THE MORAVIAN AND CALVINIST CONTROVERSIES

UP to this time the Wesleys, who had been shut out of the churches, had preached in the open air, or “expounded” at the Society in Fetter Lane and other similar Societies. Some better arrangements were now essential. Wesley says, “On Sunday, November 11th 1739, I preached at eight o’clock to five or six thousand, on the spirit of bondage and the Spirit of adoption, and at five in the evening to seven or eight thousand, in the place which had been the King’s foundery for cannon.* Oh, hasten Thou the time when nation shall not rise up against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” This foundery became the head-quarters of Methodism until City Road Chapel was built in 1778. In 1716, when the damaged cannon taken by Marlborough from the French were being recast there, a tremendous explosion tore off part of the roof, and broke down the galleries, killing several of the Workmen, and injuring others. A young Swiss called Schalch had foreseen the danger and warned the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance. All who would take warning left the place and thus escaped. Schalch Was appointed Master Founder, and directed to choose another locality for casting the King’s cannon. He chose the rabbit-warren at Woolwich. The old building was thus left in ruins. It stood, about fifty feet from Providence Row, on the east side of Windmill Hill, now Tabernacle Street, parallel with City Road, and a few yards to the east of it, just above Finsbury Square. The building had a frontage of forty yards, with a depth of about thirty-three.

It was in November, 1739, that two gentlemen, who up to that time were entire strangers to Wesley, asked him to preach here. Wesley consented. He was afterwards pressed to buy it. The purchase money was a hundred and fifteen pounds, but heavy repairs and necessary alterations raised the expense to about eight hundred pounds. Galleries had to be erected for men and women, the Society-room had to be enlarged, and the whole structure thoroughly repaired. Some friends, including Mr. Ball and Mr. Watkins, lent Wesley the purchase money; and subscriptions were raised. The first year two hundred pounds was contributed, the next a hundred and forty pounds, but the people were so poor that five years after the opening there was still a debt of three hundred pounds. There were two entrances, one leading to the chapel, the other to the preachers’ house, the school, and the band-room. The chapel would seat about fifteen hundred people on its plain benches. Men and women sat apart, and no one was allowed to claim any place as his own: those who came first sat down first. The women sat in the front gallery and under it, the men in the side galleries and in the seats below them. About a dozen benches, with rails at the back, were provided for women in front of the pulpit. In the band-room, behind the chapel, classes and prayer-meetings were held. One end of it was fitted up as a schoolroom; the other became Wesley’s “Book Room,” where Methodist literature was sold. Above the band-room were Wesley’s apartments; at the end of the chapel stood the house for the preachers. A coach-house and stable completed the accommodation.

The Foundery was closed for repairs in the early part of 1740. Silas Told, who afterwards became Wesley’s schoolmaster there, attended the five o’clock service one morning in June, 1740. He found it a ruinous place, with an old pantile covering, decayed timbers, and a pulpit made of a few rough boards. Exactly at five o’clock a whisper ran through the congregation, “Here he comes! here he comes I” Wesley stepped forward in his robes, and gave out a hymn. The singing enraptured the stranger, but he did not like the extempore prayer, because he thought it savoured too much of Dissent. His prejudice quickly abated when Wesley began to preach from the words, “I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you.” The friend who had brought Told to the Foundery asked him how he liked Mr. Wesley. He replied, “As long as I live I will never part from him.”

The time had now come when the importance of having a Methodist centre became clear. A month after Silas Told’s visit to the Foundery the final breach at Fetter Lane occurred. We have seen that Wesley was recalled from Bristol in June, 1739, by the grave disorders which had sprung up. He was able to restore peace; but the mischief was not at an end. At Oxford in December he received disquieting accounts from London. Scarcely one in ten retained his first love; most of the rest were in the utmost confusion, biting and devouring one another. Wesley had a long and particular conversation with Mr. Molther, a Moravian minister, who had come to England on October i 8th, on his way to Pennsylvania. He became very popular, and remained in London till September, 1740, when he was summoned to Germany. Molther soon caused trouble by teaching that no man had any degree of faith unless he enjoyed the full assurance of faith and the abiding witness of the Spirit. He maintained that the gift of God which many had received through Peter BOhier’s labours was not justifying faith. Wesley could not accept doctrines which were opposed to all his own experience and to the plain teaching of the New Testament. Molther also held that the way to find faith was to be “still.” Those who desired the blessing were to give up the public means of grace. They were not even to pray or to read the Scriptures, nor to attempt to do any good works.

On New Year’s Day, 1740, Wesley tried to teach the Society the true Scriptural doctrine of stillness from the words, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Two days later such a spirit of love and peace as they had not known for months rested upon the Society. Before February closed he found, however, that some of the members, not content with neglecting the means of grace, were constantly disputing with those who were of a better spirit. At the end of April the trouble became more serious. Wesley at once returned to London when he heard of the confusion. His brother Charles had suffered much during the previous weeks. Mr. Stonehouse and Charles Delamotte had both been led astray. Charles Wesley foresaw that a separation was now inevitable. He was not the man to make any truce with those who dishonoured the ordinances of God, but he was exposed to no small annoyance in consequence of his firmness. One of the fanatics declared that there were only two ministers in London—Molther and Bell— who were true believers. John Bray asserted that it was impossible for any one to be a true Christian out of the Moravian Church.

When Wesley came to London he and his brother had an interview with Molther, who still defended his erroneous views. Wesley was utterly at a loss what to do. More than fifty persons, who had been greatly troubled by this new gospel, spoke to him. “Vain janglings” sounded in his ears wherever he went. At Fetter Lane one evening the question of ordinances was broached. Wesley begged, however, that they might not be always disputing, but might rather give themselves to prayer. During his ten days’ stay Wesley laboured, both by his public addresses and his visits, to undo the mischief and save the erring; but the difficulty was only postponed. When he returned to London in the beginning of June he began to expound the Epistle of St. James as an antidote to the temptation to leave off good works. Poor Stonehouse said that he was going to sell his living, because “no honest man could officiate as a minister in the Church of England.” At one meeting in Fetter Lane Mr. Ingham bore noble testimony for the ordinances of God and the reality of weak faith. But they would neither receive his saying nor Wesley’s.

On Sunday, June 22nd, Wesley says, “Finding there was no time to delay without utterly destroying the cause of God, I began to execute what I had long designed,—to strike at the root of the grand delusion.” From the words, “Stand ye in the way; ask for the old paths,” he gave an account of the manner in which God has worked two years before, and showed how tares had recently been sown among the wheat. During the following week he laboured every day to guard the members at the Foundery against the errors that were rife. On July i6th the Fetter Lane Society resolved that Wesley should not be allowed to preach there. “This place,” they said, “is taken for the Germans.” When some asked if the Germans had converted any soul in England, whether they had not done more harm than good by raising a spirit of division, and whether God had not many times used Mr. Wesley to heal their divisions when all were in confusion, some of the agitators even ventured to assert that they were never in any confusion at all. At eleven o’clock Wesley withdrew from this useless debate.

Two days later he received the Sacrament, with his mother and a few of his friends. They afterwards consulted as to the course they should adopt. All saw that matters had reached a crisis, and were of one mind as to the course to be pursued. The following Sunday evening, July 20th, Wesley went, with Mr. Seward, afterwards one of the leading Calvinists, to the lovefeast in Fetter Lane. He said nothing till the conclusion of the meeting; then he read a paper which in a few sentences summed up the controversy, and gave expression to his conviction that their teaching about weak faith and the ordinances was flatly contrary to the Word of God. “I have warned you hereof again and again, and besought you to turn back to the law and the testimony. I have borne with you long, hoping you would turn. But as I find you more and more confirmed in the error of your ways, nothing now remains but that I should give you up to God. You that are of the same judgment, follow me.” Without another word he withdrew, eighteen or nineteen others accompanying him.

The Methodist company, thus separated from the rest, now met at the Foundery. Twenty-five men joined it. All but two or three of the fifty women in band at Fetter Lane desired to cast in their lot with the Wesleys. Some weeks before—on June 10th—the Wesleys and Ingham bad succeeded in remodelling the bands at Fetter Lane, so that those who still observed “the ordinances” might not be scattered one or two in a band of disputers and be harassed and sawn asunder, as they had so long been. Charles Wesley summed up the result in his journal:

"We gathered up our wreck,-' raros * nantes in gurgite vasto,' for nine out of ten are swallowed up in the dead sea of stillness. Oh, why was this not done six months ago How fatal was our delay and false moderation!" t The step then taken did something to preserve the faithful remnant who now met at the Foundery. This breach at Fetter Lane is a painful subject. But every one must share Charles Wesley's regret that the separation was not made earlier. His brother hoped against hope. His patience and longsuffering were characteristic. At last he was forced to take some step. The Fetter Lane Society had virtually expelled him on the Wednesday before he read his paper. He had no other course but to enter his protest and withdraw, with any whom he could save from the perilous snare of these teachers.

The Evangelical Revival now began to bear precious fruit in London. Up to this time the controversies and errors of Fetter Lane had been fatal to growth. In a letter to Zinzendorf on March 14th, 1740, James Hutton says that “John Wesley, being resolved to do all things himself, and having told many souls that they were justified who have since discovered themselves to be otherwise, and having mixed the works of the Law with the Gospel as means of grace, is at enmity against the Brethren. Envy is not extinct in him. His heroes falling every day into poor sinners frightens him; but at London the spirit of the Brethren prevails against him. I desired him simply to keep to his office in the body of Christ, se., to awaken souls in preaching, but not to pretend to lead them to Christ. But he will have the glory of doing all things.” The latter sentence explains the former. Wesley was to gather in converts; the Brethren were to stamp their own likeness upon them. It was no wonder that Wesley was “resolved to do all things himself.” If he had neglected that, his labour would soon have been undone. We have seen how calmly and patiently he treated the Moravians. His heroes were turned into poor sinners, Hutton says; that is, they were led to deny the work of grace which had been wrought in their hearts. James Hutton’s feelings were far different from those he once cherished towards the man who led him to Christ.

Molther and the disturbers at Fetter Lane were teaching doctrines opposed to the spirit of their own Church. On September 29th, 1740, Wesley earnestly called upon the Moravian Church, and Count Zinzendorf in particular, to correct him if he had misunderstood their tenets. He had learnt from them, as well as from the English Church, that a man might have a degree of justifying faith before he is wholly freed from doubt and fear, and might use the ordinances of God before he gained the full assurance of faith. Molther and his supporters entirely denied this. Wesley’s Society soon outstripped the Moravian Church. In 1743, when the Methodists in London numbered 1,950 members, the Moravians of the metropolis were only about seventy-two.

On his return from Hernhuth in 1738, Wesley began a letter to his friends there in which he says, “But of some things I stand in doubt, which I will mention in love and meekness. . . . Is not the Count all in all among you Do you not magnify your own Church too much Do you riot use guile and dissimulation in many cases Are you not of a close, dark, reserved temper and behaviour”

The letter was not sent, but it shows that Wesley had already detected some germs of that spirit which afterwards led to the separation. In September, 1741, Wesley and Zinzendorf had an interview at Gray’s Inn Walk; but it led to no practical result. When Mr. Stonehouse read the conversation, he remarked, “The Count is a clever fellow; but the genius of Methodism is too strong for him.” t Four years later Zinzendorf inserted an advertisement in the Daily Advertiser to the effect that the Moravians had no connection with the Wesleys. A prophecy was added that the brothers would “soon run their heads against the wall.” “We will not if we can help it,” was Wesley’s comment The Count’s later life fully justified Wesley’s position. His influence on the Moravian Church was singularly unhealthy, and Antinomianism spread among the English members of the community. Wesley’s painful experience did not prevent him from paying a high tribute to his old friends. “Next to the members of the Church of England,” he says, “the body of the Moravian Church, however mistaken some of them are, are in the main, of all whom I have seen, the best Christians in the world.”

Before the breach with the Society at Fetter Lane, signs of a still more painful struggle had appeared. The Calvinist controversy separated the Wesleys from George Whitefield, who had long been as their own soul, and divided Methodism into two camps. Grave and long was the strife of opinion. No other subject has so profoundly stirred Latin Christianity as the question of free-will and Divine sovereignty. From the days of St. Augustine this has been the great theological battle-ground of the West. Even in Reformation times, when the struggle with Rome assumed its most terrible proportions, this controversy rent Protestantism into two hostile sections, and turned Lutheran and Calvinist into deadly foes. It is no wonder, therefore, that such a controversy divided the workers of the Evangelical Revival into two parties. As early as 1725 Wesley had corresponded with his mother on this subject, and had taken up his own position. He was not, therefore, likely to abandon his views nor even to keep them to himself, as Whitefield suggested that he should do.

In 1740 Wesley published his sermon on “Free Grace.” He sums up the doctrine of “election, preterition, predestination, or reprobation” in one sentence: “The sense of all is plainly this—by virtue of an eternal, unchangeable, irresistible decree of God, one part of mankind are infallibly saved, and the rest infallibly damned; it being impossible that any of the former should be damned, or that any of the latter should be saved.” Mrs. Wesley, in a striking letter on election in 1725, tells her son, “I think you reason well and justly against it.” Then she expresses her own views. “I firmly believe that God from eternity has elected some to eternal life; but then I humbly conceive that this election is founded on His foreknowledge, according to Romans viii. 29, 30. Whom, in His eternal prescience, God saw would make a right use of their powers, and accept of offered mercy, He did predestinate and adopt for His children.” Such were substantially the views Wesley held in his famous sermon. So early as July 2nd. 1739, Whitefield had urged him to “keep in” his “sermon on predestination.” He went to America soon afterwards, whence he wrote several letters to his friend on the subject in controversy. In the States he found himself among ministers who were zealous for Calvinism. He read the books which they recommended, so that his own convictions became stronger. When Wesley published his sermon on “Free Grace” in 1740, he told his readers in a brief “ Address” that nothing save the strongest conviction that he was indispensably obliged to declare this truth to all the world could have induced him to oppose the sentiments of those whom he esteemed so highly for their works’ sake. He begged any. one who might feel bound to contest his views to do so in love and meekness. Charles Wesley was perfectly in accord with his brother. He wrote a hymn of thirty-six verses which was printed at the end of the sermon.

And shall I, Lord, confine Thy

As not to others free

And may not every sinner prove

The grace that found out me

Doom them an endless death to die,

From which they could not flee

O Lord, Thine inmost bowels cry

Against the dire decree I

Whitefield was much disturbed by the publication of this sermon. During his voyage to England, in an affectionate letter to Charles Wesley, dated February 1st, 1741, he says, “My dear, dear brethren, why did you throw out the bone of contention Why did you print that sermon against predestination Why did you in particular, my dear brother Charles, affix your hymn, and join in putting out your late hymn-book How can you say you will not dispute with me about election, and yet print such hymns, and your brother send his sermon over to Mr. Garden and others in America” The answer was simple. The Wesleys felt it their duty to speak plainly. They mentioned no names, but quietly set forth their own views. All must allow that the leaders of the greatest popular revival ever known in this country were not at liberty to be silent. Whitefield might argue that he did not know the elect, and was therefore bound to offer the Gospel to all. But such an argument would not satisfy the Wesleys. Calvinism was spreading. Antinomianism was creeping into their Societies. There was no time to lose in coping with the growing mischief.

Whitefield brought with him from America an answer he had prepared to Wesley’s sermon. This manuscript letter he submitted to Charles Wesley, asking his advice whether he should print it or not. Charles returned it endorsed, “Put up again thy sword into its place.” Whitefield, however, did not take this advice, but published his letter. John Wesley had no objection to fair argument; but he considered Whitefield’s letter a burlesque upon an answer. He also greatly regretted that Whitefield should have mentioned him and his brother by name, so that it seemed like a public attack upon his old friends. Whitefield began to preach against the Wesleys by name in Moor.. fields and other places. Once, when invited to the Foundery, he preached the absolute decrees in the most peremptory and offensive manner. Some thousands of people were present, and Charles Wesley sat beside him. The rupture was soon complete. Whitefield refused to hold any connection with those who believed in free grace. The Society at Kingswood was rent asunder by this controversy, so that it did not look up again for years. John Cennick, the schoolmaster there, was one of Wesley’s lay-preachers, and owed his position entirely to his kindness. ~1et Cennick did not scruple to use all his influence to spread dissension. When two women publicly railed against Charles Wesley, he did not even attempt to interpose. One day in May, 1741, when Charles Wesley was passing the Bowling Green in Bristol, a woman cried out, “The curse of God light upon you,” with such uncommon bitterness that he turned to speak to her. He stayed heaping coals of fire upon her head, till at last she said, “God bless you all.” When he visited Wales one man publicly left the room because he would not reprove Howel Harris for his Calvinism. Such facts show the bitterness of feeling that was aroused by this painful controversy.

The brothers were now left alone. Whitefield refused to work with them; their companions in Georgia— Ingham and Charles Delamotte—had become Moravians. Stonehouse, Gambold, Westley Hall, Hutton, and others also joined the Germans. For a time Wesley feared that his brother would follow their example. Charles had said, “No English man or woman is like the Moravins.” John tells him, “The poison is in you: fair words have stolen away your heart.” Charles seemed to have forgotten the struggle against stillness, in the bitterness of the more recent controversy, and drew comparisons favourable to the Germans. Whatever his danger, may have been, his preaching soon showed that he was as much opposed to their doctrine of “stillness” as ever. About this time a reunion with the Moravians was discussed, but when the “bands” met together to consider the matter, all agreed that the time had not come. The erroneous doctrines were not renounced, and the Fetter Lane Society spoke with such guile that scarcely any one could tell what ~hey really believed. Wesley did not give up hope of a reconciliation. In August, 1743, he summoned his brother Charles in haste from Cornwall to a conference with Whitefield and the Moravians. He was even willing to make unjustifiable concessions for the sake of peace; but as neither Whitefield nor the Moravians would take part in the conference, the whole matter fell through.