yet attained-that he was still short of the mark-that the joys of religion escaped his reach, though its duties were unexceptionably performed. His course of reading, the mystic and ascetic writers, together with the dryd scholastic divinity that furnishes the understanding but often drains the heart, tended to this result, to fill the life with holy exercises rather than to overflow the soul with sacred pleasure. Of the simple, ardent, gladsome, gracious piety of the poor, he yet knew next to nothing. But God was leading him through the wilderness of such an experience as this by a right way to a city of habitation, doubtless that he might be a wise instructor to others who should be involved hereafter in mazes like his own. He looked upon religion as a debt due by the creature to the Creator, and he paid it with the same sense of constraint with which one pays a debt, instead of regarding it as the ready service of a child of God. A child of God could not be other than religious; but, more than this, he would not if he could; religion is his

'vital breath,

It is his native air.'

But Wesley did not understand as yet the doctrine of free pardon, the new birth, and the life of faith: he therefore worked, conscientiously and laboriously indeed, but like a slave in chains. But God sent some poor Calvinists to teach him these truths; and he was not too proud to learn from very humble but sufficiently enlightened teachers, a few Moravian emigrants that sailed in the same vessel with him to Georgia. Their unaffected humility, unruffled good temper, and serenest self-possession in prospect of death when storms overtook the ship, struck him forcibly, and made him feel that they had reached an eminence in the divine life on which his college studies, extensive erudition, and pains-taking devotion had failed to land himself. He, therefore, sat himself at their feet; he verified the scripture metaphor, and became a little child.' In nothing was the lofty wisdom of John Wesley and his submission to divine teaching more apparent than in this, that he made himself a fool that he might be wise. Salvation by grace, and the witness of the Spirit, were taught him by these God-fearing and happy Moravians; and his understand

d Our censure of the scholastic divinity only reaches to the case in hand, as amongst our favourite authors we reckon Thomas Aquinas, and the Master of the Sentences. We are glad to be able to justify our partiality by such respectable authority as that of Luther. In his book De Conciliis (tom. vii. p. 237), he writes thus of Peter Lombard:-"Nullis in conciliis, nullo in patre tantum reperies, quam in libro sententiarum Lombardi. Nam patres et concilia quosdam tantum articulos tractant, Lombardus autem omnes; sed in præcipuis illis articulis de Fide et Justificatione nimis est jejunus, quanquam Dei gratiam magnopere prædicat." C 2 ing

ing became full of light. It was only, however, some three years afterwards, subsequent to his return to England, that the joy of this free, present, eternal salvation flowed in upon his soul. The peace of God which passeth all understanding took possession of heart and mind through Christ Jesus, and for fifty years afterwards he never doubted, he never could doubt, of his acceptance with our Father who is in heaven. The sunshine of his soul communicated itself to his countenance, and lighted all his conversation. To speak with him was to speak with an angel of God.

From that time he began to preach a new doctrine, a doctrine of privilege as well as duty, of acceptance through the Beloved, and assured sense of pardon, and the happiness of the service of God. And God gave him unlooked for, unhoped for success. Excluded by almost universal consent from the churches of the establishment, he betook himself to barns, and stable-yards, and inn rooms; and ultimately, with Whitefield, to the open air, in the streets and lanes of the city, in the hills and valleys, on the commons and heaths of our native land, and with power and unction, with the Holy Ghost and much assurance did he testify to each of his hearers the doctrine of personal repentance and faith, the necessity of the new birth for the salvation of the soul. And signs and wonders followed in them that believed: multitudes were smitten to the ground under the sword of the Spirit; many a congregation was changed into a Bochim, a place of weeping; and amid sobs, and tears, and wailings, beneath which the hearts of the most stubborn sinners quailed, one universal cry arose, 'What must we do to be saved?' John Wesley's divine simple scriptural answer was, 'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.'

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

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

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 every thing, 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 pre-eminence and peculiar honour, for it was either totally forgotten, coarsely travestied, or boldly denied. Bishops could so far forget themselves as to call William Law, because he asserted it, one who 'obscured a good understanding by the fumes of the rankest enthusiasm, and depraved a sound judgment still further by the prejudices he took up against all sobriety in religion.' Wesley is styled, because he asserted it, a hypocrite and madman, moved to seek selfish ends by sectarian craft; an impure zealot, vengeful and unforgiving. And the experience of multitudes who professed to have undergone the change the Spirit alone can produce, is pithily termed the ecstatic ravings of modern fanatics."

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

e Warburton's Doctrine of Grace,' i. 5, note. f Ibid. ii. 12.

g Ibid. i. 2.

forth

f

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 recognizing 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 19th 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 be 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