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 High Church revival 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 description1 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 1 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

for utterance, and he was free from that dark stain of mental disease which poisoned Rousseau's life. But Fletcher, on the other hand, belongs as distinctly to a mere side current as Rousseau to the main stream of European thought. The quiet vicarage of Madeley was, in fact, a hermitage far less accessible than the Island of St. Pierre to the great forces of social upheaval. There Fletcher could live in a bygone period, studying the theological problems which had been threshed out by the middle of the previous century. Formerly at the centre, they had now been banished to the very outskirts of speculation. A philosophical speculation may first lose its interest either for the intellectual leaders of mankind, or for their followers. When it disappears from the great arena of serious controversy, where the keenest thinkers reason under the healthy stimulus of contact with living men, it may retire to the schools or take refuge in country parsonages. Some minds enjoy a discussion all the more because they have to argue with the dead, and others have not yet discovered that it has ceased to have real vitality. If the pedant is contemptible, we feel at worst pity for men like Fletcher, who are discussing, in all earnestness, matters which to them are still of vital import. In this excellent man's 'checks to Antinomianism' and Scripture scales '—a characteristic title for a process of carefully balancing long chains of rival texts-we find mere relics of what once was thought, but scorn is rebuked by his simplicity. The good man really supposes that the battle is still to be decided by the use of the old-fashioned bows and arrows. We pass by, and feel that there would be a kind of profanity in exposing his weakness.

105. Toplady, his chief antagonist, seems to have been a man of considerable native powers of intellect, guided by a temperament of excessive fervour. His language towards Wesley is abusive and indecorous. He is in too great a passion to argue effectively. His chief work is an historical attempt to vindicate the Church of England from the charge of Arminianism, and he is still an intellectual contemporary of Calvin or Zanchius, and the early Puritan writers whom he quotes in utter unconsciousness that they belong to an antediluvian epoch. His latest authority is Jonathan Edwards, whose writings represent the blending of the old Calvinism with more recent

philosophical thought. Toplady, however, shows a greater logical insight than his other allies and antagonists, and remonstrates very justly with Priestley, who inherited the ordinary hatred of the rationalist school for Calvinism, whilst abandoning the rationalist dogma of free-will. Priestley previously denied that the Calvinist theory had any relation to the philosophical doctrine of causation. Toplady regards the philosophical doctrine as a perversion of Calvinism; but the mere perception that there is such a philosophical doctrine suffices to distinguish him from most of his fellows. Their arguments are almost entirely confined to a fanciful interpretation of Scripture texts, implying a serene indifference to the very existence of Hume, Gibbon, or Voltaire.

106. The Evangelical school, who sympathised more or less distinctly with Wesley, included many men entitled to our sincere respect. We can admire their energy, though we cannot read their books. Throughout England sturdy sensible men, of the narrowest possible intellectual horizon, but the most vivid conviction of the value of certain teachings, were stirring the masses by addresses suited to indolent imaginations. What, they seemed to have tacitly enquired, is the argument which will induce an ignorant miner or a small tradesman in a country town to give up drinking and cockfighting? The obvious answer was: Tell him that he is going straight to hell-fire to be tortured for all eternity. Preach that consoling truth to him long enough, and vigorously enough, and in a large enough crowd of his fellows, and he may be thrown into a fit of excitement that may form a crisis in his life. Represent God to him by the image most familiar to his imagination, as a severe creditor who won't excuse a farthing of the debt, and Christ as the benefactor who has freely offered to clear the score. Do not rest Christianity upon argument, but tell him dogmatically that every word of the Bible was dictated by God Almighty; and add that every word is as plain as the A B C. The doctrine may not be very refined or philosophical, but it is sufficiently congenial to the vague beliefs implanted in his mind by tradition to give a leverage for your appeals. By such means it was possible to kindle once more the dying embers of the old faith, and it is curious to remark how distinctly this power was recognised as the test.