those only who accept Methodist teaching aud attend Methodist services. If Mr. Whitaker wishes to be correct, he must in any case place the Methodists at the top of the list. The youngest of British religious denominations has already become the largest. Professor Seeley, in his fascinating Expansion of England, pointed out the extraordinary way in which our vast colonial empire grew almost in spite of us, while we were preoccupied with royal intrigues and party squabbles and European wars-" battles of kites and crows". that will have no appreciable effect upon the course of human history. In just the same way, while British theologians have been furiously waging their speculative wars, and examining the dead past with mediæval microscopes, Methodisun has been silently spreading throughout the world, and sowing in all lands the seed of an unprecedented religious revolution. Its numerical strength is a small part of its influence. The sudden growth of its latest offshoot, the Salvation Army, is a startling illustration of the extent to which it has silently prepared the masses of the people for evangelical teaching even in its most pronounced and defiant forms. Neither is this vigorous and restless leaven confined to the British Empire. A distinguished professor of theology in a South German University has recently issued a pamphlet which is creating a great impression in thoughtful religious circles in Germany. The keynote of this pamphlet is expressed in the following startling sentence: "Methodism is on the point of becoming, in Evangelical Christianity, prac. tically, if also unknown to many, the ruling power, like Jesuitism in Catholic Christianity.' This learned writer is by no means an admirer of Methodism. He regards the fact he has discovered as "in many respects one of the gravest signs of modern Christianity.' I believe future ages will prove that this anxious German professor is one of those extraordinary or privileged men who, by some flash of genius or revelation of God, see long before their fellow-men the meaning and the drift of world-history. I am equally confident that his boding fear is quite unnecessary. All modern religious history is summed up in the two momentous facts that Ignatius Loyola has captured the Catholic Churches, and that John Wesley has captured the Evangelical Churches.

Jesuitism and Methodism-these are the two ultimate forms of intense, logical, thorough - going Christianity. Absolute subjection to the Church, or absolute subjection to the Christ-there is no other alternative for the enthusiastic "out-andout" Christian of the twentieth century. Absolute subjection to a Creed is no longer possible. Men are becoming too much in earnest for any illogical compromise. John Newman found that a via media was impracticable and hopeless, and became a Romanist. John Wesley made the same discovery a hundred years earlier, and became a Methodist. In these two facts will be found the ultimate explanation of modern English history. The augurs of antiquity foretold future events by ransacking the bodies of animals. Our historians, who are the real augurs, may anticipate the course of history by carefully searching the Journals of John Wesley and the Apologia pro vitâ suâ of John Newman. From the combinations and antagonisms of the two movements these works describe they can explain the attitude of the Episcopal bench, construe "the Nonconformist conscience," and forecast the democratic progress of the twentieth century.

The time is past when it would be necessary to repeat Macaulay's withering rebuke of literary charlatans who professed to write the history of the eighteenth century without describing the Methodist movement, and estimating its influence upon the course of events. That race is extinct, as Macaulay prophesied it would be. The latest and best-informed of the historians of the period expresses himself thus: Although the career of the elder Pitt and the splendid victories by land and sea that were won during his ministry, form unquestionably the most dazzling episodes in the reign of George the Second, they must yield, I think, in real importance to that religious revolution which shortly before had begun in England by the preaching of the Wesleys and Whitefield. "* But even Mr. Lecky has apparently failed to realize the full import of what men call Methodism. We need to be entirely emancipated from the traditions. and prejudices of the literary circles of England in order to grasp the true proportions of a movement which is neither

*Lecky, ii, 521.

Oui, l'Angleterre, telle que nous la connaissons aujourd'hui, avoc sa littérature pudique et grave, avec son langage biblique, avec sa piété nationale, avec ses classes moyennes dont la moralité exemplaire fait la force du pays, l'Angleterre est l'oeuvre du méthodisme. Le méthodisme a plus fait que d'établir une secte, il a vivifié toutes les autres, il a étendu son influence jusqu'à l'Eglise établie, il y a remis en honneur les doctrines de la Réforma

tion, il en a réveillé le clergé, il lui a communiqué l'esprit missionnaire.*

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These are strong utterances : "Methodism a religious movement which has changed the face of England ;"" England, as we know her to-day, is the work of Methodism. They will astound all who live in literary or ecclesiastical balloons in the cloud-land of an imaginary world. But those who walk upon the solid earth, mix with the masses of the people, and have eyes to see, will not be surprised that a shrewd Frenchman has observed the most obvious fact of modern English history.

John Wesley, as our most brilliant recent historian has observed, "embodied in himself not this or that side of the vast movement, but the very movement itself." Intense interest must therefore attach to the life and work of the man whose Centenary is celebrated this month. By a very happy and timely inspiration, Dr. Rigg has been induced to issue a second and greatly enlarged edition of his Living Wesley. No great Englishman was ever more misunderstood or more unfortunate in his biographers than John Wesley. His real biography has yet to be written. It is much to be regretted that Dr. Rigg himself has never been able to achieve the hope of his lifetime, and produce an accurate, complete, and sympathetic life of Wesley. But his Living Wesley will correct the errors of previous biographers, and clear the road for the standard life which will some day appear. It is a remarkable fact that the man whom became the greatest and inost popular open-air preacher this country has ever * Revue des Deux Mondes, May 15, 1861. Green's History of the English People, p.

719.

known, not only led an academic life for twenty years, but was in no sense one of the people. On both sides he belonged," says Dr. Rigg, "to an unbroken ancestral succession of English gentlemen, of whom at least his three immediate predecessors were scholars and divines. No fibre

of hereditary connection between himself and the artisan classes, or the peasantry of England, can be traced in all his long pedigree; and yet this was the man whose words were to take hold of colliers and weavers, of tinners and stonemasons, and hard-handed workers generally, as no man's words had done before for centuries, if ever, or have done since."* This is a conspicuous evidence of the fact that good birth, high breeding, culture and refinement, instead of hindering, greatly enhance a man's or, I might add, a woman's qualifications for effective service among the ignorant, the degraded, and the outcast.

Wesley was born at Epworth on the 17th of June, 1703. His father was the rector of that rural parish, which contained two thousand inhabitants. He was a clergyman of much more than average ability and energy, and made some noise in the world. But Mrs. Wesley was the striking individuality of that immortal home. Rightly does Isaac Taylor declare that "the mother of the Wesleys was the mother of Methodism." "If you wish to train your children aright," she used

to say,

"the first thing to be done is to conquer their will." And she introduced such method and regularity into the nursery as few even attempt, and scarcely any one else has ever succeeded in carrying out. At the end of the first year of life, all her children were successfully taught to cry "softly," if they cried at all. At five years of age, not before, the children began to learn to read. One day only of six hours was allowed to each child to learn the alphabet, and all her numerous family accomplished the peremptory task except two, who were a day and a half. She carried out an inflexible but loving discipline, and they were all rigid methodists' almost before they could walk. Her determination was inex

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twenty times." "I should have lost my labor," she answered, "if I had only told it him nineteen times, since it was at the twentieth time that I succeeded." When her children grew up and left home she followed them with careful and frequent letters," such as probably no other mother ever wrote to her children. In after life, when John Wesley was at the height of power and success, the wise counsels of his mother decided his tolerance of lay preaching and other momentous innovations of his career. Before John Wesley was eleven, he was sent to the Charterhouse School, and experienced, apparently without much permanent personal injury, the brutalities which then reigned in our public schools. He became a student of Christchurch, Oxford, in 1720, when he was seventeen years of age. A writer in the Westminster Magazine, describing him as he was widely known at the end of his undergraduate days, says that he was a very sensible and acute collegian, a young fellow of the finest classical taste, of the most liberal and manly sentiments. He was at that time a general favorite, but the prospect of taking holy orders, and the evolution of the purpose of God in the depths of his nature, were already beginning to produce the great change which ultimately led gay and superficial Oxford to turn her back on one of the mightiest of her sons. He read Thomas à Kempis, and, like every other reader of the Imitation, was deeply stirred, although even then his healthy nature resented the sombre asceticism which disfigures the greatest Catholic book of devotion. He also studied Jeremy Taylor, but the new leaven was fermenting in his soul, and as early as 1725, in a letter to his mother, he revolts against Jeremy Taylor's gloomy and morbid notion that we must remain in perpetual sorrowful uncertainty with respect to our own personal salvation. Nevertheless Taylor was a great blessing to him, and, referring to the effect of the Holy Living and Dying, he says, "Instantly I resolved to dedicate all my life to Godall my thoughts and words and actionsbeing thoroughly convinced there was no medium, but that every part of my life (not some only) must either be a sacrifice to God or myself that is, the devil." This is rightly described by Tyerman as "the turning-point in Wesley's history.

In the same epoch-making year he and

his gifted mother reached a theological conclusion which has already had as great an effect upon Protestant theology as the discoveries of Darwin have had upon science. They finally rejected Calvinism," the doctrine of a restricted salvation, which from the days of Augustine had hung like a dark and deadly London fog over half of earnest Christendom. John Wesley killed Calvinism. No really instructed and responsible theologian dates to assert now that Christ died only for a portion of mankind, although the full logical effect of asserting the redemption of the entire race has not yet been universally realized. Little did the young Oxonian dream in 1725 that he and his mother were sowing the seed of the bitterest theological controversy of his life, over which Methodism would be rent in twain by an irreparable schism, that would unhappily leave the evangelical section of the Established Church on the wrong side of the breach, doomed to the comparative helplessness we witness to-day, although it would burst his fetters, and enable him to exclaim with prophetic truth, "The world is my parish." When the decisive hour came, it made his heart bleed to be separated from his greatest colleague, Whitefield, and the majority of the evangelical clergy. But he never faltered, and in his terrific sermon on "Free Grace, argued with the clearest logic and the most deliberate conviction that the doctrine of a limited salvation represents the most holy God as worse than the devil, as both more false, more cruel, and more unjust." But when he and his mother were calmly corresponding in 1725, all this was hidden in the dark and silent womb of the distant future. In the autumn of that momentous year, Wesley was ordained deacon, and preached his first sermon in South Leigh, near Witney. In the following spring he was elected Fellow of Lincoln College, and, eight months later, Greek lecturer in his college, and moderator of the classes. His long and almost desperate struggle with poverty was now at an end. About this time Wesley fell in love with Miss Betty Kirkham, the daughter of a clergyman, and the sister of a college friend. But some insurmountable obstacle-perhaps, as Dr. Rigg suggests, "a stern parental decree, more effective then than now-prohibited marriage; and after a time Wesley began

" be

to find special consolation in the sympathy of a widowed friend of the Kirkham family, Mrs. Pendarves, afterward the famous Mrs. Delany, whose well-known Life and Correspondence were published by Lady Llanover. Mrs. Pendarves was highly accomplished and very attractive. She moved in the most select society, was indeed "the idol of the Court circle," and enjoyed for half a century the intimate friendship of George the Third and his queen. It is curious to speculate what would have happened if this fashionable widow had married Wesley. Those who wish to know all about his susceptibility to the attractions of this and other gifted and beautiful women, can satisfy their curiosity in the pages of Dr. Rigg, who investigates every case with judicial solemnity and fullness. There is no doubt that this and other correspondence "reveals to us the extreme natural susceptibility of Wesley to whatever was graceful and amiable in woman, especially if united to mental vigor and moral excellence. He had been brought up in the society of clever and virtuous women, his sisters; and it seems as if he could at no time of his life dispense with the exquisite and stimulating pleasure which he found in female society and correspondence. He was naturally a woman worshipper-at least, a worshipper of such women. An almost reverent courtesy, a warm but pure affection, a delicate but close familiarity, marked through life his relations with the good and gifted women-gifted they were, for the most part--with whom he maintained friendship and correspondence.''* To complete the story of this phase of Wesley's life, I must anticipate the narrative, and say that, after some very painful disappointments, Wesley finally married Mrs. Vazeille, who turned out to be a "vain and vindictive woman," who "darkened thirty years of Wesley's life by her intolerable jealousy, her malicious. and violent temper." A review of every aspect of Wesley's relation to woman fully justifies Dr. Rigg's thoughtful conclusion that on the whole, we cannot but love our Wesley the better for these revelations."S

Law's Christian Perfection and Serious Call, and was greatly affected by that powerful writer, as he had been previously by A Kempis and Jeremy Taylor. It is a curious fact that the "Methodists" first appeared at Oxford when John Wesley was away for two years, serving in one of his father's parishes in Lincolnshire. His brother Charles, then at Christchurch, and a few other undergraduates, began to meet together for prayer and the study of the Bible. They were nicknamed Sacramentarians, Bible Bigots, Bible Moths, the Holy Club, and finally "Methodists." When John Wesley returned in 1729 to become a college tutor, he was immediately placed at the head of the little group of serious men, and styled 'the Father of the Holy Club." Thus humbly and in ridicule appeared a name which is now loved or hated in every land. These original High Church "Methodists" began at once to practise the Social Christianity which has always been characteristic of "Methodism." They visited and assisted the prisoners, instructed poor ignorant children, and relieved the poor, as well as fasted twice a week, and observed a weekly Communion. In 1732 Wesley visited William Law, and on his recommendation read the Theologia Germanica, Tauler's work, and other mystical writers. Wesley now became deeply tinged with the Mysticism which, after his evangelical conversion a few years later, he rejected with much vehemence. In 1735 he undertook the mission to Georgia, which failed to accomplish the object he contemplated, but which did accomplish a much greater by bringing him into contact with the Moravian Christians, who lived in the full light of the love of God. He failed in Georgia as the result partly of an unfortunate love affair, and partly of his irritating intolerance. In Georgia his High Churchmanship burst forth into full bloom. was all that the Church Times would like him to be, and strangely imagines he continued to be. He had two daily services. He divided Morning Prayer, taking the Litany as a separate office. He inculcated severe fasting, and confession before Communion. He made a point of celebrating

He

* Living Wesley, p. 63.

+ Ibid. p. 206.

Telford's Life of Wesley, p. 260. Living Wesley, p. 81.

refused the Holy Communion to all who were not episcopally baptized. He insisted upon baptism by immersion. He rebaptized the children of Dissenters. He