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and upon what accounts this offence is of so heinous a nature:

IV. What notion the Jews had of this commandment, and how they behaved with relation to it.

V. What our Saviour hath taught concerning it, and how far He hath extended it.

VI. Whence it comes to pass that the violation of it is a fault so common and prevalent.

VII. Lastly, By what methods obedience to this divine. law might best be secured."

We are well-nigh asleep before we can even embark on the ensuing pages, but we can see in drowsy, pictorial vision, the dim church, the heavy, high-backed pews, the women in all their elaborate artificialty of head-gear, ribbons, feathers, fruit, etc., the men with their opulent figures buttoned into velvet and brocade, and their pėriwigs awry as they lie, propped up by dingy upholstery.

We note, as we gaze down the cobbled streets of the city, the dirt and poverty of the side-lanes and alleys, the ragged, ignorant children that look up sullenly, or who fling stones at the passing vehicles, while from the darkening distance, comes the faint but ominous notes of the Marseillaise. We are glad to return Volume V to its shelf, and forget the painful picture in remembering that light did break in upon England even during those heavy, selfish, hundred years of her spiritual decadence. In just such a moral atmosphere John Wesley and George Whitefield began their preaching, and brought about the unparalleled revival movement associated with their names. Wesley entered upon his ministry in a spirit of almost melancholy asceticism, certainly in a mood of such strictness and rigorousness of method that he and his friends early gained the sobriquet of Methodists. Like Luther he owed the

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success of his open-air preaching to the adoption of the doctrine of Justification by Faith. There is something in a crowd of human derelicts-poor, untutored, suffering, yearning creatures-which evokes compassion in the stoniest heart; and if Wesley had much to teach them, they in their turn taught him much. His close touch with them, in their haunts and homes, opened his mind to the conviction that a merciful Providence would not suffer these erring, burden-bearing victims of wretchedness to be irretrievably lost, and he began to preach the possibility of salvation and even of "Christian Perfection" with an ardour that kindled a flame of inspiration among his vast audiences. Hear his testimony: "The more I converse with the believers in Cornwall, the more am I convinced that they have sustained great loss for want of hearing the doctrine of Christian Perfection clearly and strongly enforced. I see wherever this is not done, the believers grow dead and cold. Nor can this be prevented, but by keeping up in them an hourly expectation of being perfected in love. I say an hourly expectation; for to expect it at death, or some time hence, is much the same as not expecting it at all." Of a given locality he writes: "Here I found the plain reason why the work of God had gained no ground in this circuit all the year. The preachers had given up the Methodist testimony. Either they did not speak of perfection at all-the peculiar doctrine committed to our trust or they spoke of it only in general terms, without urging the believers to go on to perfection and to expect it every moment: and wherever this is not earnestly done, the work of God does not prosper. As to the word perfection, it is Scriptural; therefore neither you nor I can, in conscience, object to it, unless we would send the Holy Ghost to school and teach Him to speak who made the tongue."

To a lady who had written to him, evidently under a heavy sense of her own short-comings, he replied: "I want you to be all love," and he defined the human road to perfection to be "a constant communion with God, which fills the heart with humble love."

Correspondingly Mrs. Eddy has written:

"The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in truth through flood tides of Love. Christian perfection is won on no other basis." (Science and Health, p. 201.)

It is interesting to note that wherever the thought of Christian Perfection obtains there always follows the spiritual healing of disease or abnormality. Wesley experienced many such healings both in himself and in the districts where he visited. It was a hard age, both passionate and superstitious, and Wesley, viewed from the standpoint of two hundred years of humane development, was in many respects a hard man. While he excited emotion in his hearers he appears to have been singularly devoid of emotion himself. So that when these deliverances from danger and disease took place, he chronicled them in a calm matter-of-fact way. He ascribed the glory to God, but they do not seem to have greatly arrested his attention or to have excited any question in his mind as to whether they should always attend individual communion with God. For instance, we read this entry in the fourth volume of his Journal, "As I was coming downstairs, the carpet slipped from under my feet, which I know not how turned me round and pitched me back with my head foremost for six or seven stairs. It was impossible to recover myself till I came to the bottom. My head rebounded once or twice from the edge of the stone stairs, but it felt to me

exactly as if I had fallen on a cushion or a pillow. Dr. Douglas ran out sufficiently affrighted; but he needed not, for I rose as well as ever, having received no damage, but the loss of a little skin from one or two of my fingers. Doth not God 'Give his angels charge over us to keep us in all our ways." "

He often relates cures brought about by his faith and prayers, and on one occasion mentions that "My horse was so exceedingly lame, that I was afraid I must have lain by. We could not discern what it was that was amiss, and yet he would scarce set his foot to the ground. By riding thus seven miles I was thoroughly tired, and my head ached more than it had done for some months. What I here aver is the naked fact: let every man account for it as he sees good. I then thought 'Cannot God heal either man or beast by any means, or without any?' Immediately my weariness and headache ceased, and my horse's lameness in the same instant. Nor did he halt any more, either that day or the next. A very odd accident this also." How true are the words of the anonymous hymn which runs: "Traditions, forms, and selfish aims Have dimmed the inner light;

Have closely veiled the spirit world
And angels from our sight."

And we can but ask ourselves Wesley's question, "Cannot God heal?" And to this the author of Science and Health has made answer:

"God will heal the sick through man, whenever man is governed by God." (p. 495.)

Towards the end of his life Wesley published a collection of receipts under the title of "Primitive Physic; or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing most Diseases." Among

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