JOHN WESLEY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 May 1938, Page 8

JOHN WESLEY

A NOTABLE 81-CENTENARY.

REVIVAL THAT INFLUENCED ALL CHRISTENDOM.

The attention of all Christendom is being directed to this notable celebration on Tuesday next. John Wesley is too big to be claimed only by the people called Methodists —he has become a world figure. The noted historian, J. R. Green, states that: “The Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist Revival. Its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy, and the Evangelical movement made the fox-hunt-the parson, and the absentee rector, at last impossible.” Every church in Christendom owes an unpayable debt to Wesley. Yet, in a very special sense, the bi-centenary is of peculiar interest to the more than forty million Methodists in the world today. To them it is a holy year, and constitutes a definite challenge to rekindle the fires of evangelism and to embark upon a great soul-saving crusade. Great mass meetings and “Aldersgate Weeks” are being planned in England, America, Germany, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, and in ail countries and islands where the Methodist Church has been established. Commemorative services are to be held in St Paul’s Cathedra], where the preacher will be the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in York Minster, where the Archbishop of York, assisted by representative Methodists, will occupy the pulpit. The bi-centenary celebration finds its centre in the record in John Wesley’s Journal of his experience on the night of May 24, 1738. The now famous record runs: —“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to ‘The Epistle to the Romans.’ About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart by faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

Something happened that night, that not only changed a manj but which changed the history of Erigland for a hundred years—something happened that went far toward determining the character of the civilisation that was forming on the shores of the American continent across the seas.

The cold, calculating pen of the historian describes what it was that happened in the following sentence. A religious revival burst forth at the close of Walpole’s administration which changed after a time the whole tone of English society. In the nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm, which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose power was seen in the disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the restoration. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education.”

It is great facts like these, and the many others that could be cited, that make this bi-centenary a memorable occasion across the world as many millions of people unite in their commemoration.