station at Stockholm, Sweden, where he seems to have done good work and got himself well liked.[1] In 1830 he returned and took up a call at Ashton-under-Lyne. Four years later, owing to his taking an active part in a disestablishment campaign, he was compelled to sever his connection with the Methodist body. Like Gladstone shaking off the dust of Oxford, Stephens now felt himself unmuzzled, and plunged at once into a vehement Factory agitation, emulating in Lancashire the repute of Oastler in Yorkshire. He continued, also, to preach as a free-lance, and a chapel was erected for him at Ashton, which remained his headquarters.
It would be a far from unprofitable occupation to speculate on the influence of Methodism, both within and without the Church of England, upon the politics of the early nineteenth century. Oastler himself was a member of the Established Church, but his father was a Methodist of the first generation and a personal friend of John Wesley. In those days the gulf between Church and Methodist chapel was not wide, and professional convenience may have determined Oastler's choice of worship. In all his modes of thought he was a very replica of Stephens.
The strength of the Methodist movement was its appeal to those religious emotions in the masses of the people, which in a carefully organised form were the strength of the mediaeval Church, and which even in these days are not so overlaid with rational considerations as to be insensible to the appeal of a General Booth or a Spurgeon. The appeal of Wesley, as a protest against the soulless, high-and-dry formalism of the Church of England, was essentially popular. He re-established the notion that even the agricultural labourer had a soul, a fact which tended to be obscured by the social arrangements then coming into force. He taught, and his followers taught, vigorously, effectively, the existence of a God who cared for all the dwellers upon earth, who would not let even a sparrow fall, and who went to the extreme sacrifice to purchase from the evil adversary the souls of all His children. These teachings, which showed an effective contempt of dogma, were pressed home by a mixture of general and personal appeal, and general and personal denunciation, culled largely from the language of
- ↑ He learnt how to preach in Swedish, and acquired a strong taste for Scandinavian literature, which he communicated to his younger brother, George Stephens (1813–1895), professor at Copenhagen between 1855 and 1893. There was a touch of the undisciplined imagination of the Chartist preacher in some of the constructive work of the author of the Runic Monuments.
