and is equally adapted to those within its pale and those without. It is at once comprehensive, philosophic, liberal, and yet popular. The author shows wonderful ability to present a full and complete history, containing all the essential facts in the lives of his prominent personages, and in the organization of the system, in a clear, condensed, and entertaining manner. He says nothing too much, nor leaves anything unsaid that is essential to his design, while he carries one along through minute incidents, including various statistics, with a life and vivacity that does not allow you a moment to be weary. He combines the fullness of Macaulay without his mannerism, and the vivacity of D'Aubigne with more reliability. A few only of his salient points we shall be able to touch in this review.

Intending to consider Methodism in its most comprehensive relations, Dr. Stevens starts with noticing the organic form of the primitive Church. After glancing briefly at its early corruptions, and its utter degradation under the Papacy, and then at its reformation under Luther, he dwells at some length on the moral condition of Europe, especially of England in the last century. He here exhibits that rare talent of rapid, comprehensive, and condensed statement to which we have before alluded. A new religious movement was absolutely necessary to restore the forfeited power of a vital Christianity, and a fitting instrument was selected and qualified for this great end, in the Rev. John Wesley.

The father of John Wesley, the Rev. Samuel Wesley, was a man of striking peculiarities. He was of an ancient and respectable family, and seems to have inherited the best family traits, with, however, a mixture of sternness and self-will, that, when rightly directed, constitute honest and sturdy independence, but which, carried too far, or not well regulated, become harshness and obstinancy. He was a man of great learning, talents, piety, and strict conscientiousness, and, like other members of the Wesley family, was endowed with no small share of poetical ability. But the mother of the Wesleys was the bright gem of the family. In every sense she was an extraordinary woman. She was "nobly related," says our author, "being the daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley, who was the son of a brother of the Earl of Anglesea." She was a beautiful and an accomplished woman, and in her air and mien bore the marks of her high descent. She possessed uncommon talent, sound judgment, deep piety, and a noble and independent character. Her whole life is a wonder: highly educated, well read in history, poetry, and philosophy, keeping up with the literature of the day; the mother of thirteen children, ten of whom attained to maturity,

whom she educated herself, the daughters entirely, and the sons till they were old enough to go to a public school; the wife of a clergyman, and sharing his trials and responsibility, this noble woman, so limited was their income, was often unable to procure comfortable clothing, and actually suffered in health for the want of it. So there was "plain living combined with high thinking." If the family had not a superfluity of apparel they had an amplitude of books, and their reading was evidently choice and varied. References are made by the different members of the family, male and female, with the air of familiar acquaintance, not only to such writers as Baxter, Law, and Pascal, but also to Milton and Cowley, Waller and Dean Swift; Butler's Hudibras is also mentioned by them. So they went "from grave to gay, from lively to severe." Of the daughters we have not room to speak. In beauty, talents, and education they resembled their mother, but were all singularly unfortunate in married life. They themselves illustrated the sentiments in a part of the stanzas written by Miss Emilia Wesley, the second daughter:

"And that peculiar talent let me show

Which Providence divine doth oft bestow,

On spirits that are high, with fortunes that are low."

For the particulars we must refer to the work itself. The oldest son, the Rev. Samuel Wesley was a man of superior mind and an excellent scholar, and if he did not attain to the height of his ambition as principal of Westminster School, he enjoyed a like honorable post at the Grammar School of Tiverton, in Devonshire. He was a poet of no mean order, and wrote some of the noblest hymns in the Wesleyan Collection.

John Wesley was the tenth of this family of children who attained to maturity. A singular providence seems to have been over him. Saved most marvelously from death by fire in the burning rectory, he had almost as great an escape as his brother Charles had from being adopted by an honorable and wealthy gentleman, Mr. Garret Wesley, of Ireland, whose heir, adopted in Charles's place, became Earl of Mornington, and was grandfather to the Duke of Wellington. But God had in store for them a higher purpose and greater honor than to wear an earthly coronet. But we cannot pretend to follow our author through the history of Wesley's early days; the life at the rectory, the singular noises, so like what Bartlett in his Nile Boat relates as having occurred in Egypt, and like the Epworth noises alike unexplained; his early scholastic training, and his life

Mr. W. H. Bartlett, in his "Nile Boat, or Glimpses of Scenes in Egypt," gives an account of the Jinn or Genii, in which he extracts a passage from Mrs. Poole.

at the University. Dr. Stevens has shown untiring industry in gathering from a great variety of sources whatever is most interesting on these points, and has woven a condensed narrative, spirited, graphic, and highly entertaining.

Of Mr. Wesley's scholarship and standing at the University we are inclined to say a few words, chiefly because many have so formed the habit of looking at him as merely a religious devotee, and something of a fanatic withal, that they can hardly conceive of him as a scholar of first position, adorned with all the graces of academic lore. Yet such he really was.

He

"In his youth he was gay and sprightly," says his biographer, Mr. Watson, "with a turn for wit and humor." At seventeen he was elected from the Charter House School, where he prepared for the University, to Christ Church College, Oxford, and at twenty-one "he appeared the sensible and acute collegian; a young fellow of fine classical taste, of the most liberal and manly sentiments."* He had commenced the study of Hebrew before he went to college, under his brother Samuel's instruction, and continued it after matriculation. After his election to a fellowship in Lincoln College, he was appointed Greek lecturer and moderator of the classes. To his skill in logic even Mr. Southey bears honorable and candid testimony. As moderator of the classes at Lincoln College, he presided at the disputations by the students, which were held six times a week, an exercise which sharpened his habits of logical discrimination.' pursued through this period a regular and systematic course of study, embracing in its round the Greek and Latin classics, Hebrew and Arabic, Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy, Logic and Ethics, That lady relates that some evil possession so disturbed the occupants of a certain house that no family could live there long. After relating some incidents connected with this house, which her family had rented for want of another, she says: "To describe all the various noises by which we have been disturbed is impossible. Very frequently the door of the room in which we were sitting late in the evening. . . was violently knocked at many short intervals; at other times it seemed as if something heavy fell to the pavement close under one of the windows of the same room or one adjoining; and as these rooms were in the top of the house, we imagined at first that some stones or other things had been thrown by a neighbor, but we could find nothing outside after the noise. The usual sounds continued a greater part of the night, and were generally like a heavy trampling, like the walking of a person in heavy clogs, varied by knocking at the doors." This story," Mr. Bartlett adds, "so remarkably resembles the one told by the different members of the Wesley family, that it might almost be taken for an Oriental version of it." The similarity in many features is certainly curious and striking. It is not, however, so well authenticated as the occurrences at Epworth.

Quoted in Watson's "Life of Wesley," from the Westminster Magazine.

Oratory and Poetry, and Divinity, and chiefly composition in those arts. To mathematics also he gave considerable attention. But this branch of science was not pursued as thoroughly at that day in the schools as it is now, nor did Mr. Wesley, as we infer from what he says in after life, think it expedient for him to pursue it as he did the other branches. Mr. Southey also bears testimony to his merits as a poet. "Of Mr. Wesley's talents as a poet of high order, none can doubt who is capable of appreciating real poetic excellence." This is "laudari a viro laudato;" but as Providence had raised up for him so able an assistant in this department, he did not pursue it to any great extent, and Charles Wesley became "the sweet singer" of our Israel.*

In regard to Mr. Wesley as a writer, tastes may differ. But to form a just estimate of him his earlier writings should be perused; those, I mean, in which the odor of the college still hung about him, and in which he exhibited the full effect of his classic taste. The sermons preached before the University, while it cannot be said that they are marked with high adornments of imagination and excited thought, for that was not the fashion of the day in the pulpits of the Establishment, exhibit a fine classical taste, a style chaste, pure, correct, and elegant. They show more of the classical scholar, but less of the earnest, evangelical, and practical preacher, that he became when his soul was fully awake to the claims of eternal things, and he was baptized with the spirit of his heavenly mission. His mind then became too much engrossed with higher and holier aims to pay great attention to minor beauties. He now abjured “an elaborate, elegant, or oratorical dress." He had not time for such writing, nor did his object demand it. "I design plain truth for plain people. I now write as I generally speak, ad populum—to the bulk of mankind." And elsewhere he says: "I dare no more write in a fine style, than wear a fine coat." And yet, while not aiming at fineness in writing, where shall we find more true eloquence than in many of his writings? Take, for instance, that exquisite soliloquy in which he calls himself "a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air." The whole passage is beautiful, even sublime and thrilling, but it is too long to quote; and we apprehend our reader is familiar with it. Mr. Wesley's sermons do not show what, in point of literary excellence, he could have done, but rather what in his peculiar circumstances and under his peculiar obligations he felt called to do. Who could have done it better? And we believe very strongly that many, in attempting a more ornate style, especially in the pulpit, have done immeasurably worse. They have

Life of Wesley, vol. i, p. 70. Note. New York, 1847.

appeared like an over-dressed fop in a funeral cortege, or like Nero fiddling when Rome was on fire. His style was eminently terse, sententious, and forcible, and not unfrequently truly eloquent. But it was eloquent in thought and feeling, not in imagination and language merely. The peroration to his sermon on Free Grace is wisely referred to as a pertinent example.

Great injustice is done to Mr. Wesley by many in regard to his appreciation of learning as well as to his scholarship. Who, on any serious inquiry, can doubt his high estimate of mental culture? Let any one read his Serious Address to the Clergy, in which he erects a standard of ministerial qualifications, and points out the lamentable deficiency of too many who were called "Masters in Israel." Let them read his Plan of Study for a Young Lady, including not only the common branches, but also logic, ethics, natural philosophy, metaphysics, history, with chronology and geography, and poetry, sacred and secular. At the same time he gives a list of authors, among whom we need only mention Locke, Malebranche, Ray, and Puffendorf; and in poetry, Spenser, Milton, Young, and Shakspeare. And these books were recommended to a lady. His own practice was conformed to his advice. There have been few more omnivorous readers, as his Journals sufficiently show. And yet during his whole life he was preaching from ten to fourteen times a week; he wrote more books than authors by profession, than Addison, Pope, or Dryden; he traveled more miles than professed travelers; and he endured the care of all the societies which he founded, organized, and superintended. He wrote, besides his numerous theological works, not less than five grammars of different languages, a system of logic, and an extended volume of natural philosophy, which, if now behind the times, was yet valuable and important in its day. These facts are sufficient, surely, to prove that Mr. Wesley placed no low estimate on the value of learning either to private persons or to ministers of the Gospel. Nor have the sentiments of Methodists really changed on these points. It is not true that Methodists as a body, whatever individuals may have done, ever despised learning in its proper place. To be sure they always considered piety in a minister more essential than learning, and so they do now, and we trust they ever will; but they always regarded the union of the two as most desirable. At the rise of Methodism there was, both in England and the United States, a disposition to magnify learning above piety. This led Methodists to take the opposite ground, and exalt piety above learning. This seemed to create an antagonism. But now that other Churches have come to give the right place to piety, Methodists can afford to give the right place to learning. For