Colonies will be formed with a view to this, when colonial policy shall be better understood. It will be acknowledged, that, when protection is no longer needed, dependence ceases to be desirable; and that, when a people can maintain and defend themselves, they are past their pupilage. 66 66 This address excited no little indignation among some of the English partisans of the Americans; and it produced a letter to Wesley from Mr. Caleb Evans, a Baptist minister at Bristol, of considerable reputation in his own community. Wesley, who had neither leisure nor inclination for controversy, left the field to Mr. Fletcher, who again, on this occasion, seconded his friend with great ability as well as zeal. My reverence for God's word,” said this good man, my duty to the king, and regard for my friend; my love to injured truth, and the consciousness of the sweet liberty which I enjoy under the government, call for this little tribute of my pen; and I pay it so much the more cheerfully, as few men in the kingdom have had a better opportunity of trying which is most eligible, a republican government, or the mild-tempered monarchy of England. I lived more than twenty years the subject of two of the mildest republics of Europe: I have been, for above that number of years, the subject of your sovereign; and, from sweet experience, I can set my seal to this clause of the king's speech, at the opening of this session of parliament, to be a subject of Great Britain, with all its consequences, is to be the happiest subject of any civil government in the world.'" Mr. Fletcher was no common controversialist: earnest sincerity, and devout ardour, were not more conspicuous in his writings, than the benevolence which appeared when he argued with most force and warmth, and the pure candour, and religious charity, which even his theological opponents felt and acknowledged. He, as well as Mr. Wesley, saw distinctly in what the principles of the American contest began, and in what they were likely to end." If once legislation," he said, with Baxter, (the chief act of government,) be denied to be any part of government at all, and affirmed to belong to the people as such, who are no governors, all government will thereby be overthrown. Give me," he truly said," Dr. Price's political principles, and I will move all kings out of their thrones, and all subjection out of the world." He rested the question upon religious grounds, and, on those grounds, argued against civil, as he had formerly done against ecclesiastical, Antinomianism. The transition from one to the other, he said, was easy and obvious; for, as he that reverences the law of God, will naturally reverence the just commands of the king, so he that thinks himself free from the law of the Lord, will hardly think himself bound by the statutes of his sovereign. He traced the pestilent errors which were now again* beginning to prevail, after having, for *All our danger at present," said he," is from King Mob; and (pursuing Mr. Wesley's view of the subject) this danger is so much the greater, as some dissenters among us, who were quiet in the late reign, and thought themselves happy under the protection of the toleration-act, grow restless, begin openly to countenance their dissatisfied brethren in America, and make it a point of conscience to foment divisions in the kingdom. Whether they do it merely from a brotherly regard to the colonists, who chiefly worship God according to the dissenting plan, or whether they hope that a revolution on the continent would be naturally productive of a revolution in England; that a revolution in the state here would draw after it a revolution in the church; and that if the Church of England were once shaken, the dissenting churches among us might raise themselves upon her more than a century, been subdued, to those seeds which had sprung up with the Lollards, and brought forth their full harvest at Munster. He prest upon his opponent, as a Christian, those texts of Scripture which enjoin the duty of submission to established authorities; and as a Calvinist, the articles of Calvin's confession of faith, wherein that duty is expressly recognised. "We believe that God will have the world to be governed by laws and civil powers, that the lawless inclinations of men may be curbed; and therefore he has established kingdoms and republics, and other sorts of governments, (some hereditary, and some otherwise,) together with whatsoever belongs to judicature; and He will be acknowledged the author of government. We ought, then, not only to bear, for his sake, that rulers should have dominion over us, but it is also our bounden duty to honour them, and to esteem them worthy of all reverence, considering them as God's lieutenants and officers, which He has commissioned to execute a lawful and holy commission. We maintain, therefore, that we are bound to obey their laws and statutes, to pay tribute, taxes, and other duties, and to bear the yoke of subjection freely and with good will; and, therefore, we detest the men who reject superiorities, introduce community and confusion of property, and overthrow the order of justice. -Sir," he continued, applying the argumentum ad hominem to his opponent," you are a Calvinist; you follow the French reformer, when he teaches the absolute reprobation, and unavoidable damnation, of myriads of poor creatures yet unborn. Oh, forsake him not when he follows Christ, and teaches that God (not the people) is to be acknowledged the author of power and government, and that we are bound to bear cheerfully, for his sake, the yoke of scriptural subjection to our governors! Be entreated, Sir, to rectify your false notions of liberty. The liberty of Christians and Britons does not consist in bearing no yoke, but in bearing a yoke made easy by a gracious Saviour and a gracious sovereign. A John of Leyden may promise to make us first lawless, then legislators and kings; and, by his delusive promises, he may raise us to-a fool's paradise, if not to-the gallows. But a true deliverer, and a good governor, says to our restless Antinomian spirits, Come unto me, and I will give you rest! For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. We can have no rest in the church but under Christ's easy yoke; no rest in the state, but under the easy yoke of our rightful sovereign." The political part which Wesley took at this time made him as many enemies as his decided opposition to Calvinism had done; and even some of his adherents and admirers, who, in all other things, have justified him through thick and thin, have censured him as if he had gone out of the line of his duty, acted unwisely in meddling with political disputes, and taken the wrong side. To the question, why he had written upon such subjects, he made answer, "Not to get money; not to get preferment for myself or my brother's children not to please any man living, high or low. I know ruins; whether, I say, there is something of this under the cry of slavery and robbery which you set up, is a question (addressing himself to Mr. Caleb Evans) which, I said, in the preceding editions, you could determine far better than I: but now I recall it, because, though I may consider that part of the controversy in that unfavourable light, as a politician, yet, as a Christian, I ought to think and hope the best.". VOL. II. 25 D mankind too well. I know they that love you for political service, love you less than their dinners; and they who hate you, hate you worse than the devil." It was from the clear and strong sense of duty that he acted, and it is not the least of his merits, that he was one of the first persons to expose the fallacy, and foresee the consequences of those political principles which were then beginning to convulse the world. Their natural tendency, he said, was to unhinge all government, and to plunge every nation into total anarchy. In his Observations on Liberty, addressed to Dr. Price, in answer to a pamphlet of the Doctor's, which did its share of mischief in its day, he contradicted, upon his own sure* observation, the Doctor's absurd assertion, that the population of the country had greatly decreased; he commented upon the encouragement which was held out to the Americans in that pamphlet, and upon the accusations which were there advanced, that the British government had secured to the Canadians the enjoyment of their own laws and their own religion, for the purpose of bringing up from thence an army of French Papists,-for Dr. Price had not been ashamed to bring this charge against his country! In opposition to the Doctor's position, that liberty is more or less complete, according as the people have more or less share in the government, he contended, and appealed to history for the fact, that the greater share the people have in the government, the less liberty, either civil or religious, does the nation in general enjoy. Accordingly," said he, "there is most liberty of all, civil and religious, under a limited monarchy, there is usually less under an aristocracy, and least of all under a democracy. The plain melancholy truth," said he, "is this; there is a general infatuation, which spreads, like an overflowing stream, from one end of the land to the other. The people of England have, for some years past, been continually fed with poison: dose after dose has been administered to them, for fear the first, or second, or tenth should not suffice, of a poison, whose natural effect is to drive men out of their senses. Is the Centaur not fabulous? neither is Circe's cup. Papers and pamphlets, representing one of the best of princes as if he had been one of the worst,-and all aiming at the same point, to make the king appear odious, as well as contemptible, in the eyes of his subjects, are conveyed, week after week, through all London, and all the nation. Can any man wonder at the effect? What can be expected, but that they who drink in these papers and letters, with all greediness, will be thoroughly embittered and infla 66 "I knew the contrary," said Wesley, "having an opportunity of seeing ten times more of England every year than most men in the nation. All our manufacturing towns, as Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, increase daily. So do very many villages all over the kingdom, even in the mountains of Derbyshire; and, in the mean time, exceeding few, either towns or villages, decrease." "Dr. Price," says Mr. Coleridge, in his Friend, "almost succeeded in persuading the English nation-(for it is a curious fact, that the fancy of our calamitous situation is a sort of necessary sauce, without which our real prosperity would become insipid to us)-Dr. Price, I say, alarmed the country with pretended proofs that the island was in a rapid state of depopulation: that England at the Revolution had been Heaven knows how much more populous; and that, in Queen Elizabeth's time, or about the Reformation (!!!) the number of inhabitants in England might have been greater than even at the Revolution. My old mathematical master, a man of an uncommonly clear head, answered this blundering book of the worthy Doctor's, and left not a stone unturned of the pompous cenotaph, in which the effigy of the still living and bustling English prosperity lay interred. And yet so much more suitable was the Doctor's book to the purposes of faction, and to the November mood of (what is called) the Public, that Mr. Wales's pamphlet, though a masterpiece of perspicacity as well as perspicuity, was scarcely heard of." Vol. ii. p. 72. med thereby; will first despise, and then abhor the king? What can be expected but that, by the repeated doses of this poison, they will be perfectly intoxicated, and only wait for a convenient season to tear in pieces the royal monster, as they think him, and all his adherents! Can any thing be done to open the eyes, to restore the enses of an infatuated nation? Not unless the still renewed, still operating cause of that infatuation can be removed. But how is it possible to be removed, unless by restraining the licentiousness of the press ?"—" I am in great earnest," he says, in another place : "so I have need to be; for I am pleading the cause of my king and country, yea, of every country under heaven where there is any regular government. I am pleading against those principles that naturally tend to anarchy and confusion, that directly tend to unhinge all government, and overturn it from the foundation." Forty thousand copies of the Calm Address were printed in three weeks; it was written before the war had actually began, and excited so much anger among the English friends of the American cause, that, as he said, they would willingly have burnt him and it together. But though Wesley maintained that, when the principles of order and legitimate government were seditiously attacked, it was the duty of every Christian minister to exert himself in opposing the evil spirit of the times, he saw how imprudent it would be for his preachers in America to engage in political matters. "It is your part," said he, "to be peace-makers; to be loving and tender to all, but to addict yourselves to no party. In spite of all solicitations, of rough or smooth words, say not one word against one or the other side; keep yourselves pure; do all you can to help and soften all but beware how you adopt another's jar.' In the same spirit Charles Wesley wrote to them, saying, "As to the public affairs, I wish you to be like-minded with me. I am of neither side, and yet of both on the side of New-England, and of Old. Private Christians are excused, exempted, privileged to take no part in civil troubles. We love all, and pray for all, with a sincere and impartial love. Faults there may be on both sides, but such as neither you nor I can remedy: therefore let us, and all our children, give ourselves unto prayer, and so stand still and see the salvation of God." It was scarcely possible for the preachers to follow this advice; it was scarcely possible that they could refrain from expressing their opinions upon the one subject by which all minds were possessed and inflamed, excited, as they constantly were, by sympathy or provocation. Such, indeed, was the temper of the Americans, that a friend to the Methodists got possession of all the copies of the Calm Address which were sent to New-York, and destroyed them, foreseeing the imminent danger to which the preachers would be exposed, if a pamphlet so unpopular in its doctrines should get abroad. But the part which Wesley had taken could not be kept secret; the Methodists, in consequence, became objects of suspicion, and the personal safety of the preachers was oftentimes endangered. Tarring and feathering was not the only cruelty to which they were exposed in those days of brutal violence. The English missionaries were at length glad to escape as they could: Asbury alone remained he was less obnoxious than his colleagues, because, having chosen the less frequented parts of the country for the scene of his exertions, he had been less conspicuous, and less exposed to provocation and to danger. Yet even he found it necessary to withdraw from public view, and conceal himself in the house of a friend, till, after two years of this confinement, he obtained credentials from the governor of Pennsylvania, which enabled him to appear abroad again with safety. Methodism, meantime, had been kept alive by a few native preachers, of whom Freeborn Garretson, and Bejamin Abbot, a strange half-madman, were two of the most remarkable. It even increased, notwithstanding all difficulties, and something much more like persecution than it had ever undergone in England. In the year 1777, there were forty preachers, and about 7000 members, exclusive of negroes. The Society, however, as the war continued, was in danger of being broken up, by a curious species of intolerance, which could not have been foreseen.-The prevailing religion in the southern states had been that of the Church of England; but the clergy were driven away during the troubles, the whole of the church property was confiscated; and, when affairs were settled, none of it was restored, and no attempt made, either by the general or provincial governments, to substitute any kind of religious instruction, in place of the Establishment which had been destroyed! The Methodists had hitherto been members of the English Church, but, upon the compulsory emigration of the clergy, they found themselves deprived of the sacraments, and could obtain no baptism for their children; for neither the Presbyterians, the Independents, or Baptists, would administer these ordinances to them, unless they would renounce their connexion with Mr. Wesley, and join with their respective sects. Before the dispute between the mother country and the colonies assumed a serious character, and before any apprehension of separation was entertained on the one side, or any intention to that effect was avowed on the other, the heads of the Church in England had represented to government, how greatly it would conduce to the interest of religion in America, if a bishop were appointed there. This judicious representation was unsuccessful; for the ministers, who were but too bold in trying experiments of another kind with the colonists, thought it better to let religious affairs remain as they were, than to introduce any innovation. If this had been done half a century earlier, as soon as the population of the country required it, it would have been highly beneficial to America; part of the hierarchy would have submitted to, or taken part in the revolution, and thus a religious establishment might have been preserved in those parts of the United States, where the want of religious instruction is severely felt. The ill consequences of an omission, which, whether morally or politically considered, is equally to be condemned, were now experienced. Two American youths, after the peace, * * I have somewhere seen it stated, that, in the large town of Richmond, there was no place of worship, till the theatre took fire, and some fourscore persons perished in the flames. Then the people took fright, and built a church upon the ruins. A lady, who published an account, in verse, of her residence in the southern states, describes, with much feeling, her emotion at hearing a church clock when she returned to her own country: "A sound," she says, "I had not heard for years." |