the Old Testament applied with ingenuity and freedom, as though the preachers were not tied by a strict belief in the verbal inspiration of Holy Writ.
Both the theology and the methods of Methodism were turned directly to the purposes of political agitation by Stephens and Oastler. In fact it may be safely said that Stephens went a long way towards making the factory and poor law movement into a kind of religious revival. He issued forth from the chapel, and sermons were his chief weapon in the war upon Mammon. With Stephens and Oastler alike the Bible was the source of all political and religious teaching. Says Oastler: "I have resolved to go right on. I take the Bible, the simple Bible with me, without either note or comment, and in spite of all that men or devils may devise against me, I will have the Bill."[1] Oastler had an extraordinary faculty for playing upon the feelings of his audience, tears and shudders being equally at his command. Some of his speeches even now cannot be read without tremors, especially those in which he produced, as evidence of factory horrors, the scalp of a girl who had been caught in a driving belt.
Stephens's special gift was denunciation. He conceived himself as a successor of Bishop Latimer or of those Old Testament prophets, summoned by the Almighty to chastise the Jeroboams and Ahabs of their time, prophets "who told kings what they were to do and the people likewise, who told senates and legislatures what kind of laws they were to make and what laws they should not make." He imagined himself at war with Satan, whose reality and vitality, already an established dogma of the Wesleyan community, was vouched for by the existence of such persons as Malthus and the Poor Law Commissioners. These he compared to Pharaoh who ordered a massacre of innocents, but unfavourably, as Pharaoh was frank about the matter whilst the Commissioners were hypocritical.[2]
Both Oastler and Stephens were thoroughgoing Tories.[3] In fact Stephens's political ideal was a theocracy of the Old Testament type in which the preacher announces the will of God, the king enforces it, and the people submit to it. Altar, Throne, and Cottage are the true homes of mankind. In a society of this description neither class distinctions, factories,
