History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

They preached and suffered in England, but still without appreciable effect. As Methodism was to
be the next great stage of religious progress, after the Reformation, it was to have affinity with the
Reformation. The salient doctrinal fact of the Reformation was justification by faith. Wesley had
been feeling after this as in the dark during all these ten years; but now, by the very writings in which
Luther had declared it at the Reformation, he was to find it. On the 24th of May 1738, sitting in a
little religious meeting in Aldersgate Street, listening to the reading of Luther's preface to the Epistle
to the Romans, the great truth flashed upon his soul. "I felt," he writes, "my heart strangely warmed;
an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law
of sin and death." Here is the proximate cause of all the Methodism in the world today, for this was
the "dispensation of the Spirit," which has since continued in a baptism of fire upon the Churches.
On that, memorable night genuine Methodism had its birth. What would have been Wesley's
theological opinions without this quickening of the Spirit? -- Tenets only of the brain, exciting him
to unavailing struggles, as they had for ten years. What his practical system, had he even been able
to devise it, but a wretched failure, from which he and his people would soon have recoiled,, as from
a burden intolerable to be borne? This new spiritual life, this "strange" warmth of the heart, made
his theology vital, his system practicable; gave power and demonstration to his preaching, and spread
like contagion through his assemblies. It intoned their hymns, and kindled their prayer-meetings,
band-meetings, classes, and love-feasts. The manner of its inspiration, the time of its experience, its
effects and evidences, and the extent to which it could be perfected, became the themes of discourse
in their meetings and in their familiar converse all through the British realm. Conversion, the
Witness of the Spirit, and Sanctification, were but its corollary truths. It inspired men to enter the
ministry, it inspired their preaching, and produced the peculiar power of their preaching, and of all
their denominational methods, as witnessed throughout the world. Without it almost everything else
that is charateristically Methodistic would have been not only ineffective, but inpracticable. The
multitudes, the very mobs, recognized this power of personal religion, this divine power and glory
of the regenerated man in the representatives of the new movement; they saw it in their
countenances, in their tears, and heard it in their tones. It was the magical power by which they
controlled riots, and led persecutors in weeping processions from the highways and market-places
to the altars of their humble chapels. If it be inquired what has been the one chief force in the success
of Methodism, and what is the chief power for its future success, I reply, it is this "power from on
high," this " unction from the holy One."
Such, I think, were the primary and proximate conditions of the success of Methodism. There
were also many others doubtless: its catholicity; the subordination, not to say insignificance, to
which it reduced all exclusive or arrogant ecclesiastic pretensions; the importance which it gave to
good and charitable works while insisting on a profound personal, if not a mystic piety; the
unprecedented co-operation of the laity with the clergy in at least religious labors, which it
established; the activity of women in its social devotions; these, and still more.
I mention further but one, and particularly because it affords an important admonitory lesson -the
character of its chiefs. And I mean not merely their greatness. They were indeed great men, as
the world is beginning to acknowledge: Whitefield, the greatest of modern preachers; Wesley, the
greatest of religions organizers; Asbury, unquestionably the greatest character in the ecclesiastical
history of this hemisphere judged by the results of his labors. But it was not so much by their great
abilities, as by qualities in which all may share, that they made Methodism what it is. Its leaders were