Volume 54 — THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. OCTOBER, 1871. (continued 5)

The Church of England very soon set itself against the new movement; Whitefield, much younger than Wesley, an ardent, flaming, seraphic man, had been compelled to betake himself to the fields. Like Wesley he was an ordained minister of the Church, but he had been threatened with suspension and expulsion, and he was the first who could collect thousands—sometimes not less than twenty thousand—to hear the gospel. It was with great fear and trembling that Wesley imitated him, and he says, referring to his first preaching in the open air near Bristol, 'I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields; having been all my life, till very lately, so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I would have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in church.' 'Such,' says Mr. Tyerman, 'were the prejudices and feelings of the man who for between fifty or sixty years proved himself the greatest outdoor preacher that ever lived.'

It does not seem very easy to settle the precise etymology of the term Methodist, whether derived, as some have said, from an allusion in Juvenal to a celebrated quack physician, or whether, as Mr. Tyerman seems to think, first used in a pamphlet attacking Whitefield in the earlier years of his ministry, in which the author fetches up an old sentence from the pages of Chrysostom, who says, 'To be a Methodist is to be beguiled.' We ourselves happened once, in a parish church in Huntingdonshire, to be 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 in 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, 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 passage of the apostle, '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.' It was a piece of the richest criticism we ever remember to have heard in any pulpit. In such empty wit and ignorant punning, it is very likely, however, that the term had its origin; be that as it may, 'Methodist' soon became the designation of a really large body of social and spiritual reformers, and assuredly no term has obtained greater renown and importance since 'the disciples were first called Christians at Antioch;' but in fact the word is to be found in several places in our obsolete English. Wesley was not the greatest outdoor preacher that ever lived, but we can forgive Mr. Tyerman for thinking so in his high feeling of admiration for his illustrious hero. He became a power in the country. Earl Stanhope in his very interesting 'History of England from 1713–1783,' devotes a lengthy chapter to Wesley and the rise of Methodism, and says, 'with less immediate importance than war or political changes, it endures long after, not only the result, but the memory of these has passed away, and thousands who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole continue to hold the precepts and venerate the name of John Wesley.' Thus this venerable name is a distinguished landmark or milestone in the history of the mind of England. By his labours he gave the noblest freedom to thousands of enslaved minds, and marshalled their wild natures under the principles of order and obedience. Wesley achieved his greatest victories in the open air; he probably inherited from his father a tolerably sharp power of satiric reproof, which often served him well in such encounters as he would be sure to have in the broad streets or the fields, and was well illustrated in his victory over Beau Nash. The accomplished rake and dandy king of Bath, master of the ceremonies in that then famous watering-place, appeared swaggering in his enormous white hat, and asked, 'By what authority he dared to do what he was doing now?' 'By the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to me by him who is now Archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid his hands upon me and said, "Take thou authority to preach the Gospel."' Cried the man of Bath, 'Your preaching frightens people out of their wits.' 'Sir,' said Wesley 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'No!' 'How then can you judge of what you have never heard?' 'I judge, he answered, 'from common report.' 'Common report,' replied Wesley, 'is not enough; give me leave to ask, Sir, is not your name Nash?' 'It is,' he said. 'Sir,' replied Wesley, 'I dare not judge of you by common report.' Even the unblushing master of ceremonies was abashed and worsted; he was slinking away, when, to complete his discomfiture, an old woman lifted up her voice, and begged Wesley to allow her to question and to answer him; this made the scene ludicrous, and in the midst of such a singular and disgraceful defeat, the mighty dandy left the preacher to continue and to close his sermon.

The most romantic lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar do not present a more startling succession of incidents than those which meet us in the life and labours of Wesley and his Prætorian band, and these are all the more marvellous and romantic because they lay no tax upon credulity and never appeal to miracle as their foundation. Wesley never, like blessed St. Raymond of Pennafort, spread his cloak upon the sea to transport him across the water, sailing one hundred and sixty miles in six hours, and entering his convent through closed doors; nor do we ever find him, like the dear and judicious Xavier, spending three whole days in two different places at the same time, preaching all the while. We fear it is true that Wesley does not shine in feats like these, but he seems almost ubiquitous, and moves with a rapidity which reminds us of that flying angel who had 'the everlasting gospel to preach;' while his conflicts with the tempests of nature, and those wilder tempests caused by the passions of men, crowd his life with incident. We read of adventurous journeys through regions in the North of England when snowstorms drifted and baulked the way, and made travelling almost impossible, or over roads made like glass by the hard frost, and through pathless wastes of white. Thus we read of his travelling through the long wintry hours, two hundred and eighty miles, on horseback in six days, a wonderful feat, and Wesley himself writes,—'Many a rough journey have I had before, but one like this I never had, between wind and hail and rain and snow and ice, and driving sleet and piercing cold; but it has passed, and those days will return no more, and are therefore as though they had never been. So "the love of Christ constrained him."' Vast concourses met him in singular places: on Blackheath fourteen thousand people, in Kingswood more, in Moorfields and on Kennington Common twenty thousand people. Singular was his visit to Epworth, where he found the church of his childhood, his father's church, and the church of his own first ministrations, closed against him, but for eight days he stayed, and preached every night standing on his father's tomb; truly a singular sight, the living son, the prophet of his age, surely little short of inspired, preaching on the dead father's grave, with such pathos and power as we may well conceive. 'I am well assured,' he says, 'that I did far more good to my Lincolnshire parishioners by preaching three days on my father's tomb, than I did by preaching three years in his pulpit.' Visiting York, he went to the service of St. Saviour's Gate church; the rector, the Rev. Mr. Cordeux, had warned his congregation against hearing that 'vagabond Wesley' preach. Wesley went into the church in his canonicals, it was not unusual for ministers then to wear the cassocks or the gown like the university man in a university town: the rector of course saw he was a clergyman, but not knowing who he was, offered him his pulpit to preach, and Wesley was thoroughly willing and ready. He took for his text a part of the gospel of the day—sermons leaped impromptu from his lips and heart; this sermon was an impressive one, and after the service the rector asked the clerk if he knew who the strange clergyman was. 'Sir,' said the clerk, 'it was the "vagabond Wesley" against whom you warned us.' 'Ay, indeed!' said the astonished rector, 'we have been trapped, but never mind, we have had a good sermon.' The Dean of York heard of the affair, and threatened to lay the matter before the archbishop; but the rector outstripped the dean, and went himself and told the story to the archbishop. 'You did quite right,' he said, and so the matter ended; only when the 'vagabond Wesley' came to York again, the rector offered his church the second time to him, and a second time be preached in St. Saviour's.

A succession of persecutions attended him and his followers on their way, and yet very little could be alleged to their discredit. In Cornwall, Edward Greenfield, a tanner, with a wife and seven children, was arrested under a warrant signed by Dr. Borlase, the eminent antiquarian, who was a bitter foe to Methodism. Wesley appeared to vindicate his friend, and he first inquired what objection there was to the peaceable, inoffensive man. The answer was, 'The man is well enough in other things, but the gentlemen cannot bear his impudence; why, Sir, he says that he knows his sins are forgiven!' When Bernardine of Sienna preached at Bologna, the people brought out their dice-tables and burnt them in the streets; when Antony of Padua preached at Pavia, he saw impure books and pictures committed to immense flames; and even more remarkable, when Savonarola preached in Florence, the woman left off painting their faces, and decorating their hair. The results of Wesley's preaching were scarcely less remarkable. The story is well known how in one place a whole waggon-load of Methodists had been taken before a magistrate, but when he asked what they had done, a deep silence fell over the court, for no one was very well prepared with any charge against them; at length some one exclaimed that 'they pretended to be better than other people, and prayed from morning till night;' and another said, 'They have convarted my wife; till she went among them she had such a tongue, but now she's as quiet as a lamb.' 'Take them back, take them back,' said the sensible magistrate, 'and let them convert all the scolds in the town.' We are amazed when we attempt to realize all the causeless conflicts through which many of these holy enthusiasts passed, certainly the world in all its force was against them; no wild anti-popery riots were more unreasonable and brutal than the turbulent mobs which tore down houses and insolently assaulted women and men for their attachment to the new movement. Attempts were often made on Wesley's life in Cornwall; wild cries rose around him, 'Away with him!' 'Kill him at once!' 'Crucify the dog!' Stones and bricks were frequently hurled at him; often he might have said, 'My soul is among lions.' Staffordshire was scarcely behind Cornwall in the rough assaults. Quiet men were pressed for soldiers, and sent as prisoners to jail, simply because they were Methodists; hot-headed Hanoverians did their best to make the whole Methodist body disloyal, and both John and Charles Wesley were arrested or taken before the magistrates upon suspicion of being favourable to the Pretender. Thus Charles was brought before the magistrates at Wakefield, and five witnesses were ready to swear that he had either prayed or preached about the return of the 'Banished One,' the well-known and tender words of the wise woman of Tekoa, being supposed to convey some sinister allusion to the exiled Stuarts. It was the age of mobs and riots; for a long time the preaching of Wesley appears to have been greeted by turbulencies as wild and vehement as those which give a disgraceful notoriety to the name of John Wilkes or Lord George Gordon.

So astonishing were the results of these very simple and Christ-like ministrations, that there was surely something of the supernatural in the man Wesley. It is part of the very nature of Christianity to believe that from time to time the Church is invigorated by extraordinary impulses of divine life find grace, and singular effusions of the Holy Spirit: and to those who are able to reach at all the idea of supernatural causes in the Christian life, it is not difficult to apprehend the reality of such impulses. There was surely much that was remarkable in Wesley; it is unquestionable that strange influences seemed to attend him. His words, it has been remarked, seemed to possess a mesmeric power; his proximity to the supernatural has often been made the subject of criticism. Extraordinary circumstances which Southey, Richard Watson, Isaac Taylor, and other eminent writers have found to be perfectly inexplicable upon principles of natural reasoning marked his ministry; we read of innumerable instances of individual convulsions, and of multitudes falling prostrate to the ground before his words; cold and imperturbable natures were suddenly overwhelmed. Wesley was quite a believer in the visible and oral manifestation of the 'powers of the world to come;' such instances were especially prominent in the earlier part of his singular course. We have no remarks to make upon these phenomena, nor shall we inquire whether they may or may not be accounted for on merely natural principles; the facts remain unquestioned. One thing is certain, as when Peter preached, so at the preaching of Wesley, innumerable thousands were 'pricked to the heart, and exclaimed, "What shall we do?"'

The power of Wesley's teaching may probably be traced to the fact that it dealt with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; but then the whole doctrine was suffused in the fulness, the sufficiency, and the sweetness of Jesus, and it was a mighty reaction against the indifference and injustice of the age. The party formed against Wesley represented the higher classes, bishops and men whose minds and hearts it would seem were incapable of sympathy for the suffering and the poor, and for those who were out of the way; coarse ribalds like Lavington, the Bishop of Exeter, or dilettanti gentlemen like Horace Walpole, buffoons and time servers like Foote, or even hard theologians like Toplady, their doctrines tinctured with the harsh and morbid severity of the times, when, as we have seen, reckless disregard for life, a claim over it for the most insignificant offences, must have tended to give a rigour and narrowness to many religious ideas. Wesley's audiences were chiefly composed of the poor. The early Methodist was a very simple, perhaps usually an ignorant, man, but he had that light which 'lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' The Methodist was not such an one as the Puritan of other days, who was a sort of Knight of the Iron Hand, a Nonconformist crusader, whose theology had trained him to the battle-field, nerved him to frown defiance upon kings, and to treat as worthy only of contempt the unsanctified nobles of the earth. The Methodist was not such an one; he was as loyal as he was lowly, he had been forgotten or passed by, by priests and Levites, but suddenly he found himself raised to the rank of a living soul—a voice had reached him assuring him that he, too, was in possession of a soul. Over the country the ground, on the whole, was easy to Wesley to win; there was no education, there were no conflicts of opinion, there were no popular books, the people had no objects to claim their attention, the towns were far apart, and connected only by the mail or stagecoach, or that heavy and much more romantic-looking than agreeable conveyance, the market-cart; there was little popular excitement, there were only coarse amusements. It is unquestionable that the people had far fewer religious interests than in the old days of popery, the entire services of the Church were bald and uninteresting, there was no music, unless of such a description as to move the passions by shattering the nerves,—there was no popular psalmody worthy of the name; thus the religious nature was entranced or buried. But the Methodist was one who had heard the call of God, conscience had been stirred within him, and a new life had created new interests; for Christianity really ennobles a man, gives him self-respect, shows to him a new purpose and business in life, and stirs the spirit, moreover, with a pulse of joy and cheerfulness; hence Methodism created the necessity for meetings and for frequent reciprocations. There were no chapels, or but few, and none to open their doors to these strange new pilgrims to the celestial city. The churches, of course, were closed against them;—what could be done, for they must speak together. Reciprocation was the soul of Methodism; almost all the great religious movements have been instituted and marked by some sign—Dominic invented the rosary, Loyola the spiritual contemplations and the retreat, Wesleyanism created Class-meetings; this constituted its essential symbolism. A church can scarcely long maintain a standing without a symbol. This is the countersign of parties and sects. So these people assembled in each other's houses, in rude and homely rooms, by farm ingles, in lone hamlets; thus was created a homely piety, rugged enough, but full of beautiful and pathetic instincts. When the faith became more consciously objective, it was possessed by that singular belief ruling the Church in all such movements—the belief in the power, conjoined to the desire to save souls. This drove them out on great occasions to call the vast multitudes together on heaths and moors. Occasionally, but this was at a later period, some country gentleman threw open his old hall to the preachers; but the more aristocratic phase of the Methodist movement fell into the Calvinistic rather than into the Wesleyan ranks; these last sought the sequestered places of nature, or in cities and towns they took to the streets, outlying fields or broadways; in some neighbourhoods a little room was built containing the germ of what in a few years became a large Wesleyan society. The burden of all their meetings and their intercourse, whether in speech or song, was the sweetness and fullness of Jesus; they had an intense faith in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; their great solicitude was that souls were on the brink of perdition. This was to them more than spiritual difficulties, mere interior trials, or speculative despair; these were mostly a terra incognita to them. Wesley dealt, as it has been expressed, with sin as sin, and with souls as souls; he had little regard to mere proprieties. Wesley and his preachers, 'out of breath pursuing souls,' seemed to many ungraceful, undignified, their faces weary, their hands heavy with toil. Yet these men had found, such as it was, a definite creed, and, as in the case of their great leader, all the inexhaustible variety and world-wide energy of other minds were in them concentrated into a burning instinct; the word of 'the Lord was like fire, or like a hammer.' The early Methodists had also the mighty instincts of prayer—to them there was a meaning in it and a joy. So these men pursued their way. God's ministry goes on by various means, ordinary and extraordinary; it is the difference between rivers and rains, between the dews and the lightnings, the rivers are exhaled by the sun and return to the earth in rains, the Severn and the Wye roll their beautiful forces through the meadow and along the hill-side, but if they did not give their waters to the sun and the cloud, and fall back upon the earth as dew and showers, they would cease from their channels among the hills. So Methodism availed itself of the ordinary and extraordinary.

All truly holy souls, even those the most opposed in their pews or their studies, meet and melt and mingle in song; holy song is the solvent of the most divergent creeds. Perhaps the greater number of the early Methodists were not pressed by physical want; concern for the soul was the grand business, in many instances possibly it was a wild and even diseased feeling. There was no art, no splendid form of worship or ritual; early Methodism was as free from all this as Clairvaux, in the valley of Wormwood, when Bernard ministered there with all his monks around him, or as Cluny, when Bernard de Morlaix chanted his 'Jerusalem the Golden.' Methodism, like all the great religious movements which have shaken men's souls, was purely spiritual, or, if it had a sensuous expression, it was not artificial; loud 'Amens!' resounded as Wesley preached, spoke, or prayed, and then the hearty gushes of, perhaps, not melodious song united all hearts in some Wesleyan Litany or Te Deum. It was so throughout the whole land; such cyclones of spiritual power mysteriously visit our world from age to age, but this surely was one in which there was infinitely more to bless and benefit, and far less to which good taste or good sense could take any exception, than in perhaps any of the great preceding waves of spiritual power which had rolled over Europe. It was the ascetic type set forth by Wesley in an age of animal and sensual indulgence. It was principally by fighting with the sins of the age, at the same time by laying hold upon its characteristics, and especially by remembering that man is more than a machine to fill rich men's pockets, or to digest victuals—a soul, in fact, for whom Christ died—that Methodism 'grew mightily, and prevailed.'

The strength of a great and popular leader is especially shown in his power to infuse his own spirit into the minds of other men, thus constituting an organized band of kindred helpers; never surely was there a man who more remarkably abides this test than Wesley, and he became the general of a remarkable order. Protestantism may well, with Wesley to adduce, challenge Rome to produce any superior illustration of spiritual power. Archbishop Manning has spoken of St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Ignatius, chiefs of the orders they created, as the four rivers of the water of life; it is a singular illustration and not creditable to the archbishop's piety or good taste; but if Wesley be compared with these great fathers of the Romish Church, he shines brilliantly in the comparison. Mr. Tyerman enthusiastically inquires, 'Is it not true that Methodism is the greatest fact in the history of the Church of Christ?' We may reply we do not think so, and may yet be prepared to render almost equal homage with Mr. Tyerman to this stupendous spiritual organization. John Wesley very soon poured his animating spirit into other men, and the history of Jesuitism—that marvellous story of the conquest of the human mind—does not exhibit anything like so striking an array of heroic and glorious achievements. Rome would make much of such a history, had she to recite it of herself. The names of those who surround Wesley as his fellow-labourers and helpers are, indeed, all of them humble men; no courtly or episcopal favour smiled upon him or them as they passed along. He had absolutely nothing but the pure Gospel, by the proclamation of which he sought to awaken human interest and to command attention; but soon there came a host, of whom it might be said, 'There went with him a band of men whose hearts God had touched.' The mind of England seemed to be waiting for that which Wesley brought to it. Spiritually dead as the Church of England was, many clergymen, responsive to his call, shook off their lethargy, and several, like William Grimshaw, of Haworth, laboured heartily with the apostle of Methodism. The right material was constantly at hand so soon as it was needed, in men who have almost passed away from memory, but whose 'record is on high.' We have no space for the review of that long gallery of interesting portraits of marked and remarkable men; only we notice there seemed to be a hand for every kind of work that had to be accomplished; one to lead on the polemic work of the disputant, and another, or others, to pour forth hymns; some to sway, by rugged but splendid powers of persuasion, immense masses of people; others to minister in localities and gather up the lost sheep into folds; and others to visit in prison, or in those scenes where the tender voice and the ministering hand were needed, while all bowed before the omnific mind of Wesley. Few lives are more startling than that of John Nelson; few types of saintly holiness are higher than Thomas Walsh; Thomas Maxfield has generally been supposed to be the first of the long line of lay preachers to whose exertions Methodism owes so much; while John and Thomas Oliver, John Haine, George Story, and Sampson Staniforth, and a number of other goodly names, represent lives of such intense earnestness, holiness, and activity, as would certainly win them a place in a Catholic calendar of saints, and are so full of glowing adventure, that the story of many of them would keep a boy's eyes from winking even late in the night.

Simultaneously with Wesley came the singular apparition of Whitefield, who fell into no groove of Church routine or life, although undoubtedly standing on the Calvinistic side of Methodist opinion. It is interesting to compare these two men together. Whitefield sprang upon the world ready armed as a youth of twenty, and finished his career in the prime of life; he seems almost to realize, if it can be realized, the idea of an abstract soul. We read his words, and they are nothing; but those words uttered by him broke down, overwhelmed, and dissolved all prejudices. What must he have been to whom such strong men, such courtly, artificial, yet highly cultured men, such sceptical and inaccessible men as Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield, and David Hume, and Garrick, and Benjamin Franklin, 'were as tow,' while he was as 'a spark' to kindle all into consuming flame. Not immediately connected with Wesley's organization, this mysterious and marvellous man, an entire soul of all-embracing love and compassion, greatly aided the movement;—equally at home in preaching in the select saloons of the Countess of Huntingdon, to Dukes and Duchesses and arrays of Peers, or in the wildest and most furious and murderous mobs. Whitefield is a mystery to us; he only seems to burn with an incandescent heat, so that words shrivel, and evaporate in the flame of that pure, ingenuous, generous, and wholly consecrated soul; and this, notwithstanding the melody of that full, clear, all-encompassing voice, varying to every passionate accent, sinking to the most penetrating entreaty, swelling to the most rousing apostrophe. In the full careering heat of his speech, Whitefield became, unconsciously to himself, poet, philosopher, psychologist, thus enabling us to understand something of his stupendous power, even while we are still perplexed as to its cause. No melody or poetry shines through the words of his published discourses; but no pictures we have ever met with of inspired, rapt oratory, are more surprising than those which are presented to us by his contemporaries of Whitefield's preaching, on the slope of some mountain or hill, the trees and hedges full of people hushed to profound silence, the open firmament above him, the green fields around him, the sight of thousands on thousands of people, some in coaches, some on horseback, gathered around him and all affected—melted to tears. When the evening approached, he once said, 'Beneath the twilight it was too much, and quite overcame me!' One night he describes a time never to be forgotten: it lightened exceedingly; he preached the warnings and the consolations of the coming of the Son of Man; the thunder broke over his head, the lightning gleamed upon his path; it ran along the ground, and shone from one part of the heavens to the other. His spirit rose above the storm; he longed for the time when Christ should be revealed in flaming fire. 'Oh,' exclaims he, 'that my soul may live in a like flame, when He shall actually come to call me!'

But Wesley's success! Wesley, as an orator, seems still more inconceivable. By all accounts Whitefield was seraphic. Wesley seldom rose beyond penetrating good sense, and nothing appears to have transported him out of his invariable calm. Yet the effects of his oratory were even still more wonderful; there was something of magnetism in it. Henry Moore, his great friend, says, 'At this moment, I well remember my first thought after hearing him preach nearly fifty years ago; spiritual things are natural things to that man;' In innumerable instances we find audiences shaken as by a mighty wind, hurled down, agonizing, screaming aloud; there was much more of all this in Wesley's preaching than in Whitefield's, yet in Whitefield's we should expect it more. Wesley, in the style of his oratory, seems to have been judicial, and our readers are not unaware of the remarkable power that quiet statement is able to exercise. Who so passionless apparently as Jonathan Edwards, a man who would have disdained every approach to sensationalism, whose entire mode of pulpit delivery was obnoxious to all ideas of pulpit oratory, and whose whole scheme of thought and expression were as calm and clear as logical metaphysics could make them? yet what scenes he witnessed when he preached? Thus it was eminently with Wesley; crowds thronged around him intent to listen wherever he appeared; if the face was beautiful, the height of the body was so far beneath the average standard that it seems almost contemptible for the holding of such powers as he wielded; and then the voice, not less than the manner, appears to have been unfitted to carry tempests of passion—nor did he desire that it should; we suppose that it must have been singularly clear and penetrating, and that every sentence was sharply cut and elaborated, not by preparation and the pen, but by convictions deep and indelible. Such sentences carried upon a clear penetrating voice—and in oratory the voice is all but everything—will achieve more than more plausible means. It is fervour which fires, but fervour often burns more effectually in the still, white, soundless heat, than in what seems to be the most raging flame. There must have been considerable natural dignity in the man. 'Be silent, or begone,' he said on one occasion to some who were molesting him in preaching, and the intruders were silenced. The traditions of Methodism are rich in the recollection of such scenes;—the scenes of Gwennap Pit for instance. This is a natural excavation, three miles from Redruth, an amphitheatre, formed by nature, whose walls are from seven to eight hundred feet in height, and which is capable of holding from twenty-five to thirty thousand persons. This was one of Wesley's most famous churches. Year after year this most spacious and magnificent cathedral amongst the wild moors of Cornwall was crowded by vast and hushed assemblies. Until Wesley's day, all that immense population might have said, 'No man cared for our souls.' Wild, rugged miners and fishermen of whom it was true that they never breathed a prayer except for the special providence of a shipwreck—men whose wicked barbarity in kindling delusive lights along the coast to allure unfortunate ships to the cruel cliffs of those dangerous shores, had won for their region the name of 'West Barbary.' Now, as if some power had passed over them, clothed anew and in their right minds, they assembled to greet and gladden their venerable father in that wild glen, creating a strange and not unbeautiful life in the stillness of that desolate and romantic spot, and worshipping with the birds overhead and the broom and the wild flowers under foot, under the overhanging shadow of the venerable rocks. Truly it must have been a sublime thing to have heard that great multitude peal out in Wesley's own words:—

Twenty-five thousand persons! and it is said he was able to make everyone hear his words; wonderful, whether we think of the acoustical properties of the church itself, the attentiveness the preacher could command, or the marvellous strength, the clearness and fulness of his voice.

Of all the helpers from whom Wesley derived assistance essential to the carrying on his work, his brother Charles was the most providential. He was a narrow ecclesiastic, and often troublesome, but he did good service. Much as Wesley loved the service of the Church of England, it was utterly impossible to employ it in the work he set himself to perform; but it has been felt again and again, whether it has been expressed or not, that a religious service without liturgies is impossible. People may disclaim and disown the word liturgy, and substitute for it psalms and hymns, the fact remains the same; psalms and hymns are liturgies in rhyme—liturgies sung instead of said. Congregations need to be held together; the voice of a solitary soul is not enough for religious purposes, and especially for the pressure of overwrought emotions; multitudes require something more than a mere monologue. Wesley arose at a time when that popular and united form of worship, the hymn, had but just ceased to be regarded as an innovation. There were Churches in London—Maze Pond, for instance—which had divided upon the question of singing, and the unmusical members went off, and formed a community of their own, undistracted by notes of song. Watts had only just published some of his psalms and hymns, when Wesley came down among the people and began to move to and fro amongst his congregations. The want of simple forms of prayer and praise was soon felt. No doubt his recent acquaintance with the Moravians had given him invaluable suggestions, of which he was prepared to avail himself. Amidst much which was worse than foolish, the Moravians had, as he knew, many inspiring psalms, and a far greater variety of metre than English devotional verse had heretofore employed. Some of the most magnificent hymns in the Wesleyan collection are Wesley's translations from Zinzendorf and other German psalmists; but the fulness and splendour of Wesleyan psalmody was developed by Charles Wesley. His hymns have been the liturgies of Methodism, the creeds of that Church have been embodied in them, they have formed its collects, and enshrined its loftiest bursts of devotional ardour. What sentiment of Christian experience is there which does not find an utterance in them? What phase of Methodist faith is there which is not translated into some of these verses? In preparing the hymn-book, indeed, a great number of Watts's hymns were included, and included not only without any acknowledgment, but the preface, from the pen of John, claims for the Wesleys all the hymns in the volume. In this condition the hymn-book remains to this day, and we have often conversed with Methodists who have stoutly maintained that certain hymns in the volume legitimately belong to it, although published by Watts years before its compilation. This, however, in no way interferes with the estimate we have to form of these sacred lyrics; of course, the Methodist estimate of them is that they are the highest achievements of sacred song. That which we are constantly using, and which touches our affections becomes supremely precious and dear to us. They are all eminently experimental; they seem to have been constructed for the class-meeting and band-meeting; they are especially conjubilant, hymns well calculated to excite and stir, and carry aloft the feelings of the people; and they have become—they very soon became—the voices of the Church.

Wesley, in his reformation, soon commenced the work of reforming the singing. Throughout his life and labours he often remarks upon the questionable psalmody by which he was greeted; thus at Warrington, he says:—

'I put a stop to a bad custom which was creeping in here; a few men, who had fine voices, sang a psalm which no one knew, in a tune fit for an opera, wherein three, four, or five persons sung different words at the same time; what an insult to common sense! what a burlesque upon public worship! no custom can excuse such a mixture of profanity and absurdity.'

Elsewhere he says,—

'Beware of formality in singing, or it will creep upon us unawares; is it not creeping in already by those complex tunes which it is scarce possible to sing with devotion? Such is the long quavering "Hallelujah," and next, the morning song tune, which I defy any man living to sing devoutly, the repeating the same words so often, especially while another repeats different words, shocks all common sense, brings in dead formality, and has no more religion in it than a Lancashire hornpipe.'

In harmony with the Hymns, he introduced tunes, which appropriately rendered the words, and were soon used throughout the whole communion; from one end of the country to the other these have echoed and rolled; few are the circumstances in which they have not awakened or sustained some thrilling emotion. They hailed the bridal party as it returned from the church singing,—

they followed the bier to the grave chanting—

And few separations took place without that consolotary song,—

While some hymns speedily became like national airs to the Methodist heart: amongst the chief,—

They sob, they swell, they meet the spirit in its most hushed and plaintive mood; they roll and bear it aloft in its most inspired and prophetic moods, as on the surge of more than a mighty organ's swell. Among the mines, and quarries, and wild moors of Cornwall, among the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the chambers of death, in the most joyful assemblages of the household, they have relieved the hard lot, and sweetened the pleasant one; in other lands, soldiers, and slaves, and prisoners have recited with what joy those words have entered into their life. So early as 1748, when a sad cluster of convicts, horse-stealers, highway robbers, burglars, smugglers, and thieves, were led forth to execution, the turnkey said he had never seen such people before. When the bellman came, as usual, to say to them, 'Remember, you are to die to-day;' they exclaimed, 'Welcome news! welcome news!' The Methodists had been in their prison, and their visits had produced these marvellous effects; and on their way to Tyburn, the convicts sang that beautiful sacramental hymn of Charles Wesley:—

These hymns supplied battle-cries for all the scenes of open-air aggression and warfare. When Charles Wesley himself was preaching at Bengeworth, he was beset by a mob. He says, 'Their tongues were set on fire by hell!' One in the crowd proposed to take him away and duck him; he broke out into singing with Thomas Maxfield, and allowed them to carry him whither they would. At the bridge end of the street they relented and left him; there, instead of retreating, he took his stand, and, with an immense congregation about him, sang,—

Innumerable anecdotes might be accumulated touching the glories and triumphs of Methodist song. With all our higher love and admiration for Isaac Watts, and our feeling that, as a sacred poet, he had a more lofty and gorgeous wing, even a far more, tender and touching expression, and that in some of his hymns he speaks in a manner of strength altogether far more wonderful, nevertheless it is true that to Charles Wesley must be given the merit of, perhaps, the most perfect of all hymns, as the expression of Christian experience,—

It is necessary to have some apprehension of the Theology of Methodism, for the spirit of Methodism was in its theology, even as the soul of that theology was in its hymns. It met the heart at that point of experience at which it felt its need of God, a living God: consciousness pervaded it everywhere. This was the central teaching of the great evangelical reaction. How well does it compare and contrast with the contemplations and exercises of Loyola in the solitude of the Manreza; and also with the 'De Imitatione' of à Kempis, against which, large as has been the regard for it, a certain instinct of the Church has always testified. The theology of Methodism was, in one word, Christ for the conscience. Those, happily, were not the days of scientific theology; as a scientific statement the theology of Wesley has justly been regarded as defective, but it is possible to be defective in comprehensive knowledge, and yet to have a sufficiently full and clear understanding for practical uses; even as it is possible to work an engine well, and yet in no sense to be an accomplished engineer. The secret of Wesley's success lay in the fact that his was a theology for the multitude; on the one hand it was not a forensic theory, on the other it was not rationalistic. Both are alike unsatisfactory to the heart. There is a forensic theology, but it is for the schools rather than for the factories or the fields. 'Wesley,' says Alexander Knox, 'regarded justification neither merely nor chiefly as a forensic acquittal in the court of heaven, but as implying also a conscious liberation from moral thraldom.' Indeed this was the important point with him; consciousness, everywhere consciousness. It is in the consciousness faith is to be wrought, as he sings—

The strife ran very high upon matters where the disputants were not substantially divided; the doctrine of personal election and reprobation, Wesley, indeed, denounced in some of his most vehement words; and it seemed that the imputed righteousness of Christ, and in consequence, the doctrine of the substitution of Christ for the sinner, paled and became ineffective in his teaching. This was especially manifested in his controversy with the beloved and amiable rector of Weston Favell, James Hervey, on the publication of his 'Theron and Aspasio.' Hervey says, 'The righteousness wrought out by Jesus Christ is wrought out for all His people,' &c. Wesley replies, with truth and force, but with needless vehemence, 'What becomes of all other people? They must inevitably perish for ever. The die was cast ere ever they were in being. The doctrine to pass them by has consigned their unborn souls to hell, and damned them from their mother's womb. I could sooner be a Turk, a deist, yea, an atheist, than I could believe this. It is less absurd to deny the very being of God, than to make Him an Almighty tyrant.' It was Wesley's great and favourite faith that 'in every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him.' In some hymns he expresses, however, very unreservedly the doctrine of substitution for instance—

Wesley dealt always with those great truths which, because of the depths of his own moral consciousness, man cannot hear announced without awe. It is possible to receive Christian doctrine as only a science, or a judicial exposition; the Calvinistic theology has too often been merely this, but the core of Wesley's creed was personal perception and appropriation of the work of Christ—in a word, Consciousness. And usually his ideas were presented in a clear and transparent style, the chief of them being salvation by faith; salvation by faith rather than justification by faith. No doubt Wesley clearly and distinctly held and preached the latter, but those who have made this the principal theme of their religious teaching have been usually led into a region of thought higher than was suitable to the practical purposes of the great Methodist apostle. The designation of his doctrine, 'Evangelical Arminianism,' has often been charged with involving a contradiction in terms. The discussion of the principles of the Divine government, and the Divine decrees, the relations of fore-knowledge and predetermination in the Infinite mind, impressions concerning the freedom of the will and the nature of evil—such questions, it must be admitted, are more curious and speculative than useful, or sometimes even pious. Wesley was no metaphysician, he had little taste for such studies; and his life was passed in a round of useful activities unfavourable to their prosecution. Into the department of thought which implies the relation of logic to theology, he never entered. Alike in the frame-work of his popular creed, as we shall see in the frame-work of his Church organization, he struck out a broad basis; breadth rather than depth was the characteristic of his mind and work; he cared little for the nice distinctions of philosophical refinement; his theology turned chiefly on the responsibilities of man; his aim was to make man feel, rather than to make him think. The Calvinistic side of theology produces the exactly opposite effect. Wesley, naturally, insisted strongly on the personal sanctification of the soul, this follows, of course, that other chief and much-belaboured item of Wesleyan faith, the doctrine of perfection. 'This,' says Alexander Knox, 'was the perpetual bone of contention between Wesley and the whole phalanx of Calvinist religionists.' And assuredly, that whole phalanx showed itself to be imperfect enough in the controversy. In the story of the strifes of good men this has a shocking pre-eminence. We cannot blame Mr. Tyerman for presenting the various phases of the struggle, or even for quoting passages from the innumerable abusive volumes and pamphlets which were poured out upon Wesley, but we shall not ourselves dwell upon these scandals. On the whole, we have in Wesley the picture of a fine Christian temper and spirit, seldom condescending to reply at all, and when replying, doing so in a tone worthy even of him who could say, 'Let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.'

That Wesley should be defamed and denounced by ungodly scoffers or worldly bishops is not surprising, but that he should become the object of the ribaldry and scorn and contumely of men who were undoubtedly the children of God, is amazing. He had for long years been scourged and lampooned in newspapers, magazines, tracts, and pamphlets; Samuel Foote, the buffoon, had ridiculed him; and Lavington, the merry-andrew-bishop of Exeter, had poured out upon him volumes of ribaldry. And well says Mr. Tyerman, 'In turn Mr. Wesley had encountered mobs, and men of letters, drunken, parsons, furious papists, honest infidels, and others; but of all his enemies his last were his bitterest and worst, Calvinistic Christians.' It is a mystery to us now—and that it is so seems to prove that we have made some advances beyond our forefathers in good sense, good taste, and good manners, to say nothing of the higher attainments of Christian moderation and temper—that Christian men could ever have indulged in such envenomed speech, and that the pure air of metaphysical theology should ever have been burdened with such exhalations and such thunders. It is to the honour of Mr. Wesley that he never condescended to stoop from his work to personal recrimination, and scarcely, indeed, to personal explanation. His theology was wanting in those more noble excursions of intelligence and experience which supply strength to the spirit in seasons when a black night of doubt spreads out over the soul. Concerning the ways and means of faith, of revelation, and providence, he never attempted any solution. His mind, in all departments of it, was characterized by a quick apprehension; this was not accompanied by a power of lofty and sustained reflection; the business of his life was to train as many persons as he possibly could to habitual and orderly devotion. He taught the doctrine of the witness of the Spirit, and personal assurance of salvation, with a persistency which surely ought to have satisfied Toplady; but then his teaching had this serious difference, he conditioned assurance in the personal consciousness of the believer, while the school of Toplady fell back more securely upon the purposes, character, and promises of God. This makes the technical difference between the salvation by faith, taught by the one school, and justification by faith, taught by the other. To a profoundly experienced nature we suppose the former is included in the latter, and furnishes sources of satisfaction altogether wanting to the more narrow, plausible, and popular scheme.

Hence, so much was made of the happiness arising from states of feeling, and from the witness of the Spirit; this was to be the aim and object of the life and heart, and was the proof of that growth in the life of perfection which seems to reduce—as Coleridge has well shown in a very able note to Southey—the Christian life to a sensation: sensational assurance became the counterpart of the doctrine of sinless perfection in this life; the one is quite absolutely related to the other. It is not too much to say that Wesley quite misconceived the term 'perfect' (τέλειος) as it was used by Paul; hence it was, no doubt, that Wesley entangled himself in contradictions, and founded the religious life very much upon certain ascetic and sumptuary laws: 'Powder was antichristian; a ribbon became the sign of a carnal nature, and snuff-boxes and tobacco were the very emanations of the bottomless pit; and very innocent things became really Babylonish.' The life prescribed by Wesley was as severe as a monastic rule: his disciples were met every hour by something of which they were to deny themselves, which was to be a contradiction to them, and which they were to overcome. He insisted in the spirit of a monastic legislator, that his preachers should always preach at four or five o'clock in the morning. 'I exhort all those who desire me to watch over their souls, to wear no gold, no pearls or precious stones; use no curling of hair, or costly apparel.' 'Be serious,' was one of his favourite injunctions; 'avoid all lightness as you would hell-fire, and trifling as you would cursing and swearing; touch no woman, be as loving as you will, but the custom of the country is nothing to us.' Sometimes Wesley uses wiser words, but generally he appears to teach that deliverance from sin implies deliverance from human infirmities, and that it is almost inconsistent with temptation; and this arises apparently from an unnatural interpretation of the word 'perfect,' as we have it in the language of our Lord and in the writings of the apostles. 'Truly,' says Coleridge, 'there is no point at which you can arrive in this life, in which the command, "Soar upwards still," ceases in validity or occasion.' And yet such seems to be the doctrine of Wesley: and while in a corrupt and dissolute age his rules fostered and trained innumerable holy and saintly lives, they to a very large degree gave occasion for that satire and ridicule, which indeed is not wonderful, from the scoffing world, but which is shameful when indulged in by the pens and lips of believers. The two great controversialists of Methodism, Calvinistic and Arminian, were Toplady, the vicar of Broad Hembury, and the gentle Swiss, John Fletcher, the vicar of Madely. Both argued within the circle of Scripture. We have outlived all taste for this pamphleteering kind of controversy. Toplady was the more scholarly and logical, his style was the more nervous and terse: he also was not only the more witty but the more wilful, and made his pages sparkle with a lively wickedness which is wonderful in such a writer upon such subjects, and especially in the writer of such transcendent hymns as his. Fletcher was the more sentimental and rhetorical, frequently also more characterized by a plain and earnest common sense; he was more spiritual and devout than Toplady, nor would it be possible, we suppose, to find a sentence in his famous 'Checks' unbecoming the perfect Christian gentleman, and they furnished material and ammunition for all the Wesleyan preachers, not only for that day, but for many years after. The world and the Church, however, now demand something more concise and firmly-textured than the essays of either, Toplady or of Fletcher. It is satisfactory also to feel our way to that higher plain of thought which reconciles the two. If God be infinite consciousness and thought, can the salvation and trials of any child of man be unknown to Him? If He be infinite character and will, can any event happen unpermitted by Him? If He be infinite power, can any circumstance be unordained by Him? Is He not also infinitely amiable? It is singular how combatants fetch their weapons from the same armoury, and tilt Scripture against Scripture; but both are reconciled in consciousness, and the disciples of Wesley and Toplady alike find the same reposing rest and assuring trust in the mercy of God, through faith in the righteousness of Christ.

What shall we say of the Ecclesiastical Polity framed by Wesley? This, first of all, that he never intended that his discipline should be regarded as an ecclesiastical polity. Like so many of the fathers of the Church, he founded an order; he formed a society, not a Church. He cautions his ministers against calling the society either the Church or a Church. He created a broad organization, but not the broadest. He always remembered that he was a minister and an ordained priest of the Church of England; and it was with great reluctance that he permitted himself to yield to those innovations which the polity of the Church of England would have opposed; he always desired to regard his entire fellowship as in communion with the Establishment; his arrangements for his services were, as far as possible, for times and seasons when no services were proceeding in the parish churches of the neighbourhood, and for a long time he attempted to harmonise his method of worship to the liturgic forms and devotions of the Church. Lord King's essay on the Primitive Church made him, theoretically, an Independent; yet, there can be little doubt that had there been a broader, wiser, and more tolerant régime in the Establishment, the whole movement might have been included in the corporation of the National Church; it was surely of God that it was not so. But the Church of Rome would have known how to avail itself of such a sudden burst of energy, as in the cases of St. Francis, of Loyola, and others; the great leader and his disciples would for some time have been kept in a state of ecclesiastical quarantine, but in the course of a few years they would have been received, to pour into the mother Church the fulness of their newly-acquired life. It was a great evangelistic movement that Wesley originated and sustained; he perpetually attempted to limit and curtail the ministerial powers of his preachers; many of them, indeed, became sufficiently restive even beneath his authority, and were quite unable or unwilling to perceive the reason of the ecclesiastical refinements he taught and maintained.

Isaac Taylor has urged against Wesley that he founded an irresponsible hierarchy; he says: 'On the one side stand all Protestant Churches, Episcopal and non-Episcopal, Wesleyanism excepted; on the other side stand the Church of Rome, and the Wesleyan Conference. This position maintained alone by a Protestant body must be regarded as false in principle, and in an extreme degree ominous.' The position is not fairly stated. The polity of Rome is absolutely intolerant; she not merely has laws for conserving her own rights, which she claims as divine, but she treats with perfect contempt and scorn all reference to, or respect for, the rights of others. Even Frederick Faber, in his essay on Philip Neri, in a passage of hearty eulogy on Whitefield, consigns him to hell, notwithstanding all his usefulness, when he says, 'St. Philip would have taught him to preach if he had been an oratorian novice, which, unluckily for his poor soul, George Whitefield never was.' Such is Rome. It was not so with Wesley himself, nor has it been so with his descendants. The rubric—if so we may call it—of Methodist polity has been stringent; too stringently, perhaps, laws have been enacted against those turbulent spirits, certain to emerge in all communities, endowed with a strong desire to take their own way, and to do things merely right in their own eyes; you are free to do so, says Wesley, but not beneath the sanctions of our society, unless we approve the action. There has been a strong desire to gather in and build up, but in a sense in which, perhaps, Wesleyans have not been singular; 'they have dwelt among their own people,' their fellowship, in spite of numerous schisms, has been one of the most perfect, harmonious, and useful in Christendom; but this has existed with entire respect and good-will to other denominations. Wesley himself says, one circumstance is quite peculiar to the Methodists, the terms upon which any person may be admitted into their society, 'they do not impose, in order to their admission, any opinions whatever; one conviction, and one only, is required, a real desire to save their souls; where this is, it is enough, they desire no more, they lay stress upon nothing else, they ask only, "is thy heart herein as my heart? if it be, give me thy hand." Is there any other society in Great Britain and Ireland that is so remote from bigotry? Where is there such another society in Europe—in the habitable world? I know none. Let any man show it me who can; till then, let no one talk of the bigotry of the Methodists.' 'Look to the Lord, and faithfully attend all the means of grace appointed in the society.' Such was, practically, the whole of Methodism. So that famous old lady, whose bright example has so often been held up on Methodists' platforms, when called upon to state the items of her creed, did so very sufficiently when she summed if up in the four particulars of 'Repentance towards God, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, a penny a week, and a shilling a quarter.' And certainly, beyond any other scheme or system, the organization of Methodism has developed the power of the pence—that is, the power of the people—to provide for and to sustain their religious services. The Rev. Marmaduke Miller, in a letter to the Nonconformist for May 17th, 1871, shows that the various associations in England bearing Wesley's name, and practically working out his ideas, hold and provide sittings for 3,500,000 people; they represent the membership of 624,453 persons; the number of settled ministers is 3,137, and local preachers 41,456, while the Sabbath-schools represent 1,162,423, and the teachers 197,163. What a representation of the amazing numbers of those who call Wesley father! The rules of the Methodist polity, then, were devised in no insolent spirit; wisely, or unwisely, they were framed for the conservation of order. Mr. Wesley's object in them was certainly not ecclesiastical, as he says again, 'I have no more right to object to a man for holding a different opinion from me than I have to differ from a man because he wears a wig and I wear my own hair; but if he takes his wig off, and begins to shake the powder about my eyes, I shall consider it my duty to get quit of him as soon as possible.' One cannot but think what might have been, had Hildebrand been such a man as Wesley; what might the Church of England have been had Whitgift or Laud held views so broad and tolerant as these. In effect, his polity said, 'Come amongst us, and we will seek to do each other good; join some other communion, the Lord be with you; but if you attach yourself voluntarily to our society, you accept the conditions of the society.'

The Wesleyans constitute the largest denomination in the United States, in the form of the Methodist Episcopal Church founded by the venerable Asbury, the friend and early disciple of John Wesley, and a man baptized into a like spirit of indomitable endurance, and ardent, untiring energy. But it may be questioned whether this should be regarded as a development of Wesleyanism, or a departure from Wesley's idea of Church government. Certainly much depends upon what we find implied in the designation of bishop. The Wesleyan bishop in England is called a 'superintendent;' from a Methodist's point of view the terms are almost convertible and synonymous, and we have little doubt that superintendent is the realization of the Scriptural idea of the bishop—a pastor, shepherd, or overseer. More than this Wesley did not desire his ministers to be. Had he great prescience? Was it a far-sighted sagacity which characterized his mind? Acutely he saw the present want, and met it. Probably he never realized the wholly independent attitude his followers would assume in the future; and, like the constitution of England, so the constitution of his society grew beneath his eye; he scarcely, therefore, made provisions to meet the demands of an independent Church, or community. He was perpetually engaged in furnishing expedients; his ideas never seemed to rise beyond, or to sink deeper than the present work of evangelizing the multitude, and keeping them awake, and intent on the desire for salvation. Hence he was utterly opposed to a permanent pastorate; his ministers were to be perpetually moving; to some desires expressed to himself for a longer residence, or more continued ministration of some of his preachers, he gave his most decided negative. It is a matter still of serious dispute between the Wesleyan and other Church polities, whether for the health, growth, and well-being of the individual Church, the permanent pastorate or the itinerant ministry may be regarded as best. There is something to be said on either side. We can have no doubt that the Wesleyan polity, while it may minister something to the life of Churches, and give a pleasant variety, must be a barrier to the accumulation of learning, and what is more precious of pastoral influence; and that it offers a strong inducement to intellectual indolence, to lean upon old resources rather than to go on exploring new and fresh fields. The Wesleyan polity almost denies to the minister the position of the pastor. The true pastor of each separate little cluster in a society is the class leader; he permanently resides in the town or village; he is familiar with the conversions, the experiences, the joys and sorrows of each member of the little flock. Wesley even went so far as to interdict the presence of his ministers in the classes; and the minister is still, we believe, as a rule, only occasionally present for the purpose of distributing the quarterly tickets. But the immediate followers of Wesley have now elaborated what they regard, and even term, an ecclesiastical constitution. Its government is regulated by laws sharply cut and defined for every emergency; they have their Blackstone, and Coke upon Lyttleton, and probably Mr. Wesley himself would be somewhat amazed to find such a framework of polity as the handbook of Methodist ecclesiastical law, in Edmund Grindrod's 'Compendium of the Laws and Regulations of Wesleyan Methodism.' This defines its 'ecclesiastical courts,' 'powers of the Conference,' of 'district meetings,' of 'local courts,' of the 'committee of privileges,' and the nature of all its committees and institutions. Wesleyan Methodism in England, indeed, may be defined as a constitutional republic, but of the oligarchic order of Venice or Florence. Its polity constitutes a civil rather than a spiritual despotism, but it reminds us that men are not much interested in the government of the Church of their adoption, and that Church consciousness is very independent of Ecclesiastical organization.

Yet the entire polity of Wesley was popular, and few religions communities have so successfully cultivated the spirit infused into it; it was intended to meet the religious instincts of the uncared for multitudes. Certain words of Wesley illustrate this;—a new chapel was in the course of erection at Blackburn; Wesley was taken to see it. 'I have a favour to ask,' he said; 'let there be no pews in the body of this chapel, except one for the leading singers; be sure to make accommodation for the poor, they are God's building materials in the erection of His Church; the rich make good scaffolding, but bad materials.' 'Observe,' he said again to his preachers, 'it is not your business to preach so many times, and to take care of this or that society, but to save as many souls as you can, to bring as many sinners as you possibly can to repentance, and, with all your power, to build them up in that holiness, without which they cannot see the Lord.' He knew that preaching needs to be succeeded by personal intercourse; hence he says in visiting Colchester;—'By repeated experiments we learn that though a man preach like an angel, he will neither collect, nor preserve a society which is collected, without visiting them from house to house.' And this is the key to that comprehensive and all-permeating spirit which constitutes the idea of Methodism, at once its danger as well as its defence; to become a Methodist of Wesley's order was to be, and is to be, looked up, and looked after, and overlooked. It must be admitted that the system which is so vigorously and watchfully organized, does not leave much opportunity for the mind and soul to grow: the tutoring and training hearts and minds to walk alone is a profound study. Nothing of this is contemplated in the Wesleyan system; freedom of thought has not usually fared well in the society; minds are too closely interlocked and riveted, frequently not only with other, but with inferior minds. It is therefore a community for the poor and the uneducated, or it is nothing; and if it is not like the Romish system, dangerous by the possession of an audacious hierarchy, it must be admitted that it may become so in virtue of a system of spiritual espionage scarcely less effective than the confessional.

Did John Wesley know human nature? Judging from the effects which have followed his marvellous course, it would seem so; and if severe in discipline, and intolerant to human infirmities by his system, he was most tender and merciful, even to the aberrations and stumblings of believers themselves. He insisted on punctilious obedience to his rules, but it was easy to him to forgive all personal injustice to himself; sometimes it seems almost as if he were even unable to feel injuries, and probably this was greatly the case: his 'place was on high, his defence the munition of rocks,' and no soul ever seems to have been more securely shielded in 'the pavilion,' where spirits are kept 'in secret from the strife of tongues.' The wicked woman who was his wife, stole a number of his letters, interpolated parts, and misrendered certain expressions; and, having been guilty at once of theft and forgery, she, in conjunction with some of his enemies, published them. It led to venomous and embittered language in the newspapers concerning them. His brother, Charles Wesley, was in the utmost consternation: he went off to Wesley, imploring him to postpone a journey he was on the eve of taking, that he might stay in London and defend himself against his enemies. He found his brother as calm as he was excited:

'I shall never forget,' says Miss Wesley, the daughter of Charles, 'the manner in which my father accosted my mother on his return home. "My brother," said he, "is, indeed, an extraordinary man; I placed before him the importance of the character of a minister, and the evil consequences which might result from his indifference to it, and urged him by every relative and public motive to answer for himself and stop the publication. His reply was, Brother, when I devoted to God my ease, my time, my life, did I except my reputation? No, tell Sally (Charles's wife) I will take her to Canterbury to-morrow."'

Glorious John had to live down many worse persecutions than this. Ordinarily, his calm was imperturbable; and yet, divine as this often seems, it often, too, seems related to a side of character which almost indicates a defect in human nature. It has been alleged against him that he was thoroughly ignorant of the nature of children, 'Break their wills betimes,' he says; 'begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, perhaps before they can speak at all.' The method he adopted at Kingswood school was an illustration of this entire ignorance of the child's nature. It was not so much a school as a monastery, its rules were more stringent and hard than those of a workhouse. It is no wonder that it did not succeed, and that the whole system of the school had to undergo an entire modification. That Wesley's design and idea in founding the Kingswood school was benevolent, wise, and prescient, there can be no doubt, as also that the diet was sufficient and good; nor can exception be taken to the rule that the children should go to bed at eight, and sleep on hard mattresses; but to rise at four in the morning! and spend their time until five in reading, singing, meditation and prayer! no play-day and no play-hour permitted, on the ground that 'he who plays when he is a child, will play when he becomes a man!' When we read of such an arrangement made for children, the question recurs, did Wesley know human nature? Or if such a constitution might be suitable to the human nature of monks and ascetic saints, what knowledge does it exhibit of the child's heart? We like better to read an anecdote told of him when at the age of seventy-three—about the period when the letters alluded to were published. At Midsomer Norton, when preaching in the parish church he was staying at the house of a Mr. Bush, who kept a boarding-school. While he was there, two of the boys quarrelled, cuffed and kicked each other vigorously. Mrs. Bush brought the pugilists to Wesley. He talked to them and repeated the lines—

'You must be reconciled,' said he; 'go and shake hands with each other,' and they did so. He continued, 'Put your arms around each other's neck, and kiss each other;' and this was also done. 'Now,' he said, 'come to me,' and taking two pieces of bread and butter he folded them together, and desired each to take a part. 'Now,' he said, 'you have broken bread together.' Then he put his hands upon their heads and blessed them. The two tigers were turned into loving lambs. They never forgot the old man's blessing, and one of them, who became a magistrate in Berkshire, related the beautiful incident in long afterdays. We love to note those pleasant little incidents in the man's life, and there are many such. A thousand anecdotes are told of his benevolence and goodness, and if his life should ever be adequately written, they will form a more entertaining regalia of majesty, than we know in the life of any one of the fathers of the Church.

We are not writing a life of Wesley; we leave unnoticed, therefore, his more secret and sacred history. We have no space to devote to the romance of Grace Murray. She was the light of the prophet's eyes; he proposed to her in marriage, and was gratefully accepted. We read the story from a very different point of view to Mr. Tyerman, and have little doubt that Grace sacrificed her own feelings to the vehement anger and interference of Charles Wesley, to the welfare of her lover, and to the interests of the society. Wesley beautifully, affectionately, and ingenuously said, 'the origin of the object of his affections was no objection to him; he regarded not her birth, but her qualifications. She was remarkably neat, frugal, and not sordid; had a large amount of common sense, was indefatigably patient, and inexpressibly tender; quick, cleanly, and skilful; of an engaging behaviour, and of a mild, sprightly, and yet serious temper; and that her gifts for usefulness were such as he had never seen equalled.' He concluded, 'I have Scriptural reasons to marry, I know no person so proper as this.' But the union was not to be. If we followed implicitly the authority of Mr. Tyerman, we should express an opinion adverse to Grace; but we prefer to ask whether such a woman as she seems to have been was not moved to the step she took by the highest considerations, moved by persuasions, by the tempest she was raising in the societies, and by the not very saintly conduct of Charles Wesley, who is described in this matter—very well it seems to us—by Mr. Tyerman, 'as a sincere, but irritated, impetuous, and officious friend.' Be this as it may, Wesley met her to say farewell. He kissed her and said, 'Grace Murray, you have broken my heart.' A week or two after she was married. The two never met again for thirty-nine years. She long out-lived her husband; and when in London she came to hear her son preach in Moorfields, she met her venerable lover—lover still apparently, for the interview is described as very affecting. Henceforth they saw each other no more, and Wesley never again mentioned her name. In the whole transaction, so far from any shade falling on the memory of Wesley, his admirers will, perhaps, be pleased to find him so related to intense human feelings. No doubt the marriage would have been an unfortunate one for the society, and the possession of such a wife as Grace Murray would most likely have been fatal to, or at least would have greatly interfered with, that stupendous scheme of apostolic usefulness which he was destined to create. Seductions of domestic life sadly derange a prophet's work. Through long years Grace continued a course of Christian usefulness, and lived and died eminently respected. She lies in Chinly churchyard, in Derbyshire.

The lady who became the wife of Wesley was the roughest of termagants, the plague and pest of her husband's existence; and she takes her place in the foremost rank of the bad wives of eminent men, worthy to be classed with the wedded companions of Socrates, of Albert Durer, of George Herbert, or Richard Hooker; she was the most vicious vixen of them all. It may be imagined, without doing any injustice to him, that when his letters were stolen, interpolated, and forged by his wife, for the purpose of injuring his character, the grieving spirit of the old prophet may sometimes have said, 'Grace Murray would not have done this.'

Wesley's mind was eminently administrative. It has often been said that he had in him much that combined the genius of Richelieu and Loyola—the calm, iron will and the acute eye of the one, the inventive genius and habitual devotion of the other. He would compare better with Washington, or the illustrious member of the Wesley family of our own age, Wellington. His mind was eminently healthy, and may be said to have been always awake, ceaseless in activity, sleepless in vigilance. He intermeddled with all knowledge in many languages, and he compiled and published libraries. He appears to have been almost wholly indifferent to food; in sleep he was sparing; his frame was very small, and if this appeared to be a reason against his popular impressiveness as a preacher, it was a means of his amazing agility. Look at the remarkable likeness of the man prefixed to the work of Isaac Taylor; it has been likened to a shrivelled monk of the order of La Trappe, a face in which sharpness and serenity strive for the dominion of the features, the dark hawk-eyed intelligence with the bland smile. The principles which illustrate Wesley's character, and testify, not merely his greatness, but how it happened that he achieved so much, may be well presented in some of those brief axioms which do in fact, as we read the multitudinous events of his long career, exhibit the pivots upon which his life turned. 'I dare no more fret than curse or swear.' 'I reverence the young because they may be useful when I am dead.' 'You have no need to be in a hurry,' said a friend. 'Hurry?' he replied; 'I have no time to be in a hurry.' 'The soul and the body,' he writes, in a characteristic letter insisting on the observance of discipline in his society—'The soul and the body make a man; the spirit and the discipline make a Christian.' 'Let us work now, we shall rest by and by.' Such sentences exhibit the secret of his ubiquitous activity and his power; and such characters are usually cheerful. A glow of quiet, kindly humour often lightened his speech, sometimes sharpening into quiet satire. Many anecdotes illustrate both these attributes. At eighty he appeared to have the sprightliness of youth, and moved about like a flying evangelist. Although so clear-sighted a man, he was too great by far for the epithet 'shrewd.' If people who make mistakes in judging of character because of their own want of judgment become suspicious, the fault is chiefly theirs. Wesley was seldom mistaken in his judgment of particular persons; Charles was often mistaken. Wesley himself says, 'My brother suspects everybody, and he is continually imposed upon; but I suspect nobody, and I am never imposed upon.' Again and again we are reminded how much he lived in an atmosphere of continual quiet. 'I do not remember,' said the happy old man, when at the age of seventy-seven, 'I do not remember to have felt lowness of spirits for one quarter of an hour since I was born.' Of course it is to be presumed he means that causeless depression which is usually the result of indolence. At the age of eighty-six he writes, 'Saturday, March 21st, I had a day of rest, only preaching morning and evening.' We have seen that in his first days he was not a radiant and cheerful man; but through his long sunset we know not where to find such another instance of active spiritual brightness. He was a serenely happy old man. Sometimes he seems to us as if incapable of the feeling either of blame or praise, contempt or homage. There was great strength, as there ever is, in his clearness and stillness of spirit. Genius is so vague an epithet and quality that we know not how either to apply it to him or to deny it; but so far as it represents soul and imagination, great breadth and depth and height of soul or feeling, it was certainly denied him. On the other hand, he had a judgment most clear, an apprehension most quick and vivid, and an enthusiasm as little tainted by fanaticism as any great Christian leader since the days of the apostle Paul. Reformer as he was, he was essentially conservative.

As is usual in most religious orders, Popish or Protestant, his spirit has survived in his society, and the shadow of Wesley falls wide and far. He lived through amazing changes of opinion with reference to himself, and before he died, from being one of the most abused and execrated of men, he certainly was one of the most revered. No foe had been more rancorous and unjust than Lavington, Bishop of Exeter; Wesley lived to unite with him in the ordinance of the Lord's Supper in his own cathedral. He writes, with no bitterness of the man who had with such bitter ribaldry abused him, 'I was well pleased to partake of the Lord's Supper, with my old opponent, Bishop Lavington. Oh! may we sit together in the kingdom of our Father.' At Lewisham he dined with the eminent Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London. On proceeding to dinner the Bishop refused to sit above Wesley at the table, saying, 'Mr. Wesley, may I be found at your feet in another world.' Wesley objected to take the seat of precedence; but the learned prelate obviated the difficulty by requesting as a favour that Wesley would sit above him because his hearing was defective, and he desired not to lose a sentence of Wesley's conversation. It is known that the king had a great respect for him; and it is to this most probably Wesley refers, when writing to one of his preachers, advising him to stand his ground against the vehement opposition of the Bishop of the Isle of Man, he says, 'I know pretty well the mind of Lord Mansfield, and of one that is greater than he.' In his latter days his movements to and fro in the country became ovations; not merely did thousands gather to hear him preach, the streets of towns were lined to look upon him, and the windows were thronged as he passed along. While in Yorkshire, we read of cavalcades of horses and carriages formed to receive and escort him on the way. At Redruth, as he preached in the market place, the congregation not only filled the windows, but sat on the tops of the houses. Assuredly, as often as he had been 'persecuted, he was not forsaken;' he did not die of Crucifixion, but he felt no elation of spirit, and we see him still the same man that he had been in the widely different circumstances of cruel and unjust misrepresentation.

It is wonderful to think that at nearly ninety years of age he could continue to make any effort to preach, but he did so, and he continued as a tower of strength to the companies he had formed and called together. But he outlived most of his early contemporaries, friends and foes. He stood in the pulpit of St. Giles's, in London; he had preached there fifty years before, prior to his departure for America. 'Are they not passed as a watch in the night?' he writes. Old families that used to entertain him had passed away. 'Their houses,' says he, 'know neither me nor them any more.' His later letters show that fervid sentiment for woman known only to loftiest minds and hearts; this again is entwined with beautiful simple regards for children. When he ascended the pulpit of Raithby Church, where he was often allowed to preach, a child sat in his way on the stairs, he took it in his arms and kissed it, and placed it tenderly on the same spot. Crabb Robinson heard him at Colchester, he was then eighty-seven, on each side of him stood a minister supporting him; his feeble voice was barely audible. Robinson, then a boy, destined to enter into his ninety-second year, says, 'It formed a picture never to be forgotten.' He goes on to say, 'It went to the heart, and I never saw anything like it in after life.' Three days after he preached at Lowestoft, and there he had another distinguished hearer, the poet Crabbe. Here, also, he was supported into the pulpit by a minister on either side; but what really touched the poet naturally and deeply, was Wesley's adaptation and appropriation of some lines of Anacreon. The poet speaks of his reverent appearance, his cheerful air, and the beautiful cadence with which he repeated the lines:—

In 1790 he gave up keeping his accounts; his last entry—exceedingly difficult to decipher—is characteristic: 'For upwards of eighty-six years (meaning, of course, rather, sixty-eight, i. e., since he came to have money of his own) I have kept my accounts exactly. I will not attempt it any longer, being satisfied with the continual conviction that I save all I can, and give all I can; that is, all I have. July 16, 1790.' His benevolence indeed was excessive; and Samuel Bradburn says, 'He never relieved poor people in the street but he either took off or removed his hat to them when they thanked him.'

The story of the old man's approach towards the gates of the celestial city is very beautiful, and has often been told. His last sermons are certainly among his best; the last sermon he printed, on 'Faith the evidence of things not seen,' was the last he ever wrote, and was finished only six weeks before his death. It shows how his mind sustained the altitude of highest power when bordering upon ninety years of age; it shows also how the dear old man was preening his wings for a speedy flight. We suppose the last letter he wrote was to William Wilberforce, on the abolition of slavery—short, but full of strength—giving to the apostle of freedom his benediction. 'If God be for you,' he writes, 'who can be against, you? O! be not weary in well doing! Go on, in the name of God, and in the power of His might!'

It was in the City-road that exhausted nature gave way, unable to bear any more. And what a death it was! He was, indeed, several days in dying, but there was no pain, only exhaustion; in his wanderings he was preaching or attending classes, and singing snatches from some of his brother's, and from Watts's hymns; but he was half in heaven before he left the earth. His last strain of song was—

but his voice failed, and gasping for breath he said, 'Now we have done, let us go!' Friends crowded round his bed, and amidst their words of comfort and love he was passing away. There was no conflict; only once he rose, and in a tone almost supernatural, exclaimed, 'The best of all is God is with us!' His brother's widow tenderly ministered to him; he tried to kiss her, saying, 'He giveth his servants rest!' Then he repeated his thanksgiving, 'We thank thee, O God, for these and all Thy mercies; bless the Church and King, and grant us truth and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord, for ever and ever.' He paused a little; then he cried, 'The clouds drop fatness!' Then another pause, 'The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge!' Eleven persons were standing round his bed as he said 'Farewell,' his last word, at ten o'clock, Wednesday, March 2nd, 1791. 'Children,' said John Wesley's mother, 'as soon as I am dead, sing a song of praise!' As soon as Wesley died, his friends round his dead body raised their voices in a hymn, then knelt down and prayed. He was buried behind the chapel in the City-road, on the 9th of March. So great was the excitement created by his death, that he was buried at five o'clock in the morning; before this he had been laid in a kind of state. Thus Samuel Rogers, the poet, saw him. He says, 'As I was walking home one day from my father's bank, I observed a great crowd of people streaming into a chapel in the City-road. I followed them; and saw laid out upon a table the dead body of a clergyman in full canonicals, his grey hair partly shading his face on both sides, and his flesh resembling wax. It was the corpse of John Wesley, and the crowd moved slowly and silently round and round the table, to take a last look at that most venerable man.'

John Wesley appears to have been one of the most faultless of mortals: some of his followers claim for him a rank little short of perfection; and certainly few for whom such a claim is made, could sustain it so well. He nevertheless commands high admiration rather than passionate affection. The sapling he planted has struck its roots far and wide, still true to the spirit of its illustrious planter, his work has resulted in a great organization, rather than in a great soul. We have seen that the proportions of Wesleyanism in America are much more magnificent than in England. English Wesleyanism has narrowed its boundaries by making the sermons of its founder its legal creed; it is not so in America, there the Methodists have accepted his fundamental idea, while they have given room and verge enough for the soul to grow. Sometimes, beyond all question, Wesley himself was occupied by the consideration of the shape and the attitude his gigantic society would assume in future years; but he writes distinctly—'I do not, I will not, concern myself with what will be done when I am dead; I take no thought about that.' His was an ever-growing, keenly penetrating, and widely observant mind, and we cannot but think that he would have so modified his organization and adapted his discipline, that the immense institution he founded would have been saved from many of its ruptures and schisms, and have comprehended a still more extensive operation than it acknowledges at present. We have no space to enter into a comparison between American and English Wesleyanism; enough that the transatlantic child has far outstripped the English parent. In England, indeed, several powerful offshoots, all, it seems to us, comprehensible within Wesley's own idea, have divided the field of labour, which he, perhaps, would have occupied by his organization alone. But what a variety of sects regard him as their father: the Primitive Methodists, the Bible Christians, the Wesleyan Association, the New Connexion, and the Free Methodists; so that, regarding the immense Church of America, the old Conference of England, and all its offshoots, it is not too much to say that no single man, in the history of the Church has ever been the father of such a progeny, so many are those who in their temple and services are anxious that the 'shadow of "Wesley" passing may overshadow some of them.' In some particulars, although its numerical strength has ever gone on increasing, Wesleyanism has not grown since the days of its founder. Creating such a hymnology as that of Charles Wesley, the glory and beauty of Methodism, we do not know that since his time it has ever written a single hymn which has become the darling and the property of the Church. It has produced in England few Christian poets, no great hymn writers; certainly none to take place by the side of the lyrists of its early days. It was born in missionary fervour, and baptized into the missionary spirit; it has performed abroad a good and admirable work. To it greatly it is due that the Fiji Islanders, a race of cannibals, have ceased from their horrible manners and customs, and have approached the confines of civilization; but Wesleyanism has produced no great missionaries, and boasts of no vast achievements like those which are the heraldry of some it would be easy to name. It has no literature; it has done nothing for philosophy, with perhaps the exception of the metaphysical shoemaker, Samuel Drew; with the single exception of Richard Watson it has done nothing in scientific theology; here and there scholarly men like the learned Adam Clarke, Spence Hardy, or the recently departed Etheridge, meet us, but the history of the literature of Methodism would present only a poor scroll. There must be some reason for this, although we are not now disposed to inquire where it is to be found; we simply state a fact. Nor do those who are the immediate followers of Wesley occupy the fields of labour Wesley prescribed; we apprehend that Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians would receive the venerable Wesley's special benediction, and be regarded by him as carrying forward most efficiently his labours and intentions. Perhaps, if it were possible for the English Conference to adopt some of the principles of the American Conference, this great religious corporation might soon enlarge its field and sphere, so that even Wesley himself might seem to be the subject of a mighty resurrection.

As time advances, the point of view changes from whence a great man may be most distinctly seen; as the trees are removed which interfered with the prospect, so prejudices which prevented due appreciation are modified. If the subsequent ages do not substantially alter their verdict, yet so much is added to, or subtracted from impressions, either by a larger catholicity of judgment or by the accumulation of additional facts, that new portraits and fresh and more accurate appreciations are demanded. Ours has been called especially the age of resurrections: beyond all former times it is the age in which men have industriously 'garnished the sepulchres of the prophets,' and Wesley's tomb has not been suffered to fall into ruin; many a loving Old Mortality re-cuts his name on the stone; and recently, especially, many able hands have set themselves to the task of faithful and admiring delineation of the features of the man and his work. Miss Wedgewood's interesting little volume, if founded upon no additional information, shows the growing disposition in members of other Churches to do him substantial justice. As a history of the great evangelical reaction and revival, her work is inadequate, and we question very much whether she has qualified herself, either by sufficient sympathy or sufficient knowledge, to fulfil the requirements of the larger and more comprehensive title of her work. Mr. Tyerman's volumes constitute by far the most exhaustive, as they are certainly the bulkiest, and from many points of view, the most interesting of the lives of Wesley. He has industriously ferreted out and brought together a great deal of unpublished or unconnected material, although much material to which he might have found access still remains unexamined, acquaintance with which would probably have modified some of his judgments. The author does not aim at any remarkable melody of style, philosophic disquisition, or even personal portraiture; his work is simply an Index Rerum about Wesley. Mr. Tyerman's judgment is usually characterized by great clearness and good sense; his pen seems to be always governed by the desire to be fair and impartial, and for the first time our libraries receive a full and comprehensive memoir of the great religious teacher and ecclesiastical statesman, of a life as transcendently above ordinary lives in its incessant and immeasureable activity, as it was protracted beyond them in its period of service. We suppose that those readers who desire a philosophy of Methodism, will still turn to the pages of Isaac Taylor; and those who desire to read a charming story, will still find most refreshment in the pages of Robert Southey, or in the more recent glowing collection of anecdotes in Dr. Stevens's 'History of Methodism.'