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while he replied with weapons most familiar to him, expostulation and argument. Sometimes one prevailed and sometimes the other. At one time he was pelted from the town, bruised, wounded, and half dead. At another, his mild manner, his dignified and fearless address awed and delighted even his rude assailants. The magistrates themslves encouraged the mob now by their pusillanimity, and again, through worse motives, by assurances of forbearance. The congregations fared almost as hard as the preachers. They were stoned, and thrown into ponds, and rolled in the mud. Women and children were exposed to the brutalities of an ignorant populace. They sometimes received indignities where they might have expected kindness. Dissenters even--themselves under disabilities for conscience' sake-joined with virulent churchmen to oppress the rising community. Dr. Doddridge was subjected to severe criticism and unworthy suspicions from his familiarity with Whitefield.

Notwithstanding all, Wesley pursued his way without hesitation. The history of his itinerancy is replete with scenes of romantic and fearful interest; full too of marked and strange effects of his preaching and that of his followers. He was thrown into contact with men of all classes, the high and the low, the learned and the ignorant, and always showed his ability and self-possession. We can give but a very brief account of a few circumstances among a thousand, which show his own power, and illustrate the force of truth upon minds excited to feel it. He was attacked at Bath by Beau Nash; but the king of the gay watering place found it one thing to direct festivities, and quite another to interfere with men engaged in the most solemn business which mortals can attend to; one thing to decide matters of honor and etiquette, and a far different thing to control the liberty of conscience and the laws of God. "By what authority are you preaching?" said Nash to Wesley. "By that of Jesus Christ," replied the priest, than whom no one ever better knew his position; "by that of Jesus Christ, conveyed to me by the present archbishop of Canterbury, when he laid his hands upon me and said, 'Take thou authority to preach the gospel."" "What do these people come here for," said Nash. 66 Let an old woman answer him," cried one of the congregation. "You, Mr. Nash, take care of your body, we take care of our souls, and for the food of our souls we come here." The master of ceremonies had nothing more to say.

A preacher said in his sermon, "There are two witnesses dead and buried in dust, which will rise up against you. These are the two witnesses," he continued, hold.ng up the Bible, "the Old Testament and the New, that have been dead and buried in the dust upon your shelf." "I remembered," said John Furz some time afterward, "that my Bible was covered with dust, and that I had written my name with the point of my finger upon the binding. I thought I had signed my own. damnation on the back of the witness." He went home in terror. The struggle was a strong one, but he became a preacher for the rest of his life.

A party met at an alehouse in Rotherham, to amuse themselves by mimicking the Methodists. They preached for a wager. John Thorpe jumped on the table last in great glee, opened the Bible, and his eyes fell on the passage, "Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." He became serious and preached in earnest; "his hair stood erect at the feelings which came upon him, and the awful denunciations which he uttered.” When he ceased, the wager was forgotten: he left the company and went home an altered man, and subsequently became an itinerant preacher.*

* Were we seeking for curious conversions, the annals of no sect would furnish more. A young man at Norwich, with a number of his gay companions, had his fortune told by a wandering fortune-teller. According to the usual style of such predictions, he was to live to a great age and see about him grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The prophecy so far affected him that he determined to lay up a rich store of entertaining knowledge for his future posterity, and to begin by hearing the wonderful preacher Whitefield, who was then in the city. In the course of the sermon, Whitefield paused, burst into tears, and lifting up his hands and eyes, exclaimed, 'Oh, my hearers, the wrath to come, the wrath to come.' These words sank into his heart like lead in the waters, and resulted in his conversion. Still more odd was another instance which is recorded. An innkeeper fond of singing, went to hear the music, and in order not to hear the sermon sat with his fingers in his ears. Suddenly a fly stung his nose, and just as he took down one hand to brush away the intruder, the preacher thundered out the text, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." The impression was irresistible; this was the beginning of a new life to him. Music was as serviceable in another singu

From one of his busy circuits, Wesley was called home to the death-bed of that excellent mother to whom he owed so much for counsel and sympathy. His account of the last scene and of the funeral service is very characteristic, and affords another insight into his character. "I sat down on the bedside. She was in her last conflict, unable to speak, but I believe quite sensible. Her look was calm and serene, and her eyes fixed upward, while we commended her soul to God. From three to four the silver cord was loosing, and the wheel breaking at the cistern; and then without a struggle, or sigh, or groan, the soul was set at liberty. We stood round her bed and fulfilled her last request, uttered a little before she lost her speech: 'Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God.' Almost an innumerable company of people being gathered together at the funeral, about five in the afternoon I committed to the earth the body of my mother to sleep with her fathers. The portion of Scripture from which I afterwards spoke was, I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the book, according to their works. It was one of the most solemn assemblies I ever saw, or expect to see, on this side eternity."

We may here pause a moment to inquire the cause of the rapid and extensive spread of Methodism in England; so ex

lar case.

At Wexford in Ireland, the Catholics sought to annoy the Methodists who met in a barn. One of them endeavored to secrete himself in the barn, in order that he might open the door to his companions at a proper time, but could find no hiding-place except a sack near the door, into which he crawled. The mob collected, but the singing of the Methodists was so good that Pat thought he would not disturb it, and when the hymn was done, he felt a curiosity to hear the prayer; but during the prayer he became so confounded and distressed that "he roared out, and not being able to get out, lay bawling and screaming, to the great dismay of the congregation, who supposed that Satan himself was in the barn. Somebody at last let him out, and he confessed his sins and cried for mercy." The change seems to have been genuine and the account well attested, though the circumstances of the case are probably unique.

tensive, that in a few years its followers were numbered by thousands, and there was hardly a considerable town in England or Wales which did not have its chapel. They were everywhere spoken against; they were everywhere more or less successful. Neither ridicule nor persecution, neither the neglect of the magistrates nor the opposition of prelates, neither the authority of Lavington nor the learning and asperity of Warburton, could stop the advancing opinion. The tide flowed up to the very foot of the frowning rocks, and insinuated itself into almost every hamlet in the kingdom. The causes are several, and some of them not difficult to be detected.

The class of people from whom the first converts were gathered, was a very ignorant class, unaccustomed to preaching of any kind; hence the word which they heard at fairs and market-places, in the fields and the collieries, startled them like a new revelation. They were heathen in a Christian country. A few words of truth at long intervals had come to their ears, just enough to awaken their suspicions and fear of a future wrath, just enough to afford a ground for the appeals of the preacher, but for not much more. They were as if under an enchantment, and when the terrible shell was shattered, they came out in all the bewilderment and fear of men who had been ignorantly sleeping on the brink of eternal destruction. It was the misfortune as well as the folly of the English church, to be bound so strictly by the customs of the fathers. To the poor the gospel was not preached, because the poor could find no room in the parish churches, which were not by any means sufficiently numerous for the population. There was little of that zeal for church extension which now animates nobles and prelates, and yet to preach elsewhere than within consecrated walls, shocked all their notions of order and propriety. The consequence was unavoidable, that great masses scattered over sparsely populated regions, or clustering about the centres of commerce, and in the mining regions, were left to ignorance and degradation. But this was one great class for which Wesley and his associates labored. Moorfields, "a royalty of the rabble, a place for wrestlers and boxers, mountebanks and merry-andrews," and Kingswood near Bristol, Kennington Common and Blackheath, were prominent scenes of their labors. The lawless and brutal inhabitants of the collieries, the dissolute and reprobate who resorted to the fairs to be trained up in vice, were their hearers. It should not then be wondered at, that

when Whitefield first preached to the colliers, ignorant, but too careless to be prejudiced, they stared upon him in utter astonishment, nor that they trembled as he warned them, with his awful power, of' temperance, righteousness and judgment,' nor that the tears made white grooves down their sooty cheeks, as he told them of the love which Christ had for them. From these circumstances it happened that many societies were formed, not from the ordinary worshippers in the established church, but from those who worshipped nowhere.

Another reason is to be found in the nature of the doctrines preached. The great truths that men must be born again, and that conversion is instantaneous; that they must be justified by faith; that none who come to God through Christ will be cast away, were the cardinal points in their creed. Some doctrines were in dispute, such as free will and predestination, but these were not dwelt upon in their sermons. The burden of their exhortation was "flee from the wrath to come;" flee from the city of destruction; awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee life. They felt the absolute necessity of regeneration as something entirely different from resolutions, from Pharisaical obedience, from external humiliations and the performance of ceremonies, from a sombre countenance and a monkish life; of regeneration, as a mysterious change of the heart, wrought by the Spirit of God, which no one can explain, for none can comprehend, but as real and undeniable as our own existence. The liturgy and the creed were as full as ever of sound and wholesome doctrine. Articles still read that "every man is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh always lusteth contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth. God's wrath and damnation," and "that we are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour. Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings;" but these comfortable truths were to a great extent a dead letter in the Prayer Book. Ministers resorted to the church for a living, with not even an intellectual apprehension of the truths they professed to teach. But these truths came to many a suffering and panting soul, like bread to the famished, like cold water to the dying of thirst. There were many who were travailing and groaning in bondage, and freedom could not be more delightful to the captive, than the liberty of Christ to them.

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