Heavenly Heretics - Lyman Powell

Preface

For more than ten years past it has been my custom to speak now and then from my Sunday evening pulpit, of representative preachers who have profoundly influenced the religious life of their contemporaries. The chapters which make up this little volume, after first finding expression in the pulpit, appeared at weekly intervals in the pages of The Hampshire Gazette, one of the oldest daily papers in the land, and are reprinted here through the courtesy of the editors. Books in abundance have been written about Edwards, Wesley, Channing, Bushnell, Brooks. In some volumes, the facts about the men have been set forth; in others, their place in Church and State has been designated. In no book, perhaps, has there been briefly stated all the average reader wants to know in order to visualise as well as understand.

In attempting a hitherto neglected task, I have realised at every stage the difficulty of both interesting and edifying. To meet this difficulty, I have thought it worth while to make full use of local colour, to call in the testimony of contemporary listeners, to analyse specific sermons, and through the gateway of analysis to lead on to each man's general philosophy of life, and finally to state the salient facts and illustrative incidents in every instance in order that the rootage as well as the fruitage of America's best preaching may be evident even to the casual reader.

The selection of an appropriate title for these pulpit essays was a problem. From certain points of view, the five preachers might to some appear arch heretics. But if, as Coleridge says, heresy signifies a principle or opinion taken up by the will for the will's sake, no one of them ought to be classed as a heretic. Their opinions one and all were taken for the spirit's sake, not for that of the will. Without denying what was good in the past, they were in the main looking for a larger faith than those around them seemed to hold. That which was said of the men of faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews could as truthfully have been remarked of them by their contemporaries, - they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly. And therefore to satisfy both the conventional and the unconventional, I am venturing to present this little book under the alliterative title of Heavenly Heretics.

L. P. P.

John Wesley

"The greatest figure that has appeared in the religious world since the days of the Reformation."

John Richard Green

"No other man did such a life's work for England."

Augustine Birrell

"I desire to have a league, offensive and defensive, with every soldier of Christ."

John Wesley

"I live and die a member of the Church of England, and no one who regards my judgment or advice will ever separate from it."

John Wesley, writing in 1791

"He took his stand upon his father's tomb, on the venerable and ancestral traditions of the country and the Church. That was the stand from which he addressed the world; it was not from the points of disagreement, but from the points of agreement with them in the Christian religion that he produced those great effects which have never since died out in English Christendom."

Dean Stanley, at the unveiling of the Wesley Tablet in Westminster Abbey, 1876

"He was a man whose eloquence and logical acuteness might have rendered him eminent in literature; whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu; and who devoted all his powers, in defiance of obloquy and derision, to what he considered the highest good of his species."

Lord Macaulay

"I look upon the whole world as my parish."

John Wesley