VII

SERVANT OR SON?

IN the year 1736, and in the month of May of that year, when John Wesley was scandalizing the Savannah colonists by refusing to baptize a healthy child with any mode other than that prescribed by the Church of England, namely, by immersion, an English Bishop, Joseph Butler of Durham, was giving to the world his famous book, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. In his advertisement his lordship took occasion to say:

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is

now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.

The social and religious conditions of those decades have many times been delineated, as in the ample pages of W. E. H. Lecky. In brief space they have been compactly described. by Samuel Parkes Cadman in his brilliant study of Wesley, in the volume The Three Religious Leaders of Oxford. For our present purpose Bishop Butler's comment needs but little supplement. Green, the historian, quotes Montesquieu as reporting, after a visit to England, "In the higher circles of society every one laughs if one talks of religion." Lord Chesterfield, who ought not to have been hard to please, is found bewailing the low morals of the people. Never was the

It

tone of Oxford so poor, and it was conceded that both the Universities were able to ruin their students. Further on in the century Edward Gibbon spent fourteen months at Magdalen College. "To the University of Oxford," he says, "I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother." was of one of his instructors at Oxford that Gibbon said, "He remembered that he had a salary to receive, and forgot that he had a duty to perform." As for Lord Chesterfield's complaint of a "remarkable licentiousness in the stage," it can be matched by the remark of a philosopher, William Wollaston, whose work, The Religion of Nature Delineated, was first published in 1722. The book reached a circulation of over ten thousand copies. It was highly valued by Bishop Butler, and it was a favourite book of Queen Caroline's. Hav

ing occasion to discuss the marriage troth, Wollaston provides his page with a footnote reading thus: "The form is still extant in our public offices, and may be seen by such as have forgotten it." It is a period in the State when a Robert Walpole can flourish like the green bay-tree. It is a period in the Church when a bishop could be far distant from his diocese, could court the Mall and be devoted to London

in the season. "Our clergy," writes John Brown, as late as 1757, in An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, "have become, and deserve to become, contemptible because they neglect their duties in order to slumber in stalls, haunt levees, or follow the gainful trade of election jobbing."1 The Bishop of Ely, in assigning the living of an unhealthy fenparish to his well-connected friend Thomas Whalley, does so with the express stipula

1 Thomas Seccombe, The Age of Johnson, p. xxiv.

tion that Whalley shall never enter into residence. So, as Wilberforce put it, you have the picture, behind this amiable and typical product, of a curate starving upon a pittance and doing the rector's work. As for the spiritual heights attained in the churches, it was a time when an orthodox clergyman was expected in his preaching to show the worldly advantages of good conduct.

At the age of thirty-four John Wesley is returning from the coasts of Georgia to the shores of England. Nor does he come with such dream of ecclesiastical consequence as moved the soul of another Oxford churchman, who ninety-five years later is making a journey from Palermo to the homeland. Newman turns his face toward England with the conviction that he has a work to do. A sense of mission is at the heart of the lyric, "Lead, kindly Light." With Wesley, all through the months of his exile in Georgia, the quest