Only among the Welsh are the terms ‘Calvinistic’ and
‘Methodist’ mutually compatible. In America
Because the influence of Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland
was so pervasive in Wales, the Methodist Societies there became strongly
Calvinistic and were later considered to be synonymous with Presbyterianism.
Ironically, Howell Harris was loyal to the Established (Anglican) Church before
and after his conversion. In fact, he had harsh words for Dissenters, labeling
them “a perverted and dangerously erroneous set of people.” Yet after he began
his evangelistic ministry, he found more support from the Dissenters than from Anglican
clerics, the latter preaching against him as “a false prophet” and “a deceiver.”
Those who knew Howell Harris before his conversion would never
have expected him to become an advocate of holiness. By his own testimony he had
a combative temperament and was given to extreme vanity:
When I was at school, although small in stature, I was
ever ready to fight, even with friends. I harboured hatred towards those who
treated me shabbily, and despised those of my own family when I wore a new suit
of clothes. I was skillful at lying to my mother, teacher, or anyone
ill-treated by me, and crafty in framing excuses for breaking the Sabbath. (Harris, Autobiography)
That all changed on Palm Sunday, 1735, when the
twenty-one year old Harris heard the Vicar of Talgarth Church admonish the
congregation: “If you are not fit to come to the Lord’s table, you are not fit
to live, and you are not fit to die!” Harris was profoundly smitten by those
words. “All my natural faculties were confounded in the shock,” he wrote. He began
immediately to amend his ways, exercising religious duties faithfully and
making restitution to those he had wronged. Yet he found no peace in his good
works.
As Whitsunday approached, Harris fasted from Thursday to
Sunday, and he recorded all the sins he could remember from age four. During
this agony of spirit, “he felt the strong urge to give himself to God”
(Dallimore, 237). It was at last this abandonment of his own efforts and his trust
in the complete atonement of Christ that brought peace and transformation to
Howell Harris. “I knew that my sins were forgiven me . . . I was so deeply
convinced that nothing could shake my assurance of it.” His old life of
vainglory also vanished: “Now, the world and all thoughts of human applause and
preferment were quite vanished from my sight.” (Autobiography)
Harris wasted no time in sharing his new life with his “fellow
sinners”. Finding no churches willing to accommodate his preaching, he took to
the open air, which set a trend that was to be followed by Rowland, Whitefield,
and later John Wesley. His extemporaneous preaching found a welcome response from
multitudes across Wales, but it also stirred opposition from all ranks of
society. Mobs, sometimes led by clergymen reviling him in the same coarse
language as the common folk, accosted him, “flinging stones or anything they
could lay their hands on.” Once while Harris was preaching from a second story
window in Machynlleth, a crowd led by a lawyer, a clergyman, and “a gentleman”
began hurling stones and swearing at him. “One of them discharged a pistol at
me,” he recalled. “I received no hurt, but was obliged to go among them into
the street, not expecting that I should escape alive . . . But my hour was not
yet come.” (Autobiography)
Despite the ill treatment he received from Anglican
clergy, he remained loyal to the Established Church. He entered St. Mary’s
Hall, Oxford, hoping to attain ordination, “but when I saw the irregularities
and immoralities which surrounded me there, I became soon weary of the place.”
He returned to Wales and resumed his itinerant preaching and teaching, in spite
of Anglican rules against un-ordained religious teachers.
A strong necessity was laid upon me . . . I could not
meet or travel with anybody, rich or poor, young or old, without speaking to
them concerning their souls. (Autobiography)
Harris applied twice to the Anglican bishops for
ordination, but was – not surprisingly – refused because of his Methodism. His
denunciation of Established Church clergy trumpeted like Jesus’ denunciation of
the Scribes and Pharisees of His day:
Many who wear the cloth . . . what good they do I know
not. Because I led some hundreds of ignorant people to a knowledge of what it
means to be Christians, to live in peace and to exercise morality, I am called
a madman by those who claim the office of enlightening the people who are in
darkness.
In 1752 Harris founded a Christian community after the Moravian
model and called it Teulu Trefeca (The
Trefeca Family), which later became Trevecca College. Harris died in 1773 at
his home in Trefeca Fach and was buried nearby. It was reported that nearly
20,000 people attended his funeral.
Harris’s open-air preaching not only inspired other
revivalist preachers, such as George Whitefield, John Wesley, and American
evangelist Samuel Davies, but it laid the foundation for the 19th-
and 20th-century mass evangelism of D. L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and
Billy Graham.
Resources
Dallimore, Arnold. George Whitefield, vol.1
Douglas, J. D. The New International Dictionary of the
Christian Church.
Harris, Howell. Autobiography. Kindle edition
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howell_Harris
(First Published in the Welsh-American newspaper Ninnau & Y Drych, May-June, 2016 http://www.ninnau.com/index.html)
No comments:
Post a Comment