Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America онлайн

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They were also called Methodists. It is singular, but neither the precise etymology nor the first appropriation of the term Methodist has, we believe, ever been distinctly or satisfactorily settled. Some have derived it from an allusion in Juvenal to a quack physician, some to a passage from the writings of Chrysostom, who says, “to be a methodist is to be beguiled,” and which was employed in a pamphlet against Mr. Whitefield. Like some other phrases, it is not easy to settle its first import or importation into our language. Certainly it is much older than the times to which this book especially refers. It seems to be even contemporary with the term Puritan, since we find Spencer, the librarian of Sion College under Cromwell, writing, “Where are now our Anabaptists and plain pack-staff Methodists, who esteem all flowers of rhetoric in sermons no better than stinking weeds?” A writer in the British Quarterly tells a curious story how once in a parish church in Huntingdonshire, he was listening to a clergyman, notorious alike by his private character and vehement intolerance, who was entertaining his audience, on a week evening, by a discourse from the text, Ephesians iv. 14, “Whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” He said to his people, “Now, you do not know Greek; I know Greek, and I am going to tell you what this text really says; it says, ‘they lie in wait to make you Methodists.’ The word used here is Methodeian, that is really the word that is used, and that is really what Paul said, ‘They lie in wait to make you Methodists’—a Methodist means a deceiver, and one who deludes, cheats, and beguiles.” The Grecian scholar was a little at fault in his next allusion, for he proceeded to quote that other text, “We are not ignorant of his devices,” and seemed to be under the impression that “device” was the same word as that on which he had expended his criticism. “Now,” said he, “you may be ignorant, because you do not know Greek, but we are not ignorant of his devices, that is, of his methods, his deceivers, that is, his Methodists.” In such empty wit and ignorant punning it is very likely that the term had its origin.