The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1903-06-21
JOHN wEsLEY's REFORMATION

that uplifts his own life can or wishes
to monopolize 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-
brace of dead Journalism. They told of
1.-THE joys of living faith, but their testi-
mony fell upon deaf ears among the re-
lligious 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 in the church 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 stolid hopelessness 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
their hearts and sent them out to preach
the 'glad ..aings" to others. Not even
Paul in his missionary journeys found
harder doors of indifference barred to the
entrance of the gospel. But the open
air preaching, the class meetings, the
ministrations to the poor, the matchless
Ieloquence of Whitfield, the sweet songs
Iof 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
respects like that of Luther, came through
conflict and travail But when God has
"a message for mankind and selects His
messenger to carry it, neither dead formal
ism nor fiagrant wickedness nor stoicism
can stand in the way of The messenger or
limit tho eject OF the message The Meth
Iodist Church IS the living monument to the
ICodinspired work Of John Wesley, to which
men point Bpt MS work was much more
fafreaching. II quickenea the whole Pro
itestant world. aud brought new and
gcrer conception OF rel gion and the hap
piness that it gives to those who embrace
1T. which was little appreciated in that
century. Journalism in the established
church had caused the people to lapse
into wlckedness and wantonness. Puri-
tanism, stern, unbending, straight laced,
had no outward manifestation of a creed
except cold DUTY. Methodism, with its
preaching of heartfelt experimental re-
hgion, 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-
tabllshed church to 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 life 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 for preferment, power, ease and pleas
ure the mighty Wesleyan revival might
have eventuated in giving a new religious
life to the existing churches without the
organization of the Methodist church. But
this was not to be. There was need in
the world for another evangelical church,
free from the ritual and cere-
monies of the established church,
and wanting in the Puritan hardness; ap-
pealing 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-
istence. It's mighty growth and ire
mendous influence attest that it has had
upon it the blessings of Almighty God.
Will 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
new idea of religious experience There
are those who say that its clergy are
growing almost as worldly in some drec-
tions as the fox-hunting parsons of the
seventeenth century There are those who
think they see grasping after power,
a subservience to ill-gotten wealth, 81
lenee as to the sins of men, and
other evils of the kind against which
early Methodism was a vital and energiZ-