Arrows of FreethoughtFoote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Arrows of Freethought
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Free thought
Early Christians were "full of the Holy Ghost," that is of wild
enthusiasm. Scoffers said they were drunk, and they acted like madmen.
Leap across seventeen centuries, and we shall find Methodists acting
in the same way. Wesley states in his Journal (1739) of his hearers at
Wapping, that "some were torn with a kind of convulsive motion in every
part of their bodies, and that so violently that often four or five
persons could not hold one of them." And Lecky tells us, in his "History
of the Eighteenth Century," that "religious madness, which from the
nature of its hallucinations, is usually the most miserable of all
the forms of insanity, was in this, as in many later revivals, of
no unfrequent occurrence." Now Salvationism produces the very same
effects. It drives many people mad; and it is a common thing for men
and women at its meetings to shout, dance, jump, and finally fall on
the floor in a pious ecstacy. While they are in this condition, the
Holy Ghost is entering them and the Devil is being driven out. Poor
creatures! They take us back in thought to the days of demoniacal
possession, and the strange old world that saw the devil-plagued swine
of Gadara drowned in the sea.
The free and easy mingling of the sexes at these pious assemblies, is
another noticeable feature. Love-feasts were a flagrant scandal in the
early Church, and women who returned from them virtuous must have been
miracles of chastity. Methodism was not quite so bad, but it tolerated
some very strange pranks. The Rev. Richard Polwhele, in his "Anecdotes
of Methodism" (a very rare book), says that "At St. Agnes, the Society
stay up the whole night, when girls of twelve and fourteen years of age,
run about the streets, calling out that they are possessed." He goes
on to relate that at Probus "the preacher at a late hour of the night,
after all but the higher classes left the room, would order the candles
to be put out, and the saints fall down and kneel on their naked knees;
when he would go round and thrust his hand under every knee to feel if
it were bare." Salvationism does not at present go to this length, but
it has still time enough to imitate all the freaks of its predecessor.
There was an All-Night meeting in Whitechapel a few months ago, which
threatened to develope into a thoroughgoing love-feast. The light was
rather dim, voices grew low, cheeks came perilously near, and hands met
caressingly. Of course it was nothing but the love of God that moved
them, yet it looked like something else; and the uninitiated spectator
of "the mystery of godliness" found it easy to understand how American
camp-meetings tend to increase the population, and why a Magistrate in
the South-west of England observed that one result of revivals in his
district was a number of fatherless weans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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