Southern Christian Advocate

CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE.

CHARLESTON, SEPTEMBER 19, 1851

FOX AND WESLEY.

In a well written article in the last number of the Edinburgh Review, on the life of William Penn, the writer makes the following comparison between George Fox, the father of Quakerism, and John Wesley, the founder of Methodism: "The Journals of George Fox are perhaps scarcely calculated to be read with much profit to minds educated in the habits and notions of the present day. They have much resemblance, no doubt, to the similar record left by Wesley of his life and labours. But there is also much dissimilarity; and, this, in a popular view, at least, wholly to the advantage of the latter of these eminent men. Wesley had over Fox all the superiority of a more kindly and liberal spirit, and a cultivated intellect. And the great charm of his journals, independently of their religious interest, is the fine display of the operation of such a spirit and intellect, during the course of a long life of activity, and in chastising the fundamental enthusiasm of the character. Without losing its seriousness, the reader traces that enthusiasm, year after year, becoming more tolerant, less captious, more comprehensive. The same cannot be said of the sterner father of Quakerism. As far as such comparison may be allowed, Wesley more resembled an apostle conveying the glad tidings to the nations; Fox, one of the prophets of the old law, and not himself a son of the prophets, but like him who was called from among the herdmen of Tekoa."

John Wesley's Journals, we will take the liberty to remark, as well as his other writings, are remarkable, from first to last, in one leading characteristic. In them all, he inculcates the religion of the heart in opposition to the pietism of the imagination, in which enthusiasm, philosophically considered, has its root. The religion of the heart is indeed emotional; repentance is the contrition of a broken heart sorrowing over its sins; faith is the trust of this penitent heart in the merits of the great sacrifice; and peace with God is the sacred satisfaction felt as the result of pardoned sin. But all these feelings are accurately mapped out in the New Testament, and can be accounted for on Scriptural principles, as real and genuine. Moreover, in Wesley's teachings they were invariably connected with ulterior ends. They were not to be rested in and depended on, only as they led to the exhibition of the Christian temper, and manifested their validity in the practice of Christian obedience. Enthusiasm, on the other hand, busies itself with the fancy; it is transcendental in its mystic flights, or gorgeous in its conceptions of divine things, poetical rather than deeply serious. The beautiful or the awful is its element; imagination, its seat rather than the conscience. Wesley's mental constitution was totally adverse to enthusiasm; however high and sustained and wonderful his energy, he stood forth, the severe logician, with not a particle of the German idealism about him. The tendency was rather to undue asceticism. As the apostle of aesthetical religion he would have gone on a fool's errand. As the honored instrument in God's hand of reviving the spirit and practice of true religion in the eighteenth century, he found his true mission in diffusing the blessings of a hallowing Christianity among the men of his own time, and in handing down to posterity the unspeakable boon.