Church History — Part 4: Three Centuries to Win Back Liberty of Conscience (1517–1800)

Note: This piece merges three separate lectures from David Pawson's History of the Church series: the 16th century (54.9 minutes, "Reformers, Romans, and Radicals"), the 17th century (47.7 minutes, England's fight for liberty of worship), and the 18th century (54.9 minutes, the Evangelical Revival). I've folded all three into one essay because they tell a single unbroken story, the cost of state-enforced religion, and the long, hard road back to liberty of conscience. I haven't guessed or embellished any of Pawson's arguments. Wherever I looked something up, checked it against the sources, or corrected a detail, I've left it as an amber margin note woven into the text. The fact-checking this time is heavier than in the first three parts, simply because this stretch of history has more names, dates, and numbers than any other in the series, and it's also the stretch most prone to pulpit legend picking up extra color with each retelling.

From Wittenberg to the Wesleys' parlor

Part 3 closed with Martin Luther standing before the Empire and the Church, declaring "here I stand, I can do no other." But a declaration is not a finished reformation. Pawson opens the next lecture with a question that sounds simple: what is the difference between a Reformation and a Revolution?

The answer lies in two other questions: how much changed, and who changed it. Across the 16th century, Luther's Reformation, as it spread, gradually became a Revolution, because more and more was changed, and more and more different people, in more and more places, took it upon themselves to change it their own way.

The three centuries in this piece tell one continuous story: the Church kept getting "captured" by the state. Kings, parliaments, city councils used worldly power to impose one religion on an entire territory, and the price was always war, prison, or a spiritual life gone cold. These three centuries also tell the story of those who refused to let the state decide their faith, and paid dearly for it.

The Frame For The Whole Lecture

The three R's of the 16th century

Pawson opens by asking: what is the difference between a Reformation and a Revolution? The answer lies in two other questions: how much changed, and who changed it. Luther's Reformation, as it spread, became a Revolution — because more and more was changed, and more and more different people took up the changing.

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PHẦN MỘT: THẾ KỶ 16: REFORMERS, ROMANS, RADICALS

Pawson divides the evening into three groups, the "three R's": the Reformers, the Romans (how the Catholic Church reacted), and the Radicals (the group Pawson's own church, Gold Hill, actually descends from). He examines the Reformers in three countries: Germany, Switzerland, then England.

Germany: Martin Luther, and the man who stopped halfway

Who changed Germany? Obviously Martin Luther. How much? Pawson answers: in the first four or five years, a great deal. Luther got rid of the Pope, got rid of bishops, got rid of indulgences, got rid of purgatory, got rid of a host of other things, and reduced the sacraments from seven to two.

Then came the crisis: Luther had to go into hiding at Wartburg Castle. When he came out, he found to his horror that some friends were carrying the change much further and much faster than he'd intended. He stood in his own pulpit and asked: how dare you do this? And from that point, Luther largely stopped changing things. Very few changes came after that.

The result: Luther kept a great deal of what Rome had. He kept candles on the altar, something the Bible certainly doesn't have, but he kept it. He kept crucifixes, go into a Lutheran church and you'll often see one, which may surprise you. He kept images and pictures. And above all, he kept his own traditional practice around the Lord's Supper and baptism: he still believed, in some sense, that the bread and wine actually were the body and blood of Christ, he never quite got over that. And he kept infant baptism. When someone asked, but surely faith is needed for baptism, his reply was: who's to say the baby doesn't have faith?

✍︎Kit's note

Who carried the change out? Here's a rather startling answer: Luther relied on the princes. In other words, this was a state-driven change. Lutheranism, like Roman Catholicism, was an established religion. From the very beginning, Luther relied on princes, dukes, and the Elector of Saxony, particularly a man called Frederick, to reform "from the top." Whoever ruled the land, Luther regarded as also ruling the church.

The result: at a Diet in Speyer, it was decided that each territory would adopt the religion of its prince. If you lived where the prince was Catholic, you were Catholic. If the prince was Lutheran, you were Lutheran. A group objected violently to this, and it's from that "protest" that the word Protestant was born.

✍︎Kit's note

The result of this church-state fusion: by the start of the 17th century, the Catholic states banded together and went to war with the Protestant states, who had also banded together, the famous Thirty Years' War. That's the kind of end product this mistake produces: when the state here says everyone must be this religion, and the state there says everyone must be that religion, sooner or later you get religious war. And the pattern spread from Germany to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, all adopting Lutheranism as a state religion, binding on every citizen.

✍︎Ghi chú của Kit

The debate over the Lord's Supper wasn't only a Western argument. Between roughly 1573 and 1581, Lutheran theologians at Tübingen sent the Greek-translated Augsburg Confession to Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople, hoping to find common ground. He replied with three careful theological letters, agreeing on some points but rejecting Luther's core positions on grace, the sacraments, and the Fathers' authority to interpret Scripture, then closed the correspondence with: "Go your own way, and do not send us further letters on doctrine, but only letters written for friendship's sake." The Reformation genuinely reached the East, and was declined, on Orthodoxy's own terms.

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Switzerland: Zwingli, who died on the battlefield, and Calvin, who stayed one night and ended up staying twenty years

Luther neither started the Reformation in Switzerland nor helped it, it began entirely on its own. There were two men: a German Swiss, and a Frenchman.

Huldreich Zwingli was an ordinary parish priest of the Catholic Church in a small village in German-speaking Switzerland. He became a Protestant by reading his Greek New Testament, exactly what happened to Martin Luther, in fact a few years before it happened to Luther. Zwingli was invited to be priest at Zurich Cathedral (the Grossmünster). He preached the new truths he'd found in this book, and swept the city of Zurich along with him.

Among the things he taught: it was wrong for the Pope to have an army, staffed with Swiss mercenary troops. (Interestingly, if you visit the Vatican today, you'll still see Swiss Guards protecting it, the very practice Zwingli spoke against.) He gave up his allegiance to the Pope and got married, two things that often seem to go together. Many other priests followed him.

He eventually persuaded the city council, and notice this, that everyone in Zurich must now be Protestant. Once again, the same sad mistake. But it was carried through. Zurich became officially Protestant, as did all the valleys leading out from it. The trouble was that people in the mountains and forests didn't follow. Soon the valley people and the mountain people were fighting each other. A war lasting two years broke out in the Zurich region, and during it, Zwingli himself, who was fighting, was killed at a small place called Kappel.

✍︎Kit's note

Before he died, Zwingli had a major dispute with Luther over the Lord's Supper. Luther said: that bread is the body, that wine is the blood of Christ. Zwingli said: that's just bread, just wine, symbols of his body and blood. And Pawson observes: perhaps that's why the Germans and the Swiss never came together in the Reformation.

The story moves to France. A young man called John Calvin, born in Picardy, the son of a lawyer, was put to the study of law by his father. He studied at the universities of Paris, Orléans, and Bourges, where Calvin got his logical mind. He remained a lawyer to his dying day in his speech, his clarity of thought, and his devastating arguments, it's Calvin's arguments that persuaded so many people to become "Calvinists."

Calvin came to Paris, studied the Greek New Testament, and was converted (around 1532–34). Within months he was imprisoned in Paris for his Christian views. Released, he fled as a refugee, wandering from place to place.

He found himself in the Swiss city of Basel at the age of 26, and decided to write down his Christian beliefs. That book was The Institutes of the Christian Religion, still acclaimed as one of the greatest expositions of the Protestant faith in the world, still sold and read today.

✍︎Kit's note

He advocated church on Sunday morning and playing bowls on Sunday afternoon, he did it himself, and we owe (or blame) Calvin for the "Continental Sunday." But something far deeper mattered more: this man believed God was on the throne. He believed in the sovereignty of God, that God's will is the final factor deciding the history of nations and of men. And it's because of that tremendous logical emphasis on divine sovereignty and the doctrine of predestination that Calvin gave his name to people who think that way: Calvinists. But Calvin believed it, and so did Luther, and so did Zwingli, and so did all the Reformers: that God is on the throne, in absolute control of everything and everyone.

Calvin was still fleeing from place to place as a refugee. One day, trying to get back into France, he found a minor war going on right on his route, so he took a detour and failed to reach his destination by evening. He settled for the night where he found himself, and that place was called Geneva. Because he'd taken that detour and meant to stay one night only, he stayed 20 years, and Geneva became the center of Presbyterianism for the whole world.

Word got around that Calvin, the young author of those books, was in Geneva, and the local parish priest, a man called William Farel, hurried to the inn and said: Calvin, I want you to stay here. He said: a year ago the council decided Geneva should be Protestant. But it hasn't worked out, they're getting as drunk as ever, gambling as much as ever, nothing has changed, the people aren't changing. We need a man like you. Stay. And Calvin agreed.

✍︎Kit's note

Calvin was fairly strict. He wasn't having any funny business. He would haul a man before the church and hand him to the magistrates for this, that, or the other. But he pulled the city around until it became well-behaved, though "city" here meant a population of just 13,000. With strict discipline, he cleaned the place up, so much so that three years later he had to flee for his life, to Strasbourg. But after he left, the city collapsed; things went from bad to worse. A deputation came asking him back. And back came Calvin, for 20 more years.

He carried the reformation much further this time. No crucifixes. No candles. And, dare he say it, no organs either; people should sing. He carried the changes further than Martin Luther ever did, and instituted what's now known as the Presbyterian system of church government, in which the church is governed by bodies of laymen, pastors, and elders together, with local bodies meeting in representative assemblies overseeing wider areas.

Geneva became a place Protestants fled to for refuge, altogether 6,000 more came to live there, escaping persecution. And naturally, they picked up Calvin's ideas. When it was safe to return home, they carried Calvin's faith and Calvin's way of running a church with them.

✍︎Kit's note

But, worth adding, Calvin made the same mistake in reverse: fusing church and state. Only this time he didn't say the state must govern the church. He said the church must govern the state. If a church member misbehaved, Calvin expected the city's magistrates to deal with him. Once again, church and state were confused. It didn't lead to war in Geneva, though it did elsewhere.

✍︎Kit's note

From Geneva, the influence reached France.

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France: the Huguenots, and Scotland: John Knox

The Protestants of France leaned closer to Calvin than to Luther, and became known as the Huguenots. By the end of the French king's reign during which Calvin began his work, there were already some 20,000 Huguenots in France. They grew and grew, until the terrible St. Bartholomew's Day, 24 August 1572. If you know your history, you know that on that day roughly 22,000 French Huguenots were slaughtered, 2,000 in Paris alone. Person after person was put to death across the whole of France. The Huguenots fled, to England, to the Netherlands. If you meet a family with a French-sounding surname, there's a good chance their ancestors came over with that Huguenot flight. Perhaps tonight, in this church, there are families descended from those who fled the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

✍︎Kit's note

But the country most heavily influenced by Geneva was Bonny Old Scotland. I can't go into the whole history of Scotland, much to the disappointment of the Scots, but let me mention four great Scotsmen.

Patrick Hamilton was the Scot who started the Reformation there, but was burned in 1528. His work was taken up by George Wishart, who had been to Switzerland, but he too came to a sticky end. But the man who really finished the job was John Knox.

He's a colorful character: a student at Glasgow University, then chaplain of St. Andrew's Castle for the Scottish army; the French took the castle and sold Knox as a galley slave, there he was, rowing as a slave. The English rescued him; he came to England, then got into trouble with Queen Mary, fled to the Continent, to Geneva and Calvin. Knox was ripe for these ideas, and he came back to Scotland determined: I'm going to make Scotland Presbyterian. He once prayed: "Lord, give me Scotland, or I die."

✍︎Kit's note

In 1560, the Scottish Parliament voted for Protestantism. That same year, they held their first General Assembly. But in 1561, the beautiful and wily Mary, Queen of Scots, returned, and with her beauty and guile she won over most of the Protestant nobility. And so Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox stood face to face. It's a most dramatic story, and if you have any feel for history, you should read it. Nevertheless, after a civil war, Mary Queen of Scots was captured, abdicated in favor of her infant son James, and was ultimately beheaded for treason by Elizabeth I of England. Knox's teaching won the ground, and Scotland has been Presbyterian ever since, the Church of Scotland reflects the Church of Geneva, while the Church of England sits closer to the Lutheran churches. The Church of Scotland owes everything to John Knox.

✍︎Kit's note

When Knox died, leadership passed to the last great Scot I want to mention: Andrew Melville, who told King James: "Sire, there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is King James, of whom I am a loyal subject; and there is the Lord Jesus Christ, King of the church, of whom James himself is a subject."

✍︎Kit's note

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England: a "typical English muddle," Henry VIII to Elizabeth I

Now we come back to our own nation. What happened in England all this time? Pawson says it plainly: the English Reformation was a typical English muddle. It really was a typical compromise, we muddle through and say "that'll do", we don't work by principles, we're terribly pragmatic, we ask does it work, and whatever works is deemed right. This is very English, and the Reformation is quite typical of it.

It started, of course, with Henry VIII and his wanting to marry another woman. But this has been badly misunderstood, let me give the fuller facts. Henry VIII was pressed by others into marrying Catherine of Aragon, and it was an illegal marriage, because she was his brother's widow, so he should never have married her in the first place. But under pressure from various quarters, including the Pope, who granted him special permission to marry illegally, he was pushed into the marriage for political reasons. Every child she bore died, except one, the little girl Mary, who later became the infamous "Bloody Mary." He had no son to carry on the Tudor line, and he knew that when he died, civil war would follow without a male heir. Most people in England at the time took it as a sign of God's judgment on the marriage.

✍︎Kit's note

Then he met Anne Boleyn, a woman he genuinely loved, who might well have made a good queen and a legal wife. (I'm not justifying Henry VIII, I'm giving you the full facts.) He applied to the Pope for an annulment of the first, illegal marriage, but by then politics had shifted, and for political reasons the Pope said no. So Henry VIII said: fine, from now on I don't obey the Pope. Step by step, Henry separated the Church of England from the Pope, as England is separated from the Continent by the English Channel.

✍︎Kit's note

The most ironic part of the whole story: as a young man, Henry VIII was something of an amateur theologian, he wrote a book against Martin Luther, and the Pope was so pleased he gave him the title "Defender of the Faith", a title our own queen still carries today, stamped on the coins in your pocket. He earned it for attacking Martin Luther. Did you ever know that? What a muddle the English Reformation is.

✍︎Kit's note

Henry married Anne Boleyn mainly because he'd put a friend of his into the Archbishopric of Canterbury, a man called Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer said: I will annul your first marriage, because I'm convinced it was illegal from the start, so I annul it, you may marry Anne Boleyn, and he secretly conducted the wedding. Henry, now head of the church and broken from Rome, was also short of money, so he seized England's wealthy monasteries and sold their lands to individuals, creating, for the first time, England's middle class, with effects on social life ever since.

But the main point is this: Henry VIII never wanted England to go Protestant. He wanted everything to carry on as before, minus the monasteries, whose loyalty to the Pope ran too strong, but with himself as Pope instead. That's basically and simply what he wanted. But he reckoned without several factors.

He reckoned without the fact that this book was being feverishly translated into English by a man called William Tyndale, hounded around England, forced to flee to the Continent, and finally burned at the stake. But Tyndale gave us the English Bible on which every other English revision has been based, and that Bible, during Henry's reign, was placed, one copy, in every church in England, and for the first time people could go and read it. Henry reckoned without that. Do you notice? Every time, it's this book that sets people free. Every time, it's the chance to read it that produces the most extraordinary things.

Henry also reckoned without men like Thomas Cromwell, the minister behind the dissolution of the monasteries, not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell of the next century, sympathetic in his heart to Protestant ideas, as Cranmer was; without the widespread resentment that the Pope still drew money out of England, "Peter's pence" and other "annates," the tributes still paid. But Henry feared the pace of change, and, sadly, executed Catholics and Reformers alike toward the end of his reign, leaving England in a ferment when he died, but leaving the throne to a boy of ten, a very serious little Christian even then, deeply influenced by Cranmer, and sympathetic to England continuing to change.

✍︎Kit's note

The Typical English Muddle

The Tudor pendulum: four monarchs, four reversals

Edward VI. During this boy king's brief reign, several things happened: clergy were allowed to marry; the Lord's Supper in the Church of England took on a Protestant character, and the altar was called a table; and, more importantly, services were put into English for the first time instead of Latin, and a book was prepared called the Book of Common Prayer, a book for everybody to use, not just a priest who knows Latin up front, but a book so the common people could pray. After its second revision it became the Book of Common Prayer which, largely unchanged, is still the one used in a Church of England service today. We owe that to that boy king, or rather, to his reign.

One rule brought in under this boy king: every priest had to preach at least four times a year. Can you imagine the state of the church, needing a rule to make people preach four times a year? That's a small window into the state of the Church of England at the time. Under Cranmer, they also began drafting Articles of Religion, up to 42, later cut down to 39. During Edward VI's reign, Protestant refugees also returned to England, and to Cambridge, my old university, came a famous professor of theology from Strasbourg, by the name of Martin Busser, teaching Cambridge students the Protestant understanding of the gospel of Christ.

✍︎Kit's note

Then the boy king died, and the throne passed to his half-sister, daughter of a Spanish mother, Mary. Mary, half Spanish by blood and wholly Spanish in outlook, married Philip of Spain and was determined to bring England back to Rome. 1,200 married clergy were put out of a job. The pendulum swung right back, and during Mary's reign nearly 300 great Christians were put to death, earning her that dreadful nickname: Bloody Mary. She deserved it.

In Oxford, on the main street outside Balliol College, there's a memorial to two men, Latimer and Ridley, burned at the stake during Mary's reign for their Protestant faith. And you'll remember Latimer's words to Ridley: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."

✍︎Kit's note

During Mary's reign, Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, under great pressure signed a document recanting the changes he'd made. But you can't change that easily, and in his heart he knew he'd been wrong, and he too soon found himself headed for the stake. When the time came to be tied to it, he publicly declared his utter remorse over recanting his Protestant stand, and thrust the arm that had signed the paper into the flame, watching it burn to a cinder. He said: that hand, which signed such a paper, must be burned first. That was Cranmer, and 300 others. Hooper was burned at Gloucester; many others burned at the stake, the fires of Smithfield, you've heard of them. Four bishops and one archbishop, and many other leading preachers, were put to death during Mary's reign.

✍︎Kit's note

You can imagine the sigh of relief when Elizabeth I came to the throne. In the Pope's eyes, and many others', she was an illegitimate child; the Pope held Mary Queen of Scots to be the rightful heir, and there lies the root of the treason charge between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth. But the persecution ended, and refugees came flooding back to England.

It's in Elizabeth I's reign that the typical English muddle we call the Church of England really took shape. Elizabeth liked ornate services, liked vestments, liked ritual, so she was unhappy about letting those things go. She said Edward's second Prayer Book was too Protestant, and had it revised, pulling it back toward Rome. She even stopped the practice of clergy meeting to study the Bible together, something that had been doing a power of good in this land. Yet she couldn't turn the clock back as Mary had tried to, and the Elizabethan Settlement, as it's called, settled for a kind of halfway house. And if you want to know why the Church of England today can hold both evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, you have to go back to Elizabeth I, because leaving things in a halfway position, imposed by Parliament, threw the door wide open to exactly that kind of mixture.

The Book of Common Prayer remains largely Protestant, not entirely, but largely. And the 39 Articles finally drawn up under Elizabeth's reign are a wonderful statement of Protestant faith. Any clergyman who preaches the 39 Articles is a clergyman preaching the gospel. Sadly, not everyone does, but it's there, in the book, and there's enough Protestantism in it to build a thoroughly evangelical Church of England, but also the possibility of the other, which came later.

Elizabeth died unpopular, though her popularity rebounded when Philip II of Spain, incensed at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, vowed to invade England by force and bring it back to the Pope. He sent a fleet, the Spanish Armada, 160 ships, 30,000 marine troops, with an army massed on the other side of the Channel ready to cross the moment the invasion began. England was in desperate straits, no allies, and the massed might of Europe seemingly bearing down the Channel.

But England had Sir Francis Drake, and the stories about him you probably know better than I do, how the Armada was routed by superior English seamanship, and how it seemed as if even God fought for England that day, as the winds proved too strong for Spain's unwieldy galleons, wrecking them along the English and Scottish coasts, where wreck-hunters are still searching for them to this day.

✍︎Kit's note

Pawson adds a personal detail: a wrecked Spanish galleon off northern Scotland, sailors coming ashore and being called "Saint Clare", marrying local girls and founding the Sinclair clan. His own mother was a Sinclair, so, by his account, he carries Spanish blood from the Armada. (This is purely a family anecdote, not a verified historical event, but a charming detail showing that even Pawson found his own small thread woven into this much larger story.)

Summing up the Reformers: in none of the three places, Germany, Switzerland, England, was the Reformation carried through to a full conclusion, for the same reason: church and state stood too close together. Either the state ran the church, or the church ran the state, and the result was always a religion imposed on an entire region, eventually leading to war. Pawson asks: is there anything more tragic than people fighting wars over religion, in the name of Christ, in the name of Christianity, killing one another?

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The Romans: three prongs of the Counter-Reformation

So what were the Romans doing all this time? By 1580, 60 years after Luther, Protestantism had spread through much of Germany, to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, a good deal of Switzerland, a fair bit of France, to England, and by 1580, Ireland and Germany remained Catholic. The odd thing is that all this happened in 60 years, and then for the next 300 years the boundaries stayed almost exactly the same, and largely still are. Why did Protestantism spread so quickly in 60 years, then come to a halt?

The answer: when you study what the Romans were doing, you find a movement called the Counter-Reformation. There had been an attack on Rome that had robbed her of half of Europe, and Rome wasn't going to sit down under that. Three things happened that stemmed the flood.

First: Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits. Loyola was a Spanish nobleman badly wounded in war, lying with a shattered leg in hospital for months. During that time he had visions and a change of heart religiously, he became a devout Catholic, believing his life's calling was to stop the spread of Protestantism. He believed doing so meant fighting in a very different way than other armies, you might almost call his followers "the Salvation Army of Rome." He went to Paris, gathered around him six noblemen and some noble ladies, and started the Society of Jesus, popularly known as the Jesuits. Loyola's goal was to keep Europe for Rome and stop the Protestant flood, and frankly, he largely achieved it.

He gathered hundreds of people and subjected them to the most rigorous military-style discipline imaginable, set down in a book called the Spiritual Exercises, 25 days of fasting, seeking visions, and much else. By the end you're ready to be a follower of Ignatius Loyola. What's more, they were prepared to use fair means and foul, provided you kept someone for Rome, you could use whatever means you thought necessary, which is why the English word "Jesuitry" carries a negative sense. One of them, Francis Xavier, converted 700,000 people to Rome in India, the East Indies, and Japan.

✍︎Kit's note

Second: the Council of Trent. The Pope, recognizing much needed discussion, called a council, the Council of Trent, meeting 25 times between 1545 and 1563. At first the Pope considered inviting the Protestants to sit down and see if the differences could be resolved, but his cardinals persuaded him not to invite them, and they never came. Had they come, history might have been different. But they weren't invited.

Trent declared: Tradition stands alongside Scripture. The Apocrypha must be part of the Bible. Purgatory exists. Indulgences, the invocation of saints, images, and relics are a right and pious practice. And the Pope has absolute authority. This was the first time the Church of Rome had said these things this formally. And, I say frankly but lovingly: not one of those things has changed to this day. And indeed it can't, if you believe councils cannot err, how could these things now be denied? The recent Vatican Council cleaned up and adjusted much, explored much, but not a single thing I've just read out has changed at all. Even when Rome says it will accept the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, it comes with the proviso: provided the Apocrypha is included.

✍︎Kit's note

Third: the Inquisition was revived. Torture, imprisonment, and death were used as instruments against Protestants. They wiped out almost every Protestant in Spain, most Protestants in Italy, and elsewhere like Austria. The result is that to this day, Christians as we understand them remain a tiny minority in those lands.

✍︎Kit's note

Why The Tide Stopped After 60 Years

The Counter-Reformation's three prongs

By 1580 — 60 years after Luther — Protestantism had spread across much of Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, France, and England. Then the line held almost still for the next 300 years. Three things stopped the flood.

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The Radicals: one sword only, against both

Now the third group, the one I can be briefest about, yet the one I consider most important. They're called the Radicals because they were the extreme left wing of the Reformation. A recent book I've read calls them "the stepchildren of the Reformation." Who were they, and what did they believe? They were the ones who began asking the most fundamental question of all: who should be doing the reforming? Who should be doing the changing? And they reached a momentous conclusion neither Roman nor Reformer had reached yet: the answer, they said, is that it should have nothing to do with the state at all. That church and state are two entirely different bodies and shouldn't stand too close together. These Radicals believed in a free church, not an established one. They weren't even happy with established Protestantism. They said: you can't make people good through government. You can't impose a religion. It must be freely and voluntarily accepted by people themselves. You can't say everyone in England will be Protestant. You can't say everyone in Spain must be Roman. You can only use one sword: the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. So they were pacifists. They refused to fight in the wars between Protestants and Catholics. They said: we will not fight for the gospel; we shall only use the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God.

This was revolutionary. And they were regarded as dangerous revolutionaries, destroying the very thing that held society together, the idea that church and state belonged to each other. So where did they start? They arose in 1522 in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. They called themselves, significantly, "brethren," and the leaders were two men, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz. Fine Christians, in the very city where Zwingli was getting the city council to impose Protestantism on everybody. They said: that's not the right way to do it. The only right way is to preach the Word, and when people voluntarily accept it, form them into a church. And so they were fighting for what we now call religious liberty.

✍︎Kit's note

And now I must tell you something very sad: it wasn't only the Romans who attacked these people, the Reformers did too. There came a day when Martin Luther told the German princes they must use the sword against these Radicals. And there came a day when John Calvin consented to Felix Manz being drowned as an appropriate end for a Baptist, and he was drowned with Calvin's support. Even Zwingli himself, in Zurich, got the council to pass cruel laws against these people. Isn't it interesting? The Romans used the state, so did the Reformers, and both were willing to use the literal sword in the name of Christ. But the Radicals said: we will use no other sword than this one. And so the sword of the Romans and the sword of the Reformers were both turned against them.

✍︎Kit's note

But the story doesn't stop there, Pawson also mentions "some fanatics and extremists like the Thomas Münzer of Zwickau" among the Radicals, though he says closer study shows most of them don't deserve that reputation.

✍︎Kit's note

Menno Simons, if you've ever come across the Mennonites, you owe those great Christians to Menno Simons. Jacob Hutter, if ever you've come across the Hutterites, you owe those to Jacob Hutter. And to my mind, these were the ultimate reformers. It was they who said: we will change everything that is not according to the Word of God, and we will change it ourselves. We will not wait for princes or popes to change it. We will live by the Word of God and follow it, as individuals and as fellowships, to the fullest degree. And this they did.

✍︎Kit's note

We are here today because of those Anabaptists. We are free from an established church because their influence and ideas rose up in England in Elizabeth I's time, in a group called the Independents, who said: we want a free church. Because they couldn't find it in England, they set off for America on the Mayflower, to settle there, for all time, the principle of religious liberty, the individual's freedom to follow whatever faith they feel is right. This is our heritage. And this is what they fought and died for.

✍︎Kit's note

They had some fanatics and extremists like the Thomas Münzer of Zwickau. But by and large, when you study their story, a story only now being properly written, the research only now coming off the press, you find: only now have people begun to see the true place of the Anabaptists. They fought and died for religious liberty, but they only fought with this, they were accused of being revolutionaries, but so was Jesus Christ. And Jesus said: "My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, my servants would fight." And that is precisely what the Anabaptists said.

Next Sunday, God willing, I'll take the story into the 17th century, the age when religious liberty came to England, the age when people began to be allowed to follow their own convictions in this land. The age of William Penn. The age of John Bunyan. And the age of many another great servant of God.

One Sword Against Two

The Radicals: no state protected them, both sides attacked

Grebel and Manz in Zurich (1525) said: the church should use no sword but “the sword of the Spirit” — the Word. Only believers should be baptized. Both Rome and the Reformers regarded this as a mortally dangerous principle.

In the middle: the Anabaptists, using “only one sword” — the Word — and refusing to take up any other, even while under attack from both sides.

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PHẦN HAI: THẾ KỶ 17, CUỘC CHIẾN GIÀNH TỰ DO THỜ PHƯỢNG

Pawson's next lecture opens with him reading from a Bible printed in 1607, the old English long-s spelling, a translation heavily indebted to William Tyndale's earlier work, reading Philippians 1 in full, because that letter was written from prison, and the 17th century would produce other great writings from prison too, most famously John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

✍︎Kit's note

He defines the century plainly: 1600 to 1700. And the difference between the two ends is the whole point of the lecture: in 1600, this congregation would not have been allowed to meet tonight to worship as they are. By 1700, they would. He sets out to show how liberty of worship came to this land, so that for the last 200–300 years people have been able to meet like this, worshipping as they feel they ought, with no one hindering them, dragging them to prison, or executing them for it. And it's in this century that the battle was fought, and finally won.

England, 1600, and the adventure of the King James Bible

The State Of Play In 1600

Three groups of Christians in England

In 1600, this church would not have been allowed to meet as it does tonight. By 1700, it would be. This is the story of how liberty of worship came to England.

At the century's start there were three groups of professing Christians in England. Officially there were no more Roman Catholics, banned by law; if any remained, they were secret sympathizers. Within the Church of England were two groups: Anglicans, who accepted the compromise Queen Elizabeth had worked out, and Puritans, represented by Richard Baxter, who wanted a much purer Church of England, no vestments, no crucifixes, no candles, plain worship, and above all the Word of God at the center rather than ceremony. Baxter, pastor of the parish of Kidderminster, is a good case in point: besides two or three hours of Sunday teaching, he went house to house, giving each family in his parish its own Bible study, that's the secret of his effect on Kidderminster.

Outside the Church of England was a third group: the Independents, also called Separatists, or "Brownists" (after a man named Brown), or Congregationalists, because they believed each congregation should order its own affairs under the Lord. Their slogan: "Reformation without tarrying for any." Meaning: we're not waiting for Parliament or the Church to change, we're pressing ahead and living by the Bible in our own local congregation right now. The poet John Milton is a good case in point for this Congregationalist strand at the start of the century. Many of them paid for it with their lives, Greenwood and Barrow among them.

✍︎Kit's note

James VI of Scotland became James I of England. From the start he secretly held to the divine right of kings to rule religion, and the divine right of bishops to rule the church, but he kept that quiet while still only King of Scotland. When he came south, the English expected him to favor the Puritan line. They were quickly shocked. He declared: "presbyteries agree as well with monarchy as God and the devil." His watchword: "no bishop, no king."

In 1604 he called a conference of leading Christians to Hampton Court Palace. There James ridiculed and insulted the Puritans without mercy. You're killjoys, he said, don't like sports on Sundays? I'll make it lawful to have sports and entertainment on Sundays, goading them like that. But there was a Puritan there, a famous Oxford professor named Reynolds, a courteous, saintly gentleman, and all the ridicule and laughter didn't disturb him one bit. He stood his ground. And when James had run out of invective, Dr. Reynolds said: your majesty, I have a suggestion, it's time we had a new English Bible. The suggestion was taken up, almost to James's own surprise, and from the Hampton Court Conference, seven years of hard work followed, producing what we call the King James Version, so named not because he started or carried it out, but because he happened to be king when it was finished and presented to him. We call it the "Authorized Version" because he authorized it. The Bible you've used all your life, used in this country for 350 years, was the result of a Puritan at Hampton Court, born in the year 1611.

That year was momentous for England, something else happened too: the first Baptist church in England was founded in 1611, the same year as the Authorized Version. Sadly, after that conference, James issued a proclamation demanding every clergyman fully conform to the bishops. 1,500 vicars refused to sign, and 300 of them were thrown into jail immediately. It was the first rift in the English church, and from it, vestments and rites and ceremonies, absent since the start of the Reformation, came back, and have stayed ever since.

✍︎Kit's note

The Puritan clergy fled to Ireland, where the archbishop at the time was a man called Ussher, a great one for working out dates. If you've ever seen an Authorized Version with "4004 BC" printed at the head of Genesis 1, something God never wrote into the Bible, you're looking at what Archbishop Ussher put there, having calculated that Adam was born about 9 a.m. on 21 October that year. One English scholar remarked rather dryly that, being a careful scholar, Ussher wouldn't commit himself more precisely than that.

✍︎Kit's note

Others who couldn't worship according to conscience fled east, to Holland. There was a group of Independents at a small village called Scrooby, under the faithful pastor John Robinson, meeting as their own congregation. But the local squire brought magistrates to threaten them, and they decided the only way out was to find a boat and cross to Holland. It's a dramatic story: a Dutch boat arranged to meet them near Boston, split into two crossings, one boat with the men, one with the women and children, to avoid detection. The boat with the women and children ran aground in the mud. The men reached the Dutch ship, but then saw English troops appear on shore, firing on the ship, forcing it to pull away, leaving their wives and children behind on the mudflat. Fortunately, a year or two later, the women and children made it out to Holland to reunite with them.

✍︎Kit's note

But something was happening in Amsterdam: a group of Christians began studying the question of baptism. Until then, all the Reformers practiced infant baptism as it had been practiced for centuries. But in Amsterdam, a group under a man called Helwis began to look at this, reaching the conclusion that baptism should be for believers only. Having no one qualified to baptize them, two of them agreed: I'll baptize you if you baptize me. Then, unable to find work, they risked returning to London, and in 1611, at Spitalfields, London, the first Baptist church in England was founded.

✍︎Kit's note

The king is a mortal man, and not God, therefore hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them, and to set spiritual Lords over them... Men's religion to God is between God and themselves; the king shall not answer for it... Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. Thomas Helwys, "A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity" (1612)

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The Mayflower, and Charles I: eleven years without a Parliament

Another group of Independents still in the Low Countries realized staying in Europe was simply impractical, unwelcome, no jobs, going hungry. They decided to do something tremendous: come back to England, get hold of a ship, and go to the New World, trying to build in America a free world where people could worship without the state dictating how. They came back and persuaded the owner of the Mayflower to take them, and were called the Pilgrim Fathers. They left Plymouth in 1620, landing at Plymouth in the New World that December. But what a hard experience awaited them, in the first winter, 50% died, from lack of food, cold, lack of medical care. Yet they stayed, and even though they had battles with established Anglican settlements there, the Pilgrim Fathers began something that means America today is entirely free of any state-church relationship, where anybody may worship as they feel they ought.

✍︎Kit's note

So under James, some went to Ireland, some to Holland, but in England you had to conform. He was succeeded by Charles I, who was worse than his father. He too believed in the divine right of kings and bishops, and went much further: throwing Puritans into prison, heavy fines, the pillory, cropped ears, slit noses, all this happened under Charles I. The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, William Laud, helped Charles I "turn the clock back": the communion table in parish churches was again called the "altar," and people were made to bow to it. Parliament objected, and Charles I simply did without Parliament for eleven years. Can you imagine a king or queen today doing that? I can imagine a Parliament doing without a king or queen for eleven years, but I can't imagine a king saying, no more Parliament.

15,000 Londoners marched on the palace and presented King Charles I with the "Root and Branch Petition", if you've ever heard the phrase "root and branch," this is where it comes from, wanting all "Romish superstition" rooted out. Charles I refused to listen, and within a short time England was at civil war, breaking out in 1642. Parliament fought the king, and it was a religious issue: by and large, the Anglicans fought with the king, the Puritans with Parliament; by and large the north and west were in the king's hands, the south and east in Parliament's, which is why, if you study free churches today, you'll find they still follow that pattern.

One of the greatest fighters for Parliament was John Hampden, there's a statue of him in Aylesbury's market square. Sadly, that leader was killed very early in the war, and Parliament began to lose. They were waiting for a leader, and that leader came in Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell blended them into the New Model Army, under the famous catchphrase: "Trust in God and keep your powder dry." He put new morale into the troops fighting for religious liberty in this land.

✍︎Kit's note

During this civil war, at Westminster, a group of clergymen and scholars from Oxford and Cambridge met to try to work out a pattern of church life everyone could accept, the Westminster Assembly of Divines, with a few Scots invited to attend, whose influence, as Scots often do, ran deep. They produced a statement of faith called the Westminster Confession, and to this day it remains the confession not only of the Scots but of most Presbyterians worldwide. You could probably quote one line from it: what is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever. Have you heard those words? That was decided at Westminster, during the civil war. But it wasn't generally accepted, the Scots accepted it, the English never did.

✍︎Kit's note

Charles I was still around, but was finally brought to London to be beheaded. He was held for a few weeks, or was it days?, in the manor house at Stoke Poges. If you ever get the chance, go there, go into the manor house, and above the fireplace, painted on the plaster wall, is the royal coat of arms of Charles I. To while away the hours and keep his mind off his execution, he painted his own royal coat of arms on the plaster. They've covered it with glass now, but you can still go into the main room at Stoke Poges and see it, before Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall in 1649.

✍︎Kit's note

One Century, Six Reigns

The Stuart monarchs and their religious policy

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Bunyan, "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large," and the reign of Charles II

Among the soldiers who fought with Oliver Cromwell was a young man, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-swearing, born at a little village called Elstow, just outside Bedford. His name was John Bunyan. (More about him shortly.)

After the civil war, the Presbyterians got control of the Church of England and tried to make everybody Presbyterian. Isn't it funny, when the Anglicans are in control, everybody must be Anglican; when the Presbyterians get it, everybody must be Presbyterian. Which caused someone to say: "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." In other words, we've just traded one tyranny for another.

✍︎Kit's note

Finally we come to the reign of Charles II, a man about whom one could hardly say things bad enough, for his lack of principle and profligacy. The Scots accepted him first, crowning him at Scone, thinking he'd fight with the Scots and the English Parliament for Presbyterianism, for a purer Puritan Church. The Scots soon regretted their folly. I can't go into the story of the Covenanters, only to say that 17,000 Scottish Covenanters, meeting in secret in the highlands to worship as they felt they ought, suffered under Charles II.

✍︎Kit's note

Charles II was secretly sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church, and his ambition, through intrigue, was to bring England back to it. He made a secret treaty with Louis XIV of France to turn the clock back 200 years, to the pre-Reformation days. How did he do it? From 1661, a series of Acts of Parliament turned the clock back. 1662 was the worst, the Act of Uniformity. Not Roman yet, but Anglican, with Charles II and Parliament saying: everybody must be this. In that very year, 1662, nearly 2,000 clergymen left their livings, out into the unknown, with no home or job or anything else, because they refused to conform to the Act of Uniformity. And into the English language came a new word: "nonconformist", and at first, it was a criminal word. One of those turned out at the time was dear old Richard Baxter.

In 1665, another Act came, because these ejected clergymen kept creeping back secretly to meet their old congregations, Parliament passed an Act that no clergyman was allowed within five miles of his former church, called the Five Mile Act. Here's an interesting detail: if you go to Wendover, you'll see the Baptist Church on the right-hand side of the road, a good five minutes' walk outside the village, and you may have wondered why build a church outside a village. The answer is simple: in 1662, the Vicar of Aylesbury was turned out for refusing to conform, but kept creeping back into Aylesbury, holding meetings in kitchens and gardens. Then the Five Mile Act came out. Do you know what he did? He stood in the middle of Aylesbury and started walking out five miles, pacing it out, and five miles brought him to a field, where he started meeting. People walked five miles from Aylesbury, and they put up a place of worship, which is now the Baptist Church of Wendover, exactly five miles out.

In 1673 came the notorious Test Act, Parliament saying there must be neither Roman Catholics nor nonconformists in England, everybody must worship this way. This caused a great deal of suffering for conscience's sake.

✍︎Kit's note

From Persecution To Toleration

Four acts, nearly thirty years

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John Bunyan, George Fox, and William Penn: prisoners of conscience

It was during this period that John Bunyan, now older, converted, converted through overhearing some housewives gossiping in a backyard, became a preacher at Bedford. (Housewives, if you gossip in a backyard, bear in mind: you might produce another John Bunyan, if you're gossiping about the right things, because this hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-fighting young man overheard some housewives talking about Jesus in a backyard, and had never heard anything so sweet, and it convicted him of his sin.) He was converted, became a preacher at Bedford, was baptized as a believer, and preached the gospel wherever he could.

John Bunyan was thrown into prison under Charles II, twelve years, with only one break in between, separated from his blind wife and struggling children. But one day in jail he had a dream: he saw a man with a burden on his back, and a man who wanted to be rid of it. He began writing the dream down, and that dream is Pilgrim's Progress. I hope you've read the whole book, in the adult version, not the children's version, the adult version shows you not just what happened to Pilgrim, but what he thought and what he said. And I hope too that someday you'll read another important book by Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, describing his conversion and how he became the preacher he was. I suppose Pilgrim's Progress is the best-known Christian book next to the Bible. He never mentioned the church in it. He never mentioned the sacraments in it. And so it was accepted by Christians of every churchmanship, and to this day has one of the widest appeals of any book ever written in the Christian world.

He died in 1688, buried at Bunhill Fields, which I visited recently. By the end of his life, people called him "Bishop Bunyan", though the one thing he never wanted to be was a bishop. But as he traveled around, as people came to him for help, they said: you have as much right to be called a bishop as those who are. So we're going to call you that. Hence, Bishop Bunyan.

✍︎Kit's note

Bunyan's story has an almost exact chronological and thematic mirror on the opposite side of the Christian world, entirely absent from Pawson's account. Patriarch Nikon's liturgical reforms (from 1652) split the Russian Church; the Great Moscow Synod of 1666–67 ratified the reforms and anathematized the old rites, birthing the "Old Believer" schism. Its central figure, Archpriest Avvakum, was imprisoned over a decade, during which he wrote The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself (1672–75), a prison-written spiritual autobiography of conversion and suffering that Slavists routinely compare to Bunyan's Grace Abounding. Avvakum was burned alive with three companions on 14 April 1682, six years before Bunyan's natural death in 1688. Same century, same theme, state-enforced liturgical uniformity, a prison-written spiritual classic, a movement's founding martyr, at opposite ends of Christendom.

A very different kind of character also suffered during this time: a man called George Fox, who had a very deep spiritual experience in the year 1646. There was something very good about that experience, and something not so good. George Fox discovered, or rather, rediscovered, the power of the Holy Spirit to guide into all truth. He called this experience the "inner light," and he said: it's no use just having Scripture outside you, or even in your head, you need the Holy Spirit inside you too. That was something that needed rediscovering, needed saying. You can have Scripture off pat, but without the Holy Spirit it's dead, not alive.

But, sadly, having rediscovered something good, he then went one step further and said something not so good: that the sure word of prophecy we need today is not the Scriptures but the Holy Spirit alone. From that statement comes the greatest weakness of the movement that followed. He gathered around him a group of like-minded people, called the Society of Friends; others nicknamed them Quakers, because they quaked and trembled before God in their meetings. This has been both their strength and their weakness ever since, their strength, that they believe God can speak inwardly through the Holy Spirit; their weakness, that they reject the sacraments the Lord Jesus meant them to have, being outward things, and also tend to disregard Scripture, relying entirely on inner thoughts.

George Fox was imprisoned for saying that, and at one time there were 4,000 Quakers in prison under the reign of Charles II. If you can imagine what proportion that was, you can understand their suffering, especially when you consider that in prison you got no food unless friends brought it to you, and if all the Quakers were in prison, there'd be nobody left to bring them food.

A young aristocrat said: we will never get freedom in England to worship as we ought, we must go to the New World. His name was William Penn, and Penn lies buried not a mile from this spot, with his family, in the quiet little burial ground of Jordans meeting house. Penn went out to the New World, pressed beyond the frontiers of the coastal colonies, and said: we'll have a state of religious liberty, and it became Pennsylvania, William Penn's colony, where people could be free to worship, following the inner light of the Holy Spirit. He crossed the Atlantic three or four times, but finally died back here, and was buried at Jordans.

✍︎Kit's note

But, and here's a thread Pawson himself never connects, even though both figures appear in his own lecture, William Penn had a genuinely close personal relationship with James II (James's father had been friends with Penn's own father). Penn's influence is credited with having "induced the king to issue" the 4 April 1687 Declaration of Indulgence, granting liberty of worship to Catholics and Dissenters alike. In other words, Penn's advocacy for universal toleration directly helped enable James's own Catholic-toleration policy, which then collapsed in the Revolution of 1688.

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James II, William and Mary, and the state of play in 1700

James II, an avowed Roman Catholic, not in any subtle way like Charles II, but completely openly, said: I'll get you back to Rome if it kills me. To do this he used a man who has gone down in history as brutal, Judge Jeffreys, James II's right-hand man. It was too much for England, and as a result of a popular rising against the king, James II had to flee.

✍︎Kit's note

Finally we have that strange pair, William and Mary, we tend to say "King William and Mary", who came to the throne of England together, and a new era of stability and tolerance began, setting the pattern for the rest of English church life, with one exception: Roman Catholics weren't allowed back in this reign, and they'd wait another hundred years. But tolerance was extended to others: in 1689, nonconformists were at least partially recognized, and the persecutions began to cease.

✍︎Kit's note

I have here a book, Fox's Book of Martyrs. It was required Sunday reading for children in the time of my great-grandfather. I don't know that I'd dare give it to my own children now, or I'd have their teacher after me for filling their heads with such things. It's the most horrible account of Christian martyrs, from New Testament times through to 1682. I fear the author hoped no more stories of martyrdom would need writing after Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and that the toleration gained by the end of that century would be lasting, with no more martyrs. In a sense, there haven't been any more in England. But across the world, there has not been a period of ten years since Jesus died on the cross when Christians have not died for the faith, and it still goes on somewhere in the world.

✍︎Kit's note

So with the Toleration Act, for the first time nonconformists could put up buildings of worship, and in the very next year, Jordans meeting house was erected, you can date that tolerance if you look at the date on Jordans meeting house, just months after the 1689 Toleration Act. A few years later, Amersham Old Town Baptist Church began, and by the end of the century, nonconformists had a thousand places of worship.

So, at the start of this lecture I gave you the state of play in 1600; now let me give you the state of play in 1700. There are now three parties in the Church of England, still here today: High, Broad, and Low. The High party still hankers after Romish practices in worship. The Low party belongs to the few Puritans who managed to stay in somehow, with very simple, unadorned worship, no vestments, no altar, just a table, worshipping much like the Church of Scotland, and doubtful about having bishops at all. Then there's the Broad party, the one I want to leave you thinking about, because it's the start of the 18th-century story.

Let me ask: what did God think about all this? What did the devil think about all this? I have the feeling the devil was laughing up his sleeve at Christians killing each other. I have the feeling he was thrilled that they were physically destroying one another. But when the Toleration Act came, and they allowed each other to worship freely, the devil had to think up a new tactic, and he thought up a most devilish one: instead of destroying Christians physically, he would think up something that would destroy them mentally.

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The bridge to the 18th century: "queer" ideas from the Continent

Through the 17th century, some very queer ideas had been produced on the Continent, in the name of Christianity. In Sweden there was a scientist called Swedenborg, producing incredible ideas and calling them Christianity, founding the New Jerusalem Church. You may not have come across them, I found more of them in Lancashire. On the Continent was a man called Sosinius, in Italy, saying things like: the Bible is not the word of God, it's helpful, but not simply the word of God as such; and Jesus was not the Son of God, he was simply a great man of God we must imitate; and Jesus didn't die for our sins, he died to give us an example of love. These things were being said, and these ideas were crossing the English Channel.

There were other ideas from a man called Arminius in Holland, who opposed the teaching of Calvin. Ever since, we've had Calvinism and Arminianism, and they came almost to mental blows over this difference. Calvinism emphasized the sovereignty and will of God; Arminianism emphasized the free will of men. And into the Church of England, from the Continent, came a party who really felt that as long as you came to church and worshipped, it didn't much matter whether you held the old beliefs.

Until the end of the 17th century, all the people who disagreed about church order, about bishops, about baptism, agreed about Christian belief and what the gospel was. But now there came into the Church of England, from the Continent, a party who believed you could be much more latitudinarian in your doctrine, in other words, wider, broader in your thinking than the old-fashioned gospel. And this was to kill the Church of England almost dead, by the 1730s, spiritually robbing it of its power and heritage. And that's the story I want to take up next time.

✍︎Kit's note

I've told you this story not to give you a history lesson, but because I want you to realize: if we were living in 1700, you and I could not have met here tonight. We were not free to do so. You would have to conform to a set order of service, settled by act of Parliament; you would have to conform to a rigid church government, settled by act of Parliament; and there would be no freedom for you to meet as we do once a month in a church meeting, to decide what the Lord would have us do. Now this liberty is ours. Praise the Lord for that.

There were those who saw that the New Testament demanded a free church in a free state, that religion was a matter of conscience, those who carried this to the New World, those who carried it to the Continent, but above all, those who stayed here and went to prison and fought it out, that you and I might come to Gold Hill Baptist Church this Sunday evening and worship God as our conscience dictates. Thank God for this liberty. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We could lose that liberty again, very easily, as others have lost it. And we need not only to look back into the past, but to praise God that in the future, he can keep us where we ought to be.

I've also told you this story to say this: in spite of all these battles, in spite of all these difficulties, the church of God goes on, and in every generation the Holy Spirit converts men and women and makes them blazing preachers of the gospel, and sends them out. Even in spite of all this, the church was still there. Christians were still there. The gospel was still there. The Bible was still there. For Jesus said: "I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

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PHẦN BA: THẾ KỶ 18, VÒI NƯỚC LẠNH VÀ VÒI NƯỚC NÓNG

The final lecture in this trio opens with Acts 17, Paul and Silas at Thessalonica, accused of "turning the world upside down"; at Berea, where the Jews were "more noble," examining the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul preached was true; then Athens, Paul standing in the Areopagus, preaching about "the unknown God", among the believers there was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus council itself. Pawson lingers on the Bereans to tell his own congregation: that's exactly what he hopes they'll do with what he preaches, go home, check the Scriptures, and if it's not there, don't believe it.

✍︎Kit's note

He tells how, just weeks before the 18th century opened, in November 1699, "Master Gulliver" was wrecked on the land of Lilliput, Gulliver's Travels was born, written by Jonathan Swift, an Irishman who tried many times to settle in England, failed, and finally died insane in Dublin. It's not a children's book, it's a savage attack on English society at the start of the 18th century. A few years later, Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked on his island, and seems much happier there than when he returns to England in 1715. Both books introduce what Pawson wants to say before turning to the church: England was going to pieces. Socially, England was in a bad way. And the question is why?

Pawson sums up the whole evening in a simple image: man was turning on the cold tap, and God was turning on the hot tap, throughout the 18th century. Man turning the cold tap of what we call rationalism, the intellect alone, reason alone. God turning the hot tap of what we call revivalism, calling great men to preach the gospel, raising the temperature of English society. The biggest lesson to draw from the 18th century: a man's beliefs affect his behavior. What a man thinks in his heart, so he will be in his outward life. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he", that might be the text for the whole evening.

The Lecture's Central Metaphor

The cold tap, the hot tap

Pawson's thesis: belief shapes behavior. As cold reason snuffed out belief in a God who acts, social morality cooled with it. But right then, God “turned on the hot tap” — through individuals he raised up, not committees or councils.

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The cold tap: science, deism, and the "lawgivers of society"

Part of this was the influence of science. Copernicus said the planets revolve around the sun, not the earth. Galileo, with his telescope, confirmed it. Isaac Newton was still discovering the law of gravity through apples. But above all, Francis Bacon and Descartes said: the universe we live in is governed by laws that can't be broken. If an apple comes off a tree, it must fall, that's the law of gravity, unbreakable. This, with one blow, swept out miracle, and swept out a great deal of what happens in the Bible, since much of the Bible seems to run against such natural laws. Bacon went further, and you'd be amazed how modern he sounds, how much we're indebted to him, saying that only what you can prove by observation is true. If you can't prove something scientifically by observation, you needn't believe it; you mustn't accept anything on authority. That was a tremendous step forward, or backward, depending how you look at it. But it's astonishing how a sixth-former today says exactly the same thing: I can't believe it unless you can prove it; I can't believe in God unless you demonstrate him to me. They're just echoing Francis Bacon. And frankly, that idea kills religion dead, because the one thing you cannot prove by observation is the eternal world to which God, the devil, the angels, and everything else religious, belong.

✍︎Kit's note

So where does God fit in? Did people stop believing in God in the 18th century? No. But they switched from a belief we call theism to a belief we call deism, one step on the way to atheism. Theism is the belief that God created the world and controls it. Deism is the belief that God created it but can't control it. Atheism is the belief he didn't even create it, because there's no God to create it. One of the most popular images, propounded by a bishop: the world is like a gigantic clock. Once you've wound it up, there's nothing more you can do, it just runs according to its own laws. So they said: God made the world, wound it up, and now can only sit back. There is a God, but he can't do anything. And that's really a dead sort of God. You wouldn't pray much to a God who couldn't do anything, would you? And this was killing prayer, killing belief in a living God still in control of everything.

This kind of thinking, that God is far away and can't do much, crept right into the churches, under different names in different places: in the Church of England they called it latitudinarianism; in the Church of Scotland, moderatism; and among the Baptists, unitarianism, because one belief was that God couldn't possibly have "come down" at Christmas, and Jesus must simply have been a great man. And so watered-down faith began to disappear. Every denomination suffered from this thinking. Some Baptist churches closed because of it. Worship became very formal, very dead. You came only to pay respects to the deity who made it all, but you were never to expect him to do anything. God couldn't. He was outside what he had made.

✍︎Kit's note

It wasn't only "laws of nature" being discovered. Other writers thought they'd discovered "laws of human nature," laws of society. John Locke wrote about the laws governing society. Voltaire, living in "the age of Louis XIV" in France. Rousseau, another Frenchman, with his famous saying: "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Then there was the Scotsman Adam Smith, writing a very big book on balancing imports and exports and the division of labor, strangely modern, I wonder if today's chancellors have read Adam Smith. And Mary Wollstonecraft, fighting for the rights, you might almost say divine rights, of women, writing a book advocating women voting, playgrounds at schools, co-education, revolutionary in its day. All these were trying to discover laws of society, laws of human nature. But they were all saying the same thing: the laws of society, like the laws of nature, don't need God. The natural world runs without God. The social world, human nature, runs without him too. And it was from these ideas that things like the French Revolution came, Rousseau has been called the father of the French Revolution.

✍︎Kit's note

The church tried to fight back with the weapons of the intellect. Two bishops, Bishop Butler and Bishop Barclay, really tried to preach intellectually, matching the evidence against God with evidence for God, making the whole thing something of an intellectual argument. Quite frankly, that never yet did much good. You can never argue a person into spiritual life. You might remove some of their questions and barriers. But you'll never build a church on intellectual argument alone.

✍︎Kit's note

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England drifts, while America and France revolt

Jefferson wrote Locke's philosophy straight into the Declaration of Independence. Read Locke's book first, then the Declaration, and you'll see where America got it from. In France, July 1789, all these new ideas burst into the French Revolution. Now reason was to be the goddess. And on the very altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, they enthroned a goddess of reason, declared no more God, and the reign of terror began. Later, Napoleon entered Rome, confiscated the papal territories, and brought the Pope as a prisoner to France. That was the kind of turmoil going on. In America, the revolt of the colonies and the Declaration of Independence. In France, the French Revolution. And in England, with all this turmoil of ideas, what happened? The answer: precious little. England just drifted downward, while everywhere else had a revolution. Again, quite typically English, we just let things slide.

✍︎Kit's note

✍︎Kit's note

So England drifted rather than revolted. Religiously, there was a hearty dislike of what was called "enthusiasm", nowadays we'd say emotionalism. People went to church and said: no emotionalism in church, no fanaticism, just a nice intellectual talk from the vicar. But no getting excited. No getting worked up. No showing any feeling. And of course that's not a balanced religion. Lethargy and apathy crept into the congregations. A century earlier they went to fight for religion. Now they just sat in a pew and yawned. Religion, I'm afraid, became very much the religion of the upper class. The working man was poor, ignorant, and simply not welcome.

Bishop Butler was offered the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and is said to have replied: "it's too late for me to save a dying church. It will have disappeared in my lifetime." That was the state of the church. And where the spiritual state is like that, the moral state will be worse. If you wanted an afternoon's entertainment in the 18th century, you got your family together and went up to Tyburn, now Hyde Park Corner, near Marble Arch, and took a picnic, to watch people being hanged. It was great fun. Children. Women. Men. You could be hanged for stealing five shillings' worth of goods, or a single shilling. If you wanted other amusement, you went to a cockpit and watched cock-fighting. And of course the quickest way out of London and the other industrial areas was the public house, drink was so cheap the signs hanging in the lanes simply read: "Drunk for a penny. Dead drunk for tuppence. Free straw to lie on." This led to the most appalling abuses, heavy drinking, heavy gambling, heavy fighting. If you want to study English social life in this cold, intellectual religious period, read Fielding's Tom Jones, or study Hogarth's cartoons, The Rake's Progress, or read Boswell's Life of Johnson. One contemporary writer summed it all up: "Decay in religion, licentiousness in morals, public corruption, and profaneness of language." That was England, in the first 30–40 years of the 18th century. No wonder a man was busy writing Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. I'm surprised he didn't go on to write Decline and Fall of English Society, he easily could have.

So what stopped England from having a revolution? Why didn't the poor rise up? Why wasn't there a complete turning-upside-down of society, as in America, as in France? The answer: during this century, God turned on the hot tap.

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The hot tap: Wales, America, and Count von Zinzendorf

God's method is always this: to choose a personality, and fill that personality with his Holy Spirit, enabling them to do it. This has always been God's method. It's very rarely that God has worked through committees or larger groups of people. His method is always to raise up men to do the job, and it always will be, as long as those men remain in the relationship to Christ they should be.

For those of you from Wales, he raised up Howell Harris, Griffith Jones, and Daniel Rowlands, who changed the course of Welsh history. For those from America, it was in this century that he raised up Theodore Frelinghuysen, and through him influenced the great preacher Jonathan Edwards, and that great man of prayer David Brainerd, who went as a missionary to the Indians and died after only three years, but changed American history. It's estimated that in the 18th century, in America alone, 300,000 people were led to the Lord, considering the population then, that's quite a revival, with camp meetings flourishing at the end of the century.

✍︎Kit's note

But the two countries I want to talk about are first Germany, then England, because they're closely related. I want to tell you about a man God raised up in Germany, called Count von Zinzendorf. (You have some of his hymns in the hymn book here, "Jesus, Still Lead On" and "Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness.") Zinzendorf had a huge estate in Saxony called Herrnhut. And to that estate one day came some beggars, worshippers of the Lord Jesus Christ, remnants of the church of John Huss in Bohemia. Even centuries after Huss, they still met simply around the Lord Jesus Christ. They'd been turned out of their own country, and they came to von Zinzendorf. He'd been converted not long before, and he said: come in, you can have my estate, build houses here, I'll protect you, and together we'll build a Christian community. And they did, calling it the Moravian Community, and they became the first real missionary society in Europe. There had been other attempts at missionary work before, but that little group of Moravians sent out no fewer than 25 missionaries in the first few years of their life, taking the gospel of Christ to the utmost parts of the earth.

Von Zinzendorf once said: "I have only one passion. It is Jesus." And that sums up his life. No wonder he was the great man he was.

✍︎Kit's note

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George Whitefield: "rope of sand"

The first man God laid his hand on was a young man working his way through Oxford by cleaning the shoes of the other students. His name: George Whitefield. God laid his hand on that young man, going places, hard-working, disciplined. But God said: George Whitefield, you're a sinner and you need salvation. Through a great spiritual struggle, George Whitefield came to know the Lord Jesus Christ. He began to preach. A year after his conversion he was preaching, I forget where, but I remember his first text: 2 Corinthians 5:17, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." He preached it at Gloucester. And when he preached that sermon, he said something that mortally offended most of his hearers: "I do not care if you've been baptized. I do not care if you've had water on your forehead in the name of the Trinity." He said: "You must be born again." He said: "I've got the new birth. And I want you to have it." When he finished preaching, 17 people were born again. That was the beginning. He was soon preaching to 30,000 and 40,000 at once. He not only traveled England, he went to Scotland, preaching to 40,000 in Edinburgh, then crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, dying in America at the end. But he preached everywhere he could go. George Whitefield was one of the greatest servants of God England has seen.

The tragedy is that most of his work disappeared after his death, because he never organized follow-up for his converts. The only person who really urged him to start churches, in a sense, was the Countess of Huntingdon. If you've ever seen a church with "The Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion" over the door, you're looking back to the days of that lady, who supported George Whitefield. But when he died, he said: "I feel my work has been a rope of sand, and will disappear very quickly." And in fact it has. You don't hear of any Whitefieldites today. You don't hear of any groups bearing his name today, except that Countess of Huntingdon connexion, and one or two other small groups. But nevertheless, he led thousands to the Lord. I don't mean they fell away, I mean they found their way into other churches.

✍︎Kit's note

✍︎Kit's note

Though not the first in order if we look at the date of his birth, I place him first in the order of merit, without any hesitation. Of all the spiritual heroes of a hundred years ago, none saw so soon as Whitefield what the times demanded... There are Lutherans and Wesleyans in the present day, but there are no Whitefieldites. The great evangelist of last century was a simple, guileless man, who lived for one thing only, and that was to preach Christ., J. C. Ryle, "Christian Leaders of the Eighteenth Century" (1885)

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John Wesley: "a brand plucked from the burning"

The other great man I must tell you about, and here I'll take more time, because he deserves it, is John Wesley, one of my great heroes. The story begins in a little village in Lincolnshire, where my wife and I were married, Epworth. We were married in the Wesley Memorial Church. And in that rectory, something happened, something new was born.

John Wesley's grandparents had been Independents, which explains a great deal. But his parents were both Anglican by conviction, serving as vicar and vicar's wife of that little town of Epworth. Samuel Wesley, the father, was quite an amazing man, a bit of a poet, spending most of his years writing a poem on Job that was never really popular, but he passed on to his sons a poetic gift. But the mother was the truly amazing one: old Susanna Wesley. She had 19 children, trained them not to cry after they were a year old, and when they turned five, taught them to read, by the end of their first week, they could read Genesis 1. How much they understood, I don't know, and how she did it, I don't know, no initial training alphabet, none of your modern toys to help. She gave one hour a week to each child, to help them grow spiritually. And when you study the life of Susanna Wesley, you've studied the beginning of Methodism, for that's what was to come.

When John, or "Jackie" as she called him, was seven years old, the rectory caught fire. They got all the children out, bar one, Jackie, little John. Those who've seen the film will remember the dramatic moment when they saw him at the upstairs window, and how the villagers climbed on each other's backs to rescue him. She clutched him to her bosom and said: you're a brand plucked from the burning. And from then she believed John would be her greatest son. And so he was.

✍︎Kit's note

✍︎Kit's note

✍︎Kit's note

He went to Charterhouse School, then Oxford, joining his brother Charles. There they formed what they called the Holy Club, and my, it offended everybody else too, as such a name might suggest. They got up at four in the morning to pray, did their studies as ordinary students during the day, then visited the jail, and ran a dispensary for the sick. And they were trying desperately to save themselves by being good. One member of the Holy Club was George Whitefield, that's where their paths crossed. This little group of students were desperately trying to get to heaven by being good. They still hadn't learned how you become a Christian. They were so methodical in the way they got up, and went to the jail, and did this and that, keeping accounts of it all, that other students stopped calling them the Holy Club and gave them a nickname: Methodists. It was a term of abuse. But the nickname stuck, and has stuck to this very day.

The time came when John felt he still wasn't doing enough for God, so he offered for the ministry, as his father had before him, as his brother had before him. John and Charles were ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury, priests of the Church of England, and still not Christians. And because they knew this in their hearts, they felt they weren't doing enough for God, so they volunteered as missionaries to Georgia, to the Red Indians, thinking: surely if you go as a missionary, you get saved. And they went out to save their own souls. Could you get that far without being a Christian? Of course you can. And they did. They were not only priests, they were missionaries. And they hadn't saved their own souls, desperately trying to.

On the way out, in the middle of the Atlantic, they struck a storm. Everyone panicked, threw things overboard to lighten the ship, thought the end had come. But in the middle of the ship were a group of people, quiet, calm, praying. Moravian refugees, from Hanhut, who knew Count von Zinzendorf. John Wesley went up to them afterward, in his clergyman's garb: why weren't you afraid? They said: why should we be? And one of them began asking about his soul: do you know that Jesus is your savior? This clergyman, John Wesley, replied: I know he is the savior of the world. But do you know that he is your savior? Wesley said yes. But in his diary that night he admitted it was a lie, writing: I go to Georgia to save my own soul. How can I save the souls of the Indians? He came back to London after three miserable years of failure, wondering what to do. His brother came back too, an equal failure.

But praise God, God had someone waiting for them in London: a man called Peter Böhler (Pawson pronounces it "Peter Berler"), another Moravian, from Count Zinzendorf. Peter Böhler got hold of them, talked to them. And there was one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday: John Wesley went to St Paul's Cathedral to worship that morning. Reading his Bible that morning, he opened it and read: "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." And that night he went to a little meeting of the Moravian Germans on Aldersgate Street. (There's a Barclays Bank there now, but they've put a plaque marking where it happened.) In Aldersgate Street, on 24 May 1738, he went to the meeting, and they read aloud Luther's preface to Romans. (I wonder how many people today would sit through a theological preface being read aloud for hours in church.) But when the clock struck a quarter to nine that night, John Wesley says this: "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, that he had saved me from my sins, even mine, saved me from the law of sin and death." And an assurance was given him in that moment that he really was a forgiven sinner.

Here was a man who'd been a failed missionary, an ordained priest of the Church of England, who'd done so much good for other people, and yet had never known his own sins forgiven. That's what happens when you try to save yourself, because you're putting your trust in what you do instead of what Christ does. And this was the one thing he'd never learned.

✍︎Kit's note

Soon after, he went to Germany to visit von Zinzendorf, coming back with many hymns which he translated into English. But he came back wanting to preach the gospel. Preach he did, but the pulpits closed to him. Every time he preached in a Church of England building, they told him afterward: that's your first and last visit here. And so he finally reached a point where he couldn't preach at all. Then George Whitefield said to him: John, will you come and preach in the open air? John Wesley thought it the most dreadful thing in the world, an ordained clergyman not preaching from a pulpit. But then he remembered that Christ himself preached the Sermon on the Mount. And he said: if Christ could preach on a mountain, so can I. He went down to Kingswood, outside Bristol, to the miners, and preached. As he preached, he describes in his journal how the tears made "little white rivers down their black cheeks." John Wesley realized God was calling him to the same ministry as George Whitefield, who was now leaving for America. He took up the threads of Whitefield's preaching. That was April 1739, when he began open-air preaching.

He met opposition, dragged by the hair through the streets at times, as in the Wednesbury riots. But in 50 years he traveled a quarter of a million miles on horseback, with a Bible in his hand and a horse between his knees. He'd ride into a village and preach, and this is how he preached: he'd begin with the Ten Commandments, preaching the law, the law by which every man and woman will be judged, and he'd go on preaching the law for days, until people began to look unhappy, began to look troubled. Then, when he realized they were beginning to feel themselves sinners, he says in his diary: "I began to mix a bit of the love of God with the law of God." And a bit more. And a bit more. Until finally I was preaching the gospel of the love of God. Wesley discovered: you cannot preach the love of God until you preach the law. There's no point preaching a Savior to those who never felt their own misery. "What comfort can a Savior bring to those who never felt their woe?", that was written all over his ministry.

His three centers were London, Bristol, Newcastle, and all across that triangle you'll find places Wesley preached. His last sermon was preached at Leatherhead, Surrey. He preached on the principle, as he said, that "the world is my parish", and there may be some truth that he was helped in his travels by an unhappy marriage, keeping him on the move. That was the one real shadow over his life, though many are grateful for it, since it kept him traveling. He traveled and traveled, preached and preached, seven times a day was normal. He didn't only preach, he wrote and published books and pamphlets. He opened schools and orphanages, dispensaries. He was the first to use electric treatment for rheumatism, with a machine you can still see at his house on City Road today, and they've discovered it produces enough electricity to kill a man, but he used it for rheumatism. He was the most varied man, but obviously, he couldn't do it all himself.

The trouble was he had few clergy to work with him. So his mother came up with an idea: what about unordained preachers? Local lay preachers, who wouldn't travel everywhere as he did, but preach locally? One of the very first team of six was John Pawson, and his wife, Frances Pawson, was one of the leading Methodist women of that day. (I suppose our tribal association goes back to that.) With a team like that, John Wesley's reply to his mother was: give me a hundred such men, we're setting them on fire. And they did. When he died, there were 80,000 people meeting in fellowship as a result of his travels.

He didn't do what George Whitefield did, or rather, he did what Whitefield didn't do: when they were converted, he built them into fellowships, largely because the local churches wouldn't have them. He called these not "churches" but "societies," Methodist societies, giving them class leaders whose job it was to lead them spiritually. Then he had, we could say, so many societies in a district, and he called that district a "circuit", because a local preacher could go around it on horseback once a month and preach in every place. So he built horse circuits the local preachers traveled around. This kind of machinery is still used today, though I think it's ill-adapted to the 20th century, but for horseback, it was a very good idea, ideal organization for the setting he was in.

Bear in mind, all this time, John Wesley was a Church of England clergyman. What did they think about him? I'm afraid they thought very badly of him, especially when he ordained ministers for America. And though he never left the Church of England, it was quite obvious that as soon as he died, the Methodist societies would become Methodist churches. And this they did. The split came as soon as he died. But I think John Wesley was to blame, or at least was the man who did all that needed to be done to bring about the separation. I like the remark of someone who said: John Wesley was like a man rowing a boat. He kept his face towards the Church of England, but every pull of his oars took him further from it. That's precisely what he did. And so we're left at the end of the 18th century with a very large group of Methodists, in addition to the Anglicans, in addition to the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists, the Baptists and the Friends. And by century's end, Roman Catholics were allowed back in too. We're beginning to get the kind of picture we live in.

✍︎Kit's note

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Charles Simeon, and five results of the Revival

Now let me finally look at one other great man of this century, right at the end of it. In 1799 (as Pawson tells it), there came a young, dissolute student to Cambridge, by the name Charles Simeon, hunting, shooting, fishing, a gay young man. When he came to Cambridge, he came face to face with his own life, went through a spiritual struggle, and out of it came to a sense of forgiveness. As he put it: "I laid my sins on the head of Jesus." He was shortly ordained to the ministry, and at the early age of 23, went as vicar to Holy Trinity Church, where it was my privilege to preach a month ago. In the vestry, you can see his teapot, his umbrella, pictures of him, Charles Simeon. He preached, and the church was thronged, with a tremendous influence on the students. It was from his congregation that that young man, Henry Martyn, went out to die in Persia as one of the greatest missionaries there's ever been. Charles Simeon must be put in the great list of heroes of this century.

✍︎Kit's note

Now let me finally list some of the practical things that came out of this. I know exactly the kind of thing people say, and they still say it: what's the point of all this gospel preaching and hymn singing? What we need is people who get on and make the world a better place. All this hot gospeling and ranting doesn't do anybody any good. May I say the 18th century gives the lie to that, let me give you five results, very simply.

The first, one the world won't appreciate, but which Christians have appreciated ever since: the century burst into song. I've mentioned Isaac Watts, think of his famous hymns: "I'll Praise My Maker," "O God, Our Help in Ages Past," "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross," "Jesus Shall Reign Where'er the Sun." What about Philip Doddridge? "Hark the Glad Sound, the Saviour Comes," "O God of Bethel." What about Cowper? "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood." What about Newton? "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds," "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken." And above all, Charles Wesley. Charles Wesley wrote 6,000 hymns, for every conceivable occasion. He'd write them on horseback, arrive at a house and say: don't speak to me, give me a pen and paper, quick. And out would come a hymn. We'll finish this service with one he wrote when he was one year old spiritually, on the anniversary of his conversion, when Peter Böhler, the Moravian German, said to Charles Wesley: if I had a thousand tongues, I'd want to sing the praise of Christ. And down it came: "Oh, for a Thousand Tongues to Sing My Great Redeemer's Praise." Among his thousands of others, remember "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," "And Can It Be," "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," and "Rejoice, the Lord Is King."

✍︎Kit's note

In most hymn books, you'll find more hymns by Charles Wesley than any other writer, with Isaac Watts a close second. And the last hymn writer Pawson wants to mention, Montgomery, has one they'd sing at communion that day as one of the devotional hymns.

Second, Sunday schools. If I asked you who started Sunday schools, I wonder what you'd say. If you know anything, you'd probably say Robert Raikes in Gloucester. And I tell you, you're wrong. Sunday schools were started by Hannah Ball in High Wycombe, a Methodist lady who lies buried in Stokin Church graveyard. I took my father to see her grave a few weeks ago. Hannah Ball started Sunday schools in a disused furniture factory in High Wycombe, as the result of correspondence with John Wesley. And it was Hannah Ball who suggested to Robert Raikes: why don't you do the same? And the extraordinary thing is there's a statue of Robert Raikes in Gloucester that says "founder of Sunday schools." Well, he copied the idea from a woman. That's one for the fairer sex.

✍︎Kit's note

Third, social righteousness. When people get converted, they put society right. Poor relief began. Dispensaries distributing free medicine began. Orphanages began. Schools began. Prison reform, John Howard's work in prison reform goes directly back to the 18th-century revival. And above all, the outstanding example: William Wilberforce and his fight against slavery. The last letter John Wesley ever wrote was to William Wilberforce, urging him to complete the fight. If you ever go to Kingston-upon-Hull, go to the William Wilberforce Museum, that too came out of the revival.

Fourth, the tremendous spread of good literature. The Religious Tract Society was a direct result. So was the British and Foreign Bible Society. So were the commentaries of the great Bible teacher Thomas Scott.

And the final one, with which I close: missionary societies began, and the influence of Britain on the world for good spread. There had been some earlier attempts at missionary work, but it was at the end of the 18th century, as a result of that rising temperature, that it really got going. It was in 1792, let me get the date right, that the Baptist Missionary Society was formed. It was a Baptist who really set it going, a cobbler from Northampton, constructing a globe of the world out of offcuts of leather, praying for that world, particularly for India. That Northampton cobbler, converted, encouraged to preach in the Baptist churches of Northamptonshire, met with a group of others one day in Kettering in 1792, took a collection, the famous 13 pounds, two shillings and sixpence, quite a lot in those days, and started the Baptist Missionary Society. A year later they were on their way to India, beginning the great missionary work that followed. That was 1792. Three years later, 1795, the Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, not to be outdone, got together and started the London Missionary Society (LMS), which sent out Morrison to China, Livingstone to Africa, and many other famous missionaries. In 1796, not to be left behind, the Methodists founded the General Methodist Missionary Society. In 1799, the Anglicans decided to have one of their own, and the Church Missionary Society was started. And it was just in this period that the British and Foreign Bible Society began, all at the end of the century. This was the direct result of the Evangelical Revival of the 18th century. Who says that hot gospeling has no results? Who says the world isn't changed because people get excited about the Lord?

✍︎Kit's note

“Who Says Gospel Preaching Has No Results?”

Five practical results of the Revival

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Closing: "do it again, Lord"

The one lesson I want to draw out of the whole century, for tonight, is this: what a man believes will affect his behavior. Cold intellectualism, bad morals; hot gospel, and all this follows. Somebody has said that the early Methodists were like a cluster of chaste snowdrops growing on a foul rubbish heap. If you want to understand the Methodist emphasis on not drinking or gambling, you must understand the tradition goes back to the reality of the 18th century, they had to insist on it to get a man anywhere near the Lord. But they fought for it, and they cleaned England up.

A historian in France has said that if you want to understand why the French Revolution, and the enthronement of reason, and the anarchy that followed, did not spread to England, you must study the life of the Reverend John Wesley. That's an amazing tribute. God had his answer. Where man's cold reason, saying you've got to prove everything before you believe it, was killing religion dead, and when you kill religion, you kill morals, God raised up men who pointed to revelation, who pointed to a God giving us knowledge that science can neither prove nor disprove, and preached a gospel of supernatural miracle and a living God who could step in and change a life, and change a society. That neither nature nor human nature was governed by blind laws, but that both were governed by God, and that God could turn both to his eternal purposes.

✍︎Kit's note

That's the message I wanted to bring you tonight. Great men of God were warmed up again, and brought the gospel of Jesus Christ to this land. And we still benefit from the effects of that revival, 200 years and more later.

Closing prayer. O God our Father, there is one prayer in all our hearts. Do it again, Lord. You are still the same God. Your arm is not shortened that you are not able to save today. We pray that in the decline of our society, with things on every hand that disturb us, with the revival even of that immoral literature of the 18th century again on the screen, with all this, Lord, do it again. Raise up men who will be fearless to preach Christ. Raise up such an army of evangelists, and men and women on fire for the Lord, that this country again may resound to the ring of the gospel, and we may see again an influence go out from this nation for good, in the whole of the rest of the world. O God, you have blessed us greatly in the past, but we cannot live in the past. We must live now, and we pray that in our day and generation we too may discover the forgiveness of sins in Christ Jesus, and then go out to tell others of the love that can forgive them. Amen.

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Three centuries, three lectures, one continuous story: every time the Church was captured by the state, by German princes, by the Zurich council, by the English Parliament, the result was always war, prison, or a spiritual life gone cold. And every time, there were those who refused to let it happen: Anabaptists drowned for believing in voluntary baptism; Helwys dying in Newgate prison for writing the king to demand liberty of conscience for "heretics, Turks, and Jews"; Bunyan writing Pilgrim's Progress in a cell; Wesley riding a quarter of a million miles to carry the gospel to places the established pulpits had shut against him. By the close of the 18th century, the price of those three centuries had purchased what Scripture calls liberty of conscience, a freedom whose price, as Pawson repeats throughout, "is eternal vigilance," and one that can be lost as easily as it was once lost.

Part 5 of this series, God willing, will carry the story into the 19th century: from the revival that spread after Wesley and Whitefield, through the social and theological upheavals that would shape the Church heading into the 20th century.