distinction between the Church and the world, nor to mark it. While he viewed with becoming deference the kingdoms of this world, and bowed to the authority of the magistrate as the great cement of human society, the clamp that binds the stones of the edifice together, he saw another kingdom pitched within the borders of these, differing from them in everything and infinitely above them, yet consentaneous with them, and vesting them with its sanction, itself all the while purely spiritual in its basis, laws, privileges, and sovereign. Blind must he have been to a degree incompatible with his general perspicacity, had he not perceived this. The men who possessed religion, and the men who possessed it not, were not to be for a moment confounded. They might be neighbours in locality and friends in good-will; but they were wide as the poles asunder in sentiment. The quick and the dead may be placed side by side, but no one can for ever so short a period mistake dead flesh for living fibre, the abnegation of power for energy in repose. church and the churchyard are close by; but the worshippers in the one and the dwellers in the other are as unlike as two worlds can make them. The circle within the circle, the company of the converted, the imperium in imperio, the elect, the regenerate, Wesley always distinguished from the mass of mankind, and made special provision for their edification in all his organisms.

The

And in sooth the marked and constant recognition of this spiritual incorporation it is which gives revealed religion its only chance of survival in the world. To forget it is practically to abolish the distinction between error and truth, between right and wrong. There is no heresy more destructive than a bad life. To class the man

of good life and the man of bad together,-to call them by the same name and elevate them to the same standing, is high treason against the majesty of truth, poisons the very spring of morality, and does conscience to death. A nation cannot be a Church, nor a Church a nation. The case of Israel was the only one in which the two kingdoms were coëxtensive, conterminous. A member of a nation a man becomes by birth, but a member of a Church only by a second birth. Generation is his title to the one, regeneration to the other. The one is a natural accident, the other a moral state. Citizens are the sons of the soil, Christians are the sons of heaven. To clothe, then, the members of the one with the livery and title of the other without the prerequisite qualification and dignity, is not only a solecism in language, but an outrage upon truth. It is to reconcile opposites, harmonize discords, blend dissimilitudes, and identify tares with wheat, light with darkness, life with death. It is the destruction of piety among the converted, for they see the unconverted honoured with their designation, advanced to their level, obtruded upon their society. It is ruin to the souls of the unconverted, because without effort of their own, without faith, or prayer, or good works, or reformation, or morals, they are surprised with the style and title, the status and rewards of Christian men. This is unfortunately the practice on a large scale; the theory is otherwise and unexceptionable. Imbued with a deep sense of the beauty and correctness of the theory, Wesley did only what was natural and right when he sought to make it a great fact-a substance and not a shadow-in the Church militant. In this he not only obeyed a divine injunction, but yielded to the current of events. By a natural attraction his converts

were drawn together. Like will to like. "They that feared the Lord spake often one to another;" and "all that believed were together." The particles were similar, the aggregate homogeneous. They had gone through the same throes, rejoiced in the same parentage, learned in the same school, and embraced the same destiny. They owned a common creed, "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all;" resisted a common temptation, took up a common cross, and in common renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil. They came together on the ground of identity of character, of desire for mutual discipline and benefit, and of community of feeling and interest. It is obvious to perceive that Wesley did not originate this communion, whether it were for good or evil; for it was an ordinance of God in its primal institution, and in this particular instance arose out of the very nature of the case. Wesley could not have prevented it, except by such measures as would have undone all he had done. God's believing people found one another out, and associated by a law as fixed and unalterable as that kali and acid coalesce, or that the needle follows the magnet. But while he did not enact the law which God's people obeyed in this close intercommunion and relationship, he understood and revered it, and furthered and regulated the intercourse of the godly by the various enactments and graduated organizations of his system. He set the city upon the hill, and bade it be conspicuous; the lamp upon the stand, and bade it shine; the vine upon the soil, and said to it, Be fruitful. He set it apart, and trimmed it, and hedged it in; convinced that such separation as Scripture enjoins (2 Cor. vi) was essential to its growth and welfare-a truth the Christian law teaches and indi

vidual experience confirms. Every benefit the institution of a Church might be supposed to secure is forfeited when the Church loses its distinctive character and becomes identified with the world.

But neither to glorify their founder by their closer combination, nor for self-complacent admiration, nor to be a gazing-stock for the multitude-an ecclesiastical lion of formidable dimensions and portentous roar-nor for the tittle tattle of mutual gossipry did John Wesley segregate his people; no, but for their good and the good of mankind. The downy bed of indolence for the Church, or the obesity that grows of inaction, never once came within his calculations as their lot. To rub the rust from each other, as iron sharpeneth iron, was the first object of their association; and the second to weld their forces together in the glowing furnace of communion for the benefit of the world. They were to rejoice in the good grapes of their own garden, and sweeten by inoculation and culture the sour grapes of their neighbour. They were to attract all goodness to themselves, and where it was wanting create it, after the Arab proverb, "The palm-tree looks upon the palm-tree and groweth fruitful!" It was as the salt of the earth they were to seek to retain their savour, and not for their own preservation alone. No one ever more sedulously guarded the inward subjective aspect of the Church, its self-denying intent, its exclusion of the unholy and unclean, than John Wesley; and no one ever directed its objective gaze outward and away from itself, "to have compassion on the ignorant and out of the way," with more untiring industry than he. He knew the Church's mission was more than half unfulfilled, while it locked itself up in its ark of security, and left the world without

to perish. He was himself the last man in the world to leave the wounded to die, passing by in his superciliousness, and asking, "Who is my neighbour?" and the last to found a community which should be icy, selfish, and unfeeling. He was a working minister, and fathomed the depth and yielded to the full current of the truth, that the Church must be a working Church. Armed at all points with sympathies which brought him into contact with the world without, the Church must resemble him in this. He was an utterly unselfish being; he, if ever any, could say―

"I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me."

To work for the benefit of men when he might have taken his ease, became a necessity of his nature, moulded upon the pattern of his self-sacrificing Master, and the law of his being must be that of the Church's. It must "do or die." It must be instant in season, out of season. It must go into the highways and hedges. It must beseech men to be reconciled to God. It must compel them to come in. It must give no sleep to its eyes, nor slumber to its eyelids, till its work be done. It must stand in the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths, and cry, "O ye simple, understand wisdom; and ye fools, be ye of an understanding heart!" It must gather all the might of its energies, and lavish all the wealth of its resources, and exhaust all the influences it can command, and coin all the ingenuity of its devices into schemes for the saving benefit of the world. Thus not merely conservative of the truth must the Church be for its own edification and nurture, but also diffusive of the truth for the renewal and redemption of all around.