The Life Of Joseph Hart Pt.1

Wright Thomas | Added: Apr 08, 2025 | Category: Biography

Joseph Hart, the hymn-writer, ‘dear Hart’, ‘that dear man of God’, as his devoted admirers lovingly styled him (and admirers more devoted never man had), was born in London about 1712. His parents, who were gracious and stedfast Calvinists, worshipped at some Independent meeting in the city, and they endeavoured both by example and precept to bring up their son in the fear of God.

‘I imbibed’, says Hart, ‘the sound doctrines of the gospel from my infancy; nor was I without touches of heart, checks of conscience, and meltings of affections, by the secret striving of God’s Spirit with me while very young; but the impressions were not deep, nor the influences lasting’.

He was a warm-hearted, self-reliant, highly-strung, ambitious lad; his parents gave him a sound education; and he applied himself assiduously to his studies, especially French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, in all of which he became proficient. He was neat and methodical in his habits. A devotee to literature, he may any day be seen bending over the dingy bookstalls of Moorfields. He read with relish most of the great English writers, but his master bias was for the literatures of Greece and Rome; and after leaving school he became a teacher of the classics, though where or whom he taught has not transpired. That he was a practical, enthusiastic, and successful teacher is clear from the notes to his translation of Phocylides, in which he explains how it was that in those days so many lads made but indifferent progress in their classical studies. The reason is, he says, because the teachers themselves study their subjects only perfunctorily; consequently, instead of carrying their pupils, as they should, into the very presence of an ancient author, they leave them to stagger about as best they can ‘under a load of indigestible rules’. He laid down that, as with other temples so with the classics, it is love alone that unlocks.

Soon after reaching the age of 21, he began to be under serious concern respecting his eternal state. He says, ‘the spirit of bondage distressed me sore though I endeavoured to commend myself to God’s favour by amendment of life, virtuous resolutions, moral rectitude, under strict attendance on religious ordinances. I strove to subdue my flesh by fasting and mortification, and other rigorous acts of penance; and whenever I was captivated by its lusts I endeavoured to reconcile myself again to God by sorrow for my faults, which, if attended with tears, I hoped would pass as current coin with heaven.’ From his boyhood he had aspired to authorship, and these spiritual conflicts – victories alternating with defeats – had the effect of leading him to express his thoughts in verse, but all his early poems are lost, with the exception of a few lines which many years afterwards he thought good enough to be incorporated in some of his hymns. His religion, however, proved to be only superficial. Possessor of rare natural talents, he was a welcome guest in gilded and convivial circles; and the public garden, the play-house, and the tavern where his habitual resorts. ‘He wasted his substance.’ The name given to him by William Shrubsole – Mr Hearty – was probably the one bestowed on him by his worthless companions. He was indeed hearty in the devil’s service. If he broke with these companions, as now and again happened, it was only to return with impetuosity, after a brief interval, to his old and vicious courses. ‘In this uneasy restless round of sinning and repenting, working and dreading’, he says, ‘I went on for above seven years, when, a great domestic affliction befalling me (in which I was a moderate sufferer, but a monstrous sinner), I began to sink deeper and deeper into conviction of my nature’s evil, the wickedness of my life, the shallowness of my Christianity, and the blindness of my devotions. Long after, recalling those days, he likened himself to an insensate mariner, who ‘sees yet strikes the shelf’; and in one of the most agonising cries that ever poet uttered, he exclaims, referring to the Lord Jesus, 

I broke His law, and (worse than that),

Alas! I broke His heart.

While Hart’s mind was in this deplorable condition, while the sores of sin were corroding his soul, and while he was ‘reckoning trash for treasure’, the country was being feverishly agitated by the magnetic preaching of Whitfield and Wesley; and Hart, who notwithstanding the looseness of his life, still called himself a Calvinist, followed the career of Whitfield, first with curiosity and afterwards with passionate enthusiasm.

In August, 1739, Whitfield who since the preceding April had preached regularly in Moorfields set sail for America, his main object being the establishment of an orphanage for the benefit of the colony of Georgia. One evening in the following November, Wesley, who for long had been diverging doctrinally from Whitefield, preached at Bristol a sermon from Romans 8, in which he declared himself an unhesitating believer in perfection and universal redemption, speaking pointedly against the Calvinistic position, and against election and predestination in particular. The sermon was afterwards published with the title of ‘Free Grace’, and it fell like a thunderbolt upon the religious world. The line of argument alone would have had the effect of exciting to fever heat those who had ranged themselves on the Calvinistic side; but the title which Wesley had tacked to his sermon acted like oil to the furnace. On receiving a copy, Whitefield, who insisted that the doctrine of election had been taught him of God, wrote at once to Wesley a letter, every line of which bubbles with indignation. It is dated 24th December, 1740 and runs:

Reverend and very dear brother, – God only knows what unspeakable sorrow of heart I have felt on your account since I left England last. Whether it be my infirmity or not, I frankly confess that Jonah could not go with more reluctance against Ninevah than I now take pen in hand to write against you … For some time before, and especially since my last departure from England, both in public and private, by preaching and printing, you have been propagating the doctrine of universal redemption … Dear, dear sir, oh, be not offended … Down with your carnal reasoning. Be a little child. And then, instead of pawning your salvation, as you have done in the late hymn-book, if the doctrine of Universal Redemption be not true; instead of talking of sinless perfection, as you have done in the preface to that hymn-book, and making man’s salvation dependent on his own free will, as you have in this sermon, you will compose a hymn in praise of sovereign, distinguishing love.’

Such is the substance of this epoch-making letter. It is the conspicuous white way-post with unmistakable finger, erected at the angle where the great evangelical high road suddenly and unexpectedly splits.  This letter was afterwards printed, and hundreds of copies were handed to Wesley’s people, both at the door of his preaching place in Moorfields – The Foundry – and inside the building. Having procured one, Wesley, who believed it had been printed without Whitefield’s leave, gave an account of its origin, concluding his remarks with, ‘I will do just what I believe Mr Whitfield would were he here himself’, and then he tore it in pieces before the congregation. ‘Everyone who received it’, he says, ‘did the same, so that in two minutes there was not a whole copy left’.

When Whitfield landed again in England, on the 11th March, 1741, it was to declare that he could no longer work with Wesley. However, they were kept from anathematising each other, though there were at times ominous rumblings, and each persevered in the course that seemed best to him. 

But if Whitfield refrained from attacking Wesley, others who disapproved of the Bristol sermon trenchantly assailed it both by lip and pen, the most uncompromising being Joseph Hart, who issued in 1741 a caustic and powerful pamphlet entitled, The Unreasonableness of Religion, being Remarks and Animadversions on Mr John Wesley’s Sermon on Romans 8:32’. Gifted, acrimonious, hasty to proclaim his opinions – sound or unsound; not altogether pleasing in his manner, even when in the right; impatient to flesh his sword, Hart rushed upon Wesley with a confident and exalting ‘Ha! Ha!’ ‘It is a truth’ he commences, ‘of singular use and solid comfort to those whose understandings are enlightened by the Spirit of God to perceive it, that religion and reason are not only widely different, but directly contrary the one to the other.

‘1. Reason bids me expect acceptance from the Almighty in a future state according to the moral justice, equity and goodness of my actions in the present. Religion teaches me that I shall be acquitted, justified and accepted of God by the righteousness of another, freely bestowed and given me, without the least regard to my own personal either merit or demerit.

‘2. Reason tells me that in order to secure an interest in eternal life, I must by my own natural strength strive, struggle and labour. Religion plainly shows me that when I was in my natural state it was impossible for me to move one step towards heaven; but was as incapable of exerting the least power or motion towards any spiritual good as a dead carcass is of performing any action of natural life. 

‘3. Reason in some asserts that, admitting man in his natural state cannot turn or prepare himself to seek the Lord, yet that divine power necessary to enable him so to do is given, or rather offered, indiscriminately to all alike. Religion, in contradiction to this, declares that the glory of God is the ultimate and only end of all His works; and that as even the wicked, made for the day of evil, shall be instruments of setting forth this glory in their destruction, which they are utterly unable by any means to avoid; so, on the other hand, those who are predestinated to the adoption of sons shall infallibly receive the grace given them here, and enjoy the glory prepared for them in Christ before the foundation of the world.

‘4. Reason in those who are converted is ever speaking thus: although in my unregenerate state I was utterly unable to move the least step forward in the pursuit of religion, yet, now I am converted and born again, I must stir up the gift that is in me. It is my duty to pray to the Lord to increase my faith. I must endeavour to grow in grace, and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. The voice of Religion speaks in this wise: I plainly see and experimentally feel, that as before conversion I could not move one hair’s breadth towards God and goodness; so, since I am new created in Christ Jesus, the old man in me is as rebellious and stubborn as ever … My greatest labour is to be quiet, my strongest struggling to sit still, and my most active endeavours to apprehend myself entirely passive in God’s hand.’

After various observations ancillary to these statements, he deplores the degeneracy of an age ‘when religion is almost thrown aside; when self-named preachers of all professions seem unanimously agreed in a literal sense to do nothing, except it be to strive for the fattest livings and wealthiest congregations’. ‘Feebly, however, as the doctrines of truth had been proclaimed, alarm’, he tells us, ‘had been felt by the adversary, and zealous opposers of that little truth’ had arisen. And then it transpires that he has in mind one person in particular, ‘Mr John Wesley, who’, he adds, ‘in a sermon lately come to my hands, preached at Bristol, and published under the specious title of Free Grace, has debased and vilified the glorious doctrine of God’s eternal love to elected sinners.

He then takes Wesley’s sermon paragraph by paragraph, and comments bitterly on ‘the old Arminian errors’.

‘Many things that happen, he says, are inconsistent with one’s natural notions of justice and mercy’ – good men are weighed down with trouble; evil men go through life like a band of music. Think again of the sufferings of the brute creation. ‘Surely these things are disagreeable to our natural notions of goodness and mercy. And yet we see so they are, and ever have been. How then can any man presume to say that the doctrine of predestination cannot be true, only because it disagrees with a reason, and contradicts our natural conceptions of justice and mercy?’

After commenting on the uselessness of ‘a mere notional assent to the doctrine of election’, which he observes, ‘is as incapable of helping the soul as the bare ocular sight of meat is of nourishing the body’, he sets down what we may take to be his own experiences. ‘The first thing generally done by the spirit in the conversion of a Sinner is to show him that he is lost himself, and must die eternally without the free grace and mercy of God in the Mediator … Thus is he continually distressed … till God shall shine in upon him by his Spirit … he now begins to see a marvellous light in the sacred writings, unknown to him before by the letter.’

In his sermon, Wesley had described election as ‘an uncomfortable doctrine’. ‘Indeed, so it is’, says Hart, ‘to those who cannot see their interest in it, but marvellously sweet and comfortable to all who by grace are made partakers of it’. ‘I believe the doctrine of election to be true because I believe myself elected. It is so because it is so, is good logic in religion, though ridiculous in philosophy.’ 

Up to this point Hart’s line of argument is one which commands itself in almost every particular to those who uphold the doctrines of free grace as understood by Whitefield and his co-religionists; but having gone so far he shoots off at a tangent – taking upon himself to make the outrageous and portentous assertion sinners’ sins ‘do not destroy but often increase their comfort even here’. The painful part is that his actions at this time comported generally with his notions, for he says in his ‘Experience’, ‘Having (as I imagined) obtained by Christ a liberty of sinning, I was resolved to make use of it, and thought the more I could sin without remorse, the greater hero I was in faith’.

Often and often in after days – whatever his attitude towards one or two other passages in the pamphlet – he deeply regretted this pronouncement – those after days in which he could but write, deeply saying the while,

How sore a plague is sin,

To those by whom ’tis felt;

The Christian cries, ‘Unclean, unclean!’

E’en though released from guilt.

Far from finding comfort in the recollection of his sins, he could only look back upon them with horror and loathing. Though the sores had healed, there were still the unsightly scars.

This passage would have revealed, even if the knowledge had not come to us from another source, that Hart was at the period of his pamphlet an extreme Antinomian. ‘His choice friends’, says Shrubsole, ‘were Antinomians, and he loved nothing better than to sit under high Antinomian preachers’. It is true he adopts the role of a convert, and he doubtless persuaded himself that such a one he was; but when the great awakening came he was able to see, even in those portions of the pamphlet which he could heartily endorse, nothing more than ‘dry doctrine’, and then none so emphatic as he in pronouncing that dry doctrine cannot save us, adding,

In vain men talk of living faith,

When all their works exhibit death.

From high Antinomianism to Humanism, which is a fancy name for Paganism, was an easy course, and Hart, having constructed a religion which combined the libertinism of ancient Greece with the doctrines of Christianity, ‘published a few tracts in favour of the way in which he chose to live’. ‘He joined himself to a citizen of that country.’ Ultimately he ‘ran such dangerous lengths, both of carnal and spiritual wickedness’, that he even out went professed infidels. He says, ‘I committed all uncleanness with greediness’.

The road of death with rash career

I ran, and gloried in my shame;

Abus’d His grace, despised His fear,

And others taught to do the same.

Bold blasphemies employ’d my tongue,

I heeded not my heart unclean;

Lost all regard of right and wrong,

In thought, in word, in act obscene.

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