emotional, when to almost all his contemporaries it was historical and rational. A sovereign faculty of intuition sets aside the common sense which they took to be the only judge in all controversies. Or, in different phrase, the mechanical is superseded by the dynamical view, and we contemplate the forces by which the heart is transformed, not its arbitrary relations to an external being. The most appropriate metaphor-which, indeed, he takes to be a literal truth instead of a metaphor-is that God acts upon the soul as magnetism upon the needle. There is nothing in the universe but magnetism and the impediments of it.'1 In a state of perfection the impediments would disappear, and the whole universe be a harmonious manifestation of this all-pervading force. We see heaven breaking through the veil of the world, wherever there is order and beauty; and hell is to be seen in all discord and wrath, showing that the current has been broken by some mysterious jar. Heaven and hell, therefore, are states actually dividing all our thoughts and actions, not a mere future palace and prison-house." The ordinary theory of the Atonement, 'the philosophy of debtor and creditor,'' of a satisfaction made by Christ to the wrath of God, is a vain fancy of human reason. The Atonement is the process by which the jarring elements are brought back to unity; it is the birth of a heavenly life within us, not the settlement of an account by a transference of balances of merit. Christ is within us in the sense that his power produces an inward life, as the light of the sun is a force which incorporates itself in a growing plant. The Last Judgment is not a legal decree, but what may be called the spontaneous arrangement of all things which takes place when temporary nature disappears, according to the affinities already manifested. 84. The heart thus resembles a needle conscious of the magnetism which moves it, and is able to recognise the efficient force instead of the mere superficial change. Newton dealt only with the phenomenal, or, as Law says, only with 'facts and references, whose ground is not pretended to be known.' But Behmen's divine philosophy has to do with the noumenal, Spirit of Love,' part ii. 'Spirit of Prayer,' part i. 'Law, v. 209, On the Sacrament.' 2 lb. vi. 130, 'Appeal.' Ib. viii. 94, and shows us the ultimate principles from which, for example, Newton's three laws of motion spring. Thus we see the utter vanity of human reason, which Law is fond of denouncing. It deals with mere appearances instead of realities; and in religion leads us to mere 'notional conceptions,' instead of opening our eyes to the divine source of light. All the ordinary dogmatic theology belongs to the lower faculty. In the language of a modern school, it does not express God's revelation of himself to us, but consists of our theories and notions about him. The letter of the Scriptures is either unconsciously spiritualised, or may be set aside if it conflicts with our intuitions; for a man who is face to face with God can dispense with any of these external wrappings of belief. He 85. Here, then, Law finds a sufficient escape from the superficial controversies of his time; and an unassailable fortress from which to denounce the world and its ways. has appealed from the intellect to the heart. He gets rid of many revolting theological figments, and forms a coherent, though, in its phraseology at least, a quaint and fanciful system. Whether it has less intrinsic value than some more pretentious systems of later growth may possibly be doubted. That such a system should be sterile was of course inevitable. The English soil seems to be averse to mysticism; and in any soil it is a plant of tender growth. Few men can find satisfaction in the cultivation of theopathetic emotions; or sincerely discover that their hearts do in fact teem with those glorious revelations of the dark secret of the universe which excited Law's ecstatic meditations. The church which a man can find in his own bosom turns out to be a church limited by the walls of his hermitage. The system must be adulterated by coarser elements before it can be adapted to ordinary consumption. In Law's devotional creed we can only expect to find some of the strong wine which gives a flavour to weaker, but more generally acceptable, growths. The Wesleyans and Evangelicals, who were most immediately influenced, were, of course, repelled as much as attracted. The philosophy flew above their heads. They loved that popular mythology which seemed to evaporate into mere 'Law, viii. 38, 'Spirit of Love,' part i. 2 Ib. vii. 237, ‘Way to Divine Knowledge.' sentiment in Law's hands. They would not give up their anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity; they loved the 'debtor and creditor scheme,' which Law denounced; and feared, not without reason, that the Christ who was said to be within them would cease to be an historical character at all. Thus the circle of Law's adherents was almost confined to King's Cliffe; and even those who have adopted some of his language in later days, would shrink from the imputation of being in any fuller sense his disciples. The very fact of his unique attitude in the English theology of the time gives him a peculiar interest; and we may admit the singular beauty of his character and much of his moral and religious teaching, though we feel it to be unsound philosophically, and a morbid development in practice. 86. The impulse given by Law spent itself in the dreamland of mysticism; a very different result followed the teaching of his admirer, and sometime disciple, John Wesley. Any adequate accounts of Wesley would have to include an estimate of his amazing activity as the leader of a great religious organisation. He founded a body which eighty years after his death could boast of twelve million adherents; and its reaction upon other bodies was perhaps as important as its direct influence. Wesley's was a singular blending of strength and weakness. His strength lies almost entirely in the sphere of practice. He shows remarkable literary power; but we feel that his writings are means to a direct practical end, rather than valuable in themselves, either in form or substance. It would be difficult to find any letters more direct, forcible, and pithy in expression. He goes straight to the mark without one superfluous flourish. He writes as a man confined within the narrowest limits of time and space, whose thoughts are so well in hand that he can say everything needful within those limits. The compression gives emphasis and never causes confusion. The letters, in other words, are the work of one who for more than half a century was accustomed to turn to account every minute of his eighteen working hours. In person,' we are told, 'Wesley was rather below the middle size, but beautifully proportioned, without an ounce of superfluous flesh, yet 1 Tyerman's 'Life of Wesley,' i, 11. muscular and strong, with a forehead clear and smooth, a bright penetrating eye, and a lovely face, which retained the freshness of its complexion to the last period of his life'1-in short, a human gamecock. His nervous energy was tremendous; he was never in low spirits for a quarter of an hour;" his talents for business and for spiritual influence are stamped upon his writings, and command equally our sympathy and our wonder. No such leader of men appeared in that century; and in a lower sphere he might have been a first-rate statesman or a general. As the guide of a religious movement-the highest duty which can fall to a human being-he was, as we shall see, deficient in the speculative insight which is so rarely combined with unusual practical energy; but for the immediate purpose of stirring the stagnating currents of religious emotion no man could have been more admirably endowed. Few men have left more vivid portraits of their own personality than that which is embodied in Wesley's Journals. The detailed account of his labours surpasses in interest even the charming biography of Southey. 87. As a mere record of the quantity of work that can be got out of a single human being, endowed with untiring energy, and absolutely devoid of at least the lower forms of selfish indulgence, it is encouraging to the strong and calculated to throw the weak into despair. For more than fifty years Wesley was the autocratic chief of his society, and not content with administration from a distance, personally inspected, at frequent intervals, every part of the machinery which he had organised. He travelled on his ceaseless round of duty some 4,500 miles annually; he preached two or more sermons a day; and it is calculated that in fifty-two years he travelled 225,000 miles, and preached over 40,000 sermons. The sermons were occasionally delivered to audiences of 20,000 persons,3 and at the age of eighty-six (August 23, 1789) he records an address delivered to a congregation of 25,000. Though he doubts whether all could hear, the feat, considered as a mere exhibition of physical energy, is something stupendous. He rose every morning at four, allowing himself only six hours of sleep, though we are told 1 Tyerman's 'Life of Wesley,' iii. 656. Wesley's Works, ix. 422. Ib. iv. 288, 293. that he possessed the faculty, common to nearly all great workers, of falling asleep at a moment's notice. He often rode seventy miles a day, and generally read as he rode, avoiding stumbling, as he tells us, by riding with a slack rein.2 On his 85th birthday he ascribes his health to his constant exercise and change of air, to his powers of sleeping, to early rising, and regular preaching during sixty years, at 5 A.M., and to his having had little pain, sorrow, or anxious care during his life.3 Anyone who adopts the same methods should count upon a powerful constitution. The care of the churches, or the abuse of antagonists, never caused Wesley to fret. He was the most elastic, wiry, and invulnerable of men. This amazing soundness of physical health explains the character of his religion. He was too indomitably cheerful to dwell by preference on those gloomy imaginings which have haunted many of the greatest leaders of men. Calvinism revolted him. Mysticism seemed to him to be simply folly. His feet were on the solid earth; and he preferred the plain light of day to the glooms and the glories loved by more imaginative natures. His writings never have the questionable charm of a morbid sensibility. He is as thoroughly a moralist as any of his contemporaries. His aim is to stamp out vice; to suppress drinking and debauchery, and to show men the plain path to heaven, and force them into it by intelligible threats and promises. He differs, of course, from the ordinary moralists in the strong conviction that a blank collection of good precepts will never change men's lives without an appeal to their feelings and their imaginations; but the ultimate end of his labours is to save his countrymen, to use his own dialect, from the clutches of the Devil, and, in any case, from the tyranny of vice and selfishness. 88. Wesley's strength and weakness are equally characteristic. His faith was on a level with the ordinary English mind; he shares the popular superstitions and the ordinary theological conceptions. He believes in the supernatural as frankly as Luther; though the Devil in the eighteenth century had become, even amongst the vulgar, a rather more shadowy being than he had been in an earlier generation. At every 2 Ib. iv. 436. 3 Ib. vi. 163. 1 Wesley, vi. 270. |