The Age of Voltaire by Will Durant
His preaching was so vivid that many individuals in his audiences were moved to hysteria and convulsions. The Journal tells of sinners who, hearing him, were overcome with physical pain and rolled in agony on the ground, while other believers knelt beside them and prayed for their deliverance from Satanic possession.57 Wesley describes a meeting at Baldwin Street, London, in 1739:
My voice could scarce be heard amidst the groanings of some and the cries of others.… A Quaker who stood by was not a little displeased … when he himself dropped down as if thunderstruck. The agony he was in was even terrible to behold. We besought God not to lay folly to his charge, and he soon lifted up his head and cried aloud: “Now I know that thou art a prophet of the Lord.”58
An eyewitness quoted by Wesley describes a Methodist meeting at Everton in 1759:
Some were shrieking, some roaring aloud.… The most general was a loud breathing, like that of people half strangled and gasping for life; and indeed almost all the cries were like those of human creatures dying in bitter anguish. Great numbers wept without any noise; others fell down as dead.… I stood upon the pew seat, as did a young man in the opposite pew, an able-bodied, fresh, healthy countryman; but in a moment, when he seemed to think of nothing else, down he dropt with a violence inconceivable.… I heard the stamping of his feet ready to break the boards, as he lay in strong convulsions at the bottom of the pew.… Almost all on whom God laid his hand turned either very red or almost black.… A stranger, well-dressed, who stood facing me, fell backward to the wall, then forward on his knees, wringing his hands and roaring like a bull.… He rose and ran against the wall till Mr. Keeling and another held him. He screamed out, “Oh, what shall I do. What shall I do? Oh, for one drop of the blood of Christ!” As he spoke God set his soul at liberty; he knew his sins were blotted out, and the rapture he was in seemed too great for human nature to bear.59
Probably these hysterical outbreaks were caused by conditions affecting the victims before the Methodist meeting, and the hellfire sermon merely capped a climax beyond control. Wesley interpreted such seizures as Satanic possessions followed by divine cures. Sometimes, he thought, they brought no permanent good in conduct or character, but often, he felt, they cleansed the soul of sin, and inaugurated a new life.
The greatest success of Methodism was among the poor. The preachers themselves were men of modest learning, simple in their sentiments and speech; there was no barrier of class or culture between them and their audience. They brought their message of sin and repentance to peasants, miners, and criminals; and though they preached a faith that was based on fear rather than love, they gave to the letterless an ethical code that shared in the moral rehabilitation of England in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was the Puritan ethic against which our own time has moved into an extreme reaction. Wesley was hostile to almost all amusement. He allowed cardplaying, but thought it a sin to go to fairs, to wear jewelry or fine clothes, to attend a theater or to dance. In the school that he founded at Kingswood no time was allotted for play, for “he that plays when he is a child will play when he is a man.”60 But that Puritan ethic comported with the English character; it could be borne by strong men and patient women; and it gave to the working classes of England a proud sense of election and destiny that upheld them in poverty and made them hostile to any revolution that questioned Christianity. Conservatives later felt grateful to Wesley that he had saved the British poor from deism and free thought, and had turned their aspirations from social revolt to individual salvation, from an earthly utopia to a posthumous Paradise.61
Wesley himself inclined to conservatism in politics. He was ahead of his class in advocating some long-due reforms: he denounced the “rotten borough” system, the inequalities of representation in Parliament, the corrosive corruption of English politics, the inhumanity of slavery, the horrors of British jails. But he accepted the class structure of society as natural and just; he opposed any relaxation of the laws against Catholics, and in the re-volt of the American colonies his sympathies were all with George III.
He remained an Anglican by creed, but he rejected the Anglican view that only a bishop in the Apostolic Succession could validly ordain a priest; he himself ordained ministers for Scotland and America. When he said “The world is my parish”62 he proposed to preach wherever he wished, without episcopal permission or allocation; to that extent he seceded from the Established Church. But he exhorted his followers to attend Anglican services, to shun Dissenting assemblies and creeds, and to refrain from antagonizing the Anglican clergy. At first some Anglican pulpits were opened to Methodist ministers; but when Wesley’s lay preachers assumed the right to administer the Sacrament, and Methodist doctrine reverted to the medieval emphasis on hell and the Puritan preoccupation with sin, the Anglican divines withdrew their support, as Erasmus had withdrawn from Luther; they preferred an orderly development, and excluded the Methodists from Anglican pulpits.
Persecution of the new sect came far less from the Established Church than from the simple commoners who could not tolerate new ways of preaching old ideas. In town after town the open-air preachers—like their later counterparts preaching a new social gospel—were assaulted by mobs happy to be cruel without fear and without reproach. At Monmouth a lay preacher was struck on the head by a rock, and died of the blow. At Wednesbury a crowd wrecked the homes of Methodists, abused their women, beat their men. When Wesley appeared it cried out for his blood, and applauded those who cudgeled him; he prayed aloud, and it let him go. At Bolton the house where he was preaching was invaded by an angry assemblage; amid a shower of stones, tiles, and eggs he continued his sermon to the end. At Devizes a water engine was turned upon the residence of Charles Wesley, and bulldogs were loosed upon his followers. At Exeter Whitefield was stoned almost to death. At Hoxton an ox was prodded into a Methodist congregation; at Pensford a bull, maddened by baiting, was driven full against the table at which John Wesley was preaching. The courage of the preachers appealed to the British character, and gained them tolerance and support.
Wesley was a little man five feet three inches tall, weighing 128 pounds. He was impressive in old age by his white hair, but already in middle age he arrested attention by his ascetic chiseled features and dominating eyes. He took it for granted that he was made to govern; his nervous energy and intellectual force put him naturally in the lead; his unquestioning self-confidence sometimes carried him to an arrogance that a Methodist bishop pronounced quite “overbearing.”63 He was not an easy man to get along with, for he thought and moved too fast for others to keep his pace. He married in 1751, having fallen in love, as we all do, with the nurse who tended him in illness. For two years his wife traveled with him on his hectic rounds; then her health and nerves broke down and she left him, as one might leap from an unmanageable steed. He attributed his health and vitality to his perpetual journeys on horseback or foot; perhaps we should add that oratory is an aerating exercise. In 1735 he became a vegetarian; a year later he and a friend decided to live on bread alone, to “try whether life might not as well be sustained by one sort as by variety of food. We … were never more vigorous and healthy than when we tasted nothing else”;64 but they soon relapsed into diversity.
What were the results of the Methodist preaching? In one generation religion, which had seemed to be dying under Anglican dignity and deist doubts, became a vibrant element in English life, subordinate only to politics and war. At Wesley’s death (1791) his followers numbered 79,000 in England, 40,000 in North America; in 1957 there were 2,250,000 Methodists in Great Britain, 12,000,000 in the United States, 40,000,000 in the world.65 Outside of its own membership it influenced other denominations; so, in the Anglican Church that rejected Methodism, Methodist ideals aroused the Evangelical movement in the later half of the eighteenth century, and may have entered into the Oxford movement of the nineteenth. Politically the results were a conservative resignation among the working classes till 1848. Morally Methodism improved personal
In January, 1790, aged eighty-six, Wesley wrote in his Journal: “I am now an old man, decayed from head to foot. My eyes are dim, my right hand shakes much, my mouth is hot and dry every morning, I have a lingering fever almost every day.… However, blessed be God, I do not slack my labor. I can preach and write still.”66 Two months later he began a speaking tour that lasted five months and took him through England and Scotland. A year later he died (March 2, 1791). If we judge greatness by influence he was, barring Pitt, the greatest Englishman of his times.
V. OF BEES AND MEN
Two minor figures stop us on our way to David Hume.
Bernard Mandeville was a London physician of French ancestry and Dutch birth, who published in 1705 a sixpenny ten-page pamphlet in rollicking verse, The Grumbling Hive. Its theme was a paradox: that the prosperity of the hive is due to the vices of the individual bees—to their selfish greed, reproductive ecstasy, and collective pugnacity. Applying the paradox to the human hive, the impish doctor held that the wealth and strength of the state depend not upon the virtues of its citizens but upon those vices which grumbling moralists foolishly condemn. For let us imagine what would happen if all acquisitiveness, vanity, dishonesty, and pugnacity were suddenly to end—if men and women ate only so much food as they required, wore only so much clothing as would suffice to protect them against the elements, never cheated or injured one another, never quarreled, always paid their debts, scorned luxuries, and were faithful to their mates. At once the whole society would come to a standstill: the lawyers would starve, the judges would be left without cases or bribes, doctors would waste away for lack of patients, winegrowers would go bankrupt, taverns would fail for lack of tipplers, millions of artisans producing fancy foods, ornaments, raiment, or houses would be thrown out of work, no one would want to be a soldier; soon the society would be conquered and enslaved.
The doggerel form of The Grumbling Hive debarred it from influence. Piqued, the vain, acquisitive, pugnacious doctor reissued it in 1714, and again in 1723, as The Fable of the Bees, repeatedly enlarged with prefaces, notes, and commentaries that expanded ten pages into two volumes. This time England and France listened, for these appendages constituted one of the most biting analyses of human nature ever written.
Mandeville took the third Earl of Shaftesbury as literally his pièce de résistance, for the Earl had interpreted human nature with optimistic eloquence, and had assumed in man an innate “sense of right and wrong … as natural to us as natural affection, and being a first principle in our constitution.”67 Pretty nonsense, answered Mandeville; human nature, before education and moral training, makes no distinction between virtue and vice, but is governed solely by self-interest. He agreed with the theologians that man is by nature “evil” [lawless]; but instead of threatening men with hell, he complimented them on the clever adaptation of individual vice to social good. So private prostitution protects public chastity;68 the greed for products and services stimulates invention, supports manufactures and trade; great fortunes make possible philanthropy and massive art. While the theologians preached austerity Mandeville defended luxury, and argued that the desire for luxuries (i.e., anything but the bare necessities of life) is the root of industry and civilization; remove all luxury, and we would be savages again. While the moralists were supposed to condemn war, it was by the ability to wage war, said Mandeville, that a nation survived, for most states were beasts of prey.
He saw no morality in nature. Good and bad are words applicable to social or antisocial actions in man; but Nature herself pays no heed to our words or homilies; she defines virtue as any quality that makes for survival; and in our prejudiced terms the world of nature is a scene of voracity, lust, cruelty, slaughter, and meaningless waste. Yet out of that awful struggle, Mandeville thought, man had evolved language, social organization, and moral codes as instruments of social cohesion and collective survival. Praise and blame are not warranted by nature, but they are justified as means by which, appealing to man’s vanity, fear, and pride, we may encourage in others forms of action advantageous to ourselves or the group.
Nearly everybody who heard of Mandeville berated him as a cynical materialist. Voltaire, however, agreed with him on the beneficence of luxuries, and the laissez-faire physiocrats of France applauded his view that if human greed is let alone it will make the wheels of industry hum. The whimsical doctor would probably have admitted that his paradox “Private vices are public goods” was largely a play upon words too loosely defined. “Vices” like acquisitiveness, amorousness, pugnacity, and pride were once “virtues” in the primitive struggle for existence; they became vices only when carried in society beyond social good; they became public benefits through being controlled by education, public opinion, religion, and law.
How different from this scandalous doctor was Francis Hutcheson! Born in Ireland of a Presbyterian minister, he diverged from the paternal groove and opened a private academy in Dublin. There, conscious of his obligation to turn young savages into citizens, he wrote an Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil (1725), in which he defined a good citizen as one that promoted the general good; and (anticipating verbatim utilitarian Bentham’s formula) he described the general good as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”69 Promoted to the chair of moral philosophy in the University of Glasgow, he troubled the Presbytery by defending the right of private judgment, the legitimacy of pleasure, and “the ingenious arts of music, sculpture, painting, and even the manly diversions.”70 He did not share Mandeville’s pessimistic conception of human nature. He admitted the faults and sins of men, their wild passions and violent crimes; “but the greatest part of their lives is employed in offices of natural affection, friendship, innocent self-love, or love of country.” And he added a wholesome caution to historians:
Men are apt to let their imaginations run out upon all the robberies, piracies, murders, perjuries, frauds, massacres, assassinations they have ever either heard of, or read in history; thence concluding all mankind to be very wicked; as if a court of justice were the proper place for making an estimate of the morals of mankind, or an hospital of the healthfulness of a climate. Ought they not to consider that the number of honest citizens and farmers far surpasses that of all sorts of criminals in any state; … that it is the rarity of crimes, in comparision of innocent or good actions, which engages our attention to them, and makes them to be recorded in history; while incomparably more honest, generous domestic actions are overlooked, only because they are so common; as one great danger, or one month’s sickness, shall become a frequently repeated story, during a long life of health and safety.71
Here was a healthy mind!
VI. DAVID HUME: 1711–76
1. The Young Philosopher
Hutcheson was a modest part of the “Scottish Enlightenment”; Hume was its greatest luminary. In his simple eight-page autobiography he tells us that he was born at Edinburgh April 26, 1711, “of a good family, both by father and mother; my father’s family is a branch of the Earl of Home’s or Hume’s.I … My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the College of Justice.” The father died in 1712, leaving the estate to David’s elder brother, John Home, and to David an income of ei
At the age of twelve he entered the University of Edinburgh. After three years he left without a degree, resolved to give himself completely to literature and philosophy. At sixteen he wrote to a friend reproaching himself because
my peace of mind is not sufficiently confirmed by philosophy to withstand the blows of fortune. This greatness and elevation of soul is to be found only in study and contemplation.… You must allow [me] to talk thus like a philosoper; ’tis a subject I think much on, and could talk all day long of.73
Soon his religious faith faded away:
I found a certain boldness of temper growing on me, which was not inclined to submit to any authority in these subjects [philosophy and literature] … When I was about eighteen years of age there seemed to be opened up a new scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure, and made me, with an ardor natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it.74
He said later that “he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke.”75 By the time he was seventeen he had already planned a treatise on philosophy.