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stated means of edifying communion with them. They feel that, to a considerable extent at least, their Churches are without one most important element-the fellowship of saints."

On this Mr. Davies remarks:

"This is still truer of the Church of England. And we want still more, if possible, the provision of some such interest and work for lay Christians as are given by the office of the Class-leader. Various attempts have been made in the Church whenever the longings of a religious life have been awakened to supply the want of the help and discipline of association. Any Churchman who studies the history of Methodism is likely to feel a quickened desire that fervour and wisdom might be given us to bring into play some sure systematic machinery of guidance and fellowship. It... would be wise to realise and bear in mind that the loose public system of the Church of England is not intended to exclude, but rather demands any supplementary discipline that may be found practicable. We all know how valuable to the teacher is the post of instructing and keeping together a Sunday class of youths or elder girls; and there is still more to draw out the higher faculties in the leading of a company of fellow Christians in the ways of knowledge and conduct." (P. 194.)

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He also credits Methodism with

a good deal of that social warmth to which Renan chiefly ascribes the growth of the Church in the first age, and without which no striking extensions of it occur." (P. 196.) Notwithstanding his ill-timed indulgence of his taste for caricature at the expense of the Class-meeting, Mr. Davies has too much insight not to perceive, that the one leading purpose of Methodism being the associated search for Christian perfection, the decline of the Classmeeting would be the loss not only of its efficiency, but even of its identity. The systematic cultivation of Christian experience, character and living is now the distinctive feature of Methodism. In one fact noted by Mr. Davies we “rejoice, yea, and will rejoice: " "Efforts to evangelize the masses,' home-missions,

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out-door preaching and such enterprises, have largely occupied the minds and energies of Christians" of late years. We are well content with the position which he assigns us in the field of Evangelistic aggression : "honourable but not exceptional." Thank God "the preaching of salvation by faith, and of the necessity of holiness and of the duty of saving souls" is no longer "peculiar to Methodism." In all this we recognise the fulfilment of one great part of the Mission of Methodism,— the leavening the older Churches with its own intensity of life. But in this important respect, we regret to find ourselves still alone.

On another point we also agree with our critic: "If a clergyman allowed himself to hound on a mob, as was sometimes the case, we are ashamed of the clergyman, but we do not dignify his conduct by the title of ecclesiastical persecution." We do not object to give it a more fitting title-clerical ruffianism.

It is necessary to correct another grave error of statement. The lay element in the "Conference Committees" is not composed exclusively of "leading laymen nominated by the Conference." (P. 186.) Each of the thirty-four Districts sends a representative to those Committees chosen by the lay members only.

Our censor is also much too keen when he seeks to fasten on the Methodist ministry the charge (in his view apparently, not a very heavy one) of disloyalty to its doctrinal standards, on the ground that Wesley in his Sermons "habitually speaks of the Church of England as 'our Church;"" and he supposes "that any legal rights claimed under the Deed of Declaration or the Trust Deed of the chapels must be jeopardized." But a moment's reflection will show the acute Rector that the exact relations of Methodism to the

Church of England, not being matter of Revelation, or even of "Natural Religion," do not come within the scope of theology, and therefore not under the designation "doctrine." Various other errors call for correction, but we have already exceeded our limits.

Having, we trust, rescued the memory of a great and good man from gratuitous inculpations, and his personality and actions from injurious misconception, we now heartilyreciprocate the "respect" and "admiration" which Mr. Davies expresses towards "the Methodists and their works." He is indeed much fairer and more genial in his estimate of existing Methodists than in that of Wesley himself. He sees clearly that the blame so profusely cast on the Connexion for alleged unfaithfulness to the Founder's avowed Church-principles is altogether mistaken, seeing that there has been no divergence from Wesley's honestly-declared purposes, but that which inevitably resulted

from adherence to the profounder principles on which he acted through his whole career. Mr. Davies has also the generosity to admit that Methodism "has shown that it can take on some degree of culture," instancing "Dr. Rigg and Dr. Moulton and Mr. Waddy." We congratulate him on the insight which can discern and the candour which

can recognise some degree of culture" in such men. But an inspection of the honour-lists of Oxford, Cambridge and London would show that at least young Methodism "can take on" whatever degree of culture our Universities can test or supply, as readily as the rising intellect of any other British form of Christianity. Indeed it would be passing strange if a Community which originated in a famous University, and was founded by one of its distinguished members, should turn out to be unable to take on culture to any degree which the urgency of its mission leaves it at leisure to acquire.

THE WESLEY MONUMENT.

THE 30th of March will henceforth be distinguished in the Fasti of Methodism. The unveiling of the monument to John and Charles Wesley in the grand national templetomb, Westminster Abbey, "amongst the sepulchres of the kings," where they lie in glory," importing the reception of the two great evangelists into the highest circle of the Great Few of the British Empire, cannot but be regarded by Methodists as an important historical event. Its significance is manifold. First of all, we have England's tardy recognition of the incalculable services of two of her noblest and most duteous sons and a return of the honour which their character,

genius and spiritual and philanthropic achievements have shed upon her name. We say tardy recognition. A stretch of years, of about the same duration as their own long and fruitful lives, has been allowed to pass over their humble graves before the venerable church of sepulchres threw back its massive doors and cleared a space on its time-honoured walls to admit their marble effigies. It is not many years since the statue of John Wesley was refused admission into the neighbouring palace. Throughout his lifetime Wesley was "a sign spoken against." No powerful man was ever more "dead to human praise;" no one more humbly

ambitious of "the honour that cometh from God only" than the two poets who honestly and unaffectedly sang,

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Superior to their smile or frown."

“For this let men revile my name, No cross I shun, I fear no shame; All hail, reproach ! and welcome, pain! Only Thy terrors, Lord, restrain." The nonchalance with which John Wesley especially passed through tempests of ridicule and execration was heroic and sublime,

Censure to right of him, censure to left of him,

Censure in front of him, volleyed and thundered.

Yet on he rode. Even in his lifetime his greatness was not all unrecognised, and it has ever since been steadily growing on the public mind, and now he with his brother-fully worthy of the association-takes his place amongst the still assemblage of England's most revered and honoured worthies. We can recall no other instance of such slow-footed homage, although the two Wesleys are not the only men even there whose posthumous honours imperfectly condone contemporary neglect. Samuel Wesley's epigram on the setting up of the poet Butler's monumental tablet in the same Abbey is as pathetic as it is pungent: "See him, when starved to death, and turned to dust,

Presented with a monumental bust ! The poet's fate is here in emblem shown; He asked for bread, and he received a stone."

When the great itinerant evangelist supped on blackberries, with the eloquent stone-mason for his booncompanion, and when he faced with calm benignity the missiles of the mob, he thought as little of a monument as of a mitre. We learn from

his Journal (February 16th, 1764) that this intensely busy man occasionally "took a serious walk through the tombs in Westminster

Abbey." We venture to say that he as little expected as aspired after a place in that Valhalla of his country. Charles Wesley, during his eight years' pupilage at Westminster School, from ten to eighteen, may sometimes in the day-dreams of boyish ambition, have looked up awestruck at the venerable pile, and resolved to achieve a statue there, and thought himself quite as likely to win one as any of his schoolfellows, not excepting his Scotch protégé, the future Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. But he little dreamt of reaching it by the route he took. Yet the Wesleys were not the men to despise the sincere homage of their fellow countrymen to true religion, even in their own persons. And certainly their followers are in no mood to do so either. The nation has grown to a just estimate of the apostolic Christianity embodied in the character and career of the two brothers, and admiring their intellect, still more reveres its exemplary and too exceptional consecration to the cause of God and man. This, truly, both as a sign of the present times and a foretoken of the future, is matter of legitimate and devout rejoicing.

The scene and the ceremony on that bright spring morning were very striking. The spectacle of the ancient Chapter-house-a gem of mediæval church-architecture-not occupied by a rich-robed conclave of dignitaries, but crowded with Methodist ministers, laymen and ladies, as if for a Missionary Committee of Review, might seem enough to make some "old abbot's white spirit appear;" the magnificent Ware or the lordly Feckenham-with jewelled crosier, demanding what new gathering was this. And then the sudden appearance among us, as still and solemn and unannounced as of a visitant from

the invisible world, not of an imposing ecclesiastic, with "pompous train and sacerdotal stole," but of a slight figure, of the proportions of Wesley or of Paul, with a look which plainly told that he had come from the confines of the land of souls; the instant hush and noiseless grouping around him, at once recognised as the central personage; the brief introductory address of Dr. Jobson, perfect in its kind, a model of manly simplicity. Few men could have so delicately touched a wound so fresh and deep and throbbing, as if with trickling wine and oil. And the President's speech in the Abbey was in the same natural and timely strain. Of the Dean's reply no one who witnessed its delivery can ever lose the impression. The aspect of his fine chiseled countenance had itself almost the effect of the sudden unveiling of a statue. It was statuesque in its marble whiteness, its severe and sorrowful tranquillity, its pure and moveless resignation. We have seen him in his highest intellectual triumphs, in the pulpit and on the professor's rostrum, but never even in his magnificent last lecture on the Council of Nicæa, in the Divinity Hall in Oxford, did his features so nobly reveal his intellectual and spiritual personality. No one could fail to recognise the transfiguring power of a holy and submissive grief. The cloud that overshadowed him, though fearful and unearthly, was a "bright cloud." And his speech was such as only a mind of the highest culture could have produced, and yet such as no culture could have raised from any but the richest, deepest, strongest soil. There was nothing effusive, adulatory, or even complimentary. The combativeness and discursiveness which ordinarily give a vivid interest to the Dean's

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deliverances were overawed. But his genius flashed out in the idea that the representation of Wesley preaching on his father's tomb was "a parable which represented his relation to our own national institutions. He took his stand upon his father's tomb-on the venerable and ancestral traditions of the country and the Church." Wesley's resolution not to break with the past was one of the most conspicuous and one of the shrewdest parts of his single-eyed policy. Yet it is plain from his writings and sayings, as well as from his acts, that his loyalty to the Church of which he was a minister was not based upon the fact of its association with the State, but on its being the direct medium of historical connection with the primitive Church. It should also be remembered that from another point of view a tomb was a not inappropriate standingplace for Wesley, as but for such a movement as he initiated, the Christianity of England seemed hastening to the grave. And yet we quite agree with Dean Stanley that the eighteenth century "has been unduly disparaged." Not only was it the age of Butler, Secker, Wilson, Sherlock, Watts, Doddridge, and many other men of might, but Wesley was himself a genuine product of the eighteenth century. It was his own generation," and he served it "by the will of God." With all its faults it was pre-eminently a reasoning age, and Wesley was as much a reasoner as a revivalist.

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The Dean's appeal was irresistible for "sympathy and co-operation in carrying on the work which was still left for him to do-the work of promoting charity and good feeling and generous appreciation amongst the different branches of our divided Christendom." The followers of John Wesley would be

false to their Founder and their traditional maxims if they did not eagerly respond to the touching and beseeching challenge of a magnanimous catholicity.

We never witnessed such intense and yet controlled emotion as that of the Dean as he closed his speech, in words so startlingly appropriatean emotion which, both in its intensity and its repression, was wonderfully communicated to the audience. We hope to give an engraving and a description of the monument in a future issue. We will only say that Wesley's own pure, but by no means rigid, taste would not have been offended by it. In his two dated visits to the Abbey (February 16th, 1764, and February 25th, 1771) he is very severe alike on the designs and the inscriptions of the monuments. Of the former he writes, "What heaps of unmeaning stone and marble!" and the latter

he denounces as, in many instances, "vile flattery." And yet he had an

eye for the picturesque, even in mortuary sculpture, as is plain from his admiration of the tombs of Mrs. Nightingale and "the Admiral." Assuredly the Wesley Monument is no unmeaning stone-heap. In Mr. Adams-Acton Methodism has raised a sculptor worthy of the work. The design is admirable; and the inscription is not "vile flattery," but is most felicitously appropriate. No inscription for their monument could be more suitable than their three most famous sayings, by which they being dead yet speak: "THE BEST OF ALL IS, GOD IS WITH US." Ay, through "honour and dishonour, evil report and good report"-that is the best of all!

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NOTES ON THE SCIENCE OF THE MONTH.
BY THE REV. W. H. DALLINGER, F.R.M.S.

THE records of English engineering
operations are full of remarkable
triumphs, and attest the courage,
ingenuity and skill of the engineers.
But in recent times, certainly, the
most remarkable works of this class
have been done, not by Englishmen,
but by foreign masters of the science.
The cutting of the Suez Canal and
the tunnelling of the Alps are illus-
trations. But a work involving
quite as much if not more enterprise,
skill and outlay is about to be under-
taken by the Dutch. The Zuyder
Zee is to be drained; and its seven
hundred and fifty thousand hectares
of land restored to Dutch husbandry.
In the year 1170, a mighty hurricane
in the North Sea drove the dunes

and dikes on the northern boundary of Holland wholly away, and swallowed up an enormous tract of land which was populous and thriving; converting it into a "sea"-an arm of the ocean, and submerging cities, towns and villages. Curious legends and stories are told in relation to these, and it is now often asserted that when the water is still, the turrets and pinnacles of the ancient buildings can be recognised, protruding above the sandy bottom of the Zee. This great inland sea has thus existed for seven centuries; and it is now intended by modern engineering skill to wrench from the ruthless ocean the valuable land it has so pitilessly appropriated.

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