And these were grand discoveries a hundred years ago, of which the credit rests very mainly with the founder of Methodism, although mere common-places now. It is true they were partially and speculatively held even then; but very partially, and in the region of thought rather than of action. Some saw the truth of the matter, but it was in its proverbial dwelling, and the well was deep, just perceptible at the bottom, but beyond their grasp; while to the many the waters were muddy, and they saw it not at all. There were no Bible, Tract, or Missionary Societies then to employ the Church's powers and indicate its path of duty. But Wesley started them all. He wrote and printed and circulated books in thousands upon thousands of copies. He set afloat home and foreign missions. The Church and the world were alike asleep; he sounded the loud trumpet of the gospel, and awoke the world to tremble and the Church to work. Never was such a scene before in England The correctness and maturity of his views amid the deep darkness surrounding him is startling, wonderful, like the idea of a catholic Church springing up amid a sectarian Judaism. It is midday without the antecedent dawn. It beggars thought. It defies explanation. A Church in earnest as a want of the times is, even now in these greatly advanced days, strenuously demanded and eloquently enforced by appeal after appeal from the press,. the platform, and the pulpit; but Wesley gave it practical existence from the very birth-hour of his society. vigorous bantling rent the swathing bands of quiet, selfcommuning, and prevalent custom, and gave itself a young Hercules to the struggle with the inertia of the Church and the opposition of the world. Successfully it encountered both. It quickened the one and subdued the

His

other, and attained by the endeavour the muscular development and manful port and indomitable energy of its present life. John Wesley's Church is no mummy chamber of a pyramid-silent, sepulchral, garnished with still figures in hieroglyphic coif and cerecloth, but a busy town, a busier hive, himself the informing spirit, the parent energy, the exemplary genius of the whole. Never was the character of the leader more accurately reflected in his troops. Bonaparte made soldiers, Wesley made active Christians.

The last principle we shall notice as illustrated by his career has relation to the nature and work of the ministry.

A grand discovery lying very near the root of Methodism, considered as an ecclesiastical system, it was the fortune of John Wesley to light upon, not far from the outset of his career, a discovery quite as momentous and influential in the diffusion and perpetuation of his opinions as that with which Luther startled the world in 1524. Luther published the then monstrous heresy that ministers who are married can serve the Lord and his Church as holily, learnedly, and acceptably as celibate priests and cloistered regulars; and our hero found out that men unqualified by university education for orders in the Church were the very fittest instruments he could employ in the itinerant work of early Methodism. Rough work requires rough hands. The burly pioneer is as needful in the army as the dapper ensign, and the hewer of wood in the deep forest as the French-polisher in the city. Now this was a great discovery, up to that period a thing unknown. The Roman Church knew nothing of such a device-its orders of various kinds bore no approximation to it; the Protestant Churches knew nothing of it-presbyter and bishop

were at equal removes from it; the very puritans and nonconformists knew nothing of it, they being in their way as great sticklers for clerical order and their succession as any existing body-the more pardonable, as some were living in the early part of Wesley's history who had themselves officiated in the Churches of the Establishment. His discovery was, that plain men just able to read, and explain with some fluency what they read and felt, might go forth without license from college, or. presbytery, or bishop, into any parish in the country, the weaver from his loom, the shoemaker from his stall, and tell their fellow-sinners of salvation and the love of Christ. This was a tremendous innovation upon the established order of things everywhere, and was as reluctantly forced upon so starched a precisian as John Wesley, as it must have horrified the members of the stereotyped ministries and priesthoods existing around. But, as in Luther's case, so here "the present necessity" was the teacher: "the fields were white to the harvest, and the labourers were few." We have ample evidence to show that if he could have pressed into the service a sufficient number of the clerical profession he would have preferred the employment of such agents exclusively, but as they were only few of this rank who lent him their constant aid, he was driven to adopt the measure which we think the salvation of his system, and in some respects its glory. The greater part of the clergy would have been unfitted for the work he would have allotted them, even had they not been hampered by the trammels of ecclesiastical usage. This usage properly assigns a fixed portion of clerical labour to one person, and to discharge it well is quite enough to tax the powers of most men to the utmost. Few parish

ministers, how conscientious and diligent so ever, will ever have to complain of too little to do. But Wesley had a roving commission, was an "individuum vagum," as one of the clergy called him, and felt himself called by his strong sense of the need of some extraordinary means to awaken the sleeping population of the country to overleap the barriers of clerical courtesy and ecclesiastical law, invading parish after parish of recusant incumbents without compunction or hesitancy at the overweening impulse of duty. However much some clergymen may have sympathized with him in religious opinion, it is easy to understand how many natural and respectable scruples might prevent their following such a leader in his Church errantry. They must, in fact, have broken with their own system to give themselves to his, and this they might not be prepared to do. They might value his itinerating plan as supplementary to the localized labours of the parish minister, but at the same time demur to its taking the place of parochial duty as its tendency was and as its effect has been. Thus was Wesley early thrown upon a species of agency for help which he would doubtless sincerely deplore at first, namely, a very slenderly equipped but zealously ardent and fearless laity, but which, again, his after experience led him to value at its proper worth, and see in the adaptation of his men to the common mind their highest qualification. "Fire low" is said to have been his frequent charge in after life to young ministers, a maxim the truth of which was confirmed by the years of an unusually protracted ministry and acquaintance with mankind. A ministry that dealt in perfumed handkerchiefs, and felt most at home in Bond-street and the ballroom, the perfumed popinjays of their profession; or one

that, emulous of the fame of Nimrod, that mighty hunter before the Lord, sacrificed clerical duty to the sports of the field, prized the reputation of securing the brush before that of being a good shepherd of the sheep, and deemed the music of the Tally-ho or Hunting Chorus infinitely more melodious than the Psalms of David; or, again, one composed of the fastidious student of overrefined sensibilities, better acquainted with the modes of thought of past generations than with the actual habits of the present, delicate recluses and nervous men, the bats of society, who shrink from the sunshine of busy life into the congenial twilight of their library, whose over-educated susceptibilities would prompt the strain

"O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!"

these would have utterly failed for the work John Wesley wanted them to do. Gentlemen would either to a great degree have wanted those sympathies that should exist between the shepherd and the flock, or would have quailed before the rough treatment the first preachers were called to endure. Although the refinement of a century has done much to crush the coarser forms of persecution, it must not be forgotten that the early ministers of Methodism were called to encounter physical quite as frequently as logical argumentation. The middle terms of the syllogisms they were treated to were commonly the middle of the horsepond, and their Sorites the dungheap. Now the plain men whom Wesley was so fortunate as to enlist in his cause were those whose habits of daily life and undisputing faith in the truth of their system qualified them to "endure hardness as good soldiers." They were