Excellent Women. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ to eradicate its constitutional peculiarity, but to sanctify and render it subservient to the glory of God and the good of souls."2

      The Countess on recovering from her illness, hearing that John and Charles Wesley were preaching near by, sent them a message wishing them God-speed and testifying to her own purpose to live entirely for the Saviour who had died for her. Her friends failing in their attempt to persuade her husband to exert his influence against what they considered fanaticism, enlisted the aid of Dr. Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, who had been Lord Huntingdon's teacher. But the bishop, as many another in later days, found that the Countess was fully equal to giving cogent reasons for her faith and practice. It was he who had ordained Whitefield, and to the latter the bishop ascribed the change in her opinion. So far from accepting the bishop's view, the Countess urged home upon him her opinion of his duty, enforcing her argument with such apt quotations from the Bible, the Articles, and the Homilies, that at length he left her presence openly regretting the fact that he had ever laid his hands upon Whitefield's head. "My Lord," was the last word of the Countess, "mark my words: when you are on your dying bed that will be one of the few ordinations you will reflect upon with complacence." It is pleasing to know that when on his death-bed in 1752, this prelate sent to Whitefield, and asked to be remembered in his prayers.

      III.

      HELP IN THE WORK OF WESLEY AXD WHITEFIELD

      Although in 1738 and 1739 Wesley and his followers frequented the Moravian meeting-house in Neville's Court, Fetter Lane, the first home of organised Methodism in London was the Foundry in Moorfields. Lady Huntingdon had identified herself with the Methodists, and thus was enabled to exert great influence upon a movement, small at first, but soon fraught with most potent consequences, the employment by Wesley of lay evangelistic agency. Wesley had already allowed some of his lay helpers to expound, but not to preach. Yet here, as in his strong desire to keep the Methodist movement within the borders of the Established Church, he was to find that his personal view, if enforced, would hinder the work which was so manifestly of God, and with his clear common sense he at once gave way. During 1739 Lady Huntingdon had frequently heard Thomas Maxfield pray, and, according to her biographer, it was at her suggestion that he began to expound the Scriptures. Wesley had been summoned from London, and no clergyman being available at that moment, he left Maxfield in charge, to pray with the members of the society and to give them such helpful advice as he could. In a letter to Wesley, written either at the close of 1739 or the beginning of 1740, Lady Huntingdon writes of Maxfield: "He is one of the greatest instances of God's peculiar favour that I know: he is raised from the stones to sit amongst the princes of His people. The first time I made him expound, expecting little from him, I sat over against him and thought what a power of God must be with him to make me give any attention to him. But before he had gone over one-fifth part, any one that had seen me would have thought I had been made of wood or stone; so quite immovable I both felt and looked. His power in prayer is quite extraordinary."

      The border line between such expounding and preaching is very narrow, and it is hardly to be wondered at that Maxfield soon found that he was not only preaching, but doing so with the most true and certain warrant of fitness for the office—souls were being born again under his ministrations. On hearing such unexpected tidings, Wesley hurried back to London, and entering his house next door to the Foundry with clouded face, replied to his mother's question as to the cause, "Thomas Maxfield has turned preacher, I find." Great was his surprise to receive the rejoinder, "Take care what you do with respect to that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are." Such testimony from such a source could not fail to move John Wesley. He wisely heard for himself, and expressed his judgment in the words of Scripture—"It is the Lord: let Him do what seemeth Him good."

      Thus Methodism passed through what might have been its first great crisis. Thus it equipped itself to keep pace with the ever-increasing claims of its work. The quick spiritual insight of Lady Huntingdon recognised both the need and the fitness of the hitherto unrecognised worker.

      One of the first members of the noble band of itinerating preachers thus called into the active exercise of their spiritual gifts was David Taylor, a servant in Lord Huntingdon's household, who did much fruitful evangelistic work in the villages surrounding Donnington Park. It was this man who stood by John Wesley's side when the drunken curate of Epworth refused him admission to what had been his father's pulpit, and who announced to the congregation as they left the church that in the afternoon Wesley would preach in the graveyard. And there that same afternoon Wesley, standing upon his father's tombstone, preached to a congregation, the like of which Epworth had never seen before, the first of a series of sermons that afterwards became famous.

      Having thus aided one of the brothers during a critical administrative stage, Lady Huntingdon shortly afterwards was of great service to the other in a crisis of spiritual experience. Soon after the organisation of the first Methodist Society, the "still" heresy developed among the Moravian members of the Fetter Lane Chapel. This was the view, "that believers had nothing to do with ordinances—were not subject to them—and ought to be still; that they ought to leave off the means of grace, and not go to church; not to communicate; not to search the Scriptures; not to use private prayer till they had living faith; and to be still till they had it."3 Wesley used all his influence and all his persuasive power to counteract these opinions, but without avail. At length he decided to sever all connection with those who insisted upon acting in accordance with them, and removed Methodism to the Foundry. Charles Wesley at first went cordially with his brother, but at a later date he ceased attending the Foundry, and manifested signs of a desire to return to Fetter Lane. Lady Huntingdon, for whose views he entertained feelings of the deepest respect, remonstrated with him, and in conjunction with John Wesley's efforts kept him from a step that might have proved fatal to his further usefulness. In a letter written to John Wesley in October, 1741, Lady Huntingdon writes: "Since you left us the still ones are not without their attacks. I fear much more for your brother than for myself, as the conquest of the one would be nothing to the other…. I comfort myself very much that you will approve a step with respect to them your brother and I have taken. No less than his declaring open war with them…. Your brother is also to give his reasons for quite separating. I have great faith God will not let him fall; He will surely have mercy on him, and not on him only, for many would fall with him."

      IV.

      FAMILY BEREAVEMENTS

      Lady Huntingdon at this period of her life was called upon to endure some very heavy domestic griefs. She had to mourn for two of her sons, George, aged thirteen, and Fernando, aged eleven, who died of small-pox. They were both buried in Westminster Abbey. On October 13, 1746, she lost her husband, who was carried off by an apoplectic seizure, in his fiftieth year. The Countess had only just passed her thirty-ninth birthday when this last great sorrow came upon her. She herself was at the same time tried by a long and severe illness. The effect of these repeated and heavy afflictions was to further develop her character, and to increase the devotion and self-sacrifice with which she gave herself to works of benevolence and to the extension of the Saviour's kingdom. On Lord Huntingdon's death, besides having entire control of her own means, she became sole trustee of the children and their fortune. In regard to the latter she proved herself a good steward; the former she devoted very largely to the evangelistic and charitable work in which she delighted.

      Early in 1747 she wrote to Dr. Doddridge: "I hope you will comfort me by all the accounts you can gather of the flourishing and spreading of the glad tidings. Oh, how do I lament the weakness of my hands, the feebleness of my knees, and coolness of my heart! I want it on fire always, not for self-delight, but to spread the Gospel from pole to pole." And in other letters: "My heart wants nothing so much as to dispense all—all for the glory of Him whom my soul loveth." "I am nothing—Christ is all; I disclaim, as well as disdain, any righteousness but His. I not only rejoice that there is no wisdom for His people but that from above, but reject every pretension to any but what comes from СКАЧАТЬ