Lavingtons inferred from the questionable phenomena which followed that the whole impulse was merely enthusiastic,' or, in other words, the results of a debasing superstition. Wesley never doubted for a moment the reality of the influence, and could reply, with great cogency, that the belief in that reality was of the essence of Christianity. But he was sorely troubled by some of the manifestations which bore too strongly the marks of another than a celestial origin.

94. His early preaching produced many of those curious phenomena characteristic of great religious excitement. Men and women howled, foamed at the mouth, and went through dreadful convulsions, frequently lasting many hours, till the frame became exhausted, or the devil was cast out. Wesley argues that these symptoms were not fictitious, and infers that they must have been supernatural. As the first impulse died away, and sufficient proof appeared that a convulsive fit did not necessarily imply a permanent moral change, Wesley had an obvious explanation. The work, he thinks, was first divine; afterwards ' nature mixed with grace;' and, finally, 'Satan likewise mimicked this work of God, in order to discredit the whole work; and yet, it is not wise to give up this part any more than to give up the whole. At first it was doubtless wholly from God; it is partly so at this day (1759); and he will enable us to discern how far, in every case, the work is pure, and where it mixes or degenerates.'1 A singular cooperation between God and the Devil! To keep these manifestations and other strange aberrations of an ordinary intellect, when seized with what it takes to be a divine frenzy, within tolerable bounds, was naturally the most pressing of tasks for Wesley. It was necessary to provide a definite framework of dogma to restrain the incoherent utterances of divergent inspirations; a philosophy which might account for the varying impulses, without upsetting the validity of the general principle; and a rigorous system of discipline to maintain decency and morality. The last was supplied by the Methodist organisation, guided and impelled by his own ceaseless energy. The dogma came from the Protestant tradition, or, as Wesley would have said, from the Bible. The text of the Scriptures, interpreted, of course, with infantile faith in its literal inspira1 Wesley, iii. 414.

tion, supplied a sufficient test for the utterances of the Spirit. Wesley was content to assume, without in the least troubling himself with speculative difficulties, that God had directly inspired the Scriptures, and spoke directly to the individual, and that the two utterances must be in perfect harmony.

95. One result is, that a large part of Wesley's writings deal with what may be called the physiology of conversion. He inevitably takes the keenest interest in finding the true explanation of the strange phenomena which he at once excited and controlled. His scientific apparatus is simply the Bible, interpreted by his own common sense. What is the meaning of conversion? What is a genuine and what a false conversion? What change is wrought in the sinner's soul? How are his relations to his Creator affected? What is the precise legal significance of justification, sanctification, and perfection? In what sense does the believer become sinless? Is a relapse possible, or a recovery from a relapse? These and other questions are canvassed with unceasing interest, as, indeed, their solution vitally affected the welfare of the society. The discussions are not a mere scholastic logomachy, but are meant to decide facts of immediate practical importance. The theology, however, must necessarily be of the crude and rigid variety intelligible to the ordinary intellect of the time; for men once lost in the mazes of mysticism would fall into hopeless confusion. Wesley fully accepts the anthropomorphic conceptions of God, and the 'debtor and creditor' scheme which revolted Law's finer intellect; but he differs from Warburton and his like in so far as God is regarded as an active administrator, not as a constitutional fiction, which has retired from all immediate interference with the affairs of his kingdom.

96. The 'Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion' (1743-5) and the tract on 'Original Sin' (1757) are, perhaps, the writings most characteristic of his intellectual position. The last of these books is an answer to the Unitarian, Taylor, who is near enough to the deists to adopt their protest against the theory of human corruption, and sufficiently a Christian to support his doctrine by the Bible, and, therefore, to come within reach of Wesley. The greater part of Wesley's treatise is therefore occupied with a wearisome wrangle over texts,

with little reference to the deeper philosophical ground. The ever-recurring difficulty, indeed, presses upon him; and he evades it as best he may. How are we to reconcile the two fundamental articles of theology-the goodness of an omnipotent Creator, and the corruption and misery of the creature? Taylor had put his argument in a nutshell. If we come into the world with' sinful propensities, he had said, 'they are natural; but if natural, necessary; and if necessary, no sin.' From the goodness of God, then, we must infer the goodness of man. To admit this consequence would be to abandon Wesley's deepest convictions. Man is naturally wicked. Must we, then, infer the injustice of a God who makes men sinful and then damns them for sinning? Wesley shudders at the blasphemy. He denounces, again and again, in various tracts, the hideous doctrine of reprobation. He will not believe that God has foredoomed nineteen out of twenty of his creatures to eternal torture. The escape, of course, from the dilemma is made by the doctrine of free-will. The doctrine that God has made twenty creatures with the certainty that nineteen will be damned, and has left the selection to chance, is capable of being presented in such a way as to avoid the shock to the imagination. Upon this subject, however, Wesley, though he wrote several tracts, did not succeed in saying anything worth notice; for it belongs to a sphere of thought in which he becomes hopelessly incompetent. He is content with the ordinary reasonings; and, in fact, his dislike to Calvinism was probably more of the practical than of the speculative kind. He is an Arminian that he may preach repentance and avoid the popular fatalism of antinomian enthusiasts. It is the instinct of the ruler of men, not of the philosopher, which determines his creed.

97. To adjust the relations of speculative systems, to discover the underlying truths of which they give a distorted view, and to detect the fallacies by which they are vitiated, was not Wesley's peculiar province. But God is good: men are bad; these propositions express his deepest convictions— reconcile them who may-and he can enforce them with the eloquence of perfect sincerity.

The treatise, for example, on 'Original Sin' opens with a

vigorous survey of man in all ages and countries. The colours are so dark that the natural conclusion is purely sceptical. Can this world, we naturally say, be the work of a good God? and can even Christianity have done much good? The classical nations were cruel and lustful under the thinnest veil of civilisation; the Jewish history is a record of 'astonishing wickedness.' For centuries the Romans were godless, full of the grossest thoughts, and void of natural affection. Cato starved his old servants; and Pompey was a monster of selfish ambition; Cæsar of remorseless cruelty. The heathen at this day are little better than the beasts. Wesley had seen the 'poor Indians' of Pope's poetical sentimentalism, and declared that they were without God, and, without exception, 'gluttons, drunkards, thieves, dissemblers, liars.' Any man would leave his wife at pleasure, and she in revenge would cut his children's throats. The Chinese have this in their favour, that they lived 7000 miles off; but what Wesley knew of them was the reverse of the ordinary deist picture. The Mahomedans were as bad, and the Romanists generally infidels, unchaste, murderers, and cruel persecutors. The Protestants were not much better, and justified the account of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. The king of that country remarked that our recent history was nothing but a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres; the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce.' 3 And the theologian endorses the satire of the misanthropist. Coming nearer to his own experience, he points out all the evils which then affected English society; and he speaks as one knowing the evils which he describes. So black, indeed, is his description, that we are a little surprised when he discovers afterwards that Christians are better than heathen. He will not say that no heathen will be saved; but he will say that he never yet knew a heathen 'who was not a slave to some gross vice or other.' Bad, therefore, as nominal Christians are, he cannot yet 'place them on a level with the heathen;' and, indeed, he has a good reason; for if he believed with his opponent that the heathen might possibly be less vicious than the Christians, he would 'bid adieu to 2 Ib. xiv. 23. 3 Ib. xiv. 32.

1 Wesley, xiv. II.

Christianity and commence heathen without delay.'1 A more minute and, perhaps, effective description of English life is given in the second part of the 'Further Appeal.' The general irreligion of the nation; the extraordinary variety and extent of false swearing made necessary by the laws; the smuggling, sabbath-breaking, indifference to religious discipline, and political corruption, which was winked at by the sworn defenders of the laws; the incessant drunkenness, the careless luxury of the higher orders, the gambling and cheating in every trade, the injury done by cunning lawyers under the name of justice, the squandering of public charities, the general disregard of truth, the profligacy of the army; the servility and carelessness of the clergy, and the utter indifference to the duties of their high calling; the immorality prevalent amongst the Dissenters, in spite of their claims to a stricter observance of duty; the worldliness of the Quakers, in spite of their affected simplicity-all these are described in the language of keen indignation; though they lead to a triumphant estimate of the reformation that has been worked by the Methodists.

98. Later writers have been too apt to assume that such denunciations as these, in comparison with which Brown's 'Estimate' is mere sham rhetoric, indicate a state of society really more degraded than that which existed before or since. It is enough to reply that a writer of equal eloquence, at any period and in any country, would be able to draw as dismal a picture. Whether the Englishmen of those days were really better or worse than the Englishmen of the seventeenth or of the nineteenth century is a question not to be so speedily settled. But the exertions of Wesley, and their success, are of themselves a sufficient proof that a work was to be done of which neither the rationalist nor the orthodox were capable. The creed of the one party was too negative, that of the other too lifeless, to satisfy the minds of the people. And, therefore, in Wesley's mouth the old creed uttered itself after the old fashion.

99. Wesley's eloquence is in the direct style which clothes

1 Wesley, xiv. 152. Yet in his Journals (iii. 143) he says that the Indians learnt gluttony and drunkenness from the Christians, and asks 'Oh, who will convert the English into honest heathens?'