ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF COFFEE
Many years later, Jaime Hill would think back to the afternoon of his kidnapping and blame his father. It was late in the day on October 31, 1979, and Jaime had just settled at his desk to write to his daughter Alexandra.1 At that time Halloween was still a new holiday in El Salvador, arriving with the surge of diplomatic families who moved in after Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba. Trick-or-treating had caught on quickly in the upscale neighborhoods of the capital, San Salvador, where the forty-twoyear-old businessman lived and worked as an executive in his family’s company. Each year there were more and more costumed children going door-to-door, usually by car, for safety.2 Even so, Halloween paled in importance next to the upcoming Day of the Dead, celebrated at the beginning of November, and marking the start of the harvest season.
Jaime always looked forward to the harvest season, when six months of steaming downpours finally gave way to blue skies and cool breezes, and his excitement said a good deal about the country’s history. Lacking an Atlantic coastline, El Salvador had been something of a “backwater” when it won independence from Spain in 1821—a land of subsistence farmers with four lawyers and four physicians among its 250,000 citizens. Only two or three ships a year called at its primary port.3 That is not to say its citizens were poor, exactly, for “poor” is a relative term, and the other side of the country’s commercial isolation was economic equality. Travelers from Europe who disembarked in El Salvador in the middle of the nineteenth century were struck by “the absence of all extreme
poverty” and the obvious richness of the soil.4 Indigo and balsam, profitable exports, flourished in the countryside, and even the towns were “literally embowered in tropical fruit-trees,” including palms, oranges, and “broad-leaved plantains, almost sinking beneath their heavy clusters of golden fruit.”5 While foreign visitors marveled at the natural abundance and saw a place “eminently adapted for the production of tropical staples,” the majority of Salvadorans lived by farming communal land.6 They had little incentive to produce new and unfamiliar cash crops for distant markets, and even less to work for someone who did. Traditionally, the region’s subsistence farmers dreaded the arrival of the dry season. Every November, with months of drought ahead, Salvadorans, like their neighbors, prayed for the return of the rains on which they depended.
Deep into the nineteenth century, life for many people in the Salvadoran countryside went on much as it had for hundreds of years. As the sun came up, men carried farm tools along narrow dirt paths that ran from small villages to remote garden plots, and when work was done they returned home with whatever was ready to eat or sell in local markets.7 Parents taught their children everything they needed to know to live this way.8 And once a year, when the weather changed, Salvadorans, like their neighbors across Central America, honored their families’ ancient debts to the earth and called out to the protective spirits of their ancestors by decorating graves, dancing, singing, drinking, and feasting.9
Yet there were also those Salvadorans for whom this deep continuity with the past was not a comfort—those who looked out into the wider world of combustion engines, telephones, and electric lights and feared their country was falling behind—and this group wielded disproportionate political power. Subtly at first, but then radically after 1879, the agrarian foundation of Salvadoran life was uprooted to clear the way for a different future.
By 1889, when Jaime Hill’s grandfather James, then a young man of eighteen, arrived in El Salvador from Manchester, England, a profound transformation was under way. Within two generations, El Salvador was a different place. “The first thing that strikes the visitor,” wrote an American traveler in 1928, “is the apparent unanimity of thought: COFFEE. Everything is coffee, everyone is directly or indirectly engaged in coffee.” “Salvador is a country which should live as a unit with but one theme, a single subject: COFFEE,”
said the Salvadoran minister of agriculture, a coffee planter himself, in the same year.10
Though he settled in El Salvador a decade into the coffee boom, and though, as an immigrant, he was barred from holding political office, James Hill arguably did more than anyone else to transform his adopted country into one of the most intensive monocultures in modern history. By the second half of the twentieth century, due in part to practices Hill introduced on his plantations and in his coffee mill, coffee covered a quarter of El Salvador’s arable land and employed a fifth of its population. Salvadoran plantations generated per-acre yields 50 percent higher than Brazil’s, producing an annual coffee crop that made up a quarter of the country’s GDP and more than 90 percent of its exports. Significantly—and due in part, again, to relationships Hill helped to forge—most of those exports ended up inside brightly colored tin cans lining supermarket shelves in the United States, which had, over the same period, become far and away the world’s leading coffee-drinking country.11 In a century, the harvest in El Salvador had taken on a new meaning—picking and milling coffee bound for American cups—and its bounty had changed hands.
IN THE HILL FAMILY, as a result, the start of the coffee harvest normally meant rewards close at hand, but 1979 was not a normal year. The weather, as usual, had changed right on time, bringing sunny skies and dry air ideal for picking and milling coffee. Yet these favorable conditions were clouded by developments within the family and in the country at large. Jaime, the oldest of three brothers, had recently been demoted from his position in the family business, which had expanded since World War II from coffee into real estate, construction, finance, and insurance. More troubling, the renewal of old political conflicts had put the success of the year’s harvest seriously in doubt.
One hundred years of coffee had split El Salvador in two. At the same time as the country had achieved extraordinary levels of economic productivity, it had also become poor in the most fundamental ways. Eighty percent of the nation’s children were malnourished.12 “Extreme poverty,” once nowhere to be seen, had
become one of the two basic facts of Salvadoran life—the other being the extraordinary wealth of the legendary “Fourteen Families,” including the Hill family, who had started in coffee and kept going until they achieved a near monopoly over the country’s land, resources, economy, and politics. There was the oligarchy—educated abroad, driven around in the backseats of armored European cars, their power in business and government secured by the military, private bodyguards, and high walls around their gated homes—and there was everyone else. The fracturing of El Salvador into very rich and very poor had not gone unchallenged, but historically opposition to coffee capitalism had met fearsome repression, and for a time the popular resistance, once fearsome in its own right, had been driven underground.
Despite the danger, the revolutionary spirit had come back to life after Castro’s victory in Cuba. In turn, the Salvadoran government— backed up by the United States, on high alert against communism in the hemisphere—responded with escalating demonstrations of deadly force, amplified by the arrival on the scene of a menacing new presence: shadowy “death squads” made up of moonlighting soldiers and funded by the oligarchy. Throughout the 1970s, a rash of kidnappings, disappearances, and assassinations led to bloody retaliation and widespread terror. Then, on October 15, 1979, there was a coup. Not for the first time in Salvadoran history, the forcible change in government failed to translate directly into clear changes in policy and daily life. Even by Halloween, its consequences were not entirely clear.
JAIME HILL HAD much to say to his daughter Alexandra, who was away for her senior year at the Foxcroft School in Virginia and hoping to go on to study political science at college in Boston. As a boy Jaime himself had been sent to boarding school in Rhode Island, and the whole time he was there he dreamed of returning home and working on the coffee plantations, just as his grandfather James had. Then one day his father, also named Jaime, showed up at the school unannounced and explained to his son that he was losing his eyesight and would need someone to take over the administration of the family business. Jaime Hill went on to college at the Wharton School in Philadelphia. After graduation he worked for a few years on Wall
Street before moving back to El Salvador to fulfill his father’s wishes.13
The hands of the grandfather clock in the corner of Jaime’s office turned past 4:15. He reached for his typewriter and tapped out a greeting to Alexandra, just as a jeep and a pickup truck sped up to his building and braked to a quick halt in front. Men dressed in police and army uniforms piled out of the jeep and cleared the street, directing traffic with military-issue Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifles. A second crew in dark masks and olive fatigues jumped down from the pickup and stormed the entrance, carrying Uzis. Bursts of gunfire dropped a guard and tore a hole in the steel security door. The gunmen charged inside, past a stunned secretary, and up the stairs.
When Jaime heard commotion below his office window, his first thought was that the police were chasing a thief. When he heard shots and screams downstairs, he knew he was mistaken. Eight years earlier a hit squad disguised as a road crew had stopped a car carrying Ernesto Regalado Dueñas, Jaime’s cousin by marriage. Three days later, Ernesto Regalado’s corpse was dumped in the street. Jaime’s father made him buy a bulletproof vest, and fear began to follow him everywhere.14
Panicking now, Jaime grabbed for the .45 he kept in his desk and ran to hide in the bathroom—and there he found himself trapped, holding a pistol that now felt like an iron dumbbell in his hand. A voice called his name from the other side of the door. Jaime laid his gun down, inched out of the bathroom, and faced the masked intruders.
Immediately a hood swept down over his head, handcuffs clamped around his wrists, and unseen hands grabbed at his arms and dragged him down the stairs, past his helpless secretary, past his lifeless bodyguard, and out into the street. “Tell my family I am not hurt,” Jaime cried behind him, and he was thrown facedown into the back of the idling pickup underneath a green tarp that snapped in the wind as the truck sped away from the building and out of the city to the west, toward the place once known as “Coffeeland.”15
HALF A CENTURY EARLIER, the road to Santa Ana was small and rough, winding downhill into the wide basin of the Lempa River valley. On
the plain below, the white stucco walls of tidy buildings shone brilliantly against the dense jungle surrounding the settlement on three sides, and red tile roofs toasted gently under the warm sun. At a distance, Santa Ana was “the prettiest little town” in all of Central America, decided one American journalist who stopped for the night in the 1920s.16
By then Santa Ana was also El Salvador’s second-largest city, the center of an economic boom that had begun in the 1880s and was still going strong, thanks especially to the increasing commerce with California conducted since the start of the Great War in 1914. And if the city proper, laid out on an orderly grid around a central plaza, seemed somewhat “less animated” than might be expected of a global boomtown, that was due to the nature of the boom itself.17 Most of the real business was done beyond the edge of town, on the furrowed slopes of the eight-thousand-foot Santa Ana Volcano, the tallest in El Salvador and long thought to be extinct.
All across the broad face of the volcano, from the foothills most of the way up its steep truncated cone, spread a lush green patchwork of coffee plantations. Every day during the harvest season, from November to February, tens of thousands of people worked on these plantations, picking coffee from dawn to dusk, six in the morning to late afternoon. At the end of the workday, mule trains overloaded with bulging brown sacks and teams of oxen pulling carts overflowing with red ripe coffee cherries staggered down the volcano and through the dusty streets of Santa Ana on their way to one of the city’s many coffee mills, where the freshly picked cherries would be processed into export-ready beans.
Among the busiest streets during this time of year was a narrow road that led north from the center of town, through a stand of Spanish oaks whose branches had grown together to form a darkgreen tunnel. On the outskirts of the city, just before the road began to climb off the valley floor, the way turned slightly to the right, and on the left appeared the gate of a modern coffee mill called Las Tres Puertas, The Three Doors.
Beyond the gate, drivers led their work animals up to a utilitarian receiving station, where crews of men worked quickly to feed the fresh coffee cherries into the mill. Over the next several days, the seeds would be extracted from the cherries, washed clean, and conveyed through water channels toward the sunbaked drying patios
stretching out behind the mill. In one corner of the patios, bold white lines had been painted on the brown bricks, marking out a regulation tennis court, with doubles alleys.
On the other side of the tennis court, atop a small rise, stood an elegant two-story house of recent construction. The house had been built in the style called Spanish Colonial Revival, popular after the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, the San Francisco fair celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal—sharp white walls, sweeping exterior stairs, columned entry, trim red tile dormers and roof. Inside, with his petite, dark-eyed wife and their brigade of children—ten born, seven surviving—lived James Hill, the spindly six-foot-tall Englishman with wire-framed eyeglasses who by the 1920s had established himself as “the coffee king of El Salvador.”18
The title was sincere, and deserved, but nonetheless it carried an unintended irony that its bearer sometimes relished and sometimes tried to conceal. James Hill had been born in Queen Victoria’s England in 1871, in the slums of industrial Manchester, a neighborhood infamous around the world for its poverty and pollution. He sailed for El Salvador in 1889 with hardly a shilling to his name, and not for coffee at all, but rather to escape the gloomy skies and prospects that hung over his life in Manchester, by selling textiles abroad.
In many ways, the textile business could not have been more different from coffee. Cloth was an unglamorous but steady trade, which did after all provide a basic necessity. Coffee by comparison was a high-wire act of agriculture and finance. The fragile and temperamental trees demanded years of hard labor and delicate tending before giving a real harvest. Worse, the value of whatever coffee crop finally arrived depended entirely on an international market of such notorious volatility that it served as the setting and subject of popular melodramatic novels of the day, parables of risk and ruin.19
Yet from this unlikely beginning James Hill built a coffee empire that came to be considered by many, including his neighbors and rivals on the Santa Ana Volcano, perhaps the very finest in El Salvador—and therefore in the world. By the time he died in 1951, Hill ruled an archipelago of eighteen plantations that fed his mill Las Tres Puertas, together comprising over 3,000 acres planted in coffee, employing nearly 5,000 people at the height of the season, yielding
an annual harvest of perhaps 2,000 tons of export-ready coffee beans, and netting, in a good year, a profit of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And as impressive as these totals were, the full reach of James Hill’s coffee empire could not be calculated in acres, trees, employees, tons, or dollars—for it also served as a kind of “showplace” for coffee drinkers thousands of miles away who, for one reason or another, wanted to know where their coffee came from, and what it was like there.20
ARTHUR RUHL HAD BEEN EVERYWHERE. He left his boyhood home in Rockford, Illinois, for Harvard in 1895, and four years later he began a reporting career in New York that took him around the world. He was underneath Manhattan for the excavation of the subway in 1902; he was on the beach in Kitty Hawk with the Wright brothers in 1908; he was in scorching Reno on Independence Day in 1910 to see Jack Johnson knock out Jim Jeffries, the “Great White Hope”; he was in Veracruz, Mexico, when U.S. Marines took the city in 1914; he was on the front lines of the Great War in Gallipoli in 1915; he was in Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917; and from each place he sent thoughtful, amiable dispatches back to readers of Harper’s, Collier’s, and The Century. 21
Ruhl’s adventures taught him that the world was not so big as it looked from a fixed point, and was only getting smaller every day. “The motor-car, radio, and newspaper syndicate, let alone cables and modern steamships, are shrinking the world faster than many stayat-home people think,” he wrote. As a matter of personal preference, he was all for nice hotels, “sport and health,” good manners, “clean streets,” competent traffic policemen, and cocktails at a “wellregulated” country club, but Ruhl was not so naive as to confuse comfort with progress. He didn’t object to change in principle, he just wanted to find out what it meant.
One morning in 1927, Ruhl went down to the southern tip of Manhattan and boarded a big white banana boat belonging to the United Fruit Company, bound for Central America. In “Nice Little Costa Rica,” “Troubled Nicaragua,” Honduras, Guatemala, and “Busy Salvador,” he hoped to get a close-up view of the “profound changes” under way in the “once pastoral and patriarchal republics” as they
were “drawn into the general stream of the modern world”—where, for better or worse, virtue was measured in numbers (“speed, height, population, profits!”) and efficiency (“energy, time-saving, sanitation, the magic of machinery”) was celebrated as genius.
Arthur Ruhl found what he was looking for in El Salvador. Conduits for telephone and power lines ran under “new and very perfect” city streets. High-level government officials promised highways and airports coming soon. The “soldierlike” police force had been trained by an American and convincingly outfitted with pith helmets and military-dress belts. And the large, hardworking, mixed-race peasant class, if not so “white” and “democratic” as Costa Rica’s, was neither so “Indian” and difficult as Guatemala’s. There were moments during his stay in the capital when Ruhl felt as if he had been transported to southern California, yet he could not completely forget that he was “in a land where most workers receive less than half a dollar a day,” and where some of the new iron manhole covers above the utility conduits had been stolen and sold for scrap. After a few pleasant days in the city—and well aware that “everything in El Salvador revolves around coffee”—Ruhl boarded the train to Santa Ana, where he had made some contacts in advance.
Waiting for him at the railway station in Santa Ana was one of James Hill’s three sons, recently returned from college in California and driving his father’s car. When they pulled up to Las Tres Puertas, Ruhl stepped out of the car and greeted the “calm, capable, and polite” Englishman who was to be his host and guide. James Hill, then nearing sixty, led a tour of the “experimental plantation” adjoining his house and mill, probing the “black loam” around the trees with his “stout walking-stick” as they went. All the while, Hill talked convivially in his Manchester accent about coffee life and lore, soil and trees, prices and wages, coups and revolutions, his fellow planters and “his work-people,” doling out wisdom from his four decades in El Salvador.
After the tour, the two men settled in the immaculate office Hill had furnished in the style of a City of London counting house. With a “casual air,” Hill ventured again into serious subjects: the complicated political and economic questions facing El Salvador, the dramatic measures that had been and could be taken to secure the health of the country’s coffee industry, the important role the younger generations of his own family would certainly play therein,
and the good he hoped they would do. It was all very businesslike, and yet as Arthur Ruhl listened to James Hill go on calmly predicting El Salvador’s future, an uneasy feeling crept over him. He could not help thinking that the whole scene, if on the one hand so representative of the changing world, was also, actually, distinctly “odd.”22
JAMES HILL LIVED eighty years and two lives. Born into the world’s first industrial working class, he would be recognized as a true Salvadoran, a native member of one of the world’s most entrenched oligarchies, before he died in 1951. By then Manchester and Santa Ana were not as far apart as they had been when Hill first left home. In the eight decades of James Hill’s life—the years between the end of the U.S. Civil War and the beginning of the Cold War—the world, as Arthur Ruhl observed, got smaller. Railroads, steamships, automobiles, airplanes, telegraphs, telephones, radios, moving pictures, together with other novel forms of fuel, power, and governance, brought together people, places, and things that had once been distant, if not isolated from one another. It was not only the age when what we now call “‘globalization’ first became clearly manifest”—it was also the time when the word “global” was first applied to phenomena that seemed to encompass the whole of the earth.23 It was an age of “ever greater global interconnectedness,” when the word “interconnected” was first used to describe the sense that individual connections were themselves linked together into something greater.24 The “densely knit web of global connections” that took shape during these decades, many historians contend, forms the “basic fact” of the modern world.25
The history of coffee runs through the middle of this larger story of global connection and transformation. Four hundred years ago, coffee was a mysterious Ottoman custom, and there was no word for it in English; today “coffee” is perhaps the most widespread word on the planet.26 Three hundred years ago, coffee was cultivated commercially in only one place, Yemen, its supply controlled by a small group of merchants. Today it is a cash crop for more than twenty-five million people in over seventy countries.27 Two hundred years ago, coffee was a luxury for society’s privileged classes, enjoyed
in coffeehouses that were centers of ideas, conversation, art, politics, and culture. Today it is the unrivaled work drug, filling billions of cups around the world each day and consumed by nearly two-thirds of Americans.28 A hundred years ago, planters in Latin America and merchants in the United States concerned about the consequences of low coffee prices began to try to teach American coffee drinkers about conditions on plantations and why they mattered. Today coffee is by far the leading “fair trade” product, the commodity we use more than any other to think about how the world economy works and what to do about it.29
For all these reasons, it has often been said that “coffee connected the world.”30 It is true that the transformation of coffee from a mysterious Muslim custom to a cultured European luxury to a ubiquitous daily necessity tells a story about the world becoming what it is. And certainly, following James Hill from Manchester to the Santa Ana Volcano, tracking coffee from his plantations and mill into the San Francisco roasting plants and vacuum-sealed cans of major American coffee brands, and on to grocery stores, kitchens, break rooms, and cafés across the U.S., reveals distant people, places, and things being geared together with increasing precision: “a world connecting,” in the words of a recent landmark book on the period.31 But that is only half the story.
Modern history moves in two directions at once. New connections bred deep new divisions. In the nineteenth century, the world economy grew forty-four times larger. Between 1850 and 1914, world trade increased by 1,000 percent—“the world had never seen such a dizzying creation of wealth.”32 Yet the income gap between people who lived in regions with temperate climates and industrial economies and those who lived in regions with tropical climates and agricultural economies widened in step with increasing global connection.33 In 1880 per capita income in “developed” industrial societies was double that of the rest of the world; by 1914 it was triple; by 1950 it was five times greater.34
The division of the world into rich and poor paralleled the division of the world into coffee drinkers, overwhelmingly concentrated in the industrialized global north, and coffee workers, even more concentrated in the predominantly agricultural and perpetually “developing” global south. As the most valuable agricultural product of the world’s poorest regions, coffee has played
a central role in shaping this divide.35 In the last 150 years, coffee has become an exceptionally valuable commodity—exports are now worth over $25 billion a year, and retail sales many times more—that is a virtual monopoly of the world’s poorest nations.36 Coffee is not just one of the most important commodities in the history of global capitalism, as is commonly claimed—it is one of the most important commodities in the history of global inequality. Coffee did not simply “connect the world.” What it did, instead— what it does—is raise a question with no easy answer, one as consequential as it is complex: What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things?
THE PERFECT SYMBOL OF ISLAM
In 1554, two Syrians went into business together in their adopted hometown of Constantinople. Schems had come from Damascus, Hekim from Aleppo. Amid the stalls of the busy market district near the Bosporus, they opened a coffee shop, the city’s first. The shop was furnished “with very neat Couches and Carpets,” and it became known as an upstanding social place, “very proper to make acquaintances in.” Many of the patrons were students and other “studious Persons,” unemployed professionals searching for jobs, “Lovers of Chess,” and professors.1 At that point, coffee had entered the written historical record about fifty years earlier.2
Coffee is native to Ethiopia, where the first commercial harvests were gathered from wild plants in the fifteenth century. Early cultivation took place on terraced hillsides in sixteenth-century Yemen, while consumption spread across the Arabian Peninsula and around the Mediterranean through trade and war. A coffeehouse was often one of the first things Ottoman emperors built upon conquering a new city, “to demonstrate the civility of their rule.”3 Given this mode of diffusion, the meanings of the drink were contested. According to many etymologies, the word “coffee” derives from the Arabic qahwah, meaning wine: coffee was “the wine of Islam,” and this raised some questions.4
In 1511, a policeman in Mecca, returning soberly from prayers one evening, observed a group of his coreligionists preparing themselves for a night of worship by drinking coffee. Suspicious of coffee’s
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to.” What occasion was there then for mentioning them? Only to cast a popular odium upon these enthusiastical Methodists. Hoc est æerugo mera. “However, something of this kind we have from their own relation.” And something of this kind we have in the Evangelist’s relation of the life of J of Nazareth; who, as we are informed, before he came out into his public ministry, underwent a long and rigorous fasting, even of forty days and forty nights. And something of this kind we have in the relation that disciplinarian the Apostle Paul gives of himself; for he tells us he was in fastings often. It is true he does condemn (as you observe, page 33.) that ἀφειδία σώματος, the not sparing of the body, as useless and superstitious, when done in order to recommend us to the favour of G , or put in the place, or joined with the merits of J C . Yet elsewhere, he informs us, that he made it his common practice to keep his body under, (ὑπωπιάζω) and bring it into subjection: and think you all this was only to “gain a reputation for sanctity?” If you will believe himself, it was for a nobler and more important end, “Lest while he preached to others, he himself should be a cast-away.” And how do you know but these Methodists might, at their first setting out, have used, and even now may use abstinence for the same purpose? Nay, that this very motive led them into some extremes in it, which however must be esteemed an error of the right side? Why will you still persist in taking the keys out of the hands of Omniscience, and presumptuously judge the intentions of people’s hearts? If we had a mind to imitate you in this rash way of judging, might not we suspect, (as your pamphlet came out in that season) that in order to wound our church governors through the sides of the Methodists, you intended this part of your pamphlet as a burlesque upon them, for enjoining such a long and rigorous fasting, as that of forty days, commonly called Lent?
I should now proceed, in order, to the examination of your 15th, 16th, and 17th sections; but as these, together with ♦the 19th, wholly refer to Mr. Wesley, I shall leave you to his correction, if he thinks proper to take you in hand. However, there is something so extraordinary in your 17th section, that, I think, it calls for a cursory remark. “But, previous to this elevated state, that we may not wander
too far from the saints progress, comes their conversion; which, as another instance of fanatical peculiarities, they represent as sudden and instantaneous.” Instantaneous conversion, a fanatical peculiarity! I presume instantaneous regeneration must be a fanatical peculiarity also. What then becomes of that Diana of the present age, baptismal regeneration? Which must be instantaneous, and that always too, if every child is really regenerated when baptized?
♦ removed duplicate word “the”
But this only by the by. In your 18th section, page 43. you return to me. “After these sudden conversions, usually they receive their assurances of salvation; and these (as also the proofs of their conversion) are certainly known, heard, seen or felt; they can ascertain the particular time and place of their receiving them; as so many seals of the Spirit.” These you call, page 44. “Presumptuous imaginations.” Is assurance of faith then, in your opinion, a presumptuous imagination? For you not only ridicule the Methodists way of expressing it, which in several respects may have been unguarded; nor are you content with asserting, that some who really had not this assurance, have presumptuously imagined they had it, which we readily grant; for there is counterfeit as well as current coin: but you seem to explode the thing itself. And yet you intend in this pamphlet, to draw a parallel between the Methodists and Papists. Could you give a greater proof of your symbolizing with the Papists yourself? Or need you be informed, that one grand article of the council of Trent is this, “That there is no such thing as a person’s knowing that his sins are forgiven him, or being assured of his salvation;” and that with good reason: for if there be such a thing as being assured of the forgiveness of our sins by the internal testimony, whether mediate or immediate, of the Spirit of G ; and if a person ought to be satisfied only with that, then how could the people be brought to believe in, and trust to the mere external verbal absolution of a priest? Our church, on the contrary, in one of her homilies, says, that a true faith “is a sure trust and confidence in
G , that by the merits of C , his sins are forgiven, and he reconciled to the favour of G .” And that the Scriptures every where promise to believers, a sure and internal witness from the Spirit of G , to witness with their spirits that they are his children, is so evident, that he who runs may read. What says our L ? “He that believeth in me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” This spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive. What says St. Paul? “Because ye are sons, G hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our Spirit, that we are the children of G .” Saith another, “He that believeth hath the witness in himself.” And a third exhorts all “to give diligence to make their calling and election sure.” Art thou a master in Israel, a protestant minister, and a minister of the Church of England, and knowest not these things?
But to come nearer to a close. Your 20th section is introduced thus: “And where will these bold enthusiasts stop?” I answer for one, in order to relieve both myself and you, even here, Sir. And without giving you the trouble of taking a flight after us to heaven, from whence, you say, page 48. “These methodistical enthusiasts have taken the sacred light and fire, in order to compass effectually their own, and others delusion,” I will freely and readily acknowledge, that you and others have had too much occasion for reflection, by several things that have been unwarily dropped up and down in my Journals.
These, you inform us in your preface, are what you have chiefly consulted. In this you have acted wisely enough for your purpose; though whether candidly or not, I will leave you and the world to judge, since there were later writings of mine, which might as easily have been procured. My Journals were some of my most early performances, wrote too in the very heights of my first popularity (which is apt to make the strongest head run giddy) in the midst of which, persons very often do things, which after-experience and riper judgment teach them to correct and amend.
This is true, however, in respect to myself; and, to convince you that this is the real language of my heart, and not extorted from me
by your pamphlet, I will lay before you an extract of a letter written by me to a worthy friend in South-Carolina, in my late return from Bermudas, and published, with very little alteration, in Scotland months ago¹ .
¹ Vide the Letter at full length, volume ii. page 143.
“Reverend Sir,
YOn board the Brigg Betsey, June 24, 1748.
ESTERDAY I made an end of revising all my Journals. Blessed be G for letting me have leisure to do it. I purpose to have a new edition before I see America. Alas! alas! in how many things have I judged, and acted wrong! I have been too rash and hasty in giving characters both of places and persons. Being fond of scripture language, I have often used a style too apostolical, and at the same time I have been too bitter in my zeal, wild-fire has been mixed with it; and I find that I have frequently written and spoken too much in my own spirit, when I thought I was writing and speaking entirely by the assistance of the Spirit of G . I have likewise too much made impressions, without the written word, my rule of acting; and too soon, and too explicitly, published what had better been kept in longer, or left to have been told after my death. By these things, I have given some wrong touches to G ’s ark, hurt the blessed cause I would defend, and stirred up needless opposition. This has humbled me much since I have been on board, and made me think of a saying of Mr. Henry’s, “Joseph had more honesty than he had policy, or he never would have told his dreams.” At the same time, I cannot but bless, and praise, and magnify that good and gracious G , who imparted to me so much of his holy fire, and carried me, a poor weak youth, through such a torrent both of popularity and contempt, and set so many seals to my unworthy ministrations. I bless him for ripening my judgment a little more, for giving me to see, confess, and I hope in some degree to correct and amend some of its mistakes. I thank G for giving me grace to
embark in such a blessed cause, and pray him to give me strength to hold on, and increase in zeal and love to the end. Thus, dear Sir, I have unburdened my heart to you. I look upon you to be my Fidus Achates, and therefore deal thus freely. If I have time and freedom before we land, I think to begin and write a short account of what has happened for these seven years last past; and when I get on shore, G willing, I purpose to revise and correct the first part of my life.”
This I am now about, and when finished, shall send it into the world, I hope in a more unexceptionable dress; though I am fully satisfied before-hand, that write or speak of the things of G as unexceptionably as may be, they will be always esteemed foolishness by the natural man, because they can only be spiritually discerned. However, the way of duty is the way of safety. Let me but be found in that, and I can then chearfully leave the consequences with G . In the mean while, I thank you, Sir, for pointing out to me a very wrong expression in the last part of my life. My words are these; “I could no longer walk on foot as usual; but was constrained to go in a coach, to avoid the Hosanna’s of the multitude.” Your remark runs thus, section 8. page 20. “Very profane, unless it be a false print for huzza’s.” I could wish it had been so; but the word was my own; and though not intended to convey a profane idea, was very wrong and unguarded, and I desire may be buried in oblivion, unless you, or some other kind person, are pleased to remind me of it, in order to lay me low before G and man.
A review of all this, together with my having dropped some too strong expressions concerning absolute reprobation; and more especially, my mentioning Mr. Wesley’s casting a lot on a private occasion, known only to G and ourselves, have put me to great pain. Speaking of this last, you say, page 75. “A more judicious sentiment, perhaps, never dropt from Mr. Whitefield’s pen.” I believe, Sir, the advice given was right and good; but then it was wrong in me to publish a private transaction to the world; and very ill judged, to think the glory of G could be promoted by unnecessarily exposing my friend. For this I have asked both G and him pardon years ago. And though I believe both have forgiven me, yet I believe I shall
never be able to forgive myself. As it was a public fault, I think it should be publicly acknowledged; and I thank a kind providence for giving me this opportunity of doing it.
As for the letters, out of which you, and the author of the “Observations on the conduct and behaviour of the Methodists,” have taken so many extracts, I acknowledge that many things in them were very exceptionable, though good in the main; and therefore they have been suppressed some time. Casting lots, I do not now approve of, nor have I for several years; neither do I think it a safe way (though practised, I doubt not, by many good men) to make a lottery of the scriptures, by dipping into them upon every occasion.
And now, Sir, I am somewhat prepared to hear what follows in your 48th page. “Nothing less than inspirations, revelations, illuminations, and all the extraordinary and immediate actions of all the persons in the sacred Trinity, will serve their turn. So that now every flash of zeal and devotion; every wild pretension, scheme, tenet, and over-bearing dictate; impulses, impressions, feelings, impetuous transports and raptures; intoxicating vapours, and fumes of imagination; phantoms of a crazy brain, &c. all are ascribed, with an amazing presumption, to the extraordinary interposition of heaven setting its seal to their mission.”
Judge you now, Sir, whether I am one of those, of whom you are pleased to speak thus, page 49. “In short, whatever they think, say, or do, is from G ; and whatever opposeth, and stands in their way, is from the Devil.” No, Sir, my mistakes have been too many, and my blunders too frequent, to make me set up for infallibility. I came soon into the world; I have carried high sail, whilst running through a whole torrent of popularity and contempt; and, by this means, have sometimes been in danger of oversetting. But many and frequent as my mistakes have been, or may be, as I have no part to act, if I know any thing of my heart, but to promote G ’s glory, and the good of souls, as soon as I am made sensible of them, they shall be publicly acknowledged and retracted.
At the same time, I should lie against reason, scripture, and above fourteen years experience, if I denied, that G has been pleased, from time to time, to vouchsafe me comfortable assistance and supports; or that a great and glorious work (if the conversion of souls may be termed so) has been begun, and is now carrying on in these, and several other parts of the world, by the instrumentality of those whom you stile enthusiastical Methodists.
Indeed, the ingenious author of the “Considerations upon the conversion and apostleship of St. Paul,” speaking of the enthusiasm that appears not only in the lives of some enthusiastical heretics, but even some of the methodists now, ventures to say, that “all the divine communications, illuminations, and extacies to which they have pretended, evidently sprung from much self-conceit, working together with the vapours of melancholy upon a warm imagination.” That the mentioning these divine communications so freely to the world, might be mixed with some degrees of unobserved vanity, or want of caution, may be probable. But roundly to assert, that all their communications were only pretended, and sprung from no other sources but self-conceit, vapours of melancholy, and a warm imagination, is I think unbecoming so young a convert as that author, is a blemish to his performance, and a mistake which, I trust, he himself will be happily convinced of, when he comes to experience more of the power of that Redeemer’s resurrection, which the Apostle, of whose conversion he in the main so excellently treats, longed so much to know.
Without running such lengths in judging others, or needlessly fearing to be accounted enthusiasts or methodists ourselves; when writing in defence of christianity, I think we may rationally allow, that there may be much light and assistance given from G , though at the same time something of our own imaginations may possibly be blended with it.
This I take to be true with respect to the Methodists. That imagination has mixed itself with the work, cannot be denied; and is no more than what must necessarily be expected; for whoever saw
fire without some smoke? but that the work itself is of G ; and as good Bishop Latimer said, when the papists laid a lighted faggot at Dr. Ridley’s feet, so we may venture to affirm, “a candle is lighted in England (through the instrumentality of the Methodists,) which will not easily be put out.”
The doctrines which they chiefly insist upon, are the great doctrines of the reformation: “That man is very far gone from original righteousness. That he cannot turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good works to faith and calling upon G . That we are accounted righteous before G , only for the merit of our L and Saviour J C , by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. That albeit good works, which are fruits of faith, and follow after justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of G ’s judgment; yet are they pleasing and acceptable to G in C , and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith; insomuch that by them a lively faith may be evidently known, as a tree is discerned by its fruits.” These are doctrines as diametrically opposite to the church of Rome, as light to darkness. They are the very doctrines, for which Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and so many of our first reformers were burned at the stake. And I will venture to say, are doctrines which, when attended with a divine energy, and preached with power, “without taking to their assistance the several arts of management and craft,” always have, and always will, maugre all opposition, make their way through the world, however weak the instruments that deliver them may be, and whatever offences and divisions about some non-essentials may arise among themselves.
These are things which always did, and always will happen in the purest ages of the church. Paul and Barnabas were permitted not only to fall out, but to separate from each other, merely on account of a dispute that arose about taking with them one John, whose surname was Mark. And yet this was over-ruled for the furtherance of the gospel. There was an incestuous person in the church of Corinth, when under even a truly apostolical inspection. And to what heights the contentions arose between Luther, Calvin, and Zwinglius,
at the first dawnings of the reformation, about predestination and the sacrament; and that of Bishop Cranmer, Ridley, and Hooper, many years after, about the vestments, is too notorious to be mentioned. It must needs be, that such offences come, whilst good men carry about with them the remainders of indwelling sin, prejudices of education, blindness in their understandings, and have an artful enemy always near at hand, and always ready to blow up the coals of contention, in order to raise a smoke, whereby he may blacken or blemish the work of G . The blessed J wisely permits such things, to cure us of spiritual pride, to remind us of the necessity of looking to himself, to teach us to cease from man, by convincing us, that the best of men are but men at the best, to inure us to longsuffering and forbearance one towards another, to excite in us a more eager desire after heaven, where these disorders will be at an end, and for a more glorious display of his infinite wisdom and power at the day of judgment; when he will convince the wondering world, that in spite of all the subtlety, malice, and rage of his enemies, together with the weaknesses, blindnesses, and jarrings of his friends, he has fully accomplished that glorious work, for which he came to shed his blood; I mean the renewal of a multitude of souls, which no man can number, out of every nation, language, and tongue, by making them partakers of his righteousness, and, through the powerful operations of his blessed Spirit, bringing them back to, and re-instamping upon them that divine image, in which they were originally created.
To awaken a drowsy world to a sense of this, to rouse them out of their formality, as well as profaneness, and put them upon seeking after a present and great salvation, to point out to them a glorious rest, which not only remains for the people of G hereafter, but which by a living faith the very chief of sinners may enter into even here, and without which the most blazing profession is nothing worth; is, as far as I know, the one thing, the grand and common point, in which all the Methodists endeavours do center.
This is what some of all denominations want to be reminded of; and to stir them up to seek after the life and power of godliness, that
they may be christians not only in word and profession, but in spirit and in truth, is, and, through J C strengthening me, shall be the one sole business of my life. “As for all those (as one expresses it) who are for clipping the wings of the mystic dove, and for confining the power and Spirit of G within the bounds of human establishments, I am well aware of what opposition I must continue to meet with from that quarter. But blessed be G , there are some few amongst us that are men of greater latitude, who can think, and dare speak, more worthily of G ’s sovereignty, and acknowledge a work to be his, though it be not according to the exact measure of canonical fitness.” Amongst these, I shall be sure to find hearty friends and well-wishers. And if by others of more confined principles, I am for this accounted an enthusiast, papist, or any thing else, they or you are very welcome to confer that, or any other title, upon, Sir,
Your very humble servant,
G. W.
Expostulatory Letter,
ADDRESSED TO N I C H O L A S L E W I S,
Lord Advocate of the U F .
O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?
Galatians iii. 1.
Expostulatory Letter, &c. London, April 24, 1753.
My Lord,
ALTHOUGH I am persuaded, that nothing hath a greater tendency to strengthen the hands of infidels, than too frequent altercations between the professors of christianity; yet there are certain occasions, wherein the necessary defence of the principles of
our holy religion, as well as the practice of it, renders public remonstrances of the greatest use and importance. The sacred pages afford us many examples of this nature. When Aaron was prevailed on by the Israelites, to make a golden calf, and offer sacrifice to it, what an holy indignation did Moses express against him and them? When Peter and Barnabas were carried away with the dissimulation of the Jews, how openly did the Apostle Paul withstand them to the face, and reprove them before all, “Because they were to be blamed?” And when this same Apostle saw the churches of Corinth and Galatia in danger of being drawn away from the simplicity of the gospel, what a fervent testimony did he bear against the authors and abettors of such a destructive scheme?
I mention these instances, my Lord, because I hope they will serve as a sufficient apology for my troubling your Lordship with this letter. For these many years past, have I been a silent, and I trust I can say, an impartial observer of the progress and effects of Moravianism, both in England and America; but such shocking things have been lately brought to our ears, and offences have swelled to such an enormous bulk, that a real regard for my king and my country, and, if I am not greatly mistaken, a disinterested love for the ever-blessed J , that King of kings, and the church which he hath purchased with his own blood, will not suffer me to be silent any longer.
Pardon me, therefore, my Lord, if at length, though with great regret, as the Searcher of hearts knows, I am constrained to inform your Lordship, that you, together with some of your leading brethren, have been unhappily instrumental in misguiding many real, simple, honest-hearted christians; of distressing, if not totally ruining numerous families, and introducing a whole farrago of superstitious, not to say idolatrous fopperies, into the English nation.
For my own part, my Lord, notwithstanding the folio that was published (I presume under your Lordship’s direction) about three years ago, I am as much at a loss as ever, to know what were the principles and usages of the ancient Moravian church; but if she was
originally attired in the same garb, in which she hath appeared of late amongst many true-hearted though deluded protestants, she is not that simple, apostolical church the English brethren were made to believe about twelve years ago. Sure I am, that we can find no traces of many of her present practices in the yet more ancient, I mean the primitive churches, and which we all know were really under an immediate and truly apostolical inspection.
Will your Lordship be pleased to give me leave to descend to a few particulars? Pray, my Lord, what instances have we of the first christians walking round the graves of their deceased friends on Easter-day, attended with hautboys, trumpets, french-horns, violins, and other kinds of musical instruments? Or where have we the least mention made of pictures of particular persons being brought into the first christian assemblies, and of candles being placed behind them, in order to give a transparent view of the figures? Where was it ever known, that the picture of the Apostle Paul, representing him handing a gentleman and lady up to the side of J C , was ever introduced into the primitive love-feasts? Or do we ever hear, my Lord, of incense, or something like it, being burnt for him, in order to perfume the room before he made his entrance among the brethren? Or can it be supposed that he, who, together with Barnabas, so eagerly repelled the Lycaonians, when they brought oxen and garlands in order to sacrifice unto them, would ever have suffered such things to be done for him, without expressing his abhorrence and detestation of them? And yet your Lordship knows both these have been done for you, and suffered by you, without your having shewn, as far as I can hear, the least dislike¹ .
¹ I might here take notice of the married women’s being ordered to wear blue knots, the single women pink, and those that are just marriageable, pink and white; the widows that are past child-bearing, to wear white, and those that are not so, blue and white knots; and also of the episcopal knot of Mrs Hannah Nitschman, (who is, I am informed, the present general Eldress of the congregation) which is sometimes of a purple, and sometimes of a rose colour These, with many other fanciful things, might be considered; but my mind at present is too full of concern to dwell upon any thing but what more immediately strikes at the welfare of society, and what hath a still more fatal tendency to draw away unwary souls from the simplicity of the gospel. Would to G I could with a safe conscience be excused even from this!
Again, my Lord, I beg leave to enquire, whether we hear any thing in scripture of eldresses or deaconesses of the apostolical churches seating themselves before a table, covered with artificial flowers, and against that, a little altar surrounded with wax tapers, on which stood a cross, composed either of mock or real diamonds, or other glittering stones? And yet your Lordship must be sensible this was done in Fetter-lane chapel, for Mrs. Hannah Nitschman, the present general eldress of your congregation, with this addition, that all the sisters were seated, cloathed in white, and with German caps; the organ also illuminated with three pyramids of wax tapers, each of which was tied with a red ribbon; and over the head of the general Eldress, was placed her own picture, and over that (horresco referens) the picture of the Son of G . A goodly sight this, my Lord, for a company of English protestants to behold! Alas! to what a long series of childish and superstitious devotions, and unscriptural impositions, must they have been habituated, before they could sit silent and tame spectators of such an antichristian scene. Surely, had Gideon, though but an Old Testament saint, been present, he would have risen and pulled down this, as he formerly did his father’s altar. Or had even that meek man Moses been there, I cannot help thinking, but he would have addressed your Lordship, partly at least, in the words with which he addressed his brother Aaron, “What did
this people unto thee, that thou hast introduced such superstitious customs among them¹?”
¹ A like scene to this was exhibited by the single brethren, in a room of their house at Hatton Garden One of them, who helped to furnish it, gave me the following account. The floor was covered with sand and moss, and in the middle of it, was paved a star of different coloured pebbles, upon that was placed a gilded dove, which spouted water out of its mouth into a vessel prepared for its reception, which was curiously decked with artificial leaves and flags; the room was hung with moss and shells; the Count, his son, and son-in-law, in honour of whom all this was done, with Mrs. Hannah Nitschman, and Mr. Peter Boehler, and some other labourers, were present These were seated under an alcove, supported by columns made of pasteboard, and over their heads was painted an oval, in imitation of marble, containing the cyphers of Count Zinzendorff’s family Upon a side-table, was a little altar covered with shells, and on each side of the altar was a bloody heart, out of, or near which proceeded flames The room was illuminated with wax tapers, and musicians placed in an adjacent apartment, while the company performed their devotions, and regaled themselves with sweet-meats, coffee, tea, and wine. After this the labourers departed, and the single brethren were admitted in. I am told, that most, if not all of these leading persons were present also at the celebration of Mrs. Hannah Nitschman’s birth-day.
But this is not all: I have another question to propose to your Lordship. Pray, my Lord, did any of the Apostles or leaders of the primitive churches, ever usurp an authority, not only over people’s consciences, but their properties also? Or draw in the members of their respective congregations to dispose of whole patrimonies at once, or to be bound for thousands of pounds more than they well knew they were worth? And yet your Lordship knows this has been done again and again, in order to serve the purposes of the brethren for several years last past; and that too, at, or very near the time, when, in order to procure an act in their favour to go abroad, (which
now appears to be rather a scheme to settle at home) they boasted to an English parliament, how immensely rich they were¹ .
¹ M. Rimius, aulic counsellor to the late King of Prussia, in a treatise he lately published, I think makes it plainly appear, that the agents for the Moravian affairs, have misinformed the parliament in several respects, and upon the whole, treated that august body little better than the Gibeonitish ambassadors once treated Joshua, the captain of the L ’s host To this I refer the reader It is written with great candour, and contains such incontestable proofs of the many dangerous principles and practices of the leading brethren, that must, I think, constrain all that read it to say, “My soul, come not thou into their secret, and to their assembly, mine honour be not thou united.”
I suppose it was a consciousness of this, that induced Mr. Cossart, one of the Count’s chief agents, to suggest to Mr. Linde some time before its publication, that it would be as good as three hundred pounds in his way, if Mr. Rimius’s book could be suppressed. This looks bad; but I think it was still worse in another of the brethren roundly to affirm, in order to quiet some who were dissatisfied by reading this book, “that the author of the above-mentioned treatise, was one that personated Mr Rimius, and that the whole was lies ” Now they cannot but know, that this gentleman resides in Oxenden-street, and addressed his book to his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, by permission, and that he proves almost every word he says, from the brethren’s own writings. The abovementioned brother was pleased to add, “that the real M. Rimius was a friend, and therefore would not write against them.” I answer, that I verily believe he therefore wrote, as G knows I do, because he is a friend; or to use his own words, “from a strict regard to truth, justice, and the public good.” And I think, if instead of adding sin to sin, by continuing still to misguide, enslave, and put out the eyes of many of G ’s dear children, who, I am persuaded, know no more of their secret mysteries and intended purposes, than those who never heard of them at all, it would shew a much better spirit in the leading brethren, either publicly to refute, or ingenuously confess, and amend the things laid to their charge This is what G and the world may justly require at their hands, and without this, I cannot see how they can expect any future blessing from above; since the wisest of men hath told us, “H th t th hi i h ll t b t h
“He that covereth his sins shall not prosper, but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” Grant us all this mercy, heavenly Father, for thy dear Son’s sake! As I am not personally acquainted with Mr Rimius, I take this opportunity of informing him, that it is the desire of many, the Latin appendices may be translated into English, and the whole printed in a small edition, in order to make it more extensively useful
Your Lordship cannot but be sensible, that at this present time you stand indebted to sundry persons to the value of forty thousand pounds sterling; and unless some of your brethren had agreed to stay six years for about twenty thousand pounds, due to them; (though after the expiration of that term, as they have no security, in all probability they will be just where they are now) and if the other creditors also, upon consideration of some bonds given, and mortgages made¹ for principal and interest, had not agreed to stay four years, for twenty one thousand pounds more, many of the English brethren, who, out of I know not what kind of infatuation, have not only given their all, but have been bound for thousands more than they are able to pay, must either have immediately become bankrupts, and thereby the creditors perhaps, not have had a shilling in the pound, or have been obliged to shut up their shops, go to prison, or be turned out into the wide world, to the utter ruin of themselves and families.
¹ The buildings in Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, &c. Besides this, there are some thousands due to others upon bond, and many thousands to a particular gentleman, for which the Count has mortgaged one of the German settlements; I think it is Marienburg.
The distress and anguish of mind that hundreds have been involved in upon this very account, is, I believe, unspeakable¹ . And the bare reflection upon it, whilst I am writing, makes my heart almost to bleed within me. Who, who, but themselves, my Lord, can tell the late perplexity of their minds, who have been already
arrested, or obliged to break off their respective partnerships? Or what words can express the great concern, which Mr. Freeman and Mr. Thomas Grace must have been necessarily under, when they found that bills had been drawn in their name, unknown to them, to the value of forty-eight thousand pounds?² And how pitiable, my Lord, must the present circumstances of young Mr. Rhodes be, who, to stop a little of the above-mentioned gap, was prevailed on, (your Lordship knows by whom,) about eighteen months ago, to sell his estate of above four hundred pounds a year, and went or was sent off very lately, as I am assured, to France, (leaving a destitute mother behind him) and only with twenty-five pounds, for the payment of which he left his watch, bureau, horse and saddle?³
