His personal experience of the efficacy of the prescription gave confidence to his advice. The physician had been healed himself first: he had been his own earliest patient: he knew the bitterness of the pain, the virulence of the disease, and he had proved the sanative power of his remedy. The ordeal of the new birth he had tried before he recommended it to others. He had visited the pool of Bethesda, and could therefore speak well of its

waters.

And well might it work such change to have the necessity of personal religion insisted upon with such unprecedented particularity and pointedness. He singled out each hearer; he allowed no evasion amid the multitude; he showed how salvation was not by a Church, nor by families, nor by ministers, nor by ordinances, nor by national communions, but by a deep singular individual experience of religion in the soul. His address was framed upon the model of the Scripture query, "Dost thou believe upon the Son of God?"

A second truth developed in the ministry of John Wesley, is the absolute need of spiritual influence to secure the conversion of the soul. Conversion is not a question of willing or not willing on the part of man: the soul bears no resemblance to the muscles of the healthy arm, which the mere will to straighten and stiffen throws into a state of rigid tension at the instant, and retains them so at pleasure. The soul is in the craze and wreck of paralysis: the power of action does not respond to the will: the whole head is sick, the heart faint. To will is present with us, but how to perform that which is good we know not. The sick man would be well, but the wish is unavailing till the simple, the leech, and the blessing of the Most

High conspire to invigorate. Just so is it with the soul; it must tarry till it be endued with power from on high, but not, be it understood, in the torpor of apathy, nor in the slough of despair; no, but wishing, watching, waiting. Though its search were as fruitless as that of Diogenes, it must be seeking nevertheless, just as, though the prophet's commission be to preach to the dead, he must not dispute nor disobey. We must strive to enter in although the gate be strait and the way narrow: we must be feeling after God, if haply we may find him, though it be amid the darkness of nature and the tremblings of dismay. We may scarce have ability to repent after a godly sort, yet ought we to bring forth "fruits meet for repentance." With God alone may rest the prerogative to pronounce us "sons of Abraham," yet, like Zaccheus, must we work the works becoming that relation, and right the wronged and feed the poor. While, then, we emphatically announce the doctrine that the influence of the Holy Ghost is necessary to quicken, renew, and purify the soul, we do at the same time repudiate the principle that man may fold his hands in sleep till the divine voice arouse him. Nothing short of a celestial spark can ignite the fire of our sacrifice, but we can at least lay the wood upon the altar. None but the Lord of the kingdom can admit to the privilege of the kingdom, but at the same time it is well to make inquiry of him who keeps the door. John was only the bridegroom's friend, the herald of better things to come; yet "Jerusalem and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan," did but its duty in flocking to him to hear his tidings, and learn where to direct its homage. To endangered men the night was given for far other uses than for sleep: the storm is high and the rocks.

are near, the sails are rent, and the planks are starting beneath the fury of the winds and waves,-what is the dictate of wisdom, of imperious necessity? what but to ply the pump, to undergird the ship, to strike the mast, haul taut the cordage, "strengthen the things that remain," and trust in the Most High. If safety is vouchsafed, it is God who saves. So in spiritual things man must strive as if he could do everything, and trust as if he could do nothing; and in regeneration the Scripture doctrine is that he can do nothing. He may accomplish things leading thereto, just as the Jews ministered to the resurrection of Lazarus by leading Christ to the sepulchre; but it was the divine voice that raised the dead. Thus sermons, Scriptures, catechisms, and all the machinery of Christian action, will be tried and used, dealt out by the minister and shared by his flock; but with each and all must the conviction rest that it is not by might of mechanism, nor by power of persuasion conversion is brought about, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts.

This truth was grievously lost sight of in Wesley's days, sunk in the tide of cold morality that inundated the land and consigned it to a theosophy less spiritual than that of Socrates or Plato. But up from the depths of the heathenish flood our great reformer fished this imperishable truth, a treasure-trove exceeding in value pearls of great price, or a navy of sunken galleons. And through his ministry this shone with unequalled light, for if anything distinguished it more than another from contemporary ministries, it was the emphatic prominence it assigned to the Spirit's work in conversion. This was the Pharos of his teaching, the luminous point which led the world-lost soul into the haven of assured peace and conscious adoption.

And much need was there that this dogma should have received this distinctive preeminence and peculiar honour, for it was either totally forgotten, coarsely travestied, or boldly denied.

Having now dealt with the truths that bear upon personal religion and individual subjection to the truth, as well as the means whereby this was to be effected-the direct agency of the Divine Spirit, things insisted upon with untiring energy by John Wesley-we now turn attention to the views which our great reformer put forth regarding Christians in their associated capacity. He knew full well, none better than he, that the individual believer is not a unit, an isolation, a monad, complete in his own sufficiency, spinning round himself like a top upon its peg, rejoicing in the music of its complacent hum; no, but a joint in a system, a member of a body, a fraction of a whole, a segment of an orb, which, incomplete without its parts, becomes only by their adhesion terse and rotund. Every portion of the Christian community, like every portion of the body politic, is related to every other portion. When a man becomes a Christian he is inducted into a fraternity, made free of a sodality and guild, with the interests of which he becomes so intimately bound up that his pulse dances in its health and languishes in its decay. The figure of Scripture becomes experimental truth: "Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it." 1 Cor. xii, 26. He is disjoined from his former association with worldly men; the bad blood of his unconverted alliances is drawn off and that of a new fellowship infused, and he becomes a member of its body, of its flesh, and of its bones. A homogeneity is established

between himself and all the other parts of this spiritual incorporation; and while in matters of faith, obedience, and personal responsibility he retains his individual manhood, in all that affects the fortunes and duties of the Church he thrills with a quick sympathy as the remotest nerve will with the brain. And this corporate life he only lives, enjoys its advantages, and answers its ends, while he lives in conjunction, in observance of divine ordinances and visible worship, with men like-minded with himself, the regenerate sons of God. For developing this feature of the Christian life Wesley made provision in the arrangements of his system, and this he did by prominently recognising this further third principle, namely:

That the Church of Jesus Christ is a spiritual organization consisting of spiritual men associated for spiritual purposes.

This is the theory of that Church of which he was for several years the laborious and conscientious minister, and is nowhere more happily expressed than in its nineteenth article:"The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in the which the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments duly administered according to Christ's ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same." But this beautiful and Scriptural theory was, to a great degree, an unapproachable ideal in this country until that system arose, under the creative hand of Wesley, which made it a reality and gave it a positive existence, "a local habitation and a name." It is true the name he gave it was not Church, it was The Society, and in other forms and subdivisions, bands, classes, &c., but in essence it was the same; it was the union and communion of the Lord's people for