Perhaps the founder of a sect is specially liable to misconception. The true representatives of a reformer are never those who call themselves by his name: what is remarkable in him is that he breaks through conventional barriers, what is remarkable in them is that they take the beaten track; and it is necessary, in order to understand him, to connect him with his cotemporaries rather than with his followers. This is the attempt made in the following pages. They aim at delineating John Wesley so far as he formed the centre to a great religious revival; and regarded from this point of view it will be found that, though he exhibited great powers of rule, they were very far indeed from being the most remarkable thing about him.

now.

What, then, was the central fact in his character? It was that which is the common property of all who inspire new force into the religious life of a nation; it was the conviction, which when barely stated sounds a truism, that God governs this world, and not only that which lies beyond the grave. Who disputes it?' we are inclined to ask The reader who will peruse these pages will probably confess that in the eighteenth century it was disputed by all who filled the chief offices of the Church of England. They believed, more or less firmly, that after death we were to pass into a region under the direct government of God, and they believed that on the whole what we had done here would settle our position there; but the assertion that we were living in a world of spiritual laws now seemed to them not only untrue, but impious. They thought that the direct action of God on man was a peculiarity of the period recorded in the Scriptures;

and that to seek to discover any continuity of that action in their own time was (the words are not too strong) a kind of blasphemy.

Whenever, among a generation which denies this fact, a man arises who asserts it, he will always have power to organize and mould a society. For what men need, and especially what the sufferers of the world need, is to believe in this Divine government; and any one who has the power to inspire this belief has the one lever which can move their souls. The revival with which Wesley's name is here associated was not the work of any one man. We are obliged in any historical review to exaggerate what is typical, and to remember as the act of one what was in reality the aspiration and endeavour of many. The clergy of that day made it their aim to ward off all attacks from a particular system of doctrine and organization, and to keep a particular set of ideas in an atmosphere of profound calm. There were others who perceived that what was thus guarded was a corpse, and that the very devotion to the departed spirit demanded attention to be transferred to its representatives elsewhere. This perception found many and various exponents, but its best type is in John Wesley.

He was born in June 17, 1703, at Epworth, a market-town in that portion of the county of Lincolnshire known as the Isle of Axholme, a strip of land lying west of the Trent, and enclosed between that river and the old channels of three others, now only to be traced by the willow-trees formerly edging their banks, which before 1628 covered the adjacent country with their overflowings. The land was then drained by a Dutchman, Cornelius Vermuyden, to

whom a third of it was granted; he sold shares to his countrymen, and some of them left Holland and settled on their allotments. The Fenmen, however,

were opposed to the drainage, and refused to receive compensation for their right of pasturage on the redeemed land. Hence arose fierce riots and angry litigation, lasting for more than half a century, in which the pre-eminence in ferocity must be assigned to the Fenmen. They burnt the crops of their opponents, killed their cattle, and sometimes their workmen, laid the whole level under water in the hopes of drowning the inhabitants, and at last attempted to burn the house of the most obnoxious of their opponents, Nathaniel Reading, with all its inhabitants, the doors having been locked, and the keyholes stopped up with clay. This last atrocity was perpetrated in the year 1697, only six years before Wesley's birth, and at no great distance from his native town. This wild race did not need any provocation to regard the intruders with ill-will. The historian of this part of the country (Rev. W. B. Stonehouse), after quoting an old description of the Girvii, or Fenmen, as noted from the Saxon times for 'a race of men, according to the place where they dwell, rude, uncivil, and envious to all others,' adds that 'persons acquainted with the Fenmen thirty or forty years ago will readily admit that they were the descendants of the ancient Girvii.'1

Among such a population John Wesley passed the earliest years of his life, and his first recollection was one which connected itself with their barbarity. One winter night in 1709, the little fellow on waking up found the room so light that his first impression was

1 Stonehouse's Isle of Axholme, 1839.

that daylight had returned, and he called to his nurse to take him up. Having no answer, he put his head out of the curtains, saw the flames above his head, and rushed terrified to the door; but the fire was there, and he climbed up to the window, showing himself to the terror-stricken gazers in the yard below. The sudden cry for a ladder, the terrible response, 'There will not be time,' the improvised substitute of one man raised on the shoulders of another, and then the awful crash of the falling roof as the child felt the welcome arms clasp him, all remained fixed in Wesley's memory with that distinctness which, when associated with strong emotion, gives the event thus stamped upon the mind a significance which nothing in after-life can rival. The roof fell in at the very moment that the child was lifted to the ground, for he says it would have crushed him and his preserver had it not fallen inward. We can easily believe that that sense of personal guidance which Wesley could only recognize as providential interference with the course of nature took its rise from the moment when the boy, still quivering with the terror of that escape, heard his father cry, 'Come, neighbours, let us kneel down; let us give thanks to God: He has given me all my eight children. Let the house go, I am rich enough.' The deliverance was commemorated, under one of Wesley's portraits, by a vignette of a burning house, with the legend, 'Is not this a brand snatched from the burning?' and by Wesley's choice of these words for his epitaph, when he believed himself dying, in his fiftieth year. To his mature imagination all mankind was typified in his own remembered peril-peril only the greater from their

unconsciousness of it; his work was to imitate his own deliverer, and snatch slumbering souls from a world that was soon to sink in the flames of hell. This fire, as well as one in the year before Wesley's birth, was supposed to be the work of an enemy. The timber house, with its thatched roof, was indeed an easy prey to any accidental spark, but the character of the people by whom the Wesleys were surrounded was such as to favour the suspicion of incendiarism.

Few men of piety and zeal, probably, were ever less fitted to minister among a race such as is here described than the father of John Wesley. He seems, indeed, to have discharged his pastoral duties conscientiously, according to his ideal, but this ideal was not one to be carried out with happy results among a set of barbarians ready to burn their enemies alive, nor could it receive the undivided attention of one occupied with voluminous writings, the cares of a large family, and the pecuniary embarrassments which were owing equally to his bad management and his kind heart. The son of a Nonconformist father and grandfather, both of whom were ejected from their livings by the Act of Uniformity in 1662, he returned to the Church with something of the reactionary vehemence of a convert, and was through life an unflinching advocate of the powers that be. His father, John Wesley, seems to have had more resemblance to his great namesake and grandson. A conversation is preserved for us in Calamy's 'Nonconformists' Memorial,' which with alterations, mainly of dialect, might pass for one of those which took place nearly a century later between the grandson of one speaker and the successors of the other. Dr. Ironside, Bishop