666 'Soft peace she brings; wherever she arrives 'Perhaps if we only spoke of being saved by love you would have no great objection, but you do not comprehend what we say of being saved by faith; I know you do not. We grant nothing is more unreasonable than to imagine that such mighty effects as these can be wrought by that poor, empty, insignificant thing which the world calls faith. But suppose there be such a faith on the earth as the Apostle spoke of, such an intercourse between God and the soul-what is too hard for such a faith? All things are possible to him that thus believeth, to him that thus walks with God, that is now a citizen of heaven, an inhabitant of eternity. We join with you,' ie. the men of reason, 'in desiring a religion founded on reason, and every way agreeable thereto. But one question remains: What do you mean by reason? I suppose you mean the eternal reason, the nature of things, the nature of God, and the nature of man, with the relations necessarily existing between them. Why, this is the religion we preach,— a religion evidently founded on, and every way agreeable to, natural reason, to the essential nature of things, to the nature of God, for it begins in knowing Him, it ends in doing His will: to the nature of man, for it begins in a man's knowing himself to be what he truly is, foolish, vicious, miserable; it goes on to point the true remedy for this, to make him truly wise, virtuous, and happy, as every thinking mind (perhaps with some implicit remembrance of what it originally was) S longs to be. It finishes all by restoring the due relations between God and man; by uniting for ever the tender Father and the grateful, obedient son, the great Lord of all and the faithful servant, doing not his own will but the will of Him that sent him. 'But perhaps by reason you mean the faculty of inferring one thing from another. There are many, it is confessed (particularly among those that are called mystic divines), that utterly decry the use of reason, thus understood, in religion, that condemn all reasoning concerning the things of God as utterly destructive of true religion. But we can in no wise agree with this. In Holy Writ, we find both our Lord and His Apostles continually reasoning with their opposers. We do not know in all the productions of ancient and modern times so close and solid a chain of argumentation as the Epistle to the Hebrews. And the strongest reasoner we have ever observed, except Jesus of Nazareth, was that Paul of Tarsus, the same who has left that plain direction, "In malice be ye children, but in understanding be ye men." We therefore not only allow but earnestly exhort all who seek after true religion to use the reason which God hath given them, in searching out the things of God. But your reasoning justly on any subject whatever presupposes true judgments already formed whereon to ground your argumentation. It is impossible, if your premisses are false, to infer from them true conclusions. You know likewise that before it is possible for you to form a true judgment of them it is absolutely necessary that you have a clear apprehension of the things of God, and that your ideas thereof be all fixed, distinct, and deter minate. And seeing our ideas are not innate, but must all originally come from our senses, it is certainly necessary that you have senses capable of discerning objects of this kind; not those only which are called natural senses, which in this respect profit nothing, but spiritual senses exercised to discern spiritual good and evil. It is necessary that you have the hearing ear, and the seeing eye, emphatically so called; that you have a new class of senses opened in your soul, not depending on organs of flesh and blood, to be the evidence of things not seen, as your bodily senses are of visible things, to be the avenues to the invisible world, and to furnish you with ideas of what the outward eye hath not seen nor the ear heard. And till you have these internal senses you can have no apprehension of divine things, no idea of them at all. Till then you can neither judge truly nor reason justly concerning them, seeing your reason has no ground whereon to stand, no materials to work upon. How will your reason pass from natural to spiritual? What a gulf is here! By what art will reason get over the immense chasm? This cannot be till the Almighty come in to your succour, and give you that faith you have hitherto despised. Then upborne, as it were, on eagles' wings, your enlightened reason shall explore even the deep things of God, God Himself revealing them to you by His Spirit.' CHAPTER XII. THE WORLD AGAINST THE METHODISTS. THE separation from Whitefield was consummated in the year 1741, when Wesley had attained his thirtyeighth year: half a century elapses between that event and the day when, in accordance with his own earnest aspiration, with no intervening twilight of inaction, 'he ceased at once to work and live.' Nearly twothirds, therefore, of the life which an attempt is here made to delineate are yet untouched, which, to be brought within the space here allotted, must be given on a scale much reduced from that hitherto adopted, all chronological sequence indeed being abandoned. But this change of the point of view is needed for other reasons than those of convenience. The kind of interest excited by the history of a great religious movement, which belongs to the first portion of Wesley's life, is so different from the kind of interest excited by the history of a sect, which belongs to the last, that the two things are best treated separately. The persecution which, to the disgrace of the time, the order founded by Wesley received both from the spirit of popular turbulence and the spirit of ecclesiastical dominion; the gradual consolidation of that order under these attacks, and the controversy which gave it, alone of all religious bodies sharing Wesley's views on the Atonement, an Arminian creed; the events finally by which it was distinctly separated from the Church :— all these have to be noticed in the space remaining to us. But the ceaseless journeys through every part of the British Isles, which gave to the last fifty years of Wesley's life a mingled character of restlessness and monotony, important to remember when we would estimate his unsparing devotion and unremitting toil, but not in any further way increasing our understanding of his character, and almost impossible to arrange into any historical framework, need only be mentioned in the most fragmentary allusion. We have only to do with the man as he represented a great religious movement; in its early stages he forms the symbol of all in it that is most vital, but as he becomes the centre of a hierarchy of his own, the interest of his history gradually changes its character, and passes out of the sphere of the present sketch. The Methodists had to withstand an opposition originating in two sources: the clergy sought to put down the enthusiasts who shamed them by their conquests and angered them by their rivalry; the populace rose up against preachers who attacked their favourite diversions, offended their prejudices, and afforded them a good opportunity of indulging their taste for uproar and cruelty. The last was the strongest motive with the mob. The outrages of which we have now to hear were chiefly outbreaks of that fierce turbulent spirit of which every movement of the time bears trace; and their speedy quiescence |