The farmer and mechanic. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 18??-19??, 1903-06-23
JOHN WEsLEY'S REFORMATION.

truth that no man who has a revelation
to m~onopolize the blessing. He must Of
necessity become an evangelist, seeking
to bring others to see the light that has
Frightened his own pathway.
Wesley and his associates, young men
of scholarship and literary taste, saw the
religious world about them IN the en-
the joys Of a living faith, but their testl-
mony fell upon deaf ears among the re-
I~Iigious guides and educated classes of that
period. Their message was heard joyfully
by the people who heard Him gladly"
seventeen hundred years previous. The
masses had lost faith III the hurch and
those who ministered at its affairs. They
were the victims OF industrial, clerical and
legal oppression, they heard no voice call
ing them a higher life, and they had
settled down into a stolid hopelcssness too
depressing to permit even skepticism. 1t
was when the condition OF the poor and
when vital religion were at their lowest
ebb that the earnest young students at Ok
ford felt the strange glow that warmed
the glad ,..ings' to others. Not even
Paul in his missionary journeys ound
harder doors of Indifference barred to the
entrance of the gospel. But the open
=. -...l.- ~. .l,., .,or- ~
ministrations to the poor, the matchless
cloquence of Whitfield, the sweet songs
of Charles Wesley and the wonderful
power and genius of John Wesley, in the
providence of God, made a way where
none opened to them.
The Reformation of Wesley, in many
conflict and travail. But when God has
a message for mankind and selects His
messenger to carry it, neither dead formal
ism nor fragrant wickedness nor stoicism
can stand in the way of the messenger or
limit the effect of the message. The Meth
odist Church is the living monument to the
" hFBiiN' VI Jill Isl , I IiSh
men point. But his work was much more
far-reaching. 1t quickened the whole Pro-
~testant world. and brought a new and
rrrer conception of religion, and the hap
it, which was little appreciated in that
century. Journalism in the established
church had caused the people to lapse
INTO wickedness and wantonness. Puri-
had no outward manifestation of a creed
| except cold DUTY" Methodism, with its
preaching of heartfelt, experimental re
ligion, with its hostility to show, pride
ornament or worldly pleasures-even with
It's narroWness. too, for its idea was that
"a narrow river runs strong"-appealed
to the burdened hearts of men and wo-
men, not only those who joined the Metho-
dists, but to untold numbers of those
whose new experience quickened the es-
tablished church to a new idea of service.
and put joy into the duty of the Puritan.
1t was not only the establishment of an
other church that gives Wesley immor-
tality, but his reviving pure faith and
undefiled religion in all the world that
his lite touched. Indeed Mr.. Wesley
never set out to found a new church. and
II the men at the head OF the established
church at that day had been as much CON
cerned for the salvation of the human race
as Tor preterment, power, ease and pleas
ure the mighty Wesleyan revival might
have eyentuated in giving a new religious
lite to the existing churches without the
organization of the Methodist church. But
tlils was not to be. There was need in
the world for another evangelical church,
tree from the ritual and cere-
monies of the established church.
and wanting in the Puritan hardness, ap-
peallng to the hearts of men and women.
Wesley was the instrument in Gods hands
OF creating that religious organization,
the God-appointed agency to carry the
gospel to multitudes who were not reach
ed by any religious agency then in ex-
lstence. Its mighty growth and ire
mendous influence attest that it has had
upon it the blessings of Almighty God.
VIII the Methodist church continue to
grow? There are not wanting those who
say that In many places it has fallen into
a Journalism as dead, if not as liturgical.
as that which embraced the English
church when Wesley gave to Christendom
a new idea of religious experience. There
are those who say that its clergy are
growing almost as worldly in some direc-
tons as the fox-hunting parsons of the
seventeenth century. There are those who
lhlnk they see a grasplng after power.
a subservIencc TO ~ill-gotten wealth. a 81
lence as to the sins of - men. and
other evils of the kind against which
early MethOdlSm was a vital and erereiz-
ing protest. l. there foundation for such
sayings? There is no room in the world
Tor a Methodism that is not well do