his thoughts with the plainest language. He speaks of what he has seen; he is never beating the air, or slaying the dead, or mechanically repeating thrice-told stories, like most of his contemporaries. His arguments, when most obsolete in their methods and assumptions, still represent real thought upon questions of the deepest interest to himself and his hearers. He is not above familiar and telling illustrations, though to us they sometimes imply a childish credulity. He is at his best when striking home at the daily weaknesses of his disciples. We can fancy the venerable old man, his mind enriched by the experience of half a century's active warfare against vice, stained by no selfishness, and liable to no worse accusation than that of a too great love of power, and believe that his plain nervous language must have carried conviction and challenged the highest respect. It is rather curious, indeed, to find him saying, in his seventy-eighth year, that he had never yet preached a sermon expressly upon the danger of riches, though he had now and then touched upon the subject. Indeed, most of his disciples of that time suffered from a danger of a different kind. Wesley, however, could say that he had preached by example, and boasted that he would leave nothing but his books behind him. No man, at any rate, in that age spoke his mind more freely and forcibly as to the worst evils of the time. He gave his own notions towards the end of his life of what sermons should be. 'I dare no more write in a fine style,' he says in 1788, 'than wear a fine coat.' A man with one foot in the grave must waste no time on ornament. But were it otherwise, had I time to spare, I should still write just as I do. I should purposely decline what many admire—a highly-ornamented style. I cannot admire French oratory; I despise it from my heart. Let those that please be in raptures at the pretty, elegant sentences of Massillon or Bourdaloue. But give me the plain nervous style of Dr. South, Dr. Bates, and Mr. John Howe. And for elegance, show me any French writer who exceeds Dean Young or Mr. Seed. Let who will admire the French frippery; I am still for plain sound English.'"

100. Wesley is his own best critic. We admire his sense

1 Wesley, x. 102, 115.

2 Ib. ix. 110. Dean Young was father of Young the poet.

and his sincerity. We respect his dislike to French frippery' and to that 'luxurious' style of eloquence of which it was a characteristic to apply the word 'dear' to Christ.1 Abstinence from such language, he said, might check that kind of devotion which found expression in loud shouting, horrid unnatural screaming, repeating the same words twenty or thirty times, jumping two or three feet high, and throwing about the arms or legs both of men and women, in a manner shocking not only to religion, but to common decency.' But it would not check proper devotion to him who was at once Man and God. Wesley is entirely free from some of the extravagances of his followers, and deals little even in impassioned appeals to the terrors of hell. He remains on the plane of terse vigorous sense. But it is also true that his eloquence never soars above the ground; if there is no bombast, there is little more rhetoric than may be found in a vigorous leading article, and if he wins our respect, he does not excite our admiration, or add to the stores of English rhetorical prose. He reminds us as little of Burke or Jeremy Taylor as of Massillon and Bourdaloue. His English is allied to that of Swift or Arbuthnot; but, unluckily, his thoughts run so frequently in the grooves of obsolete theological speculation, that he has succeeded in producing no single book satisfactory in a literary sense. In his rhetoric the threads of sound sense are crossed by others doomed to speedy decay, and the whole fabric has fallen into confusion. He did not look for the praise of critics, and he has hardly won it.

101. Wesley's writings are thus illustrative of the fact too often neglected by philosophical speculators. It is not only possible, but it is the normal case, that two and more currents of thought should exist side by side in a country with very little mutual influence. In the social stratum from which Wesley drew his followers the old ideas still prevailed in a slightly modified state. The arguments of the sceptics and the deists had scarcely penetrated to that depth. They were like so much idle wind stirring only the surface. Wesley is as indifferent to the doubts expressed by Hume as if the two men had lived in different hemispheres or centuries. The

1 Wesley, x. 424.

2 Ib. x. 426.

only relation is indirect. The field was undoubtedly prepared for Wesley by the fact that prevailing rationalism had paralysed the hands of the official cultivators. Men like Clarke or Warburton could no longer preach with the energy and the faith which alone can stir a popular audience. They had but half beliefs, and doctrines which they had demonstrated till their truth became doubtful. The growth of Methodism must be explained, not as an offshoot from the speculation of the time, nor yet, as is more commonly done, as a reaction against it. The true explanation is to be found in the records of the social development of the time, and in the growth of a great population outside the rusty ecclesiastical machinery. The refuse thus cast aside took fire by spontaneous combustion. The great masses of the untaught and uncared for inherited a tradition of the old theology. As they multiplied and developed, the need of some mode of satisfying the religious instincts became more pressing; and, as the pure sceptics had nothing to say, and the official clergy could only say something in which they did not believe, Wesley's resuscitation of the old creed gave just the necessary impulse. Its want of any direct connection with that speculative movement could not stifle it, but it condemned it to barrenness. The want of a sound foundation in philosophy prevented the growth of any elevated theology, and alienated all cultivated thinkers. One outward symptom of the deficiency is the absence of any literature possessing more than a purely historical interest. The revivalism of the present century differs curiously from Wesley's in this respect. Though less important in its moral aspect, it has to the speculation of the time the relation, at least, of reaction or misunderstanding, and has, therefore, produced some valuable literature. Wesleyanism in the eighteenth century represents heat without light-a blind protest of the masses, and a vague feeling after some satisfaction to the instinct which ends only in a recrudescence of obsolete ideas.

102. When we turn from Wesley to the remarkable group of men who were his followers or allies, we find little but a less forcible utterance of the same order of ideas. The Methodists who gradually left the Established Church, and the Evangelical school which remained within it, furnish much

matter for the ecclesiastical historian, but very little for the historian of thought or literature. The lively fermentation of religious feeling was confined to the classes for whom abstract speculation had no meaning, and to whom any artistic symbolisation of thought was profoundly uninteresting, if not provocative of absolute disgust. What literature they produced is valuable, so far as it has any value, for its contents, but not for its form. The psychologist may study records of the remarkable phenomena due to the presence of a vehement excitement, and observe with interest how curiously they repeat the experience of many different ages and races. But the literary student finds it difficult to peruse with any serious interest the incessant and often incoherent repetition of the cant phrases which may once have provoked the inarticulate shrieks of a revivalist meeting. A confused hubbub of the technical terms used in the Arminian and Calvinist controversies, of scriptural texts torn recklessly from their natural connection, and of semi-mystical phrases, occasionally bordering upon the erotic, is all that meets the ear. Such language is significant only from the absence of significance. It may throw light upon the nature and origin of the patient's excitement; but it does not express any coherent or intelligent view of the problems which occupied the genuine intellectual forces of the period.

103. We turn, for example, with a certain expectation to the sermons of Whitefield, the greatest orator, if we may trust the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses, of the Wesleyan movement. Franklin's well-known description brings the man before us. To extort the copper and the silver and the gold from the pockets of that shrewdest of freethinkers was to win the most tangible of oratorical triumphs. One of Whitefield's assistants, Cornelius Winter, tells us that Whitefield wept profusely during his sermons, that he stamped and was overcome by his feelings, and that the physical effort was frequently followed by a loss of blood. But the printed sermons, which appear indeed to have been imperfectly reported, will draw no tears from the most emotional nature. In fact, they are the most striking proof that can be given of the 'Franklin's Memoirs,' i. 161 and 166. 2Life of Cornelius Winter,' by Jay.

familiar fact that oratory depends for its instantaneous effect upon the dramatic, rather than upon the intellectual, power of the orator. Here and there, there are passages of which we can believe that their defects of thought and language would not necessarily destroy our pleasure in a voice and manner of extraordinary excellence. There are apostrophes to God or to the sinner or to the Devil, in which, if we attend only to the situation and abstract our minds resolutely from the actual words, we can believe that a great effect might be produced. But nothing except the unequivocal testimony of facts could convince us that the greatest oratorical capacity could inform those tattered shreds of sensational rhetoric which are strung together to form the bulk of Whitefield's published sermons. It is, we know, the strength of the arm, not of the weapon, which gives force to the arrows of eloquence; and when Whitefield smote men to the heart with such blunt and brittle weapons, the secret of his success must have lain as much in the hearers as in the orator.

104. The controversy which divided Whitefield from Wesley brought out whatever speculative ability was possessed by their followers. The question at issue between Calvinists and Arminians has occupied many of the greatest intellects to be found amongst Catholics and Protestants; and, indeed, it is plain that the ultimate issues involved lie at the very root of a philosophical interpretation of the world. Wesley, as I have said, expressed very forcibly the sentiments natural to the autocrat of a great spiritual organisation. Such a man felt keenly the dangers of the Antinomian caricature of Calvinism, and was not able to distinguish the philosophical core of the doctrine from the perversions to which it is liable. If Wesley's treatment is ineffectual, there is not much interest in the controversy which, after his abandonment of an active share in it, was carried on chiefly by Fletcher of Madeley and Toplady. Fletcher, indeed, was a man of singular beauty of character. The simplicity, purity, and warmth of his nature are stamped upon his biography, and are traceable evenwhere such qualities are most rarely to be found-in his controversial writings. An occasional tendency to sentimentalism reminds us that Fletcher was a countryman of Rousseau; though, fortunately for him, his emotions found a safer channel