Quote of the Day (John Wesley, on God-Given Ability)

"Use all the ability which God giveth, and He will give you more.”— Methodist founder John Wesley (1703-1791), Aug. 2, 1776 letter to his sister, Dorothy Furly Downes

Song Lyric of the Day (Charles Wesley, on the ‘Love Divine’)

“O Love divine, what hast thou done!

The immortal God hath died for me!

The Father's coeternal Son

bore all my sins upon the tree.

Th' immortal God for me hath died:

My Lord, my Love, is crucified!”—“O Love Divine, What Hast Thou Done,” lyrics by Charles Wesley, music by Isaac B. Woodbury

Charles Wesley (1707-1788) might have been the younger brother of John Wesley, the founder of Methodist faith, but he had his own unique voice within the movement, as well as within the history of Christianity. That comes from having written nearly 9,000 hymns—an average of 10 poetic lines a day for 50 years—a record that no other Christian composer (no, not even the ubiquitous Isaac Watts) has equaled. John might have made his listeners think, but Charles made them lift their voices.

On this date 225 years ago, Charles Wesley died. I think that he would have been glad at the thought that, on certain days (such as this one), the anniversary of his death has fallen on Good Friday, when Jesus “bore all my sins upon the tree.”

The image accompanying this post is Crucifixion with Sts. Mary Virgin, Mary Magdalen, John and Jerome (ca. 1503), an oil-on-panel work by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael. This masterpiece now hangs in the National Gallery in London.

This Day in Religious History (John Wesley’s “Aldersgate Experience”)

May 24, 1738—John Wesley, back in London after quarrels with his Georgia congregation and unhappiness in love, uncertain about the meaning of his ministry, underwent a conversion experience on Aldersgate Street that propelled him to preach with the tongue of an angel the beliefs that came to be known as Methodism.

In 1999, I came across the story of Wesley’s Savannah mission while visiting his statue in Reynolds Square. (The photo accompanying this post, taken from the Web, comes from that site.)

I’m continually astonished that, despite the fact that it absorbs the attention of so many Americans, religious history is told less in the schools than just about any other subject. I do not exempt myself from this criticism. But, while in Savannah, I vowed to learn more about the co-founder (with brother Charles) of Methodism.

Wesley’s Aldersgate experience particularly fascinates me as a Roman Catholic. It starts out like something out of Dante’s The Divine Comedy—a believer lost “midway upon the journey of our life” —and ends like the Apostles’ overwhelming experience of God’s presence during Pentecost.

From his earliest days as a young cleric, Wesley demonstrated extraordinary intensity and an equal capacity for alienating others. As a fellow at Oxford’s Lincoln College in 1729, he and Charles, friend George Whitefield, and others formed the “Holy Club.” 

The little band of clerical brothers went about the Lord’s work—fasting twice a week, visiting prisons, aiding the sick, and the like—but their strict, at times seemingly outlandish piety (Whitefield was witnessed kneeling in prayer with his face in the dirt, not even bothering to move when rain turned the ground beneath him to mud) led skeptical classmates to label them “Methodists.”

Tiring of the religious apathy surrounding him, the young Anglican divine thought that ministering to Native Americans in Georgia might be more in his line. Instead, the new colony’s founder, Gen. James Oglethorpe, suggested he should serve the English-speaking settlers.

No matter how difficult it might have been to preach to Indians with a different language and culture, Wesley couldn’t have experienced less success than he did with his fellow English transplants. His service began in February 1736 and lasted a little less than two years.

“The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,” according to Ezekiel 18:20—but sometimes, it seems, the son repeats the father’s mistake, as happened with Wesley. 

As a young curate assisting his father Samuel in England, he saw firsthand how a minister’s financial ineptitude and strictness could enrage a flock, to such a point that it was rumored that Samuel’s rectory had been set ablaze by an angry parishioner. In Georgia, John followed in his father’s footsteps, ticking off parishioners with by-the-book High Church strictures.

His first sermon, preached at Savannah’s Bull Street and Bay Lane, was “On Love.” It began with characteristic bluntness: “There is great reason to fear that it will hereafter be said of most of you who are here present, that this scripture, as well as all those you have heard before, profited you nothing.” 

Still, his ultimate message about the passion for God was well within the bounds of what other ministers preached. But the title took on ironic meaning because of Wesley’s troubled relations with women.

Wesley, according to James Harrison Rigg’s The Living Wesley, “could at no time in his life dispense with the exquisite and stimulating pleasure which he found in female society and correspondence.” In other words, whenever a pretty girl came into view, the brain stopped being his primary organ for thinking. Millions of guys, then as now, could relate. And let it be said immediately that Wesley never acted criminally or even immorally. Just really, really stupidly.

An infatuation at Oxford had already given Wesley a bad taste for women. In Savannah, his experiences led to the mother of all midlife crises, not to mention a lawsuit. (And there was no infestation of tort law back then!)

An 18-year-old girl, Sophy Hopkey, led him to ponder whether he should devote his life to God or chuck it all for marriage. While he was considering this dilemma, Sophy accepted the proposal of another suitor.

Unable to surmount his jealousy, the minister refused her communion on the pretext that she hadn’t registered for the rite. Few if any of his congregants bought that argument, least of all Sophy’s family, who filed a defamation suit. Not surprisingly, Wesley decided that "The hour has come for me to fly for my life, leaving this place."

Six months after leaving his Savannah church, Wesley was in London, taking solace in some German Moravian friends, whose simple piety had impressed him so enormously that he even translated some of their hymns. 

One of these friends, Peter Bohler, advised the heartsick 35-year-old: "Preach faith till you have it. And then because you have it, you will preach faith."

At dawn of the pivotal day in his life, Wesley found in 2 Peter 1 the following: “There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that ye might be partakers of the divine nature." Nothing registered at first.

That evening, against his better judgment, he attended one of the Moravians’ meetings on Aldersgate Street. Around 8:45 pm, he recorded later in his diary, while a minister was preaching on Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans and “describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

All of a sudden, Wesley was a man transformed—preaching as many as 15 sermons a week, traveling on horseback thousands of miles a year, and knitting together (notably through the “small-group” concept that has lately invigorated certain branches of American Protestantism) a trans-Atlantic network of believers. 

His stress on conservative moral teaching and progressive social advocacy (abolitionism, prison reform, child labor laws, medical care units, and shelters for battered women) reminds this Catholic of the duality of Pope John Paul II that confounded believer and non-believer alike through his papacy.

In a certain respect, Wesley’s conversion experience—slow, then sudden—contrasts with that of others in his movement, something that he noticed himself. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James quotes the minister as follows, not long before his death: 

“In London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (without a single exception) has declared that the change was wrought in a moment.”

“Christian perfection” was a subject to which Wesley continually returned. Naturally, being human, this state was not something he could achieve or, at times, even reasonably approach. 

For all his enormous success through the remaining 50-plus years of his life, Wesley could not enjoy satisfactory relations with women.

A dozen years after his Savannah imbroglio, the minister became entangled with Grace Murray, who broke off their engagement and took up with one of his preachers when she became convinced that he didn’t really want her. 

Two years later, on the rebound, he made one of the great mistakes of his life and finally married Mary (Molly) Vazeille, a widow of a London merchant. The childless union ended after only a few years, with Wesley’s (perhaps sexist) biographers characterizing Molly as a hopeless harridan.