Having preached "Christian perfection" for forty years, and having passed through the various shades of belief to which reference has been made, he still holds himself open to conviction and is ready to receive light from any source.

In this tract, which contains that last formal expression of his thoughts on this subject from which he did not in after years essentially vary, he says:

The highest degree of sanctification attainable on earth will not save a man from defects in understanding, and mistakes in many things. For this reason the holiest of men need Christ as their Prophet, Priest, and King.

These sermons and this tract have for us, and for the world, what may be called Wesley's mature thoughts on Christian perfection. They are the exponents of his belief when he became "rooted and grounded" in the faith. They are not only the exponents of personal belief, but contain expositions of the doctrines so clear, and evidently scriptural, as to have maintained the position of standards on this subject to the present time. In them is found, what the Church has ever needed, a statement of the doctrine in harmony with the general analogy of faith.

The fruit of this last-mentioned phase or statement of belief is more apparent in the ministry both of Wesley and his immediate successors, also in the Church of to-day, than that of any other to which reference has been made. So soon as Wesley's personal belief became free from the entanglements of error, and the doctrine had a statement at once consonant with the facts of experience and in harmony with the general analogy of faith, it assumed its rightful position in the theology of the Church, and in the ministry of the same. That was no subordinate position taken and maintained by this doctrine. He who had taken the world as his parish declared the mission of Methodism to be "to spread scriptural holiness over all lands." The practice of Wesley personally and his advice to his preachers were closely defined. From this time on till his death, this was the most prominent theme in preaching. No decade of ominous silence on this subject now; not a year, scarcely a month, intervenes without the record in his Journal of his preaching on Christian perfection, or entire sanctification. Instead of the caution given the members of the Con

ference in 1747, "to rarely, in public at least, speak in full, explicit terms concerning entire sanctification," he earnestly exhorts his preachers to explicitly and persistently preach this essential doctrine. In 1766 he writes to Mr. Merryweather:

If Jacob Rowell is grown faint, and says but little about Christian perfection, do you supply his lack of service. Speak and spare not. Let not regard for any man induce you to betray the truth of God. Till you press the believers to expect full salvation now, you must not look for any revival.

Samuel Bardsley he counsels :

To exhort all the believers, strongly and explicitly, to go on to perfection; and to expect every blessing God has promised, not to-morrow but to day.

To Freeborn Garrettson he writes:

It will be well, as soon as any find peace with God, to exhort them to go on to perfection.

In the last year of his ministry he wrote to Adam Clarke:

If we can prove that any of our local preachers or leaders speak against it (Christian perfection) let him be a local preacher or leader no longer. I doubt whether he should continue in the Society; for he that could speak thus in our congregation cannot be an honest man.

The last recorded exhortation of Wesley on this subject was:

Whenever you have opportunity of speaking to believers, urge them to go on to perfection. Spare no pains; and God, our own God, still give you his blessing.

To the testimony given by his own custom for a quarter. of a century, and by the advice given his fellow itinerants, to the value of the faith ultimately reached, Wesley has added that of his observation respecting the importance of preaching this doctrine. In 1762, the year in which, according to Tyerman, the doctrine of Christian perfection, attainable in an instant by a simple act of faith, was for the first time made prominent in Methodist congregations, we find it recorded in Wesley's Journal:

The more I converse with the believers in Cornwall the more I am 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.

Of the Societies throughout the kingdom he says:

When Christian perfection is not strongly and explicitly preached, there is seldom any remarkable blessing from God; and, consequently, little addition to the Society, and little life in the members of it. This is the word which God will always bless. Do not neglect strongly and explicitly to urge the believers to "go on to perfection.' When this is constantly and earnestly done, the word is always clothed with power. . . . The more explicitly and strongly you press all believers to aspire after full sanctification, as attainable now by simple faith, the more the whole work of God will prosper.

95

Thus did this mature faith of Wesley bear its abundant fruit in the results of his personal ministry, in the wise counsel given his preachers, and in the conviction so freely expressed that the whole work of the Church depended on the prominence given this doctrine in the teaching of the hour.

The influence of the variations of belief indicated in this article is in the Church to-day. Those "mature thoughts" on Christian perfection, put on record after their author had reached his threescore years, have passed into, and become part of, the standards of Methodism; but in much of the recent religious literature of the Church, and often in her pulpits, are found the earlier and less satisfactory phases of belief for which men plead, and quote Wesleyan authority. The founder of Methodism has his followers in teaching, and perhaps in actual experience, at the different periods of his history, not excepting that of Moravian mysticism, or that of historic silence. Measurably we have reproduced in the living ministry of the Church the different phases of the personal belief of John Wesley, and the corresponding fruits of that changed faith.

It is in the reproduction of the declared belief and wellknown practice of Wesley at the different eras of his history by the living ministry and in the current literature of the Church that his influence is still exerted. The line of his example in faith and practice touching the primal doctrine of Methodism Christian perfection-extends from a ministry of twelve years comparatively barren of results to that of a

quarter of a century which was "as a handful of corn in the top of the mountains, the fruit of which did shake like Lebanon." Somewhere along this line, and between these limits, lies the ministry of every Methodist preacher. What the position in the line of each individual ministry is will be found to be determined, largely, by the particular belief which has been accepted of him whose "faith," consciously or unconsciously, "he follows." Only when the teachers of religion get tired of threading the mazes of doubt under the guidance of a belief acknowledged to be defective, and come to the acceptance of the truth to which after many years of earnest inquiry Wesley attained, may they hope for the larger fruits of his ripened ministry. Only when Wesleyan authority for doctrine or practice is understood to be, and, in fact, is, authority drawn from his own sentiments and practices in mature life, can there be much weight connected therewith, or can there be much uniformity in teaching the "higher life."

ART. III.-THE CRADLE OF THE ARYANS. THE latter part of the eighteenth century was characterized by a turning back of the minds of men to what they believed to be the golden age of the world's history. Under the influence of the frivolous and dissolute court of France life had become so artificial that a reaction was inevitable. This first showed itself in the literature of the age, being particularly prominent in the writings of Rousseau, and finally worked itself out in the mighty convulsions of the French Revolution, which the writings of Rousseau had no small share in bringing about. Amid the agitations of this period were born two sciences which have thrown much light on the early history of mankind, and without the aid of these we should probably never have known much. about prehistoric man. These sciences are ethnology and comparative philology. In 1806 Adelung showed that most of the languages of Europe and some of the most important ones of Asia were related. In 1816 Professor F. Bopp laid the foundations of comparative philology, and later, in his Comparative Grammar, gave shape and substance to the science. He also

proved, what was already suspected, that all the languages which we now call Aryan, or Indo-European, were related, and probably had a common origin. However great might be their outward dissimilarity, the evidence of their sisterhood was unmistakable, and those who spoke them must have had a common ancestry, no matter whether found on the stormy shores of Iceland or on the banks of the sacred Ganges.

Naturally enough the question then arose, Where did those live who spoke this mother-tongue? The answer was not long in coming. "Asia," says Adelung, "has in all times been regarded as that part of the world in which the human race originated, where it received its first education, and thence has poured its abundant stores over the whole world." In 1808 F. Schlegel declared that Sanskrit was the mother of all the Aryan languages, and that the languages of Europe gave evidence of an Eastern origin, as did also many of the ideas that lie at the very root of European civilization. The inhabitants of Europe, he said, were merely colonists from Asia, led mostly by priests, as the Israelites were by Moses.

That this theory met with immediate and general acceptance may be attributed to several causes. In the first place it was generally assumed that the human race originated in Asia, and therefore this most important branch of it of course originated there. Be it remarked, however, that the question as to the original home of the Aryans has nothing at all to do with the question as to the origin of the human race. Again, the political condition of Germany, at this time, was so nearly hopeless as to cause Germans to turn their thoughts in almost any direction except toward their own fatherland. But, lastly and chiefly, the idea that the Sanskrit was the most ancient language in the whole family gave rise to the opinion that the cradle of the Aryan race must be sought for not far from where the sacred books of the Veda were found; and this argument has continued to be the sheet-anchor of what may be called the conservative party. What it is worth will appear farther on. It was, however, supported by the authority of Bopp, Pott, Lassen, J. Grimm, and a host of lesser lights, and for a time. passed without challenge; but in 1851 Dr. R. G. Latham had the effrontery, for so it was regarded, to say in an edition of the Germania of Tacitus, that it was more probable that the