vigorous survey of man in all ages and countries. The colours are so dark that the natural conclusion is purely sceptical. Can this world, we naturally say, be the work of a good God? and can even Christianity have done much good? The classical nations were cruel and lustful under the thinnest veil of civilisation; the Jewish history is a record of ' astonishing wickedness.'1 For centuries the Romans were godless, full of the grossest thoughts, and void of natural affection. Cato starved his old servants; Pompey was a monster of selfish ambition; and Cæsar of remorseless cruelty. The heathen at this day are little better than the beasts. Wesley had seen the 'poor Indians' of Pope's poetical sentimentalism, and declared that they were without God, and, without exception, 'gluttons, drunkards, thieves, dissemblers, liars.' Any man would leave his wife at pleasure, and she in revenge would cut his children's throats. The Chinese had this in their favour, that they lived 7,000 miles off; but what Wesley knew of them was the reverse of the ordinary deist picture. The Mahomedans were as bad, and the Romanists generally infidels, unchaste, murderers, and cruel persecutors. The Protestants were not much better, and justified the account of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. The king of that country remarked that our recent history was nothing but a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres; the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce.' ' And the theologian endorses the satire of the misanthropist. Coming nearer to his own experience, he points out all the evils which then affected English society; and he speaks as one knowing the evils which he describes. So black, indeed, is his description, that we are a little surprised when he discovers afterwards that Christians are better than heathen. He will not say that no heathen will be saved; but he will say that he never yet knew a heathen who was not a slave to some gross vice or other.' Bad, therefore, as nominal Christians are, he cannot yet' place them on a level with the heathen; and, indeed, he has a good reason; for if he believed with his opponent that the heathen might possibly be less vicious than the Christians, he would 'bid adieu to 2. Ib. xiv. 23. 3 Ib. xiv. 32.

'Wesley, xiv. 11.

Christianity and commence heathen without delay.'1 A more minute and, perhaps, effective description of English life is given in the second part of the Further Appeal.' The general irreligion of the nation; the extraordinary variety and extent of false swearing made necessary by the laws; the smuggling, sabbath-breaking, indifference to religious discipline, and political corruption, which was winked at by the sworn defenders of the laws; the incessant drunkenness, the careless luxury of the higher orders, the gambling and cheating in every trade, the injury done by cunning lawyers under the name of justice, the squandering of public charities, the general disregard of truth; the profligacy of the army, the servility and carelessness of the clergy, and the utter indifference to the duties of their high calling; the immorality prevalent amongst the Dissenters, in spite of their claims to a stricter observance of duty; the worldliness of the Quakers, in spite of their affected simplicity-all these are described in the language of keen indignation; though they lead to a triumphant estimate of the reformation that has been worked by the Methodists.

98. Later writers have been too apt to assume that such denunciations as these, in comparison with which Brown's 'Estimate' is mere sham rhetoric, indicate a state of society really more degraded than that which existed before or since. It is enough to reply that a writer of equal eloquence, at any period and in any country, would be able to draw as dismal a picture. Whether the Englishmen of those days were really better or worse than the Englishmen of the seventeenth or of the nineteenth century is a question not to be so speedily settled. But the exertions of Wesley, and their success, are of themselves a sufficient proof that a work was to be done of which neither the rationalist nor the orthodox were capable. The creed of the one party was too negative, that of the other too lifeless, to satisfy the minds of the people. And, therefore, in Wesley's mouth the old creed uttered itself after the old fashion.

99. Wesley's eloquence is in the direct style which clothes

Wesley, xiv. 152. Yet in his Journals (iii. 143) he says that the Indians learnt gluttony and drunkenness from the Christians, and asks, 'Oh, who will convert the English into honest heathens?'

his thoughts with the plainest language He speaks of what he has seen; he is never beating the air, or slaying the dead, or mechanically repeating thrice-told stories, like most of his contemporaries. His arguments, when most obsolete in their methods and assumptions, still represent real thought upon questions of the deepest interest to himself and his hearers. He is not above familiar and telling illustrations, though to us they sometimes imply a childish credulity. He is at his best when striking home at the daily weaknesses of his disciples. We can fancy the venerable old man, his mind enriched by the experience of half a century's active warfare against vice, stained by no selfishness, and liable to no worse accusation than that of a too great love of power, and believe that his plain nervous language must have carried conviction and challenged the highest respect. It is rather curious, indeed, to find him saying, in his seventy-eighth year, that he had never yet preached a sermon expressly upon the danger of riches, though he had now and then touched upon the subject. Indeed, most of his disciples of that time suffered from a danger of a different kind. Wesley, however, could say that he had preached by example, and boasted that he would leave nothing but his books behind him. No man, at any rate, in that age spoke his mind more freely and forcibly as to the worst evils of the time. He gave his own notions towards the end of his life of what sermons should be. I dare no more write in a fine style,' he says in 1788, 'than wear a fine coat.' A man with one foot in the grave must waste no time on ornament. But were it otherwise, had I time to spare, I should still write just as I do. I should purposely decline what many admire-a highly ornamented style. I cannot admire French oratory; I despise it from my heart. Let those that please be in raptures at the pretty, elegant sentences of Massillon or Bourdaloue. But give me the plain nervous style of Dr. South, Dr. Bates, and Mr. John Howe. And for elegance, show me any French writer who exceeds Dean Young or Mr. Seed. Let who will admire the French frippery; I am still for plain sound English.'2

100. Wesley is his own best critic. We admire his sense

1 Wesley, x. 102, 115.

2 Ib. ix. 110. Dean Young was father of Young the poet.

2

and his sincerity. We respect his dislike to 'French frippery' and to that luxurious' style of eloquence of which it was a characteristic to apply the word 'dear' to Christ.1 Abstinence from such language, he said, might check that kind of devotion which found expression in 'loud shouting, horrid unnatural screaming, repeating the same words twenty or thirty times, jumping two or three feet high, and throwing about the arms or legs both of men and women, in a manner shocking not only to religion, but to common decency.' But it would not check proper devotion to him who was at once Man and God. Wesley is entirely free from some of the extravagances of his followers, and deals little even in impassioned appeals to the terrors of hell. He remains on the plane of terse vigorous sense. But it is also true that his eloquence never soars above the ground; if there is no bombast, there is little more rhetoric than may be found in a vigorous leading article, and if he wins our respect, he does not excite our admiration, or add to the stores of English rhetorical prose. He reminds us as little of Burke or Jeremy Taylor as of Massillon and Bourdaloue. His English is allied to that of Swift or Arbuthnot; but, unluckily, his thoughts run so frequently in the grooves of obsolete theological speculation, that he has succeeded in producing no single book satisfactory in a literary sense. In his rhetoric the threads of sound sense are crossed by others doomed to speedy decay, and the whole fabric has fallen into confusion. He did not look for the praise of critics, and he has hardly won it.

101. Wesley's writings are thus illustrative of the fact too often neglected by philosophical speculators. It is not only possible, but it is the normal case, that two and more currents of thought should exist side by side in a country with very little mutual influence. In the social stratum from which Wesley drew his followers the old ideas still prevailed in a slightly modified state. The arguments of the sceptics and the deists had scarcely penetrated to that depth. They were like so much idle wind stirring only the surface. Wesley is as indifferent to the doubts expressed by Hume as if the two men had lived in different hemispheres or centuries. The

1 Wesley, x. 424.

2 Ib. x. 426.

only relation is indirect. The field was undoubtedly prepared for Wesley by the fact that prevailing rationalism had paralysed the hands of the official cultivators. Men like Clarke or Warburton could no longer preach with the energy and the faith which alone can stir a popular audience. They had but half beliefs, and doctrines which they had demonstrated till their truth became doubtful. The growth of Methodism must be explained, not as an offshoot from the speculation of the time, nor yet, as is more commonly done, as a reaction against it. The true explanation is to be found in the records of the social development of the time, and in the growth of a great population outside the rusty ecclesiastical machinery. The refuse thus cast aside took fire by spontaneous combustion. The great masses of the untaught and uncared for inherited a tradition of the old theology. As they multiplied and developed, the need of some mode of satisfying the religious instincts became more pressing; and as the pure sceptics had nothing to say, and the official clergy could only say something in which they did not believe, Wesley's resuscitation of the old creed gave just the necessary impulse. Its want of any direct connection with that speculative movement could not stifle it, but it condemned it to barrenness. The want of a sound foundation in philosophy prevented the growth of any elevated theology, and alienated all cultivated thinkers. One outward symptom of the deficiency is the absence of any literature possessing more than a purely historical interest. The High Church revival of the present century differs curiously from Wesley's in this respect. Though less important in its moral aspect, it has to the speculation of the time the relation, at least, of reaction or misunderstanding, and has therefore produced some valuable literature. Wesleyanism in the eighteenth century represents heat without light—a blind protest of the masses, and a vague feeling after some satisfaction to the instinct which ends only in a recrudescence of obsolete ideas.

102. When we turn from Wesley to the remarkable group of men who were his followers or allies, we find little but a less forcible utterance of the same order of ideas. The Methodists who gradually left the Established Church, and the Evangelical school which remained within it, furnish much