ENGLISH SOCIAL REFORM
FROM WESLEY TO THE VICTORIAN ERA

Edward Coleson, Ph. D.
Professor History and Social Science, Spring Arbor College

I. INTRODUCTION

According to Earle E. Cairns, 1 historian at Wheaton College, the Clapham Sect (the political arm of the Wesleyan revival) accomplished more of a constructive social nature than any reform movement in history. Other historians 2 with no pro-Christian bias have insisted that Wesley and his followers saved England from the equivalent of the French Revolution. Yet in our own time there has been bitter dissension in Christian circles over what the role of the church should be in politics and social reform. On the one hand Carl F. H. Henry warned us shortly after the Second World War in his Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism that

. . . we have not applied the genius of our position constructively to those problems which press most for solution in a social way. Unless we do this, I am unsure that we shall get an other world hearing for the Gospel.... we have not as a movement faced up with the seriousness of our predicament. 3

Since then the call for "social involvement" has become a strident chorus from part of the evangelical camp, while others have resisted the fashion on the ground that it would take us away from our Christian assignment, the task of preaching the Word and saving souls. If one asks the next and obvious question of what we plan to do when we get involved, the battle between the "New Deal" liberals and the "Goldwater" conservatives becomes bitter indeed. A fairly large literature has already been produced by Christians of the "left" and "right" denouncing each other. The great mass of believers in the middle enjoy their affluence and ignore the problems, hoping they will go away. It is unfortunate that the Christian community is so divided and unsure of itself in this hour of global crisis. We are hardly in a position to supply the needed leadership when we are at war with ourselves. Perhaps a study of the way Wesley and his followers met the problems of their day may be a guide to us as we confront those of our own time.

II. CONDITIONS OF WESLEY'S YOUTH

As many of us were growing up between the two great wars, we were told endlessly that there had never been such apostasy, wickedness and violence on the earth since the days of Noah or thereabouts. Anyone familiar with conditions in Western Europe and England three or four centuries ago may well question such statements.

Slavery, an ancient evil which had become nearly extinct since the Roman era, had been revived with the discovery and settlement of the Americas and now spread its blight over the New World and the Old. The Reformation had spawned an epidemic of ghastly and destructive religious wars. Today we whimper that we can destroy ourselves, but that has been an obvious option since Cain slew his brother Abel. During the Thirty Years ' War (1618-1648) perhaps a third to a half of the German population and a multitude of the neighboring peoples were swept away, and with very crude weapons at that. Evidently they didn't need the bomb -- just the will to kill.

Among the casualties of the religious wars were the Christian Faith and the moral standards of Western Europe. England, for instance, sank to the depths. With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, after the brief period of Puritan rule, there came a flood of vice and corruption. The literature of the era lacks originality but, worse still, "is the unblushing immorality of Restoration drama, which constantly pictures vice triumphant, which 'laughs not merely indulgently at vice, but harshly at the semblance of virtue."' 4 The aristocrats who ran both State and Church were cultured and corrupt: they set the fashion for the nation. The lower classes were vile and degraded, a gin-soaked mass of depravity and despair. "Economists at the end of the seventeenth century like Petty and Gregory King gave it as their considered estimate that more than half of the entire population were a liability on the nation." 5

All classes were given to drunkenness. The consumption of distilled spirits rose from 527,000 gallons in 1684 to eleven mil- lion gallons at the peak of production in 1750, 6 or an increase of more than twenty fold. The "fox-hunting" parsons of the time caroused with the local squires and were hardly a force for re- form, although, of course, there was a saving remnant of righteous people. They even had a major financial disaster, the bursting of the "South Sea Bubble" in 1720, an event reminiscent of the "Crash of '29" in our own time. This was the consequence of a mania for easy riches, a national swindle. And one could continue the catalog of evil almost endlessly. Perhaps the conditions of Wesley's youth may best be summarized in the words of the famous French political philosopher, Montesquieu, who wrote in 1728: "In England there is no religion and the subject, if mentioned in society, evokes nothing but laughter. "7

III. "THE BIG CHANGE"

The late Mary Alice Tenney 8 of Greenville College made much of the dramatic change in England during what one might call the half century of Wesley (1740-1790). This was a great and glorious beginning, but an even more striking contrast is to be found in comparing conditions in England in Wesley's youth and those during the flowering of British greatness in the late Victorian era, a century and a half later. In 1882 The Spectator, a "sedate, middle-of-the-road" British magazine could with considerable truth describe conditions there in the following glowing terms:

Britain as a whole was never more tranquil and happy. No class is at war with society or the government; there is no disaffection anywhere, the Treasury is fairly full, the accumulations of capital are vast. 9

By way of another contrast, substitute today and the U. S. A. for Britain and 1882. Clearly something has gone wrong with America and England too in the last century. Although the outlook is dark today, the British optimist in the latter part of the last century found a multitude of encouraging trends all about him: in addition to a scientific, medical and technological revolution which was making life longer and more pleasant, there were a number of reforms that had already been achieved or were well on their way to accomplishment. The gross immorality of the previous century was giving way to Victorian respectability. Human slavery was, hopefully, a thing of the past, and the government was growing more democratic decade by decade: freedom was becoming the fashion. Revolting factory and slum conditions were being improved. The standard of living for ordinary people was rising. Life was no longer "nasty, brutish and short" for the masses.

Perhaps the greatest contrast between the last century and our present era is the one we forget most completely. Peace, that "consummation devoutly to be wished for" by modern man, seemed well within the grasp of the Victorians. Believe it or not, there were no great wars in Europe in the last century after the defeat of Napoleon. An Austrian army officer of World War I wrote a book a few years ago with the introductory chapter entitled "The Hundred Years' Peace," 10 the century between Waterloo and the "Guns of August" (1815-1914). The American Civil War was the only long and destructive one in the West during that period but, of course, it was not in Europe. Little wonder that even Evangelicals, caught up with the enthusiastic optimism of the era, decided that the triumph of righteousness was at hand, as is evident from the following quotation, written by Rev. B. Carradine as he was watching some young Scottish soldiers, drilling near Stirling Castle back in the 1890's:

. . . hear me, young Highlander: long before you will ever have the opportunity of sheathing your bayonet in human flesh, the Gospel of our blessed Lord will have spread, and will have such a grip on men's hearts, and consciences, and judgments, that war will cease, and that sword of thine will be come a pruning - hook. 11

Such optimism would have seemed like heresy in my youth, but Wesley had written a similar hopeful comment himself when he and his congregation moved into the first headquarters of Methodism near London on November 11, 1739:

I preached at eight o'clock to five or six thousand..., and at five in the evening in the place which had been the king's foundry for cannon. O hasten Thou the time when nation shall not rise up against nation neither shall learn war anymore. 12

November 11 was also to be the close of a global war in our time, the first of those mighty conflicts which have made the modern era a hell of ghastly wars. What happened to the bright hopes of yesterday? Was the Twentieth Century predestined to be what it has become or did we lose our way some where back in the Victorian era?

IV. EVANGELICAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS

If a tree is to be judged by its fruits, we have done well in some areas and very badly in too many others. Modern man, by any fair standard, is a clever engineer who is quite incompetent at ordering his social, political and economic life. We have got- ten to the moon but have done a wretched job down here below, so let us with humility attempt to learn from our betters, recognizing, of course, the obvious fact that they made mistakes too. Let us list their accomplishments. Wesley did not consider himself a success as a minister prior to his "Aldersgate experience" in May of 1738. In the next year he began his "field preaching, " and continued to minister to the multitudes until the end of his life, but it was not long before Evangelicals began doing more than preaching. The first dramatic social reform to grow out of the quickening of the national conscience was the freeing of the slaves in England in 1772, which was almost wholly the work of Granville Sharp (Sharp pressured the English "Supreme Court" into liberating about 15,000 slaves then residing in England).

Wesley himself wrote extensively on about every social and political question that arose in his time, including the American Revolution but, of course, his main thrust was evangelism. This did not prevent him, however, from carrying on an active charitable program in connection with his ministry. He maintained a book room, a free school, a refuge for widows and children, and a free medical clinic and dispensary in connection with the "First Church" of Methodism, the renovated cannon foundry which served as the headquarters of the movement for the first forty years. Although it has been claimed by J. C. Furnas, 13 for instance, that Wesley discouraged political action (a logical conclusion from Wesley's protest 14 against slavery), it also is a fact that he encouraged young William Wilberforce to pursue the abolition cause in Parliament. Indeed, Wesley's last letter l5 was to Wilberforce, telling him to keep up the good fight until "even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away.... " Wilberforce did succeed in getting the slave trade (the transportation of slaves in British ships) stopped in 1808, right in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars.

Slavery within the British Empire was abolished in 1834 and the Royal Navy policed the Atlantic until the American Civil War, to prevent the importation of additional slaves into our South, the West Indies, etc. These early reform efforts were largely the work of Wilberforce and his neighbors, Christian gentlemen who lived about Clapham Common, a suburb of London in those days. Success came slowly and at tremendous cost Their enemies derided them as the "Saints" of the "Clapham Sect, " but they accomplished much for humanity. The great reform leader in the next generation was Lord Ashley, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, and also a devout Christian. He agitated for reform of mental institutions and working conditions in factories, particularly for children. He later supported Florence Nightingale's attempts to bring relief to the Crimean soldiers. John Bright, a Quaker, pushed the "Repeal of the Corn Laws" in 1846 to secure cheaper bread for the working poor. The importation of foreign (much of it American) grain had been limited by protective tariffs to maintain artificial scarcity and hence a higher price in England. Bright and others campaigned successfully for the abolition of the "British farm program. " Bright, a factory owner, was accused of doing this to give his workers the equivalent of a pay raise, since their bread would now be cheaper, but the Earl of Shaftesbury voted with Bright, although the Earl was a land-owning Tory and would be hurt by the new legislation. Bright also could take a stand which was disastrous to himself as he did during the Crimean War and the American Civil War. According to Bright, 16 "In working out our political problem, we should take for our foundation that which recommends itself to our conscience as just and moral. " This statement might well be the motto of two or three generations of stalwart Christians who bridged the gap between Wesley and Victoria, and laid the foundations for a better world which has since seriously decayed.

V. DEFEATING VOLTAIRE AND MARX

Back during the Depression I heard a representative of the State Department of H ealth compare the medical victories of the last century or so with what I shall call the moral decline of the same period. She showed by graphs on large wall ch arts how the ancient scourges of mankind (small pox, typhoid, diptheria and many others) had yielded to science. She then pointed out how crime, divorce, insani ty, war and all the other evidences of what we call social maladjustment were on the increase. The graphs showing the triumphs of medicine were pointed downward as dramatically as the "statistical serpents" illustrating the increase of iniq uity were headed upward. Since then polio has been added to the long list of medical victories and another global war plus a long list of other evils have been added to the debit side of the ledger. The corruption in life, politics and literature so prevalent today is clearly reminiscent of the Restoration and Wesley's youth. That the situation is out of hand is obvious to the man in the street. Everywhere people are groping for answers-and answers of sorts there will be. The late Whittaker Chambers 17 wrote a few years ago that men become Communists as the answer to the crisis of our time and he who breaks with that diabolical system "must break in the full knowledge that he will find him- self facing the crisis of history, but this time without even that solution which Communism presents.... " Halevy, 18 the French historian, challenges us at this point: "A century earlier, " he writes, "John Wesley had defeated Voltaire. Would he defeat Karl Marx ? " Yet the average Christian knows little of the Methodist accomplishments and less of their ideas. Although I attended a Wesleyan church all my life, graduated from one of their colleges and also took most of their ministerial course, I did not know this dramatic story myself until I stumbled on to it in Connection with my doctoral dissertation on Sierra Leone. If the Blacks have been kept in ignorance of their great achievements because of a white conspiracy, who is keeping us from knowing our own history? Also, if they have suffered severe psychological deprivation because of this omission, what about the young Christian who has been taught that the church never did anything over the ages but get in the way and hold back progress ? It is about time we corrected this serious distortion. Modern man has repeatedly demonstrated his inability to cope with what men once called "the sin problem, " although he has been quite successful in other areas. Wesley and his followers succeeded where we have failed.

The contrast between the accomplishments of the English Evangelicals from the time of Wesley to the Victorian era and the frustrations of today is most fascinating. Actually, we have not neglected our social problems in the modern era, but they have not yielded to the remedy. For decades the governments of the Western nations have poured untold billions into programs to promote the "good life, " but with little to show for their expense and effort. Conditions steadily worsen. This is, indeed, a paradox. The historian of the future-if there is a future- will have to write of us and our attempts at reform: "Never have so many accomplished so little with so much"-multiplied billions of dollars and an army of bureaucrats to make the desired changes. Of the Clapham Sect and their Christian supporters, it can be said: "Never did so few accomplish so much with so little. " But with God all things are possible. Since their thinking is so different from ours and their accomplishments were so outstanding, it would be abundantly worth our while to try to understand their "World View" and their methods. Perhaps this brief paper may serve as an introduction to this study.

DOCUMENTATIONS

1. Earle E. Cairns, Saints and Society(Chicago: Moody Press, 1960), p. 43.

2. J. Wesley Bready, Faith and Freedom (Winona Lake: Light and Life Press. 1952), ~. 17.

3. Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids- William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1947), p 10.

4, Roy Bennet Pace, English Literature (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1918), p. 119,

5. Wellman J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Indus- trial Revolution(New York: Russell and Russell, 1930), p. 4.

6, Cairns, op. cit., p. 22.

7. Harold Nicolson, The Age of Reason (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1960), p. 381.

8. Mary Alice Tenney, Living in Two Worlds (Winona Lake: Light and Life Press, 1958), pp. 16-17.

9. Albert H. Hobbs, "Welfareism and Orwell's Reversal, " Intercollegiate Review (Spring, 1970), p. 107.

10. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), pp. 3-5.

11. B. Carradine, A Journey to Palestine (Syracuse: A. W. Hall Publisher, 1897), p. 59.

12. Basil Miller, John Wesley (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1943), p. 77.

13. J. C. Furnas, The Road to Harpers Ferry (New York: William Sloane Associates. 1959), p. 253.

14. John Wesley, Works (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House; reproduction of 1872 edition), XI, pp. 75-76.

15. R. V. Spivey, Pictorial History of Wesley's Chapel and Its Founder (London: Pitkin Pictorials Ltd., 1965), p. 19.

16. Asa Briggs, Victorian People (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1955), p. 203.

17. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House 1952), p. 193.

18. J. Wesley Bready, England: Before and After Wesley (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1938), p. 451.