Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 9
Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers
by
ELBERT HUBBARD
CONTENTS
JOHN WESLEY
HENRY GEORGE
GARIBALDI
RICHARD COBDEN
THOMAS PAINE
JOHN KNOX
JOHN BRIGHT
BRADLAUGH
THEODORE PARKER
OLIVER CROMWELL
ANNE HUTCHINSON
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
JOHN WESLEY
My horse was very lame, and my head did ache exceedingly. Now what
occurred I here avow is truth--let each man account for it as he
will. Suddenly I thought, "Can not God heal man or beast as He
will?" Immediately my weariness and headache ceased; and my horse
was no longer lame.
--_Wesley's Journal_
Once in a speech on "The Increase of Population," Edmund Burke
intimated his sympathy with Malthus, and among other interesting data
made note that Susanna Wesley was the twenty-fourth child of her
parents. Burke, however, neglected to state how many sisters and
brothers Susanna had who were younger than herself, and also what
would have been the result on church history had the parents of
Susanna named their twenty-third child Omega.
John Wesley was the fifteenth child in a family of nineteen. And yet
the mother did her own work, thus eliminating the servant-girl
problem, and found time to preach better sermons to larger
congregations than did her husband. Four of Susanna's children became
famous--John, Charles, Samuel and Martha.
John rebuked and challenged the smug, self-satisfied and formal
religion of the time; had every church-door locked against him;
sympathized with the American Colonies in their struggle for freedom;
and founded a denomination which today is second in wealth and numbers
to one alone.
John Wesley left no children after the flesh, but his influence has
colored the entire fabric of Christianity. There is no denomination
but that has been benefited and bettered by his beautiful spirit.
Charles Wesley was the greatest producer of hymns the world has ever
seen, having written over six thousand songs, and rewritten most of
the Bible in lyric form. He was "the brother of John Wesley," and
delighted all his life in being so called. No one ever called John
Wesley the brother of Charles. John had a will like a rope of silk--it
slackened, but never broke. He was resourceful, purposeful,
courageous, direct, healthy, handsome, wise, witty, happy; and he rode
on horseback, blazing the way for many from darkness into light.
Charles followed.
Three of the children of Charles Wesley became great musicians, and
one of them was the best organist of his time in England.
The third noted brother in this remarkable family was Samuel, who was
thirteen years older than John, and exercised his prerogative to pooh-
pooh him all his life. Samuel was an educated High Churchman, a Latin
scholar, and a poet of quality. Samuel always had his dignity with
him. He wrote and published essays, epics, and histories of nobodies;
but of all his writings, the only thing from his pen that is now read
and enjoyed is a letter of remonstrance to his mother because he hears
that she has joined "Jack's congregation of Methodists, and is a
renegade from the true religion." Needless to say the "true religion"
to Samuel was the religion in which he believed--all others were
false. Samuel being an educated Churchman did not know that all
religions are true to the people who believe in them.
The fourth Wesley of note was Martha, who looked so much like her
brother John that occasionally, in merry mood, she dressed herself in
his cassock and surplice, and suddenly appearing before the family
deceived them all until she spoke. Martha was the only girl in the
brood who was heir to her mother's mind. Had she lived in this age she
would have made for herself a career. A contemporary says, "She could
preach like a man," a remark, I suppose, meant to be complimentary. In
one respect she excelled any of the Wesleys--she had a sense of humor
that never forsook her. John usually was able to laugh; Charles smiled
at rare intervals; and Samuel never. As it was, Martha married and was
swallowed by the conventions, for the times subdue us, and society
takes individuality captive and binds it hand and foot with green
withes.
But the times did not subdue John Wesley: he was the original circuit-
rider, and his steed was a Pegasus that took the fences of orthodoxy
at a bound, often to the great consternation and grief of theological
squatters. He was regarded as peculiar, eccentric, strange,
extravagant, just as any man ever has been and would be today who
attempted to pattern his life after that of the Christ. Perhaps it is
needless to say that the followers of John Wesley do not much resemble
him, indeed not more so than they resemble Jesus of Nazareth.
John Wesley and Jesus had very much in common. But should a man of the
John Wesley pattern appear, say, in one of the fashionable Methodist
churches of Chicago, the organist would drown him out on request of
the pastor; and the janitor, with three fingers under his elbow, would
lead him to the door while the congregation sang "Pull for the Shore."
* * * * *
Julia Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah and Sarah Wedgwood, and sister to
the mother of Darwin, wrote a life of John Wesley. In this book Miss
Wedgwood says, "The followers of a leader are always totally different
from the leader." The difference between a leader and a follower is
this: a leader leads and a follower follows. The shepherd is a man,
but sheep are sheep. As a rule followers follow as far as the path is
good, but at the first bog they balk. Betrayers, doubters and those
who deny with an oath are always recruited from the ranks of the
followers. In a sermon John Wesley once said: "To adopt and live a
life of simplicity and service for mankind is difficult; but to follow
the love of luxury, making a clutch for place, pelf and power,
labeling Paganism Christianity, and imagining you are a follower of
Christ, this is easy. Yet all through life we see that the reward is
paid for the difficult task. And now I summon you to a life of
difficulty, not merely for the sake of the reward, but because the
life of service is the righteous life--the right life--the life that
leads to increased life and increased light."
A most remarkable woman was Susanna Wesley. The way she wound her mind
into the minds of her sons, John and Charles, was as beautiful as it
was extraordinary. Very few parents ever really get acquainted with
their offspring. Parents who fail to keep their promises with their
children, and who prevaricate to them, have children that are
secretive and sly. But often no one person is to blame, for children
do not necessarily have any spiritual or mental relationship to their
parents: their minds are not attuned to the same key--they are not on
the same wire.
Indeed, even with the great Susanna Wesley, there was a close and
confiding intimacy with only two of her brood. John Wesley has
written, "I can not remember ever having kept back a doubt from my
mother--she was the one heart to whom I went in absolute confidence,
from my babyhood until the day of her death."
The Epworth Parsonage, where John Wesley was born, was both a house
and a school. Probably the mother centered her life on John and
Charles because they responded to her love in a way the others did
not. In the year Seventeen Hundred Nine, the parsonage burned, with a
very close call for little John, who was asleep in one of the upper
chambers. The home being destroyed, the family was farmed out among
the neighbors until the house could be rebuilt. John was sent to the
home of a neighboring clergyman, ten miles away. After a week we find
him writing to his mother asking her if she has lost a little boy,
because if so he is the boy--a most gentle way of reminding her that
she had not written to him. At this time he was but six years old, yet
we see his ability to write a letter. This peculiar letter is the
earliest in a long correspondence between mother and son. Mrs. Wesley
preserved these letters, just as the mother of Whitman treasured the
letters of Walt with a solicitude that seems tinged with the romantic.
Much of the correspondence between John Wesley and his mother has been
published, and in it we see the intimate touch of absolute mental
undress where heart speaks to heart in abandon and self-forgetfulness.
The person who reaches this stage in correspondence has passed beyond
the commonplace. This formulation of thought for another is the one
exercise that gives mental evolution or education.
John Wesley was sent to Charterhouse School when he was eleven years
old, and he remained there for six years, when he went to Oxford.
After his twelfth year he was denied the personal companionship of his
mother, but every day he wrote to her--sometimes just a line or two,
and then at the end of the week the letter was forwarded.
In his later years Wesley did not think that either the "Charity
School" or Oxford, where he went on a scholarship, had benefited him
except by way of antithesis: but the correspondence with his mother
was the one sweet influence of his life that could not be omitted.
Their separation only increased the bond. We grow by giving; we make
things our own by reciting them; thought comes through action and
reaction; and happy is the man who has a sympathetic soul to whom he
can outpour his own. When Charles Kingsley was asked to name the
secret of his insight and power, he paused, and then answered, "I had
a friend!"
John Wesley had a friend; incidentally, that friend was his mother.
She died when he was thirty-nine years of age, after he had learned to
wing his way on steady pinions. And in the flight she was not left
behind.
We are familiar with the lives of many great men, but where among them
all can you name a genius whose mother's mind matched his, even in his
maturity?
* * * * *
The primitive Christian is a reactionary product of his time. Humanity
continuing in one direction acquires success, and finally through an
overweening pride in its own powers, relaxation enters, and self-
indulgence takes the place of effort. No religion is pure except in
its inception and in its state of persecution.
A religion grown great and rich and powerful becomes sloth and swag,
its piety being performed perfunk; and then ceases to be a religion at
all. It is merely an institution.
Religions multiply by the budding process. Every new denomination is
an offshoot from a parent stem. "A new religion" is a contradiction in
terms--there is only one religion in the world. A brand-new religion
would wither and die as soon as the sun came out.
New denominations begin with a protest against the lapses and
grossness of the established one, and the baby religion feeds and
lives on the other until it has grown strong enough to break off and
live a life of its own. Buds are being broken off all the time, but
only a few live; the rest die because they lack vitality. That is why
all things die--I trust no one will dispute the fact.
Christian Science, for instance, appropriated two great things from
the parent stock: the word "Christian," and the Oxford binding, which
made "Science and Health" look just like the Bible. One could carry it
on the street as he went to church without fear of accusation that he
was on the way to the circulating-library. It fulfilled the
psychological requirements.
John Wesley retained the word "Episcopal" for the new denomination,
and he also retained the gown and tippet. And it was near a hundred
years before the denomination had grown to a point where it could
afford to omit the gown--and possibly its omission was an error then.
* * * * *
Of university education at this time let Miss Wedgwood speak:
We can hardly wonder that the time spent at Oxford was, to a man
like Gibbon, "the most idle and unprofitable period of his life," to
use his own words. Even under the very different system which
prevailed in the early portion of the present century, one of the
most fertile thinkers of our day has been heard to speak of his
university career as the only completely idle interval of his life.
How often it may have proved not a mere episode, but the foundation
of a life of idleness, no human being can tell. Nor was the evil
merely negative. While the student lounged away his time in the
coffeehouse and the tavern, whilst the dice-box supplied him with a
serious pursuit, and the bottle a relaxation, he was called upon at
every successive step to his degree to take a solemn oath of
observance to the academical statutes which his behavior infringed
in every particular. While the public professors received a thousand
pounds a year for giving no lectures, the candidates for degrees
were obliged to ask and pay for a dispensation for not having
attended the lectures that never were given.
The system in every public declaration solemnly recognized and
accepted was in every private action utterly defied. Whatever the
Oxford graduate omitted to learn, he would not fail to acquire a
ready facility in subscribing, with solemn attestations, professions
which he violated without hesitation or regret. The Thirty-nine
Articles were signed on matriculation, without any attempt to
understand them. "Our venerable mother," says the great historian
from whom we have already quoted, "had contrived to unite the
opposite extremes of bigotry and indifference"; and these blended
influences, which led Gibbon first to Rome, and then to skepticism,
proved no doubt to the average mind a mere narcotic to all spiritual
life. Gibbon is not the only great writer who has recorded his
testimony against Hanoverian Oxford. Adam Smith in that work which
has been called, with pardonable exaggeration, "the most important
book that ever was written," the "Wealth of Nations," has, in the
following remarks on universities, evidently incorporated his
anything but loving recollections of the seven years which he spent
at Baliol College. "In the University of Oxford the greater part of
the professors have for these many years given up even the pretense
of teaching. The discipline is in general contrived not for the
benefit of students, but for the interest, or, more properly
speaking, for the ease of the masters. In England the public schools
are less corrupted than the universities; the youth there are, or at
least may be, taught Greek and Latin, which is everything the
masters pretend to teach. In the university the youth neither are,
nor can be, taught the sciences which it is the business of those
incorporated bodies to teach." It is the last statement to which
attention is here directed. It is not that the university drew up a
bad program, nor even that this scheme was badly carried out. That
might be the case also; but the radical vice of the system was not
that it was essentially incomplete in theory or faulty in practise,
but that it was false. Its worst result was not poor scholars, but
insincere and venal men.
I believe Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge
in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and
all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If
there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or
their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire
to please the great, and bring them to the universities, causes a
compliance with fashionable manners, a relaxation of discipline, and
a connivance at ignorance and folly, which errors he confesses
occasioned the English universities to be in less repute than they
were formerly. The fashion of sending young men thither was even in
some degree abated among that class who at the present day would be
the most reluctant to omit it--the nobility. The useless and
frivolous exercises required for the attainment of academic honors,
and the relaxation of discipline, had by this time created a
widespread and deeply felt contempt for the whole system of which
they formed a part; and the indulgent but candid observer, who tries
to dilute his censure with the truism that he could not have been
placed anywhere in this sublunary world without discovering many
evils, informs us that in his seven years' residence at the
university he saw immorality, habitual drunkenness, idleness,
ignorance and vanity openly and boastfully obtruding themselves on
public view, and triumphing without control over the timidity of
modest merit.
It is under such conditions that the strong man of right intent
rebukes the sloth and hypocrisy of his time. Very seldom, if ever,
does he faintly guess the result of his protest. Jesus rebuked the
iniquities and follies of Jerusalem, pleading for simple honesty,
directness of speech and love of neighbors. In wrath the Pharisees
made the usual double charge against Him--heresy and treason--and He
was crucified.
Heresy and treason are invoked together; one is an offense against the
Church, the other against the State. "The man is a traitor to God and
a traitor to his country," that settles it--off with his head! The
offenses of Socrates, Jesus, Savonarola, Huss, Wyclif, Tyndale, Luther
and John Wesley were all identical. Reformers are always guilty--
guilty of telling unpleasant truths. The difference in treatment of
the man is merely the result of a difference in time and local
environment. Oxford was professedly a religious institution; it was a
part of the State. John Wesley, the undergraduate, perceived it was in
great degree a place of idleness and dissipation. John wrote to his
mother describing the conditions. She wrote back, pleading that he
keep his life free from the follies that surrounded him, and band
those who felt as he did into a company, and meet together for prayer
and meditation in order that they might mutually sustain one another.
Susanna Wesley was the true founder of Methodism, a fact stated by
John Wesley many a time.
As early as Seventeen Hundred Nine, she wrote to her son Samuel, who
was then at Oxford, and who was never converted from Oxford
influences: "My son, you must remember that life is our divine gift--
it is the talent given us by Our Father in Heaven. I request that you
throw the business of your life into a certain method, and thus save
the friction of making each day anew. Arise early, go to bed at a
certain hour, eat at stated times, pray, read and study by a method,
and so get the most out of the moments as they swiftly pass, never to
return. Allow yourself so much time for sleep, so much for private
devotion, so much for recreation. Above all, my son, act on principle,
and do not live like the rest of mankind, who float through the world
like straws upon a river."
In hundreds of her letters to John and Charles at Oxford, their mother
repeats this advice in varying phrase: "We are creatures of habit; we
must cultivate good habits, for they soon master us, and we must be
controlled by that which is good. Life is very precious--we must give
it back to God some day, so let us get the most from it. Let us
methodize the hours, so we may best improve them."
John Wesley was a leader by nature, and before he was twenty he had
gathered about him at Oxford a little group of young men, poor in
purse, but intent in purpose, who held themselves aloof from the
foibles and follies of the place, and planned their lives after that
of the Christ. In ridicule they were called Methodists. The name
stuck.
In this Year of Grace, Nineteen Hundred Seven, there are more than
thirty million Methodists, and about seven million in America, The
denomination owns property to the value of more than three hundred
million dollars in the United States, and has more than one hundred
thousand paid preachers.
* * * * *
After Wesley's graduation he was importuned by the authorities to
remain and act as tutor and teacher at Christchurch College. He was a
diligent student, and his example was needed to hold in check the
hilarious propensities of the sons of the nobility.
In due time John was ordained to preach, and often he would read
prayers at neighboring chapels. His brother Charles was his devoted
echo and shadow. Then there was an enthusiastic youth by the name of
George Whitefield, and a sober, serious young man, James Hervey, who
stood by the Oxford Methodists and endured without resentment the
sarcastic smiles of the many.
These young men organized committees to visit the sick; to search out
poor and despondent students and give them aid and encouragement; to
visit the jails and workhouses. The intent was to pattern their lives
after that of the Apostles. They were all very poor, but their wants
were few, and when John Wesley's income was thirty pounds a year he
gave two pounds for charity. When it was sixty pounds a year he gave
away thirty pounds; and here seems a good place to say that, although
he made more than a hundred thousand pounds during his life from his
books, he died penniless, just as he had wished and intended.
Thus matters stood in the year Seventeen Hundred Thirty-five, when
James Oglethorpe was attracted to that Oxford group of ascetic
enthusiasts. The life of Oglethorpe reads like a novel by James
Fenimore Cooper. He was of aristocratic birth, born of an Irish
mother, with a small bar sinister on his scutcheon that pushed him out
and set him apart. He was a graduate of Oxford, and it was on a visit
to his Alma Mater that he heard some sarcastic remarks flung off about
the Wesleys that seemed to commend them. People hotly denounced
usually have a deal of good in them. Oglethorpe was an officer in the
army, a philanthropist, a patron of art, and a soldier of fortune. He
had been a Member of Parliament, and at this particular time was
Colonial Governor of Georgia, home on a visit.
He had investigated Newgate and other prisons and had brought charges
against the keepers and succeeded in bringing their inhumanities
before the public. Hogarth has a picture of Oglethorpe visiting a
prison, with the poor wretches flocking around him telling their woes.
In a good many instances prisoners were given their liberty on the
promise of Oglethorpe that he would take them to his colony. The heart
of Oglethorpe was with the troubled and distressed; and while his
philanthropy was more on the order of that of Jack Cade than it was
Christian, yet he at once saw the excellence in the Wesleys, and
strong man that he was, wished to make their virtue his own. He
proposed that the Wesleys should go back with him to America and
evolve an ideal commonwealth.
Oglethorpe had with him several Indians that he had brought over from
America. They were proud, silent, and had the reserve of their kind.
Moreover, they were six feet high, and when presented at court wore no
clothes to speak of.
King George the Second, when these sons of the forest were presented
to him, appeared like a pigmy. Oglethorpe knew how to march his forces
on an angle. London society went mad trying to get a glimpse of his
savages. He declared that the North American Indians were the finest
specimens--intellectually, physically and morally--of any people the
world had ever seen. They needed but one thing to make them perfect--
Christianity.
The Wesleys, discouraged by the small impress they had made on Oxford,
listened to Oglethorpe's arguments and accepted his terms. Charles was
engaged as Secretary to the Governor, and John Wesley was to go as a
missionary.
And so they sailed away to America. On board ship they methodized the
day--had prayers, sang hymns and studied, read, exhorted and wrote as
if it were their last day on earth. This method excited the mirth of
several scions of nobility who were on board, and Oglethorpe opened
out on the scoffers thus: "Here, you damned pirates, you do not know
these people. They forget more in an hour than you ever knew. You take
them for tithe-pig parsons, when they are gentlemen of learning, and,
like myself, graduates of Oxford. I am one of them, I would have you
know. I am a religious man and a Methodist, too, and I'll knock hell
out of anybody who, after this, smiles at either my friends or my
religion!"
Long years after, Wesley told this story to illustrate the fact that a
man might give an intellectual assent to a religion and yet not have
much of it in his heart. Oglethorpe looked upon Methodism as a good
thing--cheaper than a police system--and sure to bring good results.
If John Wesley and George Whitefield could convert his colony and all
the Indians round about, his work of governing would be much reduced.
Oglethorpe was a very practical man.
* * * * *
John Wesley did not convert the Indians, because he could not find
them, they being away on wars with the other tribes. Besides that, he
could not speak their language and was wholly unused to their ways.
The Indian does not unbosom himself to those who do not know him, and
the few Indians Wesley saw were stubbornly set in the idea that they
had quite as good a religion as his. And Wesley was persuaded that
probably they had.
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