EXCEPT his posthumous works, the remainder of Fletcher’s writings were issued during the next two years, 1776 and 1777. These will be briefly noticed in the present chapter. During the last four years, his antagonists had been Walter Shirley, Richard Hill, Rowland Hill, and John Berridge. Now he encountered three others—Augustus Montague Toplady, the well-known Vicar of Broad Hembury, in Devonshire; Caleb Evans, an eminent Baptist minister at Bristol; and, in connection with Mr. Evans, the celebrated Rev. Richard Price, D.D., an Arian minister, at Hackney, London.
Methodist readers are so familiar with the life and character of Toplady, as to render it unnecessary to refer to them in the present pages. Suffice it to say, that this remarkable and strangely constituted man seems to have been almost as much prejudiced against Fletcher as he was against Wesley. “I was lately asked,” said he, “what my opinion is of Mr. John Fletcher’s writings. My answer was, that, in the very few pages I had perused, the serious passages were dulness double condensed; and the lighter passages, impudence double distilled.”[331]
In 1770, Wesley published his tract, entitled, “The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted.” This was a faithful abridgment of Toplady’s translation of Zanchius’s once famous book,[332] and concluded with the well-known paragraph:—
“The sum of all is this: one in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can. Reader, believe this, or be damned. Witness my hand,
Toplady was terribly enraged, and immediately published “A Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley: relative to his pretended Abridgment of Zanchius on Predestination.” In 1771, Wesley replied to this, in his tract entitled, “The Consequence Proved,”—the object of which was to establish the paragraph which had occasioned Toplady such huge offence. A year later, Toplady published his “More Work for Mr. John Wesley; or, A Vindication of the Decrees and Providence of God from the Defamation of a late printed paper, entitled, ‘The Consequence Proved.’” Wesley had no time and no inclination to continue the controversy; but handed over the angry Vicar of Broad Hembury to the tender mercies of Thomas Olivers and Fletcher. Olivers’ tart pamphlet need not be further mentioned; but, in reference to Fletcher, it may be added, that, in a letter to Mr. Richard Hill, dated “March 12, 1773,” Toplady wrote:—
“I am told that Mr. Fletcher has it in contemplation to make an attack on me too. He is welcome. I am ready for him. Nor shall I, in that case, altogether imitate the examples of yourself and your brother; unless Mr. Fletcher should treat me with more decency than he has, hitherto, observed towards others. Tenderness, ’tis very evident, has no effect on Mr. Wesley and his pretended family of love. Witness the rancour with which Mr. Hervey’s[333] memory and works are treated by that lovely family. For my own part, I shall never attempt to hew such millstones with a feather. They must be served as nettles; press them close, and they cannot sting. Yet have they my prayers and my best wishes for their present and future salvation. But not one hair’s breadth of the Gospel will I ever offer at their shrine, or sacrifice to their idol.”[334]
Toplady’s information that Fletcher intended to “attack” him was quite correct; but, for the present, Fletcher was so occupied with his “Checks to Antinomianism,” that two years elapsed before he could devote attention to his new antagonist.
Toplady had no need to tell Mr. Richard Hill, in 1773, that, in any future replies he might make to the attacks of Wesley, Fletcher, or their friends, he would not be sparing in the language that he used; for, in his “Letter” to Wesley in 1770, and his “More Work for Wesley” in 1772, he had employed abuse which is, perhaps, unparalleled in religious literature, and for which it is difficult to account. Wesley was charged, by this young man of thirty years, with using “all the sophistry of a Jesuit, and the dictatorial authority of a pope.” He had descended to his “customary resource of false quotations, despicable invective, and unsupported dogmatisms.” His “phraseology” was “as pregnant with craft as his conduct” was “destitute of honour.” “By his deep-laid, but soon detected, cunning,—by his avowed vacuity of candour, truth, and shame, he has, in the general estimation of all unprejudiced people, gotten a wound and dishonour and reproach which all his whining and winding sophistry will never be able to wipe away.” “Perversion and falsification are essential figures in this man’s rhetoric.” “Unless God give Mr. Wesley repentance to the acknowledging of the truth, the unparalleled perverseness with which he labours to blacken some doctrines of Christianity will be the burden of his soul in the hour of death and in the day of judgment.”
These are really mild—very mild—specimens of Toplady’s unaccountable abuse of Wesley. How the same man could write, “Rock of ages, cleft for me,” and other hymns quite as exquisite, it is difficult to conceive.
Fletcher’s long-expected reply was published in 1776, with the following title-page, “An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Toplady’s ‘Vindication of the Decrees,’ etc. By the Author of the Checks. London: Printed in the year 1776.” 12mo, 133 pp.
Fletcher disposes of Toplady’s abusive language in his “Introduction.” He writes:—
“If Mr. Toplady, in his controversial heat, has forgotten what he owed to Mr. Wesley and to himself, this is no reason why I should forget the title of my book, which calls me to point out the bad arguments of our opponents, and not their ill humour. If I absurdly spent my time in passing a censure upon Mr. Toplady’s spirit, he would, with reason, say, as he does in the introduction to his ‘Historical Proof,’[335] page 35, ‘What has my pride or my humility to do with the argument in hand? Whether I am haughty or meek, is of no more consequence either to that, or to the public, than whether I am tall or short.’ Besides, having, again and again, myself requested our opponents not to wiredraw the controversy by personal reflections, but to weigh with candour the arguments which are offered, I should be inexcusable if I did not set them the example. Should it be said that Mr. Wesley’s character, which Mr. Toplady has so severely attacked, is at stake, and that I ought purposely to stand up in his defence; I reply, that the personal charges which Mr. Toplady interweaves with his arguments have been already fully answered by Mr. Olivers;[336] and that these charges being chiefly founded upon Mr. Toplady’s logical mistakes, they will, of their own accord, fall to the ground, as soon as the mistakes on which they rest shall be exposed. May the God of truth and love grant, that, if Mr. Toplady has the honour of producing the best arguments, I, for one, may have the advantage of yielding to them! To be conquered by truth and love, is to prove conqueror over our two greatest enemies,—error and sin.”
What a contrast between Fletcher and Toplady! Both were men of genius; both were scholars; both were clergymen of the Church of England; both were polemics; but one was meek in heart—the other just the opposite; one was a gentleman—the other, notwithstanding his ability and eloquence, was a traducer.
As already stated, the short paragraph which Wesley appended to his abridgment of Toplady’s translation of Zanchius’s “Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted” infuriated the Vicar of Broad Hembury to an almost incredible degree. Toplady employed, what Fletcher calls, seventy-three “arguments,” but which might more correctly be called dogmatisms, in replying to Wesley’s exposure of Calvinian predestination. Fletcher, in his “Answer,” deals with these, one by one, seriatim. Toplady was overmatched, and his “arguments” were shown to be fallacies. Throughout his able book, Fletcher never loses his temper, and never indulges in vituperation. The strongest language he uses is found in his concluding paragraphs, as follows:—
“I humbly hope that I have, in the preceding pages, contended for the truth of the Gospel, and the honour of God’s perfections. My conscience bears me witness, that I have endeavoured to do it with the sincerity of a candid inquirer after truth; and that I have not, knowingly, leaped over one material difficulty which Mr. Toplady has thrown in the way of the laborious divine whose evangelical principles I vindicate. And now, judicious reader, if I have done my part as a detecter of the fallacies by which the modern doctrines of grace are ‘kept upon their legs,’ let me prevail upon thee to do thy part as a judge, and to say if the right leg of Calvinism, that is, the lawless election of an unscriptural grace, so draws thy admiration as to make thee overlook the deformity of the left leg, that is, the absurd, unholy, sin-ensuring, hell-procuring, merciless, and unjust reprobation which Mr. Toplady has attempted to vindicate. Shall thy reason, thy conscience, thy feelings, thy Bible, and, what is more than this, shall all the perfections of thy God, and the veracity of thy Saviour, be sacrificed on the altar of a reprobation which none of the prophets, apostles, and early fathers ever heard of?—a barbarous reprobation which heated Augustine drew from the horrible error of Manichean necessity, and clothed with some Scripture expressions detached from the context, and wrested from their original meaning?—a Pharisaic reprobation, which the Church of Rome took from him, and which some of our reformers unhappily brought from that corrupted Society into the Protestant Churches?—in a word, a reprobation which disgraces Christianity, when that holy religion is considered as a system of evangelical doctrine, as much as our most enormous crimes disgrace it, when it is considered as a system of pure morality? Shall such a reprobation, I say, find a place in thy creed? yea, among thy doctrines of grace? God forbid!
“I hope better things of thy candour, good sense, and piety. If prejudice, human authority, and voluntary humility, seduce many good men into a profound reverence for that stupendous dogma, be not carried away by their number, or biassed by their shouts. Be not afraid to ‘be pilloried in a preface, flogged at a pamphlet’s tail,’ and treated as a knave, a felon, or a blasphemer through the whole of the next vindication of the deified[337] decrees, which are commonly called ‘Calvinism.’ This may be thy lot, if thou darest to bear thy plain testimony against the Antinomian idol of the day.”
Fletcher’s conflict with Toplady was continued. Hence the following “Advertisement,” affixed to the first edition of the book just dismissed:—
“Since these sheets have been prepared for the press, I have seen a new performance of Mr. Toplady, in defence of the doctrine which is exposed in the preceding pages. As there are, in that piece, some new arguments, the plausibility of which may puzzle many readers; and as I think it my duty fully to vindicate the truth, and completely to detect error; I design to answer that book also, in a little tract, which will be a supplement to this, and which will probably see the light under the following title, ‘A Reply to the Principal Arguments by which the Calvinists and the Fatalists Support the Spreading Doctrine of Absolute Necessity. In some Remarks on the Rev. Mr. Toplady’s ‘Scheme of Philosophical Necessity.’”
To understand this, it must be stated, that, in 1774, Wesley published a 12mo pamphlet of 33 pages, entitled, “Thoughts upon Necessity.” This was one of Wesley’s ablest publications, and, to use Wesley’s own words, in his address “to the Reader,” it was meant to rebut the teaching of an “Essay on Liberty and Necessity,”[338] which he had lately read. “I would fain,” says he, “place mankind in a fairer point of view than that writer” (the author) “has done: as I cannot believe the noblest creature in the visible world to be only a fine piece of clock-work.” Toplady was not once mentioned in Wesley’s tract; but he immediately set to work to answer it, and, in the following year, his strange production was issued with the following title: “The Scheme of Christian and Philosophical Necessity Asserted. In Opposition to Mr. John Wesley’s Tract on that Subject. With a Dissertation concerning the Sensible Qualitys of Matter: and the Doctrine of Color in particular. By Augustus Toplady, Vicar of Broad Hembury. London, 1775.” 8vo, 216 pp.
Wesley, as already stated, had not even named Toplady in his publication, much less abused him; but the opportunity of again reviling Wesley was too tempting to be neglected. In his preface, he gives an extract from a letter, written by a London clergyman, who had sent him Wesley’s tract:—
“I went last night to the Foundery, expecting to hear Pope John; but was disappointed. After hearing a Welshman,[339] for an hour and twenty minutes, on Psalm lxxxiv. 11, preach up all the heresies (sic) of the place, a man, who sat in the pulpit, told him to ‘Give over:’ for he seemed to bid fair for another half hour, at least. But he came to a conclusion, as desired. Then this man, who seemed to be a local preacher,[340] stood up with a pamphlet in his hand, and addressed the auditory in the following manner:—
“‘I am desired to publish a pamphlet upon Necessity and Free-Will,—the best I know of in the English tongue,—by Mr. John Wesley, price threepence. I had purposed to say a good deal upon it; but the time is elapsed. But, in this threepenny pamphlet, you have all the disputes that have been bandy’d about so lately; and you will get your minds more established by this threepenny pamphlet, than by reading all the books that have been written for and against. It is to be had at both doors, as you go out.’”
It is not unlikely that this narration is true; for, in those days, Methodist preachers preached long sermons, and, from the pulpit, recommended the people to purchase Methodist publications. Toplady takes occasion to call the occurrence “a droll sort of mountebank scene,” and pretends to bewail “the unreasonable and unseasonable prolixity of the long-winded holder-forth, which cruelly, injudiciously, and despitefully prevented poor Zany from puffing off, with the amplitude he intended, the multiplex virtues of the doctor’s threepenny free-will powder.” He continues:—
“‘Never do that by delegation,’ says an old proverb, ‘which you can as well do in propria persona. Had Doctor John himself got upon the stage, and sung—
who knows, but the threepenny doses might have gone off at both doors,’ as rapidly as peas from a pop-gun?”
Toplady, in a bantering tone, proceeds to give the “chief ingredients of the famous Moorfields powder,” namely:—
“An equal portion of gross Heathenism, Mahometism, Popery, Manichaeism, Ranterism, and Antinomianism; cull’d, dry’d, and pulveriz’d, secundem artem: and, above all, mingled with as much palpable Atheism as you can possibly scrape together from every quarter.” (Preface.)
In Chapter I., Toplady continues this unworthy, dishonourable abuse. He writes:—
“Aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis. The man, who concerns himself in everything, bids fair not to make a figure in anything. Mr. John Wesley is, precisely, this aliquis in omnibus; for, is there a single subject in which he has not endeavoured to shine? He is also, as precisely, a nullus in singulis; for, has he shone in any one subject which he ever attempted to handle? Upon what principle can these two circumstances be accounted for? Only upon that very principle, at which he so dolefully shakes his head, viz., the principle of necessity. The poor gentleman is, necessarily, an universal meddler; and, as necessarily, an universal miscarryer. Can he avoid being either the one or the other? No.” (p. 10.)
In a subsequent page, Toplady asserts:—
“Mr. Wesley, in one respect, is as much, and, in another respect, abundantly more a Manichae, than either Scythian, Budda, or Manes. By a very singular mixture of Manichaeism, Pelagianism, Popery, Socinianism, Ranterism, and Atheism, he has, I believe, now got to his ultimatum. Probably, he would go still further, if he could. But, I really think, he has no farther to go. Happy settlement, after forty years’ infinity of shiftings and flittings hither and thither!
Again, on page 168, Toplady’s reader is told that—
“Mr. Wesley is the lamest, the blindest, and the most self-contradictory waster of ink and paper, that ever pretended to the name of reasoner. ’Tis almost a disgrace to refute him.”
Again, on p. 172, Toplady writes:—
“Mr. Wesley’s heat and prophaneness are such, that he dares to scold his Maker with as little ceremony, and with as much scurrility, as an enraged fish-woman would be-din the ears of a ’prentice wench.”
Was Toplady a Christian? It is difficult to answer that question. A more monstrous combination of opposing qualities has seldom figured on the stage of human life. He was now thirty-four years of age.[341] Three years and a-half later he was dead.
It is needless to furnish an outline of Toplady’s bold book. What he attempted to expound and prove will be found in the following extracts:—
“I own myself very fond of definitions. I therefore præmise[342] what the necessity is, whose cause I have undertaken to plead. I would define necessity to be that, by which, whatever comes to pass cannot but come to pass (all circumstances taken into the account); and can come to pass in no other way or manner than it does” (p. 12).
Again, on page 157, he writes:—
“For my own part, I solemnly profess, before God, angels, and men, that I am not conscious of my being endued with that self-determining power, which Arminianism ascribes to me as an individual of the human species. Nay, I am clearly certain that I have it not. I am also equally certain that I do not wish to have it; and that, were it possible for my Creator to make me an offer of transferring the determination of any one event, from His own will to mine, it would be both my duty and my wisdom to entreat that the sceptre might still remain with Himself, and that I might have nothing to do in the direction of a single incident, or of so much as a single circumstance.”
The principles wrapped up in the definition and the confession of Toplady are what he tries to vindicate; and to refute them was the task Fletcher undertook. Fletcher’s pamphlet was published in 1777, with the following title: “A Reply to the Principal Arguments by which the Calvinists and Fatalists support the Doctrine of Absolute Necessity: being Remarks on the Rev. Mr. Toplady’s ‘Scheme of Christian and Philosophical Necessity.’ By John Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley, Salop. London, 1777.” 12mo, 80 pp.
Fletcher, with his talent of quiet cutting irony, might have rebuked the slang of Toplady; but, like a Christian and a gentleman, he, with indignant silence, allows it to pass unnoticed. The task of vanquishing Toplady was not difficult, for seldom has a more absurd theological work than “The Scheme of Christian and Philosophical Necessity” been committed to the press. Fletcher’s “reply” was perfectly unanswerable: poor Toplady was silenced.
It would tire the reader to analyse Fletcher’s work; and two extracts from it must suffice, the first showing with what ease Fletcher dealt with the absurdities of Toplady’s philosophy; and the second exhibiting his desire to live in peace and love with even the rabid Calvinists.
In Chapter III. of his book, Toplady wrote as follows:—
“It seems most agreeable to the radical simplicity, which God has observed in all His works, to suppose, that, in themselves, all human souls are equal. I can easily believe, that the soul of an oyster-woman has, naturally, the unexpanded powers of Grotius, or of Sir Isaac Newton; and that what conduces to raise the philosopher, the poet, the politician, or the linguist, so much above the ignorant and stupid of mankind, is, not only the circumstance of intellectual cultivation, but, still more than that, his having the happiness to occupy a better house, i.e. a body more commodiously organized than they. The soul of a Monthly Reviewer, if imprisoned within the same mud walls which are tenanted by the soul of Mr. John Wesley, would, similarly circumstanced, reason and act, I verily think, exactly like the Bishop of Moorfields. And I know some very sensible people, who even go so far as to suppose, that, were a human soul shut up in the skull of a cat, puss would, notwithstanding, move prone on all fours, purr when stroked, spit when pinched, and birds and mice would be her darling objects of pursuit. Though I cannot carry matters to so extreme a length as this, yet, I repeat my opinion, very much depends on corporeal organization.
“I just now hinted the conjecture of some that a human spirit, incarcerated in the brain of a cat, would, probably, both think and behave as that animal now does. But how would the soul of a cat acquit itself, if enclosed in the brain of a man? We cannot resolve this question with certainty, any more than the other. We may, however, even on this occasion, address every one of our human brethren in the words of that great philosophic necessitarian, St. Paul, and ask, Who maketh thee to differ from the lowest of the brute creation? Thy Maker’s free will, not thine. And what pre-eminence hast thou, which thou didst not receive from Him? Not the least, nor the shadow of any.”
“Admirable divinity!” wrote Fletcher. “So Mr. Toplady leaves the orthodox in doubt,—1. Whether, when their souls and the souls of cats shall be let out of their respective brains or prisons, the souls of cats will not be equal to the souls of men. 2. Whether, supposing the soul of a cat had been put in the brain of St. Paul, or of a Monthly Reviewer, the soul of puss would not have made as great an Apostle as the soul of Saul of Tarsus; as good a critic as the soul of the most sensible Reviewer. And, 3. Whether, in case the ‘human spirit’ of Isaiah ‘was shut up in the skull of a cat, puss would not, notwithstanding, move prone on all fours, purr when stroked, spit when pinched, and birds and mice be her darling objects of pursuit.’ Is not this a pretty large stride, for the first, towards the doctrine of the sameness of the souls of men with the souls of cats and frogs? Wretched Calvinism, new-fangled doctrines of grace, where are you leading your deluded admirers, your principal vindicators? Is it not enough, that you have spoiled the fountain of living waters, by turning into it the muddy streams of Zeno’s errors? Are ye also going to poison it by the absurdities of Pythagoras’s philosophy? What a side-stroke is here inadvertently given to these capital doctrines, ‘God breathed into’ Adam ‘the breath of life, and he became a living soul;’ a soul made ‘in the image of God,’ and not in the image of a cat! ‘The spirit of the beast goeth downward to the earth; but the spirit of man goeth upward; it returns to God who gave it,’ with an intention to judge and reward it according to its moral works.
“But I must do Mr. Toplady justice; he does not yet recommend this doctrine as absolutely certain. However, from his capital doctrine, that human souls have no free-will, no inward principle of self-determination; and from his avowed opinion, that the soul of one man, placed in the body of another man, ‘would, similarly circumstanced, reason and act exactly like’ the man in whose mud walls it is lodged; it evidently follows, 1. That, had the human soul of Christ been placed in the body and circumstances of Nero, it would have been exactly as wicked and atrocious as the soul of that bloody monster was. And 2. That if Nero’s soul had been placed in Christ’s body, and in His trying circumstances, it would have been exactly as virtuous and immaculate as that of the Redeemer; the consequence is undeniable. Thus, the merit of the man Christ did not, in the least, spring from His righteous soul, but from His ‘mud walls’ and from the happiness which His soul had of being lodged in a ‘brain peculiarly modified.’ Nor did the demerit of Nero flow from his free agency and self-perversion, but only from his ‘mud walls,’ and from the infelicity which his necessitated soul had of being lodged in ‘an ill-constructed vehicle,’ and placed on that throne on which Titus soon after deserved to be called ‘the darling of mankind.’ See, O ye engrossers of orthodoxy, to what absurd lengths your aversion to the liberty of the will, and to evangelical worthiness, leads your unwary souls! And yet, if we believe Mr. Toplady, your scheme, which is big with these inevitable consequences, is ‘Christian philosophy,’ and our doctrine of free will is ‘philosophy run mad,’ p. 30.”
Did cat ever play with mouse more perfectly and amusingly than did the Vicar of Madeley with the Vicar of Broad Hembury?
The next extract, which is the conclusion of Fletcher’s triumphant “Reply” to Toplady, shows his intense desire to live in love and peace with his opponents:—
“Mr. Wesley and I are ready to testify upon oath, that we humbly submit to God’s sovereignty, and joyfully glory in the freeness of Gospel grace, which has mercifully distinguished us from countless myriads of our fellow-creatures, by gratuitously bestowing upon us numberless favours, of a spiritual and temporal nature, which he has thought proper absolutely to withhold from our fellow-creatures. To meet the Calvinists on their own ground, we go so far as to allow there is a partial, gratuitous election and reprobation. By this election, Christians are admitted to the enjoyment of privileges far superior to those of the Jews; and, according to this reprobation, myriads of heathen are absolutely cut off from all the prerogatives which accompany God’s covenants of peculiar grace. In a word, we grant to the Calvinists everything they contend for, except the doctrine of absolute necessity; nay, we even grant the necessary, unavoidable salvation of all that die in their infancy. And our love of peace would make us go farther to meet Mr. Toplady, if we could do it without giving up the justice, mercy, truth, and wisdom of God, together with the truth of the Scriptures, the equity of God’s paradisaical and mediatorial laws, the propriety of the day of judgment, and the reasonableness of the sentences of absolution and condemnation, which the Righteous Judge will then pronounce. We hope, therefore, that the prejudices of our Calvinian brethren will subside; and that, instead of accounting us inveterate enemies to truth, they will do us the justice to say, that we have done our best to hinder them from inadvertently betraying some of the greatest truths of Christianity into the hands of the Manichees, Materialists, Infidels, and Antinomians of the age. May the Lord hasten the happy day in which we shall no more waste our precious time in attacking or defending the truths of our holy religion; but bestow every moment in the sweet exercises of Divine and brotherly love!”
During the last six years, Fletcher had most laboriously devoted the whole of the time he could conscientiously spare from the faithful discharge of his parochial duties, to an earnest and elaborate explanation and defence of the Anti-Calvinian doctrines, formally announced by his friend Wesley, at the Conference of 1770. Wesley was without leisure for this. If he had attempted it, he would have been obliged to content himself with the publication of brief, sententious tracts; and this would have been insufficient. Most of the Methodist clergymen of the day, including Whitefield, Hervey, Romaine, Berridge, Shirley, Toplady, and many others, had become sincere and laborious Calvinists. Their publications were widely spread, and their views extensively embraced. Wesley saw and felt that an antidote was needed; and especially as the Countess of Huntingdon had recently opened her college at Trevecca to multiply the number of such ministers. Hence, the declaration of his “Minutes,” and hence, the fierce controversial war that immediately followed. Fletcher had been educated at Geneva, where Calvin had propounded his creed, and his form of Church government. Fletcher was not, professedly, a theological student at Geneva; but he was a regular attendant at Divine services, as well as a diligent reader of the Holy Scriptures, and there can be no doubt that he was, to a considerable extent, even in his youth, acquainted with the Calvinian theology. At all events, when the controversy commenced, in 1770, there was no one, among Wesley’s helpers, so competent to enter the arena, on his behalf, as his friend Fletcher. Hitherto, Fletcher had been accustomed to make little evangelistic tours, to London, to Wales, and to other places; but now, for six years, he confined himself within his own parish, that he might have time to defend Wesley. Up to the present, his letters to his friends had been somewhat numerous; now, to write a letter was one of his rare exercises. He was committed to a great work; and everything, excepting the pastoral duties of his parish, must give way to it. Of the style of his writings, the reader has had numerous specimens. It is always perspicuous, lively, chaste, though occasionally prolix. Many of his figures are apt, striking, convincing; but others would have been more impressive had they been less elaborate. His arguments are fair, legitimate, and generally unanswerable. His spirit, without exception, is saintly. He never becomes personal; never deals in invective; never assails character; never impugns motives. Among the Wesleyan Methodists, he settled for ever all the questions of the Calvinian controversy. For many a long year, Methodist preachers—itinerant and local—drew their arguments and illustrations from his invaluable “Checks;” and, perhaps, it is not too much to say, that not a few of the Calvinists themselves were led by his immortal productions to explain, and modify, and, to some extent, to change their unwarrantable doctrines. To his memory, the Methodist Churches owe undying veneration; for he did for Wesley’s theology what no other man than himself, at that period, could have done. John Wesley travelled, formed Societies, and governed them. Charles Wesley composed unequalled hymns for the Methodists to sing; and John Fletcher, a native of Calvinian Switzerland, explained, elaborated, and defended the doctrines they heartily believed.
Hitherto, his opponents had been Walter Shirley, Richard Hill and his brother Rowland, honest Berridge, and clever but censorious Toplady. The last, for invective, was the worst. Twenty years before, he had heard James Morris, one of Wesley’s itinerants, preach in a barn at Codymain, and soon afterwards was converted. Two years later, while a student in Trinity College, Dublin, he wrote an admirable letter to Wesley, thanking him for his “kind” cautions and advices. When and why he became the bitter foe of Wesley it is difficult to determine. He died on August 11, 1778, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, and was buried in a grave, thirteen feet deep, under the gallery of Whitefield’s chapel, in Tottenham Court Road.
Fletcher’s next antagonist was the Rev. Caleb Evans, a Baptist minister at Bristol; a man of good sense, a diligent student, a faithful pastor, and now thirty-seven years of age. At this period, the English colonists in America were in rebellion. On May 10, 1775, a Congress of the thirteen States met at Philadelphia, and appointed George Washington as their Commander-in-Chief. He took command of the army before Boston, where the English had ten thousand men. A few days after his arrival, the terrible battle at Bunker’s Hill was fought; and a bloody war soon spread over the whole seaboard, and even into Canada, where the American colonists besieged Quebec. In the year 1775, Wesley abridged Dr. Johnson’s famous pamphlet, entitled, “Taxation no Tyranny,” and published it as his own, without the least reference as to its origin. Mr. Evans warmly sympathized with the colonists, and published “A Letter to the Rev. John Wesley, occasioned by his ‘Calm Address.’” Wesley’s reply to this was the republication of his pirated pamphlet, with a preface prefixed, in which he said, “All the arguments” [of Evans] “might be contained in a nutshell.” Political as well as theological controversy is always irritating. Angry tracts and pamphlets, almost without number, were committed to the press; but all of them, except those in which Fletcher was concerned, must here be passed in silence. Fletcher now, strangely enough, turned politician. Early in the year 1776, he published the following: “A Vindication of the Rev. Mr. Wesley’s ‘Calm Address to our American Colonists:’ In some Letters to Mr. Caleb Evans: By John Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley, Salop. London: Printed and sold at the Foundery.” 12mo, 70 pp.[343]
In a letter to Joseph Benson, he said:—
“I have unaccountably launched into Christian politics; a branch of divinity too much neglected by some and too much attended to by others. If you have seen my ‘Vindication of Mr. Wesley’s Calm Address,’ and can make sense of that badly printed piece, I shall be thankful for your very dispraise.”
To James Ireland, Esq., he wrote on February 3, 1776:—
“My little political piece is published in London. You thank me for it beforehand; I believe they are the only thanks I shall have. It is well you sent them before you read the book; and yet, whatever contempt it brings upon me, I still think I have written the truth. If I have been wrong in writing, I hope I shall not be so excessively wrong as not to be thankful for any reproof candidly levelled at what I have written. I prepare myself to be like my Lord in my little measure; I mean, to be ‘Despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with griefs,’—most reviled for what I mean best.”
Evidence will soon be adduced that Fletcher’s apprehensions of coming reproach were realized.
It may fairly be doubted whether Wesley and Fletcher acted wisely in rushing into the fierce political strife that then existed. Their motives were pure; and, perhaps, Mr. Benson, living at the time, and a competent observer of men and things, was correct when he said,—
“Mr. Fletcher’s publications upon the question which divided Great Britain and her Colonies, as well as Mr. Wesley’s ‘Calm Address,’ certainly were of great use; not indeed to prevent the continuation and further progress of the war, and stop the effusion of blood abroad, but to allay the spirits of disloyalty and insurrection which were beginning to show themselves at home.”
Still, it must be admitted, that the high and holy vocation of Wesley and Fletcher was not to rebuke and correct political errors, but to revive, spread, and defend the great Gospel truths which had been so long neglected and forgotten.
No useful end would be answered by giving an outline of Fletcher’s arguments in his “Vindication of Wesley’s ‘Calm Address.’” Many of them may be more easily sneered at than answered. They show the versatility of Fletcher’s genius; and, remembering the fewness of the newspapers then published, they create surprise at the extent of Fletcher’s political information. He often uses strong language, but he is never ungentlemanly or abusive. He was loyal to the throne and government of England, but he was not a blind opponent of civil liberty, or that exemption from the arbitrary will of others which is secured by equitable and established laws. In concluding his first letter to Mr. Evans he wrote:—
“I declare that I am as much in love with liberty as with loyalty; and that I write a heartfelt truth when I subscribe myself, Rev. Sir, your affectionate fellow-labourer in the Gospel, a republican by birth and education, and a subject of Great Britain by love of liberty and free choice.”
As soon as Fletcher’s pamphlet appeared, Mr. Evans hastened to answer it, and employed Wesley’s old friend, William Pine, of Bristol, as his printer and publisher. The title of his new production was “A Reply to the Rev. Mr. Fletcher’s ‘Vindication’ of Mr. Wesley’s ‘Calm Address to our American Colonists.’ By Caleb Evans, M.A.” 12mo, 103 pp.
Mr. Evans’s reply was full of bad temper. The first twenty-three pages were devoted to abusive remarks on the change which had taken place in Wesley’s political opinions, and to a mistake which Wesley honestly confessed he had made in denying that he had seen a book on “the exclusive right of the Colonies to tax themselves.” He acknowledges that he had seen the book, but adds: “I had so entirely forgotten it, that even when I saw it again I recollected nothing of it till I had read several pages.” Mr. Evans, in an angry spirit, uses this lapse of memory to the utmost in an endeavour to brand Wesley as a liar, and concludes his first letter to Fletcher thus:—
“Having thus given you, Sir, a faithful narrative of the rise, progress, and conclusion of the dispute betwixt me and Mr. Wesley, you are welcome to re-enter on the vindication of your friend, as you style him, as soon as you please. And should you find yourself unequal to the Herculean task, you may call in the assistance of the amazing Mr. Thomas Olivers, that mirror of Christian meekness and modesty, and with his logic and your oratory, aided by scraps of mutilated letters, you will perform wonders.”
Mr. Evans begins his second letter by politely telling Fletcher that in reading his “Vindication of Wesley’s ‘Calm Address’” he had been greatly disappointed.
“For,” says he, “instead of argument, I met with nothing but declamation; instead of precision, artful colouring; instead of proof, presumption; instead of consistency, contradiction; instead of reasoning, a string of sophistries. Your letters abound, Sir, as every intelligent reader will easily discover, with the petitio principii, the fallacia accidentis, the non causa pro causa, and those many other pretty inventions by which, as the Schoolmen very well know, a question may be embarrassed when it cannot be answered.”
In succeeding pages, Mr. Evans charges Fletcher with using “loose, inconsistent, vague declamation;” and adds:—
“This may confound the ignorant and superficial; but you cannot yourself suppose it ever can convince the intelligent and impartial. Your chief aim seems to be spargere voces in vulgam ambiguas, and thereby artfully to persuade them that all those who are enemies to the measures of the ministry respecting America are Republicans, king-haters, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Antinomians, and everything that is bad.”
Poor Fletcher! He was indeed realizing the reproach he had apprehended; and yet he was not satisfied. Hence his publication of the following: “American Patriotism: Farther confronted with Reason, Scripture, and the Constitution: Being Observations on the Dangerous Politicks taught by the Rev. Mr. Evans, M.A., and the Rev. Dr. Price.[344] With a Scriptural Plea for the Revolted Colonies. By J. Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley.” 1776. 12mo, 138 pp.
“The author,” writes Fletcher in his preface, “dares not flatter himself to have the knowledge of logic and divinity, which are requisite to do his subject the justice it deserves; but, having for some years opposed false orthodoxy, he may have acquired a little skill to oppose false patriotism; and, having defended evangelical obedience to God against the indirect attacks of some ministers of the Church of England, he humbly hopes that he may step forth a second time and defend constiutional obedience to the king against some ministers who dissent from the Established Church. Those whom he encounters in these sheets are the leading ecclesiastical patriots of the two greatest cities in the kingdom; Mr. Evans being the champion of the minority in Bristol, as Dr. Price is in London.”
Of course, Fletcher’s book is able; but, excepting so far as it teaches that loyalty is a Christian duty, it is, to a great extent, out of date.
On October 30, 1776, a royal proclamation was issued, ordering “a public fast and humiliation to be observed throughout England and the kingdom of Ireland, upon Friday the 13th of December next, for the purpose of imploring the Almighty speedily to deliver the King’s loyal subjects within his colonies and provinces in North America, from the violence, injustice, and tyranny of those daring rebels who had assumed to themselves the exercise of arbitrary power; to open the eyes of those who had been deluded, by specious falsehoods, into acts of treason and rebellion; to turn the hearts of the authors of these calamities; and to restore his people in those distracted provinces and colonies to the happy condition of being free subjects in a free state, under which heretofore they had flourished so long, and prospered so much.”[345]
This had Fletcher’s hearty approbation, and he at once wrote and published a 12mo pamphlet of 22 pages, dated “London, December 6, 1776,” with the title, “The Bible and the Sword; or, The Appointment of the General Fast Vindicated: In an Address to the Common People, concerning the Propriety of Repressing obstinate Licentiousness with the Sword, and of Fasting when the Sword is drawn for that Purpose. London: Printed by R. Hawes, and sold at the Foundery, in Moorfields, and at the Rev. Mr. Wesley’s Preaching Houses in Town and Country. 1776.”[346] One half of this pamphlet, however, was simply a reprint of extracts from his “American Patriotism;” the other half is devoted to the task of proving, from Scripture, that, under certain circumstances, war is lawful.
As he expected, Fletcher, by his political publications, brought upon himself political wrath and censure, of which the following extracts, taken from the Monthly Review, are specimens:—