These were the philosophers who ruled England when John Wesley, a youth of nineteen, went from Charter House to Oxford. Locke had then been dead eighteen years, he having died on October 28 of the year (1704) after Wesley was born, (June 17, 1703.) They were thus sixteen months on the earth together. Berkeley had put forth his treatise, (1709,) which carried Locke yet one step farther back; for as Locke had declared that sensation was nothing, so Berkeley declared that the substance from which they drew their sensation was naught. "The only thing whose existence I deny is that which philosophers call matter, or corporeal substance." Still he argued that he did not deny the existence of things seen, but that they existed only in the seeing. Such super-Hobbesism could not affect weightily the public thought. It still clung with British tenacity to Locke, as its best interpreter. Until long after Wesley left college Locke reigned alone. Nor was his first real successor of a different school. Hume, born eight years after Wesley, (1711,) sprang early into the front rank of metaphysicians. At twenty-eight his first treatise, that on Human Nature, appeared. Wesley that same year was founding his Church in London, and framing into reality his own views of metaphysics and theology. In 1741 Hume's first essays appeared, and with their baneful influence, purely material, commenced their career with that of their great counterpart. Voltaire and Wesley are contrasted by Southey. Much more truly were Hume and Wesley the antagonists who fought all over England, and have since fought all over the world for the soul of man. Hume puts his philosophy into religion, Wesley his religion into philosophy. Ingersoll, a pupil of Huine, is striking at experimental Faith, the child of Wesley. Faith and Reason struggle for the mastership, but Faith springs from the higher reason, and shall conquer. II. A true exhibit of the status of that age, in its philosophic aspects, requires a glimpse also of its theologic conditions. Much has been written on the decay of religion at the coming in of Methodism. Not sufficiently has the cause of that decay been noted. It has been charged to worldliness. It should be charged to fatalism and materialism. It was the dogma of fatalism and sensuousism that possessed the school which also possessed and paralyzed the Church. Locke had followed Hobbes in denying the supremacy of moral standards, high and immutable. "I think," he says, "it will be hard to instance any one moral rule which can pretend to so general and ready an assent as 'What is, is,' or to so manifest a truth as this, that 'It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be;' whereby it is evident that they are farther removed from a title to be innate, and the doubt of their being native impressions on the mind is stronger against these moral principles than the other." He seeks to avoid belittling them by adding: "Not that it brings their truth at all in question. They are equally true, though not equally evident." But it is not far to go to lop off this excrescence, and to affirm on his postulate of the inferiority of moral ideas, the dogma of Hobbes, that good and evil exist only in the feeling of the recipient, like tobacco and tomatoes, which one esteems good, and another evil. The theology had gone down to the same level. There had been resistance, but it had not been effectual. The devout men were Calvinists, and, therefore, fatalists. The nondevout were philosophers of the materialistic, or popular school of Hobbes and Locke, and, therefore, also fatalists. John Owen and John Howe, the great lights of the Cromwellian age, were the highest type of fatalists. And when persecution arose, and penury and martyrdom followed, their followers clung the closer to their ruling dogma. As persecution abated and the floods of ungodly men that had made them afraid dried up, the Church lapsed into the arms of this most powerless of stimulants. Baxter and Watts, and Henry and Doddridge, good men and faithful, of the preceding and contemporaneous age, were filled with this heresy, while the prelates and inferior clergy of the Established Church were possessed with the same death in the popular philosophy. III. How Wesley wrestled with and overcame this false philosophy has never been told. His biographers give but little light on his earlier studies at Oxford, Tyerman telling even less than Southey. This is to be regretted. Students of his life, disciples of his faith, are anxious to know how he wrestled himself out of the ruling philosophy and theology into that. freer and higher type with which his name is identified. That he broke from it early one instance shows. He revolted from predestination when in college, and his mother confirmed him. in his detestation of it. "The doctrine was shocking," she said, "and ought utterly to be abhorred." This was written to him, in answer to his objections, when he was but twentytwo years old. Her father being a Puritan minister, this revolt is the more noticeable. Perhaps she thought wiser than she was taught, in this as in so many other directions. Soon after, John Wesley became Fellow of Lincoln, and pursued his studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The metaphysics were necessarily Locke's; the theology was equally unspiritual and hard-bound-the God of Hobbes then ruling soul and body, time and eternity-Church and State, with equal authority and with equal lack of goodness or reason. Wesley presided over debates every day in the week, on literature, philosophy, and theology, and continued these exercises, more or less regularly, for six years. This position gave him great power of discrimination, perhaps greater than of discernment. Yet he could not be a dialectician for so long a time without investigation, and possibly, and probably, the basis was laid in these years for his departure from the field of fatalism and materialism in philosophy and doctrine. He might have taught, he must have read, Descartes, and thus began to differ with his mighty predecessor, who was a Master of Oxford, who had even been a student of his own college, Christ Church, where he had long resided as tutor. In Locke's day, his biographer tells us, "Descartes' new books began to be read." Wesley may have accepted what Locke had rejected, and been a teacher of "innate ideas" over against Locke and Hobbes' materialistic sensationalism. How desirable is information on this point. Is it impossible to obtain it? He might have seen thus early what Mr. Lewes declares to be the fact, that "Skepticism, gulflike, yawns as the terminal road of all consistent metaphysics." It surely does of all materialistic and utilitarian metaphysics, which proves that they are not metaphysics nor utilitarian, but spurious counterfeits of spiritual, true, divine philosophy. Professor Shairp declares of Wesley and his age: "How * Lewes' "History of Philosophy," p. 478. entirely the mechanical philosophy had saturated that age may be seen from the fact that Wesley, the leader of the great spiritual counter-movement of the last century, the preacher of divine realities to a generation fast bound in sense, yet in the opening of his sermon on faith indorses the sensational theory, and declares that to man in his natural condition sense is the only inlet to knowledge."* Isaac Taylor, who more than any other writer discerned the spiritual and philosophic work of Wesley, though his Scotch leanings prevented complete discernment, says: "He led this revolution by appealing to principles that have their root in philosophy." Such praise could never be ascribed to materialism; nay, could never be ascribed to fatalism, much as it might be connected with faith. It was the materialism in Locke and Hobbes, and all the expounders of his own time, against which he made vigorous warfare. And he made this warfare, not so much by philosophic forms and phrases, as by a philosophic spirit and principle that gave birth to forms and phrases. We are led to ask, Did Mr. Wesley find this path by his own faculties, by grace, by necessities of his work, or from schools? Mr. Isaac Taylor attributes it to his own being. Erring, as a Calvinist and pupil of the Scotch philosophy might, concerning the true basis of philosophy, he still assigned to Wesley the original faculty out of which true philosophy springs-the intuitions. He says: "Not one of the founders of Methodism was gifted with the philosophic faculty-the abstractive and analytic power. More than one was a shrewd and exact logician, but none a master of the higher reason." But he denies himself when he adds: "Wesley's instinct of belief, which was a prominent characteristic of his mind, met with no counteractive force in its structure," though, he adds, this instinct" was not at all of the philosophic cast." Again, in spite of these declarations that he was not master of the higher reason, he adds: "He reasoned more than he thought. Might we not say that it (the Jeffry ghost) so laid open his faculty of belief that the right of way for the supernatural was opened through his mind." And again: "Wesley was thus *"S. T. Coleridge," in the "North British Review," December, 1865. The analysis of that age in this article is worthy of attention. almost intuitively master of arts," though he must belittlingly add, “or of all but the highest, to which the predominance of secondary faculties bars the way." Again he compliments him with the "energy of the intuitive reason," and again, unphilosophically, declares this "precludes the philosophic faculty." He still is blinded to the true philosophic faculty, while he happily recognizes Wesley's faculty when he declares he possessed "the irresistible force, or, one might say, the galvanic instantaneousness, of the intuitions," though, with his old falseness of view, he adds that " this forbids and excludes the exercise of the abstractive and analytic power." He, however, concedes a point bearing on our exposition of the current philosophies of his age, when he says: "At the time when Wesley was acting as moderator in the disputations at Lincoln College, there was no philosophy abroad in the world-there was no thinking-that was not atheistical in its tone and tendency." Hear that, ye materialistic and empirical schools! This declaration disagrees with his previous statement, that philosophy consists in abstraction and analysis; for these qualities were certainly abroad in the world when Wesley began to teach. We shall accept Mr. Taylor's concessions, and show that from them John Wesley was one whom Wordsworth truly describes : "That best philosopher, who yet dost keep His heritage, the eye amongst the blind, On whom those truths do rest Which we are toiling all our lives to find." He had the basis in his nature of the real, spiritual philosophy, Platonic and Coleridgian-intuitive, whose "irresistible force, galvanic instantaneousness," is the life and soul of real philosophy. If "he reasoned more than he thought," he had the higher reason, which Taylor confusedly denies him. He grasped it, held it, enjoyed it, preached it, and with it made steadfast and successful warfare against all false forms of fatalism and naturalism, in school, and Church, and society. That was the philosophy he initiated successfully against its antagonist. Hobbes, Locke, Hume, were mastered by the |