ness can be found in any or all things in the world,— that, as I have sixteen years of my own experience which lie flatly against it, I want to talk to you about. Another thing is that wonderful thing called by us Jeffery. You won't laugh at me for being superstitious if I tell you how certainly that something calls on me against any extraordinary new affliction; but so little is known of the invisible world that I, at least, am not able to judge whether it be a friendly or an evil spirit.'

The circumstances of the Wesleys' childhood connect themselves in a strikingly transparent manner with the work they were called to do in the world. Among the wild Fenmen they must have grown up accustomed to all that brutality which, in later years, they were called upon to confront and rebuke, while the labours of their zealous and earnest father must have stood before them as a type of what the Church organization of that day could and could not accomplish to Christianize such a people; the more effectual labours of their mother, in whom their love and reverence centred, was an encouragement to higher aspirations, and a sanction to their endeavour to pour into other channels that energy which in the old ones so often ran to waste. A series of unexplained phenomena, lastly, uninteresting and meaningless as they were, furnished the mind of the elder brother with a stock of recollections firmly rooted in the supernatural which justified his freely adding to their number any analogous instances of superhuman agency without investigation.

CHAPTER II.

WESLEY AT OXFORD.

THE period during which Wesley was entered at Christ Church, Oxford, may be regarded as the lowest point in the history of that University. The half-heartedness, the lawlessness, and the irreverence which were the sins of Hanoverian England, came to a focus at the great nursery of English political life, where youth was surrounded by temptations to evil without any guidance or encouragement in resisting it. The sententious and epigrammatic style of Gibbon has preserved in the nameless portraiture of one of his tutors who 'remembered that he had a salary to receive, and forgot that he had a duty to perform '— what there is plenty of reason for regarding as an average specimen of a class intended to supply this guidance and encouragement. The more favourable sketch which precedes it perhaps suggests even more forcibly the low ebb of efficiency to which a class of public teachers were reduced, when 'one of the best of the tribe' is described as follows. Dr. Waldegrave,' says Gibbon, writing of his first tutor in the year 1752, when he had not quite completed his fifteenth year, 'was satisfied, like his fellows, with the slight and superficial discharge of an important trust. As soon

as he had sounded the insufficiency of his disciple in school-learning, he proposed that we should read every morning from ten to eleven the comedies of Terence. The sum of my improvement in the University of Oxford is confined to three or four Latin plays; and even the study of an elegant classic, which might have been illustrated by a comparison of ancient and modern theatres, was reduced to a dry and literal interpretation of the author's text. During the first weeks I constantly attended these lessons in my tutor's room, but, as they appeared to be equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I was once tempted to try the experiment of a formal apology. The apology was accepted with a smile. I repeated the offence with less ceremony; by degrees the slightest motive of laziness or indisposition was allowed as a worthy impediment, nor did my tutor appear conscious of my absence or neglect. Had the hour of lecture been constantly filled, a single hour was a small portion of my academic leisure. No plan of study was recommended to my use, no exercises were prescribed for his inspection; and, at the most precious season of youth, whole days and weeks were suffered to elapse without labour or amusement, without advice or account.'

So little did the tutorial supervision avail when it might have been exercised for good. Its influence for evil, if we might judge from the squibs of the day, was more active, and, largely as we should allow for the exaggeration of such literature, we cannot but conclude that deep drinking was as likely to be the result of their guardianship as profound learning. While such supervision as this

was the sole restraint exercised by the University upon the youths committed to her care, we can hardly wonder that the time spent at Oxford was, to a man like Gibbon, 'the most idle and unprofitable period of his life.' Even under the very different system which prevailed in the early portion of the present century, one of the most fertile thinkers of our day has been heard to speak of his University career as the only completely idle interval of his life; how often it may have proved not a mere episode, but the foundation of a life of idleness, no human being can tell. Nor was the evil merely negative. While the student lounged away his time in the coffee-house and the tavern, whilst the dice-box supplied him with a serious pursuit, and the bottle a relaxation, he was called upon at every successive step to his degree to take a solemn oath of observance of the academical statutes which his behaviour infringed in every particular. While the public professors received £100 or £200 a year for giving no lectures, the candidates for degrees were obliged to ask and pay for a dispensation for not having attended the lectures that never were given. The system in every public declaration solemnly recognized and accepted was in every private action utterly defied. Whatever the Oxford graduate omitted to learn, he would not fail to acquire a ready facility in subscribing, with solemn attestations, professions which he violated without hesitation or regret. The Thirty-nine Articles were signed on matriculation, without any attempt to understand them. Our venerable mother,' says the great historian from whom we have already quoted, 'had contrived to unite the opposite extremes of

bigotry and indifference;' and these blended influences, which led Gibbon first to Rome, and then to scepticism, proved no doubt to the average mind a mere narcotic to all spiritual life. Gibbon is not the only great writer who has recorded his testimony against Hanoverian Oxford. Adam Smith-in that work which has been called,' with great but pardonable exaggeration, 'the most important book that ever was written,' the 'Wealth of Nations'-has, in the following remarks on Universities, evidently incorporated his anything but loving recollections of the seven years (1740-47) which he spent at Balliol. In the University of Oxford the greater part of the professors have for these many years given up even the pretence of teaching. The discipline is in general contrived not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or, more properly speaking, for the ease, of the masters. In England, the public schools are less corrupted than the Universities; the youth there are, or at least may be, taught Greek and Latin, which is everything the masters pretend to teach. In the University the youth neither are, nor can be, taught the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to teach. It is the last statement to which attention is here directed. It is not that the University drew up a bad programme, not even that this scheme was badly carried out. That might be the case also; but the radical vice of the system was, not that it was essentially incomplete in theory or faulty in practice, but that it was false. Its worst result was not poor scholars, but insincere and venal

men.

1 In Buckle's "History of Civilization."