THE OXFORD METHODISTS.'"
HISTORY has as yet taken small account of the "Holy Club," and yet it is perhaps not too much to say, if it had never existed, we in this country might have had a far other page of history to read than that which the last hundred years has afforded us. The small band of men who, between 1729 and 1735, met the two Wesleys week after week in their college rooms, chiefly to read the Greek Testament, in the next fifty years had turned the English, and more than the English, world upside down. " Wisely," says Mr. Tyerman, "was the future hidden from this fraternity, for could the veil have been drawn aside, the loving brotherhood would quickly have been converted into an Ismaelitish band,—Hanoverian and Jacobite, Methodist and Moravian, Churchman and Dissenter, Arminian and Calvinist, the itinerant evangelist and the parish priest." " In a qualified sense," he observes, " we may apply to Oxford Methodism the words of the sacred text, ' A river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads." But never would that stream have gathered force enough even to divide, but for the early union of separate springs. Every one is acquainted, or thinks himself acquainted, with the life of Wesley, But how much do we any of us know of the men formed, as it were, by the influence of Wesley's character? To how many does the name of Methodist suggest the Oxford Ritualist of the eighteenth century ? Yet it was men like Clayton and Ingham and Hervey who, despite their Ritualism, really scattered broad-cast up and down the land the principles the vitality of which "Wesley had, as it were, rediscovered. In the volume before us Mr. Tyerman has given us an able and, as it seems to us, very impartial history of five or six of these men, men closely united with the Wesleys at the outset of their career, but of whom scarcely one, through the bitterness of theological strife, remained in friendly intercourse with them to the end. Wesley writes, in the year 1735, " We were fourteen or fifteen in number, all of one heart and one mind ;" but this did not last. It is pleasant, when wading through the maze of unworthy strifes which dis- figured, though possibly they did not really obstruct, the work these men had to do, to recall the well-known story of Wesley, when the differences between himself and 'Whitfield were at their height, and Wesley's followers, with much solemnity, asked him if he expected to see Mr. Whitfield in heaven. They received with grim satisfaction his slow reply, " I fear not, I greatly fear not;" but were less satisfied as he continued, " he will be so near the throne, I fear I shall hardly get a glimpse of him." Wesley's own creed was very simple, and free from the metaphysi- cal distinctions which troubled and subdivided his followers. In a letter to the father of one of his pupils, "this fanatic," this rode disturber of the heavy slumber into which the English Church had fallen, defines religion thus :—" I take religion not to be the bare saying-over so many prayers, morning and evening, in public or in private, not anything superadded now and then to a careless • Ths oxford J44hodistr. By Rev. L. Tyerman. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1873. or worldly life ; but a constant ruling habit of the soul, a renewal of our minds in the image of God ; a recovery of the Divine like- ness ; a still increasing conformity of heart and life to the pattern of our most Holy Redeemer." Ritualists Wesley and most of the members of the 11)ly Club were till the end of life, but Ritualism was servant, not master, except in Clayton's case, and he never forgave Wesley for assigning a subordi- nate place to sacraments, fasts, penances, &c. ; but Clayton, spite of his extreme ritualism, his Jacobite tendencies, and even priestly superciliousness, had, as these pages sufficiently show, come under the same vital influence as the most determined " Methodist " of them all. He was suspended from preaching by the Bishop of Chester for,some say, three years, on account of his dis- loyalty to the House of Hanover, and when at length the Bishop commanded him to preach before him, "the bold Jacobite some- what startled both Bishop and congregation by reading as his text, I became dumb and opened not my mouth, for Thou didst it.' " The sense of humour has not been wanting since, in those upon whom the mantle of the old Oxford Brotherhood has fallen.
The third and longest sketch in Mr. Tyerman's work is of the Rev. Benjamin Ingham, the Yorkshire evangelist. It is a history worth the careful reading of those who care to follow the begin- nings of a religious movement which woke up whole masses of our poor, whose lives, then and since, have, through the teaching of a handful of men, attained a higher level than a hundred and fifty years ago any one would have ven- tured to prognosticate for them,—a level which has made household suffrage and many another bloodless revolution, social and political, possible. There are few things, perhaps, more true than that when any man, from Moses downwards, has been called to any special work in the world, his education for it has not been of his own choosing. We mean, of course, the education life gives, not the learning of the schools. It was certainly so in Ingham's case. There was little in his early history or his career in Oxford, till ordained in Christ Church at the age of twenty-three, to fit him for the stormy life which awaited him as the Yorkshire evangelist. The even tenor of his way was suddenly interrupted by a letter from Wesley asking him to accompany him to Georgia, whither he was going on a mission to the Indiaus,—a request very different in its significance from what it would be now. Ingham says he " was utterly averse to going," and subsequently refused to go unless other helpers failed. At the last moment this was the case, and Ingham set sail with Wesley in October, 1735. On board the same ship were six-and-twenty Moravian, men of simple piety and godly life, who were destined to exercise no inconsiderable influence over Ingham's future career. After enduring some eighteen months of hardship, difficulty, and danger among the wild Indians, Ingham had to return to Eng- land, fully purposing to revisit Georgia, but other work was before him. Wesley, as well as he, had been brought under the influence of the Moravian, and together the two men started for Germany, to "become better acquainted with the Moravian Churches in that country." We are condensing from Mr. Tyerman, but the full account is worth reading. Ingham's journey ended in his joining the Moravians. Then came the year ever memorable iu the annals of Methodism, 1739, and the course which the Church of England, but not England herself, has had reason so bitterly to repent was inaugurated. Ingham, a faithful, indeed somewhat High, Churchman, was inhibited from preaching in the diocese of York, and subjected to fierce calumny. He replied to no attacks. " It would be endless," he observes, " to answer all that is said." But perhaps, had persecution not arisen, the scant con- gregation of some village church might have been all Ingham's audience: driven out into the barns, highways, and village greens, his work assumed proportions little dreamed of by those who drove him there. He married, in 1741, Lady Margaret Hastings, daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon, and sister-in-law of the celebrated Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, and soon after his marriage placed the societies he had founded in Yorkshire under the control of the Moravian Ministerial Conclave, and left him- self free for his special work as an evangelist. But we have not space to follow his subsequent history, though it will repay those who take the trouble to read it to the end in Mr. Tyerman's book.
We must briefly notice the life of one whose name and history are but little known, but who has always appeared to us one of the most remarkable of that extraordinary fraternity, John Gambold, the Moravian Bishop. " It was," observes Mr. Tyerman, " the highest wish and holiest ambition of the Oxford Methodists to devote their lives to the service of the Church of England ;" yet how few were permitted to remain within her pale, while of those who joined the Moravian., Gambold alone
remained with them to the end ! The son of a clergyman, we find him at the early age of fifteen already a servitor at Christ Church, Oxford ; ordained in 1733, and as soon as possible instituted to the living of Stanton-Harcourt, where he spent the first four years of his ministry, in strict retirement and philosophical speculation. The state of his mind at this period is very fully shown in a lengthy letter to Wesley, which Mr. Tyerman says has never before been published, and which is worth careful reading. We give a paragraph from it, to indicate Gambold's mental attitude before he knew Peter Baler :—
" Now, whore in allthese stages shall we place our regeneration ? And what shall we say it is ? There is reason to think that wo have no more real goodness (except experience) in one of these states than another,—in the last than the first ; wo only fill our minds with new sets of ideas, and by a temporary force, drive our constitution into something that seems answerable to them. Let this force cease, and we are the same as before ; when we are in the most plausible posture of virtue, let us but sleep upon it or otherwise remit the contention of of the mind, and 'tis no more ; affectation gives place to nature. • But,' you will say, ' the operation of grace is a real thing.' It is so ; but, for all the indications we commonly go by to prove the peculiar presence of it, it may be nowhere or everywhere to be found. Most people measure it by the relish thoy have for some particular schemes and draughts of religion. Little dothey think that the persons whom they most condemn as unspiritual and deluded, abating for what is merely acci- dental, are in the same state of heart as themselves. It may be the same complexional turn of the soul (God also speaking peace to it, and to every man in his own language) that makes the mystic happy in his prayer and quietness, the solifidian in His imputed righteousness, and the moral man in a good conscience."
When, twelve months later, he had himself embraced the strictest tenets of the Moravian faith, he still writes, " We cannot say anyone is bad, or destitute of divine grace, for not thinking as we do ; he only less apprehends, less enjoys that in Christianity which is the refuge of the weak and miserable, and will be his when he finds himself so." It was in 1738 he became acquainted with Peter Biihler, and was his interpreter when he preached. A natural inclination towards mysticism made him greatly taken with the Moravian doctrine of Stillness, into the subtleties of which we cannot pretend to enter ; but the singular feature in Gambold's history certainly is that he, a scholar, a gentleman, and beneficed clergyman, should have sacrificed his usefulness in the Church he loved so well, his old friendship for Wesley, and much beside, to join the band of Moravians in London, for the sake of the one thing he declared he could not elsewhere find,—Christian fellow- ship. At the time of his admission, the entire Moravian congre- gation in London numbered only seventy-two persons. Of these, only one besides Gambold seems to have had any of the ad- vantages of education. But that the Moravian Church has had an important work to do in the world, that it has done it so well has been in no small measure due to the eccentric being who, casting in his lot with theirs, made Moravianism a better thing than it was before. Mr. Tyerman's account of his work is very clear and concise, and well worth reading. As a specimen of Gambold's poetical fragments, we subjoin the epitaph he wrote on himself :— " Ask not, who ended here his span ? His name, reproach, and praise, was—Man. Did no great deeds adorn his course ? No deed of his, but show'd him worse ! Ono thing was groat, which God supplied, He suffered human life,—and died. What points of knowledge did he gain ? That life was sacred all,—and vain ; Sacred, how high ? and vain, how low ? He knew not here, but died to know."
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