Wesley and Shaftesbury

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 242, 9 July 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

Wesley and Shaftesbury

F all men in our modern history he seemed perhaps the most acutely sensitive to the cry of human need from any quarter, ■ B and to each he was extraordinarily responsive with pity or inxk J' dignation, or both,” said Mr. Arthur Black, the general secretary of the Shaftesbury Society, delivering a Shaftesbury lecture. "He was, so to speak, always tuned up to receive S.O.S. messages on any wave-length, and ready to seek, send, or organise relief and rescue. ’Desperate tides of the whole great world’s anguish, Forced through the channels of a single heart’

“It may be, and no doubt often used to be suggested, that he took up too many objects, and that it would have been better to have concentrated on a few and left more to others. For most men such diffusion of energy would have been a mistake. In Shaftesbury’s case it is open to difference of opinion, but it is probable that he did not add a single fresh duty to an already burdensome list out of any craving for power or popularity. . . .

“Could we gather into one place the people for whom his practical sympathies had been excited,” says Mr. Black, “they would include those suffering from lunacy, moral disorder, crime and vice, blindness and crippling diseases; the ill-housed, ill-clad, underfed, overworked ; those of other lands in special need, Chinese and Indians, persecuted races and peoples, Jews in many lands, Nestorians, Armenians, Poles, Bulgarians and negro slaves.

‘Leaders in great human causes made contact with him —Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe. Livingstone, John B. Gough, Moody and Sankey but humble rank and file workers knew that he understood and respected them, and they appreciated him.

“ ‘Go where you will, you will find in every locality, even the most unpromising in appearance, that, though the bulk of the people may be cold and lifeless,

there are some choice spirits, both men and women, full of zeal, activity, talent and administrative power. Not outcast London, but sought-out Loudon is more correct.’ “When, in 1866, a report got into the papers that he was seriously ill, 409 people on that or the following day called at his house in Grosvenor Square ro inquire and leave messages. . . . “Young men and women to-day possessing such a personality, mystical and practical, may enter wide open fields of service at home or abroad, very differ ent, but no less charged with significance, from those in which Shaftesbury laboured with the enthusiasm of young manhood, the energy of middle life, and the endurance of old age. " ‘Thro’ such souls alone God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light For us in the dark to rise by. And we rise.’ — “In the length and breadth of their service for Church and Kingdom. Shaftesbury and John Wesley, who the Protestant world remembered on the 24th of May, 200 years after his spiritual awakening—an epoch in English his tory’—were almost equal. ... "Shaftesbury followed a century later, and sought to embody in British law and custom and in imperial policy the great Christian principles that Wesley had proclaimed with such untiring zeal and extraordinary results. “The present international and religious problems offer even more stirring challenges to men and women of exceptional ability and power to invest them without reserve for the profit of humanity and the glory of God. “The world could well do with a twentieth century Wesley and Shaftesbury.”