In the dark days at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there grew up a number of so-called “religious societies,” promoted by serious-minded members of the Church of England, the members meeting for prayer, reading and mutual help. There were at one time thirty or forty such societies in London. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge began thus and also the Society for the Promotion of the Gospel. One of these societies used to meet in the house of a bookseller named Hutton. It was not very bright and Hutton himself was, as yet, an unsatisfied seeker after life. One day came Peter Boehler, a missionary from Zinzendorf’s fervent band, passing through London on his way to Carolina. He preached to the Society. “With indescribable astonishment and joy,” says Hutton, “we embraced the doctrine of the Saviour, of His merits and sufferings, of justification through faith in Him, and of freedom by it from the guilt and dominion of sin.” This was the “Society in Fetter Lane where Wesley in 1738 ... felt his heart strangely warmed” as he listened to the reading of Luther’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.
In the year 1736 London was startled by the preaching of a very young clergyman. In the great city where the gospel was rarely heard and where the churches were largely empty, there was suddenly heard the voice of a youth of twenty-one proclaiming in confident tones and persuasive language the good tidings that stirred the world in the first century. People crowded to hear him — a most unusual thing in those days. They called him the boy preacher. It was, as it were, the first blast of a trumpet that was to arouse a slumbering Christendom and which was to reverberate throughout the land and reach the New World. It was the voice of George Whitefield, the first of a chosen band of heralds, whom God was calling to awaken men from the deep sleep of the eighteenth century. Soon other voices were to join his. Indeed, some were already being raised here and there, calling upon men to repent and believe in the gospel.
Spiritual giants were being prepared, who, like David’s mighty men, would break the power of the Philistines and engage in battle with the “universal lords of this darkness” (Eph. 6:12 JND), men mighty through faith to the pulling down of Satan’s strongholds. Armed with the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, and the shield of faith, they were rising up to compass the British Isles and cross the Atlantic, calling men and women everywhere to “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). Two years after this, John Wesley and his brother Charles began their work, while Grimshaw, Berridge, Fletcher, Rowlands and Ingham — all Church of England clergymen whom God had awakened — began in the power of the Spirit to awaken others. Before long we hear of a peeress, Selina the Countess of Huntingdon, lending her wealth and influence to support the flowing tide of gospel activity. Men suddenly became aware of a powerful, nationwide movement influencing thousands of men and women and completely transforming their lives. The movement was not concerted by human counsels but by the Spirit of God. The revival, still mainly in the hands of the Church of England clergymen, was branded as enthusiasm, and leaders and followers were dubbed Methodists. Ridicule, contempt, opposition and persecution were launched against it. The bulk of the clergy angrily repudiated it. Their stale sermons and empty moralizings, prepared for the learned, polite and respectable in a very unrespectable age, drew sparse congregations, for the most part as wooden as the very pews on which they sat. But this new movement was not respectable. For the great of the land to be told they were poor, fallen sinners as much in need of salvation as the poor creatures who worked in mines and factories — this was more than their blue blood could bear. The clergy themselves, in some cases, stirred up the rabble to attack with violence the preachers of the gospel. As it was with Paul in the first century, so with the evangelists of the eighteenth.
As we have seen, the movement began with men in the Church of England. There was little outside of it. The dissenting bodies were, perhaps, on the whole, more dead than the Establishment. Be that as it may, before long thousands were turned from darkness to light and passed from death unto life. But whereby should their souls be nourished? Who was to feed these sheep? People crowded from miles around, for example, to hear Grimshaw of Haworth, in the wilds of Yorkshire. In their own parishes they could only hear the lifeless sermons of dead men. Fellowship, which is vital to the Christian, the study of Scripture and mutual edification are instinctive and essential needs of those who form the body of Christ. Where, gathered together in the unity of the Spirit, could such privileges be enjoyed and spiritual hunger be appeased? Where were such things provided for? Not in the Churches, with their formal ritual performed by unconverted clergymen. Wesley realized the need. He sought it even before his conversion, in the Holy Club at Oxford. Hence arose the Methodist societies. Zinzendorf had provided for it by his Moravian societies. The little groups of pious, if unenlightened, people, who had earlier formed societies in London and elsewhere, were groping in the same direction. The religious world called them Conventicles and had always striven to suppress them. It is a law of the body of Christ that its members seek each other in the unity of the Spirit. “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren” (1 John 3:14).
At that time, indeed, conventicles were still against the law. Satan cannot prevent men being saved; he can and does, alas, prevent them enjoying the privileges of Christianity, and to keep believers from enjoying the spiritual joys of fellowship is a thing which he has often contrived to do in many ways. The Lord’s desire was “that they all may be one” (John 17:21); the devil’s intent is that they may be separated as much as possible and be made to disagree as to points of doctrine, to quarrel, and even to fight one another. Wesley’s societies were a compromise. They provided what the Church of England could not supply: fellowship and mutual edification. It was, however, a hybrid arrangement; converts were to remain members of the Church of England, on the one hand, and members of Methodist societies, on the other. But God is very gracious. A swift and sudden change — the setting up at once of a new sect — might have hindered rather than helped the progress of the gospel. The great end in view at this moment in the history of Christianity was the revival of the gospel — the setting forth of Christ as the Saviour of sinners and the preaching of repentance and remission of sins in His name.
The tide of revival began to flow with irresistible force. Wesley won over many thousands of the poorer classes; Whitefield, Romaine and that remarkable lady, the Countess of Huntingdon, influenced the upper classes. Others, like Grimshaw, Berridge, Fletcher, Cennick and Howell Harris, to mention but a few, were doing their part, but the harvest was great, and truly converted, ordained clergymen were very rare. But even if they could be found, their job was to stay in one place. Whitefield and Wesley were anomalies in the Church of England. They were behaving very irregularly. Actually, neither ever held a living in the Church. There was, in fact, no place in the establishment for the evangelist according to the scriptural pattern, whose duty is not to stay in one place but to follow, in principle, the Lord’s original command: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15) — a command renewed specifically in the case of the great evangelist Paul. Whitefield, Wesley and their companions fulfilled a commission which they had received undoubtedly from the Lord Himself, and they went all over the land and across the ocean to America.
Because of these irregularities, the doors of the churches were often closed against them, and they then preached to vastly greater audiences in the open air. But the harvest increasing, other laborers must be found. The work of God could not be confined to college-trained and episcopally ordained clergymen. Laymen were available who, like the apostles themselves, were humble and unlearned men, but, nevertheless, men of God, divinely gifted and appointed evangelists. Wesley hesitated at this point. To choose as helpers in his work men who had not been ordained and had no university degrees — this would be another irregularity, another cause for reproach. But while he hesitated, his wise mother counseled him to take the course. The old bottles of the Establishment could not hold the new wine; inevitably it overflowed. To serve the 11,164 parishes in England, there were only 4,412 incumbents, and most of these were unconverted men.
It has been calculated that at the beginning of the century there was one professing Christian in twenty-four outside the pale of the Establishment; by the end of the century, the proportion was one in four. Of real Christians, who shall assess the proportion?
The Methodist denomination was a by-product of the evangelical revival. In the year Wesley died, there were over seventy thousand members of Methodist societies in Great Britain and over forty thousand in the then sparsely populated colony of America. The total number of adherents, that is, persons who were not registered members but attending the meetings, was estimated at 800,000 in Britain and America. Thousands more were attending the chapels of Lady Huntingdon’s Connection. Other converts remained in or joined the Anglican, Baptist or Congregational Churches, and it must be remembered that the total population of England and Wales was then only sixteen million. The churches, once half empty, were crowded. An additional evening service of a gospel character was introduced in many. Christians became exercised about the children idly roaming the streets on Sunday. Toward the end of the century, Robert Raikes and others opened Sunday schools where the rudiments of learning and Christian instruction were imparted. Wesley refers to 240 children in such a school connected with the Church at Bingley in 1784, while 200,000 children are said to have been attending Sunday schools in 1786.
We have considered the effect of the preaching. From conversion, powerful secondary results naturally follow. Converted fathers begin to pray and read the Scriptures to their families. They bring up their children in “the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). No live Christian can fail to be an influence on his friends and neighbors. Every converted person is a potential evangelist. That is how the gospel spread in the first days of Christianity, in Reformation days, and thus in the eighteenth century also.
So the flowing tide of the gospel rolled irresistibly forward. Ecclesiastical opposition, the opposition of the press, public ridicule and mob violence failed to halt its progress. Even the dissensions among the leaders concerning predestination, which brought Wesley and Whitefield and others into conflict, failed to check its force.
In the Anglican Church, a powerful evangelical element developed. The dying embers among Dissenters were fanned into a fresh flame. The public conscience was affected. Society was purged of its grosser evils and of many degrading features which characterized the first half of the century. Great humanitarian reforms followed. The abolition of slavery in the British Empire and later in America are traceable to the influence of this revival.
But the improvement of the world is not the end of the gospel. God was turning men from darkness to light, from Satan’s power to Himself, and giving them a hope beyond the grave. Because they had another world before them, they lived better in the present. Because they were brought to know and love God, they loved their neighbor. The consciences even of unconverted men respond to the light. Hence, there is the widespread improvement in every class of society. But we must not lose a sense of proportion; the world was not converted. Opposition still remained. The archenemy viewed with dismay the overthrow of his strongholds and the release of so many of his prisoners. We may be sure he would do his utmost to spoil God’s work.
The fruits of the gospel are seen in the godly lives of the converts. The early Methodists were typical fruit. Unworldliness marked them; they did not attend the theater, and they read only religious or edifying books. They did not gamble or smoke, were temperate, if not abstainers, avoided fashionable dress, and sanctified the Lord’s Day. Such habits brought them into reproach, but they are the features of piety inculcated by Scripture and have always marked Christians who desire to live according to the apostolic words:
“The grace of God which carries with it salvation for all men has appeared, teaching us that, having denied impiety and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, and justly, and piously in the present course of things” (Titus 2:11-12 JND).
After Wesley’s death, Methodism became another denomination in Christendom. We are, however, not concerned with the history of denominations as such, but to trace the work of God wherever it can be found. The fruits of the great revival flowed on into the next century, and, to this day, we owe more than we can tell to its influence.
Historians are agreed that it was due to the influences of the revival that England escaped the deluge of revolution and war that engulfed France and finally the whole of Europe. In Europe, the atheism of Voltaire and others bore its evil fruit in a bloody revolution which led to the Napoleonic wars and all the untold misery which followed. In Britain, Wesley, Whitefield and others preached the gospel of divine love, and instead of a flood of hatred and wickedness and destruction, God opened the windows of heaven and poured out a blessing, the fruits of which remain with us today.
In the following chapters we shall briefly review the lives, the conversion and the service of some of the outstanding men whom God raised up as instruments in this mighty work.