Calvin and Missions - World Evangelical Alliance

24 Calvin and World Mission
raged at his preaching,” was arousing multitudes by his fiery, impassioned,
consecrated eloquence.
We speak of the Methodist Church beginning in a revival. And so it did.
But the first and chief actor in that revival was not Wesley, but Whitefield.
Though a younger man than Wesley, it was he who first went forth preaching
in the fields and gathering multitudes of followers, and raising money
and building chapels. It was Whitefield who invoked the two Wesleys to
his aid. And he had to employ much argument and persuasion to overcome
their prejudices against the movement. Whitefield began the great work at
Bristol and Kingswood, and had found thousands flocking to his side,
ready to be organized into churches, when he appealed to Wesley for assistance.
Wesley, with all his zeal, had been quite a High-Churchman in many
of his views. He believed in immersing even the infants, and demanded
that dissenters should be rebaptized before being taken into the Church. He
could not think of preaching in any place but in a church. “He should have
thought,” as he said, “the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been
done in a church.” 39 Hence when Whitefield called on John Wesley to engage
with him in the popular movement, he shrank back. Finally, he
yielded to Whitefield’s persuasions, but, he allowed himself to be governed
in the decision by what many would regard as a superstition. He and
Charles first opened their Bibles at random to see if their eyes should fall
on a text which might decide them. But the texts were all foreign to the
subject. Then he had recourse to sortilege and cast lots to decide the matter.
The lot drawn was the one marked for him to consent, and so he consented.
Thus he was led to undertake the work with which his name has been so
intimately and honorably associated ever since.
So largely was the Methodist movement owing to Whitefield that he was
called “the Calvinistic establisher of Methodism,” and to the end of his life
he remained the representative of it in the eyes of the learned world. Walpole,
in his Letters, speaks only once of Wesley in connection with the rise
of Methodism, while he frequently speaks of Whitefield in connection with
it. Mant, in his course of lectures against Methodism, speaks of it as an
entirely Calvinistic affair. 40 Neither the mechanism nor the force which
gave rise to it originated with Wesley. 41 Field-preaching, which gave the
whole movement its aggressive character, and fitted and enabled it to cope
with the powerful agencies which were armed against it, was begun by
39
Lecky, Hist. England, Eighteenth Century, vol. 2. p. 612.
40
Bampton Lectures, for 1812.
41
Wedgewood’s Life of John Wesley, p. 157.