fact in a state of real and hopeless separation from the church; and he did some years afterwards so far relax, as to allow of preaching in church hours under certain circumstances, as, 1. When the minister was wicked; or held pernicious doctrine; 2. When the churches would not contain the population of a town; or where the church was distant. In that case he prescribed reading the psalms and lessons and part of the liturgy. And for this purpose, as well as for the use of the American societies, he published his abridgment of the Common Prayer under the title of the "Sunday Service of the Methodists." In 1756 he printed an address to the clergy, plain, affectionate, and powerful; breathing at once the spirit of an apostle, and the feeling of a brother. Happy if that call had been heard! He might perhaps be influenced in this by a still lingering hope of a revival of the spirit of zeal and piety among the ministers of the established church; in which case that separation of his people from the church, which he began to foresee as otherwise inevitable, he thought might be prevented; and this he had undoubtedly much at heart. Under the same view it probably was that in 1764 he addressed a circular to all the serious clergy, whom he knew, inviting them to a closer co-operation in promoting the influence of religion in the land, without any sacrifice of opinion, and being still at liberty, as to outward order, to remain "quite regular, or quite irregular, or partly regular and partly irregular." Of the thirty-four clergymen addressed, only three returned any answer. This seems to have surprised both him and some of his biographers. The reason is, however, very obvious: Mr. Wesley did not propose to abandon his plan and his preachers, or to get the latter ordained and settled in curacies, as proposed a few years before by Mr. Walker of Truro; and the matter had now obviously gone too far for the clergy to attach themselves to Methodism. They saw, with perhaps clearer eyes than Mr. Wesley's, that the Methodists could not now be embodied in the church; and that for them to co-operate directly with him, would only be to partake of his reproach, and to put difficulties in their own way, to which they had not the same call. A few clergymen, and but a few, still continued to give him, with fulness of heart, the right hand of fellowship, and to co-operate in some degree with him. Backward he could not go; but the forward career of still more extended usefulness was before him. From this time he gave up all hope of a formal connexion with even the pious clergy. They are," he observes, "a rope of sand, and such they will continue;" and he therefore set himself with deep seriousness to perpetuate the union of his preachers. At the conference of 1769, he read a paper, the object of which was to bind the preachers together by a closer tie, and to provide for the continuance of their union after his death. They were to engage solemnly to devote themselves to God, to preach the old Methodist doctrines, and to maintain the whole Methodist discipline; after Mr. Wesley's death they were to repair to London, and those who chose to act in concert were to draw up articles of agreement; whilst such as did not so agree were to be dismissed "in the most friendly way possible." They were then to choose a committee by vote, each of the members of which was to be moderator in his turn, and this committee was to enjoy Mr. Wesley's power of proposing preachers to be admitted or excluded, of appointing their stations for the ensuing year, and of fixing the time of the next conference. This appears to have been the first sketch of an ecclesiastical constitution for the body, and it mainly consisted in the entire delegation of the power which Mr. Wesley had always exercised, to a committee of preachers to be chosen by the rest when assembled in conference. The form of government he thus proposed was therefore a species of episcopacy to be exercised by a committee of three, five, or seven, as the case might be. Another and a more eligible provision was subsequently made; but this sufficiently shows that Mr. Wesley had given up all hope of union with the church; and his efforts were henceforth directed merely to prevent any thing like formal separation, and the open renunciation of her communion, during his own life, by allowing his preachers to administer the sacraments. About this time much prejudice was excited against Mr. Wesley in Scotland, by the republication of Hervey's Eleven Letters. He had three times visited this country; and preaching only upon the fundamental truths of Christianity, had been received with great affection. The societies had increased, and several of his preachers were stationed in different towns. Lady Frances Gardiner, the widow of Colonel Gardiner, and other persons eminent for piety and rank, attended the Methodist ministry; but the publication of this wretched work caused a temporary odium. Hervey, who had been one of the little band at Oxford, became a Calvinist; and as his notions grew more rigid with age, so his former feelings of gratitude and friendship to Mr. Wesley were blunted. He had also fallen into the hands of Cudworth, a decided Antinomian, who "put in and out" of the letters "what he pleased." They were not, however, published until Hervey's death, and against his dying injunction. It is just to so excellent a man to record this fact; but the work was published in England, and re-published, with a violent preface by Dr. Erskine, in Scotland; and among the Calvinists it produced the effect of inspiring great horror of Mr. Wesley as a most pestilent heretic, whom it was doing God service to abuse without measure or modesty. The feelings of Mr. Charles Wesley at this treatment of his brother may be gathered from the answer he returned upon being requested to write Hervey's epitaph:-, ON BEING DESIRED TO WRITE AN EPITAPH FOR MR. JAMES HERVEY. "OER-REACH'D, impell'd by a sly Gnostick's art, "No: by redeeming love the snare is broke; And dooms the unfinished libel to the flames. Let him adorn the monumental bust, Th' encomium fair in brass or marble write: "Or if they need a nobler trophy raise, As long as Theron and Aspasio live, Let Madan or Romaine record his praise; Enough that Wesley's brother can forgive!"* Mr. Charles Wesley, however, afterwards wrote and published some verses upon Mr. Hervey's death, in which the kind recollections The unfavourable impression made by Hervey's Letters, surcharged by Cudworth's Antinomian venom, was, however, quickly effaced from all but the bigots; and with them, judging from Moncrief's Life of Erskine, it remains to this day. In his future visits to Scotland, Mr. Wesley was received with marks of the highest respect, and at Perth he had the freedom of the city handsomely conferred upon him. CHAPTER XI. METHODISM having begun to make some progress in America, in consequence of the emigration of some of the members of the society from England and Ireland, Mr. Wesley inquired of the preachers at the conference of 1769, whether any of them would embark in that service. Messrs. Boardman and Pilmoor, two excellent men, of good gifts, volunteered their services, and were sent to take the charge of the societies. From this time the work spread with of old friendship are embodied, and the anticipations of a happy meeting in heaven are sweetly expressed. The following are the concluding stanzas: Father, to us vouchsafe thy grace, Which brought our friend victorious through; Let us his steadfast faith pursue; Follow this follower of the Lamb, And conquer all through Jesu's name. "Free from the law of sin and death, "O might we all, like him, believe, Our hallow'd spirits to the skies, great rapidity; more than twenty preachers had devoted themselves to it previously to the war of independence; and societies were raised up in Maryland, Virginia, NewYork, and Pennsylvania. During the war they still prosecuted their labours; though, as several of them took the side of the mother country, they were exposed to danger. Others, with more discretion, held on their way in silence, speaking only of the things of God. The warm loyalty of Mr. Wesley led him to publish a pamphlet on the subject of the quarrel, entitled, "A calm address to the American colonies;" but the copies which were shipped for America were laid hold of by a friend, who suppressed them; so that the work remained unknown in the colonies until a considerable time afterwards. This was probably a fortunate incident for the infant cause. After the war had terminated, political views were of course laid aside, and Mr. Wesley made a provision for the government of his American societies, which will be subsequently adverted to. They became, of course, independent of British Methodism, but have most honourably preserved the doctrines, the general discipline, and, above all, the spirit of the body. Great, and even astonishing, has been their success in that new and rising country, to the wide-spread settlements of which their plan of itinerancy was admirably adapted. The Methodists are become, as to numbers, the leading religious body of the union; and their annual increase is very great. In the last year it was thirty-six thousand, making a total in their communion of one thousand nine hundred ministers, and four hundred and seventy-six thousand members, having, as stated in a recent statistical account published in the United States, upwards of two millions five hundred thousand of the population under their immediate influence. In the number of their ministers, members, and congregations, the Baptists nearly equal the Methodists; and these two bodies, both itinerant in their labours, have left all the other religious denominations far behind. It is also satisfactory to remark, that the leading preachers and members of the Methodist church in the United States appear to be looking forward with enlarged views, and with prudent regard, to the future, and to aim at the cultivation of learning in conjunction with piety. Several colleges have been from time to time esta |