Who was the father of the sires of these sons? He essays to give great glory to Whitefield, and in his " Evangelical Succession" confines his list exclusively to the Whitefieldians. Yet who was the father of Whitefield? Who took that raw and reckless youth, going from his drams to his prayers and from his prayers to his drams-a youth without consistency or constancy, without principle or purpose, without a more hopeful future than Chatterton or Goldsmith-who took him, molded him, made a man and a minister of him, under God, and sent him forth to shake the nations? Wesley. This same enlogist of Whitefield, describing the clownish servitor, full of spasms of piety and profanity, declares, "He became the associate of Charles, and the disciple of John Wesley." "These future chiefs of a religious revolution," he calls these Wesleys. As "the disciple of John Wesley," Whitefield always recognizes him as Master. He owed his strength and steadiness to the founder of Methodism. So all of Whitefield's influences, spiritual and other, excepting his one error of doctrine, are thus due, humanly speaking, to John Wesley. The Clapham Sect had in its lists such men as Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, Lord Teignmouth, the first President of the Bible Society and ruler of India, Sir John Shore, also ruler of India, Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay, Brougham, Henry Martyn -every philanthropist, social or religious, of England, a century and less ago. These men affected every realm of thought and duty. They organized every sort of philanthropy. As says Sir James Stephen: "They formed themselves into a confederacy, carefully-organized and fearlessly avowed, to send forth into all lands, but, above all, into their own, the two witnesses of the Church, Scripture and tradition-Scripture, to be interpreted by its divine Author to the devout worshiper; tradition, not of doctrinal tests, but of that inextinguishable. zeal which, first kindled in the apostolic times, has never since wanted either altars to receive or attendant ministers to feed and propagate the flame." Well does he add: "Bibles, schools, missionaries, the circulation of evangelical books and the training of evangelical clergymen, the possession of well attended pulpits, war through the press and war in Parliament against every form of injustice which either law or custom sanctioned-such were the forces by which they hoped to extend the kingdom of light and to resist the tyranny with which the earth was threatened." Thus he confesses and concludes: "That confederacy which was pent up within the narrow limits of Clapham, which jocose men invidiously called a sect, is now spreading through the habitable globe. The day is not distant when it will assume the form, and be hailed by the glorious title, of the Universal Church." And all this philanthropic power is thus confessedly traced to John Wesley; for, speaking of the era of Whitefield, he says: "It was at this period that the Alma Mater of Laud and Sacheverell was nourishing in her bosom a little band of pupils destined to accomplish a momentous revolution in the national Church; and of this little band John Wesley was the acknowledged leader." We do not purpose to examine and illustrate the whole sphere of the influence of Wesley. One can see at a glance its vastness. The whole field of organized humanitarianism, of organized spiritual and ecclesiastical and Christian propagandism, is included in this range. Martyn translating the Scriptures into Persian and Hindustani, Judson into Burmese, Morrison into Chinese, Van Dyke into Arabic, Moffat into the South African dialects, are all because Wesley lived and wrought. Every missionary society, Bible, tract, and book society, sprang from his influence. Every Sunday-school book-alas, that it must be said, even in its weakness!-he is compelled to call his child; for he initiated that literature. Every temperance, antislavery, anti-tobacco, and woman suffrage society, much as one may dislike to acknowledge it, took its rise in the chambers of the Fellow and Vice-Rector of Lincoln. He first since Paul emancipated woman in the prayer-room and the pulpit. His principles necessitate her complete liberation. Green says of this movement of Wesley's, that "it changed in a few years the whole temper of English society. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education. The revival began in a small knot of Oxford students." After speaking of Charles Wesley and Whitefield, the same writer adds: "It was John Wesley who embodied in himself, not this or that side of this vast movement, but the very movement itself." * These facts are too patent to need discussion. Let us proceed to a more recondite study. At first glance one might say he did not influence literature and philosophy. The one was too refined, the other too subtle, for his practical, experimental, sociological faculties Yet both of these have felt the impress of his presence. His influence upon literature has been marked and marvelous. Thackeray and Dickens, Tennyson and Browning, though they knew it not, George Eliot and Charles Reade, Mrs. Stowe, and every reformatory romancer-even Oliver Wendell Holmes, who strikes at Christ, and yet is indebted to Wesley for the disposition and ability to strike-have another atmosphere blowing through their brain and giving character to their writings than they would have had if John Wesley had never lived. For each of them is a writer touched with reform. By comparing "Dotheboys-hall" with Fielding or Scott, we see the difference at a glance. Scott, though of the later generation, has no relation to these questions; nor Disraeli. Bulwer, a very slight one; his "Coming Race" is almost his only modern novel. Dickens is almost exclusively a reformer; Thackeray, largely so. The first reformatory novel, "The Fool of Quality," Wesley himself adopted into his library. He has been the father of multitudes of such, and has practically overturned that whole realm. It is, however, in his relation to modern philosophy, as the antagonist of material, as the exponent and starter out of spiritual or transcendental philosophy, that Wesley stands forth in a clearness of light that makes it impossible not to recognize and accept his sovereignty. To set this in sytematic form will be the aim and effort of this article. To do this justly we shall consider the status of philosophy when he arose, its theologic forms, and his relations to the same; his escape from it, how it was affected, and what were its revelations in him; his influence subsequently upon this department of thought, direct and indirect. I. Before we draw near Wesley, and the forces that made him, and that he made, look a little closer at the contest itself. * See also Leckey's "England in the Eighteenth Century." The two contending systems of philosophy are spiritual and material. They have always wrestled in the human soul since that soul became the slave of its passions and of its body, in falling under the snare of its appetites, the lowest or most outward of all the organs that had been appointed its servants. The apple eat in disobedience of law made the spirit the slave of the grossest of the physical functions. To justify himself to himself, man has ever since been creating schemes of ontology that make this outward and lowest the inward and highest of all his faculties. He has sought to deduce the inner world from the outer, and to make the outermost the uppermost. Schemes of philosophy and of religion have gained foothold in generations, races, tracts of earth deeprooted as the hills of whose nature they partake, and ruling widely as the skyey influences, no higher than which do they go. Against these have arisen the spiritual protests "Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, These declarations are not protests so much as higher assertions-gleams of the earlier age, when man stood on his feet and not his head, when he talked with God face to face, as friend talketh with friend. These truths, too, sank deep into the human heart, and flashed forth their energies against the materializing forces of the depraved humanity. The Brahman fought with the Buddhist, Pythagoras and Plato with Zeno and Aristotle, Pharisee with Sadducee, the Greek Christian with the Roman. Adown the ages the conflict ran, and to-day it still goeth on. The earth doth not protect the woman, but riseth against her. Flesh warreth against the spirit, man with God. The Church has felt this conflict. Mohammed conquered the Eastern Church with his sword, and the Western with his dogma. Fatalism took possession of the Roman Church as the Greek fell in ecclesiastical liberty, and almost in ecclesiastical existence. The Reformation developed the vitality of the hostile hosts. Luther, the apostle of freedom, was followed almost instantly by Calvin, the apostle of bondage. How much their blood had to do with their philosophic theology, is a question more easily asked than answered. For the German has always been a lover of liberty; the Frenchman, of law. Perhaps even the Roman bondage of Augustinianism, which Calvin modernized, arose from the Roman stringency of law, that external and potent governmental sense that to this day characterizes the Church which centers its power on the hills of Cæsar, and under the name of Pontifex Maximus. This conflict passed over to England, and sprang up in the fierce theologic strife that broke the long winter of Roman authority with the oncoming influences of the present summer of grace. Bacon stood at the parting of the ways, but gave no hint as to which he should take. Though experimental in his treatment, he was ideal in his concept. Cranmer was an Erasmian, and Hooker, Latimer and Owen were Calvinists. Henry More, the first writer on philosophy of any repute in English literature, was a Platonist, an Idealist. He was a graduate of Milton's college-Christ's of Cambridge—and, perhaps, was inspired in his freedom of thought by that master, for he spent one year with him as an undergraduate, More entering in 1631, Milton graduating in 1632. As More became a Fellow of Christ's, Milton must have often met him in his visits to his Alma Mater, and held deep and rich communion with a brother spirit of like perceptions with himself. His influence, however, among those who profess to set forth English philosophy has been very slight. Lewes does not regard him as worthy of mention; and he is not, if Lewes' theory of philosophy is accepted as the real English system. He may yet come to his desert, and take his rank at the head, which he deserves, no less for his position in time, than for his far higher position in thought. The father of modern English philosophy, or the one usually accredited as such, is Thomas Hobbes. He is undoubtedly the father of English material philosophy. Lewes, in his "History of Philosophy," recognizes him as the first; Robert Blakey, also, in his "History of Moral Science," begins with the name of Hobbes, though nothing could be more immoral than the science of Hobbes. This displacement of More is after the world fashion. Cain was preferred to Abel; the outward to the inward. More published his first philosophical treatise, a poem, eleven years |