and so set me at liberty, may soon feel what it is, by sore distress themselves for those hard services they have caused me.' Still she could not make up her mind to call herself and those in connexion with her, Dissenters. She tried to find some middle term; it was not a separation from the Church, but a 'secession;' which looks very like a distinction without a difference. Our ministers must come,' writes her ladyship in 1781, ' recommended by that neutrality between Church and Dissent--secession;' and to the same effect in 1782 Mr. Wills's secession from the Church (for which he is the most highly favoured of all from the noble and disinterested motives that engaged his honest and faithful conscience for the Lord's unlimited service) brings about an ordination of such students as are alike disposed to labour in the place and appointed for those congregations. The method of these appears the best calculated for the comfort of the students and to serve the congregations most usefully, and is contrived to prevent any bondage to the people or minister. The objections to the Dissenters' plan are many, and to the Church more; that secession means the neutrality between both, and so materially offensive to neither.' 2

One result of this 'secession' was the withdrawal from the Connexion of those parochial clergymen who had given their gratuitous services to Lady Huntingdon-Romaine, Venn, Townsend, and others; but they still maintained the most cordial intimacy with the countess, and continued occasionally to supply her chapels.

It must be admitted, in justice to the Church rulers of the day, that the difficulties in the way of co-operation with Lady Huntingdon were by no means slight. Her Churchmanship, like that of her friend Whitefield, was not of the same marked type as that of John Wesley. It will be remembered that John Wesley, in his sermon at the foundation of the City Road Chapel in 1777-four years, be it observed, before Lady Huntingdon's secession-described, in his own vigorous language, the difference between the attitude of his followers towards the Church, and that of the followers of Lady Huntingdon and Mr. Whitefield. So far as the two latter were concerned, he did not overstate the case. The college Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 315. 2 Id. ii. 467.

at Trevecca could hardly be regarded in any other light than that of a Dissenting Academy. Berridge saw this, and wrote to Lady Huntingdon: 'However rusty or rickety the Dissenters may appear to you, God hath His remnant among them; therefore lift not up your hand against them for the Lord's sake nor yet for consistency's sake, because your students are as real Dissenting preachers as any in the land, unless a gown and band can make a clergyman. The bishops look on your students as the worst kind of Dissenters; and manifest this by refusing that ordination to your preachers which would be readily granted to other teachers among the Dissenters.' Berridge also thought that the Wesleyans would not retain their position as Churchmen. In the very same year (1777) in which Wesley gloried in the adhesion of his societies to the Church, Berridge wrote to Lady Huntingdon: What will become of your students at your decease? They are virtual Dissenters now, and will be settled Dissenters then. And the same will happen to many, perhaps most, of Mr. Wesley's preachers at his death. He rules like a real Alexander, and is now stepping forth with a flaming torch; but we do not read in history of two Alexanders succeeding each other.' 2

But to return to Trevecca. The rules of the college specified that the students after three years' residence might, if they desired, enter the ministry either of the Church or any other Protestant denomination. Now, as Trevecca was essentially a theological college, it is hardly possible to conceive that the theology taught there could have been so colourless as not to bias the students in favour either of the Church or of Dissent; and as the Church, in spite of her laxity, still retained her liturgy, creeds, and other forms, which were more dogmatic and precise than those of any Dissenting body, such a training as that of Trevecca would naturally result, as the Vicar of Everton predicted, in making the students, to all intents and purposes, Dissenters. The only wonder is that Lady Huntingdon's Connexion should have retained so strong an attachment to the Church as they undoubtedly did, and that, not only during her own lifetime, but after her

Gledstone's Life of Whitefield, p. 465.

2 Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 423.

death. 'You ask,' wrote Dr. Haweis to one who desired information on this point, of what Church we profess ourselves? We desire to be esteemed as members of Christ's Catholic and Apostolic Church, and essentially one with the Church of England, of which we regard ourselves as living members. . . . The doctrines we subscribe (for we require subscription, and, what is better, they are always truly preached by us) are those of the Church of England in the literal and grammatical sense. Nor is the liturgy of the Church of England performed more devoutly in any Church,' &c.

The five worthy Christians whose characters and careers have been briefly sketched were the chief promoters of what may be termed the Methodist, as distinguished from the Evangelical, movement, in the technical sense of that epithet. As all alike, belonging to both sections of the movement, were termed by their contemporaries Methodists, so all alike are included under the general head of the 'Evangelical Revival.' The points of contact, as well as the points of difference, between the two bodies, will be noticed presently. Of those who took a prominent part in the earlier movement it is not necessary to write more. Not but that there were many others who would be worthy of a place in a larger history. Thomas Walsh, Wesley's most honoured friend; Dr. Coke ('a second Walsh,' Wesley called him), who sacrificed a good position and a considerable fortune entirely to the Methodist cause; Mr. Perronet, the excellent Vicar of Shoreham, to whom both the brothers Wesley had recourse in every important crisis, and who was called by Charles Wesley 'the Archbishop of Methodism ;' Sir John Thorold, a pious Lincolnshire baronet; John Nelson, the worthy stonemason of Birstal, who was pressed as a soldier simply because he was a Methodist, and whose death John Wesley thus records in his Journal: This day died John Nelson, and left a wig and half-a-crown-as much as any unmarried minister ought to leave;' Sampson Stainforth, Mark Bond, and John Haine, the Methodist soldiers who infused a spirit of Methodism in the British Army; Howell Harris, the life and soul of Welsh Methodism; Thomas Olivers, the converted reprobate, who rode one hundred thousand miles on one horse in the cause of Life of Lady Huntingdon, ii. 521.

1

Methodism, and who was considered by John Wesley as a strong enough man to be pitted against the ablest champions of Calvinism; John Pawson, Alexander Mather, and other worthy men-of humble birth, it may be, and scanty acquirements, but earnest, devoted Christians-would all deserve to be noticed in a professed history of Methodism. In a brief sketch, like the present, all that can be said of them is, 'Cum tales essent, utinam nostri fuissent.'

Before passing on to another branch of our subject a difficult question here presents itself. If these good men were really such as they have been represented-if they were enemies of the Constitution neither in Church nor State, but, on the contrary, ardently attached to both; if their sole quarrel was with sin and Satan, a quarrel in which all right-minded men would heartily join them; if they were not only God-fearing and God-loving men, but also men of most lovable characters, men who burned with an ardent and all-embracing charityhow is it that they were so generally unpopular as they undoubtedly were?

The question is so important that, at the risk of wearying the reader's patience, it will be necessary to discuss it at some length.

Let us first, then, see who were the opponents of the Methodists. Of such riots as those at Hampton, Birstal, Walsall, Wednesbury, and Devizes-some of them, one blushes to relate, instigated by the clergy-little need be said. To attempt to account for the fury of a mob is an utterly hopeless task. Probably, as at Ephesus of old, 'the more part of them knew not wherefore they were come together,'-all the more shame to those who took advantage of the people's ignorance to instigate them to deeds of violence. The behaviour of such educated ruffians as Egginton and Cadogan carries its own explanation and its own condemnation with it; but all the enemies of the Methodists were not men of this stamp. Take, for example, such a man as Hogarth. His talents were all enlisted on the side of virtue against vice. A strong moral purpose runs through all his admirable pictures. The Industrious and Idle Apprentices' and the 'Harlot's Progress' were, in their way, doing the work of Wesley and Whitefield; and yet one is grieved to think that the

last work of Hogarth, the picture entitled 'Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism,' was drawn expressly to caricature and counteract the effects of the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield. Take, again, Dr. Johnson, that sworn foe of vice and irreligion. He respected John Wesley and loved his society, and he was just enough to own that Colley Cibber's play, the Hypocrite,' was not applicable to the Methodists ;' 2 but how contemptuously he speaks of his fellow-collegian ! 'Whitefield,' he said, 'never drew as much attention as a mountebank does; he did not draw attention by doing better than others, but by doing what was strange. I never treated Whitefield's ministry with contempt; I believe he did good; he had devoted himself to the lower classes of mankind, and among them he was of use. But when familiarity and noise claim the praise due to knowledge, art, and elegance, we must beat down such pretensions.' With what perverse ingenuity he defends one of the most unjustifiable of all the outrages perpetrated against the Methodists, the expulsion of the six students from St. Edmund's Hall in 1768! 'Sir, that expulsion was extremely just and proper. What have they to do at a university who are not willing to be taught, but presume to teach? Sir, they were examined and found to be ignorant fellows. They might be good beings, but they were not fit to be at Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in a field, but we turn her out of a garden.' What evidence is there that these young men, who were expelled from Oxford simply because they would not desist from praying and exhorting in private rooms, were unwilling to be taught, or that they were at all fairly examined and found inferior to the general run of students? Lord Northington, speaking from the judicial bench-a place where of all others language ought to be calm and measured-said, in pronouncing judgment against a Methodist preacher: 'Bigotry and enthusiasm have spread their baneful influence among us far and wide, and the unhappy objects of the contagion almost daily increase. Of this not only Bedlam but most of the private mad-houses

1 Nor was this the only attack he made upon the Methodists.

2 Boswell's Johnson, v. 260.

3 Id. vii. 293.

Id. iii. aa finem.