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: The Summer of ’39.
“I got my first real band meeting
Met them near a Bristol mine.
Prayed until our kneecaps bled
Was the summer of ’39”
Me and some guys from school
Had a band, preached on the farm
Escaped the produce that was thrown by locals
Shoulda known, my heart was strangely warmed
“Almost Christian” now, I wish that it would last forever
“Awake thou that sleepist” yeah, I hoped for more religious fervor
Those were the early days of my life
Oh Yeah,
Back in the summer of ’39.
Okay, we can stop there. John Wesley left Bristol for London on June 11. He took what he had learned in the west counties and brought it to London, but both Richard Heitzenrater and Henry Rack skip over this period entirely. There are no major epiphanies shifting the history of the movement. Instead, it is a season of John putting into practice his insights from Bristol and the New Year’s Day prayer session and Herrenhut and Aldersgate. That is, we don’t have any mountaintops, but we do have John coming down the mountain. And for that reason, this period is vital for the future of the Methodist Movement. John gave up on Georgia. He did not give up on Bristol. Why?
It is an obvious but important question. In Bristol, John Wesley saw the fruit of his ministry. In Georgia, he did not. If he had gotten the same response in Georgia as he did in Bristol, I think John would have fought through the legal hurdles he was facing. Instead, the legal issues gave him an excuse to get away from an unfruitful ministry. In Bristol, John felt the fruit of an extraordinary call from God. But the question of the summer of ’39 still lingered: is the revival sustainable?
On the day before his return to the capital, John had again picked up William Law’s treatise on Christian Perfection. Even though the two men were no longer close, this second reading through the text (last mentioned in Episode 41, The Road to Aldersgate) may have helped guide the next few weeks for John.
John Wesley arrived in London on June 13, 1739 for a quick visit. His first stop is to receive communion in Islington, and then to visit his mother, Susanna.1 John had not seen his mother in nearly a year and their reunion was not entirely heartfelt. John’s older brother, Samuel Jr., had shared an account of the Aldersgate experience with Susanna, and John “now found [her] under strange fears concerning [him].”2 This meeting doesn’t end with a full reconciliation between John and his mother but with a lingering tension. It also stoked the tension that had grown between John and Samuel, Jr.
In the evening of that first day back, John went back to Fetter Lane for the first time in a few months to calm some of the tensions there.
The next day, John read some of George Whitefield’s recently published journal and then met with George. In his diary, John writes: “religious talk with George Whitefield [not in America after all].”3 George then asked John to preach in front of crowd estimated to be between 12,000 and 14,000 at Blackheath.
On Saturday, June 16, John met at Fetter Lane in a bid to reunify the society. He feels good about the evening, writing in the Journal, “In that hour we found God with us as at the first. Some fell prostrate upon the ground. Others burst out, as with one consent, into loud praise and thanksgiving. And many openly testified, there had been no such day as this since January the first preceding.”4
The next day, John preached to a large crowd of about 7,000 at the Moorfields north of the wall near Fetter Lane. Moorfields was the location of the St Mary Bethlehem Hospital until 1815. John preached at Kennington Common, where he says 15,000 heard him.
Having put some order back into Fetter Lane and having preached to the mammoth crowds in London, John headed back to Bristol. What he found there did not warm his heart.
It is scarce credible, what advantage Satan had gained, during my absence of only eight days. Disputes had crept into our little Society, so that the love of many was already waxed cold…[but] when we met in the evening, instead of reviving the dispute, we all betook ourselves to prayer. Our Lord was with us. Our divisions were healed. Misunderstandings vanished away. And all our hearts were sweetly drawn together, and united as at the first.5
What we have in Bristol and at Fetter Lane, is the beginnings of a pattern for superintendency. He takes over leadership of a ministry. Notice that John didn’t plant either. His experience of Church planting wasn’t very positive. Next, John grows the ministry. Then he leaves to work in another field. A problem arises. He comes back to address it. John doesn’t let problems simmer but confronts them.
Another challenge popping up around Bristol that he had already faced in London were a group he referred to as the French Prophets, known today as the Camisards. They were protestant refugees from France after Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes and made protestantism illegal. The Camisards spoke Occitan instead of French. They were from the south. And many of them had visions similar to Montanists of the early church. As he had done before and will do throughout his ministry, John Wesley makes pains to distinguish his movement from just another group of religious enthusiasts. He isn’t preaching a new word but an old one. Much of the work of the published Journals was to make this point. If folks in England or the colonies hadn’t been to a field preaching, they had probably heard of Methodists, and John wanted to make sure they didn’t put his movement simply into a dismissible enthusiast bucket.
Yet consistently throughout the Journal accounts of these early days of the revival, John’s own doubts are assuaged by the physical reaction of people in the crowds.
While I was speaking, one before me dropped down as dead, and presently a second and a third. Five others sunk down in half an hour, most of whom were in violent agonies. The pains of hell came about them! the snares of death overtook them. In their trouble we called upon the Lord, and he gave us an answer of peace. One indeed continued an hour in strong pain ; and one or two more for three days. But the rest were greatly comforted in that hour, and went away rejoicing and praising God.6
The rest of the week, John preached nearly every day to crowds and then went to society meetings in the evenings, or went to homes for religious talk. There wasn’t a day off from revival.
A consistent challenge in these early days, was the parish system of the church of England. John had some relations with vicars and rectors in the area, as well as strong relationships with some bishops. Others saw the revival as stirring rebellious tendencies. Especially in this period before the defeat of the last Jacobite pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, or Charles Francis Stuart, in 1746. The Stuart’s had a greater claim to the throne than King George II, which made establishment figures insecure. John Wesley was a Tory through and through, but the large crowds who came to hear him preach made some people nervous. George Whitefield didn’t care much for the parish system, but John did and he felt the need to clarify how he was still able to fulfill his promise at ordination with the practice of field preaching in parishes where he didn’t receive prior approval from the local vicar.
On June 23, 1739, John wrote to his brother Charles explaining himself.
To obey God, I have both an ordinary and an extraordinary call. My ordinary call is: Take thou authority to preach the Word of God. My extraordinary call is witnessed by the works God doeth by my ministry, which prove that He is with me of a truth in the exercise of my office…But what if a bishop forbids this? …I say, God being my helper, I will obey him still. And if I suffer for it, his will be done.7
The fruit of revival is centrally important to John. It gives him encouragement and motivation to continue the daily practices of coordinating the society meetings, preaching, seeking for people to be convicted of sin.
Luke Tyerman, an early biographer of Wesley, writes of a different challenge than the episcopacy.
Another opponent, in 1739, was Henry Stebbing, a doctor of divinity, a royal chaplain, and preacher to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. This gentleman published “A Caution against Religious Delusion,” in the shape of “a sermon on the New Birth: occasioned by the pretensions of the Methodists.” In this comparatively temperate production, the Methodists are charged with “vain and confident boastings, and with rash uncharitable censures;” with “gathering tumultuous assemblies to the disturbance of the public peace, and with setting at nought all authority and rule;” with “intruding into other men’s labours, and with encouraging abstinence, prayer, and other religious exercises, to the neglect of the duties of our station.” It is admitted that, when there are “so many combinations for vice,” “religious societies for praying, reading (if not expounding) the Scriptures, and singing psalms may be of use for the encouragement of virtue;” but the danger is lest the laymen, who were heads or leaders of these societies, should “grow opinionated of themselves and fond of their own gifts, and should run into wild fancies until the pale of the Church is too strait for them.” Before the end of the year 1739, Stebbing’s sermon reached a sixth edition.8
John wrote a detailed response to Stebbing. I include a large excerpt from the letter because it offers us a developed understanding of John’s theology of salvation in the summer of ’39.
You charge me (for I am called a Methodist, and consequently included in your charge) with ‘vain and confident boastings; rash, uncharitable censures; damning all who do not feel what I feel… I do, indeed, go out into the highways and hedges to call poor sinners to Christ; but not in a tumultuous manner, not to the disturbance of the public peace or the prejudice of families… They perish for want of knowing that we as well as the heathens ‘are alienated from the life of God’; that ‘every one of us,’ by the corruption of our inmost nature, ‘is very far gone from original righteousness’ -- so far, that ‘every person born into the world deserveth God’s wrath and damnation’; that we have by nature no power either to help ourselves or even to call upon God to help us, all our tempers and works in our natural state being only evil continually… The change from the former of these states to the latter is what I call The New Birth. But you say I am not content with this plain and easy notion of it, but fill myself and others with fantastical conceits about it. Alas, sir, how can you prove this And if you cannot prove it, what amends can you make, either to God or to me or to the world, for publicly asserting a gross falsehood… Now, this it is certain a man may want, although he can truly say, ‘I am chaste; I am sober; I am just in my dealings; I help my neighbor, and use the ordinances of God.’ And, however such a man may have behaved in these respects, he is not to think well of his own state till he experiences something within himself which he has not yet experienced, but which he may be beforehand assured he shall if the promises of God are true. That something is a living faith, ‘a sure trust and confidence in God that, by the merits of Christ, his sins are forgiven and he reconciled to the favor of God.’ And from this will spring many other things, which till then he experienced not; as, the love of God shed abroad in his heart, the peace of God which passeth all understanding, and joy in the Holy Ghost--joy, though not unfelt, yet ‘unspeakable, and full of glory.’… These are some of those inward fruits of the Spirit which must be felt wheresoever they are; and, without these, I cannot learn from Holy Writ that any man is ‘born of the Spirit.’ I beseech you, sir, by the mercies of God, that if as yet you know nothing of such inward feelings, if you do not ' feel in yourself these mighty workings of the Spirit of Christ,' at least you would not contradict and blaspheme. When the Holy Ghost hath fervently kindled your love towards God, you will know these to be very sensible operations.9
As June turned to July and again to August, a rumor began to spread that John was a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit spy. In the Journal, he includes a letter he wrote in 1735 to a Roman Catholic priest articulating his sympathy with Romanists (as he calls them) but also his disagreement based on a reading of the Canons of the Council of Trent. His two main points concern the creation of idols and what he calls adding to the book of life concerning the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, communion in one kind only, and so on.
On August 29, John ended the day at the New Room, summing up “what I said at many times from the beginning…of faith, holiness, and good works, as the root, the tree, and the fruit which God has joined, and man ought not to put asunder.”10
On the 31st he heads for London and again. And as we move into a new season, I want us to take the time to delve into a central relationship in John and Charles Wesley’s life that is often ignored by Methodists and Methodist Scholars alike. His relationship with his older brother Samuel, next time on the History of Methodism.