Hello, I'm Wilson Pruitt, and you are listening to the History of Methodism Podcast. You can support us online at patreon.com/historyofmethodism. Please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Today’s Episode: Revival on Hold.
Biographies of John Wesley and histories of Methodism tend to skip over what happened on May 25, 1738. Aldersgate is such a bright and shining moment in the history of the methodist movement that what took place immediately after is darkened by its glow and we tend to skip ahead until it gets good again, as if Aldersgate were the act I showstopper like ‘One Day More’ or ‘Defying Gravity,’ positioned in the musical in order to get everyone to come back to their seats after intermission in order to watch the final act. If Aldersgate is the showstopper, it feels like the two weeks after is the intermission to many biographers and historians.
Even the most thorough modern biographer of John Wesley, Henry Rack, quickly skips from May to September in order to look at Wesley’s trip to visit Zinzendorf.
In his Journal, John marks May 25 as a day begun in the light of calling Jesus, Master, as he awoke, but then “the enemy injected a fear.”1 May 26 goes in a similar fashion with the day beginning in grace and then continuing with challenges and temptations. Everything was not simple after Aldersgate. Assurance did not equal ease. On May 27th, John spent most of the day in prayer and ended that day in a state of peace.
Sunday, May 28, seems to have brought John to preach his first sermon after Aldersgate. He writes:
This day I preached in the morning at St. George's Bloomsbury, on, This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith; and in the afternoon at the chapel in Long-Acre, on God's justifying the ungodly; the last time (I understand) I am to preach at either. Not as I will, but as thou wilt.
The messages were not well received, but John felt confident in preaching. This, though, is not how John began his journal for that day. Instead, John began the entry for May 28 as such:
I waked in peace, but not in joy. In the same even quiet state I was till the evening, when I was roughly attacked in a large company as an enthusiast, a seducer, and a setter-forth of new doctrines.2
We have an account of this incident from another perspective, and it is one of the few anecdotes often relayed about these early post-Aldersgate days. It comes from Mrs. Hutton, the wife of James Hutton, with whom John stayed in London after his Georgia excursion. This letter gives us one of the few perspectives of these May days beyond John’s own pen. She writes, on June 6, 1738, to John’s older brother, Samuel Jr., in order to share about John’s change in character.
You will be surprised to see a letter from me, but Mr. Hutton and I are really under a great concern, and know not what to apply to, if you cannot help us. After you left London, and your brothers lost the conveniency of your house, believing them good and pious christians, we invited them to make the same use of ours, and thought such an offer would not be unacceptable to God, or to them…Mr. Charles at his arrival in England was received and treated with such tenderness and love, as he could have been in your house, Mr. John the same…[b]ut your brother John seems to be turned a wild enthusiast, or fanatic, and, to our very great affliction, is drawing our two children into theses wild notions, by their great opinion of Mr. John’s sanctity and judgment. It would be a great charity to many other honest well-meaning simple souls, as well as to my children, if you could either confine, or convert, Mr. John when he is with you. For after his behavior on Sunday the 28th of May, when you hear it, you will think him not a quite right man.
…Mr. John got up, and told the people, that five days before he was not a christian, and this he was as well assured of as that five days before he was not in that room, and the way for them all to be christians was to believe, and own, that they were not now christians. Mr. Hutton was much surprised at this unexpected injudicious speech, and only said, “Have a care Mr. Wesley, how you despise the benefits received by the two sacraments.”
…[Mr. John] made the same wild speech again, to which I made answer, if you was not a christian ever since I knew you, you was a great hypocrite, for you made us all believe you was one. He said, when we had renounced every thing but faith, and then got into Christ, then, and not till then, had we any reason to believe we were christians; and when we had so got Christ, we might keep him, and so be kept from sin.
…if you can, dear Sir, put a stop to such madness, which will be a work worthy of you, a singular charity, and very much oblige. Your sincere, and affectionate servant, E. Hutton.3
Samuel replies with confusion over his brother’s behavior. He writes:
What Jack means by his not being a christian till last month, I understand not. Had he never been in covenant with God? Then…baptism was nothing…In short, this looks like down-right madness. I do not hold it at all unlikely, that perpetual intensions of thought, and want to sleep, may have disordered my brother. I have been told that the Quaker’s introversion of thought, has ended in madness…God deliver us from visions that shall make the law of God vain. I pleased myself with the expectation of seeing Jack, but now that is over, I am afraid of it.4
John’s relationship with his older brother is complex and deserves an episode of its own, which we will get to in the future. For now, if we come back to Mrs. Hutton’s letter and the incident of May 28, it is interesting to note that she waits more than a week before sending the latter. Perhaps she grew more concerned about Wesley’s influence on her children. Perhaps she had hoped it would blow over but it didn’t. Nevertheless, during that time, John was not stationary.
After the Sunday outburst in the Hutton house, John met Shepherd Wolfe, a Moravian colleague of Peter Bohler.5 John saw in Wolfe someone more advanced than he. John writes,
his state [was] so far above mine, that I was tempted to doubt, whether we had one faith? But without much reasoning about it, I held here; "Though his be strong and mine weak, yet that God hath given some degree of faith even to me, I know by its fruits. For I have constant peace; not one uneasy thought. And I have freedom from sin: not one unholy desire."6
The next few days continued in struggle, leading up to June 3, when John writes, “I was so strongly assaulted by one of my old enemies, that I had scarce strength to open my lips, or even to look up for help. But after I had prayed, faintly, as I could, the temptation vanish∣ed away.”7
A few days later, John received a letter from Oxford which challenged him. The letter said:
That no doubting could consist with the least degree of true faith: that whoever at any time felt any doubt or fear, was not weak in faith, but had no faith at all: and that none hath any faith, till the law of the spirit of life has made him wholly free from the law of sin and death.8
John’s response was to open the New Testament and see where the page fell. His eyes landed on 1 Corinthians 3, which describes how some are infants in Christ who can’t handle the strong food yet. The scripture seemed to calm Wesley’s anxiety. He was able to see that some had degrees of faith. Specifically, that faith is not an all or nothing proposition.
The next morning, John decides to go to Germany. Something had to change. Before embarkation, he visits his mother and shares about his Aldersgate experience. He doesn’t write about it in the 1738 Journal, but in the following year, John mentions,
I had read her a paper in June last year, containing a short account of what had passed in my own soul, till within a few days of that time. She greatly approved it and said "She heartily blessed God, who had brought me to so just a way of thinking."9
The two weeks which followed Aldersgate were inconclusive. There is a reason why Henry Rack jumps over them with only scant commentary. There is a reason why V.H.H. Green, another biographer, ignores them altogether. Richard Heitzenrater, in his Wesley and the People Called Methodists, describes the period briefly (quoting from Mrs. Hutton’s letter) and says that “during the following days, [John] was constantly troubled by one problem after another relating to his only partially fulfilled expectations.”10
I must quibble with my teacher here for psychologizing John at this point. The period of time is too short and the documentary evidence too scarce to make an argument for the source of John’s ambivalence. What we can say is that John Wesley had a powerful spiritual experience on May 24, 1738. This dramatically changed his personal understanding of faith in ways that made him question his prior understanding of faith that had been instilled by in him from birth by his mother and father. This central question of an assurance of salvation undergirded so much of the transformation which had taken place on May 24, but it didn’t land John Wesley in settled waters.
On May 25, John woke up to a world that had not experienced God in the exact same way that he had. He met friends (like Mr. and Mrs. Hutton) and shared his experience, but they felt both challenged and judged by John’s account. He preached to churches, but he was not invited back.
John writes on May 31 that he was “speaking with sharpness instead of tender love, of one that was not sound in the faith”11 This distinction he makes between sharpness and tender love could also help us understand this period. John was struggling to create the right language to describe his experience and new understanding of faith. He was falling into the temptation of sharp language and unsure how to speak with tender love. This was not an intermission in John’s faith journal but a fertile time of consequence
In this moment, John makes one of his most profound discoveries as a pastor and a christian: he can’t do it alone. John decides to go to what is now Germany in order to find the source of the Moravian spirituality which had so shaped him.
What will John find across the English Channel, and how will it shape the Methodist movement, next time on the History of Methodism.
- WW 18:250. ↩︎
- WW 18:252. ↩︎
- E. Hutton to Samuel Wesley, June 6, 1738, in Joseph Priestley, Letters Relating to Methodism, 67-71. ↩︎
- Samuel Wesley to E. Hutton, June 17, 1738, in Joseph Priestley, Letters Relating to Methodism, 72-74 ↩︎
- WW 18:253. ↩︎
- WW 18:253. ↩︎
- WW 18:253. ↩︎
- WW 18:254. ↩︎
- Journals from June 13, 1739 ↩︎
- Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists. ↩︎
- WW 18:253. ↩︎
Sources
Henry Rack
Richard Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists.