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Chapter 4. Preach Faith Till You Have It. Peter
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Bowler and the Discouraged Priest from Georgia.
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1. Lodgings on Little Wild Street, February 7,
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1738. The young German bishop -to -be, who knocked
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on a door in Holborn on the afternoon of February
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7, 1738, had been in England exactly five hours.
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He had slept on a packet boat across the Channel
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the night before. He spoke by his own careful
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reckoning almost no English, and the few words
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he had acquired he pronounced with the thick
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consonant -laden accent of a man who had grown
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up in the forest between Frankfurt and Erfurt.
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He was twenty -five years old. He was an ordained
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Moravian presbyter of three weeks' standing.
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He was, by every ordinary measure, the least
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likely man in London to alter the spiritual history
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of the English -speaking world. His name was
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Petrus Bowler. Peter in the English usage he
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was about to acquire, and he was waiting for
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a ship. Count Zinzendorf had sent him to London
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en route to the slave missions of South Carolina
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and Georgia, and the passage would not sail for
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ten or eleven weeks. Bowler had no particular
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plans for the interval. He would visit the small
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Moravian gathering in Fetter Lane. He would try
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to improve his English. He would perhaps read.
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A letter had been pressed into his hand, before
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he left Germany, scribbled by a Moravian friend,
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recommending that upon arrival he look up an
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Oxford -educated Anglican priest recently returned
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from the American colonies and reportedly in
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some spiritual distress. The priest's name was
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John Wesley. He lived in lodgings near Fetter
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Lane. He was, the letter said, a brilliant and
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tormented man. Bowler found the lodging. He climbed
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the stairs. He knocked. The man who opened the
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door was 34 years old, gaunt, and shaven in the
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methodical way of a man who had forgotten when
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he last cared to shave, with the hollow eyes
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of someone who has recently returned defeated
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from a very long journey. He had, in the past
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five weeks, crossed a winter Atlantic in a storm
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so violent that he had expected hourly to die.
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He had written in his journal, in the darkest
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of those nights, the sentence that would haunt
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him through the spring. I went to America to
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convert the Indians, but oh, who shall convert
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me?" He stared at the young German on the landing.
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The Germans stared back. They shook hands. They
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did not yet know that the next 96 days would
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remake the English -speaking Protestant world.
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2. The blacksmith's son from Frankfurt. Peter
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Bowler was born in Frankfurt am Main on December
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31, 1712. the third child of a prosperous master
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craftsman who had made a small fortune in the
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city's iron trade and who intended, with the
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unsentimental ambition of a self -made German
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burger, for his son to study law. The boy was,
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from the beginning, bookish and quiet, and preternaturally
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gentle. He learned Latin early, Greek by his
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teens, and Hebrew in his first year at the University
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of Genna where his father sent him in 1731 to
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study law as planned. though within a year the
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boy had transferred over his father's objections
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to the faculty of theology. The conversion that
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reshaped him was not dramatic. Boller would never
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in later life give a precise date for it. He
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came to believe, while sitting under the pietist
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theologian August Hermann Frank's successors
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at Jena, that the Christianity he had absorbed
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in his father's Lutheran household was a form
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of religion without its inward substance, a cold
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scaffolding around an empty house. and he began
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with the unshowy persistence that would characterize
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him to his dying day to pray that the substance
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might come. It came gradually. He could not say
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afterward when it had arrived. He only knew that
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Load full transcript
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by the time he left Jena, in the winter of 1736,
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the scaffolding had been filled. He fell in with
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the Moravians almost by accident. A student friend
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introduced him to the small community at Herne
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Hut, the Saxon village that had become. under
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the extraordinary eccentric count Nikolaus Ludwig
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von Zinzendorf, the unlikely engine of the greatest
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Protestant missionary movement of the century.
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Bowler visited for a few weeks. He stayed for
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three years. He absorbed from the Moravians two
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convictions that would never leave him. First,
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that the substance of Christianity was a felt,
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conscious, joyful assurance of pardon through
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Christ. and second, that the natural expression
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of that assurance was to carry it on foot or
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on horseback or on any leaking ship available
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to any corner of the earth where it had not yet
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been heard. In the autumn of 1737 Zinzendorf
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summoned him. The slaves of the British Caribbean
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and the southern American colonies, the Count
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said, were a field largely untouched by gospel
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labor. Would the young theologian from Frankfurt
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consider going? Bowler, who had spent his boyhood
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in a comfortable merchant's house and had never
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traveled farther than Dresden, said yes without
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inquiring about the terms. On December 15, 1737,
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he was ordained a Moravian Presbyter by Zinzendorf
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and Bishop David Nitchman in the Ronberg Castle.
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Six weeks later, he was on the packet boat to
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England, with 29 pounds in his pocket and the
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address of John Wesley folded in his coat. He
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did not know when he knocked on the door in Holborn.
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what he had been sent for. 3. The priest who
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could not convert Indians. To understand why
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Peter Bowler's knock landed with the force of
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a hammer upon a cracked bell, one has to understand
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the state of John Wesley in the winter of 1738.
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Wesley had been, to that point, the most disciplined
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religious person anyone in Oxford had ever seen.
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He had, at Christ Church and Lincoln Colleges,
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founded the holy club that scoffers called the
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Methodists. He rose at four. He fasted twice
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a week. He visited prisoners. He gave away with
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iron calculation every shilling above a bare
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subsistence. He catechized the poor. He wrote
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and preached and taught with the efficient piety
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his mother Susanna had drilled into him in the
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kitchen at Epworth. It was not enough. In 1735
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his father Samuel had died and in the strange
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freedom of that grief. John had accepted a commission
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from General Oglethorpe to sail as the missionary
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chaplain of the new colony of Georgia, chiefly
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because he believed that by evangelizing the
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Creek and Chickasaw peoples of the southeastern
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woodlands he might at last convert his own hungry
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heart. He had sailed in October of that year
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with his brother Charles. He had returned alone
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in February of 1738, having failed, by every
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measurable standard, at every task he had been
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sent to accomplish. The Indians had declined
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politely but firmly to be converted by a young
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Englishman whose book of common prayer they could
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not read and whose vestments they found mildly
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comic. The white colonists of Savannah had found
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his high church severities, his insistence on
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rebaptizing dissenters' children by immersion,
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his refusal to commune those who would not first
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submit to private confession, so irritating that
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by the spring of 1737 a grand jury had indicted
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him on ten charges and driven him out of the
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colony altogether. He had slipped aboard a home
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-bound ship on December 2, 1737, pursued by Ritz,
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and had spent the Atlantic crossing in a state
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of mind his own journal describes with terrifying
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precision. I went to America to convert the Indians,
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but oh, who shall convert me? Who, what is he
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that shall deliver me from this evil heart of
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unbelief? I have a fair summer religion. I can
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talk well, nay, and believe myself while no danger
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is near, but let death look me in the face and
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my spirit is troubled. There had been, during
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the worst of the storm on that voyage home, one
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particular moment he could not expel from his
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memory. In the middle of Assam, the mainsail
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had split with a noise like a rifle, water had
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come pouring over the decks, every English passenger
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on board had begun to scream, and in the ship's
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small cabin, A party of twenty -six Moravian
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emigrants, men, women and children, had gone
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on singing a hymn in German with their faces
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calm, as though the hurricane were some distant
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matter of no immediate concern. Wesley, clinging
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white -knuckled to a bulkhead, had asked one
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of them afterward, Were you not afraid? The Moravian
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had answered in careful English, No. Wesley had
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asked, But were not your women and children afraid?
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The Moravian had smiled and said, No. our women
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and children are not afraid to die." He had not
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stopped thinking about them since. He had landed
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in Deal on February 1, 1738. He had ridden up
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to London on horseback, arrived at his brother
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Charles's lodgings in a state of pale exhaustion,
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and written in his journal on the morning of
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February 7 that he did not know what to do next.
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He had then heard a knock on his door. A young
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German on the landing. 4. The Hundred Days From
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February 7 to May 4, Peter Bowler and John Wesley
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were almost constantly in one another's company.
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They walked the London streets together. They
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rode together to Oxford, where Bowler addressed
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the remaining members of the Holy Club. They
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ate together, prayed together, and because Bowler's
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English and Wesley's German were both inadequate,
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conversed largely in the one scholarly language
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they shared. They argued in Latin. The arguments
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Wesley would later write
were the best he had
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ever lost. Bowler's thesis was simple and, to
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Wesley, offensive. It was that saving faith was
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not, as Wesley had been taught and had taught
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others, a graduated cultivation of religious
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disciplines leading over a lifetime, to eventual
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assurance. It was, rather, an immediate and conscious
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apprehension of pardon, available in a moment
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to any sinner who ceased his own laboring. and
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simply received the finished work of Christ.
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It was, Wohler said, in the Moravian shorthand
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of the period, instantaneous. Wesley bristled.
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He was an Oxford fellow. He had read the Fathers.
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He knew the history of the doctrine of justification
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better than this young German could possibly
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know it. He cited Aquinas. He cited Jeremy Taylor.
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He cited his own ecclesiastical tradition against
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the presumption of any man claiming in one conscious
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moment, to have felt himself forgiven. Bowler,
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with the patient obstinacy of a man who has himself
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been forgiven in one conscious moment, and cannot,
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therefore, be argued out of the experience, simply
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repeated the proposition. Faith, John, is like
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this, he would say, tapping the table. It is
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given. You do not build it. You receive it. And
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you know, when it has been given to you, that
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you have received it. Wesley could not shake
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him. On February 17, ten days after they met,
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the two men rode to Oxford together. Wesley,
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in the saddle beside the young Moravian, asked
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Bowler a question that had been gnawing at him
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for a week. My brother, Wesley said, they had
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adopted in the Moravian manor the familial address.
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I must confess the doctrine you preach troubles
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me. If what you say is true, then I have never
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had faith at all. And yet I am an ordained priest.
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I have preached for thirteen years. I have fasted,
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I have prayed, I have given away my substance.
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What must I do?" Bowler turned in the saddle.
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--> 00:11:46.889
He looked at his companion. And he said, in the
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unpolished Latin of their conversations, the
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single sentence that would keep John Wesley in
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the pulpit long enough to be converted. Pratica
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phidam donic habeas et tum quia habes praticaebus
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phidam. In the English Wesley would later transcribe
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into his journal. Preach faith till you have
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it and then because you have it you will preach
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faith. 5. A Dying Man at Oxford. The journal
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entry for March 5, 1738 records, perhaps the
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most quietly devastating moment of Wesley's pre
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-conversion year. He had, under Bowler's urging,
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begun to obey the council, to preach the doctrine
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of instantaneous justification by faith even
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while he himself did not possess it. He had preached
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it first in the chapel at the castle in Oxford,
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where the condemned men were kept. He had preached
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it to small gatherings of his old holy club friends.
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He had preached it that morning to a dying man,
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a consumptive Oxford student named Clifford,
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whom Bowler had accompanied him to visit. Clifford
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lay in a cold garret. Wesley sat beside the bed.
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Wesley spoke haltingly of the doctrine he had
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been pressed to proclaim, that faith in Christ
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save now in this moment to any who would receive
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it. Bowler, seated on the other side of the bed,
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began to speak with the dying young man in his
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broken English, probing his fears, pressing the
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promises of Christ upon him with the directness
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of a Moravian for whom the hour of death was
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simply the hour when evasions at last had to
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end. Clifford believed. He said so with the small
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breath left to him. He smiled, Wesley records
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the smile precisely, and died a few hours later
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in what appeared to every observer in the room
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to be a settled peace. Wesley walked out of the
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garret into the March dusk and began for the
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first time to suspect that Peter Bowler was not
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a fanatic but a physician and that the medicine
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he had been administering was the real one. He
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wrote in his journal that night, I was now thoroughly
00:13:42.460 --> 00:13:45.019
convinced and by the grace of God I resolved
00:13:45.019 --> 00:13:48.200
to seek it unto the end. Only I fixed not this
00:13:48.200 --> 00:13:50.360
faith on its right object I meant only faith
00:13:50.360 --> 00:13:53.820
in God not faith in or through Christ. The qualifier
00:13:53.820 --> 00:13:56.889
would fall too in a few weeks. But the first
00:13:56.889 --> 00:14:01.929
wall had come down. 6. The Last Conversation.
00:14:02.330 --> 00:14:05.830
Bowler stayed in England until May 4, 1738, when
00:14:05.830 --> 00:14:08.250
his ship for Charleston at last became available.
00:14:08.970 --> 00:14:11.269
In the final three weeks before he sailed, he
00:14:11.269 --> 00:14:13.970
met with Wesley almost daily, sometimes alone,
00:14:14.210 --> 00:14:16.309
sometimes with Charles Wesley, who had returned
00:14:16.309 --> 00:14:18.370
from Georgia in poorer health than his brother
00:14:18.370 --> 00:14:21.669
and was, if possible, even more distressed. Bowler
00:14:21.669 --> 00:14:25.149
prayed with them. He urged them. He watched them
00:14:25.149 --> 00:14:28.830
slowly, stubbornly give way. On April 22, at
00:14:28.830 --> 00:14:31.610
a meeting of the Small Moravian Society at Fetter
00:14:31.610 --> 00:14:34.750
Lane, Bowler introduced Wesley to three English
00:14:34.750 --> 00:14:37.710
laymen who testified, plainly and without theatrical
00:14:37.710 --> 00:14:40.289
ornament, that they had each experienced the
00:14:40.289 --> 00:14:42.950
instantaneous reception of saving faith and knew
00:14:42.950 --> 00:14:46.289
themselves to be reconciled to God. Wesley, who
00:14:46.289 --> 00:14:48.710
had been prepared to argue the theology out of
00:14:48.710 --> 00:14:51.690
them, found instead that he could not argue the
00:14:51.690 --> 00:14:54.580
experience out of them. They were not educated
00:14:54.580 --> 00:14:58.879
men. They were not emotional men. They were simply
00:14:58.879 --> 00:15:01.379
men who had been given something, and who knew
00:15:01.379 --> 00:15:04.279
they had been given it. He walked home that night
00:15:04.279 --> 00:15:07.919
in a state of quiet devastation. On May 3 Charles
00:15:07.919 --> 00:15:10.720
Wesley, bedridden with pleurisy and Bowler patient
00:15:10.720 --> 00:15:13.620
conversation, both working on him at once, became
00:15:13.620 --> 00:15:16.720
a believer by Bowler's standard. Bowler was with
00:15:16.720 --> 00:15:20.450
him. John Wesley was with him. The elder brother
00:15:20.450 --> 00:15:22.350
stood at the foot of the bed and watched the
00:15:22.350 --> 00:15:25.070
younger, the hymn writer, receive in a single
00:15:25.070 --> 00:15:27.730
clarified moment what he himself had not yet
00:15:27.730 --> 00:15:31.029
received. On May 4th, Bowler left for
Carolina.
00:15:31.750 --> 00:15:34.750
He embraced the Wesley's at the Fetter Lane Society
00:15:34.750 --> 00:15:38.409
Room. He prayed for them both. He said and John
00:15:38.409 --> 00:15:41.149
recorded the sentence in Latin, Freter purge
00:15:41.149 --> 00:15:45.309
in via quam invenisti. Fides advene. Brother,
00:15:45.470 --> 00:15:48.450
go forward in the way you have found. Faith will
00:15:48.450 --> 00:15:51.139
come. Then the young German turned, walked down
00:15:51.139 --> 00:15:53.279
the stairs, and went to Gravesend to board the
00:15:53.279 --> 00:15:57.220
ship for Charleston. He was 25 years old. He
00:15:57.220 --> 00:15:59.840
would never see John Wesley again in this life.
00:16:00.539 --> 00:16:02.980
Twenty days later, at a meeting room on Aldersgate
00:16:02.980 --> 00:16:05.740
Street, John Wesley would feel his heart as he
00:16:05.740 --> 00:16:07.679
phrased it in the one sentence that would echo
00:16:07.679 --> 00:16:09.539
through three centuries of English -speaking
00:16:09.539 --> 00:16:13.980
Protestantism strangely warmed. 7. The Heart
00:16:13.980 --> 00:16:19.049
That Was Warmed Wesley's May 24, 1738 Journal
00:16:19.049 --> 00:16:21.509
entry is the most quoted passage in Methodist
00:16:21.509 --> 00:16:25.590
literature. He had gone, that evening, very unwillingly,
00:16:25.909 --> 00:16:28.830
to a meeting of the Moravian Society in Aldersgate
00:16:28.830 --> 00:16:31.909
Street. A layman was reading aloud from Martin
00:16:31.909 --> 00:16:34.090
Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans,
00:16:34.529 --> 00:16:36.909
reading the precise passage Wesley would later
00:16:36.909 --> 00:16:39.190
note with the marvelling precision of a man who
00:16:39.190 --> 00:16:41.730
believed in Providence, in which Luther describes
00:16:41.730 --> 00:16:43.970
the change God works in the heart through faith
00:16:43.970 --> 00:16:47.190
in Christ, and about a quarter before nine seedbed.
00:16:47.360 --> 00:16:50.659
I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did
00:16:50.659 --> 00:16:53.080
trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation,
00:16:53.379 --> 00:16:55.620
and an assurance was given me that He had taken
00:16:55.620 --> 00:16:58.460
away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the
00:16:58.460 --> 00:17:01.600
law of sin and death. He walked out of Aldersgate
00:17:01.600 --> 00:17:04.759
Street at midnight a different man. He began
00:17:04.759 --> 00:17:07.059
preaching that next Sunday the doctrine bowler
00:17:07.059 --> 00:17:09.500
had taught him, not now to have it but because
00:17:09.500 --> 00:17:12.880
he had it. He preached it on June 11th at St.
00:17:13.039 --> 00:17:15.619
Mary's in Oxford in a sermon called, Salvation
00:17:15.619 --> 00:17:18.069
by Faith, that would set the tone of his ministry
00:17:18.069 --> 00:17:20.809
for the next fifty -three years. He preached
00:17:20.809 --> 00:17:23.170
it in field preachings in Bristol, in Collier's
00:17:23.170 --> 00:17:26.230
villages, in abandoned foundries. He preached
00:17:26.230 --> 00:17:28.849
it to forty thousand congregations before he
00:17:28.849 --> 00:17:31.710
was finished. He would, throughout those fifty
00:17:31.710 --> 00:17:34.109
-three years, continue to correspond with Peter
00:17:34.109 --> 00:17:37.230
Bowler. The letters, a few dozen of them survive,
00:17:37.609 --> 00:17:40.630
are remarkable chiefly for their warmth. Wesley,
00:17:40.650 --> 00:17:42.930
who could be cutting with almost every other
00:17:42.930 --> 00:17:45.869
man in his orbit, was never cutting with Bowler.
00:17:46.200 --> 00:17:50.440
He wrote to him in 1740 from Bristol, in 1742
00:17:50.440 --> 00:17:54.180
from London, in 1748 when he heard that Bowler
00:17:54.180 --> 00:17:56.960
had been consecrated bishop of the Moravian Church.
00:17:57.480 --> 00:18:00.140
He addressed him always as Dear Brother Bowler.
00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:03.319
He signed himself always with the small stubborn
00:18:03.319 --> 00:18:05.579
reverence of a man who remembered who had once
00:18:05.579 --> 00:18:08.299
shown him a window out of his own despair as
00:18:08.299 --> 00:18:10.579
your unworthy brother in Christ John Wesley.
00:18:11.619 --> 00:18:16.150
8. Bethlehem and the Long Afterward Bowler, for
00:18:16.150 --> 00:18:18.750
his part, spent the remaining thirty -seven years
00:18:18.750 --> 00:18:21.829
of his life in the almost entirely unglamorous
00:18:21.829 --> 00:18:25.349
labor of Moravian frontier ministry. He reached
00:18:25.349 --> 00:18:29.150
Charleston in the summer of 1738. He preached
00:18:29.150 --> 00:18:31.769
to the slaves of the Carolina plantations, learned
00:18:31.769 --> 00:18:34.450
as much Gullah as he could, baptized the dying,
00:18:34.809 --> 00:18:37.089
buried the murdered, quarreled gently with the
00:18:37.089 --> 00:18:39.609
overseers who found his ministrations inconvenient.
00:18:40.349 --> 00:18:43.039
He returned to Europe briefly. then sailed back
00:18:43.039 --> 00:18:46.319
to America in 1740 with a company of Moravian
00:18:46.319 --> 00:18:49.059
emigrants and helped found in the rolling hills
00:18:49.059 --> 00:18:52.079
of eastern Pennsylvania, the settlements of Nazareth
00:18:52.079 --> 00:18:55.119
and Bethlehem, towns which still exist and still,
00:18:55.160 --> 00:18:57.799
by his spiritual lineage, ring with Moravian
00:18:57.799 --> 00:19:01.059
hymnody every Christmas Eve. He preached in German,
00:19:01.240 --> 00:19:04.779
in English, in a passable Creole Dutch. He ordained
00:19:04.779 --> 00:19:08.710
pastors. He translated. He married a Moravian
00:19:08.710 --> 00:19:12.769
woman named Elizabeth Hobbs in 1741, fathered
00:19:12.769 --> 00:19:15.329
eight children, and buried several of them in
00:19:15.329 --> 00:19:19.829
the Pennsylvania clay. In 1748, in a quiet ceremony
00:19:19.829 --> 00:19:23.009
in England, Zinzendorf himself ordained Bowler
00:19:23.009 --> 00:19:26.029
a bishop of the Moravian Church, a
consecration
00:19:26.029 --> 00:19:29.349
that meant in Moravian usage no earthly advancement
00:19:29.349 --> 00:19:31.849
would ever be on the right to lay hands on the
00:19:31.849 --> 00:19:34.869
next generation of missionaries. He served as
00:19:34.869 --> 00:19:37.450
superintendent of the Moravian Church in England
00:19:37.450 --> 00:19:43.410
from 1747 to 1753, returned to America from 1753
00:19:43.410 --> 00:19:47.289
to 1764 to direct new settlements, and came back
00:19:47.289 --> 00:19:50.670
to England for his final years. He died in London
00:19:50.670 --> 00:19:56.589
on April 27, 1775, at the age of 62. He was buried
00:19:56.589 --> 00:19:59.230
in the small Moravian Burying Ground at Chelsea
00:19:59.230 --> 00:20:02.329
under a flat stone identical in every respect
00:20:02.329 --> 00:20:04.839
to the stones around it. the Moravian custom
00:20:04.839 --> 00:20:07.319
being that all their dead lie under the same
00:20:07.319 --> 00:20:10.339
modest marker, so that no brother or sister may
00:20:10.339 --> 00:20:12.660
be judged greater than another even in death.
00:20:13.359 --> 00:20:17.279
He left in his papers no autobiography. He had
00:20:17.279 --> 00:20:20.440
never thought it worth writing one. He left behind
00:20:20.440 --> 00:20:23.279
instead a satchel of letters, a few devotional
00:20:23.279 --> 00:20:26.220
journals, a bundle of sermons in his plain upright
00:20:26.220 --> 00:20:28.869
hand. and the correspondence with the Wesley's,
00:20:28.930 --> 00:20:31.130
which his executors preserved with the careful
00:20:31.130 --> 00:20:33.509
reverence of men who understood, if the bishop
00:20:33.509 --> 00:20:36.210
had not, that those particular letters had carried
00:20:36.210 --> 00:20:38.329
something the Moravian Church would never be
00:20:38.329 --> 00:20:43.809
paid for. 9. The Cost. The cost of Peter Bowler's
00:20:43.809 --> 00:20:46.970
obedience was not poverty, exactly. The Moravians
00:20:46.970 --> 00:20:50.210
lived simply, but not destitutely, and his household
00:20:50.210 --> 00:20:53.390
in Bethlehem wanted for nothing essential. The
00:20:53.390 --> 00:20:57.039
cost was of another order. It was the cost, first,
00:20:57.079 --> 00:21:00.359
of obscurity. The man who had stood in the upper
00:21:00.359 --> 00:21:03.039
room at Fetter Lane and reasoned John Wesley
00:21:03.039 --> 00:21:06.240
into the Kingdom of God would die almost entirely
00:21:06.240 --> 00:21:08.440
unknown to the wider English -speaking Church.
00:21:09.119 --> 00:21:11.799
The revival he had helped midwife would be called,
00:21:12.279 --> 00:21:15.579
almost universally, the Wesleyan revival. Its
00:21:15.579 --> 00:21:18.619
institutions would bear the Wesley's name. Its
00:21:18.619 --> 00:21:22.019
hymnody would be Charles's. Its polity would
00:21:22.019 --> 00:21:24.930
be John's. The quiet German who had stood at
00:21:24.930 --> 00:21:26.970
the beginning, tapping the table and saying,
00:21:26.990 --> 00:21:29.890
fides, fides, fides, would appear in the Methodist
00:21:29.890 --> 00:21:32.470
textbooks when he appeared at all as a footnote.
00:21:33.009 --> 00:21:35.750
It was the cost, second, of the children he buried.
00:21:36.509 --> 00:21:39.269
The Moravian archives preserve the small clerical
00:21:39.269 --> 00:21:42.190
record of the Bowler family losses, a son in
00:21:42.190 --> 00:21:47.849
1744, a daughter in 1747, another child in 1751.
00:21:48.269 --> 00:21:51.329
He baptized them. He preached at their small
00:21:51.329 --> 00:21:54.839
graveside services. He continued riding the circuits
00:21:54.839 --> 00:21:58.240
of Pennsylvania. It was the cost, third, of the
00:21:58.240 --> 00:22:01.059
ordinary loneliness of a man, whose native speech
00:22:01.059 --> 00:22:04.299
is never the speech of his ministry. Bowler preached
00:22:04.299 --> 00:22:06.740
in English for thirty years and was always, to
00:22:06.740 --> 00:22:09.119
the end, conscious of the seam between his tongue
00:22:09.119 --> 00:22:12.039
and his thoughts. His journal records, with the
00:22:12.039 --> 00:22:14.420
gentle humor he seems to have retained in every
00:22:14.420 --> 00:22:17.380
circumstance, his amusement at the ways his English
00:22:17.380 --> 00:22:20.099
sermons sometimes landed sideways on their listeners.
00:22:20.609 --> 00:22:23.670
He once, he wrote, informed a Pennsylvania congregation
00:22:23.670 --> 00:22:26.029
in all earnestness that they should preach with
00:22:26.029 --> 00:22:28.490
their whole belly, when he had intended to say,
00:22:28.569 --> 00:22:31.450
with their whole being. The congregation, he
00:22:31.450 --> 00:22:34.710
noted, had nodded solemnly. He laughed at himself,
00:22:34.930 --> 00:22:39.049
wrote the line down, and went on. 10. The Echo
00:22:39.049 --> 00:22:42.250
There is a small painting of Peter Bowler, oil
00:22:42.250 --> 00:22:45.049
on canvas, painted in Bethlehem in the last year
00:22:45.049 --> 00:22:47.880
of his life. that still hangs under dim lighting
00:22:47.880 --> 00:22:50.640
in the Moravian archives at Lehigh University.
00:22:51.359 --> 00:22:54.700
He is in late middle age. He has thinning hair
00:22:54.700 --> 00:22:57.700
and mild eyes and a faint, almost invisible smile.
00:22:58.319 --> 00:23:01.500
He is wearing the plain black coat of a Moravian
00:23:01.500 --> 00:23:04.559
minister. He is holding in his left hand a small
00:23:04.559 --> 00:23:07.019
closed book. The fingers are relaxed, the thumb
00:23:07.019 --> 00:23:09.980
rests lightly on the spine. He is looking, not
00:23:09.980 --> 00:23:12.299
at the viewer, but just past the viewer's shoulder.
00:23:12.509 --> 00:23:14.769
as though he has heard at that moment a faint
00:23:14.769 --> 00:23:17.710
call from the next room. It is the same posture
00:23:17.710 --> 00:23:20.809
Edward Kimball is in, in the one surviving photograph
00:23:20.809 --> 00:23:23.950
of him on the steps of Mount Vernon Church. The
00:23:23.950 --> 00:23:26.650
same posture, in a way, Monica must have been
00:23:26.650 --> 00:23:29.809
in at the window in Ostia. It is the posture
00:23:29.809 --> 00:23:31.910
of the person who knows that the camera does
00:23:31.910 --> 00:23:34.289
not matter, that the pulpit does not matter,
00:23:34.630 --> 00:23:36.569
that the textbook reference does not matter,
00:23:36.730 --> 00:23:39.549
that what matters is the small interior gesture
00:23:39.549 --> 00:23:41.990
of turning toward the voice that is already calling
00:23:41.990 --> 00:23:46.490
one's name. Bowler spent 152 days with John Wesley,
00:23:46.890 --> 00:23:51.490
in the winter and spring of 1738. In those 152
00:23:51.490 --> 00:23:54.130
days he tapped the table, argued in Latin, rode
00:23:54.130 --> 00:23:57.029
to Oxford, sat beside dying men, and repeated,
00:23:57.190 --> 00:23:59.470
with the patient iron of a man who had himself
00:23:59.470 --> 00:24:01.910
been shown a window, the single sentence that
00:24:01.910 --> 00:24:04.509
kept Wesley in the pulpit long enough to be converted,
00:24:04.890 --> 00:24:07.640
preach faith till you have it. Everything that
00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:10.279
followed. The forty thousand sermons, the quarter
00:24:10.279 --> 00:24:12.740
million miles on horseback, the class meetings
00:24:12.740 --> 00:24:15.180
and the foundries and the hymns of Charles and
00:24:15.180 --> 00:24:17.319
the slave galleries of the Methodist chapels
00:24:17.319 --> 00:24:19.839
in the Carolinas, and the Wesleyan camp meetings
00:24:19.839 --> 00:24:22.619
of the American frontier and the holiness revivals
00:24:22.619 --> 00:24:25.059
and the Pentecostal outpourings that would trace,
00:24:25.200 --> 00:24:27.900
through long genealogies of spirit -filled preachers,
00:24:28.119 --> 00:24:30.539
back to one Oxford fellow whose heart was warmed
00:24:30.539 --> 00:24:33.220
on Aldersgate Street. all of it rested as on
00:24:33.220 --> 00:24:35.579
a single fulcrum on a young German bishop who
00:24:35.579 --> 00:24:38.539
had arrived in London on a five -hour -old acquaintance
00:24:38.539 --> 00:24:41.119
and a pair of shoes still wet from the channel.
00:24:41.779 --> 00:24:45.000
He did not write a book about it. He did not
00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:48.220
publish a sermon. He simply did what he had been
00:24:48.220 --> 00:24:50.960
sent to do and then sailed for Carolina and then
00:24:50.960 --> 00:24:53.920
died in Chelsea and then, under a flat Moravian
00:24:53.920 --> 00:24:56.640
stone indistinguishable from his neighbors, waited.
00:24:57.069 --> 00:24:59.650
And somewhere in the long corridor of heaven
00:24:59.650 --> 00:25:02.009
where the unremembered are asked one at a time
00:25:02.009 --> 00:25:04.289
to give account of their errand, Peter Bowler
00:25:04.289 --> 00:25:06.789
will stand, in the same plain coat he wore at
00:25:06.789 --> 00:25:09.369
the Aldersgate society rooms, and will say, in
00:25:09.369 --> 00:25:13.089
the Latin he so loved, Freytor Perch, Predikavi
00:25:13.089 --> 00:25:17.569
Fidum Donic Habura. Brother, I pressed on. I
00:25:17.569 --> 00:25:20.250
preached faith until they had it. And the one
00:25:20.250 --> 00:25:22.349
who sent him, who has been waiting three centuries
00:25:22.349 --> 00:25:25.609
to say so, will say, yes. and so because you
00:25:25.609 --> 00:25:29.490
had it, you preached faith. Well done! End of
00:25:29.490 --> 00:25:30.289
chapter 4