,' who aspired to his place and duties. So also in
Methodism. Coke, with his roving commission given him
by Wesley himself, was always jealously regarded by the
prophets and presbyters, who succeeded to Wesley's
!1 There are many lives of Asbury. The following may .be
commended: G. P. Main's Francis Asbury (1909), E. S. Tipple,
Francis Asbury (19 16), and especially E. S. Tipple The Heart of
Asbury's Journal (i9°4)' Older works were by W. P. Strickland
(1858), E. L. James (1872), F. W. Briggs (1879), and G. G. Smith
(1896). The notice in DNB ii. 149 is most inadequate to his
real importance. For Coke DNB xi, 247 is much more satisfactory.

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 101
authority though not to his office. In 1813 Coke died on
his voyage to India, and no successor was appointed.
Of greater importance than the revival of the ' Apostolate' . The place of
was the return to the earlier traditions of the Church in the won?en
place assigned by Methodism to its women workers. The wor ""'
dignified position of women in the later Jewish Church —
especially that of the Dispersion — and in the early Christian
Church would require an essay in itself. The orders of
' prophets ' and ' deacons ' were open to them, at any rate
in the East1 ; while the record of the women who * witnessed
the good confession ' forms one of the noblest pages in the
annals of martyrdom. Among the Montanists women, if
gifted with the power of prophecy, could rise to the
highest positions. In the medieval Church also women
had a distinct place and power. St. Hildegard of Bingen
and St. Catherine of Sienna are but two out of the many
medieval ' prophetesses,' a critical study of whose work
is sadly wanted; while the status of women as the head of
great monastic establishments sometimes, as in the Whitby
of St. Hilda, a double monastery of both sexes, cannot be
exaggerated3 Of the mystics also some of the foremost
and saintliest leaders were women; we need only mention
St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, and, in a lesser way,
Juliana of Norwich. But with the Reformation the status
of woman in the Church somewhat declined. Geneva was
fatal to 'the regiment of women,' and in the Anglican
Church in the seventeenth century the spiritual power of
the laity became a cipher.
All this was reversed, first by the Baptists and then by
Quakers. The Baptists, we are told, in 1646, allowed every one
of their members, including women, to preach in public. One
'she-preacher of Coleman Street,' a certain Mrs. Attaway,
not only ' preaches, and, 'tis- reported, also she baptizeth. In
the Isle of Ely (that land of errors and sectaries) is a woman
preacher also.' There were also 'she-preachers in Kent,
1 Pliny, Epp. 96, 97 ; J. W. Uhlhorn, Christian Charity in the
Ancient Church, 1883, J6S ff.
J For these double monasteries, largely of Scotch-Irish origin, which
especially flourished in Saxon England, see my Evolution of Monastic
Ideal, 176 f; H. H. Howorth, The Golden Days of the Early
English Church (1917), iii. 182 f.

102 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
Norfolk, and the rest of the shires.'1 Under the clear
sighted lead of Fox, the Quakers restored to woman her
place among the ' prophets ' ; their informal female diacon-
ate was from the first one of their ministries of 'help.' '
The daring of the Friends has been but imperfectly
followed as yet by any Church, nevertheless we may urge
that Methodism has done its part in recognizing and using
more fully the gifts and graces of women. In some sections
of Methodism they have claimed their place among the
' prophets.' Throughout its history Primitive Methodism
has maintained that in the work of the Church there is no
sex limitation, and has employed women not merely as
local preachers but also as travelling preachers and mis
sionaries.3 In English Methodism, both the Wesleyan and
other sections, the strenuous and devoted work of the
' deaconesses ' has abundantly justified their recent official
recognition. In the zenanas of the East our missionary
societies have found that women are the only possible
' evangelists ' ; whilst the wide world over women have
formed most efficient ' leaders ' of ' classes.' In the
government of Methodism for many years past women have
been freely admitted to its Leaders' Meetings and its
Quarterly Meetings, the two chief local courts of spiritual
and financial affairs. The opening of the present century
saw the flinging wide of the doors of the Conference itself
to women delegates. That they will always form but a
fraction of the Conference does not arise from any under
valuing of their services, but is due to the constitution of
the Wesleyan Methodist Conference itself, half of whose
members are necessarily ministers.
1 R. Jones, Mystical Religion, 419 f, quoting from T. Edwards'
Gangraena, 1646.
' R. Barclay's Apology (1676), s.v.
3 See A New History of Methodism, i. 585. But the Dinah
Morris of Adam Bede was an Arminian Methodist called Elizabeth
Evans, the aunt of George Eliot (op. cit. i. 520).

IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 103

IX
CONCLUSION
We must bring to a conclusion this brief and rapid
survey. Limitations of space have prevented us from
noticing many matters of interest and importance, or from
quoting more fully the sources and evidence upon which
we have based our conclusions. We end as we began, by
claiming for Methodism a definite place in the progress
and development of the one Holy Catholic Church. What
the future may have in store of unions and reunions we
know not. In the twelve years that have passed since
this sketch was first written much has happened. The
reunion in England of the various sections of Methodism
into one powerful Methodist Church has passed beyond a
dream or a hope into concrete proposals to which an
answer must be returned, if not in the immediate future
certainly in the course of a few years. In America the
division in the Methodist Church caused by the question
of slavery is now in process of healing; after seventy-five
years of separation North and South are once more be
coming one. And from the Anglican Conference at
Lambeth there has come a powerful appeal for a still
larger fellowship, and a vaster reunion. What shall be the
outcome of these movements we are content to leave to
the overruling of the Holy Spirit, praying only that neither
blindness to the signs of the times nor uninspired self-
will may prevent us from fulfilling His desires. In the
eternal years of God two centuries of history, however rich
and stirring, are but as a day; nor can we argue from the
present to the demands of the future. But no larger re
union is possible which either implicitly or explicitly ignores
the fact of a Church which is to-day the largest Protestant
Church in the world, with the possible exception of the
Lutherans. In the history of every Church, we repeat, to the thought
ful student, the salient fact is not so much the human
agencies as the presence of the Divine. We believe, as did

104 THE PLACE OF METHODISM
the earliest Fathers: Where Christ Jesus is, there is His
Church.1 And in the story of Methodism only the blind
and irreverent can fail to discern the presence and power
of the Master. For us, as for St. Ignatius:
OUR CHARTER IS JESUS CHRIST;
OUR INFALLIBLE CHARTER IS HIS CROSS,
AND HIS DEATH, AND HIS RESURRECTION,
AND FAITH THROUGH HIM.2

1 Ignatius, Ad Smyrn., viii. 2 : oVou av y Xpioros Tiyo-ovs, oc« fj
Ka6o\.iKrj (.KKX-na-ia.
2 Ignatius, Ad Phil., viii. 2.

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